The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - My Dream Alliance for the US - Part 2 || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Today, we're looking at the countries that didn't quite make the first team, but still have something to offer as a strategic partner to the US. Let's break these places down.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/my-dream-alliance-for-the-us-part-2

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from New Zealand, the Brent Track. We're doing the second part of the dream alliance of the future. Last time we talked about the countries you kind of have to have. Countries where the lift is low, the payout is high, and the cultural connections are strong. So France, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Today we're going to talk about the ones that are a little bit more of an effort or a little bit more of a reach. Let's start in the Western Hemisphere. It's two countries that are border one another, Argentina and China. Chile. Both of them have a lot of resources are going to be in scarce supply in the world to come, especially food out of Argentina, but neither really have significant strategic complications.

So these are kind of like Friends Plus, if you will. Let's see. Next, let's move over to Southeast Asia. Those are the countries that are going to be like the really economic powerhouses in the future. Vietnam kind of made the first list, but the rest of Southeast Asia, most notably,

Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Indonesia are definitely a high up on the countries you're going to want to be with. All of them have pretty good demographics. All of them have an existing industrial plant. None of them have a recent history of going to war with one another. And as the Chinese system falls apart, this is the part of the world that is probably going to be most likely to pick up a lot of those pieces. So they won't have an economic miracle in the way that China did. It won't be that unhealthy. But it'll last longer. It'll be more durable, to be higher value added. And unlike China, these are consumption-led economies all.

only complication in there is Thailand. Thailand is already significantly aging demographically so probably only has about 30 years left before it's in a German-style demographic decline. Now a lot can happen in 30 years so I don't want to write them off yet but if things don't change they will definitely be eclipsed by countries like Vietnam but these countries low security heartburn high economic payout. Beyond that a couple that are really problematic. The first is Oman in the Middle East, and really that is the only country in the Middle East that I think is really worth having a long-term relationship with. It's not

nearly as cray-craze, places like Saudi Arabia, and it commands the opening to the Persian Gulf. So no matter what American foreign policy ends up being or not being in the Persian Gulf, having the ability to project power into it from the outside through Oman is brilliant. Also, So if there's one thing that everyone in the Persian Gulf agrees on, whether it's Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Iran, it's that the Omani's are okay. They are a great interlocuretor. They're a great mediator for anything that's happening in the region, no matter how blammy it gets. So it'd be lovely to have them in the outer circle of allies. And then the final one is what I almost didn't consider, but in the world we're moving to a lot of the places where

raw materials come from are going to be really unstable. And there are a few places in the world that are just have so much of it in incredible concentration that we're going to need them one way or the other. And the two countries in question are Saudi Arabia and the Congo. These are countries that are massive producers of raw materials that do very little with refining, very little with value out of. They're basically mines with people. And we're going to have to figure out some way to continue to access the copper, the cobalt, the platinum, the palladium, the diamonds, and all that other good stuff that these two countries just have in spades. Because if we can't figure that out,

the only other real player in the world that is going to be able to produce the volumes of material we need, it's Russia. And the whole point of going away from globalization is that you lose those strategic complications. So Congo, South Africa, despite all of their problems, and there's a list so much better than dealing with Yaskow.