The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Russian Reach: Russia's Wish List Part 2 || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 22, 2025

If you thought that Putin already had enough to dream about based upon yesterday's video, I've got news for you. Today, we'll be adding some more items to Russia's wish list.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-russian-reach-russias-wish-list-part-2

Hey everyone, Peter Zion here. You are about to watch a video on a series that I've put together called the Russian Reach, which examines the role of the Russians in manipulating the current White House, as well as the U.S. government in a broader sense. For anyone who signs up for my newsletter, for watching any video, for the remainder of the month, any scent that you would have normally given me for the next three months is going to a medical charity called MedShare. Medchere steps in to help out communities who, through no fault of their own, have temporarily lost the ability to look out for themselves. So, for example, if the Russians are bombing your power grid and the Americans are no longer providing the tactical intelligence so you can anticipate the missile strikes and position your air defense, and the Americans, furthermore, have stopped all financing to help you repair set power grid in the aftermath. Medchair steps in to help hospitals with things like diesel generators.

This QR code will take you directly to the Ukraine page, and that is where all of the donations will be going. Peter Zine here coming to you from Scottsdale, Arizona. We're continuing our series on the Russian Reach, working from the theory that the White House has been penetrated by Russian intelligence. Today, we're going to give basically the dream list of the things that the Russians are after. These are kind of a dragon's teeth sort of topics, things that will hobble the United States for years, if not decades, to come. and it starts with limiting the ability to actually even have optics on its own system. First thing would do would be destroy statistical capacity so that the United States doesn't even have reasonable information on its population or its economic structures within its own system.

We're seeing some of that within Commerce and Department of Labor already. Next would be to go after the law enforcement system at the federal level, most notably dissembling the ability of the FBI to function. And if you do that, the next logical step is to, disassemble the offices within the United States, whether it's for cyber security, physical security or organized crime, that allow it to target and limit Russian capacity and Russian intel operations with the United States, and then flip the script and actually allow the Russians to establish things like friendship centers throughout the country in the way that the Chinese

recently did with Confucian centers. After that, you're talking about breaking down the ability of the United States to leverage Intel on a global basis. Go after the Five Eyes network and cooperation with not just the World Health Organization, which has already happened, but with Interpol so that the United States is even losing access to the networks that it's built up over the decades to get to this point. And then finally, going after Congress. Congress provides the oversight and the budget for everything that happens in the U.S. system. So you start working with the really stupid Congress people and then move on to the ideologically blind Congress people and basically sabotage the system from the inside. All of that is on the docket. I'm not saying it's going to happen.

I'm saying this is what the Russians want to do. And that's before you talk about the really hard security issues. Okay, security issues. These fall into two general categories. The first is to sow problems around the world on the far side of what the Russians consider the outer perimeter be so that any future resurgence of American power has a dozen things to deal with before they can even consider about dealing with the Russian state. In the case of the Middle East, the Russians loved the war on terror because for 25 years, the United States was occupied

with dealing with that region. We basically went to war with a paramilitary tactic, which was stupid. They would love to see the Americans send a peacekeeping operation to Syria to try to hold that place together because you don't want to talk about a thankless task. They love, love, love, love

what the Trump administration is doing with Gaza. Because here you have a completely worthless piece of territory wrapped up with the most intractical political problem in the region. And in doing what Trump says he wants to do, he would rupture relations with pretty much everyone in the Arab world. And again, locked down an occupation for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And never forget that the Russians have noticed what's going on with the Houthis in Yemen. And to get Americans involved in what would be basically the desert equivalent of Vietnam is something that they are really pulling for. And so the Russians have really been pushing for the Houthis to restart their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. In Europe, it's a little bit more straightforward.

Number one is to break completely the relationship between the Americans and the country that has always been the primary Russian concern in Europe. And that is the Germans. And the fact that we saw the Americans actively campaigning for the neo-Nazis in the last election is something the Russians really like to see. And if the Germans are now having to rearm because, the Americans were ending the alliance, having a re-armed Germany that is also run by neo-Nazis, that's kind of the trifecta because it would scramble European security. I'm not saying that might not bite them on the ass down the line, but that's a problem for another day. Looking forward a little bit more, the countries in Europe that will be part of the American

alliance in the future have to be countries that are not dependent on globalization and have a relatively young and positive demographic structure. That's not mainline Europe for the most part. Scandinavia, most notably Sweden and Denmark, who are the larger economies, who are not part of the Eurozone. So no matter what happens to Europe, it's going to look a lot different. It won't be an economic grouping. And those two countries combined with, say, the Nordics, the rest of the Nordic countries, which is Iceland, Norway, Finland, and the Baltic states, that cluster is something that is going to endure and is likely to be the core of a future American alliance.

Well, if the Russians can break that relationship, then all of a sudden the Americans are unmoored in Europe and this cluster of countries, the Scandinavian Nordic countries, are the ones who have been most vociferously working with the Ukrainians to hold back Russian power. And all of a sudden, Donald Trump is talking about getting Greenland for the United States, and Greenland is a Scandinavian territory controlled by the Danes. So they love all that, too. But where it really gets scary when the Russians are really going to lean into this is breaking the ability of the U.S. military to function in the way that it does. There's more to the American military than the ships and the jets and the infantry and the tanks. It's about the people. We have the

best trained force in the world, not just in how to use the hardware, but how to think about the future, how to think about how to use the hardware. And that is courtesy of our staff colleges, for example, the Marine Facility in Quantico or the Air Force facility at Maxwell Air Base in Alabama or the postgraduate school in Monterey, California for the Marines in the Navy. These facilities teach the airmen and Marines and sailors and soldiers who have decided to make the military their calling their full-time career over the long haul. It teaches them how to be better officers. It's not just about history. It's about economics and trade and electricity and energy and logistics. And more over than that, they are also used to bring in soldiers from

other militaries, not just allied ones, to teach them about things like rule of law and democracy and fighting drug trafficking and money laundering, basically creating the bonds between the American military and other potentially allied militaries around the world to make for a better future and to allow the United States to penetrate where it needs to when it needs to. The Russians hate these facilities because they can't replicate them themselves. People who ally with the Russians do so out of convenience, not out of any sort of cultural bond. and the Russian military is as shot through with corruption as the rest of the Russian government. And so when it comes to things like fighting drug laundering,

the Russians are usually on the other side of that equation. The Russians would love to see these things gone, and they may have an informal ally in the shape of the current Defense Secretary of the United States, Pete Hegesa. Back when he was a Fox News host, he would often play this Russian propaganda video for Russian recruitment. It was like, you know, all strapping white dudes who were marching and shooting. And it's not that marching and shooting are not military things, but there's so much more to a modern military, especially a tech-driven military that the U.S. has, than that. And if Pete Heggs' goal really is to get back to the warrior ethos of what exists in a Russian propaganda video,

you know, that might have worked in the 1800s, but not today. And weakening the staff colleges and their support system would be an excellent way from the Russian point of view of breaking the ability of the U.S. military to function as it does long term. And that system is the result of 85 years of fine-tuning. It will take a long time to rebuild if it's closed down. Now, do I think that all of these things will happen? No, this is the Russian dream list. This is not a prediction.

I'm putting this together so you can look at what the administration does and judge for yourself just how far down the road we can go in the Russian direction. and just how powerful the Russian influence in Washington has become. I hope none of it happens, but I already see some of it going down. Quick update from the Wichita, Kansas Airport. There's this group within the military called the Office of Net Assessment that its job is to imagine the future, basically taking multidisciplinary studies in agriculture and energy and technology,

playing them forward for multiple decades, and looking how it's going to shape not just the battlefield, field, but the sorts of countries that we might find ourselves either align with or opposing. It's particularly active in helping the various services, most likely the Navy, design the hardware they're going to need because these things like the ships won't be built for 20 years, and then they have to operate for a half century beyond that. Thinking forward is critical to this sort of planning. In essence, they do what I do, but for the military.

And on March 14th, Defense Secretary Pete Hegesa closed it down. permanently. To say that the Russians are thrilled is a gross understatement.