The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Peter Zeihan - Putin Announces Withdrawal From START Treaty

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Most of us have come to expect that anytime Putin gives a speech, nothing good will come out of it...and his one-year war anniversary address to parliament was riddled with bad news.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/putin-announces-withdrawal-from-start-treaty

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado. It is the 21st of February, a Tuesday. You'll be seeing this on the 22nd. The big news today is that Putin gave his one-year war anniversary speech in front of the Russian Duma, which is the Russian Parliament today. And he, well, it was pretty, obviously, it was pretty cheesed off about a whole lot of things. But the two big takeaways. Number one, Russia has now formally withdrawn from the START Treaty. Now, the START Treaty dates back to the very, very late days of the Soviet Union or the very early days of the post-Cold War system based on how you draw the lines. I believe was ratified in 1990. And it is the original major strategic arms reduction treaty. And it is the core of not just the entire disarmament

and non-proliferation regime, in my opinion, but it also the core of the entirety of the American-Russian diplomatic relationship. Because if you can't agree that you can share a planet, then everything else is kind of the details. And so there was a start one and a start two and a start three and a start four and various agreements not just in the nuclear field but conventional weapons that had to do with the conventional forces and Europe treaty that regulated how many tanks each side could have and all of them drew back to start. And the Russians have now withdrawn from every single one of them

with one exception which was the intermediate range missile treaty which the U.S. pulled out of. And so now the entire basis, legally and diplomatically, for the entirety of the bilateral relationship is gone. And we have not seen relations at this level of hostility since at least 1983 when we had a nuclear scare over Berlin. But honestly, we're really edging back into the early Cold War days of the early 1950s when Stalin was building up nuclear armaments at breakneck speed in order to try to achieve parity with the United States and the post-World War II environment in the early days of containment. So while Russia is at best a third-rate military power, it is not a paper tiger. It is more like a rabid tiger with a really bad case of gangrene, and it can do a lot of damage on its way down. But now all diplomatic relations are basically in the Krabber.

And there is no reason to expect the United States and the Russians to have any sort of meaningful discussions on anything until such time as the military position in Ukraine breaks very firmly one way or another. As you guys know, if you've been following me, the soonest that might happen is May and June when we get a huge number of Russian constrips come in facing off of a substantial amount of weaponry that is coming from the West. The balance of forces is very clearly with the Russians in that,

but logistical supply is very clearly with Ukrainians on that one. So it is, in its own way, a very, very fair fight. And until we have movement on the ground in a substantial way in Ukraine. We should not expect anything to come out of diplomacy between the United States and the Russians. Nor are the Europeans showing any sign of backing down either. Over the last few days, we've had the Munich Security Conference, which brings together thinkers on defense issues throughout Europe and the wider world. And everything was all about the Ukraine war. And the Europeans showed more spine and more resolve, especially from people in

the European sphere that have a history of being pro-Russian or pacifistic or anti-American. I mean, where the, whew, no zealots like the converts, taking the firmest position, where Ursula von der Leyen, the chief of the EU said she can't even imagine a future where the Russians don't pay for the entirety of the Ukrainian reconstruction. And the EU's foreign policy chief came out and said that the entire EU needs to put funds, especially joint funds, towards the operation and the expansion of ammunition lines. And this is a guy who basically a few years ago said that NATO was a relic and just we needed to move on. So everyone in the Western world is kind of on board here,

while the Russians have drawn some very clear lines about what sorts of conversations can even happen, and it doesn't look like very much. The second big thing that Putin said is he has no intention of backing down from the war because Russia is fighting very clearly for their, quote, ancestral lands. This is one of those things that pops up in all of the war crimes tribunals

and all of the war crimes treaties as something you do not go to war for. Now, I think everyone in the world is already pretty much made up their mind about which side they're on. I mean, we've literally had torture centers registered in the dozens with a few of them allegedly, even for children. And so anyone who was going to make a moral stance on this already has. But having the Russian leader basically quote what is not allowed under international law as the primary justification for what he's doing, it does kind of underline things and crystallize things at least for the Western world. Not nearly as big as what's going on with the START treaty, though,

because, you know, getting nukes out of circulation, this is a good thing. All right, hopefully I will have a little bit more cheery things to say in the future, but for now, that's all I got. Talk to you guys later.