Peter Zeihan is not actually an optimist or a pessimist. He is a geopolitical strategist who has spent the better part of three decades arguing that geography, demographics, and energy are the actual drivers of how the world works, and that most of what passes for foreign policy analysis is just people describing the furniture without understanding the house. He predicted a lot of what is happening right now. That is what this piece is about.
In 2014, when he published The Accidental Superpower, the structural conditions pointed somewhere very specific. American geography gives it advantages no other country has. Two ocean buffers. Internal waterways that make domestic commerce almost effortless. An agricultural heartland that produces more food than it needs. Energy self-sufficiency just becoming real through shale. Demographics that, compared to Europe, Russia, China, and Japan, look positively sprightly. His argument was not that America was going to do great things. His argument was that the post-war order was unwinding, that the American security umbrella was structurally unsustainable, and that when the whole thing came apart, the United States would be the last country standing with its industrial base, its food supply, and its military capacity more or less intact.
He also predicted, specifically, that Cuba would get pulled back into the American orbit. That Iran's forward-deployed proxy network represented a structural threat to Gulf stability that the diplomatic community kept deciding to manage rather than resolve. That China's demographic window was closing faster than anyone wanted to admit, and that every year that passed without decisive action on Taiwan was a year China got weaker relative to the moment of action. That the maritime chokepoints, Hormuz, Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb, were the actual levers of global power regardless of what anyone in Washington was focused on.
He laid all of this out. Published it. Went on a book tour. And then spent the next decade watching every administration calculate that the domestic political cost of acting on any of it exceeded what their coalition could absorb.
Obama's team knew the JCPOA sunset clause problem existed, that the deal's enrichment restrictions expired on a rolling schedule starting in 2025, that they were trading sanctions relief for a fixed-term delay rather than a permanent solution. They accepted it anyway because the domestic political cost of the alternative was higher than the strategic cost of a problem someone else would have to solve later. Bush had the post-Iraq environment making Iran action politically impossible regardless of what the strategic logic said. Every president from Clinton forward understood what needed to happen with Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, and every one of them decided their coalition could not absorb the cost of doing it.
That calculation did not change because the strategic environment changed. Russia did not get less aggressive. Iran did not get less threatening. Venezuela did not get less of a narco-state. Cuba did not get less of a Soviet-era relic running on Venezuelan oil subsidies and nostalgia. The calculation changed because the person doing the calculating changed.
On January 3, 2026, United States special operations forces flew into Caracas and captured Nicolas Maduro at his residence. The man Democratic senators had spent years calling an illegitimate narco-terrorist who had to be removed was on American soil facing federal charges before the same senators had finished their morning coffee. The Venezuelan oil lifeline to Cuba was cut simultaneously. The mutual support architecture that had kept both regimes viable for decades started unwinding in the same week.
Iran's proxy network, the forward-deployed architecture Zeihan had identified as the primary mechanism for Chinese energy security through maritime chokepoints, took more structural damage in the first three months of the conflict that began February 28 than in the previous four decades of American pressure combined. Hezbollah severely degraded. Hamas command structure dismantled. Houthi Red Sea interdiction disrupted. The nuclear infrastructure the JCPOA's sunset clauses were supposed to constrain until 2025 through 2030 is being constrained through a different mechanism entirely, one that did not require the other side's cooperation.
The Abraham Accords normalized four Arab states that had never formally recognized Israel, in a single administration, after every previous administration had pursued the same goal and described it as a generational aspiration. The Saudi normalization track is further along than it has ever been because the regional security architecture the Accords created demonstrated durability under real pressure. Cuba is on the clock. The Venezuelan oil is gone. American officials visited Havana for the first time in a decade to deliver a message that was not an engagement offer.
Pull back to the thousand-foot view and look at what happened to the waterways underneath all of it, because this is the part nobody in Washington connected into a single sentence while it was happening.
Roughly 80 to 90 percent of the world's traded goods move by sea, and that trade does not flow freely across open ocean. It funnels through a handful of narrow passages where geography concentrates shipping into corridors that cannot be easily bypassed. The Strait of Malacca carries nearly 24 percent of global seaborne trade and over 80 percent of China's oil imports, a dependency so acute that Chinese strategic planners coined a specific term for it decades ago. The Strait of Hormuz is the only maritime outlet for five of the world's top ten oil producers, moving roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day and about a third of all global seaborne oil exports. The Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez Canal together carry the primary artery between Asia and Europe. The Strait of Gibraltar is the only maritime gateway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The Panama Canal moves roughly 40 percent of all American container traffic. These are not trade routes. They are choke valves on the global economy, and whoever controls the pressure on those valves holds leverage no army can buy.
Within eighteen months, the United States inserted direct leverage at five of those six passages simultaneously, and almost none of it was announced as a coherent strategy because it was not one.
At Hormuz, the forward-deployed Iranian proxy network that had spent four decades threatening closure was severely degraded. At Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez Canal, the Houthi interdiction campaign that had collapsed Red Sea transits by nearly 50 percent was broken, restoring the corridor that connects Asian manufacturing to European markets. At the Panama Canal, a Panamanian Supreme Court ruling voided the contracts of the Chinese-linked port operator controlling facilities at both ends of the waterway, with a security cooperation agreement and joint Special Operations Forces training established with Panama's government in April 2025. At the Strait of Gibraltar, the United States completed a new expeditionary maintenance facility at Naval Station Rota in December 2025, placing five permanently forward-deployed destroyers adjacent to the passage, while Morocco was integrated into the Link 16 encrypted tactical data network normally reserved for NATO members, giving American naval intelligence effective sensor coverage on both shores of the strait simultaneously. Greenland, which sits astride the Arctic sea lanes opening as ice coverage retreats and directly above the North Atlantic approaches, became a subject of sustained American pressure for the same structural reasons.
The one chokepoint left untouched is the Strait of Malacca. China's primary oil lifeline. The one that does not need to be touched because every other move on this list already makes the point.
China has built the world's largest navy by hull count, over 370 ships and three aircraft carriers, and it cannot protect its own supply lines. The distinction between a navy that can project force near its own coastline and a navy that can protect commerce across global distances is not a ship count problem. It is an infrastructure problem built over eight decades of American basing rights, logistics networks, repair facilities, and allied port access that China does not have and cannot replicate on any timeline that matters to its current strategic window. Every barrel of oil coming into China, every ton of iron ore, every container of manufactured goods going out, travels through waterways China's navy cannot credibly defend against an adversary with that infrastructure already in place.
China did not build the Venezuela-Cuba-Iran support architecture out of ideological sympathy. It built it as a specifically engineered alternative supply chain, discounted Russian crude through back channels, Venezuelan heavy oil outside dollar settlement systems, Iranian exports through networks designed to evade American monitoring, three separate hedges against the day the United States decided to use its chokepoint position as actual leverage. That day arrived without anyone in Washington announcing it. Venezuela is under American management. Iran's proxy network is severely degraded. The Russian crude discount is eroding as Moscow needs hard currency more than it needs to keep Beijing supplied. All three hedges are gone or significantly weakened within eighteen months, and the administration that dismantled them does not fully understand what it built, which means it has not yet decided how to use what it holds.
That last point is the most important one for anyone in Beijing trying to calculate next moves. A player who understood the hand would be using it deliberately and predictably. A player who does not know what he has sets no ceiling on how the leverage eventually gets applied. The hand sitting in front of someone who cannot see past the daily fight is not reassuring to the people at the table who can read the cards.
None of this looks like a plan. That is the most important and most uncomfortable thing to say about all of it.
The vessel delivering these outcomes cannot articulate the strategic framework underneath them in a way that builds durable public consensus. Reasoning for any given decision arrives via social media post. The historical record of why these decisions were made looks nothing like the record Harry Truman left behind when he dropped two atomic bombs, accepted 22 percent approval on his way out the door, and let history sort out whether he was right. Truman's reasoning was documented coherently enough that the strategic logic was recoverable decades later. The decisions being made right now are strategically defensible by almost any serious measure, genuinely Zeihanian in their structural coherence, and the record being left behind looks like a guy who just won a fight in a parking lot and wants everyone to know about it.
The credit for Venezuela, Iran, the Abraham Accords, Cuba, and the quiet repositioning at every major maritime chokepoint on earth will be contested in ways Truman's legacy never was, not because the outcomes are less consequential but because the person who produced them communicates in ways that make the strategic logic nearly impossible to recover. Zeihan's framework explains what needed to happen and why the structural moment required someone willing to pay costs that previous administrations calculated they could not afford. What the framework could not predict is the specific vessel the democratic system eventually produced to meet those conditions, or the fact that the traits that made it capable of meeting them are the same traits that will make it nearly impossible to account for them honestly in the historical record.
The right actions. The right structural moment. The wrong vessel for the historical record.
Peter Zeihan predicted the superpower. The hand was always going to get dealt. He just thought someone else would be holding it.
Jacob Childress is a retired Army Master Sergeant with four combat deployments and four years supporting presidential operations from inside the White House Communications Agency across two administrations. He is a Senior TSCM Technician supporting the National Nuclear Security Administration and writes geopolitical analysis at jacobchildress.com.
