The US Strikes Iran’s Nuclear Facilities

United States Air Force posted rare photos of a GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bunker buster bomb being transported at Whiteman Air Force Base. Photo by wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_Iranian_nuclear_sites#/media/File:Deleted_GBU-57_MOP_photo_(2).jpg

Over the weekend, the US launched a major airstrike on Iran, targeting critical nuclear sites. We don’t know the extent of the damage as of yet.

While the US strike will cause setbacks in Iran’s nuclear program, it didn’t destroy everything. So, we’ll have to wait and see if Iran rebuilds or escalates through other avenues.

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here comes to you from Colorado. This video is a little late getting to you, because I was hoping we were to get some more information on what happened when the United States dropped some bunker buster bombs on Iran over the weekend, but it does not seem like anything has clarified. So I’ll give you an idea of what’s happened and now what we’re waiting for. 

So, number one, United States dropped a couple dozen major bombs on the Iranian nuclear facilities, specifically a place called Fordo, which is basically under a mountain, Natanz, which is where they do a lot of their centrifuge work to enrich uranium. Some of which of the facilities are heavily reinforced and underground and is from, which is a facility where they do most of the machining and the physical construction. 

The first two sites got hit with by bunker busters, most notably Fordo, where as it’s from was primarily hit by Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from submarines in the Persian Gulf. We do not have damage assessments from any of these places, which is part of the reason that I was kind of waiting. And we’re probably not going to get anytime soon. 

Donald Trump has said, of course, at every facility, the United States has been blown up and to smithereens, and there’s no danger whatsoever. The Joint Chiefs are like, no, we really don’t know. And until somebody does an inspection, there’s no way to know. The truth, obviously, is closer to the, the general position than Trump’s. But what’s new there? 

Iran doesn’t have a conventional military. They can’t reach out and touch someone with tanks and planes in the way that you might expect a country of 80 million people to do, their military is designed to occupy their own populations. 

It’s a civil patrol force. They have normally reached out to touch people through sectarian groups that get hopped up on weapons and drugs and basically send out to cause carnage, groups like Hezbollah, for example. But groups like Hezbollah have basically been neutered. The Gazans are in no shape to do anything. And even if they were, you know, Americans are no, we’re close to them. 

And the U.S. military footprint in the region is down to less than a quarter of what it was at its peak and continues to trend down. So the the more normal military option is really off the table and they’re more normal paramilitary operation is off the table. And that just leaves things like terror attacks, for example, dirty bombs, which might work, but they take time to put together and time to ship in into place and they can be intercepted. 

And so it could be a big splash, but then it would be an attack on, say, the United States, which United States would definitely respond with something more than some bunker busters. Okay. What do we know? Or what are we waiting for? The bunker busters, the GBU 57. I think that’s the acronym. Anyway, this is the first time the United States has ever used them against an actual target as opposed to testing. 

And we dropped 20 for the suckers. These are the 30,000 pound bombs. If anything can blow up a place like Fordo, it’s probably these guys. But again, it’s the first time we’ve ever used them. We don’t know. So in many ways, this is a test case for the United States, as well as a question for Iranian actions. 

And what everyone oh my God, what everyone wants to talk about is whether this is going to make it more likely be a deal or less likely. Folks, there is never going to be a deal. Iran has never signed and implemented a security deal with anyone. In fact, the only thing that even comes close is the 1987 ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War, which was never turned into a peace agreement. 

They haven’t signed a deal with Iraq or with Turkey or with Pakistan or with anyone. We’ve got some cooperation, deals on economics and say nuclear sharing with the Russians and the Chinese, and that’s about it. So if you’re obsessed with a deal on oil or technology or security, you just waste your time obsessing about something else. This is not how Persian society works. 

I would love to be wrong, but I’ve been right since 1979, when I was five. Oh my God. Oh. Anyway, so this is what a holding pattern in the Middle East looks like. People throw weapons at one another, things explode. But we’re waiting for someone to fundamentally change the nature of the relationship. And I just don’t see that happening on the Iranian side anytime soon. 

Oh, one more thing. The Israelis have proven that while they can take out, Iran’s air defense, and while they can’t operate with impunity above Iranian skies, they lack the deep strike capability that is necessary to take out something like the Iranian nuclear program. Now. So now it’s an open question whether the United States lacks that capacity, and not just because of the size of the bombs. 

The Iranians have been preparing in some form, for this sort of attack for decades, and that means that while these are the three most important sites that the Iranians have, they have dozens of others now, collectively, they’re not as important as these three. So while this undoubtedly has set setback, that it because the program quite a bit it’s certainly not over. 

And the question now is whether the Iranians try to spin the paramilitary forces back up, spin their nuclear system back up, or try something new. We’re not going to learn that in the next two days.

Israel’s Uncertain Endgame in Iran

Aftermath of Israeli strike at the IRIB building. Photo by wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_war#/media/File:Attack_on_IRIB's_Live_News_Broadcasting_Studio_07.jpg

Israel and Iran are still in the thick of an air war, which is really their only option given the several countries between them. But are things going to ramp up here soon? Is nuclear war coming? Will the US get involved?

This conflict began because the Israelis wanted to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The reality is that Iran wasn’t even close to having a fully fleshed out nuclear weapon, they’re only just at the early enrichment stage of the process. So, cross that one off the list. What else could Israel be pushing for then?

Israel might be working towards instigating a regime change in Iran. A quick history lesson will teach us that Iran is a theocracy, seated deeply in a mountainous region, with thousands of years of continuity; simply killing the Supreme Leader isn’t going to change anything. But what if the Israelis got some help?

US involvement would most likely come in the form of air support, and it would require lots of bunker-busting bombs, with no guarantee of permanent success. But again, this wouldn’t spark regime change or revolution. Is dragging the US into a deeper conflict without a clear end goal worth it?

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from sunny Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about what’s going on with the Israel Iran war, the possibility of the United States getting involved and what you should look for and why. Core issue is that Iran and Israel not only don’t border one another, there’s a couple of major countries in between them with some major population centers, most notably Iraq. 

So there is no way for these countries to get at each other in terms of land action. There are only two ways they can interact. One is basically an air war, which we have right now. And the second option would be an exchange of nukes. On that front. The Israelis have about 150 nuclear weapons, mostly tactical scale. 

And the Iranians have none. Now, one of the reasons people have been arguing for striking Iran for a long time is to prevent them from getting nukes, but keep in mind, it’s a multi-stage process. And the Iranians haven’t completed the first one. So step one is you get uranium or you spin it until you get enough weapons grade fissile material that you can then make an explosive core. 

That is the stage that the Iranians were close to completing. However, once you have enough fissile material, you then have to build some explosives that make a perfect implosion to force the nuclear reaction to happen. They don’t have those. Then you have to make an explosive device. They haven’t done that. Then you have to ruggedized that system so it can survive an attack. 

They haven’t done that. And then you have to miniaturize it. So you can either put on a bomb that a plane can carry or a missile. And they haven’t done that. So even if they had enough to make a uranium or God forbid, a plutonium core, they don’t have any of the additional steps. And at the pace that they’ve gone so far just to get to this step. 

We’re not talking about this being a reasonable threat this century. That’s piece one. So if you want to talk about regime change, you now have to shift to a different sort of conversation. Yes, Iran is a deeply authoritarian system, but it is not a dictatorship. It is not a one man rule. This is not Putin’s Russia. This is not Xi’s China. 

This is something else. This is a theocracy. So even if the Grand Ayatollah who’s in charge of everything right now, where to kick it tomorrow with either because he’s older than dust or because a bomb drops on his head that doesn’t remove the regime. There are over 15,000 mullahs that are part of the ruling class. And while regime change certainly could lead to a period of instability. 

It doesn’t fundamentally change what Iran is. And what Iran is, is Persia. Iran is a bunch of mountains. It’s not a chunk of plains like Mesopotamia. It’s not a single seaside community like Israel. It’s about 80 million people who live in mountains. 

Some version of Persia has existed almost since the beginning of the human story. It is one of the original civilizations of our species. And yes, the government has fallen from time to time, but really, we’ve only had seven regime change that are worthy of the term in 6000 years. We’re not going to see one this year. And the United States lacks the capacity to force that issue, even if it does get involved. 

Now, in this heartbeat, the United States does not have any carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf somewhere on the way. This heartbeat. We don’t have a large military force in Iraq any longer. So if we want to do a ground invasion, we’re talking about some months of prep. Hopefully none of that happens. But if the United States was to get involved in the air war version of this, keep in mind that the various aspects of the Iranian nuclear program have been preparing for an American air war for the better part of the last 40 years. 

And so it’s dispersed. It’s hardened. It’s underground. And does the United States have enough bunker busters to take them all out? Because you would probably need a couple thousand. Maybe some of these facilities would probably take several dozen all by themselves. And yes, that might remove the theoretical future of a nuclear program which is nowhere close to producing a weapon. 

But then what? Iran is still Iran. Persia is still Persia. The United States can’t send in a military force on the ground to clean up the entire clerical class. No. If there is going to be a meaningful regime change, if Iran is going to enter a fundamentally different governing age, it’s going to have to be a revolution. And you don’t sponsor a revolution with bombs dropped from the air. 

So where does that take us? I’m honestly not sure. Donald Trump’s inner circle on national security issues is small and incompetent, and being nudged by the Russians to get us directly involved in the fight as quickly and as deeply and up to our eyeballs as is possible. It is unclear, from my point of view if Donald Trump is falling for it, yet he keeps his own counsel on issues like this. 

It’s one of the few things he’s quiet on. But forces are moving into the region. So we are all going to find out probably within the next week or two.

What is Israel’s Victory Condition in Iran?

Attacks by Israeli Air Force in Tehran. Photo by Wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Pictures_of_the_Israeli_attack_on_Tehran_1_Mehr_%282%29.jpg

Israel and Iran are still going at it, but things have not significantly escalated. Here’s a breakdown of the situation and what could come next.

Israel has been able to take out Iran’s air defenses and strike some key nuclear sites, especially at the Natanz facility that enriches mid-grade uranium. However, all of Iran’s advanced stuff is dispersed and hidden deep underground, which is beyond Israel’s current strike capabilities. Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes have been largely ineffective due to poor targeting capabilities and strong Israeli defense systems.

So, Israel can continue to hit targets that delay and stall Iran’s nuclear program, but outright destroying the nuclear program probably isn’t in the cards. The question then becomes – what is Israel’s victory condition? If fully eliminating Iran’s nuclear capabilities is off the table, will they turn towards crippling Iran’s economy?

It remains unclear where and how far the Israelis will take this campaign, but unless they escalate their effort, they’ll just be buying time.

Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. We are going to talk about the status of the air war between Iran and Israel. Today it is the 16th of June. You’ll be seeing this one in the morning. Short version. It hasn’t gotten all that serious from a physical damage point of view, especially on the Israeli side. 

Iran lacks meaningful long range power production capacity. They’ve got a lot of missiles. But they’re not particularly smart. And the Israelis have a pretty good theater missile defense. And that’s before you consider the Americans are helping as well. So no appreciable damage inflicted within Israel at the moment. Going the other direction. The Israelis have been primarily targeting air defense, which has proven to be woefully inadequate, on the Iranian side and have taken out the easy targets in the Iranian nuclear development program, most notably the centrifuge complexes at Natanz. 

That is where most of the centrifuges are. That’s where they take raw yellowcake, which is processed, uranium ore and turn it into a kind of a mid enriched uranium. From that point, the stuff is then sent to other facilities to go to highly enriched uranium. And the idea would be that if you get highly enriched enough that you could make a actual bomb. 

No indications at the moment that the Iranians have been getting to the level of enrichment that is necessary to then go to the next part of the process. The problem that the Israelis are facing is that those more advanced centrifuges, the one that goes a higher percentage of fissile material, are underground. They’re buried. They’re dispersed. 

Keep in mind that the Iranians have kind of been playing with their nuclear industry for 30 years now, and the Iranians always assumed that when the bombs actually fell on them to break up their nuclear program, it was going to be the United States dropping the bombs. And the United States would have had things like aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf that would be flying out of places like Kuwait and gutter. 

And so there would be lots and lots and lots of sorties dropping very, very advanced bombs that are designed to penetrate very, very deep places. Israelis don’t have any of that. They’re flying from an extra thousand kilometers away. They don’t have the deep penetration capacity. So can Israel hurt Iran? Of course. Can they take it all out? I really doubt it. 

It’s an open question whether the United States could, which means that the Iranian nuclear program is only stalled so long as the bombing continues, and Israel only has so many weapons that can be used in this conflict. So the question we need to start asking ourselves is, what is the victory condition for Israel? Because their ability to actually destroy everything in the nuclear program is probably not going to happen. 

So what they seem to be doing is going after the power infrastructure and the access infrastructure to delay what’s left of the Iranian nuclear program as long as possible, which is a reasonable plan. And then the question becomes whether or not they decide to do more to set back Iran. More generally, going after military sites is kind of pointless because Iran’s military, for the most part, is infantry based. 

And if you’re doing long range pinpoint attacks, you’re just not going to break it up in any meaningful way. But you could torpedo the Iranian economy by going after the oil refining capacity. Iran is an oil exporter, not merely what they used to be back in their heyday, probably only about a million, a million and a half barrels a day. 

Today. That includes the smuggling, but they are highly dependent upon fuel processing at home just to keep the country together. So if you go after the refineries, which are much easier than going after the oil fields, the Israelis could achieve two things. Number one, that could destabilize the internal regime, because if there’s not fuel, it’s really hard to maintain an industrial level economy. 

And second, it would actually probably pour some literal oil on troubled waters, because if the Iranians can’t process the crude into fuel, they would then be forced to export more crude, which would actually weirdly push oil prices down. Something to consider. No sign that the Israelis are doing that right now, but considering their limited options for actually removing the nuclear card from the board, it’s something that seems pretty feasible to me.

Oil Markets Aren’t Worried About Iran

Photo of gas pumps at a station

With everything going on between Israel and Iran right now, I know what you’re thinking – it’s time to run to Costco and fill up the gas tank. Hear me out though, we don’t live in the same world we did a few decades ago.

Oil markets aren’t reacting to this conflict for a few reasons, but it boils down to where the crude is coming from. Between the US shale revolution and a diminishing importance of the Persian Gulf in oil markets, this conflict just doesn’t move the needle like it used to.

Sure, there could be a situation where I might start to worry. But that would require Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz (very unlikely) OR marching troops all the way to Saudi Arabia’s oil fields (also very unlikely). So, unless some dramatic military step is taken by Iran, we can all just fill up whenever it’s convenient.

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a somewhat breezy and drizzly Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about the attack that happened over the weekend in Iran. Israel’s basically bombing the crap out of Iran, going after the nuclear facilities. And, contrary to popular concern, oil prices really haven’t done all that much. They’ve moved less than 10%. 

Why do they not care? Why do I not care? Now, if you back up 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, any sort of spat involving Israel in any way immediately sent oil prices through the roof. And if it involved Iran, oh boy howdy. Because the Persian Gulf remains, even today, the world’s largest producer of crude and by far the world’s largest exporter of the stuff. 

And with in the modern day, the Europeans no longer taking crude from, Russia because of the Ukraine war, it’s become more important to global petroleum than it’s ever been before. However, however, however, there is another factor and that is the US shale revolution. The United States, in the last 20 years has gone from the world’s largest importer crude to, in gross terms, the second largest exporter, second only to Saudi Arabia. Does that mean we’re completely immune to what’s going on? But it does mean that we’re dumping more than 10 million barrels a day of crude into this market than what we did before, closer to 15, actually, now that I think about it. 

And that changes the math for everything, because if we did have a sharp cut off of the very thing in the Persian Gulf, the United States would face some teething pains as we use some of the crude grades that we produce in refineries that weren’t designed for it. But overall, we’d be okay. And having that extra 10 or 15 million barrels a day of global production just means that in percentage terms, the Middle East doesn’t matter nearly as much as it used to. 

Now, where does that take us? More specifically, what would make us worry? I am of the opinion now that even if Iran decided it wanted to shut down the shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, it probably couldn’t. They’ve got a lot of small boats. A lot of them are really nothing more than, speedboats. It could do some damage. 

But about the only thing that is going to get Iran any assistance, any sympathy in the international system is if it doesn’t shut down the energy line that allows countries like China to function. If it does, that really is all on its own, except for the Russians, who would be happy to see global energy go up in smoke, which means, it’s down to how good their military is. 

And, you know, Iran has never, ever, ever in its history been a naval power. Probably the last battle that Iran was really noteworthy. It was like against Sparta. And if you’ve seen, you know, those movies, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It didn’t end well. What would make me care? Well, if Iran were to take its military and surge it into Iraq and south through Kuwait and go for the Saudi oil fields with the intention of taking them offline. 

That would get my attention. Iraq plus Kuwait. You’re talking 5 to 6 million barrels a day. Once you talk about the Saudi oil fields, you’re talking about another ten. All of these Saudi oil fields are in the far east of the country, really close to gutter. In a Shia majority area, and in theory with the Iranians, who are also Shia religiously, would get along with these people. 

So you could see some sort of rebellion happening at the same time. But for that to happen, that would be a big risk for Iran these days. One of the things we’ve seen with the Israeli attack is Iran no longer has any meaningful air defense whatsoever, and it’s generally easier to have static air defense in it. It has mobile air defense. 

So if they take their army and throw it at Saudi Arabia, they would have no air cover at all. In addition, Iran does not have what we would consider to be a mechanized military. It’s an infantry heavy force. So you’d basically be sending, don’t know, 50,000 hundred thousand, 200,000 men marching through the desert, 500 miles. Leaving aside the logistical terrain, that would be easy pickings. 

They would be completely open to the sky the entire way. And so even a successful operation would be hugely costly for them. And a failed operation would mean the end of the Iranian government, because the Iranian military wasn’t designed to fight other countries. It was designed to occupy all of the non Iranian non Persians in the country of Iran. 

Only about half the population are ethnically Persian. So if if they were to do that, it would be incredibly risky. And unless they pull it off successfully, I still don’t care and neither should you.

Israel Launches Attack on Iranian Nuclear Sites

Photo of attacks on Tehran by Israel in June 2025 targeting top military officials. Photo by Wikimedia Commons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Destroyed_buildings_as_aftermath_of_2025_Israeli_attack_on_some_areas_in_Tehran_23_Tasnim.jpg

Israel has launched a significant military campaign against Iran, primarily targeting nuclear facilities. Let’s break down the targets, impacts, and what’s coming.

A handful of sites used in uranium enrichment, fabrication, and machining were hit, along with several Iranian scientists and military figures.

Iran’s air defenses have fallen short, and given the amount and style of attacks, it’s likely that Israeli agents have made their way into Iran. The response from Iran has been lackluster and that’s not likely to change; with limited response options (paramilitary proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis are too weak), missile and drone launches are the extent of Tehran’s retaliatory options.

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a slightly stormy Colorado within the last 12 hours. The Israeli government has started a broad scale military campaign against Iran, going after primarily their nuclear facilities. This is the big one already. They’ve done more damage in Iran than any other power has done since the rise of the Ayatollah back in 1979. 

And they’re telegraphing that this is going to continue for at least a couple of weeks. The damage inflicted is notable, but let’s do a quick breakdown of what’s going on and where it’s likely to go before we all jump to conclusions. So first of all, let’s start with the non nuclear targets. The Israelis have targeted nuclear scientists. They have targeted military leaders. 

They haven’t had a success and targeted at least some of them. But honestly this is not all that impressive from my point of view. Israel has been going after nuclear scientists for the better part of the last 20 years. It’s not a great industry to be in if you want to live. So taking out 2 or 3 here and there doesn’t really change much. 

And as for the military leadership, Iran’s military is an occupation force that Iran uses to keep its own population in check. It’s not really capable of projections across territory. So if they were all gutted and it’s only been a few, it really doesn’t change the math at all. Got Iran affects its region through paramilitary groups that are not Iranian citizens. 

So by supplying them with equipment like the Houthis in Yemen. So gutting these two ranks of people doesn’t really change my math for anything of more significance is going after the nuclear facilities. Primarily we’re looking at Natanz, which is the primary enrichment facility that the Iranians used to turn uranium ore into something that can be used, fissile isotopes that can be used in weapons. 

There are secondary facilities in a place called Isfahan, which also handles a lot of fabrication. And higher end machining. In theory, being designed to be put into weapons. Now, let’s be clear. The Iranians have never tested a nuclear device. They have never demonstrated that you have the ability to put a nuclear device onto a missile and miniaturize it and ruggedized it so it can actually be thrown. 

We’re just talking here about a country that at the moment is working on enrichment and maybe the next couple of steps. And then the Israelis have started targeting an area called for, though, which is just sort of calm. For though, is the one place in the country where the centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium are actually in a reinforced location under the mountain. It is unclear whether the Israelis have the military capability of shattering for though this is where they turn. 

Kind of like mid-enriched uranium into highly enriched uranium, the fissile stuff, you can make a bomb out of, and so they’re going after things like air defense, power grids, that sort of thing going after the access points. Early days. We’re really only in the second wave of attacks right now. But the damage is notable. 

What? The Israelis have not gone after to this point are known stockpiles of nuclear fuel or the operational civilian power plant at Bushehr. It appears that they don’t want to be accused of war crimes by basically doing an inadvertent or maybe advertised dirty bomb in civilian areas. So that has not happened to this point. 

All right. What’s next? 

What is perhaps most interesting about this attack so far is there has been no meaningful Iranian air defense at all in the last two rounds of strikes over the last year, which were much smaller by comparison. Israel went after the air defenses first and discovered that they weren’t nearly as robust as they thought they were. These are older systems, or Russian systems, that have been purchased in the last 30 years, and apparently against the Israelis, who have a much more sophisticated, air penetration capacity than, say, Ukraine. 

They’re just not working at all. So if you’re a country out there and you bought a lot of Russian air defenses, you may have wasted a lot of money. Anyway, the Israelis aren’t just attacking with impunity. They’re actually announcing what their future targets would be. And there is plenty of indications across Iran that the Israelis have infiltrated and put agents on the ground and are using things like drones to go after movement of things like trucks and personnel. 

So if you announce you’re going to hit X site, an X site pulls out of their bunkers and starts to run, then they get hit by drones. So this is something that the Israelis very clearly have been working on for months. And it’s been played out so far pretty effectively. Whether it will completely destroy the Iranian nuclear program is, of course, an open question, because there are so many sites, and the Iranians have been preparing for this for so long. 

But if there’s anything that we have learned about Iran over the last few years, is that a lot of their stuff is not nearly as robust as they thought it was. It’s a lot more brittle. And so the Iranians really don’t have any good way to respond. Iranian power is not about the conventional military. They’re stuck in their mountain fastness. 

Half their population is not Persian. It’s in their paramilitary groups that they support around the country. She is in Iraq, Houthis in Yemen, maybe the Palestinians, if they get lucky, Hezbollah in Lebanon. And most of those groups between the American war on terror and recent Israeli operations have basically been gutted at the organization on the leadership level. 

And so none of them can really strike back against Israel in a meaningful way. That just leaves missiles. And yes, we have reports now that several hundred of those have been flying over, I should say several dozen. We’ve got drones and missiles. A lot of things are in the air. It’s not clear yet that they can get through Israeli defense or not. 

We’re. Oh, rain. We’re nearing a position where if Iran still thinks it’s going to have strategic leverage in anything, it’s going to have to use it or lose it. The thing is, it may know well that if it uses it, it will be its last shot and it’s not going to achieve anything anyway. Anyway, no one can decide the political and strategic math on that, except for the Iranian government and they’re under assault.

Iran Snuggles Up with the Houthis in Yemen

Photo of Houthi rebels in Yemen

Yemen, despite all the odds being stacked against it, has recently become strategically significant. If you’re not familiar with Yemen, it is geographically isolated, mountainous, hard to govern, only has a small pocket of fertile land, and has a long history of being unimportant.

The Egyptians and British can attest to how ridiculously difficult it is to control Yemen, but the Iranians are trying a new tactic. Iran is leveraging Houthi militants in Yemen by supplying them with missiles and other military support, as a way of replacing the influence they lost in places like Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. So, Red Sea shipping gets disrupted without having to commit major Iranian resources.

Most terrorist organizations are hard to uproot, but the Houthis might take the cake. However, that doesn’t change the fact that Yemen itself doesn’t matter much, just that it’s currently serving as a platform for an Iranian proxy conflict.

Transcript

Hello from Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah. And this is Peter Zeihan coming to you from 2000ft above the Colorado River. And today we’re going to talk about why anyone cares about Yemen. Now, Yemen is one of those places that I’ve gone out of my way to denigrate. I’ve called the Houthis who which are the primary militant group. 

They’re the most incompetent terrorists and alive today. So why does anyone care? Why should anyone care? Well, the topic, of course, of the moment is that the Houthis are using Iranian missiles in order to target shipping in the Red sea as part of their effort to show solidarity with the Gazans. 

But the history of Yemen is more than just that. Basically, if you wonder why anyone has ever cared about this zone, you just have to look at a precipitation map. Most of the Middle East is shockingly desert. Most of the places in the Middle East that where we’re familiar with the history is because the put simply, you can have civilization. 

There’s water. So you have the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, you have the Levant, maybe the Hatay going up into Anatolia, and of course, the Nile. These are the places where civilizations can exist. Well, Yemen is a little pocket. Basically, you’ve got this knot of mountains that rises up at the southwestern point of the Arabian Peninsula that gets just high enough to wring a little bit of moisture out of the air. 

And as a result, you have a sea of desert with this island of green in the middle, and that green is Yemen. And so when whenever any regional empire rises up and starts to establish themselves, they look around for the parts that are worth conquering. And Yemen, because it actually has green makes the list. The problem is twofold. 

Number one, there’s a lot of brown around Yemen. So you have to project a lot of power just to get to it. And then second, there’s nothing near Yemen. So you can’t really project from Yemen anywhere else. Actually let me throw in a third one. Mountains. Brown people are ornery. And the same thing happens in Yemen as happens in West Virginia or jets near you. 

They become tribal, almost Scottish. Actually, it’s a lot like Scotland, but surrounded by brown. So if you can actually project power there, you then spend all of your time at the end of a very long supply line trying to maintain control. And it has never worked out well for anyone. You can go back to the time of the Pharaohs, when the Egyptians first tried and basically got a finger cut off. 

Then the Romans tried. They got some fingers cut off. Later on, the Arab empires based out of Damascus are back. But that tribe didn’t end up very well for them either, although they did at least nominally, maintain control. Then the Ottomans, then the Brits. Everyone has basically gone through who has tried to build an empire in the region. None of them have had a great time. What is different this time around is that no one is trying to control Yemen. 

Someone is trying to use Yemen as a lever. And so Iran, having lost in Gaza, having lost in Lebanon, having lost in Syria, losing very quickly in Iraq, is discovering that most of its tools for triggering paramilitary operations throughout the region have collapsed in on themselves, and they don’t have much left. 

But then there’s Yemen. The Iranians don’t care at all what happens to the Yemenis. But if you provide them with a little technical equipment and some hardware, they can cause some problems. And anyone who wants to then subdue the Yemeni discovers just as many problems as everybody else. So what’s happened most recently is the Iranians have basically provided missiles, a little bit of anti-aircraft. 

And, you know, the technologies of how to dig a hole in order to build bunkers. And the Yemeni are proving sufficiently entrenched that an air campaign cannot root them out. So the Trump administration comes in, is looking for a quick and easy military operation. And Trump gives the U.S. military 30 days to get results. Well, shocker, if after 2500 years, no one is functionally subdued Yemen, it wasn’t going to happen in 30 days by air. 

So the Trump administration has declared a truce. And the real talks with Iran are progressing. Whether or not they will succeed in anything too soon to know. The talks, however, are real. And the Yemeni are nothing but a tool for the Iranians. And so something that without Iranian support, the Americans can simply ignore. And that’s where we are now.

Generational Divides of Other Countries

An elder woman plays basketball with a child

I’ve talked extensively about the generational divides in the US, but what about other countries? Let’s look at the unique demographic trends in Russia, China, and Iran.

We all know the US generations – Boomers to Zoomers – but that model can’t be applied everywhere. Russia is more so divided by major political events, like the Brezhnev era or the Putin era. In China, the primary divide is pre and post One-Child Policy, where instability and famine ruled before and economic boom occurred after (the younger gen now faces economic downturn, high costs, and Xi). In Iran, the main split is the 1979 Islamic Revolution, where those before and after have very different perceptions of the country, leaders, religion, and more.

The main takeaway is that each country has unique political and economic events that have shaped generational divides. While the US model helps breakdown domestic trends, we can’t use that framework for everyone.

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For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the southern headlands of the Wanganui Inlet on the northwest coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page on, demographic specifically, that I talk about Gen-X and the boomers, the millennials and all that of the United States quite a bit. What about the generational blocks for other countries, specifically Iran, China and Russia? 

There’s a little bit of a danger here because all demographic lines are a bit artificial. So the ones I use for the United States, specifically people who were born between 1946 and 1964, in the United States. Those are my boomers. These are people who were, born in the post-World War Two boom years in very large numbers. 

And as they went through their childhood and adult lives, they’ve basically remade American culture in their image after them. 1965 to 1979, roughly. You have, Gen X. That’s my generation. Birthrates dropped off precipitously. One of the reasons the boomers were so many is you still had some old gender norms. By the time you get to Gen X, their parents had become a little bit more, I mean, the female revolution happened in there. 

Dropped the birthrate a little bit. The suburbs had already been largely populated, dropped the birthrate a little bit, raised cost of living. Drop the birthrate a little bit, a little bit. Energy prices, all that good stuff. So Gen X until recently, was the smallest generation in American history. After that, you got the millennials born roughly 1980 until 1999. 

These are the kids who had never seen or remember seen a, circular phone and basically were the generation that made the transition to a digital world. And then the Zoomers, kids who were born since 2000 are the ones who were, doing penpal emails rather than written correspondence and have never looked back. All right. Like I said, it’s a little artificial. 

Whenever you’re looking to another country, you need to look at the gross economic trends, and physical conflicts that have shaped their worlds, because oftentimes you’re not going to draw the lines in the same place. So, for example, if you’re going to look at Europe, there is a boomer generation in about the same window for about the same, reasons, but because the cost of living was so much higher and because Europe is so much more urbanized. 

They didn’t have a lot of kids. So American boomers had the millennials, the European boomers did not. And so the demographics just kind of fall apart after the 1960s. So you got to be careful about how many trendlines. You try to extend. So, for example, in the case of the Russians, the really definitive break is pre and post Brezhnev for when your adult life was because if you were born and had a memory of Brezhnev years, you remember how bad central planning can be and you were probably a little bit more open things like perestroika and glasnost. 

But then when you get into the post-Soviet system, you got an equally bad thing to compare to. So Brezhnev, stagnation, economic doldrums, post-Cold War collapse, democracy for you probably equals chaos. And so you’ve always known that there’s or always felt in your gut that there’s a choice between stagnancy but stability and opportunity, but free fall. And it’s not a pretty choice. 

But if you were born just a little bit later, then you have no political memory of life under the Soviet Union. You may remember the free fall of the 1990s, but then for the next 25 years, Vladimir Putin, despite his many, many, many flaws, has been leader. And Russia has been relatively stable from an economic point of view for that entire time, and especially if your first adult memories are post 2000. 

You don’t know a life without Vladimir Putin. And yet that’s everybody under age 40 in Russia today. So it’s not really a boomer or millennial zoomer kind of thing. It’s a Brezhnev issue. It’s a Putin issue. It’s a fall of the Soviet Union issue about where you draw the lines. Now, something to keep in mind is the freshness generation was the last one to really have kids in numbers. 

We had a little blip during perestroika when people thought that the Soviet Union could be reformed, but it didn’t last. And since then, the birthrate has just been awful. So the generation that has been growing up since 2000, in Russia, you know, the the millennials and the the Zoomers of Russia, if you will, are really the last generation that is going to exist and significant enough number to make anything happen in Russia. 

And so what they do from their small numbers will shape a large part of a continent for the rest of the century as they die out. All right. What else? China. Hu. Okay. China. It’s a little bit simpler. It’s pretty. And post one child policy. If you’re born before the one child policy kicked in, you know, famine, you know, a lack of electricity, you know, outdoor plumbing, and you know that the world can be a very nasty place. 

You also know political leadership that is murderous and mercurial. And you yearn for something better if you were post one child, not only was there a floor put under the chaos, but the internationalization of the Chinese system after Mao, generated a degree of economic opportunity that had never existed. Now, part of this is indeed policy, because it was after Mao that you got things like roads and electricity and meaningful amounts of steel and high rises and health care and all the other things that go with modern life. 

But having only one child means for grandparents support, two parent support, one grandchildren and those grandchildren. The people who were born in the later decades, you know, 1990 and after, they have no nothing but an economic boom because all of the wealth of the country has been focused on industrial expansion, and there has not been a large generation from below that needs to be clothed, fed and educated. 

  

So all of the social spending that was done in China was spent on very few people, relatively speaking, and you were one of them. So for young Chinese, it’s been glorious until the system started to break about seven years ago. And now we’ve got all the worst aspects of capitalism, things like, conspiracy theories throughout the public space, massive amounts of shell games, real estate booms and that have not yet gone bust. 

Putting the money into the wrong things over investment, but no longer investment that generates growth when you do investment on the front end, when you don’t have roads or power lines, you get roads and power lines, and that’s great. But if you start with roads and power lines and you do a lot of state investment, you’re just building more roads and power lines and you only need so many of those. 

So the lesson that the Japanese learned in the 1990s and 2000, the Chinese have now learned it as well. And so the Chinese need to adapt to a new economic model, but they’re still dealing with the distortions of the old capitalized, over invested system. So if you’re a 20 something Chinese citizen today, you’re of a small generation. 

You hear the stories from your parents about how good things got, how fast it got, how stable it was. But everything has too much money chasing too few goods within the country, and everything is too expensive. So your chances of ever starting a family are nil. Your chances of ever being able to afford an apartment, much less a house, are almost nonexistent. 

And it’s a very different political view. And if you were to put a label on it, these would be the zoomers of the Chinese system. And they are the last generation that will grow up in a centralized China, and they will definitely have some visceral memories 20, 30 years from now about how the Chinese system crashed around them. 

And no one could seem to do anything because the political system is too ossified to function. Those people are going to be making some very interesting political and personal decisions as the system fails. Because if there’s anything we know about Chinese history in the past, when the center breaks, people leave if they can and a country that has at least 800 million people, that’s like the low end for estimates and maybe as many as 1.2 billion, if only 5% of them get out. 

You’re still talking about the greatest migrant surges in human history. All right. That just leaves Iran. And Iran’s is even simpler. Yet it all depends upon how old you were when the Shah fell. And the mullahs took over and close to the water here. We’re going to turn around. There we go. Okay. This is just a really cool pocket beach. 

I found. You practically have to repel down to it. Okay. Iran. So if you were are old enough to remember Iran as an adult before 1979. So you’re in your 60s for this category. The boomers, if you will. You remember just how corrupt the Shah was, but how there was opportunity for anyone with an education up to and including women. 

And then the Shah fell and the mullahs took over. Women were disenfranchized and the intelligentsia and the engineers and everybody with a set of skills who could left the country. The people who left the country tended to have the money, and they emptied out the inner cities. Sorry. Inner cities in Iran, not the same as inner cities. 

And like Chicago, you’re they emptied out the wealthier parts of Iran’s cities, took their money, took their kids, took their skill set and left. And you had a 15 year period where Iran was basically drowning and an inability to function because it didn’t have the skill set anymore. It had lost most of its educated youth, and most of the efforts the Iranian government, past and present, had made to educate another generation left the country and instead they had eight years of a grinding war with Iraq. 

And after that, a series of on again, off again confrontations with the United States. Now, if you fast forward a little bit to a break point of around whole 2008, 2010, you had a shift in government with, the rise of a guy by the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or a dog, as we used to call him at my old job, and a man at a job, was the first leader of Iran who was not a cleric since the fall of the Shah. 

And he was deeply conservative, and he was deeply anti-American and anti-Western. But he wasn’t a man of the cloth. And he thought there should be room in public life for people who didn’t go to seminary, to be perfectly blunt. And so there’s now a split in Iranian society between the mullahs. On one hand, these conservatives who are, secular on the other hand, and then a wider disenfranchized group who has to basically take whatever’s on offer. 

And that has made the country significantly more politically unstable. And in light of ongoing hostility with not just the United States, but the Western world in general, significantly less well off, because one of the mistakes that Ahmadinejad made is in order to get people over onto his side versus the clerics, he just bribed everybody. And so the state budget exploded, debt exploded, the currency crashed. 

And then when a new round of sanctions came in and they could no longer underwrite everything, it all went to hell. Now we even have the strategic steps that the Iranians have taken to spawn paramilitary groups around the world falling apart. And so all of the money that Iran has spent on political consolidation, political evolution, education and increasingly strategic cost have all gone to nothing. 

And so if you were 20, 15 years ago, for the last 15 years, your entire adult life, you have simply seen one state failure after another out of Tehran and you start to get a little pissed off. I’m not going to say anything simplistic like Iran is poised for a revolution or is ripe for change. What I’m saying is that the old pillars of stability that allow it to function don’t exist in the young adult generation, and that is a very nasty combination of factors. 

Because remember when the old people who lived under the Shah left, they took the kids with them. We had a 20 year baby bust in Iran. So this younger generation is Disenfranchized is angry and is poor, relatively speaking, to Iran’s long history that that can turn violent very, very quickly, even if it doesn’t generate political change. So bottom line, there’s a generational story everywhere, but in before you can tell it, you have to really look at the local history and the economic trends that have shaped the people have grown in that areas. 

It’s not going to be a cut and dried. It’s going to be different everywhere. But there is definitely lessons to learn. Okay. That’s it.

Trump 2.0 – Iran

Flag of Iran

Next in our Trump 2.0 list, we have Iran. This is one of those countries that is quite isolated from the US, so Trump can have a bit more fun with his policies.

Places like Russia and China are complex and require jumping through hoops to have anything stick. Naturally, Trump’s big-talk-no-walk strategy didn’t work so well against these powers, but Iran is different. The country is isolated from the US and the risk of blowback from actions against them is limited.

So, in his first term, Trump put the pressure on Iran by cutting off oil exports. However, they quickly developed a “shadow fleet” to circumvent that. Trump’s next step would be to impose secondary sanctions to disrupt the “shadow fleet”. There’s the option to involve the military with blockades, but that risks destabilizing the global maritime system.

Until Trump and his administration show the capacity to come up with policies that manage the fallout of any new actions against Iran, let’s hope that Trump doesn’t start swinging his sledgehammer too hard.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Hi everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Blenheim, New Zealand. And today we’re going to do the third in our open ended series of the challenges awaiting the incoming administration of president elect Trump. We’ve already dealt China, Russia. Today we’re going to tackle Iran. And unlike China and Russia, who had a great record of manipulating the former and future presidents in their first term, which really set back American strategic policy in both regions quite a bit. 

Iran is on the opposite side. And the reason is pretty straightforward. If you want to reign in Russia, it requires a coalition of powers to cut off technology and transfer and energy purchases. It was integrated into the system and the sort of coalition building that is required to contain or beat back a country like Russia is extreme. 

And Trump isn’t a builder. He can’t manage his own government. He can’t, direct things. He’s not a guy who has a command of the details, or allows the people who have the command of the details to influence policy. It’s a one man show with Trump and the details that are required. The breadth of expertise that is required just isn’t allowed to function in his administration in China. 

Same general topic. But instead of allies, although you do need allies to contain China, the technical expertise that is required is is extreme. The American Chinese relationship is one of the deepest economically in human history. And the idea that one person, no matter how intelligent, could see the INS and the outs and the consequences and even perceive the tools is kind of silly. 

So Trump would go for a big deal and then he’d walk away. The Chinese would never implement the deal. And there we were. So even at the height of Covid, when we realized that something like half of the medications that Americans use every day, especially the cheaper ones, were being made in China, even when there was bipartisan support to do something about it. 

He could not lead in order to bring that stuff back. Same with protective gear. Anyway, it made policy on China very difficult. Policy on Russia. Very difficult because there was never any consistency. There was never any follow through. None of that really applies to Iran, because ever since 1979, when the Iranian revolution occurred and the mullahs came to power, ever since then, the United States has basically separated Iran from everything that it cares apart bit by bit over the last eight presidents. 

So by the time you got to the Trump’s first term, there was no fear of a blowback to the American economy if you were just to crush Iran completely. And so we got what we called a maximum pressure campaign, which was nothing of the sort. But it did succeed in driving almost all of Iran’s oil exports out of the normal financial system, meaning that the Iranians could still export, but they had to use alternative means. 

They had to build a shadow fleet. 

And it’s not somewhere between 10 and $30 a barrel off of their margins for all the crude that they did export. So a lot of it did go underground. 

It didn’t go away. But the profits that the Iranians were able to reap from it dropped precipitously. And all the while in the background, the American Revolution was churning the pace, displacing some of those barrels on the international market and certainly dropping the price of global oil prices to hit the Iranians with a double blow. Now, since then, the Iranians have taken a lot of hits. 

Hezbollah and Hamas are in a box. Basically, Syria is gone. These are all proxies and allies of the Iranian system, the most capable militant force that is allied with Iran right now outside of Iran’s own borders or the Houthis, which I would argue are some of the most incompetent militants in the world. If it wasn’t for the equipment that was coming in from Iran, we wouldn’t care about them at all. 

And so taking Donald Trump’s sledgehammer approach to, to, diplomacy and strategy probably doesn’t work very well in places like Russia and China. But in Iran, it really could. Because if you were to somehow remove Iran’s crude from the market, which, based on the data, is somewhere between a half 1,000,001.5 million barrels of exports, there would be a ripple through global energy markets. 

Yes. But this isn’t the 1980s when 4 million barrels suddenly disappeared. And this isn’t China, where it’s the largest trading partner of a number of countries in the world, including, most of our allies, in Asia. So you smash China, everyone feels it for years, especially if they’ve been prepared. 

If you smash Iran, the global outcome is relatively limited, and it’s concentrated on countries like China that import the bulk of the crude that the Iranians send out. So you’ve got this weird situation where it’s an atypical power that is not heavily internationally invested. The United States is not involved with it in economic matters. And the tools that Trump would bring to bear. 

While they seem simplistic and in many ways, they are would actually work. So there’s two things that you should expect to see. Number one, you should expect to see the Trump administration come up with a series of secondary sanctions to target Iranian oil on a broader scale. Now, it used to be that the biggest hole in all of this was the Europeans. 

So the United States was established sanctions and maybe even a degree of secondary sanctions. But then the Germans, the French, would basically ignore them and claim that the Americans were exercising extra territoriality with which they were, and find ways to deal with Iran independently. But ever since things, that have boiled up in the Middle East with Hezbollah and Syria, the Europeans are taking a very different stance, taking a much stronger stance against Iran, are more likely to cooperate this time around. 

That just leaves countries like India and China, especially on the other side of this, which is something that the Trump administration isn’t going to care about all that much. But if you basically get the entire Western world, participating in the financial section’s sanctions and then start playing secondary sanctions to China, we’re in a situation where you can actually move the ball down the field quite a bit. 

The second thing, the more important thing is to go after the oil itself. Now, if you remember the term shadow fleet, these are older tankers primarily, that operate without transponders, that don’t use the US dollar system, that are basically operating under the radar of global finance. Oftentimes they deal with physical transfer of gold and or cash, typically US dollars or euros, to send money directly from the, country that is doing the buy in to the countries is doing the selling. 

So normally when you are buying or selling crude, the country that is doing the buying does basically fancy wire transfer. I’m oversimplifying here, but it’s basically goes through the financial system so it can be regulated. Most of that has been shut off. So now you either have them using the yuan as an intermediary or them literally physically transporting cash from point A to point B. 

Most of the countries that are participating in sales, with the shadow fleets, want the physical currency because it is more, exchangeable for everything else that they would need. You can only do so much with. You want to anyway. This means that the only way to really disrupt the Shadow fleet is go after the fleet itself. 

Now, in the case of, say, the Russian shadow fleet that’s going through the Baltic, the Scandinavians can always make up an environmental reason to grab a ship and dock it. But that means eventually they have to let it go. If you want to go after runs, you have to go after the ships themselves and not let them go. 

Now, from a tactical point of view, an operational point of view, this is very, very easy. The Iranians don’t have a navy that is more than speedboats. And the Indian Ocean basin is a pretty big place. So if the United States decided it wanted to blockade Iranian crude coming out of the Strait of Hormuz, it would really be child’s play from an operational point of view. 

The question is, what then happens to the broader maritime experience? Because if you get the global naval superpower, the one that’s several times as powerful as everyone else’s navies combined, even before you consider that the second and the third most powerful navy in the world are tight American allies in Japan, in the United Kingdom. If you get the U.S. Navy involved in taking civilian ships out of the system, we’re entering a new world. 

And while the Trump administration certainly could do that, it would then have to come up with a replacement system, because once the ocean blue is no longer safe, the way we handled shirts changes and the way we handle patrols changed because other countries will start doing it, too, when we very rapidly get a breakdown in global agriculture, energy and manufacturing. 

I’m not saying this won’t happen. I’m saying that I don’t think the Trump administration or the Trump administration has thought through what the next step is. So I did a piece a few days ago talking about how events with the shadow fleet in Russia, events in Scandinavia, events in the Middle East were all pushing us towards this world where the maritime system simply shatters, and most of the ships that sail the ocean blue, especially long haul ships, simply won’t be able to function. 

If you really want to go after Iran’s shadow fleet, if you really want to do a true maximum pressure campaign, that also means breaking the system. The question is whether or not the Trump administration come up with some way to soften the blow, so it doesn’t automatically wreck everything else. I’m not sure that’s a circle that can be squared. 

But if there is a way to do it, it will require some significant policy creativity, which, Trump team has never really shown. And it’ll show the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, which the Trump team has never really shown. And it will require coming up with an alternate system in which all of the major powers of the world naval powers of the world are in broad agreement as to what this should be, and diplomatically, that requires action that the Trump administration previously has not shown. 

And I don’t mean this so much as a condemnation of the Trump team specifically. I don’t think Team Biden could have figured out. I don’t think Team Obama had certainly no Team Obama couldn’t figure it out. The last president might have had the gravitas and kind of the command of the details to it was George Herbert Walker Bush. 

He obviously wanted to go a different direction that we didn’t follow. So we’ve always known that globalization was going to break sooner or later. This is one of those things that could do it. In the meantime, if you’re Iran, things are about to get rough because there are very few reasons for the Trump administration not to swing the sledgehammer. 

This isn’t Russia where there’s some strategic implications that involve nukes. This isn’t China where you’ve got a very deep interlaced economic relationship. This is a country that the Trump team knows from previous experience that it can really hurt. And now they’re looking for ways to hurt it more. The question is whether or not it gets to the point that has broader implications. 

And that will only be determined by the steps that the Trump team takes in its opening weeks. What I can tell you for sure, though, is that unlike China, unlike Russia, which are thorny issues and require a degree of collaboration, Iran doesn’t and team Trump knows that, and they are looking forward to this with giddy anticipation. 

Jimmy Carter and Jihad – MNNO’s Take

You heard Peter’s take yesterday…and now you get a different perspective on Jimmy Carter’s “legacy”.

Cover photo from Wikimedia Commons 

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For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Israel’s Strategy for Iranian Nukes

Photo of Israeli Troops overlooking an area

With the Iranians eyeing nukes, why haven’t regional powers like the Israelis stepped in and squashed those dreams?

Targeting Iran’s nuclear capabilities isn’t so straightforward. Plutonium is a byproduct of civilian nuclear reactors (and they’re not going to target those), uranium is abundant and can be sourced fairly easily, and uranium enrichment centrifuges can be easily moved…so, targeting their nuclear infrastructure is impractical.

Israel has opted to disrupt Iran’s nuclear hopes in other ways. They eliminate key experts via assassination programs, launch cyberattacks and keep tactical airstrikes in their back pocket. And given Iran’s declining industrial capabilities, this nuclear program serves more as a bargaining chip than a serious attempt at weaponization.

Should Iran fly a little too close to the sun and get a nuke within arm’s reach, you should expect Israel and Saudi Arabia to quickly put them in their place.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from three sisters in Taranaki, New Zealand. And today we’re taking a question from the Patreon family. Specifically why Israel hasn’t struck at Iranian nuclear facilities in an attempt to prevent the Iranians from ever developing a bomb in the first place. And there’s a number of reasons for this. But the core issue is this. 

And there’s too much to go after to do it reliably. So let’s go through the materials of what you need to to make a meaningful bomb. First of all, you need the raw materials, either uranium or plutonium. Now, any civilian nuclear power reactor is going to generate a lot of plutonium as a byproduct. So we’ve got about a one gigawatt, power plant, which for a nuclear power plant is pretty much a run of the mill. 

You’re going to generate enough waste plutonium every year to make about a dozen plutonium bombs. So unless you’re going to take out the nuclear facilities, you’re not going to be able to remove that from their supply chain. And, bombing a civilian nuclear power plant obviously comes with a few consequences. As for uranium, uranium is one of the most common materials on Earth. 

And so it’s very easy to source. In the early Cold War days, when we thought it was rare, we, the United States, cut a deal with the Australians who at the time had most of the global production, basically cornered the market. But since then, it’s been discovered in all kinds of places. And the world’s largest producers are Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia and China. 

So, you know, removing those countries from the mix. Yeah, I’m not going to happen. Even if you did. Ultimately, you only need a few tonnes of the ore to generate the yellowcake that you need, in order to generate the finished metal that you need for lutetium. So going after the raw materials really isn’t a play. Moving up the value added scale, however, you get some more options because, you know, these raw materials don’t do anything, by themselves. 

You need the system that’s necessary to purify and extract the plutonium from the waste material and then purified in the metal. There are a lot of chemicals you can go after there. But again, most of those are globally available under the civilian supply chain. So it’s a limited on the uranium front. 

If you have your raw uranium ore, you basically have to mix it with chlorine gas to make a material that you can then run through a centrifuge over and over and over and over to extract the specific type of uranium that is fissile, that can go into a bomb. Those centrifuges are definitely a weak point in the process that is restricted technology. 

And in order to have a weapons program of size, you also need a lot of them. Now, the problem here is it doesn’t matter where those things are. You could have a cluster of a few thousand in one place. You could disperse it. And whenever people talk about striking Iran’s weapons systems, the Iranians just move the centrifuges around because they can be easily individually loaded into trucks and move wherever they want. 

So, you know, you do a single round of airstrikes, you might get some of them. You’re certainly not going to get all of them. And you only need so much of this stuff in order to make a bomb. Then you’ve got the the metallurgy. There are different types of weapons systems, that use plutonium and uranium, and there’s different ways that you can combine them to make an explosive product. 

But this is an engineering question. And ultimately, this is where the Israelis have chosen to focus. Can’t go after the raw materials. You can’t go after the equipment. You go after the people with the experience of how to turn these processed materials into something that can go boom. And so Israel focuses on what it does well. Instead of surgical strikes, they have an assassination program. 

And whenever an Iranian nuclear scientist starts to get a little bit too productive, he tends to, fall down some stairs after getting shot in the back of the head with some bullets. So it’s not that the Israelis aren’t doing anything to contain this threat, it’s that they’re striking the weak point in the system, which is the personnel. 

One of the wild things about Iran is that their industrial base today is significantly less sophisticated than it was back in 1980. This is a country that has been in long term industrial decline for any number of reasons, sanctions of which are only one part of it. And that means the Israelis have found it actually pretty easy to pick off individual people who are involved in the weapon system in order to snarl the whole system. 

Now, that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they do. They also engage in a degree of sabotage and cyber hacks. And if push came to shove, I have no doubt that they’re willing to do tactical airstrikes. But you’re talking about something that can be dispersed. You’re talking about something that once you do start going after it, the, receiving country, Iran in this case, has a vested interest in keeping the system as dispersed as possible and then accelerating the work. 

So until now, the Iranian nuclear program has mostly been a negotiating chip that they are willing to trade away in exchange for a broader deal specifically with the United States. And that’s one of the reasons why this technology, which was developed in the 40s, still hasn’t been replicated in the Persian Gulf. There’s also a strategic side to this. 

Israel is already a nuclear power. And if the Israelis ever really did feel that the Iranians were getting close, they’d probably use their own systems to make sure that Iran could never cross the threshold and they’d do a preemptive nuclear strike. The other side of the strategic question is Iran is not alone in the neighborhood. Closer to home. 

Just across the Persian Gulf are the Saudis and the Saudis and the Iranians don’t care for each other very much. And the big difference between these two is that Saudi Arabia has much deeper pockets. So if Push ever did really come to shove, and it did look like Iran was going to develop a functional weapon, not only would they be risking a preemptive Israeli nuclear strike, but the Saudis would probably just go out, write a check, and buy some nukes from another country, most notably Pakistan. 

So for Iran, the nuclear card is not nearly as valuable as most people seem to think it is, because they know if they even try to draw it from the deck, they’re gonna get hammered real hard. So this is something I worry about. Not really. And whenever there’s something in the Middle East that I don’t worry about, I call that a win.