The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Venezuela's End: Peter Goes Squirrel Killin' || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Following the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, I've had a ton of theories and ideas flood in. So, it looks like it's time for a good old-fashioned squirrel killin'.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/49nAK0M

Hey, everybody, Peter Zane here, coming from Colorado. It's above 50 degrees, so I figured we'd go for a hike. Anyway, a lot of folks have written in with a lot of questions about what's gone on in the aftermath of Venezuela. For those of you who have been in a coma over last weekend, Delta Forces went into Caracas and grabbed the president, Nicholas Maduro, and brought him to New York to face arraignment, where he is facing narco-terrorism and conspiracy charges.

that date back over a decade. We'll never hear from him again. Anyway, lots of people have had lots of questions about what this means. So the point of this video is to do what I call squirrel killing. So coming up with these arguments that people think might be have something to them, show why they really don't what the real issue is. So let's start with the big one. And that's the idea that part of the reason why the U.S. went after Maduro

is because of the fear that Venezuela could be used as a military base to attack the United States, particularly with drones. Short version is no. First of all, there are very few drone systems on the planet that have the range that is necessary to cross the Caribbean. You're talking over 1,000 miles here, and hit the United States. Of the ones that could, most are American, but the Russians don't have models like that.

The Chinese don't have models like that. Ironically, the Ukrainians now do. Pretty sure they're not going to want to attack the United States. That just leaves Iran, which has the Shaheeds, which the newer ones do have probably, barely, the range that's necessary. What they lack is decision-making capability and real guidance. And so when you program a Shahid, you have to tell it what routes to follow and where to drop its payload.

And in the open ocean, there's nothing to follow. So technologically, there really isn't a weapon system that is set for this task. And even if there was, the first city that you're going to hit, the only one of size that you're going to hit is Miami. You know, we all have our opinions about Miami, but I don't think any of us like, oh, Miami, that's militarily critical. Yeah, no. So, you know, blowing up some hotels on South Beach is not the sort of thing that the United States

is going to be intensely concerned about. What it would do, however, is trigger an adverse reaction in the American political system, which would lead to massive American counterstrikes on whoever was behind it. Because clearly, the Venezuelan government, the Venezuelan economy can't make a bias. plane, much less a drone. So, not that one. What's next? The Russians have been itching to have an excuse to attack the United States and this is it. No. The Russians are locked down in a war that has been moving incredibly slowly. At the pace they're going, they're not going to conquer Ukraine this century and they need to really finish it up before they run out of troops in just a few

years. In addition, the Ukrainians recently have been on counter-attacks and have reclaimed a number of cities including Kupyansk. And there just isn't any Russian spare capacity to do anything else anywhere. They've even pulled a lot of troops out of not just the Far East, but off of the NATO border in order to focus them on Ukraine. And if, if, if they were stupid enough to think that they could do otherwise, let's say they staged some weapons in Cuba, for example. Number one, the Cubans would not go for it. After Venezuelan, the Cubans are pretty sure that they're next and they're desperate to find a way to avoid an American attack. Staging Russian weapons a la 1963, much less launching them, would guarantee the end of their

regime because the Soviet Union no longer exists and post-Soviet Russia in its current form really can't do a thing to protect any of its allies whether that is Iran or Venezuela or Cuba. So no. And if, if that were to happen, I can guarantee you that the president, not just Donald J. Trump, any American president would then make ending of Vladimir Putin at the very, very top of a very short list of things to do once Cuba was neutralized. And if there's one thing, Vladimir Putin values, above all else, it's his own skin. And every time in the past it, he has been personally threatened, he has backed down,

especially when it comes to relations with the United States. So no. One more thing on the Russians. The United States doesn't react well to threats, especially if the threats actually make us bleed a little bit. So if you think back to, say, Sputnik or the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. massively overreacted. And it caused the Soviet Union a series of not just geopolitical defeats, but global humiliation in their inability to counter what the United States did. And Putin doesn't just know this. Putin has lived this. So he will never do something that is intended as a direct

strike on the United States. He will always work through third parties. He will always work to turn us against one another. That's one of the reasons why the Russians intervened in the elections. That's one of the reasons why they both support Trump and oppose him. Russian propaganda is very active on all sides of all ideological debates in the United States, especially the culture war. So, you know, careful where you're sourcing no matter who you are. And the goal of the Putin administration is very simple. To get the United States to lash out, to get it to react badly, to get it to attack but not Russia, to get to do someone else, which is one of the reasons why Greenland is featuring so hot and heavy right now because the Russians are actively

working now to get the Trump administration to attack a NATO ally. All right, what's next? Okay, next squirrel. The idea that the Russians, the Chinese, and maybe others will use the United States grabbing of Maduro to justify military action in their own theaters. Can't rule out what people will say, but this is certainly not going to nudge them in direction. Be purely rhetorical. Let's start with the Russians. Again, they're in a full-fledged war where they've redirected all of their military assets to one theater, and they're not doing all that well. Also, we're talking about a war where the Russians have literally set up rape camps and establish a cabinet-level officer to assist and coordinate the mass kidnapping of children in the thousands from the occupied territories. We have over 100,000 documented war crimes. It is difficult for me to wrap my mind around what else the Russians feel they need justification to do in the Ukraine war. So, you know, it might make it out in a press release, but it's not going to move any decision that they're going to.

already made. The second one is China, of course. That gets a little bit squirly, but still, I don't think it's going to change their meaning. If the Chinese thought they could do a lightning rate overnight and overthrow Taiwan, they would, but that's not how advanced technocratic democracies work. Also, if they thought they could do it, they probably would have done it already. Keep in mind our discussion of military deployment capability before. The Chinese don't have it. The Russians don't have it. No one really has it except for the United States into a much, much, much, much, lower degree, the French and the Brits who mostly focus their deployments on territories they already control parts of their colonies of their empires, if you want to call them that.

So keep in mind that every war that the Chinese have fought on land since 1949 comes down to just two basic conflicts, one with the Russians over an island and one with the Vietnamese where they had their asses handed to them. I'm not suggesting that the military of China is incompetent today. I will point out, however, that it is in the process of being massively purged, and to think that their order of battle actually matches what they can do is a bit of a stretch. But the bottom line is that vitriolic rhetoric against Taiwan is bread and butter to the Chinese Communist Party, especially these last eight years, as Xi has basically purged everybody in the country. So if they start using some North Korea-style rhetoric, it not only wouldn't be new, but it

also has not shaped strategic policy to this point. Basically, these are authoritarian expansionist neo-imperialist powers who are not constrained by rule of law or allies. They don't need justification from anyone to attempt what they want to try to do. Their only constraints are physical, of which they have many. What's next?

The new president, Rodriguez of Venezuela, has said that this was all Israel and the Jews. What's next? Okay. What else? that Venezuela is a warm-up for the real country, Iran, which is clearly next. Probably not. Now, Cuba, Cuba is probably next, and we've already dealt with that in a previous video. But Iran's a very different situation.

While the United States certainly has the military capability of interfering in Iran's oil shipments, because you could either stop them at Karg Island where everything is loaded, or the Straits of Hormuz, which is a narrow passageway out of the Persian Gulf that everything has to pass through, that's a lot different from taking out the political leadership. See, Venezuela wasn't exactly a one-man show, but it was definitely a strong-man system with a tight cluster at the top that helped him loot the country and then very little below. There may be a mass movement of chavistas, but they're not organized in the way that, say, the Democratic Republican Party is. So, like, if someone were to take out the American leadership at the top, even every member of Congress, there's still the states and the localities and there's two million elites in the United States and the political class. that's not the case in Venezuela.

You had a couple dozen. And that's certainly not the case in Iran. Two big reasons why Iran is probably not next. Number one is that elite. Probably 10,000 mullahs are part of the clerical class. And it's going to take a lot more than some Delta forces guys are a bad flu season to take them all out. So even if you could get the Supreme Commander,

you wouldn't be able to excise the regime. The second problem is geographic. Tehran is definitely not coastal. in the way that Caracas is just a few miles from the water. So you're talking about inserting over a couple hundred miles of desert mountains. I'm sorry, I shouldn't say desert mountains. A lot of these are not desert. It's populated.

And as the United States found out back in the 70s during the Carter administration, that if you try to send a bench of helicopters to pull people out, there's a really good chance that it's all going to end very badly, just like it did with the hostage rescue back in 1979, I think. So much more durable regime, much hard. harder to get to, and I just don't see that working. Doesn't mean that there can't be an angle for American policy on Iran that's going to evolve because of this and become much more muscular and threatening. All of that is absolutely possible. But this isn't a dress rehearsal in any way.

It's a very different economic, political, and strategic challenge to go after Iran.