Peter Zeihan back on stage. Back in a tie! #peterzeihan
"Covid is a bit of the story but only the most recent bit and honestly one of the
least significant bits in the world before world war ii everything was imperial you had a
series of sequestered militarized systems
you only traded within your own network and you shot at people who tried to do
the same.
it was a fight for everything that eventually brought us world war ii which
destroyed everything that we understood at the end
of that war the americans drew our allies together and we said you know
instead of doing this shoot-'em-up style of international diplomacy we're going
to try something different you're not allowed to have navies anymore
our navy the only one that survived the war is going to patrol the #global oceans
for everyone we will protect your countries
we will allow you to send any civilian shipping
anywhere in the world to interface with
any market and any partner in any way participate in any #supplychain
export any good in exchange we want one thing
you are going to line up to fight the soviets with us
not behind us not shoulder to shoulder with us in front of us
we bribed up an alliance and it worked
but the cold war ended 30 years ago and we've been backing away from that system
ever since and the guns for butter trade that we made back in 1945
arguably is no longer relevant but let's
assume for the moment that as americans
this is something we want to preserve
let's assume that for a second what do
we need well we need three things first we need
a bipartisan political system that agrees that the costs of
maintaining a global network are worth the benefits now i would argue
that that evaporated long before trump even before obama but
i think in the aftermath of january 6 i
think it's safe to say that we're not even really
capable of having a political conversation right now
but let's assume for the moment that
Biden is the guy
i think a lot of people have doubts about that but let's just assume it for
the moment how long do you think it will take President Biden
to get us all on the same page and to
lead us back out of the world
it's like a three-month thing a three-year thing
more time than he has no this is a
generational transformation that needs
to happen before we engage the world again
it can't happen this year or next year or probably this decade
so that's one number two you need an
economy that justifies that involvement we've never
had that and that's by design the united states is the least involved
economy in the world as a percent of gdp because
if we were engaged we would just be another empire and it wouldn't
be a bribe we pay people to be on our
side not the other way around and then third
you would need a global military footprint to keep the peace
that's gone this is total number of troops stationed abroad since world war
ii it's been trending down for some time
this middle east chunk goes to zero in five weeks.
11:09
