The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - President Biden Is Making a Trip to Angola + Patreon Live Q&A || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Don't miss out on the Live Q&A on Wednesday, Oct. 23rd. Click here to join Patreon and help us donate to MedShare: https://bit.ly/medsharepatreon Already joined the Patreon? You can also donate directly to MedShare here: https://www.medshare.org/zeihan-responds/ President Biden is making a trip out to Africa (since recording, this trip has been postponed due to national weather issues). No, he's not going on safari; he's looking to shake some babies and kiss some hands over in Angola. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/president-biden-is-making-a-trip-to-angola

Hey everybody, Peter Zine, here coming to you from New Orleans. If you're seeing this, you're about to see a free video, and it's just a quick reminder that on October 23rd, we are doing our first subscription question time. So if you sign up for Patreon now, you'll be able to submit your questions and watch me squirm in real time, which apparently people enjoy. And as a reminder, anyone who subscribes before the end, October,

all the fees will be going to help with Hurricane Relief from Helene and Milton. All right, now on with the video. everybody, Peter Zion, coming to you from Washington, D.C. That's Melan auditorium behind me. Today, we're going to talk about an upcoming trip that Joe Biden has to Angola. Now, during the Cold War, the United States and Angola were definitely on opposite sides. There was a civil war there that the Soviets and the Cubans and later the Chinese were supporting on one side. We were supporting on the... Oh, hello, that's a big ass squirrel that seems to think that I have food for it. Huh. Anyway, during that time, so the Americans were on one side, the Soviet...

Soviets were on the other side, and American oil companies were helping the Soviet-backed government generate oil that was then sold to Europe and, you know, Cold War, weird stuff. Anyway, bottom line is that Cold War is long since over. Americans are saying bygones, and the Angolanes are a little curious as to the details, but they're open to some sort of a deal. It's not that Angola is all that important to the United States for its own sake. I mean, yes, they produce one and a half to two million barrels of crew today, but the U.S. is the world's largest refined cruise. product exporter now and the world's largest crude producer, so it's not like we need it for us or even for our allies anymore. The issue has to do with mining. Africa is kind of the great frontier for large-scale mining, particularly on a belt of countries going from Congo South. This is the old Cecil Rhodes route. Cecil Rhodes is the guy who basically founded modern South Africa. And from the copper belt in southern Congo, there's a series of collection railroads

that link together and form a spine going down Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswan, and ultimately reaching the better ports in South Africa. Well, there's something called the Benguela Roadway or the Libito Corridor that cuts across Angola to the Atlantic that intersects this line. And ever since apartheid ended in South Africa, the government has become increasingly dysfunctional, and the maintenance on the main spine railway has steadily degraded. to the point that it's pretty rough in a lot of places.

So the idea the United States has is if we can rehabilitate the Libito Corridor and rebuild the Benguela Railway, which dates back to the Portuguese occupation a century ago, well, then there's another route for this stuff to get out, and it would be going to the Atlantic instead of the Indian Ocean Basin, and that's closer to the United States and Europe, as opposed to China. So it's become a bit of a tug of war that the Angolanans are encouraging, because everybody's spending infrastructure money in their country. And the people who won the Civil War, the pro-Sovietes, are a minority. So now we have the group that the United States used to support it, which is closer to the majority, that's kind of an oppressed population. So once again, there's all

kinds of weird geopolitics going on in this southwest African nation. At this point, building a railway is pretty straightforward. The United States is basically invested in this project as one of its bigger oversees eight projects and it's probably going to be completed and operational within a couple of years. Too little too late. Time will tell, but the country is very much in play. And so of course, until Joe's going there.