Japan’s Navy Gets Teeth

The Japanese Navy is getting a face lift with the conversion of the Izumo-class destroyers into small supercarriers capable of holding F-35s (compliments of the US).

This marks Japan’s return to full-scale naval aviation and is a reflection of the overall strategic shift in Japan’s military posture. With regional affairs growing more dicey by the day (ahem, China), Japan is straightening out its military posture and looking to play a more assertive role.

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First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Florida. The news today, we’re in the second week of April, is that the Japanese have released from initial refit a beard, what they call a heavy destroyer. The cargo. It’s part of the Izumi class. this was designed to be a helicopter carrier, right? It’s really a small supercarrier, if you will.

And they’ve now completed the refit so it can take American F-35, of which the Japanese are purchasing about 150, at least a third of which are supposed to be the carrier versions. and there’s definitely going to be more coming. this gives the Japanese full scale naval aviation for the first time since 1945. Keep in mind that the world’s first super carriers or carriers of any type actually are Japanese.

And so this is a skill set that they’re in the process of rebuilding. they’re also doing so hand in glove with the naval superpower, which is the United States. And obviously they’re going to be using a lot of American hardware and training to make this up to speed. So basically this takes Japan and transforms its already blue water navy into a blue water strike, maybe with significant over-the-horizon capabilities.

the Japanese who were doing this happened to over the Americas from a strategic point of view. And the vessels were already sailing together with the American fleets. the cargo will be going for sea trials now for probably about a year, maybe a year and a half before beginning full deployment. And while that is happening, the other of the two sumo class carriers, Mizuho, will now be going for its refit.

critics would say, and I would agree with them, that this was always the plan for the Izumo class. They were only called helicopter destroyers, for purposes of dealing with a population and a region that wasn’t quite comfortable with Japan taking a direct military role in affairs, but that has now turned, the Koreans have gotten quiet.

Everyone else in Asia realizes the Japanese being more fourth, which is actually a good thing. But most importantly, the Japanese population has moved beyond its general feeling to pacifism and the post-World War Two era, realizing that as the Chinese become more uppity that a firmer military position is needed and that requires hardware to accentuate the policy, it.

Apparently A Cessna and Elbow Grease Is All Ukraine Needs

The Ukrainians are getting creative and finding ways to launch longer-range attacks on Russian infrastructure. We’ve already seen strikes on pipeline nexuses and chemical complexes as deep as Samara and Tatarstan.

Attacks like these hold significant economic implications for the Russians, as any disruptions to these oil facilities could be devastating. The issue isn’t so much that Ukraine is poking holes in Russian air defense, but perhaps exposing that there…Isn’t any.

Attacks like these will likely prove to be a growing challenge for Russian security and economic stability as the conflict continues.

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First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado, got a fresh dusting overnight because, you know, April, it’s April 2nd in the news in the last 3 or 4 days is that the Ukrainians have demonstrated a significantly longer range for weapons systems launched from Ukraine proper. specifically, the Ukrainians have been able to hit targets with their new drones that are in the, locations of Samara and Tartus stand.

now, these are more important than a lot of these in pieces of infrastructure that Ukrainians have been hitting with their drone campaign recently. Samara is a major pipeline nexus where a lot of the crude that comes in from southwestern, Siberia gets processed or redirected to European or Black Sea markets. And Tatarstan is even deeper within the Russian Federation, in Siberia proper.

and it is also a major chemicals and refining complex. So the significance here is pretty, pretty strong. the issue is throughput. The Russians don’t have a lot of storage. The country’s really big, and the most of these systems were built in the imperial age under the Soviets. So they were designed to supply the empire. Well, now that, the empire has gone its own way, and most of the former Soviet republics and, former Soviet satellite states are getting their crude and natural gas from somewhere else.

The Russians are completely dependent now for income on getting this crude out to the wider world. That means getting to the black on the Baltic Sea, because they can’t really use the pipes to go into Germany anymore. So when you think of that, and then you look at notes like some are in tartar, stand, we have a problem.

Because if these are interrupted, especially Samara, which is a nexus, then the crude has nowhere to go. There’s not a backup system when these clusters get taken offline, for whatever reason, pressure builds up in the pipe. Back to the wellhead. Now, this could be worse. the facilities that are in southwestern Siberia, especially places like Tarter stand in Bucharest on it, doesn’t get so cold there in the winter that the well heads freeze.

But now that the Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to strike over 1000km from their border, it’s only a matter of time before they start aiming for targets that are north of Moscow instead of south of Moscow. And if those pipeline accesses go offline, then you’re talking about the well heads in northwestern Siberia actually freezing shut. And a lot of the stuff just goes offline forever because if the wellhead freezes shut, you have to drill it.

And you can only re drill in the Arctic summer. And that only lasts for about 3 or 4 months a year. So, that’s kind of piece one. Piece two is what’s going on in Totters on Thomaston because it is a combination of producing zone and chemical zone. A lot of these chemicals are what allows the Russian agricultural system to work.

 

And a lot of this stuff is exported to China. So what the Ukrainians are demonstrating is the capacity to identify targets that move up the value added chain, not just going after raw crude, not just going after refined product, but even downstream products, like chemicals manufacture. so the economic hit to the Russians from this continues to climb.

And now it’s really just an issue of whether or not the Russians have the capacity of getting meaningful air defense of the hundreds of facilities that they have across European and Western Siberia and Russia in order to stymie these attacks in the first place, because they’re clearly not moving fast enough on the front in order to disrupt these drones launching.

And this is a very, very cheap way to do it. These things cost more than, say, the Iranian Shi’ite drones. But you’re still talking about well, well, well, well under $1 million a pop. Whereas a refinery that handles 100,000 barrels a day is going to run, you know, $1 billion on a good day. So the disruption here is real.

It is getting bigger. And we’re getting to the point where it’s time to start thinking about what happens when Russian crude and materials processing goes offline in some form, because we’re only in the early days of this Ukrainian campaign. And now that they found a soft spot, you can guarantee they’re going to hit it over and over and over and over.

Quick addendum, there is very clear footage coming out of toddler son of a small passenger plane. Think of something like the size of a Cessna, maybe a little bit bigger, flying and ramming into, a munitions factory that builds drones for the Russian military. specifically the Shaheed type that have been causing the Ukrainians so many problems.

Now, it’s not so much the significance of this attack as attacking a factory floor with a 50 to 100 pound bomb. You know, let’s let’s call it huge, say 300 pounds, isn’t going to cause enough damage to really take anything off line. The issue is that it got there. It flew over 1000km through Russian airspace. that means one of two things.

Either number one, the Ukrainians now have kits that they can smuggle into Russia, modify a plane at an airfield within Russia and launch like that, which would be from an internal security point of view and a technical point of view, just a disaster for the Russians or the Russians have absolutely no anti-aircraft coverage in the core of the country, where most of the infrastructure is and most of the people live, no matter what the outcome here is, this is a disaster for the Russians, because there’s no doubt that the Ukrainians will be now be doing it at scale, because it’s clear the Russians can’t stop them.

How Tariffs and Drones Saved Ukrainian Agriculture

Ukrainian agricultural exports are finally having the boot lifted from their throats thanks to new tariffs on certain goods in the EU and Ukraine’s adoption of water based drones.

Exporting Ukrainian agricultural products has been no easy feat; between Russian bombardment, infrastructure attacks, and European interdictions on Ukrainian goods, there wasn’t much movement early on in the conflict. Between the proposed tariffs by the French and some recent success with water-based drones, Ukraine might finally be able to get some product out.

These new tarrifs will free up the markets for Ukraine’s primary revenue generating products, wheat and sunflower. The recent water-based drone attacks on Russian vessels have helped to reestablish the grain corridor through NATO territories, easing pressure further.

Although this is just a small victory for the Ukrainians, restoring their ability to earn through agricultural exports could help ease tensions across the board.

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Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
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TranscripT

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. quick update on the trade and war situation in Europe, specifically Ukraine. it appears we have or they have solved the problem of getting Ukrainian agricultural goods to market. So the quick backdrop is that because of the Russian war, the Russians were bombing places like Odessa and interdicting ships on the Black Sea.

And by water is how the Ukrainians ship out. Well over 80% of their agricultural output, or at least before the war, it was, but nobody wanted to get hit by a Russian missile. So basically everyone got locked up in port and we had backlogs, throughout the entire system. the Ukrainians started to ship things by rail west into the European Union.

they couldn’t get nearly as much out at most one third of what they could do, based on product and some products, less than 10%. But every kilometer that the, Ukrainian stuff was in a rail car, was a kilometer of ton rails that the Europeans could not use. So the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Slovaks and the poles, the border states in particular, were getting cheesed off because their farmers were having a hard time getting their crops to market.

And so they would say, you could transit, but you can’t actually sell that here. Well, if you have to go all the way to Germany, that’s a lot of ton miles that were suddenly not available for everything else. So it wasn’t a very tenable such solution. So these countries may on the whole be very pro Ukraine, but they don’t want to destroy their own agricultural sectors to do it.

So two things have changed. First, the French, the French have gotten involved. Though the French are arguably among the most agriculturally protectionist countries in the world. and none of this stuff was coming to France, but, the French economy is roughly as large as all of the border states put together. And so when the French did decide to get involved, it had an impact at the European level very quickly.

And they were looking at some of the secondary products that were coming in, things like poultry and eggs and honey and corn and oats, and they’re like, okay, we produce all of these things, and now all these things aren’t necessarily making it to France. They are making it to Central Europe, which is depressing. Prices within the European Union.

So how about we do this? We do it. We give everyone in Europe the ability, put tariffs on the products that we care about. And in doing that, we then open up the ability for everything else, most notably wheat and sunflower, which are, the Ukrainians, big money makers. now everyone in the border states grows wheat, but by freeing up some categories, then things could go elsewhere and things could basically be shuffled around.

The French got happy, and it took some of the pressure off of everything else. That was part one. Part two is a Ukrainian military strategy using drones. they basically been refitting small jet boats and jet skis and going in force after Russian vessels, especially Russian landing vessels. well, in the last few days, they’ve taken out another two or at least heavily damaged another two, as long as as well as a spy ship that allows the Russians to identify where launch sites and radar sites are.

And what this has had the net effect of doing is clearing the entire western half of the Black Sea of Russian vessels, and forcing the Russians to fall all the way back to an over a cease, and maybe even even to offshore on the eastern side of the Black Sea, which ports most of the western half of the Black Sea, out of range of even Russian missiles.

So this is opened up a grain export corridor going down the western side of the Black Sea through NATO territory, specifically Romania and Bulgaria, Turkey, to the Turkish Straits and out to the Aegean and the wider world. You do that, you take pressure off those bulk commodities like sunflower and wheat. So I don’t mean to suggest that this is solved, and I don’t mean to suggest that everyone has gotten everything that they want.

But a lot of the pressures that we were seeing that were locking up the cargo shipments are now gone, or at least severely ameliorated. And all of a sudden, Ukraine again has its single largest line item export earner back. and that will help everyone, because the more that the Ukrainians can put their own money into the war, the less pressure there will be politically on everyone else.

The New Face of Military Technology

Image of a drone firing missiles

The new face of military technology is here…and no its not some Master Chief type suit running around the battlefield. We’re talking about the democratization of tech applications and the empowerment of individual soldiers to make strategic decisions.

The best example of this is the use of drone technology in Ukraine. With accurate and timely striking capabilities at the fingertips of everyday soldiers, attacks can be carried out at the flip of a switch. We’re seeing this play out with strikes on Russian naval vessels, small drones used in anti-personnel attacks, mid-range infrastructure strikes, and modular drones like the Phoenix Ghost for precision attacks deep in Russian territory.

These drone technologies and other developments are playing a key role in disrupting Russian operations, and we’re beginning to see practical applications for use in future conflicts. The decentralization of precision targeting is shaping up to be a transformative force in contemporary conflicts.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey Everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. We’re in the calm between the snow storms. Got 40 inches last week. What we’re going to do this weekend is 4 to 6 inches on what seems like a rounding error in comparison. Anyway, 60 degrees because Colorado today, we’re talking about the revolution in military affairs. It is now going through a second phase.

So the first revolution of military affairs happened in the 1990s and 2000 when the United States started to marry information technologies to its military, its combination of sensors and targeting information, whether it’s on the method of delivering the ordnance or in satellite or attached to the weapon itself. So, for example, joint direct attack missions fall into that category, as do cruise missiles like the Tomahawk.

Important stuff. And it basically took whatever explosive ordnance that you had and allowed you to deliver to a target with a very high degree of accuracy. So instead of having the carpet bomb, things like we used to in Vietnam, in Egypt before. Now you just send one or two weapons out and hit the specific target that you’re at the Ross Hawk for a good long time.

But that if you marry precision weapons with hypersonics, that all of a sudden all of the rules of warfare go away and you can just have a handful of hypersonics to defend everything. And then we discovered things like jamming and the fact that people don’t have one tank, they have 100,000 people in infantry and the math never just worked out.

Hypersonics are just way too expensive sort of in order to play. It’s just that it’s not the determining role. So that was kind of phase one. We’re going through phase two now, which is the democratization of the application of these technologies. And so instead of it being controlled from the White House, we’re from a generals chair. Individual soldiers are now giving command of this sort of information, can use it to make targets on an autonomous basis.

And we’re seeing this, of course, most aggressively in Ukraine, mostly with drones. The Ukrainians are following a four part strategy at the moment. So this is going to evolve quite a bit. Phase one is applying these drone technologies to things like jet skis and loading them up with a couple hundred pounds of explosives and sending them out to target Russian naval vessels.

That process has been so effective, has I’ve noted it in earlier videos that basically the western half of the Black Sea is now completely no go for the Russian fleet. And most of the ships, especially the larger ones, simply can’t shoot back because anything that’s installed on the deck of the ship is designed to hit the horizon or higher and it can’t are angled down to target these small boats in the water.

So that’s number one. Number two is actually something that’s much more recent that has come up as a result of the problems with the American Congress getting conventional aid to Ukraine. The Ukrainians have had to find a way to hold the line against the Russians when they’re running out of artillery shells. And so that what they’ve started doing, this mass producing these very small drones that only have a payload of about a pound, which is about the size of a small grenade.

And when the Russians do their human wave tactics, you just send a swarm of them out to go after anything that moves. And it’s basically dropping grenades that range into massed infantry. They’ve done this to the point that in the Battle of Africa, which the Ukrainians technically lost, they were inflicting regularly eight and 10 to 1 casualty ratios on the Russians despite not having much artillery.

So anti-personnel. Number three is mid-range infrastructure strikes. The Ukrainians developed a pair of drones called the side and the beaver of the to the beaver is far more technologically competent and has a much longer range and better avionics, whereas the South has basically a grudge project that’s practically made out of plywood. It’s a fugly. Little thing carries a decent warhead, but less range.

And they’ve been sending these out against any pieces of infrastructure in kind of the mirror abroad, if you will, within a few hundred kilometers of the front line. And they’ve used it to target any number of things like refineries in the Russian space, but also fuel depots. And then finally, something where the Americans are getting in on the job with something called the Phenix Ghost.

Now, the Phenix ghost only carries a fairly small warhead, typically 5 to £15. The advantage of the Phenix Ghost is it’s modular and you can put it together on the fly and it’s light enough that one soldier can carry it. Now, originally, when the Phenix Ghost started coming in, they were going after armored vehicles and supply trucks. But the Ukrainians very, very quickly realized that because they were available in such small volume and because they were so accurate, because unlike a lot of drones, these have a live visual feedback to the controller.

They could basically put them in a backpack, send someone hiking or driving into Russia and a thousand miles from the front line, take it out, put it together and send it against an unprotected target. And most of the refinery attacks we have seen in Ukraine in recent weeks, in two weeks maybe are probably Ukrainian special forces operating with American made.

Phenix goes deep within the Russian interior. And this is getting pretty robust because at present, you know, we’re talking about regularly a half 1000000 to 1000000 barrels per day of Russian refining capacity is taken offline. The issue is that these things are accurate enough that they can strike within just a couple of feet of what came about because you can see where you’re going.

And that allows the operators to target the sensitive spots in a refinery like the distillation tower, where the parts that are really exploding get separated. And so if you target that, but the parts that are really exploding, it really exploding and repairing this is really difficult for the Russians because they stopped training engineers in large number over 30 years ago.

Anyway, bottom line is that you’re talking about interrupting an income flow for the Russians that is typically about 8% of government revenues, which is more than what, say, the U.S. federal government, as a percentage of the budget collects in terms of corporate taxes. So big line item. And if you destroy the ability of the Russians to process crude, that means there’s no place for the crude to go because the pipeline system has already filled the maximum.

And then you talk about pressure built in back of the pipes and then having problems, everything through their midstream right up to the point of production, and they might even have to shut some in. And since they don’t have the engineers to turn it back on, that would be that. Anyway. So we’re getting a combination of strategic warfare, naval warfare, infantry warfare, economic warfare that didn’t seem possible as little as three months ago.

And now they’re all very much in play with most of these drones, 100% Ukrainian born specials. Now, this, in my mind, evokes something very similar to what happened in the American Civil War and in the Crimean campaign of the 1850s, when you had Europeans engaging in early industrial warfare and then sending observers to watch the Americans duke it out where they were watching the Americans engage in early to mid industrial warfare.

There’s a lot of reasons for a lot of countries to now send observers into Ukraine, even if they’re not providing a lot of aid because this is a fundamentally new technological breakthrough. We understand today that the first phase of the revolution in military affairs took what was a relatively lumbering Cold War defense industry that the United States had and turn it into something with extreme range and extreme precision.

We’re now keeping that precision and marrying it to individual decision making with not tens, not hundreds, but tens of thousands of individuals with weapons platforms that can be launched in a relatively short period of time. And they’re decentralized. Now, there are pros and cons to that, but being able to have individual target enemy formations at scale over a thousand mile front and then hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the front, that is something we have never seen ever in any warfare in any age.

And we are only at the very beginning of understanding just how transformative that is going to be.

The US and Iran: Deciding What to Bomb

Iran drone attack kills three soldiers

Three US soldiers were killed in a drone attack carried out by an Iranian militia near the Jordan-Syria border. I expect a timely retaliation by the US, but what will that look like?

The Biden administration could choose to target Iranian-backed militias, Iranian military assets, or even Iran’s economy directly. Some of these are a bit more involved, but disrupting oil exports wouldn’t take much more than a fly-by of Iran’s primary export terminal on Kharg Island.

There will likely be global repercussions regardless of which option the US chooses; however, given the United States limited reliance on Middle Eastern energy, disrupting that system could prove beneficial for North American interests.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is the 29th of January and the news today is that in a rocket attack, a Iranian militia operating near the border of Jordan in Syria managed to get a missile into an American base and kill three people in the vicinity of one of the barracks. These are the first deaths of American military personnel since the Iranians started pushing groups like the Houthis to attack Americans and international commerce in a large volume.

And it’s probably going to merit a response. Something to keep in mind is when the United States couple of weeks ago decided to start taking military action against the Houthis in Yemen. It wasn’t because these Iranian backed groups were attacking commerce in general. It’s because they fired an anti-ship missile at a U.S. military vessel, and that’s what started it all off.

So working from that same logic, now that some Americans have actually died, you can expect the Biden administration to strike back. The question is how? There’s kind of three things to consider. None of the options are great. Option number one, you do a semi proportionate because the Americans always believe in overkill assault against the militias that Iran backs either in the area in question or somewhere in the broader Middle East.

The problem with this is it doesn’t solve the problem. The people who are doing the attacks aren’t Iranian. They’re just using Iranian equipment and sometimes a little bit of Iranian intel. And even if you were to wipe them all out, they come from sectarian groups who are opposed to their local geopolitical orders. And so they tend to oppose Sunni groups who tend to be in the majority, especially in places like Jordan or in the case of Iraq, where you have a pseudo democracy.

And in these cases, even if you take them all out, you just have an aggrieved minority that would, again, push people in that the Iranians would recruit. So it might make things calm down for a few weeks to months, but it’s certainly not any sort of lasting solution that’s going to change the logic in Tehran at all. The second option is to strike military assets in Iran proper.

The idea is you go after the personnel that are making these decisions. The problem here is that there’s a lot of them. Iran isn’t like most strongman autocracies. You’ve got a ruling elite of the religious, the class, the mullahs, who’s over 10,000 people. And even if you were to somehow magically carry out an assassination program and within 24 hours, kill the top thousand of them, I mean, sure, they’d have some reshuffling, but it actually wouldn’t disrupt the regime in any meaningful way.

In addition, Iran is a series of mountains. It’s basically a fortress. And if you wanted to go in there and knock the government out, you would need a force significantly larger than what the United States pushed into Iraq, which is ultimately a flat and somewhat desert community. And that means you’re going over a mountain range in mountain range and mountain range.

So the distances are far. The logistics would be hard. The geography plays to the defenders strength. And then even if you were successful, well, then what are you going to stick around and try to reconstruct Iran in the way that we did Iraq? I think I think the U.S. learned that that’s not an easy thing to do. So and again, this wouldn’t change any of the logic in Iran about what they’re doing in the broader reading, if anything, were to intensify it.

That leaves us with the third option, which is a military option against Iran’s economy. Now, Iran, while it is nowhere near the peak that it once was back in the seventies, is an oil producer. What it was exporting, more than 4 million barrels a day is still in the game and still exports about a million barrels a day.

And that income is the primary source of hard currency that the Iranians use to fund everything that they do from purchasing social stability, from their population at home to funding these rocket attacks against U.S. military targets throughout the broader region. And unfortunately for the Iranians, it all flows through a single point called Kharg Island, which is on the northeast shore of the Persian Gulf.

And it would be very, very, very easy for the United States just to destroy the loading facilities or maybe even the storage tanks and the pumping stations in Kharg. They could probably do it with a handful of sorties, would probably take less than an hour. Iranian missile defense is is not very good. Their air defense is not very good either in the U.S. obviously is very good at striking in those sorts of conditions, especially when you’re talking about something that is on the coast.

So you don’t have to fly over too many defensive layers to get to it. It’d be a cost to this, of course, should the United States decide to do this step. It would take the role of the erstwhile global guarantor of maritime security and have the United States taking very discrete shots at very specific parts of the global economy that have relied upon international security in order to function.

And that means that any vessels that are part of a long supply chain along sail going through a dangerous area, near a dangerous area, or have multiple supply chain stops, meaning that if you interrupt just one of them, all of them become defunct. All of that would be in danger. And that is the entire electronics supply chain in Southeast Asia and East Asia.

That is the entire oil supply chain which either is sourced from or passes through the Middle East. The consequences of that would be significant on a global basis. But if you want to take the American populist view, which is something that Biden and Trump agree on, is that a lot of that doesn’t really matter. And in fact, there’s something to be said for stalling those international systems because they favor North American solutions.

The United States doesn’t get energy from this region anymore. Canada doesn’t, Mexico doesn’t. So the economies that we care about the most are heavily insulated already. And the economy that we’re most dependent upon or the most concerned about is China. And they get all of their energy from Pittsburgh reach that well, not all, but like half. And so if the Biden administration does take this step, two things will very much be in motion very quickly.

US Congress Dysfunction: Blocking Aid to Ukraine

We are taking a question from the ‘Ask Peter’ forum today – am I worried about Ukraine’s dwindling weapon’s supplies in light of what’s going on with the US Congress? Yes, yes I am.

Ukraine’s supplies are running out and there’s a dozen or so Republican’s blocking anything from being passed in Congress, so that means no more ammo for Ukraine. However, this isn’t isolated to things involving Ukraine, these Republicans are blocking everything they disagree with. So, this is a problem for everything and everyone.

Sure, we’ve seen unproductive Congresses before, but in case you haven’t flipped on the news in a while – there’s plenty going on. The real kicker is that I don’t see this resolving itself anytime soon. I’m sure people will try to step across the aisle and work something out, but the extremes from both sides will be sure to stomp that out ASAP.

Unless we see some true bipartisan cooperation, the dysfunction we’re seeing in Congress will only get worse. Hopefully, we don’t have to wait for the November elections to sort this out, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Calais at the southern point of the island of Hawaii. Got the slopes up on a lower behind me, the larger volcano here. I am going to take something from our Ask Peter Forum. We’re going to put that link here at the end of the video too, in case you are sending your own questions.

And it’s am I worried about Ukraine in the light of what has become an American boycott on weapons supplies? Yes. Yes, I am. The Ukrainians are running out of ammo. There’s no way they could produce enough to support the war themselves. And the Russians are mustered. A fresh human wave. And, you know, human waves are very vulnerable to mass fire, but you have to have ammo for that to work.

So there are some concerns. We might be seeing a turning point in the war here in the next few weeks if something doesn’t change. But what is going on is we’ve got a dozen roughly Republicans on the right who are blocking anything from happening in Congress that they don’t agree with. And so this is not a Ukraine problem.

This is an everything problem. These few reps are blocking anything on any issue. So we’ve got programs that need to be addressed, not just Ukraine, but aid for Taiwan against China, aid for Israel, against Hamas, others issues with health care and business reform and criminal justice before the Senate, the defense system and the budget, every single thing has been dropped.

It’s not that these folks oppose Ukraine per se. It’s they oppose anything that isn’t exactly their way. So I call them the Greenpeace faction of the Republican Party because they just hate everyone. This means that this Congress has been the least productive in American history at this stage. And Congress a little bit more than halfway through their session.

We’ve only passed about 20% of the bills that the second the least productive Congress in history has passed. So this is an issue of big government versus small government. This is just an issue of dysfunction and it’s a problem for everybody. Now, I don’t think it’s going to get any better any soon. When the Republic ends didn’t do very well.

And last midterms, the hope of getting a big majority vanishes. They had a very slim minority beginning, and they have seen that minority shrink down in part, it’s because they’ve cannibalize their own. This faction of Republicans forced out the former Speaker McCarthy from California. And so he just quit. He left the House altogether, leaving that seat open. We’ve had another couple of resignations since.

And then the Republicans purged one of their own, a Republican, Santos of New York four. Let me make sure I get this right. Using campaign finance to purchase gay fetish foot Port Arthur can’t make a shit on any hill. What it means is not just that the margin that the Republicans have in the majority has gotten smaller and smaller.

Worse than it sounds. Because to pass something in Congress, you don’t need a majority of the votes. You need a majority of the seats. And so every empty seat kind of acts as a quasi vote against the majority. So they only have a Republican that only have a margin of two. They can only lose one vote if they still want to get things passed.

That makes each individual faction, including the Greenpeace faction, more powerful. So this is going to go one of two ways. Number one, they’re going to continue to stall everything. And this Congress will go down in history as the most pathetic ever until we have general elections a year from now, November and the new Congress would set in January, or the bulk of the Republicans reach across the aisle and start cutting deals with centrist Democrats.

Now, that’s not as easy as it sounds. There’s a lot of minutia, there’s a lot of politics, there’s a lot of noise. And in the environment that we’re in right now, anyone who reaches across the aisle is inviting a primary challenge from the freak wings of their parties, whether it’s the Greenpeace faction of the Republicans or the squad version of the Democrats.

So none of these are easy decisions, but they do suggest that drama in Congress is going to increase or rather than decrease in the months ahead. And that’s not just bad for Ukraine, that’s bad for everyone except for the Chinese who think this is fair test. All right. That’s it for me. Take care.

Ukraine Attacks Russian Energy Terminal

Ukraine managed to sneak some drones by Russian air defenses and hit the Ust-Luga oil refinery and loading facility. The attack didn’t cause significant damage, but it disrupted production and shipping operations.

The successful attack has given us a glimpse at Ukraine’s capabilities and what might be in store for the future. The Russian’s response to the drone strike pokes glaring holes in the Russian system, specifically the lack of qualified workers and immense strain placed on the limited skilled personnel actively working.

This attack is a reminder of how the Russian oil industry can impact global oil supplies and the massive vulnerabilities within the system. Sanctions have also intensified in a weird sort of way following the attack, which has further impacted the flow of oil to Europe.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Everybody. Peter Zine here coming to you from above the very active Kilauea volcano. That’s the crater that kicked off last year. Today we’re going to talk about an assault that happened last week. The Ukrainian sent a squad of drones north out of Ukraine over Russian airspace into the gulf of finland to attack the Ust-Luga…hope i pronounce that right.

Oil refinery and loading facility now north mali, this wouldn’t really matter because normally drones, as we’ve seen, can’t get through any sort of meaningful air defense. But the Russian air defense in this area appears to be just as crappy as it is everywhere else in the country. So a bunch of them got through. The other reason I would normally care about this is most refineries.

Everyone gets all you want on. They expect Hollywood explosions when a bomb goes off in a refinery, you know? Yeah. Keep in mind scale here, most refineries are over a square mile and this one’s no exception. There’s a lot of standoff distance among the different facilities. So if something does blow, it doesn’t blow up the whole thing. And crude oil at room temperature isn’t even flammable.

So the warheads that these bombs can carry, which are less than £100, probably with the models that were used probably under £20, it’s not that you can’t do damage, but you can’t do real damage. But this is not just a refinery. This is also a loading facility. And in a refinery, once you’ve made your fuels, fuel’s being more flammable than raw crude.

You then put them into a truck or a pipe and send it away With a port facility you put into a big giant tank and then a large vessel comes by and sucks off what it needs and goes on its merry way. And so the tanks themselves are the vulnerable points here. Now, judging from the size of the explosions and the fires that were started, the tanks were not hit.

That’s just something that you should have in the back of your mind when you evaluating. When somebody says a refinery, a certain piece of energy infrastructure was hit, you know what to look for. What’s interesting here are two things. Number one, it took the Russians more than three days to put out the fire and they put it out the wrong way, using water in, you know, the near Arctic winter, which caused a lot of water to freeze and then expand and break more infrastructure damage assessments are still underway.

We don’t know how bad it was. And it had this been a normal attack, we would have known within 24 hours whether or not anything substantial had been done. But here we are nearly a week out and we still really don’t have any more but the vaguest ideas and the facility is shut down. Now, there’s a lot of reasons why this matters.

Number one, while the Europeans have put sanctions on seaborne crude, seaborne oil product is in a loophole. So they were still taking stuff from this facility. And with its shut down, all of a sudden sanctions have gone up to a whole new level. And we’re going to have a very good idea of how the Europeans can absorb or not.

This newest change. Quick add on the Ukrainian attack on US. Luger was on Sunday, the 21st in less than 72 hours later. The Russians were able to begin shipping out again. However, what is being shipped out is primarily oil, almost exclusively oil and something called condensate, which is kind of a raw product somewhere between natural gas and oil.

The actual refining complex remains completely offline. There’s no naphtha, there’s no fuel, there’s no intermediate products that are coming out at all. And at present, the Russians are still completing their damage assessments. And at the pace they’re going, we probably won’t have any information on the level of damage until probably March. And then with their very, very thin remaining skin of skilled labor, they can start talking about repairs.

Second, this is the first significant Ukrainian attack against a significant economic asset of the Russian Federation. And at least on the surface, it looks like it was much more successful than they ever thought was possible. That means that the northern parts of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland are suddenly in a danger zone that is well within the Ukrainians proven range of operation.

Now, the Ukrainians and the Russians haven’t really gone against civilian shipping right now, but I can’t think of a better target than an oil loading and refining platform such as what we’ve got. And it was ooyala. Again, apologies for the inaction. We’re just going to put the spelling right here so you can see what I’m having the trouble with.

Okay, So this is the sort of thing we should now watch for in the future, because this is not the only facility of this type which is within the Ukrainians reach. There are a number of facilities that no virus sees on the Black Sea and two ops on the Black Sea and closer to St Petersburg, also on the Gulf of Finland.

And now that the Ukrainians are proving that a few things can slip through, you can bet that they’re going to target all of them and all told, if you look at all of the infrastructure combined, it’s combined export and throughput capacity is in the vicinity of three and a half million barrels a day, which is about three and a half percent of global output.

So if you put a meaningful dent in the export infrastructure, it’s impossible for the Russians to shunt this stuff somewhere else. There’s nowhere else to go. And so it just backs up through the system. There’s also one other thing to look at the fact that the damage control crews proved to be so incompetent is something that we’re starting to see at the edges as the Russian economic system frays.

The Soviet educational system collapsed back in 1986, which means that the youngest people who are worthy of terms like engineer, turned 64 this year. And so when I think of fire suppression, I think of something that normally I could not just pick up the hose and go do it. You want someone with specialized training, and especially if you’re talking about petroleum, natural gas or refined product fires, you definitely want someone has some idea what they’re doing.

Russia is running out of those people. It’s not just that a million people have fled the country and a half a million have been drafted and committed to the war being killed. They don’t have much of a skilled labor pool left. And what they do have is being dedicated to the war itself. Air defense in the vicinity of the war, or the military industrial complex to keep the war going.

So we’re seeing some very serious phrase with the system. This this is not the sort of thing that they should have gotten wrong. That fire should have been put out very quickly with things like foam, and it wasn’t. And that suggests the Russians ability to maintain their overall system is starting to feel the strain of all of this.

And they don’t have a backup plan. There isn’t enough labor in the country to redirect from somewhere else, especially skilled labor. All right. That’s it for me. Take care.

 

North Korean Missiles Heading to Russia, Part Two

A missile being fired against a blue sky

We’re back with part two of Russia’s missile-sourcing escapade. Today we’re looking at the specifics of these North Korean missiles and their significance.

The North Korean’s are sending the Russians some of their KN-23 and 25 missiles, which are limited range (max. 400 miles) and low accuracy models. This means that each of these missiles is a war crime waiting to happen, but what’s another drop in that bucket? Unfortunately, this has just dumped a new load of gasoline onto the fire that is the Ukraine War.

The Russians will be able to use these missiles in conjunction with satellite guidance to close in that accuracy ring a bit. In the meantime, they’ll be gathering insights on the technological capabilities of the North Korean and Iranian missile systems.

Once the Russians mesh the missile and satellite tech together, the Ukrainians will be facing a much more intimidating Russia than before.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from? Well, there’s no other word for it. It’s a frigid Colorado this morning. We’re right at two degrees Fahrenheit. Anyway, I want to do a follow on to a little bit. We we talked yesterday on the transfer of North Korean missiles to Russia. The models in question are called KN-23 and 25.

They have a very limited range and they’re not particularly accurate when the North Koreans use them. The accuracy range is typically 100 to 200 meters. So they’re not much. Well, they’re just not smart. There are most artillery actually hits more reliably than they do with the add on of satellite guidance. And a little bit of extra hardware. You could probably get them into the 50 to 100 meter range.

Now, this is important for two reasons. Number one, it means that every missile that the Russians fire in the general direction of a population center, which is where most of these things are being used in Ukraine, is almost by definition a war crime. So, you know, we’re we’re now getting half of we’re past 150,000 documented incidents. So if the war crimes tribunals ever do happen to happen at the end of this war, who is to be a lot to do?

But the second and slightly more important in the long range point of view is the assistance, the military assistance, the supply assistance that the North Koreans and to a lesser degree the Iranians are providing the Russians. Is it just important for the war or to get an intelligence look at what the North Korean and the Iranian systems can do technologically?

And from a production point of view, the Russians are also promising that both countries are satellite tech, or at least the ability of the Russians to launch a satellite for them. And so if you marry Russian satellite tech, which doesn’t have to be top notch to provide guidance to C weapon systems, and you apply it to these two laggard countries, you can actually make a fairly significant improvement in their capacity to target going from a 200 meter range to a 100 meter range, obviously is a significant step up.

So I don’t mean to belittle any part of this transfer system that is going on. It’s just a question of time. Okay. That’s all I got for now.

Why Are the Russians Shopping for Missiles?

The Russian military industrial complex can’t keep up with the demands of the Ukraine War, so the Russians are sourcing large quantities of short-range ballistic missiles from North Korea and Iran.

This reveals, or confirms suspicions, that Russia’s production capacity for certain weapons systems has collapsed. Specifically, the Russians are sticking with their Soviet roots and purchasing Scud-like missiles for their outdated systems from the 60s and 70s. As the faux Scuds make their way to the front lines, Western intelligence will get a glimpse at North Korean and Iranian military capabilities.

Of course the Russians will deny this, but when you see some gold-heavy planes trickling over to Iran and North Korea…don’t be surprised. However, the Russians aren’t the only ones getting prepared. A number of European countries have ordered Patriot missiles and Germany has reversed its plan to decommission its military.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. One of the bits of news that came across my screen as I was flat on my back with a thrown muscle is that the Russians have started to contact the North Koreans and the Iranians about purchasing large numbers of short range ballistic missiles. Now, the concept of the Russians shopping around for weapons systems for the Ukraine war, that’s not new.

And the two systems that have seen the most activity of the Shaheed drones, which are those moped drones, really loud ones, the fly in a straight line, those are from Iran. The Russians have been launching those at Ukraine for months and then artillery from North Korea because the burn rate for Russian artillery is an order of magnitude or more than what they can produce for themselves.

But this time they’re going for short range ballistic missiles. Now, this tells us a series of things. First of all, it gives us a really good peek into just how horrible the Russian military industrial complex is. The Russians had stopped or at least slowed the making of most of these things. If you remember back to the Gulf War of 1991, the Scuds, that’s the class of missile that we’re talking about.

They’re not advanced. They were developed in the sixties, in the seventies. They’re so basic that even the Iraqis had their own weapons program where they would make their own. They’re not particularly accurate. They don’t have much of a range. And the Russians had intended to replace all of their Scuds with Iskander, which are a weapon system that is more accurate with a little bit longer range.

But it’s turned out that the Russians can’t produce those in any meaningful number. And since they have already scaled back their ability to produce the older weapons in the first place, they’ve got to go somewhere else. They don’t have a significant skill set in military technologies anymore to speed everything up at the same time. And so this is something where they simply have to shop around to find it.

Okay. So that’s number one. And number two, we’re going to get a really good look at the inside of the military industrial complex in the military capabilities of both North Korea and Iran here. We think of these countries as being, you know, warlike, but they haven’t actually been involved in a major war for quite some time in the case of the Iranians, it was in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution that brought the mullahs to power.

That was the Iran-Iraq war. So in 1998, it was the last time we saw the Iranians actually going at it. And in the case of the Koreans, you know, we got third hand reports from countries that have bought a few of their missiles here and there. But for the most part, you’ve got to go back to the 1950s for the Korean War, which ended in 1953 when these weapon systems didn’t even exist.

So if you’re in Western intelligence or Western militaries, you’re going to be really curious to see how these things look. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it sucks to be Ukraine in this situation. But in terms of kind of lifting up the skirt and being able to see what’s going on, this is going to be a really robust intelligence gathering operation.

Then we’ve got the third thing. What are the North Koreans and the Iranians getting for this? There were some reports early on that the North Koreans were going to get some sort of intercontinental ballistic missile technology from the Russians in exchange for artillery shells. And there may indeed be some of that. But it appears that the Russians are giving the North Koreans the runaround like they did to the Indians.

The Indians spent billions of dollars in years giving money to the Russians in order to develop a joint cruise missile called the Brahmos. And the Indians are now not in public, but behind closed doors, admitting that all the money was just stolen and that they’re never going to get that weapons system and it’s time for them to move on.

And it seems that some version of that is going on with the North Koreans as well, though the Russians have talked a big talk, but the number of people that they have that can actually do the work is so small and they’re all working on weapons projects within Russia. There isn’t a lot to spare in terms of sending it to the North Koreans, which leads us to what the Russians do have.

And that’s a goal. The Russians are under any number of sanctions. They can’t use the U.S. dollar in international markets. The Chinese aren’t really even interested in having their own yuan. So bilateral trade there has proceeded, but not by the volume that the Russians would like. And nobody wants the ruble. In fact, some governments have made it very publicly to how little they think of the Russian currency.

And so the solution is gold. Russia is arguably the the world’s largest second largest, the third largest gold producer here. And then their gold reserves, both in terms of bullion and partially processed gold, are completely off the books. And they’ve got a stockpile that they don’t admit to. So probably they’re the world’s largest producer, the world’s largest processor and the world’s largest holder of gold bullion.

In addition to having a massive stockpile of stuff that they could process into finish bullion if they wanted to. And so it appears what they’re doing is when they have a lot of stuff that they want to buy and they’ve got a long list of these days because there are so many tech sanctions, is they simply load up a plane with gold bullion and fly it to the country or the entity that they’re buying stuff from.

So expect to see some version. So Marine jets weighed down by gold flying across the Caspian to get to Iran or flying across Siberia to get to North Korea to pay for this stuff. I may be laughing because it’s so weird, but. But it works. It’s un trackable. And once the gold gets into the Iranian, another country in systems, it’s a fairly straightforward process to get it laundered through a place like Switzerland or especially the United Arab Emirates.

Those are the places that do the gold certification. So this is the path we’re on right now. It’s a little nonstandard, but it is definitely showing a lot of light on a lot of things that we haven’t had good information on for a very long time. And Russia’s propensity to throw the kitchen sink and everything that’s not nailed down in the Ukraine war necessity, need to, you know, do this.

Massive arms shopping has encouraged other countries to alter their defense systems. And we now have a coalition of European countries that have placed an order for over 1000 Patriot missiles so they can shoot down all of this stuff that the Russians are now buying up so that they can throw. And the country that has placed the largest order is a country that just two years ago was quiet.

Lee in the midst of its plans to decommission its entire military because it was so committed to global peace, and that would be Germany. They’ve now come full circle and now they’re arming up as quickly as they possibly can manage, which in German terms is still not all that fast because there’s a lot of paperwork, but still.

US Navy Strikes Houthi Forces in Yemen

Things in the Red Sea have ramped up yet again. The Houthis, who are an Iranian-backed Shiite group in Yemen, launched a series of missile and drone attacks on international shipping. Early today, the United States conducted a retaliatory air assault on Houthi targets.

In response to an increase in assaults on commercial shipping and an anti-ship missile being launched toward US naval assets, the US targeted Houthi command and control systems, radar, and ammunition storage facilities. Only time will tell if the US is serious about getting involved in this region, and it will likely depend on Iran’s willingness to engage in discussion with the Biden Administration.

Everything about this region is complex (and I have very little desire to dive too deep), so we’ll leave it at “complex.” In all likelihood, we’ll see Iran push the Houthis away from a conflict with the US in favor of directing any assets toward their regional rival, Saudi Arabia.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Phoenix Airport today and talk about a part of the world that I really don’t care for at all. And that’s in Yemen. There’s been an insurgency going on in Yemen since, I don’t know, Paleolithic period, multiple sides. You’ve got a relatively secular ish government. You’ve got a Sunni militia that’s kind of an officially or semiofficial affiliated with Al Qaeda.

And then you’ve got a Shiite group called the Houthis that are wildly incompetent at most work and really can’t hold themselves together. There’s very little that’s worth fighting over that you have a little natural gas. But once this boiled up, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago, everyone puzzlingly got out of that business. The water tables crashed. Most agricultural production isn’t even going to food.

It’s going to something like Qot, which is a mild narcotic. That’s kind of a very, very mild version of like cocaine and shrooms put together that most of the population is high on all the time. Really not a lot going on there that matters to anyone but the detailed depth you need to command in order to say anything.

Intelligence extreme. So it’s like that perfect mix of irrelevance and tedium that I just Treadwell avoid at all costs. Unfortunately, since the Gaza war got started, they’ve started to be cooking off missiles and drones at international shipping going through the Red Sea. Their position is on the eastern side of the bubble MANDEB, which is on the extreme southern southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

And they actually do have the ability to reach in there if they put their minds to it. Of course, they are incapable of making their own weapons. I mean, this is a place where sticks and stones are the highlight of the technology. So all the weapons are brought in from Iran. Who is specifically backing the Houthis in this multi-sided fight?

The Iranians like to do that because it’s on the far side of Saudi Arabia, who is the regional rival. And everyone’s while the Houthis are, let’s be honest here, every once while the Iranians use Houthi cover in order to launch some missiles and some drones into Saudi targets. For their part, the Saudis have not really taken the bait in the traditional sense.

I mean, yes, they have invaded, but really they’re just using everything in Yemen as target practice because they know there’s no way that they’ve got the military capacity to actually root out these groups. So they basically aim for the blue roof is what I like to call it, in anticipation of someday the Iranians actually driving down through Iraq and Kuwait to the Saudi oil fields.

Basically, the Saudis are preparing by getting their fighter pilots some target practice, which, you know, it’s not stupid, it’s just inhumane. Anyway, back in 2022, the Saudis and the Houthis signed a side that makes it sound so formal they agreed to a peace deal or ceasefire anyway. And since then, the Houthis with the Iranians have been stockpiling weapons in anticipation of the next outbreak of hostilities.

Well, and the aftermath of the October 17th assault on Israeli targets by Hamas, we now have this war in Gaza. And the Houthis are saying that they’re cooking off missiles and attacking shipping that is affiliated with Israel and by affiliated Israel. What they really mean is anything that happens to go by because they don’t really have a good way to identify anything.

So they’ve just been shooting whatever they see. Well, local time in the middle of the night on January 12, the United States launched a moderate sized air assault using some Tomahawks and some fighter bombers on who the targets saying that they were targeting a few command and control systems, a little bit of radar and mostly the ammo dumps and processing facilities where the Houthis launch these things from.

Now, this is a fairly big chunk of territory. This isn’t like the tiny little pipsqueak of territory that Gaza is. This is actually, you know, something almost size Colorado. I think I’ll get back to you on that one. So clearing out the Houthies is definitely not an option without a Iraq style invasion, and that is not in the cards.

The question, of course, is how serious is the Biden administration about this? We’ve seen 12% of global trade get disrupted by these drone and missile assaults. So they’d have to put their back into it if the United States really wanted to stop this. It’s not clear that that’s the goal. And in fact, I’m fairly certain it’s not. You see, there was a precipitating event earlier in the day before the strikes.

The amount of assaults on the commercial shipping have been incrementally increasing. But what was different about the 12th is that a ballistic anti-ship missile was launched to U.S. naval assets and within hours, the United States shot back. It’s not that the United States is overly concerned about shipping, despite the PR, but you shoot at a Navy vessel if you vessel will return fire.

So I’m sure the message is being delivered quietly to the Iranians right now is like, you know, you do what you feel you need to. Just know that if you target us again, this is going to be a lot more involved. And it’s not just going to be the Houthis that are getting shot back at. Remember that every drop of oil that Iran exports goes to the Strait of Hormuz and everyone likes to make an unknown about the possibility of Iran closing the strait.

But they actually need it more than most of the other producers in the region. Will that be enough? I mean, time will tell, but there’s reason to be at least partially optimistic because something similar happened back in 2016 when the Houthis targeted an American naval asset and a lot of their stuff got blown up within the next couple of days.

And there haven’t been threats against U.S. naval assets since until today. So there’s some capability here for this to be smoothed out, but ultimately comes down to whether or not the Iranians are willing to actually have a conversation with the Biden administration about anything. Now, the Iranians do have a stronger support relationship with the Houthis than they do with, say, Hamas.

Hamas is Sunni and Arab, whereas the Iranians are largely Persian and Shia. So the Iranians have always seen Hamas as completely disposable. They don’t really care about it. They’re happy with what’s going on in the Israel Hamas war in Gaza, but they’re not going to intervene in any meaningful way to protect something that they don’t even consider to be an asset.

Who these little bit different? They are Shia. And so there’s a little bit more camaraderie and like needling Israel, which is, you know, convenient and fun and good for PR in Iran and around the Arab world, maybe only in Saudi Arabia. Their primary regional foe is a much more strategically important thing. So there’s leverage on both sides here.

But ultimately, the Iranians would love to keep the Houthis focused on Saudi Arabia because that’s where the money is and that’s where the future conflict for the Iranians ultimately will be. And they would love for the United States to stick out of this. So they’ve been basically needling the United States and needling Israel because it’s good P.R. across the Middle East.

But I don’t think they’re really interested in bleeding for it, because their real fight requires every asset they have later on. So I would guess that we’re going to see things simmer down in Yemen and I can go back to ignoring it.