The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - When the Missile Is the Message || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Following the United States' approval for Ukraine to use its weapons systems inside of Russia, Putin decided to launch an intermediate-range missile called the Oreshnik into Ukraine. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/when-the-missile-is-the-message

Greetings from Colorado. I just got off a plane, got back home for the weekend. It's 22nd of November, and the news regards a missile attack that the Russians launched against Ukraine earlier this week. As you probably remember from a video a couple days ago, the United States government has given the Ukrainians authority to use their weapon systems on Russian territory, so specifically in the cursed province. The Ukrainians have already started to use them to target command and control nodes. and a few depots, and they're certainly going to be going after things like rail logistics in the not too distant future. This is something where a lot of Russian politicos have saying that this is a red line, this will trigger nuclear war, and that was obviously crap, because the wrong message is coming from the wrong people, and the Russians have yet to engage in this sort of meaningful conversation about the war that would allow the return of some sort of deterrence doctrine. Anyway, in order to try to press their case that there would be consequences, the Russians launched a weapon from down near the Caspian Sea well further away than it needed to be to hit someplace in Ukraine. At first, everybody thought it was an ICBM. That's an intercontinental ballistic missile. And the only reason those exist are to have nuclear warheads on them. The idea was that it was supposed to be a threat

to the United States. Turns out it was not an ICBM, not an intercontinental ballistic missile. It was a new type of weapon called an Orishnik, which is an intermediate range weapon. Now, intermediate range weapons in Europe, well, between the United States, the Soviet Union and the Europeans, they were banned under a 1988 treaty called the Intermediate Range Forces Treaty, the INF. The idea, and this was at the end of the Cold War when Reagan was in charge, the idea is if we remove the shorter range missiles that could be used in the European theater, then we move off of hair trigger alert, and we can start negotiating with some confidence, some sort of post-Cold War pact, which eventually would culminate in things like strategic

armed limitations that would take all of the city flatteners out of the equation. Well, about 15 years ago, the Russians started violating the terms of that treaty and started developing weapons systems like the Roosznik, which now have hit the battlefield. It's not so much that this is a warning to the United States because the United States isn't a target of intermediate range forces. it's too far away. This is about the Europeans. And the question in Russian foreign policy and strategic policy has always been divide and conquer. They don't like NATO because it allows everyone to ban together and brings the United States and the Canadians into the party. They want a system

where it's every man for themselves. And from the military point of view in the European space, that makes the Russians the most powerful player. So the whole point of developing an intermediate range missile and now launching it at Ukraine is a demonstration to the Europeans that we are back to the Cold War in terms of the Russians' capacity to nuke Europe before anyone can do anything. Or at least that was the intent. It is definitely not working. The British and the French have already allowed their weapon systems, most notably the Storm Shadow and the scalp missile systems, to be used by the Ukrainians to target the Russians

directly. In addition, in Germany, we have a chancellor who's on his way out, Olaf Schultz, who has been very hesitant to a lot of German weapons to be used. He's most likely going to lead his party, the Social Democrats, into a trouncing in elections that will happen within two or three months, at which point, the new incoming chancellor of the opposition party, the Christian Democrats, has already said the first thing he's going to do is call Putin, threaten him, and then free the German equivalent system, which is called Taurus for use by the Ukrainians. And third, we have Finland and Sweden commenting about the sabotage by Russian and Chinese interests of internet cables and telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea by already talking

about activating Article 5, which is the mutual defense clause of the NATO Treaty. So the Russians are misreading the situation. They're misreading how the Europeans are standing. They're misreading what the European nerve is. The question is whether or not the Europeans can stick to it. We're now in this weird situation where the Europeans are doing a lot more for Ukrainian defense than the Americans because they know at the end of the day now with or without the Trump administration that they're the ones who are going to have to live without whatever the security situation evolves into.

And so we're seeing a lot more interest in all of them to step up. And my personal favorite is an eight-party commission that it involves all the Scandinavian countries, all of the Baltic countries, Poland and Germany, to start investing in defense industry manufacturing in Ukraine proper so that the Ukrainians have a better chance of standing on their own. Will it all be enough? We'll see. But what we know for sure is that the Russian effort has had absolutely the opposite effect.