The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump and Putin Split, Ukraine Gets Aid Again || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

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Hey all, Peter Zion here, coming to you from Colorado. Brilliant sunny day. We may, may, may, may be on the edge of a significant shift in American relations with Russia and Ukraine. For those of you who have not been in a hole or drowning in conspiracy theories for the last couple of years, you will know that Vladimir Putin has been lying to Donald Trump's face for quite some time and has gotten him in bit by bit by bit to move away from Ukraine for reasons that are very, very positive for Russia and very, very negative for the United States in the long run. But time and time again, Trump has basically been made a fool of on the international stage and then has covered for Trump and either peeled back sanctions or removed weapons that were being shipped to Ukraine and basically take steps that will cause decades of international problems for the United States moving forward. well, the tide may be turning.

In the last week, we've had three communications between the White House and the Kremlin, all of which Putin basically lied to Trump to his face and then told Trump he wasn't going to do anything that he didn't want to do, including signing any sort of meaningful peace deal with Ukrainians, up to and including the point where Trump felt that he publicly needed to declare that he was sending weapons to the Ukrainians again. If you guys remember a couple of weeks ago, the Defense Department basically canceled a lot of weapons shipments for weapons that we have not used in 30 years, saying that we didn't have enough supplies, which is exactly something that the Russians have planted into the American system because so few of the old Russia hands have been allowed to continue working for the Trump administration. Most of them have been fired either from defense, from the Bureau, from the NSA, or from the CIA itself. anyway, something seems to be breaking in Trump's mind, and that kind of forces us to consider this from a couple different directions. Number one, I'm sure we all know people who have fallen for conspiracy theories, and we have all know people who have fallen for lies. And when you call them out, they take it personal and they blame you instead of the people who have been lying to them, and Trump is no different from any of those.

However, when they do finally make the adjustment, they tend to over-adjust. They'll do it in their own way, saying that this was all part of a test, and I was playing the long game, or whatever it happens to be. But when they do finally adjust, they tend to overcompensate because they've been made to look really stupid, and now they feel they need to look strong again. And when the person who feels that he's been made to look stupid and now needs to feel strong again is the president of the United States, shit can get really, real, really fast. So the question isn't so much, will Trump eventually change tune? No one can decide that but him. The question is, what will he do? In terms of military actions, there's actually a fair amount of room for ramp up.

One of the things that people loved and hated about how the Biden administration treated the Ukraine war is we never knew what the Russian red line was. Will it be providing something that's more advanced than a bullet to the Russians? So we eased in. Will it be mid-range weaponry? it be aircraft, it will be the Abrams tank? At every step, there was a lot of debate about whether or not this would push us to a nuclear exchange with the world's largest nuclear arsenal. A lot of people said, no, you need to do what's right for the right reasons, and just do it. And I'm like, there's nooks in play. There needs to be some nuance here. And so the Biden administration may,

in retrospect, have gone slower than a lot of proponents for Ukraine would have argued, but considering that if you got it wrong once. Yeah. Anyway, how it left, the last day of the Biden administration, is that the United States was up to and including allowing mid-range and even long-range American missiles to be used by the Ukraine's launch from Ukraine into Russia proper. And the Russians did nothing.

So all of the roughly 80 red lines that the Russians had established proved to be false, which means that there's really no American conventional weapons, that could be deployed to Ukraine that are in risk of even going another level up because all the levels that are short of direct American involvement have already been ticked. So it really is just a question of what sort of weapon systems the Trump administration decides it wants to share. And that could be a whole lot of things. Keep in mind that roughly 85% of the equipment that we have sent to Ukraine is stuff that the U.S. military hasn't used in 30 years. So we're not talking about anything for most of this stuff that generates a shortfall in what the United States has in its

reserves. That's, for the most part, a falsity. Of the remaining 15%, about half of that is ammo, mostly artillery, and that is something to be concerned about, and the United States has basically quadrupled its production of artillery ammo over the time of the Ukraine war. It needs to be expanded more. And then the final little bit are things like patriots that we actually do use, And those are a legitimate concern, but most of the weapon systems that the Russians are using to attack Ukraine are low-tech drones and missiles that the Patriot really isn't the appropriate weapon system for. It's not that it doesn't have a use. It's just it's not a headline issue that really changes the balance of power. So there's a whole world full of American munitions that have been developed and deployed since 1992 that the United States could throw into this mix.

just keep in mind that most of them, like say the Abrams, would require additional training and perhaps technology transfer in a way that the United States really hasn't considered to this point. And considering that the U.S. Defense Department has been just as gutted at all the other American government agencies, the people would handle these details really aren't present in volume anymore, making a very technical conversation that is very much beyond the capacity of the U.S. Defense Secretary, he was arguably the most incompetent person in the government right now. there's no one to lead this conversation in a meaningful way like we used to have. So when you take somebody at the top who's likely to make a knee-to-jerk reaction,

we could get some really erratic policies here with some very, very powerful weapon systems and some very, very proprietary technology, which could lead us down a lot of roads that in the long term could be more problematic than beneficial. That's number one. Number two, let's talk about the economics of it. The Trump administration, Trump specifically, has started to make positive sounds about a bill going through the U.S. Senate, sponsored by U.S. Senator Graham of South Carolina. Anyway, Graham has been a Russia hawk since the beginning of the war,

has really been pushing the Trump administration to take a firmer line, worked pretty much hand in glove with the Biden administration on the aid packages that happened under his term, and has been visibly upset with the inclusion of basically pro-Russian and maybe even Russian agent provocateurs within the Trump administration up to including the White House with Tulsi Gabbard, of course, being the worst of them all. Anyway, this bill, if it was turned into law, would enable the U.S. President to put a 500% secondary tariff on any country that absorbed any Russian crude.

And whoa, that would be fun. Now, there's some obvious problems with the bill in its current form, and that's one of the reasons why the Trump administration has reached out to Senator Graham's office. Number one, there's not a lot of flexibility for the U.S. administration, which is part by design, But if the Trump administration is more willing to engage the senator on this topic, and honestly, it would pass through the Senate with flying colors if it was put forward, it's an issue of enforcement.

Okay, secondary sanctions are something that have yet to be done, and the U.S. does not have the staff in place to do them. You'd basically just have to get a declaration out of what? The Commerce Department, the Treasury, the State Department saying that this country is in violation, and so bam, all of a sudden, imports from that country are going to cost six times as much as they did. It's a bit of a lower the boom. We'd get everybody's attention, but how it would be enforces a bit of a question. Second, it doesn't necessarily cover things like the Shadowfleet. So right now, about half of Russia's oil exports are

transported by ghost tankers, things that are either uninsured or unflagged or unsafe or old or should have been broken down into scrap years ago. It comes out to about two million barrels of crude a day. And one of the reasons that the Biden administration never really went after the shadow fleet, it was unclear, again, how to do the enforcement? Do you just grab the ships on the high seas? Because they're not going to dock at any allied port because they'll be confiscated. And if you decide that you're going to use your Navy to basically go out and do privateering, what becomes of the ship?

What becomes of the cargo? Is it now the property of the country that confiscated it? And all of a sudden you have sovereign countries engaging in a degree of piracy, in a world where there's something like 15,000 ships on the high sea at any given time. You'll never get a legal framework for dealing with it because there's not a legal framework for how ships are handled on the high seas now. There's just kind of this gentleman's agreement and a bunch of winks and nods and handshakes that everyone agrees that they want free commerce so they let it all flow. If you start interfering with that without a mechanism, then all of a sudden all commerce everywhere to a degree becomes under threat because the precedent will be set that a state can just go out and grab. things. The Biden administration couldn't figure out a mechanism to make that work without breaking

down global trade, which is not something they were willing to do. The Trump administration is broadly hostile to global trade. It might not think that they need a mechanism and might just go do it, which could lead to any number of less than satisfactory secondary effects. So the Trump administration is entering this era where the knee is about to jerk. And it's probably going to kick out. and do some things that some people might like in the short term, but it will trigger all kinds of problems in the long term. And this is going to fall very, very clearly under the category of things that you wish for don't always go the way that you were hoping.