#1921 - Peter Zeihan

Hello, Peter. What's going on, man? Nice to meet you.

Right back at you. It has been a crazy year.

Yeah, it's been a crazy year for everything, right?

Yeah. It's one thing when you talk about how the world's going to be coming to an end, it's quite another one. It's like here and now.

Yeah. Well, you've been working on this type of material, this subject matter for quite a long time. So tell everybody your background.

Let's see. My background is in economic development. It's all about figuring out what works, where and why, and why. If you try the same policies in the next town over, it's usually a disaster. And then I worked actually here in Austin at a company called Stratfor for twelve years, and I was their sole generalist. So it was my idea to kind of plug everything together and figure out what the map of the world looks like and how if you pull a string on one side of the world, something changes on the other side.

Well, your perspective on sort of global interactions with China and Russia and the United States and energy supply and the food supply, I have not heard before. I haven't heard it as comprehensively as I've seen you put it together. So I'm kind of excited to talk to you about.

Let'S.

I guess we should start it with Russia. When Russia invaded Ukraine, you were not.

Surprised, not even a little. No.

You expected this and you felt like this is inevitable and this is just something that was always going to happen. And it's not going to just stop at Ukraine.

No, not even remotely. The russian space is among the worst farmland in the world, and so they've never been able to generate enough income to have a road network. Everything has to be moved by rail, and their frontiers are just huge and they're open. And if you've got a force that can't maneuver itself, your only reasonable defense strategy is to be forward positioned and use geography to help you out. So you expand until you reach mountains or oceans or deserts, and then you anchor on either side of those and plug the access points. Unfortunately for Ukraine, there are two of those access points on the other side of Ukraine. So the Russians were always, always going to try to push through and retake that territory, territory that they had controlled for most of the last 350 years. Unfortunately for them, in the 30, 35 years since the soviet system collapsed, the Ukrainians have developed an identity. And now they would like to be something other than a road bump.

So one of the narratives that was going around was that the reason why Russia was pushing into Ukraine is because NATO was moving their arms closer to the border of Russia.

There is something to be said for that. You just have to put it into context to really understand it. So the russian point of view is, for us to be secure, we need to expand until we reach a point where invaders cannot overwhelm us. We have to be able to plug those access points. But to give the Russians what they want, you have to sign over the future of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine. Oh, let's go on. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, all the stands. Basically, the Russians, in order to feel safe, they have to be able to occupy total populations that are twice of their own. And I'm sorry, but that's just not feasible. So, technically, the people who claim that NATO provoked this are correct. NATO can't have what it wants in order for Russia to feel safe, but for Russia to feel safe, they've got to occupy over 180,000,000 people. And that was never part of the game.

So what do you think they anticipated was going to happen when they started the war?

Well, I don't think it was just the Russians who anticipated it. Ukraine, the last war in 2014, basically rolled over. They proved to be militarily incompetent, they were corrupt, and they couldn't put up any sort of resistance. Crimea fell in just a matter of a couple of days, and I think a lot of us who were in the security side of things thought that this was going to be, to a degree, a bit of repeat. Now, I was probably one of the more optimistic people for Ukraine because I had seen them develop a culture and seen them arm and train and seen it be meaningful. But Ukraine is still a flat country and the Russians are still one of the largest militaries in the world. So even I was saying that within six months to a year, this was all going to be over. But the Ukrainians have surprised to the upside. And probably most importantly, the Europeans didn't just roll over and let this happen like they did the last seven times, that the Russians have gone on the war path since 1999. And that's changed the game fundamentally.

And when you look at it going forward, if people didn't anticipate that the Ukrainians were going to be able to fight back as well as they have, and then you look at it going forward, where does this go?

Well, there's two paths here. And the problem is we haven't seen either side fight in their full glory yet. And until we have that fight, we really can't judge in their full glory.

Like meaning?

Well, the Ukrainians are the underdog, but they're in the process of rapidly arming with more and more sophisticated equipment. And by the time we get to May, they will have been able to do a lot of deferred maintenance on the equipment they captured from the Russians, which was more equipment than they started the war with. And there will be 60,000 ukrainian troops that have trained in NATO countries with more advanced equipment back in the field. So we get our Athens, if you will, on the other side, the Russians will have finished their second mobilization, and they will have at least another half a million men in the field. Now, they will be badly trained and badly equipped and badly led with low morale, but troops like that have a technical term attached to them. Russian. There's nothing about this war that is unique in russian history. The first year is always an absolute shit show, and then the Russians throw bodies at the problem until it goes away. And in half of those wars, the Russians ultimately win. So by the time we get to May and the mud season is over, we'll have a more advanced ukrainian force fighting a much larger russian force, and we will get our first real glimpse at how this is going to go. And we should know which way it's going to break. Now. It'll still take time because if the Russians are going to win, it's going to take them a year to overwhelm ukrainian defenses, and then they have to occupy the country, and that's going to kill a couple million people, or the Russians are going to be able to completely break the logistical supply chains that allow the russian troops to even exist, and we'll have a half a million dead Russians, and the Ukrainians will be able to push the Russians out of Crimea in the east. And then we get to talk about the next stage because this is just the opening phase of what is going to be a multi year and perhaps even multi decade conflict.

Jesus.

Yeah. Welcome to Russia.

So how do you think it like when May rolls around?

Yeah, ask me again in May. Right now, the balance of forces clearly are edging more and more towards the Ukrainians. They've proven to be more adaptable. When the Russians made it clear that they were going to do a second mobilization, that seemed to have broken the log jam in a lot of countries, most notably Germany. And we now have armored vehicles up to and including some light battle tanks, which I know all the tankies out there going to hate that term, but anyway, armored vehicles that have some serious firepower are going to be coming. Now, the Bradley's from the United States specifically, and that is a tool that the Ukrainians have not had. So every time the Ukrainians have achieved a tactical breakthrough, they can only push as far as their infantry can run. Now their infantry is going to be mobile. And in a war of movement to this point, the Russians have proven that they're absolutely incompetent. And why is that part of its graft? The guy who is the defense minister, Shoigu, is arguably one of the least competent people on the planet, but he's a friend of Putin and so he's been able to milk the defense department for everything. Best guess is that he has taken a third of the budget himself for procurement and his flunkies have taken another third. So very little gets to the military itself. So it's corruption, huge corruption. And that means no training. Or if there is training, it's basically a parade. And when you're using a force that can only supply by rail, you're completely dependent upon trucks for local distribution. And that's why the Ukrainians went after the trucks with all the javelins that they got early in the war. They didn't really go after tanks, they went after the trucks and they've destroyed roughly 2000, maybe 2500 of them. And that has reduced the russian military to going back to Russia, confiscating city buses and literally Scooby Doo vans and bringing them back to the front. And think of a Scooby Doo van. Now fill it full of artillery. Know every time you hit a huh? And that is their primary ammo supply system. Now, because the rail system into Crimea got blown up the Kirch bridge and what's going into the east is all under artillery range, so they have to use truck and they're just not very good at it.

Now, for a lot of people, the big fear is that if Russia starts really getting desperate, then they use nukes.

Sure. And it would have to be very desperate. I've not been as concerned about the nuclear question as some folks because there's really only four scenarios. Scenario one is the Russians consider throwing one against the United States. But we've made it very clear from our intercepts and our sharing of information with the media that we know exactly where Putin is at any time. We're listening to his phone calls, we're reading his emails. And so he now knows very clearly that if he throws a nuke at the United States, we're going to throw one. Not at Russia. We're going to throw one at