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Feb. 28, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:27
Joe Biden Is Still Leading From Behind | Ep. 1442
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Vladimir Putin surrounds Kiev and puts his nuclear forces on high alert as Europe moves to isolate him and Joe Biden's approval ratings dump down into the high 30s.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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I hope you had a wonderful weekend because it's going to be a very busy week.
Tomorrow night is Joe Biden's first official State of the Union address.
And he's going to lie to you, like a lot, because this presidency is an unmitigated disaster.
So he's not going to say that.
But I'm going to because everything has gotten worse in one short year.
Every single thing that Joe Biden touches, as President Trump says, has turned to crap.
And that's why this year I am going to be giving a response.
to the State of the Union address exactly 15 minutes following President Biden's remarks before that joint session of Congress and call it the real State of the Union.
I'm going to tell you where we're really at as a country.
I assure you that my State of the Union response will be free of focus group testing.
I'll be holding the President accountable.
There'll be no hiding behind COVID or blaming rogue dictators.
We'll be holding Joe Biden accountable.
I will destroy his State of the Union with facts and logic precisely 15 minutes after his State of the Union address ends.
Join me, Jeremy Boring, Michael Mills, Matt Walsh and Andrew Clavin tomorrow night at 8.15pm Eastern, 7.15pm Central on The Daily Wire's YouTube channel.
We'll be covering the State of the Union and then my real State of the Union response will be airing live as soon as Joe Biden's address ends on that same channel.
So make sure to tune in.
Okay, so the latest in Ukraine is that the Russian advance on Kiev has continued.
They have not taken the city yet, which is an amazing accomplishment for the Ukrainian military, which is wildly outgunned by the Russian military.
The Ukrainian military budget versus the Russian military budget.
It's just the size differential is astonishing.
It's just not close.
The simple fact is that Ukraine has the power to fight a guerrilla war, but I don't think anybody thought they were going to go toe-to-toe with the Russians at this point.
Ukraine has about $6 billion in their defense budget, but that is one-tenth of Russia's defense budget, according to the latest data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Yet somehow, Ukraine is still holding off the Russians from taking its major cities, which is a major, major accomplishment at this point.
Now, Russia is activating apparently One third more of its force, which has been located mostly in Belarus.
Belarus is talking about sending in its own troops because Belarus is basically a proxy state for Moscow at this point.
But the simple fact that the Ukrainian government has lasted this long must put a scare into Vladimir Putin in a very, very serious way and lead to a lot of pride among Ukrainian citizens who've basically been going this alone.
There have been heavy economic sanctions that have been placed on the Russian government, as we'll get to in just a minute.
Only in the last 24 to 48 hours has there been real materiel shipped into Ukraine from the European Union.
But it's looking as though if Vladimir Putin can't clean this thing up inside of the next week, this turns into a prolonged guerrilla war at the very, very least for him.
Vladimir Zelensky doing an incredible job leading the Ukrainian people.
He refused to flee the country.
And he's got a couple of iconic moments that are going to go down in history already.
That video of him saying, send ammunition.
I don't need an exit.
I need ammunition.
That's the kind of stuff that nation building myths are made from.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Russian and Ukrainian officials were meeting For the first talks since Moscow began its invasion four days ago as Ukraine's defenders held on to the capital in Kiev and pushed back Russian troops in urban combat in their second largest city, Kharkiv.
In a sign of growing tensions with the West over Ukraine, Vladimir Putin also ordered the country's nuclear deterrence forces to be put on alert.
And this is freaking people out.
He doesn't mean to nuke anybody at this point.
What he is doing is sort of signaling that if things go badly or if there is too many, if there's too much intervention by the outside world, then maybe, just maybe he'll start firing up The nuclear missiles.
Now that is highly unlikely because that of course would be suicidal for him but it has a lot of people on edge.
You never want to be in a situation where you are one button push away from nuclear war obviously.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a delegation led by Ukraine's defense minister began those ceasefire talks on Monday with Russian officials at the Ukrainian border with Belarus, as Ukrainian forces repelled a series of Russian attacks on the capital and Russian troops shelled a residential neighborhood in the eastern city of Kharkiv, as the talks on the fifth day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine come after Russia's forces have struggled to make headway in most of the country and failed so far to take any of Ukraine's major cities as they faced fierce resistance.
Russia was pouring large reinforcement convoys across the border on Monday in what could be preparation for a new push on Kiev and an attempt to besiege it.
They withdrew a bunch of their tanks and military munitions from around Kiev late last night.
And the impression by military experts is that this was preparing the way for a heavy bombing campaign.
Now, at the very beginning of this war, there was a baseline assumption that the Russians would take out the Ukrainian Air Force.
They still have not taken out the Ukrainian Air Force.
Not only that, the EU is now shipping New jets into Ukraine as we speak.
So this war is actually heating up for the Russians.
It is not being tamped down nearly as fast as they thought it would be.
An indication that Moscow may be shifting to a more destructive approach of targeting civilian areas.
A northern neighborhood of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, came under shelling by multiple rocket launchers on Monday.
According to witnesses and video footage from the area, this is the Wall Street Journal reporting, the extent of civilian casualties was not immediately known.
There were fatalities.
The chances of a ceasefire being agreed to on Monday are extremely unlikely, given the fact that Putin has already gone in this far.
As additional Russian forces enter Ukraine, Kiev continued to bolster its own military by mobilizing 100,000 new troops and arming its units with sophisticated new weaponry flowing in from the West.
Authorities in Kiev, which was under curfew starting on Saturday afternoon, while Ukrainian forces engaged in firefights in several neighborhoods with Russian infiltrator units wearing civilian clothes or Ukrainian uniforms, allowed residents to move around on Monday morning.
The metro is still working inside of Kiev at this point.
Meanwhile, the Russian markets are completely shut down.
They had to shut down their stock market because the ruble dumped about 30% and they have runs on banks in Russia.
Because of the cutoff from the international banking system that has finally, finally materialized, not with much help from the United States, by the way.
Outside one supermarket on the western side of Kiev, according to the Journal, the waiting time to enter was roughly two hours, even though many of the neighborhood's residents have fled the city for the relative safety of western Ukraine.
The city was calm, no looting, no violence.
Regular troops and volunteers with yellow armbands manned checkpoints at key intersections.
Key authorities warned that any looters would be shot on sight.
In some areas, signs of intense fighting were visible, with broken glass, a car with a bullet hole in its windshield, fragments of shells, and grenades.
If you take a look at the map, what you see is that the Russian ground troops have penetrated Parts of the North, they've done more serious penetration in the South.
And so the border of Ukraine seems to be shrinking gradually, although not nearly as extensively as people thought it would be this far into the war.
Zelensky said on Monday, on the fifth day of the full scale Russian invasion against the people of Ukraine, we are standing firm.
Every crime the occupiers commit against us brings us closer and closer to each other.
Russia never imagined it would face such solidarity.
Yuval Noah Harari, who usually writes on sort of anthropology, has a good piece over at The Guardian pointing out that if Putin's goal here was to prove that the Ukrainians were not actually a people of its own and that they actually were Russian, he has done precisely the opposite.
The Ukrainian people have united like never before.
They're proving in the face of overwhelming firepower that they are not going to buckle in the face of Vladimir Putin's threats.
Putin refused to take a call from Zelensky on the eve of Thursday's invasion, which he said seeks to oust the Ukrainian government and, quote unquote, demilitarize the country.
Russia sent a delegation to the southern Belarusian city of Gomel on Sunday.
Zelensky initially said he refused to meet in a country that had become a launchpad for Russia's attacks, but he did speak by phone to the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko later on Sunday.
Lukashenko has said he might mobilize troops in support of Vladimir Putin.
And apparently he then agreed to have some envoys head on over to the Ukrainian-Belarusian border.
He wasn't going to go himself, frankly, because he's afraid that he was going to be assassinated.
There is talk already that the Russians have been sending in kill squads into the middle of Kiev in an attempt to find Zelensky and just kill him outright.
So that is the state of play on the ground.
The mayor of Kiev put out a tweet last night suggesting that the entire city had basically been cut off and surrounded.
No one could escape.
He said that we can't actually evacuate civilians at this point.
He said we can't do that because all ways are blocked.
Right now we are encircled.
According to the Daily Mail, more than 400 Russian mercenaries have been flown in from Africa to assassinate Zelensky.
A private militia known as the Wagner Group allegedly has orders from Putin to take out Zelensky and 23 other government figures to allow Moscow to take over its eastern neighbor.
According to the Times, the U.K.
Times, the army for hire run by oligarchy Evgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Putin, was flown in five weeks ago and is now being offered a huge sum for the mission.
The highly trained operatives are said to be waiting for a green light from the Kremlin to pounce.
Their hit list also includes Ukraine's prime minister, the entire cabinet, mayor of Kiev Vitaly Klitschko, and his brother Vladimir, both boxing champions who become iconic figures on the front lines of the capital.
So that is the current state of play over there.
Meanwhile, the Europeans are actually getting involved much more than the United States is, by the way.
As we will get to in just a moment, Joe Biden is trying to claim credit for quote-unquote mobilizing the world.
The reality is that he didn't do much of anything.
Vladimir Putin mobilized the European Union in the same way that Barack Obama created peace in the Middle East by siding with Iran and then forcing Israel and the Arab countries to come to some sort of agreement that their security meant more than their disagreements about the Palestinian issue.
In the same way, the EU for years would not do anything to defend itself, and now Vladimir Putin in one fell swoop has caused the EU to suddenly decide that it is in fact an entity worth preserving and defending against Russian predation.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the European Union for the first time will now finance the purchase and delivery of weapons in a show of support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion, according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The EU will also extend to Belarus sanctions similar to those that imposed on Russia.
They're banning the entry of Russian planes into EU airspace.
They're banning from the 27 country block Russian state-owned media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries.
Ms.
von der Leyen said the EU's decision to finance arms purchases was a watershed moment.
The EU traces its roots to the post-World War II peace efforts and began as an economic alliance.
So the EU is now effectively rearming.
They are saying that we are not going to take this sitting down, nor are we going to hold ourselves subject to the predation of the Russian government.
The European Union has also, you remember that time that Donald Trump said that NATO should increase, all the NATO countries should increase their amount of spending, percentage of their GDP on defense?
And everybody got very angry at him for saying all of this?
Well all it took was Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine for that to happen.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Germany is now going to boost its own military spending above 2% of GDP.
And create a strategic natural gas reserve.
They're actually taking this seriously.
So after decades of shutting down their own ability to power their economy via carbon-based fuels, they've decided that they're going to re-up on that.
They're going to stop with all of this, let's spend billions and billions of dollars on green tech and make ourselves more dependent on Russian natural gas and oil.
Instead, they're going to create their own strategic natural gas reserve and essentially rearm.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the measures, all of which had long been resisted by successive governments and will now be reflected in this year's budget, underline how profoundly Russia's attack on Ukraine is upending European politics after almost eight decades of nearly uninterrupted peace on the continent.
Olaf Scholz said, we have to ask ourselves, what capacities does Putin's Russia have?
Which capacities do we need to counter his threats?
It's clear we need to invest a lot more in the security of our country to defend our freedom and our democracy.
Putin wants to establish a Russian empire.
The question is whether we can summon the strength to set boundaries to warmongers like Putin.
For decades, Germany had managed to reconcile rising welfare expenditure with budget surpluses by constraining investment in defense and other areas hollowing out its armed forces.
Also, the country has resisted diversifying its energy resources, relying instead on plentiful Russian gas supplied through the controversial Nord Stream undersea pipeline running between the two countries.
Germany has more than half of its gas coming from Russia.
Scholz said he would immediately invest the equivalent of 100 billion euros in weaponry.
Starting now, he said, Germany's military spending would exceed the NATO organization's spending target of 2% of GDP. He also said the government would create strategic gas reserves and finance the building of two liquefied natural gas import terminals on the country's northern coast.
So finally, the Europeans are actually getting serious about what it is they are doing at this point.
Ukraine, for its part, is saying, we would like to join the EU formally.
So all of the things that Vladimir Putin was seeking to prevent here, namely Ukraine joining the EU formally, he has now essentially forced the hand, which by the way, means that he is going to have to go through full scale with the invasion.
There's not going to be a peace agreement here short of Zelensky essentially surrendering himself to Putin, which he's not going to do.
According to CNN, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the European Union on Monday to urgently admit Ukraine to the bloc.
He said in his latest video message, we appeal to the European Union to urgently admit Ukraine using a new procedure.
We are grateful to partners for standing with us.
Our goal is to be with all Europeans and to be equal to them.
I'm sure we deserve it.
I'm sure it is possible.
Apparently, he spoke on Sunday with the presidents of Portugal, Lithuania, France and Poland, as well as the prime ministers of Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Already coming up, Russia, its economy is really teetering right now.
The Russian ruble is in serious, serious trouble.
We'll bring you more on that in just one moment.
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Meanwhile, the Russian ruble is just dying on the vine here.
According to CNN, Russia's currency crashed to a record low against the U.S.
dollar Monday as the country's financial system reeled from crushing sanctions imposed by Western countries in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
The ruble lost more than 30 percent of its value, trading at 109 to the dollar after plummeting as much as 40 percent.
The start of trading on the Russian stock market was actually canceled.
The latest barrage of sanctions came on Saturday when the United States, EU, UK and Canada said they would expel some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global financial messaging service, and paralyze the assets of Russia's central bank.
The United States had been Wildly hesitant to do that.
And apparently now they're going to go forward with this after being forced into it by the Europeans.
President Vladimir Putin's government has spent the last eight years prepping Russia for tough sanctions.
They built up a war chest of $630 billion in foreign currency reserves.
But his fortress economy is now under unprecedented assault.
At least some of that financial firepower is now frozen.
According to von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, we will also ban the transactions of Russia's central bank and freeze all of its assets to prevent it from financing Putin's war.
The collapse in the currency prompted the Russian Central Bank to implement emergency measures on Monday, including a huge hike in interest rates to 20% from 9.5% because basically they're trying to discourage people from taking loans.
They're saying, we need the cash.
There's not much that we can lend out at this point.
So again, there are negotiations today.
Those negotiations are highly unlikely to result in anything productive.
More than half a million refugees have now fled Ukraine, four neighboring countries at this point.
So this war is not going as easily, certainly, as Russia thought it was going to be going.
And the EU is finally mobilizing in the way that it should.
They've also shut down, by the way, all flights into the EU from Russia at this point.
As I mentioned, the EU, UK, Canada, and the United States have planned to cut some of the Russian banks from SWIFT, which is a major move.
They did this with Iran a few years ago under President Trump.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.
European Union, Canada, and the U.K.
announced new sanctions against Russia, saying they planned to cut some Russian banks off the SWIFT financial network and would take actions to prevent Russia's central bank deploying that $600 billion in reserves to help Russia's economy.
The joint statements from all of these governments sent a powerful signal of how the West could flex its collective muscle after debating how to respond to Russian aggression.
And this is a significant step up in efforts by Western capitals to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek a diplomatic off-ramp to the crisis.
So expect inflation supply chains to be attenuated.
Once again, expect prices to go up.
There will be sacrifice that has to be undergone by Europeans and, yes, Americans economically in order to fend off Russia here and in order to support Ukraine.
And President Biden should be asking the American people.
He should be transparent about this.
One of the things that's kind of amazing about this is the spectacle of watching as the United States, the White House, they're not sure whether they want to be seen as leading this or whether they want to be seen as leading from behind.
So on the one hand, Joe Biden wants to take credit for this.
He wants to say that he's been the one who's making all of this happen.
On the other hand, he pretty clearly is not the one making all this happen.
So at the same time that the Germans, who have been, again, investing billions and billions, tons of money, into their green energy infrastructure that's been utterly insufficient, and under the table has been powered by Russian natural gas and oil, They're cutting off Russian natural gas and oil, and they're starting to develop their own oil reserves.
In the United States, we have not even cut off Russia's energy sector at this point.
Representative Brad Sherman from California, he said, yeah, we're really not going to cut off their oil and natural gas because we need it.
But here's the thing, we don't.
We were energy independent until Joe Biden took office.
We're taking in hundreds of thousands of Russian barrels of oil a day.
There's no reason for that.
I mean, the first move that Joe Biden made when he came into office was he shut down the Keystone XL pipeline.
And the second move he made was greenlighting Nord Stream 2 between Russia and Germany.
So what exactly?
Like, why?
Why is it that the Europeans are taking a harsher stance on this when the United States has much more in terms of oil resources than the Europeans do?
Here's Brad Sherman.
These sanctions are actually rather modest compared to what we did to Iran back in 2014.
We have not used the SWIFT system to cut them out of international banking.
And the reason we did it is because both the United States, but particularly Europe, want to keep buying Russian oil and natural gas, and want to keep paying for it, and of course need a banking system to pay for it.
He's correct about this.
That's Democrat Brad Sherman.
According to the Wall Street Journal today, the European Union said it had agreed with all these countries to eject some of Russia's banks from the global financial system.
But, but, they're only cutting off some of those banks.
Why not all the banks?
The reason they're only cutting off some of the banks is because they don't want to cut off Russia's energy sector.
That continues through non-sanctioned banks.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Russia is one of the world's top oil and natural gas producers.
Energy exports represent half of the country's foreign sales.
The country Now embroiled in a bitter war in Ukraine provides around 40% of all of Europe's natural gas, about 50% of all of Germany's natural gas.
The commodity heats the continent, fuels many of its power plants, is a critical input for a range of industrial processes.
Russia's crude production is a major factor in the global oil marketplace.
Policymakers are tailoring their pressure campaign to protect their energy supply, prevent a surge in oil prices, and minimize the damage to their own economies.
Justine Walker, head of sanctions and risk at the Associate of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist said, you can't get away from the fact that Europe still has a dependency on Russia.
So the continuing dependence on Russian oil means that all the sanctions that are being undertaken, they're damaging the Russian economy, but they are not the mother of all bombs here.
A senior Biden official said on Saturday officials were carefully selecting which Russian banks to eject from the SWIFT network to minimize disruption of energy markets.
The official said, we know where most of the energy flows occur, through which banks they occur, and if we take that approach, we can simply choose the institutions where most of the energy flows do not occur.
And meanwhile, the attempt by the United States to split off China from Russia is utterly unavailing.
So all of the economic sanctions that we're placing on Russia, they're going to be to little avail if China continues to funnel money to Russia.
And they have a mutual interest in doing so.
First of all, China gets a lot of oil from Russia and so they want to remain on warm terms with Russia.
And second of all, Russia needs China's help in the international marketplace because people have not cut off China at the knees as of yet.
Meanwhile, China is happy to see Russia invade Ukraine as a predicate to China invading Taiwan.
There was a story that came out late last week that the Biden administration had spent months attempting to get China to split off from Russia and in fact had shown them confidential intelligence, which China then promptly turned around and handed directly to the Russians.
According to the New York Times, They visited a hockey rink in Beijing and the panda enclosure at the Moscow Zoo.
They shared blinis layered with caviar in Russia and reciprocally the popular variant in China, Jianbing.
They have shared birthday cakes and exchanged toasts with shots of vodka while demurring that neither would dare go overboard with the stuff.
For more than a decade, Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia have forged a respectful, perhaps even warm relationship, reflecting the deepening ties between two world powers that share common cause against American military and economic might.
The invasion of Ukraine could upend all that or forge in diplomatic isolation an alliance that reshapes the world order in the 21st century.
So Xi is sort of in a balancing act right now.
He doesn't want to completely cut off the West because he makes a lot of money from the West.
But he didn't do anything to ward off the invasion.
He didn't try to tell Putin not to do it.
China is waiting, in other words.
China is not likely to tell Russia to call it off.
It's pretty clear that Russia waited until the end of the Chinese Olympics in order to launch its invasion.
Finally, the White House is publicly calling on China to get involved.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, she said, this is not a time to stand on the sidelines.
It's time to be vocal and condemn the actions of Putin and Russia.
But China is very unlikely to do that at this point beyond some sort of pitter patter.
So that is an unlikely thing to happen.
So we have to ask ourselves at this point, what do we get wrong?
Because it seems like a lot of the foreign policy truisms of the last half century, they're just wrong.
What if it's possible that the ancient wisdom of foreign policy is still right?
Because human nature doesn't change.
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Hey, so what does all this mean?
I mean, one of the big things that this means is that for all of the pretensions of people in the West to the idea that we had basically fought in World War II, the war to end all wars, and that all of international politics had now shifted.
And then the aftermath of the Cold War, there was a dramatic shift in politics and that the wars of the past were over.
There wouldn't be no more major border wars.
Why would people fight over land?
After all, we're an international community with a huge global marketplace.
The belief that there wouldn't be resource wars anymore, because after all, we're going to go on green energy, we're going to develop new sources of energy.
All of those old questions about things like who has access to the oil, all of that would be a thing of the past.
None of that was true.
It turns out the old ways of politics remain, because all politics are are an extension of human nature, and human nature does not change.
So it turns out you weren't going to get aggressive countries like Putin on their own borders.
And we could ignore it, we could pretend it wasn't happening in Georgia, wasn't happening in Crimea, wasn't happening in Kazakhstan, wasn't happening in Belarus where the Russians were effectively setting up puppet states.
We could pretend all that wasn't happening because after all we were in a new modern era.
But Vladimir Putin wasn't in that era.
We could pretend that oil wars were never going to happen again because after all we were moving toward something approaching green energy.
And we could cut our nose off to spite our face.
We could continue to pump up those dreams while at the same time consuming Russian oil.
And then it turns out that those resources are still very necessary.
It turns out there are new types of resources that are going to lead to war.
Things like semiconductors.
The next wars, as Neil Ferguson has suggested, could be fought over semiconductors.
That is just a resource.
Resource wars could happen in the very near future.
Because again, human nature is human nature.
And so when people ask what Vladimir Putin is doing, you have to understand that Vladimir Putin isn't doing anything different than Peter the Great did.
Or that Catherine the Great did.
All that he's doing is expanding the borders of the Russian Empire.
And he is seeing the world in a slightly different way.
The way that Vladimir Putin is seeing the world is not as an international new world global order.
He is seeing the world as spheres of influence in the same way that all of the politicians of the late 18th century saw the world.
It was all spheres of influence and balance of power and Which countries?
Can I move inside either our formal borders or informal borders?
We're going to be our friends and we're going to help punish our enemies.
The interrelated world where we all got to trade with one another, that lasted, what, 30 years?
And it's been over for a little while.
And it's taken a little while for people to notice this.
The great dream after the fall of the Soviet Union is that now everyone would be integrated.
We were past all of the wars.
We were at the end of history.
The clash of civilizations was effectively over.
And it turns out the clash of civilizations is never over because as long as there are different cultures and different civilizations, there will be clashes between those civilizations and cultures.
And so you will have people like Vladimir Putin who wants to set up effectively an autarky A self-sufficient area that isn't reliant on trade with the West, where you don't have to import the West's values in order to run your economy.
Now, listen, it's a very bad thing.
We should have interrelated economies.
It's made everything cheaper.
It's made the world much richer.
It's made your life better.
It's made my life better.
It's made the lives of literally billions of people the world over better.
It's lengthened lifespan all over the planet.
The power of economics is not to be sniffed at.
And global supply chains are a really good thing.
Interrelations in trade are, generally speaking, a really good thing.
But again, the reality is that different cultures prize different things differently.
And that means that if they can use those tools in order to enrich themselves and then clamp down on their surrounding states in order to maximize their own cultural power, they will do so.
And that is what China is doing.
And that is what Russia is doing.
Vladimir Putin may be approaching the end of his life, right?
There are rumors about Vladimir Putin's health.
And so his ambitions are historic Russian ambition.
He wants to be Vladimir the Great.
He wants to be just like Peter the Great.
He wants to expand the borders of the Russian Empire.
And if that means that he's going to have to take an economic hit in order to do so, he'll take an economic hit in order to do so.
And for the Chinese, they feel the same way, which is why they are casting their eyes on Taiwan right now.
What has happened in the last week or so is that all of the prettiness of foreign policy thought since the end of the Cold War has been blown up.
I talked about this a little bit last week, all the various myths.
The myth of an international order led by the United Nations, which is always a joke.
The myth that economic sanctions were going to dissuade states from taking aggressive military action.
The myth that you could make soft guarantees to countries and that if they didn't have the ability to defend themselves, they could still rely on you to fill in the gaps.
None of that was true.
And so what you are likely to see is a massive rearmament movement across the world right now.
Because there are only two alternatives.
The alternative is either American power or everybody protecting themselves the way they see fit in order to preserve their own nationhood status.
It means Taiwan attempting to smuggle in or develop a nuclear weapon.
It means multiple countries now attempting to build up their militaries.
So maybe you think that's a good thing.
Maybe you think that that's good.
Then America doesn't have to do it.
The only problem is that puts a lot of countries outside the American purview.
It turns out that America's sphere of influence being very large, America being a global hegemon, has led to tremendous peace and prosperity for Americans living at home.
If you have a much more dangerous world where people are more likely to fight one another, and that's likely to impact you, not just at the supermarket, But in your job, in your supply lines, in what you pay for, in what you consume, well, that means that America's interests are more difficult to secure.
A non-American-led world is a more dangerous world for Americans and for American allies.
Because when everybody goes their own way, it's the Tower of Babel.
Everything becomes a lot more chaotic.
And that's the world before U.S.
dominance.
And that will be the world after U.S.
dominance.
So all this talk about America sort of withdrawing within our borders, why can't we leave everybody alone?
We can.
We can.
But it will come home.
There will be problems that affect Americans in a very deep and profound way.
For sure.
Meanwhile, by the way, the White House is attempting to determine whether or not they should take credit, sort of, for where things are at this point.
On the one hand, they want to take credit because look how we've mobilized the world.
On the other hand, they didn't mobilize the world.
So Politico is basically, in advance of Joe Biden's State of the Union address, they're running out interference for Joe Biden.
They have a piece in the Politico playbook today talking about the magic of Joe Biden.
If foreign policy crises have a way of reshuffling the priorities of a president, Joe Biden's standoff with Putin happened to come along just when Biden had lost some urgency in confronting his three big domestic threats.
The pandemic is becoming endemic, there's not much Biden can do about inflation, and the key senator standing in the way of Biden's domestic agenda remains immovable.
While the war in Ukraine is just five days old, administration officials and Biden allies are starting to grapple with the ways in which Biden's presidency may be fundamentally altered.
What Biden world is eager to talk about, according to Politico.
Biden is an Atlanticist who likes to brag about how he stayed in touch with European leaders while out of office from 2017 to 2021.
He's a creature of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Munich Security Conference.
He came up in politics immersed in the debates of the Cold War, which are now newly relevant.
Yeah, I mean, he also was on the wrong side of every issue that entire time.
Joe Biden has been an idiot for his entire career on foreign policy.
Domestic policy, too, but on foreign policy, just a disaster area.
When Joe Biden said recently that the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power, he could have been lifting the line from one of his 1988 presidential campaign speeches.
Biden in this view is uniquely suited for the new role that has been thrust upon him, which in the words of Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, is to, quote, rally the West in the face of Russian aggression.
It was Biden and his team's patience and close consultation with European allies that has led to the extraordinary unity now on display.
Biden's patience waiting to impose sanctions until after the invasion, even in the face of intense criticism, has been vindicated because Putin would have pointed to preemptive sanctions as a provocation and a reason to invade.
Oh, as opposed to him pointing to other provocations as a reason to invade.
So wait, just to get this straight, Biden team is now claiming we are right not to issue preemptive sanctions because then Putin would have invaded.
I noticed something that happened over the course of last week, which is that Putin invaded.
So it's hard to say I did the right thing, because if I hadn't done that thing, Putin would have invaded when Putin has, you know, boots on the ground surrounding Kiev.
One Biden official noted their team learned from the experience of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan when Europeans were outraged by the lack of coordination.
Chris Coons said, can you imagine a former president complimenting Osama Bin Laden the day after 9-11?
That's what Trump is doing with Putin.
That's not what Trump is doing with Putin, by the way.
Trump was saying that Putin has been clever.
He has on a raw level been clever.
That does not mean that he thinks that Vladimir Putin is a wonderful person doing non-evil things.
There's a lot of pride right now among Democrats in how Biden has handled the crisis so far.
Okay, now there is only one problem with this, which is that Joe Biden has not handled the crisis so far.
The same day this piece comes out from Politico, there's a piece in the Washington Post talking about all the new sanctions, and here's what it says.
The actions culminated on Saturday when the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union announced it would bar several major Russian banks from the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT, crack down on Russian oligarchs, and prevent the Russian Central Bank from bailing out the domestic economy.
The unprecedented moves led Russians to crowd ATMs into desperate bids to withdraw cash and sparked a furious response from Putin, who called them illegitimate and ordered his nuclear forces to a higher state of alert.
Here's the key.
Surprised by the unusually rapid European decision, the White House scrambled over the weekend to catch up in drafting its own related measures, according to one American and one European official.
We're not going to fight with bullets.
We're going to choke them financially, said Mark Chandler, chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex.
So, just pointing out here, that one sentence.
Surprised by the unusually rapid European decision, Europe is taking the lead here.
This is just Barack Obama leading from behind.
That's all this is.
And so Joe Biden trying to claim credit for mobilizing the world in support of Ukraine?
The Ukrainians were going it alone until the last five minutes.
Joe Biden had been announcing since November, November, that the Russians were going to invade Ukraine.
And he proceeded to do nothing of real consequence up until the Russians invaded Ukraine, at which point he put in some half-hearted sanctions that did not include the Russian energy sector.
And now Europe is ratcheting it up and Biden is following suit.
But that doesn't mean that Joe Biden is the great leader here by any stretch of the imagination.
Listen, I wish he would be.
I wish he would be.
And I'm glad that Europe is levying these sanctions against Russia.
I'm glad that Europe is raising its military budget.
I'm glad they're doing all of these things.
But let's just face the prospect that if American leadership had not been weak in the first place, Vladimir Putin probably doesn't do this.
If Joe Biden does not give up Afghanistan to the Taliban, do you think he makes this aggressive move to take Ukraine outright?
I think that's quite unlikely.
Alrighty, coming up, Joe Biden has the State of the Union coming up, and he has to change the narrative.
So the narrative that he's pushing is that he's in charge, he's great at this.
Yeah, I don't think anyone believes this.
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All righty, so meanwhile, Joe Biden's approval ratings are in the toilet.
He's trying to craft a narrative in advance of the State of the Union address that he has mobilized the world to stand with Ukraine.
Well, here's the thing.
Ukraine knows this is not true, which is why they have been essentially saying to each other, we are now going this alone.
It's only in the last couple of days that the EU has really gotten active right here.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden is still not taking the measures that, in a long-term way, would actually make the United States and the West more energy independent of Russia.
So, for example, over the weekend, the White House actually said that the drive to enhance oil production was wrong.
They said that if we actually changed our rules about enhancing oil production, that would be a mistake.
Here was Jen Psaki explaining this.
The Keystone Pipeline was not processing oil through the system.
That does not solve any problems.
That's a misdiagnosis or maybe a misdiagnosis of what needs to happen.
I would also note that on oil leases, what this actually justifies, in President Biden's view, is the fact that we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, on oil in general, and we need to look at other ways of having energy in our country and others.
So, excuse me?
You want us to take you seriously, as though you are fighting Russia, and meanwhile, you are saying that if we increase our oil production, that's a misdiagnosis?
And that we shouldn't be cracking down on the energy sector?
It's amazing.
It's an amazing thing.
So Germany, which is way more green than the United States, is saying, we're going to ramp up our oil production.
And Jen Psaki can't say it.
She can't say it.
Because always and forever, this is a radical administration enmeshed in progressive idealism without respect to the real world.
Which is one reason why this is not going to play.
This line is just not going to play.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi is trying to cast this as the GOP is equal to Russia.
You guys don't have a narrative here.
Here's Nancy Pelosi.
As we talked about Ukraine on the trip, we talked about the fact that the invasion, the assault on Ukraine was an assault on democracy.
Barbara took the time to talk about assaults on our democracy in our own country.
Putin was engaged in trying to disrupt our own elections.
But separate and apart from that, what's going on in our country about The vote and the role that you're playing to fight for passage in the Senate and the rest on voting rights in our country.
I mean, they have no narrative here.
I'm sorry.
This attempt to spin Putin and the 2020 election and the 2016 election and voting.
You guys don't have a narrative.
You have a president of the United States who's not all with us, and everybody knows it at this point.
There's a new Harvard-Harris poll out today.
This is the second poll in two days showing Joe Biden in the high 30s.
According to that Harvard-Harris poll, Biden's job approval overall is 38%.
On the economy, 33%.
On immigration, 32%.
On foreign affairs, 33%.
On crime, 33%.
On inflation, 28%.
Those are horrendous numbers.
Those numbers are vicious and brutal for Joe Biden.
And that's the second poll in two days that has him in the 30s.
According to the Washington Post, Biden will deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday to a deeply pessimistic nation, one that largely sees the economy worsening under his watch, disapproves of his leadership on key issues, and prefers that Republicans control Congress after the November elections, according to a Washington Post-ABCnew poll.
That poll finds Biden's presidential approval rating at 37%, 55% saying they disapprove.
Overall, 44% say they strongly disapprove.
61% of independents rate him negatively.
Only 77% of Democrats give Biden positive marks.
That is a bad number right there.
Asked whether they would prefer the next Congress to be in the hands of Republicans acting as a check against Biden or in the Democratic hands to support Biden's priorities, 50% say they'd rather have Republicans in charge.
40% for the Democrats.
That's a plus 10 for the Republicans.
Asked how they would vote today?
49% of registered voters said they would support the Republicans, 42% Democrats.
For comparison, ahead of the 28-term midterms, where Democrats scored big gains, Democrats had a 7-point advantage on the same question.
Now, the media are trying to spin this into some sort of victory for Joe Biden.
They're suggesting that things are likely to change when it comes to Ukraine, that Joe Biden's leadership here is really going to be well respected.
But that's not right.
Most Americans are not looking at this and thinking Joe Biden is strong.
They're thinking that Vladimir Putin thinking Joe Biden is weak is a reflection of all of us.
We all think that Joe Biden is pretty weak at this point.
George Stephanopoulos pushed Jen Psaki on a poll, came out yesterday saying that Americans think that Biden is really not all there.
The President is approaching his State of the Union in a pretty difficult political position right now.
37% approval rating.
Democrats trailing badly in the midterm polling.
A majority in our recent poll out this morning even questioned the President's mental capacity.
How is he going to turn that around on Tuesday night?
And how much has his State of the Union been changed by this war in Ukraine?
And if you look back, when President Obama gave his first State of the Union, it was during the worst financial crisis in a generation.
When President Bush gave his first State of the Union, it was shortly after 9-11.
Leaders lead during crises.
That's exactly what President Biden is doing.
Okay, yeah, there's a difference you may have noticed.
Joe Biden caused all of these crises.
That's the part that Jen Psaki won't talk about.
We've talked about the worst first year in presidential history.
If you can go first, like worst first years in presidential history, it's Abraham Lincoln actually had a civil war breakout.
That wasn't his fault.
That civil war broke out effectively upon him taking office.
Worst first years include JFK.
Some of that was self-inflicted, but not close to as bad as Joe Biden.
You might have to say George W. Bush because 9-11 happens his first year in office again, exogenous event, external event caused not by him.
Every problem that Joe Biden is currently suffering from is a problem of Joe Biden's own making and the American people know it.
He made these problems happen.
Joe Biden Made what is happening right now in Ukraine happen in large part with his pullout from Afghanistan, which he triumphantly announced as a victory, despite the fact that Americans were murdered, that millions of people will starve this winter because of him, that hundreds of thousands of women are now living under sexual predation and tens of thousands will probably be sold into sex slavery.
That's because of Joe Biden.
Inflation is because of Joe Biden.
That 40-year inflation is not just a supply chain problem, it is a supply and demand issue that is created by blowing out the budget and loose monetary policy from the Fed.
Every major problem that Joe Biden is currently experiencing, the border crisis, is a Joe Biden problem.
It has been exacerbated wildly by Biden's ascension to the office.
All of these problems are Joe Biden problems.
So when she says he's responding to the crisis, no, Joe Biden is the crisis.
And the American people know that.
And so this attempt to spin him into a masterful leader, a masterful world, like no one believes this.
No, by the way, I do have to mention here the State of the Union address, which is supposed to happen tomorrow.
It's pretty amazing.
I suggested a while ago that I would not be surprised if there was a mask removal that happened directly before the State of the Union so that Joe Biden could go out there and say he had defeated COVID.
Now, of course, that's really, really silly.
Joe Biden did not defeat COVID.
Omicron defeated COVID.
Omicron defeated COVID by getting everyone who didn't already have natural immunity infected, and many people who already had vax immunity natural immunity.
So everybody at this point has either natural or vax immunity.
That's because Obamacare has nothing to do with Joe Biden, who's been incompetent all the way throughout COVID.
More people have died under his watch with a working vaccine than died under Donald Trump without a working vaccine.
So what's happening?
The U.S.
Capitol attending physician said on Sunday, masks will be optional on Capitol Hill starting the day before Joe Biden is to deliver his State of the Union address.
Why?
Because Joe Biden didn't want the spectacle of a bunch of people in the audience wearing masks while the rest of the country is already unmasked because we're already done.
We've been done in some parts of the country for a year.
Joe Biden didn't want to look ridiculous.
And so magically, the science changed just in time for the State of the Union, which of course underscores the fact that it was never about the science for the Democrats in the first place.
They've been cramming down these ridiculous measures on Americans by the millions, by the hundreds of millions, depending on where you live.
They've been doing this for no reason other than politics.
And Joe Biden just underscored that.
So once again, the attempt to draw victory from the jaws of defeat for the Biden administration, good luck with that.
No one believes it, nor should they.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today for an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Mills Show that's available right now.
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Propaganda goes into overdrive during the first major war between civilized nations in many decades.
The White House can't point to any Ukraine policies that have worked.
And Trump calls Putin smart.
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