Peter Zeihan

So the Chinese have never, ever, ever been able to be a global commercial power, except when the United States, when it created the global system, told everybody that they couldn't bring guns to trade talks.

And that one decision that we made allowed the Chinese to play on the global field in a way that they just never could until that point.

And so, lo and behold, this is the one era of Chinese history where they're unified and successful.

Sure.

So before World War II, it's a good break, we basically had an imperial system where if you wanted links to resources and markets and populations that were outside of your home country, you had to build a navy and you went and took it.

You built your empire.

And those empires attempted to not trade with one another if they could help it.

They just traded within their own network.

That model generated what we like to call history, and it led to World War II, when all the empires crashed and burned at the same time fighting for dominance.

Well, at the end of World War II, the only Navy that was left that was worthy of the name was the American Navy.

And we had never been a trading power because we more or less had a continent to ourselves, and we're still digesting the continent.

So we had this idea that we will use our Navy to protect everyone, and we will allow everyone to trade with anyone else, and we will allow our market to be open to your goods if, in exchange, we get to write your security policies so we don't get another conflict like this again.

One of the things that people want to break down the trade relationships and say that it's unfair for the United States, what they forget is it was supposed to be unfair to the United States.

From an economic point of view, we bribed up an alliance.

If you remember your history, it wasn't just Britain and Germany and Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Italy that were allies during the Cold War.

It was China, too, because it was all about boxing in the Soviets, and it worked beautifully.

The idea that this should be recalibrated in a post-Cold War environment, perfectly reasonable.

But if you don't want to pay people to be on your side, they need another reason to be on your side.

And so what we're seeing in American politics right now is this kind of cognitive disconnect where we still want everyone to do everything we say, but we also don't want our market open.

And that is not a viable long-term plan.