Can the British Reopen the Strait of Hormuz?

Close up of the British flag

The British-led effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by forming a coalition without U.S. involvement is just unrealistic.

Most countries lack the naval power to do this, and even if the coalition could assemble the ships needed, countering Iran’s drones and missiles would be extremely difficult. Protecting shipping and reopening the strait would require naval escorts and control of vast stretches of the Iranian coastline…not something this coalition could achieve.

There’s no path forward without U.S. involvement, and any resolution will inevitably have to be political.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. It’s the what, 2nd or 3rd of April kind of lost track. It’s been a weird year. Anyway, the news we’re going to talk about today is the Brits attempt to build a coalition without the United States to go to the Persian golf and force open the Strait of Hormuz. 

I heard that this meeting was happening. The first thing I did was get a good laugh. Problem number one, the way the global system was set up after World War two is the United States basically told everybody that you barely need a military, and you certainly don’t need a long range Navy. We will take care of all that stuff and allow you to trade with wherever you want in the world, which is something that only the major empires had ever been able to do, even in part before. Now everybody could do everywhere. If in exchange, we can write your security policies. And because of that, most countries gave up having navies at all. 

And while the Trump policy of basic denigrating all of the allies and now abrogating that deal means that they’re all going to be developing their own navies, developing your own navies and having a navy or two different things. And if they all start right now, it’s going to be before the end of the decade, before any meaningful results are generated. 

Which means that instead of looking at what people might want to happen, whether that be the Brits, Donald Trump himself or anyone else, we have to look at what hardware actually exists right now. What could it be? Use. And the answer is almost nothing. There are really only five navies in the world that are worthy of the name the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan and China. Of those two of them, France and China have very sharply limited range. Really, there are only three countries in the world with meaningful naval production capability that can reach the Persian Gulf from home. The United States, which is already there, Japanese and the French might be able to, but only if they can use Suez. And that introduces some logistical problems that I think would make it difficult. 

So, number one, if everyone had a navy magically could transform their strike cruisers or whatever else into deepwater platforms, and if they could all reach the Persian Gulf, even then, all of that combined firepower would probably be less than what the U.S. already has on station. So just the volume of ships, the type of ships, the number of ships, just isn’t appropriate for this specific task. 

Second problem. What do you do when you get there? The problem is that the Iranians have established a sort of toll system where ships check in, get their paperwork, stamps, pay their money, and then the kind of class escorted by the Iranians through the Iranian sector of the Persian Gulf, instead of using the normal international lanes in the middle of the Gulf. 

Ships that don’t do that risk coming under attack, but not by Iranian ships, because the Iranians don’t really have a navy, especially not after a month of war with the United States. So you’re talking about things like missiles and drones. Here’s the problem. A lot of these drones have a range of at least a couple hundred miles, the ones that you can actually micromanage. 

The ones that you know, our fire and forget, those are more like 600 miles. So if you’re going to have any sort of meaningful escort in a hot security environment, you don’t simply need to get ships on station to escort, of which there aren’t enough anyway. You also have to be able to either bombard the coastline and most likely occupy it so that there can’t be spotters that could identify potential targets. 

And the scale of that, I don’t think a lot of people have really wrap their minds around. Basically, imagine the coastline of the United States from roughly New York City down to Savannah. That is the length of the coastline in question here for the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf, where these ships are going through. The United States was to deploy its entire army to that zone. 

Might emphasis on the word might be, are you able to occupy enough of that coastline to prevent spotters and launchers? But even that would be a bit of a toss up. But everyone else? No, there just aren’t a lot of countries that have any sort of meaningful amphibious capacity. That’s, a land assault from the sea, at all. 

Much less enough to secure this. So if there is going to be a deal that removes the threat to shipping, it has to be a political deal with Iran. There really is no other option here. And even if there was, the rest of the world combined does not have the naval force to even pretend to enforce it. So we’re in one of those situations where every Joint Chiefs of Staff and every CIA director and every Defense Department secretary has warned every president since 1979 that if you do want to go to war with Iran, there’s a few things that are going to break that there’s really nothing we can do about. 

So make sure you’re okay with those consequences. But the Trump administration, Donald Trump, personally chose to ignore all of those warnings. And so we’re here in a situation where I’m laughing at the Brits for even pretending to have a meeting because there is not a military solution to this problem. The best scenario we have now is that Donald Trump decides, okay, we’re all done. 

We’re pull out of the region completely. And the Iranians just say bygones and move on. And I think we all know enough about the United States and about the Middle East to know that that’s not a particularly likely outcome.

A Flawed Trade System in Europe

Photo of a US aircraft carrier on the water

European efforts to build trade systems that exclude the U.S. are inherently flawed.

Without the U.S. Navy securing global trade routes, Europe will be limited in how far its trade network can extend. Given how protectionist the EU is, especially with agriculture, meaningful trade agreements will be difficult to negotiate. And even if they get through all of that, Europe’s slow and complex ratification process is no walk in the park.

The latest agreement with Australia will likely face a similar fate to the Mercosur and Canada deals, which took decades to finalize. Best case, this deal will take full effect around 2040…

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. This is Pandora, the other cat. She’s a little louder when it’s meal time. Anyway, on the topic of things that are loud and annoying and sometimes take forever to do anything, let’s talk about trade deals with the European Union, because, wow, those are a shit show. So the big news is that in Europe, they’re trying to come up with non U.S alternatives to the international order. 

This faces three really big problems. First of all, there is no international trade without the US Navy. The Europeans absolutely do not have the capacity to project naval power very far past their own front yard. So if they want to trade with Turkey or Russia or North Africa, sure. But anything beyond that, they really do need the security that the US Navy granted. 

So let’s just put that to the side. Number two, the Europeans are aggressively protectionist, particularly when it comes to agriculture and most trade deals that have been negotiated in the last 30 years have found a way to kind of leave that out of the equation. Which is a way of saying that they really haven’t negotiated many trade deals in the last 30 years. 

Which brings us to the track record, the Europeans are so technical and so detail oriented and so emotional about the details. And then there’s a ratification process that we’ll get into here in a minute. That they can’t do anything quickly. So, for example, we now have a trade deal that has been negotiated with the Australians. And that was done in record time less than a year. 

That’s really, really good. But the ratification process is a whole different question. So the deal that was recently ratified, with the Brazilians, the Argentinians, you know, the Mercosur bloc that was negotiated back around the year 2001, and they only now finish it. We had a Canada free trade agreement that was negotiated in the early 20 tens. 

That took 11 years to get through. The issue is, not only does the European Union have to sign on, deliver the treaty. Each of the member governments and has to sign off, and some of those member governments require plebiscites. Some of them require regional legislatures, signing off. In the case of Canada was Belgium was the real sticker. 

And we’re going to have something similar here now for the Australian deal because it’s very heavy on, as you might guess, agriculture. Australia is a massive agricultural producer, an exporter, and they have insisted reasonably that any trade deal that is going to access the raw materials also has to allow access for their trade goods, whether it’s beef or lamb or wheat or whatnot. 

And we already have farmers across the European Union, including the trade associations and of course, the French saying that this deal has no chance of getting ratified. So if in the ideal situation, everyone ultimately lines up and teaser cross crossing eyes or dotted noses are counted and it goes through, we can look forward to the first large scale transfer of Australian goods to the European market in the year 2040. 

I am not going to be doing this long enough for that to matter.

Why Would Europe Trust France with ALL the Nukes?

A french flag over the Arc de Triumph

Macron is proposing that France expand its nuclear deterrent to help shield the entire European Union. This comes at a time when Europe is losing confidence in the United States’ security guarantees. But there are major obstacles in the way.

Many European countries could build their own nuclear weapons, and do so quickly. So, why would they rely on France? Would Paris really risk nuclear war for a smaller EU state that was under attack?

Rather than a centralized French nuclear umbrella, proliferation throughout Europe is more likely. Many countries could spin up a weapon within months, so we could be looking at a more heavily armed and fragmented Europe very soon.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about nukes in the European context. Specifically, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, wants to expand the French nuclear deterrent in order to provide a missile shield for everybody in the European Union. Right now, because the Brits left the EU several years ago. 

France is the only country in the EU that currently has nuclear weapons. Now, what’s going on here? Is that the French just trying to make a power play to make themselves sound important. You can answer that yes to anything that the French say. That doesn’t mean that there’s not something here. What is going on? Is that, well, to make it perfectly blunt, the Europeans have lost confidence in the United States. 

When the Greenland fiasco happened earlier this year, the Europeans realized that 75 years of alliance was functionally over. And if the United States was willing to threaten its most loyal allies, directly with military intervention in order to get a piece of property that is useless, what will the Americans do when something’s actually important is on the line, like, say, a threat that requires a nuclear strike? 

And so the conversations that are going around Europe are is what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? Part of this means building, much bigger militaries that are independent, the United States. Part of this means fuzing their defense establishments with the Ukrainian one, to put Ukrainian tech and European capital manufacturing capacity to generate an entirely new style of war. 

That leaves both the United States and the Russians out in the cold. And a third layer of it is a nuclear shield. The problem here, what the French are going to run into is that third one is the least feasible of the three because, well, a couple of things. Number one, the technology is not new. Any country that has a nuclear power plant, there’s a dozen European countries like that could relatively easy build a nuke with what they have on hand. 

A one gigawatt nuclear power plant, which is, you know, medium to large size, generates enough waste plutonium every year to make a dozen or so weapons quite easily with technology that was developed in the 1940s. So there’s not a technical obstacle at all. And since the United States is basically no longer enforcing any of its weapons treaties, the non proliferation treaty is one of those. 

And there’s really nothing standing in the Europeans way except for the European sense of propriety. 

which means that nobody has to rely on the French. They could build their own. The second problem the French are going to have is the issue of thresholds. So let’s say, for example, that Estonia, a country with less than a million and a half people way up in northeastern Europe, was under attack by the Russians, and the prime minister was dead, and the cabinet had been strung up in the streets. 

And the deputy education minister, because that’s all that’s left, calls up. The French president says you got to nuke Moscow. What’s the French response going to be like? Maybe. No, that’s not very convincing. So what is more likely to happen is just a mass proliferation process throughout all of Europe. They might coordinate on fighter jets and tanks and drones and the rest, but nukes. 

Every country is going to want their own deterrent. 

Every country is going to want to be able to say yes or no for their own reasons. And that means we should be looking in the next few years for a number of countries that are already very close technically Finland, Sweden, Romania, Poland, Germany all getting their own deterrent, and probably some smaller countries as well, because one of the things that the Europeans like to forget that those of us who know our history, remember, is that, historically speaking, well, almost all of the Europeans have been at odds and at the throats of the Russians and vice versa. 

They also have been at odds with themselves and at the throats of one another. Historically speaking, Europe is the most blood drenched chunk of territory on this planet, and it’s only with the post-World War II settlements where the Americans basically occupied the place for 40 years, that all of these countries were forced to be on the same side. 

And then when the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain came down, Central Europe kind of rejoined that group under the egis of NATO. And if NATO doesn’t mean anything anymore than the Europeans have to start making decisions for themselves, and a lot of Europeans are going to make decisions that not only the Americans don’t like, but other Europeans don’t like either.

Iceland and Norway Ponder EU Membership

Flag of the European Union

As Trump has been screaming into the void about acquiring Greenland, the wheels over in Iceland and Norway are starting to turn.

Both countries have much of what Donald Trump says he wants out of Greenland: Arctic access, deepwater ports, and mineral resources. And as the U.S. becomes more transactional and predatory, Norway and Greenland are now considering EU membership to add a bit more security.

EU membership would be costly and heavily regulated, but when the strategic calculus shifts as much as it has under Trump 2…moves like this need to be considered. This goes to show how much trust in U.S. leadership is fading (even amongst America’s historically closest allies).

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody, coming to you from a bright sunrise here in Colorado. Peter Zeihan here. Today we’re going to talk about the Greenland fallout in Europe. Not so much about relations with the Europeans and about how that’s really changed the nature of the relationship. I mean, when your primary security guarantor strikes threaten to invade one of you. That’s a big deal. But instead, the countries that now think that they might be in trouble and are starting to change their strategic policy. 

And that comes down to Iceland and Norway. Norway has about 5 million people. Iceland like one tenth of that, Nordic countries on the North Atlantic that are a little chilly, that have good relations with the Danes and until now, very good relations with the United States as well. But when they look at the things that Donald Trump was demanding, he’s like, we need have Greenland in order to prevent Russia and Chinese from entering the Arctic. 

We need to have Greenland in order to have a port up in the Arctic. We need to have Greenland for the critical materials. We need to have Greenland for the resources. You know, Greenland has almost none of those things, but Iceland and Norway do. And they are lightly populated, especially Iceland, which basically has under three quarters million people, three quarters of them in the area around the capital, Reykjavik. 

The rest of the country is open and there are multiple, multiple, multiple deepwater opportunities. There’s a lot of zones where they know they’ve got minerals, but they have it mined because of the climate and they have a huge access to continental shelf. We might have to do this one later. We’ll see how it goes. And huge fishing reserves. 

If the United States was going to want a North Atlantic bastion on the Arctic, it would absolutely be Iceland. Or maybe even Norway. And because Iceland has so few people, it doesn’t even have an army and has relied upon the United States for its defense. Going back 70, I got two cold. 

Finishing this one up inside. Yeah. So Iceland doesn’t really have a defense force in any meaningful sense because it doesn’t have a population, much less a population that’s capable of controlling its own territory, much less the wider seabed around it. It’s an island in the middle of kind of nowhere. And so what we’re seeing in both Norway and Iceland now is a renewed debate, especially at the parliamentary level, about joining for the first time, the European Union. 

European Union does have a defense clause, but it has no military decision making power. Just basically says that we all hang together, and if somebody threatens one of us, we’re all kind of have a meeting about it and nothing really big, but it puts you in a group with 450 million people, with an economy that’s three quarters of the size of the United States. 

And the idea is that there’s strength in numbers. And now when the rubber hits the road, that might not be worth anything. But if you were Iceland and Norway and you’re currently on the outside of the EU and you’ve been relying on NATO for your security, and by NATO, I mean the United States, and all of a sudden, the United States is saying all of the things that it wants. 

You have, it’s forcing a change in mindset. The primary reason that these two countries have not joined the European Union until this point is cost and regulation. If they joined, they be two of the richest members, and they would be paying far more into the European Union budget that they would ever get back. But if all of a sudden NATO is led by a nation that is predatory when it comes to the Europeans on issues of resources and territory and ports in the Arctic, then all of a sudden, all of the math that they have relied upon for decades has gone out the window, and they need to consider new options. 

The fact that this conversation is even happening is kind of a shock, because even in the depths of the financial crisis back in the 2000, when Iceland was imploding, they still didn’t seriously consider going to the European Union even when they thought they would get money back. So it gives you an idea of how much the mindset has changed among countries in northern Europe that until now were the firmest allies the United States has ever had. 

And all of a sudden, they’re all considering alternatives.

The Two-Speed EU of the Future

A map of Europe with lines going from different countries and showing connection points

The EU struggles to take any decisive action on foreign and security policy because it has to wait for all 29 member states to agree. Whereas the US can make and enforce security decisions at the drop of a hat.

The Europeans have long debated whether they should become bigger or closer. Bigger = more members for weight. Closer = deeper integration. Both cause more problems. So, a compromise has been proposed for a two-speed Europe.

There would be a loosely integrated EU for everyone, alongside a much tighter inner core that coordinates on economic, political, and security matters without vetoes. It’s still messy, and it would require a new treaty, but most importantly, powers like Germany and France would have to relinquish their treasured veto power, which likely won’t happen.

Unless a truly catastrophic war breaks out, the Europeans aren’t going to be on board for true political-military integration. So, we’re probably going to see the EU structure and institutions snap before actual reform takes place.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about Europe. Specifically, the Europeans are being faced with what is not a new problem. The idea is that the United States, on a whim, in this case with the Trump administration, can make a decision and enforce security realities across the continent, in a matter of hours or days. 

Whereas the Europeans have to sit down and have a meeting among their 29 member states and hash things out over days, over hours, over weeks, over months, over a year. And then maybe, maybe, maybe there needs to be a new treaty that has to be ratified by everybody. And so it’s a decade or two decades or three decades from now when action finally starts happening. 

The problem is an age old debate in Europe that goes back to the late 80s. The debate is over whether we should be bigger or closer. So the idea, step one is that the more members, the European Union has, the more geopolitical and economic heft it will have, and the more powerful it will be on the larger stage. 

And, you know, it doesn’t take a lot of genius to see the logic behind that. The United States is, in part, very powerful because it controls the best part of an entire continent, and that allows it to be a huge force economically, politically, culturally in Project Power, where I say Swaziland, not so much. And so when you take a country or a union of the EU that has as many people as the United States, you would think, at least on the surface, that it should be able to punch at its weight. 

The problem with that is, if you’ve got 29 members, you’ve got 29 opinions. And for the big issues, which most foreign affairs issues are big issues and I’m all security issues are big issues. Everyone has to agree. Every single member has a veto. So if only one country disagrees with the path, that plan falls apart, which is one of the reasons why four years into the war with Europeans having explosions on their territory, a hot war on their border, and the Russians specifically threatening each and every country individually, you still haven’t seen the Europeans be able to take a really firm stance that has really tipped the balance, because they have one member, Hungary, who is basically in the Russians pocket. And it’s galling. So being big is great, but that’s not enough. The second path is called getting closer or getting deeper. And the idea is that you change the treaty structure of the European Union so that these national vetoes don’t exist or that they’re harder to use. And if you do that, if you allow fewer of voices to derail whatever the common goal happens to be, well, then you can act faster. 

The thing is, countries then have to give up their vetoes before the issue comes up, knowing that when an issue that is of importance to them surfaces, they might not be able to stop it. Now the EU has edged this direction with something called qualified majority voting, where a certain percentage of the states representing a certain percentage of the population can force something over the others. 

But this really has to do with economic issues that are really not all that important, as opposed to foreign policy, and especially security issues, which everyone thinks are part of the reason why the United Kingdom ultimately left the EU. 

what’s being debated now also not a new idea, is something called a two speed Europe, where you get a cluster of European countries that want to go the deeper route, who integrate more and more tightly and give it away their vetoes for core decisions. 

So basically you’d have an EU light that is everybody, and then an EU deep, which is a cluster of six, seven, ten, 15, 20, whatever the number happens to be who agree to coordinate on not just economic and financial issues, but political and security issues as well. Without those national vetoes, or at least with them watered down, it’s an intriguing idea. 

Organizationally, it would be horrible because at every meeting you have to decide what is in what bucket and what not, and then those other people just leave the room because they’ve got vetoes and they’re not invited. But there’s a couple other obstacles that are going to prevent this from probably moving forward. Step one this requires yet another treaty. 

And every time the Europeans start a treaty process, it’s at least a decade long. So whatever they do now is not for the Ukraine war. It’s for the world on the other side of Ukraine. On the other side of Trump. And based how things go, there may be a hot war in Europe when that is happening. And so this will all be tossed to the side based on current circumstances. 

The second problem is that the two countries that matter the most in these discussions are Germany, because it’s the largest population and largest economy, and the biggest industrial base by far. And France better has a nuclear deterrent as the most powerful military by far, and is also, you know, second largest in the Union by every other measure. 

These countries don’t want to give up their vetoes. Think of it this way. Let’s say the United States and Canada merge into a super state. And let’s say the next president just happened to be from Ontario. And all of a sudden you have a Canadian commander in chief commanding American forces. Can you can you see how that would be really awkward? So in the case of a deeper union where the Germans and the French and a lot of other countries are involved, let’s say we have a, I don’t know, a Latvian president, and the Latvian president is now commanding the French nuclear force. 

This sort of integration culturally for everyone to really, truly, deeply agree that they’re on the same side to the point they’re willing to bleed because someone else made a decision that is not something that happens, or 2 or 5 or 10 or 20 years. That is something that has to start at the beginning or require a devastating conflict that is so extreme that everyone was already fighting and dying on the same side. 

Anyway, that just hasn’t happened in Europe yet, and it’s probably not going to happen even with the Ukraine war. Or more to the point, any sort of merger would happen after. So all the countries who want to maintain their vetoes could veto this plan. And then once you get to the other side, you have to decide what sorts of sovereignty to pull and whether that actually makes a difference at all. 

Because when you’re talking about the Trump administration specifically, or the United States in general, all of this is already done. All of this was done over 200 years ago. You could even argue that since, the Civil War, it’s been locked in hard when someone from Virginia or New York or California is president. It’s not like you have a half a dozen states that refuse to pay taxes and actually go through with it, or pull their troops. 

There’s no legal structure, there’s no cultural structures, no support in these societies for things like that. In Europe. All of that is still there. These are nation states talking about pulling power. They are not component states of a larger political entity. So I find this very unlikely that this just like the last couple times it’s gone down, it’s going to lead anywhere. 

The question is whether or not the legal structures of the EU are going to fracture under the pressures that they’re in. And if once that happens, a new form ultimately emerges from the other side. And I’m down on paper going back 20 years, seeing that some version of that is far more likely than the negotiating incrementally into a more federal Europe, because the systems we have right now in Europe are designed for globalism. 

They’re designed for multi-party democracy. They are designed for not having a hard war, and those worlds are going away. And I really doubt the Europeans are going to be able to adapt their institutions before they snap. Now, what happens on the other side of that? That’s a different conversation. But we have to have that breaking event first. Brexit didn’t do it so far. 

The Ukraine war hasn’t done it. And it doesn’t look at the Trump administration to be doing it. So it’s gonna have to be something a lot more dramatic. And that’s just not in the cards today.

What’s Wrong with the EU-India Trade Deal?

Made in India. Cardboard boxes with text made in India and indian flag on the roller conveyor. Licensed by Envato Elements: https://elements.envato.com/made-in-india-cardboard-boxes-with-text-made-in-in-8X3N3JR

The EU and India have struck a trade deal, but it’s not the breakthrough it’s being made out to be. Just because you sign a trade deal doesn’t mean that integration magically appears.

Both sides of this deal are highly protectionist and have no interest in introducing new competition to their markets. This deal is fairly modest; some tariffs get lowered, but there are enough barriers in place for either side to block trade wherever they see fit.

One of the problems with global trade deals is that it only works if the oceans are free and the global rule of law is intact. The EU would be better off spending its time strengthening relations among regional nations, rather than looking far and wide.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from the Caribbean. A little breezy today, so apologies about the sound quality. I remember well, shielded spine. I could anyway, today we are talking about the new trade deal that was just signed between India and the European Union. People are talking about, oh, it’s one third of world trade and it’s a big deal. 

It’s all about the Trump administration, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. A couple things to keep in mind. First, on size one third world trade, considering that one quarter of world trade is the European Union, and you’re just attaching India to that, keep your numbers straight. Second, there’s a bigger problem here among the first world economies. 

The European Union is by far the most protectionist. It does things to basically encourage mass industrial production. And because they don’t have the demographics to consume what they produce, a lot of that has to be exported. And in terms of agriculture, their agricultural lobbies are incredibly powerful. So the single largest line item in the budget of the European Union going back decades has been to subsidize farmers and producers. 

And at times that’s been half the entire budget. And that really hasn’t changed. So whenever the European Union tries to sign a treaty with anyone, they want to shove manufactured agricultural products down the throat of whoever it is, and it makes it very hard for the European Union to do that in a meaningful way, unless the country in question has no interest in agricultural products or no interest in manufactured products, of which there are a few. 

So the European Union has a real hard time signing deals, because if anyone wants agricultural or industrial access to the European space, they immediately come up against a series of entrenched interests. So, for example, the America’s order deal that’s been in the news recently, they started negotiations on that in the 90s, and they finally got the final ratification. 

The European Parliament is like, nah, let’s shove this off to the court to see if it’s actually legal. So we’re pushing 30 years since they started talks there, and it still hasn’t happened because on the other side, Murphy’s Law is very protective of their industries. So if this deal were to go through the Mercosur, one, the South American countries, most notably Brazil and Argentina, would be able to shove agricultural products into the EU, which is something that is wildly unpopular. 

And the Europeans would be able to shove industrial products into South America, which would be wildly unpopular locally. So this doesn’t happen. India, if anything, is even more protectionist. Almost every industrial sector that they have is wildly subsidizing every farmer, basically riots, every year when they try to liberalize their agricultural system. So the nature of the deal that has been negotiated is actually very, very calm. 

There’s not a lot involved in it. And while it does reduce tariff levels, it does nothing to address non-tariff barriers. So for example, if in the European Union, that decide that the trade coming in from India market the sorting, they can easily put up a non-tariff barriers that doesn’t require approval of the member States or their regions, which is one of the things that the Canadian free trade deal with the Europeans. 

A few years ago. Secondly, that same applies on the Indian side. There they have a cart blocked, national security exemption that they can use for any reason that they want. So yes, everyone is looking for a non-American alternative for trade. No, it’s not something that’s easy to do because there are so many entrenched interests and systems across anyone who wants to do anything meaningful. 

The fact that the European Union internally is a trade union has taken 60 years to build, and those are countries that are so close together that a degree of integration is almost unavoidable. You start talking about places on the other side of the planet. It gets almost insurmountable. Finally, and this is the issue that everyone ignores when they’re talking about free trade. 

There is no free trade on a transcontinental or trans oceanic basis, unless there’s freedom of the seas and global rule of law, and the only country that has ever been able to impose that is the United States. Now, I would argue decisions that we made back in the 80s, in the 1990s have changed the nature of the US Navy to the point that can no longer patrol globally at all. 

And all of the countries of the world combined, if they put all of the navies into a single force and agreed on every single deployment decision, all of that combined is still nowhere near as powerful as the US Navy. So we’re leaving the World war deals like this. Conversations like this among the EU and the Indians or the EU and the South Americans mean anything because there’s no capacity to enforce safety. 

And even if that could somehow exist, I have no doubt that French farmers or Belgian fascists or Indian manufacturers would get in the way of all of the details that would matter. So it’s a nice talk, but ultimately what countries need to do is something like what the European Union has done and develop an internal, a regional structure that can support as much of that trade as possible. 

And you only deal with countries beyond your region when you have absolutely no other choice.

Ukraine Hits the Caspian and Europe Goes Nuclear

Aerial photo of the Caspian Sea

We’ve got two major developments in Eurasia. We’re talking about Ukraine disabling two ships in the Caspian Sea and Poland getting EU approval to build a nuclear power plant.

Since the Caspian is landlocked, it’s difficult for Russia to reinforce. So, Ukraine could disrupt Russia-bound Iranian weapons flows with limited strikes. With two ships already disabled, the Caspian could be a success story for Ukraine.

Let’s jump over to Poland. With approval for a nuclear power plant, they will now have access to fissile material. Which means nuclear weapons could be developed at the drop of a hat (and even shared with some close friends).

As the security landscape in Europe changes, we’ll likely see the emergence of multiple new nuclear-capable countries in the coming years.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming from Arizona. Today we’re talking about a couple things that have gone down in the former Soviet Union in the last couple of days. Two events. Number one, the first one is in the Caspian Sea. A couple of ships have been, disabled, blown up. Short version is that Ukraine has said that their special forces have operated in the area and disabled two vessels that were carrying military cargo from Iran to Russia. 

Now, why does this matter? 

Caspian is landlocked sea, and Ukraine is not one of the littoral states. You know, you’re not going to hit it with a naval drone. But, this is well outside of the normal range of operations for anything that we’ve seen the Ukrainians do so far. Now, the Ukrainians say they did this in League with local resistance forces, completely unconfirmed. 

So I don’t know if there’s anything to that, but there’s five former Soviet. I’m sorry, there’s four former Soviet states plus Iran that border the Caspian, Russia in the north, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in the east, Azerbaijan in the west, and Iran in the south. Like I said, it’s a landlocked body of water. So the military presence there is pretty limited because you can’t bring in ships from other places particularly easy. 

You have to bring them into pieces and assemble them for use, which means it’s a largely demilitarized body of water. 

There’s not a lot of cargo that gets shipped around except oil from the Kazakh portion of the northeastern part of the sea, and military and agricultural goods going back and forth between Russia and Iran. And even if the Ukrainians have no more ability than to hit the odd ship every once in a while, the Russians having to relocate military forces to something like this would be a really huge diversion, because supplying them is so difficult. 

The only way that the Russians could really do it is to have a naval presence on the sea, and a naval presence on the sea to protect against the odd special forces group would just be not a very good use of the defensive capacity. So for the Ukrainians to find someplace that’s sensitive, that they can strike where the Russians can’t really compensate very easily. 

You know, this is a good play. Also, Iran is where most of the Shaheen technology comes from. So anything that interrupts that flow is something that Ukraine will really feel on the battlefront. That’s peace. One peace to happen on the other side of the equation over in Poland. The polls got approval from the European Commission to use state subsidies to build their first ever nuclear power plant. 

Construction is supposed to start in two years. They’re expecting, 5 to 7 years construction time. But that will probably be accelerated quickly, because in the world we’re going to where international shipping becomes more and more constrained. Nuclear power is one of those things that’ll probably continue to be a good idea, because it’s easier to fly in some nuclear fuel, once every few years, compared to the alternative of bringing in oil or natural gas by Piper by ship every single day. 

So, not only is this an energy issue, it’s a military issue. You see, we’re in the process now of the United States backing away from its commitments to Europe. So the Europeans are being forced to take security matters into their own hands. And while you can, over the course of five, ten, 15, 20 years, build up fighter jets and bombers and tanks and artillery and all the rest, if you have the nuclear fuel, you can make a crude nuclear weapon in a matter of days, two weeks, or if you’ve never done it before, months. 

So Poland now already has all the other pieces in place. They already have the artillery. They already have the fighter jets. They already have, basic ballistic missiles. And now they’re going to have all the inputs that they need if they want to build a nuke. Poland is one of a half a dozen countries in Europe that is considering going nuclear right now. 

And the last piece they needed was the fissile material. one of the waste products from a normally operating nuclear power plant is plutonium. And the, a plant of the size that they’re going to have will generate enough waste plutonium for at least a half a dozen bombs a year. 

So, over the course of the next few years, we’re going to have at least four, probably closer to eight new nuclear powers in Europe. In order to compensate from the Americans basically staying on their side of the ocean. So a lot going on in Europe and in the former Soviet Union right now. This is really just the beginning. The Americans, with the new national security strategy, basically dared the Europeans to look after their own security. And this is part of what that looks like.

REPOST: Jets, Drones & Refineries: Europe Remembers Geopolitics

Based on our discussion yesterday, we’re looking back at this post from April of last year to see how things have evolved.

It looks like the Europeans may have figured out that Russia’s war plans don’t end in Ukraine, so more and more countries are beginning to send aid to the Ukrainians. The Americans, however, are still working through flawed economics and political considerations.

The Norwegian government has decided to send some F-16s to Ukraine, joining Denmark, the Netherlands, and others in providing military support. The most important shift we’re seeing in aid sent to Ukraine is that it is intended to be used on Russian infrastructure and military units…within the Russian border.

The Biden administration’s caution regarding Ukrainian targeting is based on flawed economic analysis and pointless political considerations. This has led us to a strange intersection of this war, where Europe is done limiting Ukraine’s actions in fighting, but the more commonly aggressive American stance is still lagging behind.

Click to enlarge the image
Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

TranscripT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a very windy Colorado. It is the 16th of April, and the news today is that the Norwegian government has announced that they are joining the coalition of growing countries that is setting F-16 jets to Ukraine, specifically the foreign minister, a guy by the name of Aspen Barth, I’d, probably has said specifically he hopes and encourages the Ukrainians to use the jets that at the moment are being provided by a coalition of Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, to stark to target infrastructure and military units actually in Russia proper.

In fact, his phrase was the deeper the better lot going on here to impact. So number one, to this point, the NATO countries have tried to limit the direct attacks by the Ukrainians with their equipment or with equipment that is donated, in order to prevent an escalation. But a few people’s minds have been tripped in recent days because the Ukrainians are now using one and two tonne bombs to completely obliterate civilian infrastructure and are going after aid workers, including, things like E-m-s services.

And this is really tripped the minds of a lot of people in northern Europe in particular, that this war is now gotten way too serious to have any sort of guardrails on what the Ukrainians can target. The French. Well, they have not weighed in on this topic specifically. They’re now openly discussing when, not whether when French troops are going to be deployed to Ukraine to assist the Ukrainians in a rearguard action.

And we have a number of other countries, especially in the Baltics and in Central Europe, that are also wanting to amp up the European commitment to the war. In part, this is just the recognition that if Ukraine falls, they’re all next, and in part is that the United States has abdicated a degree of leadership, both because of targeting restrictions and because there’s a faction within the House of Representatives that is preventing aid from flowing to Ukraine.

So the Europeans are stepping up. In fact, they’ve been stepping up now for nine months. They provided more military and financial aid to the Ukrainians each and every month for nine months now. And this is just kind of the next logical step in that process, which puts the United States in this weird position of being the large country that is arguing the most vociferously for a dialing back of targeting, by Ukraine, of Russian assets in Russia.

If you guys remember, back about three weeks ago, there was a report from the Financial Times that the Biden administration had alerted the Ukrainians that they did not want the Ukrainians to target, for example, oil refineries in Russia because of the impact that could have on global energy prices. And I refrained from commenting at that time because it wasn’t clear to me from how far up the chain it has come.

That warning. But in the last week we have heard national Security adviser Jake Sullivan and the vice president, Kamala Harris, both specifically on and on record, warn the Ukrainians that the United States did not want them targeting this sort of infrastructure because of the impact it would have on policy, and on inflation. Now that we know it’s coming from the White House itself, I feel kind of released to comment.

And I don’t really have a very positive comment here. There’s two things going on. Number one, it’s based on some really, really faulty logic and some bad economic analysis. So step one is the concern in the United States that higher energy prices are going to restrict the ability of the Europeans to rally to the cause and support Ukraine.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the Europeans realize that if Ukraine falls they’re next and most of the countries with an activist foreign policy are already firmly on the side of an expanded targeting regime. The biggest holdout would be Germany, where we have an unstable and unconfident leader and coalition that wants to lead from the back, not the front, which I can understand, but most of the Europeans have realized that if we’re actually getting ready for an actual war between Europe and Russia, that’s not going to be free.

And higher energy costs are just kind of baked into that pie. So almost all of the Europeans have basically cut almost all Russian energy out of their fuel mixes already in anticipation for that fight. So argument number one, gone. number two, the idea that this is going to cause the war to expand in a way that will damage Ukraine more.

Well, one of the first things that the Russians did back in 2022, in the war, was target all Ukrainian oil processing facilities. They don’t have much left. So, yes, there’s more things that the Russians can do, but this is basically turned into a semi genocidal war. So it’s really hard to restrain the Ukrainians and doing things that are going to hurt the Russian bottom line that allows them to fund the war.

So that kind of falls apart. specifically, the Ukrainians have proven with home grown weaponry they don’t even need Western weapons for this. They can do precision attacks on Russian refineries, going after some of the really sensitive bits. Now, refineries are huge facilities with a lot of internal distance and a lot of standoff distance. So if you have an explosion in one section, it doesn’t make the whole thing go up like it might in Hollywood.

As a result, there are very specific places that you have to hit, and that requires a degree of precision and accuracy that most countries can’t demonstrate. But the Ukrainians have a specifically go after something called a distillation tower, which is where you basically take heated crude and you put into a giant fractionated column, if you remember high school chemistry, and if you can poke a hole in that, it’s hot and it’s pressurized.

So you get something that spurts out and based where on the verticality you hit. The products that hit are either flammable or explosive. So we’re including a nice little graphic here to show you what that looks like. the Ukrainians have shown that they can hit this in a dozen different facilities, and the Russians have proven that it’s difficult for them to get this stuff back online, because most of the equipment, especially for his distillation tower, is not produced in Russia.

And a lot of it’s not even produced in China. It’s mostly Western tech. So as of April 2nd, which was the last day we had an attack on energy infrastructure in Russia, about 15% of Russian refining capacity had been taken offline. In the two weeks since then, they’ve gotten about a third of that back on using parts they were able to cobble together.

But it gives you an idea that this is a real drain, because we’re talking about 600,000 barrels a day of refined product that just isn’t being made right now. That affects domestic stability in Russia, that affects the capacity of the Russians to operate in the front. And yes, it does impact global energy prices, but that leads me to the third thing that I have a problem with the Biden administration here, and that the impact on the United States is pretty limited.

the United States is not simply the world’s largest producer of crude oil. It’s also the world’s largest producer of refined product to the degree that it is also the world’s largest exporter of refined product. So not only will the United States feel the least pinch in terms of energy inflation from anything in Russia going offline, we also have the issue that the US president, without having to go through Congress, can put restrictions of whatever form he wants on United States export of product.

Doesn’t require a lot of regulatory creativity to come up with a plan that would allow to a limiting of the impact to prices, for energy products in the United States. And I got to say, it is weird to see the United States playing the role of dove when it comes to NATO issues with Ukraine. Usually the U.S. is the hawk.

Now, I don’t think this is going to last. the Biden administration’s logic and analysis on this is just flat out wrong. geopolitically, there’s already a coalition of European countries that wants to take the fight across the border into Russia proper, because they know that now, that’s really the only way that the Ukrainians can win this war.

Second, economically, you take let’s say you take half of Russia’s refined product exports offline. Will that have an impact? Yeah, but it will be relatively moderate because most countries have been moving away from that already. And the Russian product is going to over halfway around the world before it makes it to an end client. So it’s already been stretched.

Removing it will have an impact. But we’ve had two years to adapt, so it’s going to be moderate, though not to mention in the United States, as the world’s largest refined product exporter, we’re already in a glut here, and it doesn’t take much bureaucratic minutia in order to keep some of that glut from going abroad. So mitigating any price impact here for political reasons.

And third, the political context is wrong to the Biden administration is thinking about inflation and how that can be a voter issue, and it is a voter issue. But if you keep the gasoline and the refined product bottle up in the United States, the only people are going to be pissed off are the refiners. And I don’t think any of those people are going to ever vote for the Biden administration in the first place.

There is no need to restrict Ukrainians room to maneuver in order to fight this war. in order to get everything that the Biden administration says that it wants to be.

Trump Trade Talks: US-EU Strike a Deal

European Union Flags in front of a stormy sky

The Trump administration and the EU have announced a new trade deal. It’s more of a political headline than a meaningful agreement, but let’s break it down.

The agreement includes a 15% tariff on European goods, $750 billion in US energy exports to Europe over three years, and $500 billion in investments from EU institutions in US infrastructure. There is a lot to going on here, but the bottom line is that the “deal” was made with the EU, NOT the member countries. So, until the individual countries agree or decide to move forward with this…it’s just another wish list from Trump that’s not likely to go anywhere.

Up until now, these talks have just been political fluff. The structural issues in the US-EU trade relationship remain untouched and will stay like that until the real negotiations begin.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, I’m Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a suddenly stormy Colorado. Today we’re launching off a new series on the status of the trade deals that the Trump administration has announced. We’re going to start with the European Union, which is by far the biggest. Now, Donald Trump has said this is the biggest trade deal ever. It doesn’t even make the top 25 list, actually, for the United States. 

And the problem is that a lot of the things that have supposedly been agreed to can’t happen. So, let’s start with the headline where we are at the moment. Then we’ll go into the detail. So the headline is that Trump was threatening the European Union with originally a 20% tariff, and that went up to 30%, then eventually 50%. 

And now it’s going to be 15%. And the Europeans agree to not retaliate, with their own tariffs. So there are a lot of folks across Europe who think that this is a particularly unfair deal. But, you know, whatever. 15% on European trade, Europe collectively is probably our fourth largest trading partner. That would have an impact on a lot of things. 

The United States and Europe have a relatively robust trading relationship that’s built on intermediate manufactured goods and then finished things like cars and aerospace that go both ways, as well as the United States sending a fair amount of energy products and processed materials, whether it’s lumber, cement or whatever. To the Europeans, the Europeans, of course, send a lot of luxury goods to the United States. 

French wine, of course, is on that list. Kentucky bourbon goes the other direction. You know, these are these are culturally intertwining trade types. And so throwing a 15% tariff on what’s coming from Europe to the United States is obviously going to require a squeeze in people’s budgets and redirect how things are going elsewhere. The thing to keep in mind, primarily when you’re talking about European trade, however, is that most of the stuff that we buy from Europe is not stuff that can really be sourced from other locations. 

So you’re either going to be looking at a reduction in demand as prices go up, or a withering of that trade relationship. So this is not one of those trade relationships where you’re going to see new industrial plant coming online in the United States to compensate. It’s not that kind of trade. That’s kind of the first piece. 

That’s the headline piece. That’s where we are. That all takes effect August 1st. The other two pieces are kind of loosey goosey and are very Trumpian. Trump has announced and the Europeans have said that, yes, this is broadly what we agreed to, that over the next three years, the Europeans will buy three quarters of $1 trillion in American energy products. 

Now, the energy product is defined very, very loosely to include things that don’t exist, like small modular nuclear reactors, or things that the Europeans just don’t buy from us like, for the most part, crude oil. Mostly we’re talking here about natural gas and liquefied form, but the number makes no sense. 

$750 billion in U.S. energy products over three years, the United States only exports a little over $300 billion of energy products total globally. So the idea that all of a sudden it’s all going to be and go to the United States, that would actually be a massive reduction in the take home pay for U.S. energy exporters. Right now, U.S. LNG exporters in particular, are in kind of the catbird seat because they look to see whoever is having a crunch, and then they send LNG there. 

So they get spot prices that are very, very, very high. If we were to send everything to the continent of Europe, we would be talking about more term contracts where the renumeration cost would be significantly lower because of the reliability. You would probably see U.S. LNG exporters see their profits drop by well over two thirds. And you’d probably drive a quarter of them out of the business if this agreement were to happen, which it won’t, because the European Union is not an economic entity. 

It is an international political organization among the member states. And the member states are the ones who decide what they buy from where. So the EU, the European Union institution, the executive arm, has committed to buy in the stuff, but their annual budget for the entire European Union is under $200 billion a year. So no, this is not going to happen at all. 

And if it did happen, it would be really bad for American energy exporters. That’s problem. One problem too, is that supposedly there’s going to be a half $1 trillion of investment by European entities in the United States. And again, the EU is a political institution that doesn’t have that kind of budget. It has agreed on behalf of the member states, but the member states are under no legal liability whatsoever to actually carry out the agreement. 

So what’s probably going to happen is a few months from now, these talks will continue again, because this is not a final deal. This is a memorandum of understanding for what the Trump administration would like to see happen. And even if this was a final deal, it would then have to be ratified by all the member states. But the EU institutions don’t have the political or legal authority to negotiate for their member states on behalf of things like energy and investment treaties. 

That is a bilateral deal. Those talks have not even begun. And from what we’re hearing from both the Trump administration and from Brussels, is that Trump basically came into the room with a few numbers, said, I want this, this, this, and this. And the Europeans kind of nod and smiled, assuming that this would end the conversation for the moment, which appears to be what has happened. 

But in terms of the real talks, the things that might address the irritants in the relationship, of which there are many, those haven’t even started.

The Revolution in Military Affairs: Europe’s Future

Last time we chatted about the misalignment between American weapons systems and European needs. So, what does the future of Europe’s military strategy look like?

A growing threat from Russia means European countries are rearming, and quickly. Between Polish conscription, Swedish and German defense budgets climbing, and everyone else preparing infrastructure at home, there’s a lot happening. The big question on everyone’s mind is who/what can replace the Americans and their weapons systems?

European jets are too limited in supply, so a different direction is being pursued. Think drones and jamming systems. After seeing success in Ukraine, the rest of the Europeans are treating these options as viable way of fighting wars and defending themselves. And they’ll get some tech and help from Ukraine.

While there are still capacity and infrastructure issues that will have to be dealt with, this is solid alternative to relying on the Americans. Obviously, there’s still a need for infantry, navy, and manned aircraft, but this is the first step in shifting Europe’s military future.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to continue our open ended series on the future of military technology. And we’re gonna look specifically at Europe. The Americans under the Trump administration have gone from being Europe’s security guarantor to perhaps even a security threat. And everyone in Europe is trying to figure out if there’s any pieces of the relationship that can be salvaged. 

And in the meantime, laying the groundwork for whatever is next. The problem, of course, is the Europeans know in their bones that the Russians are coming for them. And if Ukraine falls within 2 to 3 years, they’re going to be fighting on European territory. So we already have the poles, which have basically reestablished something equivalent to the draft for all men of potential fighting age. 

The European Union is encouraging its people to build basically prepper kits that allow them to deal for three days on their own minimum, without any sort of government services. The Swedes are announcing a tripling of their defense budget. The Germans are doing something similar. And on and on and on. But the common refrain and all of these things are two things. 

Number one, the Russians are coming. We have to get ready now. And number two, the Americans can’t be relied upon. And that includes American equipment. Historically speaking, since World War two, about half of all European military procurement has come from American firms, and most Europeans are basically looking to drive that number down to zero as quickly as possible. This isn’t necessarily a political issue from the European issue. It’s a practicality issue. 

Legacy systems like fighter aircraft can take decades to design, years to build out the industrial plant, and then you get only a certain flow through of production per year. So if you look at the options that are in front of the Europeans right now, there’s really only four. First is the American F-35, which is by far the best in terms of overall capabilities, but it has a couple giant, flaws in it. 

Number one, it’s over $100 million in airframe and then triple that addition over the lifespan of the vehicle. So, you know, the Europeans just don’t have that kind of money. But the other options Europe has designed for themselves don’t look great. 

The best one is probably Sweden’s Gripen. They can make about 25 of those a year. That’s great for Sweden, but it’s not enough for anyone else. The French have the rifle, which they can also do about 25 a year. Again, because the French have been maintaining an independent defense. Identity for decades. That might might be enough for just France, but there’s no more for anyone else. 

And then you’ve got the Eurofighter Typhoon, which is kind of the European equivalent of the F-35, but older technology, which is of questionable use in a lot of situations. It’s designed the industrial plant is designed for 60 year, but it’s really never run more than 20. So the idea that you can spin this up is a question mark. 

But the bottom line is, you know, if you’ve only got 2 to 3 years and you’re talking about needing about a thousand airframes, there’s just no version of traditional fighter jets that works for you at all. And so the Europeans have to turn the page on military technology and try something fundamentally new. 

Consider the system in Germany, which is kind of emblematic of what’s going on and what will be going on. They’ve invested nowhere near enough for the defense industry to be self-sufficient on any stretch of the imagination. And me personally, the idea of a relatively unarmed Germany. I consider this a plus from a security point of view personally. 

Anyway, now that the Americans are proving to be a little whacko, the Germans have to do their own thing. And so they’re looking at the legacy systems that they’ve invested in. After the Ukraine war began in 2022. The Germans decided to belatedly sign up to the F-35 program that the Americans run, on the condition that the manufacturing for the German airframes actually happen in Germany. 

So the Americans basically worked with the Germans in 2023 and 2024 to build a facility that can handle the construction, but it’s not happening fast enough. I mean, the first plane began manufacture in 2024. It won’t be finished until 2026. First deliveries to the German Air Force won’t happen until 2027, and the 35 airframes that the Germans have ordered won’t be completely built into around 2040. 

And it’s only 35 frames for a country the size of Germany, that is almost pointless. But the cost of these planes is, you know, 100 to $110 million in airframe. It’s a waste of money, especially for an airframe that is not appropriate for the German strategic needs. So why did the Germans do it at all? 

Well, two reasons. First, that implicit security guarantee you get from the Americans because you know, you’re using their hardware. Trump administration has shown that that is absolutely worthless. So that logic has gone away. And second, they want to learn the technology. And so what’s going to happen in Germany is because what’s going to happen a lot of places, assuming they continue with the F-35 program at all, it’s just so that they can do it long enough to master the technologies involved. 

Then they’ll, under the contract, walk away and use those technologies to build something that they actually have a use for. And at the moment, the only thing that looks sufficiently promising to replace ground strike air power, is a combination of air defense and drones. And in that the Europeans do have a couple things going for them. First is resources. Drones cost a lot less. The most advanced rocket drone that the Ukrainians have fielded so far only costs about $1 million, compared to a $110 million for an F-35. Smaller drones that are used on the battlefield to go after tanks are an order of magnitude less. 

And the anti-personnel drones that the Ukrainians have been kicking out in the millions because two orders of magnitude less. There’s also a range advantage of the shaheen’s that come out of Iran, much less the Ukrainian and the Russian. Duplicates of those technologies have the same range as the J35, and you can send them out in the thousands if you want to, which means that any sort of forward positioned air facility is going to have to have great jamming, because if a few of those suckers get through, you’ve lost airframes that you simply can’t replace. 

So the Europeans are terrified, and rightly so, because they have to turn the page on the technological book that they’re used to, but they have to do it because there’s no way they can build out the industrial plant that is necessary to generate what they need in time. There are only a very few countries in Europe that have been able to even try this, and it’s ones that started years ago, specifically mentioning the Swedes and the French, who have always had an independent defense identity and maybe mentioned poles, who have been working with the South Koreans to build out their capacity. 

They brought in a couple hundred tanks. They’re building out construction facilities right now with the intent of starting mass production next year. But even that might not be soon enough. So it’s drones, drones, drones, drones, drums. And if you look at what the Europeans were planning on spending on the F-35 program, it was supposed to be about $80 billion for procurement and then about another 220 to 250 billion for, life cycle. 

You know, that’s a lot of money that you can put in other things. And so the Europeans are going to be doing just that. So resources probably not going to be an issue because the technologies are much more appropriate to the needs the Europeans have than what the Americans would have sold them otherwise. 

The second issue provides even some more, hope and that’s Ukraine. Ukraine, out of necessity, has become the world leader in drone based technologies. And it’s got everything from those small first person drones that have a range of a few kilometers to fiber optic drums that are immune to jamming, that have a range of upwards of 60km long range ones like their rocket drones and their version of Shaheed, which can go 600 to 1000km. 

And increasingly, we’re seeing the manufacturing being more and more components that come from Ukraine itself right now. Probably, when they started, it was like 10 to 20% of the components were made in Ukraine. Now it’s closer to 70 to 80%. The biggest challenge of the Europeans are going to have is building out the industrial plant that’s necessary to build these parts. 

Right now, a lot of this stuff just comes from the United States of China, off the shelf. They’re gonna have to build that themselves. But the Ukrainians have shown, with a relatively strict budget on a tight timetable while under air assault, you could actually make a lot happen. So if you start doing this in, say, Belgium, while you’re in a very different security situation with a lot more money, that you can throw these problems. 

But perhaps the best advantage that you have of working with Ukraine? Well, there’s two of them. Number one. This is where the things are going to be used. And every drone that is used in Ukraine against the Russians is one that doesn’t have to be used in Germany, against the Russians. That provides you a lot more flexibility. Not to mention an amazing testbed. 

But second. The Ukrainians have promised to fully share all of their drone technology with any country that is willing to put boots on the ground in Ukraine, either as part of a peace agreement, as for on training, or to fight the Russians directly, and for the Europeans who are watching the Americans exit stage right. That’s a really attractive offer. 

Now, will this work? Revolutions and military affairs caused by changes in technology. These are tricky things. You don’t know what’s going to work until it comes up against its equivalent on the other side and up against legacy systems on the other side. 

the determining technology that I have identified at the moment. And keep in mind that, you know, anyone who makes these guesses is just that. 

It’s just a guess. It’s jamming. Because if you can prevent the drones from functioning, then they really can’t target anything. Now again, the Ukrainians have become the world leaders in electronic jamming technologies and the most expensive jammer they build right now is only $5 million. That’s like 1/20. The cost of what comes out of the United States. And the Ukrainian system is far, far, far superior. 

The American systems really can’t jam drones at scale. So you basically get the Europeans looking to bankroll Ukraine’s military industry with the hope of copying and advancing as much of it as possible as part of Europe’s own defense matters. Now, this doesn’t solve everything. They’re still gonna have to figure out infantry. They’re still gonna have to decide if they’re even going to have a navy. 

And at the end of the day, there are certain missions that you need manned aircraft for that drones can’t do. But that is today. If you had told me three years ago there’d be something called a rocket drone with a range of almost a thousand miles that was basically immune to jamming. I would have laughed at you. But necessity, invention, all that good stuff. The Europeans are operating under necessities lash.