The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Revolution in Military Affairs: Water Wars || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Today, we move onto the backbone of civilizations, the lifeblood of (most) meaningful empires—water. Will future wars be fought over it?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-revolution-in-military-affairs-water-wars

Hey L. Peter Zine here, coming you from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page specifically about water wars. Do I expect the distribution of water to be the source of military conflict in the future? Short version is this is something I usually don't worry about for the simple reason that water is really hard to move and it's pretty corrosive to any system that you're going to use to move it. So, for example, if you just spill some water on your countertop and touch it, you'll notice how it clings to your finger in that weird drop, that's something called hydrogen bonding. It's an atomic feature that a small molecule that has some very strong positive and negative aspects tends to link together without

actually forming, say, ice. That hydrogen bonding basically causes a cling between water and everything, including itself. So pumping water outside of a municipal environment is very, very difficult and very, very, very expensive. So if you are going to move large volumes of water from one place to another, you're generally not going to do it by pipe. You're going to use, gravity, and that means basically digging some sort of canal and allowing the world to do the work for you. There are some exceptions, of course. Whenever you have a municipal situation, you obviously need water treatment and distribution. That is all done by pipe, but again, it's very, very energy intensive. And you will always have some places like, say, China, who weren't going to let something

little like physics or economic rationale get in the way of national unity. And so the Chinese are in the process of basically diverting several of their rivers in order to ship water from the south where it's more humid and more jungly to the north, which is more heavily populated and more arid. But this comes at a huge cost environmentally and economically. What that means is it's really difficult to imagine a situation where people will go somewhere to get the water and bring it back. If they're going to get the water, they're going to go there and they're going to stay. And that is also very hard. As a rule, economic development follows the same track.

You start with water. You use that water to grow food. You use the food to expand your population. You use the capital from that population growth and that agricultural sales to establish a tax base and eventually an industrial base. You then use that industrial base to build a military and it is all rooted in having water at the very start.

If you don't have that water, you're never going to get the industrial base that is necessary to have a projection-based military. And so if you look out through, throughout history, while you do sometimes have dry cultures that conquer wet ones, the only ones who then become meaningful cultures that can project power in the future are those that then stay, conquer, assimilate, wipe out the generation that they're conquered in and then move on. The technology that is required for the industrial age just doesn't allow it to go any other way.

So, are there exceptions? Of course. Every rule has exceptions. Let me give you the two big ones. The first one is the Nile region. Most of the rain that fuels the Nile River falls in the highlands of Ethiopia. It then flows down through the tributaries of the Nile through Sudan before eventually entering Egypt and becoming the rivering culture that we all know from history. Well, the water falls in one place, passes through another place and is ultimately used in the third place in the existing treaty systems that date back to the colonial era say that Sudan and especially Ethiopia aren't supposed to tap the river at all. It's all for Egypt. Well, that's breaking. And we're seeing the Ethiopians and the Sudanese starting to take more and more water from the river for irrigation purposes

in order to stabilize their populations and have economic growth. Hard to argue with them. But that does mean there's no longer enough flow coming down into Egypt to sustain Egypt long run. So sooner or later, something is going to crack. Either we face an economic and ecological collapse in Egypt, or the Egyptians get creative with military. military power and go up river with the intent of blowing up the dams, preferably in a way that does not trigger a fresh biblical flood in Egypt. No easy solution, but there's certainly not enough water for everyone to come out on top. The second big issue is in Central Asia, where the Pamirs

provide the headwaters for a couple of rivers called the Amu and the Sear, and those two rivers flow through Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan before dead-ending in the Arrow Sea. Well, during Soviet period, cotton plantations were planted throughout these areas, most notably in Kazakhstan, and especially Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. And now most of that water never even makes it to the Aral Sea, so it's become desiccated. And right now, what's left of the arrow, the little bits that are left, are only about 10% the volume of what existed there back when these diversion systems were built back in the 1960s. So the entire area is gradually drying out. And after having a few decades of agricultural runoff get into those rivers, they've basically

polluted what is now the open salt plains of the formal aral seabed. And hotter, drier conditions mean more winds, which means those salts are being whipped up in storms and dropped several hundred miles away and are causing health issues for everyone in Southeast Asia. So sooner or later, one of the downstream states, if it has the capacity, is going to invade the upstream states to control what little of the water there still is. Of the five stand countries, the one with by far the most military capacity is Uzbekistan, and it is very close to the physical borders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which control the headwaters.

So expect a hot fight there with the Uzbek's moving in with the intent of taking over. And unlike the situation that we have, say, with Egypt and Sudan, there isn't a big giant chunk of trackless desert to serve as a barrier. These population centers are all on top of one another. So for water, that's what you're looking. looking at pretty much a local issue. We still obviously have issues with distribution in the United States, but it's very rarely a cross-border issue. And where it is, it's really just limited to those two locations.