Peter Zeihan

The Germans do forced regeneration, precision manufacturing, but have managed to do it at scale.

The United States designs the systems.

Okay.

And then marries it to close support merging with technology, which with more traditional tech, like you would think of when you think of Silicon Valley, so that everything has a services component as well.

The Singaporeans, they're great at precision measurement.

And then those tools are used in other systems.

The Koreans, it's memory chips.

We all are like Taiwan, Taiwan, Taiwan, TSMC, GPUs, all that.

And that's true.

But the Koreans are actually better.

It's just a different kind of chip they focus on.

So we're all very good at very specific things.

And we take components from one of these systems and merge it with manufacturings and the others to make the products that we use.

That doesn't mean that China is irrelevant.

It just means that China is much further down in terms of value added.

They're very good at assembly and they have scale to do a lot of things that other countries just can't pretend to do.

Well, this is why Trump matters.

It's because he's the guy in charge of making the decisions as this happens.

If you dial back to George W. Bush, he was the last American president to negotiate and implement a meaningful trade deal.

And at the end of his terms, we had NAFTA, we had free trade deals with Colombia and Chile, Japan, Korea, and reasonably good manufacturing integration with the European Union.