Understanding American Success | Peter Zeihan

first things first why are the people in this room successful American agriculture from 1776 the roughly World War two that was the greatest economic expansion ever in human history you have it good he thought to why that is the case well here's a hint this is a list of every war that happened in Europe for that 150 year period that interfered with food supplies somewhere on the continent here's a list of all the wars in North America that did the same thing hmm let's look at why that happened why Europe had so much of a problem feeding themselves and why the United States and Canada had no problem whatsoever it really comes down to this big area right in the middle of the continent we of course know this is the greater Midwest it's the largest chunk of arable land on the planet but more important than the ability to grow food is the ability to get it from A to B moving things from A to B is very difficult look at the blue on this map the interconnected waterways of the Mississippi Basin the Intracoastal waterways collectively that's about 16,000 miles of waterway now moving goods from A to B on land if you have a rail system if you have a road network is still 15 times as expensive as moving them via water and this network here is the largest network in the world in fact it has more miles of waterway than the rest of the world put together this is a system that is nice and secure as well there's deserts that separate us from Mexico force and lakes from kanva you got oceans on both sides it's really hard to invade the United States hasn't been tried in the last 200 years you put it all together and you get a political and economic system that cannot fail despite the best interests and the best effort of whoever they elect and for the last 22 years Wow have we had some doozies the Canadians don't snicker too much I've been watching your system too and then here's Europe northern European Plains a nice area it grows for early it grows quite a bit of crop but it's much thinner in fact from north to south of its thickest point it's only about as thick as Iowa is where my Iowans no one from Iowa the stuff oh one hey marshal town peace out anyway but the rivers in Europe are not interconnected like the Mississippi they cross the northern European Plain south to north a very few of them interconnects you have French rivers and German rivers and Dutch rivers and Polish rivers each one is separate and when you have countries like that that are basically in each other's faces because there's no separation the German border is the Dutch heartland you get a very different method for interacting with the world and interact with each other you have to establish lines of supply independent of your neighbors whereas Wisconsin Iowa Illinois were all in the same basket and so you get what we and in the United States consider to be ancient history you get the Imperial system where the British Navy guards British trade with the British colonies and the French Navy trades with French colonies guarded by the French Navy and they don't interact if they can help it because because they don't want to become dependent on someone else that might go to war with him in the near future and so they always buy from the United States so until 1945 this is how the world worked and for the United States and Canada it was absolutely brilliant and then we went messed it all up in 1945 the United States changed the way the world worked at the end of World War two we said okay none of no more of this Imperial crap I'm retired of the world going to war every few years because somebody has a bug up there but instead what we're going to do is we're going to allow everyone to trade with everyone else we're going to open our market not just the largest market that the world has ever seen but the only market to survive the war the US consumer market at that time was twice the size of the rest of the world put together and then we're going to use our Navy the only one that survived the war to guarantee that trade for everybody for the European allies this was a dream come true and for the Germans in the Japanese this was very confusing because they had just fought a very serious the tairy conflict to get just this like you know you really should have brought this up in 1929 we could avoid a lot of problems why could the United States make this happen it's pretty straightforward this is a jump carrier traditional jump carry there's ten of those in the world none of them American this is a super carrier there's ten of these in the world each one has over five times the combat capability of one of these guys there's ten of them they're all American in 1944 and in 2014 the United States has a stronger blue water projection Navy than the rest of the planet put together and if you were to sail the entire global Navy against the United States it would only take a couple of American task forces and it would all be over in a few hours that balance of power has not changed in 70 years so this system exists because the Americans made it but that doesn't mean that the Americans use it all that March and actually it's the worst possible system for the people in this room the green areas are the areas where it's easy to grow crops winter is harsh enough to kill the bugs but not harsh enough to drive the people away summer is warm enough so the crops can ripen but not so warm that things catch on fire rain is relatively common transport is relatively easy those are the green areas these are the areas that grew crops reliably before 1945 you'll notice that the single biggest chunk about of course is the United States the purple areas are areas that you can grow things but you really have to put your back into it and your chequebook the soil is rocky or the winters are harsher it may be subtropical you can make these places green but it's very very expensive and you have to apply extra fertilizer extra pesticide every single year to make it go what we did with Bretton Woods is allow the purple areas to develop because they were no longer colonies they were independent countries they were no longer the targets of Wars they were the targets of investment and your competitive advantage degraded considerably Brazil India China all became economic superpowers in their own way key thing to remember about Bretton Woods when you're talking about it today though is we don't use it as a percentage of GDP the United States is one of the most isolated economies in the world despite being the largest by a factor of three as a percentage of GDP the only three countries in the world that are less interconnected than we are are Brazil South Sudan and Rwanda that's it even Afghanistan is more wired than we are best part this green line our imports one-third of that is energy that's disappearing very quickly for the remainder one third of it is NAFTA basically a near domestic situation okay so that's piece one the United States controls the system created the system but doesn't use the system and the only reason the system is still there is because of the cool heads in Washington

Channel: Speakers' Spotlight

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Keywords: Zeihan, Peter, geopolitics, politics, world, global issues, futurist, speaker, speaking, keynote, best speaker, guest speaker, motivational speaker, forecast, trade, business, commerce

Id: x5Ha_nbY9UE

Length: 7min 28sec (448 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2017