The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Northern Africa, After America || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

For our next installment in the 'Post-American' series, we're looking at Northern Africa. This region only has a few countries that will turn out alright and a lot that will hurt for some time.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/northern-africa-after-america

Hey, everybody, Peter Zeyn here. We're going to do the most recent installment of our post-American series. We're going to start talking about Africa, specifically North Africa. Now, so remember from grade school, Africa is not just one place. Big continent, larger than South America or Europe or Australia, obviously. It gives North America run for its size in every way that matters. But it is split by the Sahara. So the population of North Africa has almost nothing to do.

with the population of sub-Saharan Africa. You've got a relatively thin coastal strip going from Morocco and the northwest into Algeria, and then it just stops. The Libyan part of North Africa is pretty dry, so once you get past Tunisia, there's a little nub of territory by the Gulf of Sidra, but the Gulf of Sidra and areas east

are completely barren in most places. The coastal strip where you get a little bit of rain is less than 10 miles. And then, of course, eventually, you get on the other side of the desert and you get to Egypt, which has a very different hydrological and cultural and economic history. So we're going to work from west and east. The key thing to remember about all of these areas is they're utterly incapable of projecting power. Most of these zones have never had trees so they don't have a maritime tradition

that's worthy of the name. And industrialization came very late to them after independence, after World War II for the most part. And even then it's been very uneven because there aren't a lot of resources to generate income. And so there's not an opportunity to generate a lot of education. And since the areas are so dry, the population has never been very substantial. So let's start from Morocco. It's probably the most functional of the North African states because it does rain a little bit more there. The Atlas Mountains do generate a little bit more impulse for agriculture and even industry. And so in terms of most of the measures that most people care about it and Tunisia, which has a somewhat similar setup, have always been the most

advanced countries, but it's not enough to look after their own needs. Like a lot of developing countries in the post-World War II era, these countries were able to develop certain sorts of income from, say, phosphate mining in the case of Morocco and a little bit of oil in the case of Tunisia, and they used that to provide services for their population and to most importantly by food. So the carrying capacity of these lands is arguably higher than what is capable. And if something happens to international trade, famine is kind of be one of the major concerns moving forward. What Tunisia and Morocco do have going for them, though, is a much more sophisticated population with higher educational levels and a better relationship with outside powers. So everyone in North

Africa lacks the capacity to look after their own needs. All of them need to partner with someone. But these are two countries that have pretty good relations with someone. So in the case of Morocco, there's a free trade agreement with the United States. In the case of Tunisia, they have pretty good relations with most of the Europeans and have been among the more liberal politically countries of the Middle East. Now, liberal, not like Democrat versus Republican, liberal like women can show their faces. People can get an education. The government doesn't shoot everyone that they disagree with.

And so both of these countries are going to be able to maintain kind of a, oh, what's the right term? Not semi-independent, that's not it. But they're definitely going to have sovereignty over their own issues. There aren't a lot of resources to go after, and they have a more capable population. So it argues for negotiations in their future about issues of security and trade, as opposed to anything that's more neo-colonial. Algeria, not so much. Algeria's got oil. and it lacks the technical capacity to keep its oil fields operational, much less expand them.

Now, the Algerians, if they were given the choice, would only deal with the United States. That's because they actually have a colonial master that's real close, and that is the French. Relations between the French and Algerians have never been good. The French tried to hang on to Algeria during the decolonization process of the 20th century, to the point that the United States and the United Kingdom felt it was necessary to write into the NATO charter that things like the security guarantees of NATO's Article 5 did not apply to Algeria. And so when the Algerians fought for their independence, it was a brutal, bloody war that lasted years. Now, the French do have the technical expertise that's necessary to maintain the Algerian oil fields,

but the Algerians have said repeatedly that they would rather not produce oil at all and descend into poverty and famine then let the French back in. And unless, and it's unlikely, the Americans are willing to step in to mediate this or manage Algerian oil, odds are we're going to have some sort of reprise of the conflict between the Algerians and the French. And that is going to get ugly.

There's no way around that. The future of Algeria will be determined by how willing Algiers and Paris are to have a conversation as opposed to shoot at one another. And that is very much to be determined. Libya, on a good day, is a failed state. The only way that Libya ever was able to achieve anything

is under the rules of globalization and the globalized order where countries were not allowed to invade one another. But Libya is absolutely incapable of looking after itself. It's arguably one of the more incompetent oil producers out there, and since you have a very thirsty continent just to the north of it, there will be a military invasion in some form of what is left of the Libyan state, with the Italians being the most likely power, maybe the French in second place, although they might cooperate on this.

The future for Southwest Europe is one where France is calling most of the shots, including in Rome, and so I can see sort of a co-dominion in Libya there. But there is no room whatsoever in the future for an independent Libya, period. And that leaves us with Egypt, which is a very, very special case. The Egyptians have been around for a few millennia, arguably the oldest ethnicity in the world. The problem here is that I industrialized to a degree. And so they were able to produce cash crops like cotton or citrus

that massively earned massively more money on international markets than wheat. And they then used that money to buy wheat. Now, this kept the population relatively quiescent because bread is heavily, heavily, heavily subsidized. But it means that the population, is probably now double what the carrying capacity of the Nile Valley would be if they switched everything

back to wheat today. So, we are looking at a mass famine event of biblical proportions later this century in Egypt's future. The only question is how bad and how soon. I'll give you an idea of how it could get really bad really quickly. The number one

source of wheat that they import is Ukraine, and that's gone. The number two source is Russia, and that's unborrowed time. There is no capacity for the world to ship enough emergency wheat supplies in to save the tens of millions of people who are going to starve to death. And that assumes nothing worse goes wrong. Remember, every country in this world can't project power. You can barely look after themselves.

And there's a big shakeup coming to the eastern Mediterranean, and it all depends upon what the Turks do. The Turks have to decide what they want to focus on. And from the Egyptian point of view, they would dream. of the Turks focusing to the southwest and on Egypt and Suez and the valley, because if that happens, then the Turks have a vested interest of getting food into Egypt in collaboration to a certain degree with Israel. But for that to happen, the Turks and the Israelis have to get along. And so the Egyptians' best case scenario is that the Turks agree to work with the Israelis,

even though they don't much care for Zionism, and then focus a lot of aid, money on Egypt to keep it alive. And that is a wish built on a wish, and it might well work out. But if it doesn't, we're looking at half the Egyptian population being in food danger. And that's before you consider something like climate change. If we get a really mild sea level rise over the next few decades, the entire Nile Delta where half the population lives is looking at getting, if not drowned, salt inundated, which will crush the... ability of Egypt to grow food for its own people. So no matter which scenario you look at, Egypt's time is ending. It's not that anyone's going to take them over or erase the ethnicity,

but the ability of Egypt to function as a state with its current population, it's almost laughably unlikely. And the only question is how does that story end? But the only good news I have is that it's probably not going to be a mass migration event because there's a book in the Bible about how hard it is to get out of Egypt. Physical infrastructure linking the valley to the rest of the world is almost non-existent. And that means Egypt was going to suffer and maybe even die more or less in silence.