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Dec. 22, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
42:51
Zelensky Goes To Washington | Ep. 1636
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky comes to Washington, D.C.
and receives a hero's welcome.
Republicans debate whether to vote against a massive omnibus spending boondoggle.
And House Democrats release Donald Trump's tax returns.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Benchmark Show.
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Well, big news of the day.
Obviously, Vladimir Zelensky visited Washington, D.C.
yesterday.
He spoke before a joint session of Congress last night.
This is his first trip outside of the country since the beginning of the Ukraine war that Russia launched in February of 2022, a lot earlier this year.
The war has been going on for at least 10 months at this point.
It has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. One of the big questions that has arisen, particularly on the right, but also on some for some people on the left, is why the United States is involved in this in the first place. And the answer is actually multifaceted because foreign policy is a complicated area.
So the answer is actually not all that complicated. Russia is a geopolitical foe of the United States.
Degrading Russia is in the strategic interest of the United States.
Now, there are some people on the right who are very isolationist in orientation, and they're constantly asking why the United States should basically be involved anywhere in the world, which was a fair question in about 1850.
It is a less fair question today.
When obviously global supply chains have to do with international politics, when global economics have to do with international politics, when the ability to move weaponry and troops and terrorists around the globe is very, very easy.
We live in a very global society.
What that means is that the waters that once protected the United States from all encroachments abroad, those waters look a lot narrower than they did circa about 1850.
And what that means is that geopolitically, our foes are either on the move or they are in retreat.
The United States is either on the move or it is in retreat.
The world is a safer place when the US has more hegemony.
The world is a less safe place when the US tends to create a vacuum in foreign policy, which is then filled by geopolitical foes like Russia or like China.
What this means on a sort of hard-nosed level is that we do have an interest in degrading Russia's military strength to invade surrounding countries.
We have that interest because Russia, again, is a geopolitical foe of the United States that is not interested in forming an alliance with the United States.
It's been our foe in Syria.
It's been our foe in Afghanistan.
It's been our foe repeatedly throughout the world that is hoping to shape a new sphere of influence to activate against the West.
Russia is not a part of the West.
Russia's goal has been pretty overtly to break NATO.
particularly in the fall of the Soviet Union, to do that.
Russia just has not taken advantage of any of that.
Russia's goal has been pretty overtly to break NATO.
NATO in the aftermath of the Cold War was reconstituted as a sort of anti-Russian alliance, knowing that Russia had predatory instincts with regard to the Baltic States particularly, but also with regard to Ukraine, with regard to Poland, with regard to a lot of the former satellites of the Soviet Union, NATO continued to be a viable defense mechanism against the Russians.
That doesn't mean that NATO's policy with Ukraine has made any sense.
It hasn't made any sense.
NATO, which originally was formed with a tripartite purpose, keep the Americans in, keep the Germans down, keep the Russians out, right?
That was the tripartite purpose.
That continues to be NATO's mission is to keep Germany at the center of European politics without allowing them to sort of break out because they've done so twice in the 20th century to the devastation of the world.
To keep the Americans in because America has an interest in European politics, at least to the extent that we send the money.
And to keep the Russians out because again, Russia's predatory instincts were communist and now they are more oligarchic.
So that mission maintains, but that does not mean that NATO wasn't playing games with Ukraine.
They kept making overtures to Ukraine.
Maybe you should come.
Maybe you should not come.
And finally, Russia got tired of it and invaded.
And you see why Putin invaded doesn't mean it was justified, but you see why he did it.
He also had the bizarre notion that Ukraine was not at this point a polity of its own, that it considered itself part of Russia so you'd be able to walk in just the way that Hitler walked into Austria during the Anschluss and everybody just cheered.
Putin obviously thought that was going to happen in Ukraine.
That did not happen.
Part of the reason, by the way, it didn't happen is because Russia had invaded the Donetsk-Luhansk region as well as Crimea in 2014 and turned those places into absolute hellholes.
So if you're a Ukrainian looking to your east and you look at Luhansk-Donetsk or looking to your south at Crimea and you say, I can be living like those people or I could be living not like those people.
The answer is you don't want to live under Russian rule.
It turns out that Vladimir Putin's rule has not been good for Russians and it has not been for Ukrainians inside Luhansk-Donetsk or inside Crimea.
So that miscalculation by Putin has led to an entrenched war in which he has been pretty thoroughly rebutted.
The surprise of the war is not only that Ukraine was able to stave off Russia, but the Ukraine has been able to inflict extraordinary casualties on Russia.
Now part of that is because Russia's conventional military is actually incredibly second rate.
Not just their trained soldiers, but also their weaponry.
Their weaponry is really old.
Because Russia is a very poor country.
I mean, it really is.
Russia's GDP total is about the GDP of the state of Florida.
Russia is not a rich country.
Russia is, as some people have suggested, an oil station with a nuclear arsenal.
And because of that, Russia's conventional military was defeated by Ukraine, which was armed with NATO weaponry, which actually is significantly upgraded weaponry over whatever the Russians have to offer.
So Russia has been forced back.
That is in the interest of the United States.
It upholds the deterrent power of NATO.
It degrades Russia's conventional military to the extent that Russia is going to have a very tough time with adventurous ambitions in terms of foreign policy and violating other countries' borders, which is good for the world.
Stability is generally a good thing.
Violation of borders is generally a bad thing.
And it deters China as well, because again, the cost that Russia has now borne is so significant that if China is looking at Taiwan and thinking to itself, maybe we'll try that, while looking at what happened to Russia, not wonderful if you're China.
We'll get some more on this in just one minute.
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Now China's gotten some side benefits like namely it's been able to turn Russia into its giant oil field.
Russia's been shipping all of its oil to China instead of China once being a client state of the Soviet Union.
Now Russia is essentially a client state of China.
So in some ways it's maximized Chinese powers but in other ways it's actually degraded a very strong strategic ally of the Chinese and made it harder for them to engage in adventurous foreign policy in Taiwan.
So the United States has achieved a bunch of interests.
With regard to the Ukraine war and as far as the investment that the United States has made in the Ukraine war, again, we've expended no lives in the Ukraine war.
We've expended a fair bit of money in the Ukraine war, but the truth is that the amount of money that we have spent in 2022 amounts to approximately 6% of total US defense spending.
In 2022, the U.S.
defense budget was $715 billion.
The amount that we've spent in Ukraine is something like $77 billion.
It'll raise to maybe $100 billion.
It's a lot of money.
It is a lot of money, but it represents a fraction of the United States' military budget.
If you could trade Say, 10% of the American military budget.
Four, the complete degradation of the Russian military.
That actually is not a bad move, considering that Ukrainian armed forces have already killed or wounded at least 100,000 Russian troops.
That is half of its original fighting force.
There have been almost 8,000 confirmed losses of armored vehicles, including thousands of tanks, thousands of APCs, artillery pieces, hundreds of fixed and rotary wing aircraft, numerous naval vessels.
So basically, you've destroyed half of the Russian military by just giving the weapons to Ukraine.
So that is a pretty solid return.
I mean, the truth is that on a year-to-year level, the amount of money that we'd be spending in the American military budget in order to counter whatever moves the Russians are making would easily be that amount of money.
And here you're talking about a one-time expenditure that has taken out an extraordinary percentage of the Russian military.
So, is it in America's interest to fund this?
Sure.
Now the question becomes, what the end of this war looks like?
And this has been my point.
The United States and Ukraine had convergent interests when it came to the beginning of this war.
Stopped the Russians, pushed the Russians back, degraded the Russian military.
Now the question becomes, for how long?
What is the end point here?
Because the truth is that the United States does have an interest in stability.
Despite all the talk about how we would love to see regime change in Russia, the truth is we don't know what comes next in Russia.
And were the Russian regime to fall, what you could end up with, as Henry Kissinger has said, is a complete destruction of any centralized authority in Russia.
And now you're talking about an extraordinarily large landmass with tribal situations taking over all over this landmass armed with 2,500 nuclear weapons.
That does not sound like an ideal situation.
You actually do need a centralized government in Russia as much as you think that Vladimir Putin is a thug and a strong man.
As much as that is true, the complete collapse of the Russian government into sort of chaos would be a worse solution probably than what we are currently looking at right now.
And so this means that we actually do have some divergent interests from the Ukrainians.
The convergent interest is Ukraine pushing back the Russians.
Where it diverges is the end goal.
If you're Ukraine, what you want is for the Russians to actually just surrender.
You want the Russians to surrender in Ukraine.
You want them to just leave.
That is not going to happen.
Putin can't allow that to happen.
If you're the United States, what you want is for the Russians to be defeated.
They have been conventionally.
You want the Russian military degraded?
You want NATO upheld?
You want NATO deterrence upheld?
You want deterrence of China?
All that stuff has already happened.
So the question becomes where the line gets drawn and how we best get to that line.
And this is why I've been saying for a long time here that we need to pursue a two-fold strategy, the United States.
One, you have to continue funding Ukraine so they don't actually lose the war.
You need to allow them to continue to push the Russians pretty hard on the battlefield.
At the same time, we need to open up backchannel negotiations with Putin, and we have to say to him, what does a solution, what does a goal look like to you?
What does the end goal look like to you?
Because at a certain point here, Joe Biden is going to have to be the bad guy.
At a certain point here, the President of the United States is going to have to say, here is what a solution looks like in Ukraine, and we are going to stop funding military aid that is used this way.
Until we get what we need.
If the Ukrainians are the ones who actually push back against that possible solution.
The reason that Biden needs to be the bad guy is because Zelensky at this point cannot go back to his own people and say, I'm going to accept Russian domination of particular territory.
He's lost too many people.
His people are mobilized on behalf of war.
War leaders have a very, very difficult time with the negotiated peace.
That's a very difficult thing to do.
Absent just the abject surrender of the other side, which again is not going to happen because Putin cannot allow that to happen, which means that Biden is going to have to make the sacrifice of going out there and saying, here is what a negotiated solution looks like.
I'm going to cram it down.
Is he actually going to have the stones to do that?
I have very serious doubts whether he's going to have the stones to do any of that.
Now, in this whole analysis, it is not necessary to ignore all of the problems inside Ukraine.
There's been a lot of talk about why are we even supporting Ukraine against the Russians.
I just explained on a geopolitical level why we're supporting Ukraine against the Russians.
Russia presents a geopolitical threat to the United States.
It backs all of our foes, including Iran, including China.
It has been an aggressive foreign player in foreign policy, invading other countries and surrounding regions.
It does not have the economic interests of the West or the United States at heart.
It is clearly opposed to many of those interests.
Ukraine is to all extents and purposes for the United States kind of a nothing burger until the Russians invaded.
So the United States had an interest in Ukraine remaining an independent country apart from Russia, but it's not as though the United States had like heavy investment in Ukraine.
Ukraine was just another country until Russia invaded it.
And you don't have to ignore the problems inside.
Ukraine has serious problems.
Ukraine, you don't have to be a person who flies the Ukrainian flag because you love Ukraine, because you love the governance in Ukraine, in order to oppose the Russian predations upon Ukraine.
It's a false binary.
I can accept all of these things.
Foreign policy is a place where you are constantly making choices between unpalatable actors.
Is Ukraine a place where you'd normally want to sink billions of dollars?
No, it is completely corrupt.
Okay, the government of Ukraine has been completely corrupt for decades.
There's nothing new about this.
And those corruption allegations do include people like Vladimir Zelensky.
It was the Associated Press that was reporting all the way back in July, quote, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky's dismissal of senior officials is casting an inconvenient light on an issue that the Biden administration has largely ignored since the outbreak of war with Russia, Ukraine's history of rampant corruption and shaky governance.
This is leading a lot of Americans to say, okay, why are we sending so much money over there without any oversight?
Which is a proper and correct question.
Obviously, we need oversight of where that money is going.
In some ways, it's better for us to just ship the weaponry directly in as opposed to sending them the money to buy the weaponry.
At least if you just ship them the weaponry, you know they have the weaponry.
If you ship them the money, it might be going into Zelensky's personal bank account.
You just don't know.
Unless that sounds like some sort of slanderous idea about Zelensky.
It's been true of literally every Ukrainian prime minister so far as I'm aware for the last several decades.
As it presses ahead with providing tens of billions of dollars in military, economic, and direct financial support to Ukraine and encourages allies to do the same, the Biden administration, according to NPR, again this is NPR, back in July, is now once again grappling with long-standing worries about Ukraine's suitability as a recipient of massive infusions of American aid.
Those issues, which date back decades and were not an insignificant part of former President Donald Trump's first impeachment, have been largely pushed to the back burner in the immediate run-up to the Russian invasion.
But Zelensky fired his top prosecutor, intelligence chief, and other senior officials, resurfacing those concerns.
This may have given fresh attention to allegations of high-level corruption in Kiev made by one outspoken U.S.
lawmaker.
Now again, it may be that in the years to come, we find out that a lot of the money that we've been sending to Ukraine actually went into the pocket of Vladimir Zelensky's friend.
Like, that would not be the craziest possible outcome of this, because again, given how politics works in Ukraine, it'd actually be shocking if that wasn't the outcome here.
With that said, that does not undermine the idea that the United States should be providing aid to Ukraine for all the reasons that we've already mentioned, mainly checking the Russians and deterring the Chinese.
The same thing holds true with regard to Ukrainian religious treatment.
Now, there are a few myths that have been purveyed here with regard to Ukraine.
One is that Ukraine is some sort of secular liberal paradise.
It is not.
Ukraine has higher levels of church-going than Russia does.
Ukraine does not allow same-sex marriage.
Ukraine is not pro-transgender.
Ukraine is a very socially conservative country.
However, is it true that Vladimir Zelensky is cracking down on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church?
The answer is yes, and the reason that he's been doing that is because he believes that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, not without evidence, is linked to Moscow.
Because as it turns out, they've actually done some raids on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
And what they found is large amounts of cash, dubious Russian citizens, leaflets calling on people to join the Russian army, etc, etc.
Now, is that a violation of religious freedom?
It very well may be.
And you don't have to excuse it away in order to say that it's still better to choose to give aid to Ukraine, to stave off the Russian.
Again, it was Russia that crossed Ukraine's borders.
It's not the other way around here.
You also don't have to ignore the reality that Battalions like the Azov Battalion have been covered since like 2014 as rooted in neo-Nazi ideology.
That was reported by virtually every major media outlet.
That is not Russian propaganda.
That happens to be the truth.
That white nationalism is in fact quite present in many areas of the Ukrainian military.
All of those things can be true.
All those things can be true.
It can also be true that the vast bulk of the Ukrainian military is not those people.
It can also be true That again, Ukraine is standing up to the Russians, and that is a good thing for the United States.
The United States does have an interest in all of these things.
So all of these things can be true at once.
Because we are constantly thinking in such Manichean, black and white, what Manichean means, Manichean terms.
What we tend to think is, well, we either are fighting for the forces of light against the forces of darkness.
Or the only side that we can support has to be absolutely pure and every dollar has to go exactly where we say it's going.
None of that has ever been the reality in foreign policy.
Whenever in foreign policy we give aid, a lot of that money is wasted.
Whenever we give military aid to a country, we're giving aid to countries generally that are not as open and honest as the United States.
The United States happens to be the greatest country on earth.
That means that by definition, when we give aid to other countries, those countries are not as great as the United States.
This happens all the time in American foreign policy.
And yes, America does have an interest in shaping the world to its priority.
There are a lot of folks out there who say that it's not America first if you are interested in the foreign sphere.
No, precisely the opposite.
It is because I wish to protect America's interests that I believe that a muscular America on the world stage is better.
It's the reason why it was an idiotic move to pull out of Afghanistan for no apparent reason and hand the country over to the Taliban who promptly welcomed terrorists back in.
Whenever the United States retracts on the world stage, people who hate us take over.
This is the rule in American foreign policy, and this is why the United States is involved.
Now again, one of the things that drives people absolutely up a wall is the fact that everyone in politics speaks about this stuff without any nuance.
Everybody in the political sphere, the people who should be expressing some sort of nuance with regard to this sort of stuff, they're making clear all of the holdups that they have with Ukraine, making obvious that they do not think that Ukrainian government is free of corruption, that it is a bastion of light and happiness.
But we are going to support them against the Russians because the Russians are the predatory power in this particular situation and the United States has an actual national interest in staving off Russian victory in this particular arena.
Instead of politicians actually saying any of that stuff, what you get is the happy talk.
And the happy talk, I understand it rubs everybody the wrong way.
Instead, what you have is the Ukrainians are, the Ukrainian government is absolutely scot-free wonderful.
It's the greatest.
The Ukrainian flag, I won't fly the American flag, but I will fly the Ukrainian flag.
I won't shut the American border, but I will ship $45 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
Now, the criticism there is not about shipping aid to Ukraine.
The criticism about shutting the border So, whenever you hear people who say, why are we shipping the aid to Ukraine as opposed to shutting the border?
The real question for Joe Biden should be, why aren't you shutting the border?
It's not about the aid.
The aid isn't really the question.
The question is, why aren't you shutting the border?
The notion that, while I can't believe we're spending $45 billion on Ukraine, while we're spending $1.7 trillion, we don't have, we're borrowing the money to spend it.
That's a question about American spending.
Generally speaking, it is not about this specific spending priority.
I agree with all those critiques.
I just think it's a non sequitur in many cases.
The question is whether it is in the interest of the United States to again fund Ukraine to the defeat of Russia.
And the answer is, truthfully speaking, this is one of the greatest American military investments of all time.
You have degraded the Russian military by a factor of one half at the cost of less than $100 billion.
It's a pretty big win, especially when you look at the wars that are going to be prevented in the future because you have basically made it impossible for the Russians to get predatory anywhere else in the world because their military has been degraded so much by this particular war.
Now again, The big problem is our politicians have no capacity to explain any of this.
They're not honest with the American people.
And so instead what you get is the light versus darkness, dark side of the force versus the Jedi kind of description of this conflict.
No nuance at all.
And that's a problem because it actually doesn't teach Americans or tell Americans or explain to Americans that foreign policy is a place filled with lots of complexity, lots of nuance and lots of darkness.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So, for example, Nancy Pelosi yesterday, Zelensky was preparing to come to Washington, D.C., and the outgoing Speaker of the House, she says that Zelensky is a total and complete hero.
To have a complete, total hero in the Congress of the United States, fighting for democracy, leading people who are fighting for democracy, would bring honor to the Congress of the United States.
And then Pelosi, of course, did what she always does, and she tried to liken January 6th to what's happening in Ukraine.
This is just a bad habit for Democrats.
Pretending that a couple hundred rioters breaking into a building and quickly being ousted is the same thing as a country nearly being stamped out by another country is pretty ridiculous on its face.
Again, I will say this about Zelensky.
Zelensky acted heroically in staying in Kiev.
He could have fled.
Many other leaders have.
You saw this in Afghanistan.
His leadership has been excellent in terms of wartime leadership in Ukraine.
Zelensky's leadership has been very good.
He's great on TV.
He's very charismatic.
This is his job.
And he's very good at his job.
And is that in Ukraine's interest?
Sure.
So if you are Ukrainian, do you like Zelensky?
Sure.
Of course.
I mean, he's acting in his national interest.
But this sort of drooling, overweening talk is not necessarily, I think, the most honest.
Yes, he's acting heroically.
Is he a quote-unquote total and complete?
Is this the way that you should talk about something where you're going to have to impose a negotiated solution in the very near future?
I have some problems with it.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell using very similar language to talk about this.
Here is the Senate Minority Leader.
Providing assistance for the Ukrainians to defeat the Russians.
That's the number one priority for the United States right now.
According to most Republicans, that's sort of how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment.
Okay, that's a wild overstatement.
I mean, that is not remotely the number one priority for most Republicans or most Americans.
I mean, by polling data, that's just not true.
I think it's a major foreign policy priority.
Is it the main priority of the United States to fund Ukraine?
No, I mean, these mass overstatements, all they do is drive opposition because, again, they're not true.
It's not true that this is the vast priority of the United States.
Kevin McCarthy, presumably at some point, the Republicans in the House will make him the Speaker.
He was actually more accurate about this.
He was on the floor with Laura Ingraham last night.
He said, listen, we should be signing checks to Ukraine, but there needs to be oversight and we need to make sure we know what we're doing with the money.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable response from Kevin McCarthy.
Germany's already reneged on its own military expenditures, and we're spending 62% of all the costs in Ukraine, but it's supposed to be the big threat to Europe.
Why are the American people on the hook for this, to the tune of 85 billion more, it looks like?
Well, we shouldn't be.
Before the election, I explained to everybody, no more blank checks for Ukraine.
No more blank checks for Ukraine is probably right.
I mean, there should never be a blank check.
I mean, I understand that's all the Congress does these days, just sign blank checks to everything.
Now, here's the thing.
The American people actually are pretty much on the same page about this, meaning they support Ukraine against Russia.
They don't want this to be endless.
They don't think that America's interests are entirely convergent with Ukraine's interests in terms of the end goal.
So when you hear politicians say, well, we're willing to fight this thing, we're just going to keep it going ad infinitum, the American people are not with that.
The American people They want to see Russia chastened.
They want to see Russia lose.
They want to see Ukraine funded.
They also want to know what the end goal here is.
They want to know where our money is going.
They want to know what this looks like.
What does the solution look like?
The latest opinion poll that I can find on this.
It's from December 5th.
It is from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
And here is what they find.
An equal percentage of Americans say that Russia, 26%, Ukraine, 26%, has the advantage in the current conflict.
Plurality, 46%, believes neither country has the advantage.
Solid majorities of Americans continue to support supplying Ukraine with arms, that's 65%, and economic aid, 66%, accepting Ukrainian refugees, 73%, and sanctioning Russia, 75%.
Only 40% of Americans, however, believe that the United States should maintain its current level of support for Ukraine indefinitely.
Now, the rest of the public splits in two different ways, right?
3 in 10 say the United States should intervene militarily to tip the advantage to Ukraine, which of course is silly.
We're not going to put troops on the ground, nor should we, and end the war as soon as possible, or that the United States should gradually withdraw support for Ukraine at 29%, which means that Again, the American public is pretty split on this.
They're pretty ambivalent about the spending.
They don't know what a solution looks like because Joe Biden has not talked about a solution.
I quoted a Washington Post piece, maybe a month ago, talking about how the Biden administration said, this is not going to end with Russia leaving Ukraine.
We don't know what it is going to look like, the end solution.
We're not going to impose a solution.
We're going to continue funding.
That is a very bad policy.
That is a policy that doesn't look like anything that Approach is an end.
You literally have to have an end goal in mind when you go into a war or there will be no end to the war.
And this is a basic rule of war.
Americans are now closely divided on whether Washington should support Ukraine as long as it takes.
48% of Americans say that Washington should support Ukraine as long as it takes.
47% say Washington should urge Ukraine to settle for peace as soon as possible.
That's 47%.
So again, Americans are pretty split on this issue.
This notion that it's like a wild right-wing conspiracy to say that we should get to a solution here, that America's interest is in coming to an end point because we've already achieved our interests.
That is not a wild right-wing position.
That's a fairly mainstream position.
And if you look at the US policy on Ukraine, Russia, and poll statistics on what Americans believe, A majority of Republicans believe in increasing economic and diplomatic sanctions on Russia, sending additional arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government, providing economic assistance to Ukraine, accepting refugees.
Only 26% of Republicans believe that the U.S.
should send troops to the Ukrainian government, but that's accompanied by about 34% of Democrats, right?
Only one third of Democrats believe in that.
So Americans are actually Fairly in agreement on all of this.
The only area in which they are in significant disagreement is when it comes to maintaining the current level of support for Ukraine indefinitely, or whether we should intervene militarily to end the war in favor of Ukraine as quickly as possible.
Mainly, Republicans think we should gradually withdraw U.S.
support for Ukraine, and Democrats, by plurality, or by majority, believe that we should maintain the current level of support for Ukraine indefinitely.
That number is going to shrink over time.
Again, fewer Americans say the United States should support Ukraine as long as it takes.
Right now, about 61% of Democrats think that the U.S.
should support Ukraine as long as it takes, which again, means open-ended spending, which Democrats will not support the minute a Republican takes office, as we all know.
But only 48% of Americans overall actually agree with that position.
If you look at independence, independents are split 46-46 on whether the U.S.
should gradually reduce its aid, They take the position the United States should urge Ukraine to settle for peace as soon as possible, so the costs aren't so great for American households, even if that means Ukraine will lose some territory.
So the notion that there's sort of like an overwhelming majority for endless aid is not true.
The American people are beginning to settle on the notion that there has to be some sort of end point which of course is perfectly correct.
This is perfectly right.
Now you don't blame Zelensky for coming and asking for the aid.
That's literally what his job is to do.
I'm not going to blame Zelensky for that because why would I blame Zelensky for that?
That is his job.
What I blame is the President of the United States for not making clear what exactly America's policies are or doing the things that are necessary to come to a conclusion point here.
Now what's weird about this is that The Democratic Party and Joe Biden in particular, the president, they're taking a very split rhetorical view of the situation.
On the one hand, they're saying they want to be careful.
On the other hand, they're being completely not careful.
So for example, John Kirby, who's national security spokesperson, he says, we're going to be very careful what we talk about with Vladimir Zelensky.
He said this on MSNBC.
And then publicly, they're not careful at all.
But if you give us broad strokes as to how the U.S.
is ensuring his safety to Washington and then back home.
I can tell you that the U.S.
is in support in various ways of helping him get here to the United States safely.
He is en route right now.
And obviously, because he has to get back into country, we're going to be careful in terms of what we talk about.
Okay, but it's not just they're careful in what they talk about with regard to him coming in, him coming out.
They say they're gonna be careful as far as what they talk about in terms of weaponry.
And there's some pretty significant disagreements between the Biden administration and between Ukraine.
Ukraine would love for them to, they'd love to have Patriot missiles capable of striking into Russian territory, for example.
Their case is you have to hit the Russians where they live in order so that they stop sending people over the border.
And the United States is saying, we don't want you to escalate by attacking across the border.
But the Biden administration is not making that very clear.
Okay, so finally, Zelensky arrives at the White House yesterday.
A lot of people aren't making a big deal out of the fact that Zelensky wore essentially his military suit, which is his green sweatshirt and his military pants.
I mean, it looks like he's wearing fatigues almost.
Getting out of the car here, here's what it looks like.
You can see here, here comes Lenski.
He's wearing sort of the military fatigue uniform and Biden is wearing a suit.
A lot of people were apparently upset that he wasn't wearing a suit.
I mean, frankly, I don't care.
I think the bigger problem is that we have a senile daughter as the president of the United States.
I care very much less what people wear to greet that, that senile daughter.
When I hear people from there like, they're not showing proper respect to Joe Biden.
It's like, guys, pretty sure that the level of respect that Joe Biden is, number one, due, and number two, that we have granted him on the right, are not particularly high.
And I think that that is justified.
Second of all, obviously, this is a photo op.
If you are doing a photo op near Vladimir Zelensky, leaving your military invaded country for the first time since the beginning of the war, And you're still dressed in sort of your military gear.
I'm not going to blame you for that.
I think it's kind of ridiculous that people are getting very upset about what Vladimir Zelensky is wearing to meet Joe Biden.
And come on, come on.
In one second, we'll get to Zelensky's comments with Joe Biden and Joe Biden's response.
Then we'll get to his speech in front of Congress.
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Okay, so Vladimir Zelensky comes to the United States.
He sits down with President Biden at the White House and promptly calls Russia a terrorist country.
He then proposed what he called a global formula for peace summit, but he didn't offer any details as to what exactly that looks like.
And herein is the rob.
We actually need to know what the solution looks like before we decide whether to back that solution.
I'm not sure why that conversation is not taking place.
Here was Zelensky yesterday.
We are discussing sanctions and legal pressure on the terrorists in Russia.
Russia needs to be held accountable for everything it does against us, against our people, against Europe and the whole free world.
And it is very important that we have the peace formula and for that we offer very specific steps what America can do to help us to implement them.
We propose global formula for peace summit.
So what exactly is that global formula for peace summit?
Nobody actually knows.
And then Joe Biden himself spoke and he just spoke in constantly high praise for Zelensky.
Now again, Zelensky's war leadership in Ukraine has been incredibly impressive.
I mean, just on a pure leadership level, him staying in Kiev, him refusing to leave the country, his global appeals, all this has been very, very effective.
Pretending it's not been effective would be very silly.
Of course it's been effective.
The question is, what is the strategic aim of the President of the United States here?
If, in fact, he wants to get to some sort of negotiated solution with Putin.
Now, you don't know what's happening behind closed doors, obviously.
On the one hand, I'm not going to blame Biden for talking up Zelensky at the same time that he's pushing on the other end for Putin to make some sort of negotiated move.
The question is what the end of that's going to look like.
Here was Biden praising Zelensky yesterday.
We have a famous thing that occurs once a year.
We pick the man of the year in Time magazine.
You are the man of the year in the United States of America.
He's the man of the year in the United States of America.
Now again, is this an overstatement?
It is.
I mean, he's the man of the year in terms of, you know, sort of political news coverage for sure.
Is he the man of the year in the United States?
Is this an issue that Americans really even care about very much?
The answer really is kind of no.
Biden said the Ukraine's war is part of something bigger.
Again, I don't like these sort of big sweeping terminology that Biden uses when he talks about this sort of stuff, mainly because it's wildly inconsistent, right?
He'll talk about how we're standing up against autocracy on behalf of democracy.
Well, I mean, we constantly make alliances with autocracies if it's in our national interest.
What he should say is in the American people's national interest to back Russia, to back Ukraine against Russia in order to prevent the constant crossing of borders, the destabilization of the world, in order to degrade a military power that has been threatening to America's allies.
And there are a lot of reasons to support Ukraine.
Chief among those reasons is not the giant battle.
This is all language that's been adopted from World War II, and it really is not completely applicable.
Americans of every walk of life, Democrats and Republicans alike, had the resources to rebound in a resounding, united way to provide unequivocal and unbending support for Ukraine.
Because we understand in our bones that Ukraine's fight is part of something much bigger.
You know, he then went on to talk about how it was part of a bigger fight against autocracy.
And there's a guy who literally handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban.
So I don't buy a lot of this kind of broad spectrum language from the president of the United States.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
It also tends to alienate erstwhile allies who actually are not democracies.
Plus, Ukraine is a rather imperfect democracy at best.
Is it better than Russia?
Absolutely.
Is it a perfect democracy?
Not even close.
Meanwhile, John Kirby, again, the spokesperson for the National Security Wing of the presidency, he says, we're not going to force a conversation on Zelensky.
And herein lies the problem.
When you make this sort of pre-commitment, we're not going to force a conversation on Zelensky.
The question is, is America's interest identical with the interest of Ukraine?
I don't think so.
I think there's crossover.
I don't think that it's identical.
Does President Biden need to understand what President Zelensky's bottom lines are?
And how to get Putin to the table?
And of what happens to Crimea and, you know, territory that Putin has had since 2014?
I absolutely think that diplomacy will be part and parcel of what's discussed today.
This won't be about, however, forcing President Zelensky to negotiate or describing or dictating to him what the terms of a negotiation might look like.
He's the commander in chief.
It's his country.
Okay, well, I mean, that may be true, but it's our money.
So, I mean, at a certain point, we are going to have to have a pretty strong say in this.
Are we not?
And what does that say look like?
Has the administration made that clear along any lines?
And the truth is that on a practical level, there are disagreements between the Biden administration and Ukraine.
I mean, all of this sort of pretend we stand shoulder by shoulder, everything you want, we'll give you is not true.
As the Washington Post reports, in a tweet labeled My Christmas Wishlist posted earlier this month before this week's announcement of another $1.85 billion worth of U.S.
security assistance, Zelensky adviser Mikhailo Podolyak's top five items included four the Biden administration has declined to offer or help provide, including advanced battle tanks and long-range missiles.
The fifth, the Patriot air defense system, was included in the new aid package.
U.S.
defense officials said Ukraine already has enough tanks and that the U.S.
M1 Abrams sought by Kiev are too difficult to maintain and complex to operate, meaning that we'd actually have to put soldiers on the ground in order to operate those things, which we're not willing to do.
When asked at a joint news conference with Zelensky about the missiles, which would allow Ukrainian forces to strike targets inside Russian territory, Biden actually warned such weaponry could shatter NATO unity in support of Ukraine.
He said of the alliance, we're not looking to go to war with Russia, which of course is correct.
A little bit more of that, a little bit more balance in terms of the rhetoric might be something nice here.
Okay, so all of this led up to Zelensky actually speaking in front of a joint session of Congress last night.
Again, this is all PR.
It's all optics.
And you can't blame Zelensky for being good at his job.
He is good at his job.
I mean, that's literally his job, is to go into the joint session of Congress to brag about his country's achievements and to get the picture of Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris holding up a Ukrainian flag, which is what he did.
By the way, I'm aware of no other time in modern American history in which you have the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House holding up the flag of another country no matter what that country is.
So it's pretty astonishing display on their behalf.
One I don't think was actually entirely appropriate.
Say the least again.
You believe in anti-Ukraine and not believe in those sort of optics.
I think that they would have a harder time holding up an American flag at this point than a Ukrainian flag.
Anyway, Zelensky, he gave a speech.
Speech was good.
He said that Ukraine is alive because Russian tyranny has lost control.
Here was Zelensky last night.
Against all odds and doom and gloom scenarios, Ukraine didn't fall.
Ukraine is alive and kicking.
You Europeans gained this victory.
And that's why Europe is now stronger and more independent than ever.
The Russian tyranny has lost control over us.
I mean, it is important to remember how historic it is that the Russians tried to invade a country and got thrown back.
I mean, it's like the Winter War in 1939 in Finland.
It's kind of an amazing achievement.
And certainly, Zelensky deserves incredible props for all of that.
Then Zelensky asked for more aid.
And here's a line that tended to tick a lot of people off.
He said, this is not charity.
Financial assistance is also critically important and I would like to thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for both financial packages you have already provided us with and the ones you may be willing to decide on.
Your money is not charity.
It's an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.
Okay, now I understand again why he's saying that.
I also understand that it is in fact charity.
I mean it is both.
These things, these are not mutually exclusive.
You assume when you give charity that people are going to use the charity not to buy drugs or alcohol with it.
You assume that they will go better their lives with it.
It is in fact both in America's interest for Ukraine to stand up to Russia and also it is charity.
And by the way, when we say it's charity, we mean that it is taxpayer taken charity.
It is not the government having its own money.
It is the government taking your money and giving it to Ukraine.
So a little, you know, he's being grateful, but he should say, we thank you for the money that you're giving us.
And we are in acknowledgement that it is in America's interest to do so.
The line that it's not charity, I think is completely superfluous there.
Absolutely.
Okay.
But does Zelensky come away with what he wants?
Well, he comes up with a political win for sure.
Does it provide more cover for Joe Biden to give more aid?
Sure, that was probably going to happen.
Anyway, the question again is going to be what a solution looks like here.
And I keep asking it over and over because the Biden administration has provided no guidance as to this.
Not only have they provided no guidance, when you actually have in a PR Opportunity like this, where you have a foreign leader coming to the United States in the middle of a war that we are funding, meeting with the President of the United States, what you're showing is shoulder to shoulder.
So, is it any surprise that Putin is now upping the ante?
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into your phone calls, plus an update on Amber Heard and Johnny Depp.
I don't care, but you guys apparently do, so we're covering that.
Apparently, she's now signing a check to Johnny Depp.
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