The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump 2.0 - Russia || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

As Trump enters his second term, there are going to be numerous challenges facing his administration. So, we're launching a series touching on several of these issues and what to expect from President Trump. Our first video in the series covers Ukraine and Russia.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/trump-20-russia

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Corr, Glen, New Zealand, about to relocate. We're going to launch off a bit of an open-ended series today talking about the challenges that are going to be facing the incoming administration of President-elect Trump. He's actually President Trump, President-elect, he's both. Anyway, specifically today we're going to talk about what's going on in Ukraine and Russia. And before we go into the impact that Trump can or cannot have, I think it's a best to revisit. visit why the Russians are doing what they're doing. They don't feel like they have a choice in this war. I would argue that they're broadly correct with that,

which doesn't mean that there is a solution where everyone can just get along. It's part of the problem. You see, the core territories that the Russians are from, Moscow, the territories to the north, south, and southwest are open and they're vulnerable, and there's no natural barriers that prevent invasion. And so what the Russians have always done since the time of the early as ours is to expand as much as they can,

absorb culture after culture, people after people, conquer nation after nation, until they reach a series of geographical barriers that do block tanks and troops. And those barriers are the Arctic Ocean, the Baltic Sea, the Carpathian Mountains, the Caucasus and the deserts and high mountains of Central Asia. Anyway, under the time of Stalin and during most of the Cold War, the Russians controlled all of these territories, and they were the most secure they've ever felt. That is one of the many reasons why during the Cold War, the primary concern was about a nuclear catastrophe rather than a conventional invasion.

We are now in a different system, however, though. Post-Soviet Russia lost control over almost all of those access points, and in the time since the wall fell in 1989, the Russians have launched or participated in nine different military operations, of which the Ukraine war is only the most recent. So if there's anything we know about the Russians, it's that this war was always going to happen, and it was never going to be the last one,

and any sort of peace deal or armistice simply buys the Russians times to recoup so that they can then go for the next thing. And if they do succeed in absorbing all of Ukraine, as soon as they are capable, they'll go after the next line of countries in the West, which are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Moldova, all of which Moldova are members of NATO. So we are not at the end of the story here. We're in the middle of the story.

That's the why. The why now is even more simple. demographics. The bottom fell out of the Russian birth rate back in the 1980s. We had something called a death cross in the 1990s where the birth rate fell below the death rate. At one point, twice as many people were dying every day in Russia as were being born. There's since been a bit of a recovery, but it's since turned again, and that's before you consider the war. So this was always going to be the final decade that the Russians could attempt to use their superior numbers to force a military solution to what they see as their frontier problem.

And if they had waited until 2030, there simply wouldn't be enough men in their teens and 20s to even make a meaningful attempt. So it was always going to happen. And it was always going to happen about right now. And what happens in the rest of the world from the Russian point of view as a rounding error in considering how they prosecute the conflict.

Enter Trump. Trump says he can stop the war in 24 hours. Trump says a lot of things that a lot of people don't take seriously. But let's assume for the moment that there was a deal to be had. What has been floated from the Trump camp is an armistice along the current division line with European troops coming in to monitor the ceasefire and the Ukrainians facing a 20-year pause before they can even consider applying for NATO membership. Now, from the Ukrainian point of view, this is obviously not ideal because it takes roughly a quarter of their population,

excuse me, a quarter of their territory and locks it more or less permanently under Russian control. But moreover, this is a deal that the Russians would never accept because they don't have 20 years. And they don't need to just get Ukraine. They need to get the rest of the entire western periphery. They need to get Georgia and Azerbaijan and Armenia, the bulk of Central Asia. If they wait 20 years, the demographic bomb will have fully gone off. And so the Russians have rejected this proposal post-haste. Now, let's talk about a couple of the minor things going on.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories going around right now. Oh, my God, there's so many conspiracy theories going on right now. But let's deal with the one that deals with the Ukraine war that the Russians only attacked because they thought the Biden administration was weak. The specific timing for the launching of the Ukraine war was very straightforward. Trump made it very clear four years ago that if he was reelected, he was going to withdraw from NATO fairly early in his second term. This was something that was communicated to Putin.

And so Putin was very clear that should that happen, Ukraine would basically be handed to him on a plate. And when that's not how things unfolded, he felt that the only way to get what he needed was to launch a military attack, which was correct. So there is nothing there that is Trump-related that caused or deferred the war in any meaningful sense. Like I said, this was always going to happen. Now, that doesn't mean that the Russians don't have some opinions on Donald Trump. They find him to be an eminently manipulatable person. They were able to hive him off from all of his security personnel, including the Secret Service and the first term, and to get him into a room alone with Putin and Putin's senior staff.

That's never happened throughout American history in any summit, anywhere, where you'd have a president completely separated from anything. And what the Russians found out was that Donald Trump really didn't know a whole lot about what was going on. Unlike most presidents who rely on their cabinet members to keep them informed, Donald Trump relies on his cabinet ministers to keep him feeling good about himself. And so whenever somebody would tell him something that he didn't know and make it very clear that he wasn't the smartest person on the room in each and every topic, he generally fired them.

And so the Putin government really liked the first Trump term because nothing could really get done on the American side that wasn't being done on Twitter. And they have high hopes for the second term because a number of the people that are being appointed to cabinet level positions. for example, the proto defense secretary has limited military experience. He's a cultural warrior, and it's very clear that it doesn't actually have any plans in mind for the military, aside from de-woking it, as he says. And from the Russian point of view, this is brilliant,

because if you can hobble the ability of the American military to function, the American intelligence community to function, because the coordinator of that is basically somebody who's been working for the Russians for years, then all of a sudden you have a free hand, or at least that's what they think. I think as is typical with the Russians, they may have overthought this out and come to the wrong conclusion. If you go back through modern American Russian history, the Russians do this from time to time. They think they have an upper hand. They think they can play the American president, whether it's JFK or Bill Clinton or someone else.

And then they discovered, no, that's not really how it works. This is still the most powerful country in the world. And regardless of what you think of the individual leader, there's a lot of institutional heft there. even if the individual leader has a problem with the institutions. In this specific case, though, it's much more personal. They have already told Donald Trump flatly no. And if you are a world leader in the current age and you want something out of the United States,

we all learned in Trump, Term 1, that the way to do it is to flatter Donald Trump. And for whatever reason, the Russians have forgotten that. And so, while Zadlizziqli of Ukraine has already been on the phone with Donald Trump to talk. While the Canadian Prime Minister has already flown down to Mar-a-N-Lagro, while Shinebaum of Mexico has already been on the phone. Well, several European leaders have already arranged

sweet talks, basically to kiss up to get what they want. The Russians seem to have forgotten that, and they just said no. And so, if you take Donald Trump's temperament and apply it to this situation, I think it's pretty safe to say that the Russians are not going to get what they're hoping to get at the same

time that Donald Trump has come up with. It's brilliant, the best. The awesome plan. of freezing the conflict for 20 years, which was something would be anathema to Russian strategic plans in the short, medium, and long term. So, regardless of what Trump said during the campaign, regardless of which J.D. Vance, who is a Russian apologist, said during the campaign, he really comes down to the emotions of one person right now on this issue, and the Russians have really gotten off to the wrong foot and put that foot directly in their mouth.