Peter Zeihan

But we had a couple of massive trends that have been playing out for the last several decades that are coming to an abrupt halt right now.

anyway, and Trump is manifesting how we evolve from those old systems to whatever comes next.

So he is going to be one of, if not the most consequential American presidents in modern history, simply because of the timing for when he is in the big chair.

And he will have an imprint upon what it means to be American or what it means to be human on this planet for decades to come.

And those two big trends are trade and demographics.

The whole concept of how we have managed the world since World War II was that the United States will take care of global security, make sure that anyone can ship anything anywhere at any time.

The U.S.

will keep their markets open if you allow us to write your security policies.

And that's NATO and that's the Japanese and the Korean and the Taiwanese alliances.

That is the physical structure that makes it all possible.

But for the Americans, it was always about security, not about trade.

And so as a percentage of GDP, if you remove agriculture and energy, we only trade with the rest of the world for 5% or 6% of GDP once you factor out NAFTA.

We're just not involved in it.

That was the deal.

If we had invested our economy into the world, it wouldn't have been a trade.

It would have been an empire and no one would have joined.

So that's kind of piece one.

And we've been moving away from that since 1992 because the Cold War is over.

At the time, yes.

Keep in mind that if you go back to the 80s and the 90s, China was an ally.