The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The U.S. Helps India and Russia Helps Iran || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

There have been two major developments involving India, Russia, and the Iran war being conflated. These are two separate issues altogether. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter:

Hey everybody. Peter Zine here. Come to you from a snowy Colorado. Finally got a big storm. Oh, anyway, today we're going to talk about something that a lot of people are conflating. That does it with Iran and the oil trade and Russia and India and sanctions and terrorists and blah, blah, blah. A lot of people are tying this all together with a nice big bow. It's not quite that neat. So the two big things. Number one, the Trump administration has granted India a series of waivers. Right now, courtesy of the Trump administration, we have sanctions on a few Russian oil companies, and Donald Trump managed to cut a deal with the Indians about six weeks ago, I think it's been now, where the Indians would stop importing Russian crude.

I definitely had my doubts about that at the beginning, but it seems as actually sticking because there's now this waiver. The issue is that the Indians had been grabbing oil in excess of a million barrels a day, really, since the Ukraine war. going. And it was one of the big financial lifelines. And now that the Trump administration has put sanctions on Russian companies, they have slowed, not stopped, but slowed. But now with the Persian Gulf being closed for, I believe we are in day 10 now, the Indians' only other source of crude was from the Persian Gulf, and that has functionally gone to zero. So in order to keep the Indians on board, the Trump administration has granted this waiver, allowing the Indians to bring in temporarily, at least for a month, Russian crude. That's piece one.

piece too is we've had a number of leaks from the international community, especially from the American intelligence services and also from Congress that the Russians are actively assisting the Iranian government with targeting of American troops, which is definitely true. The people that are deeply anti-Trump are conflating the two, saying that Trump is basically Putin's sex toy, and so therefore Trump has been looking at. for any opportunity to cut the Russians a deal on absolutely anything. While there may be a little bit of truth behind the thrust of that, linking these two events is not correct. Let's start with the Indians. If you're going to split the Indians off from the Russians, if you're going to have a

better relationship between America and India, causing an economic depression is not a good way to do that. So once the United States started the war in Iran and the Persian Gulf got shut off, your choices were either to try to somehow force India to have an energy-induced depression and then still be pro-American, which would have been a very, very tall order, or issue these temporary waivers. So the temporary waivers make a lot of sense. I'm not a big fan of the Russians having any market, but if you took the Russians out of the equation,

at the same time you took the Persian Gulf of the equation, you're talking like 25 million barrels a day of global oil production that has nowhere to go and can't get anywhere. And that would have been disastrous if it was all focused on India. If you want to focus on China, that's a different conversation. Different video. Okay, so that makes sense. The second one, the Russians have maintained links to basically any group that has ever targeted

the United States, whether that is various derivatives, Al-Qaeda, or more specifically, the group in Iran that is calling most of the security shots, which is the IRGC. And of course, they're continuing to provide targeting information, just like they did for the 20 years of the war on terror. Anything that keeps the Americans bottled down anywhere else. in the world gives the Russians the free reign to do whatever they want in their neighborhood. That is a time-honored Russian tradition going back all the way to the Tsars. So, of course, of course, of course they're doing this, which puts the Trump administration

and Donald Trump personally in kind of an awkward spot. The information is coming from so many sources, international, domestic, military, intelligence, congressional, that there's a lot of. lot of texture in detail to the accusation. Specific cases have been noted, so of course it's true. And that puts Trump in an odd position because he has basically given Putin the benefit of the doubt in everything regarding global affairs and Ukraine warrants specifically. And now we have his most recent crown jewel in his foreign policy, Iran, that has been actively undermined by the Kremlin and Putin personally. Does this mean that we're about to see Donald Trump

turn over a new leaf that's a lot more realistic when it comes to the Russians? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Remember that surrounding him, you've got Whitkoff, who is maybe the dumbest person in Western civilization, who is the prime interface between Putin and Trump. And all he does is regurgitate Putin's propaganda in Trump's presence. Number two, you've got the Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a not-so-closeted white supremacist,

who thinks that the Russians are the great hope for the white race. And third, you've got the director of national security or national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who basically has stood against the United States on any meaningful foreign policy position for the last 15 years and has been very, very pro-Russian from the very, very beginning. The key thing about Tulsi Gabbard is that she controls the daily presidential brief that the intelligence community puts together for the president. So I would be shocked if details about what the Russians are doing even made it into the document in the first place.

So this basically has to grind on. We've already had a half a dozen Republican senators and a number of Republican House members go public in the last 72 hours, screaming at Trump to finally, finally, finally fix this and get rid of people like Tulsi Gabbard and Steve Wutkoff and actually have a foreign policy that is worthy of the United States. But as we all know, Trump really doesn't care what anyone else thinks. And he's really not even concerned about the midterm elections because, He's already a lame duck, and even when he controlled both the Senate and the House, he's really never bothered going to Congress for anything. So why would he care what Congress looks like? Anyway, things are slipping bit by bit in the right direction for more realistic foreign policy versus the Russians.

And things are, kudos to Donald Trump, slipping in the right direction for more productive relations with the Indians as well. I was very doubtful that the Indians would abide by any sort of ban of Russian product, but yet here we are, and the market is proving it. Russian Urals crude sold on the Indian market has actually now risen above the Brent benchmark. That is kind of the global standard. And the only way that would be happening is if we had a sudden surge in purchases because of the waiver. And that's exactly what's going down. So a lot of moving pieces here.

And I'm not trying to convince anyone that we're about to have a dramatic change. in foreign policy that would be more realistic, but we do finally have multiple vectors moving in the same direction at the same time. You will not see a meaningful change in policy, however, until Whitkoff and Gabbard are gone. I don't see that as imminent, but then again, Christy Noem finally got let go after six months of horrible mismanagement at DHS. And again, the Republicans in Congress are not so good. quietly celebrating in media. So, you know, there is hope here. Let's just not get over-excited until we actually see the back sides of some of these people who functionally work for the Russians.