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Peter Zeihan Geopolitics: North American Market Integration and Economic Resilience
Peter Zeihan emphasizes a shift in focus from reshoring or nearshoring to leveraging the advantages of the North American market. He highlights Mexico’s demographic advantages, with a younger workforce and higher consumption per person due to a later industrialization process.
Additionally, Zeihan underscores the logistical benefits of proximity, reducing the impact of international security issues and promoting a more manageable and familiar relationship. He suggests that the integration of Texas with Northern Mexico has played a significant role in the American growth story since 1992, indicating a promising trajectory for North American collaboration.
Transcript
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.
