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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Russians think that RFK is so stupid. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not that we’ve ever seen that before. 

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

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

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

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

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

Forthcoming…

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.

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.