The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump Goes A-Conquerin' || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Trump just kicked around invading and coercing some allies. Oh boy....Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/trump-goes-a-conquerin

Hey everybody. I am in Motuoka, New Zealand. I'm on my way to the next part of my adventure, and I just saw that Donald Trump is talking about cocking cranks. So, for God's sake, leave me alone, but here we go. So Donald Trump says he's willing to use military force to go after Panama and Greenlands, and economic coercion to go after Canada. Now, oh my God. It's difficult to know where to start. Let's start with the smallest piece. That would be Panama. The United States built the canal about the early 1900s

after sponsoring a revolution in a bit of a coup in Colombia a few years later to split it off. And there's no infrastructure that links Panama proper into Colombia. So we were basically able to take a piece off over the over the decades to follow the United States basically ran the zone

as a military asset to the point that we even have a term zone for Americans who were born and raised in the Camel zone whereas the rest of the country bit by bit was given more and more autonomy and eventually independence and under Carter

the a treaty was signed with Panama reverting control canal to Panama but the United States always has a first right for military purposes so they take care of the canal, they maintain it and we use it whenever we want Donald Trump seems to not like the fee structure which okay but if the United States were to take over

Panama a couple things would come from that number one you got a country about 4 million people whose primary business is money laundering or subsistence agriculture. So integrating them into any sort of American occupation system would be very expensive. The pro, if that's the right word, is full control of the canal zone, would mean that the United States would have full control of the bridges between northern Panama and southern Panama. So any illegal migrates who are coming up through the dairy and gap and crossing the Panama and then all up,

you could basically stop them right there, but that means you're doing security checks on the inside of an occupied territory that is also a country with several million people, the cost of that would be high. The United States has not run a proper colony since Philippines, I think, is the last one. And that sucked, just to be clear. That's not something we want to get into. So could the U.S. do it? Well, of course, the U.S. could do it.

Under Bush Sr., we actually sent a military force into Panama because we didn't like the Noriega government because it was bigoted in drugs. If we do this, we basically guarantee that the Mexican cartels or the Colombian cartels or some cartel is going to move in and set up an underworld to basically handle all the things that the United States is not very good at doing as we prove to ourselves in the world over and over and over and over and over and over and over in the war and terror. So, needless to say, this is not something I would strongly recommend. Greenland! Oh my God. Okay, so the United States already has a pretty sizable military operation in Greenland, which is a legacy of the Cold War. We use Greenland's territories to help patrol the North Atlantic, and I would actually argue the Danes who administer Greenland and own it,

are definitely on the top five list for, most creative and loyal allies. They're not nearly as persniquity as the French or the Germans. They don't have an ego like the Brits. They've always been there in all the ways that we've always wanted, and they take care of Greenland and they allow us unlimited access for military purposes. So if the United States was actually to go in and conquer Greenland, again, yes, we could do it. This is a place that has less than 50,000 people. But from a strategic point of view, there would be no gain, because we already get all the good stuff. And then we'd have to administer it.

We'd also be rupturing relations with a country that has been a very loyal ally and which controls access between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. So if we disrupt that relationship, we take what is likely to be our best alliance of the future, which is the United States, the Brits, the Dutch, and then all of the Scandinavians and Balts, Estonia, Lafia, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Denmark, Norway. They're all in a cluster together.

We basically taken the most geographically significant of them and poisoning the relationship from the inside, endangering really anything you want to do versus the Russians or the Germans or the French or anywhere in northwest Europe. So a military action against an ally is a great way to make sure you don't have an ally and it wouldn't just be Denmark.

Third, Canada. I'll give Donald Trump this. Great timing because the Canadian government just collapsed like a day and a half ago. Okay, Canada ally, Canada's family, Canada integrated economically. He says he's not going to use military force against Canada, so you'll get that going for us, but he would be perfectly willing to use economic coercion, I believe, was the specific quote. First thing to remember about Canada is it's not a normal country. 90% of the population of Canada is

part up on the southern border with the United States where they're clustered together for warmth because it's Canada. Part of what that means is that you've got this thin layer Canadians on the northern border all of the mainland provinces, for in British Columbia,

all the way over to Nova Scotia. All of them trade more north-south with the United States than they do east-west with one another. So when Donald Trump is talking about things like trade deficits. He's using the wrong measure

because if you're, for example, Saskatchewan and you're trading with the United States and you trade more with the United States that you do with everyone else in your own country, you're actually part of the American economic space. And so we don't consider it a problem if Texas has a positive trade balance with Mississippi, right? It's like we're not going to tariff that

to punish Texas in order to encourage industrial activity in Mississippi because we're all part of the same economic space. It's the same thing in Canada. Every single province that matters falls into that category. I mean, I think like Labrador and PEI might trade more with Canada, but that's mostly federal transfers. So going after Canada in order to break the trade deficit is actually breaking what I would consider internal United States trade, and that's just dumb.

I mean, there's just no other word for that one. Second, I'm not sure you want, Canada, and that's not just because the food in Ontario is so awful. No, no, no, no. The issue is demographics. So if you remember back to someone my earlier work, demographic structures,

if you have a pyramid, you've got lots of children, fewer young adults, fewer mature adults, fewer retirees, something like this is kind of what you're after. And as you industrialize and urbanize child mortality goes down. And so people at the bottom live longer

and it starts to turn into more of a chimney. And then eventually you get to a point where the birth rate drops because everybody has moved into town and then it starts to invert into an open pyramid. United States is still more or less at the chimney stage for a number of reasons whereas Canada has opened up quite a bit more.

But if you look at the demographics of Canada by province, there's a whole realm of stories. You've got places like Saskatchewan and Alberta, who are prairie provinces that are more of a pillar, more like the United States, and you've got places like Quebec that are full-on inverted and are in the process of dying out and losing the workforces. So let's assume for the moment that Canada and the United States were to merge tomorrow. These aren't occupied territories. These would be states or combinations of them would figure out of large states, whatever. There's 35 million Canadians. It's going to be more than one state.

It would be really expensive. I mean, do away with the entire Canadian social welfare model for the moment, just for argument to say, because that's really expensive, and Americans wouldn't want to pay for that. If you put them into the American system, Quebec, demographically speaking, would be by far the oldest of the new states. And the expense in Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid alone would be crushing for the American federal budget. So if we were to absorb Canada, you'd easily have another $500 billion to a trillion of social spending just to maintain these aging and increasingly ancient populations before you start considering anything else. Labrador, P.E.I. No Scotia. All of them are actually in a worse position than Quebec,

but combined there are less than 10% of the Canadian population. The real problem, though, is that Ontario, which is the biggest of the states economically demographically, is aging very rapidly into a Quebec-style inversion, and within a decade or two is definitely going to be another massive outlay. If you want to be serious and talk about a Canadian American merger, the more likely path would be for Canadian provinces that have to pay for all these mass retirements, which are mostly in the middle. So, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta. They would probably choose for economic reasons to join us because that way they're not responsible for paying for Quebec's in-process retirement and Ontario's neary retirement. And from the Alberta point of view, that was the argument that I put into my first book, Accidental Superpower, in a chapter called The Alberta Question.

The update for that book, by the way, is out so you can see how that has evolved over the last 15 years. Anyway, bottom line is Canada, like Denmark, is an ally, and whenever it comes to a real security issue with missile defense being the primary method of collaboration right now, the Canadians have always been very cooperative because they realize that anything that the United States does to protect the homeland from missiles going over the pole, obviously you're going to be going over Canada. And so we've really not had a problem there in any meaningful way. I mean, Canada is still a country. We're not going to agree on everything all the time. Go fake. But it's not the sort of thing where we've had any knee-aithful disputes in that sphere. Most of the Canadian arguments that we have on security issues have to do with NATO spending,

which is an issue. I'm going to deal with another video here that you'll see probably a week or two. I was going to forget any. It's probably lots. Okay. So, bottom light, Panama, totally doable, but we'd be signed up for a lot of expenses that right now we're not responsible for. Greenland would be easy to do, but it would shatter the Americans of a strategic position in northern Europe and make us much more dependent upon countries that are a little bit more persnifony like France. and I don't think that's what we're after,

and not actually generate any meaningful security gains. In Canada, I don't want to say what is the winner yet. I mean, this isn't Syria, and I think closer economic integration with Canada, the United States, is a great idea. But if you're going to blackmail or otherwise threaten your number two trading partner, in order to get a financial commitment that is, wow, that would be expensive.

That's just bad math. So hopefully all of this falls into the category of bluster and threats in order to get something else that isn't being discussed yet. I don't know offhand what that would be, but I'm not in terms of circle. So anyway, if Mr. Trump, you want me to comment on more things, please say it in the next 36 hours because I'm about to disappear into the backcountry a few days and I will have no idea what's going on. So, toodles, and I will see you guys on the other side of the past.