Geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan says recent events are the culmination of 20 years of his predictions that the U.S.-centric global free trade system would eventually break down: <\/p>\n
PETER ZEIHAN: As you may recall, the Ukrainians have really upped their attacks on Russian transport infrastructure for oil, specifically targeting the Baltic. In the last week, they’ve been widening their target set to go after other transport nodes, including those on the Black Sea. This has reduced exports of Russian crude by over a million barrels a day, and now it has reduced production. The problem the Russians have is they don’t have a lot of internal storage, and they are a net exporting entity. They can’t really shuffle exports from one port to another-they don’t have enough interlink in their pipelines. So having the Baltic pipeline system-largely offline-means that flows from elsewhere have to simply stop. We’ve seen drops in exports of about one to one and a half million barrels per day, and a drop in production of about half a million barrels per day. Now, there is a little bit of interlink, which means not all fields are as difficult to restart. The further north you go in the Russian system, the more difficult it is to restart. These are more remote areas-assuming there’s a population center at all. You’re getting into the harsh parts of Siberia and permafrost. If those fields are shut down in the winter, they tend to freeze solid and you have to redrill them. So the Russians prefer to reduce production in the south, in places like Bashkortostan and Tatarstan-and that’s what they’ve done here. There’s only about a million barrels per day of production in those zones, so half of that is now offline. They have about that much again as a buffer, but if the Ukrainians keep going at this rate, we will blow through that within another month. Who knows if that’s actually going to happen-it all depends on what the Ukrainians are able to hit and what the Russians are able to defend. But we now know that pretty much everything that matters in the transport system-especially the mega-hub of Samara-is within range of Ukrainian drones. We should probably be looking at permanent reductions in Russian oil output by the end of May at the rate we’re going. That’s piece one. *** Piece two: in the Iran war, the United States, as you know, has been blockading Iranian ports and starting to go after specific ships that are violating the blockade. Today, the United States widened that conflict and started going after Iranian vessels that were nowhere near the Persian Gulf. They seized a large tanker-two million barrel capacity-off the coast of Sri Lanka, which is three to four thousand miles away from the Persian Gulf. Basically, the United States is transitioning into a privateer navy. There is no place in the world the U.S. can’t reach if it has a little time to get things into position. This is a formal break with everything that has allowed globalization to work to this point. It is now American policy-and the only question is who the Americans are going to target. Now, I don’t expect the United States to be alone in doing this. Basically, everyone who has a major navy is going to be enforcing their own littoral zones. That breaks down, among other things, global agriculture, global energy, and global manufacturing. So if you are dependent on any of those three sectors, you need to look at where you’re getting your inputs or where your customers are. If they are in zones where there’s a hostile navy, you need to write that off. That includes, among other things, everything in the Persian Gulf, everything in China, everything in the Black Sea, and everything in the Baltic. That is hardly an exhaustive list. *** This is the culmination of what is now 20 years of my efforts in predicting the fall of globalization-and where it takes us. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n