The Demographic Crisis in Russia

Photo of St Basil Cathedral in Red Square, Russia

The Russian demographic crisis is worsening. So, let’s look at the long-term structural, social, and economic problems, as well as some of the more recent changes hurting the Russian population.

Forced urbanization under Stalin and Khrushchev meant fewer children. Major wars led to dramatic population holes. Substance abuse, both drugs and alcohol, has raised deaths and lowered birth rates. Economic instability discourages family growth. High abortion rates, well that one is self-explanatory.

And now the Ukraine War has accelerated this demographic decline, especially amongst men under 30. Rather than addressing the root causes, the Russian government would rather push its propaganda; like a new law that bans any media that doesn’t promote childbearing. And of course we can’t get reliable data out of Russia, so things are worse than advertised.

Transcript

Good morning All, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Zion National Park’s infamous West Rim Trail. Good morning. Today we’re going to look at something that’s happening in Russia with their demographic work. Before I give you the trigger, let’s give you the background. The demographic situation in Russia is bad and has been declining for the better part of a century. 

Basically, there are three interlocking trends. First is that whenever any country urbanize or industrialize is, the birth rate drops because people move on from farms where kids are free labor to cities where they’re an expense. And you fast forward a couple of generations and the numbers just get worse and worse. In the case of Russia specifically, however, Stalin and Kristoff are the people who are responsible for the industrialization and the urbanization. 

So people were forced into small apartments, that were efficiency or at most one room, which really, dissuaded having more kids. And you had collectivization, in the agricultural sector where people no longer could profit from the work that they did on the farm. And there just was no impetus for people to want to work. Therefore, there was no impetus for people to want to have children. 

On top of that, you have these giant gouges out of the demographic structure of Russia from major events like, say, the world wars, where, you know, several million people were killed, and, or were away from their spouses for a long period of time, making the formation of families at all very, very difficult. Now, the second big issue is drugs and, alcoholism. 

One of the first things that the Russians industrialize was the creation of vodka. And vodka still today, is, day to day plague. Beer is considered not an alcohol. You can actually get it in a lot of vending machines on your way to work if you want to, but hard drugs were the real problem. 

When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, one of the things they discovered was heroin. Because the largest poppy fields in the world at that time were in, Afghanistan. And because there were now transport links between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union. We saw three of the four major heroin smuggling routes in the world. Trans north through Russian positions and into Russia and into the rest of the world. 

It’s a lot worse than it sounds, because even when the Soviets left Afghanistan, they left a buffer force behind in Tajikistan. Even after Austin got independence. And the soldiers there who were supposed to keep, keep the Taliban from interfacing with the rest of the former Soviet Union didn’t only fail. They then took a chunk out of the drug trade and actually facilitated its flows into Moscow. 

So we had at some point something like 10 million heroin addicts in post-Soviet Russia, a country with under 150 million people, very, very bad for demographics, kept the death rate high, kept the birth rate low. And then third and most, finally, you have significant economic degradation. The Soviet Union was a superpower, but it never really was an economic superpower. 

They never achieved the types of growth after about the 1960s that was necessary to advance a technological population. So we had long periods of stagnation under Brezhnev, and then we had the post-Soviet collapse and now the Ukraine economic contraction, all of which have convinced people that tomorrow is going to be worse economically for them today. And that is arguably the single worst thing for convincing people to have kids. 

If you don’t think there’s going to be a world for them to live in, you usually don’t want to have them. And so Russia traditionally has the world’s largest and highest abortion rate as well, with some statistics suggesting as many as 70% of all pregnancies are terminated. On top of that, most recently we have the Ukraine war. 

When the Russians started mobilizing, a million men aged 30 and under fled the country. And since the war began three years ago, a million men, mostly aged 30 and under, have either been killed or incapacitated to the point that they’re functionally non workers within the Russian system. So this is bad. It’s only going to get worse. And so the trigger what’s making me talk about this today is that there is a bill going through the Duma. 

That’s the national parliament in Russia that would criminalize, the publication or the broadcasting of any media that does anything other than glorify the production of children. So if there is a character in the show that, for whatever reason, has chosen not to have kids and say, you, like, have a career that is now going to be illegal in Russia, and before you say, that’s going to have no end, in fact, keep in mind, this is Russia, in fact, and fiction are oftentimes intertwined. 

Back during the 2000, there were several provinces in Russia that criminalized death. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. That’s how they were going to cut the death rate in half. And you know what? It worked because people just stopped reporting deaths. Which brings us to the final point here. Statistics in Russia, on a good day are kind of Potemkin. 

And on this topic in particular, the Russians have not been collecting, much less analyzing, much producing any reasonable statistics on birth or death rates now for over 15 years. So we really don’t know what the real picture is. We can only guess now. When the Russians did their first post-Soviet census back in the 2000, the best guess is that the population of Russia proper was about 140 million. 

The census found another 4 million people somewhere, and now they’ve said they’ve had 144, according to the official statistics. That has now been whittled down to 141. Ignoring the Ukraine war, ignoring the X migrations. In reality, we’re probably closer to 130, but there’s really no way to confirm that. All we know is that the clearest sign that the Russians are facing a real pressure in the demographics is going to be what happens with the Ukraine war, because if they simply run out of men who are under 30, who can fight that, it’s going to be very, very visible. 

But we’re not there yet. They started the war with their own statistics by 8 million people in that block between X migrations and deaths and casualties. We’re now down to about 6 million. So they can keep this pace up for several more years. Just the question at the end of the day is of the younger generation, people 20 under how many were there ever? 

And we have never had a good count of that number. But because of the war, we’re going to find out pretty soon.

Ukraine Strikes Russian Strategic Bombers

Imagine of a drone firing missiles

Ukraine just did more to enhance American national security than any country since 1945. Here’s what went down…

Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here come to you from Colorado where we’re about to get a storm. Anyway, it is the 1st of June. You’re going to be seeing this tomorrow, on Monday the second. And the big news is, a few hours ago, the Ukrainians launched what is the most significant strategic attack on Russian territory since at least World War two? 

What? It seems that they did is they took a bunch of trucks, some flatbeds loaded sheds on top of them and drove them deep into Russia, like, thousands of miles into Russia, and then parked them and remotely retracted the ruse and launched over 100 drones and sent them at two air bases where they took out strategic bombers by strategic mean long range bombers whose primary purpose is to nuke the United States and hit, naval convoys that are crossing the Atlantic to support the Europeans in case of a Russian invasion. 

The tradecraft of this, the defense craft, the audacity of this is immense. And the damage caused was immense. The simplest report I have seen, the lowest casualty report, suggests at least 40 of these long range aircraft were destroyed. There are some indications it was a lot more than that. It’s not just that. This is billions of dollars of equipment, that it would take the Russians literally over a decade to replace. 

It’s the nature of the weapons involved. 

What? The Ukrainians did not particularly sophisticated drone. The audacity was getting the drones into target and launching them from relatively close in the. The real importance is what was hit, these weapons can be used. They have been used in order to bomb Ukrainian cities and military sites. 

There’s no doubt there, but not from where they are currently based. The two locations in questions are acute, which is way out in Siberia, basically further from the Ukrainian border than Miami is from Seattle. And the other one was up in Murmansk. Basically at the Arctic Circle. These are not locations that the Russians would be using to do tactical in theater attacks on Ukraine. 

These are where you put your bombers when you’re getting ready to bomb the United States. And for those of you who are Russian apologists, the Russians have never stopped getting ready to bomb the United States. So fuck off. Anyway, this is the single biggest strategic achievement for American security since at least 1945. We have never had any ally deliver this sort of blow to someone who is targeting the American homeland and to take out so much military capacity that was designed around hurting the United States in this. 

So when I think of the political ramifications of this, I have to think of something that Donald Trump said when he had Zelensky in the white House. You don’t have any cards. You can’t hurt Russia. That is clearly now false. The question is whether there’s someone in the Trump administration who’s smart enough to realize what just happened and brave enough to make policy around it when it goes opposite of what’s been coming out of the white House for the last few months. 

Ukraine just proved in the day that they have what it takes to guarantee American security. And that’s probably going to take us some really interesting directions.

The Russians Continue Stirring the Romanian Pot

Romanian flag

Romania just held its second attempt at the first round of presidential elections, after the initial round was invalidated due to Russian interference. Looks like the Romanians are having some major déjà vu.

Both elections yielded an unqualified pro-Russian candidate surging to the top. Translation: the Russians are meddling, and frankly don’t care about hiding it. The question that must be asked here is why do the Russians care so much about Romania?

Think of Romania as the next steppingstone after Ukraine. If the Russians prevail in the Ukraine War, the next logical target would be fortifying the southwestern flank – aka Romania. The scariest part of all this is that Russia already has a political foothold in all the other countries in the region. Should they push into Romania, they will be at the doorstep of Vienna.

Transcript

Hey. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Chicago. And before I go and get some pizza, because, we’re going to take a break from American politics and economics and, for the moment, and we’re going to talk about a country that doesn’t come up very often, and that is Romania. Now, Romania just had their second run, second attempt of the first round of the presidential elections. 

The first round a few months ago was canceled. We’ll link a video to that piece here. After basically, the Russians massively intervened to the point that it was just stupidly obvious. And it appears on the surface like that has now happened again. The Romanians do a two round system where everybody gets to run the first round, and then they were to have to have a run off for the second round. 

Now, last time around, the guy in play was a guy by the name of Georgia Screw, who was kind of a nobody. He had been a minor cabinet minister, back in the 1990s, and that was it. Then he vanished from the political scene, barely held down a real job, and all of a sudden, wow, he’s back on the political scene and came in first in the presidential election. 

The Russians basically made up 20 million fake accounts in a country that doesn’t have 20 million accounts on social media. And, canvass the country for him, this time around. The guy’s name is Simeon, and something similar has happened. Semyon is even more of a nobody. He was never in government before, has never had a real job. 

He was a professional protester. So imagine AOC in the United States, if she hadn’t had that job of being a bartender and she just went straight into the presidential election and did well. That’s basically this guy. Anyway, he actually, he sued the government a couple of years ago for accusing him of being a Russian agent. And in the court case, they actually proved that he was a Russian agent. 

So the fact that he’s even allowed to run, you know, Romania, who knows? Who knows what’s going to happen with the specifics, whether or not the Romanians are going to try to do this a third time? I have no idea. But why the hell are the Russians so focused on Romania? Well, it’s a geographic thing. There are two pieces of geography that define this part of the world. 

The first is the Eurasian steppe, just this broad, wide open, about the same size as the United States is in total. That’s flat and it’s open and it’s arid, and you just can’t get much economic activity about it. And that is in essence, Belarus, Russia or western Russia and Ukraine. And so the Russians, being from the Eurasian steppe, the only way they’ve ever figured out that they can be secure is to conquer all of it and eventually get to the zones where you can’t just run across the great wide open and punch them in the face to to a place where there’s a geographic barrier, and that barrier is the second of those geographic items. 

And that’s the Carpathian Mountains, which starts in the northwest at roughly the gates of Vienna, and then wraps along the Slovak Polish border, curving south through the eastern parts of Hungary and the western parts of Moldova and Ukraine, and eventually ending up in Romania and Romania, is where the southern anchor of where these two great features of the space come together. 

And so what the Russians have been after, what the Russians have always been after, is once they conquer the stepped anchor in the gap between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, where the Eurasian steppe ends. And so if and when the Russians succeed in conquering Ukraine, they’re just going to turn their sights further west and go for the line of countries that basically make the entire periphery of the Eurasian steppe. 

So getting to Finland and the Baltic states right up against the Baltic Sea, getting through Poland up to Vistula, that’s the river that separates the Eurasian stuff from the northern European plain. And then getting up into Romania and Moldova in order to plug the gap access from the southwest. That’s what the goal has been. That’s what it’s always been. 

And they’re using politics as a way to soften up opposition, of which Romania is part of this. Romania is actually the state in the region where they’ve had the least success, if you can believe that. So Hungary is ruled by a neo authoritarian, the name of Viktor Orban, who has been blanket pro-Russian for the last several years, to the point he’s actually using his position as president of Romania to sabotage NATO and EU operations from the inside. 

Next door, you’ve got Robert Fico in Slovakia, who’s trying to become Slovakia’s Orban. But the democratic traditions in Slovakia are a lot stronger than they are in Hungary. And so far it’s very back and forth. You’ve got Bulgaria, where about a quarter of the parliament is so tightly in Russian’s pocket they don’t even have to be directed. They do what the Russians want before the Russians even say. 

And then you’ve got Serbia, which Serbia is kind of a mess, but it’s Slavic and it has been pro-Russian, really, for the better part of the last 200 years. All that’s left is Romania. And if Romania falls, then not only would the Russians have no problem pushing into the Carpathians, there’s a very distinct possibility they might be able to push all the way to the gates of Vienna. 

And that would obviously get a lot of attention from a lot of places. So this is an election and a place that most of you have probably never heard of. That matters hugely, because if Romania falls the entire southeast quadrant of the EU and NATO falls with it, splitting Turkey and Greece off on their own. And we are in a fundamentally different game.

A Concerning Update to the Russian Reach Series

Flags of USA and Russia merging

Well, the Russian Reach series needed an update, and it’s not a pretty one. The infiltration of the US government by Russian interests is growing and I don’t see an end in sight.

We have figures like Tulsi Gabbard with a foot in the White House and the Kremlin. The very institutions which were created to protect the US from these threats are being dismantled under the Trump administration. Don’t even get me started on ‘SignalGate’. Grenell is spewing pro-Russian narratives to whoever will listen. Navarro is echoing Russian propaganda as it relates to economic policy. Trump is still repeating disinformation. Russia is finding more ways to align itself with MAGA through its influencers. Russia wants in on the invasion of Greenland. And to round it out, we have Tucker Carlson as the only media source Trump’s admin is talking to (the guy that features guests like Russian fascist ideologue and genocidal proponent, Alexander Dugin).

I’ll let you sit with that one for a bit…oh, and have a good weekend!

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Atlantic City. Today we’re going to update a series that we did last month called The Russian Reached what looked at the logic and the actions of the Russian government and how they were attempting and probably successfully attempting to penetrate deep into the American government right up to and including the white House. So the purpose of this is to give you an idea of how much is involved in just the last 3 or 4 weeks, and it’s unfortunately a very long list. 

First off, keep in mind that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is somebody who most of the intelligence community who is has thought of as a Russian agent for quite a few years and one of the first actions that she… well, let me let me put it this way. If she’s not a Russian agent, she’s probably a traitor because the Venn diagram of her worldview and Vladimir Putin’s are pretty much identical. I mean, there might be a little bit of not overlap like a half of 1%, but that’s largely just hairstyles because, you know, Putin is bald and got rich hair is fabulous. 

Anyway, she’s pretty much completed gutting the counterintelligence arms of our various intelligence agencies. So most of those staff aren’t even doing the jobs that they once did, allowing the Russians to really plow into American society however they want. Also, the Trump administration has largely dismembered the parts of the intelligence community and the State Department that, were there to protect our election integrity from Russian intervention. Same thing for web hacking. And, the Department of Justice has largely stopped investigating white collar crimes, most notably fraud and cryptography. Cryptography. Wrong word like Bitcoin scams. 

Which are another way that the Russians really, really enjoy getting their claws into American society. In the American government. We basically just stopped enforcing those laws. The same goes for white collar crimes in general, which, of course, for a country like Russia that is corrupt and uses US intelligence systems to undermine societal stability all around the world, is something that has made their job a lot easier. 

The next big issue is, of course, signal gate. Now, signal gate, happened back in March, mid-March, when the United States was preparing military assaults against the Houthis, which are the militant group in Yemen. And basically the entire top tier of the American national security team, including defense and intelligence. And Gabbard, of course, basically participated in a chat on the signal chat program. Signal is a platform that supposedly secure, but the week that this all went down, the Defense Department’s internal Intel, indicated that the Russians had probably hacked the encryption protocols. 

So, basically, the American national security apparatus were all using what had become an unsecured platform to communicate, basically operational intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard, again, testified, about halfway through the revelations to Congress that this really wasn’t a big deal. And no one should be overly concerned about it, because, of course, it’s not. 

All right. Let’s see what’s next. Rick Grinnell. He is an on again off again semi diplomat who is, working for the Trump administration. He worked for Trump one, did a really bad job, basically just went around talking to German neo-Nazis the whole time so the Germans wouldn’t deal with him at all. Anyway, he’s back in the administration now, and he’s one of those people that is so unlikable that even Donald Trump doesn’t like to have him around in person. 

So he kind of hovers outside of the West Wing and is basically spewing anti Ukrainian Russian propaganda in the ears of Trump Jr because he can’t get the ear of Trump himself. Specifically, he likes talking about the Budapest Agreement, which was something that dates back to the immediate post-Cold War years, when, the Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons. Basically, Grenell is a spouting the Russian equivalent of that deal. Their interpretation of it 15 years on, and basically trying to get the Trump administration to disenfranchise Ukraine as a state and suggesting that they’ve never had a claim to anything in the first place, which is, of course, exactly what the Russians would love the Trump administration to believe. 

Let’s see. Next up, we’ve got Peter Navarro. Who is the manufacturing advisor to the president. Very protective guy. He started using Russian propaganda that has been recently designed and released into the ecosystem. That’s specifically targeting Canada. So Navarro has always been an anti-free trader. Don’t really have a huge problem with that. But it’s interesting to see Russian propaganda popping up in his statements on TV now that are very, very specifically tailored to a very specific issue that really wasn’t an issue in, the Russian propaganda sphere until just a few weeks ago. 

Then we have Donald Trump reporting Russian propaganda on everything from broad strategic issues, to very tactical issues. So, for example, near the end of March, Trump started talking about how Ukrainian troops in Kursk had been encircled by Russian forces. And, you know, this or that should happen. I mean, that never happened. 

The Ukrainians were able to withdraw from the Russian province of Kursk fairly, I don’t want to say easily, but without a lot of casualties. And in fact, that withdrawal had been completed more than 48 hours before. Trump is supposedly asking the Russians to modify their operations in Kursk. So this is something that actually came from internal Russian Federation propaganda that was designed to shape attitudes within Russia itself. But somehow it got on Trump’s desk. If I was a guessing man, I would say that that probably happened via gab or directly. 

On Greenland, the Russians are trying to convince, the MAGA spear that a joint invasion, Russians in the North and Americans in the South would be a keen idea, something that would obviously shatter NATO overnight and end America’s defense alignments with, the Scandinavian countries that, in my opinion, are going to be the future of the American alliance network in Europe, which, of course, is something that the Russians would love to see destroyed. 

You may have heard of Tim Poole. He is a far right influencer that’s very tight in the MAGA space. He has a number of podcast and, video vlogs. Kind of like, you know me a little bit. He’s been basically indicted, I think is the technical term for taking somewhere between $400,000 and $10 million from, the Russian state. 

Basically, they’re shoving money into his platform to help spread disinformation throughout the American MAGA sphere. He claims he didn’t realize that it was going on. That’s his official stance on the investigation is impending. But, you know, he has on any given day, somewhere between a number of followers similar to me and twice as many. And I can guarantee you that if $100,000 per video least that I did suddenly showed with my my bank account, I would not need the FBI to tell me to investigate the shit out of that. 

So let’s just say I don’t take it very seriously. 

But the most important part of this is that Tim Pool is now part of the white House press pool. The Trump administration has brought him into the inside while kicking out, you know, those liberal rags like AP and successful farming. 

And then finally, a name that, you may have started to hear bouncing around Alexander Dugan. He is basically a run of the mill Russian fascist who has been advising Vladimir Putin for over a decade now, basically making up the ideology to justify genocide against anyone they feel is necessary. And until a year ago, most of his vitriol was ultimately, reserved for the United States. 

So preemptive nuking, death camps, that sort of thing. He’s a real peach. Anyway, he has started making the rounds of MAGA, publications, in the United States recently. And of course, the first one in that role, the first of the big ones that he did was none other than Tucker Carlson. Now, you guys may remember, Tucker Carlson used to be a Fox News host. 

Tucker has been fired from every media job he has ever had for lying on air about things on purpose. And since he left Fox, he has now basically migrated directly into the orbit of Russian propaganda. And most of his shows deal with Russian propaganda from it. You know, sharing it with the world point of view. Perhaps the most concerning thing I have in the information space as regards the Trump administration is not this Tim Paul thing, although that’s, you know, not minor. 

But this is the American administration throughout history that has had the least contact with the media of any form. It’s not just that they’re not talking to more liberal groups like, say, the New York Times. They’re not really talking to Forbes or Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. They basically shut out everybody. But many members of the Trump cabinet have done extensive one on ones with Tucker Carlson. 

So we basically have a gutting of the normal means by which an administration would normally interact with the country and focused on a very, very few, avenues, of which the bigger ones are already in the Russians pocket. Anyway, I don’t have a lot of great news on that front, and I will leave everyone to their own recognizance as to what’s going to happen next. 

The Ukraine War Ceasefire

Photo of Ukrainian soldier in front of flag

Here’s a quick update on what’s going on in the Ukraine War and the discussions of a potential ceasefire.

Ukrainian forces had to withdraw from Kursk following a Russian assault. This was conveniently timed during the US intelligence blackout. Ukraine lost plenty of equipment and were on the receiving end of some new Russian drone tactics.

Trump has been spewing some more Russian propaganda, like 10,000 Ukrainians being trapped (which had already been debunked). So, he’s either getting bad/tainted info or he’s just naive. This erratic behavior will continue to plague this administration and negatively impact US strategy.

What about the ceasefire? Well, the initial agreement broke within hours. Putin’s demands are absurd and would effectively dismantle Ukraine’s military. So, not much movement there…

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Hey all, just a quick update from Vegas on what’s going on with the Ukraine war. Two things. Number one, the Ukrainians are definitely being kicked out of their position in Kursk. That’s the chunk of Russian territory that they invaded over the summer in order to get negotiating. Chip. During the American Intel and weapons blackout, the Russians were able to launch a multi vectored assault. 

They basically relocated over 100,000 troops and basically hit the Ukrainians from all positions at a time when the Ukrainians couldn’t see them coming because of the lack of the Intel from the United States. The Ukrainians did manage to get their people out, but lost a lot of gear along the way. The Ukrainians, found themselves facing some new drone tactics from the Russians specifically. 

The, Russians would fly in dozens of drones and then park most of them near the roads, wait for something to come by that they could pick up from, say, airborne reconnaissance and then activate the drones and swarm in. So casualties were not light. And a lot of equipment was destroyed, especially softer things like ambulances and pickup trucks and vans. 

Even a couple of tanks were abandoned. But most of the troops got out. Which brings us to number two. The degree to which that Donald Trump personally has been caught up in Russian propaganda is really robust, because while this attack was going on in Kursk, the Russians, in order to communicate to their own people how wonderfully the war was going, were releasing, things were just not backed up like facts. 

Specifically the idea that somewhere around 10,000 Ukrainians had been caught in what they call a cauldron and cut off from other forces. And in a cauldron that you can push in from whatever direction you want because there’s no retreat. Well, that did not happen. Ever. In fact, when Trump was repeating, these things on his truth social post, all the Ukrainians are had already been out of Kursk, or at least the dangerous part of Kursk for 48 hours. 

So just basic information from the American military, the American intelligence stuff is not reaching Trump, and he’s just spouting out whatever he’s being told by the Russians. Now, who specifically the vector was for sharing that information with Trump? I don’t know. It could have been Putin himself, could have been, someone with the administration who has basically been compromised. 

Could be somebody who’s just really, really stupid and has fallen for it. You know, all three of these, unfortunately, are options. But held true. And then most importantly, yesterday, the 18th of March, we had a one on one phone call between Putin and Trump that lasted about 90 minutes, where Trump tried to convince Putin to adopt a cease fire. 

And Putin’s position is that he would do a partial cease fire that involved things like, not attacking energy infrastructure. He violated that less than three hours after the phone call. And he said that for real? Cease fire again, 30 day cease fire. What he expected was an end to all Western weapons transfers to Ukraine, and then to all intelligence support to Ukraine, and an end to all military recruiting within Ukraine to set the stage for the complete dissolution of the Ukrainian armed forces, and this for a 30 day cease fire. 

It’s obvious to anyone who is familiar with this conflict, or anyone who is familiar with nouns, that Putin is not interested in a cease fire unless he gets everything he wants on Ukraine. Long run. And that means the dissolution of the state. Trump seems to be, at the moment, not ready to accept that that is the situation. 

It doesn’t mean he won’t. But with Russian influence in his administration so robust, just getting basic information and accurate information to the president is clearly become a challenge. But we can’t rule out that at some point that, the Trump administration will treat Russia like it’s a real threat, like it’s Canada. And should that happen, you know, everything is up in the air. 

 This is the most erratic American, administration we have ever had. And its strategic decision making is clearly hobbled by the fact that it’s compromised, in terms of intelligence. But when you’re dealing with somebody who is that erratic and is just at the top of a system that is so unstable, things can change in a heartbeat. 

 So I don’t want to say boo, and I don’t want to say yay. I just want to say that this is a very dynamic political process, and it all depends upon the mood of one person. And that person’s mood is famously volatile.

Why You Shouldn’t Expect Good Policy

Photo of the US White House

A nice convo with mom and dad can always yield some new ideas, so if all you get from this video is “give your parents a call” – I’ll consider that a win. The TLDR of our convo is that you shouldn’t expect good policy from the Trump Administration.

Following the purging of experienced US government officials, widespread dysfunction has broken out. The traditional flows of information have been severed; it used to start with technocrats that retain their positions across administrations due to their institutional knowledge > then deputy secretaries overseeing operations > then secretaries who pass the info along to the President. Well, many of those technocrats have been fired and replaced by political loyalists, sans expertise.

Many agencies are left with inexperienced loyalists not simply at the helm, but throughout the entire senior management. The result? Dysfunction, an inability to respond to crises effectively, and weakened American power on the global stage.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here come to you from Colorado. I just had a phone call with my mommy and my daddy where we talked about Trump, and, it occurred to me that, the conversation could really be distilled into a fun video about why we should not expect any meaningful positive evolutions in policy out of the Trump administration, really, from any department, the way the US federal system works is at the top of every department is something called a secretary. 

So secretary of defense, secretary of the interior, Secretary of energy, all that good stuff. And the primary job of the secretaries is not to make policy, is not to carry out the president’s wishes. It is to keep the president informed of what is going on in their little circle of the world. The job, of secretary is a political appointment has to be confirmed by the Senate. 

The next step down or the deputy secretaries. These are the people who are responsible for carrying out policy. For the most part. There are again, political appointees, again confirmed by the Senate. And they’re in charge of the day to day operations and giving the orders and managing the department directly. So three tier system so far, president’s at the top gives the orders. Secretary is one step down. They’re the ones who keep the president informed to make sure he understands what’s going on. 

And then the next step down are the deputy secretaries, whose job it is to manage the department and push through the president’s agenda. Below that, you get these multiple tiers. You get things called assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries and executive secretaries. And this is where it shifts. And it’s a different department by department. But these are the folks who actually make the trains run on time. These are the people with the institutional knowledge of what’s going on in the department, in the sector. 

These are the people who have managed day in day out, the staff of the department in its many thousands over the years, they’ve been people who have been steeped in the culture, and they know the ins and outs of how things work. They’re the ones who actually implement any policy changes that come down. Now, the problem that we’re having with the Trump administration is that most of these positions, most of these technocratic positions, are still technically political appointees, but established by tradition over the last hundred and 40 years. 

They’re allowed to keep their positions year in, year out. Administration. After administration, because they’re the ones who know how the things work. And so it is very, very rare for a president to dismiss anyone at this lower level because this is where the knowledge is. Well, Trump came in and fired them all in every department, and in most of the cases, he replaced them with people who were politically loyal to him but actually have no experience in the sector in question. 

So a great example, in the Defense Department, all of these top levels, there’s only one person who has any experience in defense work, and it’s experience in as a contractor as opposed to policy or warfighting. So basically the top three levels of all the departments have been stripped of any knowledge of how these things work. 

Now, if your goal is to eliminate regulation by simply hobbling the institutions, you know, this is one way to do it. It’s the expensive way, and it’s making sure that you can’t react to anything in a crisis. So if something does go wrong in defense and energy and so on, there is no longer a cadre of people who are capable of informing the president of what’s going on because they don’t understand what’s going on in the sector. 

And then there is no longer cadre of people who can do anything about it, because those people have all been fired. You have to go down and your career civil servants, and hope that they’re competent enough and that they can up manage, the people above whom? Them who really aren’t familiar with the sector at all. Now, you go below all that political, pointy and managerial stuff, and eventually you get to the rank and file of the people who do the jobs. 

The Congress has mandated that you do. And of course, there’s different categories of people here as well. The two that have been in the news the most are the provisional employees and the temporary employees now, provisional employees or people who have been onboarded into their department within the last two years, typically. And so they don’t enjoy full civil service protections. 

They’re not full members of the union. And so does. And Elon Musk has really gone after this class of people and firing them because they’re easier to fire. But they haven’t really paid attention to what they were doing. They just fired anyone that they could. One problem here is that Congress has mandated and appropriated money and was signed by the president in the budget, for them to do X, Y, and Z the departments, and they need the staff to do that, including the provisional staff. 

So the question is whether or not the provisional staff can be fired. And in most cases where they have sued in the aftermath, either the labor boards or the unions or the workers themselves, they’ve won. 

Now, to the credit of some of these new secretaries who have come in, who do have some concept of what’s going on, a lot of these provisional and temporary workers were fired before they even got confirmed. So they came into their departments, denuded of staff, and discovered that they were playing catch up. 

Probably the best example of this that I have seen so far is Brooke Rollins of Agriculture. Now, I have said a couple of not nice things about her in the past. I need to apologize for that. She was raised on a farm. She has a degree in agricultural, development, so she has some concept of what’s going in agriculture. 

She just hasn’t worked in that space. For her career as an adult, she was in the law firm and then end up working for, Rick Perry. Rick Perry? No shit. Whoever the governor, Abbott, Governor Abbott of Texas now, as well as in a conservative think tank, she’s not dumb. She’s got a college degree, but she hasn’t worked in the agricultural space until now. 

So she comes in on her first job and realizes that, you know, we’re not testing for food borne diseases. The people who were testing for bird flu are gone. And so she is on her back foot trying to reconstruct this, and she has to do it by herself, because the people that Donald Trump has put under her don’t know what they’re doing. 

So for every positive story we have, like somebody like Secretary Rollins, we’ve got a negative story of someone like Pete Hegseth at defense or RFK Junior Health and Human Services. Who knows very little about their department and maybe has a couple of ideological or crazy, conspiracy level ideas about what they want to do. And they’re surrounding themselves with people like themselves who also don’t know anything about their departments. 

And the result is already pretty widespread dysfunction at higher cost than what we had before. And when I think of defense and I think of health and human services, I don’t think of optional departments. These are ones we kind of need now as policy continues to break down and as management of these systems continues to crack, it’s a question of what’s geopolitical and what’s not. 

I could spend months going through some of the disasters that are happening in domestic policy right now, but unless it hits American power, I’m going to leave that one out. That still leaves me with a very rich tableau of things to work with, unfortunately. And we’ll be covering up lots of those in the days, weeks and months to come.

Russia, NATO, and Negotiations

NATO flag with a Russian pin and ammunition

At the time of initial posting on Patreon, negotiations were just beginning between the US and Russia on the topic of Ukraine. US defense secretary Pete Hegseth began by conceding several points to the Russians and with blood in the water, the Russians are trying to roll back NATO’s involvement in Europe to pre-2007 levels…all based upon some he-said, she-said.

This is all part of the usual smoke and mirrors that the Russians love. As this next wave of propaganda hits, these claims will be amplified and figures like Tulsi Gabbard will likely make things worse.

The bottom line is that the Russians are betting on the Americans being dumb and gobbling up this narrative they’re pushing. Let’s just hope that US security policy isn’t so easily swayed.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Forthcoming…

The Russian Reach: Russia’s Wish List Part 2

Flags of USA and Russia merging

If you thought that Putin already had enough to dream about based upon yesterday’s video, I’ve got news for you. Today, we’ll be adding some more items to Russia’s wish list.

As you hopefully picked up by yesterday’s video, Russia really loves when bad things happen to the US. We’re talking dismantling the FBI, undermining cybersecurity efforts, killing data collection efforts, and weakening those global intelligence networks. The Russians would also love for the US to get caught up in more global conflicts, sever ties between the US and their allies, and promote extremist politics. Oh, and while we’re at it, why not throw in the overall weakening of the US military and ability to maintain long-term strategic dominance.

Okay, that’s quite the list. This is in no way a set of predictions, just some things to keep an eye on as the Russian influence in Washington continues to shape policy.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re continuing our series on the Russian reach, working from the theory that the white House has been penetrated by Russian intelligence. Today, we’re going to give basically the dream list of the things that the Russians are after. These are kind of a dragon’s teeth sort of topics, things that will hobble the United States for years, if not decades to come. 

And it starts with limiting the ability to actually even have optics on its own system. First thing would do would be destroy statistical capacity so that the United States doesn’t even have reasonable information on its population or its economic structures within its own system. We’re seeing some of that within Commerce and Department of Labor already. Next would be to go after the law enforcement system at the federal level, most notably dissembling the ability of the FBI to function. 

And if you do that, the next logical step is to disassemble all the offices within the United States, whether it’s for cyber security, physical security or organized crime that allow it to target and limit Russian capacity and Russian Intel operations with the United States. And then flip the script and actually allow the Russians to establish things like friendship centers throughout the country in the way that the Chinese recently did with Confucian centers. 

After that, you’re talking about breaking down the ability of the United States to leverage Intel on a global basis. Go after the Five Eyes network in cooperation with not just the World Health Organization, which has already happened, but with Interpol, so that the United States is even losing access to the networks that it’s built up over the decades to get to this point and then finally going after Congress. 

Congress provides the oversight and the budget for everything that happens in the U.S. system. So you start working with the really stupid Congress people and then move on to the ideologically blind Congress people and basically sabotage the system from the inside. All of that is on the docket. I’m not saying it’s going to happen. I’m saying this is what the Russians want to do. 

And that’s before you talk about the really hard security issues. 

Okay. Security issues. These fall into two general categories. The first is to. So problems around the world on the far side of what the Russians consider their outer perimeter be, so that any future resurgence of American power has a dozen things to deal with before they can even consider about dealing with the Russian state. In the case of the Middle East, the Russians loved the war on terror because for 25 years, the United States was occupied with dealing with that region. 

We basically went to war with a paramilitary tactic, which was stupid. They would love to see the Americans send a peacekeeping operation to Syria to try to hold that place together, because you don’t want to talk about a thankless task. They love, love, love, love what the Trump administration is doing with Gaza. Because here you have a completely worthless piece of territory wrapped up with the most intractable political problem, in the region. 

And in doing what Trump says he wants to do, he would rupture relations with pretty much everyone in the Arab world and again, locked down an occupation for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And never forget that the Russians have noticed what’s going on with the Houthis in Yemen and to get Americans involved in what would be basically the desert equivalent of Vietnam is something that they are really pulling for. 

And so the Russians have really been pushing for the Houthis to restart their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea in Europe. It’s a little bit more straightforward. Number one is to break completely the relationship between the Americans and the country. That has always been the primary Russian concern in Europe, and that is the Germans. And the fact that we saw the Americans actively campaigning for the neo Nazis in the last election is something the Russians really like to see. 

And if the Germans are now having to rearm because the Americans are ending the alliance, having a rearmed Germany that is also run by neo Nazis, that’s kind of the trifecta, because would scramble European security. I’m not saying that might not bite them on the ass down the line, but that’s a problem for another day. 

Looking forward a little bit more, the countries in Europe that will be part of the American Alliance in the future have to be countries that are not dependent on globalization and have a relatively young and positive demographic structure. That’s not mainland Europe for the most part. That’s Scandinavia, most notably Sweden and Denmark, who are the larger economies who are not part of the euro zone. 

So no matter what happens to Europe, it’s going to look a lot different. It won’t be an economic grouping. And those two countries combined with, say, the Nordics, the rest of the Nordic countries, which is Iceland, Norway, Finland and the Baltic states, that cluster is something that is going to endure and is likely to be the core of a future American alliance. 

Well, if the Russians can break that relationship, then all of a sudden the Americans are unmoored. In Europe and this cluster of countries, the Scandinavian Nordic countries, are the ones who have been most vociferously working with the Ukrainians to hold back Russian power. And all of a sudden, Donald Trump is talking about getting Greenland for the United States. 

And Greenland is a Scandinavian territory controlled by the Danes. So they love all that, too. But it really gets scary when the Russians are really going to lean into this. Is breaking the ability of the US military to function in the way that it does. There’s more to the American military than the ships in the jets and the infantry in the tanks. 

It’s about the people. We have the best trained force in the world, not just in how to use the hardware, but how to think about the future, how to think about how to use the hardware. And that is courtesy of our staff colleges, for example, the marine facility in Quantico or the force facility at Maxwell Air Base in Alabama, or the Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, for the Marines in the in the Navy, these facilities teach the airmen and Marines and sailors and soldiers who have decided to make the military their calling their full time career over the long haul. It teaches them how to be better officers. It’s not just about history, it’s about economics and trade and electricity and energy and logistics and more over than that, they are also used to bring in soldiers from other militaries, not just Allied wants to teach them about things like rule of law and democracy and fighting drug trafficking and money laundering, basically creating the bonds between the American military and other potentially allied militaries around the world to make for a better future and to allow the United States to penetrate where it needs to, when it needs to. The Russians hate these facilities because they can’t replicate them themselves. People who allied with the Russians do so out of convenience, not out of any sort of cultural bond. And the Russian military is as shot through with corruption as the rest of the Russian government. And so when it comes to things like fighting drug laundering, the Russians are usually on the other side of that equation. 

The Russians would love to see these things gone, and they may have an informal ally in the shape of the current defense secretary of the United States, Pete Hegseth, back when he was a Fox News host. He would often play this Russian propaganda video for Russian recruitment with, like, you know, all strapping white dudes who were marching and shooting. 

And it’s not that marching and shooting are not military things, but there’s so much more to a modern military, especially a tech driven military, that the U.S. has than that. And if Pete Hegseth goal really is to get back to the warrior ethos of what exists in a Russian propaganda video, you know, that might have worked in the 1800s, but not today. 

And weakening the staff colleges and their support system would be an excellent way from the Russian point of view, of breaking the ability of the U.S. military to function as it does long term. And that system is the result of 85 years of fine tuning. It will take a long time to rebuild if it’s closed down. Now, do I think that all of these things will happen? 

No. This is the Russian dream list. This is not a prediction. I’m putting this together so you can look at what the administration does and judge for yourself just how far down the road we can go in the Russian direction, and just how powerful the Russian influence in Washington has become. I hope none of it happens, but I already see some of it going down.

The Russian Reach: Russia’s Wish List Part 1

Flags of USA and Russia merging

The Russians have already achieved a major intelligence breakthrough by influencing American leadership, but what if they started really swinging for the fences? What would be on the Russian wish list?

Ukraine sits at the top of that list, forcing a surrender agreement, eliminating NATO involvement, and crippling Ukraine’s military and economic capabilities. By no means is that the end of the line for the Russians. As Putin puts his head on his pillow at night, he dreams of a dismantled NATO, access to American intelligence, the ability to impose his will on other economies to benefit a struggling Russia, and undermining American demographics and health.

Some of those SHOULD seem far-fetched, but with the way things are heading…I’m not taking anything off the table. The common thread here is that Russia would love to weaken the global influence the US has and open the door for future conflicts in Eastern Europe.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. The Russians have already achieved what is typically considered the platinum standard for an intelligence operation that has been successful, and that’s getting a foreign leader to repeat all of your propaganda and even make policy based off of it. But now that they’ve achieved that, they are going to aim higher. 

And there’s no reason for them not to. They’ve got Tulsi Gabbard in the white House basically serving as their primary funnel for misinformation. And she’s preventing other information from even making it to his ears. And there are probably we’ll do with this later. Other folks within the Trump administration that are also serving as similar conduits, the bottom line is that the sky is the limit here for the Russians. 

I mean, normally you split your operations in kind of three general categories. You’ve got your day to day operations to undermine foes and support allies and support operations. You’ve got your, brands in the fire where you have longer term assets that are kind of waiting for the opportune moment, and then you’ve got your Hail Marys that you’re lining up. 

You know, you don’t expect any of these to work, but you might as well try. And now that the most powerful person in the world appears to be at least susceptible, I mean, this isn’t Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, who’s been a Russian stooge for years. This is the most powerful man in the world. 

And so for the Russians, they’re thinking that today the sky is the limit and they’re going for everything. And so this video is a list of the things they’re after. And what’s really depressing about it is you will notice that some of the things on this list, they’ve already achieved. 

What we’ve seen so far with the recent changes in the Ukrainian war with the Americans stopping to send any weapons to Ukraine, barring, any intelligence transfers, barring private entities from doing any intelligence transfers, barring the Ukrainians from purchasing anything like satellite imagery. 

It’s not that the United States is now neutral on the war. It’s that it’s actively sided with the Russians. And there’s even some preliminary reasons to expect that the U.S is actually sharing Intel with the Russians on the Ukrainians. So this is hardly the end of the story. This is the beginning of the story. So it’s worth looking forward and thinking about long term Russian goals and how the Russians can redirect American power to help achieve them. 

And the first step, of course, is any peace agreement. That’s just such the wrong word here. The, the surrender agreement, that the Trump administration is likely to force upon Ukraine in favor of the Russians, what the Russians want. Step one, no restrictions on the placement or type of Russian forces on the Russian side of the Line of Control, but a demilitarized zone on the Ukrainian side of the Line of Control. 

Also, no foreign peacekeepers, certainly. No. No NATO members, in Ukraine’s territory at all. A complete, evisceration of the Ukrainian leadership with Zelensky, the president and his senior political and military staff being remanded to Russia for trial, a public admission by Ukraine that the war is their fault and therefore the Ukrainians are subject to war. 

But preparations and, for the United States to say publicly that the war was also Europe’s idea. So Europe is on the hook for war reparations, financial assistance from the United States to reconstruct the physical infrastructure, the oil, natural gas pipelines that used to cross Ukraine, as well as the Black Sea going to Europe and an end to American liquefied natural gas exports to Europe, so that the Europeans are once again hooked on the Russians for all sorts of energy, a barring of European assistance to Ukraine and military sense. 

And should European arms manufacturers defy that, secondary sanctions from the United States on the countries involved, an American public declaration that the territories that are held by Russia, in Ukraine, as well as in other parts of the former Soviet Union, where they’ve taken over chunks of territory in other war, say, Moldova and Georgia are sovereign Russian territory. 

And therefore, from the American point of view, can never be remanded back. 

A ban on all American weapons transfers and civilian efforts from the business community to help Ukraine, whether that’s for imagery or for weapons or any sort of support equipment. A similar ban on anything coming from Europe and a Russian customs presence at all Ukrainian ports of entry to monitor, to make sure that nothing flows through, and active collaboration with American Intel throughout Europe. 

In order to make sure the Europeans stick to the letter of the deal. And remember, of course, that this deal does not need to be ratified by the Europeans. This is going to be an American Russian bilateral deal, and everyone else can just suck it. 

 Anyway… You get the idea. The point is, for Ukraine to be so neutered as a country that when the Russians decide six months, two years from now to roll in again, it’ll be a much easier fight than it was last time. 

Oh, yeah. De-industrialization of Ukraine specifically for all of its weapons development, most notably drones. That would have to be part of it. Anyway, the whole idea is that so whenever the Russians decide that now is the time to continue the war, they can roll in without a problem, and it would shatter the American relationship with NATO, which is probably on deck anyway, so that the Russians could actually then roll right into the next phase of the war, for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Moldova. 

Remember here that this is, this is the swinging for the fences plan. You basically split what any country does with intelligence into a few buckets. You know, number one is your your day to day operations. Number two are the things where you want assets in place so you can take advantage of changes in situation. And the third one is swinging for the fences. 

So you’ll notice that some of these items are already part of the official, American line. For example, the Americans already given in to a number of the Russians, strictures when it comes to things like NATO membership for Ukraine. The Russians are going to push for more. And this is their dream list. And I’m not saying they’re going to get them all, but how far they make it down. 

This list will give you an idea just how tight, Russian control over the white House has become. Let’s see. Next, let’s talk about what the Russians are going to try to get directly, not Ukraine, but for Russia proper. 

Okay. Moving on. The thing the Russians want to affect Russia directly. An end to NATO. The United States pull out and cease all meaningful intelligence cooperation. In fact, turn that intelligence operations that we have in Europe and put them at the Russian disposal so that the Russians have eyes on everyone in Europe, most notably Germany and countries further east. 

So when that they do decide to launch the next phase of the war. Estonia, Latvia. Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Romania, you know, everyone in the Central European bloc can’t get the jump on the Russians and surprise them in the way that the Ukrainians did over and over and over again in the war. Basically use American intelligence operations, maybe even some limited American military operations, to hamstring that whole process. 

All Russian news outlets should be allowed to operate within the United States information space without any sort of restriction. The United States should stop importing agricultural products from Canada, which is mostly, wheat and coarse grains, and instead start importing them from Russia to build a reverse dependency. Compared to what we had during the Cold War, the Russians have studied their own economic history very well. 

They know where they screwed up in the Cold War and basically tried to turn that into an American vulnerability, which could only happen if the American president was really pushing for it, abandoned the American icebreaker program and decommissioned the two icebreakers the US has so that the, high Arctic becomes a Russian only zone of influence. 

Wipe all American held Russian debt to zero, and let the Russians into the heart of the American financial network once again, so they can raise funding from everywhere and even provide a few US sovereign guaranteed backstops to the bond market so that people could invest in Russia and the Americans will take the risk, which would definitely allow them to tap more capital at a lower rate. 

And then finally, perhaps most importantly, use American government financial guarantees to encourage American companies to invest directly in the Russian economy. The Russians have had a complete gut, of their skilled labor force during the war. And because no one’s really been trained in technical stuff since the 90s now, and they’re losing the ability to produce almost everything. 

But with the oil and gas industry, definitely be at the top of the list. So the Russians, literally hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, and it can’t be generated from it themselves. So if you get the U.S. government to pay for it, and the U.S. government to encourage American companies to come into the Russian space and start rehabilitating those fields and building new pipelines, that would be wonderful for them. 

In addition, yeah. It’s not enough for to just rehabilitate Russian oil and gas. You also want to get American companies involved in the production of everything in Russian occupied Ukrainian territories, so that the American government is firmly, in bed with the Russians in recognizing Russian controlled Ukrainian territory. 

Next, let’s talk about the Russians favorite topic and how to smash the American demographic advantage. 

One of the biggest weaknesses of Russia vis-a-vis the United States is demographics. Between the world wars and the mismanagement of the Soviet system combined with massive heroin and alcohol abuse, and then the economic dislocations of the 1990s, the Russian ethnicity is literally dying out. Now, it’s not dying out today. This isn’t China where we’re going to be able to see it within a decade. 

But it’s a multi-decade trend down. And the Russians know that they’re going to vanish from the Earth this century at some point. And that’s part of the reason why the Ukraine war was launched, when it was when they still had enough people under age 30 to try. But when they look at the United States and see that they see a country with much lower mortality rates, especially in younger people, they realize that there is an opportunity, right now with the Trump administration, to undo the last 120 years of progress, in reducing American mortality and in that they have probably the best possible stooge to help. 

And that is RFK junior, who is the new Health and Human Services, secretary, aside from the fact that he is personally staunchly opposed to vaccines are pretty much all types. I mean, they technically call him a vaccine skeptic, but he’s not skeptical. He’s opposed. And even with the measles outbreak we have in Texas right now, he’s saying publicly, you know, vaccines are a choice anyway. 

What the Russians would like to do is increase mortality among Americans. Under age five by at least a factor of ten. Right now, it’s about .6.6 5%. Back in 1900, before the industrialization of medication or mass immunizations, it was closer to 19%. So, you know, it’s come down by like 95%. And they’d like to push it back up. 

And the easiest way to do that is to remove vaccines from the system. You start by doing what RFK says he wants to do and making them all optional. And then you use the his position in HHS to basically dissuade everyone from getting things like boosters and to dissuade the development of new vaccines. So during Covid, we saw the first large scale application of new RNA vaccines, which have an order of magnitude fewer side effects. 

But the Russians were able to basically convince a segment of the American population that they were horribly dangerous. And right now, we have mRNA vaccines starting to come out in all kinds of different disease prevention. And we’re even starting to see the early stages of, say, cancer vaccines because of the technology. I mean, it really is amazing stuff. 

So the Russians would want RFK to do what RFK is going to do and try to smash that development at any possible way in order to keep American mortality as high as possible. 

The Russians think that RFK is so stupid. 

I mean, he’s got to be one of the dumbest people alive today that, they really can’t keep up with how misfired his brain works. Because anything that they try to put into his head, he immediately twists into something that’s even more grotesque. And he’s kind of like a roach motel for conspiracy theories. So there’s this one little contest among the Russian bot farm about who can get RFK to say the dumbest things. 

And the thing is, everyone has one. Because the guy really is a moron. And now he’s in charge of health policy in the United States. So now that the Education Department is likely to go away and its, prerogatives are likely to be split up among other departments, things like vaccine mandates that were used to be enforced by the Education department will now come to HHS, and RFK Jr will be in a position to basically smash those shots first, turning them into voluntary operations and eventually whittling down the list of vaccines that can be used, even if some of these has been approved for decades and really have no side effects at all. 

The goal here is very simple to, over the decades, bleed out the American population so that we end up in a Russian style demographic crisis. 

Let’s talk about the economic space. The Russians would love, for example, to break the power of the US Federal Reserve. Or at least have it redirected to service Russian national goals. The US dollar is the global currency that allows the United States do a lot of things. And part of that is because the Federal Reserve runs a relatively tight ship when it comes to monetary authority. 

Anything that weakens that would be great, especially if it encourages the circulation in the use of non US dollar assets, over which the Russians have a lot of influence, especially through the crime directive. Or keep in mind that the Russian political system is led by Putin is in part a partnership with organized crime. And so any type of cybercrime fall to the core of that. 

So anything that encourages crypto, especially Bitcoin, is something that the Russians would really like to see because it would give them more of an in into the entire Western world and start to eat away from it below. There is nothing in the private sector that could make that happen. But if the US president were to take actions to weaken the fed and encourage crypto. 

Well, there we are. Let’s see, on the topic of the bond market, use the politicization of the FBI to go after any sort of financial institution in the United States that actually provides a degree of economic stability. So these are the major bond traders. These are the major banks. And all you have to do is generate a pretext that, for whatever reason, one of the or more of these groups has a problem with Donald Trump, and then he directs the FBI to basically go in there, start arresting people and shutting things down. 

The Russians would love to see that at scale. And there are so many people in the financial world who are concerned about what Trump is doing economically. It’d be really easy for Trump to drop a hit list, in terms of broader economics, go after the trade relationship, most notably the NAFTA relationship. The Russians understand that they’re no longer manufacturing power. 

And part of the reason for that is that no one trusts them. And so no one will participate with the Russians on supply chains. Well, in North America, the three countries are the most tightly integrated manufacturing region on the planet. And anything you can do to throw sand in those gears is great. So, for example, if you can get the president to go up to Canada and say, you know what, we’re going to change the borders. 

You know, that’s a great idea. Also, this tariff strategy going on and off and on and off and on and off and on off. Last week we had five different strategies for tariffs in Canada in one week. That’s wonderful for arresting industrial development in all three countries. And then what else? Oh yeah. Destroy the agricultural sector. 

Ban the use of things like synthetic fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, synthetic herbicides. This is something that their wind up toy of RFK juniors already working on. Because if you can reduce American yields by half or more, all of a sudden the world’s largest food exporter turns into a food importer. And the Russians gain a lot more leverage around the world because they’re still the world’s largest wheat exporter. 

One more end of American sanctions on the Chinese chip industry. Two things going on here. Number one, the Biden administration built up this great alliance of countries around the world who participate in the supply chain for microchips and got them all to cooperate on restricting access to China. So in breaking this, not only would the Russians break up the American relationships with a lot of the allies, you’d also establish in China an alternative option for high end chips. 

So if relations with the United States and Russia go back to something that’s more akin to normal, there would now be an alternate supply. It would make the Russians far less susceptible to American sanctions for the next war. The Russians try to launch. 

On the security front, things basically fall into two categories, and it’s all revolving around nuclear weapons. The Russians would want to break the relationship between the United States on one hand and the French and the Brits on the other hand, because those are the two countries in Europe today that already have nukes. And there’s a lot deeper relationship here than just having three nuclear powers who are our allies. 

I mean, it’s not just about breaking it so that they’re pointing nukes at one another instead of just at the Russians. And it really comes down to the American British relationship. That relationship gives the United States access to a huge portion of what used to be part of the British Empire. So, for example, there is a nuclear submarine base that the US uses extensively in Scotland that allows for power projections into the northeast Atlantic, which is the part of the Atlantic the Russians are most concerned about. 

If you can, for example, get the Americans to actively encourage Scottish independence. You not only shatter the relationship with London, you also end the American naval presence in that part of the world, which gives the Russians a number of options. Same basic concept is down in the Mediterranean. The Brits have a foothold in Cyprus. They have a foothold in Gibraltar. 

And the Americans both use those assets regularly. But if the American Anglo relationship is broken, then all of a sudden the American position in the Mediterranean writ large dissolves because there’s no place to base. Same goes for places like Diego Garcia in the Pacific. So this is absolutely top tier. It’s definitely falling into the swing for the fences issue. 

But considering the ability of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to deeply, personally offend the Brits of late and basically talk down the alliance, it’s not something that we can rule out something the Russians would love to see. 

As for the American nukes, Donald Trump is on record saying he’d like to get rid of him completely so that. Yes. Have the Americans unilaterally disarm, or at least get rid of more of their weapons? Maybe have an agreement with the Russians that you can’t place any sort of nukes on any sort of naval vessel. Since the Russians don’t have much of a navy, that’s not them giving up very much. 

And maybe even get some inspections in there so that the Russians can peep under the hood of American military hardware to ensure that the Americans aren’t warmongers. 

Hell, that’s a lot. Okay, we’re not done. That’s just 20 minutes. That’s enough for today. Tomorrow we’re going to go into the really long term stuff that is designed to cripple the United States. Long term things that the Trump administration may already be working on.

The Russian Reach: Christian Ultranationalism

Photo of a bible on the US constitution and flag

I’ve been on the receiving end of more than a few theories on what might be contributing to the absurdity that we’re seeing. One of the more interesting ideas is that there could be some Christian ultranationalism on the table.

Christian Ultranationalism is the ideology that blends extreme nationalism with religious rhetoric, promoting the idea that a global cabal is working to eradicate the white race – and yes, it is often just a cover for racism and anti-immigrant beliefs. The basic premise is that everything in the Western world needs to be toppled and rebuilt.

There are plenty of figures within the US administration that adhere to these beliefs, and they are OBSESSED with South Africa and Russia. Obviously, there’s a lot of discrepancies mixed into this belief system, which makes it an even more dangerous manipulation of religion for political purposes. Oh, and it just so happens to mirror a lot of Russian propaganda efforts.

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Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Scottsdale, Arizona. Since we started the Russian Reach series, a lot of you have been writing in with little tips, information that you’ve got from within the government system right up into the white House, which is kind of crazy. And, alternative theories that might match the facts in front of us. 

And one of these, I think, is worth exploring a little bit. It’s called Christian nationalism. Or really, what it is, is ultra nationalism. It’s the idea that there’s this global cabal out there that is working to undermined and eradicate the white race. It tends to be obviously wildly racist, opposed to immigration in pretty much all forms, unless they’re white people, very violent and, distrust any sort of large organization. 

So they generally hate Catholics, specifically the Pope, Muslims or worse. And as a rule, they think that, Western civilization has been corrupted or controlled from within by these larger forces. And so all of Western civilization needs to be torn down to the studs have been rebuilt with a fusion of church and state. Of course, there’s no agreement as to what church means. 

So really, it’s just a cover for people to be wildly racist and say that white people should be in charge. 

Powerful white people, specific, Powerful white people. Within the American administration, the four biggest adherents would be, Russell Vought, the OMB. Elon Musk, of course, on the outside looking in is Peter Thiel. And then JD Vance, the vice president, is a member of this general. 

It’s not even a club, but worldview. And that kind of gives you an idea of just how flexible, the ideology of Christian ultra nationalism is. It’s, you know, JD Vance is a Catholic, although a practically evangelical Catholic. Elon Musk is practically agnostic. Peter Thiel is gay. So there’s all it’s kind of a big tent with a lot of ideas. 

All I can really say that kind of draws it all together is there’s nothing about it that’s actually Christian. 

I’m no theologian, but I’m fairly certain that there’s a nice hot spot on the other side of the veil for people who try to actually put this into practice. Anyway, there are some commonalities here that kind of run the rainbow with this group that everybody agrees on. There are two countries in particular that they’re just obsessed about. 

And the first is South Africa, because here is a country that white people brought civilization to. And clearly, with the end of apartheid and the return of majority rule by blacks. Clearly this is part of an effort by the globalist cabal to test out white genocide. So when Donald Trump picked a fight on a random Tuesday with the South African government, it didn’t just completely come out of the blue. 

It was routed on by these groups, specifically Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa. The other country that the Ultranationalists are really obsessed with is Russia. They see Russia as fighting the good fight and its demographic collapse as a warning to white people everywhere of what could happen if the Muslim hordes were allowed to rise up. 

And as a result, Christian Ultranationalists are pretty much pro-Russian, no matter what the Russians do. So, for example, if they attack another Christian nation, Ukraine, that’s fine, because they’re just trying to hold the torch for the rest of us. And it’s just it’s kind of silly because the Putin government, one of his chief pillars of support are the ultra violent Muslim Chechens who carry out pogroms against Christians regularly and the Russian military forces when they went into Ukraine. 

 One of the first groups that they attacked were American evangelical ministers which is one of the reasons why it’s kind of just a shade in the background. It’s people using religion as a cover to do horrible things. 

Not that we’ve ever seen that before. 

But the reason it’s worth talking about is not only are some of these people very well placed within the current administration, but, there’s a lot of overlap between Christian nationalism and Russian propaganda these days. The Russians are very well aware of this trend, and they’ve worked to encourage it across Europe and the United States for quite some time. 

And a lot of their useful idiots throughout the US and European political systems fall into this Christian nationalist camp. I’m sure you can all come up with a few names yourself if you put your mind to it. The idea that Russia is beleaguered and needs assistance and should be respected is something that dovetails very nicely with the Russian mindset. 

Every country has their own reason why they think they’re better than everyone else, and for the Russians, they have superiority complex that is based on an inferiority complex. The idea is that we have suffered so much. Therefore, you should do things our way. It’s very powerful, for motivating Russians. And now it’s being repeated basically by these Christian ultranationalists. 

And so whether the issue is going after U.S. intelligence, part of the cabal, going after the European Union, part of the cabal, or simply trying to give the Russians, what they want in places like Ukraine fighting back against the cabal. The Russians have done what they can to dovetail their existing propaganda with these forces. 

So yeah, it can be both. Not just the Russians, but trying to dovetail with a more domestically oriented group that is trying to use a bastardization of religion to achieve its political goals.