Japan Prepares for a Changing World || Peter Zeihan

hey everybody Peter Zion here coming toyou from Harris saddle on New Zealand'sfamous root burn track a little chillytoday oh stupid helicopters anyway uhwe're going to talk about Japan whileI'm out here the G7 is getting ready fortheir annual Summit and of course thetopic of the moment is UkrainianUkrainian created Ukraine and theJapanese have decided to belly up thebar with a significant amount of cash tosupport the polls who are in turnsupporting the ukrainians nowhistorically speaking unless you'retalking about pure humanitarian relieffor things like hunger the Japanese havereally had a really small footprint ininternational relations uh it has to dowith their geography so uh it's a seriesof volcanic islands that have a littleenclaves where people can live sorelatively weak infrastructure linkingthe the sections historically speakingit's really only the Modern Age that'schanged but what that does mean is thatthe Japanese have always had to have asignificant Navy which means they'vealways been technological advance andwhen that is kind of how you knit yourHomeland together you can imagine howadvanced you feel when you go out intoyou interact with countries that don'thave the infrastructure and don't havethe Navy and don't have the technologyso the Japanese have always had a bit ofa superiority complexand uh that led them to basicallycolonize and Conquer a number ofcountries including China and Korea andTaiwan over the ages uh and led them inWorld War II to try to knock the U.S outof the war by destroying the fleet ofPearl Harbor now obviously history wenta different direction and the UnitedStates showed that even when it wasfighting a land battle in Europe that itwas still able to float and sail asuperior Navy to the Japanese both interms of technical Acumen and tonnageand so the Japanese were crushed in theWar uh and then of course that waspunctuated with the two Atomic blast andNagasaki and Hiroshima now with thatkind of in the back of your mind youhave to look forward the Japanese no intheir bones as much as they knowanything that they will never besuperior to the United States in termsof economic strength Naval power andeven now technology their first worldpower that is no joke it's the secondmost powerful navy in the world I'm nottrying to talk them down but theyrealize that there's a limit that theycan't go past number two as long as theUnited States is in the game and throughthe 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the80s you had this strain of nationalismin Japan that would talk about tryingfor it anyway doing another chunk ofWorld War II a former Tokyo mayorishiharaum I hope I got that name rightapologies if I didn't can't fact checkout here uh advocated breaking thealliance and going in its own way nowthis was never viable China is a navalpower and its economy is based on theimport of raw materials especiallyenergy and the export of finished goodssounds a little bit like China does itand the United States was the power thatwas capable of patrolling the sea landsand keeping safe keeping Commerce safefor the Japanese but by the time we gotto the 90s a couple things had changeduh number one Japan entered into aprotract financial crisis that I wouldargue they will never recover from inkind of a weaker version a less intenseversion of the way that the Chinese doit they'd print currency they'd issueloans to everyone that confiscate thesavings of their population in order tomake sure that there were sufficientlyinvestment in jobs so that no one wouldRebel they didn't do this to the samejust ridiculous stage that the Chinesehave done but it did build up trillionsof dollars of equivalent of bad debt andthey have been trying to get under outfrom under that since the 1990s soreally since things broke back in 1989roughly the Japanese economy has barelygrown at allin fact I think it's today less than 10percent larger than it was 30 years agoI think 1993 was the last year they hadany meaningful growth so they know thatthe United States is on a continuedgrowth spurt it's not rapid by firstworld standards but it's faster thananything the Japanese can manage so thatthe Delta between the Americans and theJapanese keeps widening the second bigthing is demographics uh because of thatunclavic geography this is a veryurbanized country pretty much everybodylives in high rises and in high risesit's hard to tell the kids to go play inthe yard so you just don't have them andso Japan has had one of the world'slowest birth rates uh not just for yearsbut for decades and by the time we gotinto the 1990s it was pushing towardsretirement that even the nationalists inJapan are realized that the dream wasreally dead and so throughout the 90sand the 2000s and the 2010s you had thisincreasing pragmatism in Japaneseforeign policy versus the United Statesversus Taiwan versus China versus Koreawhere a lot of the more iconoclasspositions kind of faded away and thepositions where the Japanese would tryto be neutral because they didn't wantto repeat World War II or really how itended uh kind of turn into bit by bit alittle bit more proactivityand this culminated under Donald Trumpof all presidents when the Japanese CameCalling looking for a trade deal and inthe end knowing that the United Stateswas the demographic and the militarysuperpowerthey decided that they needed to seek apermanent alliance with the UnitedStates under Donald Trump figuring ifthey could do it with Trump they coulddo it with anyoneand they prove that they could and theysigned a humiliating trade deal withWashington which is enforced today andunlike a lot of the other countries I'mthinking here Korea Mexico Canada whosigned trade deals with the TrumpAdministration and then in the firstmonth of the Biden Administration triedto back away from some of the morecrushing details the Japanese made itvery clear that they were fine as it ismeaning that the Japanese are the onlycountry that really sees where all ofthis is going with China and broaderconflict in the world especially interms of Commercein terms of demographics and in terms ofrealizing that if you can't get alongwith all Stripes of Americans you riskbeing left on the outside so for theJapanese to step forward and say they'regoing to be taking direct economicactivity to directly buttress theEuropean effort in Ukraine Ukraineitself that's a big deal because theyare completely out of region and if thishad happened just 10 years ago theJapanese would be trying to find amiddle ground that was would not offendanyone but in for a penny in for a poundand the Japanese are in for a Timeokay that's it for me until the nextviso