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How world leaders spoke about Putin before the war in Ukraine. https://t.co/EG8utHIH7H
Video Transcript AI Summary
Two American speakers express trust in Vladimir Putin, with one stating that he found Putin to be straightforward and trustworthy. Another speaker praises Putin for his initial move towards democracy and describes him as very smart. The same speaker also mentions having a good relationship with Putin and states that he kept his word in their agreements. Another speaker acknowledges the challenges faced by the Russian president, including the need for economic restructuring and rebuilding civic society. This speaker believes it is understandable that Putin presents himself as a strong and patriotic leader. Lastly, one speaker expresses confidence in improved cooperation between NATO members and Russia. However, another speaker predicts that Putin will eventually take over all of Ukraine.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Is this a man that Americans can trust? I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to, get a sense of his soul.
I wouldn't have invited him to my ranch if I didn't trust him.
Speaker 1: Well, here's Biden 20 years ago praising Vladimir Putin for moving toward democracy. I'm close to amazed by how far Putin seems to have come in making throwing his lot with the West. I don't think anybody since Peter the Great has made such a significant, at least Initial move to the west.
Speaker 2: Mister Putin has got he got all he's very smart.
Speaker 0: Well, you know him better than most people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think we had a really good blunt relationship.
Speaker 0: Did Putin ever renege on a personal agreement he made to you?
Speaker 2: He did not.
Speaker 0: So behind closed doors, he could be trusted?
Speaker 2: He kept his word in all the deals we made.
Speaker 3: We have to understand the scale of the problems that the president of Russia has to deal with, and they're unlike any of
Speaker 0: the problems that any
Speaker 3: of the problems that any of the rest of us in in the Western world have to deal with. I mean, he's dealing with an economy that needs absolutely fundamental restructuring, civic Society that needs to be rebuilt after the years of Communism and external relations that have a whole series of historical Legacies that have to be overcome. So I don't think it's surprising that he is and presents himself as a strong leader, as a patriotic leader for Russia.
Speaker 0: I am Confident that this new level of cooperation between NATO's members and Russia will now change the world and for the better.
Speaker 2: I got along with him great. But ultimately, he's gonna take over all of Ukraine.
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🚨MUST WATCH: “A US president can play a very important role, by reassuring Russia that we're not gonna consider them an enemy anymore and that we wanna be friends.” -> RFK breaks down the Ukraine war and explains how JFK directly talked to Chrushev, preventing WW3 many times! https://t.co/MeIk2xomY5
Video Transcript AI Summary
The war in Ukraine stems from a long history of provocation by the West towards Russia, particularly since NATO's eastward expansion after the Cold War. Promises made to Russia about NATO not moving east were broken, leading to heightened tensions. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was seen as a response to perceived threats, including the potential inclusion of Ukraine in NATO. The U.S. has engaged in a proxy war, aiming for regime change in Russia rather than seeking peace. The conflict has resulted in significant casualties on both sides, and a military solution seems unlikely. Dialogue and diplomacy are essential to resolving the situation, and there is a need for improved relations with Russia to avoid further escalation, including the risk of nuclear war. Communication between leaders is crucial to address global threats like AI and biological weapons collaboratively.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: That's the time we really need to do that.
Speaker 1: Well, if we can apply that style of empathy, style of curiosity to the current war in Ukraine, what is your understanding of why Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022?
Speaker 0: Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine. His invasion was illegal. It was unnecessary, and it was brutal. But I think it's important for us to move beyond these kind of comic book depictions of a, you know, of this insane, avaricious Russian leader who wants to, you know, restore the the Soviet empire. And that that's why and it was I and it made an unvoked, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
He was provoked, and we were provoking him, and we were provoking him for for since 1997. And it's not just me that's saying that. I mean, when when and I and before Russia before Putin never came in, We were provoking Russia Russians in this way unnecessarily. And to go back that time in 1992 when the Russians moved out of when the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Russians moved out of East Germany, and they did that, which was a huge concession. And they had 400,000 troops in East Germany at that time, and they were facing NATO troops on the other side of the wall.
Ogorbachev made this huge concession where he said to George Bush, I'm gonna move all of our troops out, and you can then reunify Germany under NATO, which was a hostile army to the to the so it was created to, you know, with hostile intent toward the Soviet Union. And he said, you can take Germany, but I want your promise that you will not move NATO to the east. And James Baker, who was his secretary of state, famously said, I will not move NATO. We will not move NATO 1 inch to the east. So then, 5 years later in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was kind of the father of the neocons, who was a democrat at that time, served in the in the, Carter administration, he said he published a paper, a blueprint for moving NATO right up to the Russian border, a 1000 miles to the east, and and taking over 14 nations.
And at that time, George Kennan, who was the kind of the deity of American dip diplomats, he was probably arguably arguably the most important diplomat in American history. He was the architect of the containment policy during World War 2, and he said, this is insane, and it's unnecessary. And if you do this, it's gonna provoke the Soviet, the I mean, the Russians to a violent response, and we should be making friends with the Russians. They lost the Cold War. We should be treating them the way that we treated the our adversaries after World War 2, like, with a martial plan to try to help them incorporate into Europe and to be part of the the brotherhood of, you know, of man and of western nations.
We shouldn't continue to be treating them as an enemy and particularly surrounding them at their borders. William Perry, who was then the secretary of of, defense under Bill Clinton threatened to resign. He was so upset by this plan to move NATO to the east. And William Burns, who was then the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, who's now, at this moment, the head of the CIA, said at that time the same thing. If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response.
And the the we we we moved it. We moved all around Russia. We moved to 14 nations, a 1000 miles to the east, and we put Aegis missile systems in 2 nations in Romania and Poland. So we did what, you know, what the Russians had done to us in 1962 that had provoked would have provoked the invasion of Cuba. We put those missile systems back there, and then we'd walk away unilaterally, walk away from the 2, nuclear and missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear and missile treaties that we had with Soviet with Russia.
And when neither of us would put, those missile systems on the borders, we walk away from that, and we put Aegis missile systems, which are nuclear capable. They can carry the Tomahawk missiles, which have nuclear warheads. So the last, country that they didn't take was the Ukraine, and the Russians said and and, in fact, Bill Perry said this or or William Burns said it, who's now the head of the CIA. It is a red line. If we go into if we bring NATO into Ukraine, that is a red line for the Russians.
They cannot live with it. They cannot live with it. Russia has been invaded 3 times through the Ukraine. The last time it was invaded, we killed it or the Germans killed 1 out of every 7 Russians. They destroyed my uncle described what happened to Russia, in his famous American University speech in in in 1963, 60 years ago this month or he's or last month, 60 years ago in June, June 10, 1963, he told that speech was telling American people, put yourself in the shoes of the Russians.
We need to do that if we're gonna if we're gonna make peace. And he said, all of us have been taught, you know, that we won the war, but we didn't win the war. The Russians if anybody won the war against Hitler, it was the Russians. Their country was destroyed. They they all of their city and he said, imagine if all of the cities on the East Coast of Chicago were reduced to rubble, and all of the fields burns, all of the forest burns.
That's what happened to Russia. That's what they gave so that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler. And he had them put themselves in their position. And, you know, today, there's none of that happening. We have refused repeatedly to, to talk to the Russians.
We've broken up. There's 2 treaties, the Minsk agreements, which the Russians were willing to sign, and they said we will stay at the Russians didn't want the Ukraine. They showed that when they when the Donbas region voted 90 to 10 to leave and go to Russia. Putin said no. We we want Ukraine to stay intact, but we want you to sign a Minsk Accords to to you know, they the Russians were were very worried because of the US involvement in the coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then the oppression and the and the, you know, and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians.
And Russia hasn't had the same re the same way that if Mexico put Aegis missile systems from China or Russia on our border and and killed 14,000, expats American, we would go in there. Oh, he does have a national security interest in the Ukraine. He has an interest in protecting the Russian speaking people of the Ukraine, the ethnic Russians, and the Minsk Accords did that. It left Ukraine as part of Russia. It left them as a semiautonomous region that could and, continue to use their own language, which is essentially banned by the coup, by the government we put in in 2014.
And, and we wouldn't we we sabotage that agreement. And and in we now know in April of 2022, Zelensky and, Putin had inked a deal already to another peace agreement and that the United States sent Boris Johnson, the neocons in the White House, sent Boris Johnson over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement. So what do I think? I think this is a proxy war. I think this is a, you know, this is a war that the Neo cons in the White House wanted.
They've said for 2 decades, they wanted this war, and that they wanted to use Ukraine as a pawn in a proxy war between, United States and Russia, the same as we used Afghanistan. And they in fact, they say it. This is the model. Let's use the Afghanistan model. That was said again and again And to to to get the Russians to overextend their troops and then fight them using local, fighters and US weapons.
And when president Biden was asked, why are we in the Ukraine? He was honest. He says to depose Vladimir Putin, regime change for Vladimir Putin. And when his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022 was asked, you know, why are we there? He said, to degrade the Russians' capacity to fight anywhere.
You know, to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world. That's not a humanitarian mission. That's not what we were told. We were we were told this was an unprovoked invasion, but and that we're there to bring a humanitarian relief to the Ukrainians, but that is the opposite. That is a war of attrition that is designed to chew up, to turn this little nation into an avatar of death for the flower of Ukrainian youth in order to advance a geopolitical ambition of certain people within the White House.
And I, you know, I think that's wrong. We should be talking to the Russians the way that, you know, Nixon talked to Brezhnev, the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev, the way that my uncle talked to Khrushchev. We need to be talking with the Russians. We should and and and negotiating, and we need to be looking about how do we end this and preserve peace in Europe.
Speaker 1: Would you, as president, sit down and have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky separately and together to negotiate
Speaker 0: peace? Absolutely.
Speaker 1: What about Vladimir Putin? He's been in power since 2000. So as the old adage goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. Do you think he has been corrupted by being in power for so long?
If you think of the man, if you look at his mind.
Speaker 0: Listen. I don't know exactly, I can't say because I just I don't know enough about him or about you know, I my the evidence that I've seen is that he is homicidal. He kills his enemies or poisons them. And, you know, the reaction I've seen to that to hit those accusations from him have have not been to deny that, but to kind of laugh it off. I think he's a dangerous man and that, of course, you know, there's probably corruption in his regime.
But having said that, it's not our business to change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it's a good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is, I think, irresponsible. And, you know, Vladimir Putin himself has said, you know, we will not live in a world without Russia. And it was clear when he said that that he was talking about himself. And, and he has his hand on a button that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet.
So why are we messing with this? It's not our job to change that regime, and and we should be making friends with the Russians. We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy. Now we've pushed them into the camp with China. That's not a good thing for our country.
And by the way, you know, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. Putin now you know, if you believe the the polls that are coming out of Russia, they show him you know, the most recent polls that I've seen, show him with that 89% popularity that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine, and that, and they support him as an individual. So, and I understand there's problems with polling, and, you know, you don't know what to believe. But but the polls consistently show that. And, and I you know, it's not America's business to be the policeman of the world and to be changing regimes in the world.
That's illegal. We're not we shouldn't be breaking international laws. You know, we should actually be looking for ways to improve relationships with Russia, not to, you know, not to destroy Russia, not to destroy and not to choose its leadership for them. That's up to the Russian people, not us.
Speaker 1: So step 1 is to sit down and empathize with the leaders of both nations to understand their history, their concerns, their hopes. Just to open the door for conversation so they're not back to the corner.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And I think the US can play a really important role, and a US president can play a really important role by reassuring the Russians that we're not gonna consider them an enemy anymore, that we wanna be friends. And it doesn't mean that you have to let down your guard completely the way that you do it, which was the way president Kennedy did that it is. You do it one step at a time. You take baby steps.
We do a unilateral move to reduce our, you know, our our hostility and aggression and see if the Russians reciprocate. And, and that's the way that we should be doing it, and, you know, we should be easing our way into a positive relationship with Russia. We have a lot in common with Russia, and we should be friends with Russia and with the Russian people. And, you know, apparently, there's been 350,000 Ukrainians who have died at least in this war, And, and there's probably been, 60 or 80,000 Russians, and that should not give us any joy. It should not give us any you know, I saw Lindsey Graham on TV saying, you know, anything we can something to the extent that anything we can do to kill Russians is a good use of our money.
That it is not. You know, those are those are somebody's children. They're you know, we should have compassion for them. This war is an unnecessary war. We should settle it through negotiation, through diplomacy, through statecraft, and not through weapons.
Speaker 1: Do you think this war can come to an end purely through military operations?
Speaker 0: No. I mean, I don't think there's any way in the world that the Ukrainians can beat the Russians. I don't think there's any appetite in Europe. I think Europe is now, you know, in having severe problems in Germany, Italy, France. You're seeing these riots.
There's internal problems in those countries. There is no appetite in, in, in Europe for sending men to die in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians do not have anybody left. The Ukrainians are using press gangs to, to, you know, to fill the ranks of their armies. Men military age men are trying as hard as they can to get out of the Ukraine right now to avoid going to the front. The front you know, is is the Russians apparently have been killing Ukrainians at 7 to 1 ratio.
My son fought over there, and he told me it's an art you know, artillery he had. He had firefights with the Russians mainly at night, but he said most of the battles were artillery wars during the day, and the the Russians now out, outgun the NATO forces 10 to 1 in artillery. Oh, they're killing, at a horrendous rate now. You know, my interpretation of what's happened so far is that the Putin actually went in early on with a small force because he expected to meet somebody on the other end of the negotiating table there once he went in. And, and that when that didn't happen, they did not have a large enough force to be able to mount an offensive.
And so they've been building up that force up till now, and they now have that force. And even against this small original force, the Ukrainians have been, hope helpless. All of their offenses have died. They've now killed, you know, the head of the Ukrainian, special forces, which was the probably, arguably, by many accounts, the best, elite military unit in all of Europe. The the commandant, the commander of of the, that special forces group, gave a a speech about, 4 months ago saying that 86% of his men are dead or wounded, and Will cannot return to the front.
He cannot rebuild that force. The, and, you know, the the the troops that are now headed, that are now filling the gaps of all those 350,000 men who have been lost are, are scantily trained, and they're arriving green at the front. Many of them do not wanna be there. Many of them are giving up and going over the Russian side. We've seen this again and again again, including platoon size groups that are defecting to the Russians.
And, I don't think it's possible. And and anybody you know, I saw I I of course, I've studied World War 2 history exhaustively, but I saw a, there's a new I think it's a Netflix series of documentaries that I highly recommend to people. They're it's they're colorized versions of the black and white Mhmm. Films from the battles of World War 2, but it's all the battles of World War 2. So I watched Stalingrad the other night, and, you know, the the willingness of the Russians to, to fight on against any kind of allies and to make huge sacrifices of Russians.
The Russians themselves who are making the sacrifice with their lives, The willingness of them to do that for their motherland is almost inexhaustible. It is incomprehensible to think that the, that Ukraine can can beat Russia in a war. It would be like Mexico beating the United States. It it's just it's impossible to think that it can happen, and, you know, Russia has has deployed a tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far. And, you know, now it has China with its mass production capacity supporting its war effort.
It's just it's a it's a hopeless situation, and we've been lied to. You know, we're the the press in our country and our government are just are just, you know, promoting this lie that the Ukrainians are about to win and that everything's going great and that Putin's on the run, and there's all this wishful thinking because of the the Wagner Group, you know, the the Progression. And the Wagner Group that this was an internal coup, and it showed dissent and weakness of Putin, and none of that is true. I was a that that insurgency, which wasn't even an insurgency. He only got 4,000 of his of his men to follow him out of 20,000, and they were quickly stopped.
And nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy, the political system, nobody supported it. You know? And but we're being told, oh, yeah. It's the beginning of the end for blue Putin. He's weakened.
He's wounded. He's on his way out, and all of these things are just lies that we are being fed.
Speaker 1: So push back on a small aspect of this that you kind of implied. So I've traveled to Ukraine. And one thing that I should say similar to the battle of Stalingrad, it is just not it is not only the Russians that fight to the end. I think Ukrainians are very Yeah. To fight to the end.
And the morale there is quite high. I've talked to nobody. This was a year ago in August with her son. Everybody was proud to fight and die for their country, and there's some aspect where this war unified the people to get gave them a reason and an understanding that this is what it means to be Ukrainian, and I will fight to the death to defend Islam.
Speaker 0: I, you know, I would agree with that, and I I should've said that myself at the beginning. You know, that's one of the reason my son went over there to fight because the you know, he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian people and the, you know, this extraordinary willingness of them. And I think Putin thought it would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine, and he found, you know, a stone wall of, of Ukrainians whether ready to put their their lives and their bodies online. But that, to me, makes the the whole episode even more tragic is that, you know, I don't believe I I, you know, I I think that the US role in this, has been, has you know, that there there were there were many opportunities to settle this war, and the Ukrainians wanted to settle. Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he ran in 2019.
Here's a guy who's a a comedian. He's a he's an actor. He had no political experience, and yet he won this election with 70% of the vote. Why? He won on a peace platform.
Anyone promising to sign the Minsk Accords, and yet something happened when he got in there that made him suddenly pivot. And, you know, I think it's a good guess what happened. I think he was you know, he came under threat by ultranationalist within his own administration, and the insistence of neocons like Victoria Nuland in the White House that, you know, we we don't want peace with Putin. We want a war.
Speaker 1: Do you worry about nuclear war?
Speaker 0: Yeah. I worry about it. It's,
Speaker 1: it seems like a silly question, but it's not. It's a serious question.
Speaker 0: Well, the reason it's not, you know, the reason it it, might it's not. It's just because, people seem to be in this kind of dream state about that it'll never happen. And yet, you know, we're, it it can happen very easily, and it can happen at any time. And, you know, if we push the Russians too far, you know, I I don't doubt that Putin, if he felt like his regime was in you know, or his nation was in danger, that the United States was gonna be able to place, you know, a a quizzling on, you know, in into the Kremlin, that he would use nuclear, you know, torpedoes. And, you know, these, these strategic weapons that they have, and that could be the be it.
Once you do that, nobody controls the trajectory. By the way, you know, I have I have very strong memories of the, Cuban Missile Crisis. And out of those 13 days, when we came closer to nuclear war, you know, and particularly, I think it was when the u two got shot down over, Cuba that you know? And nobody in this there's a lot of people in Washington DC who, at that point, thought that they very may well, may wake up dead. That the world may end at night.
30,000,000 Americans killed, a 130,000,000 Russians. This is what our military brass wanted. They saw a war with Russia, nuclear exchange with Russia as not only inevitable, but also desirable because they wanted to do it now. We still had a a superiority.
Speaker 1: Can you actually go through the feelings you've had about the Cuban Missile Crisis? Like, what what are your memories of it? What what are some interest
Speaker 0: I know. In the middle of I was going to school in Washington, DC to, to sit well, or to, Our Lady of Victory, which is, in Washington, DC. So we were I lived in Virginia across the Potomac, and we would cross the bridge every day into DC. And during the crisis, US Marshals came to my house to take us, I think, around day 8. My father was spending the night at the White House.
He wasn't coming home. He was staying with the ex comm committee and sleeping there, and they were up, you know, 24 hours a day. They were debating and trying to figure out what was happening. And, but we had US Marshals come to our house to take us down. They were gonna take us down to White Silver Springs in, in Southern Virginia in the in the Blue Ridge Mountains where where there was a, there was an underground city, essentially, a bunker that was like a city, and apparently, it had McDonald's in it and a lot of other you know, it had it was a full city for the US government and their families.
US Marshals came to our house to take us down there, and I was very excited about doing that. And this was at a time, you know, when we were doing the drills. We were doing the ducking cover drills, once a week at our school where they would tell you if they that, you know, when the alarms go off, then you you put your head onto the table. You take the remove the sharps from your desk, put them inside your desk, you put your head onto the table, and you wait. And the initial blast will take the windows out of the school, and then we all stand up and and file in an orderly fashion into the basement where we're gonna be for the next 6 or 8 months or whatever.
But in the basement where, you know, we we went occasionally in those corridors, we're lined with, freeze dried food can off to the from floor to ceiling. So people were you know, we were all preparing for this, and it was, you know, Bob McNamara, who is my who is a friend of mine and, you know, is my father. One of my father's close friend is secretary of defense. He later called it mass psychosis, and my father deeply regretted participating in the bomb shelter program because he said it it was part of a a, you know, a psychological psyop trick to treat them to teach Americans that nuclear war was acceptable, that it was survivable. And my father anyway, when the when the marshals came to our house to take me and my brother Joe away, and we we were the ones who are home at that time, My father called, and he talked to us on the phone.
And he said, I don't want you going down there because, because if you disappear from school, people are gonna panic. And I need you to be a good soldier and go to school. Now what and and he said something to me during that period, which was that if a nuclear were to happen, it would be better to be among the dead than the living, which I did not believe. Okay. I mean, I I had already prepared myself for the, you know, for the for the dystopian future, and I knew I could I spent every day in the woods.
I knew that I could survive by catching crawfish and, you know, cooking mud puppies and all to whatever I had to do. But I felt like, okay. I can I can handle this? And I really wanted to see the setup down in, you know, this underground city. But, anyway, that was, you know, part of it for, me.
My father was away and, you know, the last days of it. My father, got this idea because Khrushchev had sent 2 letters. He sent one letter that was conciliatory, and then he sent a letter that after his joint chiefs and the warmongers around him saw that letter, and they disapproved of it. They sent another letter that was extremely belligerent. And my father had the idea.
Let's just pretend we didn't get the second letter and reply to the first one. And then he went down to Dobrinin and who was he met Dobrinin in the justice department. And Dobrin was the Soviet ambassador. And they, you know, they proposed this settlement, which was a secret settlement where Khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev had put the missiles in Cuba because we had put missiles, you know, nuclear missiles in in Turkey and Italy.
And my uncle's secret deal was that if he if Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba within 6 months, he would get rid of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. But if Khrushchev told anybody about the deal, it was off. Mhmm. So if if news got out about that secret deal, it was off. That was the actual deal, And Khrushchev complied with it, and then my uncle complied with it.
Speaker 1: How much of that part of human history turned on the decisions of 1 person?
Speaker 0: I think that's one of the you know, because that, of course, is the perennial question. Right? What is history kind of on a on a automatic pilot? And, you know, human decisions, decisions leaders really only have, you know, marginal or incremental bearing on what is gonna happen anyway. But I think that is the and the historians argue about that all the time.
I think that that is a really good example of a play of a a place in human history that, that literally the world could have ended if we had a different leader in the White House. And the reason for that is that there were, as I recall, 64 gun emplacements, you know, missile missile emplacements. Each one of those missile emplacements had a crew of about a 100 men, and they were Soviets. So, they were and they we didn't know whether we we had a couple of questions that my uncle asked Alan or asked the CIA, and he asked Dulles was already gone, but he asked the CIA and he asked, his military brass because they all wanted to go in. Everybody wanted to go in.
And my uncle said, my uncle asked to see the aerial photos, and he examined those personally. And that's why it's important to have a leader in the White House who could push back on on their bureaucracies. He, and then he asked them, you know, are those who's manning those missile sites? Who and are they Russians? And if they're Russians and we bomb them, are they isn't it gonna force Khrushchev to then go into Berlin?
And that would be the beginning of a cascade effect that would, you know, highly likely to end a nuclear confrontation. And the the, the military said to my uncle, oh, we don't think you'll have the, you know, we don't think you'll have the, the guts to do that. Mhmm. So he went my uncle was like, that's what you're betting on? And, you know, they all wanted him to go in.
They wanted him to bomb the sites and then invade Cuba. Mhmm. And he said if we bomb those sites, we're gonna be killing Russians, and it's gonna force it's gonna provoke Russia into some response, and the obvious response is for them to go into Berlin. Oh, the but the thing that we didn't know then, we didn't find out until, I think, you know, there was a it was like a 30 year anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana. And what we learned then was that from the Russians who came to that event.
It was like a symposium where everybody on both sides talked about it, and we learned a lot of stuff and and never nobody knew before. One of the insane things, the most insane thing that we learned was that the the weapons were already the the nuclear warheads were already in place. They were ready to fire, and that the authorization to fire was made, was delegated to each of the gun crew commanders. So there were 60 people who had all had authorization to fire if they felt themselves under attack. So you have to believe them.
At least one of them would have launched, and that would have been the beginning of the end. And, you know, if they if anybody had launched, you know, we knew what would happen. My uncle knew what would happen because he asked again and again what's gonna happen? And they said, 30,000,000 Americans will be killed, but we will kill a 130,000,000 Russians, so we will win. And that was a victory for them.
And my uncle said later said he told he told Arthur Schlesinger and Kenny O'Donnell. He said, those guys, he called them the salad brass, the guys with all of this stuff on their chest. And he said he said, those guys, they don't care because they know that if it happens, that they're gonna be in the charge of everything. They're the ones who are gonna be running the world after that.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: So for them, you know, it was it was an incentive to to kill a 130,000,000 Russians and 30,000,000 Americans. But my uncle, he has this correspondence with Khrushchev. They were secretly corresponding with each other, and that is what saved the world is that they had both of them had been men of war. You know, Eisenhower famously said it will it will not be a man of war. It will not be a soldier who starts World War 3 because the guy who's actually seen it knows how bad it is.
And my uncle, you know, had been in the heat of of the South Pacific. His boat had been cut in 2 by a Japanese destroyer. His many of it 3 of his crewmen had been killed. 1 of them badly burned. He he pulled that guy with a lanyard in his teeth 6 miles to a island in the middle of the night, and then they hid out there for 10 days.
You know? And, and, you know, he came back. Like I said, he was the only, president of the United States that earned the purple heart. Meanwhile, Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad, which was the worst place to be on the planet, you know, probably in the 20th century, other than, you know, in Auschwitz or one of the death camps. It was, you know, it was it was the most ferocious, horrific war with people starving, people, you know, committing cannibalism, you know, eating the dogs, the cats, eating their shoe leather, or easing to death by the 1,000, etcetera.
Khrushchev did not want the last thing he wanted was a war, and the last thing my uncle wanted was a war. And they but the the CIA did not know anything about Khrushchev. And the reason for that is the there was a mole at Langley so that every time the CIA got a spy in the Kremlin, he would immediately be killed. So they had no eyes in the Kremlin. You know, there were literally hundreds of Russia of Russian spies who had who were who had defected the United States and were in the Kremlin, who were killed during that period.
They had no idea anything about Khrushchev, about how he saw the world, and they saw the Kremlin itself as a monolith, you know, that it is, this kind of, you know, the same way that we look at Putin today that, know, it's all they they have this ambition of world conquest, and that's it's driving them, and there's nothing else they think about. They're absolutely single-minded about it. But, actually, there was a big division between Khrushchev and, and his joint chiefs and his intelligence apparatus, and they and they both at one point discovered they were both in the same situation. They were surrounded by spies and military now who were intent on going to war, and they were the 2 guys resisting it. So when my uncle my uncle had this idea of, you know, being the peace president from the beginning, he told Ben Bradley, his one of his best friends who, you know, was run the publisher of the Washington Post or the editor in chief at that time.
He said, Ben Bradley asked him, what is what do you want on your gravestone? And my uncle said, he kept the peace. He said, the principal job of the president of the United States is to keep the country out of war. And, and so when he first became president, he he anxiously agreed to meet Khrushchev in Geneva to do a summit. And by the way, Eisenhower wanted to do the same thing.
Eisenhower wanted peace, but his and he was gonna meet in Vienna. But that peace summit was blown up. He was gonna try to do, you know, he was gonna try to end the Cold War. Eisenhower was in the last year of his of his in May of 1960, But that was torpedoed by the CIA during the u two crash. You know, they sent a u two over the over the Soviet Union, and it got shot down.
And then they told and then Alan Dulles told Eisenhower to deny that we had a program. They didn't know that the Russians had captured Gary Francis Powers. And so when and and that blew up the peace talks between Eisenhower and Khrushchev. And so, you know, they and the the the there was a lot of tension. My uncle wanted to break that tension.
He agreed to meet with, with Khrushchev in Vienna early on in his term. He went over there, and Khrushchev snubbed him. Khrushchev, lectured him imperiously about the, you know, the the terror of American imperialism and and rebuff any you know, they did agree not to go into Laos. They made an agreement that kept United States to keep my uncle from sending troops to Laos, but, it's a it had been a a disaster, Vienna. So then we had a spy that used to come to our house all the time.
I I cut Georgi Bolshukoy. He was this Russian spy. My my parents had met at the embassy. They had gone to a party or reception at Russian embassy, and he had approached them. And they knew he was a he was a GRU agent and KGB.
He was both oh, he used to come to our house. They really liked him. He was very attractive. He was always laughing and joking. He would do rope climbing contests with my father.
He would do push up contests with my father. He was, he could do the Russian dancing, the Cossack dancing, and he would do that for us and teach us that. And he would and we knew he was a spy too. And this was at the time of, you know, the James Bond films were first coming out, so it was really exciting for us to have a actual Russian spy in our house. The state department was horrified by it.
Yeah. But, but, anyway, when Khrushchev after Vienna and after, the, you know, the bay pigs, Khrushchev had second thoughts. And he sent this long letter to my uncle, and he didn't wanna go through his his state department or his embassy. He wanted to enrun them, but and he was friends with Polshkoy. So he gave Georgi the the letter, and Georgi brought it and handed it to Pierre Salinger, folded in the New York Times.
And he gave it to my uncle. And it was this beautiful letter, which he said, you know, he my uncle had talked to him about the children who were played. You know, we played 29 grandchildren who were playing in his yard, and he's saying, what is our moral basis for making a decision that could kill these children so they'll never write a poem? They'll never participate in election. They'll never run for office.
How can we make a how can we can we morally make a decision that is going to eliminate life for these beautiful kids. And, he has said that to to Khrushchev, and Khrushchev wrote them this letter back saying that he was now sitting as this dacha on the Black Sea and, that he was thinking about what my uncle Jack had said to him at Vienna, and he regretted very deeply not having taken the olive leaf that Jack had offered him. And then he said, you know, it occurs to me now that we're all on an ark and that there is not another one and that the entire fate of the planet and all of its creatures and all of the children are dependent on the decisions we make. And you and I have a moral obligation to go forward with each other as friends. And immediately after that, this was you know, they he said that right after the Berlin crisis in 1962.
General Curtis LeMay, tried to, had tried to provoke a war with a an incident at Checkpoint Charlie, which was the the the entrance the entrance and exit through the Berlin Wall in Berlin. And the Russian tanks has come to the wall. The US tanks had come to the wall, and there was a standoff. And my uncle had had, sent a message to Khrushchev then through Dobrin and saying, my back is at the wall. I cannot I have no place to back to please back off, and then we will back off.
And Khrushchev took his word, packed his tanks off first, and then my uncle ordered LeMay to back back. He had LeMay had mounted bulldozer plows on the on the front of the tanks to to plow down the Berlin Wall. Mhmm. And that and the Russians had come. So it was just you know, it was the it was the his generals trying to provoke a war.
And, but they started talking to each other. And then when he after he wrote that letter, they agreed that they would install a hotline so they could talk to each other, and they wouldn't have to go through intermediaries. Mhmm. And so at at Jack's house on the Cape, there was a red phone that we knew if we picked it up, would answer.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: And there was another one in the White House.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: And but they knew it was important to talk to each other. You know? And you just wish that we had that kind of leadership today. I can, I you know, that that just understands our job? Look.
I know you know a lot about AI. Right? And you know how dangerous it is potentially to humanity and what opportunities it also, you know, offers. But it could kill us all. I mean, Elon said, first, it's gonna steal our job, then it's gonna kill us.
Right? Yeah. And it's it's probably not hyperbole. It's actually you know, if it follows the laws of biological evolution, which are just the laws of mathematics, that's probably a good endpoint for it, you know, a a potential endpoint. So, we we need it's gonna happen, but we need to make sure it's regulated, and it's regulated properly for safety in every country.
And and that includes Russia and China and Iran. Right now, we we should be putting all the weapons of war aside and sitting down with those guys and say, how are we doing? How are we gonna do this? There's much more important things to do. We're gonna this stuff is gonna kill us if we don't figure out how to regulate it.
And and leadership needs to look down the road at what what is the real risk here. And the real risk is that, you know, AI will will, you know, enslave us for one thing and, you know, and and then destroy us and do all this other stuff. And how about biological weapons? We're now all working on these biological weapons, and we're doing biological weapons from for Ebola and, and, you know, dengue fever and, you know, all of these other bad, things, and we're making ethnic bioweapons, bioweapons that can only heal Russians, bioweapons that that the Chinese are making that, you know, are are can kill people who don't who don't have Chinese genes. So all of this is now within reach.
We're actively doing it, and we need to stop it. And we can easily a a biological weapons treaty is the easiest thing in the world to do. We can verify it. We can enforce it, and everybody wants to agree to it. It only insane people do not wanna wanna continue this kind of research.
There's no reason to do it. So there are these existential threats to all of humanity now out there, like AI and biological biological weapons. We need to star stop fighting each other, start competing on economic game fields, playing fields instead of military playing fields, which will be good for all of humanity, and that we need to sit down with each other and negotiate reasonable treaties on how we regulate AI and and biological weapons. And nobody's talking about this in this political race right now. Nobody's talking about it in the government.
They get fixated on these little wars and, you know, and, these comic book depictions of good versus evil and, you know, and we all go, you know, and and go off to and give them the weapons and enrich, you know, the military and gush a shuttle complex, but we're we're on the road to perdition if we don't end this.
Speaker 1: And some of this requires to have this kind of phone that connects Khrushchev and John f Kennedy that cuts through all the bureaucracy Yeah. To have this communication between heads of state. And in the in the case of AI, perhaps heads of, tech companies, we can just pick up the phone and have a conversation. Because a lot of it, a lot of the existential threats of artificial intelligence, perhaps even bioweapons, is unintentional. It's not even, strategic and actionable effects.
So you have to be transparent and honest about especially with AI, the people who might not know what what's the worst that's going to happen once you release it out into the wild. And you have to have an honest kind of communication about how to do it so that companies are not terrified of regulation, overreach of regulation. And then, government is not terrified of tech companies of, manipulating them in some direct or indirect ways. So, like, there's a trust that builds versus a distrust. That that seems to so, basically, that old phone where Khrushchev can call John f Kennedy is needed.
Speaker 0: Yeah.
@PBDsPodcast - PBD Podcast
🤯 “If Russia and China are in alliance… that means the Unites States of America as we know it, could cease to exist.” @VivekGRamaswamy on how World ward 3 could end America. https://t.co/JkovijCIVm
Video Transcript AI Summary
If Russia and China form a military alliance and the US enters World War 3, there is a high likelihood that the United States could cease to exist. The foreign policy establishment that led us to Iraq and Afghanistan has failed to protect our borders and cyber defenses. A super EMP attack from a country like Iran could take out our electric grid, causing millions of Americans to become impoverished. Russia and China have advanced space-based offensive capabilities, while the US lacks both offensive and defensive capabilities. Russia is accumulating nuclear weapons at a faster pace than the US. Going to war would be a huge risk, especially when our own homeland is vulnerable and our industrial capacity is lacking. Both parties in the US support a pro-war agenda, increasing the risk of World War 3. The American people are not being informed about the potential consequences of such a war.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: I'll put a fine point on this. This is not hyperbole. If Russia and China are in a military alliance with each other and we enter World War 3, I want people to understand what that means. That means the United States of America, as we know it, could cease to exist. K.
We're we're with 2 nuclear allied superpowers, I want people to understand this. It's not some vague idea avoid World War 3. No. Like, this country that we know, 250 years in, The greatest country I believe known to man to secure freedom, to advance human being to allow human beings to achieve the maximum of their potential. That gift To human history that we have the blessing to live in today, that nation will be at a high likelihood of ceasing to exist If we enter World War 3 right now why do I say that?
Because that same foreign policy establishment that led us to Iraq and Afghanistan and spent $7,000,000,000,000 We killed tens of thousands of our sons and daughters fighting somebody else's war, which is a mistake. And I don't want that Dick Cheney goes to the past to come retake over the Republican Party like they're trying to with the Nikki Halys of the world who are doing it now. That same foreign policy establishment as they were doing those things Failed to protect the borders of this country. Failed on cyber defenses, completely missing. Failed on and I want people to understand this with a country like Iran could hit us with a super EMP and electromagnetic pulse attack.
What does that mean? It takes out our electric grid in a matter of days. You could have millions of Americans impoverished instantly if our electric grid is taken out. You could have tens of millions of Americans impoverished instantly if our entire electric grid is taken out. Space based defenses.
Russia and China both have space based Offensive capabilities. We have neither meaningful space based offensive or defensive capabilities when it comes to space based nuclear capabilities. So cyber, super EMP, space, border, missile defenses, all missing. So our homeland is as vulnerable as we have been in a long time. Russia has actually been accumulating nuclear weapons at a much faster pace way faster pace than the United States.
Hypersonic missiles that Outdate that that beat old, outdated missile defense systems. Against this backdrop, do you really wanna march away to World War 3? It's bad enough to say I wanna send $200,000,000,000 of our taxpayer money Said that some Ukrainian mid level kleptocrat can buy a bigger house because that's what's been going on so far, well, with $34,000,000,000,000 in the hole over here, bad enough here. And that's all bad enough. But that's not even the biggest risk here.
Biggest risk is at a moment where we're bankrupt, where we have no industrial capacity in the United States, and the foundation Of war is absolutely economics, and and we have the economic backbone not to fight this war right now from an industrial capacity standpoint. But our own homeland is as porous and vulnerable as it is. And so there's a reason why younger people do not like the idea of going to war. Right? The peep young people who are disaffected from politics, you wanna pay attention right now?
It's gonna be a gun over your shoulder while you're sitting in some trench, Dying in a World War 3 or, yeah, worse even somebody else's war that gets us there along the way if you put the people in charge in either party. Right? It used to be that we would have 1 party on one side and 1 party on the other side of this issue. Now it's even there's another factor domestically that could increase the risk of World War 3. It's not like you have a Democrat party that's against a pro war Republican Party or a Pro American interest, Republican Party that's against wars that the Democrat Party is pushing.
We also live in a moment now where even as we're having this election Turn in tug of war between 2 parties and, you know, who's gonna defeat Joe Biden and Ronald McDaniel talking about defeating Joe Biden to deflect from her own Failures as a leader here, that's a tall deflection because both parties agree on the pro war agenda right now. That is another danger that increases the risk of World War 3, and they say the most dangerous ideas in Washington are the bipartisan ones. Well, this is the most dangerous idea of our den generation, And I think that the policies that they're advancing of arming Ukraine and other otherwise to the teeth, Driving Russia further into China's hands. Yes. Our own policy makers are Driving us into World War 3 where the risk of doing so is at the highest point it's ever been in our life and at a moment where we could very well lose it, which means our nation ceases to Exist.
And there isn't a single person in either political party laying that out for the American people who will be left holding the bag suffering and possibly dying as a result of
@TCNetwork - Tucker Carlson Network
Putin on the collapse of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. https://t.co/1ntaKj96nP
Video Transcript AI Summary
The US dollar's position as the world's reserve currency is being questioned due to the use of sanctions as a foreign policy tool. This move is seen as a strategic mistake by US political leaders, as it weakens American power. The massive debt of $33 trillion is a clear indication of the consequences. Even US allies are reducing their dollar reserves, seeking ways to protect themselves. The imposition of restrictive measures on certain countries raises concerns and sends a signal to the world. It is important for the United States to understand the impact of these actions and the significance of the dollar for their own country.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: The US dollar, which has kind of united the world in a lot of ways, maybe not to your advantage, but certainly to ours. Is that going away as the reserve currency, the the common the universally accepted currency? How have sanctions, do you think, changed the dollar's place in the world?
Speaker 1: You know, To use the dollar as a tool of foreign policy struggle is one of the biggest strategic mistakes made by the US political leadership. The dollar is the cornerstone of the United States power, but they won't stop printing. What does the debt of $33,000,000,000,000 tell us about? Comes? As soon as the political leadership decided to use the US dollar as a tool of political struggle, a blow was dealt to this American power.
I would not like to use any strong language, but it is a stupid thing to do and a grave mistake. Look at what is going on in the world. Even the United States allies are now downsizing their dollar reserves, seeing this, everyone starts looking for ways to protect themselves. But the fact that the United States applies restrictive measures to certain countries, such as placing restrictions on transactions, Freezing assets, etcetera, causes great concern and sends a signal to the whole world. Do you even realize what is going on or not?
Does anyone in the United States realize this. What are you doing? You're cutting yourself off. All experts say this. Ask any intelligent and thinking person in the United States What the dollar means for the US?
You're killing it with your own hands.
@TCNetwork - Tucker Carlson Network
When was the last time Biden and Putin spoke? https://t.co/NcZhKEix71
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 1 cannot recall the last time they spoke to Joe Biden and dismisses the need to remember everything. They acknowledge that Biden funds the war they are involved in but claims to have spoken to him before a special military operation. Speaker 1 expresses their belief that Biden is making a historic mistake by supporting actions in Ukraine that push Russia away. When asked about Biden's response, Speaker 1 suggests asking him directly as it is not appropriate for them to comment. They confirm that they have not spoken to Biden since before February 2020.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: When was the last time you spoke to Joe Biden?
Speaker 1: I cannot remember when I talked to him. I do not remember.
Speaker 0: You don't remember?
Speaker 1: No. Do I have to remember everything? I have my own things to do. We have domestic political affairs.
Speaker 0: Well, he's funding the war that you're fighting, so I would think that would be
Speaker 1: Well, yes. He funds, but I talked to him before the special military operation, of course. And I said to him then, by the way, I believe that you are making a huge mistake of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening Take of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening there in Ukraine by pushing Russia away. I told him told him repeatedly, by What
Speaker 0: what did he say?
Speaker 1: Ask him, please. It is easier for you. You are a citizen of the United States. Go and ask him. It is not appropriate for me to comment on our conversation.
Speaker 0: But but but you haven't spoken to him since before February of 2020
Speaker 1: No. We haven't spoken.
reSee.it AI Summary
The author discusses various instances of geopolitical history involving the United States, Russia, and Ukraine. They highlight the US's involvement in conflicts and regime changes, as well as the Minsk II agreement for peace in Ukraine. The author expresses a lack of trust in the US government and calls for both sides to negotiate and uphold agreements transparently.
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
Piers Morgan Has Received Totally 100% Real and Accurate Lesson in Geopolitical History From Jeffrey Sachs ENJOY‼️‼️‼️ 📑You seem very reliant on accepting Putin's worldview rather than perhaps the stark reality of the barbarism with which he's executed this war. Yeah, maybe because I know too much about the United States. Because the first war in Europe after world War two was the US bombing of Belgrade for 78 days to change borders of a european state. The idea was to break Serbia, to create Kosovo as an enclave, and then to install Bondsteel, which is the largest NATO base in the Balkans, in the southwest Balkans. So the US started this under Clinton, that we will break the borders, we will illegally bomb another country. We didn't have any UN authority. This was a, quote, NATO mission to do that. Then I know the United States went to war repeatedly, illegally, in what it did in Afghanistan and then what it did in Iraq and then what it did in Syria, which was the Obama administration, especially Obama and Hillary Clinton, tasking the CIA to overthrow Bashar al Assad. And then what it did with NATO illegally bombing Libya to topple Muammar Gaddafi and then what it did in Kiev in February 2014. I happened to see some of that with my own eyes. The US overthrew Yanukovych together with right wing ukrainian military forces. We overthrew a president. And what's interesting, by the way, is we overthrew Yanukovych the day after the European Union representatives had reached an agreement with Yanukovych to have early elections, a government of national unity and a stand down of both sides that was agreed. The next thing that happens is the opposition, quote unquote, says, we don't agree. They stormed the government buildings and they deposed Yanukovych. And within hours, the United States says, yes, we support the new government. It didn't say, oh, we had an agreement that's unconstitutional what you did. So we overthrew a government contrary to a promise that the European Union had made. And by the way, Russia, the United States, and the EU were parties to that agreement. And the United States an hour afterwards backed the coup. Okay, so everyone's got a little bit to answer for. In 2015, the Russians did not say, we want the Donbas back. They said, peace should come through negotiations. And negotiations between the ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine and this new regime in Kiev led to the Minsk II agreement. The Minsk II agreement was voted by the UN Security Council unanimously. It was signed by the government of Ukraine. It was guaranteed explicitly by Germany and France. And you know what? And it's been explained to me in person. It was laughed at inside the us government. This is after the UN Security Council unanimously accepted it. The Ukrainian said, we don't want to give autonomy to the region. Oh, but that's part of the treaty. The US told them, don't worry about it. Angela Merkel explained in Die Zeit in a notorious interview after the 2022 escalation. She said, oh, you know, we knew that Minsk two was just a holding pattern to give Ukraine time to build its strength. No, Minsk too was a UN security council unanimously adopted treaty that was supposed to end the war. So when it comes to who's trustworthy, who to believe and so forth, I guess my problem, Piers, is I know the United States government, I know it very well. I don't trust them for a moment. I want these two sides actually to sit down in front of the whole world and say, these are the terms. Then the world can judge, because we could get on paper clearly for both sides of the world, we're not going to overthrow governments anymore. The United States needs to say, we accept this agreement. The United States needs to say, Russia needs to say, we're not stepping 1ft farther than whatever the boundary is actually reached and NATO's not going to enlarge. And let's put it for the whole world to see once in a while, treaties actually hold.
Video Transcript AI Summary
I rely on Putin's worldview due to US history of illegal actions in Europe and the Middle East. US involvement in conflicts like bombing Belgrade, overthrowing governments, and ignoring peace agreements in Ukraine raises trust issues. The Minsk 2 agreement, meant to end the Ukraine conflict, was disregarded by the US and Ukraine. To establish trust, both sides need to commit to peace and transparency, ensuring no more government overthrows or NATO expansion. A public treaty is needed for accountability and peace.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: You seem very reliant on accepting Putin's worldview rather than perhaps the stark reality of the barbarism with which he's executed this war?
Speaker 1: Yeah. May maybe because I know too much about the United States. Because the first war in Europe after World War 2 was the US bombing of Belgrade for 78 days to change borders of a European state. The idea was to break Serbia to create Kosovo as an enclave and then to install Bondasteel, which is the largest NATO base in the Balkans, in the Southwest Balkans. So the US started this under Clinton, that we will break the borders.
We will illegally bomb another country. We didn't have any UN authority. This was a quote NATO mission to do that. Then I know the United States, went to war repeatedly, illegally, in what it did in Afghanistan and then what it did in Iraq, and then what it did in Syria, which was the Obama administration, especially Obama and Hillary Clinton tasking the CIA to overthrow Bashar al Assad, and then what it did with NATO illegally bombing Libya to topple Nurmur Qaddafi. And then what it did in Kiev in February 2014.
I happened to see some of that with my own eyes. The US overthrew Yanukovych together with right wing Ukrainian military forces. We overthrew a president. And what's interesting, by the way, is we overthrew Yanukovych the day after the European Union representatives had reached an agreement with Yanukovych to have early elections, a government of national unity, and a stand down of both sides. That was agreed.
The next thing that happens is the opposition, says, we don't agree. They stormed the government buildings and they deposed Yanukovych. And within hours, the United States says, yes. We support the new government. It didn't say, oh, we had an agreement.
That's unconstitutional what you did. So we overthrew a government contrary to a promise that the European Union had made. And by the way, Russia, the United States, and the EU were parties to that agreement, and the United States an hour afterwards backed the coup. Okay. So everyone's got a little bit to answer for.
In 2015, the, Russians did not say, we want the Donbas back. They said peace should come through negotiations, and negotiations between the ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine and this new regime in Kyiv led to the Minsk two agreement. The Minsk 2 agreement was voted by the UN Security Council unanimously. It was signed by the government of Ukraine. It was guaranteed explicitly by Germany and France, And you know what?
And it's been explained to me in person. It was laughed at inside the US government. This is after the UN Security Council unanimously accepted it. The Ukrainian said, we don't wanna give autonomy to the region. Oh, but that's part of the treaty.
The US told them, don't worry about it. Angela Merkel explained in in a notorious interview after the 2022 escalation. She said, oh, you know, we knew that Minsk 2 was just a a holding pattern to give Ukraine time to build its strength. No. Minsk 2 was a UN Security Council unanimously adopted treaty that was supposed to end the war.
So when it comes to who's trustworthy, who to believe and so forth, I guess my problem, Pew, is is I know the United States government. I know it very well. I don't trust them for a moment. I want these two sides actually to sit down in front of the whole world and say these are the terms, then the world can judge because we could get on paper clearly for both sides of the world. We're not gonna overthrow governments anymore, the United States needs to say.
We accept this agreement, the United States needs to say. Russia needs to say. We're not stepping one foot farther than whatever the boundary is actually reached, and NATO's not going to enlarge. And let's put it for the whole world to see. You know, once in a while treaties actually hold.
@JohnnyAkzam - Johnny Akzam
Jeffery Sachs thoroughly educates Piers Morgan on the Ukrainian conflict. https://t.co/2FUyx1Pa2I
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker argues against accepting a one-sided view of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, citing the US's history of interventionism. They claim the US illegally bombed Belgrade, initiated wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and illegally bombed Libya. They allege the US overthrew Yanukovych in Kyiv in 2014, despite an EU-brokered agreement for early elections.
The speaker states that Russia initially sought peace through negotiations, resulting in the Minsk II agreement, which was unanimously approved by the UN Security Council. However, they claim the US government dismissed Minsk II, and Angela Merkel admitted it was a ploy to strengthen Ukraine. The speaker distrusts the US government and advocates for a transparent agreement between Russia and Ukraine, with both sides committing to non-intervention and NATO non-enlargement, to be witnessed by the world.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: You seem very reliant on accepting Putin's world view rather than perhaps the stark reality of the barbarism with which he's executed this war.
Speaker 1: Yeah. May maybe because I know too much about The United States, because the first war in Europe after World War two was The US bombing of Belgrade for seventy eight days to change borders of a European state. The idea was to break Serbia, to create Kosovo as an enclave, and then to install Banda Steel, which is the largest NATO base in the Balkans, in the Southwest Balkans. So The US started this under Clinton, that we will break the borders, we will illegally bomb another country. We didn't have any UN authority.
This was a NATO mission to do that. Then I know The United States went to war repeatedly, illegally, in what it did in Afghanistan, and then what it did in Iraq, and then what it did in Syria, which was the Obama administration, especially Obama and Hillary Clinton, tasking the CIA to overthrow Bashar al Assad, and then what it did with NATO illegally bombing Libya to topple Muammar Gaddafi, and then what it did in Kyiv in February 2014. I happened to see some of that with my own eyes. The U. S.
Overthrew Yanukovych together with right wing Ukrainian military forces. We overthrew a president. And what's interesting, by the way, is we overthrew Yanukovych the day after the European Union representatives had reached an agreement with Yanukovych to have early elections, a government of national unity, and a stand down of both sides. That was agreed. The next thing that happens is the opposition, quote unquote, says, We don't agree.
They stormed the government buildings, and they deposed Yanukovych, and within hours The United States says, Yes, we support the new government. It didn't say, Oh, we had an agreement. That's unconstitutional, what you did. So we overthrew a government, contrary to a promise that the European Union had made. And by the way, Russia, The United States, and the EU were parties to that agreement.
And The United States, an hour afterwards, backed the coup. Okay, so everyone's got a little bit to answer for. In 2015, the Russians did not say, we want the Donbas back. They said peace should come through negotiations. And negotiations between the ethnic Russians in the East Of Ukraine and this new regime in Kyiv led to the Minsk two agreement.
The Minsk two agreement was voted by the UN Security Council unanimously. It was signed by the government of Ukraine. It was guaranteed explicitly by Germany and France. And you know what? And it's been explained to me in person.
It was laughed at inside the US government. This is after the UN Security Council unanimously accepted it. The Ukrainians said, we don't want to give autonomy to the region. Oh, but that's part of the treaty. The US told them, don't worry about it.
Angela Merkel explained in desight in a notorious interview after the twenty twenty two escalation, she said, Oh, you know, we knew that Minsk II was just a holding pattern to give Ukraine time to build its strength. No. Minsk II was a UN Security Council unanimously adopted treaty that was supposed to end the war. So when it comes to who's trustworthy, who to believe, and so forth, I guess my problem, Peers, is I know the United States government. I know it very well.
Don't trust them for a moment. I want these two sides actually to sit down in front of the whole world and say, These are the terms. Then the world can judge, because we could get on paper clearly for both sides of the world. We're not going to overthrow governments anymore, the United States needs to say. We accept this agreement, the United States needs to say.
Russia needs to say. We're not stepping one foot farther than whatever the boundary is actually reached. And NATO's not going to enlarge. And let's put it for the whole world to see. You know, once in a while, treaties actually hold.
@BGatesIsaPyscho - Concerned Citizen
Piers Morgan getting absolutely schooled on Geo-Politics by scholar Jeffrey Sachs. Have never seen Piers Morgan so quiet. https://t.co/xjszsvtnUJ
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker suggests the US has a history of interventionism, citing the bombing of Belgrade to create Kosovo and establish a NATO base. They claim the US illegally engaged in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, with the Obama administration tasking the CIA to overthrow Bashar al Assad. They also allege the US, along with right-wing Ukrainian military forces, overthrew Yanukovych in Kyiv in 2014, despite an EU agreement for early elections.
The speaker states that in 2015, Russia wanted peace through negotiations, leading to the Minsk II agreement, which was unanimously voted on by the UN Security Council and signed by Ukraine. However, the speaker claims the US government laughed at it, and Angela Merkel admitted it was a holding pattern to allow Ukraine to build strength. The speaker distrusts the US government and wants both sides to agree to terms publicly, with the US agreeing to stop overthrowing governments, Russia agreeing to not advance further, and NATO agreeing to not enlarge.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: You seem very reliant on accepting Putin's world view rather than perhaps the stark reality of the barbarism with which he's executed this war.
Speaker 1: Yeah. May maybe because I know too much about The United States. Because the first war in Europe after World War two was The US bombing of Belgrade for seventy eight days to change borders of a European state. The idea was to break Serbia, to create, Kosovo as an enclave, and then to install Bondisteel, which is the largest NATO base in the Balkans, in the Southwest Balkans. So The US started this under Clinton, that we will break the borders, we will illegally bomb another country.
We didn't have any UN authority. This was a NATO mission to do that. Then I know The United States went to war repeatedly, illegally, in what it did in Afghanistan, and then what it did in Iraq, and then what it did in Syria, which was the Obama administration, especially Obama and Hillary Clinton, tasking the CIA to overthrow Bashar al Assad, and then what it did with NATO illegally bombing Libya to topple Muammar Gaddafi, and then what it did in Kyiv in February 2014. I happened to see some of that with my own eyes. The U.
S. Overthrew Yanukovych together with right wing Ukrainian military forces. We overthrew a president. And what's interesting, by the way, is we overthrew Yanukovych the day after the European Union representatives had reached an agreement with Yanukovych to have early elections, a government of national unity, and a stand down of both sides. That was agreed.
The next thing that happens is the opposition, quote unquote, says, we don't agree. They stormed the government buildings, and they deposed Yanukovych, and within hours The United States says, yes, we support the new government. It didn't say, Oh, we had an agreement. That's unconstitutional, what you did. So we overthrew a government, contrary to a promise that the European Union had made.
And by the way, Russia, The United States, and the EU were parties to that agreement. And The United States, an hour afterwards, backed the coup. Okay, so everyone's got a little bit to answer for. In 2015, the Russians did not say, We want the Donbas back. They said peace should come through negotiations.
And negotiations between the ethnic Russians in the East Of Ukraine and this new regime in Kyiv led to the Minsk two agreement. The Minsk II agreement was voted by the UN Security Council unanimously. It was signed by the government of Ukraine. It was guaranteed explicitly by Germany and France. And you know what?
And it's been explained to me in person. It was laughed at inside the US government. This is after the UN Security Council unanimously accepted it. The Ukrainians said, we don't want to give autonomy to the region. Oh, but that's part of the treaty.
The US told them, don't worry about it. Angela Merkel explained in desight in a notorious interview after the twenty twenty two escalation. She said, Oh, you know, we knew that Minsk II was just a holding pattern to give Ukraine time to build its strength. No. Minsk II was a UN Security Council unanimously adopted treaty that was supposed to end the war.
So when it comes to who's trustworthy, who to believe, and so forth, I guess my problem, Peers, is I know the United States government. I know it very well. Don't trust them for a moment. I want these two sides actually to sit down in front of the whole world and say, These are the terms. Then the world can judge, because we could get on paper clearly for both sides of the world.
We're not going to overthrow governments anymore, the United States needs to say. We accept this agreement, The United States needs to say. Russia needs to say. We're not stepping one foot farther than whatever the boundary is actually reached, and NATO's not going to enlarge. And let's put it for the whole world to see.
You know, once in a while, treaties actually hold.
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
Jeffrey Sachs: This is a US-Russia War and That is DANGEROUS Learn from the best, be your best Only facts
Video Transcript AI Summary
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine began in 2014 and has three core issues. First, Russia has maintained for over 30 years that NATO expansion into Ukraine is a red line. The speaker claims the US has been determined to expand NATO to Ukraine since 1994, violating prior promises.
Second, Crimea is vital to Russia's naval fleet and access to the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia will not cede Crimea.
Third, the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. Initially, Russia sought autonomy for Donetsk and Lugansk. The speaker claims the US dismissed the Minsk II agreement, leading Ukraine to disregard it.
The speaker believes Crimea and NATO are non-negotiable for Russia. Territorial issues might allow for flexibility, such as dual nationalities or freezing the conflict along the current contact line. Russia's primary concern is its security, viewing the US as aggressive since 1991. Negotiations should commence between the US and Russia, as this is fundamentally a US-Russia conflict.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: So this war did not start in February 2022. It started in February 2014. There have been 3 issues on the table from the start. The first issue is NATO. Russia has an absolutely clear unambiguous red line that it has expressed for more than 30 years.
NATO must never come to Ukraine. How many stupid US and Western officials have denied this is amazing to me. This could not be clear and could not be more explicit. It is the essential cause of spelli. It's the essential reason for this war is the US determination decided already back in 1994, mind you, 30 years ago, to expand NATO to Ukraine in complete violation of promises made to the Soviet Union and then to Russia from 1990 onward, and then broken by Clinton and broken by every US president since then.
So that's the that's the first issue is NATO. This war will end when the United States president says, you know, that was a bad idea to push NATO. And how many European leaders are just liars? Because they know privately. They knew it in 2008 when this was on the Bucharest NATO Summit.
They have known until today that this is the provocation that keeps the war going. But they're they lie or they're scared to tell the truth or some of them are just confused or some of them say, what the hell? We're gonna do it anyway. Okay. So that's number 1.
2nd issue is Crimea. Crimea is the home, of, Russia's naval fleet in the Black Sea and Russia's ability to trade and to project power into the Eastern Mediterranean. This has been understood for 2 centuries. This is why Britain and France went to war in 18/53 to try to kick Russia out of the Black Sea. That was the first Crimean war.
This is big Brzezinski's idea in 1997. This goes back a long time. Russia will not cede Crimea. Thank you very much. Forget it.
Then the third issue is the the Donbas and now, 2 more, Oblast, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. So 4 Oblast right now, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Russia did not claim these until late in 2022. Russia was insisting on autonomy for the 2 eastern, oblasts, Donetsk and Lugansk in the Minsk two agreement. If those had been honored, if there had been autonomy for the ethnic Russian regions, again, that plus NATO would have meant no war.
But the United States said, nah. We don't believe in the Minsk II agreement. Go ahead and violate it, and from Poroshenko and Zelensky, to all of the regime after February 2014. They just blew off a treaty that they had signed and that that was backed by the UN Security Council. So the third issue is these territories.
Now my view is the first two are completely nonnegotiable, and we shouldn't enter into negotiations thinking, oh, Russia's gonna give back Crimea. It ain't gonna happen. Or that, well, we'll give this territory, but then the rest will be NATO. No. It's not going to happen.
You don't understand. You haven't been listening for 30 years. When it comes to the third issue of, the territories, that are the contact line right now, I think that there's probably some give or creativity, that can be made. There could be dual nationalities. There could be other things that could be discussed.
There could be freezing along the current contact line. Many things, I think. Because though that issue is not the central issue for Russia. The central issue for Russia is security. And Russia's feeling, which I completely understand, that the US has been aggressive vis a vis Russia since 1991 and actually since 1945, if you wanna be clear about it.
And, UK has been aggressive towards Russia since about 18 40. So this this is, to my mind, where we stand. What does it mean for me? I'd open negotiations today, and I'd say, yes. President Putin, we hear you.
We know there are a number of issues on the table. Let's get down to work and find the peaceful outcome. Now who are the negotiations between? Not between Ukraine and Russia. It's between the United States and Russia.
This is the other point that, any honest observer has to understand. This is a US Russia war, and that is dangerous.
reSee.it AI Summary
I note a stream of posts arguing NATO expanded eastward provoked Ukraine conflict, blaming the US, global elites, and NATO for coups, regime change, and resource grabs. Minsk II overlooked, 2014 Maidan story told, and calls to disband NATO. Jeffrey Sachs and others challenge mainstream narratives, claiming the war is about geopolitical and financial power, not just Ukraine.
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
Jeffrey Sachs Killed Biden, Zelensky and Kamala!!! https://t.co/INb5j8dLiN
Video Transcript AI Summary
Checklist for summary approach:
- Identify and preserve the core causation chain from 1990 to the present.
- Retain all direct claims about NATO expansion, treaties, regime changes, and key US actions.
- Highlight unique or surprising elements (intercepted calls, personal connections, blunt quotes).
- Exclude repetition, filler, and off-topic discussions.
- Do not judge the claims; present them as stated, without added qualifiers.
- Translate any non-English nuances into concise English where needed.
- Aim for 395–494 words.
According to the speaker, the Ukraine war is not a Putin-initiated attack as framed by common narratives, but a long sequence beginning in 1990. James Baker (Secretary of State) told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move eastward if Germany unified; Gorbachev agreed. The speaker asserts the US then “cheated” with a 1994 Clinton plan to expand NATO to Ukraine, arguing that neoconservatives took power and NATO enlargement began in 1999 with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Russia initially cared little, seeing no direct border threat beyond Kaliningrad, and NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999 aggravated Moscow.
Putin’s leadership is described as initially pro-European; he even considered joining NATO when a mutually respectful relationship existed. After 9/11, Russia supported the US in counterterrorism, but two decisive later actions altered it. In 2002 the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which the speaker says triggered US missile deployments in Eastern Europe—Aegis systems—prompting Russia to fear a decapitation strike from missiles near Moscow. He claims the US then invaded Iraq in 2003 on phony pretenses. In 2004–2005 a “soft regime change operation” in Ukraine (the first color revolution) installed leaders connected to US interests; the speaker recalls advising Ukraine’s government in the early 1990s and knows Yushchenko personally.
Yanukovych won Ukraine’s 2009 election and pursued neutrality; the US pressed NATO expansion despite Ukrainian public preference for neutrality amid ethnic divides. On 22 February 2014, the US actively participated in overthrowing Yanukovych, with a leaked call between Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Pyatt discussing a preferred next government (names like Yatsenyuk/Yats, and influence from Biden) and vowing Western support; the speaker asserts the Americans told Yanukovych to fight on, promising “we’ve got your back” but “we don’t have your front,” pushing Ukraine into front lines and contributing to a high death toll—“six hundred thousand deaths now of Ukrainians since Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to tell them to be brave.”
The speaker contends the war is misrepresented as a madman invading Europe and criticizes it as “bogus, fake history” and a PR narrative by the US government; he claims NYT suppressed his commentary and argues the US ignores prudence in favor of open-ended enlargement. He cautions against pursuing China and Taiwan, warning about nuclear risk if a power challenges the US. He notes Putin’s 2021 security proposal to bar NATO enlargement, the White House’s rejection of negotiations, and NATO’s “open door” stance, which he decries as unstable. The narrative concludes with a focus on preventing further escalation and avoiding a nuclear confrontation.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Let me just explain in two minutes the Ukraine war. This is not an attack by Putin on Ukraine in the way that we are told every day. This started in 1990. 02/09/1990, James Baker the third, our secretary of state, said to Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO will not move one inch eastward if you agree to German unification, basically ending World War two. And, Gorbachev said that's very important.
Yes. NATO doesn't move, and we agreed to German unification. The US then cheated on this already starting in 1994 when Clinton signed off on a, basically, a plan to expand NATO all the way to Ukraine. This is when the so called neocons took power, and, Clinton was the first agent of this. And the expansion of NATO started in 1999 with Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic.
At that point, Russia didn't much care. There was no border other than with the Kernigsberg, but other than that, there was no direct threat. Then, The US, led the bombing of Serbia in 1999. That was bad, by the way, because that was a use of NATO to bomb a European capital, Belgrade, seventy eight straight days to break the country apart. The Russians didn't like that very much.
But Putin became president. They swallowed it. They complained, but even Putin started out pro European, pro American actually asked, maybe we should join NATO, when there was still the idea of some kind of mutually respectful relationship. Then nine eleven came, then came, Afghanistan, and the Russians said, yeah, we'll support you. We understand to root out terror.
But then came two other decisive actions. In 02/2002, The United States unilaterally walked out of the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. This was probably the most decisive event never discussed in this context, but what it did was trigger The US putting in missile systems in Eastern Europe that Russia views as a dire direct threat to national security by making possible a decapitation strike of missiles that are a few minutes away from Moscow. And we put in two Aegis missile systems. We say it's defense.
Russia says, how do we know it's not Tomahawk nuclear tipped missiles in your silos? You've told us we have nothing to do with this. And so we walked out of the ABM treaty unilaterally in 02/2002, and then in 02/2003, we invaded Iraq on completely phony pretenses as I've explained. In February, 04/05, we engaged in a soft regime change operation in Ukraine, the so called first color revolution. It put in office somebody that I knew and was, I was friends with, and I'm kind of distantly friends with the president Yushchenko, because I was an adviser to the Ukrainian government in nineteen ninety three, ninety four, ninety five.
And then The US had its dirty hands in this. It should not meddle in other countries' elections. But in 02/2009, Yanukovych won the election, and he became president in 2010 on the basis of neutrality for Ukraine. That calmed things down because The US was pushing NATO, but the people of Ukraine on the opinion polls didn't even wanna be a NATO. They knew that the country is divided between ethnic Ukrainian, ethnic Russian.
What do we want with this? We wanna stay away from your problems. So in 02/22/2014, The United States participated actively in the overthrow of Yanukovych, A typical US regime change operation, have no doubt about it. And the Russians did us a favor. They intercepted a really ugly call between Victoria Nuland, my colleague at Columbia University now.
And if you know her name and what she's done, have sympathy for me. Really. Between her and, The US ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Piot, who's a senior state department official till today, and they talked about regime change. They said, who's gonna be the next government? Why don't we pick this one?
No. Klitschko shouldn't go in. It should be Yat senuk. Yes. It was Yotsenok, and we'll get we'll get the big guy, Biden, to come in and do an attaboy, they say, you know, pat them on the back.
It's great. So they made the new government, and I happened to be invited to go there soon after that, not knowing any of the background, and then some of it was in a very ugly way explained to me after I arrived how The US had participated in this. All of this is to say, The US then said, okay. Now NATO's really gonna enlarge, and Putin kept saying, stop. You promised no NATO enlargement.
It's been by the way, I forgot to mention in 02/2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, seven more countries in the not one inch eastward. And then okay. It's a long story, but The US kept rejecting the basic idea, don't expand NATO to Russia's border in a context where we're putting in goddamn missile systems after breaking a treaty. 2019, we walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty. In 2017, we walked out of the JCPOA, the treaty with Iran.
This is the partner. This is the trust building. In other words, it's completely reckless US foreign policy. On 12/15/2021, Putin put on the table a draft Russia US security agreement. You can find it online.
The basis of it is no NATO enlargement. I called the White House that next week after that, begging them, take the negotiations. Putin's offered something. Avoid this war. Oh, Jeff, there's not gonna be a war.
Announce that NATO's not gonna enlarge. Oh, don't worry. NATO's not gonna enlarge. I said, oh, you're gonna have a war over something that's not gonna happen? Why don't you announce them?
And he said, no. No. Our policy is an open door. This is Jake Sullivan. Our policy is an open door policy.
Open door for NATO enlargement. That is under the category of bullshit, by the way. You don't have your right to put your military bases anywhere you want and expect peace in this world. You have to have some prudence. There's no such thing as an open door that we're gonna be there, and we're gonna put our missile systems there, and that's our right.
There's no right to that. We declared in 1823, Europeans don't come to the Western Hemisphere. That's the Monroe Doctrine, the whole Western Hemisphere after all. Okay. Anyway, they turned down the negotiations.
Then the special military operation started. And five days later, Zelensky says, okay. Okay. Neutrality. And then the Turks said, we'll we'll mediate this.
And I flew to Ankara to discuss it with the Turkish negotiators because I wanted to hear exactly what was going on. So what was going on was they reached an agreement with a few odds and ends. And then The United States and Britain said, no way. You guys fight on. We got your back.
We don't have your front. You're all gonna die. But we got your back as we kept pushing them into the front lines. That's six hundred thousand deaths now of Ukrainians since Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to tell them to be brave. Absolutely ghastly.
So when you think about your question, we have to understand we're not dealing with, as we're told every day, with this madman like Hitler coming at us and violating this and violating that, and he's gonna take over Europe. This is complete bogus, fake history that is a purely PR narrative of the US government, and it doesn't stand up at all to anyone that knows anything. And if you try to say a word of this, I got completely cut out of the New York Times back in 2022 after writing my whole life columns for them. Oh, I'd send this. Okay.
And by the way, online, it's not even space. You know, there's no limit. They could publish 700 words. They would not publish, since then, 700 words for me about what I saw with my own eyes about what this war is about. They won't do it.
We're playing games here. So, god forbid, a nuclear power comes at us. I don't know what's gonna happen, but we came at them, and we should stop going after China and Taiwan.
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
@Chicago1Ray - @Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸
Breaking ..... Putin says he's ready to enter into peace talks.... says Trump is intelligent and experienced, and said Trump acted like a real man after the assassination attempt in July https://t.co/eztlwEbpEa
Video Transcript AI Summary
President-elect Trump is described as intelligent and experienced, with potential for future talks. However, Russia has recently attacked Ukraine's energy infrastructure, raising concerns about possible escalations before Trump takes office. Dan Hoffman, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, is asked about Putin's compliments towards Trump, particularly regarding Trump's response during a July assassination attempt. The discussion centers on the implications of Putin's flattery and what it might mean for U.S.-Russia relations moving forward.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: That president-elect Trump is, quote, intelligent and experienced while speaking to reporters. He seemed to leave the door open for talks. But just yesterday, Russia attacked Ukraine's energy infrastructure and warned more could come. So could we see an escalation from both sides before Trump takes office? Let's bring in Dan Hoffman, former CIA station chief in Moscow and Fox News contributor.
Dan, great to have you in on this today. So what do you make of this flattery, coming from Putin of Donald Trump? He also said that he thought Trump acted like a real man during the assassination attempt in July. What's with the flattery here?
reSee.it AI Summary
I just saw that President Trump announced Ukraine and Russia will start negotiations to end the war. He shared this on TRUTH Social after a "lengthy and highly productive" call with Putin. This comes after Pete Hegseth stated that NATO membership for Ukraine is off the table.
@CollinRugg - Collin Rugg
BREAKING: President Trump says Ukraine and Russia will immediately begin negotiations to end the war. The announcement was made on TRUTH Social after Trump had a "lengthy and highly productive" call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The announcement follows Pete Hegseth's comment today where he ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine.
@JackPosobiec - Jack Poso 🇺🇸
BREAKING: THE TRUMP PEACE TALKS WITH RUSSIA AND UKRAINE HAVE BEGUN https://t.co/L7It5XL9Fp
reSee.it AI Summary
I shared insights from Jeffrey Sachs during his conversation with Tucker Carlson about the origins of the Deep State Project, which he claims began under Clinton to expand NATO. He highlighted the significance of the recent Trump-Putin call, noting that every president since Clinton has supported this secretive agenda, except Trump. Sachs emphasized the broken assurances to Russia regarding NATO expansion after the Soviet Union's fall and criticized the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002, which he believes increased the risk of nuclear conflict. He also discussed efforts to integrate Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, framing the situation as a path that could have led to World War III.
@JohnMcCloy - Johnny St.Pete
Jeffrey Sachs divulged to Tucker Carlson the “Origination of The Deep State Project started under Clinton to expand NATO” He explains how yesterday was truly HISTORIC DAY once that call between Trump & Putin occurred. Every president since Clinton has signed onto this secret plan until Trump. We had made assurances not to expand NATO to Russia and then after the fall of the Soviet Union we embarked on warp speed expansion. And the most dangerous move was to back out of the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) in 2002 which was designed to prevent nuclear war. We then attempted to absorb Ukraine & Georgia into NATO. This full segment is worth the time because it lays out how we arrived to this dangerous point that many times could have led us to WW3.
Video Transcript AI Summary
In 1994, the U.S. initiated a project to expand NATO eastward indefinitely, despite assurances given to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not move "one inch eastward." This expansion continued under multiple presidents, with seven more countries added in 2004. In 2007, Putin urged the U.S. to halt expansion, reminding them of the earlier promise.
In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and began installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Russia's bordering territories. In 2008, George Bush Jr. aimed to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, which led to conflict. The U.S. also played a role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who favored neutrality.
Recently, President Trump had a call with President Putin, signaling a respect for Russia's concerns. The new defense secretary stated that Ukraine will not join NATO. Additionally, Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged a multipolar world, marking a shift from the U.S. mindset of sole superpower dominance. These events signal a potential shift towards peace.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: A very bad idea of The United States taken in 1994. It's a project. The project was a project to expand NATO forever, anywhere. Just keep moving east. Keep moving not only to the first wave, which was the prime minister's country, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but then move eastward closer to the former Soviet Union, into the former Soviet Union, surround Russia in the Black Sea region, go all the way to a little country in the South Caucasus, Georgia.
It was mind boggling. Clinton signed on to that in 1994. It became what we call the deep state project, meaning it didn't really matter who the president was. Each president would come and basically would be informed. NATO's moving eastward, you're part of that process.
So Clinton started it in 1994. And as prime minister Orban said, he mentioned briefly, in 1990, on 02/09/1990, in unequivocal, clear as can be terms, The United States had said to president Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO will not move one inch eastward. And if you have any doubt about it, all the documents are now online available. You can scrutinize everything. Hans Dietrich Genscher, The US the German foreign minister said the same thing same day.
He's on tape actually explaining, no, no, I don't just mean within Eastern Germany. I mean anywhere to the East. Clinton being Clinton, and The US Deep State being The US Deep State started this project in 1994. They already had the idea, by the way, in in 1991, '92, as soon as the Soviet Union ended. Now we move.
Now we move eastward. Now we control everything. Now we are the sole superpower. So this has gone on for thirty years. And each president got into it under George Bush junior.
Seven more countries were added, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania, nine in 02/2004. Then in 02/2007, President Putin said at the summit that's taking place right now, the Munich Security Summit, said, stop. You told us no expansion, not an eastward expansion, even an inch, you said. You've now done 10 countries. Stop.
Perfectly reasonable. Stop. I don't think our president Donald Trump would much like to see China and Russia building their military bases up from Central America. You know, this was how the Russians saw this. Why are you coming to our border when you told us you weren't gonna move?
And there was one other thing that was very important in this, which was probably the most decisive thing and almost not even recognized. In 02/2002, The US did something really, really, really destabilizing, and that is it unilaterally left the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. That was a core strategy to stop a nuclear war between the two superpowers. Because what ABM had done for thirty years was to say, we each have deterrents. You If you strike us, we can strike back.
We'll limit our anti ballistic missiles so that both sides maintain deterrence. In 02/2002, The United States unilaterally, unprovoked, walked out of ABM, said, no, no, we're not gonna do it anymore. We're going to put anti ballistic missile systems into Russia's bordering territories. The Russians said, are you kidding? The US said, what's your problem?
We do what we want. So in 02/2007, Putin said, stop already. In 02/2008, George Bush junior doubled down as Americans typically do, and said, okay, now we're moving to Ukraine and to Georgia. That was why this war occurred. But Ukraine had one more sliver of life, and that was that they elected a president in 2010 that didn't want to be part of NATO.
And the public didn't wanna be part of NATO. Why? Because they knew this is very dangerous. Why get into this provocative situation? His name was Viktor Yanukovych.
Americans don't like neutrality, but Yanukovych was trying to be neutral between the two sides. And The US played a rather unfortunate role on 02/22/2014 in a violent overthrow of this person. And that's when the war started. And it's been now ten years, and no president has told the truth until yesterday, by the way. Yesterday is a historic day because the a call took place between president Putin and president Trump.
It was the first call. We don't know if there had been a short call beforehand between the two of them, but there was no call by Biden and Putin. With war going on for three years, no call. And now there was a call, and the readout from the American side was excellent. What president Trump said in the call was, we respect Russia.
We hear Russia's concerns. We fought on the same side in World War two. Nice point, by the way. True. Russia lost Soviet Union lost 27,000,000 people in World War II, and was an ally of The United States.
The fact that wasn't mentioned for years and years and years by President Biden. And then the defense secretary Hagstad, the new defense secretary said yesterday, the truth for the first time, that Ukraine is not going to join NATO. This is the basis for peace. This is absolutely the basis for peace. And they couldn't tell the truth for three decades.
They could not admit what any of us knew, because I've been around this region for thirty six years in detail. I sat with Boris Yeltsin. I sat with Mikhail Gorbachev. But the Americans would not tell the truth publicly until yesterday that this was so provocative, it was a game. They thought they'd win the game.
I don't know how many people here play or played in their childhood the game of risk. The game of Risk was a big game for me. You wanted your peace on every part of the world map. That was the game. When you took over the whole world, world hegemony, we now call it, you won.
They're playing that game until this administration. So the two most important, three important things have happened in my view in this administration so far. First, our new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told the fundamental truth. We are in a multipolar world. First time the sentence was uttered, he told the truth.
What does it mean? The American mindset for thirty years was we run the show. Marco Rubio said, well, we don't run the show. We live with other powerful countries. Great start.
Second and third were the two events yesterday. So I'm feeling about peace that this is really something that happened yesterday. If if they follow through, we know what Washington is like. There's every crazy idea swarming still. A project of thirty years doesn't go down necessarily in one phone call or one statement by the Secretary of Defense, but it's pretty important that it was said so publicly and so visibly.
And of course, Europe is in a tizzy because Europe signed on to The US project. All these politicians in Europe are there where they are because they were part of The US project. And now The US is reversing its project, and you didn't tell us and you didn't what are we supposed to do? We're way out there. And so they're completely befuddled.
And I have to say, I told them personally, many of these leaders, and I mean personally, one by one, for years, you are gonna get trapped this
@ricwe123 - Richard
Tucker Carlson interviewing Jeffrey Sachs..... https://t.co/mdYIr1j3xl
Video Transcript AI Summary
I met Prime Minister Orban 36 years ago and saw his vision for a new Hungary. The Ukraine war stems from the US's 1994 NATO expansion project, despite promises to Gorbachev. This was a deep state project that every president after Clinton was a part of.
Yesterday was historic because Trump and Putin spoke, and the new defense secretary admitted Ukraine won't join NATO. This is the basis for peace. For 30 years, America has been playing a game of risk, seeking world hegemony. Marco Rubio acknowledged a multipolar world.
The US must stop attacking others and respect other countries. With mutual respect, we can achieve a golden age, investing in technology instead of war.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to, introduce someone who I consider one of the smartest people I know and whose understanding of the world is matched only by his ability to synthesize huge themes, and illustrate them with precise detail, someone who's traveled the world for forty years, a man who not only writes about leaders of the world but knows them personally, professor Jeffrey Sachs.
Speaker 1: Thanks. Alright. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much, Jeff. Thank you. So how long I just you were telling me backstage, I didn't realize this, for for those who enjoyed prime minister Orbanet. I'm one of them. I was tell us when you first met the prime minister.
Speaker 1: We met, forty six years ago. Thirty six years ago. 1989.
Speaker 0: He was just getting out of jail at that point.
Speaker 1: No. Yeah. They were just opening up, and, this young guy was starting a political party. And he gave me a call, and, we sat in our my backyard in, in Boston for a few hours. And I thought, okay.
This guy's gonna be prime minister for most of the next, thirty six years. It's very, very impressive then, and it's very impressive now.
Speaker 0: So you said that. You saw in him and it's not just about him, but it's about what are the markers of enduring leadership, what makes, you know, this politician impressive while most of them are not impressive. What did you see in him? What do you see in leaders like him who have been successful?
Speaker 1: This was 1989. It was even before the Berlin Wall Fell, but Hungary had cut the barbed wire. So people were that was the beginning of the end in 1989 of the Soviet domination of of Eastern Europe. And, this young guy said, I'm gonna make a political party, and I'm gonna be a leader, and I'm gonna make a new Hungary. And, what he showed was vision that, look, we're a great country.
We've been held back for the last forty five years. I'm gonna help lead the way. And it was a, Fidesz, young democrats, I think was the translation of it, and he just had the idea. We're we're gonna move forward. He was a kid, and, we were all kids then.
And, you could see that there was energy, vision, foresight, and and it proved right.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And a toughness. So you heard his analysis, I think, of where we are, with the war in Ukraine election of Trump on the basis in part of, you know, his promise to to try to end this if he can. You saw the new secretary of defense say, no. We're not gonna support Ukraine's entry into NATO.
Where are we now?
Speaker 1: You know, yesterday was the most, important day for peace in maybe decades, actually. This war in Ukraine resulted from a very bad idea of The United States taken in 1994. It's a project. The project, was a project to expand NATO forever anywhere. Just keep moving east.
Keep moving not only to the first wave, which was the prime minister's country Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but then move eastward closer to the former Soviet Union, into the former Soviet Union, surround Russia in the Black Sea region, go all the way to a little country in the South Caucasus, Georgia. It was mind boggling. Clinton signed on to that in 1994. It became what we call the deep state project, meaning it didn't really matter who the president was. Each president would come and basically would be informed.
NATO's moving eastward. You're part of that process. So Clinton started it in 1994. And as prime minister Orban said, he mentioned briefly, in 1990, on 02/09/1990, in unequivocal, clear as can be terms, The United States had said to president Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO will not move one inch eastward. And if you have any doubt about it, all the documents are now online, available.
You can scrutinize everything. Hans Dietrich Genscher, the US the German foreign minister said the same thing, same day. He's on tape actually explaining, no. No. I don't just mean within Eastern Germany.
I mean anywhere to the East. Clinton, being Clinton, and the US deep state being the US deep state started this project in 1994. They already had the idea by the way in in 1991, '90 '2 as soon as the Soviet Union ended. Now we move. Now we move eastward.
Now we control everything. Now we are the sole superpower. So this has gone on for thirty years and each president got into it under George Bush Junior, seven more countries were added, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania Nine in 02/2004. Then in 02/2007, president Putin said at the summit that's taking place right now, the Munich Security Summit, said stop. You told us no expansion, not an eastward expansion, even an inch, you said.
You've now done 10 countries. Stop. Perfectly reasonable. Stop. I don't think our president Donald Trump would much like to see China and Russia building their military bases up from Central America.
You know, this was how the Russians saw this. Why are you coming to our border when you told us you weren't gonna move? And there was one other thing that was very important in this, which is probably the most decisive thing and almost not even recognized. In 02/2002, the US did something really, really, really destabilizing, and that is it unilaterally left the anti ballistic missile treaty. That was a core strategy to stop a nuclear war between the two superpowers because what ABM had done for thirty years was to say, we each have deterrence.
You if you strike us, we can strike back. We'll limit our anti ballistic missiles so that both sides maintain deterrence. In 02/2002, the United States unilaterally, unprovoked, walked out of the ABM, said, no. No. We're not gonna do it anymore.
We're going to put anti ballistic missile systems into Russia's bordering territories. The Russians said, are you kidding? The US said, what's your problem? We do what we want. So in 02/2007, Putin stopped already.
In 02/2008, George Bush junior doubled down as Americans typically do and said, okay. Now we're moving to Ukraine and to Georgia. That was, why this war occurred. But Ukraine had one more sliver of, of life, and that was that they elected a president in 02/2010 that didn't want to be part of NATO, and the public didn't wanna be part of NATO. Why?
Because they knew this is very dangerous. Why get into this provocative situation? His name was Viktor Yanukovych. Americans don't like neutrality, but Yanukovych was trying to be neutral between the two sides. And The US played a rather unfortunate role on 02/22/2014 in a violent overthrow of this person.
And, that's when the war started. And it's been now ten years, and no president has, told the truth until yesterday, by the way. Yesterday is a historic day because the a call took place between president Putin and president Trump. It was the first call. We don't know if there had been a short call beforehand between the two of them, but there was no call by Biden and Putin.
With war going on for three years, no call. And now there was a call, and the readout from the American side was excellent. What president Trump said in the call was we respect Russia. We hear Russia's concerns. We fought on the same side in World War two.
Nice point, by the way. True. Russia lost Soviet Union lost 27,000,000 people in World War two and was an ally of The United States. A fact that wasn't mentioned for years and years and years by president Biden. And then the defense secretary head set the new defense secretary said yesterday the truth for the first time that Ukraine is not going to join NATO.
This is the basis for peace. This is absolutely the basis for peace, and they couldn't tell the truth for three decades. They could not admit what any of us knew because I've been around this region for thirty six years in detail. I sat with Boris Yeltsin. I sat with Mikhail Gorbachev.
But the Americans would not tell the truth publicly until yesterday that this was so provocative. It was a game. They thought they'd win the game. I don't know how many people here play or played in their childhood the game of risk. The game of risk was a big game for me.
You wanted your piece on every part of the world map. That was the game when you took over the whole world, world hegemony we now call it. You won. They're playing that game until this administration. So the two most import three important things have happened in my view in this administration so far.
First, our new secretary of state Marco Rubio told the fundamental truth. We are in a multipolar world. First time the sentence was uttered. He told the truth. What does it mean?
The American mindset for thirty years was we run the show. Marco Rubio said, well, we don't run the show. We live with other powerful countries. Great start. Second and third were the two events yesterday.
So I'm feeling about peace that this is really something that happened yesterday. If if they follow through, we know what Washington is like. There is every crazy idea swarming still. A project of thirty years doesn't go down and so visibly. And, of course, Europe is in a and so visibly.
And, of course, Europe is in a tizzy because Europe signed on to The US project. All these politicians in Europe are there where they are because they were part of The US project. And now The US is reversing its project, and you didn't tell us and you didn't what are we supposed to do? We're way out there. And so they're completely befuddled.
And I have to say, I told them personally, many of these leaders, and I mean personally, one by one for years, you are gonna get trapped this way because this project doesn't work. It doesn't make sense. It's a game for the Americans, but it's life and death for the Russians. So it cannot be won by the American side. It's impossible.
And I tried to tell them, and nobody in Europe either had the clarity or the guts to see it except the person that preceded me in this seat, prime minister Orban, because he was completely clear about this from the first day. Now others are starting, but even till today, the Europeans can't get it because they're so deeply invested in something that makes no sense. They should have said, Russia's big. It lives near near us. Let's cooperate.
That's how you do it.
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We recommend it. I think one of the reasons we wound up in this position, we meaning The United States, but also Europe, is there's a habit of speech which reflects a habit of mind, which is an unwillingness to engage with ideas and instead resort immediately to attacking the other person on the basis of motive. And you saw this with Orban. You're a Russian stooge or whatever and was especially hilarious as he explained. No.
It's the opposite of a Russian stooge. Of course. Lifelong. His country was occupied by the Russians. But you do see it also in The United States, and it
Speaker 1: makes it kind of impossible to have a rational conversation
Speaker 0: about any I know you've been the the butt of this too, not whining about it, but it's like Yeah. Is there even a culture in our foreign policy establishment of having rational conversations
Speaker 1: to the point where we
Speaker 0: can solve problems like this?
Speaker 1: You know, we've talked about, I think, an uncle of yours, who's, one of my favorite politicians of American history, j William Fulbright. And, he wrote a book in the nineteen sixties called the arrogance of power. And I was a a kid then, and I read that book like it was the coolest thing imaginable. This was the chairman of the US foreign relations committee saying, we're too arrogant to think clearly. That was amazing.
He was an amazing person. Now I think that's the fundamental problem. I'm not sure we're properly over it, but I have to say that, in nineteen ninety, ninety one, we had the chance for global peace, really for global peace. That doomsday clock of the atomic scientist which I like to refer to so much, which measures how close or far are we from nuclear war, was the farthest away it was ever in its history because the cold war had ended. So I was there as a as a young economist who actually knew something about economic stabilization, and I made proposals.
And, interestingly, just as a footnote, I advised the Polish government in 1989. I just long story, but suddenly as a kid, I happened to be there, and I helped write their plan. And I, everything I recommended for Poland was immediately accepted by the White House. It's a very odd thing. In fact, I went one day, I had an idea of mobilizing some finance to help Poland stabilize, and I called the Polish finance minister, said, do you mind if I try to raise a billion dollars for you today, which was a lot of money in in those days.
And said, if you raise a billion dollars, that would be great. So I called Bob Dole, our senate majority leader, whom I knew because of the Poland, work that I was doing, and he invited me immediately into his office. And he said, come back in an hour. So I came back in an hour. This was, September 1989.
And who was sitting there? General Brent Scowcroft. Oh, okay. He was the general who was our national security adviser. I was a kid.
So it was a little bit interesting moment. And he senator Dole said to me, explain to general Scowcroft your idea. So I handed him the paper, and this is how you do financial stabilization, and here's how you stabilize the currency. And Scowcroft looked at it and said, well, will this work? And I said, general, this will work.
And, Dole led me out of the office and said call me back, later in the day. So at 5PM, I called, and Dole said the White House has called. You have tell your friends you have the 1,000,000,000. So I raised a billion dollars that day. It was good.
So no. No. That nothing to do with me, because, it was the right idea. The Polish stabilized. I did a good I did a good thing.
I was a technically, equipped, sophisticated manager of a financial stabilization or not manager, but advisor on the financial stabilization. Okay. Then in 1991, I recommended the same thing for Gorbachev and for this creaking, collapsing, Soviet Union. Gorbachev wanted to have elections in all of the republics, and he wanted to democratize and stabilize. So okay.
I know something about that, mister president. And so we met, in, the Harvard Kennedy School, and, there were, one, two, three, four, five of us, a little team. One of them was the chief economic advisor of Gorbachev, Grigor Yablinski. One was the dean of the Kennedy School. One became a very senior diplomat, Bob Blackwell, that I deal with.
One was a very senior economist at, MIT, Stanley Fisher. We wrote a plan for how, the Soviet Union could stabilize, and I did the chapter on the financing. Basically, the same thing that I had said for Poland. Okay. It was completely rejected within about twelve hours in Washington.
Okay. I hated this for the next thirty years, I have to tell you, because we just could not take yes for an answer. Couple of months ago, someone sent me from the archives, the first time that I'd ever seen it, the National Security Council minutes rejecting the proposal. Fascinating to read because that's your life before your eyes watching this. There was a guy named Dick Darman who was a former colleague of mine.
The technical term, I don't I don't think I can say it in mixed company, actually. So I I I won't say what I would say about him.
Speaker 0: But it's an unpleasant English word.
Speaker 1: It's really nasty. Too nasty for polite company. He says in this thing, we should do the minimum necessary so that there's not a collapse, but nothing more. And, he quotes Machiavelli and, you know, we're not interested and we're not gonna do this. And it's it's really watching stupid people taking important stupid decisions.
Fools. By the way, they never called to say, can we discuss stabilization? This guy knew nothing. They don't understand anything. They don't care.
So what were they doing? They actually reached a conclusion at the end of the meeting. We're gonna do the minimum possible. I mean, minimum, minimum. It's not our business to help.
We're not gonna do any of that. That's arrogance of power. We don't have to do anything. Why? We're The United States.
We don't have to do anything. They didn't even look. The stakes for the world were very high. You could have a thirty minute phone call to understand financial stabilization. You could say in history, when countries are destabilized this way, here's how stability has worked.
That was my specialty. That's what I knew and taught at Harvard and knew knew a lot about. But they're so arrogant that it's not even to discuss for a half an hour any of this, and they didn't, and they took a terrible decision. And by the way, my point is not that that led on to this and this and this. No.
They took terrible decisions for the next thirty five years. This could have been stopped at any moment. Not one thing led to the next thing. No. One stupid decision, then the next one, then the next one, then the next one.
You have to learn to behave. The way you behave in this world is mutual respect. The way you behave is thinking you're not gonna be more secure if they're completely destabilized. That's what you have to understand. And that is not so hard to understand.
We teach it to our kids. At age four, we start teaching that. And then suddenly, if you want your passport to Washington, you have to forget it at age 40 or something. And that's how they behave. So that's my feeling about this, that it's just a kind of arrogance.
And you can see it in this writing which I find fascinating to go back and watch this tragedy unfold. Nineteen ninety seven, another wonderful moment if you wanna just watch hubris and tragedy. Very good book, good in that it's insightful, terrible book in that it's all wrong by Zvi Brzezinski. And many of you have probably read it called the Grand Chess Board, and he could have called it the game of risk. It would have been a little bit more accurate, but it was about how to make American dominance in the world.
And he has a chapter about expanding NATO to Ukraine. Exactly that. He's and he talks about Europe and NATO expanding eastward. And the question that he asked in 1997 is, what can the Russians do about it? Because they're weak.
And he answers meticulously. He considers, would Russia ever ally with China? Impossible.
Speaker 0: He can That'll that'll never happen.
Speaker 1: That'll never happen. Could Russia ever ally with Iran? No. Impossible. That will never happen.
So you watch like we watch now the Chat GPT thinking out loud. It's all there. It's all wrong, and it was all American policy for the next twenty five years. That's tragedy.
Speaker 0: May may I ask a question, though? Like, a kind of thematic fundamental question. So, great empire, one of it you know, empires tend to be arrogant. I think that's a feature of empires.
Speaker 1: That is it.
Speaker 0: But a an enduring empire shows stability. Its goal is stability. Because it understands exactly what you said I thought so nicely. It doesn't help you if your neighbors are in chaos. It doesn't it doesn't help you.
It's against your own interest. So that's such an obvious insight. The Roman Empire was based on it. The British Empire was based on it. Ours is the only empire I'm aware of that has kind of intentionally sowed chaos, and and I don't understand where that thinking comes from.
Leaving aside, the moral question is, is that right or wrong? It doesn't work for you. So why have we done it?
Speaker 1: You know, the Roman Empire is always a great story for us, and I compare the Ukraine war to the battle of the Teuttenberg forest, which is AD nine. Yep. And in AD nine, the Roman Empire reached its limits, on the Rhine. It never it tried to conquer the Germanic tribes, in September. They were defeated under Augustus.
And there were sporadic border things from then on, but they never tried again. They had hundreds of years where that just was wasn't their business. It was very, very smart. Hadrian, in the first, second century AD was the emperor at the maximum extent of the Roman Empire, and he basically wanted stability across the the the border lines. And this was the prudence of the empire.
It wasn't Alexander, you know, was very different three, four hundred years earlier. He wanted to conquer the whole world. There was no limit. Finally, his soldiers told him, if you go any further, we're killing you. We we've got to go home because they were already at the beyond the Indus River.
But the Romans said no. We're gonna put some boundaries, we're gonna keep the borders, and we're gonna not go beyond our means or our needs. I hope what happened yesterday was a a good example of that. What Trump and, Hegseth did yesterday, if they follow through, if the deep state doesn't undermine it, if it's some crazy thing doesn't happen, said, we don't need to be in Ukraine with NATO. We don't need to be.
It's for us, it's nothing. And it doesn't mean that Russia's now gonna invade Western Europe. That's crazy. This was a project going the other direction. So it's basic prudence, and that's what a great power should show, prudence.
Speaker 0: What are the chances that some you said unless the deep state doesn't make some crazy thing happens. I would note that for a good part of the presidential campaign, the deep state was telling the candidate Donald Trump that the state of Iran is trying to kill you, which as far as I know was totally untrue, by the way. But they were telling him that in order to prepare him to attack Iran, which they're still trying to do. So we know that this kind of deception is just a feature of it. How hard will people invested in the Ukraine war go?
Yeah. What to what lengths will they go to continue this, do you think?
Speaker 1: First of all, the the main job of The US President, of a of a successful US President, is to put the foot on the brake. This is if you look in history, the good presidents know when to stop. Eisenhower was such. Kennedy was such. Reagan understood this, and all our recent presidents did not up until now, basically.
Speaker 0: Well, troop Truman in Korea, George H W Bush in Kuwait. I mean, also true.
Speaker 1: No. That they fought too many wars in my Yeah.
Speaker 0: But they but they did stop.
Speaker 1: And No. But they stopped, but they, made too much Iraq Two Thousand Three. I mean, there were just too many too many wars. So the question is, can we learn, and can the president keep the foot on the brake? If he does, he will have a extremely successful administration.
He, I think, understands that all of Netanyahu's pleading and this has been thirty years also, this another project to go for The US to go to war with Iran is just the worst idea imaginable, would be a disaster. And so I think president Trump understands that. I think he understands that a war with China would be a complete disaster, which it would be, though there's a lot of war parties around on that. The funny thing about our time right now, not funny, the the the wonderful thing about our time right now is that we're in the midst of the biggest technological boom in the history of the world. So so many good things could happen in the next ten to twenty years.
President Trump has used the expression which I fully subscribe to, a golden age. We could have it. A golden age is not war. A golden age is investing in all this wonderful technology so that we can have health care that works, education systems that work, infrastructure that works. It would be nice if The United States even had one kilometer of fast rail, just saying.
China just completed its fifty thousandth kilometer of fast rail. We we don't have one. I can't even take the train reliably from, New York to actually from Washington to New York. Last time it took the Accela, it broke down in the middle, and I I had to change to a local in New Jersey, which does not happen between Shanghai and Beijing, by the way. Just saying.
Speaker 0: But you missed the countryside. I mean, that is part of it, though.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 0: Not a lot of incentive to stop in New Jersey, and now they're giving you one.
Speaker 1: There I was. I felt so privileged. Right. And there was the local right on the next Exactly. Exactly.
Waiting for us.
Speaker 0: And you wouldn't have been in Passaic otherwise. So Exactly. Lucky you.
Speaker 1: You count your blessings. Right?
Speaker 0: So the whole point of market capitalism is consumer choice. You have a choice between products and services, and the competition between companies makes the goods and services better. That's the core idea. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of monopolies out there. Monopolies are not good for consumers.
They are not good for you. And one of the places where there's effectively a monopoly is in wireless contracts, but it's not a complete monopoly. You're probably paying way too much to use your cell phone, but now you have a choice. You don't have to pay a hundred bucks a month just to get a free phone. That's not a good deal.
There's a company called PureTalk, which we use, that has no inflated prices. With a qualifying plan of just $45 a month, you can choose a free phone, an iPhone 14 or a Samsung Gallery, then you get unlimited talk, tax 25 gigs of data, which is enough for most people, a mobile hotspot, all for that low price, and it's got the most dependable five g network. So you get your free iPhone 14 or Samsung Galaxy by visiting puretalk.com/tucker, and you switch to Pure Talk today. America's wireless company, Pure Talk. It does feel I'm glad that you are saying this because it does feel like we're not even a month into the Trump administration.
I don't think anybody agrees with, you know, everything of anyone else's program, but, clearly, this is a massive departure from what we had, much more than I thought. I feel like I'm I watch pretty closely. I'm amazed by the ambition of what they're doing, and it does feel like the only way to stop this. Tulsi Gabbard just confirmed yesterday as the director of
Speaker 1: National Intelligence. Very big deal. It's unbelievable. It's a very big deal.
Speaker 0: Tulsi Gabbard's right in the president's daily brief. Tulsi Gabbard is in charge of a lot of declassification efforts. Like, the whole thing is unbelievable. The only way to stop this is with a war. I mean, that's my kind of simple reading of it.
Do you agree with that?
Speaker 1: I think that is exactly entirely the point. And if, and we had news today, please, inshallah, that, the ceasefire will continue on Saturday because more hostages will be released, more exchanges will take place, and there won't be a return. Really, If it happens and an outbreak of war is stopped, because it has to be stopped, this will be such a blessing, not only for this region, but I have to say for our country too, The United States.
Speaker 0: I agree.
Speaker 1: And so this is really the key moment, and I think Trump's instincts are there. And what he says, we didn't even hear Biden or other presidents say, president Trump said many times about Ukraine, too many people are dying. You didn't even hear those words. I mean, the idea that war involve by the way, maybe a million Ukrainians dead or seriously wounded. We're gonna find out in the next months because finally we'll see what reality is, not what the propaganda is, but it's horrible what's happened.
So that instinct is essential, and there are several places where everything could be derailed. This region is one of them. Ukraine is another. South China and East China Sea is is the third. And if the president gets it and has the basic idea we live together in respect with other countries, the golden age will come.
Speaker 0: I I think and I'd love your view of this. I think of all the amazing things I've seen in the last three and a half weeks, maybe the most amazing is the emergence of Steve Witkoff, who I I just I will say I know personally and and like enormously, but he was a real estate guy. K? All of a sudden, Trump appoints him an envoy sort of over and above massive stable diplomats. We have professional diplomats at the state department to go do, you know, effective ceasefire here in this region and then sends him over to Russia, and he winds up meeting Yeah.
With Putin apparently for several hours. And then all this stuff happens. You've been around diplomats your entire life. You've functioned as a diplomat. What do you think of
Speaker 1: that? Look. He did the single coolest thing since this administration started, I I have to say, which was, Trump made this cease fire. There's no question about it. Biden would never I mean, he didn't make the ceasefire because we don't know where Biden was mentally anyway, but his team was completely incompetent.
Horrible. I'm sorry to say it. It's very terrible.
Speaker 0: A lot of the rest of us did notice that.
Speaker 1: Yes. It it wasn't a completely it wasn't a completely closely held secret, let's say. So Trump said, we gotta have a ceasefire before my inauguration. And he sent Witkoff. And, Witkoff said to Netanyahu, I'm coming to meet you tomorrow.
And Netanyahu said, no. No. No. Tomorrow is Saturday. I can't meet you.
And Witkoff said, I'll be in your office tomorrow at one, and, told him, I don't care anything. I'm there. We're gonna have a a discussion. And out of that meeting came the ceasefire. Now the ceasefire looks maybe like it will hold this weekend.
Believe me, in Israel, they want war everywhere for a lot of reasons. But the president's job from my point of view of American interest and the world interest and this region's interest, everybody's interest. No more war. Stop this now. So if Witkoff can keep that track record, that would be the heroic success.
Speaker 0: But what does it tell you that Steve Witkoff, who I will say, again, I'm biased because I really like him, he's got a great personality, super energetic, very straightforward, believable, but zero training in any of this. Like, not he's a real estate guy. And he pulls this off? Like, what does that tell you about our professional diplomatic corps?
Speaker 1: I'll tell you one thing it it tells you. Trump can make peace if he wants to make peace. I mean, he needs he needs a capable guy that can go and read the riot act and say this is no joke, and we're gonna have it. And that is basically what good diplomacy is. And again, in The US system, of course, we've got the deep state who tell presidents what to do.
We've got lobbies. We've got all all sorts of things, but a president's true job is to lead. And if you don't have a president compasementus, like I think we didn't have in The United States, you get war breaking out everywhere like we had, in the last two years. Or if you have a president that is poorly directed or poorly, you know, really doesn't get it. And Clinton was an inconsequential president in my opinion because he is so easily swayed.
He lets he he just made so many lousy decisions. George Bush Junior listened to Cheney who was really a nonstop warmonger and so on. If a president gets the idea, I want peace because this war is really destructive of everything else I'm trying to do, then you can have peace, actually. It's possible. No one is gonna attack The United States, so peace depends on us.
No one is attacking us. China is not about to invade The United States. Russia's not gonna attack The United States. Mexico and Canada are not gonna attack The United States. Panama's not gonna attack The United States.
Greenland's not gonna attack The
Speaker 0: United States. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to make I don't wanna go the whole list, but I'm just confident about this. So if the president wants peace, he'll get it. If he gets peace, believe me, he'll get all the other things that he wants, like low inflation, being able to pass the budget that he wants, getting his tax policies that he wants. But if there's war, he ain't gonna get any of it. That's the basic point.
And, you know, I voted democratic in '9 in, 2020. I voted for Biden. And Biden I've had a lot of experience with governments over the last forty five years, so I watched them, and I I think I understand a lot of of them. And Biden, in the first days, said stupid things about foreign policy. The world is divided between this and this and blah blah blah.
And he's saying, oh my god. What is the guy is doesn't get it. And in fact, he didn't get it at all, and I told many democratic leaders when they still talk to me. Now if they don't talk to me and I don't talk to them, You're gonna you're gonna do something completely almost impossible in American politics, which is you're gonna lose on the basis of foreign policy because Americans don't vote on foreign policy. And I said, your foreign policy is so bad.
This is gonna bring you down. And in fact, the democrats lost their heads in this, and they were so intent on defeating Trump that no matter what Biden said, well, we have to back him up a % as he led them off to war and complicity in the war here and the Ukraine war and tensions with China and all the rest. And they created a milieu of so much unhappiness in The United States, Anxiety, higher inflation, big budget deficits, that the public said, no. We don't like this. This is so they did really the impossible.
Speaker 0: But they brought Liz Cheney over to the coalition.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly. And then what's ironic is, you know, this wonderful person who was confirmed yesterday for, the, head of director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who's really smart by the way, very honest, very meticulous. I know her extremely well over many, many years. Totally up and up, so I'm delighted she's gonna be briefing the president each day.
I couldn't think of a better person. All the democrats voted against her. This is crazy. She was their colleague for decades. She stood up for things that they should be applauding her for.
Every one of them voted against her.
Speaker 0: She was the vice chairman of the DNC Exactly. Seven eight years ago.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 0: So, I guess the question is the opposition you've alluded to the deep state, but there's also the out in the open state. You know, the the congress, for example, the other party, the Democratic Party, does Trump's success, not just in the election, winning the popular vote, but in affecting peace, which is actually popular with people, does that change their views on foreign policy? Like, does he bring people with him, or does he stand alone between the two parties as he did in the first time?
Speaker 1: Look. This is very early days because we're just a little over three weeks into this. But if yesterday turns into policy, which it could, and the Ukraine war ends soon, which it could, You're gonna see everybody changing their views. Oh, I didn't support that. Peace is great.
The European leaders are gonna be saying the opposite of what they're saying right now. Look. In a hundred politicians, anyway, rethink, the rest line up somewhere tactically. So, yes, they will change their view. They'll complain about other things.
That's their job. They're in the opposition, but this war was a disastrous, stupid project that went awry, should have ended, makes no sense. And if Trump pulls it off as he can, if he's resolute now and clear minded and Witkoff does his work, because he'll be the one to do it, it looks like, and he does his work, then this won't be talked about or complained about. This will pass into history as just another one of those blunders. I mean, we don't talk about the two thousand three Iraq war or the twenty years waste in Afghanistan or so many Libya, so many completely ridiculous projects that America has been involved in for no conceivable reason other than these, weird game of risk ideas.
We gotta own that space on the board. Turns out the world and that game board are are rather different. But if Trump pulls this off, what he needs, I think, and what we need to understand is the American scene, it ain't great in general. The budget deficit is enormous. The fragility of society is is actually quite significant.
There is lots of depression, lots of violence, lots of problems that haven't been addressed for thirty years. Big, big budget deficit, huge, can't be solved with all due respect to Elon. It's not the budget deficit has very little to do with the size of the civil service. That's not where the budget deficit comes from. That's not where the spending comes from.
Spending comes from seven fifty overseas military bases, from wars, from massive outlays, of course on pensions, on health care, on interest payments, on the debt, and so forth. So war derails all of that. We're not with a buffer. We're not where the US dollar is king forever. It's almost the opposite, by the way, although it's not so clear to people.
But ten years from now, it's gonna be completely different international monetary scene from the one that we have now because the renminbi is gonna play a completely different role. And the way that international settlements will be done is completely different. You can if you watch like I do, you see all of the stitching together of a new system taking shape. So The US does not have this great room for maneuver, and it's all a game, and we can do this, and we can do that. The president needs to be really accurate right now, really accurate, and understand.
Also, not don't overplay the hand. The world's not desperately waiting to get into The US market as I think he thinks, that these tariffs give all this leverage. No. The US is not the big deal that maybe some people imagine right now. So we gotta get our act together, and you can't get your act together in war.
That's that's the bottom line.
Speaker 0: Professor Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Great to be with you, Steve. Thanks.
Speaker 0: Thank you. That was great. Thanks. So in September, we went across the country, coast to coast, 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour, and it was amazing. We brought the entire staff with us like we always do because we all work together for so long and enjoy traveling together.
And one of our producers is a documentary filmmaker, and so he decided to make a documentary film about our trip a full month of so America was some of the most interesting people around. Different people join us every single night. John Gino and Russell Brand and Bobby Kennedy and JD Vance and Donald Trump, etcetera, etcetera. We had the best time, and the fruit of that is a documentary called On the Road, the Tucker Carlson live tour, which is available right now on TCN. On the Road, Tucker Carlson live tour is hilarious.
You will like it.
@RWMaloneMD - Robert W Malone, MD
Last year, Jeffrey Sachs delivered a most important history lesson at the European Union. This is why Ukraine is at war. Ask yourself, who actually is the aggressor in this conflict? https://t.co/8dPkv1EC5b
Video Transcript AI Summary
Putin's intention in the war was to keep NATO, meaning the United States, off Russia's border. After the Soviet Union ended in 1991, NATO agreed not to move eastward, but the US later decided to enlarge NATO eastward to Ukraine and Georgia. Despite Russia's unhappiness, NATO enlargement continued.
In 2008, the US pushed for NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, leading to protests from Russia. The US then installed missile systems in Poland and Romania. In 2014, the US actively worked to overthrow the Russia-leaning Yanukovych government in Ukraine. Later, Ukraine, supported by the US, refused to enforce the Minsk Two agreement, which would have given autonomy to Russian-speaking regions. In 2022, the US asserted its right to place missile systems anywhere, leading to the war. Putin's initial aim was to negotiate Ukraine's neutrality, but Ukraine withdrew from near-agreement due to US influence, furthering the proxy war.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: What was Putin's intention in the war? Not the propaganda that's written about this. Oh, that they failed and he was gonna take over Ukraine. The idea was to keep NATO. And what is NATO?
It's The United States off of Russia's border. No more, no less. When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, and an agreement was made that NATO will not move one inch eastward. Now what happened after 1991, the United States decided there would be no end to eastward enlargement of NATO, and the decision was taken formally in 1994 when president Clinton signed off on NATO enlargement to the East, all the way to Ukraine and into Georgia. So the NATO enlargement, as you know, started in 1999 with Hungary, Poland, and The Czech Republic, and Russia was extremely unhappy about it.
But these were countries still far from the border. So the next round of NATO enlargement came in 02/2004 with the three Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia. At this point, Russia was pretty damn upset. So as everybody recalls, in 02/2007, president Putin said, stop. Enough.
And, of course, what that meant was in 02/2008, the United States jammed down Europe's throat enlargement of NATO Ukraine and to Georgia. This is right up against Russia. And Russia protested because if Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or the Canadian border, not only would The United States freak out, we'd have war within about ten minutes. And a month later, a war broke out. That gets Georgia destroyed.
And starting in 02/2010, the US put in Aegis missile systems in Poland and then in Romania. And Russia doesn't like that. In 02/2010, Viktor Yanukovych was elected on the platform of neutrality. Russia had no territorial interests or designs in Ukraine at all. What Russia was negotiating was a twenty five year lease for Sevast Opol naval base.
That's it. Not for Crimea, not for the Donbas, nothing. In 02/2014, the US worked actively to overthrow Yanukovych. Everybody knows the phone call by my Columbia University colleague, Victoria Nuland, and The US Ambassador, Peter Piat. Listen to it.
It's fascinating.
Speaker 1: I don't think Klitsch should go into the government. I don't think it's necessary. I don't think it's a good idea. I think Yatz is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience, and, you know, fuck the EU.
Speaker 0: No. Exactly. And I think we've gotta do something to make You don't get better evidence. Then came especially Minsk Two. It said there should be autonomy for the Russian speaking regions in the East Of Ukraine.
It was supported unanimously by the UN Security Council. The United States and Ukraine decided it was not to be enforced. There were many thousands of deaths in the shelling by Ukraine in the Donbas. And one of the issues on the table in December 2021, January '20 '20 '2 was does The United States claim the right to put missile systems in Ukraine? And Blinken told Lavrov in January 2022, the United States reserves the right to put missile systems wherever it wants.
So the war started. What was Putin's intention in the war? It was to force Zelensky to negotiate. Neutrality. And that happened within seven days start of the invasion.
Ukraine walked away unilaterally from a near agreement. Why? Because The United States told them to. The idea was that there would be Ukraine, Romania, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia that would deprive Russia of any international status by blocking the Black Sea. And the American senators who are as nasty and cynical and corrupt as imaginable say this is wonderful expenditure of our money because no Americans are dying.
It's the pure proxy war. And since The US talked the negotiators away from the table, about a million Ukrainians have died or been severely
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
Why is NATO surrounding Russia with its bases even after the fall of the Soviet Union? ‘It was never about resisting communism’ – ex-President Medvedev https://t.co/tggpkjLxXO
Video Transcript AI Summary
Европейским лидерам помешали две вещи в воплощении принципов: неспособность противостоять курсу руководства США и Англии (Рейгану и Тэтчер), и надежды на сокрушение коммунизма. Коммунизма давно нет, хотя его пытались строить.
Элементы этой политики реализуются до сих пор, включая военное присутствие США в Европе, базы НАТО и попытки выстроить диалог с позиции силы. Дело не в коммунизме, а в тотальной русофобии.
**Translation:**
Two things prevented European leaders from implementing principles: the inability to resist the course of the US and British leadership (Reagan and Thatcher), and hopes for the destruction of communism. There has been no communism for a long time, although they tried to build it.
Elements of this policy are still being implemented, including the US military presence in Europe, NATO bases, and attempts to build a dialogue from a position of strength. The point is not communism, but total Russophobia.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: У себя этих европейских лидеров, но воплощению в жизнь этих принципов помешали две вещи. Во-первых, неспособность и нежелание европейских руководителей противостоять жёсткому курсу американского и английского руководства, а именно Рейгану и Тэтчер, и надежды на сокрушение коммунизма. Что любопытно, никакого коммунизма, как известно, давно нет. Но его и не было. Во всяком случае, мы его пытались строить.
Однако элементы этой политики реализуются до сих пор. В том числе усиленное военное присутствие США в Европе, многочисленные базы НАТО, попытки выстроить диалог с позиции силы. В чём дело? Значит, не в коммунизме, конечно, а в тотальной русофобии. МУЗЫКА
reSee.it AI Summary
I shared that Trump had a lengthy call with Putin, but I'm unsure who initiated it. The tone was notably different from his previous "playing with fire" remarks. They talked about Ukraine's drone strikes and acknowledged that both sides would retaliate, with Trump recognizing that immediate peace isn't on the horizon. I also noted a significant development: Trump's admission that Russia could be crucial in the Iran deal, a topic we discussed over a month ago. Russia's involvement could open many opportunities for Trump's policies, but time is of the essence.
@AXChristoforou - Alex Christoforou
Trump speaks with Putin. Another long call. Who initiated the call, Trump or Putin? Much different tone than "playing with fire" Truth post. Two leaders discussed Ukraine drone strikes and "various other attacks...by both sides." Trump accepted that Putin will retaliate, and it will be big. Trump admits "immediate peace" not coming. BIG NEWS: Admission that Russia can play a key role with Iran deal, something The Duran discussed more than a month ago and is now in play. Russia can unlock many doors for Trump and his policies, but time and patience is running out.
reSee.it AI Summary
I had a 1 hour, 15 minute call with Vladimir Putin. He expressed strongly that he will respond to Ukraine's recent attack on the airfields. I found the conversation to be good, but it won't lead to immediate peace.
@kayleighmcenany - Kayleigh McEnany
🚨 BREAKING NEWS: President Trump had a 1 hour, 15 minute call with Vladimir Putin. The Russian president said "very strongly" that "he will have to respond to the recent attack [by Ukraine] on the airfields." Trump characterized the call as "a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace." ⬇️
Video Transcript AI Summary
President Trump announced on Truth Social that he spoke with Russian President Putin for an hour and fifteen minutes. They discussed Ukraine's attacks on Russian airplanes and other attacks from both sides. Putin stated he will have to respond to the airfield attacks.
Trump and Putin also discussed Iran and its nuclear weapons program, agreeing that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Putin offered to participate in discussions with Iran to help reach a rapid conclusion, with Trump stating Iran has been slow-walking their decision.
The conversation occurred after Ukrainian and Russian representatives met in Istanbul to discuss swapping injured soldiers, but admitted there is no immediate end of peace in sight. Some believe Putin is testing Trump's administration to see how far he can push. Others question Trump's ability to influence Putin, as the U.S. has limited leverage over Russia. There are also concerns about Putin's actions beyond Ukraine, including construction on the Estonian border.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Well, we have some breaking news. President Trump announcing he has just spoken with Russian president Vladimir Putin. He wrote this on True Social. I just finished speaking by telephone with president Vladimir Putin of Russia. The call lasted approximately one hour and fifteen minutes.
We discussed the attack on Russia's docked airplanes by Ukraine and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides. It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate peace. President Putin did say and very strongly that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields. Those were those Ukrainian attacks on the airfields with the drones. We also discussed Iran and the fact that time is running out on Iran's decision pertaining to nuclear weapons, which must be made quickly.
I stated to president Putin that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. And on this, I believe that we were in agreement. President Putin suggested that he will participate in the discussions with Iran and that he could perhaps be helpful in getting this brought to a rapid conclusion. It is my opinion, the president continued, that Iran has been slow walking their decision on this very important matter, and we will need a definitive answer in a very short period of time. A few interesting notes here.
First, just yesterday in Istanbul, you had the Ukrainian side meet with the Russian side, and they were talking about swapping injured soldiers, but they admitted there is no immediate end of peace in sight, an immediate ceasefire. Not only that, we know that Russia is a close ally of Iran. They partner together strategically, militarily. So any assistance on that front could push Iran perhaps into an agreement. So two interesting notes there.
And, Ari, this all comes against the backdrop of president Trump saying, I'll know in two weeks whether Putin is serious, and he said that about about a week and a half ago. So this development coming as he's really prodding Putin to push towards peace.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it doesn't sound like there's gonna be any prospect of peace between Ukraine and Russia if there were. If the president had any inclination from president Putin that there was something encouraging, we'd have seen it in that true social. Its absence speaks volumes. Look, I think the only way to get peace between Ukraine and Russia is for Ukraine to continue to bring the war into Russia.
That strike against the 40 Russian long range bombers was instrumental in telling Russian people and the Russian government, there's a cost to you for continuing your attacks in Ukraine. You need a stalemate in order for two parties to come to a peace terms. Right now, there's been an imbalance until this recent Ukrainian attack inside Russia. I don't know if the Ukrainians can sustain it though. And if you're Russia, you might wanna just continue to keep the attacks going because you think you can win.
That's why I think this was very risky for president Trump to think he could be the peacemaker. America's strong. President Trump is strong. But we can't do everything around the world. And I think if Russia and Ukraine won't make peace, we can't do it for them.
Speaker 0: Kaylee, interestingly, in in the middle of that true socialist, president Putin did say and very strongly that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields. I'm sure that caught the ear of Zelenskyy.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think that one thing to Trump's credit is we have full confidence that both Putin and Iran, all these other countries that he's dealing with, know for a fact that Donald Trump is not messing around. I think what's happening here is Putin is deliberately testing the bounds to see how far he can push Trump, how far he can push this administration before receiving a really harsh rebuke. But Donald Trump is not messing around. And I think that these countries know that.
The American people know that, and that's why they elected him to handle our foreign policy.
Speaker 0: Yeah. And, Laurie, this comes against the background of the hill. The Russia Hawks are meeting today. It's a bipartisan group. It's Blumenthal and Graham about potential sanctions on Russia.
You know, notably, I would I would I always point out president Trump on his watch, you did not see Putin go into sovereign territory. You did see that with his predecessor. You saw that with president Biden. There was an absence for years. So there is a respect there that could be leveraged by president Trump.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And he's talked about that too. You know, we didn't see the issue in The Middle East. Donald Trump was in the White House, we didn't see an issue with Russia, in by in large part when he was in the White House. I interviewed last week, on my show, general Keith Kellogg, who is a special envoy to Russia and Ukraine.
And when he was talking about the discussions that have been had, that he was privy to between these two, countries, he says Ukraine is very clear on what their parameters are, where they are, and what it would take for them to come to a a peace agreement. Russia is not. He said they will not actually give us any framework to use. And so I think that's the needle that president Trump is trying to thread. If there's anyone who can thread that needle, if there's anyone, to Kaylee's point, who can tell the rest of the world, I mean business, and they know he means business, it's president Donald j Trump.
And I'm still hopeful that we're gonna see peace.
Speaker 0: Keith Kellogg is the perfect person to talk to, Emily, because there's the public conversation where president Trump is broadcasting one message. The private conversation with the world leader is very, very different, and sometimes we've seen that spillover in Oval Office meetings we've covered here. But how he talks to Putin, know from talking to Kellogg, it's it's going to be in a tough manner. Kellogg has stories about him picking up the phone, talking to the Taliban, to Bardar saying, do not harm the head on an American troop, and thereafter, many, many months, not a single American troop was harmed. Those kinds of hard conversations are the hour and a half ones that happened behind the scenes.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And I think we've caught glimpses of that in the public eye of exactly who the president is. He's the same off air as he is on air. And I think while that's many may have surprised members of the public, it doesn't surprise those who look at him with respect and value the fact that he is authentically himself in every conversation. I'm grateful that you pointed out the the Ukraine point because I think specifically that Putin apparently talked about sort of a retaliation.
And I point that out that Ukraine bombed them because they were the ones that were invaded. This is an oversimplification, but it seems to me that Putin is sort of interested in an eye for an eye at every point of the way because to your point, Putin sees Ukraine as his territory. Like, nothing less than subsuming it back within his borders will suffice because to him, that's a loss. That was a lost territory this entire time. He sees it as as not sovereign.
So I'm not quite sure if that that approach and that perspective that Putin has is something workable on the Ukrainian side. Because it's like it's like a, you know, football penalties. I mean, he's never it's he's like, oh, I have to get them back for this. Wasn't it enough that you invaded? But clearly, it's not.
So tough road ahead. I agree that my faith is in our president to get it done if it's possible, but I think we still have a
Speaker 1: rock this is also where I question president Trump's ability to influence these events because president Putin does not care. And we, as Americans, we don't have much leverage over Russia. We're adversaries of Russia for the most part. We don't do a lot of commercial trade with Russia. So we don't have the leverage we have in other places that president Trump can use.
So I I think this is a lonely mission for president Trump, and he's gonna quickly come to the realization Putin's not listening. America doesn't have a lot of leverage. There are other priorities for The United States around this And
Speaker 3: he also said last week that something is off with Putin. Something is different about Vladimir Putin. So I'm I'm wondering if that's playing into this as well. Maybe it's a different Vladimir Putin than he dealt with the first term in office.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's the same Vladimir Putin he's always been.
Speaker 0: And Putin, it's worth noting. I know that all eyes are on Ukraine, but he is constructing on the border of Estonia. They call that the edge of the free world because that's where you start to get into NATO territory. Does he have designs beyond Ukraine? Let's certainly hope not, but we'll see.
More Outnumbered in a moment.
reSee.it AI Summary
I believe we wouldn't have taken any action if it weren't for the Maidan coup. We accepted Russia's 1991 borders, but we never agreed to NATO's expansion or Ukraine joining NATO. It's crucial for Trump to grasp this before the summit with Putin, as it underpins the Ukraine proxy war.
@GUnderground_TV - Going Underground
Vladimir Putin: 'We would have never considered to even lift a finger if it hadn't been for the Maidan coup. We had agreed to Russia's 1991 borders...but we never agreed to NATO's expansion and we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO' Trump must understand ahead of the summit with Putin that this is the root cause of the Ukraine proxy war
Video Transcript AI Summary
That is exactly what the miscalculation is. CIA did its job to complete the coup. It cost almost 5,000,000,000, but the political mistake was colossal. This could have been done legally, without victims, without military action, without losing Crimea; we would have never considered lifting a finger if it hadn't been for bloody developments on Maidan. We agreed after the Soviet collapse that borders should be along the borders of former union republics, but we never agreed to NATO's expansion or that Ukraine would be in NATO. We did not agree to NATO bases there without discussion. For decades we asked, don't do this. What triggered the latest events? Firstly, the Ukrainian leadership declared they would not implement the Minsk agreements. A year or so ago, former leaders of Germany and France said they signed the Minsk agreements but never intended to implement them; they led us by the nose.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: That is exactly what the miscalculation is. CIA did its job to complete the coup. I think one of the deputy secretaries of state said that it cost a large sum of money, almost 5,000,000,000. But the political mistake was colossal. Why would they have to do that?
All this could have been done legally, without victims, without military action, without losing Crimea. We would have never considered to even lift a finger if it hadn't been for the bloody developments on Maidan. Because we agreed with the fact that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, our borders should be along the borders of former unions' republics. We agreed to that. But we never agreed to NATO's expansion, and moreover, we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO.
We did not agree to NATO bases there without any discussion with us. For decades, we kept asking, don't do this, don't do that. And what triggered the latest events? Firstly, the current Ukrainian leadership declared that it would not implement the Minsk agreements, which had been signed, as you know, after the events of 2014 in Minsk, where the plan of peaceful settlement in Donbas was set forth. But no, the current Ukrainian leadership, foreign minister, all other officials, and then president himself said that they don't like anything about the Minsk agreements.
In other words, they were not going to implement it. A year or a year and a half ago, former leaders of Germany and France said openly to the whole world that they indeed signed the Minsk agreements, but they never intended to implement them. They simply led us by the nose.
reSee.it AI Summary
The recent summit in Alaska between Putin and Trump marks a significant shift in international relations, potentially fostering peace in Ukraine and enhancing Russia-US normalization across various issues. Trump's immediate outreach to Zelensky and European leaders suggests concrete negotiations for a peace settlement, moving beyond previous vague terms. The summit may lay the groundwork for a new world order based on dialogue, with the next steps resting on Ukraine and Europe’s acceptance of the proposed terms. If they refuse, the US could weaken Ukraine's military position significantly. The personal rapport between the two leaders contrasts sharply with the previous administration's tensions.
@SputnikInt - Sputnik
🇷🇺🤝🇺🇸PUTIN & TRUMP REWRITE THE RULES OF GREAT POWER POLITICS IN ALASKA The Anchorage summit could pave the way for peace in Ukraine and Russia-US rapprochement for years to come. 💬 Dmitry Suslov, a prominent Russian international affairs expert, explains why. 🧵👇 https://t.co/x1UwhEgUQY
@SputnikInt - Sputnik
1️⃣NORMALIZATION BEYOND UKRAINE The meeting “gave impetus” to Russia-US normalization on all fronts – not just in Ukraine, but issues ranging from strategic stability and arms control to economic cooperation. https://t.co/NIjmGORGpf
@SputnikInt - Sputnik
2️⃣CHANCE FOR REAL PEACE Trump’s calls to Zelensky and European leaders immediately after the summit signals “negotiations were conducted on specific conditions for a final peace settlement,” not the vague ‘ceasefire as a precondition’ demanded by Ukraine and the EU. https://t.co/frCWgTx7BZ
@SputnikInt - Sputnik
3️⃣PRELUDE TO A NEW WORLD ORDER? The summit could go down in history for laying down the foundations of a future, post-war world order, one based on dialogue between great powers, on equal terms. Its key immediate goal: stopping the West’s hybrid war against Russia. https://t.co/lLbIrpQcdB
@SputnikInt - Sputnik
4️⃣BALL IN ZELENSKY’S COURT It’s now up to the Europeans and Ukraine to decide whether to accept the terms of a settlement outlined by Putin and Trump. If they do, preparations for further talks can begin immediately. https://t.co/diCa3Znurn
@SputnikInt - Sputnik
5️⃣IF THEY REFUSE? The US could freeze intel and halt deliveries and sales of arms and equipment to Europe for use by Ukraine. Doing so would “fundamentally and radically weaken Ukraine’s position on the battlefield and bring a Russian military victory much closer.” https://t.co/sPECpC0PkB
Video Transcript AI Summary
For that that would be a critical mistake. And now, president Trump, when he says that he if he were president, there would be no war. And I personally believe that is the case. There would be no war had president Trump been president at that time because myself and president Trump have had very good trust based relations. And I'm confident that if we had stayed on that path, we could move as quickly as possible to a resolution of the conflict in Ukraine.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: For that that would be a critical mistake. And now, president Trump, when he says that he if he were president, there would be no war. And I personally believe that is the case. There would be no war had president Trump been president at that time because myself and president Trump have had very good trust based relations. And I'm confident that if we had stayed on that path, we could move as quickly as possible to a resolution of the conflict in Ukraine.
@SputnikInt - Sputnik
6️⃣AND THE WAR PARTY? Trump 2.0 is far stronger than he was in his first term, no longer shackled by the Russiagate hoax that blocked him from any reconciliatory steps toward Russia. Now, neither Europe, the deep state or the US war party can stop him on fake collusion grounds. https://t.co/S4gsl0Vyrp
@SputnikInt - Sputnik
7️⃣SMALL DETAILS COUNT TOO The two presidents’ clear, public demonstration of personal affection and respect toward one another, was an important and striking contrast to ice-cold ties under Biden, when Russia and the US were brought to the brink of war. https://t.co/f3IpeMjoqZ
@Glenn_Diesen - Glenn Diesen
Jeffrey Sachs: America Accepts Peace, But Still Demands Global Primacy https://youtu.be/9AZAHaZS7jE https://t.co/sZTnHvQcrx
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 1 argues that 'this will be a peace agreement, not a ceasefire,' forcing the U.S., Russia, and Europe to define peace beyond a halt. He says the war reflects 'an unnecessary set of provocations from the West, not the unprovoked war of aggression by Russia.' He favors Ukraine's security through neutrality, insisting 'Ukraine's real security is neutrality' and 'Neutrality is desirable.' He envisions a monitored security arrangement via the UN Security Council, with 'Russia is one of the guarantors of peace because it's got security interests that need to be respected alongside Ukraine.' He notes 'there was no treaty to end World War II' and that 'promises unfulfilled by the West of no NATO enlargement.' He criticizes Western leadership as 'a gang of the rankest amateurs' and laments 'the Russophobia is rampant and wild' in Europe, urging renewed collective security discussions.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Hi, everyone, and welcome back. We are joined today by Jeffrey Sachs to discuss the wider conflict between, the West and Russia. So welcome back to the program.
Speaker 1: Great to be with you, Glenn.
Speaker 0: So The United States and Russia appears to be moving toward a common understanding of how to end the war. So there's a recognition that the root causes of the war has to be resolved, which is why Trump now walked away from the ceasefire. There's also talk about something like article five type security guarantees for Ukraine, which makes me wonder that, well, perhaps Trump doesn't understand the root cause of the war. Anyways, I just want to get your opinions on what is your main takeaway from this recent diplomatic developments that is what's needed for peace and is this possible?
Speaker 1: I think the big advance actually is that Trump and therefore the American side, the American negotiators have said explicitly that this will be a peace agreement, not a ceasefire. That forces The United States and Russia and eventually Europe to act look at what peace means. It requires an understanding of the deeper causes of this conflict, the essential role that the NATO enlargement played. And I think it's moving in the right direction with a lot of obfuscation and foot dragging because in part it exposes what this has been about and that exposure is uncomfortable for The United States and for Europe. It basically says that this war was an unnecessary set of provocations from the West, not the unprovoked war of aggression by Russia.
Well, that's that's a big admission to to make. It it's a big change of view to swallow. But I think we're getting there, unfortunately. But before getting there, the war continues. It takes too much time to arrive at conclusions that you and I and many others have arrived at years ago.
This war could have ended. Of course, it could have been avoided entirely, and it could have ended at the negotiating table on better terms for Ukraine than today as of April 2022. But that option was turned down by The United States and UK, but especially The United States. So, here we are. Now, the specifics are still to be worked out and that is taking time.
Surely, there will not be NATO like guarantee for Ukraine that is tantamount to inviting a war between Russia and NATO. Russia's not going to agree to that. The United States and Europe should not agree to that. It's too easy to get drawn back into conflict or into an even escalated conflict. What does security therefore mean for Ukraine?
It's a good question and we should ask that directly. In my view, history and logic shows that Ukraine's real security is neutrality, that that is security in and of itself. In fact, because the history of Europe, it's a long history, but even the history of post World War II is that countries that were neutral remain neutral and basically unbothered by the Soviet Union or by Russia or by the Cold War or by the the post Cold War Cold War. In other words, countries that were neutral, like Sweden and Finland, which chose for wrong reasons recently to end their long neutrality, were not bothered by the Soviet Union or by Russia. Austria is my favorite case because it was an explicit design that Austria would become neutral in 1955.
The Soviet troops would leave. And I think it's right to say the Soviet Union never bothered Austria again, nor did Russia bother Austria. So we exaggerate the need for boots on the ground or Article five foot like guarantees. Neutrality is desirable. For both sides of a conflict.
In other words, Ukraine being in the middle, but neutral is by itself a major guarantee because both sides have an incentive to leave well enough alone so that neither is bothered by the other. And it was exactly undermining neutrality that led to the war in the first place. A second point is that Russia has proposed, and I think there's a very logical and reasonable way to do it, that Russia is one of the guarantors of peace because it's got security interests that need to be respected alongside Ukraine. The logical place for a real security arrangement is the UN Security Council that automatically brings in The US, UK and France, but also Russia and China. And it brings the public exposure and the ways to monitor an agreement.
Now we all know it's not perfect, but this is a way I think to make very clear what is agreed to have independent monitoring. And in our world that is pretty good and probably the best that should be aimed at in fact, rather than trip wires and mechanisms that one way or another lead to war by accident or by machination or by false flags, or by miscalculations. All of this is to say this security arrangement issue is solvable. It is not a breakpoint of negotiations. It should not be used in a way to try to break the negotiations similarly.
So if we get down to work and have some practical solutions in an arrangement that is monitored and and blessed by the UN Security Council, this war can end very quickly.
Speaker 0: It is strange to see the recognition that NATO is the source of the conflict, but yet they envision a role for NATO as the solution. But but this root causes of a more durable peace, it it's based on the recognition, though, that Ukraine is a mere symptom of a wider conflict, which is, yeah, the lack of a mutually acceptable post Cold War settlement, which has plagued us now for thirty years building up to this war. Now we actually had agreements for for an inclusive indivisible security architecture that abides by the principle of indivisible security in which we would then also consider Russia's sec security concern. But but I guess this is where NATO came in because instead of pursuing this indivisible security, we went with hegemonic peace, which entails expanding NATO. Now I'm just some levels, I'm still questioning the willingness even from Washington to actually reconsider the entire hegemonic system.
So I I wanted to ask you there for about the origin as well. I mean, you were there in the early nineteen nineties. You were advising not just Poland, but also Gorbachev, Yeltsin. What was the mindset and strategy of The United States for this post Cold War order?
Speaker 1: Yes. And as I answer that, let me say that this question goes back to 1945, not only to 1991. What kind of order will there be? Will it be collective security? Or will it be a block security and The US attempted hegemonic security?
Well, back in 1990, '91, '92, events were revolutionary. Of course, let me start it in 1989. Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union unilaterally ended the Cold War by saying that the Warsaw Pact Military Alliance would be dissolved. But more than that, and I was a direct witness to it, Gorbachev orchestrated the end of one party rule in Eastern Europe. He brokered the deal that, led to, Poland's first post communist government in the 1989.
He called, the communist president, Yaroslavsky, and said, take in that solidarity movement into your government, absolutely extraordinary. He was offering a true peace. He was offering a peace from Rotterdam to Vladivostok as it was described at the time, or a common European home. I was an advisor. I was absolutely smitten with this vision of a peace that would extend from Rotterdam to Vladivostok.
There's no doubt that Gorbachev meant it. And there's no doubt that the West prevaricated. What happened is that Gorbachev made unilateral concessions immediately with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chancellor Helmut Kohl called for reunification of Germany. This brings us to this point that the questions really start in 1945 because there was no treaty to end World War two, and Germany became divided, until, 1990.
When, German reunification was raised, that was the moment of setting a new architecture for European security, a collective security. And in the context of German reunification, The United States and Germany promised Gorbachev in February 1990 and many, many, many times onward that NATO would not enlarge eastward. In other words, that the peace and the German reunification would not take advantage of the Soviet Union or compromise Soviet security. This was key. Gorbachev said this is essential.
And the point was made. One can watch the tapes or look at documents. And I always encourage people to look for themselves at something called the National Security Archive of George Washington University. A, in a file called What Did Gorbachev Hear? Gorbachev heard an earful that NATO would not enlarge.
And this was the basis for reaching the four plus two agreement that reunified Germany in 1990. And that in essence ended World War II. It sounds strange that World War II was ended forty five years later, but there was no peace treaty after World War II. Now, The United States almost immediately cheated afterwards, because when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and again, I was there in the Kremlin as that happened, in fact, the Elsin said the same thing as the successor state. We want peace, we want cooperation, we count on the West as a peaceful partner.
But as soon as the Soviet Union was dissolving, The United States pursued an extension of the Cold War. This is the point. The Cold War did not end from the Western point of view. It did in surface rhetoric, but immediately the security state in The United States started to plan NATO enlargement. And by 1994, it was official US policy.
And in 1997, in a paper for Foreign Affairs magazine by Zbigniew Brzezinski called A Geostrategy for Eurasia, Brzezinski lays out The US strategy, including the expansion of NATO to Ukraine by around 2010 discussed in the article. And the article explains that the point is to weaken Russia, even to divide it into a set of loose, state, loose, confederacies, part of a confederation. Brzezinski talks about Russia, basically, dissolving from a unitary state into three pieces, a European Russia, a Siberian Russia, and a Far Eastern Russia linked together in a loose confederation that would have no imperial power, Brzezinski says. But this was Brzezinski as the Polish American anti Russian patriot, in his, wish list that the Cold War would continue onward to the point of the disintegration of Russia and NATO enlargement would be the linchpin of that and surrounding Russia in the Black Sea, meaning that Ukraine and Georgia, Romania and Bulgaria would join Turkey as Black Sea nations that would surround Russia and therefore surround Russia's naval fleet. So this story actually goes back to, yes, 1991, to promises unfulfilled by the West of no NATO enlargement.
But if I could, Glenn, I'd like to go back to 1945 just very briefly. There was no peace treaty at the end of World War II. In fact, by the 1945, both The UK and The US were already gearing up for a possible war against their ally, wartime ally, the Soviet Union. This is the most incredible fact that a military alliance that had defeated Hitler, in which the Soviet Union had suffered 27,000,000 deaths, broke apart within weeks of the end of World War II with Churchill asking his war command about the possibility of continuing the war against the Soviet Union. They said, no, not a good idea.
And the US military already foreseeing within weeks of the surrender of Germany, the possibility or even likelihood of war with the Soviet Union, by the early nineteen fifties. And because of that vision by The US and UK in 1945, in my view, the post war turned into a cold war rather than into a peacetime, because the peaceful approach to ending the war, which would have been the neutrality of Germany, of post Hitler Germany, was blocked by the Western powers. The West said, no. Germany is divided into four parts, the four occupying powers. Three of them, the Western side, will form the Federal Republic Of Germany, and it will be remilitarized.
And by 1955, it would join the new NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Alliance. So the West turned down the idea raised repeatedly by the Soviet Union of a demilitarized and neutral Germany as the key to a peace agreement in Europe. This was raised by the Soviet Union in 1945. It was raised again by Stalin in 1952. It was proposed again in the context of the Austrian neutrality in 1955.
But at all points, the West said, no. We will remilitarize our part of Germany. NATO will be our defense block. We will not have a neutral Germany in the center of Europe. To my mind, of course, this is heatedly debated among those historians that look at this.
To my mind, this was the lost opportunity to avoid a cold war, to avoid a harsh peace and one that nearly brought us to nuclear war on several occasions after World War II. And it was the chance to overcome that again in 1990 with German reunification. NATO could have been dissolved, should have been dissolved. At least it should not have moved one inch eastward. But we did in 1990, 9192, the same thing that the West did in 1945, that hegemonic idea.
It's a British idea, ultimately, not a US idea. The US learned it from Britain. But it's ultimately, we don't accept peace as equals. We must be hegemonic. And that idea, I think, was the basis of the Cold War and then the basis of the post 1991 system.
And it's what's in part on the table today. So the question is, can The United States accept a post hegemonic system? Globally, probably not yet. Within, Europe, probably yes, vis a vis Ukraine. But this is really what's on the table right now in in my view.
We've never gotten over eighty years of the British ultimate British idea, which became the American idea that peace through hegemony.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It's quite amazing that all the British strategy, they all planned. They called it operational unthinkable, which immediately after the war was over, they were planning an attack on the Soviet Union, surprise attack on their ally on the 07/01/1945. That is right after the war, consisting then of American, British, and also what remains of Nazi Germany's army, so using their eminent soldiers as well. It's kind of extraordinary to to that this would be, yeah, the the the plan.
But it kinda begs the question there for what to to what extent do you think the Washington is prepared for peace? Because I I hear that they they talk about ending the Ukraine war, but I don't hear anyone recognizing basic Russian security concerns. I hear no one talking about a common peace. I hear no speak of indivisible security where we recognize that all sides have to be yeah. Have have the security concerns met.
Instead, the rhetoric appears to be we lost Ukraine, but then that doesn't mean abandoning hegemony. That suggests a temporary ceasefire would do. So I I'd also just don't see anyone walking away from the idea that crime controlling Crimea and black the Black Sea is ultimate goal. Recently, general Donahue, he argued that NATO has plans for and has been training for invading Kaliningrad, which not just an attack on Russian territory, but would also put 1,000,000 Russians under NATO occupation. But, again, it's same with China.
I don't see any willingness to live side by side with the Chinese either. So it kinda begs the question, have have the hegemonic peace been abandoned? If not, is is a temporary peace or a temporary ceasefire all that's on the table in Ukraine?
Speaker 1: Well, I think first to say that the the low level of of discussion in Washington, in Brussels, in Berlin, in London, in Paris is shocking. Where are statesmen? Where are diplomats? We don't see any of them. Just the quality of this discussion is abysmal without any voices of inside governments of history, perspective of this point of view that we need to find a way to end this cycle of violence, of recognizing the choices before us.
Well, if you look at the US administration, it's a gang of the rankest amateurs. There's no thinker around in Washington right now. And this counts because the level of discussion is, it's sometimes mystifying. We don't even know what the words mean. And it's not only because of obfuscation, it's because of utter confusion.
Or you look at the discussion in London or Brussels, it's without even these concepts being asked or raised or debated. So I think that this is part of the story. The art of diplomacy, which is a skill, it requires knowledge, history, perspective when it's done very well, As in many examples in keeping the peace in nineteenth century Europe, it is the result of enormous skill and historical knowledge and perspective and active engagement in diplomacy. None of that happens right now. Within Europe, the Russophobia is rampant and wild.
The voices have been raised of the most Russophobic, elements. The fact that Europe is represented, by its probably single most Russophobic region, the Baltic States. One can understand in some way the Russophobia of the Baltic States. But on the other hand, one would think that there would be some perspective of prudence as well, but that's lacking. And to have Kayakalas from Estonia as the voice of Europe as the high representative vice president for external affairs is truly dismaying.
And to hear such simplicity and crudeness coming from Brussels is very dismaying. I should have added on that list of shocking lack of insight, of course, Germany. Mertz, can't I even I couldn't imagine a government to rival, how bad, the Scholz period was. But Mertz is actually worse. Mertz shows no perspective at all.
And how can it be that a Finnish president, just to add to my list of complaints, Stubb, who knows that on the basis of neutrality, as painful as Finnish history may be from Finland's perspective, in World War II or vis a vis the Soviet Union, neutrality for Finland brought Finland to number one in the world in world happiness and well-being. And it brought Finland to a state of peace and prosperity beyond imagining. And he can't bring himself to say anything other than continued war towards Russia. Can't explain anything about Finland's success. Can't explain anything about the real history, after 1944 about what neutrality means and how it can work.
So we don't have anybody trying to draw positive lessons right now. This makes a difference because ideas count. And when you have a complete vacuum of thought, as we have right now, You don't make progress beyond old failed ideas. The fact that a lot of the hegemonic tools are the toolkit of the CIA and the security agencies really hurts, because a huge amount of foreign policy of the West is like the iceberg. It's submerged below the surface.
It is truly deep state operations. It's covert operations. It's regime change operations. And by the way, one piece of evidence completely in support of your proposition that the thinking hasn't changed is even as we're trying to make peace in Ukraine, we are messing up the South Caucasus royally right now, with the The United States claiming a ninety nine year corridor on the border of Iran. Unthinkable things that will lead to new wars through the same kind of machinations as in the past.
So all of this is to say, this is the time when we should be rethinking more fundamentally the collective security, exactly where you started. Ukraine at least could push us to thinking again. It's been a long time since there has been thinking. Foreign policy in The US has been on autopilot basically since the 1990s. It failed miserably.
It failed Ukraine miserably. It failed Western security miserably. It failed everybody miserably. Maybe as people contemplate what does security really mean in the coming weeks, somebody will learn something from history.
Speaker 0: I'm glad you mentioned the Europeans. I just have a very brief last question before we run out of time is the Europeans now, not only are they opposed to Trump's peace efforts, they don't even wanna talk to Russia. Is this is this a failure to imagine a multipolar world or to live without The United States? Or how how do you make sense of refusing to end the war they're losing?
Speaker 1: The structural problem of Europe being 27 independent countries remains unsolved. There is no clear security architecture for Europe, and the Europeans have not devised one. And The US was their security blanket and their security umbrella, if you want, all this time. And so this led to an utter decline of European thinking and a simple dependency on The United States. And we don't see among any of the actors right now, Starmer or Mertz or Macron or others, any leader with ideas.
They're absolutely, not, presenting, structured ideas about European security. So this is this is very disappointing. I think it shocks all of us who view Europe as, you know, a very sophisticated place. This is the most unsophisticated discussions one can imagine. I I would use the word primitive.
And the failure of any Europeans to sit down with Russian counterparts and actually discuss these things is mind boggling. You learn when you discuss and meeting for the ten thousandth time with Zelensky and not once with Lavrov is, is the huge blunder.
Speaker 0: Well, thank you so much for your time and, yeah, look forward to seeing you very soon in New York.
Speaker 1: We'll talk soon. Thanks a lot.
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
Jeffrey Sachs: NATO Expansion Provoked the Ukraine War https://t.co/H9B5Ohm430
Video Transcript AI Summary
Let me just say that all the major conflicts can be ended straightforwardly. The Ukraine war the causes of the Ukraine war is NATO enlargement, US coup, CIA operations all over Ukraine, even the New York Times reported that one a couple of months ago. We've got to stop being in Russia's face. They know all of it. They know who paid for the Maidan demonstrators. They've got everything. We've got to stop the provocations. And yes, by the way, there was no Russian demand for territory of any kind. Crimea, they wanted a twenty five year lease, which they negotiated, president Putin, and president Yanukovych. Not territory, not a claim. No NATO, you're not getting that base. In 2021, the war could have been avoided easily by president Biden saying to president Putin, NATO will not expand to Ukraine, and I will say so. I called Jake Sullivan. He teaches at Harvard. It's all consistent, after you fail in Washington, and I said, Jake, avoid a war. There’s not gonna be a war. Open door policy for NATO. Ukraine can be stopped when the president of The United States says publicly NATO will not enlarge.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Let me just say that all the major conflicts can be ended straightforwardly. The Ukraine war the causes of the Ukraine war is NATO enlargement, US coup, CIA operations all over Ukraine, even the New York Times reported that one a couple of months ago. We've got to stop being in Russia's face. They know it. They know all of it.
They were so kind as to post Victoria Nuland's call with Jeffrey Piatt choosing the next government. Thank you. They know all of it. They know who paid for the Maidan demonstrators. They've got everything.
We've got to stop the provocations. And yes, by the way, there was no Russian demand for territory of any kind. Crimea, they wanted a twenty five year lease, which they negotiated, president Putin, and president Yanukovych. Not territory, not a claim. Even after the coup, Russia took back Crimea.
No NATO, you're not getting that base. But even when it came to the Donbas, they just said autonomy in this post coup anti Russia regime. The United States said no to that one too. And incidentally, I'll share with you just one moment. In 2021, the war could have been avoided easily by president Biden saying to president Putin, NATO will not expand to Ukraine, and I will say so.
And I called Jake Sullivan. He teaches at Harvard. It's all consistent, after you fail in Washington, and I said, Jake, avoid a war. Stop NATO enlargement, it's ridiculous. It's useless.
Would you like it on the Rio Grande in Mexico, a military Mex a Russian military base? Said Jeff, we have an open door policy for NATO. Said, Jake, give me a break. Open door policy. I repeated the Monroe Doctrine to no effect, and I said, Jake, stop the NATO enlargement.
He said to me, Jeff, NATO's not going to enlarge to Ukraine. I said, Jake, we're gonna have a war over something that's not gonna happen? Why didn't you say so? He said to me, don't worry, there's not gonna be a war. Honestly these people are not clever.
They're not clever. What they're doing makes no sense, They don't know what they're doing. We don't know when Biden checked out, maybe already then, but in any event, they're not smart. They're getting us into trouble so we could make peace in Ukraine. Tomorrow was a yesterday was a hint of it, but you could see the president is so everything about our media, about the congress, about the military industrial complex, he whether he has the skill or not, don't know.
But if he were a communicator, and had the guts, and what he should stand up and explain to the American people this was about NATO enlargement, we're not gonna do it. And that would be the end. But he can't quite, he says it privately I'm sure, but not publicly. Why? Because we're still trapped.
We're trapped as Eisenhower told us we're trapped. And all these think tanks up and down the East Coast are bought the same way. It's all phony, everything you hear about it, the data there was a report recently about Russia's casualties being x times that of Ukraine by one of the Washington think tanks, so I looked at the it was absurd, so I looked at the footnote, where'd that come from? The footnote came from the Ministry of Defense of Britain, I was already suspicious. So then I went to the Ministry of Defense of Britain, and after a little maneuvering, tracked down its source.
It was Ukraine. Oh my god. They get paid for this. Of course, it's paid propaganda. Okay.
Ukraine can be stopped when the president of The United States says publicly NATO will not enlarge. He could add parentheses, it was a bad idea. If he wants, he could say, it wasn't my idea, was their terrible ideas. He could say Obama did the coup, whatever he wants to say, but if he told the treaty the war will end.
@Glenn_Diesen - Glenn Diesen
Scott Ritter: Trump Set Up Putin & Escalates War With Russia https://youtu.be/zH5xP8GSArg https://t.co/SENuU6mzhN
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 0 and Speaker 1 discuss a series of escalating tensions and strategic assessments around Ukraine, NATO, Russia, and the United States.
- Nightfall concept and implications: The British Ministry of Defence announced a new deep-strike ballistic missile for Ukraine, Nightfall, intended to carry a 200 kilogram warhead with a 500 kilometer range to strike Moscow. Scott Ritter says Nightfall is a joke: it is still developing, with a budget around £9,000,000, no production facility, no prototype built or tested, and a target of producing 10 missiles a month at about £800,000 each. He argues the idea is not a real weapon but an underfinanced concept, and that Russia will watch with interest while the plan remains insufficient to matter.
- Britain’s strategic credibility and potential retaliation: Ritter contends that Britain could strike Moscow with such missiles only once before Russia responds decisively, potentially even with nuclear weapons. He asserts Russia resents Britain as a “failing power” and believes there is “great hatred” toward Britain among Russia’s political elite; he predicts Russia would not tolerate continued British escalation.
- Western troop commitments and feasibility: The discussion also covers the idea of sending British troops to Ukraine. Ritter asserts that Britain cannot deploy 7,600 troops nor sustain them logistically or politically; he describes the British military as incapable of a rapid deployment and notes the overall size and combat-readiness of the British forces as insufficient for sustained operations.
- The “keep Ukraine in the fight” plan: The speakers discuss the UK’s strategy to keep Ukraine in conflict as a political/propaganda effort, rather than a path to victory. Ritter calls much of Ukraine’s and Western rhetoric “the theater of the absurd” and says many actions by Ukraine are designed for propaganda rather than strategic success. He highlights drone strikes on Caspian oil rigs as demonstrative of “propaganda purposes.” He also notes that Russia’s response includes power and water outages across Ukraine and a strong retaliatory capability.
- Arashnik and Russia’s nuclear posture: They discuss Russia’s Arashnik program, noting that initial launches were treated as test missiles, with a brigade deployed in Belarus and other units being prepared for fielding. Ritter asserts that Arashnik is now a permanent part of Russia’s strategic posture, and that Russia is deploying production-quality missiles, though exact production rates are uncertain.
- Arms control and the European security architecture: Ritter claims there is a “total disconnect from reality” in Europe, asserting arms control is effectively dead. He argues Russia has advantages in intermediate and strategic nuclear forces, while U.S. forces are aging and expensive to modernize; he predicts a coming arms race with Russia holding an advantage. He is critical of attempts at extending New START and expresses belief that arms control is no longer feasible given the current political environment and U.S. leadership.
- The Alaska “spirit” and U.S. foreign policy: The conversation discusses the 2024-25 era, with mentions of Donald Trump and the CIA’s role in anti-Russian operations. Ritter argues that U.S. actions, including cyber and drone activities against Russian targets (oil refineries and military assets), reflect a CIA-led strategy against Russia. He contends that Trump’s approach has shifted over time from tentative peace prospects to aggressive posturing, and that American leadership lacks trustworthiness in negotiations.
- Intelligence and operational transparency: The dialogue touches on the May 2024 and June 2025 attacks on Russian deterrence assets (e.g., Engels base, and the Kerch Bridge operation). Ritter argues that the intelligence community (notably MI6 and the CIA) uses psychological operations to undermine Putin, but that Russia’s restraint and measured responses indicate limited willingness to escalate beyond a point.
- Toward a broader European security collapse: Ritter foresees NATO’s dissolution or “death,” suggesting that the United States will pursue bilateral arrangements with European states as NATO weakens. He predicts Greenland and broader European security would become dominated by U.S. strategic interests, diminishing European autonomy.
- On Trump’s transformation and democracy in the U.S.: The speakers debate Trump’s evolution, with Ritter arguing that Trump’s rhetoric and actions reveal a long-standing pattern of deceit and anti-democratic behavior, including alleged manipulation of elections and the undermining of international law. He depicts a grim view of the constitutional republic’s future, suggesting that Trump has consolidated power in ways that erode checks and balances.
- Final reflections: The conversation closes with a weighing of whether peace can be achieved given deep mistrust, the CIA’s alleged influence in Ukraine, and the wider geopolitical shifts. Both acknowledge growing instability, the potential end of NATO as a cohesive alliance, and the possibility of a broader, more dangerous security environment if current trajectories persist.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Welcome back. We are here with Scott Ritter, a former US marine intelligence officer and also a UN weapons inspector. So thank you for coming back on. We see now that the British Ministry of Defense has published that they're developing a new deep strike ballistic missile for Ukraine, Nightfall, it's called, with the objective of carrying a 200 kilo warhead with a 500 kilometer range so that it can strike Moscow. It seems almost as if it's foolish now to still pretend as if this is a proxy war.
I mean, Russia obviously hasn't escalated with NATO as it wants to avoid World War three, but the restraint seems to, time and time again, be interpreted as a weakness. How long do you think this can go on? I mean, the can the British bomb Moscow with 200 kilo warheads and still pretend this is a Russia Ukraine war?
Speaker 1: They can do it once, and then then the reality of their errors will be made manifest as Russia strikes British. I mean, I if the British don't think that the Russians won't attack Great Britain decisively. And when I say decisively, I mean up to and including nuclear weapons. There's no love lost between Russia and Great Britain. In fact, within the political elite in Russia, there's a great deal of hatred towards Great Britain.
The British have never treated the Russians well ever. And, you know, the Russians are sort of fed up with this failing power, failing power, approaching failed power, continuing to insert itself in the manner that's, you know, not just disrespectful, but, you know, it it it represents a a threat, not of existential nature, but a threat to Russia's national security. There there's only one piece of good news in all of this. Nightfall is a joke. It's an absolute joke.
I mean, just look at the numbers. Okay. We're told that the first of all, it's in developing. It's it's not developed. It's developing.
The amount of money that was allocated, I believe, was $9,000,000 or £9,000,000, 9,000,000, whatever currency element is attached to that. That's not very much. And when you look at the small print, they say that the goal is to be able to produce 10 of these skyfalls a month at a cost of £800,000 each. Now, I'm just a simple marine. I don't claim to be the greatest mathematician in the world, but 10 times 800,000 gets you to the about £8,000,000 mark.
And if the total budget for developing this missile is 9, do you understand how much of a joke this is? They don't even have a production facility yet. They have not built a prototype. They haven't tested a prototype. We don't even know if the concept works.
It's the British allowing their mouths to get ahead of their brains once again. Yes, the Russians, of course, will be following this with great interest. But the the idea that Skyfall is a weapon that's about to make its debut on the battlefields of Ukraine is a joke. It's not a weapon. It's an idea that's been totally under financed.
£9,000,000. Do you know what the payroll of a of a missile production line is? It's more than £9,000,000. You know, so they haven't even hired the people yet. They got a bunch of scientists somewhere, you know, with chalk, drawing pictures on a board, taking snapshots of it with their iPhone and send it to the defense minister saying we have a plan.
That's all they have. So I I don't think anybody's losing sleep over this. It's just another stupid idea from a nation of stupid people.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So another headline or article coming out of Britain by one of their generals, Richard Sheriff, who was was well, warning against some of this more aggressive rhetoric coming out of London. That is he made the point that the idea of sending troops to Ukraine was kind of out of the question because they don't have the manpower. They don't have the money. They don't have the military equipment, and also not the political will, either by the political class or the public.
So what is the point of all this escalatory rhetoric if they can't even back it up with anything real?
Speaker 1: Because we're we're in the theater of the absurd right now. This is pure theater. The British have a plan, a master plan they've been seeking to implement in Ukraine called keep Ukraine in the fight. A key aspect of that is the psychological preparation of Ukraine for sustaining a conflict that by any measure it's being decisively defeated in. At this juncture, any rational leadership having assessed the totality of the picture, understanding that there was no pathway to victory would be looking for a pathway to avoid an even more decisive defeat.
But that's not what's happening in Ukraine. The Ukrainian government in in a way that just defies comprehension, to double down on stupid and undermine whatever strategic resources it had plans, throwing away reserves and fruitless attacks for propaganda prayer because this is all propaganda purposes. Everything that's done in Ukraine today is for propaganda purposes. They launched drone attacks against luke oil drilling rigs in the Caspian Sea. They didn't destroy the rigs, but they got their video they were able to put out there.
And they have Zelenskyy meeting with the new head of the Ukrainian intelligence services talking about how we have struck deep into Russia. They not understand that the retaliation that Russia will inflict on them is going to be extreme? You know, chunks of Kyiv don't have power, don't have water and not going to get power and water restored. Much of Ukraine is in a similar fashion. The Russians just unleashed a second a second or eschnik on the Ukrainians, which, you know, given the silence of Ukraine about what happened implies that the Russians sort of hit what they were planning on hitting and getting done what they planned on getting done.
And so the British right now have to do, you know, staged actions. They meet in Paris, the coalition of the willing. They may be willing, but they're unable. I don't want to get too crude here, but you put a 110 year old man in bed with a 22 year old starlet, he may be willing, but he's not going to be able. And this is Europe.
This is The UK today. They can't perform. They're literally pathetic. 76,000 is the total size of the British military. That, you know, now you parse that down into how many of those are actually combatant troops.
And when the British are talking about deploying 7,600 troops, they can't. They don't have them. They literally don't have them. They can't deploy them. They're incapable of physically moving these troops out of The United Kingdom into Ukraine and then sustaining them.
The logistics along is beyond the capability of the British military. And when you talk about sending a force in, I mean, there are two things. One, where's your rapid reaction force? I mean, you're going to put 7,600 troops in harm's way. What happens when the proverbial bovine excrement hits the fan?
Who's riding to the rescue of these 7,000? There's no one to ride to their rescue. They'll be dead. All of them will die. But then also let's just assume that they don't die.
What's their rotation? Six months? That means you need another 7,600 training up to replace them, getting equipped, brought up to speed, which they are unable to do. These British troops are not combat deployable. They're not combat deployable.
They can barely get out of garrison. Okay. So now if you scrape everything together and you get 7,600 deployed, you need another 7,600 to replace them. And you need another 7,600 on top of that preparing, getting ready, getting your paperwork done, getting your final training done, preparing. That's how a standard rotation works.
The British can't do it. And they know it and they've been called out on it by their leadership. It's an absolute joke. The same thing with the rest of Europe. I mean, none of nobody in Europe can do this.
And now we come to the skyfall. It's a non existent missile. I'd be surprised if it ever existed past the prototype. It let's just put it this way. If you have a a missile that's 800,000 pounds, it's not a very sophisticated missile.
And you think that missile is going to actually penetrate Russian air defenses if it is produced? No. All it's going to do is make England a target. And I I don't know how many more times you have to listen to Dmitry Medvedev say, guys, it's gonna happen before it's going to happen. You have members of, the Russian Duma saying, We need to strike now with nuclear weapons.
I mean, is where this conversation's gone. The Russians now are taking a look at what The United States is doing with NATO, and they are firmly convinced, at least at certain levels, that they could strike Europe with nuclear weapons and The United States would do nothing. That The United States will not commit suicide on behalf of Europe, especially if Europe is provoking the Russian bear, to speak. It's a very dangerous way of thinking. I don't agree with it.
I actually think we would do something. I think we'd end up with a general nuclear exchange and all life on the planet would end. But Sergei Karagawa, was a very influential political thinker, famously or infamously said that The United States will not sacrifice Boston for Poznan, meaning that Russia could throw a nuclear weapon on Poznan and The United States would do nothing. So this is where we're at. Now we have the French pretending that they have a strategic nuclear deterrent capable of, of holding Russia at bay.
You have the British pretending that what's left of their strategic nuclear deterrent is relevant. And you have the Russians making the decision that Arashnik is staying, not just staying, but will be a part of their strategic nuclear deterrence profile indefinitely, means intermediate nuclear forces are now here to stay in Europe. Thank you, Donald Trump, and thank you Europe for destabilizing your continent. And it gives Russia the ability to do strategic escalation in a non nuclear fashion, which means Russia's more likely to use this weapon in the future. So, know, this is where we're at right now.
Total disconnect from reality in Great Britain and in Europe.
Speaker 0: Yeah. This project of keeping Ukraine in the fight is kinda strange that this is where we are now. There's no pretense that they can win. Just our goal is now for them to lose slower and, again, bleed out the rest of their their manpower. It's it's it's it's so dark because you know that if there was a British troops being slaughtered in this way, they would they would not have put this as an objective to keep the war going at any cost.
They would have made a deal or pulled out by now. But, again, they're fighting with Ukrainians, so I don't think they're counting their losses. But there was you mentioned the Oreshnyk, and this came in response to this attack on Putin's residence. I was wondering what you make of this because I listened to former adviser of Zelensky, Alexey Orestovich, who made the point that the real target was probably beneath these residents, which is a nuclear command center. And I thought it was interesting because, as we know, in June 2025, they they also attacked Russia's nuclear bombers.
That is its nuclear deterrent. Again, the the Russians see the British as being behind this. And, of course, in May 2024, we know that Russia's early warning radars for nuclear attack was attacked as well. And you can add all these attacks on the Engels Nuclear Airbase, but if you put them all together, there's a lot of attacks on Russia's nuclear deterrent here then. I mean, if any of these things had happened once during the Cold War, there would have been panic, red flags going up, possible nuclear exchange.
But now this is becoming a almost a common occurrence. What do you think is the thought process behind this? I mean, going after the nuclear deterrent of the largest nuclear power in the world?
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, when you put it that way, it sort of makes it look imbecilic. But let's let's back up for a second. MI six, the secret intelligence service of the British. When it comes to Russia, they are extraordinarily incompetent. Extraordinary because, I mean, we only have to take a look at the case of Christopher Steele, who was the former SIS operative agent who worked in the former Soviet Union and you know, the quality of his work.
There in the 1990s, they spent a whole bunch of effort and not so much money recruiting anybody they could. I mean, was, it was easy pickings. They just went out and recruited everybody, taxi drivers, hookers, know, politicians, former politicians, everybody. Then the Russians cracked down. And if you remember, there were some famous scenes coming out of Russia, the Spyrok, if you remember the Spyrok.
And the Russians, of course, uncovered the Spyrok and uncovered everything that was going on in the Spyrok and unraveled, you know, those networks that the British had that were functioning. The British have some deep sleep networks that they've activated. We see we saw them activate them in support of the Kerch Bridge Attack, which was a British operation. And we saw them bring it up with this operation with the drone striking the the airfield. But the British, they are very superficial here.
You see, they they their Russia house is appended to their London station and their London station is home of a bunch of anti Putin emigres. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, not Khodorkovsky, I think, the former, you know, oil oligarch who was imprisoned for corruption and then released. He's now there using his billions to work with MI6 to create this anti Putin propaganda machine. And they advise the British, they work hand in glove. And so you- all you have to do is listen to the stupidity that comes out of this former oligarch's mouth and the people around him.
And you see how it's translated into action by MI6. The belief that if you hit these targets, you will undermine the credibility of Vladimir Putin. They believe that Vladimir Putin is a unpopular dictator who rules through fear and intimidation. And that if they can expose him as weak and frail, that they will create the opportunity for these disaffected, enraged aspects of Russian society to remove him from power. So, they're the ones behind this.
This is a deliberate act to be seen as not destroying Russia's capability, but destroying Putin's reputation. That's the goal. That's the objective. And Donald Trump bought into it. This drone attack is an American attack.
It's not a British attack. It's an American attack in support of a British plan. Keep Ukraine in the fight. Let's bring down Vladimir Putin. But, you know, they they made a a fatal mistake.
They gave away the evidence. They, they, they, you know, these 91 drones that came in, many of them were of a type that made use of a specific, computer chip, that contains all the programming that's used to guide this drone. And this drone doesn't operate on GPS because GPS is of course jammed. It's pre programmed and then it has AI And as it flies in, it will occasionally take a picture and then compare the picture to mapping data that's stored and realign readjust based upon wind speed and all the, all these things are collecting and then fly to the target. To get that, the intelligence that has to be loaded into the chip has to be both extremely detailed and also extremely timely, meaning you need the most recent updates for this thing to hit the target it wants to.
This means that Palantir, this company that's running this operation on behalf of the CIA and the British to program these chips, they claimed that they make use of commercially available information. There's no commercially available data collectors out there that can collect the data that went into this. When the Russians reverse engineered the information in this chip, the timing of the information is linked now to assets that are capable of collecting during that window of opportunity. The specificity of the data, again, limits it to certain. The bottom line is the Russians know exactly which intelligence resource collected the information.
The way this data is packaged consolidate it because you're taking different sources of information and you're bringing them together into a single digital information packet. There's literally only one place in Europe that can do this, That's a Department of Defense organization or entity in Europe that supports the targeting of the Tomahawk missile because the same principles of targeting here applied. So the Russians know which intelligence assets collected the data, who processed it and packaged it and put it into this chip. So when the Russians turned this over to The United States at a time when Donald Trump was saying, there was no attack. If they did, they attacked this thing here.
The Russians said here. And by doing so, they said, we know everything. Yeah. I mean, it does, you know, the defense intelligence agency, the CIA is gonna reverse engineer a chip and go. They know everything, which means Trump will have been exposed as a liar, an absolute liar, a fraud.
A man who literally used negotiations to try and target president of Russia. Not in a way to kill him. I mean, look, drones have a long time of flight. They've redetected. This was a demonstration of vulnerability designed to create the impression that Putin is weak and that he is subordinated to Trump, that Trump is daddy to him, and Trump gets to dictate, Putin's the the the misbehaving little boy.
And the other signal it sends to Russians, including especially those who have become excited by Kirill Dmitryev's economic outreach that, hey, everything could be better if we just got these sanctions lifted. But now we can't because of Vladimir Putin. He's sort of losing it. I mean, he's attacked. He's doing nothing and all that.
You know, this is the impression to get British psychological operations, mental warfare, information operations. They do this for a living. I've actually done it with them in the past targeting Iraq. I know the office. I could take you into the headquarters and walk you up and take you to the office.
I don't know if I know the people anymore because I'm of a certain age where my contemporaries may not be in service anymore, but I know who they are and what they do. And you know, the Russians know this as well, but they're so wrong because Vladimir Putin isn't weak. And what the Russians just did, you know, that first Arashnik they used was a was a test missile. The Russians said it's operational test. Now they've gone into serial production and they have deployed a brigade in Belarus, but they're in the process of deploying other brigades.
Now these brigades are using production quality missiles. But at the time Vladimir Putin said, have a number of other Arashnik's in in, you know, available to us. Test missiles. These are test missiles. The missile that was launched against Ukraine was a, was a test arrest and it got out of Kapustin Yar where they continue to do operational testing.
Because remember, this is a weapon system that's been brought in fairly quickly. And so there's still some tests that are being done or have been done recently, but they have a stockpile of these missiles now that aren't operational quality, meaning they're not serial production. They don't have the certificates. They don't have the, they call them the passports that attach to them out of the production facility. I believe that Russia launched another one of these test missiles.
But in doing so, you know, they preserve their stockpile. We don't know what the production rate of the Arashnik is. We can guess that if it went into serial production in August and by December, they they are able to deploy a minimum of 10 missiles to this Belarusian Russian unit because you need nine for the three battalions of three launchers of three missiles each, and you need a tenth for training purposes. And, you know, so we have an idea what their production rate is. It may be greater than that because Russia is talking about simultaneously preparing other units for fielding.
But they didn't launch from a combat position. They launched from Kapustin Yar, which tells me it's another training missile. But the important thing is they launched. And if you look at the rhetoric that came out of Russia afterwards, the Urechnik is now a permanent part of Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent posture. Any hope we had of reviving arms control, for instance, New Start, which will expire next month, it will not be extended.
It's over. It's dead. Vladimir Putin talked about extending the caps associated with that. But to do that, you needed The United States to concur. Right now, there's no movement in that direction, but you also needed the political environment to be conducive to this.
And the key element of this political environment is that there was no escalation in the INF. Meaning, if if The United States deploys Dark Eagle to Europe, that's the end of it. Or there can be no deployment of Golden Dome. Well, Trump just turned the the the the defense budget he promised to cut in half. He now is increasing it by 33 per you know, by 50%, 1,500,000,000,000.0, much of that going to Golden Dome.
So the Russians have just basically said, we're done with arms control. I was supposed to go to Russia in March and April to Saint Petersburg where we were going to have a very cool exercise. Graduate level students would play the role of American and Russian negotiating teams. We would have a team of American arms control experts advising the team playing the Americans, a team of Russian arms control experts advising the team playing the Russians. And then we would go through this exercise, capture this data, and produce a deliverable that we were going to give to both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was supporting this endeavor at the time, and the Department of State as an effort to sort of kickstart to say, here's some ideas.
And there's a lot of excitement for this. That's dead. They just canceled. The Russians are like, no, we're not doing arms control anymore. It's just not going to happen.
There's no reason to even go through the motions of it. So this is a big deal. This is a huge deal. We are about to enter an arms race where Russia holds all of the advantages already. They have deployed intermediate forces that are unmatched.
They have the best strategic nuclear forces in the world, most modern. The United States is confronted by the reality that our bombers don't work, our missiles are old, and our submarines are aging out quickly. And it's going to cost us trillions of dollars to fix this problem, money we don't have. At the same time, the president's diverting precious resources to build a missile defense system, will never work ever. None of the technology in Golden Dome is proven and we can't afford it and it won't work.
But, you know, from the Russian perspective, the American actions combined with the fact that the president of The United States attempted to assassinate the president of Russia. It means that the Russians will never do anything to give away the advantages they have. This advantage that they have is what ensures that they will never be defeated. Nobody can defeat Russia because Russia has this unmatched nuclear capability. The Russians will never negotiate that away, ever.
They have overmatched in every aspect, except perhaps submarine launched ballistic missiles. But with the Poseidon now, I would say that Russia's submarine delivered nuclear arsenal is better than the Tridentine Mihds. So, you know, that's where we are. It's over for arms control. It's a very sad reality.
I don't know if we're going to survive this. I mean, this is a very dangerous time. I'm becoming somewhat despondent. I try to remain optimistic and I will continue to move forward and see what can be done to educate people. But you know, The United States is ruled by a dictator who doesn't care about international law, doesn't care about constitutional law, doesn't care about anything but his own, you know, ego driven narcissism.
And this is a very dangerous
Speaker 0: thing.
Speaker 1: Arms control is about international law, and The United States doesn't believe in international law anymore, which means there can be no arms control. So, we're into an arms race that America can't afford. An arms race that underpins the notion of peace through strength. But when the reality of your strength is that you have no strength and yet you want to continue to posture, that creates the potential for bluffing or, you know, biting off more than you can chew. And how long the Russians are willing to pay the pay play the patient game?
I don't know. I mean, the good news is that Russia loves itself, and they believe in their civilization, and they believe in the glory of their civilization. And having resurrected themselves, I don't see the Russians turning into a bunch of lemmings overnight rushing to the nearest cliff to jump off. And so hopefully, we can pray for continued patience and pragmatism on the part of the Russian leadership. But they tried to kill their president.
I mean, my god, could you imagine what the American response would be if Donald Trump was in Camp David and 91, Russian drones launched by Venezuela were launched against Camp David at a time where president Putin would say, hey, just hold on for another hour. I'll be right back. I'll call you back. Just stay right there at Camp David. I'll call you right back.
And then try to attack him. We'd be blowing everything up in the world. I mean, the fact that Russia limited their response to what they did, again, is proof positive that Russia is not looking to escalate. But how much longer we can count on Russian, you know, responsible Russian behavior is not known. There's people are losing their patience in Russia.
There's no doubt about that.
Speaker 0: Well, it is interesting, though, that well, I noticed when Trump got elected for the second time, there was some cautious optimism in Moscow. I guess the assumption or hope was that there's a century of conflict between The US and Russia could come to an end because a lot of this, of course, was communism. And then, of course, after the Cold War, it was the efforts of preserving well, essentially, the Cold War security architecture, which then revived the Cold War logic with Russia. But the idea that in a multiple world, the Russians and Americans could be actually friends, if not allies, it was appealing. Again, that that, yeah, that they could take out, I guess, the root of the of the conflict.
But the belief in belief in Trump, though, has diminished. He keeps talking about sanctions against Russia, the need to, you know, harm its economy. There's still US weapons being used against Russia. It's the CIA which operates and does intelligence. We saw this New York Times article in which the Trump had given the green light to attack Russian refineries and ships.
I mean, we already crossed the line long ago of what was a proxy war. This is very direct. And now, of course, boarding the Russian ships, which is it's very hard. You can't let this go because if this is accepted, it becomes the new norm. And now suddenly all Russian ships in the on at sea can be intercepted.
You even hear now more aggressive rhetoric from, yeah, from the Europeans saying, oh, we can also border ships. We can make it seem legal. I mean, it are we heading towards a major war here?
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, we are. This is very dangerous, a very dangerous period of time. Look, I was one of those people that shared, you know, sort of cautious optimism that Trump was serious about peace. I, I really did.
I knew that he had to fight the deep state, but I thought that it was Donald Trump versus the deep state. And I think the Russians believe that as well. But what we're finding out is that, you know, Donald Trump didn't just surround himself with Russophobic personalities who don't believe in not just don't believe in good relations, but actively seek to destroy Russia. Scott Bessen, the secretary of treasurer, he wants- he believes that he can bring Russia to its knees, that he can physically destroy the Russian economy. And he wants to do that.
He is supported by members of Congress. Lindsey Graham is one of them. I just thought that, you know, that was, you know, Trump saying, okay, speak loudly and, you know, we'll keep the pressure on the Russians until we get this deal and then I'll come in and fix everything. But it appears that no, President Trump has been behind this, this economic strangulation plan forever. That everything he was doing with Russia was, was a lie.
It was a setup that Alaska was never meant. I thought can I my mind gets blown sometimes? Julia Gaganis was the former National Intelligence Officer of Russia Eurasia back in 2016, and she honchoed the 2017 intelligence community assessment that said that, you know, Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians to steal the election in 2016. She knew it was a lie. She doctored the intelligence.
And then when it looked like she was going get called out, they put her into a, you know, sort of a semi retirement. They gave her a she was still a CIA officer, but they put her in one of the think tanks in Washington, DC. Well, she was pulled out of that think tank shortly before she was pulled out. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director underwent an emergency whitewashing. He, I guess, had found out that Tulsa Gabbard was getting ready to release the Gates report and other reports that would expose the deception and criminality of the intelligence community in manufacturing a case against Trump regarding Russia.
So, he published a five page declassified memorandum that basically gave Julia Garganis a clean bill of health. This is a woman who's on record saying, hate Donald Trump. I want to bring Donald Trump down. But he whitewashes her and she's on the airplane briefing Donald Trump on his way to meet Putin. I used to think that was just a big mistake.
I now believe that Donald Trump knew that this was a lady who hates Russia and that he- Donald Trump has won the CIO over by telling him, no, no, no. I'm not a Russian asset. I'm Russia's worst enemy. I'm Russia's worst nightmare. Tell me what I need to do to set Putin up.
I believe Trump went to Alaska to set Vladimir Putin up. And how do you set him up? You use Kuril Dimitriv. You create this artificial notion that sanctions can be lifted. And when they are lifted, it's going to be a glorious economic renaissance for Russia and The United States.
And then what happens is Putin buys into that, comes back and they start holding meetings. We wanna revitalize oil production in the North. Oh, well, let's call the mayor and the governor. You guys get a committee together and tell us what we need to do. What are our number one priorities?
And people start planning about the better times they're going to come and they start spending that money before they have it. And what you've done there is you've carried out mental warfare and you've created a fifth column inside Russia of people who are now anticipating the lifting of sanctions, which are never going to be lifted by the way. But then Trump says they're not going to be lifted because of Vladimir Putin. He's the one. I'm not happy with Putin.
I think Putin's the problem. I think Putin's this. And the idea is to create a wedge between Putin and the political and economic elites who are now you know, enthralled about the potential lifting of sanctions. That's what Donald Trump did. Radcliffe, he didn't carry out these The New York Times article came out at an interesting time because it was timed literally for the assassination attempt against Putin.
I believe the article may have had a different headline and and some paragraphs that were removed because I think the article was, hey, look what we did. We're the CIA. We were really doing this all the time. And then when it failed and the Russian found out, they changed it, but they didn't change the article. The CIA had to openly collaborate with the New York Times for this article.
This is highly classified information. The idea that the CIA is enabling Ukraine to strike Russian oil refining capacity in specific components in there, the precision necessary. And the CIA is doing this at a time when the president is talking about the spirit of Alaska. It means it's a setup. It's a lie.
There was never a spirit of Alaska. The CIA is at war with Russia today. At war with Russia. The CIA is killing Russians. Scott Besson's secretary or department of the treasury is at war with Russia to try to destroy the Russian economy.
Marco Rubio is at war with Russia seeking the isolation. Remember Rubio is dual headed, and this is where the ultimate nefariousness comes in because he can be the secretary of state and say, Hey, we're all for diplomacy. Remember his little snide comment? Hey Sergei, how are doing? Like he's friends with Sergei Lavrov.
He's not. He hates Sergei Lavrov. We know he hates Sergei Lavrov because he said he hates Sergei Lavrov. He hates every Russian, but he's pretending that he's diplomatic. Then he goes and puts on his national security advisor hat, where he's not accountable to anybody but the president.
And he's the one who green lights the CIA attacks. It goes through the national security advisor. The CIA goes through him. The treasury department goes through him. Rubio is running this anti Russian campaign as the national security adviser.
So Donald Trump's been a liar from day one. Day one. And I think the Russians are waking up to this reality. Of course, the Russians are pragmatic. And as Lavrov said, we won't end negotiations or discussions with the Americans.
They never the Russians never fully walk away, but they're going nowhere. The Russians can't trust these people at all. I mean, if they do trust these people, then you have to question, you know, are the Russians really as capable as everybody says they are, including myself? You can't trust The United States. You can't trust Donald Trump.
And now you layer this with people who, I mean, the whole boat thing, to show you how stupid people are, you know, the reflagging of this of this boat this, this, this tanker, I think it was a Ghanian ship or no, no, Gyanian ship, maybe you know, it reflagged in process, not illegal not normal, but not illegal, but the Russians used a process that only has legitimacy in Russian territorial waters. It's sort of a domestic law kind of thing. It doesn't really apply to ships on the open sea. In fact, the law of of the sea, you can't have a dual flag ship. The the the flag that the ship set out on is sort of the flag it has to be.
If it changes flag, then it has no flag. So the Russians set themselves up on this one. It wasn't wasn't a good move and the Russians themselves have sort of admitted. That's why Russia's been quiet. Everybody's like, why is Russia quiet?
Because they're weak. No, they messed up. They they reflagged the vessel in a way that is unenforceable. But the problem with this is that Europe and The United States are picking up on Russia's non reaction as a sign of weakness. And now they're talking about going against actual flagged Russian ships.
That would be a fatal mistake because the Russian Navy will intervene. The Russian Navy had- the Russians are very legal. The Russian Navy had no legal authority to intervene on behalf of this alleged Russian reflagged ship because there was no legitimacy to that ship. The ship actually didn't have a flag now because of what had happened. But that doesn't mean that the Russian Navy won't intervene if you go after a Russian ship.
And now you got the British say, well, we're going to change our laws so we can board ships. You have the Danes saying we're going prove the Americans that we're really important members of NATO and we're going to board ships. You have the Norwegians wanting to board. Everybody wants to board Russian ships now. Russians are going to kill you.
Kill you. How stupid can you be? Well, it's a rhetorical question because we know the answer. Very stupid.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I think this the past thirty years of simply having or more than that, wars being something fought far away from home and only the adversary takes major losses, I think this is gonna come to an end. I think it impacted their carelessness in terms of provoking a major war with Russia now, but it does seem that's where we're heading. So the negotiations, you mentioned that only fools would now believe in the Alaska spirit. So the the negotiations were faked over.
Is there any do you see any pathways to peace anymore? Because I I keep thinking about it. And even if you have a peace agreement, how can you possibly dislodge the the CIA from Ukraine or the MI six? Or by definition, they they wouldn't but they wouldn't be deceptive, I guess. So it's just hard to see how any deal would be able to encompass what the Russians demand.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, the idea that Russia is gonna make compromises, I think is mooted. I can't speak on behalf of Russia. Nobody can except the Russians, so they can do whatever they want to do. But I do study Russia, and I study past patterns of behavior, and I recognize that when the Russian president commits to something publicly, that's generally what's Russia's committed to. And, you know, the Russian president's committed to terms and conditions that must be met for this conflict to end.
And I don't see him making any compromises on that. The other thing about a compromise, it requires trust. Russia can't trust anybody. None of the actors on the other side of the table are trustworthy. None.
There was some thinking that The United States could be and that Russia could lean on The United States to lean on Europe. But The United States is actually not only, you know, not trustworthy. They're at the center of this. They're the ones planning the anti Russian actions. So, would say that as long as Donald Trump is the president of The United States, there's no prospects of peace whatsoever through negotiation, that the Russians will continue to go through the process just to keep lines of communication open.
Remember, the Russians didn't have lines of communication open with the Biden administration. And I think one important element of conflict avoidance is talking. And so I think the Russians are keen on keeping the lines of communication open only so far as it supports continued communication to avoid avoidable conflict. But you have and the other good news it's not good news, but I mean, it's big picture good news. Guess NATO is about to die.
I mean, rapid death. You know, this is The United States is going to make a move very soon on Greenland. Hopefully, it won't be violent. But I mean, if the Danes and many Europeans that want to be deployed there think they're going to they don't understand the people that are getting ready to come to Greenland. Trump is tasking the Joint Special Operations Command to come to Greenland.
Okay. They just kill. Look what happened to Maduro Security Force. No effort to take any prisoners. They just rolled in.
They killed everybody. They aren't going to be, you know, sitting there crying tears of, you know, of sorrow. Oh, the end of NATO. They have a mission. They've been given a mission.
They're going to plan the mission. And when they come rolling in any Dane stupid enough to lift his weapon against him will be killed on the spot along with everybody else. But you know, we are close to having The United States militarily occupy Greenland, a NATO ally. And that'll be the end of NATO. That's, and that's the other good news because this complicates greatly.
You just saw the European, the, the, the, forget, I can't remember his name, sort of a fat old man, the head of, you know, defense, for the European union. He's sort of their defense advisor. I mean, sort of sorrowful to watch him. The United States, he said, is withdrawing from the security of Europe. Who will secure Europe?
I thought that was Europe's job. But but Europe can't defend itself. So the good news is the, all the, you know, to have theater like the British have been doing, you have to have a stage, you know, there has to be a setting. The setting is collapsing. NATO is going to die a very, hopefully not a violent, but a very sudden death.
And Europe has no plan B, none whatsoever, zero, no capacity. And we're going to be seeing the collapse of Europe because what Donald Trump does better than anybody else is he will divide and conquer. As NATO dissolves, as Europe collapses, there's gonna be countries desperate. And Trump is gonna reach out and go, we'll have a bilateral relationship. We'll do a bilateral relationship with you.
And next thing you know, The United States will build a European security architecture that Europe has no vote in. It's all gonna be based upon a bilateral relationship between, you know, baby boy and daddy. And that's the direction we're heading. So old Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. We've been cursed very heavily because these are extraordinarily interesting times.
Interesting, not in a good way, interesting in a deeply disturbing way, but interesting nonetheless.
Speaker 0: I'd always hoped that NATO would be able to reform into some inclusive pan European security architecture where we sought security, yeah, with other members instead of against nonmembers as an alliance. But I I think it's it's just way too late. I think yeah. Well, I agree with you. He did it should probably just die.
This is it's beyond reform now. Just as a last question, though, and I I do think we're heading that direction with NATO, by the way. But, yeah, last question, how how do you make sense of this transformation of Trump? I the the new Trump, the one that bombs Venezuela, backs genocide in bombs yeah. Yeah.
Venezuela, but also Iran backs the genocide in Venezuela, will now conquer Greenland, it seems, and, of course, determined to defeat Russia. All of this, it's so contrary to the Donald Trump that runs for president. Now everything is about war. Again, he was gonna he was gonna scale back the forever wars. Now he needs a $1,500,000,000,000 military budget.
He was gonna he was worried about going bankrupt. Now, you know, he can't spend money fast enough. America first has been turned on his head. Now it essentially means America will, you know, fight wars to gain its greatness back. I mean, none of this was was what he was speaking of during the during the the campaign.
Again, he was mocking Biden for bombing Yemen, I think, and, you know, now what's the difference? So how do you make sense of this? Because it's he, you know, he fueled a lot of optimism among many people around the world that that he kinda recognized that, okay. Now it's either the American Republic or the Empire. Let's save the Republic.
This was at least the the logic I was, left with. But now he is no. Not anymore.
Speaker 1: The republic's dead, and he just killed it. And he he said he killed it. Look. He said he doesn't believe in international law. I have to remind the president, although it's a stupid reminder because he's ignorant of these things, that international law what he calls international law is the United Nations Charter.
And the United Nations Charter is a treaty obligation incurred by The United States when the president of The United States signed it and it was ratified by two thirds of United States Senate. Constitutionally, it becomes the supreme law of the land. So, you can't just disregard international law. You can't disregard the Charter because to do so, you're disregarding the constitution. But the president doesn't care about the constitution.
The constitutional republic is dead. The constitutional republic mandates three separate but equal branches of government. And the president is running roughshod over Congress and the judiciary has been tamed. You know, maybe there's some fight left. We saw Congress just pass a war powers resolution, but I don't think Trump is going to pay much attention to that because he doesn't care if Congress impeaches him.
He does. You know, the the resolution didn't pass with sufficient votes to override, you know, to to guarantee, you know, conviction at trial. And so I I this president is a carrier. You know, he said the things he said to get elected. There's no doubt about that.
This is what was very attractive. This is what brought the RFK junior and Tulsi Gabbard independence over that 12 to 20% of the vote that brought him over, you know, to to to to victory. That now there's talk that he is basically seeking to manipulate how America votes, that he is going to cook the books. He's going to steal an election, steal a midterm election to guarantee that he remains in power. Our country is physically occupied by stormtroopers who operate above the law, who are not afraid to murder American citizens in broad daylight.
This whole ICE invasion and occupation of major American cities is again fundamentally unconstitutional. And it it it's it doesn't meet anybody's vision of what a constitutional republic looks like. The president today is a is a de facto dictator. He is a dictator, with no law. He says that he doesn't need international law.
He relies upon his own morality. Well, given the Epstein files, I I think we need to question his moral moral character. I mean, given the fact that this man has lied openly to the American people and to the world. And today he is the most war hungry president ever. And there's, I mean, maybe Andrew Jackson, back when he was taken on the Cherokee Nation was as war mongering.
But this this president, you know, he he is Orwellian in in everything he does. What he says, the exact opposite is the truth. He wants the Nobel Peace Prize because he's the world's greatest warmonger. And that's where we are today. And the American people may find out that they by ceding so much trust, confidence, and power to this man, they've taken away their ability to, you know, rectify the errors of their way.
It was always the possibility in American democracy that we could vote the guys out. But if Trump takes over, continues to use ICE as a as a vehicle of intimidation and occupation, and starts gaming the system to guarantee an outcome in the midterm election, we don't function as a constitutional republic anymore.
Speaker 0: Oh, it's, it seems like he disappointed a lot of people. And, again, this is the tragedy because he seemed to have had his finger on the pulse. He realized, you know, where the where the country was going wrong, where the world was going wrong. He recognized the weaknesses, but also the opportunities in terms of how, you know, saying, well, it would be a good idea to get along with Russia. Something simple.
And and, of course, I mean, this is one of the diseases we have in NATO where I hear European leaders say, well, we can't do that. That's something Putin would want. But, you know, at some point, you want the opponent to to have some security as well if you want security for yourself. But he he seems to be on just, yeah, spot on on a lot of these things. But, yeah, this new Trump.
Well, I don't
Speaker 1: think it's a new Trump though. I think what we're seeing is he's been a liar the entire time. You know, he treated the American people like a love interest. He said all the right things. He sent us flowers.
He gave us nice perfume on our birthday. He never missed a holiday or event. He was there for every important event in our life. My God, we fell in love with this guy. We like, look at the attention he's giving us.
He has to be sincere about wanting a long and fruitful relationship. And then as soon as we got married, it turns out he had a mistress the entire time. That mistress was war and power and narcissism. This is all a plan that he's been operating on. This isn't a new Trump.
This is Trump. This is what Trump did. And the American people have every right to feel deceived, but we're now we're trapped in a relationship we can't get out of. I mean, I I hope that the American people come out and vote in the midterm and do what needs to be done to limit the power of this madman. But if he's gonna start cooking the books, if he's gonna start manipulating the system, you know, Stalin, I think said, it doesn't matter who votes.
It matters who counts the votes. And I think Trump's gonna be the guy counting the votes and the vote counts gonna be you know, and here's the irony again that this man is such a liar that he's going to do to the American people the exact thing that he accused Joe Biden of doing in 2020. He's gonna steal an election. And I I the twenty fifth amendment couldn't come quick enough in my mind.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Just watching him give us well, two times speech telling how Maduro killed millions of people, which doesn't make much sense. But, yeah, we feel to be very post truth at this point. Anyways, we ran out of time, but I wanted to thank you so much for taking time as always. I know you must be incredibly busy.
So, yeah, thanks again.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for having me. It's a I think it was a good conversation.
@Glenn_Diesen - Glenn Diesen
Jeffrey Sachs: We Are Now in the Early Days of World War III https://youtu.be/DeRETBWnNWA https://t.co/SgZsSrO1QP
Video Transcript AI Summary
Professor Jeffrey Sachs argues that the current moment represents dramatic and dangerous upheaval, with the war against Iran in its second week and a “regime change operation” not going as planned. He says there is tremendous confusion about war aims and the ground situation, describing Washington as “fogged” and characterizing Donald Trump’s public messaging as “ravings” from a “madman.” He contends that escalation control is illusory and that the world is sliding toward a broader and more dangerous conflict.
Sachs asserts that the war is not limited to Iran: Iran has claimed to strike U.S. bases in several countries while denying attacks on Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. He suggests the U.S. and Israel are pulling in proxies, including Kurdish fighters, and that Russia may be supplying Iran with intelligence while the U.S. supplies Ukraine. He contends that after decapitation strikes on Iran, Moscow faces pressure to deter NATO attacks, while Europe contemplates increasing nuclear weapons. He views the conflict as part of a wider global struggle, with fighting across the world and potential linkages to energy markets, indicating that an energy crisis is likely to be severe and poorly priced in by markets. He argues that if China and Russia support Iran, it underscores a broader strategic dynamic, given China’s oil interests and the U.S.’s efforts to cut off oil supplies to China from Venezuela, Russia, and Iran.
On international law, Sachs reiterates his argument that the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran is also an attack on the United Nations. He asserts that the U.S. under Trump “despises the UN” and seeks to kill it “through a thousand cuts and through a devastating blow,” pointing to the U.S. withdrawal from UN agencies and rejection of key treaties. He emphasizes that Europe is complicit, with European leaders and ambassadors at the UN Security Council focusing critiques on Iran rather than on the U.S.-Israel strike. He invokes Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as the essence of the UN’s purpose to stop the use of force, contrasting this with the belief that the U.S. “rules the world” and uses violence to impose demands, including the call for “unconditional surrender” in Iran.
Sachs describes the U.S. foreign policy machinery as dominated by the CIA and a network of “off the books militaries” that pursue regime change and hegemony. He recalls historical episodes: the 1953 coup in Iran, the Kennedy and Eisenhower era, and the long-standing pattern of U.S. interference in other countries’ leadership. He asserts that performance of checks and balances is deteriorating, with democracy weakening under threat and dissent punished, both in the U.S. and in Europe. He likens Trump’s rhetoric to a hyperbolic assertion that he would determine Iran’s next leader, calling this symptomatic of a broader U.S. imperial project.
In discussing European responses, Sachs criticizes Germany for showing subservience to the U.S. stance, with European leaders at times prioritizing confrontation with Iran over engagement with Russia or seeking peace. He laments the decline of European strategic autonomy and the EU as a whole, noting the Danish ambassador’s focus on Iran while ignoring U.S.-Israeli actions. He argues that Europe’s leadership has failed to act in the spirit of postwar peace, contrasting current leadership with figures like de Gaulle, Mitterrand, Kohl, or Schroeder.
Toward multipolarity, Sachs traces the idea back to Roosevelt’s vision for a United Nations-centered postwar order and contrasts it with the post-1990s U.S. unilateralism. He argues that the United States, Britain, Russia, and China would need to cooperate to avert catastrophe, and that the current trajectory—led by an obsession with global dominance—risks war, economic crisis, and widespread destabilization. He suggests that China and Russia are the most likely to push back against U.S. hegemony, with India possibly playing a role, though its alignment remains ambivalent. Sachs closes by noting that a move toward peaceful multipolar cooperation would require different leadership and a rejection of the Leviathan-style dominance mindset.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Welcome back. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us today to discuss, well, seemingly the unraveling of the world. So thank you very much for coming back on.
Speaker 1: These are dramatic moments. No question about it. Absolutely unbelievable.
Speaker 0: We are seeing now though the that we've entered the second week of the war against Iran, and it's well, the regime change operation is not going as planned, obviously. What do you see being the strategy of The United States now that they failed in the initial objective?
Speaker 1: Strategy is a big word when it comes to Donald Trump. I I don't think there is a strategy. I, we don't really know. And of course, wartime, we will not be told what is going on behind the scenes. But what we can gather is tremendous amount of confusion, that confusion about expectations of what would happen, a confusion about war aims, a confusion about the real situation on the ground.
So fog of war is the usual simile. I think we are absolutely befogged right now when it comes to Washington. The only public outlet we have is Donald Trump's posts on true social. These are the ravings of a of a madman. And this is also part of what we are experiencing.
We have a war with great danger and complexity, and we have a president that is, in my view, mentally unhinged.
Speaker 0: Well, I'm I've repeatedly warned that well, the illusion of escalation control is what could take us to a third world war because this war is spreading fast and it's very much out of control. Indeed, it's not just a war in Iran. We see, of course, Iran taking credit for hitting US bases in several countries, yet it also denies the attack on Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey, which doesn't seem to make much sense and could be, of course, The US and Israel attempting to pull in proxies. Well, we don't know. But we do know that The US is arming and pulling Kurdish fighters as a proxy into the war, and there's now arguments that Russia is giving Iran intelligence, which I'm not sure is true, but it seems likely as The US gives Ukraine intelligence.
And also after the decapitation strikes on Iran, there is immense pressure on Moscow now to restore its deterrence from further NATO attacks while the Europeans talk about more nuclear weapons in quantity and spreading it around. Are we already moving into a World War three here?
Speaker 1: We are probably in the early days of World War III, and the question will be whether it is contained, but we're already in a global war because there's a war in the Western Hemisphere underway. And even as the attention is on Iran, Trump is signaling in his not so subtle way that The US will take Cuba. This could very well happen. The war in Ukraine, of course, continues. The war in The Middle East is now across the Middle East.
The war between Pakistan and Afghanistan is perhaps somehow related to this Iranian vessels, an Iranian naval vessel was sunk off the coast of India. For all of these reasons, fighting is across the world. The fighting is at least loosely linked. We don't know how closely linked it is. Part of American strategy seems to be to try to corner and control the energy markets.
This is not playing too well because the energy supplies are being blown up by the hour. And so we're entering also a worldwide energy crisis that is likely to be extremely serious. As they say, it's not yet been priced into the markets. So this is the usual way that cataclysmic global events are turned into financial jargon. But the point is, we're going to enter a, an energy crisis that is extraordinarily severe as well.
This will hurt Europe considerably. It will threaten Asian countries deeply. It will probably mean spreading war. So there's no doubt by the way, I shouldn't say no doubt. I'd be shocked.
Absolutely. If Russia and China were not supporting Iran, why wouldn't they? They have a strategic relationship with Iran. China depends on Iran for oil. The United States is basically at war with China.
And much of what The United States is doing is really aimed at China. For example, cutting off Venezuelan oil supplies to China now aiming to cut off Russian oil supplies to China, though the waiver was just lifted because of the chaos, aiming to cut off Iranian supplies to China. So if China isn't supporting Iran, something's wrong with all our textbooks, that's for sure. If China were to stand by and let The US take over the world, that would be quite strange.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Just, well, this efforts to take over the world energy markets, It's very blatant. I mean, I just watched a clip on Fox News where they have an interview going, well, yes, any any price we're paying in this war will be outweighed by the massive benefits once we get control of Iran's oil as well. And it made me think about the article you wrote recently about arguing that The US Israeli attack on Iran is also an attack on the United Nations. And indeed, well, international law obviously has been violated in the past, but now there doesn't even seem to be a pretense to abide by it.
Indeed, there seems to be a pride in it. For example, Hegzeff, he dismisses the rule of engagement as being politically correct in the weak. So there seems to be almost direct efforts to dismantle international law as, you know, the Board of Peace, more or less, makes this clear. Was wondering if you can flesh out that argument.
Speaker 1: Well, the US government under Trump, but I would say more generally, but still to a dramatic extent under Trump, despises the UN, wants to kill it, is aiming to kill it both through a thousand cuts and through a devastating blow. If you believe that you are the world's hegemon as Emperor Donald believes, then anything that tries in Lilliputian ways to hold you down is pathetic. So they want to smash the United Nations. And they've been absolutely clear about it. Earlier this year, The United States walked out of more than 30 UN agencies.
The US has repudiated fundamental UN treaties and objectives. We've had an end of the nuclear arms control agreements, which were part of the UN system. The US doesn't pay its bills to The United Nations. The US doesn't respect the institutions of the United Nations. And it's clear, at least Trump and this US government, And I would say the CIA and the deep state more generally aim for global hegemony.
And the UN is the opposite of that. We're not maybe not quite the opposite of it, but it's co responsibility with other countries and The US does not accept co responsibility with anybody. So everything that is being done, I completely sneers at the UN. And if the topic is raised, those are, as you said, whether it's by Hagsef or by the White House, those are pathetic niceties in a world of power. We've not really seen this kind of brutality of sentiment, of rhetoric and of action since 1945.
By anybody, by the way, whether it's by the Soviet Union, or by The United States in an earlier vintage, or by any other country, nothing remotely close to this. I calculate each year with my colleagues an index of UN aligned multilateralism, which we report annually in a report called the Sustainable Development Report. And even before this war, The United States far and away and not even close, Glenn, was the least aligned with the United Nations of all 193 UN member states in terms of engagement with UN processes, including votes in the General Assembly, where The US almost always votes in a tiny minority with Israel and Paraguay and a couple of other countries against the will of the rest of the world in terms of not signing treaties or leaving treaties. The US is simply rogue or out to destroy the UN. Let's put it that way.
And this is all accelerated in recent weeks. What is disturbing, if I could use a light term, because I love to use a stronger terms. Europe is completely complicit in this. Europe doesn't show one morsel of support for the UN system processes, or most importantly, the UN Charter. The core of the UN Charter, the very purpose that you find in the preamble, and then in the opening articles, is to stop the use of force and the threat of force by one nation against another nation.
This is the essence of the whole UN system. Article two paragraph four of the UN Charter, which I encourage people to go online and read, says that no nation may threaten force or use force against another nation. It's simple. And as the opening words of the UN charter made clear, this is to prevent the scourge of war. Well, we have a US President who does believe that The US rules the world, and that violence is a core instrument of ruling the world, and that if countries don't exceed to US demands, what Trump calls unconditional surrender, with Trump picking the new leader of Iran, well, then force will be continued until that outcome occurs.
It's in the mold of Hitler or Napoleon, or other delusional actors who thought that they could rule. But even in those earlier cases, they did not believe that they ruled the world. They aimed to rule their neighborhood. They aimed to rule Europe. They Hitler aimed for living space in the Slavic lands.
Trump's rhetoric and behavior is that he believes that he rules the world. By the way, he believes it in a personalistic level, as well as at a political level. And I'm not exaggerating, and it's not Trump delusion syndrome. It's just the overt behavior. The man's loony, and you can watch it.
He's got every trait of megalomania, grandiosity, narcissism. And it's quite clear, by the way, that The US governmental processes where US foreign policy is typically run by the CIA is little bit being run ragged right now, because they can't keep up with this madness. So there's a lot of unpredictability and a lot of danger in what's happening. Because we have a mix of US normal grandiosity, which is a deep trait of The United States. It was true during Bush Jr, Obama, and Biden.
But with Trump, it adds the usual US institutional grandiosity and militarism with a personal level delusion of leaders. We know this through history. This is not for the first time. It is for the first time though in the nuclear age. We've never had circumstance like this in the nuclear age.
And I would say the world is in a more dangerous situation than it has ever been.
Speaker 0: Period. You mentioned the European response to this. And when we see that Germany is trying to position itself as the number one supporter of Trump, hoping almost explicitly that disobedience in over Iran would be rewarded by with deeper US involvement in Ukraine war, also for US to make no concessions towards peace in Ukraine while UK and France are looking now to enter the war in a more direct way. And this, of course, comes at the backdrop as Macron arguing that the reason why they need more nuclear weapons is because for France to be secure, it has to be feared. Same as Europe, they have to be feared.
This is the path to security. Right? How do you make sense of this? This is very different than the peace project that, you know, I was teaching students only fifteen, twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Europe has completely lost any any identity and any sense. I would say that just as the European, as the UN is dying right now, the European Union project is not coming together in strategic autonomy. The European project is falling to pieces as a vassal of The United States. We have the weakest leadership in Europe in generations.
Again, we have the worst German leadership in particular, and Germany is key to the European project. If you think about German chancellors, I'd known several of them. Do you think about Willy Brant, Helmut Schmidt, or Helmut Kohl, or Schroeder, or Merkel. These were personalities. They were also decent.
They understood German interests, but they also understood the idea of Europe as an aim of peace after centuries of European devastating war. The last two German chancellors have been out of this approach. Schultz was simply the weakest chancellor, a complete non entity. People said that The US had the goods on him, so that he was suborned in one way or another. I don't, I have no idea whether that's true.
And with Mertz, you get the idea that, oh my God, you get the idea that this man wants a reversion to German militarism. I could be less polite. But when when you look at Mertz, you see somebody who seems to know nothing of modern history. I he's belligerent, ignorant, a mix of fawning to The US on the one hand and warmongering on the other hand, incoherent. And not in Europe's interest or Germany's interest in the slightest.
He doesn't understand his job, I'm sorry to say. His job on the first day should have been to pick up the phone and called his counterpart in Russia, President Putin, and begun to discuss this vital relationship between Germany and Russia to head off disaster and to rebuild some kind of collective security on the continent. He hasn't lifted the finger one time, hasn't even crossed his mind that this is his job. So between Trump's madness and Europe's subservience, it's really an extraordinarily depressing scene. I was at the UN Security Council last week after Israel and The US attacked Iran.
And there were the German, I'm sorry, not the German, the European ambassadors, excuse me, at the UN security council, one after another, on the day that The US and Iran, on the day that The US and Israel had attacked Iran, all of them berating Iran, most of them not mentioning the Israel US attack on Iran. You can't even believe, Glenn, how surrealistic it is. I, I was especially perturbed and bemused by the Danish ambassador. Denmark is a country that will be invaded by The United States sometime soon with very, very high likelihood. The US will declare that Greenland is America's because of national security.
Watch that space that is basically underway right now. So you might think that Denmark would have some notion that international law might be important, because someday they're going to come crying to the world. Look how unfair Emperor Donald is to us. He's taking away our territory. But there was the Danish ambassador, full out fulminating against Iran without mentioning the war that Israel and The United States had started against Iran.
I went up to her afterwards to exchange my concern about this. But she looked at me and turned around and walked away. They don't want to engage. They don't want to have the discussion. But the pathetic nature of this is really something sad for Europe to simply completely fall into line with American and Israeli madness is something that you wouldn't not have thought of Schumann or Monet, or the other architects of Europe, people who knew what World War II had meant, and who aim to stop a World War III.
They would have behaved differently, as would generations of leaders in Europe. Again, whether it was Willy Brant or Helmut Kohl, or De Gaulle or Mitterrand, you would have had a completely different idea. A Europe that's Europe, that is the era of thousands of years of civilization that knows something or two that has seen war and wants peace. But this is not at all what we see. We have Vanderlayen, we have Mertz.
You just can't make this up right now, how this project has collapsed. And that's why we're in the early days of World War III, because nobody has sense right now to say to emperor Donald that this is not a good idea.
Speaker 0: Well, only it's becoming more warmongering though, but we also see as in many wars, the the rule of law weakens. And I wanted to ask how you see the rule of law and the division of power as being weakened because, again, well, unlike Continental Europe, The US has strong traditions on on, you know, democracy, the division of power, and ask because democracy and freedom doesn't tend to fare well under wars. As we saw during the Cold War, this was not great either for liberalism. And during times of external threats, we see governments often develop authoritarian tendencies, and we had this now for more than a decade. That is we went from Russiagate to the Ukraine war, we had the we had the economic war with China.
None of these things actually stop, by the way. They just, you know, stack on top of each other. And now, of course, the Middle East is set on fire. Under these conditions, it one one would expect that the rule of law would weaken. Certainly, I see the case here in Europe as well.
We we have the EU sanctioning, you know, its own citizens. We have any dissent or criticism of the government's wars is essentially, well, then you stand with the enemy, and you will be punished accordingly. But how do you see it in The United States, though? Because, you know, if if it's game over there on the rule of law, then it doesn't bode well for Europe.
Speaker 1: I think in The United States, foreign policy has been in the hands of the CIA as lead for many decades. And CIA is convenient because it can be completely secret. It is operating through a network of so called intelligence agencies. These are not intelligence agencies. These are off the book militaries.
And this has been true for many decades, especially if you are the US government, where the foreign policy is an imperial policy of regime choice and regime change. Trump just says out loud, and in a crazier way, I have to say what has been US policy. Trump, because he is really what he is psychologically, says that he will pick the next Supreme Leader of Iran. Okay, this is rather startling. Of course, I have to add no European leader murmurs a word that this is at all strange, that this is a good way to have a war escalate and continue and on its way to getting us all killed.
Not a single European leader scratches her head or his head to say, Oh, that's our ally saying the weirdest goddamn things you could possibly imagine. No, they don't say that. But in any event, that mindset you might think is a little odd. But remember, the CIA has always had that mindset. And in 1953, without public scrutiny, without explanation, The US did choose who would lead Iran.
They installed the police state that overthrew a democratic government in 1953. And The US backed that police state until 1979. When lo and behold, the public revolted against it as that police state leader was dying of cancer. That's where the Iranian revolution came from in the first place in 1979, not out of the blue, but out of a US imposed police state. Well, look all over the world, including in Europe, The US imposes governments of choice.
And that means that the rule of law in The United States, it comes to foreign policy has always been a veneer. I find it very notable. I think it's very important for historians and analysts to reflect on the famous farewell address of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the Supreme Allied Commander, the top general of The United States who became president from nineteen January nineteen fifty three to January 1961. And in his farewell address of the 01/17/1961, he warned famously of the military industrial complex.
We should understand that farewell message in a different way. What Eisenhower was saying to the American people is, it's already happened. This is already a military state. The institutions of government have already been fundamentally weakened. I think Glenn and, you know, not to take us too far aside.
But I think the evidence is quite overwhelming that the CIA killed Kennedy in 1963. And that's not meant as a flamboyant remark, or as conspiracy theory or something else. It's meant in an explanatory way that no American president since Kennedy took on the security state. Johnson reversed all of Kennedy's peace initiatives. And every president since has essentially gone along with the agenda of The US Security State, including nice people like Obama, who came in and then presided over several regime change operations.
And Obama thought, yes, I'll choose who leads Syria. I'll choose who leads Libya. They didn't put it that way. They had manners. Trump has no manners.
Trump has grandiosity, but it was the same. Obama and his deputy, who's now my colleague, Victoria Nuland, and Hillary Clinton, also my colleague at Columbia University. And I say it with interest. They decided who would lead Ukraine In February, actually, it's probably late January twenty fourteen, Victoria Newland is picked up by the Russians on a phone call on an open line to The US ambassador talking literally about who would lead Ukraine. And she picks a man named Yat senuk who became the leader after the coup.
So when Trump says, I'll choose who the supreme leader is, it sounds outlandish and it is. And it is a step of World War III, but it's also US behavior. It just is the usually unsaid part of US behavior. So I'm unfortunately not very impressed with the so called checks and balances of The US system, or with the constitution. We've had a military state for decades.
I often think that just as the Roman Republic became, the Roman Empire and The US, Republic has, become, the US Empire, What is the actual date of that happening? In the normal discourse, people point to the Roman history as a warning to The US, don't let this happen. But I think it's quite arguable that not only has it happened, but that it happened several decades ago. And I wonder if we were in Rome in twenty seven BC, when Augustus declared himself princeps, whether we would have felt that that was a dividing line. That's historians' dividing line, but there was still the Senate.
They still, the senators still wore togas. There were still consuls. It looked like the Roman Republic institutions were still intact. And I I have a sense that this is The US situation, that maybe The US Republic ended in November 1963 with Kennedy's assassination. And since then, we've been in, The US Empire.
I don't know. But I just raised the point to say that Trump is outlandish. He's he has this dark triad personality of extreme Machiavellianism, malignant narcissism, and psychopathy, which we can see when he expresses absolute lack of interest in who's dying. There is no feeling there. So we know that this is a very unusual psychological character, but he's on top of a machine that already existed.
Speaker 0: Well, on this issue, though, this is the last question, the this insistence of choosing other leaders of other countries and the the reluctance to find peaceful solutions with adversaries and primarily other rising powers, be it Russia, China, Iran. To what extent do you think this is linked to the reluctance or the unwillingness to see hegemony go away? Because the Europeans, at least, they very much bought into the whole idea after the Cold War about a world order based on the collective hegemony of the political West led by The US. But I remember this whole unipolar moment when it was introduced as a concept by Charles Krauthammer back in 1990. You know, he just he framed it as, you know, this is the distribution of power.
All power is in America, but he was making a point as well in this article once the world shifts to a more multipolar international distribution power, then we shift away as if this will be a rational decision that will be made. But after thirty five years of having this political class raised on the ideology that the dominance on perpetual hegemony of the West would essentially be this, you know, democratic peace theory, it would destabilize the world. It would transcend the chaos of the past. So essentially, the hegemony was yeah. So essentially humanity's salvation.
After you had thirty five years of politicians like this, it you know, there's there won't be a peaceful transition to multipolarity. Just do you see this as being the reluctance to even accept to have other powers to that the that the West won't dominate anymore? Why there's no alternative to plunging the world into World War three? Because, you know, this a lot of people criticize Marco Rubio at Munich Security Conference, but I I don't see this is essentially the logic I hear from political leaders across Europe as well. Well, not all, but many.
Speaker 1: Well, I think this is another case where this is a profound process that has been underway actually for eighty years. The idea of multipolarity was both born and died in 1945 for the following basic reason. The brainchild of the United Nations was also the brainchild of the victory in, in World War II. And that was Franklin Roosevelt who understood that he and Stalin and Churchill, and with Franklin Roosevelt's insistence, Chiang Kai shek, who was head of a struggling and invaded China in the 1940s, invaded by Japan, of course, jointly had to operate to defeat Hitler. This was a collective enterprise.
It was an enterprise of the United Nations, a term that was used early in World War II. And Roosevelt believed in that unity, that these nations together had to stick together to defeat Hitler, and then afterwards to make the world safe. And he really believed in world peace and safety. Now, on the ground, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of defeating Hitler by far losing 27,000,000 people, and being the key to breaking Hitler's war machine. And Roosevelt knew that.
The United States played its particular role as the industrial backbone of the defeat of World War II, providing weapons, air airplanes, technologies, radar and so forth, that helped this. But the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war. Roosevelt was absolutely intent and capable of cooperating with Stalin throughout the war, often pushing Churchill to the side. Roosevelt wasn't much taken with the British empire. Roosevelt saw that major powers and that there really would be major powers after the war for in particular, The US, Britain, Russia and China.
France was led in late in the day for tactical reasons. But the idea was that these countries would cooperate, cooperate, not fight each other, not veto each other in the UN, but cooperate to help keep the global peace. And Roosevelt believed that lesser powers, the rest of the world should have its place. And he was the opposite of US arrogance he had that he introduced from the first moment he came in as president, the good neighbor policy towards the Americas. He said, we've got to stop invading the Americas, like Trump has done recently in Venezuela and is about to do in Cuba.
So that's how the UN was born. Just one problem. Roosevelt had untreated high blood pressure and he died on 04/12/1945. And that was the end of the American multipolar vision because Truman, his successor was a much lesser person, not experienced, FDR was a gifted individual also and Truman bought in immediately to the idea that this is now a war with Bolshevism. FDR wasn't much impressed with these labels, I have to say.
He was just a great pragmatist. He didn't care who called what, whom, what labels, titles, ideologies. He was going to get along and he was going to get along and he was going to be practical. But already in the second 1945, and that's why the bomb was dropped twice on Japan to impress Mr. Stalin.
The US was now at war for global control. The idea of shared responsibilities was already out the window in the American mentality. And this was of course, put most vividly in, NSC memo 68 in 1950, that this was going to be The US battling world communism for dominance. I say all of this, Glenn, because when the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the insanity of a country of 4% of the world population deciding it would run the world, into overdrive and it went into overdrive. And it's been in overdrive since 1991.
The US has viewed itself and by US, I mean the CIA, the military industrial digital complex, the ones that make the war decisions that have brought us nonstop into war, that allocate the trillions of dollars and so on. They believe they run the world. When China rose in power over several decades, and that was noticed by The United States sometime around 2010. This freaked out these would be hegemonists. Now there's an enemy.
Russia was dismissed as any way has been useless. So not really to worry. So we don't have to listen to anything Russia says, but the attention turned to China and we have to defeat China the same way. That's been The US foreign policy for the last fifteen years. Just quickly, a couple of flies in the ointment.
First, all of this is delusional. That's the first starting point. The idea that The US runs the world, rules the world, dominates the world, have its way is a madness. It's been a madness for decades. But it's been a repeated madness that leads to millions of deaths all over the world, whether in Vietnam or across wars of the Middle East.
Second, the misjudgment about Russia is the reason for the Ukraine war. The US never expected Russia to resist NATO enlargement. Never expected to be able to stand up to The United States for one moment. This is, both the denigration of Russia and a profoundly delusional exaggeration of American power. Both go hand in hand, but the war in Ukraine is fundamentally the result of an American delusion spelled out helpfully by his big new Brzezinski in 1997, because he spelled out in the grand chess board exactly what the delusion is.
And he concluded Russia could not resist the eastward enlargement of NATO and Europe. So that's, and then the other fly in the ointment is Israel. Israel is a crazy rogue state with half its political leadership in the mindset of the fifth century BC. Reading some text from King Josiah. And there Israel has just plunged the world into probably the third world war, but into a phenomenal economic crisis.
This is the timing, the instigation is Israel's. The fact that The US goes along with it is because it's completely coherent with The US hegemonic project. But this is Israel, complete madness. And because of the hold of the Israel lobby in The United States, that madness isn't even examined. Excuse me, we had to have an ambassador in Israel, The US has an ambassador named Mike Huckabee, who is a, let's just say a minor, Protestant evangelical theologian, if I could put it that way, but that's a very polite way to put it.
And, he said, two weeks ago, yes, Israel owns the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. And when Tucker Carlson asked him, excuse me, they own the land, could they take it? He said, sure. Yeah, sure, they could take it. This is again, what's sometimes called by psychologists or psychiatrists, folly adieu.
This is a craziness of Israel matched by a craziness of The United States. Israel wants to be the hegemon from the Nile to the Euphrates or beyond. The United States wants to be the hegemon of the world. That's a long standing project. And here we are in the early shooting of World War III, unless, unless somehow somebody stands up and stops the madness.
The ones that are most likely to do it in the end are China and Russia, because they are mature, aware and not really so happy about this US hegemonic project. If India would recognize its own interest clearly, it would also play a very major role in this. But India has signed on to The US project to some extent. And it raises a big question. What is India thinking?
What are the Indian leaders thinking? They had the British Empire for a couple of centuries. It should have been enough. They should have good instincts to know don't follow the US Empire in this kind of madness. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Well, I think pragmatism as you say is what we need. In 2003 Condoleezza Rice, she made the comment that the multipolarity, she called it a theory, not the distribution of power about competing interests and competing values. So she said, no no one should want this at all because this is you know, if you value freedom, you don't wanna put a check on it. So this is kind of the logic that is we need to have dominance. Without dominance, there can't be freedom.
And I think this is the Europeans as well, we buy full into this. When I listen to our politicians, journalists, this is why they're willing to go to war with Russia. They're willing to go to war with China. They're willing to go to war with Iran and burn down the world because otherwise, there can't be freedom. There has to be dominance.
This is kind of the virtue of dominance that is selling it as freedom.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. And incidentally, you know, I've been thinking about this from the especially the Anglo American mindset, because Britain and The US have done the most to wreck things for a couple of centuries in this way. The mindset goes back to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who said that in the state of nature, life is life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And Hobbes said that to get out of the war of all against all, you need a Leviathan, he called it, you need a superior power. And that was his theory of national government, that people would give up their sovereignty to kill each other, their freedom to kill each other, to a sovereign who would then keep order and everyone would be better off because they wouldn't be killing each other.
Then you turn that logic to the global order. And the way that that is turned into the global order by the CIA or by MI6, or by these intelligence agencies in the West is to say, well, we don't have a supreme ruling Leviathan. So it is a war of all against all. And we have to be brutally realistic. It's us or them.
And sometimes you have to strike first, like Israel and The United States striking Iran. That's the mindset. But another part of the mindset is The United States says, we'll be the Leviathan. Thank you. Britain was the Leviathan in the nineteenth century.
The only way to be safe is if we are the Leviathan. In other words, there can only be one that runs the world and will be the one that runs the world. Now, there is another way in life, which is that you get along with each other. You make some common rules, you share the sandbox, we teach our five year olds to do this. It's not impossible that you don't need one ruler of the world to have peace.
And this is what the American hegemonists or supremacists cannot understand, but I think it's partly they're trapped at an emotional level, maybe before age five, I don't know. They don't really see that there's another way that in a multipolar world, we actually really could get along, we could make some rules of the road, we could have some cooperation. The one who understood that, as I said, in The United States was Franklin Roosevelt. Another one who understood that more recently was John F. Kennedy.
And probably he died because he held that belief and he was killed from the inside because he held that belief. So this is a tough struggle and we're in an extraordinarily dangerous moment in the world. We're if this continues, if, mister Trump continues, to believe that he will pick Iran's next leader and that this is going for unconditional surrender, Of course, things will then depend on military outcomes, but one real possibility is an economic crisis globally instigated by Israel and The United States, the likes of which we've not seen for a long time.
Speaker 0: I wish you could have finished on a more optimistic note, but thank you very much for taking the time. I know you have a busy day in Rome there, so try to enjoy it in these perilous times and, yeah, hope to see you soon.
Speaker 1: See you soon. Thanks.
@ivan_8848 - Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
Jeffrey Sachs Killed Biden, Zelensky and Kamala!!! https://t.co/INb5j8dLiN