The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump, Cartels, Terrorism and...Increasing Migration || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

Trump had a fat stack of executive orders waiting to be slammed down onto his desk as soon as he took office. One of those was his designation of Mexican cartels as terrorist groups, which will have some unintended consequences.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/trump-cartels-terrorism-andincreasing-migration

Hey all, Peter Zion here coming to you from a Lake Waukatipu in Queensland. It's 21st locally, which means it's the 20th in the United States, which means that Donald Trump was just inaugurated, and we've had several dozen executive actions quickly thrown in there. There's a lifetime of material for me to work with in there, but I'm going to focus on the one that I think is actually most significant to how most Donald Trump supporters view the world, and that has with designating the Mexican cartels who traffic illegal narcotics into the United States as terror groups. Okay, let's talk about what it does, let's talk about what it doesn't do, and let's talk about where it's going to lead us. So what it doesn't do is strictly

loosen the tools that the U.S. military can use on foreign soil, because Mexico is not a country that we are in war with. So designating the cartels, sponsors of terror, doesn't really do much unless you also desicate the Mexican government as a sponsor of terror, what it does is allows the U.S. government to very easily move against any entities who are associated in any way with the cartels, especially from a financial point of view, especially if they're victims. So, like, if there's a tukaria in Mexico City that pays protection money to the cartels, this action would target them because of the financial transfers.

But it's not actually going to encourage U.S. Apache helicopters to be flying south of the border and blowing shit up. Keep in mind that the number one drug that is of concern from my point of view is no longer cocaine. It is fentanyl. And fentanyl as a synthetic has a very different supply chain. What happens with cocaine is it starts in Colombia. It's turned into a leaf. It's pressed into a brick. It's refined with gasoline. It's turned into the white powder that we all recognize. Hopefully we don't all. Cocaine is bad. Don't do cocaine. Anyway, it is smuggled by plane, train, or automobile north, and eventually makes the jump by water or air to Central America, where it gets on land and it goes into Mexico and up north. So we're interrupting cocaine flows. This is a good thing. We like this. That is not what we're dealing with. We're dealing with fentanyl.

Fentanyl is a synthetic. And what happens is in China, you get a chemicals company that makes a precursor, which is then processed into another precursor. That precursor is put in the main. mail and is mailed to the United States, and then it is smuggled south across the border to a mom and pop shop that processes a few kilos of this stuff a month, and then that stuff comes north. That is where the money is. That is where the danger is. And this does nothing for that because the mom and pops aren't big enough to justify classification as terror groups because there's literally thousands of them, as opposed to just a few cartels. Anyway, so it's going after the wrong thing. More importantly, when you identify a group as a terror group, you have also identified the people that they prey upon as victims of terrorism, right? We all agree with this, right? Well, if you identify someone as a victim of terrorism, then they automatically qualify for asylum status within the United States.

So what Trump has done with this designation is designate 130 million Mexicans and 50 million Central Americans as automatically qualifying for U.S. immigration protection. Now, if you dial back four or five years ago, I said that Donald Trump will long go down in history as the most pro-illegal migrant president in American history. Because by building a wall, what he has done is built 50 roads, construction roads, that bypass the most robust natural barrier on the North American continent, the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts. And lo and behold, it came to be true and we eventually got two million illegal migrants a year. What he has done now is generated the largest inflows of the legal migration of the asylum clause of any American president in American history. Now, normally, I would argue that this would mean the end of him because his supporters will immediately abound him because he's done exactly the opposite, or achieved exactly the opposite of what he said he was going to do. But this is Donald Trump, and he defies convention all the time.

But it will set the stage for a very different conversation in the United States, and I can't wait to see how that comes out. Oh, one more thing that I would be remiss and saying. This is my last day in New Zealand. I have been drinking. I've been doing some wine tastings. And this is not what I would call grade A analysis. There's nothing that I just communicated with you that would be any sort of secret to the national security community,

the law enforcement community, the folks who are interested in immigration at pro or con, or anyone interested in generally security of the border in general. but clearly the new president slash old president is unaware. Otherwise, he would not have done it because this is going to generate exactly the sort of crisis that he says he wants to solve. The reason for this is very simple.

Donald Trump has made sure that there is no one in his inner circle who is capable and competent in the issues that really matter. And his cabinet nominations reflect that. The only other two leaders in modern history that I can think of that kind of fall into this category of deliberate blinders are Xi Jinping of China, who is rapidly leading his country into a full-out national collapse, and Barack Obama, who hated having conversations with other people to such a degree that he basically hermetically sealed himself into the White House for his eight years.

Donald Trump now joins those other two as one of the three most deliberately unaware leaders in modern history, which means that of the dozens of executive orders that were just handed down, there is undoubtedly more that fall into this general category. of going directly against what Donald Trump says that he stands for, which means that we are in for an incredibly interesting period over the next four years as Donald Trump's leadership, or more accurately, the lack of competence in his circle leads to some wildly interesting outcomes, and I am here for it.