Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Mediterranean coast. It is the morning of May 20th, and the news at the moment is that late last night, local time, helicopter went down and Iranian Azerbaijan in the north of the country and on board was Iranian President Gracey. And he perished. the Iranians don’t use GPS like we do in the United States, because they think that is an end for American intelligence. 

Of course, they don’t use the Russian system either. so it took them many, many hours to find him. And it was bad weather and it was cold. It was foggy. And by the time they found the crash site, he was gone. for a country with Iran that is so, desperate for this dramatic, this is obviously not a great thing to happen, and it’s obviously not a great time for anything to happen, because there’s a lot of movement in a lot of places in the Middle East. 

We have the Israelis trying to box the Iranians in strategically by getting a peace deal with the United States and Israel. We have a number of other Arab states looking to follow their lead. we’ve got the Gaza war. We have the Ukraine war. We’ve got the Chinese starting to put out feelers in the Middle East to see if they can become a regional power there as well. 

a lot is going on. So of course, everyone, everyone, everyone is talking about how he died, how he could have died, how he could have been assassinated. And I don’t want to rule out any particular theory right now, but, it probably doesn’t matter. Raisi is like any other Iranian president before him getting more and more and more involved in violence in the region and more and more involved with the violence at home. 

so it’s not that nobody wants the guy dead. It’s there’s very few people out there who don’t want the guy dead. But at the current moment, killing it doesn’t really achieve anything. Because first and foremost, the Iranian president is nowhere near the most powerful person in Iran. That would be Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader. in fact, we were going to have elections later this year, so somebody in the regime wanted him gone. 

There’s much simpler ways to do so. I also don’t think that we’re in a situation in the Middle East right now where violence is naturally just going to explode. The Iranians and the Israelis have actually figured out how to step back from mutual confrontation to a degree. I mean, I don’t want to overplay this. It’s still the Middle East. 

And so there is no immediate reason for the Israelis wanting to be gone. And if risk is replaced by just another ultra-Orthodox hardliner, you know, it’s like, what changes, you were talking about variations on the theme. There’s always personal reasons. He’s, contributed to the death of a lot of people. And there is a lot of families out there who would like to see him gone. 

But again, there’s nothing new here, and there’s nothing that really moves the needle for me. everybody has their own pet theory. I’m not going to bother lining them up and knocking them down. I will just underline that Iran has been under sanctions as regarding its air force and its aviation, civilian and military for 40 years at this point. 

So you’re talking old vehicles being maintained by second, third and fourth hand parts that can sneak through the sanctions airframes that were designed to be pulled from service in the mid to late 80s. And this is what he was flying because this is all they have. And so the idea that this is simply a mechanical failure in bad weather remains the dominant. 

Theory. But that’s the likelihood here as to what happens next. There is a caretaker vice president who will take over. He said do that. No one has heard of before. He has no ambition and no talent, so he’ll be sidelined. I mean, this isn’t like the United States, where the vice president just steps in and serves the remainder of the term. 

And it’s certainly about like Europe, where the Parliament gets together and chooses a new prime minister. he wasn’t that important. And he’s going to be replaced by someone who is even less important. And then we will have elections to decide who will take the spot. at the moment that the only risk here is that the natural drama of the Persians, boil up or someone on the outside chooses. 

This is the opportunity to attempt to destabilize a country that actually hasn’t been destabilized. And then we would be reminded that Iran has a lot of paramilitary operations well beyond its borders. So I kind of find myself, as in this situation, is when Iran launched their deliberately botched attack on Israel a few weeks ago. this is a chance, an opportunity to calm things down. 

And normally in the Middle East, I would say no, grab it. But we’ve had several incidences like that in the last few months. So maybe, just maybe, Rossi leaving this Earth will be an opportunity for a little bit more calm in a region that is unexpectedly become the calmest in the world. Take your good news where you can. 

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Poland in downtown parsnip. a lot of you have written in about some of the news that’s coming about, you know, from Iran, about the potential of them actually having an active nuclear weapon at this point. I need to take some air out of that argument. 

first of all, these announcements are coming from members of parliament in Iran that are ultranationalist. So it’s kind of like having Cori Bush or Marjorie Taylor Greene announce policies for the government. So, you know, don’t take that too seriously. but more importantly, the technology just in question here, it’s not clear. It’s something that the Iranians can do. 

Now, I know that sounds a little weird. We’ve been hearing intelligence agencies across the West warning about the emergence of an Iranian nuclear program or a nuclear weapon for quite some time. But, you know, that’s kind of the point. Supposedly, Iran has been six months away from having an active nuke for 25 years now. And at some point, it’s not just an issue of putting up or shutting up. 

It’s an issue of dissecting the technology that’s in question and what is actually necessary. So to have a uranium explosive device, you have to do something that’s called implosion, which is basically having a series of very precision milled explosive plates that surround a plutonium or uranium core and all explode in at the same time in order to compress the sphere of enriched material, which then triggers a runaway chain reaction that triggers the actual mushroom cloud. 

this is harder than it sounds, because if you have any flaw in that, or if one of the plates doesn’t go off at exactly the right time, then you don’t get that implosion and the explosion. Instead of funneling in, goes out through one of those spots. And then the nuclei never collide and you never actually get the nuclear reaction. 

So getting this all right is very difficult. And it’s something that yes, yes, yes, the United States figured out in the 40s and other countries have cracked the code since. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. And there is no sign at this point that the Iranians have figured out how to do that. Because if you didn’t do it, not only would you get a nuclear explosion, but you would be able to detect that with, say, earthquake monitors. 

So from the point that that happens, you then enter into this really weird spot where you’ve demonstrated the ability to crack the atom, but you haven’t demonstrated the ability to actually deliver that explosion where you want it. So you the thing is this, this device that can do this is going to be fairly large, fairly heavy and difficult to hurl at someone. 

So if you’ve demonstrated that you can capture the power of the atom but not deliver it, that is the time when anyone who doesn’t like you is going to hit you very, very, very, very hard to prevent you from getting a deliverable weapon. and Iran knows this. Iran knows that if they managed to demonstrate that they can crack the atom but not deliver it, then everyone will be after them. 

So the question is whether they can do it in that or not. I would say they can’t because they haven’t. And even if they did, all that would do is open up a whole Pandora’s box of security problems for them. So am I concerned about Iran for any number of reasons? Sure. This doesn’t make my list. Now, that does raise the question of the broader question of who might want a nuke. 

As we’ve seen over the last 80 years, the countries that develop the nuclear arsenal are the ones who don’t think that they can win a conventional conflict. So Israel has nukes because they were worried that we’re going to be overwhelmed by the Arabs. India has nukes because it was concerned about a war with Pakistan and vice versa. China has nukes because they were concerned about Japan and the United States and so on and so on. 

And so the countries that the United States has traditionally been concerned about are the ones who might find themselves at a conventional war with the United States. Iran obviously falls into that category. But if you’re looking forward, it’s probably going to be a different list of countries that are on the proliferation list. Because if, if, if the United States backs away from some of its security commitments, the math change during the Cold War and since, the United States has a series of alliances that basically underwrite the security of any number of countries and some American nationalists see that as a problem, see these countries as freeloaders. 

But should the United States no longer provide the nuclear umbrella, a lot of these countries are going to feel that they have to take care of themselves. And for many of them who don’t think they can win a conventional fight against a superior conventional force, that means nukes. So during the Cold War, China had nukes to fend us off. 

But the Koreans, the Taiwanese and the Japanese felt they didn’t need one. You remove the United States from that strategic competition, and all of a sudden they do. And all three of those countries Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, have civilian nuclear programs and could easily build a bomb in a matter of days or weeks. In the Middle Eastern theory, it’s not so much Iran that I worry about as, say, Saudi Arabia, who may not have the technical expertise to build a bomb, but they certainly have the cash to buy one. 

And in the European theater, if the Americans, for whatever reason, are a wall and you’re dealing with the Russians, you have a whole list of countries that are going to want nukes Kazakhstan, Finland, Sweden, Germany and above all else, Poland. So for people who are arguing that nuclear proliferation is an issue, I say, yeah, it is, but the suspects are not the usual ones.