Trump 2.0 – Russia

Photo of St Basil cathedral in Red Square, Russia

As Trump enters his second term, there are going to be numerous challenges facing his administration. So, we’re launching a series touching on several of these issues and what to expect from President Trump. Our first video in the series covers Ukraine and Russia.

The Russians are running out of people (and time) to reach out and secure defensible boundaries, so the Ukraine War always had to happen now. How does President Trump factor into all of this?

Trump has suggested freezing the conflict along current lines and delaying Ukraine’s NATO membership for 20 years. Spoiler alert: that’s not going to work for the Russians. While the Russians knew how to manipulate Trump during his first term, it seems they’ve forgotten that winning strategy. On the other hand, the Ukrainians (and plenty of other countries) have already begun with the flattery and brown-nosing to get on Trump’s good side.

Regardless of who is in the US office, this war is just a step in Russia’s broader strategy to regain former Soviet territories. It’s likely that Trump’s proposals will fail since they go against Russian objectives.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here comes to you from Cora Glen, New Zealand, about to relocate. We’re going to launch off a bit of an open ended series today, talking about the challenges that are going to be facing the incoming administration of president elect Trump. He’s actually President Trump, president elect. He’s both. Anyway, specifically today, we’re going to talk about what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia. 

And before we go into the impact that Trump can or cannot have, I think it’s best to, revisit why the Russians are doing what they’re doing. They don’t feel they have a choice in this war. I would argue that they’re broadly correct with that, which doesn’t mean that there is a solution where everyone can just get along. 

It’s part of the problem. You see the the core territories that the Russians are from Moscow and the territories to the north, south and southwest are open and they’re vulnerable, and there’s no natural barriers that prevent invasion. And so what the Russians have always done since the time of the early is ours, is to expand as much as they can, absorb culture after culture, people after people, conquer nation after nation, until they reach a series of geographical barriers that do block tanks and troops. 

And those barriers are the Arctic Ocean, the Baltic Sea, the Carpathian Mountains, the Caucasus and the deserts and high mountains of Central Asia. Anyway, under the time of Stalin and during most of the Cold War, the Russians controlled all of these territories, and they were the most secure they’ve ever felt. 

That is one of the many reasons why, during the Cold War, the primary concern was about a nuclear catastrophe rather than a conventional invasion. We are now in a different system. However, though, post-Soviet Russia lost control over almost all of those access points. And in the time since, the wall fell in 1989, the Russians have launched or participated in nine different military operations, of which the Ukraine war is only the most recent. 

So if there’s anything that we know about the Russians, it’s that this war was always going to happen and it was never going to be the last one. And any sort of peace deal or armistice simply buys the Russians time to recoup so that they can then go for the next thing. And if they do succeed in absorbing all of Ukraine, as soon as they are capable, they’ll go after the next line of countries in the west, which are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Moldova, all of which Moldova are members of NATO. 

So, we are not at the end of the story here. We’re in the middle of the story. That’s the why, the why now is even more simple. It’s demographics. The bottom fell out of the Russian birthrate back in the 1980s. We had something called a Death cross in the 1990s where the birthrate fell below the death rate at one point, twice as many people were dying every day in Russia as were being born. 

There since been a bit of a recovery, but it’s since turned again. And that’s before you consider the war. So this was always going to be the final decade that the Russians could attempt to use their superior numbers to force a military solution to their what they see as their frontier problem. And if they had waited until 2030, there simply wouldn’t be enough men in their teens and 20s to even make a meaningful attempt. 

So it was always going to happen, and it was always going to happen about right now and what happens in the rest of the world, from the Russian point of view, is a rounding error in considering how they prosecute conflict. And to Trump, Trump says he can stop the war in 24 hours. Trump says a lot of things that a lot of people don’t take seriously. 

But let’s assume for the moment that there was a deal to be had. What has been floated from the Trump camp is an armistice along the current division line, with European troops coming in to monitor the cease fire and the, Ukrainians facing a 20 year pause before they can even consider applying for NATO membership. Now, from the Ukrainian point of view, this is obviously not a deal because it takes roughly a quarter of their population, excuse me, a quarter of their territory, and locks it more or less permanently under Russian control. 

But moreover, this is a deal that the Russians would never accept because they don’t have 20 years and they don’t need just get Ukraine, they need to get the rest of the entire Western periphery. They need to get Georgia and Azerbaijan and Armenia and the bulk of Central Asia. If they wait 20 years, the demographic bomb will fully gone off. 

And so the Russians have rejected this proposal posthaste. Now, let’s talk about a couple of the minor things going on. There are a lot of conspiracy theories going around right now. Oh, my God, there’s so many conspiracy theories going on right now. But let’s deal with the one that deals with the Ukraine war that the Russians only attack because they thought the Biden administration was weak. 

Anything? No. The specific timing for the launching of Ukraine war was very straightforward. 

Trump made it very clear four years ago that if he was reelected, he was going to withdraw from NATO fairly early in his second term. 

This was something that was communicated to Putin. And so Putin was very clear that should that happen, Ukraine would basically be handed to him on a plate. And when that’s not how things unfolded, he felt that the only way to get what he needed was to launch a military attack, which was correct. So there is nothing there that is Trump related that caused or deferred the war in any meaningful sense. 

Like I said, this was always going to happen. Now, that doesn’t mean that the Russians don’t have some opinions on Donald Trump. They find him to be an eminently, manipulable person. They were able to hire him off from all of his security personnel, including the Secret Service, in the first term, and to get him into a room alone with Putin and Putin’s senior staff. 

That’s never happened throughout American history, at any summit anywhere, and where you’d have a president completely separated from anything. And what the Russians found out was that, Donald Trump really didn’t know a whole lot about what was going on. Unlike most presidents who rely on their cabinet members to keep them informed, 

Donald Trump relies on his cabinet ministers, to keep him feeling good about himself. And so whenever somebody would tell him something that he didn’t know and make it very clear that he wasn’t the smartest person in the room and each and every topic, he generally fired them. And so the Putin government really liked the first Trump term, because nothing could really get done on the American side. 

That wasn’t being done on Twitter. And they have high hopes for the second term, because a number of the people that are being appointed to, cabinet level positions, for example, the Trudeau defense secretary, has limited military experience. He’s a culture warrior. And it’s very clear that doesn’t actually have any plans in mind for the military aside from Woking. 

It, as he says, and from the Russian point of view, this is brilliant, because if you can hobble the ability of the American military to function, the American intelligence community function because the coordinator of that is basically somebody who’s been working for the Russians for years. Then all of a sudden you have a free hand, or at least that’s what they think. 

I think, as is typical with the Russians, they may have overthought this out and come to the wrong conclusion. If you go back through modern American Russian history, the Russians do this from time to time. They think they have an upper hand. They think they can play the American president, whether it’s in jet, whether it’s JFK, or Bill Clinton or someone else, and then they discover, no, that’s not really how it works. 

This is still the most powerful country in the world. And regardless of what you think of the individual leader, there’s a lot of institutional heft there. Even if the individual leader has a problem with the institutions. In this specific case, though, it’s much more personal. They have already told Donald Trump flatly, no. And if you are a world leader in the current age and you want something out of the United States, we all learned in Trump term one that the way to do it is to flatter Donald Trump. 

And for whatever reason, the Russians have forgotten that. And so,while Zelensky of Ukraine has already been on the phone with Donald Trump to talk, while the Canadian prime minister has already flown down to Mar and Allegro, while Sheinbaum of Mexico has already been on the phone, while several European leaders have already arranged for talks basically to kiss up to get what they want, the Russians seem to have forgotten that and they just said no. 

And so if you take Donald Trump’s temperament and apply it to the situation, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the Russians are not going to get what they’re hoping to get. At the same time that Donald Trump has come up with this brilliant, the best, the awesome plan, of freezing the conflict for 20 years, which was something would be, anathema to Russian strategic plans in the short, medium and long term. 

So regardless of what Trump said during the campaign, regardless of what JD Vance, who is a Russian apologist, said during the campaign, he really comes down to the emotions of one person right now on this issue. And the Russians have really gotten off to the wrong foot and put that foot directly in their mouths.

Playing Jenga with Maritime Shipping

Cargo ship with containers

In my books, I highlighted how even a minor, seemingly insignificant event could cripple global maritime shipping. Well, not only did one of those events just happen, three did. We’re talking about a Russian cargo ship sinking, Israel targeting the Houthis in Yemen, and Finland impounding a Russian ship.

A Russian cargo ship went down in the Mediterranean and some foul play could be involved. This ship was critical for Russia’s nuclear icebreaker fleet, as it carried equipment necessary for construction. This will delay (or even cancel) these construction timelines, which marks a significant blow to Russia’s merchant marine capabilities.

Israel expanded its operations against the Iranian-backed Houthis, with efforts to disrupt supply chains. This could even spill over into targeting ships transporting Iranian weapons.

Finland’s seizure of a Russian ship accused of severing subsea cables escalates tensions in the region. This ship was already under scrutiny for its unsafe condition, but its suspected involvement in sabotage activities was the final straw.

Global maritime shipping relies upon trust, insurance and the US securing the sea lanes. These three events that have unfolded in the past weeks are causing the pillars propping up maritime shipping to teeter. It’s only a matter of time before maritime shipping, and globalization along with it, come falling down.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Wynona Bay. Just outside of Carmel Town in north east New Zealand. Doing a lot of little things have happened in the last 48 hours that are threatened to boil up into, something very significant. So let me go through the three items in our time together. First of all, the Russians had a cargo ship that sank in the Mediterranean. 

There’s some question as to whether sabotage was involved. What’s unique about this ship is, you know, the Russians don’t have much of a merchant marine at all. And this one was a roll off, roll on vehicle that can just accept vehicles from pretty much any sort of facility. Doesn’t even have to be a proper loading port or anything. 

There were also a couple construction cranes on board and a lot of specialty equipment for the Russian icebreaker fleet, most notably its nuclear fleet. Anyway, without this ship, the Russians are going to have a hard time moving things around the Mediterranean, where they’re in the process of evacuating their forces from Syria. And in the longer term, there, icebreaker, nuclear or icebreaker, which is under construction, which was supposed to be operational already has been pushed back to 2027 and 2030, probably will never be built because the Russians can’t build, the sort of specialty parts that were on board, one of which is something as simple as hatches. 

So we’re looking at the beginning of the end of the Russian merchant marine because they now can’t move the pieces around. Sanctions prevent them from moving or buying everything else that they need. Second, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has announced the beginning of a much broader assault against the Houthis of Yemen. Now, the Houthis are a militant group, Islamic, that are sponsored by the Iranians. 

And the Iranians have basically been supplying them with weapons over the last 20 years. 

Yeah, it’s probably too much. It’s got 15 years, in order to destabilize all kinds of things in the country, because they see the Houthis as an eminently disposable ally or proxy, whatever the right word is. Because basically they’re a bunch of desert fighters who have never been able to hold anything together, completely incompetent at administration, and not very good at attacks either. 

But they know how to operate a chunk of equipment that flings a weapon. So they’ve been used to attack population centers and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. They have been used to take out some things in Israel. They’ve engaged in some, like piracy, and they’re just generally a strategic nuisance. The countries in the neighborhood that have tried to quell them, most notably Saudi Arabia, have done bombing campaigns in the on again off against sponsorship of other sides in the ongoing Yemeni civil war. 

And but the terrain is very difficult. The Houthis are, if anything, persistent. And it has basically been impossible for anyone to bring Yemen to heel. And that is not something that this is the last ten, 15 years. That goes back centuries. It’s an unruly place with a difficult geography, and no one has really had a lot of fun operating there. 

I don’t think that, the Israelis will be successful in rooting out the who? These. Fabulous. Put that to the side right now. But, the Israelis have definitely demonstrated some interesting out-of-the-box thinking over the last few months, and in doing so, have participated in the destruction of Syria as a conventional power had destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

And, well, their operations in Gaza against Hamas, are let’s just call that complicated. Hamas is definitely in a box and cannot strategically expand at all. So to say that, success against the Houthis is impossible is, of course, ignoring recent history. I’m more concerned with how they would interrupt the flow of the weapons systems that they have a problem with, because the Houthis have been doing long range drones and missiles and talking to Israel directly. 

And to go after that sort of stuff, they would have to go after the ships that sail from Iran to supply the weapons systems. So that’s two third Finland just all over the place today. The Finns have, boarded and impounded the first ship of the Russian shadow fleet. One of the things we’ve been seeing over the last several months, really started about 18 months ago, but really accelerated recently is that the Russians have been either directly or through third parties, like the Chinese. 

Getting ships operating in the Baltic Sea to drag their anchors to sever subsea physical infrastructure, within the northern Baltic, specifically places that transmit data or electricity among Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the ship that they have now impounded is accused of basically dragging its anchors and severing five different cables in a short period of time. 

Now, in the past, what has happened is when the Russians have done this, they’ve done it to one at a time. They’ve done it through a third party vessel, most notably a Chinese vessel. And the ship has gone before anyone realized what was going on. But this time, two things have changed. Number one, the, all the Scandinavians, all the the Baltics, all the Nordics are more on to it. 

And they’ve been watching a lot more closely. And the Russian vessel, did several in short order. And the vessel itself is part of the Shadow fleet, which means it’s old. It’s rusty. Probably couldn’t pass a safety inspection in Guatemala, much less in Finland. And so the Finns were already watching it. And so when these cables got snapped one after another in a short period of time, they really had no doubt as to what was in play. 

Okay. That’s a lot. What’s going on here is we’re seeing a multi vector challenge to the naval order that allows international trade to happen. One of the things that we had in the world before World War two was unless you could provide naval security for your ships, you just didn’t sail somewhere. Or if you did, you did so without any insurance or confidence, that the ship could make it. 

It was very, very risky business. One of the many, many things that globalization has been very successful about is about making it so that anyone can sail anywhere at any time and interface with any partner to access any commodity or any product. And that has engendered not just global trade as we know it now, but the expansion of various economic sectors in a way that just simply wasn’t possible before. 

So, for example, today, over half of all internationally traded oil sales, long haul ships. And that means if you’re going from the Persian Gulf to the East Coast or Northeast Asia, wherever, you can do so without much fear that your cargo is going to be anything inopportune. And for that rare occurrence where something might go wrong, you can buy an insurance policy for your vessel and its cargo, which only costs about 1% of the cost of your ship every year. 

Quite affordable. Same thing for food production. Roughly a third of all food production globally is shipped in a similar manner, with a similar insurance for fishermen. And the very existence of a manufacturing sector in the world is courtesy of this sort of security set up. Because if you’re looking at something like, say, a stereo, you know, there’s roughly 400 parts in that thing. 

You’ve got 400 different producers for each part, some of which have their own supply chain stretching back several steps, and intermediate products are shuttled around. Well, especially in East Asia, almost all of that, well over 95% of that is done on the water. And none of this would be possible without a relatively peaceable international system. Well, now we’re seeing that system hit from a number of different angles. 

You’ve got the Russians who are basically turned much of the Black Sea to no go zone. You’ve got the Ukrainians who have started to go after Russian shipping in that space. We now have the Baltic states and the Nordic states, Scandinavian states, sorry. Most notably Finland, that have just impounded one of the ships that is taking advantage of that order in order to evade sanctions. 

And we now in the Middle East have a situation where the Israelis, on a little bit of a high after the fall of Hezbollah and the fall of Syria, are going after another strategic irritant, the Houthis, which means they have to go after the shipping in order to interrupt the weapons. All of this is happening at the same time. 

And one of the things I hit very hard in my, my last book, The End of the world, is just the beginning. Talking about the end of globalization is that the maritime order is based on trust. The trust that your ship will get there, the trust that the Americans will enforce the sea lanes, the trust that no one will challenge that. 

And all of that is now falling apart. And in the book, I mentioned that, you know, it doesn’t really matter, what it is that breaks the system of trust. I must admit, having Israel and the Houthis or the fins and the shadow fleet on the bingo card. Not specific things I predicted, but it doesn’t really matter what it is. 

Because as soon as states, for whatever reasons, have a vested interest in going after the system, the trust is broken and the insurance system can’t handle it. And that’s when we get a rapid fire breakdown in all types of shipping, because it’s no longer profitable or safe manufacturing is definitely the sector where we will feel it. First, in the United States, for most of the rest of the world, it’s going to be a race between energy and agriculture. 

So we are in the witching hour of this system right now. And based on how any of these issues unfold could get really rocky, really quick and never take your eyes off the Russians because they’ve just lost the ability to maintain their icebreaker fleet, which means the entire Arctic route is something that is no longer strategically viable for them. 

And if that is the case, then the Russians have a vested interest or may perceive that they have a vested interest in challenging parts of the system itself. We’ve been in this weird little holding pattern globally for the last decade, roughly where it wasn’t apparent that the Americans had the will, the interest or the ability to maintain the global order. 

And lots of countries that are American rivals started challenging the US and various points thinking that the future was the Americans will keep the world safe for everyone, but they can carve out whatever they want for themselves, and we’re about to see all of that blow up in everybody’s faces. The future on the other side of this, from my point of view, is pretty clear. 

You basically have regional powers that can guarantee regional security for the waves. And so you can have regional trade systems or national trade systems, but the days of long haul multi continental shipping that have dominated manufacturing, agriculture, 

And energy since 1950 were at the very end of that. And it’s going to be interesting to see whether it’s Finland or Israel or Russia that fires the shot that formally breaks the system. 

But these are just three examples of how easy it would be for this whole thing to come unwound. And we may very well see this before I get back from New Zealand. Yikes.

One Ship Inspection Could Unravel Global Maritime Shipping

Photo of a ship in a port in Helsinki, Finland

The Nordic nations are teasing a new initiative of inspecting ships leaving Russia’s St. Petersburg port for insurance and environmental compliance. This may seem insignificant, but it could disrupt shipping on a global scale.

Russia has relied on its shadow fleet (uninsured and aging tankers) to export oil after the sanctions began; this new initiative aims to curb Russian income and disrupt funds for the war in Ukraine. But what happens when one of these countries completes an inspection and decides to confiscate or detain one of these ships? We’re talking about uncharted maritime territory…and it could get messy very quickly as countries start to take maritime security and trade into their own hands.

A return to localized maritime security enforcement and controls won’t look the same everywhere. The Western Hemisphere and the Nordic countries will experience some shortages but be mostly fine. The Mediterranean’s future would rely on cooperation between Italy, France and Turkey. Places that are heavily reliant on energy and food imports (i.e. East Asia) could face economic collapse or famine.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from the Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand. We finally got a break in the weather, just in time for the emerald pools, which are, you know, volcanic and super stinky. Anyway, on the 17th, 18th, of December, representatives from all the Nordic nations, plus Poland and Britain. So that’s, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, basically got together and said that they’re going to start checking ships that are coming out of Saint Petersburg port in the Baltic Sea, for things like insurance and compliance with environmental regulations. 

In order to disrupt the shuttle fleet, the shuttle fleet is how the Russians are getting their cruise to market since they canceled by pipeline, and they can’t use Western maritime insurance or navigation aids. They basically, have to get insurance from the Russian government, the Chinese government or the Indian government. And there’s a suspicion that no one is actually issuing policies that pieces are just sailing. 

They get out of the port, regardless of whether or not they have a policy. Not the Indians, the Chinese and the Russians have never actually paid out on one before. So if there was an accident, the idea is that there would be no one there to help pay for the cleanup. But more to point, the Shadow fleet is how the Russians get their money. 

They basically have uninsured or under-insured old aging tankers, that evade everything that the Europeans are trying to do to shut Russian oil out of their systems, and especially to deny, income to the Russians as they’re launching a war in Ukraine. Will it work? It all depends upon how the Nordics and the poles and the Brits decide to handle enforcement. 

So if a ship doesn’t have anything, what does that mean? You confiscate it, you take it into port. That would be getting into some very interesting territory, that it would be uncharted in the modern age. The whole idea of globalization as created by and then guaranteed by the United States since World War two, is that anyone can sail anywhere at any time. 

And you don’t necessarily have to have insurance, although that’s a really good idea. And if the Russians don’t have it, it’s then up to the Nordics to decide what to do. And if the ships are confiscated, because they don’t have something that is not technically illegal, or they haven’t complied with something that just someone said that they needed to do. 

We enter into a new phase of naval maritime transport. If if, if, if we go down that road that there’s no reason for any country really in the world to not take a ship that they like the look of or don’t like the look of unless they fear the consequences of whoever happens to own the ship or whoever happens to, have the ship registry. 

The registry is a joke. Those are countries like Guinea Bissau and Panama, basically places where you can basically file a web address for free, and officially register your ship if you’re going to replace the system with something that actually means something that has to be a country that has a navy that can actually protect the shipping and are only a handful of countries in the world that can even pretend to do that in a regional basis. 

And only one U.S. that could do it on a global basis. And since the United States does not dependent on international transport for most of its economic strength, it’s a stretch to think that the United States would do that unless it was paid a whole lot of money. And so if the Nordics do this, it is the end of the globalized system as we know it. 

Now, keep in mind that I think we’re going here anyway. There is too much shipping. There are too many powers or too many people wanting revisions, and the US has lost too much interest. And we’re probably going to a naval freefall in the not too distant future. I’m not saying that this is the trigger, but I think it’s time to start talking about what the next system looks like and what the consequences are. 

For the United States, if it happened today, it would hurt. Most of the naval shipments that come into the United States are large container ships carrying manufactured goods from Asia. So we’d have to get by without things like phones and computers and all that. The more valuable stuff eventually would be flown. But for all the bulk stuff, you know, your stereos, your cars, you’re going to be having some problems until that manufacturing capacity is rebuilt in North America, something we’re working on, something that is unlikely to be finished before the end of the decade. 

So, you know, timing matters here, too. For other countries, this would be an absolute disaster. Most of the countries of the world, especially in East Asia, import the vast majority of their energy and material inputs. Some of them are even dependent upon significant food inputs, or at least the inputs they need to grow their own food. 

So if this happened to China, for example, we would easily have a deindustrialization, or collapse, complete with famine in a very short period of time measured in months, not even years. 

What takes its place is probably regional groupings, where either the seas are safe or everyone’s on the same side, and agrees with the rules of the games are, that looks really good for the Western Hemisphere. 

That looks pretty good for the Scandinavian bucket. And in the Mediterranean might get a little dicey based on how relations between or among the Italians, the French and the Turks go. If they agree that they can, work together. That looks great. And if they can’t, You get two different mediterranean’s that shoot at one another, which, if you know your history has happened many, many, many, many, oh, so many times. 

So, I can’t wait until the first time that Sweden or Finland or Poland decide that a ship that’s sailing by their coast isn’t doing something right. I want to see what they do. This is one of those many things that could all fall apart in a day. If the stars are aligned. 

So stay tuned. This is probably not something you’re gonna have to wait for me to comment on, because if it does go down, a lot of things are going to break real soon.

The Russian Navy Leaves Syria for Benghazi…

Photo of Russian Naval Infantrymen on a boat

There are reports stating the Russian naval fleet might have found a new home (since their last one in Syria is no longer available). This new location is Benghazi, Libya and boy oh boy would I love to see that happen.

Russia has used Syrian ports for decades, but since the new Syrian government is not so friendly to the Russians…they must leave. The only viable option the Russians have is to move the fleet over to Benghazi.

Benghazi doesn’t offer much, other than a place to park. So, no repairs would be done, no significant naval operations could be carried out, and resupplying would be a joke. Oh, and relocating to Libya places the Russian fleet within range of NATO forces.

So, the Russians can hide out in Benghazi for a bit and avoid embarrassment in Syria, but they shouldn’t stick around for too long… or maybe they should.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey Everybody Peter Zeihan, New Zealand, Tongariro Circuit, blah blah blah. This is a quick take. I just found out that, the scuttlebutt in the Middle East is that the Russians are going to relocate their fleet to Benghazi, Libya. Quick background. The Russians have been operating out of the ports of Banias and Tartus in, Syria for about a decade, and they’ve been using those as the primary supply points to participate in the Syrian civil War, where they are responsible for, among other things, carpet bombing civilians and probably killing, somewhere around 100,000 people in Aleppo specifically. 

Anyway, the new government that is taking form is a group of militant groups that are opposed by the Russians. So the Russians are getting the hell out of Dodge because they’re not completely stupid. Anyway, I’m digging this Benghazi story. Let me explain. The fleet, the Russian fleet has to go somewhere. They can’t stay, in Syrian waters, for long. 

And their options are limited. If they were to try to go through the Turkish straits to get to the black Sea, which would be for some of these ships, their home port, that is not allowed, because there is now a war on in the Black Sea. And under the treaty, of Montreal, that the Turks adjudicate and control. 

No warships can come through without Turkish. Get go. And the Turks back. The militant groups that are kicking out the Syrian government and the Russians. So can’t go there. You can sail all the way around Europe, to where the Northern Fleet headquarters are in Murmansk and Archangel. But, the Russian ships don’t have much range, and it’s highly likely that most of the fleet wouldn’t be able to make it. 

So they would have to dock to refuel and resupply and European ports, all of which are NATO and the, the likelihood of a NATO country just seizing the ships very high. So two humiliations that the Russians are trying to avoid. So that leaves Benghazi and Italy, where, again, the Russians are participating in the local civil war. Here’s the thing. 

But Ghazi doesn’t have the necessary port facilities to do full resupply and certainly can’t do repairs. So the Russians would have to build that when they did it in Syria. It took several years and several billion dollars. So in the meantime, the Russian fleet would just sit in Libya, rusting while support facilities are built. And with the way things are going between NATO in Russia, the chances of there being a bit of a spark down the line pretty good, and the Russians will have repositioned their most capable naval assets within easy striking distance of the French Navy and the Italian Air Force. 

So in order to avoid some significant embarrassment today, the Russians are arguably doing the most stupid thing that I could possibly come up with, and I really hope they do it.

Cover photo by Wikimedia Commons

Red Strings in Romania

Photo of far right candidate from Romanian election, Călin Georgescu

The most recent presidential election in Romania has been annulled, and surprise, surprise, it’s because of the Russians.

The Russians like to meddle about in everyone’s business, but some countries get the short end of the stick; Romania is one of them. Given its proximity to Ukraine and geographic access points, it provides a critical space that the Russians would love to control. By interfering with the elections, Russia can create divisions and weaken political resolve amongst the Romanians, with the hopes of then swooping up some Romanian territory.

Romania’s political environment isn’t squeaky clean to begin with, but the coalition of dominant parties would love to prevent Călin Georgescu from entering office. New elections will be held soon, and we’ll just have to wait and see how the Romanian people respond.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from the crater of Mount Taranaki in Egmont National Park in New Zealand. And today we’re going to talk about Romania. Very, very short version. There’s this guy by the name of George Eskew who is a bit of a nationalist and kind of a dumbass. Really a no one, was in a couple of minor government, positions back in the 90s and really hasn’t done anything with his life since then. 

Anyway, he came in first in the first round of the presidential election that the, Romanians recently had. And, in recent days, the Electoral Commission of Romania has nullified that election. They’re going to hold it. And the reason is pretty straightforward. It’s flat out election interference by the Russians. And the Russians are trying different things in different places. 

They’re trying to see what sticks. And obviously not every culture is the same thing. So the playbook changes. But every once in a while they, like, bring everything together and push really, really, really hard to see if they can make a change. In the case of 

Romania, they pushed so hard it was really obvious. So something like 11,000 fake accounts were detected on social media with over, like, I think it was 17 million fake followers in a country with only 19 million people. 

So the interference was mad and it was obvious and it was found. And now we’re going to find out if the Romanians, once they realized the degree to which the Russians were trying to fuck around in their internal affairs, if they come up with a different opinion, there’s no guarantee that that’s how it’s going to go. 

Of course, people vote the way they vote. And when you tell people to go back to the polls so they can vote the right way, they tend to tend to get a little pissed off. Specifically, the leading Romanian parties have a reputation for corruption and being really cozy with one another, basically trading power back and forth. 

And they’ve recently joined forces to form a joint government to keep the presidency out of Georgia’s use hands. Or at least that’s the goal. Romania is generally considered one of the 2 or 3 most corrupt countries in the European Union. So the idea that there would be a robust protest vote makes a lot of sense. 

And it also makes sense that that protest vote would happen for the presidency. The Romanian system is a little bit like a flip of the French system. So in France is a very strong executive, a very strong president, but Parliament is elected separately. And if the Parliament and the presidency are from the same party, the president is in charge. 

The president picks the prime minister, the prime minister runs the government in Romania. It’s kind of the opposite, where the parliament, selects the prime minister, the president is elected separately. And if they’re from different parties, the president doesn’t have a lot of authority. Technically, he’s in charge of foreign affairs. Technically, he’s in charge of the military. 

But really, because they control the budget, the parliament still does that. So if you’re just you were to become president, he certainly wouldn’t control Parliament. And his room to maneuver would be somewhat limited. But for the Russians, this is enough, because Romania is one of the countries, after Ukraine that the Russians have shortlisted for the next wave of countries they want to invade. 

And anything that weakens the political resolve in Romania is something that can’t help but benefit the Russians in the long run. Now, specifically, the Russians are trying to weaken the resolve of the countries that border Romania to make it more difficult for the West in general to support Ukraine. And then, of course, the Russians ultimately want to make it to the Danube Delta, which would mean annexing somewhere between 20 and 30% of Romanian territory. 

Now, that’s a problem for another day. You can fault the Russians for being many things. But, planners, they’re always planners. 

So we’ll have a new first round elections pretty soon, and probably second round elections somewhere around the end of the year. 

And we will know what the Romanian people think of all of this before too long. 

Cover photo of Călin Georgescu by Wikimedia Commons

Why the Russians Need Georgia and the Caucasus

Photo of the city of Tbilisi, Georgia

Protesters have taken to the streets in Georgia after pro-Russian oligarch and head of the ruling Georgia Dream party, Bidzina Ivanishvili, announced that Tbilisi would be ending its bid to join the EU.

Many Georgians saw the EU bid as a way to distance themselves from Russian influence, but the current government—which has strong ties to Moscow—has chosen to prioritize its own power over Georgian independence.  Russia would love to keep Georgia under its thumb for a few reasons, but its geography is in the driver seat. Georgia and its geography act as a key barrier against invasions through the Caucasus, and a limiter to Chechen expansion.

If Georgia exited Moscow’s orbit, Russia’s southern flank would be exposed. If Tbilisi joined the EU, Brussels (and, perhaps, NATO) would play a bigger role in one of Russia’s most traditionally restive regions. Russia can ill-afford to divert attention away from its war in Ukraine, and with Syria heating up, public unrest in Georgia is a low-cost, high-reward move to push Moscow to divert resources away from other theaters.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. It is the 3rd of December. 

Today we’re talking about something that happened in the former Soviet Union over the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. And that is, we seem to have the beginnings of an uprising in the former Soviet state of Georgia. 

Now, for those of you who follow this, Georgia, not Peach and Atlanta, Georgia, the one that’s in the Caucasus, uprisings here seem to be happening often. And the reason is that the Russians are getting a little nervous about political evolutions there. 

The Russians are far more sensitive of what’s going on in Georgia than they are in any, of the other former Soviet provinces, with the notable exception of Ukraine, which is, you know, where there’s a war. It has to do with the geography. It has to do with the ethnography, and it has to do with how the Russians manage their political system. 

So the specific trigger for the most recent protests, we’re talking about here, about a country with under 6 million people and over 100,000 people showed up to protest over the weekend. Is that the current government, which just cheated its way into a new term, had elections recently that were neither free Norfair, they announced that they are going to drop their bid to join the European Union specifically. 

And the Georgians have often thought of the EU as their only way from getting out from under the, Russian thumb. I’m not suggesting that that would work, but that’s certainly the plan. The idea is that NATO is a bridge too far. NATO is too far away. 

But if you go with, say, a European economic grouping, maybe that will work anyway, whether or not that would work or not. But outside the point, the current Georgian government is under Russia’s thumb. Russia is a multi-ethnic empire. The Soviet Union was as well. It has to do with geography. The core Russian territories around Moscow, are largely indefensible. 

Aside from a few fours and a couple chunks of swamp, there’s just nothing to hunker behind. And so, going back to the time of the early czars, the strategy has always been the same. You expand, you expand, you expand, you conquer everybody. You you neighbor, you turn them into cannon fodder, and then you conquer the next line out and you keep going and you keep going until you eventually you get to a geographic barrier that you can hunker behind the Carpathian Mountains, the Baltic Sea, the car come desert the tension mountains, whatever they happen to be. 

And in the cases of the, the Georgians, it’s the Caucasus Mountains, both the greater caucuses, which are immediately to Georgia’s north, and the lesser caucuses, which are part of Anatolia and Persia to the south. So the Georgians are on the frontier from the Russian point of view. And when the Russians conquer a people like they functionally have in Georgia now, they assign a local, who is a little bit creative in their loyalties. 

Most people would use the word traitor, to rule them indirectly so that the Russians can occupy themselves with other things, like conquering other people who are causing problems, like in this case, Ukraine. In the case of Georgia, that guy’s name is, let’s see if this is right. But Xena Ivanishvili even. Yeah. 

You have to have five syllables to be a good Georgian name. 

Anyway, he is an oligarch who made his money in the post-Soviet collapse. He is a former prime minister of Georgia, and now he is basically Russia’s front man. He sees himself in his position as linked to Russian power, which is how a good stooge works. And so he will do what the Russians want in order to protect himself. 

He believes that there’s a certain amount of power to be had in this country. And if he shares with anyone, that won’t work. And if the Europeans come in, they will have different ideas on regulation and democracy and everything else. And that would see a degradation of his personal position. So he is willing to fight to the last Georgian to maintain control, and in the end will have to be removed by force if Georgia is going to find a new way forward, because he will make sure that electionscan have the refused or fair, because that would not serve his interests. 

And the Russians, of course, are willing to supply intelligence and cash and disinformation to make that happen. 

Now, that’s kind of piece one, piece two. Why do the Russians care so much about Georgia? I mean, it’s not that powerful of a place. The issue again is geography. 

Not all Russian territories equally crappy. Some is less crappy than others. 

And if you go from the Russian wheat belt going west into Ukraine, you get some of the best possible land. Ukraine, by the way, is on the footsteps of, those two most important of those access points to the Russian space and Poland and Romania. And so the Russians really want to anchor in the Danube basin, the Polish gap, and ultimately the Carpathians. 

But no less important is the southern anchor, because if you follow the rainfall in Russia, it basically makes a crescent from Moscow west into Ukraine and Belarus, and then arcing south along the Black Sea into the caucuses, into Georgia, and to the north of the Greater Caucasus Mountains. You’ve got a smattering of peoples that hug the valleys, making them very difficult to dislodge. 

And this is where, for example, the Chechens are from. In the case of the southern side of the Carpathians, the land is much more open. And you’ve got this interesting little pocket with the Greater Caucasus to the north, the Lesser Caucasus to the south, the Black Sea to the west, and the Caspian Sea to the east. And you have three small states Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia in there. 

But Georgia controls most of the good land where you actually can have agriculture. Azerbaijan, of course, is an oil state, and Armenia is a mountain exclave. Now, when Armenia switched sides from being pro-Russian to exploring relations with the West over the course of the last couple of years, the Russians were of course upset. But the at the end of the day just kind of let it happen. 

And not just because they didn’t have the power to resist because they were locked down in Ukraine. Armenia is just not as important. It’s down in the southern Caucasus is the Lesser Caucasus, if you will, and it’s a mountainous state. So it’s really just one city, Yerevan, and then a chunk of territory. And then the Russians were never going to be able to project power down there if they were busy with more important things, like they are with Kiev. 

Georgia’s different. Georgia can support a larger population. Georgia has infrastructure. Georgia has agriculture. But most importantly, Georgia is opposite. The greater Caucasus from all those little micro states that the Russians have conquered, like the Chechens. So if Georgia were able to go its own way, not only would the Russians lose their primary foothold for their southern boundary, which is just as important to them as Ukraine when it comes to the West, they would also lose the ability to keep all of their little micro states, like the Chechens under lockdown, a Georgia that goes its own way in order to look out for its own interests, is going to have a vested interest in causing problems for the Russians north of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, so that the Russians never have a free hand to come south of the greater Caucasus Mountains. And so they’ve invested a lot of, hope and money and not a small number of political assassinations in the person of Ivanishvili, because they see him as the best guarantee for their position. 

And he, of course, sees the Russians as the best guarantee for his position. So next steps. The United States isn’t interested. Even in a day where the United States is really raring to go and expand NATO and have an internationalist footprint. Georgia is always kind of a bridge too far. And as the Russians have shown over and over and over again in the last 30 years, them invading Georgia is not hard. 

They sponsored two secessionist groups in there, one in place called Abkhazia, one in the place called South Ossetia, and in both cases they have appointed their own traitorous frontmen to run the place. They’ve got another frontman on the other side of the border in Chechnya. That’s, Kadyrov. He’s a psychopath. And so having the place kind of broken up like this serves the Russian interests, so long as there’s not a major power involved. 

The problem is, if you take the long view of history here. The Turks. Impressive industry, second largest army in NATO, demographically robust, clearly an up and coming country. Iran, despite the fact that is on Russia’s side at the moment, would really rather be the premier power in places like Azerbaijan and Armenia. And so with the Russians were to get knocked back a bit. 

All of a sudden the Persians get involved in a very interesting way. And while the Russians primarily are concerned about invasions from the West and Germany, they have been invaded from the south multiple times by the Turks and the Persians, both. So if this barrier fractures, things get really interesting. But it’s not going to be the United States that steps in to try to stir the pot or get the Georgians under the Western cloak or whatever it happens to be. 

The Americans just have bigger fish to fry in other places right now, and probably will for the remainder of the decade. So the question is whether the Europeans are going to rise. Now, if you had asked me this five years ago, so this is a really interesting ideological and hypothetical discussion because the Europeans just really haven’t been able to belly up to the bar when it comes to great powers. 

They don’t have the fiscal capacity, they don’t how to raise an army. They don’t have an army. They have a lot of individual states that think of their military as something that they protect. And, everyone is mostly interested in economic issues rather than strategic issues. They just kind of subcontract that out to the United States. That’s changing. 

The first big fiscal program that the Europeans did to raise a joint debt mechanism wasn’t used to do bailouts, wasn’t used to overhaul their economies for a more technocratic age. No, it was used to buy ammo to fight the Russians in Ukraine. We’re seeing more movement on things like military spending with everyone, even the laggard Germans now saying that 2% of GDP, which is kind of a NATO flaw, what they recommend is probably not enough. 

And we need to go up to three and maybe even 4% in a world where the Russians are on the warpath. And if you are European and you’re starting to admit that the European entity that is the EU or its individual states need to take more actions to protect themselves than causing problems, critical problems for the Russians, nowhere near Ukraine is a very low cost way to get a lot of benefit. 

So right now the Europeans are saying all the things they normally say about free market economics, socialism and democracy and how they’re outraged. What is going on in Georgia. But it doesn’t take a big jump for the Europeans to do something that’s a little bit more traditional in terms of state power. They can support the Georgian protesters with money. 

They can step in with intelligence. They can provide a little quiet assassination program if they want to get really back into old school. But the bottom line is this is a country, especially in league with the Turks, that is ripe for intervention. And any dollar or euro that is spent orienting the Georgians away from Russia is one that is going to spawn dozens of positive outcomes for the Europeans. 

And even if it all fails completely, it’s on the other side of the Black Sea. 

This is a very low risk, high reward series of operations that I would guess we’re going to see the European start in under a year. And if you happen to be the new Trump administration, they’re going to look at the Europeans actually getting involved. 

 And probably get a little thoughtful. 

It’s one thing if you’re an American and you tell the Europeans you want them to spend more on defense, if you want them to take care of themselves a little bit more, it’s a very different thing when the Europeans actually start doing it and developing independent capacity based on independent decision making. One of these looks great on paper. 

The other one, in the long term, gets a little complicated.

When the Missile Is the Message

A missile being fired against a blue sky

Following the United States’ approval for Ukraine to use its weapons systems inside of Russia, Putin decided to launch an intermediate-range missile called the Oreshnik into Ukraine.

This was initially mistaken for a nuclear capable ICBM, but that was cleared up rather quickly. Turns out it is a missile the Russians developed illegally while pretending to abide by an arms control agreement. The important detail in all of this is that the Russians completely misread the room. They thought by flexing their missile capabilities that NATO unity might be fractured, and they could assert some dominance, but that backfired.

Many EU nations are increasingly arming Ukraine and taking a firmer stance against Russia, and some other factors are also increasing European solidarity. With regional security in question, European countries are locking arms and uniting against the Russians.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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Transcript

Greetings from Colorado. I just got off a plane, got back home for the weekend. It’s 22nd November, and the news regards a missile attack that the Russians launched against Ukraine earlier this week.

As you probably remember from a video a couple of days ago, the United States government has given the Ukrainians authority to use their weapons systems on Russian territory. Specifically, in the Kursk province, the Ukrainians have already started to use them to target command and control nodes and a few depots. They’re certainly going to be going after things like rail logistics in the not-too-distant future.

This is something where a lot of Russian politicos have been saying that this is a red line that will trigger nuclear war.

And that was obviously crap because that’s the wrong message coming from the wrong people. The Russians have yet to engage in the sort of meaningful conversation about the war that would allow the return of some sort of deterrence doctrine.

Anyway, in order to try to press their case that there would be consequences, the Russians launched a weapon from down near the Caspian Sea—well, further away than it needed to be to hit someplace in Ukraine.

At first, everybody thought it was an ICBM. That’s an intercontinental ballistic missile. And the only reason those exist is to have nuclear warheads on them. The idea was that it was supposed to be a threat to the United States.

Turns out it was not an ICBM, not an intercontinental ballistic missile. It was a new type of weapon called an “Organic,” which is an intermediate-range weapon.

Now, intermediate-range weapons in Europe—well, between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Europeans—they were banned under a 1988 treaty called the Intermediate Range Forces Treaty, the INF.

The idea, and this was at the end of the Cold War when Reagan was in charge, was if we remove the shorter-range missiles that could be used in the European theater, then we move off of hair-trigger alert. We could start negotiating some sort of post-Cold War pact, which would eventually culminate in things like strategic arms limitations that would take all of the city-flatteners out of the equation.

Well, about 15 years ago, the Russians started violating the terms of that treaty and started developing weapons systems like the Organic, which now have hit the battlefield.

It’s not so much that this is a warning to the United States because the United States isn’t a target of intermediate-range forces—it’s too far away. This is about the Europeans.

And the question in Russian foreign policy and strategic policy has always been divide and conquer. They don’t like NATO because it allows everyone to band together, and it brings the United States and the Canadians into the party. They want a system where it’s every man for themselves. From a military point of view in the European space, that makes the Russians the most powerful player.

So the whole point of developing an intermediate-range missile and now launching it at Ukraine is a demonstration to the Europeans that we are back to the Cold War in terms of the Russians’ capacity to nuke before anyone can do anything.

Or at least that was the intent. It is definitely not working.

The British and the French have already allowed their weapons systems—most notably the Storm Shadow and the Scalp missile systems—to be used by the Ukrainians to target the Russians directly.

In addition, in Germany, we have a chancellor who’s on his way out, Olaf Scholz, who has been very hesitant to allow German weapons to be used. He is most likely going to lead his party, the Social Democrats, into a trouncing in elections that will happen within 2 or 3 months.

At that point, the new incoming chancellor of the opposition party, the Christian Democrats, has already said the first thing he’s going to do is call Putin, threaten him, and then free the German equivalent system—which is called a Taurus—for use by the Ukrainians.

Third, we have Finland and Sweden commenting about the sabotage by Russian and Chinese interests of internet cables and telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea. They’re already talking about activating Article Five, which is the mutual defense clause of the NATO treaty.

So the Russians are misreading the situation. They’re misreading how the Europeans are standing. They’re misreading what the European nerve is.

The question is whether or not the Europeans can stick to it.

We’re now in this weird situation where the Europeans are doing a lot more for Ukrainian defense than the Americans because they know, at the end of the day—now, with or without the Trump administration—that they’re the ones who are going to have to live with whatever the security situation evolves into.

So we’re seeing a lot more interest in all of them to step up.

My personal favorite is an eight-party commission that involves all of the Scandinavian countries, all of the Baltic countries, Poland, and Germany, to start investing in defense industry manufacturing in Ukraine proper, so that the Ukrainians have a better chance of standing on their own.

Will it be enough? We’ll see. But what we know for sure is that the Russian effort has had absolutely the opposite effect.

Ukraine Can Now Strike Russia Direct

Photo of the ATACSM rocket being fired

The Biden administration just gave Ukraine the greenlight to use American weaponry inside of Russian territory. So, what does this mean for the future of the Ukraine War?

The biggest change will be Ukraine’s usage of long-range ballistic missiles (mainly the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS) to target military infrastructure within the Russian border. While there will be some impacts to Russian logistics, this likely won’t lead to any significant breakthroughs. And it doesn’t look the Russians are too worried about this either…otherwise someone important would have been doing the press conference.

Without too much concern for immediate escalation, this greenlight allows Ukraine to soften Russian positions and supply lines along the frontlines. But perhaps the biggest thing to watch, is that Trump now has another card up his sleeve once he gets into office and begins his negotiations with Russia.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from chilly Colorado. It is Monday, November 18th, and yesterday, on the 17th, the Biden administration lifted restrictions on the use of American weapons by the Ukrainian government. They can now launch wherever they want in Russian space. The weapon system that is of the most importance are the outcomes, which are kind of a rocket ballistic missile that has a range of about 200 miles.

It’s broadly expected that within the next day or three, the Ukrainians will be using them to target things like ammo dumps, air assets, and especially rail bridges—basically anything to snarl the logistics on the Russian side of the equation.

The two areas you’re going to see the most activity are in the vicinity of Kursk, where the Ukrainians have a foothold in Russian territory, and an area in the Donbas near where the Russians have been focusing strongly on capturing the city of Picross, given that it’s a rail hub.

The whole idea is to disrupt the ability of the Russians to get military assets to those theaters. There’s probably not going to be too much of an impact on things like air power on the Russian side because already 90% of the jets that the Russians have been using to operate in Ukraine are beyond that 200-mile range.

You might push a few more back, so this is concentrating the fight on those two main salients. But it’s probably not going to generate any sort of meaningful breakthrough in either direction, though it will certainly help the Ukrainians hold out.

There are three big things that we do need to consider now that we’ve had this kind of upgraded military capacity.

First of all, I don’t see this as a meaningful escalation in the war. I don’t think it’s going to generate any sort of significant response by the Russians. That’s not just because the Russians have, by my count, had over 200 “red lines” that the West has eventually skipped across.

You can always tell if the Russians are serious or not by who does the speaking. In this case, the Russian that came out and condemned the American action, saying this was an escalation, was a guy by the name of Dmitry Peskov, who is basically their press attaché. It didn’t even come from a policymaker. So, you know, it’s not serious.

I don’t expect the Russians to do anything significantly more. Keep in mind, the Russians have been crossing a lot of what the West would consider red lines—with spies, sabotage, and even bringing in North Koreans to fight in the war. There have been a lot of steps here, and that was probably ultimately what drove the Biden administration to take this action. But I don’t think this is an escalation in the traditional sense.

Second, if the Russians want to rebuild their credibility when it comes to red lines, they have to talk. The way you establish red lines and mutual deterrence is through a direct face-to-face summit. Putin, however, has refused to pick up the phone and call any leaders who are decision-makers because he knows that if he does, everything is on the table.

He would then have to give something up. Since the Russians have been pushing broad-spectrum interference in Western affairs—whether politically, economically, or strategically—for three years now, he’d have to give up a lot of that to get anything he wants. So it’s simpler to just avoid communication altogether.

We’ve been here before. When the Soviet Union developed its first atomic weapon back in 1949, that was the height of the Cold War. Things were really sketchy, and we didn’t get our first real bilateral summit after that weapons test until 1955, after Stalin had died. I’m not saying we have to wait for Putin to die or anything like that, but we’re not in a position in Russia politically where it’s feasible to have that conversation.

As long as the Russians feel they’re making incremental gains in Ukraine, which they have for about a year now, there’s no need for a broader renegotiation of the relationship. Always keep in mind that Ukraine was never a one-off; it’s the ninth post-Soviet conflict the Russians have either instigated or been involved in, and it won’t be the last.

Regardless of how Ukraine gets settled, one way or another, there will be another series of wars further west that will involve NATO countries until we get to that point. Putin feels that negotiations are better carried out on the battlefield rather than by phone or in person.

Which brings us to the third thing: this is really interesting timing for this step by the Biden administration. Obviously, Biden’s not going to be president after January 20th, and there’s going to be no succession within the Democratic structures.

Donald Trump is coming back, and here we have a very clear step forward that puts a fascinating chip on the table for potential negotiations down the road. If there’s anything we understand about Donald Trump, it’s that he sees everything differently. Putting this card into his hand to play with Putin at a later time is kind of fascinating.

What Trump will do with this is entirely up to him, but Biden appears to be setting the stage for Trump to have whatever he needs to force the Russians to the table in whatever way he wants to. This is a really interesting approach to bipartisan foreign policy that we used to see all the time during transition periods but really haven’t seen in the last eight years.

All right, that’s it for me. Everyone take care.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Which BRIC’s Member Will Survive?

The future for most of the BRIC countries is not – as Rihanna so eloquently put it – “shining bright like a diamond.” If I had to choose between Brazil, Russia, India and China, my money is on India outlasting the others.

Most of you know where I stand on China, and its collapse is inevitable. Russia has been shooting itself in the foot for ages, and its recent war on Ukraine is only going to bring them closer to that final bell. Brazil has a better demographic outlook than China and Russia, but geographic constraints and dependence on China will catch up to the Brazilians sooner or later.

Thanks to a stable demographic picture and growing need for self-sufficiency, India stands out as the most resilient. As long as these factors remain, India is set to do very well…even if they have to do everything on their own.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Maine. That’s New Hampshire over there. Because, you know, what? You state. Today I’m taking an entry from the Ask Peter Forum, specifically of the original BRIC countries: which one do I think is going to do the best and stand the test of time and why? And it’s always… there’s no boat.

The waves can’t be good anyway. Well, let’s do a process of elimination. First and foremost, China — let’s dispose of that. Demographically, China is facing national dissolution. The birth rate has now been lower than the United States since the early 1990s, and it’s already at a point where it has about the same number of people over age 50 as under.

So, we are looking at ethnic dissolution of the Han ethnicity before the end of this century. To think that there can be a country that comes out of a place with no people? No. It’s just a question of how China dies. And that’s before you consider that this is a country that imports almost all of its energy, imports almost all the components that allow it to grow its own food, imports almost all of its raw materials, and is completely dependent upon exports to the wider world in order to absorb all of its manufacturing capacity.

It is the country on the planet that is most dependent in absolute terms on globalization, and that means on the U.S. military to make sure that its ships can travel without being molested, no matter where in the world they go. That is a bad business strategy. And we’re going to be seeing the end of the Chinese system and probably of the Chinese state within ten years. So, not them.

Russia second. Very exposed geography: 5,000 miles of external border that really doesn’t have an anchor in any sort of geographic barrier. They have to defend the whole thing. Part of the logic of the Ukraine war is to get closer to the old exterior crustal defense they had during the Soviet period, where they could rely on things like the Tension Mountains or the Carpathians to shorten that external barrier.

So, they’re in a weird situation that if they don’t expand, they can’t actually shorten their external borders. Russia today actually has longer external borders, even just by drawing on a map, than the Soviet system did, despite losing all 14 of the constituent republics. So, geographically, that’s a bad situation. Demographically, we don’t have nearly as good of a picture of Russian demography as we do of the Chinese because the Russians stopped collecting census data 17 years ago and just started making up the data.

But at the time, they had one of the worst demographic structures in the world, and even by their official fabricated data, they’re in the bottom ten. So yes, Russia is not long for this world. The question is whether it dies this decade, next decade, or the decade after. There are some things they can do to buy themselves more time. They’re not nearly in as poor of a situation as the Chinese are, but they’re certainly not an economic power, and they can’t even maintain their raw materials exports without external help.

Third up: Brazil. Demographic situation is much better. Brazil didn’t really begin industrializing and urbanizing in fervor until the 1990s. Now the birth rate has dropped by almost three-quarters since then. But even if they keep aging at their current rate, they’re not going to face a Chinese or a Russian situation before at least 2070. So there’s still a demographic dividend to be had.

Their problem is more geographic. Think of Brazil as a table that has lost two of its legs, but the two legs that fell off are the ones to the interior. So if you want to start from the coast and get into interior Brazil, you first have to go up an escarpment and then gradually down into the interior. That means it has very, very high infrastructure costs because everything requires going massively uphill from these tiny little flat plains in the cities that are on the coast.

That makes Brazilian cities dramatic and beautiful, but it also means that everyone’s living on a postage stamp in a slum, and the only real city that they have that you would recognize anywhere else in the world is Sao Paulo. Up on top of that escarpment, which is a normal city, and so the economic hub. But it makes its interaction with the rest of the world very, very difficult and expensive.

So it’s not that Brazil is flirting with failed state status like China or Russia, but it’s very difficult for it to operate unless somebody is going to underwrite its development. Now, since roughly 1990, that country has mostly been China because the Chinese are not price-sensitive when it comes to getting raw materials, and so they will basically fund the development of infrastructure in Brazil in order to get to the farms and the mines that are in the interior and bring it out.

But in doing so, they also built joint ventures with a lot of Brazilian companies — joint ventures, which was Chinese for stealing all the technology that the Brazilians had so painstakingly developed over the last 40 years, taking those technologies back to China, mass-producing them, and forcing all the Brazilian companies out of business. So Brazil is actually less advanced now than it was 30 years ago. And that’s a really tough road to hoe.

The final country, of course, is India, and that is the default winner. But they probably would have won on their own anyway. Like Brazil, they had a demographic moment, and they’re now aging. And like Brazil, they didn’t really start to industrialize until after 1990 because they were basically pro-Soviet and didn’t want to participate in something that was U.S.-led, like globalization.

And so they are aging very quickly. But again, like Brazil, this isn’t going to be a real problem till at least 2070. In addition, India has never had a manufacturing pulse like, say, Brazil did. So there’s no place to fall. There was no place for the Chinese really to cannibalize these. What they need to do now, what the Indians need to do now, is more or less the same thing we need to do here in North America.

If they still want stuff in a post-China world, they’re going to have to build up their own industrial plant. And that is a growth story, but it’s going to be a more complicated one than it is here in the United States because the United States has partners in this. We’ve got Mexico and Canada and trade deals with Japan and Colombia and Korea, a solid relationship with Taiwan. And if the Brits can ever figure out what the hell Brexit means, I’m sure the Brits will be brought along for the ride as well.

That means that we have help in building out our supply chains, and we can all specialize in the things that are the best. India doesn’t have that. Every country that India borders hates India, and India hates every country it borders. So India is going to have to do all of this by itself, and that will make it more expensive. And that means it can’t get any help. And that means it has to build up the infrastructure with its own system in a way that we just don’t have to do in the United States.

There’s a pro and a con for that. The con is obvious. The pro is that this is an Indian story. With India doing this for its own reasons, on its own time schedule, in its own way, for its own needs. Yes, it will take longer. Yes, it’ll be a little ugly. Yes, it’ll be a little dirtier than it could have been otherwise. But it means that India will be globally significant even if it’s not globally involved.

And in a globalizing world, that’s just fine.

Russians, Russians Everywhere

The Russian Embassy in Warsaw, Poland

Russian “diplomats” are being expelled from Poland due to sabotage attempts. Sabotage has long been a trick up the Russians’ sleeve, as we’ve seen in similar incidents across Europe targeting infrastructure and humanitarian shipments related to Ukraine.

The Five Eyes got rid of their Russian “diplomats” when the Ukraine war started, and that list of intelligence agents was shared with lots of other countries. Sooo, there’s been some widespread diplomatic purges of these Russians.

The Russians have been redeploying these agents worldwide, but predominantly focusing on Africa and Mexico; that’s where they see their sabotage and espionage efforts working the best.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a chilly Colorado morning. Today we’re going to talk about something that’s just happened. It’s October 23rd, and the Polish government has basically kicked everybody out of the Russian consulate in Poznan, declaring them all persona non grata due to attempted sabotage throughout the country, most notably in Lwow, I believe.

This is not new. We’ve seen dozens of sabotage efforts across Europe, angering a lot of people. They’ve targeted rail systems in Sweden and the Czech Republic, been accused of arson in the United Kingdom and Germany, and have interfered with humanitarian and military shipments to Ukraine, particularly going after food and medical supplies. It’s a frustrating situation but not entirely unexpected.

When the Ukraine war started, there was a wave of diplomatic expulsions. The “Five Eyes” — the American-led intelligence network that includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — and countries with robust intelligence systems, like France, Sweden, and the Dutch, began tracking Russian intelligence assets. With the onset of open conflict, countries with decent intel systems purged all KGB and GRU officers from embassies and shared lists of known agents with other nations.

At the time, about one-third of diplomats in Germany were reportedly KGB officers. Germany, however, was not very adept at intelligence, and given the political climate, many Germans believed the Russians were not a problem until the Ukraine war began. So, these Russian agents were expelled not only from NATO countries but also from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Consequently, Russia redeployed these agents elsewhere, and countries that received the lists were now aware of their status as intelligence assets.

Russia then shifted its sabotage activities globally, focusing heavily on Africa. This wave of Russian activity is partially why we’ve seen so many coups in Africa recently. There are three benefits Russia gains from these operations: changing the country’s strategic alignment and expelling Western assistance, destabilizing countries to create refugee flows that put pressure on Europe, and, crucially, seizing control of valuable assets like gold, given that Russia has been excluded from most global financial institutions. Russian groups like Wagner now operate gold mines across the Sahel, bringing gold back to Russia, refining it, and transporting it to pay for imports, often to countries like China.

Another specific hotspot is Mexico. The Mexican government sometimes resists U.S. security recommendations, making Mexico City one of the few embassies with a significant number of Russian agents. For those familiar with Cold War spycraft, this isn’t surprising; Mexico City was one of the top KGB outposts during the Cold War. The logic was that causing instability there could indirectly affect the United States. Although we haven’t seen overt sabotage in Mexico like in other regions, Russia is continuing its espionage activities.