The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Western Europe, After America || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Ahhh, Western Europe. A region with no shortage of history, but how will they move forward into a deglobalized world? Let's just say Germany will soon be replaced as the dominant regional power.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/western-europe-after-america

Hey everybody, I'm coming to you from Waka Rupo on the South Island of New Zealand. Today is going to be the latest in our series on retail power in a post-American world. I want to go through Western Europe here. Now, the dominant power in Europe since the Industrial Revolution has been journeyed. It's got the largest population, the most land to work with. It's got access to a huge chunk of the Northern European plane. It's littered with navigable rivers, and so it's always been a capital and an industrial power. And dealing with German strength or German weakness has always been the issue that the rest of Europe has turned on.

And we are now moving into not simply a period of extreme German weakness, but absolute long-term national collapse. And there is no way that Europe can navigate that without substantial changes to the security, economic, and political order. We are dealing with one of the most dramatic demographic collapses ever recorded. We've got some of the best data on it. We know that they passed the point of no return back in the 1980s. So even if you include one-off events like the Civil War in Bosnia or the migrant move up from Syria, those collectively only gave the Germans about 5% of the population increases that they needed in order to stave off decline, it is not politically possible for them to have.

have events like that every single year from now on in order to prevent demographic collapse. So we've always known that the 2020s were going to be the final decade that the Germans could exist as a modern economy. And that's the best case scenario because we're also moving into a world where international connections are worse. And the German economy, because it's so old, because the average age of the population is in the mid-50s already, they can't consume what they produce. They have to export it. And as international trade, becomes more problematic, especially as the Americans and the Chinese both become more nationalistic on economic issues, the entire German model is facing collapse for geopolitical, as well as demographic reasons.

So we need to start thinking of the German space differently, not as kind of a self-moralizing, what's a hypocritical position like they had for the versus the Russians, the Chinese, during the last couple of American administrations, certainly not as a military superpower. That requires people. but instead as something that if you wanted to continue to exist, you have to pay for it. Basically, Germany is devolving into a much larger version of Greece, and the cost is going to be necessary to maintain the German nation and the German state is an order of magnitude bigger than what the Europeans have paid for the Greeks to continue to exist at this point. And since it's the Germans that have paid for the Greeks to exist,

it is unclear who, if anyone, has the interest or most most important, the capacity to pay Germany to continue to exist. That is a decision that can only be made at the highest strategic decision points in Paris, in London, and in Washington, and I can tell you right now, none of them are really grappling with that issue at this moment. Most likely outcome. In the short term, next five years, the Germans will no longer have the financial and economic capacity to pay for the European Union, and they have been the single large funder of the EU and its predecessors since the very big, beginning. And as Germany goes from a half country to a have not country, the entire fundamental

basis of the European Union crumbles in a day. We are in the final decade of not just the German economy, but the European Union as a whole. And that frees up everyone else in Europe to do something else, whether that's good or bad. Bad for most of them. There are two powers worth considering in a post-Jurban Europe. The first one, of course, is France. It has the healthiest demography. It has the least complication of security issues. It has the strongest military its economy has not been integrated into Europe as a whole, much less the world. And so in a post-globalized system, the French actually can build up to the bar with absolutely all of the assets and a national idea. I phrased that wrong. The French can enter a post-German, post-global, post-U.S. competition

with absolutely everything they need to be a very successful regional power. Their first issue, of course, is going to be the management of the German decline in whatever the post-relipped. post-German space looks like, but they're going to have their fingers throughout the entire periphery of their interests. The second country that matters, of course, is the United Kingdom. The demographics are significantly better than Germany, although not as good as France, and of course it's an island. So just like the French, they never really integrated their economy into the European space. And in the post-Brexit world, they are bit by bit by bit by bit trying to explore what it means to be an independent middle power. The end result for the

Brits was always going to be the same. Doesn't matter what the politics can let them tell us. It's always going to be a partnership with North America and most notably with the United States. But until the Brits come to that conclusion publicly, they're kind of in this limbo. And that buys that most precious of commodities for the French. Time. Because the Franco-British competition for the last 300 years has obviously been intense. and until such time as the Brits realize that they have to work hand and glove with the Americans from now on with the Americans being the hand, they are going to see seeing incremental declines in the geopolitical position from now on. Now, the one thing that the Brits have always had that have allowed them to punch above their wages of their Navy,

they're an island nation, they have to have a Navy, that means they can choose the time and the place of the competition. That's always served them well. And in the last few governments, because it's Britain, you can't say the last two, it's like the last 90, now, like, Italian-style government stability. The last several governments have finished work on their Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, which are two of the world's 14 supercarriers, sorry, two of, to a 15. The problem is, in order to get those out of dry dock, they had to gut the rest of the military. And so the Brits no longer have a strong enough Navy to provide an escort ring for their supercarriers.

So the only way that their supercarriers can sail as part of an American combat group, And the Americans really don't see the point, and the Brits making a power play in Northern Europe. That's going to constrain London's room for maneuver, not just strategically versus the United States, but versus the French at a time when the French are riding high and are only going to be riding higher in the future. Then, of course, the two countries on the outside that the matter of the most, Russia doesn't really directly impact the security of this region, unless, of course, they went in Ukraine, which case all that's are off. Good as a motivator, that's about it. And then the United States, which really hasn't made up its mind yet.

I find it unlikely that the Americans are going to try to subsidize the Germans over the long term. I find it unlikely that the Americans and the French are going to find themselves on opposite sides of any serious discussion of anything other than cheese policy. The question, though, is whether the countries on the French periphery are going to choose to deal with someone other than France. In the case of Portugal, they have one of Europe's longest standing treaties. with the Brits. In the case of Spain, there's always already whispering on the edges of Madrid and Mexico City about the Mexicans sponsoring the Spanish for membership in NAFTA. In the case of Italy, you've got a fractured polity that has always gotten along very well with the United States. And in course, in case of the Netherlands, they will every single time on security issues

side up with the Brits and the Americans over the French. So there is kind of this competition for who will be the dominant regional power. It's not that the Americans have an in dominating this region, but they certainly have an interest in no one else dominating the region. And that is going to make politics between France and the United States this weird combination of friendly and rivalrous all at the same time. For those of you who have been following French-American relations for the last two centuries, this should sound really familiar. It's just the most recent iteration. All right, that's it for me. Talk to you guys next time.