Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The Global World Order Is Collapsing- And It's Much Bigger Than Trump! | Impact Theory W/ Tom Bilyeu & Peter Zeihan
12 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: How did Trump influence the current global order?
Most people think what's happening right now in the world is because of Trump, but I've heard you say that we were always going to end up here. I would love to get an explanation on that. Like what is here exactly?
Yeah, well, I mean, first, let's start by saying that the U.S. president, whoever it happens to be, is the most powerful person in history and typically the most powerful person in the world. Trump, no exception to that. To say that he's not having an impact is not what I'm going for.
But we had a couple of massive trends that have been playing out for the last several decades that are coming to an abrupt halt right now. anyway, and Trump is manifesting how we evolve from those old systems to whatever comes next. So he is going to be one of, if not the most consequential American presidents in modern history, simply because of the timing for when he is in the big chair.
And he will have an imprint upon what it means to be American or what it means to be human on this planet for decades to come. And those two big trends are trade and demographics. The whole concept of how we have managed the world since World War II was that the United States will take care of global security, make sure that anyone can ship anything anywhere at any time. The U.S.
will keep their markets open if you allow us to write your security policies.
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Chapter 2: What are the significant trends affecting global security?
And that's NATO and that's the Japanese and the Korean and the Taiwanese alliances. That is the physical structure that makes it all possible. But for the Americans, it was always about security, not about trade. And so as a percentage of GDP, if you remove agriculture and energy, we only trade with the rest of the world for 5% or 6% of GDP once you factor out NAFTA.
We're just not involved in it. That was the deal. If we had invested our economy into the world, it wouldn't have been a trade. It would have been an empire and no one would have joined. So that's kind of piece one. And we've been moving away from that since 1992 because the Cold War is over.
Trump just happens to be the guy who is officiating the formal break. So really fast, when we were talking about controlling people's security policy, it was just a question of Russia?
At the time, yes. Keep in mind that if you go back to the 80s and the 90s, China was an ally.
that's interesting okay so if our goal was we need to deal with russia we dealt with russia the ussr collapses uh i've heard you talk about um the first bush presidency h.w bush tried to get us to have a conversation about what the new world order look was going to look like um one help me understand so if this is trade is a huge part of the world order if demographics are a huge part of the world order
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Chapter 3: What role does trade play in the evolving world order?
other than safety? What is the world order? When we say that, what do we mean?
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.
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Chapter 4: How are demographics impacting global economics?
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. And we have failed to update those strategies for the new reality. And so lo and behold, whether you're on the left or the right in American politics, the rest of the world just seems less relevant to you. And we've been edging away from that system ever since. And now it's breaking.
All right. Having grown up in the middle of it, it felt awesome. So what I want to understand is what broke down.
Chapter 5: What historical events correlate with today's geopolitical landscape?
So regardless, like, OK, Russia, let's say, is the excuse. So we all have to band together. But what you described sounded like to me empire via cooperation instead of empire via force or having to pay for everything outright. So a quite incredible system. And speaking from experience, as an American anyway, it felt fantastic. So why, without Russia, why did it begin to break down?
Is it because that system was great for America but not other places? Or did, say, globalism, hollowing out our manufacturing, creating a K-shaped economy, is that what ended up becoming intolerable such that we were always going to end up here, to quote you?
A-Shape is more recent. Let's put that to the side for now. The whole concept was that we pay you to be on our side. And when everyone agreed that nuclear annihilation was a problem, it was pretty easy to make that deal. But after 1992, no one until relatively recently, in 2022, the Ukraine war, thought of the Russians as a problem.
They thought of them as just something that could be managed off to the side while they stew in their own juices and degrade.
Chapter 6: How is the U.S. adapting to challenges in international relations?
And they are still degrading. Go back to that if you want to. But the idea that we were under this nuclear Paul had faded. And so various countries, based on their politics, based on their internal demands, became less willing to sublimate their security policies to the United States, became less willing to follow Washington's lead on things like economic sanctions.
And as the United States' attention moved from the Russians to other things like, say, Iran, a lot of countries were like, this isn't what we signed up for. And so there became a lot more friction in the system. that really accelerated in the George W. Bush administration with the Iraq War. Because the Americans said, you know what, we hold up the ceiling here.
Why are you not helping us with this conflict? And for the French and the Germans, it was like, because this isn't what the conflict is that we agreed that we were all on the same side for. This is something new. You're trying to repurpose this without negotiating with us. And so you can see how we saw a fissure in the alliance at that point.
You move on further into, say, the 2010s and the war on terror, and the United States just became obsessed with things from the European and the Japanese point of view were ever more esoteric. And they wanted economic opportunities that went different directions.
Chapter 7: What strategies could the U.S. implement to counter China?
So the Germans started getting the vast majority of their energy from the Russians. A lot of countries started integrating with China because they saw an economic advantage to doing that. If it happened to hollow out the American industrial base or even some of their allies, that was fine because economics evolve.
The United States saw problems with the structure because we were no longer being able to dictate the security environment. And everyone else saw problems with the economic structure because they saw the Americans in many ways becoming a barricade towards what they thought was perfectly natural activity.
And the bilateral agreement between us and all the allies that had held for 40 years broke down bit by bit at pretty much every functional level until we get to Trump. It was always going to end now, this decade, 2025 to 2035, for demographic reasons. The problem there is when we started to globalize back in the 40s and 50s, everyone moved off the farm and into the town.
When you're on the farm, kids are free labor. You have a lot of them. You move into town, all of a sudden kids are expense. And so we went from on average in the Western world having something like four or five kids today to having only one to two. You do that for 80 years and eventually it's not that you run out of children. That happened in the 80s and 90s in most countries.
We're now in the position in this next 10-year period where we're running out of working-aged adults, and there is no trade if there is no one to consume or produce.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for global economic models?
So we're looking at a collapse of the economic model. And the security model was based on the economic model. So we were always going to get to some version of where we are now. And now the economics have caught up to the politics and it's all breaking.
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