All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 13, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:42
The Political War Over Ukraine
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Massive debate has now broken out in Congress over the passage of a $95 billion bill that provides some $60 billion in support to Ukraine and provides another $14 billion for Israel's war against Hamas and then $10 billion for supposed humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones including Palestinians in Gaza.
This thing passed 70 to 27 or 70 to 29 in a vote in the Senate last night with 18 Republicans voting along with the Democrats in favor of passing this particular bill.
The Republicans were very splintered on it.
They split almost down the middle in terms of who voted for the bill, who voted against the bill.
And there are a few reasons for this.
One is, there's a bunch of bad stuff in the bill.
There's no question.
Even if you support aid to Ukraine, even if you support aid to Israel, there's a bunch of bad crap in the bill.
The biggest piece of garbage in the bill is this $10 billion in humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza.
Distributed it by whom?
Handed out to whom?
Why should American taxpayer dollars be sent to a place that will be then run, presumably, by the UNRWA or by Hamas or by some other agency that acts on behalf of terrorists?
That's just one problem with the bill.
But there are plenty of other problems with the bill.
One of the questions about the amount of Ukraine aid is what is the Ukraine aid for?
And this raises a broader question about exactly what the goals of the United States are in Ukraine and what the United States is hoping to forestall for additional aid to Ukraine.
So, this is a broader scale foreign policy question.
First rule of foreign policy.
First rule of foreign policy.
Foreign policy is about preventing the worst outcome very often using the second worst outcome.
Foreign policy is a series of bad choices that you have to make.
And one of the problems with doing foreign policy is that if you are successful in a foreign policy context, then what you typically have done is you have forestalled the counterfactual.
So, for example, let's say that the United States, instead of going isolationist after World War I, had remained relatively interventionist and had built up its military power and said to the Germans and Japanese, we're not going to allow you to get aggressive.
And World War II had never happened.
Well, the critique would have then been, why is the United States spending so much money on its military when there is no war?
Only the counterfactual allows you to understand what could have happened if not for particular intervention or particular action.
That's why hindsight is always 20-20 in foreign policy.
Because the reality is that whatever choice you're making right now, you have to try to imagine outside your box.
It's very easy to say in 2002 that the American military drawdown in the 1990s and the perception of weakness by America's enemies led to 9-11.
And that's clearly true.
And there were people making that argument at the time.
But the argument on the other side of the time was, why are we spending so much money on the military when the USSR has just fallen?
There's no actual reason for it.
So when it comes to every foreign policy debate, we have to understand what exactly is the goal.
So is the goal in Ukraine to, for example, degrade the Russian military,
which by the way is something I think is worthwhile because I believe that the Russian military
has been used for expansionist purposes and is working hand in glove with the Chinese military
and that both of them provide threats ranging from naval arena to ground assaults
in various places in Eastern Europe, for example, to places like Taiwan.
Okay, but let's talk about what are the American goals.
Degrade the Russian military would presumably be one.
Two would be prevent the Russians from taking over all of Ukraine and then threatening NATO's borders.
Because Ukraine is in fact a giant chunk of landmass directly in the middle of Eastern Europe.
It borders Poland, it borders Hungary, borders a bunch of important states.
The taking of Ukraine would also provide impetus for Russia presumably to try to attack one of the outlying states like Lithuania in the Baltics.
Because the Russians actually do, if you look at a map, hold a piece of territory on the edge of Lithuania called Kaliningrad, which used to be known as originally German territory, known as Konigsberg, where Immanuel Kant was from.
So theoretically, that could incentivize the Russians to move into Lithuania.
Ukraine happens to be the breadbasket of the world.
Huge amount of grain is produced there.
Ukraine also happens to provide quiescence in the Black Sea in a way that the Russian domination of the Black Sea would not.
There are a bunch of geopolitical and strategic and economic reasons that you don't want the Russians taking over all of Ukraine.
So, if the two American goals are to degrade the Russian military, specifically because the Russians have been expansionist, And to prevent them from taking over all of Ukraine, those are American goals that have largely been achieved at this point, maybe.
If the goal is to push Russia out of Donbass and Crimea, that's not going to happen, and pretty much everybody understands that's not going to happen.
So the big question for the Ukraine aid is, is this aid being sent to Ukraine?
It's military aid.
Which means, honestly speaking, it's just American military spending.
It's we spend money by giving it to Ukraine and Ukraine then spends it on American military contractors to build up all of the military credibility that we actually require.
Like, it actually gets the machine working.
And so if you think the world is about to become a much more violent place, which I do, it's actually not a terrible thing that you have more money pouring into the systems that sort of grease the wheels of the American military complex in terms of being able to produce weaponry for use against further threats like, say, China invading Taiwan.
But, Put all that aside, if the money for Ukraine is designed to prevent the full takeover of Ukraine, then that's the amount of money that we should be spending on Ukraine.
That is what is in America's interest.
If that money is being given to Ukraine in the bizarre assumption that that will allow for the full-scale reconquest of Donbass and Crimea, that's stupid and it's not going to happen.
No one has made clear at this point exactly what the aid is for.
This is a signal failing of the Biden administration.
It really is.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, we're experiencing a lot of global instability as we plunge into primary season.
How are you protecting your family in the midst of all this chaos?
The fact is, there is one asset that has withstood famine, war, political and economic upheaval dating back all the way to biblical times, and that, of course, is gold.
It's not too late to diversify an old IRA or 401k into gold, and Birch Gold Group can help you with that.
Birch Gold can help you create a well-thought-out and balanced investment strategy that'll help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold without paying a penny out of pocket.
Diversify into gold today.
Just text Ben to 989898 for a free info kit with an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless 5-star reviews, and thousands of happy customers.
I encourage you to check out Birch Gold today.
Text Ben to 989898, claim your free info kit, and protect your savings with gold.
That's Ben to 989898 to get started.
Again, gold is a great safe haven against global uncertainty.
Text Ben to 989898 today.
Let's face it, your bank, it sucks.
I don't know what bank you use, but I do know that it kind of sucks.
That's why you need Current.
Current's build card is a secured credit card.
that lets you use your own money to build your credit.
It basically functions like a debit card, but rather than borrowing money you don't have
and getting dinged with a 25% interest fee every time you do,
you use your own money and improve your credit score as you do.
So, you know, there've been times where we are really low on the credit card
years and years ago, and it is deeply uncomfortable.
Well, you don't have to do that.
You might not think building credit is very important right now.
Trust me, it is.
When you go to buy a car or a house, the first thing they do is ask for your credit score.
You need to start building your credit.
The best way to do that is with Current.
Current is a more affordable, accessible, innovative banking system to help you better spend, save, and manage your money.
There are no credit checks or credit histories required.
There are no annual or subscription fees.
If you set up direct deposit with Current, you can get paid up to two days faster and you can qualify for a fee-free overdraft of up to $200.
The world is changing.
It's time your banking did too.
What are you waiting for?
Get Current, the future of banking.
Go to Current.com slash Shapiro or download the app.
That's Current.com spelled C-U-R-R-E-N-T dot com slash Shapiro.
Terms apply.
So, there are a couple of big battles that are broken out.
One on the Democratic side and one on the Republican side.
Financial Group member FDIC and CrossRiver Bank member FDIC for full terms and conditions.
Visit Currents.com or call 888-851-1172 for more information.
So there are a couple of big battles that are broken out, one on the Democratic side
and one on the Republican side.
The battle on the Republican side is a almost tripartite battle.
There are three positions on the Republican side with regard to Ukraine.
Position number one is the position that I take, which is that, effectively speaking, it is in the interest of the United States to prevent a full-scale Russian takeover of Ukraine, but it is not in the interest of the United States to prolong the war only to grant the false assumption that Ukraine is going to take control of Donbass and Crimea.
And so we should seek an off-ramp while also preserving Ukraine's independence against the Russians.
That happens to be the Henry Kissinger position.
I've been taking that position since, I believe, April of 2022, like two months into the war.
This has been my consistent position.
At no point, for example, have I suggested the Ukrainians invade Russian territory.
At no point have I even suggested that there was a possibility the Ukrainians would take back Crimea or the Donbass.
At no point have I suggested that there ought to be American boots on the ground.
There should not be.
I've not even suggested there should be an American no-fly zone over Ukraine.
So, the position that I've taken is America's interests are promoted by preventing the Russians from taking all of Ukraine, but they already were in control of the Donbass and Crimea, and that's probably not going to reverse itself.
That's position number one.
Position number two is the position that Joe Biden seems to be taking, kind of, which is that we should just, in an open-ended way, grant aid to Ukraine for anything they want.
We'll let them decide the off-ramp.
I think this is an idiotic position.
Why exactly should Ukraine decide the off-ramp?
In fact, Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is actually trapped.
He's trapped because he can't tell his own people who want back the Donbass and Crimea that he's going to stop the war short after a full-scale invasion of his country.
So he actually does not have the ability to go back to his own parliament and to his own people and say, I want an off-ramp here.
And I'm going to let them keep Donbass.
I'm going to let them keep Crimea.
Which means that it's actually in the United States' interest, if it could, and again, I've been saying this for almost two years at this point, It's in the interest of the United States to actually, if they could, go negotiate a separate peace with Vladimir Putin that would guarantee the future security of Ukraine, American security guarantees, Western security guarantees, and also acknowledge that Russia is going to maintain control of the Donbass region as well as Crimea.
So, there's the Biden position, which is basically like, okay, blank check, do what you want with the money, push hard, maybe you'll get the non-bass back, maybe you'll get Crimea back.
And I've always thought that was a stupid position because the American people do not have taste for that, nor really should they, because it really is not in America's interest.
And then there is the third position.
And the third position has not been clearly articulated, but it has been heavily implied.
And that position seems to be that Ukraine ought to be fully ruled by Russia, that Russia actually should win in Kiev, that Russia should actually take over all of Ukraine and install a puppet dictator in Ukraine.
And so it's unclear to me in a lot of the foreign policy, or at the very least, that the United States doesn't have any interest if Russia takes over all of Ukraine.
So theoretically, I guess you could say there are four positions.
There's the full isolationist position, which is we shouldn't care about anything that happens outside the borders of this country.
Which, again, I think is consistent, but I think short-sighted.
Because the reason we do foreign policy in this country is not because it's a fun thing to do on the side.
It's because foreign policy has significant ramifications for Americans.
It has ramifications in terms of security.
It has ramifications in terms of economics.
It has ramifications in terms of resources.
There are lots of ramifications to foreign policy.
But, you can say there are four positions, I suppose.
One, full isolationism.
Shouldn't care anything that goes on anywhere in the world.
Bring everybody back home.
Wall on all of our borders and that's it.
I don't think that's a possible solution, but that is one position.
Position number two is that for some odd reason, Vladimir Putin would be better running Ukraine than the current government of Ukraine.
And not only do we have no interest in stopping Putin, we actually should effectively pull out of Ukraine with our money and allow Ukraine to fall in the interest of fostering a broader peace with Vladimir Putin.
Position number three, which is my own, is we should stop Vladimir Putin from taking all of Ukraine, but we should acknowledge the realities of the situation on the ground, and we should acknowledge that Donbass and Crimea aren't going to be taken out of Russian hands.
And position number four is the Biden position, which is sort of open-ended, poor money and hope that Ukraine can take back everything.
Those are the four articulated positions, and Republicans seem to be split between these four positions when it comes to Ukraine.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden has not even articulated what the $60 billion is for.
Is the $60 billion designed for his ends?
Like, quote-unquote, liberate the Donbass and Crimea?
Or is it designed for, let's look for an off-ramp while we freeze the lines of conflict?
He's not made that clear.
And so that's opened up a weird debate in which no one will actually state their position on Ukraine.
Like, I, honest to God, don't know the position of many members of the Senate on Ukraine.
If not granting Ukraine the aid means that Kiev falls to Putin, Are you okay with that?
Or, is what you're saying, maybe what you're saying is this, we don't actually think Kiev is going to fall to Putin, we want to grant enough aid to prevent that, but we're not going to prevent forward-looking aid that is essentially designed for humanitarian purposes, or it's designed to shore up the economy of Ukraine, or it's designed to take the Donbass back.
We're not going to do any of that.
So because no one is clarifying their positions, this entire thing is incredibly muddy.
And the same thing, by the way, is happening on the Democratic side of the aisle, because they don't know what their position is with regard to Putin and Ukraine.
So there's all sorts of confusion with regard to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, on the Israel side of this particular policy, you have an isolationist right, which is increasingly arguing That there is something bad and immoral about supporting a democratic ally of the United States in destroying a terrorist group that just murdered 1,200 citizens of their country and took 200 hostages, including 100 who are still being held in captivity.
There is that isolationist right that believes that.
And much more importantly, there's a large block of the left that seriously sympathizes with actual Palestinian terrorism.
And those folks are sort of voting on the same side when it comes to Israel aid with regard to Hamas.
In other words, foreign policy is a mess right now.
The clear lines that used to exist with regard to sort of foreign policy positions are completely collapsing.
And when people make arguments, like you see Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, he put out a statement on the passage of the Ukraine aid, in which he said, House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions, any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border, and then he makes the case that border has to be included in this particular act.
Border was just stripped out of that act because the Senate couldn't come up with anything workable that Republicans were willing to endorse.
For good reason.
Republicans shouldn't endorse what Democrats want on the southern border.
And let's be realistic about this.
What's happening on the southern border is not a question of money.
It really is not a question of funding.
It's a matter of the political willpower to tie the hands of the executive branch in enforcing the southern border.
I say this as someone who just went down to the southern border and produced a full documentary about the southern border and who spent time with the head of the Border Patrol Union.
And he's spoken with border patrol officers, and he's spoken with senators.
I promise you, the problem at the border is not lack of funds.
The problem at the border is lack of will.
That is a very different thing.
So in other words, when Mike Johnson says, we can't fund Ukraine or Israel because of what's going on at the border, that's a complete non sequitur.
Make the argument that the bill on Ukraine aid is bad on its own merits, that it gives too much money to the wrong places.
Or make the argument that the bill for Israel aid is bad on its own merits because it gives $10 billion, for example, to the Palestinians in Gaza, most of which will be sucked up by terror groups.
Make those arguments.
But what I'm seeing is a lack of clarity with a wide variety of these issues in which it's unclear exactly what everyone even wants.
And that's confusing to me.
That is confusing to me.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, let's say you are a highly skilled assassin that inherited Mandalorian Beskar Steel from your late father.
Let's also say you were hired to go out to the Dune Seas and make sure a few prisoners saw their fate into a Sarlacc pit.
Quickly, you realize you're outmatched.
While attempting to fire that wrist rocket, you're taken out by Han Solo while he's kind of blind.
Well, things just got a little awkward for your reputation as being one of the best bounty hunters in the galaxy.
Worse than that, you practically jumped into the Sarlacc pit and you now will be slowly digested over the next 1,000 years.
Well, when you're in the bowels of the Sarlacc, that's a lot of time to consider that you should have gotten life insurance, like Shapiro said.
Life insurance is incredibly important.
You need to include it in your financial planning this year.
Start shopping right now with my friends over at PolicyGenius.
Find the right policy to protect your family today.
Give yourself the peace of mind that comes with knowing that if something were to happen to you, your family can cover all their expenses while getting back on their feet.
PolicyGenius's technology makes it easy to compare life insurance quotes from America's top insurers in just a few clicks.
Save time and money.
Give your family a financial safety net with PolicyGenius.
Head on over to policygenius.com slash Shapiro or click that link in the description.
Get your free life insurance quotes.
See how much you could save.
That's policygenius.com slash Shapiro.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are making some claims about this particular bill that I actually don't think hold water.
So, there's a claim that's being made about the Ukraine bill, that because the Ukraine bill includes funding for Ukraine, that stretches into 2025, that this is somehow an impeachment procedure.
Now listen, I opposed both impeachments against Donald Trump.
They did not allege high crimes and misdemeanors.
And I have to love everything that Trump did in his conversation with Vladimir Zelensky, asking Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden and Burisma in order to recognize that that did not rise to the level of high crime and misdemeanor, that was an impeachable offense.
The claim right now that is being made is that because the funding to Ukraine extends into 2025, and this is just useful for purposes of fact checking, that because of that, this is the predicate to an impeachment push.
That basically, the first impeachment of Donald Trump was rooted in Donald Trump saying to Vladimir Zelensky, I'm not going to give you the supplemental aid that has been allocated to your country until you investigate Burisma.
Because he withheld the aid, impeachment went forward.
Thus, a new bill that allocates aid to Ukraine puts Trump at risk of impeachment if he withholds the aid to Ukraine.
That doesn't follow.
The actual rationale for the impeachment, to be fair, was not just that Trump was holding up the aid to Ukraine.
If he had said, Ukraine is corrupt, I don't think, as a foreign policy matter, we should be giving that aid to a corrupt country, so I'm not doing it.
That would not be impeachable in any way, shape, or form.
I don't even think Democrats would have tried to impeach on that basis.
So the argument that simply by allocating aid in the future to when Trump could be president, that's kind of the predicate for impeachment.
I don't think that argument holds particularly a lot of water.
I think, again, there are good arguments against the bill.
I don't think that happens to be one of them.
OK, all of this meshes with, again, this broader foreign policy debate inside the Republican Party right now.
And that was brought to the fore, a lot of this, by the interview that Tucker did with Vladimir Putin.
Tucker Carlson, of course, went over to Moscow where he interviewed Vladimir Putin.
We covered that pretty extensively on the show.
We went through the interview.
Again, I thought that Tucker did a fine job in asking questions that allowed Vladimir Putin to talk.
And so the question with any interview is sort of, what's the goal of the interview?
Tucker asked a series of questions that were not designed to be confrontational, that were not designed to be aggressive against Vladimir Putin, and that's totally fine.
You're allowed to do an interview that way when the goal is to allow the dictator to speak for himself so that everybody can see what he says and what he thinks.
And even moments where it looked like Tucker was trying to elicit a particular response, Putin didn't go for it.
I mean, to be perfectly frank with you, I think that Putin blew a massive opportunity.
I think that if Putin had come out and made the case that I've seen so many people on the right make, which is Ukraine is sort of a left liberal country, and that when you fight for the Ukraine flag, you're actually fighting for the LGBTQ flag, or that the entire debacle that's been happening in Ukraine is the result of American foreign policy elite establishment types.
Like, that would have been the argument.
That Putin could have made that I think would have drawn more eyeballs.
Instead, he went into his actual true rationale, which was this sort of long historic explanation of why Ukraine ought not exist and why he ought to take the whole thing.
Well, I mean, the argument that he makes leads conclusively to the conclusion that he really, really believes that Russia should be the ruler of Ukraine, period, full stop.
That was the case that he was making.
He tried to back off of that when he said, oh, well, maybe there'll be an off-ramp, but then he refused to suggest sort of an actual realistic mechanism for an off-ramp.
And listen, I'm somebody who's warm to an off-ramp.
If he presented one, I'd say the United States should jump on it like right now.
Okay, but that's the interview that Tucker did with Putin.
But it elicited questions about what Tucker's beliefs are with regard to Vladimir Putin because, again, this foreign policy debate that's happening inside the right is really kind of fascinating right now.
And I think it's worthy of elucidation.
And I think, again, Tucker's a very articulate person and he articulates a point of view on foreign policy with which I heartily disagree.
I've invited Tucker on the show to discuss it.
Hopefully he'll take me up on that.
I would love to have a conversation with him about that to clarify positions.
I think it'd be good for the movement.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, if you have not had Black Rifle Coffee yet, now is the best time to try it for yourself.
I'm saying that because I am deeply reliant on Black Rifle Coffee.
My kids get me up too early.
I'm working too late.
It's the coffee keeping me going.
Right now, you can get 20% off your first order with promo code SHAPIRO at BlackRifleCoffee.com.
You'll see why they're becoming one of the most popular coffee companies in America.
Black Rifle Coffee is a veteran-founded and veteran-run company.
They take pride in serving coffee and culture to people who love the country.
When you shop with Black Rifle Coffee, your money goes a long way toward giving back to those who serve our nation.
Black Rifle Coffee just announced today a massive new partnership with UFC that started with a huge donation to the Hunter 7 Foundation.
Every purchase you make helps fuel their mission to support veteran and first responder causes.
This includes everything from getting much-needed equipment to first responders to helping veterans fight cancer and more.
Black Rifle Coffee sources exotic roasts from award-winning farms worldwide.
They offer a wide variety of ground coffee, whole beans, K-cups, and ready-to-drink coffee for those who like their coffee on the go.
We can say with full confidence that Black Rifle Coffee is simply the best.
Don't take our word for it.
Head over to BlackRifleCoffee.com right now.
Get 20% off your purchase with code SHAPIRO.
That's BlackRifleCoffee.com with promo code SHAPIRO.
In any case, Tucker was at the World Government Summit in Dubai with an Egyptian journalist named Imad Eldin Adib.
And one of the clips that he stated during this interview kind of went viral.
And it went viral because it's evocative.
It's actually not even remotely the most controversial thing that Tucker said.
Now again, Tucker's interview with Putin, I'll say it again, I have no problem with Tucker's interview with Putin.
I think anybody should be able to talk to any dictator at any time and ask any questions they want.
And I didn't find Tucker's questions to be particularly bad.
I thought that some of Tucker's questions, particularly at the end about Evan Gershkowitz, were quite good.
But Tucker's conclusions are ones that have real implications for the Republican Party.
Because again, what I'm seeing in this debate over the Ukraine bill, I'm not as interested in the Ukraine aid bill itself as the foreign policy debate over what that means.
Is the Republican Party moving in a direction in which it effectively says that the United States should not have a foreign policy and should be totally isolationist?
Or is the Republican foreign policy establishment moving in a direction that says that people like Vladimir Putin Ought to have more power because the United States is actually a bad force in the world, which is an even stronger argument in almost horseshoe theories with Bernie Sanders.
There is a part of the libertarian right that horseshoe theories all the way around and meets Noam Chomsky on the left.
Is that what's being articulated on the right?
Or is it sort of a foreign policy realism, which is sort of where I sit, right?
Opposing some wars, like for example, in Libya, suggesting foreign aid to some countries that are American allies in order to achieve American interests.
And then, of course, there is sort of the older school mid-2000s neocon position, which is that the United States should be involved in a vast variety of wars, whether or not it is in America's interest, kind of a Wilsonian perspective on foreign policy in which America has to preserve morality in the world at the cost of blood and treasure, whether or not it's in direct America's interest.
Okay.
Those are the open lines of debate.
And I think Tucker's interview in Dubai sort of brought these to the fore.
So again, he's being interviewed by an Egyptian journalist named Imad Eldin Adib.
And here's the clip that went viral.
It's him talking about Putin and Moscow itself.
So an incapable person couldn't do that.
He is very capable, and many of you know him, and you know that.
What was radicalizing, very shocking, and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow, where I'd never been, the biggest city in Europe, 13 million people.
And it is so much nicer than any city in my country.
I had no idea.
My father spent a lot of time there in the 80s when he worked for the US government, and it barely had electricity.
And now it is so much cleaner and safer and prettier aesthetically, its architecture, its food, its service, than any city in the United States that you have to... And this is non-ideological.
How did that happen?
How did that happen?
And at a certain point, I don't think the average person cares as much about abstractions as about the concrete reality of his life.
And if you can't use your subway, for example, as many people are afraid to in New York City because it's too dangerous, you have to sort of wonder, like, isn't that the ultimate measure of leadership?
The ultimate measure of leadership, in other words, is that Moscow is clean while New York City is dirty.
Okay, well, there are a few things at play here.
So one, I totally agree with Tucker when he says that there are many cities abroad that are better run than American cities.
There's no question that that is the case.
I've been to many more beautiful cities than any city that I've seen in the United States.
And there are some really beautiful cities in the United States.
They also have pretty seamy underbellies.
There are kind of smaller cities that I think are quite beautiful, like Charleston, South Carolina.
There are bigger cities that have areas that are beautiful, like Boston, but some other areas that are really, really not nice.
I spent most of my life in big American cities, like Los Angeles, which turned from a fairly nice place to live into a very bad place to live.
So when Tucker says that, for example, law and order matters in major American cities, that of course is for sure true.
But when he uses that as a stand-in for the Russian model of governance, that's when I start to have some questions.
And maybe he didn't mean that.
I don't know.
But it seems like when he is saying that it radicalized him, why would Moscow radicalize you exactly?
I mean, Tucker's always been a law and order guy.
Tucker's always wanted, for example, broken windows theory applied in places like New York or Washington, D.C.
It's not like Tucker was ever pro-crime or something.
He's never a liberal on these issues.
So what exactly radicalized him?
Did it radicalize him to a different idea about how government works when he says abstractions are less important than how you live life on the ground?
Abstractions are kind of important depending on what abstractions you're talking about.
If those abstractions are, for example, Liberty in the American model versus, say, the Russian model, where liberty really does not exist.
And this is where the other clips from Tucker, from this interview, I think are more evocative of maybe what Tucker means than this clip right here.
By the way, it should be noted at this point, Moscow, I've never been there.
So I'll take Tucker's word for it and the word of many other people that it's a beautiful city.
We should also point out at this point that the GDP per capita in Russia is $12,000 per year.
Only 77% of the Russian population even has indoor plumbing.
All the wealth gets sucked into Moscow, where it is widely distributed among people who are friends of Putin and friends of the friends of Putin.
The Moscow metro area has an income twice that of the general Russian economy.
Russia continues to have a stagnating economy.
They had an inflation rate of 6.3% in this year, 5.28% in 2023, and almost 14% in 2022.
So when we talk about, you know, the glories of Moscow, we should also recognize that a lot
of dictatorships had really nice cities.
Berlin under Hitler was a beautiful place.
Dresden under Hitler was a beautiful place.
Rome under Mussolini was a beautiful place.
In other words, a beautiful city...
Beautiful cities can exist across the world, in various locations, and under various systems of government.
They are not actually the best marker of whether a government is properly run or whether the leader is good at his job.
That is not a sole indicator.
Every single factor analysis fails.
Anytime you say, ah, I can tell that leader is good because he has a beautiful city.
There's like 85,000 other factors as to whether the leader is good.
But again, I think that what Tucker is saying there, just to take it on its face value statement, is the least Problematic or interesting thing that he said during this interview.
That Moscow is beautiful and American cities are not as beautiful and we should clean them up and not allow graffiti and not allow pot and all that.
I agree with all of that.
It's some of the other things that he said that I think have broader implications for American foreign policy.
So, for example, Tucker was asked by this Egyptian journalist about Vladimir Putin and assassinating people.
And the Egyptian journalist was like, well, you know, you could have asked him about why he kills people and censorship and all the rest.
And here was Tucker's answer.
You should challenge some ideas.
For instance, you didn't talk about freedom of speech in Russia.
You did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about the restrictions on opposition in the coming elections.
I didn't talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about.
Why?
Because those are covered and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries
in various countries and have concluded the following, that every leader kills people,
including my leader.
Every leader kills people.
Some kill more than others.
Leadership requires killing people, sorry.
That's why I wouldn't want to be a leader.
That press restriction is universal in the United States, I know because I've lived it.
I've, you know, asked my former, you know, I've had a lot of jobs.
And I've done this for 34 years and I know how it works.
And there's more censorship in Russia than there is in the United States, but there's
a great deal in the United States.
Okay, we can stop it right there for a second.
Okay, so.
Thank you.
This is where we start to get into the more interesting part of what Tucker is saying here.
Okay, when he says that he likes Moscow, alright, fine.
When he starts to say that the Russian way of assassination and censorship is somewhat akin to how the United States runs things, the answer there is no.
Just on a factual basis, the answer there is no.
You know how I know?
Because Tucker Carlson doesn't only live in the United States quite safely, criticizing the current president of the United States as a senile dotard, he makes millions of dollars doing so.
You know what happens to you in Vladimir Putin's Russia if you criticize Vladimir Putin as a senile dotard?
You kill yourself by shooting yourself twice in the back of the head and then being thrown off a building.
These are not comparable.
When Tucker says that everyone assassinates, everyone kills, kind of reminiscent of Michael Corleone justifying the mafia when he's talking to Kay in Godfather 1.
It's like, oh, Kay, now who's being naive?
The idea that the President of the United States has the summary ability to simply murder his opponents, the way that Vladimir Putin does, is not reality.
I don't like Joe Biden either.
I think he's a terrible president.
I hope he's not president as soon as humanly possible, obviously without wishing any ill health on anyone.
But let's be clear about this.
If your vision of the United States is that it is somehow comparable to the governance of a kleptocrat like Vladimir Putin, that seems pretty wild to me.
And if that's the basis of foreign policy, I'm not sure how that is sustainable.
The attempt to relativize the United States to Russia under Vladimir Putin, that's the part that I'm finding bizarre here in what Tucker is saying.
And that leads to a foreign policy that is quite dangerous for the future of the United States.
If the foreign policy of the United States is Russia good, Russia no worse than United States, therefore, if Russia takes Ukraine, for example, no problem.
I don't understand how you uphold A powerful America in the world for the benefit of its own citizens under that rubric.
Again, that's not a defense of anything Joe Biden is doing.
But Tucker comparing himself and his treatment in the United States to the treatment of Russian journalists who descend from Vladimir Putin is just, it is not factual.
It does not seem to have a relation to factual reality.
We'll get to more on this in a second.
Because again, I think that there are some very significant gaps in American foreign policy thinking.
And again, this is why I've invited Tucker on the show, because I would love to discuss this stuff with him.
And I'd love to clarify our thoughts on this.
What does he think a good American foreign policy looks like?
We'll get to more of this in just a second.
First, mark your calendars.
It's the epic return of Backstage.
Almost a year away filming the Pendragon cycle, but Jeremy Boring is back.
He is joined by Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Michael Moles, Andrew Clavin, and me.
Join us tonight at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central, as we go behind the scenes and beyond the headlines.
There's a lot to cover.
You're not going to want to miss a minute.
Watch the show live exclusively on Daily Wire Plus tonight at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central.
You're not going to want to miss it.
Okay, meanwhile...
Okay, so we are going through this Tucker interview in Dubai because it has sort of his thoughts about what happened with Vladimir Putin.
Again, there are two interesting things about the interview with Putin.
One is what Putin had to say, which we went through pretty in-depth the other day.
And the other is sort of what Tucker's perspective is because, of course, Tucker has a huge following and is incredibly talented at what he does.
Again, the clip that has been going viral is the one about him saying that Moscow is a wonderful place.
I find that less interesting and compelling than his clip suggesting a sort of moral equivalence between Vladimir Putin's assassinations and what the United States does.
Or censorship in Russia and censorship in the United States.
And that extends to Tucker really giving the benefit of the doubt to Vladimir Putin.
So he starts talking about Vladimir Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine.
And I gotta say, I don't believe that this is reflective of the facts on the ground.
American policymakers have convinced themselves that Vladimir Putin is going to take over Poland.
And it is not a defense of Putin.
I don't mean to defend Putin.
I'm not a fan of Putin's and I'm not a subject of Putin's.
I'm an American.
However, there's no evidence that Putin has any interest in expanding his borders.
He is the largest country in the world and it's very hard to run.
They don't need natural resources.
There's nothing in Poland he wants.
There's nothing he will gain by taking Poland other than more trouble.
The core question is why did he move his forces into Eastern Ukraine?
And I watched this from a distant vantage in the United States and I watched the Vice
President of the United States Kamala Harris go to the Munich Security Conference just
days before that in February of 2022 and say in a public forum at a press conference to
Zelensky the President of Ukraine, we want you to join NATO.
Which is another way of saying, it's a synonym for we plan to put nuclear weapons on Russia's
border.
You think they threw a bait for him?
I'm not joking, of course they did.
They threw a bait.
And it just tells you how constipated and restricted and censored the U.S.
media landscape is, that I was the only one who said that.
Well, wait a second.
The purpose of diplomacy is to reach a peaceful, mutually one hopes beneficial conclusion to a crisis.
So if you're showing up voluntarily at the Munich Security Conference and saying, hey, Zelensky, why don't you allow us to put nuclear weapons on Russia's border?
You're cruising for a war because you know that's the red line.
Okay, so first of all, let's be clear that NATO already extends to Russia's borders.
The Baltic states are on Russia's borders and they are members of NATO.
In fact, NATO has expanded during this war to include places like Finland, also on Russia's border.
As far as the argument that Vladimir Putin does not have any designs on Poland, his entire disquisition on history to Tucker suggests that he would be warm toward the division of Poland.
Because, again, if you look at Polish history, Poland did not exist for solidly 150 years as an independent nation from about the mid-18th century all the way up till the end of World War I. It did not exist as an independent nation because it was under the preserve of the Russians.
The land of Poland was divided during that time.
And again, the Russians were in charge of it.
And then after Poland was reconstituted, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between the Russians and the Nazis split Poland right down the middle, in which the Soviets basically had a peace agreement with the Russians so that they could gain half of Poland.
So to pretend that Russia has no territorial ambitions toward Poland is weird.
It's also very, very weird considering that literally in November, Not of 1939, of last year, of last year, Dmitry Medvedev, who's the former Russian president and a Putin ally.
In fact, when he was the president, that was that brief period in time where Putin stepped over to being prime minister and Medvedev was the shadow president.
This is why you will recall in 2012, Barack Obama talking to Medvedev and saying, tell Vladimir, I'll have more flexibility after the election because everyone knew that Medvedev was just a cutout for Putin.
Well, in November, Medvedev wrote a piece, an 8,000 word article, on Russian-Polish relations, saying Moscow had a dangerous enemy in Poland.
Quote, We will treat Poland precisely as a historical enemy, said Medvedev in November of last year.
If there is no hope for reconciliation with the enemy, Russia should have only one and a very tough attitude regarding its fate.
History has more than once delivered a merciless verdict to the presumptuous Poles.
No matter how ambitious the revanchist plans may be, their collapse could lead to the death of Polish statehood in its entirety.
So, again, Medvedev is a cutout for Putin.
He's an ally of Putin, explicitly threatening the end of Poland.
And if you spend time in Poland, what you'll find is that everyone in Poland is deeply concerned with what's going on in Ukraine because the Polish people remember being invaded multiple times.
They know Polish history, in which Poland was divvied up repeatedly.
Poland was then occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II.
It wasn't just that it was divided with the Nazis at the beginning of World War II.
It was then occupied by the Soviet Union for the entirety of the rest of the Cold War.
So, this bizarre notion that Russia has no territorial ambitions in Poland, again, runs counter to what members of Putin's inner circle are saying, like, right now.
And grants a level of credible doubt to the Russians that I don't actually understand Tucker doing.
Not just that.
When Tucker suggests that NATO should have invited Vladimir Putin in, in 2000, The reason that NATO did not invite Vladimir Putin into NATO in 2000 or disband NATO in the aftermath of the Cold War is because Russia has had a long history of territorial ambition in Eastern Europe.
The purpose of NATO was, as Tucker says, to check Russian ambitions.
Once you invite Russia into the group, you have an inter-NATO conflict.
So let's say that Russia invades Ukraine, and let's say that both of those countries were members of NATO.
Now, Article 5 cannot be invoked, because Article 5 is only able to be invoked against an aggressor against NATO, not by NATO against a member state against another member state.
If, for example, Lithuania were to invade Estonia tomorrow, you could not invoke Article 5 realistically, because both of those countries are members of NATO.
So the idea of Russia trying to get into NATO to thus thwart NATO, that is typical Russian foreign policy.
That's exactly how Russia has used its seat, for example, on the UN Security Council.
They tried to use its seat on the UN Security Council in order to thwart NATO intervention in Yugoslavia during the Yugoslav War of 1999.
And in fact, that's something that Putin is still mad about.
So this kind of notion that Vladimir Putin is a kindly hearted gentleman who is not seeking territorial expansion, who does not have ambitions toward his Eastern European neighbors, who is not using threats of military force in order to convince territorial neighbors to move toward him, which is clearly what he's doing.
He doesn't have to invade Belarus.
Belarus is already a proxy state of the Russians.
And presumably that is what would happen if he took over Ukraine in full.
It wouldn't just be that Russia rules Ukraine directly.
It would be that he installs a dictator, declares Ukraine quote-unquote independent, and then rules via proxy.
Almost as part of the new Soviet constellation.
It'd be a state ruled by proxy from Moscow through an ally.
So, the level of credibility that Tucker is granting to Putin here, what does that say about what his view of American foreign policy is?
I really am not sure.
Again, I keep calling for clarification because Tucker's a really important voice and I'd love to know what he thinks on all these things.
Then Tucker was asked during this interview about America's policy with regard to Israel and Gaza.
And this part of the interview is rather stunning.
So he suggests that America's role with regard to Israel and Gaza should be to force Israel to stop its killing of Hamas members and its attempts to defend its own borders.
And in fact, he goes further.
He suggests that America is evil for not doing that.
Here was Tucker in Dubai.
Sir, do you have an explanation?
Till this moment, since the Gaza events took place, till now, nobody came out and said how on earth the United States of America is vetoing the stoppage of fire?
How a country would veto Not to continue war.
How somebody is against stopping a war?
The United States is, for this moment, is the most powerful country in the history of the world.
So if you were to frame this in terms we're all familiar with, which are the most basic terms, the terms of the family, the United States would be dad, would be the father.
And the father's sacred obligation is to protect his family and to restore peace within his walls.
So if I come out, I fortunately... I'll get positive for a second.
So first of all, for Tucker, who has posited that the United States really has no interest in things that go on outside of its borders in large scale, to be suggesting a familial analogy here is already very strange.
At the very least, it's strange.
The idea of America as world father is extremely imperialist.
That America is basically out to dominate every- I mean, it sounds Wilsonian, almost.
That it is the job of America to impose its will wherever humanly pos- I mean, I think that's a proposition that the Tucker disagrees with.
So it's strange to use an analogy where America is the father and its job, as America, is to restore peace everywhere on the globe.
First of all, just start with that.
That's weird.
But the analogy continues.
So if I come home... I have four children.
If I come home from work and two of my kids are fighting, what's the first thing I do, even before I assess why they're fighting, before I gather the facts and know what's happening?
I stop the fight.
I stop fighting.
Yes.
So if I come home and I have two kids fighting and I say, Go!
Go!
Beat the crap out of them!
I am evil.
Because I violated the most basic duty of fatherhood, which is to bring peace.
Because I have the power.
I'm the only one who can bring peace.
And so if you see a nation with awesome power abetting war for its own sake, You have a leadership that has no moral authority, that is illegitimate.
And I'm very distressed and concerned that we are entering an era where this awesome force for good is instead being used for evil.
Okay, so he says America is effectively evil for not promoting a ceasefire, leaving Hamas, a terrorist group, in control of the Gaza Strip, using this familial analogy.
So again, there are a thousand problems with this familial analogy, just on the face of it.
Number one, Hamas is not part of the family of nations.
Okay, so even if you were to accept Tucker's analogy that America is somehow great father in the sky, that rules foreign policy all over the globe, and has a role in ending every war, which I know Tucker does not agree with.
Even if you accept that analogy, the next question is, are these children both yours?
Because I'm pretty much clear on the idea that Israel is an American ally, an incredibly pro-American democracy in the region that provides pretty significant intelligence support to the United States.
And that Hamas is a terrorist group.
So those are not... If you were to carry this analogy realistically, it would be the father of one country, meaning like the father, and then any associated child would be presumably an American ally in this particular analogy.
And then you would have a foreign child coming in and murdering 1,200 of the citizens of your child.
Beyond that, let's just take his analogy straight.
If you were the father and you walked into your home, and I'm father of four, and one of your children had stabbed the other child in the eyeball, which is what happened on October 7th, your first move would presumably not be to sit everyone down and find out how this had started by stopping the conflict.
Some shit would get real.
Because you would be the enforcement mechanism against that sort of thing.
You as the father are the enforcer.
So, in other words, he would be calling for interventionism.
Now, again, the entire analogy doesn't make any sense.
Israel is an independent country.
Hamas is an independent polity.
The United States has its own interests.
Those interests don't align always with either group that is being discussed at this point.
But the notion that America is evil For facilitating Israel's care on its own borders to destroy a terrorist group that just murdered 1,200 of its citizens is pretty, I mean, that's pretty stunning stuff.
And it does line up with a sort of broader tenor to Tucker's view of America's role in the world, which is that America historically and currently has been Apparently, a fairly negative force in the world.
I say that not just because of what he's saying about what's happening in Gaza or American support for Ukraine or any of that.
He did an interview with Russell Brand that came out fairly recently in which he was talking about World War II.
And what he suggested is that America was bad during World War II because America had engaged in what he called collective punishment.
Now let's be clear about what America did during World War II.
In, for example, the firebombing of Dresden, which was in fact a manufacturing center, or the firebombing of Tokyo, which was a military center, or in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
America was attempting to win a war and forestalling American casualties therein.
So if you are America first and you wish for America to win wars in which it is engaged without getting a lot of Americans killed, sometimes you have to do really, really ugly things.
I think most Americans understand that and historically have understood that, particularly the grandchildren of the people who did not die invading the mainland of Japan because of the dropping of the atomic bombs, for example.
Military estimates suggested that a million Americans could die in the invasion of Japan if it had been an amphibious assault as opposed to the dropping of atomic weaponry over Japan in August of 45.
But here was Tucker talking about American evil during World War II.
Collective punishment is completely accepted as legitimate.
They're all part of the same bloodline.
That's incomprehensible to the Christian mind.
Because bloodline is irrelevant, neither Jew nor Greek.
I mean, the whole point of Christianity is it doesn't matter who your parents were or what your DNA is.
You have a direct relationship with God, and if you're on board with that, then you're a Christian, and if you're not, you're not.
But there's no sense—there's no template for collective punishment in Christianity.
It's repulsive to Christians.
It's repulsive, and in my view it should be, and it always was in the West.
And I do think there are war crimes that the United States committed during the Second World War, the firebombing of Tokyo, famously Dresden, that were collective punishment.
And I would also say, by the way, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that's collective punishment.
And I think that rotted the soul of the West.
I do.
I think that's so immoral that it did two things.
One, you know, you carry the burden of sin at scale like that.
You just do.
You can't help it.
And two, that level of power in the hands of human beings convinced them that they were gods.
Yes, it's curious because you would hear a comparable argument offered for slavery, for example, that this burden is borne by American culture.
And yet I've never heard anyone advance it around the acts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I wanted to... We dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.
I'm not endorsing Imperial Japan.
Yes.
And it was an imperial power in the worst sense.
Horrible, horrible, horrible government.
However, you can't annihilate a civilian population and call yourself the good guy.
I don't care.
I love America.
I will defend America almost under any circumstances.
You can't defend that.
And the right and the left, I mean, everybody in our country, no one revisits that.
It was only 80 years ago.
We dropped atomic weapons on a civilian population.
I know that there were munitions plants there, but you just vaporized tens of thousands of people who had nothing, women, children, the elderly, they had nothing to do with this.
Yes, then or now.
How can you feel good about that?
It's not permissible unless you can undergird it with a set of ethical and moral arguments.
But it's all bulls**t!
Absolutely.
Okay, so let's be, can we be clear about something?
The West has then spent every moment trying to develop weaponry so sophisticated That they can target specific military members, even as they embed among civilian populations, which is what Israel is doing, for example, right now in the Gaza Strip, or what the United States did when it fought ISIS, or what the United States did when it was fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But the baseline notion that collective punishment is equivalent to war, collective punishment is, I know who the bad guys are, and I don't care who the bad guys are.
I want to punish all of you out of malice and pressure.
That is the goal of collective punishment.
Collective punishment is not you're at war with a country.
That country is threatening you.
The only way to win the war and to make sure that your interests are maintained is to take certain military action that will have collateral damage.
Collateral damage is not the same thing as collective punishment.
But Tucker seems to equate these two things, collateral damage and collective punishment.
As though the intent of the dropping of these bombs does not matter whatsoever, and that forecloses the possibility of winning a war like World War II.
Again, war has gotten a lot more meticulous since then, which is why casualty numbers in war have dropped so significantly.
It's also why, for example, the United States, despite having a nuclear monopoly in the aftermath of World War II, if that had truly corrupted the American soul to the extent that Tucker suggests here, if that had truly corrupted the American national soul that way, From 1945 until 1949, the United States had a nuclear monopoly.
No one else had a bomb.
We could have literally bombed Moscow into rubble.
We could have dropped one nuke and we could have finished the Cold War at the beginning of the Cold War.
But we didn't.
Because we cared about collateral damage.
Because we did not want collective punishment.
So, you know, this sort of generalized view of foreign policy, which essentially suggests that everything that's bad in the world is a response, it's a blowback to America's interventionism in the world, because America has historically and currently fostered bad things in the world, suggests a revanchist foreign policy in which the United States basically undercuts all of its interests in the world in the interest of what?
Now, again, maybe that collapses back into that original isolationist argument that the U.S.
has no foreign policy, we don't need a foreign policy, erect a wall, everything's good.
Maybe that's the idea.
Okay, I think that's shortsighted.
I don't think that that is going to...
I don't think that is going to be realistic in a world in which vacuums are filled by forces nefarious that do not like America and do not wish for the prosperity of American citizens.
But at least that's a foreign policy.
But this is why clarification on these issues, I think, would be a good thing.
There's a lot of vague talk floating around about foreign policy.
And for the third time, I would love to sit down with Tucker and talk about these things to actually establish what he thinks a good and moral American foreign policy should look like.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
We will be getting into the Democrats desperately attempting to continue to paint Joe Biden as a victim of a special counsel.
If you're not a member, become a member.
Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
Click that link in the description and join us.
One stage.
One night.
No limits.
Don't miss the epic return of the God King, Jeremy Boring, with Ben Shapiro.
Matt Walsh, Candice Owens, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Clavin.
Backstage.
Watch it live tonight at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central.
▲
Export Selection