The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - US Congress Dysfunction: Blocking Aid to Ukraine || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

We are taking a question from the 'Ask Peter' forum today - am I worried about Ukraine's dwindling weapon's supplies in light of what's going on with the US Congress? Yes, yes I am. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/us-congress-dysfunction-blocking-aid-to-ukraine

Everyone, Peter Zine here coming to you from Kalea at the southern point of the island of Hawaii. Got the slopes of Owanaloa behind me, the larger volcano here. I am going to take something from our Ask Peter Forum. We're going to put that link here at the end of the video, too, in case you was sending your own questions. And it's, am I worried about Ukraine in the light of what has become an American boycott on weapons supplies? And yes, yes, I am. The Ukrainians are running out of ammo. There's no way they could produce enough to support the war themselves.

And the Russians have mustered a fresh human wave. And human waves are very vulnerable to mass fire, but you have to have ammo for that to work. So there are some concerns we might be seen a turning point in the war here in the next few weeks if something doesn't change. But what is going on is we've got a dozen, roughly, Republicans on the right, who are blocking anything from happening in Congress.

Congress that they don't agree with. And so this is not a Ukraine problem. This is an everything problem. These few reps are blocking anything on any issue. So we've got programs that need to be addressed, not just Ukraine, but aid for Taiwan against China, aid for Israel against Hamas. There's issues with health care and business reform and criminal justice before the defense system and the budget. Every single thing has been dropped. It's not that these folks, oppose Ukraine per se and they oppose anything that isn't exactly their way. So I call them the Greenpeace faction of the Republican Party because they just hate everyone. This means that this Congress has been the least productive in American history. At this stage in Congress,

a little bit more than halfway through their session, we've only passed about 20% of the bills that the second least productive Congress in history has passed. So this isn't an issue of big government versus small government. This is just an issue of of dysfunction, and it's a problem for everybody. Now, I don't think it's going to get any better any soon. When the Republicans didn't do very well in the last midterms, the hope of getting a big majority vanished, so they had a very slim minority beginning, and they have seen that minority shrink down. In part, it's because they've cannibalized their own. This faction of Republicans forced out the former Speaker McCarthy, California, and so he just quit. He left the house altogether,

leaving that seat open. We've had another couple of resignations since, and then the Republicans purged one of their own, Republican Santos of New York, for, let me make sure I get this right, using campaign finance to purchase gay fetish foot porn. Can't make this shit on it. Anywho, what it means is not just that the margin

that the Republicans have and the majority has gotten smaller and smaller, worse that it sounds, because to pass something in Congress, you don't need a majority of the votes, you need a majority of the seats. And so every empty seat kind of acts as a quasi-vote against the majority. So they only have a, the republics now only have a margin of two.

They can only lose one vote if they still want to get things passed. And that makes each individual faction, including the Greenpeace faction, more powerful. So this is going to go one of two ways. Number one, they're going to continue to stall everything. And this Congress will go down in history as the most pathetic ever, until we have general elections, a year, from now, November, and the new Congress would sit in January, or the bulk of the Republicans reach across the aisle and start cutting deals with centrist Democrats.

Now, that's not as easy as it sounds. There's a lot of minutia. There's a lot of politics. There's a lot of noise. And in the environment that we're in right now, anyone who reaches across the aisle is inviting a primary challenge from the freak wings of their parties, whether it's the Greenpeace faction or the Republicans or the squad version of the Democrats. So none of these are easy decisions, but they do suggest that drama in Congress is going to increase or other than decrease in the months ahead.

And that's not just bad for Ukraine. That's bad for everyone, except for the Chinese who think this is fantastic. All right, that's it for me. Take care.