The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - North Korea to Provide Russia with Military Aid || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

Putin and Kim Jong-un finally had their little tea party at the Cosmodrome out in the far east of Russia. Besides boosting each other's egos and gossiping a bit, it looks like the main discussions revolved around North Korea providing military assistance to Russia in the form of artillery shells.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/north-korea-to-provide-russia-with-military-aid

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Phoenix, Arizona. Today we have to talk about the summit between the strongmen of Russia and Korea. So Vladimir Putin on the Russian side and Kim Jong-un on the Korean side. They met in one of the Russian cosmodromes in the far east, and the primary topic was whether or not the North Koreans can provide the Russians with military assistance, which for anyone who has a sense of history, the irony here is practically bleeding out of the sky. Anyway, the issue, of course, is that the Russian war in Ukraine is not going to spec. And when you have a conscript heavy force like the Russians do, you try to use standoff weapons and aren't to be really smart in large volumes, specifically artillery. If you exclude either China or the

United States from the math, Russia has more artillery than the rest of the planet combined. And best guess is by the end of this year, they'll have gone through over 20 million artillery shells. artillery shells don't age particularly well, and after they're more than 10, especially after 20 years old, the explosives start to crystallize a little bit, and that can make things decidedly lively when you try to, I don't know, move them, especially when you try to launch them. So the Russians have had a lot of accidents with the transport system, their logistical system, and then, of course, they've had a lot of barrels on the artillery just blow up from the inside. All of these are bad things if you try to launch a lot of artillery. So they need more shells, and they're turning to North Korea, which I believe has the world's fourth largest stock of artillery.

The problem here, of course, is that North Korea's industrial plant isn't exactly great either, and a lot of the North Korean stuff is actually older than the Russian stuff. It gives you an idea of how desperate the Russians are for ammo. Now, the question, of course, is what do the North Koreans get in return? Because the Russians don't have anything from a trade point of view that's of use. You might be able to send a few tankers of crude oil, but the Russians, on it, need that for hard currency earnings. So the questions if there's anything else can be transferred. In terms of military technology, there really isn't. One of the things that the Indians have

found out recently that they've been developing missiles and planes with the Russians where the Indians provide a lot of the capital and then the Russians provide the technical know-how. And what they've discovered is very few of those contracts are actually being honored by the Russian side because the Russians have lost the technical capacity to manufacture even moderate numbers of planes. So they're now starting to back out of all their contracts because they realize that the Russians have been lying to them the whole time. In addition, there's some talk of like maybe a nuclear powered vessel or submarine, but it's taken the Russians 15 years to build their last nuclear powered ship, which was an icebreaker. So the argument to be made here is whether

or not the Russians even have the capacity to sustain their existing nuclear naval fleet, much less build new ships for themselves, much less have surplus to transfer to North Koreans. And honestly, it's looking pretty poor for that. That doesn't mean the Russians have nothing, and it doesn't mean that's not a problem, which is probably not going to be the things that most people are talking about. Look at where the meeting was, the cosmodrome. This is a facility out in the far east that the Russians built when they lost control of the Kazakhstan cosmodron at the end of the Cold War.

And when it comes to launching satellites or intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Russians are still one of the few places in the world where that technology can theoretically be obtained, even if the Russians have lost the capacity to build a lot of new stuff themselves. So the primary global concern, primary regional concern for North Korea is missiles, long-range missiles, and that is something the Russians have in spades. So whether it's officially part of a program to launch a satellite into space, which, you know, whatever, or more likely to deliver a payload to another hemisphere, that is something the Russians can and probably are willing to transfer to the North Koreans because the Russians are no longer party to any meaningful arms control treaties at all, which will generate no end of headache, not just for the South Koreans and the Japanese and the Chinese, who news flashed the North Koreans hate the Chinese, but also the United States. There's not a lot the United States can do about this

because the North Koreans are not in a position where sanctions work at all. All you can do is punish the Russians indirectly and hope for the best. And that's not a great security strategy, but that is where we are. Yeah, that's all I got. Bye.