The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - MedShare Donation + The Koreans Are Coming to the Ukraine War || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 12, 2024

Click here to join Patreon and help us donate to MedShare: https://bit.ly/medsharepatreon Already joined the Patreon? You can also donate directly to MedShare here: https://www.medshare.org/ Reports coming out of South Korea indicate that North Korean troops could be deploying to Russia. These reports are unconfirmed, but the South Koreans aren't usually in the business of lying. So, what does this mean for the Ukraine War? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/medshare-donation-the-koreans-are-coming-to-the-ukraine-war

Hey everyone, Peter Zion here. If you are seeing this, you are about to view a free current affairs video despite not having signed up for my subscription service on Patreon. And the reason for this generosity is quite simple. I'm trying to bribe you. There are a lot of people in Western North Carolina, Northern Georgia, and most recently in Florida, that are suffering from various hurricanes, and they need all the help they can get. So anyone who signs up for my subscription service before the end of the month of our October, I will give every cent that I would have earned from those subscriptions for all of October, all of November, and all of December to a medical charity called MedShare. MedShare steps in to help people in their communities when for no fault of their own, they've lost the ability

to temporarily look out for themselves. Now, if you've been following me for a while, you know that I strongly support MedShare's projects in Ukraine, but at this point, there are needs closer to home. So again, anyone who signs up in the month of October, every cent that I would have gotten between now and the end of the year is going straight to MedShare. MedShare's headquarters are in Atlanta. They had the foresight to pre-position equipment and personnel before both Hurricane Helene and more recently Hurricane Milton. And they're already providing a combination of medevac, medical assistance, equipment assistance in order to help everyone in all of the affected areas. So please, please sign up. Every cent will go to them.

And if you don't want to sign up, you know, consider just giving them an independent donation just because. Okay, that's it for me. On with the video. Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. Today, there's some weird stuff going into the news. We've got reports that North Korean troops are in the process of deploying to Russia. Some technical advisors are already there providing the Russians with assistance on how to use North Korean weaponry system. But now we've got open discussion in South Korea.

Korea about intercepts from Hoyang about an actual troop deployment to maybe even fight on the front front lines. Now, I don't have any way to confirm this. I don't have my ear in the Korean dictator Kim Jong-un's house or anything like that. But the South Koreans are not known for making stuff up. I mean, they're known for chopche and they're known for Bogogi and chimchi and soju and electronics and cellular technologies and computing and mass manufacturing and heavy drinking. But they're not known to make shit up. So I'm taking this a little bit more seriously than I would any other random report. We don't usually get a lot of fake noise out of Seoul. Anyway, four big things come from this. Number one, the North Koreans have not been in a fight since 1953. So there is no

living soldier in North Korea that has ever fired a rifle in anger and getting any sort of information on how they might perform in real-word circumstances or be an intelligence. It would be an intelligence bonanza. Of course, it goes both ways. The North Koreans haven't had been in a fight. So being able to see a front line, even if they're not major combatants, is something that they could use for training purposes. But for the point of view of the United States and South Korea, this is going to be the best bit of information we've ever had in the last 70 years that will allow us to remap our war plans for the Korean Peninsula should anything go wrong. Having a more accurate view of your enemy is always the first step to planning. Second big thing, North Korea is not the only country that is providing foreign assistance to the Russians. Specifically, they're providing ballistic missiles and artillery shells to the degree that maybe half of them,

artillery shells that have been used in Ukraine by the Russians this year are from North Korea. I mean, they're crap, probably half of them don't work, and they've been blowing up more Russian artillery tubes than Ukrainian artillery tubes, because sometimes they blow up too soon. Anyway, they're not the only ones. The Iranians are also involved with the Shahid drones, over which a thousand have been used at this point. Now, just as in with the North Korean situation, there's an intelligence bonanza to be had here

or a way to get information on the inside of the system. The Iranians have recently launched a couple hundred ballistic missiles against Israel, and Israel is itching to respond, and they've basically already been given the green light more or less by the Biden administration to do so. the question is where, when, and how? Well, if we now have the North Koreans intervening in the Ukraine war, and we already have the Iranians intervening in the Ukraine war, then there's an opportunity here for, in exchange for the Biden administration, you know, kind of giving its blessing

to an Israeli retaliation attack on Iran, they might just add a couple target coordinates in order to get the facilities that make the Shahid drones. Iran, like North Korea, is not exactly a technological leader, and the number of personnel that can put these things together is limited. So if you were to take out a cluster of technical support, which the Russians desperately need, as well as the manufacturing facilities of which the Russians desperately need, you could, as part of your retaliation attacks, see Israel actually remove a huge source of military capability from the Russians in the Ukraine war. Also keep in mind that the Russians are among the best in the world at assassination campaigns. And whenever an Iranian nuclear scientist gets a little bit too

useful, they tend to meet a dire end. Just simply expending that target set to include drone technicians is something the Israelis could do very, very, very easily. The third thing, as I mentioned, North Korea and Iran are not countries that I would mention as technological leaders. And the fact that the Russians need them for half of their artillery shells and a substantial percentage of their drone warfare, uh, that bodes really, really badly for the Russians' ability to maintain this war long term. We already know that they're only being able to make a double-digits number of new tanks a year. They're just really refurbishing their old ones. And if the technical skills within the military industrial complex of Russia are down to the degree that they're this dependent on two fourth-string countries,

that would suggest as we move forward they're going to become wholly dependent upon imports of weapons. Well, that provides other opportunities for countries to choke the Russian war machine, because if the vulnerability isn't in Siberia, if it's in, say, Isfahan, that's a lot easier to get to, especially if you've got countries like South Korea or Israel who are now involved, which brings us to the fourth and final thing. South Korea and Israel are now involved. There's a diplomatic angle here as well as a strategic angle you have to consider. Both of these countries have been desperate to avoid Ukraine's entreaties and the United States' requests to get involved in the conflict in any meaningful way because they've got bigger security issues closer to harm. that focus wholly on them, and they didn't want the Russians stirring the pot in their own backyards. Well, now the Russians are stirring the pot in their own backyard, so they are involved, and so we're seeing the political restrictions loosen in both Jerusalem and Seoul,

and that can have a lot more impact than simply providing the Ukrainians with some technical help and some weapon systems. South Korea is one of the world's five biggest arms exporters, and produces regular things like artillery and rocket system and tanks that are not too far behind what comes out of Germany or France or the United States, but at a significantly lower price point. In fact, they've already signed a deal to provide the polls with over a thousand tanks and assorted systems. Providing that sort of assistance to Ukraine is obviously a no-brainer, but when you look at a country like Israel that has under 10 million people and is in kind of a tough

neighborhood, mass-producing hardware quickly is something they cannot do, but the South Koreans can. And to flip the equation, the Israelis are the world leader or a world leader in anti-missile technologies and by far have the world's best anti-artillery and anti-rocket technology in their Iron Dome system. Well, on day one of any theoretical Korean war, the North Korean is going to be lobbying all kinds of ammo into downtown Seoul. So if Israel can help out Korea with artillery and rocket defense, cooperation between these two countries changes the strategic calculus of both of them in a very very, positive way. And if you can take Israel's technical acumen on some specific weapon systems and marry it to Korea's ability to produce a lot of things very quickly, you can actually see that working out

through the entire Western Alliance system. So as I said, several months ago when the North Koreans started to get involved at Russian insistence, you know, this was probably one of the dumbest things that the Russians could do. I mean, yes, it gives them a tactical leg up in terms of ammo, but it risks bringing in a really important player on the other side. and that's South Korea and now we're looking at both Israel and South Korea being brought in at more or less the same time and being brought in together and that changes a lot