Peter Zeihan Geopolitics: North American Market Integration and Economic Resilience

Leah Archibald: What you’re encouraging all countries to do to what we’ve been calling reshoring or near shoring, but you’re even saying, “Don’t talk about shores at all. Talk about what you can do inland within the United States.” 

Peter Zeihan: Well, it’s the North American market. The advantage, the Mexicans bring us two huge advantages. Number one, it’s a different demographic structure. They started the industrialization process like India late in the game, so it’s a much younger workforce with much higher consumption per person that you’re gonna have in some of these rapidly aging systems. In addition, because they’re proximate, the logistics of getting stuff back and forth is usually not colored by international security issues. It’s not that there aren’t issues in the bilateral relationship or in Mexico, obviously there are, but they’re manageable ones. And they’re ones we’re more familiar with, and they’re ones that don’t sneak up on you like, say when the government in China just decides to shut down Foxconn because of a political issue. And we’re already integrated very heavily in North America. You could argue that maybe one-third of the American growth story since 1992 has been about the integration of Texas with Northern Mexico. That’s a story with legs. That was a long way to go.