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March 4, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

47:30

The World-Changing Unintended Consequences of War | Ep. 1446

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Time	Text
	Russia shells a Ukrainian nuclear plant.
	Ukraine and Russia hash out a few areas of agreement while war continues and the economic impacts of war start to go global.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Well, the world started to panic late last night when it appeared that there might be a nuclear meltdown in Ukraine over Russia shelling a nuclear power plant.
	According to the Associated Press, however, no radiation was released from a Russian attack at Europe's biggest nuclear power plant in Ukraine.
	Firefighters have extinguished a blaze at the facility, according to U.N.
	and Ukrainian officials, on Friday.
	Russian forces continued to press their campaign to cripple the country despite global condemnation.
	The International Atomic Energy Agency's Director General, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said on Friday that the building hit by a Russian projectile at this particular plant was not part of the reactor.
	Instead, it was a training center at the plant.
	Nuclear officials from Sweden to China said there were no radiation spikes that had been reported.
	Ukrainian officials said Russian troops took control of the overall site.
	The plant's staff were continuing to ensure its operations, so electricity has not been cut across Ukraine thanks to the takeover of the nuclear power plant.
	In the frenzied initial aftermath, When the risk of a radiation release was not clear, the attack caused worldwide concern and evoked memories of the world's worst nuclear disaster, which, of course, did happen in Ukraine at Chernobyl.
	Facing worldwide indignation over the attack, Russia sought to deflect blame without producing any evidence.
	Defense Ministry spokesperson Igor Konashenkov blamed arson rather than artillery fire, he claims, of the Ukrainian sabotage group.
	had actually occupied the plant, fired on a Russian patrol and then set fire to the building as they left. All of this, of course, raised the alarm because when we look at the situation in Ukraine, there are a lot of unintended consequences that are possible, which we'll get to in just a moment. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Russian forces continued pushing up north from the They reached a place called Enerhodar on Wednesday.
	After attempted surrender negotiation failed, a large column of Russian forces attacked the city on Thursday.
	Webcam footage showed a huge fireball rising behind a church in the city, a short distance from the nuclear facilities, and then two munitions, possibly illumination rounds, landing on the compound itself.
	The video is, in fact, pretty stunning.
	Meanwhile, Russia continues to pound a bunch of Ukrainian cities.
	The war that Putin launched on Ukraine more than a week ago has run into fierce Ukrainian resistance, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	While Russian forces have advanced in the northeast and south of the country, the offensive has continued to stall around Kiev and Moscow, has now resorted more to indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighborhoods in cities like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol, and Sumy.
	Russian shelling in the power plant area paused after 3 a.m.
	local time.
	At the time of the Russian attack, two of the six reactors were operating.
	The plant's management switched off reactor number three at 2.26 a.m., leaving only number four.
	According to Jans Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, he said the shelling of the plant just demonstrates the recklessness of this war and the importance of ending it.
	For his part, Vladimir Zelensky spoke with President Biden about the attack on the plant, and Biden urged Russia to cease its military activities in the area and allow firefighters and emergency responders access to the site.
	U.S.
	Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Twitter she'd spoken with the Ukrainian energy minister.
	She said, we have seen no elevated radiation readings near the facility.
	So there were a bunch of false reports at the very beginning that this was going to turn into a full-scale nuclear meltdown, which again underscores the fact that you can't predict what's going to happen in a war.
	Meanwhile, Vladimir Zelensky keeps calling on the West for more intervention.
	He says, we're fighting for our people.
	We are fighting for our land.
	We don't have nuclear arms.
	We don't have oil and gas to fill the world with.
	But we have our people.
	We have our land.
	And for us, that is our gold.
	That's what we're fighting for.
	We have nothing to lose other than our freedom, our dignity.
	This is our greatest treasure.
	There's also a propaganda war that's going on between Ukraine and Russia at the moment, which is why there's a humanitarian ceasefire that has been signed.
	Temporary local humanitarian ceasefires allowing for humanitarian corridors so civilians can be evacuated and food and medicine can be delivered.
	By the way, it's also in Russia's interest to destabilize the rest of Europe by effectively forcing out millions of Ukrainian refugees into the rest of Eastern and Central Europe, which is exactly what is happening.
	Right now, according to the Washington Post, Russia has sent nearly all of its assembled combat power into Ukraine.
	On Thursday, they unleashed some of the most intense fighting since the invasion began, with local officials pleading for help as ground troops seized or encircled strategically important southern cities.
	Vladimir Putin, for his part, For his part, he said that the mission was, quote, going according to plan and in full compliance with the timetable.
	Despite widespread agreement among Western military analysts, the invasion had been slowed by unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance.
	And of course, the images that are coming out of this war are stunning to a lot of people because this is what it looks like when it's not the United States running a war.
	When it's Russia running a war.
	The fact is that when first world nations run wars, they're very meticulous in how they go about fighting those wars.
	They try and hit very specific military targets.
	You don't see a lot of tape coming out of indiscriminate rocket fire against civilian targets.
	When Israel fights a war, they actually drop knock bombs on the top of buildings to evacuate the building before they bomb the building.
	When the United States fights a war, they're firing missiles through individual windows.
	When Russia fights a war, they're fighting a war like 1945 style.
	They're just firing munitions at anything that they think is going to achieve some sort of objective for them, strategic or otherwise, and that includes killing a lot of civilians.
	They want to cover up for that fact by allowing humanitarian aid, but mostly what they want is more streams of refugees, because again, that encourages the West to try and make some concessions to him to make all of this stop.
	He's ratcheting up the pressure not just on Ukraine, but on the West, the West to force Ukraine into some form of surrender.
	And realistically speaking, that is probably the most likely scenario here is that the West negotiates some sort of separate peace with the Russians without a lot of Ukrainian input and just carves off part of the Donbass region and gives it to Russia in a final attempt to appease.
	And then they say, if you ever come in here again, then we are going to establish an off-line zone.
	You have to reestablish deterrence because deterrence obviously didn't work in Ukraine.
	The problem is once the deterrence has not worked, as we discussed yesterday, you start to run out of options very, very quickly.
	According to the Washington Post, Kherson, among the first Ukrainian cities to be encroached upon by Russian forces, was running out of medicine and is facing disaster within days if that humanitarian corridor was not established, according to the secretary of the city council, She said people are in a panic, people are tense, people are frightened to the core of their souls.
	Reports from other cities in Ukraine's south told a story of increasing desperation as communications and transport routes were cut off and supplies dwindled.
	The mayor of Mariupol said a Russian siege and hours of shelling that battered rail links and bridges had cut off all water, power, and food supplies.
	The mayor of Odessa, which is a major port on the Black Sea, said the population was preparing to mount a defense.
	Amid unverified reports, a large fleet of Russian warships was heading toward the waters off the coast.
	When you look at the map, what you see is that Russia has taken over Literally the entire southern border of Ukraine outside of the area around Odessa because they now have control over the Sea of Azov.
	They have control over large swaths of the Black Sea.
	They've also taken control of pretty much the entire Ukrainian northern border up to the Ukrainian border with Belarus.
	And Belarus has become effectively a Russian client state at this point.
	There's been talk about whether the Russians go into Moldova when all this is over.
	That if the pressure is ratcheted up Ratchet up further and further by the West.
	Russia says, OK, we got nothing to lose.
	We'll just attack every nation in the region that is not an overt NATO ally at this point.
	Ukrainian officials said early Friday that Russian shelling had caused that fire to break out at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, which is Europe's largest power plant.
	This week, Ukraine temporarily lifted visa requirements for foreign volunteers who wished to enter the country and join the fight against Russian forces.
	In Washington, two men arrested with firearms near the Ukrainian embassy told police they had driven from Indiana to volunteer for the battle, according to law enforcement officials.
	A senior U.S.
	defense official, according to the Washington Post, told reporters that 90% of the combat power Russia had assembled outside Ukraine was now within the country, up from 80% on Tuesday.
	So now it's just going to be a long, grinding war in which Russia tries to crush all opposition by cutting off supply lines, by creating a humanitarian crisis.
	Again, they might try to band-aid that for public consumption by essentially allowing some humanitarian aid in.
	But that is not going to make up for the fact that they continue to close off these cities in the main.
	Pressure people to leave the country and create humanitarian crisis within by shelling civilian areas.
	The situation on the ground for people who are still in Ukraine is really, really ugly, according to the Financial Times.
	In the two-day battle for Kherson, Russian tanks shelled the school and troops shot dead residents seeking to repel the attack with molotov cocktails.
	Once the city was captured, the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag kept flying above its main official building as part of life under Russian occupation.
	The new mayor laid out the rules in a Facebook post.
	His constituents could leave home in groups no bigger than two.
	Cars were told to drive at low speed.
	Arrangements were made to collect corpses of Ukrainians killed in the main square and other parts of town.
	The city said that was at least 49 people, mainly civilians.
	According to that mayor, Ihor Kolikayev, he said, we are experiencing colossal difficulties with collecting and burying the dead, delivering food and medicine, rubbish removal, accidents removal, etc.
	He said, for now, the flag flying above us is Ukrainian.
	In order for it to stay that way, these requirements must be met.
	That is all that I can offer for now.
	Ukrainians say that the Russian hold on these cities is incomplete and occupiers have shown little sign they are equipped to run them or any interest in doing so.
	How they hold this long term is going to be a major question because obviously the Ukrainian people are not interested in living under Russian occupation.
	So the most likely scenario here is if there is no separate peace signed, if there is no attempt to do some sort of final appeasement of Vladimir Putin, then the likely outcome here is going to be a 10 to 20 year civil war, which really is just an insurgency against an imperialist foe in Russia invading Ukraine.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden is calling out the In the State of the Union address, I announced that the Department of Justice is going after the crimes of Russian oligarchs.
	Attorney General spoke to that earlier and who lined their pockets with Russian people's money and while Ukraine and the people are hiding in Subways from missiles That are being fired indiscriminately in Russian cities. Of course that is true It is also true, as many people pointed out, that there is a propaganda war going on between Russia and Ukraine in which you can't fully trust the information coming from either side.
	The one thing that we know, and you don't require any sort of belief in Ukrainian propaganda to believe this, is that Russia has invaded a sovereign foreign state and is seeking to impose its will on it.
	However, it is certainly true that much of the stuff that's coming out of war zones, Fog of War and all of that, or active propaganda, may not be true.
	According to the New York Times, just days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pilot with a mysterious nickname was quickly becoming the conflict's first wartime hero.
	Nicknamed the Ghost of Kiev, the ace fighter had apparently single-handedly shot down several Russian fighter jets.
	The story was shared by the official Ukraine Twitter account on Sunday in a thrilling montage video set to thumping music showing the fighter swooping through the Ukrainian skies as enemy planes exploded around him.
	The Security Service of Ukraine also relayed the tale on its official Telegram channel, which has 700,000 subscribers.
	The story of a single pilot's beating the superior Russian Air Force found wide appeal online.
	Videos of the so-called Ghost of Kiev had more than 9.3 million views on Twitter.
	The flyer was mentioned in thousands of Facebook groups, reaching up to 717 million followers.
	On YouTube, videos promoting the Ukrainian fighter collected 6.5 million views.
	There is only one problem, which is that this might be a myth.
	While there are reports of some Russian planes that were destroyed in combat, there's no information linking them to a single Ukrainian pilot.
	One of the first videos that went viral, which was included in the montage shared by the official Ukraine Twitter account, was a computer rendering from a combat flight simulator originally uploaded by a YouTube user with just 3,000 subscribers.
	A photo supposedly confirming the fighter's existence, shared by the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, was from a 2019 Twitter post by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
	In the information war over the invasion of Ukraine, says the New York Times, some of the country's official accounts have pushed stories with questionable veracity, spreading anecdotes, gripping on-the-ground accounts, and even some unverified information that was later proved false in a rapid jumble of fact and myth.
	Now, Russia itself has been suggesting that false flag attacks are what caused them to rush into Ukraine in the first place.
	That's propaganda as well.
	Laura Edelson, a computer scientist studying misinformation at New York University, said Ukraine is involved in pretty classic propaganda here.
	They're telling stories that support their narrative.
	Sometimes false information makes its way in there too.
	More of it is getting through because of the overall environment.
	And so it's important to keep an eye on what exactly is happening.
	However, none of this changes the basic logic on the ground, which is that the Russians are in fact involved in imperialist conquest of a foreign neighbor.
	And for all the talk about how Russia is quote-unquote justified for having to protect itself from NATO expansion on its borders, the simple fact is that Russia is currently bordered by a wide variety of NATO nations, ranging from Norway in the very north of Russia, which joined NATO in 1949, to Poland, which joined in 1999, There's an area called Kaliningrad.
	It's kind of a bizarre outlying area of Russia.
	It's like a little kind of tip of land and it borders Poland.
	And if they were to invade Ukraine, by the way, they would be, if they were to take over the entirety of Ukraine, they would now be bordering Poland on the other side.
	They'd be bordering Hungary.
	They'd be bordering Romania.
	So this really is not about any sort of buffer zone against NATO.
	Ukraine was the independent buffer zone against NATO.
	And if Ukraine became more Western, and even if it had joined NATO, all that would have meant is that there was just more border that was bordering with NATO.
	But NATO has never attempted to topple Vladimir Putin.
	And that's why it's a mistake at this point for people in the West to start openly talking about the necessity of toppling Vladimir Putin if they are in a position of power.
	Lindsey Graham came out yesterday and he tweeted out that it was time to topple Vladimir Putin.
	Well, that seems like a really good way of getting Vladimir Putin to attack more countries.
	Because if he feels like the West is actually going to attempt to throttle him from the inside and coo him out, then what exactly would prevent him from getting more and more aggressive in an attempt to stymie any sort of internal dissent?
	And cracking down on all dissent inside of Russia, by the way.
	This is why, again, John Brennan, who's the former Director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama, he said Putin's days are numbered.
	Like, you shouldn't be saying this stuff publicly.
	Listen, I'm more hawkish than Brennan is, by a long shot.
	It is unwise in the extreme to talk about cooing out the dictator of a country that is armed with thousands of nuclear warheads, not a bright moon.
	Putin and his henchmen that are around him.
	I think they believe that the only option they have is to continue with this ferocious intensity and trying to devastate Ukraine.
	But I think, as Ambassador Soderbergh said, this is only going to lead to, I think, Putin's unraveling in terms of his position in the Russian government.
	Now, what's going to be the tripwire in terms of pressure on oligarchs and pressure on the Russian people and commodities and other types of things?
	It's unclear.
	But I do believe that Putin's days are numbered.
	Maybe in the double digits.
	Maybe in the double digits?
	You think that Putin is going to get cooed out in the next two weeks?
	Yeah, good luck to you there.
	Now, that's not the real story.
	The real story is that Putin is well ensconced and he ain't going anywhere.
	It'd be a giant shock, a cataclysmic, earth-shaking shock if he were to be cooed out at this point.
	So when Joe Biden says things like the sanctions are having a profound impact on Russia, they are having a profound impact on the everyday Russians living in Russia.
	And they're having an impact on the oligarchs and depriving Russia of the resources it needs in order to project foreign power is a good thing generally.
	But the reality is that it's having very little.
	The severe economic sanctions on Putin and all those folks around him.
	Ukraine, which seems to be, if anything, the sanctions are actually strengthening his grip on Ukraine. Again, when deterrence fails, bad things happen.
	Deterrence failed because the man sitting right here in the middle of your screen, Joe Biden. Here's Joe Biden saying that the sanctions are a big win.
	The severe economic sanctions on Putin and all those folks around him, choking off access to technology as well as cutting off access to the global financial system. It's had a profound impact already. And the goal is to maximize the impact on Putin and Russia and minimize the harm on us and our allies and friends around the world. Our interest is in maintaining the strongest unified economic impact
	campaign on Putin in all history.
	And I think we're well on the way to doing that.
	Well, not really.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, sanctions are very unlikely to force Putin to back down in Russia.
	According to David Lunel, Andrew Rastuchia and Shun Engel Rasmussen writing for the Wall Street Journal, Western nations have in the past week imposed the most sweeping economic sanctions against a major country in recent decades, moves that are likely to cripple the Russian economy and sharply raise the costs of the country's invasion of Ukraine.
	Whether it will be enough to cause Putin to withdraw his troops from Ukraine or even weaken his hold on power is far less likely, according to experts on sanctions.
	This is obviously the case.
	Sanctions have historically done very little unless you have a complete blockade.
	They do not have a complete blockade of Russia.
	In fact, as we'll talk about in a moment, we are still importing Russian oil and natural gas right now.
	Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, he said there's very little in the history of sanctions that show they can get the target country to change policy on something that is important to the country.
	I see very little of Putin's temperament that sanctions will even be in the zip code of being decisive.
	Sanctions have a mixed track record, often falling short of causing a dramatic change in behavior, particularly in authoritarian countries like Russia.
	Sanctions on Iran were one of the factors analysts believe pushed it into a 2015 deal on its nuclear program and brought its leaders back to the negotiating table recently, but they didn't dislodge the government or stop what the U.S.
	sees as its aggressive military behavior in the Middle East.
	That's not even true.
	It wasn't sanctions on Iran that brought Iran to the table.
	It was the fact that Barack Obama wanted to give them an ass massage that brought them to the table.
	They were getting free crap from Obama, and now they're getting free crap from Biden, and so they're at the table.
	Sanctions by the U.S., the U.N., and others have failed to make North Korea give up its nuclear weapons.
	So sanctions are useful in terms of limiting the reach of an opposition power by impoverishing that power.
	But in terms of getting there to be a shift in power within the country, very, very unlikely.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.
	and European sanctions against Libya from the 1980s for its activities sponsoring terror lasted 20 years before Libya disclosed and scrapped its weapons program.
	And by the way, the reason that they scrapped their weapons program had nothing to do with the sanctions.
	It had to do with the fact that the United States invaded Iraq.
	Once the United States invaded Iraq, Qaddafi looked around and he said, maybe I should give up this nuke that I have here, this nuclear program that I'm working with.
	And of course, that ended well for him when Hillary Clinton Had him killed.
	So that turned out to be a bright move all the way around for Muammar Gaddafi, who certainly deserved it, but also bad strategy right there.
	Iraq's Saddam Hussein resisted more than a decade of UN sanctions.
	So all the talk about how sanctions are going to change the situation on the ground, that's obviously not true.
	Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesperson, said they probably think by imposing sanctions, they can force us to change our position.
	It's obvious here this is out of the question.
	For all their limits, sanctions are widely viewed as better than doing nothing.
	But, I mean, better than doing nothing is not much of a measure.
	That's a pretty low bar to clear.
	And again, the West sanctions that are being placed on Russia exempt a large part of its energy sector.
	So Russia is still able to bring in the kind of money that Putin needs in order to keep the oligarchs happy enough not to coup him, even if that were a serious possibility.
	So Gensaki says that we are willing to pay any price, undergo any burden for freedom, except for a higher gas price.
	Prices.
	We'll get to that in a moment.
	First, let's talk about another podcast you should give a listen to.
	This is a podcast I've recommended time and again, so if you haven't done it yet, you really need to.
	I'm talking about the Jordan Harbinger Show, a top shelf podcast named Best of Apple in 2018.
	Don't just ignore my suggestion to listen to this one like you probably do when your friends tell you to listen to a podcast.
	We are fans here at The Daily Wire.
	I know podcasts.
	This is a good one.
	They have episodes that you will be interested in.
	He does interviews with really, really fascinating people.
	Everybody from Dan Carlin to Kobe Bryant to Scott Adams.
	Harbinger has a talent for getting his guests to share never-been-heard-before stories and thought-provoking insights.
	Without fail, he pulls out tactical bits of wisdom in each episode, all with the noble cause to make you a more informed, critical thinker to better operate in today's world.
	He's also got a strangely relatable weekly segment called Feedback Friday, where Jordan covers advice on everything from psycho family situations to relationships to networking.
	I don't always agree with Jordan and what he says on the show, but hey, that's what makes it interesting.
	You can't go wrong with adding The Jordan Harbinger Show to your rotation.
	It's fascinating.
	There is not a dull show in the bunch.
	Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show.
	That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts today.
	The fact is that Europe right now is significantly more serious about Russia than the United States is.
	Europe is rethinking its whole relationship with green energy because they've recognized that their green energy utopianism has led them to reliance on Russia.
	And they're trying to cut that off now.
	The United States isn't doing that.
	Joe Biden is afraid of the economic blowback were he to do that.
	Which is why yesterday, Jen Psaki, for example, she said, we're going to do everything we can to lower gas prices.
	When she says everything, she means everything except for Except for abandoning the progressive environmental left.
	We would say directly to consumers, the president is going to do everything we can to reduce the impact, to make sure that we are working with our partners around the world to address the volatility in the global oil markets, to consider a range of options that he can continue to take to reduce the impact that they're feeling at the pump.
	And this has been front and center on his mind since the beginning of this conflict.
	Okay, so she was asked about banning Russian oil from American markets, and she went further.
	She said there's no strategic interest in banning Russian oil from American markets, which is a weird thing to say, considering that your entire administration is now marking the... is now essentially suggesting that only economic sanctions are going to work here.
	We don't have a strategic interest in reducing the global supply of energy, and that would raise prices at the gas pump for the American people.
	Okay, so he doesn't want to raise prices.
	So, well, Europe, by the way, you know the kind of prices that Europe is facing right now for gas and oil?
	prices. And that is certainly a big factor for the president in this at this moment.
	Okay, so he doesn't want to raise prices. So, well, Europe, by the way, you know, the kind of prices that Europe is facing right now for for gas and oil, like 100% higher than it was two weeks ago. In the United States, the change is incremental.
	And that change could be made up for if they would just abandon their green utopian nonsense.
	But they won't.
	But they won't.
	Jen Psaki was asked about this yesterday, about Keystone XL.
	And she's like, nah, it'll take a long time to greenlight Keystone XL.
	We should invest in clean energy instead.
	Okay, first of all.
	Investing in clean energy does not lower prices in the here and now either.
	If the argument is that Keystone XL will only come online after a certain amount of time, and therefore it doesn't lower prices in the here and now, which is a dubious proposition, because if you know that more gas is going to be supplied in the future, it does actually, future supply, does have the capacity to drive down price marginally.
	But, even if she were right about that, that would be exponentially more true of clean energy, which is not even close to coming online in the kind of numbers that you need it to come online in order to lower the gas prices right now.
	I mean, that's absurd.
	Here she was making the case anyway.
	The Keystone Pipeline has never been operational.
	It would take years for that to have any impact.
	I know a number of members of Congress have suggested that, but that is a proposed solution that has no relationship or would have no impact on what the problem is.
	We here all agree it's an issue.
	During those years where it would take to bring down prices, as you're saying, we should just continue to buy Russian oil?
	Well, again, Jackie, I think you're familiar with a number of steps we've taken, a historic release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
	Let me finish.
	What we can do over time, and what this is all a reminder of in the President's view, is our need to reduce our reliance on oil.
	The Europeans need to do that.
	We need to do that.
	If we do more to invest in clean energy, more to invest in other sources of energy, that's exactly what we can do to prevent this from happening in the future.
	Oh, really?
	Is that what we can do to prevent this from happening in the future?
	Because, you know, Europe has invested exponentially more as a percentage of GDP in green energy than the United States has, and all it did was make them extraordinarily reliant on Russian oil.
	Because unless you can change the basic science, which is that carbon-based fossil fuels are way more efficient and way more easily available than green energy, That ain't going to change anything.
	So it's just delusion all the way down.
	I mean, Nancy Pelosi is saying she's not even... Nancy Pelosi is out there saying, no drilling on public lands.
	So yeah, we got to fight the Russians.
	Here's my Ukrainian flag pin.
	Look how wonderful.
	Let's stand for Ukraine.
	Also, no, we're not going to drill on public lands so that we're less dependent on Russian oil.
	And I'm not for drilling on public lands.
	Yeah, I noticed.
	I noticed.
	Okay, meanwhile, the pressure is in fact telling on the Russian natural gas and oil sector, but not because of the United States.
	It's because of Europe, and it's also because you have a bunch of other oil companies that are attempting to divest from the Russian oil industry.
	Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company, appeared to distance itself from Vladimir Putin on Thursday, calling for a fast resolution to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
	The statement most likely reflects the company's desire to protect its extensive overseas operations, which include a network of more than 200 franchised gas stations in states like New York and New Jersey.
	Luke oil is one of the most recognizable Russian brands in the United States.
	They're afraid that in the United States there will be local acts to shut down Luke oil.
	Many lawmakers in Washington are pressing the Biden administration to ban the purchase of Russian oil by U.S.
	companies and to impose sanctions on Russian energy companies.
	Shares of Luke oil have fallen more than 40%.
	Since mid-February.
	So they're afraid of us doing this, but apparently we're not going to do it.
	So it's kind of a moot point.
	So here's the question, where does all this go from here?
	And this is where things start to get ugly because the unintended consequences of war, they really do change in enormous amounts across the planet.
	So we've already seen a major realignment.
	Europe is starting to rearm.
	Japan, there's Shinzo Abe, he's the former president.
	He's now calling for nuclear weapons in Japan.
	If Taiwan isn't seeking a nuclear right now, I don't know what they're doing.
	They should be seeking a nuke.
	All independent minded nations have no trust in the West and no trust in Russia and China.
	And so they're going to seek to go their own way and to develop their own militaries and nuclear weapons.
	Which raises the prospect of future war pretty dramatically.
	The overt alliance now between Russia and China, which has rejected economic sanctions against Russia, and their alliance with Iran is reshaping the world order.
	The United States is now no longer seen as a reliable partner in pretty much any way.
	We're not a reliable partner to the people of Hong Kong.
	We're not a reliable partner to the people of Afghanistan.
	We're not a reliable partner to the people of Ukraine.
	We're trying to backfill that now.
	But it's a little late for that, especially when the United States is using Russia to make overtures to Iran.
	So if you're an erstwhile ally of the United States, why would you not hedge your bets?
	Why wouldn't you?
	Like, what would be the... Let's say you're Saudi Arabia.
	And let's say that the United States has had a warm relationship with Saudi Arabia for a long time because of Saudi Arabia's access to oil.
	And now the United States is making overtures to Iran.
	Would you start triangulating?
	Would you start making overtures to maybe Russia, and China, and Israel, and a wide variety of countries that might have an impact on you, rather than staying in the American camp?
	The answer is, of course you would, because you'd be a fool not to do otherwise.
	So the entire New World Order is reshaping, but not in the way that the left once suggested, which was going to be a sort of grand global liberal democracy get-together, or a grand kind of Francis Fukuyama barbecue.
	That's not how it's turning out.
	It turns out that we are seeing again a re-emergence of the spheres of influence that dominated international politics all the way up through basically the end of the Second World War.
	That's not a good thing.
	War was much more common in the spheres of interest area.
	Once the spheres of interest area basically broke down into two and it was just the USSR versus the United States, the world got a lot more peaceful post-World War II than it was pre-World War II.
	And as it turns out, post-Cold War, the world got very peaceful in the era of American hegemony.
	The biggest wars in the post- Cold War era where wars were maybe three, four thousand people died.
	I'm talking about wars involving major powers.
	That is likely not to be the case in the next few decades because of the global realignment that we are seeing right now.
	And all of that could have been prevented.
	All of that could have been deterred by a muscular America who knew her world, who knew her role on the world stage.
	Right now we're in sort of an odd position with Ukraine because on the one hand, if you get too hawkish, you're actually encouraging Vladimir Putin to invade more surrounding countries.
	You're encouraging him to use tactical nuclear weapons if he thinks that he's going to go down.
	On the other hand, if you are not more hawkish when it comes to NATO, If you're not rebuilding the American military, if you're not guaranteeing the security of Taiwan, if you're not guaranteeing the security of Middle Eastern countries against Iran, if you're not doing those things, what you're likely to see is a world that gets fragmentary, chaotic, new alliances being formed that we can't completely control.
	And for all those people who think that has no impact on America, just get ready for higher prices for literally everything.
	And the possibility of more involvement in war.
	Because once war starts, it's difficult to see where it goes.
	Most wars, most major wars, start off as rather contained conflicts.
	And then they spiral out of control.
	According to the New York Times, that is the worry with Putin right now.
	Senior White House officials designing the strategy to confront Russia have quietly begun debating a new concern, that the avalanche of sanctions directed at Moscow, which have gained speed faster than they imagined, is cornering Putin and may prompt him to lash out, perhaps expanding the conflict beyond Ukraine.
	In Situation Room meetings in recent days, the issue has come up repeatedly, according to three officials.
	Putin's tendency, American intelligence officials have told the White House and Congress, is to double down when he feels trapped by his own overreach.
	They've described a series of possible reactions, ranging from the indiscriminate shelling of Ukrainian cities to compensate for the early mistakes made by his invading force, to cyberattacks directed at the American financial system, to more nuclear threats and perhaps moves to take the war beyond Ukraine's borders.
	And again, herein lies the problem.
	I'm going to go back to it one more time.
	If the United States had engaged in actual deterrence of Russia over the course of the past 20 years, but particularly within the last year, this would not have happened.
	Once you have the invasion of Ukraine, it is now in Vladimir Putin's interest to make it as ugly as humanly possible.
	Because that leaves the rest of the world with a couple of choices.
	One is to get an overt conflict with Russia, which no one wants.
	And the second is to make some sort of concessions to Vladimir Putin to end this thing.
	So Putin is now fully invested in making things hideous and ugly.
	Especially because the world has not seen hideous and ugly, at least not in the center of Europe, for a very, very, very long time.
	Like long before any of us listening were probably born.
	You have to be, at this point, well into your 80s to remember the last time Europe saw significant damage this way.
	The debate over Putin's next moves is linked to an urgent re-examination by intelligence agencies of the Russian leader's mental state and whether his ambitions and appetite for risk have been altered by two years of COVID isolation.
	Those concerns accelerated, according to the New York Times, after Putin's order on Sunday to place the country's strategic nuclear weapons on a combat-ready alert to respond to the West's quote-unquote aggressive comments.
	It was a sign of the depth of American concern that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on Wednesday he was canceling a previously scheduled Minuteman nuclear missile test to avoid escalating direct challenges to Moscow or giving Putin an excuse to once again invoke the power of the country's nuclear arsenal.
	John Kirby said, We didn't take this decision lightly, but we are trying to demonstrate we're a responsible nuclear power.
	We recognize at this moment of tension that it's critical that both the United States and Russia bear in mind the risk of miscalculation and take steps to reduce those risks.
	Beyond canceling the missile test, there is no evidence the United States is considering steps to reduce tensions.
	A senior official said there is no interest in backing off of sanctions at this point.
	Quite the contrary, said the official, who, like other American officials, asked for anonymity to discuss the internal debates.
	In fact, Biden announced expanded sanctions on Thursday.
	A few hours after he spoke, S&P dropped Russia's credit rating to CCC-.
	The credit rating agency said in a statement that is far below junk bond levels Russia was ranked at a few days after the invasion.
	It is two notches above a warning that the country was going to completely default at this point.
	But as we box Putin in, is he actually boxed in or is he just going to get more and more erratic?
	In just a moment, we'll get to further unexamined consequences of this war that, again, could have been fully prevented by a West that actually had the balls to stand up to Greta Thunberg on energy and the spine to stand up to Vladimir Putin on territorial invasions over the course of the last several decades, but instead decided to neuter itself.
	And now these are the natural consequences.
	We'll get to that in just a moment.
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	Among the other unintended consequences of what is going on in Ukraine is of course this massive wave of refugees, which has destabilized governments in the past.
	We saw an entire populist uprising in Europe thanks to their taking in of hundreds of thousands, millions of Muslim refugees from the Middle East, from Syria, from places like Libya.
	What's it going to be like where, in the course of one week, you have a million refugees Hundreds of thousands of whom are crossing over the borders into places like Hungary and Poland.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, within days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine last week, the line of cars carrying people fleeing to the country's border with Poland was already 55 miles long.
	55 miles long, that's crazy.
	In wet snow and cold rain, Mothers began abandoning their cars to walk for hours, prodding exhausted children as they dragged their strollers and suitcases along the road.
	Near them, jam-packed sedans running low on gas inched to a modest checkpoint that ordinarily serves a half-dozen people at a time, often day-trippers crossing into the duty-free zones to buy cigarettes.
	Inside the checkpoint, two Ukrainian immigration officers have been frantically trying to keep up with one of the fastest exoduses from any country in modern history.
	In just a week since the war with Russia began, according to the Journal, more than 1 million refugees have left Ukraine.
	Most headed west into Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova.
	At the current pace?
	By the weekend, more asylum seekers will have entered the EU in a matter of days than in all of 2015, when 1.3 million people crossed from the Middle East and Africa into the bloc.
	That would make the rush from Ukraine, the continent's biggest refugee crisis, since World War II.
	Most of the people are fleeing to Poland.
	The sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of people has jolted many European governments, which didn't consider a Russian invasion imminent, as the United States did and had not foreseen the massive exodus.
	So how do you even take care of these people?
	Two days into the war, which began last Thursday, no EU member state had requested tents, blankets, or other basic necessities from the bloc's emergency reserves.
	On the eve of the conflict, Poland's local governments were still scouting potential locations, like town halls, stadiums, and schools, for an inflow it estimated would reach no more than one million people in all.
	A week later, Poland is half full.
	It took a procession of volunteers on both sides of the border to manage the mass displacement of Ukrainians in roadside villages in Ukraine, lined with wheat and lavender fields, elderly residents set up stands, stacked with free food from their own pantries, as shelves at local gas stations ran bare.
	Others walked along the traffic, ordering soup and porridge to passengers stuck in cars and to families trekking beside them.
	It's just a complete mess over there.
	Whatever the duration and outcome of the war, it is likely the conflict will deposit an enormous diaspora of Ukrainians in the EU, reshaping politics, society, and the refugee population on the continent.
	At this point, 550,000 people have already arrived on the border to Poland, another 80,000 have arrived on the border to Slovakia, 133,000 on the border to Hungary, 51,000 on the border to Romania, 100,000 on the border to Moldova.
	In total, the UN Refugee Agency now expects 4 million Ukrainians to seek shelter outside the country.
	And this will have long-term implications for Europe, especially Poland.
	The country's had very few ethnic minorities since World War II, when basically all the Jews of Poland were murdered.
	And then all the other minorities either fled or ended up in the Soviet Union.
	Poland has spent a long time trying to restrict the flow of asylum seekers, but it's welcoming Ukrainians because, of course, Ukrainians speak similar language, they've found jobs in a wide variety of areas, but the diaspora is likely to expand.
	So that giant overtaxed welfare state, the overburdened welfare state in all of Europe, that's likely to get significantly worse.
	These are impoverished people who don't have jobs, who have no assets, and who are now arriving inside the borders of a country where, in many cases, they do not speak the language.
	That will have some pretty dire and severe consequences with regard to world politics, including, by the way, pressure on the EU.
	The EU is trying to solidify in the face of Russian aggression.
	And at the same time, you're going to start to see member countries of the EU saying, we really need to solidify our borders here because we just don't have the wherewithal to take in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees at a time.
	Meanwhile, I've got money problems as well.
	Okay, so Lindsey Graham yesterday, he said, we're crushing the ruble.
	Well, that's true.
	That has some spillover effects.
	Here's Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina.
	For 20 years, Putin has murdered his own people, imprisoned dissidents, opposition leaders in his country, committed war crimes in Syria and Chechnya, nothing happened.
	The game has changed.
	The off-ramp for Putin would be built by the Russian people, not by the West.
	And how do you get that off-ramp built?
	We're going to crush the ruble.
	Okay, so again, the desire to crush the ruble, I get it.
	It's going to have some pretty severe consequences globally because there are a lot of people who have rubles.
	There are a lot of people who have invested their rubles in Western products.
	So if you're willing to take that sacrifice, do it.
	But you have to make clear to the American public what that sacrifice is on behalf of.
	What is it intended to do?
	The Wall Street Journal points out another unintended consequence of all of this.
	They say, if Russian currency reserves aren't really money, the world is in for a shock.
	What is money is a question that economists have pondered for centuries, but the blocking of Russia's central bank reserves has revived its relevance for the world's biggest nations, particularly China.
	In a world in which accumulating foreign assets is seen as risky, military and economic blocs are set to drift farther apart.
	After Moscow attacked Ukraine last week, the United States and its allies shut off Russia's central bank access to most of its $630 billion of foreign reserves.
	Weaponizing the monetary system against a group of 20 countries will have lasting repercussions.
	Why?
	Well, the idea is that Russia doesn't just hold banknotes in rubles.
	They have dollars.
	They have yen.
	They have a bunch of different currencies.
	If the world financial system can basically say your money is no longer fungible, you can't use U.S.
	dollars anymore based on who you are, that's going to have some pretty dire ramifications.
	Why would anybody invest in U.S.
	dollars if you can't use the dollars anymore?
	It becomes absolutely worthless to you.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the 1997 Asian financial crisis scared developing countries into accumulating more funds to shield their currencies from crashes, pushing official reserves from less than $2 trillion to a record $14.9 trillion in 2021, according to the IMF.
	While central banks have lately sought to buy and repatriate gold, it only makes up 13% of their assets.
	Foreign currencies are 78%.
	Many economists have equated this money to savings in a piggy bank.
	Recent events, however, highlight this error in thinking.
	Barring gold, these assets are someone else's liability, someone who can decide they're worth nothing.
	Last year, the IMF suspended Taliban-controlled Afghanistan's access to funds and SDR.
	Sanctions on Iran have confirmed that holding official reserves doesn't stop the U.S.
	Treasury from taking action.
	To be sure, the West has frozen Russia's stock of foreign exchange.
	It hasn't blocked the inflow of new dollars and euros.
	The country's current account surplus is estimated at $20 billion a month, thanks to exports of oil and gas.
	The US and EU want to keep buying that.
	These balances go to the private sector, but officials have mobilized them.
	But the entire artifice of money as a universal store of value risks being eroded by the banning of key exports to Russia and boycotts of the kind corporations like Apple and Nike announced this week.
	Why hold dollars if you literally can't use the dollars?
	If currency balances were to become worthless, computer entries, and didn't guarantee buying essential stuff, Moscow would be rational to stop accumulating them and stockpile physical wealth in oil barrels rather than sell them to the West.
	At the very least, they're going to shift into gold.
	Indeed, the case levied against China's attempts to internationalize the renminbi has been that, unlike the dollar, access to it is always at risk of being revoked by political considerations.
	So, this is a real problem because the United States is funded by debt.
	If the United States sells its bonds, for example, and let's say that you have a bunch of countries that are holding American bonds, and let's say to punish those countries, we decide that we're going to cut them off from their bond holdings.
	We're just going to renege on our debt because we don't like them.
	Who's going to buy our bonds in the future?
	If people translate their money into dollars, In order to hold those dollars so they can use them for later.
	Because the dollar is a good store of value.
	And then we say, actually your dollar is a store of zero value because we're just going to freeze it.
	That's going to undermine the value of the dollar.
	China itself owns $3.3 trillion in currency reserves.
	Unlike Russia, it cannot usefully hold them in renminbi, a currency it prints.
	Stockpiling commodities might be the alternative, so that creates more inflation.
	So what can investors do?
	The answer is, buy gold.
	Many of the world's central banks are going to be buying gold as it becomes clear that currency is actually no guarantee of access to value.
	So all of this is really risky stuff that we are playing with here.
	When deterrence fails, things get really risky really fast.
	Plus, none of this is mentioning, by the way, the simple fact that the interest rates in the United States are about to rise in the middle of a massive inflationary cycle, which has now been exacerbated by foreign chaos.
	Here is Jerome Powell yesterday saying, it's too early to know if the Russian invasion will impact the interest rates in the United States.
	Does Russia's war in Ukraine change the Fed's thinking about interest rates?
	Too early to say.
	I think right now, in this very sensitive time where uncertainty is highly elevated and we really don't know which way things are going to go, I think we need to move carefully.
	We need to move carefully, is what he's saying, because we don't know which way things are going to go.
	Well, that's a lot of reassurance to markets.
	Again, war is a dangerous thing.
	That doesn't mean pacifism or isolationism is the answer.
	Both of those make war more common, make it more likely.
	What it does mean is, this should be a reminder, when deterrence fails, things get bad.
	So, spend more time on deterrence, and less time on appeasement, and less time on worrying about the worries of Greta Thunberg, and less time worrying about the international liberal order, and ignoring actual threats as they grow on your own borders, including Russia and China.
	All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
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