The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Marines, Uranium, and a Symbolic Win? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Claims that the U.S. will end the war by seizing Iranian assets make no strategic sense. Targeting Kharg Island or removing the uranium from Isfahan with ground operations is just too risky.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/477h7IL

Hey, everybody, Peter Zion here, coming to you from the San Antonio Airport. Today is the 17th of March, and there's a lot of stuff going on in the news related to the Iran War that I find a little concerning. So I wanted to lay out what a few things are and are not, and hopefully some clarity will come out of this. So there's a lot of talk in U.S. media, especially being leaked out of the administration deliberately, like straight from the White House, that in order to conclude the war, they need to remove the enriched uranium from the equation. The idea is that this MEU, that's a marine expeditionary unit, where the U.S.S. Tripoli, that is currently en route from East Asia to the Persian Gulf, is doing so in order to participate with that. So the two dominant theories are that the United States wants to bootz on the ground on a place called Karg Island,

which serves as the destination point for about 90% of the cruise. that Iran produces. It's the sole loading facility that they have for super tankers. It's in the northern part of the Gulf, about 30 kilometers off the coast. The second theory is that they want to remove, they, being the United States government, wants to remove the enriched uranium that Iran has from contention. That stuff is in a place called Isfahan, which is about 40 miles inland. Neither of these really match the facts. In the case of Karg Island, there's a single pipeline, there's no bridge. So actually if you wanted to take this out of the equation, you drop one bomb on one pumping station on shore, and you cut it down with minimal damage and it would be easy to repair later. So there's no need to put lutes on the ground in Karg itself. All that would do would be to open you up to potential counterattacks from the shore. Now, the Iranians couldn't like surge across the street then with ground troops, but they could continually attack any American forces there with drones, for example.

and if you're going to have a ship supporting marines on card, all of a sudden you've given them a big fat, easy to sheet target. That would be stupid, just monumentally stupid. But so would go after Isfahan, because Isfahan was one of the first places that we hit during the war. We also hit them in July. Sorry, June of last year. Sorry.

It's all right. It's ingreatic time. I guess it is. Isfahan is under hundreds of tons of forest. rubble and it's 400 miles inland. So the 2,500 Marines that are with the Tripoli, there's no way that they could land move to Isfahan, somehow magically excavate hundreds of tons of debris and then move the canisters of enriched uranium back to the coast. That's assuming that the canisters are over 90% purified already, which is highly unlikely. So the hardware that is now moving and the

conversations that are being deliberately had publicly just don't match the facts on the ground. I wish I had a clearer idea of what was going on here, but it's pretty obvious that the administration is looking for a way out and looking for a way to manufacture a success. Just keep in mind that the position of this administration, and by this, I mean the Iranian administration, going back 35 years, has always been that if we get a nuke, we will be attacked. so we want a nuclear program that can create a nuke in a short period of time, you know, six months. But we don't actually want to get the bomb. So the idea is that the deterrent is the program, not an actual weapon.

Or at least that's what they believed up until June of last year. And in June of last year, it was real United States attacked anyway. And so the conversation then was basically, do we now need to have the bomb so we have an actual return? And regardless of how that conversation worked out over the last several months, This month, with the new attack that killed, among other people, the supreme leader, the conversation has changed. And now it's like, of course we need a nuke. And everyone that the United States has off so far, Kamenai, his assistance, most recently,

Larenjani, all of these people by Iranian standards were the moderates who favored negotiation with the United States as opposed to nukements. So pieces in motion, not a lot of it makes a huge amount of sense strategically right now. but not a lot of how we got makes a lot of strategic sense either.