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March 17, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:42
The Most Dangerous Moment In Recent Memory | Ep. 1455
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Time Text
The Federal Reserve signals a bevy of rate hikes coming as the economy teeters on the brink of recession.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky begs for more help as the Russian offensive continues to stall.
And the Biden administration keeps reaching out to Iran.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, the Federal Reserve finally did what everybody expected it to do, and they raised the interest rates yesterday by a mere 0.25%.
That is not going to do it in terms of curbing inflation.
It is signaling to the market that there will be a steady increase in the interest rates, that it's going to be 0.25 percentage points every time.
They're going to do this very incrementally, but they're going to do it six more times by the end of the year, which would put the interest rates at about 1.5, 1.75% if they are on track.
That is significantly higher than it is now.
It is well below what it would need to be In order to curb inflation, considering that inflation rates right now are running so hot, they're probably in double digits year over year.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve officials voted Wednesday to lift interest rates and penciled in six more increases by year's end, the most aggressive pace in more than 15 years, in an escalating effort to slow inflation that is running at its highest levels in four decades.
The Fed will raise its benchmark federal funds rate by a quarter percentage point to a range between 0.25 percent and 0.5 percent.
That is the first rate increase since 2018.
Officials signaled they expect to lift the rates nearly 2% by the end of the year, slightly higher than the level that prevailed before the pandemic hit the United States economy two years ago when they slashed rates to near zero.
Now, you should remember that what that means is that when they slashed rates to near zero at the beginning of the pandemic, the interest rates were about 2%.
We did not have inflation rates that were running at 8%, 10%, 12%, 15% in terms of goods.
Right now, services are running about 5% inflation rate.
Goods are running about 15% inflation rate.
Increasing the interest rates to what we had just before the pandemic is not going to do it.
You're going to need many, many more interest rate increases.
The market took this as a sign that the Fed is getting serious and that they think that the economic growth of the country is going to remain strong.
But I would take this as a sign the Fed, once again, is playing around with things that it does not understand.
I've constantly been told the Federal Reserve is filled with experts, and yet throughout my lifetime, the Federal Reserve has blown it with easy monetary policies.
This was true under Alan Greenspan in the 2000s.
It led to the cratering of the economy 2007-2008.
It's been true under Jerome Powell, who spent the last two years printing more money than God has ever seen.
The Fed's post-meeting statement hinted at rising concern about inflation that initially appeared last year to be driven by pandemic-related bottlenecks, but has since broadened.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced he said, as I looked around the table at today's meeting, I saw a committee that's acutely aware of the need to return the economy to price stability and determined to use our tools to do exactly that.
Powell announced yesterday that wage increases should slow.
Here's what he had to say.
There's a misalignment of demand and supply, particularly in the labor market.
And that is leading to wages moving up at ways that are not consistent with 2% inflation over time.
And so we need to use our tools to, you know, Okay, so what he is essentially saying is that by raising the interest rates, you're going to get the wildly overpaid segment of the population that has been sitting it out back into the workforce because the economy is going to slow just a little bit, people are going to go back to work, and when they go back to work, they're going to be paid a little bit less.
He then said that the Fed is also going to start shrinking its balance sheet.
They're going to start selling off their $9 trillion asset portfolio.
He said that the Fed will finalize that plan by May 3rd or 4th.
Here he is yesterday.
We made excellent progress toward agreeing on the parameters of a plan to shrink the balance sheet.
And I'd say we're now in a position to finalize and implement that plan so that we're actually beginning runoff at a coming meeting.
And that could come as soon as our next meeting in May.
So this has some pretty serious ramifications for everybody involved.
If you take a look at the Wall Street Journal piece, they say, what the Fed's interest rate increase means to you.
Well, you will feel the impact of rising rates on the individual level and on a household level, says the Wall Street Journal, when interest rates go up or down.
The resulting changes in other rates impact the way we borrow money, but also how we save money.
Frustrated house hunters, for example, have already seen mortgage rates increase in recent months.
Rising rates mean homebuyers will pay a little bit more each month in mortgage payments.
So those mortgage payments are probably going to go up.
You should have taken advantage of American financing and refined your mortgage six months ago.
Okay, the reality of the situation is that you're about to see all of those mortgage interest rates go up, and that's going to have an impact on how you pay your mortgage or whether you can even buy that new home.
Raising the interest rate is about creating an inducement to saves.
And Laura Veldkamp, professor of finance and economics at Columbia University, it's basically a deterrent to consumption spending.
When an economy is overheated, raising the interest rate is a way to pull back and say, I'll hold on and postpone that spending.
Right, because inflation makes you want to spend.
Inflation means that your savings are worth less tomorrow than they are today.
So you need to spend that money before the spending is gone, basically.
When you raise the interest rates, you're trying to resupply the monetary value.
And what that means is that people are going to want to save rather than to spend.
And that means that you're going to have a drawback in certain parts of the economy.
The way mortgage prices are set is based largely on the yield of the 10-year U.S.
government bond known as the Treasury Note.
This rate is used as a benchmark for all different types of loans, including mortgages.
When the Fed raises rates, this pushes the yield on the Treasury Note higher.
This will, in turn, push mortgage rates higher.
As the Fed has signaled higher rates, the 10-year yield has moved higher.
This has, in turn, pushed the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage to 3.85%.
A year ago, it was about 3%.
Meanwhile, banks have little incentive to raise interest on savings accounts.
During the pandemic, Americans have been hoarding cash, leading to the highest personal savings rate since World War II, and then edging down in recent months.
Carolyn Folin, professor of economics at Emory University, she says that her traditional view is that rising interest rates helps savers, but most people who are savvy are in a broad range of assets.
For your average person who just has their money in a savings account, you make nothing.
The interest rates offered on savings account and many certificates of deposit often move with the Fed funds rate.
According to the FDIC, the average annual percentage yield on a one-year CD is at 0.14 percent.
Goldman Sachs Group's Marks account is offering 0.50 percent.
Low interest rates very much affected savers, said Fernando Martin, assistant VP at the Federal Reserve Bank of St.
Louis.
People were looking for alternative investments and yield, which always implied more risk.
As interest rates go up, CDs will go up, which should perhaps help savers a little bit more.
So what you're going to see, by the way, is less investment in startups.
You're going to see less investment in brand new SPACs.
There's going to be less investment, generally speaking.
Inflation creates stock market bubbles.
When you take out a car loan, that loan has a fixed interest rate pegged to treasury yields.
That means the rise in interest rates shouldn't bring a lot of surprises for those who have fixed rates.
But if you have a variable rate, you're about to feel it.
Credit card debt is about to go up.
According to WalletHub's March report of more than 1,500 credit card offers, the annual percentage rate for those with good credit is 18.98%.
APR, an increase in interest rates, can sometimes affect the credit card percentage rate.
Student loans, those interest rates are probably going to go up.
So, bottom line is that when you raise interest rates, what you end up doing is you end up encouraging, saving, discouraging, spending.
You end up discouraging lending by banks.
The goal is to take money out of the economy.
That is the stated goal of increasing the interest rates.
And when you have the economy that is running super hot right now, and then you start increasing the interest rates, you are looking at the possibility of stagflation.
That possibility, by the way, gets worse when you don't just crush it right away.
is part of the problem here. You see that Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve, they're attempting a sort of lukewarm policy here where they gradually and slowly increase the interest rates the way that we did in 2004 to 2006 when we had 17 straight quarters where we had an interest rate increase.
The difference is that 2004 to 2006 was not seeing inflation, 40-year inflation waves. I mean, this is a 40-year inflation wave that we are seeing right now, and it's likely to continue to be bad, not just because of the Russia-Ukraine war, but because we have manufacturing shutdowns in China from the new wave of COVID. Something like over 1% of the entire South Korean population tested positive for COVID in the last couple of days.
So COVID is not through with the manufacturing chains.
You're starting to see the global economy separating off into spheres of interest, as opposed to the globalized economy we have been used to since the end of the Cold War.
All of this spells inflation in products and services in terms of cost.
And meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is not doing enough to tamp down those interest rates, to ramp up the interest rates, to tamp down the inflation.
They're not doing enough for that.
Instead, they're just doing it really slowly in the hopes that it won't cause a recession.
What that's likely to lead to is longer-term inflation, which leads to stagflation.
See, the calculation here is, do you take a lot of short-term pain for long-term gain, or do you try and sort of massage this thing?
And right now, it appears the Federal Reserve is trying to massage this thing at the moment.
Meanwhile, the White House continues to whistle past the graveyard.
They have shifted their narrative again on oil and gas.
So you remember that when it came to oil and gas inflation, it was originally inflation is imaginary and temporary.
Then it was, well, it may be permanent, but it's good because it just means that there's high demand.
And then it was, it's oil and gas companies fault for being greedy.
And then it was Putin.
And now they are back to it's oil and gas companies fault for being greedy.
Here's the White House blaming oil and gas companies again for the price of oil.
While we reiterate what the president said to oil and gas companies last week, the invasion of Ukraine and the volatility of the oil market is no excuse for excessive price increases, profit padding, or any effort to exploit American consumers.
No one should capitalize on Putin's aggression by taking advantage of American families.
That's what's happening here.
They just got greedy.
They got super duper duper greedy.
So the reason that I point this out is because what this says is they are not shifting their approach at all.
Their approach is the same as it was six weeks ago or two months ago or six months ago, which means that the economic policy pursued by this administration is going to be very, very hard on business.
It's going to be very easy on useless businesses that require massive government subsidies.
It's going to be subsidies all the way down for all of their union buddies.
None of this spells a future of serious growth.
Now, as I've said before on this program, in the mid to long term, I'm less worried about inflation than I am about economic stagnation.
Because I think that the conditions for innovation in this country are getting worse and worse under the Biden administration.
Regulations are getting worse.
They keep threatening higher taxes.
They keep threatening more subsidies for the least productive industries.
That is a recipe for European-style stagnation, economically speaking.
We spent more money than we could afford in the last couple of years, and that obviously has driven up things like the inflation rates.
But as we tamp those down, that just means, by the way, as we raise the interest rates, what that really means also is that we're going to have to pay back more on our national debt.
We've trapped ourselves here.
We're at a very perilous moment here, and we are not taking our medicine.
We are instead attempting to, again, sort of take the easy path of least resistance.
There's a famous story in the Talmud about a man who walks up to another man who's at a crossroads, and he says to the guide, he says, which way should I go?
It's a kid.
He says to the kid, which way should I go here?
And the kid says, well, there's the long way that's short, and there's the short way that's long.
And the guy says, oh, I'll take the short way that's long.
So he goes on the short way that's long, and it turns out that the short way that's long is filled with thickets and brambles and blockages, and he can't get through.
He goes back.
He says, I see what you meant now.
What you meant is that the long way that's short is a longer road, but you get there more quickly because there are fewer obstacles.
It seems as though the Federal Reserve is determined to take the short way that is long.
The easy solution that is not a solution at all.
And I have serious doubts as to whether the interest rate increases that they've announced yesterday are actually going to handle this job.
Again, the Democrats, there are two aspects of the American economy.
There's economic policy and there's fiscal policy.
Fiscal policy is set by the Federal Reserve.
They're doing it wrong.
Economic policy is being set by the White House and they're doing it wrong as well.
This is why Jennifer Granholm yesterday, in the middle of a price spike on gas, She's once again saying this is a moment to transition to green energy.
No, this is exactly the wrong moment to transition to green energy.
You dope?
The reduction of supply of natural gas and oil from Russia creates a moment that we should be acting.
I mean, we heard President Zelensky.
We do not want to see any country that is held hostage to Vladimir Putin.
And this is a moment for Congress to be able to act.
These people are out of their mind.
They're out of their mind.
They look at President Zelensky talking about what's going on in Ukraine and their first move is, what if we cut ourselves off further from natural gas and oil?
Meaning that we're going to make ourselves more dependent on foreign natural gas and oil?
It's just stupidity.
So we are on a perilous economic front right now.
Very, very perilous.
Like, many economists think we're going to slide into recession over the course of the next few months.
You combine that with the perilousness of the situation in Ukraine, and you have a recipe for a real conflagration.
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Now, everybody is sort of taking it as though Russia's failures in Ukraine are going to somehow tamp down the prospect of serious war.
I am not so sure that is the case.
The reason that I am a little more skeptical is because the deeper that Vladimir Putin gets in here, and the fewer off-ramps that are available to him, the more volatile he is going to become.
This was always seen by the West, which is why it was important to box him in before he invaded Ukraine.
Once he invaded Ukraine, there are not a lot of good solutions on the table, as I keep saying.
Now the West is sort of getting happy and fat over the idea that Ukraine is going to completely repel Russia here.
But this neglects the fact that not only is Russia a much larger country than Ukraine, but also Vladimir Putin has a lot more at stake than the West does here.
The West has something at stake in defending Ukraine in that they want to dissuade Russia from doing things like this again.
They want to dissuade China from going after Taiwan.
We do have a heavy stake here, which is why we're doing what we're doing.
Of Vladimir Putin, his entire regime may be tottering right now because he's completely destroyed the economy of his own country in order to make this move.
And so he has to come up with something.
And so what you've seen is him ramping up in radical fashion the attacks on civilians.
I mean, in serious, like, there was a report yesterday that he just attacked a theater in Mariupol.
The people were just sheltering there.
And so, the Russians just bombed the theater, which would not be a shock.
They did the same thing in Grozny and Chechnya way back in 1999-2000.
Just killed several hundred people.
It is unclear how many people died in that theater in Mariupol over the last 24 hours.
Meanwhile, things get worse for the Russians, not better, on the military front.
According to the New York Times, In the 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima during World War II, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed.
Now, 20 days after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, his military has already lost more soldiers than that, according to American intelligence estimates.
That's unbelievable.
So, he has lost more soldiers in three weeks than we lost during the entirety of the Battle of Iwo Jima, which is totally crazy.
That was one of the bloodiest battles in modern American history.
The conservative side of the estimate at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Russia's strategy, by the way, is the same as it was during World War II, which is just throw men into the meat grinder.
It's an insane strategy, particularly in a time when Russia does not have the resources to replenish those men.
But Russia has one way of doing things, and they have not changed that way of doing things.
With the more than 150,000 Russian troops now involved in the war in Ukraine, Russian casualties, when including the estimated 14 to 21,000 injured, are near the level of the 10% casualty rate for a single unit that renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.
So the idea here is that Russia may be on the brink of losing.
Pentagon officials say a high and rising number of war dead can destroy the will to continue fighting.
The result, they say, has shown up in intelligence reports that senior officials in the Biden administration read every day.
One recent report focused on low morale among Russian troops described soldiers just parking their vehicles and walking off into the woods.
The American officials caution their number of Russian troop deaths are inexact.
Though, compiled with the analysis of the latest news media, Ukrainian figures, which tend to be high, they say almost 14,000 troop deaths, and Russian figures, which tend to be really low, they say just 500 troop deaths.
This should be somewhere near accurate.
American military and intelligence officials know, for example, how many troops are usually in a tank.
They can extrapolate from that by the number of casualties when an armored vehicle is hit by, say, a Javelin anti-tank missile.
Evelyn Farkas, top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration, says, Okay, so all of that is good and wonderful in the sense that we don't want Russia to win.
However, we should mention that as things get worse for Russia, it is more likely that they become more volatile.
It is not more likely that they become less volatile and just sort of go away.
On the economic front, Russia's in serious trouble.
On the economic front, Russia's about to default on all of its bombs, which means it won't be able to take out any credit on world markets anytime soon ever again, meaning it becomes basically a gas proxy state for China.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Russia's finance minister said the country paid what it owed on its foreign debts on Wednesday, but wasn't even sure if the payments would go through.
The Russian government is required to pay $117 million in interest payments on $2 denominated government bonds on Wednesday.
Failure to pay or attempting to pay in rubles would set the stage for Russia to be placed in default by its creditors.
The impossibility of fulfilling our obligations in foreign currency does not depend on us, said Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.
He says we have the money, we paid the payment, now the bill is on the side, first of all, of the American authorities.
So Russia may be on the brink of basically defaulting, which again means that the country is effectively bankrupt and nobody's going to invest there pretty much ever again.
Which is why it is no shock that the US is now warning Moscow against using chemical or biological weapons.
President Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, warned his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, according to the New York Times, against, quote, any possible Russian decision to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine.
The explicit warning to Nikolai Petrushev, President Putin's main national security adviser, reflected escalating concerns in Washington that the Russians, stymied in their hopes of a quick takeover of the country, could resort to weapons of mass destruction.
Officials said there was no direct mention of the use of battlefield nuclear weapons, though two officials said the administration did send a separate warning on that issue.
And this does raise the question, OK, if Russia goes ahead and they feel so boxed in that they use chemical or biological weapons or, God forbid, a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield, what exactly does the West do at this point?
Remember, it was Barack Obama who drew a red line against using chemical weapons in Syria, only to back off wildly from that red line as soon as Assad used chlorine gas in Syria, and he just handed over the entire place to the Russians.
So if you're Vladimir Putin, you feel totally boxed in.
Do you just go for broke here?
I mean, you already went into Ukraine.
You've already lost thousands of troops, more than the entire Western losses during the Afghanistan-Iraq War, probably.
So what do you do?
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so let's take that for example.
Let's say that, for example, Vladimir Putin does go for it.
Let's say that he uses chemical or biological weapons.
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Let's say that that, for example, Vladimir Putin does go for it. Let's say that he uses chemical or biological weapons. Is the West willing to get directly involved here? So there have been recommendations that what the West actually what the West actually should do here is station troops in Western Ukraine.
They should sort of edge over the border.
Western Ukraine has not been taken over by the Russians.
There's been really no Russian activity in the western part of Ukraine.
The furthest west they've gone is Kiev, which is about two-thirds of the way west of the eastern border of Ukraine.
But they've not really done anything in the in the western third of Ukraine.
So if you station NATO troops there, then you basically say to Putin, listen, if you cross this particular line, you're going to start killing NATO troops.
And at that point, we have to get directly involved.
The problem with setting a red line with regard to chemical or biological weapons is that if Putin uses them, are you willing to go to full scale boots on the ground war with Vladimir Putin over his use of chemical or even tactical battlefield nuclear weapons?
If Vladimir Putin decides he's just going to level population centers, what exactly are you going to do about it?
This is the real question for the West right now.
Because as that box tightens in around Vladimir Putin, and as Zelensky feels that he might be able to win this thing outright because too many Russian troops are getting killed, what happens if Putin just decides to go for it?
This is what Bret Stephens over at the New York Times is writing about today.
He says, before the invasion, we had the Russian invasions of Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine, the Russian carpet bombing of Aleppo, the use of exotic radioactive and chemical agents against Russian dissidents on British soil, Russian interference in U.S.
elections, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the blatant poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny.
Were any of these sovereignty violations, legal violations, treaty violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity met with a strong, united, punitive response that could have averted the next round of outrages?
In short, did Putin have any reason to think before February 24th, he wouldn't be able to get away with this invasion?
Beijing's eradication of Hong Kong's autonomy, Iran's war by proxy against its neighbors.
Give Vladimir Putin pause.
In short, did Putin have any reason to think before February 24th, he wouldn't be able to get away with this invasion?
He did not.
The West has spent 22 years placating Putin through a long cycle of resets and wrist slaps.
The devastation of Ukraine is the fruit of this appeasement.
The Biden administration now faces the question of whether it wants to bring this cycle to an end.
And the answer is not clear.
Sanctions have hurt the Russian economy.
Arms shipments to Ukraine have helped slow the Russian advance.
Russia's brutality has unified NATO.
This is to Biden's credit, but the administration continues to operate under a series of potentially catastrophic illusions.
Sanctions may devastate Russia in the short term, but the immediate struggle in Ukraine is short term.
It is not long term.
So if the sanctions hurt Russia long-term, short-term, doesn't matter all that much.
For Russia, what do they care?
Their economy's bad for three years, but if they get what they want in Ukraine, that's happening over the next six weeks.
Arming Ukraine with Javelin and Stinger missiles has wounded and embarrassed the Russian military.
Providing Kiev with MiG-29 fighter jets and other potentially game-changing weapon systems could help turn the tide.
Refusing to do so may only prolong Ukraine's agony.
Frequent suggestions Putin has already lost the war, or that he can't possibly win when Ukrainians are united in their hatred for him, or that he's looking for an off-ramp may turn out to be right, but they are grossly premature, says Brett Stevens.
This war is only in its third week.
It took the Nazis longer to conquer Poland.
The ability to subdue a restive population is chiefly a function of the pain an occupier is willing to inflict.
And Putin has no limits on that one.
There is now a serious risk these illusions could collapse very suddenly.
There's little evidence so far Putin is eager to cut his losses.
On the contrary, to do so now would jeopardize his grip on power.
So expect him to double down.
If he uses a chemical weapon or deploys a battlefield nuclear weapon in keeping with long-standing Russian military doctrine, does he lose more than he gains?
The question answers itself.
He wins swiftly, he terrifies the West, he consolidates power.
He suffers consequences only marginally graver than the ones already inflicted.
And his fellow travelers in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang take note.
So I tend to agree with Brett Stevens here.
The fact that our deterrence failed with regard to Ukraine means that trying to reestablish deterrence in Ukraine is going to, it's the same thing as the economy.
It's going to cause pain.
The question is when you want to take the pain.
So is the pain going to be in watching Putin devastate Ukraine?
Is public opinion going to be willing to go along with that to avert an open war between NATO and Russia?
Because Putin is probably going to up the ante here.
Or alternatively, is the West basically going to look the other way while Putin Subjects the Ukrainians to the kind of treatment that the Chechens got in Grozny or that the Syrians got in Aleppo.
And if that happens, how do you re-establish deterrence after that?
Because every time you fail in deterrence, you now have to react more harshly in order to re-establish the possibility of deterrence.
If you let the bully beat up everybody on the playground, you're gonna need to stand up to him pretty damn strong if you want him to stop doing that at some point here.
So the possibility of World War III is becoming significantly more likely, not less likely, with Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
And now it's not clear whether it becomes even more likely or less likely should the NATO forces start to engage in actual containment mechanisms against Vladimir Putin at this point.
Meanwhile, if you're Vladimir Zelensky, you're just looking for help because obviously the short-term problem is your problem.
You're not worried about the ramifications of World War III.
The West is.
You're worried about the ramifications of bombs falling on theaters in the middle of Mariupol right now.
So Zelensky spoke in front of the U.S.
Congress yesterday.
He did about half the speech in Ukrainian.
He did half the speech In English, he started by talking about Pearl Harbor at 9-11.
And by the way, one thing that should become very clear from all of this is how lucky you are and I am and everybody is to live in the United States.
We have lived in a country where bombs do not fall on us on the regular.
We have lived in a country that has never had to experience this in our history.
And the worst things that we've seen in our lifetime are 9-11, which was a horrific terrorist attack, but it was not a regular weeks long bombing campaign against civilian centers in the United States.
It was a really horrifyingly evil terrorist day.
But what you see in other countries on a fairly regular basis is just violence that pervades life.
Here's Zelensky talking about how bad it is in Ukraine.
Remember Pearl Harbor.
Terrible morning of December 7, 1941, when your sky was black from the planes attacking you.
Just remember it.
Remember September the 11th.
A terrible day in 2001 when evil tried to turn your cities, independent territories in battlefields.
When innocent people were attacked.
He continued along these lines.
He tried to make a direct argument to Joe Biden.
He's trying to get Joe Biden to take the leadership position that Joe Biden really does not want.
He says, you need to be the leader of the world, be the leader of peace.
Today it's not enough to be the leader of the nation.
Today it takes to be the leader of the world.
Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.
Peace in your country doesn't depend anymore only on you and your people.
It depends on those next to you, on those who are strong.
You can't blame Zelensky for making this moral appeal.
After all, his country is under threat of essentially being overthrown by the Russian bear.
Zelensky continued along these lines.
He talked about the virtue of strength in the face of Russian aggression.
Strong doesn't mean weak.
Strong is brave and ready to fight for the life of his citizens and citizens of the world.
For human rights, for freedom, for the right to live decently and to die when your time comes.
And not when it's wanted by someone else, by your neighbor.
So Zelensky essentially saying, I'm willing to die for my country.
Sentiments you don't hear too often in the United States, where literally five in 10 Democrats say that they would flee rather than fighting for their country, as opposed to four who would stay.
Zelensky completed his speech by showing a video of the suffering that's been going on in Ukraine.
Very, very difficult to watch.
It's graphic content, but you know, so is war.
So here's what Zelensky showed yesterday to the U.S.
Congress.
was devastated.
And it says, close the sky over Ukraine is how this completes.
And this was his call.
Close the sky, close the sky.
The idea of being calling for no fly zone.
NATO has rightly been hesitant to declare a no fly zone because they don't want to go to direct war with Russia.
And again, the question is going to be, what does Russia do in order to secure Ukraine that could provoke a war?
And is the West willing to do anything or is the West going to draw its next line at somewhere beyond Ukraine?
For its part, the Biden administration once again seems to be taking half measure.
It is not precisely clear where they are on this question.
They keep making warnings to Putin, and I just wonder whether Putin is going to care about those warnings.
We'll get to the White House response in just one second.
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Well, tonight it's time for my third Thursday book club again.
You still have a chance to sign up.
Tonight, we're going to go through my analysis of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
I can't wait to read it and discuss it with you.
Perhaps the greatest book ever written on the French Revolution.
Remember, Third Thursday Book Club is a live experience you get to engage with me like never before.
Here's the thing.
Even if you haven't read the book we discussed, you will feel well-read by the time we are done.
It's going to sound like you know the book, because I'm going to be your guide.
I'm going to show you why each one of these works is such an important work.
When you sign up, you get my notes.
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Remember, You're doing all of this with thousands of other Daily Wire members live.
Seriously, this isn't like any other book club you've been a part of.
So sign up for the Third Thursday Book Club at thirdthursdaybookclub.com to get my notes sent straight to your inbox for A Tale of Two Cities.
Set a reminder to join the conversation tonight, 8 p.m.
Eastern, also at the end of the conversation, I'm gonna be giving you next month's book, which is a really, really great book.
We'll get to that tonight, thirdthursdaybookclub.com.
Also, There are a lot of books that are great that just don't get published.
That's why Daily Wire Books began.
DW Books.
We are proud to be publishing books that are actively fighting the left's monopoly on storytelling.
The first book is 12 Seconds in the Dark by Sergeant Jonathan Manningly.
Now, you know that story because 12 Seconds in the Dark is about what happened the night of the tragic Breonna Taylor shooting.
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They lied to you a lot.
And this book explodes those lies.
Check out the trailer.
It was very chaotic.
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These are lies.
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And all the while you're hearing all these outside influences from athletes and Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, all those people come in and attacking you, putting your name on their account, saying he should be in prison.
All these things that they have no idea what they're talking about.
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The more we attack police for doing their job, the less good qualified police you're going to have.
When you read 12 Seconds in the Dark, you will find out the truth of what really happened the night of the Breonna Taylor raid.
The book is a must read.
If you want to know how the media skews the facts and lies about the facts, this book is just case 1A for why you can't trust the mainstream media.
The book, 12 Seconds in the Dark, is available now on Amazon or anywhere you buy books online.
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As you all know at this point, The Daily Wire does not stop creating awesome new content.
We're super excited about our latest docuseries, Fauci Unmasked.
This show exposes the most successful failure in government history, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Hosted by our very own Michael Knowles, he will peel back the mask on Fauci's past, show the world's leading scientist for what he really is, a giant fraud.
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So the White House has responded to Zelensky's appeal by announcing more aid, about 800 million dollars in more aid.
Only a portion of that is military aid, a lot of it is humanitarian aid.
Here was Joe Biden announcing that from the White House yesterday.
Now I'm once again using my presidential authority to activate an additional security assistance to continue to help Ukraine fend off Russia's assault.
An additional $800 million in assistance.
That brings the total of new U.S.
security assistance to Ukraine to $1 billion just this week.
These are the large, these are direct transfers of equipment from our Department of Defense to the Ukrainian military to help them as they fight against this invasion.
Okay, so this is right.
I mean, this is what we should be doing.
The question is, what is the actual strategy here?
What is the offer that is being offered to Putin?
Putin has to have some law for him here.
You know, it's amazing.
I'm as hawkish as anyone on the right.
I'm extraordinarily hawkish.
When deterrence fails, you have very few options that are very good.
And the possibility of biological, chemical, or nuclear warfare in Ukraine is rising exponentially the more, or as Joe Biden might put it, exponentially, exponentially, the longer this war goes on and the more losses Putin suffers.
Russia has a strategy that they've termed escalating to deescalate, meaning we we ramp everything up in order to then deescalate.
But the question is whether the West is willing to actually do the hard things that would be necessary in order to stop Putin from doing that.
And at this point, I really wonder if that is the case.
Biden has been pretty vague about what exactly his his end goal here.
What's the strategy?
And he says that the goal is to make Putin pay the price.
Well, Putin's paying the price, economically speaking.
He's paying the price militarily speaking.
The question is, what happens if Putin escalates?
Here's Biden not answering that particular question yesterday.
Together with our allies and partners, we will keep up the pressure on Putin's crumbling economy, isolating him on the global stage.
That's our goal.
Make Putin pay the price, weaken his position, while strengthening the hand of the Ukrainians on the battlefield at the negotiating table.
Okay, well, that is fine, but there's going to actually have to be some sort of negotiated solution in which Putin gets something of what he wants.
Because if that does not happen, then the likelihood, again, that an event happens that escalates this thing to the possibility of World War III actually rises fairly dramatically.
I've been pretty sanguine about the possibility of World War 3 so far.
I really don't think that this is going to break into a major shooting war between the major powers, mainly because I don't think that the West has any interest in that.
I think Russia has very little interest in it also.
But the problem is that the lines that the United States and its allies have been setting are not credible lines.
Putin has to know that if he uses a chemical weapon in Ukraine in order to subdue the native population, then the West is likely to do very little.
At least that's what the past would have suggested at this point.
The West is being very robust in its economic response.
They're being significantly less robust in their military response.
But meanwhile, you got Joe Biden using language that is not useful.
So, he may be correct, but it's not useful.
In diplomacy, there's a difference between being right and being happy.
And Joe Biden was asked yesterday whether Putin is a war criminal.
Now, the answer clearly is yes, of course.
Of course, Putin is a war criminal.
But the goal of the White House here, again, is to offer Putin an off-ramp.
How do you call Putin a war criminal publicly, and then within 24 hours try to sign a peace deal with him?
Makes it very difficult.
Here's Joe Biden yesterday.
He said, I think he is a war criminal.
Okay, well, again, that's true.
He is a war criminal.
And thus, don't write checks.
Your body can't cash here.
Jen Psaki tried to back this one off yesterday from the White House.
The president was answering a direct question that was asked and responding to what he has seen on television.
We have all seen barbaric acts, horrific acts by a foreign dictator in a country that is threatening and taking the lives of civilians, impacting hospitals, women who are pregnant, journalists, others.
And I think he was answering a direct question.
Okay, so you saw that based on the news.
That doesn't mean that he's actually labeling him a war criminal.
There will have to be processes that are put in place to determine whether they're trying to back off of it, which is what they should do.
But every time you let Joe Biden off the chain, something bad happens.
Jen Psaki also could not answer.
The United States and NATO, they are now providing drones, a certain type of drone that is directed at, for example, artillery positions among Russian troops.
And she was asked, why is it that you guys are willing to send those types of drones, but you're not willing to send MiGs?
Why is one escalatory, but the other is not?
And the White House has no answer for this.
Is your position that the drones were assessed by the Defense Department to not be perceived as escalatory and to not be perceived as offensive weapons?
Again, I don't have anything more to confirm beyond what was in the fact sheet and specifics in there, but defensive weapons is what we have provided.
No, you have not.
You've provided offensive weapons because the distinction between a defensive weapon is like a defensive weapon is like Iron Dome, right?
It's a shield.
An offensive weapon is one that could be used offensively, which is like a drone that takes out artillery positions or Russian troop positions.
That is an offensive weapon.
And meanwhile...
One of the reasons I think that Vladimir Putin still has cards to play here is because the Biden administration has made itself extraordinarily vulnerable with regard to this Iran deal.
So they are so stuck.
They're so up their own butts on this Iran deal.
It's insane.
It's totally crazy.
They've pretzeled themselves completely.
The head is so far up the butt that it's coming out the face again.
They've decided that they are just going to push forward with a deal with Iran's ayatollahs no matter how terroristic Iran is.
And not only that, they're going to provide cash to Iran and they're going to provide cash to Russia in order to make this deal happen.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Russia's top state-controlled energy company is set to cash in on a $10 billion contract to build out one of Iran's most contested nuclear sites as part of concessions granted in the soon-to-be-announced nuclear agreement that will guarantee sanctions on both countries are lifted.
Russian and Iranian documents translated for the Washington Free Beacon show that Razatom, Russia's leading energy company, has a $10 billion contract with Iran's Atomic Energy Organization to expand Tehran's Bushehr nuclear plant.
Russia and the Biden administration confirmed on Tuesday the new nuclear agreement includes carve-outs that will waive sanctions on both countries so Russia can make good on the contract.
So Putin knows that he has Biden over the barrel with regard to Iran and that Biden would love to make a deal with Iran no matter how bad that deal is because Biden has a perverse view of the Middle East that he shares with his predecessor Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.
And that he's so interested in making this deal that he's willing to allow Russia to make billions of dollars in building a nuclear facility in Iran while Russia is attacking Ukraine.
So much for those crushing economic sanctions.
So in other words, there are ways out here for Putin.
And by the way, this is all happening like days after Iran fired off missiles at an American consulate in Iraq.
That's how delusional this administration is.
They're just doubling down on the truisms of American foreign policy that have been wrong for decades.
That if you're nice to America's enemies, that the enemies will be nice to you rather than aggressive with you.
Every time you make a deal with the Russians, on a non-Ukraine basis, and you open the door so they can broker a deal with Iran, you are giving them a piece of leverage to use over you, and the Russians know this.
State Department spokesman Ned Price confirmed on Tuesday, quote, we of course would not sanction Russian participation in nuclear projects that are part of resuming full implementation of the JCPOA.
Russia's foreign ministry made a similar statement on Tuesday, saying, quote, additions were made to the text of the future agreement on JCPOA restoration to ensure that all JCPOA, that's the Iran deal, related projects, especially with Russian participation, as well as Bushir, are protected from negative impact of anti-Russian restrictions by both the United States and the European Union.
A State Department spokesman speaking on background told the Free Beacon the administration, quote, continues to engage with Russia on a return to full implementation of the JCPOA.
As Secretary Blinken said last week, Russia continues to be engaged in those efforts.
It has its own interest in ensuring that Iran is not able to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Well, no, Russia has an interest in continuing to use Iran as a proxy state.
And then they used Iran as a proxy state in Syria, and they've maximized their exposure in the Middle East and their control in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, of course, the Saudis are looking at the United States cross-eyed and saying, I guess we're going to have to triangulate with China right now.
Jen Psaki yesterday refused to rule out delisting the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.
That organization, by the way, is responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of American troops in Iraq.
Is the White House willing to delist the IRGC from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list in order to get a deal with Iran?
We're still in the negotiations, so I'm not going to speculate or outline from here what the final details look like.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
She also, by the way, she was asked directly about the Iranians firing at a U.S. consulate, and she had nothing for you because she doesn't care because this administration does not And then they wonder why deterrence fails.
Deterrence fails because you guys are not a credible threat.
You're not a credible threat.
You can make a credible economic threat.
You cannot make any sort of actual credible military threat.
And it turns out that foreign policy does not run on economic threats.
It runs on the threat of force.
It always has and it always will.
Here is Jen Psaki being Jen Psaki.
These are likely the group responsible for firing missiles at U.S.
facilities in Iraq.
So as long as Americans aren't killed, are there no consequences for something like that?
All in an effort to get a nuclear deal?
Again, you're speculating on something that is not even finalized.
The deal is not finalized.
You can't show strength to Russia while at the same time showing weakness to Iran using Russian negotiators.
It doesn't work that way.
If you're seeking to establish deterrence, every time, by the way, you fail in your deterrence, the possibility, as I said, of World War III grows larger.
The possibility of major world conflict grows larger.
Miscalculation based on misinterpretation of weakness leads to conflict.
That is the story of every major world war that we have had.
It'll be the cause of any future world war that we have as well.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Coming up soon is the Matt Wall Show that airs 1.30 p.m.
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Be sure to check it out over at DailyWire.com.
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