Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about the geopolitics of weapon sales, particularly American weapon sales or what the US builds, the sort of weapon systems that fields. And so therefore what it sells are largely driven by America’s own geographic options and constraints. The whole goal going back to the time of reconstruction 150 years ago, has been to make sure that if the United States is going to be involved in a war, that it happens over there and not over here. 

So we have a forward deployed military, wherever possible, that tries to keep potential violence as far away from American shores as we can, preferably away from the entirety of the Western Hemisphere. And over the decades, weapons systems that we use, have evolved to mirror that prerogative. So we started with the Monroe Doctrine and blocked sea access to the United States. 

Then we projected out on our sea lanes, and then eventually with World War One and World War Two, were actually fighting in the Eastern hemisphere in major conflicts. And the weapon systems that have evolved since then reflect the fact that the bulk of the fight happens over there. So if you look at every weapon systems that the United States has, it’s built on two basic cons or three basic concepts. 

Number one, we will always, always be outnumbered no matter where we are. And so the weapon systems have to punch much harder than everybody else is to make up for it. Second, we’re going to be fighting at the very end of a very long logistical chain, which means that the US has to excel at logistics and have allies that can help with logistics. 

And then the weapons systems themselves have to be much longer range than anything they’re fighting against, both because basing can be limited. And we have to make sure that the fight is happening as far away from our bases as they possibly can. And then the third system is these systems have to be durable. So whether it’s the F-16 or the Abrams or the now the F-35, it has to be able to fight in a contested environment that will always be contested by a greater number of things. 

And it has to be able to take as many hits as possible before it goes down. So yes, the US Abrams is the most badass tank on the planet, can take several direct hits and probably just shrug them off. Things like the F-16 can actually take anything shy of a missile hit and keep flying. And of course, the F-35. 

It’s a stealth issue. These aren’t by accident. This isn’t something that the United States just stumbled across. It’s something that we discovered with blood and with money over the decades for what was necessary for us to project power. And it affects everything from the hardware to the alliance structure. The Russians have a very different system. The Russians knew that all fights are always going to happen on their immediate periphery. 

And so they don’t need a long range system. 

They don’t need an excellent logistical tale. They don’t even need durable stuff. They want numbers. They want to be able to mass the other side with more jets than anyone else can field. They can be short range. That’s fine. They’re fighting from their own territory. They don’t need to worry about the logistical tail. They don’t have to be particular lethal. Sure. 

Maybe the opponent vessel can take eight hits. Hit him with 100. And so you go for cheap, short range and disposable. You fight with numbers, which makes the American Alliance with Europe somewhat odd. Why the U.S. wants to fight in Europe is obvious. 

Keep the fight over there and why the U.S. wants American basing rights in Europe is obvious. You want that logistical tale in place with competent people. But why? The Europeans would purchase American weapons? That’s a bit of a mystery, because ultimately the Europeans know that their fights are going to be in their near abroad. The Russians are right there. 

And if Ukraine falls over there, right, right. Right there. So you would expect the Europeans to develop systems that are much shorter range, that are much less durable, that are much cheaper, that can be fielded larger and larger numbers. And when you look at the weapons systems that the Europeans have fielded themselves, most of them crowd into that category. 

And yet they still buy weapons from the Americans. In fact, half of their military procurement is from the United States. But their weapons systems that are broadly inappropriate for their needs. They do this for two reasons. Number one is the NATO alliance. If there ever is a fight, the United States assumes immediate control of all European militaries, and interoperability of military forces is critical, especially to the United States, considering its robust logistical needs. 

The second reason is a little bit more tutti frutti. The Europeans would like the Americans to offer the Europeans as many security guarantees as possible. And while NATO is there from a legal structure, using American systems implies a degree of involvement in European militaries, because the manufacturing is in the United States, the services comes from the United States, the technicians from the United States. 

All the equipment comes through the United States, and the weaponry comes from the United States. And so maintaining that commercial relationship maintains an implicit security guarantee that is every bit as important as the article five guarantee of NATO. Or at least that’s where we were a few weeks ago. The last few weeks, the United States has proven the Trump administration has proven to the Europeans that none of this means anything. 

United States is clearly moving away from supporting article five on any issue that matters to the Europeans, most notably Ukraine and Russia. The United States is publicly debating whether it should withdraw from military command of NATO, which is the basically the same thing is withdrawing from NATO itself, since it’s illegal in the United States for any other country to command U.S. forces. 

That would mean an end to the NATO alliance. and that is the explicit security guarantee. And the Americans have already withdrawn weapons support and intelligence support for Ukraine, which is, you know, the fight of the age from the NATO point of view, especially from the European point of view. And the Europeans seen that the Trump administration is directly militarily threatening NATO allies now in places like Denmark and Greenland. 

Everyone’s wondering, why did we buy any of this stuff in the first place? If ultimately the Americans simply are going to stop supporting it. And so the Europeans, every country is basically in the midst of having a debate with itself over whether and how to stop buying American weapons systems and moving to something that is more appropriate for their needs, their geography, and especially the war that is on their horizon right now. 

A great example is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a fighter bomber with stealth capabilities. It’s perfect for the United States. It’s got stealth capabilities, got okay range, really good hitting power, very tough plane, largely pointless for everyone in Europe. It’s got too much range for what they need. Cost too much. Over $100 million per platform. And so far, the Europeans have committed to purchasing enough to spend about 75 to $80 billion. 

And then over the lifecycle of the jet, that’s another 250 to 300 billion. That’s a lot of money to spend on a relatively small number of planes that are not designed for your theater or your needs. And so the Europeans are looking to back away from all of those purchases and spend it on something that’s more appropriate. 

Now, at break of European purchase of American weaponry means a lot of things to a lot of people in a lot of places, and will require a lot of words for me to explain all the connotations. And that’s going to have to be tomorrow’s video.

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan coming to you from a hotel room where I’m about to give a presentation. I figured that with everything going on in California, I’d better say hello and let you know my $0.02 on what’s going on. Short version is that we have protests and a little bit of rioting in the Los Angeles area specifically. 

What happened is, a few days ago, immigration enforcement went into communities and started rounding up people that they thought may or may not be illegal. There have been several hundred arrests, and that has triggered protests and action. That has prompted Donald Trump to send in about 4000 National Guard troops from local units, over the objection of the la mayor and the California governor. 

And as of a few hours ago, 700 Marines have, joined them as well. So few things here to unpack. Step one. Does Donald Trump have the legal right to do this? Of course he does. Enforcing immigration laws is why Ice exists. So of course, Donald Trump can send in, their forces in order to root out what they see is an illegal community. Were these folks doing anything particularly bad? Not really.  

One of the things that, the Trump administration has discovered is that if you want to treat immigration as a law enforcement issue, the step one is to investigate and figure out if someone’s actually breaking a law aside from being in the country illegally. That’s what Trump campaigned on. But that takes time. And, per agent, if you can get an arrest every few days, that’s actually pretty good. 

And Trump wants to uproot people and hundreds of thousands moving into the millions. And so that just doesn’t get the numbers that Trump is after. So he’s going into places where illegal immigrants are known to congregate. In the case of this California case, they started at the Home Depot and went after the day laborers and then eventually went into the communities and places that were known to employ illegals. 

And that’s how this all got started. Can Donald Trump declare a state of emergency and mobilize the national Guard over the objections of local authorities? That’s a bit more mixed, but probably yes. The federal government political leaders have the right to declare states of emergency and bypass some of the laws that we consider to be normal, especially if you’re dealing with someone who isn’t an American citizen. 

So Governor Newsom and the LA mayor have both sued, and the initial court case will be heard, today when you’re seeing this on Thursday. But I really doubt it’s going to go their way. The courts generally give a very wide latitude to any administration when it comes to issues. Federal law enforcement, if there’s going to be a check on the president’s power in this specific instance, that’s probably going to have to come from Congress, because they’re the ones who determine when states of emergency can and cannot be declared. 

And at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any appetite in Congress to challenge the president on this or any other issue. So this is probably going to work out just fine for Trump from a legal point of view. That, of course, leaves the practicalities. Honestly, if I were the one writing this headline, I’d be like only 17,000 people in California protest. 

I mean, the protest movement in California has this high on self-righteousness and huge. And to consider that we are now in, I reemerge April, May in the fifth month of the Trump administration, and we haven’t seen widespread protests. That’s kind of surprising to me, especially in California. So the numbers of people involved here, the level of skullduggery or violence, if that’s what you’re after, is really very, very low by normal California standards, much less by the standards of what the Trump administration say triggered the first time around. So, this is very clearly, from my point of view, Trump trying to instigate an issue, California is on the opposite side of the political aisle from this administration. It is the most powerful economy in the country, and arguably the sixth or seventh most powerful one in the world. And Trump would love to take it down a notch. Now, will that work? Well, that’s really up to the rest of the country and Congress. 

But I think it is worth pointing out that this has the potential to get really, really ugly. The military is designed to kill people. We discovered in the war on terror that we do not like it when our military is responsible for civilian control and law enforcement. They are not trained for it, and it’s only in the last 24 hours that the Marines have started to get trained on non-lethal munitions and things like riot shields. 

So they’re being deployed with minimal training, but a lot of testosterone into an environment that is becoming deliberately volatile. That is not the sort of mix I feel great about now. Legally, unless it’s things get really out of hand, the military can’t be used for law enforcement, so they’re technically there to protect, say, federal sites. The Marines are not a protection force. 

The Marines are go in there and kick some ass force. And so putting the military in this sort of position is really awkward for everybody. Now, the last time the California authorities requested government assistance for things like law enforcement was the Rodney King riots that dated back to, you know, the early 1990s. Anyone who participated in that has been long since left the federal bureaucracy. 

And another thing to consider is that Donald Trump’s gutting of the federal bureaucracy goes up, and to include the military itself. So most of the people who would tell him that this is a horrendously bad idea have already been fired, and we’re all going to have to learn the hard way.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. We have to talk about this whole signal gate thing. Oh, my God, so many, so many, so many things going wrong. Signal gate is this little scandal that has popped up in Washington because a number of top Trump administration national security officials had a chat on a third party unsecured platform about tactical military operations involving the strike on Yemen in mid-March, I think was the 12th and 13th of March. 

Anyway, reason we know about this is a reporter from the Atlantic was accidentally keyed on the conversation and basically had the whole thing. So we’re going to talk a little bit about classifications then, and secrecy issues and operational security. And then we’re going to talk about more of the implications of this and what it actually means for us as a country. 

And it’s not a happy story. So, from my brief and limited experience in the government, both in the State Department and the Defense Department, it’s drilled into you as an intern, operational security, the things you don’t talk about, the things you do talk about, where you talk about them with, who you talk about them. And the key thing is that every topic has its own set of rules. 

So if you have a certain level of security clearance, that doesn’t mean you can just go into the archives and read everything. There has to be a certain need to know. And if there’s a conversation on a certain topic that is sensitive, those conversations can only happen on specific locations or on specific platforms, none of which involve third party software. 

Which is very vulnerable to hacking. More on that in a minute. Anyway, so the fact that this conversation happened at all is bad. The idea that it happened with the people who were involved is worse, because one of those people was in Russia at the time using his personal phone, and one of those people was the Treasury secretary, who had no business being on a communication about tactical military operations at a place like Yemen. 

And then, of course, this was tactical military operations. What pushes you way above the, you know, the classic classification of top secret and is the ultimate of the need to know. Now, anyone who is a rival to the United States, or honestly just curious, is going to be targeting our Treasury secretary, because he apparently is involved in these conversations that have nothing to do with the Treasury Department, and there nothing in his background, and there’s no one in his circle that suggests he has any experience in operational security. 

So we just identified our top finance individual as being a leaker and intelligence target for intelligence operations for the rest of his term. That is a disaster in of of itself. But now let’s talk about the actual format here. Signals a third party app for communications. No third party apps are allowed anywhere in the State Department or the Defense Department or the intelligence agencies specifically because it’s illegal. 

It’s a bad idea to be communicating outside of government channels. When you’re talking about information that should be classified, part of it is illegal, because the little simple thing of the Freedom of Information Act, so that decades from now, we know how things happen on the inside. Part of it is to help future administrations see inside the decision making process for the current administration. 

All that information will be lost, but most importantly, it’s because it’s fucking hackable. And specifically with signal. The week that this went down, the Defense Department warned everyone in the defense Department that the Russians were actively circumventing the security measures on signal. So Pete Hegseth, who was the defense secretary, is the one who set this up. And he should have known better at every possible level. 

And every person who was involved in the chat should have known that everything about this at every level was not just a bad idea in poor statecraft, but illegal as well, for all the right reasons. That all of that is part one. second issue is the general mismanagement of information in the public sphere of the Trump administration at this point. Now, when this story broke, the smart play, the national security conscious play would have been to contact the reporter and make sure that information got wiped. Instead, they did what they always do, and they went on the attack saying that, nothing was shared. 

That was a war plan or classified information. And it is the fault of the reporter who doesn’t even have a security clearance, that this information was out at all. In fact, it got so bad that Tulsi Gabbard, who is the director of national Intelligence, even went to Congress and testified that this is no big deal. Now, I have an opinion. 

Most of the intelligence community in the defense community are of the opinion that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian agent that is actively working against American interests, right at the very top. Little professional tip, Miss Gabbard. If you don’t want people to think you’re a Russian agent, quit acting like a Russian agent. So, for example, lying to Congress about the use of the platform at the use of security, about the use of commercial information, and then actually what was in the conversation in the first place, because within hours of her doing that nonsense, the reporters like, well, if you don’t think this is classified information, I guess I can release it. 

And he did. And holy shit, it talked about specific assets, specific attack vector, specific times and locations. This is as high as it gets in terms of operational security needs. Which brings us to the third question why? Why is the Trump national security team so moronic? Two things going on here. First, Trump himself. When most leaders spend time out of power, they reflect on what went wrong and they build a team that fills in the gaps of what they don’t have. 

And they put together legislation so that when they get back into power, they can actually make their vision reality and make it last beyond their term. Trump didn’t do that. Trump fired everyone from his circle, inner and outer, who knew anything about anything. Because people who know things share what they know. And that means that Trump can’t be the smartest person in the room. 

He instead surrounded himself with loyalists, people who, you know, the recruiting process, competence didn’t make the list for anything that he wanted. So we have a DNI who works for a foreign power. We have a defense secretary that is a former TV host, and it shows. The second issue is when you’re first asked, when you get into the white House, is to pardon the people who protested and rioted on January 6th, complete with those who had attacked law enforcement personnel. 

Anyone who knows anything about national security won’t work for you because they’re like, fuck that noise. So the pool of people that Trump could draw from self-selected out, leaving only the people who would be personal, loyal, loyal, and really didn’t know anything about the process. Trump then went on to gut the upper echelons of every single department, not just the undersecretaries and the deputy secretaries, but everyone down as far as he possibly could fire. 

Removing all the knowledge base of everyone throughout the entire federal government and then replacing them with lackeys. And so we have people like this who literally have no idea how to keep information secure, who are making policy on behalf of all of us. And so, of course, it is all going horribly wrong. And that’s before you even start talking about the specifics of what those policies are.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a sunny Colorado. Today is the 21st of March. And there was just a press conference between American President Donald Trump and American Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, where they announced the launch of a new fighter program called the NGAD, the next generation air dominance fighter. It’s been, dubbed the F 47 because it’s Trump’s the 47th president. 

 But anyway, you can’t make this stuff up anyway. It in theory will be made by Boeing and should come into manufacture in a few years. That’s the goal. Before we go forward and talk about what it can do and implications, let’s talk about how we got here. So if you dial back to the 1990s and the early 2000, the Defense Department realized that they had a window. 

The Soviet Union had collapsed, and the Russian Federation, which emerged from it, was a pale shadow of its predecessors. And so there was going to be an extended period of time where the Soviet slash Russians weren’t going to be able to develop new air products. No new bombers, no new fighters. They did get a couple off the drawing board, but they were never able to produce more than one of them at a time. 

And even now, 35 years later, they only have 12 of some of their more advanced fighters. And that meant you had an opportunity to skip a generation. So Donald Rumsfeld, who was working with the Defense Department at the time, had this idea that we will look at the best technologies we have available right now and build the absolute minimum that we possibly can, and then research the next generation. 

Back at the time, we were dealing with F-15s and F-16s and the two programs that were greenlighted to proceed on that limited production basis were the F-22 air superiority fighter, which I think is one of the most badass pieces of military technology I’ve even heard of. It can hit supersonic speeds without using its afterburners, and all of its weapons are internal bay, so it has the radar cross-section of a small bird. 

I mean, it is bad ass. And then the other one is the F-35 joint strike factor, which is a flying pig. From my point of view, yes, it’s better than what we had, but its range isn’t very good. And the technology that’s gone into it has had all kinds of teething pains, and this has driven up the cost of the fighters to over $100 million per fighter. 

And it’s not very good at doing what it needs to do because its range is so limited. And that’s even before you put external weapons on it. The problem is it’s a Joint Strike fighter. It’s designed for both air to air combat and ground assault. And by being a multi-role platform, yes, you can do more, but you don’t do any of it particularly well. 

So we only made a few less than 200 of the f-22s, even though they are the perfect tool for the job, because we also need ground strike. And so the decision was made to do more and more and more of the F-35s, despite its many, many shortcomings. And that meant looping in lots of allies in order to help defray the overall production cost. 

And that brought it down to $100 million per airframe. Anyway, Rumsfeld and people like him thought, you know, we’ll just build the minimum we possibly can and then launch forward. And then the war on terror happened. And in the war on terror, what we discovered is we don’t need an air superiority con or a fighter against the Taliban because they don’t even have blimps, much less jets. 

But we do need ground strike. And so the F-22 was pushed to the side, kind of stuck with that initial plan of just a limited run. And the F-35 went into mass production. And we’re getting lots and lots and lots of those. Fast forward to today, because of the war on terror, we spent 20 years fighting ground wars, and we weren’t able to put the resources that would have been ideal under the Rumsfeld plan into the next generation. 

We’re only now getting there, took this long, and the end gap is supposed to be an air superiority fighter. The next generation after the F-22. Well, that leaves us with four complications. Problems. The first is cost. We saw the cost of the F-35 go up and up and up and up and up, and the end guard got a really nasty review from an internal Pentagon audit. 

I think it was just last year or the year before where they said it looked like the cost could be upward of $300 million per airframe. And the days of us being able to spread that out across the alliance are gone. The Trump administration is careening very rapidly to breaking most of our alliances, including the NATO alliance, which is where almost all of the F-35 sales we’re making are going. 

And every country that is committed to buying them is now rethinking it. Because if the United States is not going to be there in a real fight, not only are you not getting the implicit security guarantee that you thought you were getting, but if the Americans are responsible for all the tech and all the technicians and all the repair work and all the servicing, all the software and a lot of the weapons, do you really want to be dependent on the Americans at all in this brave new world we seem to be falling into so the F-35 is likely to get even more expensive, and no one is likely to sign up for the end guard at all. Problem two range. This is a black issue. It’s just an issue of, classification. We don’t know what the range of the guard is yet. It is in limited production, very limited, basically handmade. Nothing manufactured. The manufacturing wouldn’t be in for a few years yet. 

Three at the absolute low end. So this is a weapon system for the future, not for tomorrow. And until we know that range, it’s really hard to know if this is going to give us some of the advantages of the F-16 and the F-22, or weigh us down with some of the restrictions of the F-35. We’re just going to have to wait for more details on that. 

The third problem is that the end guard is going to need a complement. It is an air superiority fighter in the vein of the F-22, and we will still need something for ground attack. And if it’s going to be the Joint Strike Fighter, if that’s what we’re going to use for the next 30 years, then that puts some really huge limitations on what the United States can do militarily. 

Its range is just about 600 miles. Not great in terms of deep strike. And if we are moving into a world where the United States is walking away from most of its alliances, then we’re losing all the forward bases that allow us to launch these things in any meaningful way in the first place, which means we will also need a new ground strike jet. And that is an entirely new program that is going to have its own cost structure. And overlaying all of this is the question of technology during the course of the last 60 years. We haven’t seen actually almost 80 years. We haven’t seen a lot of changes. I mean, yes, yes, yes, we’ve gotten better at stealth. 

Yes, yes, yes, our missiles have gotten more accurate. All that’s true. But we haven’t really seen a change in what, a fighter or what a fighter bomber does. Until really recently, in the last few years, we’ve had building breakthroughs in things like materials science and digitization and energy transfer. And we don’t know where this is going to take us in terms of military technology. 

Yet the end guard looks interesting to me. It’s basically like a narrower version of the B-2 bomber, which is a badass piece of equipment, but it’s not a fundamental break. The stealth is cool. Don’t get me wrong, stealth is awesome, but it doesn’t do anything that you wouldn’t expect an air superiority fighter to do. These three breakthroughs in technology are in the very, very beginning stages, giving us drone technology, and we have discovered that the Ukrainians, for less than 20,000 a pop, can build a thousand drones that can saturate a battlefield, or for something closer to $200,000 a pop, develop rocket drones that can strike targets that are about as far away as the F-35 can reach. So we’re seeing these newer technologies come in and we don’t know how they’re going to mature. And so investing billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions into a new manned fighter program, you got to wonder if this is the right call. I’m not saying it’s not. I’m saying we don’t know. And in a world where the United States is walking from its alliance structure, the new systems are probably not appropriate to what bases we’re going to have in a few years. 

I don’t mean this so much as a condemnation of Trump, although there’s plenty of that going around right now, but just a recognition that as our technological envelope evolves, one of two things has happen. Either we develop technologies to match the geography of our deployments, or we change our deployments to match the evolution of the technology. 

And there’s plenty of examples throughout history of both happening. We don’t know where we’re at yet. What we do know is if we try to do both.