The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Relocate or Move On from the Middle East || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Following the dumpster fire that was the Iran war, the U.S. is contemplating how and where to redeploy forces to the Middle East.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/45MUx7b

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Banff, Canada and Alberta. Today we're going to talk about the American in-progress plans to redeploy its forces throughout the Middle East. One of the many things that we saw as a result of the Iran War is that the Iranians now have a limited number of precision weapons. As we've been watching the Ukraine War, we've seen the accuracy in the reach of drone warfare extending incrementally ever since February, which is the same window that the Iran War happened in. And what we now have are a new type of drone that I call memory drones, where you can program in a limited decision tree. And when the drone gets to the general vicinity of its target, the pilot releases it. And the drone looks at its targeting criteria, selects a target itself, and then goes in.

And since the decision was made on board, it can't be jammed at that point. It can only be shot down. And most of the damage that we have seen to U.S. military facilities in places like Kuwait and UAE and Saudi Arabia were by these drones. It's not just that they hit the United States, they hit with extreme precision, hitting whether it was a barracks or a radar dome. Anyway, bottom line is that the United States lacks a good defense for these systems. The Patriots are absolutely the preeminent system that the Americans have for shooting down those drones, and they'll definitely do that. But the United States can only build about a dozen of those things a week,

whereas the Iranians can assemble several thousand drones per week. The math was always going to be against the U.S.'s favor. So the discussion now is to where to move these facilities. And the two countries that keep coming up over and over and over again are Jordan and Israel, where you'd probably put them in the Negev desert. And the theory is would put them outside of Iran's range. But no. There are multiple versions of the drones that the Iranians are using.

But what we've seen in the Ukraine war is that the range gets incrementally longer every single day. The Ukrainians are now regularly striking targets that are over 1,000 miles away from the Ukrainian space. And in the case of Iran, they're nowhere near that long, but they've certainly breached 600. And 600 miles range can bring those Iranian drones all the way to the Mediterranean hit anywhere in Israel already. So if the American goal is to have a close-in military facility in the Persian Gulf region or the Middle East in general that can threaten Iran, the interceptor problem has to be solved. It isn't an issue of distance. Iran has already demonstrated, it has robust capability of hitting anything in the region, all the way to Israel, all the way to the

Red Sea all the way to Yemen. Moving the basis isn't going to achieve anything except for maybe by just a few months while the Iranians tick up their drone range just a little bit, and that's all it would take just a little bit. So no, this isn't a good solution. So we're probably going to be seeing a broad-scale American withdrawal from the region unless and until the interceptor problem can be solved, and it will not be solved with Patriots.