Peter Zeihan | The Changing Character of War | Maneuver Center of Excellence

our next speaker is an expert geopolitical analyst and author and an accomplished speaker he analyzes geography demographics global politics and strategy to understand how place impacts financial economic cultural political and military developments ladies and gentlemen please welcome mr peter zion [Applause] other side okay hey everybody uh short version general miley's right the ad no here it is the advent of the transition from the musket to the rifle was part of the industrial revolution it changed everything but it didn't just bring us a different kind of warfare brought us a different kind of system gasoline concrete steel railroads fertilizer electricity the world we know but there's nothing that says that progress is one way history is replete with examples of cultures people regions going the other direction we are on the verge of something fundamentally different right now yes but of a lot of it looks more like the world before 1945 than the world of the future so with that the 10 most terrifying words in the english language i am an economist and i have a powerpoint deck let's start by talking about how we got to right here this graphic is this is my life first the flags at the end of world war ii we changed the world worked everything about it it used to be we had sequestered imperial systems that would trade only within their own networks because if somebody threw a war even if you weren't invited it could disrupt your supply chain so you kept everything in-house and you fought to keep it in the house and expand your house that eventually culminated in world war ii which tore the entire system down so we at the end of the war changed everything we used our navy to patrol the global ocean so that anyone could go anywhere at any time participate in any supply chain access any raw material build any product sell into any market and none of it would any longer require a military escort that's globalization that's free trade that's the world we know but there was one catch that we insisted upon you had to line up shoulder to shoulder not behind us not with us in front of us to absorb the ammo that might come in from the soviet union we bribed up an alliance to fight the cold war and it worked but the cold war ended 30 years ago and in the last eight presidential elections we chose the guy who had no interest in maintaining that system the one exception is this most recent election where globalists didn't even have a horse in the race that's not an aberration that's a pattern culturally the americans are done that's piece one piece two are these graphics now these are demographic profiles children at the bottom young adults mature adults retirees at the top men on one side women on the other mortality tends to build it into a pyramid now this is canada in 1965 and this is what most of the world looked like until then lots of children few retirees and that shapes the economic model that a country can use because when you have a lot of people down here it's all about what you buy you're raising kids you're going to college you're buying cars and homes very consumption heavy but young workers are relatively unskilled they can't produce enough to sustain their consumption habits so it's low capital because all the money comes from the the mature adults it's high consumption they tend to import to make up the difference but the industrial revolution remember after world war ii global stability meant that everyone could play people moved off the farm people moved into town on the farm kids are free labor they're a source of money when you live in town especially if you're in an apartment or a condo kids are just really loud annoying pieces of furniture that take money so you have fewer of them you play that forward 60 years and you get something more like canada today not a lot of young people not a lot of consumption not a lot of unskilled workers but a big bulge here in the 50s and early 60s folks that literally have decades of work experience very productive very high value added but with not a lot of people to sell to so consumption investment government debt government surplus importer exporter the whole world has gone from this to this here are a number of major economies in the year 2000. kind of right in the middle of the heyday of globalization from 1985 when it became apparent that dayton was going to stick until 2015 that was the perfect moment for all of us because we had a balance of countries that were consumption driven and importers and countries that were export driven and uh investors and the united states was holding up the ceiling for everyone and the cold war was over it was perfect but 20 years later we are all 20 years older and i know what you're thinking that's fake news but no that's how math works here's where we are now the moment's over even if the united states decided that it still wanted to hold up the ceiling the economic model that has allowed everything we understand about trade and growth and consumption and investment it's already gone it's not coming back there's your new ten words the world you understand is gone it is not returning here's us we're different a lot of elbow room in the united states we industrialized over the course of over 200 years instead of less than 60 for most we got used to having larger families that's shaped everything about this country let's start with the baby boomers the green block they're the largest generation we've ever had and the thing you must always remember about the baby boomers is there's not a damn thing about them that's special oh come on there's a lot of gen-xers in the room that was hilarious anyway they were born at the same time they went to school at the same time they started families at the same time they entered the workforce at the same time and now they are retiring at the same time they are the single largest chunk of our workforce ever they are the culmination of all of our skill sets and they're all leaving the workforce at the same time you want to understand what's going on with inflation today that's the single most important factor they're all leaving and they will never come back gen x that's my generation um we're a little bitter because we've always been outnumbered we always will be outnumbered we will not ever be the largest demographic in the country we have always known that the baby boomers will absorb most of the social spending capacity of this country and we have always known that the millennials will support them because the millennials don't support the boomers with medicare and medicaid and the rest that means that the boomers will have to move in with their kids and from the millennials point of view that is a one-way relationship not going to happen now the millennials large generation that is true they are filling out the ranks of the labor force and what the next never could but they face a challenge half of them match the stereotypes live in the basement mom takes them to work at their first job at age 27 half of that for them it's true the other half it's not the other half did everything that we've always expected they graduated from college in three and a half years they did not take an extended adolescence they went right into the workforce and then they got slammed up the side of the head by the financial crisis ironically this means the two halves of the generation are in the same place whether it's because they took an extended adolescence or because they when they got their jobs they were the last ones in so the first one's out millennials lost three to five years of work experience they're behind they will always be behind for our labor force to get back to where it was in 2019 we have to wait for the millennials a large generation to have kids and for those kids to enter the workforce that'll happen in 2045. and then finally the zoomers which are gen x's kids smallest generation ever in american history general funk's right there's a recruiting problem but oh my god look what's coming and unlike the millennials who are social and are team oriented the zoomers were raised by gen x gen x told them there will be no break the government will take everything i have there will be no inheritance if you want to succeed you have to be better than everyone they are anti-social their idea of a dream job is to work in a locked closet coding think of it with their fiction with the millennials it's harry potter you have a wand you fly around on a broom you play some weird-ass three-dimensional version of soccer and at the end of the day with the confrontation with the big bad you don't win because you're smarter or because you worked harder you win because of who you are then there's the zoomers hunger games you too there's a plastic spoon fight to the death using that and only that and the winner gets lunch this is not the sort of group that is easy to recruit for anyone who's not in software but it's nothing compared to what our rivals have to deal with oh my god so here's china in 1950 this little blob here at the bottom that's what happens when foreign troops stop rampaging through your village you have a birth boom 30 years later this is the demographic structure that terrified mao zedong he was afraid that a young growing generation of chinese were literally going to eat the country alive his solution a one-child policy 20 years after that this is the demographic structure that scares americans we see a bottomless supply of young chinese workers who are taking everybody's manufacturing jobs this is also the demographic structure that excites the chinese politburo because they see it as a bottomless supply of young chinese consumers remaking global norms we're both right we were both right past tense because this is 20 years ago here's china today now this is according to data from january of 2020 at that point china was already the fastest aging society in human history and it was aging towards oblivion at a rate we couldn't even consider possible until 10 years ago according to this data china by the year 2100 will have less than half the population it has today since then the chinese have started releasing bits and pieces out of their 10-year census they now believe that they've over countered their population in excess of 100 million people the best guess that we have from what they have chosen to share is that the yellow bars don't even exist if this is true china's population will drop by half by 2050. most of us are going to live to see the end of the han ethnicity much less the people's republic the question is how does it go out that's only one reason i'm really not bullish about the chinese system now this is completely over complicated graphic is global oil flows the thicker the bar the more oil that is going on the tanker route the one that matters more of course is right here the chinese import over 80 percent of their oil needs and about 85 percent of that comes from the persian gulf it is the single most exposed trade route on the planet now the chinese do have a lot of ships most of them would fit on this stage only about 10 of the chinese ships can actually sail more than a thousand miles from a friendly port and the chinese have no friendly ports outside of the prc which means they can't patrol that trade route in the case of a war a real war the countries that have the capacity to destroy china as a modern industrialized country include but are not limited to india singapore thailand malaysia indonesia australia taiwan the united states and japan you put two destroyers in the indian ocean three months later the trucks stop running six months later the lights go out and a year after that they lose 500 million people from famine the chinese are utterly dependent on the world that the united states maintains in a globalized fashion we go home it ends we are the single greatest ally and empowerer of today's china and we've lost interest in globalization there's a reason that the chinese are sounding really desperate and really belligerent and really bitter they know what's almost over give you an idea of just how vulnerable the aussies great friends great allies right we recently struck a deal to provide them with some very cool military equipment now publicly what everyone seems to grab on to are those nuclear submarines and i don't mean to suggest that there aren't sexy pieces of equipment but we're also giving them air launch cruise missiles maximum range of the existing australian fighter bomber fleet with these cruise missiles can reach here if they just launch them from their own terrestrial airspace it reaches here there's a street of malacca the australians country 30 million people can now bring china to its knees that's how vulnerable they are so uh china has gotten interesting from my point of view chairman xi has consolidated power unto his person to a degree that not even mao attempted it is a full cult of personality he has executed or exiled or intimidated into silence everyone in the country who is capable of an independent opinion and he has shot the messenger sometimes literally so many times that no one wants to bring him bad news he kind of combines the worst characteristics of barack obama and donald trump barack obama refused to let anyone to the white house who disagreed with him he didn't want to hear news that he didn't want to hear and donald trump if you can get in a meeting with him he will talk about anything except the topic at hand you guys remember when the power outages started in china last may at one point over a third of the country was experiencing rolling blackouts they still haven't stopped best guess is that chairman g was not aware of it until september we didn't get a policy adjustment until november no one wants to tell him bad news this is not how a functional country works we also know from countries like chile and the uae who have used the chinese vaccine is that it's crap it doesn't work against alpha much less delta much less omicron so china can never move away from a zero tolerance strategy because the health care impact upon the population would be crushing until such time that they say oh yeah we're going to bring in 3 billion doses from the united states and do you think that's going to happen this year or next year or ever they're stuck and so we're seeing increasingly frequent lockdowns because omicron is simply too contagious for a zero tolerance system to work china is inadvertently breaking itself away from global manufacturing and with a population that is physically incapable of mass consumption exports are the only game in town so if the chinese system can't guarantee demographic survival or financial stability or an export market or even basic health what's left food for those of you who watch agriculture which is probably nobody uh this is a nice little shot from 2019 the chinese are experiencing an outbreak of what is called african swine fever it's kind of the pig equivalent of ebola it's really nasty they culled over two-thirds of their herd pork plays a role in chinese culture equivalent to hamburgers and steak and chicken and bacon and fish in this country it is the protein everyone goes for the chinese swine herd is bigger than the rest of the world's combined and they culled more pigs in china in the last three years than exist on every commercial farm in the rest of the world combined they are now attempting to rebuild the herd because this is all they have left and if you are going to raise a hundred million pigs you've gotta feed them a lot quickly so the chinese are buying up every scrap of food they can find anywhere on the planet even if it isn't normally designed for pigs so they're buying broken rice out of india they're buying high grade i get wheat out of france everything you're like oh great now he's talking about agronomics the only other thing that chinese care about besides pigs is rice they know that they're a food unstable country and they are terrified that the bottom's falling out of that too so they have recently criminalized the export of phosphate-based fertilizers hold on to that phosphate-based fertilizers we'll come back to that energy investment 2015 was the heyday this is all oil and all natural gas investment globally it's less than half of what it used to be back in 2015 a narrative took place in london and tokyo and wall street but fossil fuels are done why would you invest in an industry that is dying the future is evs and solar and wind now there is a discussion to be had about green tech and its viability but your average oil or natural gas well takes three to eight years to bring online you cut investment by sixty percent the pipeline of new projects collapses if that number was flipped today the soonest you would expect the energy inflation the world is experiencing right now to fix itself is 2025 assuming nothing else goes wrong but it's not true everywhere this is the checkbook map everyone who has a dot up there can pay their power bill here are the world's conventional oil and natural gas basins you'll notice that there's almost no overlap between the lights and the green much of our global geopolitical and strategic angst of the last 70 years has been about bringing the oil from where it's produced to where it's used from the dark to the light and click one more time and i'm going to show you where the global shale basins are pay particular attention to saudi arabia and north america there are a number of reasons why shale energy is transformative but for you guys the most important one is that it's produced not just here but the parts of here where people live the transport of oil in the shale world is not a problem for north america for everyone else's building but not here there's also a little quirk about shale wells that they don't take three to eight years to develop they take three to eight weeks so while everyone else is looking at a macroeconomic picture of energy shortage for a minimum of another three years here it's already fixed itself we've already seen prices come down in many sectors because once you start drilling within a couple of months it's already in the system so probably by april from our point of view energy inflation will be in our past this is natural gas prices in the united states these spikes here are hurricanes because we used to get about a third of our natural gas from the gulf of mexico but one of the beautiful things about shale wells is they are all on shore and when we got to 2009 two-thirds of the natural gas production in this country was coming from shale we didn't have another hurricane bump this little pickup right here near the end you guys remember last year texas trees texas does not do well with coal that's what that did here's the energy inflation that we all seem to be freaking out about right now we've gone from three dollars to six dollars yes that's technically a doubling but because of shale it's already being addressed but here's europe and asia oops that's the laser minimum three years before this fixes itself for them minimum the chinese have blocked the export of all phosphate fertilizer they were the world's largest supplier all of the world's nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from natural gas so phosphate weakened natural gas or nitrogen expensive hang on to both of those let's talk about the russians uh yes this is on it on its side so north this way just just do that if you have to a lot of people do there's no shame this v this wedge is populated russia it is the part of russia where it's not so cold that your nose will freeze off in early october late october you're screwed but early october you're fine now this orange color here that's roughly the population density of eastern nebraska if you melon scoop out lincoln and omaha so you do have neighbors you will not see them every day that's populated russia on the shoulders it gets a little less encouraging so same view but this is a combined climate and economic map so the green that's the russian wheat belt that's where everybody lives the blue tundra and tagai nobody lives there the yellow desert nobody lives there you technically could survive in the beige but it's not pleasant all right when the russians look at this map they really hate what they see because they see a chunk of territory that cannot be defended they look at it from the point of view of these red hashes these are the physical boundaries that you can't drive a tank through or the mongolians can't hoard through from the russian point of view the only way that they can get security i'm saying if they can put permanent mass formations in these corridors the access points to the russian heartland when the soviet union existed they controlled all nine of those access points it was the most secure the russian ethnicity had ever been in its existence when the soviet union collapsed and we were left with rump russia they went from nine to one in 2007 when the russians invaded georgia they went from one to two in 2014 when they took crimea they went from two to three last year with the second nargono kaaba war with the new troops that are there they went from three to four they're hoping that the situation in kazakhstan will stabilize to their benefit which would take them from four to five and if they can take ukraine it's in its entirety they would go from five to seven there's a method to the madness also means that the russians can't stop as catherine the great said the only way that russia can protect her borders is to expand them they're not making that up does that mean they're going to do it this time around i have no idea this is hardly the first time since 2014 that the russians have chosen to put a hundred thousand troops on ukraine's borders to dick with them could be but there's nothing to guarantee it the reason that they haven't moved is because time is really not on their side oh yeah do we have anything from texas yeah it's not as big as you think time is not on their side this is the russian demography and we're assuming here that the russians are not lying about the numbers and they lie about all their numbers so you know this bulge down here probably is not as big as it looks because back in 2014 they just found eight million children that they didn't have in the previous year's census so but here's the part that really matters this is the generation that was born in the 1990s and early 2000s the cold war collapsed that's draftable age yes the russians can probably take the country with 130 000 troops take ukraine but they can't hold it you guys know that from the experience in iraq and afghanistan occupying not easy when the population doesn't want you there it's a country 45 million people that's iraq plus afghanistan and unlike iraq and afghanistan where the population concentrations were pretty tight ukraine is farmland not possible with 130 000 troops you're talking 2 million troops the russians only have 2 million troops that can play that role and they are irreplaceable and once they are deployed that is it russia is done it is russia's last war it's an open question in the united states whether it's better to just let them die over the long term which they will or lock them down in a war that is endless which it would from the american point of view these are both equally viable options ukrainians of course have an opinion bringing this back to the china discussion russia and belarus are the world's second and fourth largest supplier of phosphates or excuse me of potash nitrogen fertilizer is disappearing because of what's going on in energy markets phosphate fertilizer is disappearing because what's going on in china and if this war happens potash fertilizer globally has a shortage as well yes rifles are an industrial technology but so is fertilizer and if you remove all three types of fertilizer at the same time this world is over now the us will be fine we either produce it ourselves or get stuff we need from canada but the rest of the world the technical term is [ __ ] so let's talk about where it hurts most here's africa in 1950 this is a crop concentration map the pink and the blue are areas where roughly one-third or less of the land is under cultivation and in a pre-industrial system this is what you would expect we don't have this experience in the american midwest our land is too good but in every other part of the world most of the lands are sub-par and it takes value-added inputs in order to make them productive fertilizer pesticides herbicides equipment finance takes it all all of those are industrial technologies and with 50 years of access to those technologies this is what africa became over five decades their output increased by a factor of five it's one of the great successes of the globalized order now take away some of those inputs subpar technology i'm sorry subpar lanes once you apply the technology have explosive increases which means if you take away the inputs they have explosive decreases now this next map combines my entire oh no no yet sorry it's weird when you don't have a confidence monitor you never know what's next this is where the world's wheat comes from the beige are the net exporters the rather than importers the reason i'm putting this up is because of the russians uh the last time the russians mucked with export markets for wheat and imports it was 2010. they had a very dry season in siberia and a lot of their wheat fields burned on top of the previous year where they would have been a wet year and they had locus i mean russia is very good at plagues anyway in 2010 they had export restrictions that had the net effect by removing a certain percentage of global production from the market of doubling wheat prices globally it tripled in the countries where they were usually the primary supplier particularly the middle east we know the outcome of that is the arab spring and that's nothing compared to the scale of what we're seeing already this year in fact even if things with china and russia and energy went away today it's probably too late to get the fertilizer created processed and distributed before planting season in the northern hemisphere this is a list of the wars in europe that erupted that impacted food production and distribution the eastern hemisphere agricultural zones are as a rule subpar and when you mess up the input stream things get nasty fast here's a list for the same time frame for north america the midwest is not normal it rains it's on a water network for distribution nobody else can do that so yeah we're looking at a turning of history but it's turning back this is my favorite map of all times this takes everything that i do in manufacturing and military strategy and energy and agronomics and puts in one graphic the countries in the blue in a de-globalized world are the ones that rule the future they've got everything that they need locally they're going to do very very well they will try to screw it up they will fail the green looking pretty good more or less where they are now yellow and brown is where things fall apart now the yellows have something going for them maybe they're self-sufficient in food or energy or they have a particularly unified population that doesn't mind a few hardships here and there they'll suffer through the browns can't the browns are utterly dependent upon the shape of the world as it is today as it is maintained by the americans and they lack the capacity to impose a replacement system even in their own neighborhoods and then the reds are the failed states so if you don't know their names don't bother learning them i am not worried about managing or repulsing a chinese or a russian war of expansion the chinese or the russians move it's their end and part of me is kind of looking forward to that i am worried about managing wars of collapse and wars of after effects as these major powers that have thrived in recent decades because of the american strategic overwatch because they collapse under their own weight and leave gaping holes in the map that's my concern and for you guys i would be looking for your next conflict maybe a little closer to home now here's the mexican demography it is one of the healthiest in the world now about 25-30 years ago they started operationalizing nafta and for the first time mexico started to really industrialize and people moved off the farm into towns to take the manufacturing jobs so it has dropped down but it's not nearly as steep as almost every other country in the world that is facing some degree of population collapse this century if if that trend holds mexico and 2060 will look about like we do now and then they can start stressing about things like population structure but for now this looks pretty good and that has allowed mexico to do things that no one else can do this is an export graphic everything on this side is what peru exports and everything on this side is where it goes and this is pretty typical for a developing country and doubly so for one in latin america they produce a lot of relatively low value-added products and they export most of it to the industrializing economies of east asia so this is peru the value-added industries that we think of as manufacturing are these guys they make up less than three percent of their export portfolio and again this is typical this is here are our mexican neighbors the mexican economy is larger the mexican population is more value added and more skilled and the mexican export portfolio is more advanced than the entirety of central europe mexico is the only country on the planet we need from an economic point of view it's the only one we can't turn our backs on from an economic point of view think of donald trump think of what he said during his campaign the first time around about mexico some very not nice things i might add within a year even he realized just how critical the relationship was and the result among other things was nafta ii and the friendliest bilateral relationship we have had with mexico since its foundation as a republic in the 1800s there are a lot of things about donald trump that i'm just like oh but wow he was dead on on that one which means that we need to pay attention to mexico in a way we have not this is the mexican population structure this is a flat out population density map take a look at texas and this this is broadly what we think of in the united states when we think of normal you have a dense population center surrounded by suburbs and then speckles of small towns beyond that why because it freaking rains in america you can have small towns because that's where the farms base but look at mexico you get sprawling cities in the thousand miles from the border south and then nothing you don't have the population density of a downtown core because it was never an entrepreneur system like we have in dallas or kansas city or des moines they're isolated from one another now from an economic point of view that means that mexican labor's in limited supply there is no hinterland to draw upon so the first movers who take advantage of mexican labor are the only ones who really win that's one of the reasons why we're seeing the greatest industrialization push in this country right now as industrialists relocate manufacturing plant from east asia to north america they're starting to realize that the mexicans have become a precious resource but it also means that you guys face a complication cartel control map now this is from 2015. uh you guys remember el chapo he was kind of badass in a terrifying way el chapo was not your normal kingpin this is not the sopranos he didn't run a mob boss operation he kind of ran a korean style conglomerate he would bring in all of his regional commanders a couple of times a year and they would compare notes and he would lay down a few basic laws you know don't engage in petty crime don't steal widowers pension checks don't mug people we are drug smugglers focus on our core competency and if you want to branch out you have to clear it with me first so people come in and say well what about methamphetamines he's like well what about methamphetamines it's like well you know we can get this from this and this one this and we can run along the same routes to the same distributors in the united states approved what about cocaine saying we can't grow cocaine oh but with a grant from usaid we could do hybridization we can probably grow some in sinaloa approved that's how we ran the place so in 2016 he became our wanted number one and we got him then he got away and then we got him again and now he's in prison forever removing that personality the manager the guy who saw drug smuggling as a business and not as warfare changed the map and here's where we are now the sinaloa was the orange the blue is jalisco new generation they used to be the enforcers for sinaloa and after el chapo fell they went into business for themselves they see the drug business as a war they see intimidation and mass murder as an end and not just as a means to one now this would be bad for any number of reasons you guys hear about the avocado ban that's in the country right now that's sinaloa i'm sorry that's uh jalisco new generation they've expanded into parallel industries agriculture transport tourism local government and they are the single biggest organized crime group in the world right now but their presence north of the border is almost non-existent but here are the plazas you'll notice that they are now all split authority jalisco new generation is challenging each pre-existing crime structure to get control of the plazas american strategic policy on the drug war has kind of an echo of american strategic polio policy on afghanistan when we were in afghanistan if we saw two jihadist groups going at it green on green action we'd let them go not a problem for us that's kind of how we've thought of the cartel wars if jalisco new generation gets control of a plaza today sinaloa el chapo's group is the single largest crime group in the united states single largest if jalisco new generation brings the mexican drug war north of the border we have a very different problem and it's not a problem that law enforcement on this side of the border can solve so whether you're looking at this from a demographic point of view a drug point of view a civil authority point of view a strategic point of view this is your next war we haven't thought about how to fight it yet the yellow is arid the orange is desert all this hash is verticality roughly one mile above sea level you know what i see when i look at that empty spaces rugged terrain dry terrain an unsecurable border this is afghanistan the same tool set that we use there we're probably going to have to use in northern mexico okay let's uh close out with some uh some thoughts we can all agree on let's talk about politics i think it's important to understand the field so this is a simple two by two matrix that everyone falls on so if you're over on this hard left side you're an economic liberal you believe that the government should increase the tax take to achieve some sort of goal probably redistribution-minded if you're on the far right side you're an economic conservative and you want the world the the government out of your wallet if you're at the top you're a social liberal and you want the government out of your personal life but if you're at the bottom you're a social conservative and you think the government has a responsibility to regulate and preserve a certain degree of social morality and you can put yourself in a corner and kind of combine these two so if you are a social liberal and an economic liberal the top left corner you think that the government should confiscate all private property and use that money to give us all government issued gunny sacks so that we can sing kubaya and all look the same if you are a social conservative and economic conservative you think the food stamp program is immoral on its base and in fact you think that uh starvation encourages character building okay in the united states these are our traditional swing voters social conservatives economic liberals here's the traditional democratic alliance as we understand it one of the reasons that the democrats have not done well at the ballot box for the last 30 years is that they are just all over the place different factions believe in different things and any political candidate who tries to run on the issues hillary clinton michael dukakis they're going to offend at least one faction by saying something that just makes them beyond consideration then those people don't show it up to vote but the republican coalition is a lot tighter and for the most part their issues don't overlap so there are more reliable block even though it's a smaller number of voters okay everybody got that and put up everybody at the same time what has happened with the trump revolution is that one faction of the republican coalition sorry whoa whoa totally out of control okay here's you guys right in the middle you try to kind of stay out of the economic and the social arguments when you can don't blame you with the trump revolution one specific faction the populace has risen to prominence now this is a group that the republicans traditionally treated as a vote bank and didn't let into the room when the decisions were being made that obviously is not working for them anymore and they've risen to be the single largest voting bloc in the united states today based on whose number you're you're looking at trump brought in somewhere between 11 and 20 million voters who had not participated in the last half dozen elections and has turned them into a powerful voting bloc and they will not go back but for every person he brought in he drove someone away the business community clashed with donald trump for any number of reasons the fiscal conservatives hate his budget policy and the national security community had the annoying tendency of telling him when he was wrong as a result he melon scooped these three factions out of the republican party they're barely represented in congress they were gone from his administration by year three and they are no longer represented in the republican party national hierarchy at all two weeks ago friday this boiled up into public mind when the republican national committee condemned and expelled kissinger and cheney from the party properly and the response from congress was thin only a half a dozen republican legislators objected because they've already lost the party's already changed now trump did succeed in bringing in some new folks the unions liked his rhetoric on trade hispanics people forget are for the most part very socially conservative i know that there's a lot of folks who think that the democrats are trying to encourage illegal migration in order to sway the demographic structure of the voting blocks that's bad math illegal migrants can't vote and hispanic americans who are born here second generation on are far more likely to vote social conservative aka republican than democrat and then the catholics kind of split down the middle but half of them basically became evangelicals under trump my mother among them this is today's republican coalition it is custom crafted to fight the culture war and that can't find canada on a map this is your problem the national security conservatives are no longer part of the political process and i'm not saying that you have to choose to become democrats or republicans i mean we we go through this kind of shakeup every 30 or 50 years or so this is the seventh time we've done it we'll get through it i'm not worried about that the process is ugly and it's loud because we're americans and this is how we are but it does mean that here we are at the intersection of major secular and structural forces turning the world into something we've alternatively never seen before and maybe have seen a little bit in the distant past making something fundamentally new and the military is not part of the conversation that's a difficult place to be and you're trying to transform the force and you're trying to recover and learn from 20 years of military occupations all at the same time that's hard in the business world we call this everyone is wrestling with some version of this right now but very few groups have as much on the line as you do so the challenge for you looking forward with either the bite administration or whatever ultimately displaces it is to find a voice and that is going to be difficult because there's something that americans have refused to do since 1989 that now you need to do for us we've refused to have an open honest conversation with ourselves about what sort of world we want to see and that's just left you guys flailing because if you don't know what the goal is you don't know how to get there so if you've got a vision for god's sakes talk about it write it down and present it to other people i don't care who your political contacts are left right center far left far right doesn't matter at this point the united states today while we're in this transitional period they usually last eight to twelve years we're in year six while we are in this process we cannot have a conversation in the civilian world about foreign policy that matters we're too drowned out with the noises of the transition as the factions rise and fall and jump ship you are the only community who can read a map the business community is out there are only actually two little parts of the business community that are internationalized agriculture because our farmers are so productive and silicon valley because they outsource the entire manufacturing base to east asia silicon valley has made itself irrelevant to this conversation because that all now has to move and the farmers want to feed the world they're going to try they're going to fail but they're going to try that just leaves you i don't have a solution here we're living in the lightning this is the greatest period of change we will experience in our lives and the world on the other side of this is going to make the transition through world war ii look like child's play so if you've got a vision i'd love to hear it but more than that i am available for questions now if you're looking for something to throw at your seat mates here are the books and i'm happy to say that the new one comes out in june yay just sent it off for final proof yesterday uh so let's do some questions i'm going to go ahead and put up the future stability map because i find that that is a useful backdrop where you guys want to go first all right sir i'll kick it off so tying on what you just said sir how would you recommend that we prepare for the trends you've identified because what you're saying at least in my understanding seems to be something much more like an early 20th century continental or hemispheric defense strategy is that is that's my interpretation of what your recommendable starting point for the discussion uh let me give you a scenario of what will happen if we don't come up with a vision of the future at the end of the civil war the united states was obviously split and couldn't take any strong positions on international trade or security issues beyond the continent because we didn't want to risk the reintegration process reconstruction was critical for us in many ways as a result the state department the defense department basically shut down all discussion of meaningful interactions with the outside world for 50 years we got something called dollar diplomacy out of that which meant that individual rich americans or business interests or religious interests would go wherever they wanted in parts of the world that didn't have a large european presence and do whatever they wanted and the result was hemispheric chaos and among many many many many other things the destruction of china as a functional power and its eventual fall to the communist system i'd prefer to not do that again that's the road we're on right now because until our political transition completes we've lost all guidance so i can't tell you how to do your jobs that would be a disaster i can tell you that you are the only repository of functional information about how the world works in america right now and if you can't provide discussion and leadership on that topic it's not going to happen any questions from in the room yes sir get the mic down here can you hear me hey thanks that was that was fascinating um my name is ian sullivan i'm the senior advisor uh for analysis at tradoc's g2 so i'm an intel guy and i spend much of my time doing what you do i kind of in some ways but but i i come at it from a different perspective obviously i don't i don't start with economics i i factor economics into it i suppose i start on the hard power end in most cases as you know that's my job um but but we do of course you know think long and hard about what we call dime you know from the basic right diplomatic intelligence military economics my concern or my thoughts and i'd be curious as as your thought your thoughts on this you spent a a in a really good amount of time walking out the economic factors but but i'd be interested to hear a little bit more about your views on the interrelationship between the other dime elements because i see this map that you put out in front of me and i actually see i see it a little differently i suppose you know i see some of the actors china for example perhaps thinking at least from a a diplomatic perspective that they have some answers to the to the questions or the problems that you put out here i don't think if you if you talk to beijing they believe that economics are necessarily destiny and i do believe that in some cases they they think that that they have some economic answers and perhaps a system that that they think could reorder the world differently so the reason i would be concerned about instability is perhaps um more focused on the the people end of things um the ability to to act or or the desire to act to shake this up so that economics would not become destiny so i'd be i'd be just curious curious to to hear about your take on on how the the four elements of national power would actually interrelate in this in this sense if if that makes sense uh let me start by saying that um it's not just economics economics itself is an outgrowth of demography and geography uh the american geography has the greater midwest has the greater mississippi system lowest cost food production and transport system in the world ocean moats so any defense force that we are going to build is going to be primarily outward based rather than inwardly based that's kind of the basis of american power from my point of view china is the opposite china land china's land is low quality they don't have an in internal transport system except for in regions that they're concerned are secessionist and then they are surrounded by a belt of useless lands that they can't really patrol effectively and because of the first island chain they can't project power out except now when the united states has put everybody on the same side with globalization so i i see the the overall geographic underpinnings of chinese power being completely resting upon the united states nullifying their geographic disadvantages and so the idea that if the chinese think that they can move beyond economics as the basis for power they really do have nothing left i mean the chinese ethnicity the han have been there for over 3 000 years but they've only been able to be a united entity that is relatively secure in their borders for about 10 percent of that time and half of that is under the american led order so if we remove economics from the equation this ends a lot faster also let's assume for the moment that china just wanted to displace us and use more or less our management system they don't have the naval forces to get past the first island chain much less secure the the persian gulf energy routes and let's assume that they could do you really think that like the united states they're going to fight wars in the middle east so that their allies can access oil no that oil would be for them so the uh the guns and butter trade that we made with the world they are not capable of doing hey sir scott mckean down here uh great presentation thank you so so if we were if the chinese were to take your assertions as that's their view and they see that as well what what have you seen there i mean what are you forecasting their actions to mitigate that i'd actually argue they've already done it and that's one of the reasons why she has gone to the cult of personality management of government he knows that either the americans will leave in which case the basis of chinese power collapses or the americans won't and they will become hostile to china in which case the basis for chinese power collapses and in that sort of environment being able to define the narrative becomes critical because in an authoritarian dictatorial system is really what they are now a fascist dictatorial system the only way you can maintain power is if the people choose to let you i didn't worry about a war in taiwan until very recently the chinese didn't have the naval capacity even if they did they couldn't operate the superconductor or super the semiconductor fab facilities they were too advanced the technology that actually makes tmse run is from the united states it requires american designs and then they're still 5000 miles from their energy source made no sense made past tense if the financial and the demographic and the trade and the agricultural system are all facing threat at the same time there's something to be said about choosing the time and the place of the fight and writing the narrative it will come at the cost of a modern industrialized economy and agriculture is an industrialized sector but i think if g's position i think sushi's position is if i can maintain power for the the low low price of only 500 million dead chinese that's worth it so now i kind of give a taiwan invasion like a one in three chance so the chinese fall who steps in that's a great question uh chinese history is replete with the the han chinese not being able to hold the center uh we're we're and it's replete with examples of how it all could go to hell in a very short period of time if i was a betting man i would guess that the north china plain which is home to about two-thirds of the chinese and the vast vast super majority of the han chinese i would guess that that would kind of become its own political entity and kind of fall into a neo power neo-maoist tyranny complete with all the cultural revolution connotations that come from that and i would further guess that the city-states from shanghai down to hong kong city states that traditionally have gotten the majority of their food not from mainland asia will integrate into some sort of extra national supply system whether with in the past this was the united states this was britain this was france this was even australia and they basically throw in their lot with somebody who can keep them alive now of course the road from here to there messy because there's nothing about the cultural revolution that was fun for anybody so we have a online question on chinese demographics so do you see any uh china's demographics have a distinct male female imbalance oh you see a significant security risk to this uh imbalance in their population sure so we they haven't released sex data with the new decade census yet so we really don't know that picture we but we can project because in the january 2000 data there was a sex imbalance of 5 to 20 percent province by province 5 being the low 20 to be in the high so they probably have about according to that data about 95 million more men aged 40 and under than women the the supposition with the new census data is they probably over counted the women by about 20 to 25 percent so we're just talking a massive surplus of men over women which is part of the reasons why we're looking at such a fast population collapse now i'm familiar with the argument that if you've got all the extra men and there just aren't enough women locally and there's not enough women in any of the bordering countries to make up the difference that it might make sense to throw them at someone i've always found that argument a little dubious the russians made it very clear in the 1990s that if there was a land war with china that the russians would not try to meet them with tanks and men they would just nuke so siberia's off kazakhstan what does the winner get not a big gain there you can't go southwest into india because of the himalayas that leaves vietnam and when the chinese last did that in 1979 the vietnamese treated them with the same general welcoming that they treated us so you know that's recent memory for the chinese there's nowhere to go uh i mean if they could make a land bridge by holding hands to get to taipei maybe but no so this is an internal security threat not an external one and you know there's all kinds of studies that have been done about what happens when you have literally tens of millions of extra frustrated men that can't do anything in your system that is a system killer yes sir thank you star sir rising stars you show up there particularly sure is that primarily because of that cultural capability this is a mix of everything so in the case of turkey specifically yes it's a developing country but it's a country with a long cultural history they have very few problems from my point of view in maintaining social control sure they've got a kurdish issue in their south east but if anything that unifies the turks rather than divides them in addition they control any trade systems on land or in water between the two lobes of eurasia giving them immense influence and if you look at all the countries on the periphery they're not ones that can stand to the to the turks if anything they want to be cooperative with the turks so they've got all the energy they need within arm's reach their agricultural system is self-sufficient their agricultural input system is self-sufficient and courtesy of on-again off-again cooperation with the europeans their manufacturing system is nearly as good as mexico's so they're a country in a post-globalized world that can stand on their own and expand their writ that's my view of it no problem we have time for one more question anybody in the room have another question all right sir online question uh related to your previous comments do you see the russia chinese alliance as any sort of of threat or an ability for them to overcome their demographic or economic problems if the united states decided that it wanted to continue its role as the guarantor of global order it would be because here you've got two major polls of power who are willing to put aside their many many differences in order to resist america's sphere of influence that's the wrong phrase american rules on how the world should work you remove the americans from the equation though and these are security and economic competitors their population centers are convenient seven thousand miles apart they are not capable of functional cooperation uh once you remove the united states and its kind of overarching reach remember these are countries that have fought a number of wars in the past they only officially settled their border disputes about 10 years ago and anything that we know about countries that are in population decline is that their security policies become very brittle because they can't sustain a conflict for any duration of time they don't have the replacement population to do it so i am far more concerned about these two countries falling to blows and what that might lead to than i am about them having any sort of long-term functional alliance okay thank you very much thank you guys i will be sticking around during the day so feel free to pigeonhole me if you have a question that you didn't want to ask in front of the class all right thank you [Applause] you

Channel: MCoE Fort Moore

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Keywords: Fort Benning, Maneuver Center of Excellence, MCOE, U.S. Army, Army, Soldier, Soldiers, military, Training, Doctrine, TRADOC, Department of Defense, news, military news, Basic Training, OSUT, One Station Unit Training, Medal of Honor, Infantry School, Armor School, Sniper School, Ranger School

Id: l0CQsifJrMc

Length: 68min 40sec (4120 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022