The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Is Trump Playing 4D Chess? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 19, 2025

If you're like me, you've probably sat at your computer for hours on end, reading tons of articles, watching countless interviews, and you still have one question...Does Trump have any strategy at all?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/is-trump-playing-4d-chess

Hey L. Peters 9, Newcom, New York, Denver Airport, and in the aftermath of all the back and forth on tariff, specifically with China, it's worth asking the question, is there a strategy here? We're all looking for it, and we're all desperate to find one, and by we, I mean, Americans in general, in the wider world, everything out of the White House seems completely chaotic, and it may well be. But we did have the Treasury Secretary, Mr. Besant, mentioned that the specific goal was to box in China. In his words, we'll probably strike a deal first with our allies, that they've been good military allies and less good economic allies. And once we have that deal in place, then we were all together going to confront the Chinese. And for someone like me who plays in the world of big geopolitics, that's really sexy and really attractive.

and is probably, potentially, a very effective way to do it. But there are a few problems. I mean, first and most obviously, that is not how it's happened so far. The Trump administration, well, actually, let's be honest here. Donald Trump has threatened all of the allies, some with military invasion, and that's usually not the sort of activity you want to do if you are going to then try to build a coalition. There's also the leadership issue and the coordination issue.

The Trump administration, again, Donald Trump personally, gutted the upper tiers of every department, including defense and state, as well as commerce. So there simply aren't a deep cadre of staff that can carry out multiple negotiations at the same time. It's really just Donald Trump himself. And even if you believe that he's the best negotiator in human history, still just one guy and he's got other things going on. So the idea that he can build a coalition of several dozen countries and then lead them in negotiations against another power, that definitely flies in the face of what your lying eyes are seeing on a regular basis. Third, the value of the tariffs. We're now up to 125%, I believe, is the current number for the tariff level with China.

That's enough to freeze commerce between the two countries. With the notable exception of a few things that we can't get from anywhere else, which we're just going to suck up the cost. Trade is basically going to collapse already, and that's before you consider that on April 17th, Chinese shipping companies and Chinese ships are going to face an additional fee on top of everything else when they hit an American port. There's not a lot of room here for negotiation. And putting the Chinese in a box, while I do enjoy seeing it,

is not really conducive to having a meaningful negotiation relationship. And then, of course, there's the little intel thing. As I've started doing pieces on the tariff issue, I've had people from the administration contact me from time to time, and the most enlightening one, well, two of them. Number one was a guy who's deep in Maga World who said that the morning of the tariff announcements on April 2, that they still haven't started putting it together. And if you remember, the tariffs that were adopted on April 2, the reciprocal tariffs, were nothing of the kind. Rather than looking at what everybody's tariff levels were and what non-tariff barriers such as currency manipulation might have been, all they did, all Trump did, was take the trade deficit and divide it by what we export, and that was the number. No basis, in fact, no basis in reality had nothing to do with trade policy whatsoever.

It was just a fabricated number. So nobody knows what it is that the Trump administration is actually after, so there is no way to position yourself for meaningful talks because you don't know what success looks like. Canada has definitely been on the receiving end of this in the worst possible way. Trump originally said it was about fentanyl, but the U.S. sends a couple orders of magnitude

more illegal narcotics north than come south. Then he said it was about illegal migrants. The U.S. sends more illegal migrants north than south as well, again, by an order of 10. Then he said it was about dairy, but we don't send them in enough dairy to even qualify for their country. terrorist level. So now it's about Canada becoming the 51st state. And that really doesn't leave a lot

of basis for negotiations. Negotiations, it's not just about providing people with a method of meeting you part way, but you have to let them know what it is you actually want so they can actually think about giving it to you. And we haven't established that relationship with anyone yet. So the more likely outcome is we just get a direct clash between Chairman Xi of China and Donald Trump of the United States and that goes in a lot of very interesting and particularly dangerous directions now again this is all great for me chaos and dysfunction are my jam but in the meantime the world's largest economy and really everybody else's economy are hanging by a threat in the meantime and we're looking at a

recessionary stackflationary environment until this is resolved one way or assuming it is resolved at all