The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Russian Tech Transfers and Propaganda in the US || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

It should come as no surprise that the Russians love meddling around, so let's see what they've been up to lately. We'll be looking at tech transfers with Iran, North Korea, and China and Russian propaganda in the US. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/russian-tech-transfers-and-propaganda-in-the-us

Everyone, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado, where we are recovering from Snowmageddon, 2024. We've gotten about 40 inches of snow in the last 36 hours. Pretty, though. Anyway, the news today is that the Russians are making some adjustments. Two things. Number one, they're starting to pay back countries that have helped them in the war with Ukraine. So, for example, they've promised a satellite launch to both North Koreans and the Iranians, and the Iranian one launched in the last few days.

So if you think of all of the operations where Iran has activities in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and Jordan, in Gaza, they now have the ability at least in a limited way to have a bird's eye view of what's going on, which is going to cause significantly more problems for anyone who happens to be on the other side of the ledger. The Russians are doing this in exchange for the Shahid drones that the Iranians have been providing. Those are the ones that are basically flying mopeds and they have a 10-pound warhead. The Russians have been using those targets, say, power centers. The North Koreans will be getting one soon as well. Of course, North Korea has been providing the Russians with about a million artillery rounds.

And for those of you who have forgotten, North Korea has intercontinental ballistic missiles. So getting satellite recon for any reason is something that vastly increases that threat. And then, of course, there are weapon systems being traded to the Chinese, things like naval technology, where the Chinese could use them to hurt the United States in any number of ways. That's kind of half of what's going on. The other half is the Russians are in a celebratory mood because they're discovering that they can widen this sort of propaganda that they spread in the United States and certain factions of the American political system,

specifically the Maga right. Because, I mean, here we've got the Russians providing aid in comfort to three countries, North Korea, Iran, and China that even Maga agrees are all bad, but that doesn't seem. to be registering. They're still thinking of Russia as a friend. Let's see, the background of this, of course, happened during COVID when the Russians were the most active peddler of anti-vaccine disinformation in the world, which resulted in the death of over a million Americans, you know, the kind of death toll that the Russians could have never achieved during the Cold War without some

sort of horrible response. But now they have enablers across this branch of the Republican Party. And so the Russians have started to diversify what they've been saying just to see how far they can push it. And last week they were able to actually get Donald Trump to stop campaigning against the ban of TikTok, which is something that is broadly popular, even among the American right. So it's going to be interesting to see how Donald Trump's shift on this is going to now translate into Makka's opposition to Chinese issues. I don't know how far this is going to go. the general breakdown in civics evocation in the United States is definitely having a very deep impact on our political system at home, but it's providing a lot of opportunities for the Russians to drive wedges between the various aspects of American society so far with minimal blowback.

So this is something that is definitely on my worry list and not something that I have a very clear idea of how it's going to go. There's just too many pieces in play. I can tell you that because it's an election season and because, Donald Trump is defending himself from 90, I think, indictments, that there's going to be ample fodder for the Russians to work with over the next several months. This is definitely one of those things that's going to get far worse before it even begins to get a hint of better.