The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Mr. Putin Goes to Hanoi || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

With Russian President Vladimir Putin heading to Vietnam, some American security experts are getting concerned about the future of the US-Vietnam relationship. To understand why the Vietnamese are working with Russia, we need to take a quick history lesson. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/mr-putin-goes-to-hanoi Donate to MedShare Here: https://www.medshare.org/zeihan-impact/

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from the Turks Trail near Denver, Colorado. It is the 20th of June, and the news today is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a state visit to Vietnam. He landed in Hanoi last night. He'll probably be seeing this tomorrow. Anyway, some American security folks are having a bit of a conibption fit because they thought Vietnam was now firmly in the American camp. And that is not a very nuanced understanding of why Vietnam and the United States are going to be good allies in the future. A quick story. So there is a plaza, kind of an open-air museum in Hondoy near the Capitol complex, where they commemorate basically all the conflicts of the past. And there's this two-foot-tall structure, a little obelisk to commemorate the U.S. Vietnamese military.

We know is the Vietnam War. That lasted about 20 years. And right next to it, there's another structure, about 10 feet tall, to commemorate the France-Vietnamese War, which lasted about two centuries. And next to that is the largest structure in the facility, which is about two stories tall, which is to commemorate the Chinese-Vietnamese conflict, which lasted the better part of two millennia. You see, American and Vietnamese interests are converging because they are both concerned about China. And for Vietnam, this is typically their first and foremost, their first, their last, their only security concern because they've been conquered more than once and advanced any number of military conflicts

with a vastly superior power in terms of numbers. fought back, just like they did in our Vietnam War, and they've done pretty well for themselves. Anyway, bottom wide is that Vietnam will always see its security interest through that lens. And so if you go back to the Vietnam War when we were on the other side, they saw it the same way. And so in the Vietnam War, you're talking about things that happened after the Sino-Soviet split. And when you all of a sudden had Maoist China and Soviet Russia, staring down one another, all of a sudden Vietnam came into play, from the Russian point of view. So the Russians were backing Vietnam,

not just because we were involved, but because the Chinese were involved. And so the Vietnamese became used to having the Russians as a counterweight to Beijing, not just Washington. And say, if you look at the relations that the Russians have with everyone around the world, they've gotten significantly worse with almost everyone. With the West, with the United States,

with the Northeast Asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, that's pretty straightforward. It's straight up Ukraine war. But with other countries, it has to do with military contracting. Russian weapon systems have proven to be not a lot advanced, especially when it comes to things like jets and aircraft and missiles.

And so countries like India that have literally soaked billions of dollars into the Russian military complex only to discover that most of the money now was stolen and most of the technologies that the Russians said they were developing just worked. And then of course there's the weapon systems, the legacy weapon systems,

billions of dollars of that going back years that don't work as well as they thought they did. And the Russians or even combing the world for things like artillery shells and hoovering them up in order to have them in the war. This doesn't really affect Vietnam. Vietnam doesn't have an artillery army. It doesn't use a lot of aircraft.

It doesn't use a lot of missiles. It doesn't use a lot of armor. They want machine guns. They want RPGs. They want things that can be shoulder-launched. They want anti-ship missiles. These are things that haven't underperformed in the Ukraine war to this point. So from Vietnam's point of view,

it's almost unique in the world of arms. absorbers, importers, that they haven't been disappointed yet by the performance of what's gone on in the war. And so for the Americans out there who are concerned about the ally of the future, maybe not being all that, don't worry about it. For the issues that matter to the United States in the region, we're actually on the same page. It's China, China, China, China, China. Now, I don't doubt, if you fast forward a couple years, failures in the Russian military complex means it won't have the capacity to export arms to Vietnam any longer. And then, And that part of the conversation changes too.

We're just not there yet.