Comments by "yop yop" (@yopyop3241) on "The Middle East, After America || Peter Zeihan" video.

@joem0088 If there is a new Tanker War, can China maintain enough ship presence in the Gulf to ensure that oil can get out in volume? If India starts up a Chinese-style maritime militia that targets Chinese oil shipments, can China do anything to stop them?
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@billywhite1403 Japan going on expeditions for oil. In the 20th century, the expeditions were to SE Asia. In the 21st century, the expeditions will be to the Persian Gulf and probably closer to home and in the other direction to Sakhalin. At least this time the Japanese probably won’t need to go on expeditions for food, coal, and iron ore, not with the US and Australia as close allies. That should allow the Koreans to breathe easier….
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Zeihan thought that the Europeans would shut down Russian exports through the Baltic Sea and that the Ukrainians would shut down Russian exports through Ukraine and the Black Sea. Those were reasonable assumptions. The fact that he got it wrong is probably an indication that the Europeans are very, very happy with how the war is playing out. Russian oil being allowed to continue to flow is an indication that the Europeans don’t feel threatened at all.
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pa_2600 Japan’s reputation is rising rapidly in Korea. The dyed-in-the-wool anti-Japan people are dying out, and younger Koreans have much more favorable opinions of Japan.
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The JMSDF is highly competent, and most of the world has allowed their navies to wither away to almost nothing. But the key reason the JMSDF is head and shoulders above everyone except the US is the “tyranny of distance.” Japan is a close, trusted US ally and is therefore free to operate out of US military bases. In a conflict with any of the likely opponents, the fight will happen in a location where Japan has overwhelmingly superior logistics thanks to the US’s global network of 700+ overseas military bases. No one else comes anywhere close to that number. The UK and France probably have a dozen or so each. No one else has more than a bare handful. China has only one, same as Japan, and those bases are just a few miles apart with Japan allowed to have sea, air, and land forces vs China being restricted to sea only. In any conflict, China’s sole overseas foothold will probably go “poof”within minutes.
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pa_2600 What do your kids think about Japan? Because “younger” referred to Millennials and especially GenZ, not GenX. Polling in Korea shows much higher estimation for Japan among people in their teens and twenties.
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pa_2600 Young Koreans know what the Japanese did to Korea in the first half of the twentieth century. But they also know that current Japanese society is very, very different from what it was back then. The current Japanese are not their great grandparents.
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India doesn’t need to go into the Middle East. By controlling access to the Gulf, they will be able to skim off the oil they need without needing to expose themselves to the chaos. The oil will come to them, even if they don’t do anything. In contrast, a country like Japan needs to be present along every inch of the route from the Gulf all the way to Japan to ensure access to oil. India has the ability to be the major player in the Middle East. But that’s a game where if you don’t have to play, why the heck would you?
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Because it’s irrelevant. It played a role decades ago in first getting the world started in trading in USD. Nowadays, it doesn’t matter, trading in the USD is embedded in the system. The petrodollar was useful in starting the avalanche. Now that the avalanche has started, reversing the petrodollar won’t do much.
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Twenty years ago, the US would have responded unilaterally within 30 minutes. Then they would have had to spend three weeks pulling together an international coalition, because the international community would have been convinced that the US would take care of everything without anyone else needing to lift a finger.
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We’ll see how long that lasts. The US President (with no need for Congressional action) has the power to halt exports of US crude. That would split the US market/price off and make it independent of the global market/price. (Or likely eventually global markets/prices, plural.)
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Three directions? (1) space aliens, (2) mole people, (3) mer-folk? Because Jordan and Saudi Arabia are Israeli allies, Syria is in the middle of a civil war, Lebanon is a failed state, and Egypt is basically neutral.
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@joem0088 The point of grey zone maritime militia activities is to inflict costs on the enemy without escalating all the way to open warfare. Those sorts of grey zone operations used to be the norm. The US-created rules based order backed by the US military presence on the seas are what ended those sorts of activities. Gaming out those sorts of scenarios has been a US responsibility for the last several decades. If the US is pulling back, the rest of the world is going to be forced to figure out their own courses. It is extremely likely that the PRC is going to come out worse than anyone else on the far end of that process.
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@joem0088 Um, no. There is absolutely no chance that the Saudis and Iranians would save China. Oil is the entire basis of their economies and the entire basis of the ruling regimes’ hold on power. They will not be able to afford to do what you claim they will do. If the US pulls back, China will suffer more than anyone, but the Saudis and Iranians won’t be much better off. In contrast, India will be one of the few winners. This is the way the world worked for most of human history, going back to “ancient times.” We’re so accustomed to globalization and globalized prices that we forget that that is not the norm. If the US pulls back, India is ideally positioned to have a big ability to control oil prices. India and its close allies will be able to reliably import oil at cheap prices. Unfriendly countries like China will suffer perpetual shortages and sky high prices. The US obviously has the ability to be a lead player in those sorts of games. We’ll see how far the US decides to pull back into isolationism or if the US chooses to join the game as a major power broker.
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@joem0088 Again, this would be done via a maritime militia. Same as how China pretends that it’s not the PLA harassing other countries’ fishermen, those are the actions of independent Chinese fishermen. Plausible deniability. Similar to how the Iranians are using Hamas and the Houthis to avoid most of the negative repercussions of those actions. And just like we’re seeing with the Houthi attacks, when dealing with international maritime trade, it doesn’t take much to be incredibly disruptive and inflict tremendous economic damage. It’s ironic that it is Iran and China that have chosen to uncork the genie and start off the use of these tactics, because in the end, Iran and China are two of the countries that can and will be undone with these tactics. When these tactics are used to fracture the single global market, Iran will be screwed by only being able to sell its oil at dirt cheap prices while China will be screwed by being unable to buy oil at any price. Iran and China don’t have any other options— they have to trade through waters that India can easily control. In contrast, the Europeans can get their oil from Africa and the Americas. Manufacturing will shift to India-friendly countries or to India itself. The Houthis will be squelched. Whether that is done by the US or not remains to be seen, but it will happen. In contrast, who is going to squelch India once they start using these underhanded Chinese/Iranian tactics?
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lol. No, actually you wouldn’t. In a nutshell, his thoughts on the border are, “Trump is an idiot.” The wall makes it harder to get five feet into the US. Instead of just stepping across, now you have to spend a couple of minutes using a rope or a ladder. But on the other hand, the roads that were built to bring in the materials to build the wall make it much, much easier to get into the rest of the US. Instead of spending days trudging across uninhabited desert to get to a road, now the road is right there, so you can meet up with a criminal with a car right away. Couple of minutes climbing a rope or a ladder vs days of trudging across open desert. Trump and his enablers in Congress did more to fling open the doors at the border than anyone else ever. But, hey, it made for a good photo op, and that’s all that matters, right?
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In the past, the US would have responded instantly and unilaterally. They would have recruited allies to help, but that takes time, and that time means disruptions that the US of the past would not have allowed.
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India can collect the oil it needs as a toll when other countries need to cross the Indian Ocean. India has the power to go into the Middle East harder than anyone except the US. But if you don’t have to go in, why would you choose to?
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He predicted Ukraine would fall in three weeks. He misread Russian competence. Lesson: authoritarian states are far more corrupt and incompetent than you presume, even when you presume that they are incredibly corrupt and incompetent. He also predicted that Japan and Korea would not sign on to sanctioning Russia. He predicted that Germany would choose Russian energy over Western morals. Lesson: the advanced democracies are more cohesive and united than anyone gave them credit for. Based on these lessons learned, we should expect Israel to do better than Zeihan predicts while authoritarian states like Iran should do worse. Zeihan’s prediction that advanced democracies like Germany and Korea will be energy constrained is likely to be overstated, because the advanced democracies are likely to band together as a group to secure access to that energy.
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The US oil export ban can be reinstated at the President’s discretion. That decouples the US oil market from the rest of the world. Shale oil making the US energy independent is a much bigger deal than most people recognize.
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The US oil market can be decoupled from the global market. Only takes a Presidential signature. If global oil prices ever go high enough to be a major election issue, you can be certain that that decoupling will be invoked. It is a major geopolitical change that shale oil has made the US a net oil exporter as of a couple of years ago. What you write about in your post used to be true. Not anymore.
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The US oil market is easily decoupled from the global oil market. Only requires the President’s signature to reinstate the former US oil export ban.
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Why do you think that? I don’t see it.
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Japan is allowed to operate from US military bases. China obviously is not. And we should assume that the US and its allies are exerting great pressure on countries not to allow PLA bases on their soil. Under the table pressure, of course.
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Multi-nation task force, no? For now, at least, the US isn’t going to be one of the only advanced democracies sitting on the sidelines. But note the change. In the past, the US likely would have already acted to nip this problem in the bud long before it could have reached this level.
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Multi-nation task force, no? For now, at least, the US isn’t going to be one of the only advanced democracies sitting on the sidelines. But note the change. In the past, the US likely would have already acted to nip this problem in the bud long before it could have reached this level.
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US land ownership includes mineral rights. The profits go to the drilling company and landowner at whatever terms they can negotiate. Shale oil is almost entirely on private land. Shale oil is in former seabed. Flat. Flat land is good agricultural and grazing land, so it is mostly in private hands. The negotiated terms are likewise private. Alaskan oil is largely on state land. I believe that all Alaska state residents receive an annual dividend. Federal oil is largely offshore oil. Not sure what the arrangement is there. My guess is that the federal government collects very little. It was a national security issue to have domestically produced oil, so they probably decided to charge as little as possible in the interests of minimizing oil import dependence.
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That’s when countries will move to protect their own access. It will start with oil producing countries instituting (reinstituting, in the US case) export bans/restrictions. If it gets bad enough, you’ll have countries like India moving militarily to ensure that their own needs are met before any excess tankers are allowed to traverse across their area of maritime control. At that point, oil prices will no longer be global. You’ll have oil at basically the price of extraction in the producing countries, whereas you’ll have shortages even at $1,000 per barrel in distant countries.
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If the US had been an old fashioned empire (as its critics like to claim), it would have secured its oil without needing to get involved with the quagmire of the Middle East or expose itself to global prices.
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No. China has no ability to fill the power vacuum if the US pulls back. India and Turkey are probably the best positioned to step in if the US pulls back entirely. But it’s still an open question how hands-off the US will be. There’s still the possibility that the US could step back as it simultaneously gives one or more of its allies a boost in taking the seat at the head of the table in the region. There’s also the question of whether Turkey or India even WANTS to fill the power vacuum when the US leaves. Both of them have the option of staying out and using their geographic location to skim off the oil that they need as it goes by. There’s obviously a lot of profit to be gained by controlling the Middle East, but controlling the Middle East is such a giant headache that it’s not clear that the potential economic gains are worth it.
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“Fortify the use of the petrodollar”? Not a consideration at all. The petrodollar was useful at getting the USD started as the global reserve currency, but at this point it has tons of momentum on its own. There’s no need to “fortify” its use.
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@Jokstaify Everything is traded in dollars because there’s no other real choice. The Euro, yen, pound, Aussie and Canadian dollars, etc. all follow the USD on sanctions, so they’re essentially the same as the USD but with more non-sanction risk and more red tape. No one wants Chinese yuan, Russian rubles, Indian rupees because of capital controls and exchange rate manipulation. Other than the USD, the only other choice is barter. Good luck with that.
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@Jokstaify The value of the USD is largely about the value of the goods and services that the US produces. Many of the products on the market were designed by Americans. If you want products with that design, you have to pay for that design service with USD. The manufacturing process for making those products was probably developed by hyper skilled American engineers. If you want that high end manufacturing, you have to pay in USD. US agriculture is incredibly productive. If you want US corn or soybeans or whatever, you have to pay in USD. And on and on. In addition, the US is the most reliable currency out there. China and Japan have strict currency controls, and they have both routinely manipulated the value of their currency. The Euro turned to mud during the 2008 financial crisis because every Eurozone country had some control which meant that there was no coherent control. After that you’re in to countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Russia, Turkey, etc. that have been guilty of badly mismanaging their currencies in the recent past, so no one trusts their currencies to be a reliable store of value. For currencies that are seen as reliable, you’re down to countries like Canada, Australia, and the UK. Those countries reliably move in lockstep with the US on sanctions, and they don’t have the volume of the USD, so they come with proportionally greater volatility. The Chinese think that it’s unfair that the US can threaten to cut them off from Swift. Americans think it’s unfair that China can manipulate its currency to give Chinese workers a cost advantage over American workers. What most people fail to recognize is that these are two sides of the same coin.
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