The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Peter Zeihan's Favorite US President of All Time Is...

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Many of you have asked who my favorite US President is, so I figured I would do a video covering that. And we don't have to go too far back, just to number 41 - George H.W. Bush.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/my-favorite-us-president-of-all-time-is

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here, coming to you from D.C. That's obviously the Washington Monument behind me. One of the handful of things is not covered in scaffolding at the moment. Considering that the election is almost upon us, I decided to take a question from the Ask Peter Forum on the Patreon page and answer, who is my favorite president and why? And that's a no-brainer. That's George Herbert Walker Bush. If you consider he was president at the end of the Cold War and helped manage the decline of the Soviet Union without a shot being fired. in our general direction. That enough is enough to make him a great president. But think about what it was he tried to get us to do. He wanted us to have a conversation with ourselves about how do we take the Cold War alliance, the globalized system, and play it forward for another generation

of just American preeminence, but to improve the human condition. And if you think about what he inherited, that was pretty bold, because the whole idea of globalization was that we needed a whole world full of allies to be on our side against the Soviet Union. And to do that, we created the global structure and we used our Navy to patrol global ocean so that anyone could trade with anyone else without even a military escort. Basically, it would be like every single country, one World War II all by themselves and could dictate the terms of free commerce, and the U.S. allowed everyone to do that. And so having those assets in play when the Soviet Union finally fell was the ability to basically create a new human condition on a global base.

And he was the right person to do it. Not only had he just come from the White House, not just four years as president, but eight years as vice president. He had used to serve in Congress as an elected representative. He had been an ambassador to China. He had run the CIA. And he was on a first name basis with everyone in the world who mattered. He was the right person in the right place at the right time with the right Rolodex asking the right question. So of course we voted against him and threw him out of office and started down a parade of relatively or increasingly narcissistic leaders and the six we've had since then are definitely four of the worst presence we've ever had in American history and I'll let you guys debate among yourselves who

the two exceptions are but it was a missed opportunity and now today that opportunity has probably expired the United States is not just simply turned sharply isolationist and protectionist on both sides of the political aisle, but the nature of the world has now changed the point that doing any sort of broad reboot is not possible. 30 years on, we're all 30 years older, most countries have terminal demographics, and the moment that we had to reshape everything has passed.

So we're going to have to wait another 20 or 30 years for all of this to shake out, and then hopefully at the end of that period, we will have another president similar to Herbert Walker Bush, who is willing to ask us that question again. and maybe this next time we'll choose to answer.