The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Russia, NATO, and Negotiations || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 23, 2025

This video was originally posted on Patreon on Feb. 19, 2025. At the time, negotiations were just beginning between the US and Russia on the topic of Ukraine.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/russia-nato-and-negotiations

Hey, everybody, Peter Zillion here coming to you from Colorado. It is the 18th of February, and we now are in the middle of the opening rounds of negotiations over the future of Ukraine carried out by the American and the Russian delegations in Saudi Arabia. And the backstory from last week is that American Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth let slip, well, now kind of showcased, that they were going to give in to the Russians on every major negotiating point on Ukraine bonehead maneuver. Horrible negotiating strategy. Anyway, so the Russians of course now are pushing for.

for more. Already they have stated in the negotiations, they want to roll back everything that has to do with NATO and Ukraine to at least 2007, basically predating any meaningful engagement between NATO and Kiev. And we're already seeing the early stages of the Russians setting up their propaganda to attempt to roll it back to at least 1989. Specifically, what they're looking at is in 1990 and 1991, the Russians assert that there were a number of conversations between Western leaders and the then-Soviet leadership that said that if the Soviets allowed Germany to reunify, then NATO would not push the borders of NATO further east towards the Soviet frontier. And there are reasons to expect that some of these conversations did happen from historical information that has recently come out of the

U.S. archives. However, anyone who tries to push this, and there's going to be a lot of Russian propagandists who are pushing it soon, remind them of five things. Number one, if the Russians felt so important about this, they should have said something at the time. None of this was ever put down into writing. There was never a press report from either side about it and didn't come up in any of the press conferences after the ministerial meetings, much less after the summits. Number two, newsflash, the Soviet Union is gone. Less than a year after these supposed conversations happened, it dissolved in December 1991. And under international law, no country is bound to obey an agreement that was made with a power that is now dead. Number three,

You could argue that the Russian Federation is the successor to the Soviet Union legally. So if there was an agreement, which there wasn't, then maybe there is at least a little bit of a legal straw to stand on there. But Poland isn't the successor. Neither is Estonia or Lithuania or Slovakia or Romania or Armenia or Armenia or Georgia or Ukraine. Remember that all of these countries and about a dozen more got their independence from the Soviet Union either during these. opposed talks or in the year after. In fact, every single constituent republic of the Soviet Union except for Russia itself declared independence before the Soviet Union dissolved in December of 1991. And collectively, they have a population that is almost double that of the Russians

living in Russia. So even if there was a deal, which there wasn't, it would have been stupid. Fourth, to paraphrase Obi-1 Canobi from a certain point of view, NATO has really never moved closer to the Soviet frontiers because it was the Soviet frontier that moved. First, East Germany was folded into West Germany, then the Central European states of the Soviet Combine broke away, and then the constituent republics of the Soviet system itself. In fact, NATO's border today, by most measures, is actually much further away from the Soviet-Slas Russian frontier than it was 40 years ago. And fifth, to hold the West responsible for a conversation it was never written down, own. That's rich coming from the Russians who have now violated and abrogated every single

arms control and defense treaty they have made with every power in the West over the last 40 years. So to say that the Russians are the ones that are in the wrong here is kind of funny. Anyway, you're going to see this and more coming out from Russian propagandists. It's made the rounds over the last couple of decades. It's going to come back in a very big way. Now that the Russians think they can really pull one over on the the American administration. And the greatest ally in this is going to be a woman by the name of Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump recently selected and was confirmed by the Senate to be his director of national intelligence, which basically means she's the window, Trump's window on

the world. And she has been in the Russian pocket and been spouting anti-American things along the lines of this specifically for the better part of the last 15 years. Bottom line, expecting the United States to shape today's security policy on behalf of the better part of a billion people based on what happened in back-channel conversations with a dead power from 40 years ago would be a bit like expecting Trump's tweets in the 2010s to shape American policymaking in the 2050s. In other words, don't be stupid because that's exactly what the Russians are counting on, Americans being stupid.