The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump Takes on the Middle East || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Israeli successes across the Levant have transformed the broader Middle East, wrecking the countries and militant groups that have long scourged the region.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/trump-takes-on-the-middle-east

All right. We're now going to do the third in our open-ended series on what Trump is doing in his new administrative term. And today we're talking about the Middle East. Now, the Middle East is ripe for change. We've had, wow, we've had a lot of shifts in just the last six months, but really in the last two years. So quick review. After an attacks a little over a year and a half ago now, year and a half ago, wow, has been that long. By Hamas, that's the political group, the terror group that rules the guys. Gaza Strip, which is an extreme southern Israel. After the launch terror attack into Israel, killed over a thousand people and took a couple hundred people hostage. Israel's been on a tear. It started with a borderline incompetent invasion and occupation of Gaza. No matter how much it went back and forth, on how much it smashed it, how much it bombed, and how many people were arrested, it just couldn't root out Hamas.

Because everybody who lives in Hamas is basically living in an open-air prison and the people weren't given an opportunity to leave. What little they had was destroyed. And it was very, very easy for Hamas to replace any of its war losses with new recruits. Because you've got 2.2 million people with absolutely no options. Anyway, well, that was all going on. And I'm just like, this is looking really bad. Israel was doing other things. And then it launched a decapitation strike using exploding pagers and, of course, a lot of air drop bombs on a military group slash terror group called Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. And in doing so, took out the entire leadership. Shortly after that, the Turks managed to maneuver things over in Syria so that

the Syrian government collapsed. And all of a sudden, if you're Israel, you're looking around, and things have gotten pretty good. Hamas is in a box. They haven't been destroyed, but they haven't been able to strengthen, and all of their regional allies are gone. Hesbalah has been decapitated, and the only way that you would resurrect Hesbola is with a lot of additional support and training and personnel, which would normally come to or through Syria, which is now gone. And that left Iran, which was the ultimate sponsor for Hezbollah and Syria on the wrong side of Iraq and really unable to do anything meaningful. And so they were reduced to using diplomatic attachés to shuttle cash into the country one envelope at a time. And it's just not doing what they needed to do.

Even if Iran is able to regenerate Hezbollah, it took him 30 years to do it the last time. It's not going to turn it on a dime here. So there's a real opportunity, not just for Israel, but for everyone in the Middle East to turn the page and move on to something. new. It helps that no one in the Middle East likes the Palestinians at all, and specifically Hamas. So there's a possibility here with a little bit of leadership and a little bit of creativity of the United States that we really could open a new book, not just to turn a page, open a new book on what the Middle East is. So Donald Trump wants to build a hotel. Donald Trump's idea is that all of the Palestinians of Gaza will be relocated to another country.

Keep in mind, all other countries hate them. And the United States will take ownership of Gaza, which is a little chunk of land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt, making it the least strategically valuable chunk of territory in the entire region. And it will develop it into a resort area. And opportunities like this don't happen, but once a century or so. And this is not how you cement the future of a new region. Let's just go down the reasons why this is a horrible idea. Number one, moving 2.2 million people. Let's leave aside the whole genocide human rights thing. A lot of other people tackle that topic. Let's talk mechanics. The last couple of times that we saw people relocated against their will, governments were participating in the relocation. Specifically, you had the partition of India where a newfound India and Pakistan were basically agreeing to swap Hindus and Muslims so that they weren't living among one another and they had a better chance at having a peaceful coexistence.

The one before that is called the Benes Decree in the aftermath of World War II, when newly Soviet satellites like Pullman and Czechoslovakia uprooted Germans and shipped them off to the new German boundaries, specifically East Germany. When that happened, you had states that had agency and capacity and gravitas to make it happen. So the new East Germany did a massive building program in order to accept its own people back, its own ethnic, co-ethics. and the Soviets helped with transport and food. Also, you're talking about Northern Europe, which even in the aftermath of World War II

had some of the densest transport arteries on the planet, including roads and trains. You had the same thing in India. This is part of the old British colonial mandate, the Raj. And as a result, you had the parts of Pakistan in India that are viable, economically viable, climatically livable, were attached to one another. And so you could basically just run people on the roads on the rail back and forth until you achieve what you wanted. But also in both cases, people had housing to move into.

In the case of Germany, we'd had a population drop in the war. In the case of Indian Pakistan, people were moving in each other's homes. It was ugly. It took years. There were definitely lots of complications, but it kind of sort of worked. That's not what we're looking at here. Number one, the Palestinians don't want to move. Number two, there's no infrastructure at all linking them to anywhere else.

You either cross through the unpopulated part of Israel that is the Negev in order to get the unpopulated part of Jordan before you eventually get into a place that is already 70% Palestinian. But the leadership of Jordan is Hashemite Arab and they hate the Palestinians and they basically oppress the people so they have a chance of retaining their throne. You throw two million pissed off Palestinians in that mix and Jordan goes from being a quasi-failed state and a satellite of Israel to a chaos cannon in no-time flat. And all of a sudden, you've taken the problem of the Gaza Strip and turned it into a formal state called Jordan. Alternatively, you could go through Exodus in reverse and cross the Sainah where there's almost no roads and certainly no rail. And then you get to the Suez Canal where there is a bridge, thank God. And you can get over to populated Egypt, literally Exodus and reverse, where the Egyptians hey to the Palestinians and find a place in a country that is failing because it has now outpopulated the abysits. of the country to grow its food itself.

And that's before you consider global climate change or global trade breakdowns, which means that very soon the Egyptians won't even be able to sell cotton and citrus on international markets to buy wheat to feed their own people. So you're basically prejudging the Palestinians for starvation. And then we get a new exit the other direction with Palestinians instead of Jews. Those are the only option. So those are the only places you can walk from Gaza. We're talking 2.2 million people.

You cannot relocate them any other way. And when you're done, assuming all of that works somehow, you now have a chunk of land that is nothing but rubble, abutting unpopulated Egypt and lightly populated southern Israel that you're going to turn into what of Las Vegas of the Middle East? No. And for that, you're going to burn American blood and treasure, which is going to take way more than what we used in Iraq. in order to get something in a place that nobody wants to be anyway. I've heard dumber ideas. Not often. Yeah, I'm done with this one.

Tomorrow we'll talk about China. No, I'm not done. I forgot to give you the forecast. So if Trump proceeds in trying to get the Arab states of the Middle East, who don't have the capacity to come and get the Palestinians to uproot the Palestinians, who don't have the infrastructure to move the Palestinians or house or feed or water the Palestinians,

Indians, if he tries to give them to do it anyway. Talk about pressure on the relationship. We're at this wild moment where both Russian and Iranian power in the bulk of the Middle East has been broken in a short period of time at the same time. If Trump does what he says he wants to, he will provide a years-long window of opportunity for both of those countries to reestablish their old position and then some because Trump will do what Trump does and he'll put pressure on Everyone. He started with Jordan. He moved to Egypt. He's now working on Saudi Arabia. By the way, there's even less infrastructure connecting Saudi Arabia to the zone in question. And he's going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And if he does that, all relations with all Arab countries are going to freeze. And it will be very, very easy for the Russians and the Iranians to reestablish their position. However and wherever they want. Now I'm done. Tomorrow's China.