Peter Zeihan

However you want to get Cuba on board, there are a wide variety of options.

Go to town.

It can be more than a tropical Vegas because you've got a workforce that is probably about one-third as skilled as the Americans, but work for one-tenth the cost.

That's a great set of math to start from an assembly point of view.

Those two could find probably would be enough for what we need.

The other big problem is processing.

One of the effects of globalization is we go broadly with the most reliable, lowest cost producer.

And so China has lower environmental regulations.

And processing is technology that was developed more than a century ago.

So turning aluminum to bauxite, refining rare earth metals, getting the cobalt out of Congo with slave labor, and turning it into cobalt metal and intermediate components.

That, North America does not do well.

Now, because of the shale revolution, the US has the cheapest energy and electricity on the planet, but you still have to build out the basic infrastructure, and we really haven't started that yet.

The Trump administration talks a good game there, but there's been no money really put behind building the actual infrastructure because the people who knew how to do that were all fired in the first week.

So we have to build out some more government capacity in order to lead this effort.

Yeah.

I'm not worried about Thucydides, but it's still not going to happen.

Well, let's start with Columbia because it's simpler, I think.

Columbia's limitation is infrastructure.

The people live in the highland on the sides of mountains because if you go any lower, it's humid and tropical and it's just can't build infrastructure and maintain it.

If you go higher, you're in tundra and nobody can live there either.