The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Question of Leadership…And Management || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Everyone gets mad at me for critiquing the leader that they like, but listen...I'm out here roasting everybody. Whether it's Obama, Trump, Xi Jinping, or Grandma, nobody is safe. Okay fine, we'll leave Gram Gram out of it for today.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-question-of-leadershipand-management

Hey all, Peter Zine here coming to you from the Colorado, Denver, Colorado airport. Today we're talking about leadership. There are a few things going on, but I want to talk about three of my least favorite leaders that are on the public stage right now. A lot of beat, you know, this thing. First, to establish my bona fides, I consider myself to be a political independent, which means that I think that I can look at politics in an objective manner that's even handed. What that really means is that everyone assumes that I'm partisan for the other side.

And, you know, it's just my personal cross to bear. But let's start with somebody who is no longer in power, and that's Barack Obama. Barack Obama is one of my least favorite leaders of the modern age, largely because of his lack of managerial skills. Now, it's not that he's not intelligent. I would argue that he is the smartest president we've had since at Jefferson. And he gave a lot of kind of exit interviews in his last year as president, where he demonstrated that he really did grasp how everything worked, like why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

really had no meaningful conclusion that could ever be resolved, why green tech in its current form actually increases carbon output rather than decreases it, whether it was economics, politics, or strategy, he really did understand how everything fit together. But he really hated people. He hated being in the same room as people. He hated having conversations with people. It was a constitutional law professor.

He wanted a lecture from the front. He wanted that to be the end of it. So we actually thought when he was elected that just because he was there, that we'd have bipartisan cooperation on everything, and everything would be easy. And since he didn't have meetings with anyone, that just didn't work out. So of the presidents who served full terms, going back to foundation, no American president met with his cabinet

or went to Congress fewer times than Barack Obama. And so for eight years, we basically didn't have a president. But that didn't stop him from thinking that he was the smartest person in the room. So in his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs, he basically told everyone that he could do all of their jobs better than they could. You know, let's assume that that's true for a moment. So, my understanding is the presidency is not a part-time gig. So even if you were the best person for every job, you can't do them all the same time and do your own. And so he never delegated, he sealed him himself in the White House, basically built an information wall around him and just sat there for eight years.

And he'll go down in history as one of the worst managers and the worst precedents we've ever had. Next up is Chiron and Xi of China, who, like all world leaders, is a bit narcissistic, but his issue is power preservation. Whereas Barack Obama always insisted that he was the smartest person in the room and was so confident in his arrogance and he basically just could be in a room alone, Xi is always concerned about what the next threat happens to be from internal services. Because if you look back on the long stretch of Chinese history, lots of coups, lots of assassinations,

and he knows that in a ossified political system like the Chinese Communist Party, it's only a matter of time before somebody else decides to kick him off. So his policy was to preemptively stop that. So he purged. He started with local regional governments. He worked into the federal bureaucracy. More recently, he's taken on academia and the business. community and the military. And really the last time he had a meaningful advisor who would tell him

the truth who has been six or seven years ago now. And so he's been making policy in a box all that time. And federal policy out of China has become more and more erratic and less and less connected to reality. Now part of this is in the geography of China. It's a big place with a lot of variety and the saying is that the emperor is far away. And so you get China spinning between these two extremes of over-centralization, which is definitely what we have now, or when the emperor, the chairman, loses control, all of the regions take out power and basically become fiefdoms, if not nations, to themselves. There's really no good middle ground. At least there hasn't been since Chairman Ding back in the late 70s throughout the 80s and the 90s.

Wow, sorry, Ding lived a long time. Anyway, what this means is that leadership in China is completely broken, completely isolated from the wider world, and the federal bureaucracy in China has seen so many of their messengers shot, in some cases literally, that they've basically not just started to self-censor, but to self-guide. So if you look at the statistics the Chinese systems collects, it's not as robust as you would expect for a country of China's level of size or sophistication, because if they present a data point to the Chinese premiere that he doesn't like the Chinese simply stopped collecting that statistic. So there's no longer any information on things like local political biographies because that would allow people to start climbing the ladder

and getting into the system. Same for college dissertations. Same for death rates. Same for the bond market. It might generate bad information. It's not that they collected and sit on it. It's that they don't even collect it anymore so they can never have that awkward moment with the boss. And then finally you've got Donald Trump. Now, it's not that they don't. Normally, when a leader loses an election and spend some time out of power, they try to hire some new people who fill in the gaps of their knowledge base, have skill sets that they don't have, especially built around things that they want to achieve. They build up a cadre of legislation so that when they get back into power, they can

hit the ground running, modify the laws in Congress, and make sure that the vision this time outlasts the president, or at least his current term. That's not what Donald Trump did. Instead, Donald Trump purged his inner circle of anyone who knew anything about anyone, including his outer circle, including the leadership of the Republican Party. So it's just a yes-men crowd, and a very thin one at that. You see, when he became president the first time around, he really didn't expect to win, and so he tapped the Republican Party apparatus quite strongly as well as the military for his circle.

And when they would inform him of things that he didn't like to hear, he would fire them. That's why he went through more cabinet secretaries than any American president. in history by a significant margin. This time around he's made sure that that can't happen. He hasn't brought in anyone who knows anything. So we have a vengeful incompetent running the FBI. We have a TV host running the Defense Department and so on. What this means is that Trump has achieved in just a few months what has taken Chairman Xi of China almost 13 years to achieve. And so what he's done is basically seal himself in the White House, Obama-esque style, built a hermetic seal around him

where information can't penetrate, Obama-style. But then he's also gutted all of the sources of information that leadership would normally rely upon, G-Style style. In many ways, we've gotten the worst of all worlds. About the only thing I can offer as hope here is that really most of the purging is at the top of the federal bureaucracy and all of the people down below,

you know, the 3 million people in the military in the federal bureaucracy that do the day-to-day, They're still there. There's still a cadre that over time can regenerate the leadership. But that's going to be a five to 15 year process. So take this for what it is. We've got three world leaders, two of them are active that are actively destroying the ability of their states to function, not just during their administrations, but long term. Now, in the case of the United States, there's a use-by date here.

Trump will be gone one way or another within four years. Who knows what's going to happen next? But in China, who! Even before the trade war, their demographic situation was so atrocious. They probably only had about eight years left. And now they have to do it without a functional government. So Xi will be the last Chinese leader, and he will ride this system into the ground, and he will destroy the People's Republic of China.

And hopefully, here in the United States on the other side of the Pacific, we'll look at how that goes down and learn a few things about what to do and what not to do with your government.