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The Iran money was letting a foreign bank unfreeze an Iranian account. It wasn't straight up giving Iran money. The money to Hamas was first (poorly) laundered through the UN. And Congress isn't going to be approving any more funds for UNRWA.

Zeihan is ignoring the domestic political realities in the US. If Trump is elected then the US position will become very solid support for Israel and fuck the Palestinians hard. The dock ends the next day and the whole political calculus of the ME changes. If Biden tries to end the...

Relatively minimal in this case basically means the President issuing orders and various US military platforms doing relatively routine things to carry those orders out. Fundamentally, a modern nation requires electricity. It requires telecommunications. It requires gasoline and diesel. It...

Sure, and that state of affairs persists because those politicians are operating with different considerations. Yes, the US could end Iran (for example) as an entity tomorrow with a relatively minimal effort and with relatively minimal physical risks to the US or its citizens. Doing so would...

The US military doesn't need (or desire) US citizens dying for it. That is kinda the point. The US has spent decades and trillions of dollars focusing its efforts on locating, targeting, and destroying everything necessary for another nation to survive (much less fight a war) on day one from...

Anyone who thought Iraq/Afghanistan was a real war in any way was/is a fucking idiot. Those were occupations/nation building done under incredibly restrictive rules of engagement and with minimal to no non-military investment. Ukraine likewise isn't a "real war" in many respects. Ukraine's...

The UK has repeatedly fucked itself over and proven, repeatedly, that it is unwilling to face reality. With Brexit the UK should have tied itself hard to the US and done everything it could to fuck over the EU, doing so would have gotten it a NAFTA style trade deal with the US and at least...

My problem with Zeihan's comment on the Trump case is that he doesn't actually taught about the geopolitical ramifications. If SCOTUS rules against Trump then you will have 40% of the US population openly saying that they are being disenfranchised and that the political system doesn't work for...

Japan has the second most powerful and capable blue water navy after the US, and is fully capable of building all of the fiddly bits that make a proper warship a proper warship. The nation actually best positioned to radically expand its naval forces relatively quickly is Japan. They have the...

Those "pirates" have names like Japan and India. China can generally defend its coasts and contest its immediate naval environment. What it is basically utterly incapable of doing is 1) interdicting shipping to its likely enemies, or 2) defending the shipments that it needs against hostile...

In 1968 manufacturing one unit of something took effectively 100% human labor. Assembly lines made that labor more efficient (as did machine tools) but it was still a human directly controlling every single one of those tools and carrying out every single one of those myriad manufacturing...

That's a disingenuous comparison. In 1968 manufacturing was incredibly labor intensive with very little automation. The same with the entire supply chain that went into producing those manufactured items. The amount of human labor required to manufacture one unit was at least an order of...

Honestly, most people don't understand what is going wrong or why it matters. FedNow is a massive win for the average citizen. Why? Because suddenly the PayPal middle man has to obey the Constitution and is part of the federal government so discrimination gets really hard. Basically, any legal...

No one else is anywhere near the ballpark. And in the case of China they are running headlong into what is likely total governmental collapse and is practically guaranteed to be near total economic collapse. China will cease to play in the space race long before they match what SpaceX can do...

Predicting innovation over the next decades has so very many caveats. Take space for example. The US military is not going to allow any US launch provider to launch something like Starlink for any foreign entity (corporate or government, allied or not). The mega constellations are going to be...

Realistically, they can't. Way too much demand for the product and way too much money is involved. If one wanted to even make the attempt, the place to start is with the banks. Design a top to bottom, zero trust, banking system and force everyone who wants a bank account to link a finger print...

Zeihan is very good at the fundamentals and understanding the broad situation that people are going to have to deal with in the future. His biggest weakness is when it comes to political analysis and how individuals will act/react.

... Saudi Arabia and Iran in joint military exercises. Yeah, that isn't happening. Israel and Saudi Arabia in joint military exercises is substantially more likely. Saudi Arabia and Iran creating a joint Navy? Hell would freeze over first.

One is a major geopolitical enemy, the other is an annoyance with a lot of relevant stakeholders with differing opinions. The NSA fucking with Russia and Russian aligned criminal entities, even to the point of using proper cyber warfare utilities, is going to be supported basically 100% by...

Sure, the US could massively out produce Russia when it came to nuclear weapons. But the political will really isn't there. You think that Biden is going to go to Congress and ask for funding to drastically increase the US nuclear arsenal? Or that Congress would give it to him at the moment...