#1921 - Peter Zeihan

Joe Rogan (0:14)

What's going on, man? Nice to meet you.

Peter Zeihan (0:15)

Right back at you, it has been a crazy year.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

Yeah, it's been a crazy year for everything, right?

Peter Zeihan (0:21)

Yeah, it's one thing when you talk about how the world's gonna be coming to an end, it's quite another when it's like here and now.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

Yeah, well, you've been working on this type of material, this subject matter, for quite a long time. So tell everybody your background.

Peter Zeihan (0:35)

Let's see, my background's in economic development. It's all about figuring out what works where and why, and why if you try the same policies in the next town over, it's usually a disaster.

And then I worked actually here in Austin at a company called Stratfor for 12 years, and I was their sole generalist. So it was my idea to kind of plug everything together and figure out what the map of the world looks like and how if you pull a string on one side of the world, something changes on the other side.

Joe Rogan (0:59)

Well, your perspective on sort of global interactions with China and Russia and the United States and the energy supply and the food supply, I have not heard before. I haven't heard it as comprehensively as I've seen you put it together, so I'm kind of excited to talk to you about this.

So when, let's, I guess we should start it with Russia. When Russia invaded Ukraine, you were not surprised.

Peter Zeihan (1:27)

Not even a little, no.

Joe Rogan (1:28)

You expected this, and you felt like this is inevitable and this is just something that was always gonna happen and it's not gonna just stop at Ukraine.

Peter Zeihan (1:37)

No, not even remotely.

The Russian space is among the worst farmland in the world, and so they've never been able to generate enough income to have a road network. Everything has to be moved by rail, and their frontiers are just huge and they're open, and if you've got a force that can't maneuver itself, your only reasonable defense strategy is to be forward positioned and use geography to help you out. So you expand until you reach mountains or oceans or deserts, and then you anchor on either side of those and plug the access points. Unfortunately for Ukraine, there are two of those access points on the other side of Ukraine. So the Russians were always, always, always going to try to push through and retake that territory, territory that they had controlled for most of the last 350 years.

Unfortunately for them, in the 30, 35 years since the Soviet system collapsed, the Ukrainians have developed an identity. And now they would like to be something other than a road bump.

Joe Rogan (2:33)

So one of the narratives that was going around was that the reason why Russia was pushing into Ukraine is because NATO was moving their arms closer to the border of Russia.

Peter Zeihan (2:44)

There is something to be said for that. You just have to put it in context to really understand it. So the Russian point of view is for us to be secure, we need to expand until we reach a point where invaders cannot overwhelm us. We have to be able to plug those access points. But to give the Russians what they want, you have to sign over the future of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine.

Oh, let's go on. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, all the stands. Basically, the Russians, in order to feel safe, they have to be able to occupy total populations that are twice of their own.

And I'm sorry, but that's just not feasible. So, technically, the people who claim that NATO provoked this are correct. NATO can't have what it wants in order for Russia to feel safe, but for Russia to feel safe, they've got to occupy over 180 million people. And that was never part of the game.

Joe Rogan (3:48)

So, what do you think they anticipated was going to happen when they started the war?

Peter Zeihan (3:53)

Well, I don't think it was just the Russians who anticipated it. Ukraine, the last war in 2014, basically rolled over. They proved to be militarily incompetent, they were corrupt, and they couldn't put up any sort of resistance. Crimea fell in just a matter of a couple of days.

And I think a lot of us who were in the security side of things thought that this was going to be, to a degree, a bit of repeat. Now, excuse me, I was probably one of the more optimistic people for Ukraine, because I had seen them develop a culture and seen them arm and train, and had seen it be meaningful. But Ukraine is still a flat country, and the Russians are still one of the largest militaries in the world. So even I was saying that within six months to a year, this was all going to be over.