The Russian Reach: US Cuts Ukraine Intel & Dominos Fall

A Ukrainian soldier in the trenches

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.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming 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: Why Leadership Doesn’t Matter…Until It Does

Photo of the US capitol

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.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, 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

Flags of USA and Russia merging

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.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from 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.

From the Frontlines in Ukraine to Truth Social

Ukraine solider on a armored vehicle with a split screen of Donald Trump

There’s a lot going on in Ukraine right now, so let’s do a quick update on the military and diplomatic developments.

On the military front, Ukraine’s ability to jam Russian glide bombs is improving, which has been a critical tactic for Russian success in the war so far. Ukrainian forces are targeting Russian supply routes in an attempt to bottleneck logistics. So far, these efforts seem to have stalled the Russians and opened a window for Ukrainian counterattacks.

Things on the diplomatic front are somehow fuzzier than on the frontlines. Trump’s Truth Social post (shown in the video) aligns with Russian disinformation and goes to show how Russian propaganda has been adapted to appeal to Trump personally. Trump’s inconsistent views/takes/posts make it impossible to predict his future stance on Ukraine.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody Peter Zeihan here. Coming from Colorado, a lot of you been asking with good reason, for updating what’s going on in Ukraine. And, let’s split into what I know, and then just what else? What I know is what’s going on in the front, which is weird, because usually that’s the hard part. The Ukrainians ability to jam the glides systems for something called glide bomb has really gotten good. 

Now, if you go back about a year, year and a half ago, one of the things I was really worried about is that the, Russians were dropping these mass sieve, in some cases over 1000 kilogram bombs, with glide kits on them. Glide kits, like what the United States has been using with our JDM system since the first Gulf War back in the early 1990s, which was giving them a range of 20, 30 miles beyond the point that they drop the weapon in the MiG, the drops, it just veers off and, you know, it’s safe. 

And then you get a blast radius that sometimes it’s like a third of a mile, just absolutely demolishes any sort of fixed, fortification and stuns the hell out of the defenders. And then the Russians would come in with one of their meat assaults. And in doing this, they were able to take over the fortress city of, the Deepika, last year and were closing on per cross this year. And if they’d seized Picross and they’re just a few miles away, that would have basically broken the Ukrainian line in the Donbas. It’s the middle of a series of fortifications, and it’s a logistics hub. So if with Picross, they can go north and south up the line with up across, they have to go back a few dozen miles to get to another line, to transport things up and back and forth. 

For the Ukrainians. They will try to keep this war as a war of movement because they have fewer troops and better troops, whereas the Russians are more, a stagnant fighter. And so they can engage in more points, just not as well. So if the ability of the Ukrainians to move had been inhibited, it would have been a real problem. 

The jamming seems to have made the tactic that the Russians were using for the last year less and less effective. But that’s kind of piece one. Piece two is the Ukrainians have, using not necessarily new technology, just applying a little bit differently determined another, strategy for mucking up with the Russians logistics, not just going after things like fuel supplies or ammo dumps and things like that, but they look for an important intersection that the Russians have, and they take out a couple vehicles there. 

And then a couple of days later, they take out a few more, and a couple days later, a few more. And eventually you get this, carcass field of vehicles that the Russians are forced to send out things like tow trucks, and then you hit the tow trucks. And so you just get this ever mounting line of vehicle debris that forces the Russians to detour ever further around. 

Once they go through the fields, they might. You have to deal with the mud season that is Ukraine is so famous for in the fall and in the spring, and in the other seasons eventually gets so choked they have to use the transport options all together. These two things together have basically stalled the attack on cross and even the Russian counterattacks on Kursk and the case of a cross have even allowed the Ukrainians counter-attack a little bit. 

Not saying that the danger is past, but it’s a it’s a different kind of fight now. So that’s that’s the military look at the moment, diplomatically, everything’s all over the place. Let me show you this little thing from Truth Social. That’s Donald Trump’s personal version of social media. This is what he posted last week about Zelensky. 

When Zelensky said that Trump was living in a Russian disinformation bubble, which you. Yes. And it’s proven by this, document here. Everything it’s highlighted in red is something that is an oldie but goodie from Russian propaganda going back the last three years. These are the points of Russian propaganda have been hit, man. Month after month after month, after month. 

The yellow ones. Those are things that were new, when Trump was reelected or elected the second time. Probably a better way to phrase that, the Russians changed the tenor of a lot of their propaganda to appeal to Trump personally. Basically, they took Trump’s lies and they made some of those integrate with their own. And these yellow parts of some of the newer propaganda. 

But what really had the Russians salivating when this Truth social post comes out, or the bits I’ve circled? Because these are Trump’s words, these are not things that were plucked wholesale from Russian disinformation. Instead, they’re places where the Trump has the Trump. They’re places where Trump has taken, Russian disinformation and put it in his own words. 

Whenever Trump uses quotes or all caps, that’s him channeling himself. You buy guns anyway. And so the Russians see this, and they’re just giddy because getting getting a foreign leader, any sort of foreign policymaker to use Russian disinformation is always a win. But when the foreign policy maker is using the updated stuff and put it in their own words, that that’s kind of a gold standard for espionage, basically getting the other side to do things your way for you, but them thinking it’s all their idea. 

So when this came out, I was kind of like, what the hell is going on? It’s like, I know that Donald Trump has gutted the upper echelons of the Defense Department and the CIA and the FBI, and he’s appointed someone who’s a Russian agent to basically be his premier intelligence filter. But the idea that he would just be so out of it as to just wholesale garble down and then regurgitate back Russian propaganda, had me really worried. 

And then on, a week later on Thursday, Donald Trump, when he was, when somebody asked him about what he said was specifically, Zelenskyy being a dictator, he says, did I do that? I don’t think I said that. He just kind of moves on. So the number one thing to remember about Trump is a track record means nothing. 

Consistency means nothing. Whatever comes out of his or goes through his head comes out his mouth. There is no consistency. He changes his mind all the time. I don’t mean to say that this is a good thing, but it means that no matter what you think about what Trump is or what he says, it’ll change tomorrow. The Ukraine war to this point has been one of the most dynamic conflicts in history. 

I never expected the Ukrainians to do so well. I never expected the Russians to do so bad. I never expected the Europeans, to get involved. I never expected the American hands to get involved. This war has been one surprise after another. And that’s before you consider that the technology of the conflict is evolving so quickly as we move from the industrial age into the digital age and the rise of drones, and probably in the not too distant future, AI systems courtesy of Donald Trump. 

The diplomatic side of the Ukraine war is now just as dynamic. And so everybody, no matter whose side you’re on, buckle up. 

 It’s about to get a lot rockier and a lot weirder.

What Trump Should Take on Instead…

Newspaper photo of President Donald Trump

The last few videos have covered all the things that Trump is focusing on (and doing wrong), and many of you have asked where he SHOULD be spending his time. So, today we’re discussing the things that should be prioritized.

The US has a unique global position, its economy is strong, it has a powerful military, and it’s largely self-sufficient when it comes to energy and food. With that in mind, here are the four main opportunities I see: Europe, the UK, Southeast Asia, and Cuba.

Each of these places offers the US something it could use in the decades coming. Whether that’s a foothold in reshaping European economics and diplomacy, adding the UK into NAFTA to strengthen economic ties, securing a future of industrial capacity in Southeast Asia, or adding a low cost manufacturing partner in Cuba.

Basically, I would stop spending my time antagonizing our allies and focus on strengthening our economic and strategic partnerships.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. We’ve been doing a number of pieces on how Donald Trump is, manipulating the world for various outcomes. A lot of you have written in and asked me, well, what should he be working on? And I’m going to assume that you’re asking that in a constructive way. 

So here we go. Remember that we are in this weird moment in history where the United States is really the only country of size that has a positive demographic structure and so still has a consumption led economy. We’ve got military reach, around the world. We have navy that’s more powerful than the next eight put together, if not all of them self-sufficient, energy, self-sufficient in food. 

We’re really holding the handle of the whip on everything that matters. The question is how we want to use it. And if you look around the world, the opportunities are just robust. Right now in the Middle East, Iran has suffered a generational blowback. It’s lost its allies and Hezbollah and, Syria and the time is here to completely remake the region, really, however we would want. 

We’ve got something similar going on in China as it’s facing demographic, financial, transportation and strategic collapse. Ten years from now, China won’t exist. And by the end of this century, the Han of necessity won’t exist. Talk about just a wondrous opportunity to shape things in a different way. Donald Trump instead is, picking fights with all of the allies, specifically the allies that we’re going to need to help re fabricate the future, especially our own in terms of manufacturing. 

So I look for the low hanging fruit that is out there right now, of which there is an immense volume. Let’s start with Europe. Germany is in the midst of an election campaign. No matter who wins, it’s going to be a weak government with three parties. It’s going to be very difficult for to lead at home and impossible for it to lead on the European stage. 

In France we have a hung parliament, and if we have elections again this year, that locks the French out of policymaking for at least six months, assuming they come up with a new government that’s actually cohesive, which is very unlikely. I mean, the France is kind of out to lunch.  

Italy has a reasonably strong leader in the form of Giorgia meloni. But she too leads a coalition government, and she can only go so far. And then the Brits are gone because of Brexit. So there is no leadership in Europe. If you wanted to take control of the continent from an economic and a diplomatic point of view and reshape how it works for generations, now is the time. And instead we had JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference talking to the Europeans about how European cultural evolutions are a greater threat to the United States than either Russian nuclear weapons or Chinese predatory practices and cyber, attacks. 

It was easily the most destructive speech that I could have come up with in terms of solidifying the alliance against the Russians, against the Chinese, to create a new world. And I’ve never seen so much diplomatic and political power by any country pissed away in 45 minutes. But that’s where we are. I don’t know if it’s too late to kind of pick up the pieces, but clearly keep Vance away from all of them. 

That opportunity, unfortunately, may have been destroyed in a single hour. Second up, the Brits, the Brits voted themselves out of the European Union several years ago. And if you’re like me and you see the demographic changes coming that the European Union is going to have to re fabricate itself from its current state as an export union to something else, because if you don’t have enough workers, you don’t have enough taxpayers. 

All of the economic models that we have right now just don’t make sense. So getting out of that before the break and starting on something new, that made a lot of sense to me, puts the Brits never got started on anything new. They’ve just kind of been in this netherworld in the seven years since, and we now have a newish government in London that is giving fresh insipidus to the term disorganized destruction. 

They can’t seem to form a policy on anything. They’re completely rudderless. Well, as the world did, China fires, we’re going to need some partners to build an industrial plant that can replace what the Chinese are going to take away with them as they fall. The United Kingdom is a first world country with a highly technocratic system and phenomenal engineers. 

I would love to see NAFTA expand to take in the United Kingdom. And since the Brits can’t make any decisions right now, having somebody of Trump’s, how should I say, this delicate nature impose a solution on them would be brilliant. And instead, the administration has basically just ignored the United Kingdom altogether. Third is Southeast Asia. This is home to about a billion people. 

We already count Vietnam as one of our top ten trading partners, a position it’s just gained in the last few years. And it is the part of the world that is most likely to pick up pieces of the industrial plant that the Chinese can no longer operate. Also, most of the countries in Southeast Asia already have lower operating costs. 

It’s a geographic feature. Most of Southeast Asia is jungle and islands and, peninsula and mountain. So it’s really hard for them to integrate in the traditional sense. And people flock to the cities because they don’t want to work in tropical agriculture. What that means is most of the, states interact by water for their trade. They have limited physical connection. 

So they don’t have any of the bad blood, like what has existed historically in Europe or Northeast Asia. It’s very easy for them to make economic deals with one another. And they have also because people are crowded in the cities, there are workforce is cheaper on average than the skill points that there are compared to the global average. 

So they’re very, very competitive in any number of things. And as China falls, this is the region that’s going to do the best. And so a tighter relationship between North America and Southeast Asia is really the smartest play that we could take in terms of our trade and our future security and economic relations. And Trump on China has done almost nothing so far. 

And on Southeast Asia it’s been crickets. But with the Americans basically ignoring East Asia, the Chinese are doing everything they can to double down and triple down in Southeast Asia to hedge out the United States. So the opportunity is still there. We should seize it with both hands. And then fourth, and finally is something much closer to home. 

And that’s Cuba. We’re in this weird little situation right now where Mexico has become so high value added that it needs a low cost manufacturing partner. And I would argue that the workforce in Cuba is roughly half the skills of the Mexicans for about one tenth of the cost. So if Cuba were to be opened up and were to join the North American trading family in some way, it would be a huge addition. 

Now, obviously there are some political problems between here and there. The United States and Cuba have not gotten along ever since Castro’s rise in the early 60s. But I would argue that while I think Trump’s bare knuckle approach negotiations with the allies is perhaps not the best way to go, unleashing that kind of fire and fury on Cuba, I think would be highly entertaining. 

And it could actually lead to some political shifts in Havana that we would like a great deal. It’s not just about the economic side of things there. Getting Cuba back into the American family of nations is something that would hugely boost our security and basically make it impossible for anyone from the Eastern hemisphere to punch into the Western Hemisphere, or at least are part of it. 

So those are kind of my big four. I quit picking fights with the allies, especially the ones, you know, you’re going to need for economic issues and start picking fights with the countries that, are actually trying to hobble you, maybe. And in the meantime, solidify relations with the countries that are on the fringes who could really be part of a very bright future.

Trump Takes on Illegal Immigration

Photo of the US-Mexico border

Trump’s immigration policies have caused quite the stir, specifically his hardline stance on illegal migration. So, how will these policies impact the US economy?

The US is in the midst of needing to double its industrial capacity, which will require a large labor force. Losing the population of 10-15 million undocumented immigrants would dig that hole even deeper. Trump isn’t approaching this from an economic or security perspective, his migration policies are being shaped by ideology.

By making the conditions for migrants worse and cutting off certain paths to legally enter the US, it will inadvertently encourage illegal border crossings and create enforcement inefficiencies. Practices like mass deportations are pulling resources from other important tasks and making future cooperation between the law and migrants less likely.

The better approach would be providing legal pathways for migrants to integrate into the economy, but Trump’s path is creating a permanent underclass.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a chilly Colorado. Today we’re near the most recent in Trump taking on the world. We’re talking about, Trump policies on illegal migration and where they are going to lead. First a little backdrop and, scene setting. A couple things. Keeping in mind, number one, the United States has somewhere between 10 and 15 million under documented people in the United States. 

So that’s a substantial number of folks. And the United States is in the process of doubling the size of its industrial plant. As we prepare for the end of China as a meaningful participant in the trade system, that means a lot of blue collar jobs, and Ford loaded with construction jobs. So, anything that inhibits the labor force is definitely going to inhibit our ability to prepare for a post Chinese world. 

So put that in the back of your mind as we go through the rest of this. There has always been a mixed view of immigration in general on illegal migration, in particular in the United States. As a rule, we go through ebbs and flows. We’re definitely at an ebb right now. And as a rule, the business community has been in favor of larger flows of migration in any form. 

In order to access workforce, that has not changed. What has changed is that with the reshuffling of the American political deck, the business community is no longer in the Republican Party. Other swing voters now. And so they don’t have a say in immigration policy in the way they might have before. So as the United States goes through this transition, as we have a nativist moment and as, the Make America Great Again, movement has basically decided to take a very, very hard line on things like the border and migration. 

Those are the folks that are making policy decisions at the national government. There will be an economic cost for that. The question is whether or not what Michael wants can be achieved. And in doing so, how does that reshape the world? And especially, of course, the United States, another little piece of backdrop, any policy that ignores why people are doing what they are and ascribe somebody else’s motives to them, generally doesn’t work. 

This is one of the reasons why Maoist China was such a disaster. Same with Brezhnev’s, Soviet Union and Chavez’s Venezuela. People used ideology, their own ideology, to ascribe motives to other people and made policy based on that. And that’s a lot of what we’re seeing in Washington right now with the migration question. The official story is that these are a lot of illegal people who are doing a lot of bad things and a lot of crime. 

There’s nothing in government statistics or private sector statistics that supports that. As a rule, migrants are less than one third as likely to commit a crime as an American citizen, largely because they know that the consequences are deportation. For the most part, well over 90%. The people who are crossing the border are coming in, searching of the American dream, a safer place to raise their children, a place where they can work and earn more money. 

And above all, a place where rule of law works better than where they’re from. But by ascribing false motives, the enforcement system is really causing some problems in the short and ultimately the long term. So let’s start with the border, as was introduced under the Bush administration and really built up by size by the time we get to the Obama years, the tendency of illegals crossing north shifted. 

It used to be that you tried to avoid the Border Patrol, but then people discovered things like asylum laws where you could apply for asylum and get into the court system. And after a certain amount of time, get a court case that could rule, a lot of criticism of system where people just to the system. But, you know, you’ve got, people waiting two and three years for court date. 

And it turns out that the vast majority of people do show up, because they do get a relatively favorable reading. What has happened most recently is that the Trump administration has basically shut that down. They’re not even accepting applications. So if you show up to the border, you turn yourself over the border Patrol, they simply turn you around and walk you right back. 

What that has done is encourage people to go back to the old system that we had before the 2000s, and basically just trying to sneak around the Border Patrol. And in doing that, Donald Trump in his first term made it very, very, very easy to cross the border undetected. You remember the border wall? Well, the border wall cuts through the middle of the Sonoran and the Chihuahuan Desert, which are the greatest natural barriers in the Western Hemisphere. 

Fantastic for stopping illegal migrants from flowing. A lot of them just die on the trip. But if you build a border wall, that means you need to build 50 odd construction roads across half of that natural barrier. So all you have to do if you’re an illegal is use a ladder once to quadruple your income, and then you’re on a road. 

And whether you’re working with a coyote or on your own with a dirt bike, all of a sudden it’s gotten much, much easier to cross. So I have no doubt that 20, 30 years from now, when we looked at back of this period, Donald Trump will go down in history as the greatest supporter of illegal migration in American history. 

And that’s before some of these other changes. Ultimately, because most of the people crossing the border north want a better life, they are looking for avenues to cooperate with local government because living in the shadows isn’t great. If you’re an illegal in the United States and you have no chance of getting documentation, you probably only work for cash, which means you’re never going to buy a house. 

You’re only going to rent. And if you pay for everything with cash, robbers tend to identify that and target you. And if you can’t go to law enforcement after you get robbed because you don’t have documentation, you may get deported, you then don’t cooperate with law enforcement, which makes it a lot easier for gangs and cartels to recruit on both sides of the border. 

Or you can provide the illegals with a way to become legal. What’s going on now is that the Trump administration is taking the sharply opposite tact. And that’s going to hurt us in two ways. Number one, he really, really, really wants to have some showy, mass deportations. So he’s redirected other law enforcement to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, taking people off of other law enforcement duties to send them against illegal migrants. 

He’s been hit very hard by this. But really, there’s none of the three letter agencies that haven’t seen a direction. And that means we’re not looking at things like money laundering or child porn. And there was a really a scary moment when people were starting to be pulled off of active monitoring of terrorist groups internationally, to be put in Chicago to round up illegals. 

Luckily, the Trump administration backed down from that. But we’re seeing basically a hollowing out of the law enforcement capacity at a federal level to focus on this one thing. That’s a problem. Number two, Trump wasn’t happy with the numbers. So instead of going after the criminals, which means you go after people one at a time and you have to investigate to make sure they’re a criminal and you have to do a sting operation to get them. 

They started going after groups of illegals who had shown no propensity for engaging in illegal behavior. So you started just to go to where those people were. So to use the stereotypical ones that had been proven true in the last couple of weeks, they’ve been going to churches on Sunday morning when people are with their families and basically arresting Hispanics in mass. 

They’ve been going to food banks for people who are having problems. They’ve been going to Home Depot where there’s day workers, any place where you’re going to get a concentration of people with a tan have basically been, been targeted by law enforcement in order to generate the numbers that are necessary to meet Trump’s quotas, which he’s handed out to everybody. 

And then once those people are grabbed, Trump tries to make it a very, very showy deportation, mostly using military jets. Well, here’s the fun thing about military jets, the globe masters that they’re using because they’ve got the reach. They’re designed to move like helicopters and tanks and equipment, but not really designed to move people. So you have to put seats in them and they can’t operate nearly as efficiently as, say, as a commercial airliner. 

So it costs about $6,000 a person just to fly them to the country. You’re going to dump them off. And so it’s turned out to be this incredibly expensive operation that has netted very few criminals, but has also introduced a lot of fear into the community because the most recent one, just in the last week, is law enforcement is now going to the asylum hearings for the people who have kept their nose clean and cooperated with the system from the very beginning, and arresting them before they can even go in to get their hearing. 

Or then, of course, if they get their hearing and denied immediately hauling them off in chains. And this is dissuading anyone who is an illegal migrant from ever cooperating with the system. Now go back to what we need to do as a country, double the size of the industrial plant. That’s going to be concentrated in certain areas, which means these illegal migrants are going to be clustered in places where the job opportunities are. 

And now if they can’t cooperate with the federal government, they’re going to live as a permanent underclass, which is going to build up crime possibilities on all sides in all of those cities, and in no particular order, those cities are Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Birmingham, Montgomery, mobile, Atlanta, Richmond, Norfolk, Charlotte, and all of the other major cities of the North Carolina cluster. These are the places where the industrial activity and construction has been concentrated. This is going to be where the Hispanic migrant community is most likely to relocate. And now these are the cities that are most likely to have a starkly increased crime wave, because there is no point in migrants now cooperating with the system. 

We’re going back to the system we had before the 2000s where migrants really were an underclass. I mean, the smart play here is to provide avenues towards legal migration, even if that doesn’t lead towards citizenship, so that the people can be part of the system so they can have a bank account so they don’t get robbed, so they can participate with law enforcement, and to shut the cartels out of our communities. 

But what do I know?

Trump Takes on Trade

Photo of man standing in front of trade shipping containers

There’s plenty of tools at the disposal of the US President and tariffs are one of them. When used appropriately – i.e., to get something else or discourage a certain action – tariffs can be a very effective measure. However, Trump is using them as an end, rather than a means to an end.

This has blossomed into “reciprocal tariffs”. These aim to match foreign tariffs on US goods. At first glance, this idea seems fair, but the complexity of international trade, vast product categories, and admin that would be involved make this nearly impossible.

If Trump continues down this path, it is likely that US international trade would come screeching to a stop and a severe recession would follow.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. We are continuing with our, coverage of Trump’s first month in office. We’ve gone through the Middle East and China, the former Soviet Union, Europe. Today we’re going to talk about, international trade, specifically tariffs. Now, tariffs obviously are something that Trump is quite fond of. And it’s pretty clear by this point that he doesn’t necessarily see tariffs as a means to an end, but just an end in of of themselves, which is not great economic policy unless you already have your industrial plants set up. 

And even then it’s wildly inefficient. But let’s focus on more of the specifics. I’ve talked at least briefly about the tariffs on America’s closest trading partners. I think it’s worth underlining what a couple of these things would do. One of the new ones is Trump says he wants to do a 100% automotive tariff on Canada. 

Keep in mind that every car manufactured in the United States includes a substantial percentage of parts that come from Canada and Mexico, most of them over one third, a lot of them two thirds. And vice versa. It’s a very integrated system. So if you were to put anything more than about a 15 to 20% tariff on autos specifically, are you going to be taxing things as they go back and forth across the border? 

And you’re going to cause a massive headache for American consumers, raising the price of your average vehicle by somewhere between 4 and $8000. If you do 100% tariff, we just stop making cars. Detroit collapses within a week, and Texas within a month. So, you know, not my recommendation. But I think a more interesting topic is one that’s gotten a little coverage. 

The Trump implemented last week and something called reciprocal tariffs. And it sound on a surface to be pretty fair. The idea is if somebody else has a 15% tariff versus a product, that comes from the United States, then you should flip that and have a 15% tariff on anything that you take from them that is in that product category, and at least on the surface, against places like China where tariffs are high and subsidization is high, in order to force American products out of the product mix. 

It seems like a great idea, right? A couple problems here. Number one doesn’t always line up that way for climactic reasons. So, for example, if Kenya has a tariff on imported coffee, we’re going to what tariff coffee we bring in from Kenya because, you know, we don’t export coffee, so we’d just be charging our people more. 

That’s a pretty minor one. The bigger one, though, is administration. There are literally hundreds of thousands of product categories. And that’s before you consider intermediate product trade. And so if you want to do a reciprocal tariff, number one, you need a massive staff, at least an order of magnitude more than what we have a Customs Enforcement in the FTC, Federal Trade Commission right now just to learn all the product categories and all the tariffs for all 200 odd countries in the world. 

And then you would need at least five times as many of that staff to then enforce, these tariffs at the border. Keep in mind that most international trade, even today, is not digitized fully. It might be on the container level, but each container is going to contain somewhere between dozens and thousands of products, and typically not all from the same country, because as container ships go around the world, they drop things off, they pick things up. 

If there’s space in a container, you can always shove more in there. And by the time it gets to the United States, it’s a mess. And then what comes off is not all of it necessarily. Some of it gets shipped back out. And so somebody has to manually enter every single product. So it’s not so much that, reciprocal tariffs isn’t fair or is at least intellectually a good idea, but actually putting it into process basically ends trade, because it’s impossible to administrate with anything approaching the number of people we have in government right now in total. 

Much less if you wanted to do anything else. Now, the fact that Trump has announced this anyway gets back to the general theme of all of this is that he’s built a completely incompetent administration that won’t tell him the truth, because the truth might not make him look great. But on this specific topic, it’s less of a designed incompetence and more a purposeful incompetence by his other staff. 

Trump’s trade representative is a guy by the name of Jamison Greer, who is a smart dude who basically was raised from a pup by Robert Lighthizer. And Lighthizer was Trump’s first term trade representative. And Lighthizer has been in and out of government and at the center of American trade law going back to the 1980s into the Reagan administration. 

So, I mean, this is a guy who knows everything, is everything about trade. He’s not shy about using tariffs, but it’s always when there’s a specific goal in mind in order to reshape the relationship. He just doesn’t just do tariffs or turfs anyway. Greer learned at Lighthizer he was his chief of staff, during Trump’s first term. 

Definitely knows what’s going on. And definitely knows that reciprocal tariffs is a horrible idea unless you’re going to do an absolutely massive state expansion, which is definitely not in the cards. So one of two things either happened. Number one, he probably took the advice of Lighthizer because one of the things that Lighthizer learned from his four years working with Trump the first time around is you never contradict Trump. 

Not in public, not in private. You just nod. You smile. You make him think that you were one of the brainless people that he has surrounded himself, that do nothing but tell him how wonderful he is, and then hopefully he gives you enough room and enough lack of attention, for you to actually go and do your real work. 

And for Lighthizer, at least in part, that worked. He was able to renegotiate NAFTA and the Korean trade deal. He got a new trade deal with Japan, made a lot of progress on a trade deal with the United Kingdom. But then, we just ran out of time. And then there were the events of January 6th. So, Greer clearly knows that reciprocal tariffs are horrible. 

Just beyond stupid idea. But either one. He kept his mouth shut, nodded, and smiled. Or number two. He told Trump this and, managed to do it in a way that didn’t get himself fired already. Even odds for probably the first one being the way one or whatever went. 

So we’re going to see more things like this. 

Because the only way that reciprocal tariffs can work is with a staff you can’t build. So either we go 1 or 2 directions at this time. Number one, reciprocal tariffs are actually implemented, in which case pretty much all international trade stops in the United States falls into a really, really ugly recession in a short period of time or, or there’s an actually an effort to implement it on a case by case basis for specific countries, absolutely wrecking trade relations with that country. 

That could get interesting based on who you choose to go after. Hopefully it would not be a country like Canada. Oh my god. But if you did against India, that could actually set the stage for changing the relationship in any number of ways. But Trump coming to that conclusion would require someone to explain to him how reciprocal tariffs overall are. 

Really bad idea. And I don’t think that is going to happen at all.

Trump Takes on China…or Not

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit

China is on its last legs. Its demographic picture is far past terminal. Its financial system makes Enron look responsible. Simply feeding its people is far beyond Beijing’s capacity without legions of outside assistance. And with the wider world ever-more-firmly turning against Chinese manufactured goods, there is little reason to expect an industrial recovery. If you don’t care for China, now is the time to nudge the country into history’s ash heap.

And so Donald Trump is picking trade fights with Mexico and Canada, the two countries indispensable to the United States if the goal is to create a world independent of the Chinese. In doing so, Trump is granting China that most precious of all commodities: time.

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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.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. We’re doing the latest in a series on what Trump is up to in the world. And today we’re going to talk about the Chinese. Now the Chinese are having a shit time. The demographic situation keeps getting worse. We’re at the point where we’re probably only a few years away from the general collapse of their labor market, and we have seen their labor costs go up by a factor of roughly 15 since the year 2000, which is, one of the 3 or 4 fastest increases in human history. 

Financially, they’ve expanded their credit pool by a factor of 3500 at least since the year 2000. For point of comparison, the U.S has tripled. So we have an Enron style bubble. And basically every economic subsector they have, it’s probably a lot more than that 35 times, because they change the way they look to statistics when it comes to local government debt. 

And they just cut it out of the system altogether. Stopped reporting. That probably adds another, times five. So, you know, 40 times anyway, so massively overexposed, massively leveraged. In terms of manufacturing, that means their labor costs have gone up. And so they’re not nearly as competitive as they once were. The Mexicans are now more competitive in almost every major manufacturing sector in terms of agriculture. 

They’re the world’s largest importer in absolute terms, and they’re the least efficient producer in terms of the input per calorie that they get out. And almost all of those inputs are imported as well. From a security point of view, yes, they’ve got a lot of ships, but they need to be able to control global sea lanes if they’re going to protect their commerce. 

And that is the job of the US Navy. So if you ever have a fight with the US, there goes their entire economic and development model. It’s just a series of bad upon bad upon bad. And at the very top, their government has become completely ossified, as chairman G has basically put the finishing touches on his cult of personality. 

So it’s very difficult to get anything done in terms of policy. Not to mention that he’s pretty much blind to what’s going on because he’s shot the messenger so many times. Nobody brings him anything. You put all that together. Now is a great time to push against the Chinese and just knock them over the edge so they can fall into 

The dustbin of history. So, what is going on with U.S. policy towards China is almost the opposite of what Donald Trump said he wanted to do during the election campaign. He took a very hard anti-China line, and one of the many impacts that Donald Trump had in his first term is he changed the conversation in the United States about China from potentially being a partner to definitely being a perceived threat or a foe. 

But since he became president a second time, we haven’t seen really much on China. There’s been a blanket 10%, tariff on everything. And that’s about it. Instead, Donald Trump has reserved most of the fights that he’s picked for our allies and especially our close neighbors in Mexico and Canada. From the Chinese point of view, this has been not just a reprieve, but it’s allowed them to continue doing what they’re doing and shoving products into the American market. 

Because ultimately, in a world without China, the United States is going to have to build out a massive amount of industrial plant in order to produce the things that we used to get from East Asia. And there is no way that that can happen unless it’s hand in glove with the Canadians and the Mexicans in the NAFTA system. 

And so by picking tariff fights with the closest neighbors, what Trump has done is strongly disincentivize anyone from relo hating their operations from China to the United States. And that was in full swing calendar year 2024 and 2023 saw the greatest declines in foreign direct investment into the Chinese system that we have seen in ages. In fact, last year, total new investment in China was only $4.5 billion. 

We haven’t seen a number like that since the early 90s. Companies were running to get out and getting to the North American market. But at a stroke, Trump’s tariff policy has frozen that in place, which is setting us up for a combination of factors. That is really problematic because if we haven’t built out enough industrial plant to replace the Chinese system when it crashes, we’re just not going to have stuff. 

Now, the road from here to there was always going to be difficult. We’re talking about an environment that is not particularly conducive to industrial expansion, and the issue is a capital and labor. It’s largely a baby boomer story. When you retire, you liquidate your savings, you move out of stocks and bonds into cash and T-bills and the money that used to fuel economic development and credit in the broader system shrivels up. 

Well, two thirds of the boomers have already retired. Two thirds of that money has already shifted over. So I’d argue that the rough tripling of capital costs we’ve seen in the last 5 or 6 years is largely demographic driven. That has very little to do with the economic cycle or policies of the Fed or Trump or Biden. 

It’s just demographics. And on top of having now basically a capital shortage, that we need to somehow use what’s left to metabolize and build up this industrial plant. Trump has pledged to increase the annual budget deficit of the federal government by over $1 trillion a year. Now, you might say, well, he’s going to get some savings out of the federal government with all these mass firings. 

But keep in mind that the vast majority of federal spending is Medicare, Social Security, defense, and, Medicaid. Those four together are the 7,080% of the total. If Trump does what he says he wants to do and fires a full one quarter of the federal workforce, that actually only reduces the government budget by about 2%. 

So it’s a lot of sound and fury without a lot of movement. And on the backside, he’s going to add $1 trillion to deficit spending. That’s going to make everything else a lot more expensive and a lot more difficult. There’s also the labor situation. The United States, if it needs to double its industrial plant, needs a lot of blue collar workers to fill those jobs, and a lot of construction workers to build the plant in the first place. 

Well, most construction workers are undocumented in some way. And so a mass deportation program not only stalls our ability to build in the first place, it shrinks the labor market overall. And at a time when we’re already at record low unemployment levels, all of this is making the Re industrialization more difficult. And now the tariff policy is forcing companies to take a pause and what they were already doing and give the United States kind of a side eye, because we now have something that we’re not used to hearing here. 

Regulatory instability. And the Chinese at the moment look more stable than we do from that measure. And this is obviously a problem unless you’re a Chinese, of course, because what Donald Trump is doing right now is granting the Chinese that most valuable of geopolitical commodities time.

Photo of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit from Wikimedia Commons

Trump Takes on the Middle East

Israeli successes across the Levant have transformed the broader Middle East, wrecking the countries and militant groups that have long scourged the region. The moment is ripe for a complete reordering of regional norms. To capitalize upon this rare moment, Donald Trump wants to invest blood and treasure in the region’s most worthless and historically fraught chunk of land in order to build…hotels?

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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.

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Transcript

Alright. We’re now going to do the third in our opening series on what Trump is doing in his new administrative term. And today we’re talking about the Middle East. Now, the Middle East is ripe for change. We’ve had, wow. We’ve had a lot of shifts in just the last six months, but really in the last two years. 

So quick review. After attacks a little over a year and a half ago, now you’re gonna have to go. Wow. Has been that long? By Hamas. That’s the political group. The terror group that rules the Gaza Strip, which is an extreme southern Israel after the launch of terror attack. And Israel killed over a thousand people and took a couple hundred people hostage. 

Israel’s been on a tear. It started with a borderline incompetent, invasion and occupation of Gaza. No matter how much went back and forth and how much it smashed and how much it bombed, and how many people were arrested, it just couldn’t root out Hamas. Because everybody who lives in Hamas is basically living in an open air prison. 

And the people were given an opportunity to leave. What little they had was destroyed. And it was very, very easy for Hamas to replace any of its war losses with new recruits, because we got 2.2 million people with absolutely no options anyway. Well, that was all going on. And I’m just like, this is looking really bad. Israel was doing other things, and then it launched a decapitation strike using exploding pagers and of course, a lot of airdrop bombs on a military group, a terror group called Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. 

And in doing so took out the entire leadership. But shortly after that, the Turks managed to maneuver things over in Syria so that the Syrian government collapsed. And all of a sudden, if you’re Israel, you’re looking around and things have gotten pretty good. Hamas is in a box. We haven’t been destroyed, but they haven’t been able to strengthen, and all of the regional allies are gone. 

Hezbollah has been decapitated, and the only way that you would resurrect Hezbollah is with a lot of additional support and training and personnel, which, ironically, would come to or through Syria, which is now gone. And that left Iran, which was the ultimate sponsor for Hezbollah and Syria on the wrong side of Iraq and really unable to do anything meaningful. 

And so they were reduced to using diplomatic attachés to shovel cash into the country, one envelope at a time. And it’s just not doing what they needed to do. Even if Iran is able to regenerate Hezbollah, it took them 30 years to do it the last time. It’s not going to turn on a dime here. So there’s a real opportunity, not just for Israel, but for everyone in the Middle East, to turn the page and move on to something new. 

It helps that no one in the Middle East likes the Palestinians at all. And specifically Hamas. So there’s a possibility here with a little bit of leadership and a little bit of creativity of the United States, that we really could open a new book. Now, just don’t turn a page, open a new book on what the Middle East is. 

So Donald Trump wants to build a hotel. Donald Trump’s idea is that all of the Palestinians of Gaza will be relocated to another country. Keep in mind, all the countries hate them. And the United States will take ownership of Gaza, which is a little chunk of land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt, making it the least strategically valuable chunk of territory in the entire region. 

And it will develop it into a resort area. And oh my God, opportunities like this don’t happen. But once a century or so. And this is not how you cement the future of a new region. Let’s just let’s just go down the reasons why this is a horrible idea. Number one, moving 2.2 million people. Let’s leave aside the whole genocide human rights thing. 

I’ll let other people tackle that topic. Let’s talk mechanics. The last couple of times that we saw people relocated against their will, governments were participating in the relocation. Specifically, you had the partition of India, where a newfound India and Pakistan were basically agreeing to swap Hindus and Muslims so that they weren’t living among one another, and they had a better chance at having a peaceful coexistence. 

The one before that is called the Beninese decree. In the aftermath of World War Two, when newly Soviet satellites like Poland and Czechoslovakia uprooted Germans and shipped them off to, the new German boundaries, specifically East Germany. When that happened, you had states that had agency and capacity and, gravitas to make it happen. So the new East Germany did a massive building program in order to accept its own people, back its own ethnic ethnics. 

And the Soviets helped with transport and food. Also, you’re talking about northern Europe, which even in the aftermath of World War Two, had some of the densest transport arteries on the planet, including roads and trains. You had the same thing in India. This is part of the old British colonial mandate or the Raj. And as a result, you had the parts of Pakistan and India that are viable, economically viable, climatically livable, were attached to one another. 

And so you could basically just run people on the roads, on the rail, back and forth until you achieve what you wanted. Also, in both cases, they were moving. People had housing to move into in the case of Germany, we’d had a population drop in the war. In the case of India and Pakistan, people were moving in each other’s homes. 

It was ugly. It took years. There were definitely lots of complications, but it kind of sort of worked. That’s not what we’re looking at here. Number one, the Palestinians don’t want to move. Number two, there’s no infrastructure at all linking them to anywhere else. You either cross through the unpopulated part of Israel, that is the Negev, in order to get the unpopulated part of Jordan before you eventually get into a place that has already 70%. 

How a Palestinian. But the leadership of Jordan is Hashemite Arab, and they hit the Palestinians, and they basically oppress the people, so they have a chance of retaining their throne. You throw 2 million pissed off Palestinians in that mix and Jordan goes from being a quasi failed state and a satellite of Israel to a chaos cannon in no time flat. 

And all of a sudden, you’ve taken the problem of the Gaza Strip and turned it into a formal state called Jordan. Alternatively, you could go through exodus in reverse and cross a scenario where there’s almost no roads and certainly no rail. Then you get to the, Suez Canal where there is a bridge, thank God, and you can get over to populated Egypt, literally Exodus and verse, where the Egyptians say to the Palestinians and find a place in a country that is failing because it is now unpopulated, the ability of the country to grow its food itself. 

And that’s before you consider global climate change or global trade breakdowns, which means that very soon the Egyptians won’t even be able to sell cotton and citrus on international markets to buy wheat to feed their own people. So you’re basically pre-judging the Palestinians for starvation and then we get a new access the other direction with Palestinians instead of Jews. 

Those are the only option. So the only places you could walk from Gaza, we’re talking 2.2 million people. You cannot relocate them any other way. And when you’re done assuming all of that works, somehow you now have a chunk of land that is nothing but rubble abutting unpopulated Egypt and lightly populated southern Israel that you’re going to turn into. 

What of Las Vegas, of the Middle East? No. And for that, you’re going to burn American blood and treasure, which is going to take way more than what we used in Iraq in order to get something in a place that nobody wants to be anyway. I’ve heard dumber ideas. Not often. 

Yeah, I’m done with this one. Tomorrow we’ll talk about China. 

No, I’m not done. I forgot to give you the forecast. So if Trump proceeds in trying to get the Arab states of the Middle East who don’t have the capacity to come and get the Palestinians to uproot the Palestinians, who don’t have the infrastructure to move the Palestinians or house or feed or water the Palestinians, if he tries to get them to do it anyway, talk about pressure on the relationship. 

We’re at this wild moment where both Russian and Iranian power and the bulk of the Middle East has been broken in a short period of time. At the same time, if Trump does what he says he wants to, he will provide a years long window of opportunity for both of those countries to reestablish their old position, and then some, because Trump will do what Trump does and he’ll put pressure on everyone. 

He started with Jordan. He moved to Egypt. He’s now working on Saudi Arabia, by the way. There’s even less infrastructure connecting Saudi Arabia to the zone in question. And he’s going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And if he does that, all relations with all Arab countries are going to freeze. And it will be very, very easy for the Russians and the Iranians to reestablish their position, however, and wherever they want. 

Now I’m done. Tomorrow’s China.

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

Photo of Vladamir Putin

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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Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. 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.