The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - While I Was Gone, Part 4: US Security || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

To wrap up this short series on things that went down while I was away, we'll be looking at some alarming developments in US security.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/while-i-was-gone-part-4-us-security

Hey, Peter Zine here, coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks. This is the last in our series of what the hell were you thinking while I was gone. I was out backpacking for two weeks and the world kind of fell apart. This time we're going to talk about security in the United States' borders. There are two big things that went down when I was gone, both of which concerned me greatly. The first involves a gentleman by the name of John Bolton. John Bolton was a national security advisor,

which is kind of America's top foreign policy coordinator, during the first Trump administration, but after seeing how the sausage was made inside, he left the administration and basically became a critic and has now been one of the more reliable voices for saying when Donald Trump is doing something that perhaps isn't the brightest. Well, while I was gone, the FBI was ordered to raid his business and raid his personal residence, and he has now been accused of improperly handing classified materials. The hypocrisy of this is pretty rich. Anyone who is like independently minded will be able to tell in a second that the Trump administration is the least information secure administration we have ever had.

We've already had a number of cabinet ministers up to including the vice president included in signal checks, which is a Russian penetrated, not particularly secure platform in which they shared operational data. We've had situations most recently in the Alaska summit where information's and the personal intelligence, information of security and diplomatic personnel, including their contact information, was just left on a printer. And we're seeing a general disregard for all the counselor generals, assuming they haven't been fired already, which are the people who are supposed to maintain information security within the administration. So this administration is leaking classified information massively. We even have our DNI who's in charge of the intelligence system outing covert, covert agents around the world on Twitter.

And so to accuse Bolton of doing something inappropriate with documents is really rich, especially since he has been in government service in this sort of role for over 20 years and has never even had a hint of that concern brought up ever. I mean, there's a lot of reasons to not like John Bolton mostly politically or personal. He's not a particularly nice gentleman, but no one has ever accused him of not being confident. So that's number one. Using the FBI as a hit squad for political opponents is something the United States has never done. This is right out of modern China or 2000s Russia or maybe a Latin American democracy. This is not a great thing.

The second thing, which actually concerns me even more is what's being done with the military. The U.S. military is designed to do military operations overseas. They're designed to kill people and detect threats. But Trump is given the order for the military to form specialized units designed to specifically patrol and pass by American urban centers. Now, the U.S. military is not good at law enforcement, and it has never been trained to be good at law enforcement. The third thing is to get in a tank or get in a jet and go overseas and do things there. When you put them into a law enforcement role, like we saw, say, in the Iraq occupation, things go to hell really quickly. Their equipment's not right for it. The training is not right for it.

It's a mismatch. And so a lot of people died that probably didn't need to. You take those same people and you put them on American soil and tell them to do law enforcement. And we're in a very different situation. The only governments in modern history that use their military for urban pacification are those countries where occupying their own people is a national security issue. This is Iran. This is to a degree Russia. This is to a degree North Korea. This is not something we want to see. Not only would it be violent. Not only will there be a lot of political degradation because of it. not only will this erode the U.S. military's capacity to function, it is by far the most expensive way that you could possibly do it, because you're taking people that you'd like say train to work on

an Abrams tank, people that you probably cost at least a quarter of a million dollars just to do their training and then baking them beat cops? No. So we have this cascading list of economic and social and political and health and national security and military issues that just in the last two, weeks, I've taken an absolute nose dive. I'm not a call to action guy, but we're nearing the point pretty quickly where if Congress cannot find a backbone to re-inject some sanity into American policy, we're going to be having some severe degradation in our economic, social, and military models that are literally going to take us decades to unfuck. This is getting very real.