The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Latin American Militaries Can't Stop the U.S. || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Sure, the US could probably overthrow just about any Latin American government with ease, but what happens after that?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4pJxG3Y

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado. We're going to continue what we talked about yesterday with the shape of militaries and the reality of deployment and apply it to Latin America. Now, obviously, the United States is far and away the most powerful military force, not just in the world, not just in the hemisphere, but in human history. And a big part of why that is true is because of the deployment capability. The United States has spent the last century building up the logistics that allows it to push troops, ships, ships, and power anywhere in the world. And when you're talking about places like Venezuela, which are just across the Caribbean, it's not too hard to get there. The problem is not offing the governments. The United States could probably, if it wanted to op every Latin American government in a matter of a few weeks.

The question is what happens the next day. Latin American militaries have zero deployment capabilities beyond their own shores. Part of this is economic. It takes a strong trade base, technically. advanced economy in order to protect power somewhere else. Part of it is a bit of a gap. One of the things we learned from the British Empire is that when you have industrial technologies and no one else does, you can literally bring a gun to a knife fight and rule the world for a century or two until the technology finally catches up. And the Anglos, which include the Americans, have held that kind of technological advance over the rest of the world for the better part of the last 300 years at this point.

It's only in the last 50 years that the rest of the world has kind of caught up, and that is the rise of Russia and China and the rest. Of course, there's also a digital divide. When you throw in the Revolution and Military Affairs, which in the United States really started kicking in the late 80s and really manifested for the first time on the battlefield in Desert Storm back in, geez, 1991, and eventually Iraqi Freedom in 2002, 2003. Details for less fuzzy. The United States demonstrate that it had precision as well as reach.

None of the Latin American countries have anything like that. So if you were to throw the United States against all of the Latin American countries individually or together, the battle would be over in a few days with the United States taking very few casualties and the Americans completely disemboweling the command and control of everybody on the other side. It would not be a contest. The problem, of course, is, again, what happens the next day. and that is a geographic problem. You see, Latin America isn't like Europe or the United States

where we've got these large chunks of flatland, crisscrossed by rivers that you can transport goods and people and troops on. It's mostly Highland or jungle. And in doing so, the population centers get broken up from one another. So you really don't have something like you'd have in the Midwest or on the East Coast or in Northern Europe where you can shuttle resources and people and troops and goods. back and forth and back and forth and back and back and forth. And that's what makes a modern

economy super successful is having very low resistance within your system. There really isn't anyone in Latin America that benefits from that. The mountains and the jungles cut the population centers off from one another. People have to move upland in many cases to get above the humidity and disease belts, which means all of a sudden you're having population centers at five, six, seven, eight, nine thousand feet with all of the problems that come from that. But it's better to not get disease and have those expensive so than to have diseases and maybe have flatter land. It means that the countries of Latin America cannot wage war in the way that we normally think of it in, say, Russia or China or Europe or North America. Instead, it's a

problem of fractionalization with different regions and identities and economic loyalties boiling up not just between the countries, but within them. So while the Latin America countries don't have much when it comes to conventional military forces. Their paramilitary forces are in order of magnitude larger in relative terms, and they are elsewhere in the world, because that's how you fight. You see, the problem with countries like Colombia or Mexico or Venezuela or Brazil isn't so much a conventional military threat. It's a paramilitary threat that is caused by guerrilla groups and rebel groups that boil up throughout these territories because they can't project traditional power and cultural monolithicness with their own systems. And so Columbia has had the longest

running civil war in the world. It really was only ended a few years ago because you had the population living on the sides of mountains at elevation and kind of this V in the Andes. And everywhere else, if you go too high, it's too cold. If you go too low, it's too humid and too rugged. And so if you go too low, you're all of a sudden in cocaine lands. And you can have groups that can generate capital by selling at least narcotics wherever it happens to be. Same thing in Brazil. The vast tracks of the Amazon might be romantic, but they're impossible for Brazil to project power through. In fact, the last time that this wasn't true, oh, geez, you'd have to go back. So the last war in Latin America was the Sinapa conflict between

Peru and Ecuador and the highlands and the jungles, where 300 people died. It lasted like a month, and that was it. Before that, man, you have to go back to the earlier century. There were two conflicts in the 1800s that were what Americans would probably consider a real war. You had the War of the Pacific in the later part of the century among Peru and Bolivia in one side and Chile and the other side. That was largely a naval conflict with some desert fighting where the Chileans wiped the floor with the other two in northern Chile, the Atacama, became Chilean territory. And the only other one happened just at the tail end of the Civil War in the United States. So 1864 to 1870, something like that. And that was a four-way conflict with Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil on one side,

and Paraguay on the other. And it was basically a fight over the littorals of the Rio de Plata region. If Paraguay had won, it would have controlled all of the rivers of those zones and access to everything that mattered. But they lost. And Paraguay became the pathetic rump stape that it is today. Since then, there's been nothing worth fighting over because the countries can't get at one another. So we're entering this phase where the United States is far more interested in managing and dictating what happens throughout Latin America. And there is no doubt that it can kick over the ant-hill whenever and however at once. But if wants anything productive to come out of the other side, it has to find a strategy

for managing what happens after. The problem is that most of the people in the U.S. government who have some degree of experience in that, and I'm not saying they're great at it, because these are the people who managed Afghanistan and Iraq. Didn't go great, but they've all been fired. So the Trump administration is trying to do it from the top by Dictot, when they have no one to handle the administration. And on the other side, the very nature of the military attack means that you topple the governing structure that happens to be there already. So in many ways, it's taking the worst lessons of what we did in Iraq, where we rooted out not just Saddam, but the entire Bath Party, and then tried to put on our own people

over a society that didn't have the ability to generate its own elites at first. And it took us being there for 15 years for them to generate the militant culture that was necessary to generate the elites. We discovered we didn't like that at all. This time, the Latin Americans have gutted their own societies in places like Venezuela. And so the elites are already gone and we don't have a management system. So you get two very brittle systems interfacing. Now that story will be different country by country. Colombia has a much more robust elite system, the Brazilian system, has a lot of oligarchs who can manage economically.

And there is an opportunity for an interface there in a post-intervention scenario. But if you think it's going to be simple, it is not. At the moment, the path that we seem to be on is a little bit reminiscent of American strategies during the Cold War, where we indirectly or directly propped up authoritarian governments who would do what we wanted vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The difference this time around is motivation. It's much more similar to late 1800s strategies where the United States would go in militarily, knock off the government or make a fuss in order to enforce contractual norms that were not

established by the U.S. government, but they were established by U.S. corporations. And we called that dollar diplomacy back in the day, and some version of that seems to be where we're headed right now. It's going to be a very rocky road because for the dollar diplomacy to work, the United States has to both build up institutions here to manage it and knock down institutions there to enforce it. It is kind of an ugly system, but if it works, and I'm trying to say this in as a moral point of view as possible, it does, allow the United States to treat Latin America like what it is. Its strategic backyard, but then also make it its economic backyard. But I will warn you, where we are today, the U.S. government is unprepared for this, and U.S. corporations are unprepared for this, because for the last 80 years, we have drilled into every American company that rule of law on a global basis is the first issue.

And dollar diplomacy by default says it's not.