Peter Zeihan

Well, from the American point of view, it means one thing.

From everyone else's point of view, it means another.

So from the American point of view, it was about containment or neocontainment or whatever version of containment you want to call it.

So stop anyone from getting too powerful to challenge us?

Exactly.

Wherever that happens to be, the Western Hemisphere is very well insulated from the rest of the world, and North America is the best chunk of land on the planet in terms of its capital capacity and for developing an integrated nation-state.

And the greater Mississippi, the East Coast, those two chunks, they don't exist anywhere else on the planet.

And to have them both in the same political authority gives us massive flexibility.

But that doesn't mean we can impose on the rest of the world.

That requires a strategy that involves basing and allies.

And so what we did with our post-World War II environment was incentivize all of the allies to participate in our security structures.

and use their land and their armies and their navies to impose a security regimen on the entire hemisphere.

And so the French, the British, the Japanese, the Turks, all of the major powers of the last half century, excuse me, half millennia, became from a certain point of view, proxy powers under American control.

And according to our treaties with all of them,

In the case of a hot war, we take command of their militaries, something that a lot of people forget today when they're talking about the fact that these countries apparently owe us.

So we created this structure where all of the powers of the past were functionally on the same side under our command.

except the Russians.

And that's why the Cold War ended the way it did.

There was never a strategic or economic option for the Soviets to prevail.

But the Cold War ended 30 years ago.