War Crimes, Drugs, Venezuela, Pardons…and Dancing?

Unclassified footage of the first airstrike (1 September)

When the US starts publicly admitting to war crimes, we ought to pay attention. So, let’s look at what’s going on with Venezuela.

Trump has announced imminent strikes on Venezuelan territory. Our most powerful aircraft carrier is already sitting in the region, so things could move very quickly. However, the administration still doesn’t have clear objectives for this operation. If cutting off drug inflows to the US is the main goal, how does pardoning the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of orchestrating major cocaine trafficking routes, fit into that goal?

The inconsistency coming from the White House on drug-war priorities is indicative of the broader chaotic nature of this administration. It looks like the new year is poised to be an…interesting one.

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Transcript

Hey, Peter Peterson here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about what’s going on in Venezuela in the world of Coca Cola. This is going to be a little all over the place because reality is a little all over the place. First of all, war crimes investigations are in play is a short version. 

According to the white House, according to the Defense Department, according to Donald Trump, according to Defense Secretary Hegseth, one of the things the U.S. military has been doing is after it blows up a boat that is allegedly, smuggling cocaine from Venezuela to the United States. If there are any survivors that go in and strike it again, under every treaty the United States has ever signed regarding war crimes, this is a war crime. 

I mean, that’s flat out, going after somebody who can’t shoot back, who’s already been defeated and is basically executing them. This is a lot of what the Russians have been doing in the Ukraine front. This is one of the things that the United States decided back in the 40s should never be allowed to happen again. 

And now we have public admission that this has been happening. The only question is at scale. Now, once it was explained to some people in the administration that this is actually a war crime, there’s been a lot of backtracking, where this will go that’s entirely up to Congress. Which brings us to the second piece, land invasion. 

Trump has now publicly said that strikes on Venezuela on shore are imminent. In fact, they might have happened by the time you see this video. We still have not had the administration present any information on the drug smuggling, on potential actions to Congress. We’re very clearly in violation of the War Powers Act, which was something that Congress put together in the aftermath of Vietnam to make sure things like this could never happen again. 

And Trump is very clearly violating that. But until and unless Congress decides to stand up for itself, there is no functional check on executive power on this topic. We still, according to Republicans in Congress, haven’t had the administration produce any meaningful information on the strikes that have been happening so far on any of the intelligence suggesting that these strikes were against vehicles, were actually smuggling drugs, or really anything about the operation. 

And we already have, America’s most powerful aircraft carrier in the region. As for what the administration’s goals are, they are now deciding what those are. On Monday, we had a national security, meeting in the white House that included, among other people, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs, where Trump started to discuss, started to discuss what the end goal might actually be. 

It looks like the United States has concentrated force in the region before even coming up with a general approach, much less a goal. We have had a conversation confirmed by the white House between Donald Trump and the Venezuelan president, who was Nicolas Maduro, where he basically told Maduro to leave. Maduro said no. And so now Trump is left deciding, you know, this. 

Do we go in and take him out? Do we then install a government in the aftermath? Keep in mind that Caracas, the capital, might look like it’s close to the, coast on the map, but it’s actually on the other side of a thin mountain range. And so an occupation there would be at least as difficult as something like we did in Iraq. 

And this is a country that already imports over 80% of its food. So a mass famine event without massive American logistical support would almost be baked in at this point. We don’t know if you’re confused. You’re not the only one. The administration really hasn’t made any decisions or provided any information. It’s just acting, which is in general how you get into big, drawn out, nasty in broad clios. 

If you think I’m defending Maduro. Nope. The guy’s a nut job. So Maduro is a former bus driver who was appointed by Chavez Chavez as kind of the Chavez as kind of the Venezuelan version of Trump. To be exact, his successor. So we have a former bus driver as president. And after his call with Trump, he went on the air and pledged his undying loyalty to the Venezuelan people and then started dancing. 

Because apparently that’s what you do in Venezuela now when you’re a former bus driver. On the drug front, back in the United States, Donald Trump has pardoned a guy by the name of. Let’s see. What is it? One, Orlando Hernandez, who is a former president of, Honduras. Now, Hernandez has been convicted, not not accused, convicted in U.S. court of law of being the single most consequential person in Western hemispheric history for establishing routes for smuggling cocaine and other illicit narcotics into the United States. 

He was sentenced to 45 years in prison and is now he’s out, free. He and his wife are among the most corrupt people in Western hemispheric history, which is saying something. And he used the tools of the state to establish multiple trafficking routes in collaboration with the Mexican cartels. The difference between him and Maduro is that Hernandez has been convicted. 

I mean, there’s really no doubt at all as to his guilt, whereas Maduro is merely accused. And, Hernandez said nice things about Trump, and that got him the, the pardon. So we have this bizarre mix of policy indecision, rudderless leadership and a rhetoric against drugs, but a practicality that’s actually encouraging them. Now, about the only good news I have on this general topic is that Congress passed and Trump has signed into law, something that puts a couple billion dollars into opioid and opiate, recovery for people, 

But the net effect is that one of the most effective things that U.S. law enforcement has done against narcotics in the last 15 years was just undone by a pardon. And instead, were focusing on a country that is. Let’s to be perfectly honest, a marginal player in drug smuggling to the United States, not saying that Venezuela is not part of the problem, but, if you really want to go after drug smuggling, you start with where the stuff is produced. 

That’s Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia. And then you collaborate with the Mexicans to break down the cartels. Venezuela is a sideshow. Hernandez and Honduras, of course, were part of the court system. Okay. If that’s a little all over the place, it’s because the world is all over the place right now. Apologies for that. I will try to get the world into order for the next video.

Ukraine Targets the CPC in Recent Drone Strikes

Image of a drone firing missiles

Over the weekend, Ukraine expanded its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure to include facilities tied to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), as well as the shadow fleet of tankers that Russia uses to bypass Western sanctions. All told, roughly 2.5 million barrels a day of Russian and Kazakh oil exports are now in mortal danger.

The Baltic Sea is the next-best route for the shadow fleet, and if any European powers decide to help Ukraine…that could be shut down quickly as well. That would leave the Pacific (out of Vladivostok) as the only viable route for the shadow fleet.

Sure, the world is currently in an oil oversupply, but if both the Black AND Baltic routes went down, the global system would be pushed to the limit.

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Transcript

Hey. Coming to you from Colorado. We got snow. Finally. A couple things happened over the last few days and the Thanksgiving holidays. We’re going to start with Ukraine. All energy related. So, the Ukrainians obviously have been using heavier weapons and, bigger drones and rocket drones and naval drones to attack Russian energy assets across the length and width of all of western Russia. 

They’ve now done a couple of things that are not necessarily unprecedented, but added together are going to really challenge what’s going on in global energy markets. The first is the port of Novorossiysk. Now Novosibirsk is a major naval base and has been a major Russian loading facility for crude for some time. And over the weekend, the Ukrainians hit it again with some naval drones. 

But most notably, they hit something called a loading booey, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an offshore Bui that a tanker comes in, docks with, and then loads up with crude. But this time the, Bui doesn’t belong to the Russian government. It belongs to a group called the CPC, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which is a consortium of international companies that operates the Tengiz super field on the northeastern coast of the Caspian Sea. 

Tengiz Chevron was the original company that founded. This dates back to the Soviet periods. It was the first real foreign direct investment by Western companies, in the former Soviet Union. And eventually, Chevron became the functional operator, along with some Kazakh and some Russian companies. Anyway, CPC is responsible for about 75 to 80% of the total exports of Kazakh oil. 

But because the pipeline has to go through Russia, because the Russians were just dicks when all of this was being negotiated, the Russians throw a lot of crude in the pipeline as well, and sometimes even crowd out Kazakh crude. So the Ukrainians see it as a viable target. So, Tengiz, is a big deal. The CPC consortium is a big deal, but overseas is really where it’s at, because that’s not just an export point for Kazakh crude, but a lot of Russian crude as well. 

Now it’s under regular direct attack as specifically CPC, aspects. So you’re talking about, just from CPC, roughly 1.4 million barrels a day is under a degree of threat, and then another million barrels a day of purely Russian crude. So if the Ukrainians can keep this up and it is kind of the next target in the crosshairs, that is a significant reduction in potential flows. 

That’s part one. Part two is the Ukrainians deliberately, again, using naval drones, went after a pair of shadow fleet vessels in the Black Sea that were coming in from Istanbul. They were empty at the time, which is probably the only reason that the Europeans haven’t screamed bloody murder, because if you actually had an oil spill in the Black Sea, all of it has to flow through downtown Istanbul on the way to the Mediterranean. 

It would be a mess. But we now have the Ukrainians actively, deliberately targeting the shadow fleet, which basically means that the between targeting overseas on the front end in the Shadow fleet, on the back end, the entire Black Sea is now a no go zone, for the Shadow fleet tankers and for Russian oil experts in general. 

And we’re going to lose somewhere between 2 and 3 million barrels a day of flow just from that. That is a big deal in of of itself. But it also brings up the next stage of this Russian shadow fleet. Tankers only depart from three locations near, Saint Petersburg, on the Baltic, near and over a sea on the black, andnear Vladivostok, on the, the Pacific coast. 

One of those is now functionally shut off. The next one to go is going to be the Baltic. And the question will be whether the Ukrainians do that themselves. It is further away it would be harder to do, or whether the Europeans assist, because every tanker that flows out of the Saint Petersburg region has to go through EU and NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Poland and Denmark, as well as Norway and Germany. 

So, you know, if there’s any one of those countries that decides to assist the Ukrainians in any meaningful way, whether it’s time on target information, intelligence, information targeting, going after themselves, allowing the Ukrainians to fly through the airspace or dock at their ports, whatever it happens to be, then you’re talking about roughly two thirds to three quarters of Russian oil exports from a pre war point of view being gone. 

And we’re now in a position where we can talk about what that’s going to look like in just a few months. Now the global energy supply is at the moment in oversupply. So losing one to maybe even 3 million barrels a day of Russian crude is not something that’s going to break anybody. Except for Russia, of course. 

But once you start talking about the black and the Baltic being off at the same time, we’re already up against the upper limit there of how much flow you could probably remove from global systems without everybody, like having a CS. You combine that with more and more targeting of the shadow fleet itself so that there just aren’t tankers available. 

And then we get into some really interesting positions. It looks like calendar year 2026 is going to start off with a bang, and I am here for it.

China’s New Ship: Enter the Sichuan

LHD Sichuan Class Aircraft Carrier | Photo by Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_076_landing_helicopter_dock#/media/File:LHD_Sichuan.jpg

Let’s talk about the Sichuan. And no, we’re not ordering take-out. We’re talking about China’s newest Type 076 amphibious assault ship, similar to the US Wasp-class.

Through the lens of global power projection, this falls short; it doesn’t have the range or speed necessary. However, this ship isn’t meant to cover too much ground. It’s designed for near-coast, amphibious assaults within 1500 miles of China. You know what lies within that range? The first island chain.

If all China wants to do is bully its smaller neighbors, the Sichuan will do the job fine. Should it find itself caught in any real naval combat…I hope they have enough lifejackets.

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Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today, we are going to talk about the newest vessel in the Chinese navy, the Sichuan. It is a 40,000 45,000 ton carrier. And it’s roughly analogous to the US wasp class, which are the core of our expeditionary units. And so, of course, the core questions is, is this something from a military point of view, the United States should worry about, big problem that the Chinese have always had with all of their vessels is while they have teeth and they’ve got decent missiles, and those missiles have reasonable ranges. 

The ships themselves don’t have long legs, and the Sichuan is no exception, that it’s probably maximum emergency speed is less than 25 knots, probably closer to 20, which means that even three days in full sprint, it’s just not going to go that far. From the point of view of global power projection. It does have a wet deck. 

It is designed to help with amphibious landings. But it just doesn’t have the range or the speed to compete with anything that the United States has put in the water, really since the 1960s. It does that mean that it’s a pointless platform? Not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is it’s no good for power projection at distance. 

It can’t operate in the Central Pacific, much less the Indian Ocean or anywhere else. But that is not the strategic environment that the Chinese would like to contest with it. They’re concerned primarily about the first island chain, which are at the line of archipelago, starting with from Japan in the north to Taiwan to Philippines, to Indonesia and Singapore. 

That is the line of islands that basically block in the Chinese and mean that the Chinese are ever, ever, ever going to be a, naval superpower. They need to have a navy that’s at least five times as powerful as the US Navy, because they have to get through all these potential interdiction points or conquer them first before they can even pretend to be a global naval power. 

And the situation in that context is a step in that direction. Basically, if you’re within 1000 1500 miles of the coast, the system can operate, and it’s designed for insidious assaults. So you use those against islands in particular, most notably Taiwan and the Philippines. And for that specific task, this is probably the right ship for their needs. But if it comes up against any capable naval power and I’m talking here, Australia, Japan and the United States, of course, in this theater, want to look elsewhere. 

You’re looking at the United Kingdom or France or Turkey. This ship will go down fast. It’s not quick. It doesn’t have long legs. It requires a massive logistical train, which is something that the Chinese aren’t very good at at all. So in a hot war against a country that actually has a meaningful navy, this thing is almost useless. 

The Chinese aren’t planning on using it against somebody who has a navy. They’re planning on using it to intimidate the weaker powers immediately in the periphery. For that, it’s okay for anything else. It’s a reef.

Ukraine’s New Drone Killer: The Octopus

Photo of a military drone

Yet another innovation has come from the Ukraine War. We’re talking drone-on-drone warfare. Codename: Octopus.

The Octopus is designed to hunt and destroy other drones. Ukraine sees three main aerial threats from Russia: missiles, glide bombs, and Shahed drones. The last on that list is the real nuisance for Ukraine; these cheap, pre-programmed drones are volleyed into Ukraine by the thousand. Enter the Octopus.

The Octopus drone is a cheap, mobile hunter drone that intercepts the Shahed drones mid-flight. If this new tech proves to be effective, it could change the way drone warfare operates, and a new phase of the drone arms race would commence.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about a new drone technology that you’re probably going to be hearing about pretty soon. It’s called the octopus. It’s a Ukrainian design and unique among drones to this point. It is designed to hunt drones. So the situation that Ukrainians are in is they basically face three kinds of threats from the Russians when it comes to the air. 

Threat number one, our missiles, primarily a mix of hypersonic and, ballistic, which can be and are intercepted by a variety of air defense systems up to and including the American Patriots. And it’s not that the Russians don’t know how to make good missiles or anything, but what we’ve seen in the last three years that even their best ones, even their supersonic ones, can be taken down by a patriot. 

Pretty reliably. It doesn’t mean that anyone should rest on their laurels or anything, but that threat has, to a degree, been addressed. The second category are something called glide bombs, and they’re just what they sound like. A Russian jet drops the bomb from over here. It is. Has a thin kid on it, and the bomb glides upwards of 15 to 20 miles. 

So that you can’t really intercept. It doesn’t have a lot of guidance, if any, on it. So from the thins, and the only way you can stop those is to push back the envelope where the jets are dropping from. In this, the Ukrainians have had some degree of success. They’ve got their own jets. 

They’re getting F-16s from a number of NATO countries. And every once in a while, they regularly put their patriots on the front line to shoot down jets that come too close. It’s not a perfect system, but it is something that’s been partially addressed. And the third and most problematic category are cheap mass produced drones, specifically the Shaheds that are, designed in Iran used to all be made in Iran and shipped to Russia. 

Now the Russians have their own assembly and manufacturing capacity. Out further east, away from the front. Shahed cost somewhere between. Oh, based on the model and the number that they’re making $20,000 to $90,000, for the most part. And the problem with your Shahed. Well, pros and cons. First, the cons of the Shahed, there’s so cheap that they really don’t have much for optics or sensors or compute power at all. 

So what happens is the Russians program in specific coordinates, and the head flies there and crashes at those coordinates. So, whenever you see that the Russians have hit a school or a mall or a hospital or an apartment complex, they actually programed in those specific coordinates. So every strike is a war crime. Second, because they’re so cheap, the Russians can field at first a few than a few dozen, and now more recently, a few hundred. 

And the understanding is that by the end of this year, the Russians will be producing these things in the, the thousands of units per month. And so very soon, the Ukrainians are going to be dealing with thousands of these at a time in a single assault. And defending against that is almost impossible with all the technologies we have right now. 

Because if you’re going to use an anti-missile missile that is expensive, each missile costs significantly more than the Shahed does, and you now need hundreds, if not thousands of them. And most countries don’t even have that kind of volume in their arsenal. So that leaves you with things like machine guns. And while there are a couple things out there that work great, their point defense, and they can’t roam and hunt. 

So what the Ukrainians are doing with the octopus drones is an attempt to build a small, cheap drone that can go out as the Shaheds are on their way in and basically work through the way through formation. Pick them off one at a time. And the idea is that the Shaheds, cost more than the defensive drones, than the octopus. 

That’s the theory will work. We’ll see. The Ukrainians, because this is an operational weapons system, are not providing really much of anything in terms of details as to the range and the cost and all that good stuff, but a few things that we know have to be true. Number one, unlike the Shaheds, which don’t have really a processing memory at all, you’re going to need both a GPU and a microprocessor in the octopus drones, because they have to be able to perceive and hunt. 

You need the GPU for decision making capacity. You need the microcontroller for low latency. Those two chips together probably cost, call it 40 bucks for the GPU and probably another 20 bucks for the microprocessor. These are things that Shaheds don’t have because they’re stupid drones. 

That’s still not very expensive. And if you’re talking about something with a relatively limited reach that can hunt something that’s flying 120 miles an hour, it’s theoretically possible that you could drop the cost of that to below the Shahed, because a Shahed has to fly several hundred miles before it gets to its target. 

So a very different profile for the type of weapon system it has. Also, if you have a decent yes, we’re talking 14 nanometer don’t get crazy decent ish GPU along with some, some Dram memory, for probably Nand memory. Ukraines. Yeah, let’s go with Nand difference. Dram is faster and can store more, but it loses all of its memory when it’s powered down. 

Nand doesn’t store nearly as much. It’s not nearly as quick, but you can leave it in the on the shelf for a couple of months, and nothing’s going to happen to the data on it anyway. You throw a bunch of these against a fleet of incoming  Shahed, and if they miss the first one, they just go for the second one and so on.  

Anyway, according to the Ukrainians, these are already in mass production, producing over a thousand units, a month. And if this is true and if it works, it is going to change the face of warfare in the drone age. At this point, drones fall into two categories. Those that can self target kind of like the  Shahed. 

But because GPUs are very subject to vibration and heat and moisture, they’re not hard. You can’t get a good GPU in it to do any real decision making. Just basically they get to the point of arrival. They look around the first thing that they see that hits the target set, they go for that. That’s it. That’s as smart as it gets. 

Or you have a live link back to a controller or a data center, and someone else is making the decision and, programing it step by step. In the first one, you don’t get a lot of accuracy. In the second one, you might get great accuracy, but it’s very easy to jam. So to this point, aside from shooting it down, the only defenses that the Ukrainians or anyone has is to be really good with jammers. And the Ukrainian jammers are now the best in the world, far better than American jammers. 

If you can have a counter drone drone that’s inexpensive, that changes the math. Again, provides an entirely new type of defense that countries can use to protect against drone onslaughts, and probably changes the math of these cheap, mass produced drones that the Russians and the Iranians are doing. 

Anyway. We’re going to know before the end of the year whether this thing works or not. And then we start an entirely new sort of drone race with a fundamentally new type of defense.

Imminent US Strikes Against Venezuelan Government

A US Fighter jet conducting a barrel roll

It appears that US military strikes against the Venezuelan government are imminent. Let’s take a look at what passes for a military in Venezuela.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re talking about Venezuela because it looks like the United States is getting ready to overthrow the Venezuelan government. We now have the USS Ford, which is the largest and newest of the American super carriers in the region, by far the most important and powerful battle platform that humanity has ever created. 

A along with roping in certain countries in the region like, say, Trinidad and Tobago, which are directly off the coast of Venezuela. And then, of course, the US facilities in Puerto Rico being used very aggressively to push troops and ships into the regions. 

Let’s talk about what the other side looks like. Okay. That’s about it. One of the fun things about Latin American militaries is back in the 1970s and 1980s, they were involved in coups. And so when democracy kicked back in in the 90s and 2000, the military’s were deliberately gutted. 

And so as a result, they’re really not capable of much. 

Venezuela was a partial exemption to that because in Venezuela, you actually had a relatively robust democracy throughout this entire period until a guy by the name of Hugo Chavez, who was a military dude, through his own coup and overthrew the democratically elected government and basically imposed an authoritarian system that has since, under his successor, become flat out dictatorial. Chavez. Maduro and their click have basically robbed the country blind, ripping up everything that wasn’t bolted down and even a lot of things that were bolted down and basically destroying the entire, non-oil economy of the country. And they haven’t exactly done a great job with the oil economy either. So what used to be the most technically, educationally, and industrially advanced country in all of Latin America is now a laggard. 

What that means for the military. Well, Chavez, when he came in, was not a general. I think he was a colonel. Was even that? No, I don’t think he was even that. I’m not a big dude. So his coup wasn’t really military in the traditional sense, and the military had been a pillar of support for the old government. 

So Chavez started by buying off the leadership of the military directly, but no longer really purchased a lot of equipment. Then when it became apparent that he was going to be opposed to the United States and he realized the military hardware would be useful. He started buying hardware from the Russians. But the Russians, not having a lot of respect for Chavez, sold him a lot of crap. 

That didn’t even operate when it was purchased in the 2000. Well, it’s now 2025. And for the last several years, the leader of Venezuela has been a bus driver. So the military has not been given a priority. It’s been gutted of all of its leadership. It’s basically been turned into a corruption sieve. And they haven’t gotten really good equipment since the 1990s. 

So if it came up to a straight up fight between the United States embassy guards in Caracas and the Venezuelan military, I would bet on the embassy guards. Even those are only a couple dozen of them, because they’re Marines and dirt. In a straight up fight between the military of Venezuela and the military, the United States. There’s no math here. 

If the United States decides that it wants to knock off the government of Nicolas Maduro, this is an operation that will be measured in hours, days if they get really lucky. That doesn’t mean that this is a great idea, because there’s always the question of what happens the next day. Knocking the government off is the easy part, especially in a place like Venezuela. 

Putting a government back together on the other side. Well, the United States tried to do that in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we saw how much fun that was. Venezuela is in better shape than Afghanistan, but I’d say worse shape than Iraq was under Saddam. 

Oh, and one more thing. Under the previous government, Chavez, the Venezuelan government 

imported a huge number of AK 47. Not for the military, but for the population. And then built an AK 47 facility to make more. By a very, very, very, very conservative assessment. There’s 100,000 AK 47 in public circulation with the approach of eastern gangs. 

And a probably a more realistic number is upwards of a half a million. So no matter who the next political authority is who tries to run Venezuela, there are literally hundreds of thousands of assault rifles in the hands of a population that has literally been paid for the last 25 years to be on the side of the government that will now be deposed. 

So whatever comes next to Venezuela, Lord, it’s going to be messy.

Tomahawk Missiles for Ukraine

Picture of a Tomahawk cruise missile mid-flight

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the US has been trying to figure out the appropriate level of involvement. Tomahawk Missiles would be quite the game-changer for this cyclical conversation.

Ukraine’s current long-range drones are built for carrying out pinpoint strikes on smaller targets. So, a ~1,000-lb warhead with ~1,600-mile range wouldn’t just be a small step up, it would be a leap. But we’re not just talking about handing over the Tomahawks and waving good-bye, the US would have to give prototype US launch systems that would be used in directly targeting Russia.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Comedy from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page. Specifically, do I think that the Trump administration is going to send a Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine? And if so, what sort of damage would they cause? Let’s start with the damage. Then we’ll go to the decision. Ukrainians would love to get their hands on tomahawks. 

Now, the Ukrainians have, shown no shortage of creativity and ingenuity when it comes to developing their own drone program. They now have drones that can regularly go several hundred miles. And they even have rocket drones that can go almost a thousand miles, and have used these things to attack pinpoint targets. But that’s the problem. 

Pinpoint targets, these sort of drones just can’t carry big warheads. So the good for targeting specific pieces of infrastructure? But they’re not good for mass damage. So if you want to say target the distillation column on a refinery grate, you want to take out the entire refinery? No, because those complexes, even in Russia, where the refineries are smaller, are like a quarter of a square mile, and you’re not going to take that out with 100 pound warhead. 

So they send fleets. But even then, you’re not going to attack, a really big building. It’s just not going to do appreciable damage. The Tomahawks, however different, a Tomcat carries a 1,000 pound warhead and can carry submarine mission. So you’ve put 2 or 3 of these into, like a four acre building, and you can basically take out the whole thing. 

They also have a range of about 1600 miles, which is almost double what any Ukrainian drone can do. So the idea is you would use these things, launch them from western or central Ukraine, nowhere near where the Russians could do anything to interfere with the operation. They fly low. They can’t be intercepted and they take out facilities deep, deep, deep into Russia. 

The three facilities that the Ukrainians would probably use these against are all drone production facilities. There’s one near Moscow. There’s one in the yellow book, which is in Tajikistan, which is at kind of the far edge of where the Ukrainians get it with the drones right now and and the third one is further east, getting into proper Siberia. He’s up to, maybe about 1300 kilometers away. Anyway, these are where things like the Shaheed are being mass produced, where the Russians own systems are being mass produced, where Chinese parts are coming in and being assembled. And if those three facilities could be taken out, it would really change the face of the war in a very big way. 

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. And the problem isn’t so much political, because we know that Donald Trump has really no problem with political niceties. The problem is technical. The tomahawk was designed for the Navy. It’s fired from submarines and destroyers, neither of which the Ukrainians have. And even if they did, can’t exactly quickly retrofit something to take a 20ft long missile, that was designed by a different country. 

So these things would have to be put on trucks. Now, the Americans are at the prototype stage of putting Tomahawks onto trucks. The idea was you hand them over to the Marines and they take them out to islands in the Pacific theater. And if a war spins up with the Chinese and you basically have these mobile launch platforms that can basically sink half the Chinese navy before the Chinese Navy even knows that war has been declared. 

Great little program. Problem is, it’s not ready. It’s only a prototype stage. So if the Trump administration was to do this, they would be sending the Ukrainians prototype weapons that haven’t been through the full testing regime in, in order to attack Moscow. Hopefully it is obvious that if that decision was made that we are in a fundamentally new position, not just with this administration’s risk tolerance, but with the war overall. 

So I would argue that this is not something that is going to happen. If it does happen, well, then we are in a fundamentally new chapter, and the Americans have decided to use the Russians as a testing ground. And that is a very different sort of political commitment. Now, the rhetoric out of the Trump administration has changed radically in the last six weeks. 

So I am expecting a significant change. I am expecting more blam stuff from the Americans to go to the Ukrainians. But remember this weapon system in the form that it could be used does not yet exist. So if we do get there, we’re in a new world and we’re using Moscow for target practice.

Should China Invade Siberia?

Cleaning the tents in northern Siberia

While the Russians are busy throwing everything they can at Ukraine, could China make a move to seize Siberia?

This is highly unlikely and there’s really no point for the Chinese to make a move on Siberia. Best case, they get some oil fields (which they can’t operate without Western assistance) located in a cold and barren region with limited potential for any growth. And they run the risk of the Russians whacking that scary red button.

If any power wanted to challenge Russia in the Far East, they would need to cut off Moscow from Siberia. This would involve severing the Trans-Siberian Railway and making a move on the choke point in Tatarstan. But again…that nuclear carrot would still be dangling over the invader’s heads.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page. And that is with the Russians. So obsessed with all things Ukraine, with all our military force going there, with the dependency they have on the Chinese for military equipment, would now be a good time for China. Just take over Siberia, I think. 

I see where you’re going. But, invading Russia is never as easy. It sounds, three things to keep in mind. Number one, the single most valuable thing in Siberia is the oil and natural gas. And the Russians aren’t the ones who really produce that. You’ve got something called the covector field, which is the general vicinity of Irkutsk, which is by, Lake Baikal. 

And then you have the fields offshore of Sakhalin Island in the Far East. Neither of these are operated by the Russians. They’re very technically challenging projects that are done by Western companies. And there’s still Western consulting work being done in order to allow the production to continue under sanctions. And if that were to end, or if the Chinese were to take over those facilities themselves, the Chinese do not have the technology to operate them either. 

So it would be kind of a wasted effort. So that’s number one. Number two. Population. Yes. There’s only 10 to 15 million Russians in Siberia. But that’s because the carrying capacity of the land is very low. You’re not going to be able to forward stage a population there that can really do much. The agricultural potential is shitty because the climate is so crappy. 

Third, if these reasons do not dissuade you, consider that the Russians still have the world’s single largest nuclear arsenal, and they made it very clear during the Yeltsin years that should the Chinese attempt to invade, that the Russians would not meet them with tanks and with guns and with men, they would just nuke China’s cities. And that policy formally remains in place. 

So if, if if the Chinese decided that they wanted to make a bid for Siberia, what they have to do is prevent the Russians from interfering in the operation. And the first piece for that would be to sever the Trans-Siberian railway. The TSR is a single transport network that allows European Russia to interact with Asiatic and Siberian Russia. 

And if you were to cut it somewhere closer to European Russia, then there’s really not anything the Russians could do in a conventional set to counter Chinese actions or Japanese or anyone coming in from the Far Eastern theater. The logical place to do that cut would be a place called totter Stand, the Tatars are an ethnic minority, the single largest minority 

in Russia and Kazan, their capital, is not only a relatively advanced city. This is not only the educational system that generated Mir. This is not only an oil area in its own right, but it sits on top of the TSR. So if Tatarstan were to declare independence or fall into rebellion in some way, then the Russian ability to manipulate events in the Far East, much less send troops, would be gone. 

And then all that would be left would be the nuclear card. And then we could talk about some really interesting things. No sign that that is happening right now, by the way, same goes on the Ukraine war. There’s a specific city that sits upon all of the connecting infrastructure that links Moscow to the Caucasus, Rostov on Don. 

And if Rostov on Don, which has been a major staging point for Russian forces in the Ukrainian war, were to fall or rebel or whatever, then all of a sudden Russian power in the Caucasus would be shattered and we’d be dealing with, at a minimum, a new Chechen rebellion. So there are these nodes in Russia that really matter. 

But at the moment no one is poking them with any sticks.

America’s Generals Gathered for…That?

Official government photo of Pete Hegseth

It appears Trump and Hegseth have been getting the Led out, because the song ‘Ramble On’ pretty much summarizes how their speeches went the other day.

With America’s generals gathered, I was worried that Defense Secretary Hegseth and President Trump would make some dangerous comments or announcements. While they both managed to make everyone seriously uneasy, it was more mush than alarming.

Hegseth focused on culture-war themes. Trump rambled about God-knows-what, with a few coherent sentences that the teleprompter fed him. But both speeches highlighted the lack of strategy and alarming drift of US military leadership.

Don’t believe me? We are including the text of the speeches so you can enjoy the fun yourself.

Link to Hegseth’s speech

Link to Trump’s speech

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. This is a topic I was hoping to avoid, but so many people have written in on the Patreon page, and I feel like I kind of have to. Today’s the 1st of October. Yesterday was the 30th September. And, yesterday was the day that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the US president, Donald Trump, addressed the entire coterie of American generals who were flown in for the speeches. 

Honestly, it reminded me of, Gaddafi of Libya or Fidel Castro of Cuba in their later decades when they would stand in front of an audience, says blah, blah, blah about nothing for hours. There didn’t seem to be a point to the speech at all. And the day before, two days before, when Trump was talking about putting himself on the agenda, he said something along those lines. 

Isn’t it nice that so many people are coming from so far away? But Secretary of Defense ordered them to come. This wasn’t a social call. 

I was originally very much dreading the speech. I was expecting perhaps a really dark turn in American form and strategic policy. Luckily, we did not see that, which is not mean that there was anything that happened to the speech that makes me feel good. I just that sense of dread I was feeling is no longer there. So, let’s start with Haig stuff, because that was the more substantive context. 

And then we’ll move on to, Donald Trump, because of, least qualified defense secretary in American history. His words, not mine. I just happened to agree with them. He said them during his, confirmation hearing. He actually said somebody who doesn’t know anything about the sector whatsoever, if they were to go in, could actually do better, than any of the secretaries of defense that we’ve had since World War two. 

He has proven that to be lovely, inaccurate. At this point, most of his speech was spent on the culture war. Basically, it was like he was giving a long monologue back from when he was on Fox News as a correspondent. Very, very short version. He made it very clear that any sort of protections that existed for any sort of group, whether it’s women or blacks or whatever, they were all going away, the physical requirements for anyone who is in a combat role will be based on men, which basically will exclude, 80 to 90% of women who are already serving from continuing if these policies are instituted. 

Keep in mind that the United States is going through demographic decline and the single largest growth unit in terms of recruitment for the military for the last half decade has been women, especially as we move to a more technical military. So by establishing these criteria, we’re basically guaranteeing that we’re not going to be able to hit our, recruitment numbers, and it’s going make hitting the technical numbers very, very difficult. 

Probably what this will mean is the United States will have to take a page from what it did during the war on terror, specifically in Iraq, and start playing, six figure salaries to contractors because we can’t generate the staff that is necessary. So from a strategic technical, recruiting, equity and especially warfighting capability, these pieces are just a series of horrible ideas. 

He also made it very clear that all of these generals who have decades of experience, if they don’t like it, they can quit, which is, you know, how it’s supposed to go with policy. But he was kind of rude about it. Anyway, I spoke to a number of people who were in the room, and, let’s just say that Secretary Hegseth is not exactly well respected because there’s a lack of credentials. 

And, well, some secretaries, like, say, Secretary Rollins in agriculture came in not knowing much, but really put her nose to the grindstone in order to school herself up on the issues in play. Hegseth has done nothing like that. He hasn’t even built a senior staff yet. So he does a lot of proclamations like this speech today or yesterday. 

And then he goes and does some social media or maybe pumps iron with the troops, because that’s what a secretary of defense is apparently supposed to be. My favorite line from someone in the room was that, if Secretary Hegseth just wanted to remind us all that he was incompetent and not worthy of the position. He could have just done that in an email. So harsh. Then Donald Trump. Oh, okay. So we’re going to append the full text of both speeches, Hegseth and Trump’s to you. So you can read this for yourselves. But oh my God. 

If I were to sum it up in one word, it would be bumbling. There were really only about three full sentences and an hour of him yammering on about loves lost and fights one, and how wife is one of his favorite words. And it was obvious when those three sentences came up because he was reading directly from the teleprompter. 

In his opening paragraph, he said, you guys can do whatever you want. You can laugh, you can cry, whatever. Of course, if you leave the room, then there goes your career. Super inspiring. Dude. There were no policy announcements. There was no strategic guidance. There was really no reason to be there. aside from the fact that he had a captive audience, and from what I heard from the people who were in the room, everyone was just sitting there. 

Stone faced the whole time because it wasn’t even a political speech. It was just rambling and the line of somebody who shared it with me that really got me was like, if the president wanted to highlight to us that he was no longer capable. Mission accomplished. I’ll let you read the speech yourself. I’ll let you decide for yourself. 

The one item that did perk people’s ears up is when the president said that he was considering using American cities as proving grounds for the US military. There is not a successful country in human history that has done that. Because once you turn the defenders of the nation on the citizens and the social contract is broken, and you need something new that is based on fear, that is the downfall of the Roman Empire and the Hittites and the Byzantines and any number of things since you keep your internal security forces and your external security forces separate at all costs and yes, yes, yes, Portland annoys me too. 

But the idea that you’re going to use Chicago or Nashville or anything else as a training ground, no, it was almost as if the president was daring the assembled generals to carry out their oath to defend the constitution of the country from all foes, foreign and domestic. And I am not comfortable with where this might lead. About the only thing I can say about it is that this was one of those bumbling passages that was made in passing, that was not the centerpiece of the speech. 

It was one line amongst a lot of mush. 

I don’t think anyone walked out of that room encouraged by their leadership or the current state of military policy. But considering some of the things that we have seen in military and strategic policy in the last few months, I still count this as a win.

Ukraine (And Everyone Else) Develops Glide Bombs

A Russian FAB-3000 with a UMPK guidance kit attached, converting the unguided bomb into a glide bomb | Wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_bomb#/media/File:FAB-3000_with_UMPK_kit.png

Ukraine has added glide bombs to its list of military ordnance, enabling Ukraine to send modified dumb bombs up to 100km away. This likely won’t alter the outcome of the war in Ukraine, but the democratization of this technology is setting off alarm bells in the US.

Joint Direct Attack Munitions were the bread-and-butter for the US military, maintaining a multi-decade monopoly on the precision strike technology…but all of that is changing. Now that Ukraine and Russia both have this tech in their hands, it’s only a matter of time before it appears everywhere else.

This is yet another sign of the US stepping back from its role as global protector; meaning American strategic primacy is coming to an end.

You can find more info about glide bomb technology appearing in Russia’s arsenal and the beginning of the proliferation of this tech in the linked video released on March 12, 2024:

Russian Bombs Get an Upgrade
Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about a change in military tech that just happened in Ukraine. Specifically, there are factions of the Ukrainian military industrial complex that are now putting together glide bombs. Glide bomb is basically when you’ve got an old dumb bomb that you put a guidance kit on. 

It has kind of wings on it. And so instead of dropping it, it kind of glides to the target and the Ukrainian prototypes that are being tested right now indicate that they can go upwards of 100km, about 60 miles, which is well beyond the front lines. 

Why this matters, the Ukrainians have been on the receiving end of glide bombs these last couple of years. The Russians have converted several of their old Soviet bombs, which are typically a much larger than the ones the US uses. We use, 500 pound bombs. Sometimes they use either kilo bombs. Sometimes there’s even a thousand kilo bombs. 

Anyway, they drop them from outside of air defense capability. They drop them from within their air superiority envelope. So they just have basically modified dump bombs coming in that can’t be intercepted. And some of the bigger ones, when they hit, have a blast radius that’s more than a quarter of a mile. 

And so you drop a dozen or so of these in the general vicinity of a fortification, and then Russian forces can then move in. That’s how they’ve been used to this point. The Ukrainians probably won’t be using them the same way because they don’t have the manpower. That’s necessary to penetrate the Russian lines. And there’s multiple layers of minefields as well, making that more difficult. 

So we use it against things like supply depots and, convoys. But the Ukrainians are already doing that with first person drones. So the ability to change the battlefield in Ukraine, by Ukraine, having some of these is probably pretty limited. The targeting sequences are probably just not going to be as robust as it might be for the other side. 

For a country that is more likely to be on the attack, the Ukrainians are typically on the defense. So it’s not that there’s no utility. It’s not. It’s just not a game changer. Also, there’s just the amount of effort that it takes to build one and test it because every prototype is destroyed as opposed to like a first person drone, where you can fly it back and forth without actually having it blow up to make sure it works. 

And you can get new iterations every month. This one will probably take a little bit longer, but it still has a huge impact, just not in Ukraine and everywhere else. The issue here is that the United States has had a de facto monopoly on this sort of technology for decades. We hear we call them Jay Dams, Joint Direct Attack Munitions. 

We took our old Cold War bombs. We put a kit and some things on it and do precision targeting. And through the 1990s, the US had a total monopoly. These were first debuted during the first Iraq War. 

Desert Storm back in 1982 and then have been incrementally upgraded since then. But really, it wasn’t until as recently as five years ago that any other country in the world had their own. 

Well, the Russians developed their own last year, and now Ukraine, a country that is much smaller, with a much smaller technical base and industrial base, has them as well. And if Russia and Ukraine can have them, you know that it’s just a matter of choice before countries like Korea, both of them, Japan, Taiwan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, pretty much every country in NATO, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, Israel, obviously, I don’t know if Iran could do it, but the United Arab Emirates could. 

Anyway. The point is, there is a long list of countries where this is no longer a technical barrier. And the technology that the United States has had a complete monopoly on this last generation, which has allowed it to shape strategic environments around the world, is now gone. And it’s only a matter of time, probably months, not even years, before we see copycat versions of the Russian and other Ukrainian versions popping up in a half a dozen different countries, and within five years they will be everywhere. 

Which means if the United States is going to maintain its military posture of having a global position without really any meaningful pushback, it’s going to need new technological tricks to do that. Most likely, combined with the Trump administration’s backing away from every alliance we have, this means that the United States is going to vacate militarily large portions of the planet and just let the chips fall where they may. 

Now, for those of you who’ve been following my work for the last decade, you will know that this was in some version probably going to happen because of American political considerations anyway. But we’re now set up a technological U.S. cannot just leave because it wants to. It’s going to be technologically pushed out from certain areas. And the question now is where first. 

And we just it’s too soon to have an answer to that question. There’s too many decisions that have to be made up at the white House, that color where the map is going to go blue and where it’s going to go red. But bottom line, the era of American strategic primacy with global reach that is now over. 

And it’s now a question about managing the withdrawal and dealing with the consequences of that.

Everybody Wants to Bomb Qatar

Hands holding the flag of qatar in front of a building in the middle east

Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Qatar mark a significant shift in Israel’s positioning in the region. Israel has made it clear that they are willing to strike anywhere, regardless of alliances or presence of US bases…bad news bears.

Qatar may be filthy, filthy rich, but all that money couldn’t buy military aptitude. These strikes caught Qatar with its pants around its ankles, something that rival Arab states weren’t upset about.

However, the bigger story here is that Qatar hosts america’s regional military headquarters, and Israel only gave the US a ten-minute heads up before the missiles started flying. Whatever influence the United States had over Israel military actions has quite simply dissolved. And THAT will be noticed globally.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here comes to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about what went down on September 9th in the Middle East. Specifically, the Israelis dropped a few bombs and missiles on sites in the country of Qatar. That’s a little thumb like thing in the Persian Gulf. Small country, less than a million population going after some Hamas targets. 

Hamas, of course, is the military slash political group that used to run Gaza and is now on the receiving end of the Israeli occupation campaign of Gaza. Three big things. Oh my God, so many things, but three big things that come from this. First of all, let’s talk about Israel. Israel has never, ever, ever bombed anyone in the Persian Gulf. 

I mean, they’ve gone after Lebanon because it’s right there. They go after Syria, especially as it’s fallen apart. And, they’ve gone after Iran most recently in a big way. But the last time they bombed anyone else was like in the 1980s, they took out a nuclear reactor in Iraq. And before that, you’re talking about the Arab-Israeli wars of the 1970s and 1960s. And 1950s. 

This is a significant escalation. There’s been an expansion of their capabilities as they’ve gotten the Joint Strike fighter. They’ve gotten better weapons from the United States that have better range. Looks like what happened is they flew down into the Red sea and launched missiles over Saudi Arabia to hit Qatar. They didn’t do a direct overflight. 

Probably. 

And this level of aggression, this willingness to ramp up this newborn policy of taking action wherever and why ever, is immense. Because, you know, Qatar is a U.S. ally. Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally. And for the Israelis to be so brazen, this is something that is going to continue until and unless a significant series of countries that includes up to in the United, including the United States, levy some sort of massive economic or military penalty on Israel for acting like this way, at the moment doesn’t seem like that is in the cards. 

And honestly, if you’re in the Persian Gulf, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, like Qatar or the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, there’s really nothing you can do. So this is the new norm of Israel just dropping bombs wherever in the region it wants to. And that will cause any number of political complications and strategic complications, because at the moment they’re going after Hamas. 

But there are other militant groups that the Israelis are not big fans of. And should a government in the region become more hostile, the Israelis have now demonstrated that really doesn’t matter what your air defense systems are, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, they have some shiny hardware, but it’s clear they don’t know how to use it very well. 

And as the Israelis discovered with Iran, even if you’ve got stuff that you’ve integrated over decades, it really can’t stand up to the technology the Israelis can bring to bear. So all the royal houses of this region are now on notice. And if they do things that the Israelis don’t like, they can expect visits by explosives. 

The one thing that was really holding back the Israelis before, from doing things like this is the idea if you knock off the government, you could have Sunni jihadists boil up and turn the area into a scarred wasteland that would eventually cause problems for Israel. 

Well, some version of that has happened in Syria and Israel looks just fine. So if the nightmare situation is not something to be avoided, then destabilizing the neighborhood is something they don’t have a problem with. So that not all of that is number one. The Israeli side, number two is the Qatari side. Qatar is a small country. 

doesn’t have a lot going forward except for a big natural gas field, a little bit of oil. And in doing so, it’s become one of the richest countries in the world in per capita terms, because there’s very few people, the locals are the fattest humans in history because the national security program has run by Doha, the capital is to get everybody, heart disease and obesity so that they can’t protest. 

So, I mean, these are a whole country of taboos, that basically do nothing but eat all day, and they’re serviced by a couple to maybe 4 million today, expats who basically take care of their every whim. 

As a result, no shock that they don’t know how to use their own military equipment. But they do have, however, is ambition and arrogance and just supreme levels. The ruling government of the of the ruling family, is convinced that they were ordained by Allah himself to be a major power. And since they were late to the game, they basically went out and cut deals with everyone that nobody else would deal with. 

So the deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, they deal with Hamas, they deal with everybody, in order to prove how important they are. And then they throw a lot of cash at whatever the issue happens to be. So they are on the opposite side of a lot of the other Sunni governments in the region. And so while no one in the region is thrilled that the Israelis have gone and basically proven how powerless that they are in the face of a superior military force, there are a lot of countries, most notably, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, that are pointing at and kind of going, because they are not loved at all. 

And seeing them taken down by such a big notch and made to look so incompetent and so impotent, is honestly very rewarding to a great number of people. What impact this will have on Qatari foreign policy moving forward is unclear, but certainly Israel is indicating to them that there’s certain lines they just can’t cross or bombs will fall. 

The government was not targeted. This was all targeted against Hamas groups and the Hamas groups were only kind of sort of taken out because they use longer range weaponry. But we now know with refueling that the Israelis could easily get there and back with more precise weapons. So something to watch for the future. In the meantime, Qatars on notice. 

Third, and perhaps most importantly, is how the United States fits into this, Qatar is the location of Centcom headquarters. This is where the United States coordinates everything throughout the entire region, including the recently closed down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a lot of countries in the region and up to and including Israel until very recently and until last week, thought that having Centcom headquarters in Qatar made Qatar bulletproof because the Americans offered an express security guarantee to the country. 

Well, that has proven to be wrong. And we now have a really interesting situation shaping up. Yes, the United States is willing to allow countries to bomb places where it has bases and not do anything that makes the United States look toothless. And for Israel, specifically, Donald Trump is now in a position where he can’t get the Israeli government to do or to not do anything. 

The Americans were notified of the attack less than ten minutes before the missiles flew. No. No way, no way. Enough time to get through the chain of command for Trump to say, call up Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of Israel. Say, don’t do this. So the United States is now being actively ignored by the country, in the region that is supposedly its closest religious demographic and strategic ally in the region. 

That is not a good look for an administration who thinks that it’s tough, and that will have consequences here, there, and a lot of places in between.