The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Welcome to Captain Phillips' Nightmare || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

Captain Phillips is shaking in his boots because piracy is returning to the high seas, specifically in the Red Sea and off the Horn of Africa. Somali pirates have already attacked multiple ships.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4ut7lcV

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Just head to mood.com. That's M-O-O-D.com to get started. Hey, L. Peter Zeyn here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we're going to talk about piracy because it is back. In the, off the horn of Africa and the Red Sea, We have seen Somali pirates active again with at least three ships being attacked. This is a direct outcome of the Iran war, and we should expect a lot more in the days and weeks to come. So very, very short version, in case you haven't been paying attention, the trade of Hormuz is offline. And that means roughly three quarters of a billion barrels of crude haven't made it to the market. That's roughly equivalent of 10 to 15 percent of global supply is just gone, probably not coming back.

And the United States has its largest concentration of naval. forces in the area, really in the history of the region. So those two things make it almost impossible for people to patrol. Countries that might be a little hostile to the United States say China, they're not going to put any of their naval vessels in the region in an area with so much American military ordinance running around. And number two, the oil shortages means that more conventional navies, because most navies in the world are not nuclear powered, can't actually get the fuel to keep their economies running. So the idea of doing a long-range projection force into a war zone to fight pirates, no. So what we basically have is the United States concentrated

on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. It no longer has the bandwidth to patrol the Red Sea, and the coalition of forces from 10, 15 years ago that did it can't function in this environment. What it basically means is as this ramps up, not only is the Strait of Hormuz a no-go zone, the Red Sea will once again become a no-go zone. That will also hit energy prices because a lot of stuff is currently being exported through the Red Sea and then up through Suez, that's going to not work anymore.

You're going to have to go all the way around Africa. And for shuttle tankers that are coming in from, say, the Russian space in the Baltic or the Black, they originally would go through Suez and the Red Sea. Now, if they can't arrange some sort of ransom system or a prepayment system to Somali pirates, which don't exactly have to, crypto accounts like the Yemenis, the Iranians do. Those ships simply can't sail the distance

that's necessary to get them all the way around Africa. So this is going from bad to worse in a very short period of time. Everybody enjoy your 2026.