Japanese Weapons Are Open for Export

Japan tanks and military parade

Japan has lifted its long-standing restriction on exporting weapons. This will bring some fresh dynamism to the global defense industry, specifically in naval manufacturing and drones.

While the impact will likely be gradual, Japan is already fleshing out plans to supply ships to Australia. The real impact will be seen when Japan’s decades of investment in automation are on display, which positions it to become a major drone producer. Collaborations with Ukraine are just the first glimpse of what could evolve from this.

As Japan leans into defense exports, it could very well reshape modern warfare and emerge as a leading global drone power.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Nashville. Today we’re going to talk about something actually happened about a week ago. The Japanese changed their legal structures so they can now, for the first time since World War two, export weapons. So the question is, how big of an impact that this have? In what sectors over what sort of time? 

Japan has the world’s second largest navy, but they have always, by design, not had a particularly large military because of the whole World War II thing. And in all operational terms, the United States more or less operates their military on a tactical level whenever we decide what we want to. So that is, encourage the Japanese to not do a whole lot. 

And so in terms of percent of GDP, which is a threshold that most people use for defense spending, the Japanese have actually dipped down to as low as about 1% as of ten years ago. Now, as China has become more of a threat, that has risen and they’re now spending just under 2%. And, you know, if you double the size of your defense budget, you would think that your military industrial complex would expand. 

And it has, but not by as much as you might think. The Japanese are working from the theory that before we get all the hardware, we should make sure that we have the right people and the training regimen works hard to argue, and that means that the defense expansion hasn’t really kept up. So a sudden change and the ability to export weapons doesn’t immediately translate into those weapons being available. 

But this is still Japan, one of the most technologically advanced cultures with the fastest rate of change in technology, in manufacturing, in human history. And now that they can access the market, they’re going to. So kind of phase one is there are 20 countries that they consider allies, which can includes most of NATO where weapons are now legal to sell to. 

And the question is what are they going to do? The obvious one is ships, especially small ships. And they’ve already cut a number of deals, including with, say, Australia, to turn more ships out of their shipyards and get them out there. And since the Japanese Navy is one of the three most powerful on the planet at the moment the Brits, the Japanese and the Americans, I don’t doubt that they can do that in number in a relatively short period of time, but it’s the second phase that I’m really interested in. 

Japan is a partially robotic society. This is a country that has been aging very, very quickly and as the world’s oldest average population. And so 15 or 20 years ago, they established a national robot strategy to basically automate and robotics, whatever part of their economy that they could, because they knew they weren’t going to have the people and they knew that the people were going to need the obsessed. 

You mate that with what is going on in this second phase of the revolution in military affairs, and all of a sudden some really interesting things can come out of the drone world, because when it comes to actuators and things like that, the Japanese have been doing it for decades. So we now have a deal in place already between the Japanese and the Ukrainians to bring Japanese production capacity to Ukrainian drone tech. 

You put those two things together a fast adapting, automated workforce with a very quick turnaround on things like prototyping. And you’re talking about Japan becoming a massive drone power in probably less than two years. And now they have export capacity. So I don’t know what they’re going to look like, but we’re going to have Japanese built drones produced in mass and exported in mass in the not too distant future. 

And we’re only at the very beginning of understanding what drone warfare means in general. We are utterly unprepared for what it means when the Japanese take lead in that sector.

The Iran War Approaches a Tipping Point

Missiles with Iranian flags on them

The Iran war is approaching a painful tipping point this week. Global energy flows remain in a chokehold, and economic conditions are worsening worldwide.

This week’s shift will be caused by Iran’s oil storage reaching capacity. Once that happens, Iran will have to shut in wells, which will cause long-term damage to production capacity. The fallout from that will be sure to get the IRGC riled up.

Now that the real decision-makers will feel the pressure, there will be an opening for policy change. The outcome, however, remains uncertain.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Nashville. You are going to see this video on Monday the 27th. And this week is going to be a big week in the Iran war. We’re in this painful economic state where both the Iranians and the United States are blockading traffic in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused any number of problems downstream, whether it’s jet fuel shortages or just general economic dislocation, it’s bad. 

It’s getting worse. It will continue to get worse for months. This is not something we’re going to fix this year or probably even next year. But for the first time, by the end of this week, the people in Iran who matter will finally feel some pain. One of the aspects of the American blockade is to make sure that the Iranians cannot get crude out. 

Now, normally, Iran only exports about a million barrels a day, but based on buffers in their storage system at a place called Kharg Island, they can surge out if they have stuff that’s already on site. What that does mean, however, is that once the blockade is in, that storage starts to fill up. Most people estimate that they have between 30 and 35 million barrels of storage and Kharg. 

And that’s really all the storage they have in the country for crude. And now that we’ve had the blockade in place for quite a bit, we’re probably going to see that storage hit full capacity this week, probably on Thursday or Friday, which means for the first time, it’s not an issue of short term income disruption. It’s a question of the Iranians then having to forcibly shut in their wells. 

You see, it’s one thing to cut off their day to day income for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, a few years, whatever happens to be if they know they can ultimately still get it out. But if you clog up the system and prevent exports completely, then they have to shut in wells, and those wells will never come back on in the same way. 

And they might have to do some redrawing, which means a long term degradation of their capacity to generate income at all over the years to come. Now, the people who are calling most of the shots right now are with the IRGC. That’s the paramilitary organization that enforces security, that controls the missile force that has been doing most of the drone attacks, and they make their money by a combination of smuggling and oil sales. 

So for the first time in this war, they actually have a reason to change policy. Is that something that is going to happen? You know, who knows. But this is the first time they will actually feel pain. And if there is going to be something that the Trump administration is going to do to take advantage of that, we get the beginnings of that strategy by the end of this week. 

Way too soon to suggest that there’s going to be success or failure in any particular direction. But this is the first thing that the United States has done for long enough that matters to the people who are actually making the decisions.

Underwater Drones and the Future of Naval Warfare

An unmanned Underwater vehicle drone about to be dropped into the ocean | Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_underwater_vehicle#/media/File:Unmanned_Underwater_Vehicle_operations_130605-N-AZ907-046.jpg

Drones have been all the rage in the Ukraine War, and they will continue to be one of the primary topics of warfare in the near future, but do underwater drones have any place in this conversation?

Underwater drones just don’t have the same use case that airborne drones have. Torpedoes have been around since the 19th century, so these underwater drones aren’t doing anything groundbreaking. Surface maritime drones are a different story. These remote-controlled jet skis strapped with explosives have been wreaking havoc on Russian vessels.

So, forget the underwater drones and focus on the surface-drone tech, especially if you’re in places like the Taiwan Strait or the Japan Strait. As these innovations roll in, we’re looking at a full restructuring of the global maritime shipping sector.

Note: This video was recorded last year during one of Peter’s backpacking trips.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Lost canyon. Got a little interesting stuff. I’m gonna have to climb through tomorrow, but you know, that’s tomorrow’s problem. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page, and it’s specifically about drones, specifically underwater drones. And the question is, as did globalization really kicks in, do I expect underwater drones to play a role in some of the major things that are coming, like the just incorporation of China or perhaps Korean unification? 

Probably not. Unlike airborne drones, underwater drones are missing a couple key factors and its range and detection radius. The technologies that have allowed airborne drones to do their thing better optics, better power management, lighter materials really don’t change the math for an underwater, weapons platform, but can’t see any further than they did before. 

The range is limited by the fuel type. It’s having a little bit bigger Battery isn’t going to do all that much of a difference. And being able to get things to where they need to go, probably not a very big play. The only way that underwater drones might make, might see bigger plays are, is if they were dropped off by submarines closer to their targets. 

But, you know, we would call those normally torpedoes. We already have that technology, so we’re not really, doing much here. We’re just kind of reinventing the wheel. Now, that’s under water. Drone. So does it mean that maritime drones aren’t moving forward and don’t have a role to play? But it’ll probably be surface drones. One of the things that the Ukrainians have shown us is they can take a jet ski or a small motorboat packed with an explosives, basically strap a control system to the steering column and off it goes with five, six, 700 pounds of Boom-boom. And when it hits a ship, that ship has a big problem. And using water, drones, maritime drones, surface drones, Ukrainians have done an immense amount of damage to the Russian Navy because pretty much all of the weapon systems that are on traditional naval vessels are designed to shoot up at things like planes. They’re not designed to shoot down at things that are in the water. 

And so we’ve seen the Russians basically have to defend their vessels with dudes on the deck with machine guns and RPGs, and it’s not a very effective thing. So if you take maritime drones and introduce them into constrained waters like, say, the Taiwan Strait or the Japan Strait, all of a sudden you do have a very different sort of system because these sorts of drones do have ranges of a few hundred miles, already. 

And that’s just by retrofitting, platforms like jet skis that already exist. As soon as you start taking, the technologies that the Ukrainians have built and use them on a completely new chassis, you can have a lot more range. And then we’re talking about a fundamentally different system. And if you’re talking about defending a civilian vessel in that sort of environment, that’s going to get a lot harder. 

At least naval vessels have the possibilities of having jamming and having things like a ready supply of RPGs. Now, this does bring us to another topic that we’re going to have to find out the hard way. And that’s the general militarization of cargo ships. Because it’s coming soon. There are not not not not enough military vessels on the planet, to be able to patrol the sea lanes to a degree that would be necessary for the type of security breakdown that we’re facing. 

So the only way we’re going to be able to maintain even a modicum of globalized trade is if cargo ships, whether they’re container ships or, bulk ERS or tankers themselves, are able to mount their own weapons systems, and that will also most likely be airborne drones, because that’s the only thing that can get the radius and maybe the strike capacity to take out something like a surface drone before it gets to you.

U.S. Ground Troops Coming to Iran

Squad of Soldiers Running Forward and Atacking Enemy During Military Operation in the Desert | Licensed by Envato Elements: https://app.envato.com/search/photos/b369387a-4bc2-43d2-808a-0341aa11dbcc?itemType=photos&term=military+desert&sort=relevance

The U.S. is preparing for a potential ground operation in Iran. Marines from the USS Tripoli and Boxer, as well as elements from the 82nd Airborne, could be looped in. That’s roughly 8,000 troops, which is just a small-scale, fast-response force, but no matter the size, boots on the ground is a scary endeavour.

If Kharg Island is in fact the target, the retaliation from Iran would be massive. This is Iran’s main oil export hub, which means it’s the main revenue source as well; with that gone, Iran would unleash hell. And Kharg Island would be extremely difficult for U.S. forces to defend; they would be under constant threat of drone strikes, and quite exposed.

Another plan would be to use these troops for targeted raids along the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting Iran’s ability to attack shipping.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you on March 25th from inside the house in Colorado because, false alarm. I’m not getting better and sicker. Anyway, I’m going to talk about, Iran today, specifically what’s going on? Ground troops, which looks like they’re absolutely going to be used. This is a bad idea from any number of matters, but let me give you an idea of what’s in play and what it might be used for, and we’ll go from there. 

So, as you may remember, the USS Tripoli, that’s one of America’s amphibious assault carriers, carries a clutch of F-35 fighter jets, as well as 2000 to 2500 Marines. Relocated from the Philippine Sea and the ceiling through the Indian Ocean. Now, it will probably arrive in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf in the next day or two. 

We also have the USS boxer, which is another EU marine expeditionary unit. That’s basically what the Tripoli is, which has left San Diego. It will not be an area for probably close to three weeks, but the news from yesterday is that the 82nd airborne, which is kind of America’s rapid reaction force, troops that are run by the army, that are mated with permanent transport aircraft that can deploy to anywhere in the world in less than 48 hours. 

They were given the marching orders to move to the Middle East, last night. And we’ll probably. Well, they could be moving right now. You know, all hush hush classified. But when the, orders are given, it’s usually not too long until they’re on their way. Collectively, in three weeks. This means we have about 8000 troops in the region. 

And they’re really heavy hitters. Basically, unless you’re going to move into special operations, the Marines and the airborne are about as good as they get without having armor. And that’s something else that’s important to note. So this is not a traditional ground invasion where we’re driving tanks and using artillery. This would be a relatively light force that punches above its weight for what it is, but is not designed to take on another major force. 

Keep in mind that if the Iranians don’t have another major force, so that should be fine in that regard, they may have a million man army, but it’s apparently designed to shoot civilians rather than swarm over foreign countries. Now, the news is going on and on and on and on about something called Kharg Island. As someone has highlighted Kharg Island 15 years ago, part of me is like, yeah, you finally, but I really doubt that’s the target. 

Or more to the point, I really doubt that that should be the target. Kharg Island is a small facility off the western coast of southwestern Iran. It’s up in the northern Gulf. It doesn’t have a bridge to it. It was built by foreigners, and it has a subsea pipeline that basically carries all Persian Gulf crude to it, because the Persian Gulf Coast is really, really bad to accept tankers. 

It’s just very shallow and muddy. So they have this island out where they can accept tankers. And it is the point for plus of Iran’s oil exports. And what we’ve seen in the war so far is that the United States came in completely unprepared for the idea that something might happen to the Persian Gulf and really didn’t have the hardware or the positioning in place to protect ships in the Gulf, or make sure that the Iranians couldn’t attack ships in the Gulf. 

So everyone’s now focusing on Kharg. And the logic seems to be that Donald Trump wants to make another fucking deal. And the idea is that if the United States occupies Kharg Island, then Trump will have a negotiating card to play against Iran elsewhere. So we will give you Kharg Island back. If you stop attacking places in the Gulf, specifically if you allow the Strait of Hormuz to be open. 

I will tell you bluntly, in anyone who studies, the Middle East will tell you bluntly and, that that will not work, because that will remove Iran’s oil income and then the gloves will really come off. And as we’ve seen, when the Israelis attacked a natural gas processing facility last week, the Iranians had more than enough, weapons left to open up on infrastructure throughout the Gulf. And they did well over $100 billion of damage in a matter of hours. You would probably get something like that. In addition, Kharg Island, is not going to be easy to defend. 

one of the things the United States has been doing is its carriers haven’t even come in the Gulf. One has been off in the Arabian Sea, the other one has been off in the Red sea. 

They’ve been fighting Iran at a distance. If you’re going to put a few thousand troops in Kharg, you’re going to need close in support. And it is within 30 miles of the coast. And the Iranians will hit it with everything they have, because the ability hit several thousand American troops with limited defenses right up and close. Oh, man, they’ve been waiting for a situation like that the entire war. 

It would basically be putting them in the most vulnerable way you could imagine. And now, like I said, anyone who knows anything about this region or oil politics or how defenses work would have told president that this isn’t how things go. But the president isn’t being told anything. The people in the Department of Energy and the DoD who were responsible for studying things like chokepoints and, the Strait of Hormuz specifically, were all fired last year. 

And the same goes for basically any sort of strategic planning or think work. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of Defense, has been going on a crusade in his, Anything that does not actively support the warfighter is being cut out of the Department of the defense, and that removes all education that would allow people to make educated decisions about, say, what you do in war. 

So when I say that this is a Donald Trump plan, this is a Donald Trump plan. He’s no longer allowing information to reach him, with the possible exception of through Dean Cain, who is Joint Chiefs of Staff. And that’s about the only voice of caution he’s get. And so far, he has overruled Cain on really everything of substance. 

So if this is where we’re going, this is going to end in a bit of a debacle. The only other thing that I can think of were 8000 troops that are heavy on the insidious component might be of use, as in the Strait of Hormuz itself, if you put, Marines and airborne in that area, and enable them to do land strikes, rapid and then retreat land strikes up and down the Strait of Hormuz, you can probably limit the ability of Iran to launch attacks on civilian tankers. 

And since the United States doesn’t have the ships, doesn’t have the hardware to do a meaningful convoy system, this might be the next best plan. It’s not a great one, but I would find it much more viable than, say, going after Kharg. That’s my $0.02. Anyway, that’s where we are right now. The Tripoli will arrive within 48 hours, and the 82nd could be there at the same time. 

So if you only feel you need two thirds of these forces, you get going on it right away. If you decide you need the full 8000, you have to wait for the boxer to arrive. And that will not be until the second week of April. Anyway, pieces are moving so that these options are available. Whether they are used, of course, depends upon, what Trump feels, because that’s all that matters in this war.

Marines, Uranium, and a Symbolic Win?

Claims that the U.S. will end the war by seizing Iranian assets make no strategic sense. Targeting Kharg Island or removing the uranium from Isfahan with ground operations is just too risky.

These narratives are likely just a reflection of the U.S. searching for a symbolic win, rather than a practical military plan. But this conflict could be pushing Iran closer to nuclear armament. Iran’s ability to quickly build a bomb wasn’t enough deterrence, so building a bomb appears to be the only option left.

As the war escalates and moderates are sidelined (or killed), the Iran war will grow less coherent and much more dangerous.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the San Antonio airport. Today it’s the 17th of March, and there’s a lot of stuff going on in the news related to the Iran war that I find a little concerning. So I wanted to lay out what a few things are and are not, and hopefully some clarity will come out of this. 

So there’s a lot of talk in US media, especially, being leaked out of the administration deliberately, like straight from the white House, that, in order to conclude the war, they need to remove the enriched uranium from the equation. And the idea is that this meu that’s a marine expeditionary unit with the USS Tripoli that is currently enroute from East Asia to the Persian Gulf, is doing so in order to participate with that. 

So the two dominant theories are that the United States wants to put boots on the ground in a place called Kharg Island, which serves as the destination point for about 90% of the crude that Iran produces. It’s the sole loading facility that they have for super tankers. 

It’s on the northern part of the Gulf, about 30km off the coast. The second theory is that they want to remove they being the United States government, wants to remove the enriched uranium that Iran has from contention. That stuff is in a place called Isfahan, which is about 40 miles inland. Neither of these really match the facts. In the case of Kharg Island, there’s a single pipeline. 

There’s no bridge. So actually, if you wanted to take this out of the equation, you dropped one bomb on one pumping station on shore, and you cut it down with minimal damage, and it would be easy repair later. So there’s no need to put boots on the ground and car gets off. All that would do would be to open you up to potential counterattacks from the shore. 

Now, the Iranians couldn’t, like, surge across the street then with ground troops, but they could continually attack any American forces there with drones, for example. And if you were going to have a ship supporting Marines on card, all of a sudden you’ve given them a big, fat, easy to shoot target. That was stupid, just monumentally stupid. But so would going after for harm because it’s behind one is one of the first places that we hit during the war. 

We also hit them in July or sorry, June of last year. Sorry. It’s angry that time. I guess it is. You have been, This farm is under hundreds of tons of rubble, and it’s 400 miles inland. So the 2500 Marines that are with the Tripoli, there’s no way that they could land moved to his farm, somehow, magically excavate hundreds of tons of debris and then move the canisters of enriched uranium back to the coast. 

That’s assuming that the canisters are over 90% purified already, which is highly unlikely. so the hardware that is now moving in, the conversations that are being deliberately had publicly just don’t match the facts on the ground. I wish I had a clearer idea of what was going on here, but it’s pretty obvious that the administration is looking for a way out and looking for a way to manufacture a success. 

Just keep in mind that the position of this administration, and by this I mean the Iranian administration going back 35 years, has always been that if we get a new goal, we will be attacked. So we want a nuclear program that can create a nuke in a short period of time. You know, six months, but we don’t actually want to get the bomb. 

So the idea is that the deterrent is the program, not an actual weapon, or at least that’s what they believed. Until June of last year and in June of last year, Israel, the United States attacked anyway. And so the conversation then was basically, do we now need to have the bomb? So we have an actual turn? 

And regardless of how that conversation worked out over the last several months, this month with the new attack that killed, among other people, the Supreme leader and the conversation has changed. And now it’s like, of course we need a nuke. And everyone that the United States has are so far coming. I as assistance most recently Larijani all of these people by Iranian standards were moderates who favored negotiation with the United States as opposed to nuke. 

So pieces in motion, not a lot of it makes a huge amount of sense strategically right now, but not a lot of how God makes a lot of strategic sense either.

The Iran War: Enter Sting Interceptors

Drone-intercepting Sting drone being prepared for launch | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sting_drone-interceptor_being_prepared_for_launch.png#/media/File:Sting_drone-interceptor_being_prepared_for_launch.png

Defenses in the Persian Gulf are collapsing as Iran continues large drone attacks, but there’s a country that already has the answer. Enter Ukraine’s Sting interceptor.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is late on the 15th of March, giving you an idea of what’s happened over the weekend in the Iran war. A few big developments. Number one, it’s very clear that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are almost entirely out of interceptors. And we’re seeing more and more shots getting through to that. 

And the Iranians have warned citizens of the UAE in the vicinity of military facilities and ports to move, because it is the Iranian intent in the next few days to basically destroy all of them. Judging from the number of drones that are still coming out, I don’t think they can destroy all of them in that kind of timeframe, but they can certainly wreak immense damage, especially to the energy infrastructure. 

So we’re now at the point we’re seeing the act of disassembly, if you want to use a less horrible term, of the physical infrastructure up and down the Gulf. And when they’re done with the UAE and Kuwait, they will obviously focus on gutter. In Saudi Arabia. We’re also seeing reports that Israel is almost completely out of, interceptors as well. 

And the United States does not have a replacement stock to help with any of the countries, the Trump administration, Donald Trump personally, I should say, has, taken to Truth Social to start demanding that other countries start sending warships to attack Iran. Gone is the bluster that, oh, the war is completely over, and it’s just a matter of tying this up. 

I mean, that was always really stupid. Now it’s being peeled back for the ridiculousness that it is. Specifically, Donald Trump has called upon the Japanese and the Koreans to send ships. A few things here. First of all, the Koreans don’t have the range, so it’s going to be very easy for them to ignore that one second. 

Japan does have the range and like the bar for us getting involved in a war that somebody else has started when we don’t have really the military capacity to appreciably, help. It makes it a bit of a stretch. But more to the point, there’s just the time, these are not countries that maintain navies on a wide ranging global patrol like the United States. 

Nobody does. And so if the Japanese did decide to send a meaningful contingent, they would not arrive in the next two, three weeks. That’s assuming they were ready to go right now, which is an open question. So you can just take that little bit of American propaganda and shove it to the side because it’s irrelevant. 

The other big thing is Ukrainian President Zelensky has said that he has provided the United States with definitive proof about how Russia is assisting Iran in the war with the United States. Specifically, he says it’s a combination of Intel programing and hardware, at the moment. 

the white House has been silent about that. And anyone who knows anything about this region of the Russians is going to know that. 

Of course, that was going to happen because the Russians have been doing it for the last 30 years. And just because we’ve had a change in president, that doesn’t mean that the Russians or the Iranians see the United States any different at all. 

What will probably happen is unless we have a significant shift in attitude out of Donald Trump personally, we will probably see the Ukrainians providing that information to the countries in the Persian Gulf that are actually getting hit so that the Kuwaitis, the Qatari, the Saudis, the Emiratis and everybody else understand exactly, how the United States has screwed this up. 

Once that happens, I would expect the Arab states of the Persian Gulf to start spending just immense amounts of cash in Ukraine to massively expand their capacity to build counter, drone weaponry interceptors. There’s something called the Brave One, which is about a foot long. It and its entire launcher fits into a duffel bag. 

According to the Ukrainians and some countries that have bought some, you can make these things for somewhere between 1 and $3000 each, whereas a shithead costs in the 35 to $55,000 range and a Pac three interceptor, the one to the United States is running out of are 4 million a pop. 

In addition, the United States can only make about 700 PAC threes in a year, whereas the Iranians pre-war could make 700 shitheads in a week. And the Ukrainians can probably make several thousand, brave ones a week as well. But they need industrial infrastructure and plant expansion in order to up their production, both for their own defense as well as for any sort of export sales. 

Say what you will about the Kuwaitis, the Qatari, the Emiratis and the Saudis. They’re not particularly good at anything that involves the military, but they have a lot of cash sitting on hand. You got over $2 trillion in sovereign wealth funds, and we will probably now, within days, see a fairly substantial chunks of that dedicated to investing in Ukrainian infrastructure in a way that we just haven’t seen from the Europeans, much less the United States, in the last year. 

That changes a lot of the math of what is possible and impossible in Russia, in Ukraine, in Europe, in Iran, in the Persian Gulf. We’re now in a position where the best chance for preserving the infrastructure to prevent some sort of global calamity, ironically, runs through Kiev, and Riyadh and Doha and Kuwait City. And the rest are going to come to that realization, probably in the next 48 hours. 

One quick correction on today’s video. The name of the drone right here that the Ukrainians are producing that is in high demand is called the sting, not the brave one. Brave one is the tech incubator that Kiev has set up to facilitate innovation across the entire drone and general defense space. So brave one is the institution. The sting is the actual piece of hardware that everybody is after.

Why Would Europe Trust France with ALL the Nukes?

A french flag over the Arc de Triumph

Macron is proposing that France expand its nuclear deterrent to help shield the entire European Union. This comes at a time when Europe is losing confidence in the United States’ security guarantees. But there are major obstacles in the way.

Many European countries could build their own nuclear weapons, and do so quickly. So, why would they rely on France? Would Paris really risk nuclear war for a smaller EU state that was under attack?

Rather than a centralized French nuclear umbrella, proliferation throughout Europe is more likely. Many countries could spin up a weapon within months, so we could be looking at a more heavily armed and fragmented Europe very soon.

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 nukes in the European context. Specifically, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, wants to expand the French nuclear deterrent in order to provide a missile shield for everybody in the European Union. Right now, because the Brits left the EU several years ago. 

France is the only country in the EU that currently has nuclear weapons. Now, what’s going on here? Is that the French just trying to make a power play to make themselves sound important. You can answer that yes to anything that the French say. That doesn’t mean that there’s not something here. What is going on? Is that, well, to make it perfectly blunt, the Europeans have lost confidence in the United States. 

When the Greenland fiasco happened earlier this year, the Europeans realized that 75 years of alliance was functionally over. And if the United States was willing to threaten its most loyal allies, directly with military intervention in order to get a piece of property that is useless, what will the Americans do when something’s actually important is on the line, like, say, a threat that requires a nuclear strike? 

And so the conversations that are going around Europe are is what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? Part of this means building, much bigger militaries that are independent, the United States. Part of this means fuzing their defense establishments with the Ukrainian one, to put Ukrainian tech and European capital manufacturing capacity to generate an entirely new style of war. 

That leaves both the United States and the Russians out in the cold. And a third layer of it is a nuclear shield. The problem here, what the French are going to run into is that third one is the least feasible of the three because, well, a couple of things. Number one, the technology is not new. Any country that has a nuclear power plant, there’s a dozen European countries like that could relatively easy build a nuke with what they have on hand. 

A one gigawatt nuclear power plant, which is, you know, medium to large size, generates enough waste plutonium every year to make a dozen or so weapons quite easily with technology that was developed in the 1940s. So there’s not a technical obstacle at all. And since the United States is basically no longer enforcing any of its weapons treaties, the non proliferation treaty is one of those. 

And there’s really nothing standing in the Europeans way except for the European sense of propriety. 

which means that nobody has to rely on the French. They could build their own. The second problem the French are going to have is the issue of thresholds. So let’s say, for example, that Estonia, a country with less than a million and a half people way up in northeastern Europe, was under attack by the Russians, and the prime minister was dead, and the cabinet had been strung up in the streets. 

And the deputy education minister, because that’s all that’s left, calls up. The French president says you got to nuke Moscow. What’s the French response going to be like? Maybe. No, that’s not very convincing. So what is more likely to happen is just a mass proliferation process throughout all of Europe. They might coordinate on fighter jets and tanks and drones and the rest, but nukes. 

Every country is going to want their own deterrent. 

Every country is going to want to be able to say yes or no for their own reasons. And that means we should be looking in the next few years for a number of countries that are already very close technically Finland, Sweden, Romania, Poland, Germany all getting their own deterrent, and probably some smaller countries as well, because one of the things that the Europeans like to forget that those of us who know our history, remember, is that, historically speaking, well, almost all of the Europeans have been at odds and at the throats of the Russians and vice versa. 

They also have been at odds with themselves and at the throats of one another. Historically speaking, Europe is the most blood drenched chunk of territory on this planet, and it’s only with the post-World War II settlements where the Americans basically occupied the place for 40 years, that all of these countries were forced to be on the same side. 

And then when the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain came down, Central Europe kind of rejoined that group under the egis of NATO. And if NATO doesn’t mean anything anymore than the Europeans have to start making decisions for themselves, and a lot of Europeans are going to make decisions that not only the Americans don’t like, but other Europeans don’t like either.

The U.S. LUCAS Rivals Iran’s Shahed

A photo of LUCAS drones courtesy of US Central Command: https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4347030/us-launches-one-way-attack-drone-force-in-the-middle-east/

The U.S. has a drone that punches in the same (financial) weight class as the Iranian Shahed. Everybody, meet LUCAS.

With a range of ~500 miles, a price tag around $45,000, and modular capabilities, this is the U.S. military’s first step towards scalable and affordable drone warfare. This is still in early phases of production, but plans are in place to ramp that up by 2027.

These systems have already been used to strike Iranian targets, but the extent of the damage is unclear. LUCAS might not shift the trajectory of this war, but with widespread deployment over the next few years, the math of modern warfare could shift drastically.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Hello from Dallas. Today we’re going to talk about drone warfare, specifically, a new weapon that the United States has introduced in the Iran war. It’s called the LUCAS, which is short for a very long item. That basically means really, really cheap drone. In fact, it’s modeled off of the Iranian Shahed, which has a cost probably in the 30 to $55,000 range. 

Right now, what has been released indicates that it’s in the middle of that range, right around 40, 45,000. It’s a modular drone, so you can decide whether you want a warhead, a jamming pod control, a variety of other things. Anyway, this is the United States first entrance into low cost drone warfare. The idea is you’ve got a drone with a decent range 500 miles, which for an autonomous system is pretty good. 

And because it’s made by the United States and not a country like Iran that doesn’t have much of an industrial base, things are being produced at scale. Or at least that’s the intent. And the modularity means that you can mix and match while you’re in deployment mode. So either on an aircraft carrier or by some Marines who happen to be on a beach somewhere. 

You plug in what you want and then send it off. We know that they have been used already in the Iran war to ironically, target drone manufacturing capacity. The Shaheds, it’s unclear whether or not, the targeting just went after the barracks or the depots or the actual manufacturing floor. We just don’t know that. And Centcom has talked a lot about the targets they’ve taken out, but they haven’t yet to mention the manufacturing capacity at all. 

So far, the estimate is that 1500 of these things have been built. And the intent is by at some point in calendar year 2027 for annual production to exceed 10,000 units. Compare that to how many patriots, the anti-missile systems that the United States is known for, can be made that comes out to about 600, maybe 700 a year right now. 

They’re hoping to get that up to over a thousand over the next five years. Here’s the thing about drones. You have a couple of options. You can either have a fiber line, which means you can’t be too far away because you basically have it on a cord, or you have to realize that there’s going to be jamming. And if there’s jamming, you lose control of it, or you program in a decision tree imprinted onto something like a Nand chip, that’s, the memory in your computer that holds when your computer is off, and then it just kind of goes to that specific location, looks around for something that matches its targeting priority, and then drops. 

That’s basically what the Shaheds are with the United States, though, you have a different option because the United States typically has air superiority where it operates and a satellite network. So you can put something like, say, a Starlink transceiver on it, and you can micro adjust it the entire way. And since these things have a range of 500 miles and a lot later in time, about six hours, that really expands your options. 

Now, in this specific war with Iran, there just aren’t enough of them at the moment to make a difference. 1500 total. Not a big deal. The United States hit over 1200 targets in the first 48 hours of the war. But if you fast forward this 2 or 3 years, when a typical American naval asset can have a few hundred of these bad boys on station in any given time, then you’re talking about a very, very different sort of math. 

One of the weapon systems that I was a big fan of that ultimately did not get built was the Arsenal ship. The idea you have something that’s smaller than a destroyer that basically carries a bunch of cruise missiles, 5000 of them, and you just send it out there and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This achieves that basic concept at a fraction of the cost, assuming it works. 

Right now we know they’ve been used. We don’t know how well they’ve done, but these are exactly the sort of weapons that we need in this transition phase from going from an old, very, very high cost system to whatever the future of drone warfare happens to look like. And as soon as I find out more, I’ll let you know.

Belgium Seizes Shadow Fleet Vessel

Flag of Belgium

The Belgian government has seized a tanker of the shadow fleet. With the United States, India, and now the Europeans intervening, it is only a matter of time – months at most – before the entire fleet is shut down.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody Peter Zeihan here. Coming from Colorado, it is the 1st of March. And today we’re going to talk about Belgium. Earlier today the Belgian government grabbed a Russian shadow tanker and escorted to port and opened a criminal investigation, all in one. I’ve been watching the Shadow fleet for, well, almost four years at this point. The primary way that countries like Venezuela, Iran and Russia have been earning oil income while under sanctions. 

They put out a bunch of really old ships. They fake their papers, they give them fake insurance policies, and then they sail kind of under the radar. Of late, the United States has gone after the Shadow Fleet. That was involved with Venezuela. 

And now we have had several instances where Russian shadow tankers have been grabbed, some by the United States, one by France, which was then summarily released because the French quote, didn’t know how to prosecute, which made them look really stupid. 

But the Belgians apparently have figured it out, and they’ve already opened prosecution. Now, I don’t say positive things about Belgium often, but weather is awful. The food isn’t that great. The beer is questionable. The Dutch part of Belgium is in the north. The French part is in the south. They don’t interact. They rarely have a government. Yet here they have all their ducks in a row. 

So, you know. Kudos, Belgium. What this means is if we can have a small state, Belgium is not a power player. Going after the shadow fleet, then there’s really no excuse for the bigger countries to go after it, as well as countries that are closer to Russia, like, say, the Baltics. Sweden. So, we are seeing a cracking in the shadow fleet, left, right and center number one, the United States broke the seal when it went after, about ten shadow vessels that were taking Venezuelan crude. 

Number two, we now have the Europeans gearing up to do the same. The Brits look like they’re on the verge, for example, of jumping into this. And because of the channel, that’s pretty much everything that matters. And you get the Belgians and the Danes and the Dutch and Swedes. 

Then all of a sudden the Baltic Sea is shut down. Third, the war going on in Iran. Iran feared that this was going to happen. And so they moved a lot of the crude that they had in storage onto floating cargo ships, basically tankers that don’t have a destination yet and something like 200 million barrels. That’s a big chunk of the shadow fleet and all of a sudden they can’t leave the Persian Gulf because of the war. 

They’re just floating there. And it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. Navy decides to go and confiscate all of them. And when that happens, the Shadow Fleet will well and truly be dead. And the way that something like 4 million barrels a day has been getting to market over the last couple of years simply withers and dies. 

So kudos, Belgium. The Europeans are probably going to line up behind them within a matter of days and weeks, and the US Navy will be going after the Shadow Fleet undoubtedly, within a couple of weeks. The US Navy only really has enough ordnance on station for two weeks of the current tempo. But here we are in day two, and they’ve already obliterated the Iranian Air force and Navy. So there’s really nothing that Iran can do to protect the shadow fleet. 

They’re just basically sitting in a bathtub of the Persian Gulf. So we’re looking at the entire shadow fleet being wrapped up here in a matter of weeks to a few months, which will generate an entirely new energy market on a global basis.

Strike Targeting Problems in Ukraine

Imagine of a drone firing missiles

The U.S. is pressuring Ukraine to avoid striking specific Russian energy infrastructure. As you could imagine, this all has to do with American economic interests.

Chevron and ExxonMobil have a stake in major Kazakh oil projects, which flow through Russia to be exported. Ukrainian strikes on any related infrastructure risk harming those American energy companies’ bottom line, and that simply will not do (even though Trump stopped providing military aid to Ukraine over a year ago).

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. The news this week in Kazakhstan, of all places, is that the United States is starting to point its finger at Ukraine about the targets it’s supposed to attack in Russian territory. The issue is that over the last several months, Ukrainian drones have gotten more effective with better range and more explosive capacity and better accuracy. 

And they’re now regularly targeting Russian infrastructure, several hundred kilometers. On the other side of the international border. And several of those attacks have struck an area called Novorossiysk, which is an oil loading facility on the Russian part of the Black Sea. The issue that apparently the American government has is upstream of that pipeline on the other side of another international boundary with Kazakhstan. 

We have some investments by American super majors, and those super majors have gone to the U.S government and said, hey, hey, hey. And so the U.S government has gone to Ukraine, said no, no, no. The two projects in question are called Tengiz and Cash are gone. Now. Tengiz is the original foreign direct investment project by Western companies into the former Soviet Union. 

So old that actually predates the fall of the Soviet Union, was negotiated under Gorbachev. And then Kazakhstan got it and it became a Kazakh project. It is a consortium that involves, Chevron, which has a 50% share. ExxonMobil, which has a 25% share, and then a series of local and Russian firms, it produces about what’s called 700,000 barrels a day. 

On a good day, considerably below where it was supposed to be. But the problem with that project is the pipeline. C, the pipeline, comes out from Kazakhstan, goes around the Caspian Sea, crosses into Russia, and then uses a lot of old repurposed Soviet section. So it’s kind of jigsaw together before it gets to another SEC. And so the Russians have insisted that they be able to put their crude into the pipeline as well. 

So while you do have a signal field that does produce a large volume, it’s kind of capped at what it can do because the Russians demand access to the pipe for the rest of the capacity. The second project, kasha gone is much more difficult. It’s offshore. It’s in the Caspian Sea. You only have one American company involved. 

That’s ExxonMobil. They have about a one sixth share. It’s not doing nearly as well, but even it is getting up over a 400,000 barrels a day. So you put it together. You’re talking over a million barrels a day. This is this is real crude. And the overseas terminal can handle it. And then some. But it’s impossible for the Ukrainians to attack the Russian energy infrastructure that ends in overseas without it also being perceived by American companies that it’s impinging upon their, economic interests. 

And so the Ukrainians are basically told, go attack something else. And that is exactly how the Ukrainians have interpreted it, not don’t attack energy infrastructure like the Biden administration used to tell them, don’t attack energy infrastructure for which American interests are involved. How this is going to go is going to get really interesting because when something loads up at an overseas port, you don’t necessarily know what it’s loading up with. 

And as soon as Ukraine started going after shadow fleet tankers, more and more tankers are refusing to even go to Novorossiysk. So this is one of those six and one half dozen another. How do you define it? How are you going to enforce it? But the bottom line is, is that the United States is no longer contributor to Ukraine’s military defense. 

And in the way it used to be. It used to be that the United States was the majority of the military aid and provided very little economic aid. They left that to Europe after a year of Donald Trump. The United States is still providing no economic aid, but is now providing no military aid at all. So how talks evolve among the Ukrainians, the Americans and the Russians is going to termine how the Ukrainians decide to leverage their military technology here. 

There are a number of ways that the Ukrainians could go after pumping stations on different projects for, say, the Druze, the pipeline that used to bring in lots of crude into Germany. 

But those attacks target facilities that supply crude to Hungary and Slovakia, which are two countries in Europe that are extraordinarily pro-Russian at the moment, to the point that they’re even shutting off fuel and electricity deliveries to Ukraine because they want to make sure they can still get Russian oil flowing through Ukraine. 

So it’s we’re still dealing here with the detritus of the Soviet collapse, because it’s not just one empire anymore. 

It’s 25 different countries across Central Europe. In the former Soviet Union proper. All of them have chunks of infrastructure that were designed for a different air and a different political reality. And Ukraine is just in the unfortunate part of being in the middle of it. 

While under attack. There’s no such complications. However, further north, there’s another major pipeline system, the Baltic Pipeline network, that terminates near Saint Petersburg, which is just as big as what’s going on in over a sec. And as we’ve seen in recent months, that two is now within range of Ukrainian drones. More importantly, we have the Europeans that are in the process of negotiating how to go after the shadow fleets directly. 

So we could actually have a number of NATO countries, ten of them who border this littoral, who could all of a sudden all decide on the same day because they tend to coordinate policies, that no more. And then you’ve got to have Denmark, Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland all at the same time. 

Same. Nope. It’s over and there is no way to redirect that crude somewhere else. And if you want to talk about something that’s going to hit Russia’s bottom line, that’s the way to do it. And now the Ukrainians are in a position where they may be forced to concentrate all of their long range attacks on one specific system. 

I would not want to be running that system.