The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump Takes on Russia…or Maybe It's the Other Way Around || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

US President Donald J Trump, both directly and via his senior staff, has outlined his administration’s policies for Europe, Ukraine and Russia.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/trump-takes-on-russia

Hey everybody, Peter Zeyn here. Before we get in today's video and really this whole series, keep in mind that I'm talking about very, very dynamic situations where somebody says something and somebody else responds. Specifically on today's video about Russia, Defense Secretary Hagseth said one set of things. He walked them back a few hours later. Trump countermanded him. He walked them back the other direction. Trump said so it's all in motion. So what I am presenting in the video is my best understanding of where we actually are as a opposed to all the da-la-blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now that you know that, here we go. Okay, guys, I need my notes for this one, so I'm going to try to look down as little as possible,

so there's not too much that has to be edited out, but there's definitely going to be some. It has been a remarkably good month for the Russians. Ever since Donald Trump has come in, he stressed America's alliance system to an extreme, and over the last few days, we've seen a number of decisions made publicly that have basically bet to the Russian will in any number of issues. It started probably in the first full week Donald Trump's turn when he turned Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency on the Central Intelligence Agency. Now, the agency has been the primary function within the U.S. government for decades of informing the American president of the threats coming from

Moscow in general and has actually been one of the bureaus has been most active in countering those threats. And one of the first things that Musk did is one after the senior staff at the agency, specifically the folks that are involved in threat detection and briefing the upper ranks of the U.S. government on possible options. Donald Trump has made sure that his inner circle doesn't have anyone who is competent in it because competent people have opinions on topics because they know things about topics and Donald Trump doesn't like to be countered. So he has always had a hostile relationship with the agency whose job it is to inform the executive branched. The only other president that comes even close to Trump's degree of dislike for the agency was,

of course, Barack Obama. Now, of course, the agency isn't the only agency within the U.S. government that has involved encountering Russian threats. The Defense Department's right up there, and Trump's directives against the Defense Department have actually been more disruptive than what they have done against the CIA's. specifically the Trump effort on DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, basically the woke agenda, if you want to call it that, is something that has been around in the Defense Department before the Biden administration. It was actually implemented by the first Trump term as a recruiting

tool to get people who are not simply white males. We don't know what the future of the military is going to be, but we know it's going to be a lot more technically evolved than what we have now and we need to throw as wide as a net as possible, Trump's words. Anyway, by trying to comply with the blizzard of anti-D-EI orders that the Trump administration has handed down since taking over the job again on the 20th of January. The military has basically stopped recruiting at anything that might be perceived

as favoring anyone who isn't a white dude and that includes black technical universities. So we've seen the possibilities for the Pentagon to do intake for people with the skill sets that we need to maintain today's forces, much less build tomorrow's, basically go to zero. And for the Russians who have always been technically behind the Defense Department, they're thrilled with that particular outcome. And then, of course, tying this all together

requires some people and some important notes. And Donald Trump has found a doozy in Tulsi Gabbard. Now, you have to believe Gabbard falls into one of two categories. Number one, you have to believe the Russians who have publicly been calling her one of their agents for the better part of the last decade, something that U.S. intelligence has corroborated. too many more. We'll listen. Or two, you have to look at what Gabbard has said when she's been in or near Russia or China or Iran or Syria, where she is consistently built up a long trap record of taking anti-American positions. And that's before you consider that BNI job that she's taking is basically a management job to funnel all of the intelligence that's coming in into a single

source collaborate with the agencies to manage their output and then in for the president. although she's never had an management job or an intelligence job. So either she's a traitor or anti-American or incompetent or some combination of the three. And legless to say, the Russians are over the moans at her confirmation. And then there's Ukraine. Trump made it very clear in the last week that whatever negotiations are involved between the United States and Russia, that he will handle personally and that the Ukrainians are not involved and the Europeans are not involved.

Considering that the last time that Putin and Trump engaged in negotiations, Trump left behind his security detail, his translation team, his intelligence team, its national security team, and he walked into a room where Putin had all of those things with him. And the Russians basically pumped Donald Trump for information for three hours and used the information they got to reshape their world over the next several years, which is one of the things that led to the Ukraine War. Negotiating master. Yeah.

Anyway, I don't want to prejudge the outcome of negotiations that haven't yet started, but the other couple of things that are going on in Europe right now don't make me particularly confident. It has to do with Pete Hagsuff, who is the Defense Secretary. He was recently in Munich for the Munich Security Conference. which has resolved when all the Europeans and the Americans get together in powwow about defense issues. And he said very clearly and publicly and officially that NATO will never admit Ukraine, as I remember, and U.S. forces will never be on the ground in Ukraine. This is a European,

not a NATO responsibility. And in doing that, he basically hewed to every demand that the Russians have made since the beginning of the war as the starting point for the American position. I have not not seen this degree in negotiating incompetence out of the American leadership since Barack Obama gave us that terrible deal with Iran. What was it 10 years ago? And from a fairly similar point of view, Obama just didn't want to deal with it. It looks like the Trump administration just doesn't want to deal with this. Which brings us to the third and perhaps the worst one, Hagseth in his speech made it very clear that not only would U.S. forces never be involved, that NATO would never be involved, that the Europeans were going to have to do this themselves outside of NATO.

And if the Russians attacked the European forces on Ukrainian territory, that NATO and the U.S. would not get involved in the subsequent conflict, basically abrogating Article 5 as far as Ukraine is concerned. And to call this a sellout is to be generous because the United States founded NATO with the intent of guarding Western civilization from Moscow. And to say that now that the Russian forces are on the march literally across the Plains of Europe, backed up by North Koreans, no less, that the American position on the whole thing is basically meth. That Haigsa speech was given in Munich, which is the place where the last time the West caved to a dictator setting the stage for a larger and much more violent war than needed to happen is not lost.

And I can tell you precisely where this will lead. I've got a book here. That kind of dives into this about how the United States is eventually going to lose interest in NATO and we will have a war in the plains of Europe between the Russians and the Central Europeans. Now, I had hoped over the course of the last three years that I was wrong.

But here we are. A couple things have changed. First of all, the Russian military, is not nearly as capable of large-scale lightning strikes as I thought it was 10 years ago when I wrote that book. It's more of a long-braining war patrician that's really ugly and takes more time. And because of that, it does buy the Central Europeans more time to do things and to prepare, not just to rearm for a broader conflict, but to engage in sort of technical military work that normally they wouldn't have had the time for.

And what we now need to watch for very closely is the nuclearization of the weapon systems. Central Europe. Specifically, Sweden and Finland have the capacity to go nuclear at very short period of time measured in weeks, if not days. And once that happens, Ukraine, Poland, and probably Romania will follow suit, because this is really the only way that they can stand out if NATO forces are being completely withheld. Keep in mind that the best forces that the Europeans have are banged up within the NATO alliance. And by saying to the Europeans that those cannot be used in Ukraine or against Russia, despite the fact that that's the reason the alliance exists, really limits what the Europeans can do.

So they have already given significantly more financial and military aid to the Ukrainians and the Americans have. And by now, removing the best stuff from the table or really giving the Europeans no choice but to play the nuke card. And once a number of countries in Central Europe do this, the generals will be forced to consider doing themselves. And that triggers a series of strategic entanglements that I really do. have the brain power to focus on. All right, Matt. I have always found it quizzical that people believe that as combative and erratic as Donald Trump is, that somehow he's the person who's going to usher in world peace.

It is difficult to come up with a more perfect set of circumstances than what the Trump administration has set up in the last few days to trigger anything other than a horrific continental war in Europe. But here we are. And tomorrow we'll talk about what the Trump administration has cooking up in the Middle East.