War is getting cheaper, supply lines are in danger, and the old order is cracking. Peter Zeihan explains why it's breaking and what North America can do.
War just got cheaper, not less lethal. A drone costing double-digit dollars can now pick its own target, fly hundreds of miles, and destroy gear guarded by $4 million interceptors. Ukraine fires hundreds a day, and the edge that made piloted systems king is shrinking by the week.
America blew through half its Patriot interceptors in the Iran war and can build only about 70 a year — refilling the stockpile is a 15-year math problem. The result: a broad drawdown of US power across the Eastern Hemisphere, because we can no longer afford to defend it.
The real crisis isn't losing cheap gadgets — it's losing the building blocks. Roughly 80% of the world's steel, copper, lithium, and cobalt is processed in China. Break that system before a replacement exists, and we lose the materials that make the things that make everything else.
AI isn't floating safely above the mess. Its best chips lean on about 9,000 companies and 100,000 production steps, so one broken link stalls the whole thing. Stack that on China's demographic freefall — a white-collar generation apparently never born — and 'fragile' undersells it.
The way through: deepen North American integration — lock in NAFTA with Mexico and Canada and rebuild industrial capacity at home. Mexico's plants are largely built and Turkey is rising fast. The path exists; it just takes the discipline to stop dismantling the fix first.
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