Geo Political Risk

[moka]

Why New Zealand needs to prepare now for a future in 'a world without China' - Peter Zeihan

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/519988/why-new-zealand-needs-to-prepare-now-for-a-future-in-a-world-without-china

China is in trouble - and New Zealand should look to Japan for a way out of its reliance on it, a geopolitical expert says.

"No one is in a worse position than the Chinese," Peter Zeihan, a top geo-political strategist, says.
"According to the data that the Chinese have updated in just the last year... they've got a fertility rate that is one quarter, or below, replacement levels in all of their major cities.
"So, we're looking at the demographic collapse of the Chinese state within 10 years, and that assumes nothing else goes wrong - no trade war with the United States, no government breakdown because of the cult of personality that has arisen around chairman Xi [Jinping], no conflict, nothing."
Zeihan's dramatic predictions are in the latest episode of RNZ's multimedia programme, 30 with Guyon Espiner.
The implication of China's collapse as a viable global economic power, according to Zeihan, is huge losses to New Zealand's export market.

He has warned that globalisation as we know it is in its twilight years, with the US becoming increasingly isolationist and pulling back from its post-war role in policing global trades routes.
Over decades of diplomacy culminating in a free trade agreement, China has become New Zealand's largest trading partner buying more than $21.b in exports including dairy, meat and wood products each year. Few countries have achieved the diplomatic ties with China that New Zealand has won.

The US, he says, due its geographic position, security and self-sufficient energy production, doesn't rely on globalisation for survival in the same way most of the world currently does.
"The United States is the world's premier power not because of globalisation.
"If you remove the NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] states from the equation, we trade for about 3 - maybe 3 and a half - percent of our GDP."
To bolster its chances of survival, Zeihan believes New Zealand must be prepared to acquiesce more to US demands in terms of free-trade agreements, and actively pursue inclusion in sensitive security arrangements with Western allies, like the AUKUS pact.

[kiora]

Rather than Japan with its ageing pop as well,we should be looking at stonger ties to India & Africa?
Ha,SJ already years ahead.

"Kiwi multi-millionaire says Africa holds big opportunities for NZ"
"These days, his business activities are focused on Africa, where his land development firm, Rendeavour, is building large-scale satellite cities in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo."

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/...oogle_vignette

[warthog]

… a geopolitical expert says.
…
"No one is in a worse position than the Chinese," Peter Zeihan, a top geo-political strategist, says.
…
To bolster its chances of survival, Zeihan believes New Zealand must be prepared to acquiesce more to US demands in terms of free-trade agreements, and actively pursue inclusion in sensitive security arrangements with Western allies, like the AUKUS pact.

There you have it.

The experts says NZ needs to acquiesce harder.

[clearasmud]

There you have it.

The experts says NZ needs to acquiesce harder.

Peter Zeihan LOL.

[Davexl]

Thanks Moka!

Found Peter Zeihan's presentation very interesting. Particularly his idea that Biden will win in a landslide vs Trump.

The key factor of Demographics breaking globalisation and particularly China seems at first on point, but I suspect
he has forgotten one key factor that might save the day, and that is Artificial Intelligence.

A.I. driven factories don't need so many workers to carry on producing goods for a start.

The issue that remains is consumption - who is going to consume all this manufacturing largess.
The answers here are perhaps Africa, South and East Asia, South America, who are ripe for development.

China might yet win the Geopolitics battle as they historically & strategically back the BRICS country networks
that the US has largely ignored until recently.

If we can ignore Thucydides trap, between the US and China, we will all be living in very interesting times...

[moka]

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Political Upheaval and Global Security Challenges
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttniXFhc6U0

Sachs serves as Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. https://www.jeffsachs.org/

0:32 Hi everyone Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom today is Tuesday July 9th 2024. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now.
While the Western press was concentrating on the French elections and the apparent disintegration of the candidacy for reelection of Joe Biden there was a meeting in Asia which comprised 80% of the countries of Eurasia and represented 40% of the world's population the Shanghai cooperation organization how significant is this and how surprised are you if at all that it was ignored in the western press?

It is very significant, this Shanghai cooperation organization is an initiative underway many years led by the Asian countries, China, India, Russia and many others Bellarus joined in this current meeting and more and more of the world is basically saying we want a different security arrangement from the one that the US has been promulgating.
We want a different way to achieve collective security. We want actually more economic interconnectivity. And these are countries that often the US says are our enemies. They're not really enemies but in the mindset of the security state they are enemies. And they're going about their business making progress, making a larger interconnected world in which the US has absented itself. So I think it is a very very significant change that's underway. The fact that the main mainstream media ignores it shows that they're basically ignorant of what's happening and not informing us.

3:04 As we speak NATO leaders and foreign ministers are arriving in Washington DC. I don't know if this is Joe Biden's swan song or not but it's a meeting of NATO. Somebody leaked a proposed conclusion of the meeting and on that leaked document, I don't know if it's real or not, it says that NATO is of the belief that Ukraine's membership in NATO is inevitable.
I mean to make a statement like that is to be utterly totally completely ignorant of the past two years of world history.

I would say not only is it not inevitable, I would say it is impossible. It is impossible because it will be resisted in every way, including up to complete disaster for the world by Russia which has said no to Nato enlargement to its border with Ukraine. And Russia will fight as necessary to prevent. It will not happen. It is as realistic is saying that Joe Biden has it all together. These are just delusional dangerous statements though because they basically are a way of prolonging yet another perpetual war of the United States that has no end at this point other than killing more and more Ukrainians

5:02 We literally have a leader who is not competent mentally to do this job and we don't really know who calls any of these shots but they don't make sense. Whoever it is has not been elected by the public. It is not transparent as just say we don't even know who it is I mean Joe Biden may be signing documents but it's hard to believe that he can rationalize to the decisions that he that he needs he needs to make back to NATO. What do you think will come of this meeting more bellicosity more support for Ukraine more uh dangers for Europe more steps in the direction of World War.

5:56 Right now we are adrift and we will be a drift for a while. Biden is not competent to be president, he's not competent to negotiate this resistance to what cries out for negotiations with Russia, with China, with the Arab leaders over the war in the Middle East. We don't have any of it happening. I though I've been begging for it and calling for it for years. It probably could not happen with the Biden in the state that he is in at this point of course.
I do think he should not remain President, much less candidate for another four years in this state. So what's going to come out of this we have continued war and instability lack of clarity and yes the rhetoric continues almost on autopilot because this has been a long-term project that doesn't yet end even though it's causing disaster.

[moka]

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Political Upheaval and Global Security Challenges
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttniXFhc6U0

7:10 That long-term project of expanding NATO whenever, wherever the US deep state says it should go. One of the things that will be re-emphasized at this NATO meeting is a decision taken last year and absolutely disastrous as well that NATO should be engaged with East Asia and with China as a threat to the West supposedly and thereby actually institutionalize a link of NATO with Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand. It's mind-boggling. NATO means North Atlantic. It should have ended in 1990 or 1991 when the Soviet Union was ending, and had disbanded the Soviet military alliance.

8:10 Now they're talking about expanding to East Asia, absolutely mind-bogglingly wrong. I think one thing that I'd like people to understand is that if you add all of the population of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Australia New Zealand, and the few NATO countries that one would add to that you arrive at something around 12 to 15% of the world population. When you asked me about the Shanghai cooperation, that's the rest, not all the rest because there are other parts of the world also that don't want have anything to do with this NATO business. but we're talking about such a small part of the world that pretends it runs the show, whereas 85% of the world is saying what are you doing, why the wars, why the militarization, why all this in incredibly provocative talk, why the taunting of China, why the continuation of war in Ukraine when neutrality for Ukraine and a buffer space between NATO and Russia would solve problems for every one of the countries. That's what the rest of the world is asking, that's what I hear every day when I speak to leaders outside of this even call it a NATO bubble because when you're basically no more than 15% of the world population you're talking to yourself and you're not listening to the rest of the world.

10:14 I'm going to guess that M16, Mossad and the CIA were at this SE meeting even though the mainstream media totally ignored them. When we have say negotiations over the ceasefire which doesn't ever happen even though the UN Security Council has called for it in Gaza. Who are the US negotiators, the Israeli negotiators and so forth? It's the CIA, it's Mossad, it is actually the secret intelligence agencies and the secret armies that are running the show. And we see them visibly at these certain moments. Why are they negotiating? What happened to the diplomats, what happened to the State Department, what happened to the Ministries of Foreign Affairs? They don't do the negotiations, it's the intelligence agencies. That's pretty telling actually for how the world is actually working.

11:29 Right now you have an American President who is incapable of the leadership necessary, have an Israeli Prime Minister at odds with his military and intelligence establishment and at least half of the public.
Every approach that Amos Hochstein (US negotiator) has championed has failed because they have had a strategy that we're going to divide the Arab world once again. We can ignore the Palestinian right to self determination that overwhelmingly is the call of the entire world but the United States Mr Hochstein and others think it can be gamed again. They talk to themselves. They're not talking to the rest of the world and so we're in a kind of bubble in the US foreign policy world right now that is delusional, absolutely unrealistic and getting us deeper and deeper into war and into crisis.

[moka]

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Political Upheaval and Global Security Challenges
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttniXFhc6U0

13:04 One of the newcomers in DC is Sir Keir Starmer, the new British prime minister, I wish it were Jeremy Corbin but it's not, it's Keir Starmer and I don't think there's going to be any change whatsoever in British foreign policy with respect to Gaza and with respect to Ukraine. Well he said so in the first minute of his prime ministership but the UK basically has two characteristics, one nostalgia for the British Empire and so it's filled with its own delusions and second a decision taken decades ago never, ever do anything other than what the United States says but cheerlead as much as you can for that.

13:57 And so it doesn't matter whether it's Conservative or Labour this guy didn't take five minutes even to think what do I do now I have the burdens of state, I'm engaged in a war, do we have a look, are there consultations, are there opportunities for negotiation? No, from the first moment it was we maintain exactly the same course as the government that just went down to defeat. It's shocking but that's because we don't think. We are just completely aligned with what the United States says. This goes back to George W Bush and Tony Blair this idea of Britain as America's poodle. Well it goes back before that but that was an example of it which is that Blair was told by George W Bush Jr we're we're going to invade Iraq on absolutely bizarre and phony premises, and Tony Blair said good we’ll do the same, we’ll join you. It didn't take a moment, they broke their own laws and their own processes. Later the Parliament investigated them for that. But that was not the start of this, that was the ongoing result of British foreign policy which says just salute the United States.

15:36 How unstable is the government in France? As we speak President Macron had recklessly talked about putting French troops into Ukraine and he brushed aside risks of nuclear war and made remarkably strange statements in recent weeks, all sorts of bravado. And the French people were absolutely shocked I think, and so both in the European Parliament elections of a few weeks ago and then in the snap elections that Macron called in the face of his party's defeat we have had a large part of the French electorate say no I don't want this whether they voted for the right or the left. By the way these terms barely mean anything anymore, these are kind of cat calls rather than real descriptions of these parties.
Because it turns out what we call the right doesn't want war it used to be the right was the militaristic side at least in some ways of using that term so I just caution about the terms but basically the French electorate on now two rounds of occasion have said we do not want to be more deeply engaged and at risk over the Ukraine war.

17:32 In two weeks Prime minister Netanyahu regrettably will be greeted as a hero on the floor of the House of Representatives by nearly everyone there. They've already determined that they're going to give him more than 55 standing ovations so as to beat the record of 55 standing ovations the last time he was there.

The basic goal of his party going back to its founding is what is called greater Israel which means never have a Palestinian State, dominate the Palestinian people, control all of the lands of Palestine, ethnically cleanse those lands if possible, do what is being done in Gaza, make life completely unlivable, as well as killing vast numbers of people in basic slaughter. So, this has been the goal. This continues to be the goal. Of course on the personal side he wants the continuation of power and all the rest but the basic political goal is that there should never be a state of Palestine. It is a goal that can only be pursued with the extraordinary violence, a violence that is tantamount to genocide by what looks to be a decision that will come from the International Court of Justice. It's a disaster but to continue with that line means continued war and likely escalation of war because now in addition to Gaza there's every possibility that there will be a full-fledged war on Israel's northern border with Lebanon with Hezbollah, that would quite possibly trigger a war with Iran, who as you said would love to pull the US into a war with Iran, like extremists in Ukraine, extremists in Israel want to use the US, the US military power for their extremist ideologies and their extremist purposes and if we had a functional President the President would say no, we’re the United States you don't use us period. But we don't have a functioning presidency right now.

[moka]

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Political Upheaval and Global Security Challenges
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttniXFhc6U0

20:34 Since you and I were last together two rather startling reports came out about Gaza. One in the well-respected British medical journal the Lancet saying that it is likely that 186,000 human beings are dead in the Gaza a strip, that's about 8% of the total population. The other report is from Haaretz demonstrating conclusively by revealing emails and text messages uh that Israel did do what it calls the Hannibal option, and in fact half the people who died on October 7th were murdered by the Israeli military. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-07/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-ordered-hannibal-directive-on-october-7-to-prevent-hamas-taking-soldiers-captive/00000190-89a2-d776-a3b1-fdbe45520000).

21:20 Let's start with the Lancet. Those numbers are almost incomprehensible Professor Sachs are they not? 186,000 dead by the hands of the IDF. Well we don't know yet until there's a full demographic assessment after this horrific war ends but they're not shocking because we quote the number of 40,000, but that's the bodies pulled from the rubble. First there are bodies under the rubble and that has been frequently estimated to be another 10 to 15,000 who were not recovered from the Israeli mass bombing. Then there are the people who have been deprived of the basics to survive, the basics of shelter, the basics of water, the basics of food, and the basics of healthcare, so I've been saying when have been discussing this that the numbers are vastly higher and I've thought again on very general principles and experience that it was not implausible to talk about the well over a 100,000 people that have died already.

22:53 The fact that the Lancet says it can be up to 186,000 and so forth therefore it is not really a huge surprise. It's a shock, it's a disaster, it is a reflection of a genocidal campaign in my opinion, but it's not a shock from an analytical point of view here's how flippant the American state department is when confronted at a Q&A yesterday.

24:08 Look this is an Administration that has a President that can't even utter a sentence and they fake that they have a fake spokesman of Admiral Kirby at the White House, they have this Miller guy at the State Department, there's all smirks, there's no seriousness, it's all lies, it's all narrative. It's just a disgrace that this is the United States of America and that we have people of such shallowness and utter irresponsibility in positions of responsibility There's no excuse for it.

25:16 Let's go over to Ukraine before we finish. Prime minister Orban of Hungary who showed up in Kiev in his capacity as the Prime Minister of Hungary but also as the Presidency of the EU that rotates on a six-month basis and this six months it's the Hungarians as the presidency of the European Union. And Brussels went apologetic when he went to Kiev to try and talk them into negotiating, and then when he went to Russia and Brussels said he doesn't have a mandate. And he said go take a hike I don't need a mandate, I can go talk to whoever I want.

26:07 While he was there he said the EU bureaucrats want war with Russia, do you think he's right?
Well for first I know Prime Minister Orban very well, he's extraordinarily intelligent and by the way I spent several hours with him recently discussing the situation in Ukraine. He's extraordinarily knowledgeable and experienced, not surprisingly and has a very clear understanding about the history of this conflict, the sources of the conflict, the behavior of his fellow politicians, who tells the truth, who lies, who says one thing in public and another thing in private. It's extremely interesting his visit to Moscow first to Kiev, then to Moscow and then to Beijing is extremely meritorious, he's trying to find a way forward because he knows that what's coming out of Brussels is just absolute pablum and again following a US narrative that is being enunciated by a failed Administration that no longer has a functioning president.

We're going to play two clips one is President Putin talking about his meeting with Orban and the other is Prime Minister Orban talking about how rational President Putin is.

29:35 Orban says (in the clip) "He (Putin) is a 100 more than 100% rational person. When he negotiates, when he starts to explain a point, when he makes a proposal, saying yes or no, he's super, super rational."

30:16 In other words he (Putin) is the opposite of Joe Biden. First of all negotiatation is what keeps us from blowing each other up, and we don't have it right now. Second to be able to negotiate indeed means to be intellectually prepared and also able to function to listen to respond. We don't have that right now. It's extremely serious. I remember decades ago how we just mocked the Soviet Union when Brezhnev was really not functional anymore, and we just wondered what kind of decrepit political system would keep someone like that in power. We have a president that is not functional right now on a consistent basis and what's amazing about it is how many people scurry to hide this most obvious and basic fact. So it not only is a direct disservice in a very dangerous situation, to our own situation but it exposes the whole pattern of lying and the routineness of the lying that goes on by our government.

The End

[moka]

Rather than Japan with its ageing pop as well,we should be looking at stonger ties to India & Africa?
Ha,SJ already years ahead.

"Kiwi multi-millionaire says Africa holds big opportunities for NZ"
"These days, his business activities are focused on Africa, where his land development firm, Rendeavour, is building large-scale satellite cities in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo."

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/...oogle_vignette

Quote from the article - Closer to home, Jennings used his NZ Initiative speech to highlight what he views as the key challenges facing this country's economy.
He said our tax rules "favour the old and rich" and rising house prices and immigration-fuelled economic growth were masking an "iceberg that lies ahead".
"As weaknesses compound each other, economic or social crises will become increasingly likely.
"We are sleepwalking into an economically ugly place."
He also said low productivity growth, weak global linkages and rising inequality, particularly in the education system, were major issues facing this country.
Social divisions would only worsen if such issues were not addressed, he said.
So is the arch-capitalist Jennings, the free-market economist, turning into a socialist, of sorts?
"I think I'm just focusing on outcomes," he says. "I think we have to put ideological, left/right differences behind us."