The Russian Reach: Series Introduction || PETER ZEIHAN

hey everyone Peter Zion here you are about to watch a video on a series that I've put together called the Russian reach which examines the role of the Russians in manipulating the current White House as well as the US government in a broader sense uh for anyone who signs up for my newsletter for watching any video uh for the remainder of the month any scent that you would have normally given me for the next three months is going to a medical charity called medshare medshare steps in to help out communities who through no fault of

their own have temporarily lost the ability to look out for themselves so for example if the Russians are bombing your power grid and the Americans are no longer providing the Tactical intelligence so you can anticipate the missile strikes and position your air defense and the Americans furthermore have stopped all financing to help you repair set power grid in the aftermath Med share steps in to help hospitals with things like diesel generators this QR code will take you directly to the Ukraine page and that is where all of the donations will be going hey everybody Peter

Zan here coming to you from Colorado um this's going to be awkward uh I am absolutely not a conspiracy theorist in fact I've Last 5 Years spent a substantial amount of my time um talking people down from theirs but uh so much has gone down in the last just couple of weeks that I am having a hard time ascribing changes in American policy both at home and abroad to a more conventional Theory this isn't Maga policy this isn't policy incompetence on the part of the administration uh this is something else and bear with me as

I kind of lay it all out and um we're going to see where it goes uh I'm recording this on the 4th of March and the two big pieces of news for the day are let's start with Ukraine uh the Trump administ ation immediately suspended or suspended effective immediately all military aid of all types to Ukraine including anything that was in transit and had already been uh budgeted paid for and palleted and moved um with the equipment that the ukrainians would have received for the United States they probably could have kept fighting until Midsummer without

help now a lot of things are up in the air um jeez let's start with explain why this isn't a Mara thing uh a lot of people say that oh all this money has been given I like there's big trick loads of cash going it's like no I mean the total value of the stuff is somewhere between 150 and 185 billion but think of it this way when you clean out your closet at home uh to make room for your new stuff after Christmas um and you take it to Goodwill how much do you say

it's worth when you fill out that little form of Goodwill you what it's worth when you bought it and uh what the military has done it's basically gone through their old stores of things they haven't used literally in decades um reported them for the cost that it take took to build them and then adjusted for inflation and for about 70% of the total number that is the uh donation and so you're talking about old equipment we weren't using that was marked at a value that's probably higher than it ever was worth uh of the rest

10 to 15% is ammo and more legitimate equipment legitimate as in current uh and then the rest is cash so really you're talking about a total value given that's well under 40 billion uh chump change in addition uh the Russians have been pointing uh nuclear weapons at me not just my entire life uh B since the 1960s and they have abated every arms agreement that the United States has ever signed with them and every conventional arms agreement they have ever signed with any country ever in the modern era uh if there is going to be

a war between the United States and anyone over the next three decades or so it'll probably be with the Russians so for having the ukrainians basically take our hand-me-downs and fight the Russians to a standstill that's a national security win and an economic win by any possible measure uh and so I've seen that just twisted around and dropped as a problem and that's before you consider that we now have uh the Trump Administration not casually but actively deliberately breaking relations with all of our closest allies up to including the United Kingdom uh and now regular

calls throughout congress not just for this or that NATO leader to resign or zalinsky of Ukraine of course but actually withdraw the United States from NATO all completely now you might be able to say that there's a strategic argument to be made here or at least a discussion to be had and that's fine but this is just like one of like 20 things I want to talk with you about today this this all by itself this is a problem uh the second big one that happened today is the imposition of a 25% tariff on everything

coming from Mexico and Canada Mexico and Canada are number one and number two trading partners and uh everything every everything that we do in the world of manufacturing is integrated with them across borders and so by doing a blanket tariff W it's a lot warmer out here than I thought it was by doing a blanket tariff what that's basically done is made most American can manufacturing uh nonviable almost overnight you know there are certain types of manufacturing that may in time prove to be exceptions to this uh there's some very high-end stuff like in medicines

maybe but if it involves anything that you think of as manufacturing you know an assembly line a production floor that basically doesn't stop but it's now no longer viable versus imported stuff that comes from Beyond North America so the biggest winners of this by far are the Chinese where they already have competing industrial plant up and running and if you look forward to the world that we're moving to where the Chinese are disintegrating because of the demographic situation we have a limited amount of time to prepare for a world where Chinese industrial plant just isn't

there and what Trump did by threatening the tariffs a couple months ago and now implementing them today is even before today new investment into the United States in zo North America had Frozen completely cuz no one knew what the situation was going to be he introduced what we like to call regulatory uncertainty into the situation and now that the terrorists are in place and people know what the math is no one's going to come here because the economic case has now been destroyed and that will set us up for a situation years from now when

the Chinese system finally fails where we don't have an industrial plent in place and we're going to have significantly higher inflation uh Trump of course loves his tariffs and also today he said he's going to put a 40% tariffs on all agricultural Imports now the United States is a large country that grows a lot of its own food we're the world's largest agricultural exporter we have a varied variety of climate zones but we don't have all of them and so if you go into any Supermarket especially if you're looking at things like fish fruits or

vegetables a huge proportion of those and any given season is coming from a different country uh we already have a food inflation problem here and uh now we're going to have a significantly larger one uh those tffs are supposed to kick in in April and trumpa said Farmers start producing but the Farmers can't produce most of the stuff that we import uh because swims in a different Sea comes from a different climate zone or relevant to this moment in March looking around me at the snow you're not going to grow a lot of food in

Colorado right now so it has to be brought in from somewhere else same's true throughout the United States uh in Winter uh we're particularly vulnerable to Mexico in that so we're going to have a 40% tariff on top of the 25% tariff that's already there that is enough to push all by itself probably 10% of the American population uh beneath the poverty line and we're just getting started let's talk about Doge that department of government efficiency that musk is after uh Trump is a great marketer I will give him that but you know the total

value of everything that musk has rooted out of the federal bureaucracy that supposedly was all fat you know we're only like $30 billion for all the disruption out of a seven trillion dollar budget that's so small it should just not be worth my time to even look at or if you look at the employees that he's fired uh right now it's only about 1% of the federal Workforce and you would have to purge about 20 to 25% of the federal Workforce just to knock 1% off of the budget most of what's going on in the

budget is entitlement Social Security Medicare Medicaid it's not discretionary spending and of those workers you know there's been a lot of Splash but you got to understand how organizations work uh there's basically three categories of workers um at the top you have your political appointees which are themselves tiered between the folks that are always political pointies that are let go at at the end of every Administration you got the one a step down who uh it's their job to make the trains run on time and they may be politicized but they have a lot of

back experience in the topic and then the next level down while technically political employes they're typically never let go at the end of the administration because they're apolitical technocrats who make operations function um now the president has the authority to get rid of all three layers and he's gotten rid of trump has gotten rid of all three layers throughout every individual agency in the government even those that are not political at all and have nothing to do with foreign affairs uh so for example the Department of Agriculture uh those firings uh if it has to

do with provisional employees or permanent employees are generally have already been rolled back by the courts because the Congress has not given the president the power to fire most of these people and so every time that one of those cases has come up they've basically the courts have ruled in favor of uh the employees um that goes for the second class of categories as well which are the comp trollers and the internal Auditors you know these are the people who make sure that fraud doesn't get into the system and that foreign interests can't penetrate the

system Trump fired all of them U doesn't have the authority to fire any of them uh it doesn't achieve anything from a policy point of view it doesn't achieve anything from a savings point of view they will all in time be reinstated undoubtedly unless Congress intervenes and says yeah they need to go uh but what it's done is it's stripped out the internal system that the US government used to prevent foreign influence from penetrating there's nothing about that that matches with Maga goals and then the third category are not your provisional employees those are the

ones that are new and don't have full Civil Service protections those might be able to get fired a little bit uh but the temporary ones uh the government does a lot in a lot of places and you hire people temporarily to do things that don't need to be done all the time so for something that's near and dear to my heart the forest service you know Staffing all the national parks that surges in the summer firefighters those people have all been let go so when we get to Summer driving season this time uh in a

couple months uh a lot of the national parks probably aren't going to be able to open and if we have forest fires these years that's going to be awful fighting Forest Fighters without Forest Fighters anyway well that's in convenient there's a lot of things that these provisionals do that's a little bit more important like maintaining the nuclear Arsenal Trump just fired them all that's doesn't serve a Maga goal uh or in the food supply system you know people who are in USDA Department of Agriculture you know they don't tolerate a lot of because they know

if they screw up people die like by the tens of thousands we're no longer testing food safety because those are temporary jobs and so we no longer have an eye on the bird flu epidemic because we're not able to collect the information that we need now the midterm solution to all this is to just hire a bunch of contractors to do it all but that means you're paying for the old bureaucracy that they're not using and you're paying extra cash to create a new private bureaucracy it's it's expanding the budget not tracking it we've seen

that in the headline figures with all the firings with everything that Doge has done the US budget expenditures have gone up compared to the Biden Administration uh as to Doge we basically have a lot of people without Congressional Authority and without security clearances that have gone into very sensitive databases started posting things on social media uh we've got lists of government assets around the world some open some covert that have just been released to the public stuff like this is if it gets in the hands of other states that's like the 5year effort of Espionage

and it was just handed out that doesn't serve anyone's agenda in the United States what else I got to look at my list I've got a long one all right uh the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stop investigating terrorism in order to focus on illegal migrants what Department of Health and Human Services isn't even holding the meetings that are necessary to start the process for SEL the next flu vaccine which has the medical community freaking out because they rely on these private groups to at no compensation to themselves advise the government as to what type

of vaccine is going to be needed based on the flu strains that are circulating and since HHS also cut con connections with the World Health Organization we're just kind of guessing at what's out there and literally relying upon the kindness of strangers to tell us what we need to get ready for all right usaid uh that's the agency for International Development uh it's got a lot of crap for doing some strange things that's fair but if you're not going to invade or occupy a country usaid is the primary method that the United States to uses

to influence countries around the world you can call it whatever you want the bottom line is when it's not present the Iranians the Chinese and the Russians absolutely dominate the space cuz they will step in with relief support that is loaded with intelligence operations and all of a sudden they've gone from meeting usaid head to head to having a completely open operating environment and so of course the Iranians and the Russians sent a joint letter to the Trump Administration thanking them for making life so much easier for them or in the defense department uh we

canceled all operations against Russian cyber activity uh that includes uh defensive operations on our part as well as offensive oper ations to disrupt their ability to hack the United States uh the Russians maintain a very active cyber presence they're not just hacking our elections and our media and our power grid and our water and our food supply in the stock market they're going after you specifically because part of the Putin Alliance that rules Russia includes organized crime out of St Petersburg and so most of those cyber things are linked to Russia in one way or

another and we have basically decided just to lay back open our legs and let whatever happens happens this isn't magga y this isn't toddler syndrome this isn't this isn't even incompetence this is too much too soon too holistic this isn't an abdication of American power this isn't mismanagement this is a deliberate disassembly of the building blocks of American power and security and safety this isn't anything that I would think that any American would ever want much less orchestrate which has pushed me into the realm of some some conspiracy theories I think we now need to

consider that the Russians really have penetrated the White House and while I think it's a stretch to say this is like a Manchurian Candidate sort of situation there are too many things happening that seem too tailored to hobble American capacity long run and everything that was on this list is something that the Russians have tried before NATO is something they've been trying to destroy since the 50s and now we have a possibility of the US just walking away the military has been the bul workk of Global Security and so gutting it from the inside is

something they would love to see our Intel system has been the canary and the coal mine and it appears that Trump is either not receiving or not reading the Daily Brief that the agency produces for him every day the food supply situation in the United States has long been the world's safest and now we're not even testing to maintain it the demographic of Russia is one of the main reasons why the Russians are facing such a bleak long-term future but if you interfere with the vaccine schedule in the United States you can start increasing the

death rate in Americans not just under 20 but under five and start to equalize that situation this is some heavy stuff and what we're going to be doing in the next few videos are exploring all of this from the Russian point of view how they see the world how they influence the world and given the chance how they would redirect American policy to serve their interests I would love to say this is hypothetical but I've already got a dozen examples in addition to the ones I just shared with you about how that is already happening

so buckle up because for the first time since I started doing this 25 years ago I'm actually worried for the United States we'll talk about that too