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A Fresh Mess In Syria

Government-backed paramilitary forces (supported by Turkey) in Syria’s Alawite enclave brutally suppressed the Alawite opposition. The Alawites are now seeking protection at Russian military bases as the Sunni-led government consolidates power.

Turkey’s support was critical in this crackdown and furthers the Turkish goal of weakening opposition along their Southern border. The Russians are getting squeezed out of the region, although Israel would prefer they stay in place to keep Syria fragmented.

Israel isn’t the only one favoring the Russians though; US policy is shifting in favor of Russian interests in Syria. This is just another layer of how Russian influence is reshaping global power dynamics.

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.

Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Denver airport. Today we’re talking about something happened yesterday, and they did before. Basically, we had a blow up of violence in the Alawite enclave of Syria. Now the highlights live on a coastal enclave that’s heavily forested on the west side of a mountainous ridge that separates the interior of the Fertile Crescent region from the Mediterranean.

This is the place where a couple of the Russian bases are called on Tartus and, Bonnie on. I mean, buddy is something like that. Anyway, it’s unclear what started. The Alawites had reason to go after the government. The new government, which is Sunni different ethno sectarian group, had reasons to go after the Alawites.

And the Alawites were the ethnic group that the previous dictator, Assad, came from. So it’s unclear who pulled the trigger first, but both of them went at it and the government absolutely came out on top. Specifically groups of the paramilitary group that’s aligned with the government called the FCS. They’re the ones who recently, decisively won the Civil War.

They’re the ones who did most of the killing. And several hundred, civilians were basically dragged out the street shot. They had group definitely had a hit list lined up. And so it’s unclear who started the fight. It’s very clear who finished it. A couple things here, number one. The government forces backed by or vice versa.

We’re a little bit too confident, a little bit too together. Had a little bit too good of Intel and too good of weapons for just being a government that has been there for less than two months at this point. So their sponsors, the Turkish government, were absolutely in play and they wanted these massacres to happen. It’s not hard to see why the Alawites were the core of the previous government that was anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti Turkish.

And the Turks want to make sure that everyone in the northern perimeter of Syria is either broken or on their side. And this one along we would mean that. But that brings us to the second thing. The Russians have had bases in Syria for about a decade now, and they intervened very decisively in the favor of the old government in the Civil war, killing probably close to 100,000 people before all was said and done, mostly civilians.

And the Russians would like to hang on to the two naval bases that they have on the coast. But they were in the process of getting squeezed out by the Turks and the new Syrian government. Well, a few things. Number one, the Alawites now are apparently congregating outside the bases asking for protection. But number two, the Israelis kind of would like to have the Russians keep at least a nominal foothold because it would shatter Syria and prevent it from ever resurrecting itself as any sort of threat to Israel again.

But third, far more importantly, is the chief Russian agent in the US government, Tulsi Gabbard, is now starting to agitate actively against the new Syrian government in favor of the Alawites. And it’s probably only going to be a matter of days before she, and by extension, the US government, starts actively asking the Russians to stay behind. We’ve been seeing American, foreign and strategic policy tilt towards the Russians in any number of ways.

It’s loudest in Ukraine. It’s also happening within NATO’s Europe. It’s also now happening in places like Japan. And now we have it also in Syria. So the degree of Russian penetration into the white House really is robust, and it’s starting to reshape regional dynamics in ways that will empower the Russians for years, if not decades to come and will complicate American foreign policy for years, if not decades to come.

Yeah, that’s all I got to.

The Russian Reach: A Grip on Romania

If Russia’s influence can make its way into the US on the scale we’re discussing, you can only imagine how bad it is in places like Romania. In December of last year, we discussed the “Red Strings in Romania” (which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/LP7tkPO6Wqk – but things have ramped up.

Romania annulled its presidential election due to proven Russian interference, mainly with Georgescu. He has now been barred from running in May in the re-election. Let’s circle back to how this is playing out in the US.

Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance have criticized Romania, claiming that Europe is now a bigger threat than Russia. Couple that with the purging of any intelligent government officials near these issues and it’s looking like the US administration is making the case for a broader NATO withdrawal. And I would expect it to only get worse from 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.

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from my house. I’m about ready to jump in the car and head to the airport, but quick news update. A few months ago there were presidential elections in Romania. They did in two rounds. And the guy who came in first place? Guy by the name of Călin Georgescu.

It was a nobody. I’ve been in a couple of minor roles in government. The 1990s really hasn’t done anything with his life since. Except for kind of shifted to the hard right, Nazi salutes and everything. Anyway, Romanian authorities, were able to easily prove Russian intervention in the election.

Both funding for, rescue specifically. So he’s under criminal investigation right now. As well as, my just a huge social media presence that the Russians have fabricated with as many, fake followers as there are citizens in Romania. So it was it was really beyond the pale. The Russians wanted to see how far they could go.

Anyway, the first round election was annulled. Repeat elections are going to be held in May. And the news overnight is that George Eskew, has been barred from even running, because of the investigation, because of the Russian influence. Now, this, matters for two reasons. First of all, the U.S government now, both Tulsi Gabbard, who is the director of National intelligence, who has been working with and for the Russians for the better part of a decade, and JD Vance, the vice president, have both come out publicly and said that what the Romanians are doing to withdraw George Eskew is part of the reason why Europe is now a bigger threat to the United States than, the Russians are, which is, you know, propaganda of which the Russians are just gleeful to have people at the top of the American system saying that. And now that you’re just you want to be able to loud to run, you should expect, those statements of the United States to get much, much firmer.

Two things. Their number one, I can’t speak to JD Vance. That investigation is still in progress, but, Tulsi Gabbard, she’s in the process of going through all the Intel, the strictures, and basically purging anyone who knows anything about counter Russian operations, specifically about her. So that’s a problem. Second, it appears that elements within the administration are looking for a minor ally, like, say, Romania, because they’re in NATO.

To have a formal breach of relations with in order to basically justify some of their policies and especially, set the stage for a full NATO withdrawal, by the United States. And this is shaping up to be the perfect test case for that. So the Romanians are doing what they need to to protect their system. Decision makers within the American government are very clearly working hand in glove with the Russians on this, and things are going to get a lot worse before they even pretend to tilt towards getting better.

The Russian Reach: Categorizing Intelligence Agents

Man looking a computer screen with reflection

The Russian intelligence system is comprised of a vast and interconnected network of agents. Each of these pawns plays a different role in supporting the “king” back in Moscow.

Today we’ll be exploring these different roles and how they fit into the master plan of the Russian machine.

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.

Forthcoming…

The Russian Reach: Playing Catch Up Part 2

This is part 2 of my attempt at catching up to current events in our Russian Reach series. Again, I’m going to let the videos do the speaking for themselves, but here are some questions to ask yourself before diving in:

Am I dreaming? Did I take any hard drugs in the past week? Am I still in my dystopian FPS augmented reality simulator? Whether you answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to those questions, you’re in for a rude awakening…

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.

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here. You are about to watch a video on a series that I’ve put together called The Russian Reach, which examines the role of the Russians in manipulating the current white House as well as the US government in a broader sense.

For anyone who signs up for my newsletter for watching any video for the remainder of the month, any sense that you would have normally given me for the next three months is going to a medical charity called Med Share.

But your steps in to help out communities who, through no fault of their own, have temporarily lost the ability to look out for themselves. So, for example, if the Russians are bombing your power grid and the Americans are no longer providing the tactical intelligence so you can anticipate the missile strikes and position your air defense and the Americans.

Furthermore, have stopped all financing to help you repair said power grid. In the aftermath, Medicare steps in to help hospitals with things like diesel generators. This QR code will take you directly to the Ukraine page, and that is where all of the donations will be going.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Let’s see. Let’s start with the Defense Department. Secretary Hegseth, has said that the reports that he gave the order to stop cyber operations, defending and defending against Russian cyber operations or disrupting their cyber operations was not actually true. Didn’t say the statement. He just retweeted somebody else’s, newspaper article. I have no way of confirming that personally.

But I will point out the original report came from within the Department of Defense. So I have my doubts. But for the moment, let’s just take folks off at his word. Good. Because the Russians have certainly not stopped hacking us. But if you look across the rest of the US government, the trend is definitely in the direction of just lying back and let it happen.

So there’s something called, let me show you this. Right. See, so the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, this is the group that prevents, the Russians from hacking the elections. Either going after the hardware or participating in misinformation. It wasn’t disbanded. It’s just all the people were fired, and, no one has been brought in to do the work since then.

Second one comes out of the Justice Department, which, Pam Bondi is the secretary of Justice now, and Task Force Klepto Capture, which was designed to go after foreign assets held primarily by Russian oligarchs. They basically stopped that work altogether. So it doesn’t matter where you got your money. If it’s from theft or criminality or whatever else. If you’re Russian, you’re in the clear. Now. Investigations have stopped, and the third one is at the FBI, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Basically, if you’re in the United States and you’re a citizen, you’re going to be doing the work for foreign government. You have to register of doing the work for the foreign government. Well, not anymore.

Donald Trump’s team has fallen, a foul of this act. Many, many, many, many, many times, for either not reporting or reporting after the fact. And now you just don’t have to do it at all. So we’re on a one off for China mean it’s not going to be enforced.

Want to work for Russia? Go for it, Turkey. Take your pick. Okay. What’s next?

All right, let’s talk about what’s going on with the federal bureaucracy for in terms of hiring and firing. So first, some good news. The Trump administration has reinstated the people who were disassembling nuclear weapons. The people that he fired while the weapons were disassembled, the check on, you know, safety and maintenance of the so-called those people are back at the jobs, thank God.

Okay. However, overall, in the last eight days, the rate of firings has increased dramatically. We’re probably up to about 70,000 people have been fired. That’s about two, maybe 2.5% of the workforce. Keep in mind, these people aren’t really gone. Because, Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to fire them. So, in the time that since Trump has come in, which is we’re in week setting, I think, most of these people have been been reinstated by labor boards and especially courts.

Thing to keep in mind is that the premier authority in the United States is not the president’s Congress. Congress, establishes the bureaus and the departments and pays for them with taxpayer funds. And it’s up to the president to manage them. Now, the president does have a huge amount of autonomy and how to do that. But there are limits.

And so in this specific case, what we’re seeing is the people have basically been reinstated by the courts, but the Trump administration is not letting them back to work. However, Congress has mandated that the services that they were providing still be provided. So we’re starting to see large scale hiring of contractors to do the work. So, basically, we’re paying for everything twice now.

So budget deficit goes up. And if this sounds familiar to some of you, that’s because this happened also during the first Trump term. So he apparently either didn’t learn his lesson or thought that if he did it on a grander scale with less competent subordinates, he would get a different outcome. And he does get a different outcome.

It’s costing more. Okay. What’s next?

Okay, let’s talk tariffs. On the 4th of March, when we launched the series, Trump had just announced a 25% tariff on Canadian Mexican products. Two things going on here. He instinctively believes that a trade deficit is something that, is unfair. And so he wants to get that down to zero. And we do have large trade deficits with both countries.

But keep in mind that, every Canadian province and every northern Mexican state trades more with the United States, and they do with the rest of their country, which is another way of saying that their industrial plant is fully integrated into ours. And so we get all the benefits of their industrial plant without having to pay for their Social Security equivalent, their health care system, their infrastructure, their education, any other maintenance.

So we get the results of all the good stuff without having to pay for all the stuff that comes from running a government. This is a really good deal. Anyway, Trump has, of course, modified his position and say, now it’s all about illegal migrants and, fentanyl. Keep in mind that fentanyl is not actually controlled by the drug cartels.

It’s a mom and pop operation where three guys in a garage can make tens of thousands of doses very easily. Also, the precursor materials come from China. That’s why the Chinese have their own tariff structure now, which is now at 20%.

But, those precursor materials are shipped largely through the US mail to the United States, where they are repackaged and then shipped on to Mexico. So if you’re looking for the low hanging fruit and how to, destroy fentanyl is a problem, and you don’t want to go after demand in the United States, going after the post office is a much cleaner, simpler, cheaper method. Because as long as we have these tariffs going on and often enough. Oh, sorry, I forgot to say, on the sixth.

Yeah. On the sixth, Trump had, conversations with both. Claudia, shame on the Mexican president and Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister. And the tariffs, for the most part, were deferred for another month. So they were originally put on in February. They were pushed a month. They took effect for 48 hours. They have been pushed another month. And this back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, has generated so much geopolitical and regulatory uncertainty that inward investment of the United States, it’s basically frozen, especially for American companies, because they just don’t know what the rules of the game are going to be.

And so even if you’ve got a stronger tariff today, against China, you really don’t want to move your industrial plant if you don’t know what the rules of the game are going to be. There’s one other problem is that, you know, one of my favorite quotes, the enemy gets a vote. The Canadians, did a first round of small tariffs, to counter Trump on the fourth.

They haven’t pulled those back. And Ontario, which is the largest, most populous, most industrialized, most integrated in the United States province, their premier, premiers kindof a governor in the American parlance. Ford has announced that on Monday, which will be the 9th of March, I believe that a 25% tariff will go into place on all electricity exports to the United States, and that primarily affects New York, Minnesota and especially Michigan.

So Detroit was already freaking out. Because the tariffs that Trump put into place affect anything that crosses the border. And the integration between Detroit and Ontario sees products go back and forth across the border on an average of like 6 or 8 times. And so they be terrified each time, which would add somewhere between 4 and $10,000 a vehicle for the final product.

For automotive. Doug Ford is basically taking a page from the Trump book and saying, fine, you want to be crazy, you want to put in tariffs that have nothing to do with the trade situation. Fine. Here’s one on electricity. You have fun with that. And he indicates he’s going to keep that in place until this terrorist situation is completely put to bed.

Whether or not I believe him, I don’t know. I’ve never had a chance to meet the guy. This is a new thing for him, but the dude, is is arguably the second most powerful person in the Canadian system because Ontario is so big relative to the rest of the country, it would be like Florida, Texas, and California all wrapped into one, with a much bigger industrial plant relative to that size.

All right. What’s next?

Okay. NATO. Well, no. Two in the European Union. Don’t have perfect overlap. The countries that are in the European Union that are not in NATO, like Austria and Ireland, are generally neutral, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they love the Russians or anything like that. They’ve just choosing to not shoot anyone anyway. Things are changing. The Trump administration’s basic abrogation of NATO leadership and, retreat on Ukraine, which is really the only issue that the Europeans care about right now, has forced them to do something that is honestly long overdue and, expand their defense spending.

We did a video already on the German situation, which is its own, ball of wax. But now the European Union nonmilitary organization is getting into it, too. And, basically, they’ve got this thing called a debt break. Where you can deficit spend up to 3% of GDP. Do any more than that, you get in trouble and you start getting fined by the European Commission.

So what they’ve done is they this is a condition for the monetary union. Otherwise they were afraid that some countries would just print currency like mad and deficit spend like mad and, wreck everybody’s plan. So limits. Anyway, in the last four days, the EU ministers met and they agreed to suspend the 3% limit. If what puts you over is defense spending.

And the thinking is that this by itself will free up about 6 to €700 billion, which is about 630 to 750 billion USD, for unspent defense spending. And if that is all spent in the next 2 or 3 years, basically you’re looking at the European Union countries roughly increasing the collective defense spending by somewhere between 50 and 100%.

So significant margin, is it enough for them to carry the water on Ukraine and everything else with it, the United States? No. But it’s a step in the right direction. And if you know, nothing else good comes from what’s going on right now in the world. Having the Europeans have some more capabilities on the surface seems good, but you know, there’s 27 EU members and each have their own story.

So that is a very dangerous blanket statement to put in there. Something that I addressed in the German video that I think went out yesterday, having a hard time keeping track of time. Okay. What’s next?

On March 7th, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced before the Polish parliament that Poland would be withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty on the Banning of Landmines and the Dublin Treaty on the Banning of Cluster Munitions, in order to build out a defensive capacity that allows them to defend better. They’re also going to do a nationwide draft of all men of military age to prepare for the war with the Russians, because they know that they are next after the Russians are joining with Ukraine.

And furthermore, he announced that the government is formally considering starting the exploration process to build its own independent nuclear weapons system. Because ultimately, that’s the only thing that’s going to be able to hold the line. It takes years to build up a conventional military. And while Poland has a head start, it’s not going to be able to stand up to the Russians on their own.

Certainly nothing without United States assistance. And we should expect many, many other European countries to follow these broad guidelines, especially when it comes to nukes. With Finland and Sweden being at the top of the list, Romania probably being right there with Poland, and shortly thereafter the Germans will have no choice but to consider doing it themselves.

The Russian Reach: Playing Catch Up Part 1

We’re only four days into this series and somehow it seems as though we’re weeks behind current events. So, I’m doing some rapid fire updates this weekend to bring everyone up to speed.

Even if I sat here with a dictionary, a thesaurus, and ChatGPT trying to come up with the right words to describe these last 96 hours, I’m not sure I could muster up anything better than this: HOLY S***!

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.

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here. You are about to watch a video on a series that I’ve put together called The Russian Reach, which examines the role of the Russians in manipulating the current white House as well as the US government in a broader sense.

For anyone who signs up for my newsletter for watching any video for the remainder of the month, any sense that you would have normally given me for the next three months is going to a medical charity called Med Share.

But your steps in to help out communities who, through no fault of their own, have temporarily lost the ability to look out for themselves. So, for example, if the Russians are bombing your power grid and the Americans are no longer providing the tactical intelligence so you can anticipate the missile strikes and position your air defense and the Americans.

Furthermore, have stopped all financing to help you repair said power grid. In the aftermath, Medicare steps in to help hospitals with things like diesel generators. This QR code will take you directly to the Ukraine page, and that is where all of the donations will be going.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan, here it is early in the morning on March 8th. March 8th? We’re deep into the series on the Russian reach right now. And while it has only been, oh, my God, four days since we launched it, so much has evolved. So this video today is going to be an attempt for me to get you caught up on everything that’s gone down in the last 96 hours.

This is Loki. He’s my copy editor.

This week, the Trump administration sent a delegation to Kiev to speak with the opposition, which in of of itself is not all that odd. The United State maintain a bipartisan boring you. Yes. So US maintains a bipartisan foreign policy, and that’s not just a Democrat Republican thing.

It’s an us and them thing. The idea being that you never know who is going to be across the table from you after an election. So you maintain good relations with both sides. So whenever we’re visiting another democracy, if there is time, Secretary of state or whoever tends to carve out at least a little bit of time to meet with the other side to keep everybody in the loop in an agreement, at least until this week, because the only topic that the Trump team wanted to discuss in Kiev and then even bother going to speak to the government was, how do we get rid of Zelensky specifically, how do we get early elections so that he can be gone now to God? This is a very Russian thing to do. In fact, Russia is the only country where we don’t have this sort of bipartisan approach because there is no opposition. Every democracy in the world is going to look at this and see the United States playing favorites and willing to tilt the electoral balance like they did in Germany recently.

And it’s going to put a chill on relations with everyone for everything, unless it happens to be a one party state, in which case they’re going to take their own lessons from it. Right now, to their credit, the people who the Trump administration met with turned him down flat. They’re like, guys, we’re we’re in a war.

We’re under martial law for good reason. And Zelensky, while he’s our political opponent, is doing a decent job. I mean, the only people who think he’s a crook are the Russians. And you. So, you know, kudos there. But this is definitely going to have reverberations for U.S. policy moving forward everywhere. All right. What’s next?

All right. Next up is Russia. Vladimir Putin, on the 6th of March, preemptively rejected every version of every ceasefire plan currently under discussion, saying that none of them even remotely addressed Russia’s concerns. Keep in mind that the Russian goal here is not simply to destroy Ukraine, but it’s to carry on the war until it reaches a more defensible perimeter that includes all of the territory of Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and at least the eastern half of Poland, or at least the north eastern half or quarter of Romania, basically getting all the way to the Vistula River, the Danube River and the Carpathians, and probably now including Finland.

Now, now that I think about it, the Russians will settle for nothing less than the complete demilitarization of Kiev. The extradition of Zelensky and absolutely no foreign peacekeepers on Ukraine territory at all, because they want to be able to restart the war after a cease fire once they’ve had a chance to rearm and get more equipment from China, North Korea.

And right now, the Russians feel absolutely no compunction to negotiate on everything because the American administration is basically using Russian talking points on everything, calling Zelensky a dictator and a criminal, saying that the Europeans are the actual war party here, not the Russians who are the rapists and murderers and so on. So, yeah, good luck with those negotiations.

Okay, What’s next?

All right, let’s talk about what’s going on. On the ground, on the war in Ukraine. A couple days ago, the United States stopped all intelligence cooperation with Ukrainians, making it much easier for the Russians to bombard Ukrainian cities, because no longer are they getting early warnings about the attacks, they can’t position anything. It also prevents the Ukrainians from going after Russian logistics because they don’t know where they are now.

In addition, on the sixth, the United States banned all private companies from selling any sort of recon related information, including satellite images, to the Ukrainian government. So basically, we took what was a gutting and turned it to a complete blackout. And on the seventh, the Russians claim that they have achieved a series of breakthroughs in Kursk province.

That’s a little chunk of Russia to the northeast of Ukraine that Ukrainians have established a foothold in over, last summer and into the winter. Basically, the Russians are now able to maneuver without any problem, they’re not being seen. Or more to the point, they’re not being seen by the Ukrainians. And so the Ukrainians simply can’t move troops to where they need to be.

So the United States has basically fully sided with the Russians here. And for the Russians to achieve some sort of breakthrough on this short time frame, you know, less than 72 hours after the original information cutoff. The Russians are slow, so there is no way that the Russians could have moved that far that fast, with that sort of achievement, without some act of collaboration on behalf of the US government.

So it’s not that the United States is neutral in this. It’s not that the United States is siding against the Ukrainians. It’s the the United States is now actively assisting the Russians in the war. Okay. What’s next?

Okay. Final one. In the last five days, the US government has launched a pretty significant assault on its own ability to gather and publish information. I’m not just talking here about things disappearing from online websites, although that is a big deal. But more specifically, the Trump administration has dissolved the federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, which basically helps put together the data for things like GDP and, inflation and employment.

They’re gutting several of the committees that work to do the work on these things. Within the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is the platinum standard for government statistics on a planetary basis, and in general, going after the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics as well. Noah has been. That’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Basically, whether for the federal government has basically been so pared down from staff, it can’t function. And it’s removed all of its climate data, which is making the farming community freak out because, you know, I don’t know if you knew this, but weather’s kind of important to farmers. And then in the census, they’re stripping out anything that has anything to do with, undocumented populations.

Keep in mind that the census counts these people not because they’re citizens or because they’re going to qualify for services, but so that urban centers and states have some idea of what the population complexion is in their state so they can make educated decisions all in, it’s generally blinding the US government at all levels to the reality of the situation on the ground, making policymaking difficult.

And just to make it a little bit worse, the Trump administration wants to rejigger how GDP is calculated so that the actions that they’re taking right now, aren’t reflected in GDP data officially. The idea is that we’re trying to pare down the federal government. And so that would make it look like we are having a recession when it’s really a one off.

But really, this is more of an Argentina style Potemkin bullshit, where if you know, the statistics are going to be bad, you change the way that they’re generated so they don’t look nearly as bad as they really are. That’s a lot. We’re going to continue to try and keep you updated. Hopefully I won’t have to do anything this long every single week.

But there is so much going on and there is so much breaking. As I said in the series, we’re seeing an active deconstruction of American power here, and the events of just the last 96 hours are kind of mind blowing that any of these things have happened, much less all of them.

The Russian Reach: US Cuts Ukraine Intel & Dominos Fall

The US has halted all intelligence sharing with Ukraine. If you thought the weapons cutoff was a big deal, buckle up. Since Ukraine relies on US intelligence for battlefield maneuvers, we might as well start air-dropping blindfolds to Ukraine.

You can bet your ass that Russia will happily exploit this weakening of Ukraine. However, the fallout of this move by the US is not contained to the battlefield, or even the region. Key US allies are now raising alarms over fear of intelligence leaks and potential Russian access to sensitive information. The Five Eyes alliance is on red alert over the lax handling of classified data and leadership purges under Trump.

This is an unprecedented intelligence breakdown and puts a fat ole ‘X’ on US credibility.

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.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming from Colorado, this one is going to seem a little out of order in the series, but, events are happening very, very quickly. We’re getting overtaken by them. It’s the 5th of March while I’m recording this.

And the United States has just ceased all intelligence sharing in cooperation with Ukraine. There’s any number of reasons why this is not in America’s interests. Not to mention, you know, all the Intel that the U.S was gathering from Ukraine. But for the Ukrainians, this is actually far more important than the weapons cutoff that is now about 96 hours old. The United States contrary to what you might have heard, has supplied Ukraine with less than one third of its, equipment in any given day of the stuff that is important from somewhere else.

And probably 40% of the total that Ukraine uses now is produced within Ukraine itself. So while losing access to the weapons flows is bad, it’s not nearly as deadly to Ukraine as losing access to the information that allows the Ukrainians to target it. The Russians outnumber the Ukrainians in every field, and can draw upon the old Soviet era stockpiles, in addition to the Chinese and North Korean troops and equipment.

That gives them a huge numerical advantage. So the way the Ukrainians have been staying, one step ahead is to do two things. Number one, try to turn the war into a war of movement at any given point so that numbers in any particular place can be moved and concentrated to attack Russian weak points, as opposed to staying still and letting the Russians to come to them and grind and grind and grind.

And then, number two, know where the Russians are coming from, not just so you can maneuver, but so you can target logistics in that direction and know which rail lines, in which trucks, in which intersections and all that good stuff without American signals intelligence, satellite intelligence, a lot of that goes away. The other NATO countries do have some capacity, but, the agreements that are made with NATO were specifically designed so that the United States maintains preeminence in all of that.

And by turning it off, the Ukrainians basically lose every advantage that they had in the fight, with the exception of the drones. And the drones require long range targeting information that came from the Intel. So they can really only be used relatively close to the front. In contrast, every advantage that the Russians have can now be pushed to its ultimate maximum because they will be encountering Ukrainians in pockets that can’t maneuver intelligently, and just overwhelming them with sheer numbers of weapons and people.

So far from being an honest broker, far from trying negotiate peace, this is a flat out effort by the Trump administration to crush the Ukrainians on the battlefield as quickly as possible, and about the only thing that they could do that would be more horrific than this would be to actually provide information to the Russians directly. And we are now in a World war.

I can no longer rule that out.

Well, shit, we may already be there in the time that it took us to process the previous section of this video. We’ve had a number of America’s close security partners. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all publicly float through back channels that, they are considering suspending, at least selectively, intelligence, cooperation with the United States.

The two reasons given, again, backchannels very, very spy worthy are they’re concerned that the United States is just hemorrhaging classified information, not necessarily the information per se. And the findings, the raw Intel, all of that, too, but methods of collection and integration that would basically endanger their entire Intel networks and their own national security. And of course, the second piece is whether or not the Russians are actually reading any of this as well.

Quick backstory. So intelligence cooperation with Saudi and Israel has always been a little, tongue in cheek because, like, we’re worried that the Americans are going to leak and then something bad will happen. And the Americans, like, we’re worried that you’re going to leak and something bad is going to happen. So it’s always been a little bit of back and forth, and we only cooperate with one another on the things that are of direct interest to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It’s not like they’re getting the motherlode here. But their primary concern, of course, is if you’re Israel and if you are Saudi Arabia, or 3 biggest threats are Russia, Iran and Iran’s various proxy organizations throughout the region, groups like Hezbollah. And if we now have the United States compromised, there is a question as to how much American Intel and global Intel is getting into those hands, which would, of course, be a real problem for Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The second issue, deals with the Anglo states, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada. Those four combined with United States are called the Five Eyes. And it is the tightest alliance in human history, the tightest alliance in American history. And it is the only system in the world that is basically an open book for Intel sharing.

So the United States collects the lion’s share of the Intel. But there are other things that the other allies are better at, and they all have their own regional networks. So the US collects its bevy, we go and we have a powwow with the rest of the Five Eyes. We compare notes with what they’ve collected, and then we all go back home and take the information that we’ve learned and use that to inform additional investigations using our other partners.

And we just go back and forth and back and forth. It’s a very robust, very productive system. But the five eyes are have two concerns. Number one, the way that the Trump administration is completely gutted, the top level of our intelligence directorates, has them terrified because they are seeing things leaked out into the public sphere. That should be kept secret.

In addition, they’re also very worried about Elon Musk’s Doge, because you’ve got people who are in their 20s with no security clearance or getting access to databases, and then just posted it on social media because it’s fun. Whether this is just rank or gross incompetence on the part of the Trump administration or the Russians are directly manifesting these things from behind the scenes, really doesn’t matter at this point, because anything that gets out, the Russians are going to pick up anyway.

So the five eyes are seen, Russian eyes and fingers in the heart of their own national intelligence system.

Right now, which means that the United States just isn’t a competent or a trustworthy partner to them. And so the question isn’t how will cooperation be scaled back, but how much and where? This isn’t the end of the relationship. This can probably hopefully be fixed, but we haven’t had this sort of sustained breakdown in intelligence collection and processing in the United States ever, not even with the most robust, Soviet moles, Russian moles that we’ve seen.

Folks like Walter James. I can’t believe I have to say this, but if you are one of my followers in the intelligence community, and you are concerned that your senior leadership is either completely incompetent or has already been compromised, your options are limited for what you can do. And I’m assuming you want to do it by the book, in which case the authority that has oversight over your entire world is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

That’s where you need to go. Anyone who says giving information to the oversight committee is traitorous is themselves a traitor. Because this is how the system works. This is how you do it by the book. This is the part of the legislative branch that has actual tactical oversight over everything in the world of Intel. So don’t let people bullshit you on things like that.

And if you are one of my non intelligence industry followers and you do not have a senator who is on the select committee, leave them alone. They’re dealing with enough right now as it is.

The Russian Reach: Geography and Intelligence

Putin, like the Soviets before him, is clouded by fear of invasion due to Russia’s vulnerable geography. Understanding that makes Russia’s strategy of expansion and occupation towards defensible borders clearer.

That’s the backbone of today’s conflict in Ukraine – Russia seeking a secure and manageable perimeter. While this war was inevitable, it is no way the end of the line. Should Russia win in Ukraine, it will push into NATO countries like Poland and the Baltics to “reclaim” the natural geographic barriers once held by the Soviets.

Capturing, occupying, and controlling non-Russian populations is no easy feat, but an extensive intelligence system allows the Russians to rule through fear and disinformation. This system not only keeps these captured people suppressed, but also shapes global politics through covert influence. Tomorrow we’ll discuss how they do this on a global scale.

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.

Okay, let’s look at the world through the Russian eyes. The Russians are from an area that was Moscow. Used to be known as Must Troy, which is in kind of the northwestern part of the Eurasian steppe. Very cold winters, short summers, generally shitty weather. Overall. Very prone to floods and droughts. They are not particularly secure ethnicity. And what they’ve discovered is there’s really nowhere to hide. The force of northern Russia, which could serve as barriers, do work. That’s how they hit out from the Mongols for a while. But, it’s all pine forest in the upper latitudes. And so basic agriculture is almost impossible. Everywhere else is flat.

It’s open. The rain is erratic. It’s very difficult to build the pillars of civilization. And most importantly, there’s no geographic barrier you can hunker behind. So at least one side is free. So you’re completely insecure from all sides in land that is decidedly subpar. The only way that the Russians have discovered that they can achieve any degree of security here is by conquering everyone around them, basically expanding.

They do that. They now have their inner core, which is protected, but they have an outer core that is now occupied hostile minorities. And around that outer core, there’s again no defensible barrier. So they do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again, until they reach an area that they can block. And so they expand from tiny Muscovy away to something more akin to the territory of the Russian Federation today, or ideally, the Soviet Union.

I say ideally, because the really good barriers that actually do limit external attack are the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, the Carpathian Mountains, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the deserts of Central Asia, and the tension mountains of Central Asia. If if the Russians can reach those zones, they shrink their outer perimeter. Give me an idea of just how extreme the differences.

Modern day Russia, which lost a fair amount of territory and half of its population compared to the Soviet Union, actually saw its external boundaries get longer. And the right now about 5000 miles in total. If they were able to re expand to where they were during Soviet times and actually plug the access points between those various barriers, that 5000 miles would shrink to about 500 miles.

That is ultimately what the Russians are fighting for because of the Eastern Hemisphere’s four big regions. The Russians are by far the weakest of the four. You’ve got Europe, which is densely populated. Much better climate can support much denser population patterns. You’ve got the East Asian rim, a very similar to Europe in that regard.

And so you get the Colossus that is China in whatever form it happens to be in. And then you’ve got the areas of the Middle East which combine kind of the best parts of the Russian space with something new. You got a lot of oasis cities. You get a little pockets like Mesopotamia that can support, like European style density populations and then surrounded by Arabs.

So what happens with political entities in the Middle East is they dominate a handful of these oasis communities or these bread baskets, and then they boil out across the deserts because they have mastered long range military, fighting. And so if they can get into the Russian space, they already have the transport technology built in.

So the Europeans can dominate on technology and capital and military force. The Asians can beat the Russians on numbers alone. And the Middle East senators can outmaneuver the Russians. And so the Russians have been invaded 50 odd times in their history. And the only way that they know to protect themselves is to conquer everyone in their neighborhood, and then set up a really dense shell around the outer perimeter.

The Ukraine war was always going to happen because Ukraine has two things going against it. Number one, it’s on the wrong side of that outer shell. And so the Russians see them as one of those internal ethnic groups that has to be oppressed and turned into cannon fodder. Second, the Ukrainians are up against parts of that outer shell, most notably the Arabian Gap, that is, goes into Romania and of course, the Polish gap of Poland.

So this war was always going to happen. The Russians were always going to try to take Ukraine, and Ukraine was never going to be the end of it, because once Ukraine is subjugated, if Ukraine is subjugated, the Russians then need to push to the next line of countries, which includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Romania, five of which are NATO countries.

So this was always going to go down.

But there’s another piece of this that is much more relevant to this overall series that we’re doing right now. And that’s how the Russians manage all of these restive occupied populations. It’s basically everyone who’s living in the Russian Federation who isn’t an ethnic Russian, is someone who’s been conquered because they were in the way or because they were perceived as a threat.

And so the Russians basically have this mélange of occupied populations that, based on whose numbers you’re using, are somewhere between 20 and 40% of Russian citizenry. And that’s before you consider the countries that are on the outside of today’s Russian Federation boundaries, like, you know, say, the Latvians, who used to be the someone of those internal oppressed minorities but have managed to slip away.

Ukraine, until recently was fully in that category. Now it’s a toss up. Well, the Russians can’t occupy them with their military because the military has to be at the frontier. The Russians do not have a good land. They do not have a lot of spare capital to throw around. They can’t go for the sort of fast and loose military forces that countries of the Middle East have done in the past.

They can’t do the technocratic stuff that the Europeans have done in the past. And they no longer have the numbers to do. The human waves, endless human waves that say, the Chinese can do. So their military is spoken for. It’s there to plug the gaps. And if the gaps fail, all that’s left is partizan warfare. So in order to keep their populations from doing the partizans in the wrong direction, the Russians maintain what is arguably the world’s most advanced and penetrating internal intelligence system.

Basically, they shoot through occupied populations with as many agents as they can possibly afford, to monitor the population, to spread disinformation, to keep the population turned against itself. And never, never, never allow them to agitate against Russian occupation in the first place. It makes Russia basically a state that is ruled by terror. And if the Russians happen to not like you for whatever reason, it means that they have this great tool, this Intel system that is great at passing unnoticed among populations, but finding the societal weak points about turning populations against one another.

And at the end of the day, sowing information that can shape policy. And it’s very much in use today. So tomorrow we’ll talk about how the Russians see their Intel system.

The Russian Reach: Why Leadership Doesn’t Matter…Until It Does

Despite the short-term emphasis placed on the title of president, chancellor, or prime minister, the reality is that leadership typically has minimal impact on the trajectory of a nation. The real movers are geography and demography; however, sometimes a leader can be the exception to that rule.

If you take the US, it’s clear that geographic security enabled a flexible and powerful military. If you look at German history, constant neighboring threats lead them down a different path. Demographic structures carry influence in all spheres of life. Younger demos can drive consumption and inflation, while an older, wealthier demo fuels investment and stability. Again, geography and demography are structural realities that are often “untouchable” by a singular leader.

And yet, there are pivotal moments when a leader (or single decision for that matter) can change the course of history. We’re talking about instances like Churchill’s stance during WWII or Zelensky’s defiance in the opening week of the Ukraine War. And now, Trump is pulling the US from its post-Cold War holding pattern and plunging it into a deglobalized system.

Trump’s leadership, coupled with his ability to appoint unqualified officials with little opposition, is a symptom of the disintegration of both major US political parties. Which means we’re entering a period where outside forces, like Russia, can weasel their way into American politics.

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.

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here. Coming from Colorado. Today we’re launching into our new series on what the hell is going on in Washington. Over the last few weeks, The Donald Trump administration has taken a number of steps that I don’t think pushed the MAGA agenda at all. And can’t be explained away as incompetence or toddler syndrome or whatever you want to call it.

Something else is up. It seems like the actions were designed specifically to tear down American power over the long term. And so I want to start by talking about why normally leadership just doesn’t matter. All countries are shaped by two things, their physical environment, their geography and their population structure, their demography. You understand those two things.

You can understand the challenges, opportunities and tools in front of a country. So, for example, if you’re a country like the United States that is surrounded by oceans, you don’t have to spend a lot of resources on defending the homeland, especially not on land. And armies are expensive, both in terms of money and in terms of manpower.

So if you are freed up from that, you can then instead invest your people in doing something that will actually earn income and invest your military and naval forces, which, while not cheap, can be wherever you need them to be. And so you basically get a much more mobile military force, and you get to choose the time and the place of when a conflict happens, rather than the other way around.

Another good example are the Germans. They are surrounded by potential competitors the Dutch, the French, the Austrians, the poles, the Russians, the Swedes and off the coast, the Brits. And so no matter where the Germans look, they face a potential threat. And throughout all of German history, until very recently, the goal was always to consolidate as quickly as you can, develop as quickly as you can, just in a panic, and then eliminate one of the threats so you can focus on the others.

And this generated a very hostile, erratic, rapid German economic and security policy that eventually triggered a couple of wars. That ended the European order, as it was until World War Two. And it was only with the creation of the European Union and NATO where the Germans were no longer, viewed themselves as surrounded by enemies but surrounded by allies, that this finally changed, of course, that shaped their economy because they still have that built in.

And so they focused everything on industrial activity because that’s what they knew. And because the frantic miss in the culture never really went away. They just focused it differently, which was triggered some of the economic problems that the Europeans are having. Now. You can play this for any country. Open borders means you have to have an army and you’re going to be a little nervous if you’ve got a rampart between you and everyone else, like, say, the Chileans versus the rest of the world.

With, the Andes Mountains, you get a culture that can be very productive, a pretty laid back because you’re not facing any sort of threat on a regular basis. And then everybody in between. That’s for demographic structure. It’s a question of balance among people who were under the age of 18, roughly 18 to 45, 45 to 65, and retired that first category.

Those kids to expensive. And you have to house them, clothe them, feed them, educate them. And for most adults, raising your kids is the most expensive thing you will ever do. Certainly more expensive than purchasing a house, but it does generate a lot of consumption, which generates a lot of economic activity

Next group, 18 to roughly 45. These are your young workers. These are typically your parents. And just like with the kids, lots and lots of consumption because they’re buying homes, getting educated, and, buying cars. So we have a relatively low value added workforce, but still a lot of consumption and a lot of inflation, and you got people 45 to 65. The kids are moving out. The house has probably been paid for and they’re preparing for retirement. They’re also paying a lot of taxes because they’re experienced workers that are very productive with high incomes.

So this is the tax base. This is the capital stock. This is the stock market. And then when you retire whatever assets you’ve accrued, you want to protect them. So you move out of things that are relatively risky, like say the stock market and go into things that aren’t like cash or property, and then you basically just whittle away at it until you pass on.

Every country has all of these categories. The question is the balance. If you have a lot of young people, you have a consumption led system that tends to be inflationary. It’s also easier to build an army. If you have a more mature system, you’re going to have a little bit more capital, a lot more industrial capacity. It might be easier to do a Navy.

It’s got an advanced population 45 plus. The capital you have is massive, and your ability to invest in technology and be making yourself a technocracy is a very real possibility. And usually countries that are in this stage have some amazing growth patterns. But it’s not from consumption, it’s from investment, it’s from technological breakthroughs. It’s from the application of those technologies.

And then eventually you retire and everything stops. What does all this have to do with leadership? Well, very little. You can’t leader your way out of your borders without a war. And while wars do happen, consolidate and whatever the territory on the other side is a multi-generational thing. And the consolidation usually matters more than the conquering.

So when you look back at, say, American history, as we expanded westward through the continent, we don’t remember the politicians like Paul King, those who came before that actually expanded the borders very well. We think of the politicians that successively turned the country into something else. On the other side of that, we think of Eisenhower. It’s a different sort of work.

It takes time, and it takes a lot longer than any one leader ever has. Even if you happen to be a despot who happens to be a genius and you take over at age 22 and you rule your entire life, this is the stuff not so much of decades, but of centuries. Same and population policy. Let’s say we had a really robust population policy that really encouraged large scale childcare to allow workers to both work and have kids.

Well, that’s not going to hit economic headlines for 25 years, because you have to wait for the kids to grow up and become adults themselves. Leaders just don’t change that. But every once in a while, we have a moment in history where the decisions that are made in the short term don’t just matter. But after everything. A great example is Churchill, during the Blitz, could have surrendered, cut a peace deal with the Nazis.

But no, he decided to make his country and unsinkable aircraft carrier and pray that the winds of time would be favorable. It was a gamble. It worked, and history would have turned out very, very differently had he, not me personally. I put Zelensky’s quote to Ukrainian president of, when the Chechen hit squads were closing in and the United States offered evacuation.

He says, I don’t need a ride. I need ammo. That changed the course of the war. And without that decision, this conflict in Ukraine not only would have been over a lot longer, we’d have a lot more dead Ukrainians than we have now, but we’d already probably be hit deep in a war on the plains of Poland.

We’ve been at one of these moments for arguably the longest window, in human history, for these last 35 years. Ever since the Cold War ended, the world has kind of been in this weird little transition period where the old globalized system of the US, built to build an alliance to fight the Cold War, was mostly maintained, and the structures of globalization on the economic side were mostly maintained.

But we’ve all been kind of a holding pattern to see what the United States was going to do. And most of my work, most notably my first book, The Accidental Superpower, is about this dichotomy and how it can’t last, and that sooner or later, the United States is going to move on to something else, whether it’s something internally, something regionally, the Western Hemisphere, or sees something shiny elsewhere.

And this whole system was going to end anyway. But no world leader, no American leader really took advantage of that moment to do something or take us in a different direction. Until now. And that person who is doing something is Donald Trump. But rather than translating American power of this moment into a new system that will last for decades, he seems to be tearing it down.

Which is why we’re doing the series. There’s something else to consider about why Trump has been so successful and is faced so few obstacles. And it’s more than just the fact that the United States military is more powerful than everyone of the allies combined. It has to do with what’s going on in the United States, because our political system is not stagnant.

It evolves, too. And every generation or so, the factions that make up our political parties move around. And in those periods and these windows of opportunity, in these transition moments and these interregnum politics become unstuck. So I would argue that what we’ve seen in the last 15 years is a complete disintegration of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, other apparatus and loyalty system.

In that environment, MAGA was able to hijack and take over the Republican Party quite successfully, whereas the Democrats more or less just dissolved as an institution. We’re in the transition process here. We are not seeing anything close to what the end result will be for the next period of American history. But at this moment in time, the institutions which are based on the parties, which are based on the people are in flux.

And I think the best example I can highlight for that is what’s gone on in the US Senate. No American president has ever had all of his cabinet appointees approved. You have to get confirmed by the Senate with a majority except Donald Trump and phase two. And without a doubt, this is the least qualified cabinet we have ever seen in American history.

And every single one of them have gotten through. We’ve gotten a guy who pledged publicly to turn the FBI into a vindication engine, specifically to prosecute the president’s opponents, confirmed. We get a vaccine skeptic who’s a complete nut job confirmed. We get an agricultural secretary who’s never been on a farm, confirm, and we get a defense secretary whose military experience is limited and has absolutely no experience in policy.

Whatever confirmed all of them got through, all of them got through quickly. All of them got through easily. This is not my army. This is not the power of Trump’s charisma. This is an issue that we are in one of these moments where the institutions are in flux, most notably the political parties in this case. And until that firms back up, the Senate has basically abdicated responsibility and that provides opportunities for others who are much more organized, who are not going through this sort of flux to exercise their will.

Which will bring us to the Russians. And we’ll tackle them tomorrow.

The Russian Reach: Series Introduction

There’s been a slew of US policy changes that the Trump administration has laid out. I’ve done my best to explain away as many as I could with conventional political reasoning, but I’m not sure I can anymore. Today, I’m going to be laying the foundation for a multi-part series on what is happening in Washington.

The list of policy changes is far too long to mention every single one, but some of the heavy hitters are: Ukraine aid suspension, trade tariffs, government firings and bureaucratic disruptions, and major foreign policy shifts. Again, I’ve tried my best to justify these moves using all the frameworks at my disposal, but when the things I’m seeing can’t even be rationalized away with MAGA ideology or incompetence…something more concerning could be shifting in US governance.

This series will explore the departure from traditional American policy that we’re currently seeing, what that means for the future trajectory of the US, and what the actual f*** is going on.

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.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. This one is going to be awkward. I am absolutely not a conspiracy theorist. In fact, I last five years, spent a substantial amount of my time, talking people down from theirs. But, so much has gone down in the last just couple of weeks that I am having a hard time ascribing changes in American policy, both at home and abroad, to a more conventional theory.

This isn’t MAGA policy. This isn’t policy incompetence on the part of the administration. This is something else. And bear with me as I kind of lay it all out. And, we’re going to see where it goes. I’m recording this on the 4th of March, and the two big pieces of news for the day are.

Let’s start with, Ukraine. The Trump administration immediately suspended or suspended, effective immediately. All military aid of all types to Ukraine, including anything that was in transit and had already been, budgeted, paid for and piloted and moved, with the equipment that the Ukrainians would have receive for the United States, they probably could have kept fighting until mid-summer, without help.

Now, a lot of things are up in the air. Geez. Let’s start with explain why this isn’t a Maga thing. Well, people say that all this money has been given, and like, there’s a big truckloads of cash go is like. No, I mean, the total value of the stuff is somewhere between 100 and 50, 285 billion.

But think of it this way. When you clean out your closet at home, to make room for your new stuff after Christmas, and you take it to goodwill. How much do you say it’s worth when you fill out that little form at goodwill? What it’s worth when you bought it. And, what the military has done is basically gone through their old stores of things they haven’t used literally in decades.

Reported them for the cost that it took to to build them and then adjusted for inflation and for about 70% of the total number that is the donation. And so you’re talking about old equipment we weren’t using that was marked at a value that’s probably higher than it ever was worth. Of the rest, 10 to 15% is ammo and more legitimate equipment legitimate is and current.

And then the rest is cash. So really you’re talking about a total value given that’s well under 40 billion, chump change. In addition, the Russians have been pointing, nuclear weapons at me, not just my entire life, but since the 1960s. And they have abrogated every arms agreement that the United States has ever signed with them in every conventional arms agreement they have ever signed with any country, ever.

In the modern era, if there is going to be a war between the United States and anyone over the next three decades or so, it’ll probably be with the Russians. So for having the Ukrainians basically take our hand-me-downs and fight the Russians to a standstill, that’s a national security win and an economic win by any possible measure.

And so I’ve seen that just twisted around and dropped is a problem. And that’s before you consider that we now have, the Trump administration, not casually, but actively, deliberately breaking relations with all of our closest allies up to including the United Kingdom. And now regular calls throughout Congress, not just for this or that, NATO leader to resign or Zelensky of Ukraine, of course, but actually withdraw the United States from day to all completely.

Now, you might be able to say that there’s a strategic argument to be made here, or at least a discussion we had, and that’s fine. But this is just like one of like 20 things I want to talk with you about today. This you know, all by itself this is a problem. The second big one that happened today is the imposition of a 25% tariff on everything coming from Mexico and Canada, Mexico and Canada.

Our number one and number two, trading partners and, everything, every everything that we do in the world of manufacturing is integrated with them across borders. And so by doing a blanket tariff, lots a lot warmer out here than I thought it was by doing a blanket tariff. What that’s basically done is made most American manufacturing, non-viable almost overnight.

No, there are certain types of manufacturing that may in time prove to be exceptions to this. There’s some very high end stuff, like in medicines, maybe. But if it involves anything that you think of as manufacturing, you know, an assembly line, a production floor that basically doesn’t stop, but it’s now no longer viable versus important stuff that comes from beyond North America.

So the biggest winners of this by far are the Chinese, where they already have competing industrial plants from running. And if you look forward to the world that we’re moving to, where the Chinese are disintegrating because of the demographic situation, we have a limited amount of time to prepare for a world where Chinese industrial plant just isn’t there.

And what Trump did by threatening the tariffs a couple of months ago and now implementing them today, is even before today, new investment into the United States in North America had frozen completely because no one knew what the situation was going to be. He introduced what we like to call regulatory uncertainty into the situation. And now that the tariffs are in place and people know what the math is, no one’s going to come here because the economic case is now been destroyed, and that will set us up for a situation years from now when the Chinese system finally fails, where we don’t have an industrial front in place and we’re going to have significantly higher inflation. Trump, of course, loves tariffs. And also today he said he’s going to put a 40% tariffs on all agricultural imports. Now, the United States is a large country that grows a lot of its own food. We’re the world’s largest agricultural exporter. We have a very wide variety of climate zones, but we don’t have all of them.

And so if you go into any supermarket, especially if you’re looking at things like fish, fruits or vegetables, a huge proportion of those in any given season is coming from a different country. We already have a food inflation problem here. And, now we’re going to have a significantly larger one. Those tariffs are supposed to kick in in April.

And Trump has said farmers start producing, but the farmers can’t produce most of the stuff that we import. Because swims in a different sea comes from a different climate zone or relevant to this moment in March looking around me at the snow. You’re not going to grow a lot of food in Colorado right now, so it has to be brought in from somewhere else. Same is true throughout the United States. In winter, we’re particularly vulnerable to Mexico in that. So we’re gonna have a 40% tariff on top of the 25% tariff that’s already there.

That is enough to push all by itself, probably 10% of the American population. Beneath the poverty line. And we’re just getting started.

Let’s talk about those that Department of Government efficiency that Musk is after. Trump is a great marketer. I will give him that. But, you know, the total value of everything that Musk has routed out of the federal bureaucracy that supposedly was all that, you know, really like $30 billion for all the disruption out of a $7 trillion budget that’s so small as to just not be worth my time to even look at.

Or if you look at the employees that he’s fired, right now it’s only about 1% of the federal workforce, and you would have to purge about 20 to 25% of the federal workforce just to knock 1% off of the budget. Most of what’s going on in the budget is entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. It’s not discretionary spending.

And of those workers, you know, there’s been a lot of splash. But you got to understand how organizations work. There’s basically three categories of workers. At the top, you have your political appointees, which are themselves tiered between the folks that are always political appointees that are let go at at the end of every ministration, you have the ones a step down who, it’s their job to make the trains run on time.

And they may be politicized, but they have a lot of back experience in the topic. And then the next level down. While technically political appointees, they’re typically never let go at the end of the administration because they’re apolitical technocrats who make operations function. Now the president has the authority to get rid of all three layers, and he’s gotten rid of Trump, has gotten rid of all three layers throughout every individual agency in the government, even those that are not political at all and have nothing to do with foreign affairs. So, for example, the Department of Agriculture, those firings, if it has to do with provisional employees or permanent employees, are generally have already been rolled back by the courts because the Congress has not given the president the power to fire most of these people.

And so every time one of those cases has come up, they’ve basically the courts have ruled in favor of, the employees. Now that goes for the second class, categories as well, which are the comp patrollers and the internal auditors. You know, these are the people who make sure that fraud doesn’t go into the system and that foreign interests can’t penetrate the system.

Trump fired all of them. Doesn’t have the authority to try any of them. It doesn’t achieve anything from a policy point of view. It doesn’t achieve anything for savings point of view. They will all in time be reinstated, undoubtedly, unless Congress intervenes and says, yeah, they need to go. But what it’s done is, is it stripped out the internal system that the U.S. government used to prevent foreign influence from penetrating?

There’s nothing about that that matches with MAGA goals. And then the third category are not your provisional employees. Those are the ones that are new and don’t have full civil service protections. Those might be able to get fired a little bit. But the temporary ones, the government does a lot in a lot of places. And you hire people temporarily to do things that don’t need to be done all the time.

So for something that’s near and dear to my heart, the Forest Service, you know, staffing all the national parks that surges in the summer, firefighters, those people have all been let go. So when we get to summer driving season this time, in a couple of months, a lot of the national parks probably aren’t going to be able to open.

And if we have forest fires years, fuck, that’s going to be awful for fighting forest fires without forest fires. Oh, anyway, well, that’s inconvenient. There’s a lot of things that these provisionals do that it’s a little bit more important, like maintaining the nuclear arsenal. Trump just fired them all. That’s doesn’t serve a mark, a goal, or in the food supply system.

You know, people who are in USDA, Department of Agriculture, you know, they don’t tolerate a lot of bullshit because they know if they screw up, people die, like by the tens of thousands. We’re no longer testing food safety because those are temporary jobs. And so we no longer have an eye on the bird flu epidemic because we’re not able to collect the information that we need.

Now, the midterm solution to all this is to just hire a bunch of contractors to do it all. But that means you’re paying for the old bureaucracy that they’re not using, and you’re paying extra cash to create a new private bureaucracy. It’s it’s expanding the budget, not tracking it. And we’ve seen that in the headline figures, with all the firings, with everything that Deutsche has done, the U.S. budget expenditures have gone up compared to the Biden administration.

Has to dodge. We basically have a lot of people without congressional authority and without security clearances that have gone into very sensitive databases, sort of posting things on social media. We’ve got lists of government assets around the world, some open, some covert that have just been released to the public. Stuff like this is if it gets in the hands of other states, that’s like the five year effort of espionage.

And it was just handed out. That doesn’t serve anyone’s agenda in the United States. What else? I got to look at my list. I’ve got a long one.

All right. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stopped investigating terrorism in order to focus on illegal migrants. What? Department of Health and Human Services isn’t even holding the meetings that are necessary to start the process for selecting the next flu vaccine, which has the medical community freaking out because they rely on these private groups to, at no compensation to themselves, advise the government as to what type of vaccine is going to be needed based on the flu strains that are circulating.

And since HHS also cut connections with the World Health Organization, we’re just kind of guessing at what is out there and literally relying upon the kindness of strangers to tell us what we need to get ready for.

All right, USAID, that’s the agency for International Development. That’s got a lot of crap for doing some strange things. That’s fair. But if you’re not going to invade or occupy a country, USAID is the primary method that the United States uses to influence countries around the world. You can call it whatever you want. The bottom line is, when it’s not present, the Iranians, the Chinese and the Russians absolutely dominate the space because they will step in with relief support that is loaded with intelligence operations.

And all of a sudden they’ve gone from meeting USAID head to head to having a completely open operating environment. And so, of course, the Iranians and the Russians sent a joint letter to the Trump administration thanking them for making life so much easier for them. Or in the Defense Department, we canceled all operations against Russian cyber activity.

That includes, defensive operations on our part, as well as offensive operations to disrupt their ability to hack the United States. The Russians maintain a very active cyber presence. They’re not just hacking our elections and our media and our power grid and our water and our food supply and the stock market. They’re going after you specifically because part of the Putin alliance that rules Russia includes organized crime out of Saint Petersburg.

And so most of those cyber things are linked to Russia in one way or another. And we have basically decided just to lay back, open our legs and let whatever happens happens. This isn’t MAGA policy. This isn’t toddler syndrome. This isn’t this isn’t even incompetence. This is too much, too soon, too holistic. This isn’t an abdication of American power.

This isn’t mismanagement. This is a deliberate disassembly of the building blocks of American power and security and safety. This isn’t anything that I would think that any American would ever want, much less orchestrate, which has pushed me into the realm of some computer, some conspiracy theories. I think we now need to consider that the Russians really have penetrated the white House.

And while I think it’s a stretch to say this is like a manchurian candidate sort of situation, there are too many things happening that seem too tailored to hobble American capacity, long run, and everything that was on this list is something that the Russians have tried before. NATO is something they’ve been trying to destroy since the 50s, and now we have a possibility of the US just walking away.

The military has been the bulwark of global security, and so gutting it from the inside is something they would love to see. Our Intel system has been the canary in the coal mine, and it appears that Trump is either not receiving or not reading the daily briefs at the agency produces for him every day. The food supply situation in the United States has long been the world’s safest.

And now we’re not even testing to maintain it. The demographic of Russia is one of the main reasons why the Russians are facing such a bleak, long term future. But if you interfere with the vaccine schedule in the United States, you can start increasing the death rate in Americans not just under 20 but under five, and start to equalize that situation.

This is some heavy stuff. And what we’re going to be doing in the next few videos are exploring all of this from the Russian point of view, how they see the world, how they influence the world and given the chance, how they would redirect American policy to serve their interests. I would love to say this is hypothetical, but I’ve already got a dozen examples in addition to the ones I just shared with you about how that is already happening.

So buckle up, because for the first time since I started doing this 25 years ago, I’m actually worried for the United States. We’ll talk about that too.

Trump Takes on Russia…or Maybe It’s the Other Way Around

US President Donald J Trump, both directly and via his senior staff, has outlined his administration’s policies for Europe, Ukraine and Russia. If the policies come to pass it will be the greatest expansion of Russian power since the conquering of Eastern Europe in the waning days of World War II, and a long-term hobbling of American military and intelligence capabilities on a global scale.

And that’s not even the worst part.

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Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Before we get into today’s video and really this whole series, keep in mind that I’m talking about very, very dynamic situations where somebody says something and somebody else responds. Specifically on today’s video about Russia, Defense Secretary Hagel said one set of things. He walked them back a few hours later. Trump countermanded him.

He walked them back the other direction, Trump said. So it’s all in motion. So what I am presenting in the video is my best understanding of where we actually are, as opposed to all the Douglas blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now you know that. Here we go.

Okay, guys, I need my notes for this one. So I’m going to try to look down as little as possible. So there’s not too much that has to be edited out, but there’s definitely going to be some.

It has been a remarkably good month for the Russians ever since Donald Trump has come in. He stressed America’s alliance system to an extreme, and over the last few days, we’ve seen a number of decisions made publicly that have basically bent to the Russian will on any number of issues.

It started probably in the first full week, Donald Trump’s term, when he turned Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency on the Central Intelligence Agency. And now the agency has been the primary function within the US government for decades of informing the American president of the threats coming from Moscow in general, and has actually been one of the bureaus, has been most active in countering those threats.

And one of the first things that Musk did is went after the senior staff at the agency.

Specifically, the folks that are involved in threat detection and briefing the upper ranks of the U.S government on possible options. Donald Trump has made sure that his inner circle doesn’t have anyone who is competent in it, because common people have opinions on topics, because they know things about topics, and Donald Trump doesn’t like to be countered.

So he has always had a hostile relationship with the agency whose job it is to inform the executive branch, the only other president that comes even close to Trump’s degree of dislike for the agency was, of course, Barack Obama. Now, of course, the agency isn’t the only agency within the US government that is involved encountering Russian threats.

The Defense Department’s right out there, and Trump’s, directives against Defense Department have actually been more disruptive than what they have done against, the CIA, specifically the Trump effort on DEA diversity, equity and inclusion, basically the woke agenda, if you want to call it that, is something that has been around in the Defense Department before the Biden administration was actually implemented by the first Trump term as a recruiting tool to get people who are not simply white males.

We don’t know what the future of the military is going to be, but we know it’s going to be a lot more technically involved than what we have now, and we need to throw as wide of a net as possible. Trump’s words. Anyway, by trying to comply with the blizzard of anti die orders that the Trump administration has handed down since taking over the job again on the 20th of January, the military has basically stopped recruiting at anything that might be perceived as favoring anyone who isn’t a white dude, and that includes black technical universities.

So we’ve seen the possibilities for the Pentagon to do intake for people with the skill sets that we need to maintain today’s forces, much less built. Tomorrow’s basically go to zero. And, for the Russians, who have always been technically behind the Defense Department, we’re thrilled with that particular outcome. And then, of course, tying this all together requires some people in some important note.

And Donald Trump has found a doozy in Tulsi Gabbard. Now, you have to believe Gabbard falls into one of two categories. Number one, you have to believe the Russians who have publicly been calling her one of their agents for the better part of the last decade, something that U.S. intelligence has corroborated to anyone, Wolf. Listen or two, you have to look at what Gabbard has said when she’s been in or near Russia or China or Iran or Syria, where she is consistently built up a long track record of taking Anti-america fricken positions.

And that’s before you consider that DNI job that she’s taking. Is basically management job to funnel all of the intelligence that’s coming in into a single source, collaborate with the agencies to manage their output, and then inform the president, although she’s never had a management job or an intelligence job.

So either she’s a traitor or anti-American or incompetent or some combination of the three. And needless to say, the Russians are over the moon at her confirmation.

And then there’s Ukraine. Trump made it very clear in the last week that whatever negotiations are involved between the United States and Russia that he will handle personally and that the Ukrainians are not involved in the Europeans are not involved. Considering that the last time that Putin and Trump engaged in negotiations, Trump left behind his security detail, his translation team, his intelligence team, his national security team, and he walked into a room where Putin had all of those things with him.

And the Russians basically pumped Donald Trump for information for three hours and used the information they got to reshape the world over the next several years, which is one of the things that led to the Ukraine war.

Negotiating, master. Yeah. Anyway, I don’t want to prejudge the outcome of negotiations that haven’t yet started. But the other couple of things that are going on in Europe right now don’t make me particular, really, confident, has to do with Pete Haggis, who was the defense secretary. He was recently in Munich for the Munich security Conference, when all the Europeans and the Americans get together and talk about defense issues.

And he said very clearly and publicly and officially, that NATO will never admit Ukraine as a member and U.S. forces will never be on the ground in Ukraine. This is a European, not a NATO responsibility. And in doing that, he basically hewed to every demand that the Russians have made since the beginning of the war as the starting point for the American position.

I have not seen this degree of negotiating incompetence out of the American leadership since Barack Obama gave us that horrible deal with Iran. What was it ten years ago? And from a fairly similar point of view, Obama just didn’t want to deal with it. And it looks like the Trump administration just doesn’t want to deal with this.

Which brings us to the third, and perhaps the worst one, hangs up in a speech, made it very clear that not only would U.S. forces never be involved, and they would never be involved, that the Europeans were gonna have to do this themselves outside of NATO. And if the Russians attacked the European forces on Ukrainian territory, that NATO and the U.S. would not get involved in the subsequent conflict, basically abrogating article five as far as Ukraine is concerned.

And to call this a sellout is to be generous, because the United States founded NATO with the intent of guarding Western civilization from Moscow, and to say that now that the Russian forces are on the march, literally across the plains of Europe, backed up by North Koreans, no less, that, American position on the whole thing is basically met.

That Haig’s a speech was given in Munich, which is the place where the last time the West caved to a dictator, setting the stage for a larger and much more violent war than needed to happen. It is not it’s not lost on me.

And and I can tell you precisely where this will lead. I’ve got a book here that kind of dives into this about how the United States is eventually going to lose interest in NATO, and we will have a war in the plains of Europe between the Russians and the Central Europeans. Now, I had hoped over the course of the last three years that I was wrong.

But here we are. A couple things have changed. First of all, the Russian military is not nearly as capable of large scale lightning strikes as I thought it was ten years ago when I wrote that book. It’s more of a long, grinding war of attrition that’s really ugly and takes more time. And because of that, it does.

By the Central Europeans, more time to do things and to prepare, not just to rearm, for a broader conflict, but to engage in sort of technical military work that normally they wouldn’t have had the time for. And what we now need to watch for very closely is the nuclear ization of the weapon systems in Central Europe, specifically, Sweden and Finland have the capacity to go nuclear in a very short period of time, measured in weeks, if not days.

And once that happens, Ukraine, Poland and probably Romania will follow suit because this is really the only way that they can stand out if NATO forces are being completely withheld. Keep it. Keep in mind that the best forces that the Europeans have are bound up within the NATO alliance. And by saying to the Europeans that those cannot be used in Ukraine or against Russia, despite the fact that that’s the reason the alliance exists, really limits what the Europeans can do.

So they have already given significantly more financial and military aid to the Ukrainians than the Americans have. And by now, removing the best stuff from the table. We’re really getting the Europeans no choice but to play the nuke card. And once a number of countries in Central Europe do this, the Germans will be forced to consider doing themselves.

And that triggers a series of strategic entanglements that I really don’t have the brainpower to focus on right now.

I have always found it quizzical that people believe that as combative and erratic as Donald Trump is, that somehow he’s the person who’s going to usher in world peace, it is difficult to come up with a more perfect set of circumstances than what the Trump administration has set up in the last few days to trigger anything other than a horrific continental war in Europe.

But here we are, and tomorrow we’ll talk about what the Trump administration has cooking up in the Middle East.

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

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