The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - How Was Trump's Trip to Asia? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

President Trump has wrapped up a whirlwind trip to Asia; he met with several key regional leaders...Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/43Q87FY

Hey, all, Peter Zion, coming to you from Colorado. Today, I'm going to give you a quick breakdown of what happened in Asia last week. Donald Trump had multiple summits in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, up to in, including a one-on-one with the chairman of the Chinese system, Xi Jinping. So we're in the midst of a major transition in the United States in terms of trading partners. And whether you think it's for strategic reasons like the Magga Group and Trump seems to think, or you think it's for demographics reasons, which is kind of my general feel, there's not a lot of disagreement. as to what's happening as opposed to why it's happening. So what's happening, from my point of view, is that the Northeast and Asian countries, most notably China, are aging into not just obsolescence, but national dissolution. And so the trade relationships with countries like China

have to go to zero more or less anyway. Now, if you want to do that earlier for political reasons, there's some complications there, but we're going to get to the same place. This is a question of time frame. On the opposite side of the ledger is Southeast Asia, where the demographics are broadly healthy and the relations with the United States are broadly positive. So it makes sense you want these relationships to grow over time because they can. And if you choose to denigrate those relationships, you're making a political choice to punish yourself economically. So the relationships from a tariff point of view under Trump have been, in a word, erratic with multiple times threats on the Chinese going up to 100 percent tariffs and sometimes actually being there. But at the

same time in Southeast Asia, some of the codified tariffs that the Trump administration has put in place, not negotiation tactics, actually codified tariffs, are some of the highest in the world, which has directly been penalizing the American companies that have been working to move their trade exposure away from China since COVID. Anyway, Trump was down in Southeast Asia, met with a lot of the ASEAN leaders, and hammered out a series of deals, most notably with Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. And really across all of them, the The core issue is that these really were only deals as declared by Donald Trump himself, and none of the four countries are really talking about them in the same way.

Most of these deals never even had a text released or even a press statement from the hosting government. So it's all very much in progress. Basically, the approach that Trump seems to be taking is that our trade deficit in goods has been imposed on us and is unfair, but our trade surplus in digital goods has been earned, and so therefore it is fair. And if you don't accept that, you can have tariffs. And needless to say, there is a lot of countries who find that general negotiating position to be unfair,

and so there hasn't really been any meaningful progress made on the talks. A lot of little details have been popped up, like say, rare earth exports from Malaysia as being a big deal, but, you know, Malaysia already exported rare earths to the United States. They just put a limit on the exports to the world, not just the United States, so they would have enough for themselves. None of this has really been changed. And the country that is probably, from my point of view, the most important to the United States

midterm as a train partner would be a Vietnam. One more technologically advanced than the Chinese are. They have over a workforce that's almost 100 million people. If you're looking to plug gaps, that's a country you want to plug them with. And we really didn't get a meaningful deal out of these agreements. Moving up to Northeast Asia, there does seem to be more progress with the Japanese and the Koreans. The Koreans are in a desperate position because their demographics are so bad. and they realize that if they can't maintain a working relationship with the United States,

so they're kind of screwed as a country. So they were willing to give a lot more. And we actually got our most detailed deal yet out of all the trade negotiations between the Trump administration and the rest of the planet. Just came out of Korea just a few days ago. That doesn't mean it's done. It basically promises that the North Koreans are going to dump over $150 billion of investment to the United States, which I would argue they were going to do anyway, but now it's codified. And in exchange, they got a lower terror.

This is really the first deal we've seen out of the White House that actually has numbers to it. Now, it remains to be seen whether it can be done because some of the numbers involved are pretty big for a country, the size of South Korea, which has under 50 million people, but still progress. And then the final deal with the Chinese, we'll come back to that. Now, before you think that I'm just like, Trump's an idiot and he doesn't know how to negotiate, he certainly doesn't understand trade, let's look at this from the Chinese side. because Chairman Xi Jinping went to ASEAN almost immediately after Trump was there and talked about multilateralism and unicorns and chocolate

and how we're all one big happy family and signed a trade deal with the ASEAN countries, a phase three-day trade deal. So while the Southeast Asians and, to a lesser degree, the Koreans and the Japanese are looking at Trump and like, God, when will this end? They're not looking at G and think, oh, thank God G was there. No, no, they're like, you expect us to believe us that you're the nice guy, the one who's been bullying us on every issue for the last 30 years, that suddenly we're going to love you. So, you look at Trump, and they say he doesn't understand economics or trade. And they're right.

And then they look at G, and they're like, he doesn't understand diplomacy or trade. And they're right. One of the things to keep in mind about both leaders is both of them have actively circumscribed the type of people that, they allow in the early circle to be people who will never even appear to know more about any topic than they do because they don't want to be told that they might be wrong. So we have these completely ossified gerontocracies running the two largest countries in the world right now. And it's showing up and how they're dealing with every other country. So really all that leaves for today's topic is how they dealt with one another because Xi and Trump meant directly in Korea. We have a temporary

diffusing of the trade tensions. There's no reason on any side to think that this is going to last, but the Americans agreed to reduce the tariff rate. They were charged in the Chinese. They removed their threat of an additional 100% tariff. So based on what the product is, the tariff rate from products coming from China is somewhere between 20 and 50% again. In exchange, the Chinese agreed to limit fentanyl precursor exports to the United States and to start buying some soy. So from my point of view on the outside looking in, the Chinese agreed to do some of the things that they have agreed to do over and over and over these last 15 years in exchange for actual concessions. And if the Chinese actually do what they say they're going to do this time, it will be the first time that has ever happened. Part of the problem that the United States always has in trade relations with the Chinese is there's rarely any follow-up.

And there won't be this time because that requires a team. that is actually staffed out to enforce the trade deals. And even under normal circumstances where the United States has the commerce and the Treasury Department and the U.S. Trade Representative's office dealing with trade issues, that's a lot to do. And this time around, commerce and treasury and the U.S.T.R. aren't even staffed out, and Trump is handling the negotiations personally. So just as what happened in phase one trade deals between the Chinese and the Trump administration in the first Trump presidency, the Chinese aren't going to do it.

of this, and we'll be right back where we started six months from now. And one more thing. One thing that doesn't change, the more the things change, the more they stay the same. With these adjustments this last week, we are now on our 540th tariff policy since January 20th. So the ambient chaos that is confusing American traders and manufacturers and consumers showing no sign of letting up. There's no reason to expect that any of these deals are the final version and until we get, well, maybe, maybe Crea, maybe Crea. So maybe we have one. Until we have a whole raft of those, the back and forth and the oven float continues.