Germany in a post-American world

Everybody, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Pacific. Today, we’re adding another entry into things that I do and do not worry about. And this one is one that I mostly do worry about. And that’s what happens to Europe as the German economic model fails. For those of you who don’t live and breathe things German, you basically have three reinforcing trends that have made it Germany and industrial superpower, especially for the last 30 years. The first one is an extraordinarily high value added economy that is focused on ultra skilled labor and precision. The problem with that is the German population is aging out. And over the next decade, they’re going to lose the bulk of that workforce. And the retirees are going to start drawing and pensions and health care instead of paying taxes, and providing the capital that’s necessary to keep that high end manufacturing base working. So the entire base within the German system is breaking. In addition, number two, relatively cheap, relatively bottomless supplies of energies and inputs from the Russian system, not only those obviously been constrained by sanctions in the Ukraine war, but it was the Germans who did a whole lot of the work in places like Siberia, and keeping that production flowing. And since the Germans stopped doing that, because of the war, we now know that there’s going to be maintenance issues in the Russian system, even if there’s no war damage, even if the sanctions allow the stuff to flow. Now, that’s a little bit loosey goosey. We don’t know how long it’s gonna take for this stuff to go offline, but we know what’s coming. And then the third issue is the United States. The Americans have provided global cover to the world so that anyone can ship anything anywhere. And the Germans used this before 1990 to ship product primarily to the United States. And more recently, they’ve been using it to ship to China. Well, that’s another country that is facing demographic issues. And there’s a competition between Joe Biden and Donald Trump over who can be more economically protectionist. So the entire model is in danger. But the real reason I worry about this is not for Germany, per se, but Germany is the hub of a multinational manufacturing system, of which it may be the central and most important part, but it’s hardly the only one. German technology, German training, German infrastructure and German manufacturing supply chains are not contained within Germany. They are arguably the single biggest piece of the manufacturing systems in Belgium and Austria and Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, and probably a close second in places like the Netherlands and Denmark. So as the German system fails, even if everyone else demographically is okay, and they are not, you’re still looking at the broad scale failure for the entirety of the Central European manufacturing system. And that is going to have any number of rattle on effects politically, economically and strategically.