NATO weapons support comes at crucial time for Ukraine

Hi everyone, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. While I was gone on my trip, my staff were keeping track of what’s going on in the world. And yeah, thanks for everyone taking some time off. It was nice to not have anything to dig out from under. Anyway. I’ve seen a lot of information about weapon transfers from various NATO countries, plus the Swedes and the Finns,  to the Ukrainians. Nothing’s new there. But what was new was the scale on the technological level. Now, of course, in the case of the United States, this is taking the form of more advanced types of artillery, but it really runs the gamut and it really is different based on which country you’re talking about. So for example, Slovakia has apparently given their entire air force to the Ukrainians and they’re relying upon their NATO allies in order to patrol their own skies, to keep their own defense agreements.

Now, this is kind of a defense kick-line that we have seen in NATO a couple of times before. Whenever there’s a significant change in the geopolitical environment like there is now or say when the Cold War ended, weapons move around. So the last time this happened at scale, it was 1992 to 2000. The Soviet system had collapsed; the new European countries were negotiating to accede to NATO, but there was still a lot going on. We saw the Germans and the French and the Italians go through a degree of disarmament because the Cold War was over and they had treaty limits for how many…weapons they could have. So they’d get under that level now that the war was over. They transferred a lot of those weapons to Turkey, which was well under its threshold. So we had some minor upgrading in Western Europe, and then this hand-me-down process going to Turkey and the Alliance got stronger as a result.

We’re seeing some version of that now with Ukraine. 

So in the case of the Slovak example, they’ve transferred their entire air force over. They’re buying American and German-made aircraft to replace that. So they’re gonna get an upgrade and the older stuff goes on to Ukraine. Some version of this is happening with anti-aircraft… radar and with javelins and with tanks and with artillery. Everyone in the west is moving their older stuff east and then buying new stuff for what they anticipate will be a prolonged period of hostility. 

Everyone wins of course, except for the Russians who have the ammo like thrown into the teeth of the war machine. But the best part of all of this of course, is that for the Ukrainians, this…these are weapon systems they already know how to use. This is exactly the same stuff that they had.

See when the Soviet system collapsed, all the Soviet military stuff was everywhere. And in the case of the Central Europeans and to a lesser degree of the Ukrainians, they didn’t have the money to upgrade to what are now NATO standards. So NATO changed their standards, and they said that as long as you do some security upgrades so things can’t be hacked and to make it so a Russian intelligence won’t have a kind of a purchase, we’ll allow you to keep your gear until your economy expands to the point that you can do an overhaul. Well, that overhaul is now happening and the old stuff is being put to use. Okay, that’s it for me for today. Hope everyone has a great weekend and I will see you Monday.