The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Israel and Russia Fall Out (Sending Aid to Ukraine) || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

In a marked shift away from the historical relationship between Israel and Moscow, Israel plans to send early warning radar to Ukraine. The details of this plan are still unconfirmed, but let's break it down. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/israel-and-russia-fall-out-kindle

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from the California coast. It is the 28th of February. And the news today is that Israel's ambassador to the United Nations has announced that because of ongoing Russian changes and policy, both the Ukraine and the Middle East, Israel is going to start providing a degree of military aid to the Ukrainians to help fight off the Russians. Specifically, he says that early warning radars are now being shipped to you. Ukraine so Ukraine can get some advanced notice of when missiles and drones are incoming. Let's start with the caveats because the details provided from the ambassador were somewhat limited. We don't know exactly what systems and we have no reason to believe at the moment that this is the Iron Dome system, which is world-renowned. For those of you who are not living and breeding the details of the Gaza War, the Iron Dome is a combination.

of radar and interceptor system that is designed to hit short-range ballistic missiles and drones, and especially swarms of both of them. And it has been broadly successful at protecting the Israeli population

when Hamas and groups like it watched not just dozens, but hundreds of projectiles and missiles and drones into Israeli civilian areas. If the Iron Dome was provided to Ukraine in sufficient numbers, that all of these Iranian long-range Shahid drones

that have been causing so much problems really would cease to exist as a problem because the Iron Dome basically uses fairly cheap interceptors. Okay, we don't know if it's that, probably something significantly more basic. But why is this important? Israel and Moscow, and I say Moscow to include the Soviet system,

have had a non-standard relationship for most of the last 75 years. the Russians slash Soviets have tended to favor supporting the Arabs against the Israelis, especially in the 1956 war, the 1973 war, and the Lebanon War, because they see Israel as a proxy for Western powers, most notably the United States. But Israel, as anyone who is involved in U.S. foreign policymaking will tell you, is its own thing. And independent of whether they feel they are in our American strategic cover or not,

They certainly don't feel constrained by American policy decisions in most circumstances. So in the aftermath of the 67 war, the Israelis started developing an intermediate range ballistic missile that would allow them to directly target Moscow with a nuclear assault should the shit really hit the fan. And in doing so, Moscow was forced to admit the Jerusalem was a significant power in above itself. And so relations between the two powers, whether it's Soviet Israeli or Russian Israeli, have all always been cool. That is the threat side. There's also an incentive side. In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse when you had millions of people basically looking to leave the former Soviet for anywhere else, that included over a million Russian Jews. The Russian government wanted to get

rid of them. The Israeli government wanted to bring them home. And so a series of deals were struck in diplomatic cooperation that would allow these people to relocate with a minute of fuss. And now those Russian Jews make up more than 15% of the Israeli population. Because of this balancing act, the two governments have always had a degree of grudging respect towards one another, and as such they share information, especially things like tax evasion information, on activities of the Russian oligarchs who oftentimes have dual citizenship in Israel. And this has encouraged the Russians to kind of go softly, softly, softly softly when talking with anyone who happens to be an outright foe of Israel.

So the Israelis kind of turn a blind eye when the Russians are talking to Iranians about things that are relatively ethereal and don't affect the Middle East directly. But this seems to have now changed with the Ukraine war. The Russians are involved in a military conflict that they see as existential. And that means a lot of these softly softly relationships that the Moscow folks have with other countries are secondary at best. And so the Russians have started inviting groups like the Houthis, which had no international platform prior, to Moscow to talk about strategy. And in this week, the Hamas group is actually going to be in Moscow for the same reason. And for the Israelis, this is not a minor issue. This is an existential issue for them.

So we now have the UN ambassador basically publicly declaring that the Russians are carrying out a genocide. The Russians, by the way, are now calling what's going on in Gaza formal occupation, and we're seeing a hardening position and an eroding of this kind of general understanding that their spheres of influence don't really overlap, so let's not push it too hard. Now it's being pushed. And if we get into a situation in the next few months where the Russians from the Israeli point of view are directly interfering in what the Israelis consider to be critical issues, you can bet your ass that Israeli intelligence is going to start.

to get shared on the Russian topics with everyone in the Western Alliance, first and foremost the United States. And that'll open up no end of opportunities for U.S. law enforcement on things that have nothing to do with the Ukraine war. In addition, there'll probably be a lot more military cooperation because we know to be perfectly blunt that the Iron Dome system works pretty well. The limitation is that Israel is a country of just a few million people and they can only produce so many of these things. But if you start putting Western money behind Israeli technological might, all of a sudden you can see a world where more of this stuff is produced and it can provide strategic cover for larger areas of Ukrainian landmass.

And all of a sudden, these hundreds of drones that are coming in every week might not matter nearly as much.