The US has halted all intelligence sharing with Ukraine. If you thought the weapons cutoff was a big deal, buckle up. Since Ukraine relies on US intelligence for battlefield maneuvers, we might as well start air-dropping blindfolds to Ukraine.
You can bet your ass that Russia will happily exploit this weakening of Ukraine. However, the fallout of this move by the US is not contained to the battlefield, or even the region. Key US allies are now raising alarms over fear of intelligence leaks and potential Russian access to sensitive information. The Five Eyes alliance is on red alert over the lax handling of classified data and leadership purges under Trump.
This is an unprecedented intelligence breakdown and puts a fat ole ‘X’ on US credibility.
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Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming from Colorado, this one is going to seem a little out of order in the series, but, events are happening very, very quickly. We’re getting overtaken by them. It’s the 5th of March while I’m recording this.
And the United States has just ceased all intelligence sharing in cooperation with Ukraine. There’s any number of reasons why this is not in America’s interests. Not to mention, you know, all the Intel that the U.S was gathering from Ukraine. But for the Ukrainians, this is actually far more important than the weapons cutoff that is now about 96 hours old. The United States contrary to what you might have heard, has supplied Ukraine with less than one third of its, equipment in any given day of the stuff that is important from somewhere else.
And probably 40% of the total that Ukraine uses now is produced within Ukraine itself. So while losing access to the weapons flows is bad, it’s not nearly as deadly to Ukraine as losing access to the information that allows the Ukrainians to target it. The Russians outnumber the Ukrainians in every field, and can draw upon the old Soviet era stockpiles, in addition to the Chinese and North Korean troops and equipment.
That gives them a huge numerical advantage. So the way the Ukrainians have been staying, one step ahead is to do two things. Number one, try to turn the war into a war of movement at any given point so that numbers in any particular place can be moved and concentrated to attack Russian weak points, as opposed to staying still and letting the Russians to come to them and grind and grind and grind.
And then, number two, know where the Russians are coming from, not just so you can maneuver, but so you can target logistics in that direction and know which rail lines, in which trucks, in which intersections and all that good stuff without American signals intelligence, satellite intelligence, a lot of that goes away. The other NATO countries do have some capacity, but, the agreements that are made with NATO were specifically designed so that the United States maintains preeminence in all of that.
And by turning it off, the Ukrainians basically lose every advantage that they had in the fight, with the exception of the drones. And the drones require long range targeting information that came from the Intel. So they can really only be used relatively close to the front. In contrast, every advantage that the Russians have can now be pushed to its ultimate maximum because they will be encountering Ukrainians in pockets that can’t maneuver intelligently, and just overwhelming them with sheer numbers of weapons and people.
So far from being an honest broker, far from trying negotiate peace, this is a flat out effort by the Trump administration to crush the Ukrainians on the battlefield as quickly as possible, and about the only thing that they could do that would be more horrific than this would be to actually provide information to the Russians directly. And we are now in a World war.
I can no longer rule that out.
Well, shit, we may already be there in the time that it took us to process the previous section of this video. We’ve had a number of America’s close security partners. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all publicly float through back channels that, they are considering suspending, at least selectively, intelligence, cooperation with the United States.
The two reasons given, again, backchannels very, very spy worthy are they’re concerned that the United States is just hemorrhaging classified information, not necessarily the information per se. And the findings, the raw Intel, all of that, too, but methods of collection and integration that would basically endanger their entire Intel networks and their own national security. And of course, the second piece is whether or not the Russians are actually reading any of this as well.
Quick backstory. So intelligence cooperation with Saudi and Israel has always been a little, tongue in cheek because, like, we’re worried that the Americans are going to leak and then something bad will happen. And the Americans, like, we’re worried that you’re going to leak and something bad is going to happen. So it’s always been a little bit of back and forth, and we only cooperate with one another on the things that are of direct interest to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
It’s not like they’re getting the motherlode here. But their primary concern, of course, is if you’re Israel and if you are Saudi Arabia, or 3 biggest threats are Russia, Iran and Iran’s various proxy organizations throughout the region, groups like Hezbollah. And if we now have the United States compromised, there is a question as to how much American Intel and global Intel is getting into those hands, which would, of course, be a real problem for Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The second issue, deals with the Anglo states, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada. Those four combined with United States are called the Five Eyes. And it is the tightest alliance in human history, the tightest alliance in American history. And it is the only system in the world that is basically an open book for Intel sharing.
So the United States collects the lion’s share of the Intel. But there are other things that the other allies are better at, and they all have their own regional networks. So the US collects its bevy, we go and we have a powwow with the rest of the Five Eyes. We compare notes with what they’ve collected, and then we all go back home and take the information that we’ve learned and use that to inform additional investigations using our other partners.
And we just go back and forth and back and forth. It’s a very robust, very productive system. But the five eyes are have two concerns. Number one, the way that the Trump administration is completely gutted, the top level of our intelligence directorates, has them terrified because they are seeing things leaked out into the public sphere. That should be kept secret.
In addition, they’re also very worried about Elon Musk’s Doge, because you’ve got people who are in their 20s with no security clearance or getting access to databases, and then just posted it on social media because it’s fun. Whether this is just rank or gross incompetence on the part of the Trump administration or the Russians are directly manifesting these things from behind the scenes, really doesn’t matter at this point, because anything that gets out, the Russians are going to pick up anyway.
So the five eyes are seen, Russian eyes and fingers in the heart of their own national intelligence system.
Right now, which means that the United States just isn’t a competent or a trustworthy partner to them. And so the question isn’t how will cooperation be scaled back, but how much and where? This isn’t the end of the relationship. This can probably hopefully be fixed, but we haven’t had this sort of sustained breakdown in intelligence collection and processing in the United States ever, not even with the most robust, Soviet moles, Russian moles that we’ve seen.
Folks like Walter James. I can’t believe I have to say this, but if you are one of my followers in the intelligence community, and you are concerned that your senior leadership is either completely incompetent or has already been compromised, your options are limited for what you can do. And I’m assuming you want to do it by the book, in which case the authority that has oversight over your entire world is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
That’s where you need to go. Anyone who says giving information to the oversight committee is traitorous is themselves a traitor. Because this is how the system works. This is how you do it by the book. This is the part of the legislative branch that has actual tactical oversight over everything in the world of Intel. So don’t let people bullshit you on things like that.
And if you are one of my non intelligence industry followers and you do not have a senator who is on the select committee, leave them alone. They’re dealing with enough right now as it is.
