Here’s Peter Zeihan to state what conservatives knew a decade ago: Venezuela is headed for collapse.
It’s just over 6 minutes long, so even though I’ve excerpted it, you might want to watch all of it to listen for the one word Zeihan doesn’t say.
“Under 20 years of ridiculous mismanagement and theft by the governments of Hugo Chavez and now Nicholas Maduro, the state’s broken.”
“Basically we’ve had two decades of the governing authorities literally stealing everything that wasn’t stripped down, and then getting a wrench and getting a lot of the stuff that was stripped down [I think he means “strapped down”], to the point that they simply didn’t just confiscate materials they stripped it of equipment and melted it down or sold it for parts and there’s really nothing left.”
“So the country that used to have the highest educational levels in Latin America, the country that used to have the highest standard of living and the most cultural achievement, is now teetering on the verge of being a broken state, a failed state.”
“Roughly 1/3rd of the population that has out migrated since uh the last 6-7 years.”
“In calendar year 2022 and calendar year 2023, the Biden Administration did a partial lifting of sanctions on the regime, basically saying that if you start working in the direction of free and fair elections, we will allow investment to come in to stabilize the energy sector and get some more oil out of the ground. Uh, we’re going to trust your word for it, and then we will reassess when we get closer to elections in 2024.”
I bet everyone reading this can figure out exactly how well that worked out. “We’ll just take your word that your three card monte game is on the level.”
Chevron came in and got oil output up to a million barrels a day.
“But in the last several weeks it’s been clear that the government of Maduro has no intention of having real elections.” You don’t say. What you mean is “It’s been clear for decades that Venezuela’s socialist thugs have never had any intentions of holding free elections.” Only and idiot would think otherwise.
But the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to increase oil production in the rest of the world to help Biden’s reelection chances, while supressing oil production at home. “There’s a lot of things about that that are inconsistent.” You don’t say.
Oil production is now under three-quarters of a million barrels and falling.
“The really high-end stuff, the stuff that was part of the outcome of Venezuela being such a successful state, left a long time ago, and in bits and pieces ever since the the middle management and the secondary skill set and now there’s really nothing left.”
“People like to talk about the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians coming, in but they don’t have any experience in this sort of oil patch, so we are probably going to see a collapse of what’s left of the output this year and early in the next year.”
“One of the many, many, many, many, many mistakes that Chavez and Maduro made is they hated the United States so much, and their spending was so crazy, that they started pre-selling their oil specifically to China and to a lesser degree to Russia. ‘We’ll take X number of billions of dollars from you now and we will pay you back with raw crude in the years to come.’ Well, what that means is that the Venezuelans are already not getting money from the oil that they produce.”
“So we are going to see this collapse, and as that happens, the ability of getting even a modicum of foreign currency to pay for the 80% of their food that they now import because they destroyed their agricultural sector is on deck.”
“So the famines of the past, the dislocations of the past, the migrations of the past these have all just been the appetizer course, and over the next very few years we’re going to see the full collapse of Venezuelan society.”
Leave it to the Biden Administration to enable foreign leftist enemies for temporary political gain.
Did you notice the word missing from Zeihan’s analysis?
Nothing to cheer you up quite like a discussion of potential genocide.
Takeaways:
He starts out talking about how Russia plans to add some 500,000 new troops and use them in a late spring offensive when the mud dries up. As I mentioned previously, that plan is only scheduled to produce new troops over several years, and I express grave doubts that Russia can train and equip new troops when it has singularly failed to do so thus far.
He reiterates from previous videos that Russia’s military is heavily dependent on rail, but they’ve had to make do with trucks, and those trucks have been heavily targeted by Ukraine.
“Russians began the war with 3,000 military support trucks they’re probably down to only about 500 now.”
“[Russians] are doing what they can to destroy morale, and destroy the Ukrainian economy, and kill as many Ukrainian civilians as possible. They’re using drones, they’re using fighter launch missiles, they’re using cruise missiles and they’ve started to use ballistic missiles, to target specifically Ukrainian physical infrastructure, most notably electricity generating plant.”
Ukraine is having trouble exporting grain. “Exports have fallen to almost nothing.”
The countries that would normally import from Ukraine, come October, November, December are going to realize it’s just not there. Most of those countries are in Africa, some are in South Asia. And the one I am, by far, the most worried about is Egypt. Egypt is poor and they import over half the grains they need to survive, mostly wheat. The wheat is already off-line, and so we should expect to see significant upheaval—economic, humanitarian, political—across the Arab world and into South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa.
The mention of a second Holodomor is a reminder that not enough people know about the first Holodomor, when the Soviet Union starved some 5-7 million Ukrainians to death (and some 14.5 million total for the whole collectivization famine/”dekulakization”/suppression of the Kazakhs and Tartars/etc.
You may remember Peter Zeihan’s analysis of world agricultural output in the wake of of deglobalization and the Russo-Ukrainian War, and his forecast of famine late this year.
That was just before the Ukraine export deal was signed. Now he’s looked at the facts and run the numbers, and says it isn’t going to help much.
Takeaways:
“Right now the Ukrainians have about 18 million metric tons stored up in their silos at or adjacent to their ports. That’s a lot that needs to move. That is in excess of half of a normal harvest for the country.”
“On August 1st we got our first ship, the Razoni, to dock to load up and to leave for Lebanon. It’s carrying 26,000 metric tons. So we need 700 more ships of this size if we’re going to get that grain out.”
“The Ukrainian harvest starts in less than 45 days. So you’re talking about needing to get a dozen or so vessels in there every single day. So far we’ve had one. I don’t have a lot of hope for this.” (Note: Since then we’ve had four more.)
“Right now the Ukrainians have nowhere to put it. Their silos are full from last year’s harvest. They weren’t able to export because the war started back in February.
“Even if the farmers were able to work their fields and not be molested by Russian troops (and remember we’ve already had mass evacuations from eastern and southern Ukraine) the problem remains that they can’t get fuel into the country. So you’re talking about needing to harvest industrial levels of wheat without industrial equipment.”
“The likely end result here is that this is the last year that Ukraine participates in international grain markets. They simply don’t have the capacity to get stuff up at a scale. In fact the only place that they might be able to ship stuff is by rail and at most with significant upgrades that have not yet been done. They can probably only ship about one-fifth of their normal produce out that way the rail lines are just not designed for that kind of bulk cargo.”
Bottlenecks have arisen due to the different rail gauge used in Ukraine, dating back to the Soviet era. That means shipments are being transferred to new wagons at the border.
Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov has targeted the upgrading of rail infrastructure in western Ukraine as a priority the EU should focus on. “Rail transport can partially undertake all the transportation of agricultural products, particularly grain,” he said. “However, transporting goods is difficult due to western Ukraine’s low border-crossing capacity, which is not designed for transshipping such volumes.”
“Some 768,300 metric tons of Ukrainian grain was exported by rail between May 1 and May 16.”
Back to Zeihan: “And a lot of them have to transit little territory called Transnistra [in Moldavia], which is under Russian control.”
The sobering conclusion:
You remove the world’s fourth largest wheat exporter from the market and you’re going to look at cascading problems. Not just with food prices and malnutrition, but civil conflict and breakdown, most notably in the Middle East. The last time we had a doubling of global wheat prices, we saw the Arab spring back in 2011. What we’re dealing with is an order of magnitude more complicated and deeper rooted. And to think that we’re only going to have doubling of prices is ridiculously optimistic.
Well, it’s a good thing the Middle East isn’t know for having populations full of unstable hotheads looking for an excuse to kill each other at the drop of a hat…
With Ukraine in the news, it’s a hood time to look back on how horribly Ukraine suffered under Soviet Communism, especially in Stalin’s 1930-33 terror famine, the Holodomor. Here’s a video that covers the history of the Ukraine up to and through the Holodomor.
More information on the Holodomor can be found in Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Conquest estimated that for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization”/Holodomor period (including the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) some 14.5 million died due to the actions of the Soviet government.
Here’s Joe Rogan and Michael Malice discussing historical atrocities, including the East German concentration for children were the guards were allowed to rape their child charges as a matter of choice.
