Peter Zeihan

I mean, this is a guy who has written 30,000 pages of ideological treatises in the last 10 years.

That doesn't leave a lot of time to govern.

And it may be that his mind is just mush now and that, yes, he pulls the trigger.

It's not a very satisfying explanation, but that's really the only way I see it happening.

That's one of the reasons why I really like countries like the United States or Germany or Australia or Brazil, because the states have as much power as the national authorities.

And so you get a lot of policy experimentations on everything from labor policy to tax policy to culture policy throughout the entire system.

And we make some bad decisions.

No argument.

But we also make some good ones.

And then we learn from one another.

If Mexico was located anywhere else in the world with the industrial plant that it is, we would already talk about it as being more powerful than Germany or France.

But all that trade relationship was with the United States, so it skews everybody's perspective.

Doesn't mean that they don't have very real problems.

They do.

But as an industrial power, they're already massive.

What is their advantage?

They're right next to the United States.

So you've got the technology, you've got the infrastructure, you've got the consumption base, and they can complement what they do with what we do.

It's a great relationship.

That's a little harsh.