SPECIAL EPISODE: Michael Tracey Reports from Emergency Summit on Ukraine
Michael Tracey and Lee Fang discuss the pitfalls of the new media landscape, Alex Jones, crackdowns on Israel's critics, the fallout from Zelensky and Trump's shocking meeting, and more.
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Friend of the show, European correspondent for System Update.
Really, I'm taking his job.
He should be here filling in.
You've been replaced, Michael.
How are you doing?
I think I might need to orchestrate another coup to reclaim my rightful role as the semi-regular System Update guest host.
But I'm sure you've been doing a fantastic job in my absence, Lee.
Yeah, it's been fun.
I like the community, actually.
Some of the feedback's been good.
What's been your experience doing this?
I know you've done it maybe a few times in the past.
How has that been for you?
Yeah, well, one time I did it for like two weeks straight when I went to Brazil and guest hosted from the studio.
And then I've done it kind of intermittently, remotely.
And then most recently, last week, I did two shows from the Rumble studio or bureau in Washington, D.C., where we aired some of the CPAC interviews that I did, and I kind of narrated them.
I don't know.
I mean, I guess I find it tolerable.
I mean, if people like to watch me extemporaneously speak, then that's good.
I don't know.
I guess we were just talking about this, but, like, I'm not...
I have to admit, I'm not the biggest fan of just sitting and absorbing monologues.
But I guess that's how people process information now.
So you have to kind of cultivate it as a skill.
Otherwise, you're going to be deemed irrelevant in our bold, brave new media landscape.
Yeah, I don't even know how many people...
Glenn's very good at it.
He's transformed his trial attorney skills.
He's given a deposition or something.
He's just nailing you with arguments.
When he's doing it.
But then I don't even know how many people really like the Glenn style.
I like the Glenn style.
But I think most human beings, most consumers of media, want the TikTok-ification of media.
They want the, like, 15-second clips that are, like, interspersed with emotionally evocative bullshit.
That's what everything's boiling down to.
Like, I'm writing these 3,000-word investigations.
I'm looking at the click-through rates and people are opening my emails and closing it immediately because of too many words.
That's the – you know what?
I don't even – I try not to even look at those data.
Like maybe I should because it would behoove me to know how much of my stuff is getting read or just clicked out of immediately.
But like I almost find it's a bit of like a cognitive distortion influence to even be – Mindful of those figures?
Because I don't want it to subconsciously influence me.
Yeah, but you want people to listen to what you have to say, right?
It's important.
The format is just the way it is.
I'm sure that there are other journalists who write for print and they're nostalgic for print.
I've always been online, so the transition isn't as radical for me, but I don't...
I don't welcome this movement towards all video, all audio.
It's kind of horrible.
I appreciate your occasional commentaries on this.
One reason I think that I do at least partially lament whatever transition we're in is because there are just so many people who could be broadly construed as in the media of some kind.
But they never do any journalism at all.
Like, I'm not saying I'm the most intrepid journalist on the face of the earth or I've done the most bombshell investigative stories, but I at least, like, try to do some original reporting and have some original thoughts.
thoughts i just feel like if everybody's always just pontificating online and they can be like just lumped into this ever evolving category of media that kind of dilutes like i think what the real purpose of the media is or like one of the most benefit the most beneficial purpose of the media which is to shine light on stuff that's otherwise not going to be covered and if it's just if it's just punditry again i'm not going to claim that i don't engage in punditry at times
Yes.
But it's just it's just an overload and it's just it's too much.
It gets conflated and it breaks everybody down, I guess.
I don't know.
I find, like, I've pointed this out on Twitter.
I saw from some of the people who got the Jeffrey Epstein binder.
Yes, that was a great example.
Yeah, it's like, one, I've never even heard of half of those people, and I looked them up, and they all have over a million followers.
It's like, what?
And it's like this whole flimflam, you know, these were documents that were already released, I think, over 10 years ago, including some of the flight log stuff that Gawker reported.
A gazillion years ago?
That was like 2015, I think.
But these people are influencers.
Look, so not everybody has to be a journalist.
I understand that there are different walks of life that one can pursue.
But every now and then, it is actually useful to have somebody with a journalistic impulse to be examining government documents that are just being spoon-fed to them.
And clearly, this whole Epstein document release thing was engineered so...
Frankly, a bunch of dopey people who are just going to be awestruck that they were given this so-called access by the Trump administration just kind of credulously regurgitate whatever it is they're fed.
And I get it.
Sometimes like the more mainstream media, oftentimes the more mainstream media does go way overboard in kind of dwelling on petty things to nitpick Trump on.
So I get that there's been a – there needed to be some correction, but this seems like an overcorrection where now you could just delegate core functions of the media to like essentially just partisan influencers who don't even pretend to be engaged in any critical scrutiny of what it is they're being provided with.
And that's why it blew up in their faces because it was like comical.
Yeah, and that's to the credit of the – I think everyone's kind of disgusted by this, even people who are loyal followers of these influencers.
But, you know, it just kind of gets me back to something I was talking to a friend about the other day.
You know, I've been critical.
I write about money in politics.
It's one of the main beats I do.
But, you know, one thing I'm critical of is, you know, these corporate PACs, the kind of big money lobbyist fundraisers that most of the folks in Congress rely on.
It's kind of obviously a quid pro quo.
You know, you at least get some favor by engaging this type of thing with the industries that donate.
But as we've seen the gravitation away from that to small-dollar donations, now you have this huge incentive for members of Congress to become influencers, to, like, go and, like, do dances on the Capitol Hill steps or, like, engage in conspiracy theories or do these theatrical outbursts and committee hearings that...
Don't make any sense.
I've seen them happen live where it's so obviously scripted.
It's not something that is an organic outburst of anger towards Trump or Biden, depending on which member of Congress you're talking about.
And it's all just geared to get these small dollar donations.
It's like, well, I don't want the Goldman Sachs, you know, Northrop Grumman PAC dominated world.
But I don't want this either.
Be careful what you wish for.
Yeah, like the workhorse legislators.
Are probably not going to be the ones who are getting the small dollar donations because they're not entertainers.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm not even trying to glamorize the workhorse legislator necessarily because it all depends on to what end they're legislating toward.
But let's say like theoretically there was something productive that you wanted to see get accomplished legislatively.
The people who are going to be in the weeds of those issues.
Generally are not the ones who have been primed to kind of fashion their public profile around this endless race to the bottom for small dollar donations.
And I mean, I'm sort of like you.
I was optimistic when this small dollar model seemed to be at least gradually supplanting the older model, which was much more reliant on donor insider access.
But as we see, it's never really black or white.
And there are some pretty significant pitfalls.
And you see this incentive structure replicated in the media itself.
It's almost like the politicians and the so-called media are operating within the same structure here.
So somebody goes on Joe Rogan.
I'm not trying to even badmouth Joe Rogan.
I've been a long-time listener.
But somebody goes on and he says, by the way, Pizzagate.
Actually, it was never debunked, and I'll give you just this, like, scattershot list of facts that seem to maybe add up to some indication that there's something legitimate about Pizzagate.
I don't even want to even, like, litigate Pizzagate, but it's just, like, that kind of, like, that's taken now as...
That's the kind of, I guess, intrepid journalism that gets rewarded in this ecosystem.
Yeah, it's bottom of the barrel.
It's...
You know, it's kind of like the Alex Jones dynamic where, you know, we don't have to get deep into Alex Jones, but...
Let's go.
Let's get deep into Alex Jones.
Well, it's like, you know, he takes a real issue, a very serious issue, exaggerates, you know, adds on other issues that are not well-founded or completely fabricated, and then brings attention to it.
And then this issue that is often like something that's kind of on the sidelines that's a little bit more of a niche, subterranean topic.
And then he basically – by using – by being so bombastic, he delegitimizes discussion of this very rural issue by glimbing onto it.
I'll give you one.
The famous clip of him saying they're putting chemicals in the water.
They're turning the frogs gay.
Turning the frogs gay.
Yeah.
I knew exactly where you were going.
I've written about Syngenta, the herbicide company, has put – So much of their herbicide into crops and it's water soluble.
If you drink water in Iowa or Illinois, you're drinking astrazine, their herbicide.
And very interesting kind of dynamic where there's a professor at Berkeley who discovered that if you give frogs a relatively small amount of astrazine, it changes their sex.
It completely changes their hormones.
It basically transes the frogs.
You know, this whole story around Syngentia is incredible because they hired private detectives.
They hired people to harass this professor at Berkeley.
It became a whole kind of, you know, one of those corporate intimidation campaigns where they suppressed his science.
You know, they did everything they could to try to delegitimize the research he was doing and to intimidate him.
And this is something that is not well known.
This is a problem around a lot of pesticides that are very common in everyday American agriculture that are affecting the the biological environment animals and sex and possibly humans But then how do people act?
What do people do people know the real story?
Do they know the Alex Jones version that?
That is mostly bullshit.
I would even broaden it out a bit like Like, Alex Jones, in his earlier days of influence, kind of popularized this notion of globalism.
As being something bad, right?
And there are legitimate critiques of quote-unquote globalist institutions like the World Economic Forum or different international financial organizations.
So there's obviously a overabundance of material to rationally critique there.
But when it gets layered onto just kind of this baseline, almost like...
Quasi-theological conspiracism, it kind of limits the amount of rational critique you can do on this subject that actually does call out for it.
And so there's always a layer of spurious dot-connecting that has to come into every discussion of every legitimate issue.
It's turned now in certain sectors the term globalism into like an insult, which maybe it ought to be.
But I feel like people should have like a more rational understanding of why it is that they're objecting to these globalists.
No, I think that's exactly right.
The same dynamic could be applied to deep state.
I mean, like this was not a partisan concept.
I've stopped using that term.
Unelected bureaucracy that's very heavily in the intelligence national security space that basically...
Here's a great example.
So I stopped using the term deep state earnestly in 2017 the minute Sean Handy started using it.
Because the minute he started using it, you knew that it just became a Republican talking point.
There was obviously a legitimately existing permanent bureaucracy or national security state apparatus.
That had aggregated unto itself levels of autonomy that are probably inconsistent with what the founders would have envisioned, right?
Or what people who just want minimum democratic responsiveness would advocate.
So that's a huge issue.
I mean, that was definitely a totally legitimate issue.
But now it's gotten to the point where Doge, you'll see Doge proponents supporting it.
Moves like totally crippling the Consumer Protection Financial Board by saying, oh, we're getting rid of the deep state.
So they're like, this is the deep state.
Everything's the deep state.
It's ever shifting what they can classify as the deep state.
Like some, I don't know, National Park Service.
Air traffic controllers.
Right.
So it's gone so far beyond the bounds of what would have been at one point a rational critique.
but I haven't seen much sign yet that, you know, they've shuffled out a lot of personnel, obviously, from the security state agencies, but are they reducing the power of the security state agencies?
Maybe there's some stuff that I missed and it could be coming.
They've only been in power for like six weeks, but that would be the real sign that the power or influence of the so-called deep state is actually being genuinely curbed, not just firing a bunch of people who work not just firing a bunch of people who work in national parks.
And we don't want FBI agents or people with incredible reach inside the intelligence agency.
Intelligence agencies swapped out for other partisans with their own kind of extremely narrow agenda.
Like Dan Bongino?
Why am I supposed to be thrilled that Dan Bongino, who's a hardcore...
Republican, partisan, which he's entitled to be.
I'm not even begrudging that.
There's a big market out there for that, apparently.
Is this the alternative to the so-called deep state that we're all supposed to be clamoring for?
I'm not sure.
This is an issue that is TBD. So far, we haven't seen it.
This is one of the things I'm holding out some optimism for.
Yeah, I pledge, because people get mad at me on these kinds of subjects, I've pledged to strive to keep an open mind.
But it's hard to keep an open mind when, for example, today, the administration announces they're carrying forth Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s big free speech initiative, which is to crack down on so-called anti-Semitic speech by using the coercive power of the state to compel...
Basically, the prohibition of certain forms of political speech that RFK Jr. and Linda McMahon deem unacceptable pursuant to an executive order that was issued by Trump, which actually drew on an executive order from his first term in 2019 that mandated that...
The federal government agencies start employing the so-called IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which is the most expansive possible definition of anti-Semitism.
And so if you could be accused of applying double standards to Israel, that means you're anti-Semitic.
And now under this current framework, you could be subject to legal penalties.
And they're going after, they just deprived...
They just canceled like $700 million or something or $300 million of federal contracts or grants to Columbia University on the basis of anti-Semitism, which obviously, as Glenn covered earlier this week, the government is not permitted to condition expenditures that it otherwise would have been making on...
The political speech of the recipient.
Like that's basic First Amendment case law.
So on the one hand, I do think a lot of what J.D. Vance said when he went to the Munich Security Conference and castigated European countries for their own free speech infringements, a lot of that was substantively correct.
It's true, as you know, that Romania just kind of like randomly abrogated an entire presidential election through judicial edict because they claimed that there was some interference over TikTok.
That was true, but then what standing now does J.D. Vance have when he goes around pontificating about free speech, sometimes validly, if it's being totally disregarded domestically in the United States?
That's where I struggle to keep an open mind.
This area is sensitive, as you know, because even though it's a winning, I don't know if it's a winning, but it's a very potent area for criticism.
For Democrats, they could be raising this.
No one talked about this during his confirmation hearings.
No one really raised these issues, even though now it's very clear that because HHS oversees billions of dollars in grants to universities, he actually has these kind of levers to pull with research institutes and really basically any major university in the country because they're so reliant on federal research dollars.
But Democrats won't touch it for, I guess, political reasons.
And same in Europe.
I mean, this is a great way for any kind of Eurocrat to poke back at J.D. Vance or the Trump administration saying, you have no free speech on Israel issues, except that maybe they're still worse than Germany and most of these other countries.
They don't actually have free speech either.
So there's no kind of platform for them to stand and take the principle.
It was so funny.
When I was at CPAC, and people might have seen this if they've been following the channel, but I interviewed a member of the European Parliament with the AFD. So the alternative for Germany, the so-called far-right party, I don't even know what that descriptor means anymore, but they're widely labeled that, and it came in second in the German federal election.
And I asked, this came up, you know, Vance's hectoring or lecture or scolding of the European countries, she was inclined to agree with it, but then I brought up, what about Germany's attitude toward...
Pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests, which have been ruthlessly prescribed much more wantonly in Germany than I think would even be possible in the United States, much as some people would like to.
And she had this whole rationale.
Christine Anderson was her name.
People can look up the interview.
She had this whole rationale for why that actually was not protected speech.
It wasn't even like a coherent rationale.
It was just like they don't even – events that they've made any attempt to try to reconcile their broader critique of like the liberal bureaucrats genuinely oftentimes infringing upon speech of conservatives with this giant exception that they've all decided on for speech critical of Israel.
I mean Trump came into office in the second term, like one of the first executive orders he signed to much – Fanfare was basically something to the effect of free speech is back.
The government shall not infringe on free speech.
And then, like, within a couple of weeks, we have this intergovernmental initiative spearheaded by Bobby Jr., who, let's not even dwell on him, because I wish during his confirmation hearings...
Look, I mean, I get people want to always belabor the vaccine issue.
To me, it's like...
I don't understand what...
It just didn't seem...
It seems like there's a disproportionate emphasis on that with respect to him as evidenced now by his first big initiative being an intergovernmental campaign to liken anti-Semitism with racism.
It's almost like he's copy and pasting one of those corporate mea culpa things from 2020. Like Target and...
MasterCard and all these companies had to like...
Yeah, there's a template for how to do this now.
Yeah, yeah.
Had to apologize for racism.
Now, like, we're randomly getting this new variant of it in 2025, but anti-Semitism is the big new disease or pestilence, as RFK said, that everybody now has to take accountability for.
And that means, I guess, withholding grants to universities that don't comply with the speech restrictions that RFK would like to see imposed.
I think there's part of the general conservative mindset here, and I'll be open to critiques of this.
It's just there's such a hatred for universities that universities, you look at the donations, all the professors and administrators give to Democrats.
They're all registered Democrats.
We've seen like 10 years of conservatives being shut down.
I think there's just a nihilism here.
If anything, if you want to compare it to something, it's like...
You know, you get these leftists in a room a few years ago, and they would kind of get each other so excited because of their hatred for police, because of, you know, certain viral videos or other kind of like books that inspired them, that, you know, you start asking them, it's like, well, wait, what are we going to do about public safety?
Or, you know, what happens when there's a crime?
You know, it didn't matter.
It wouldn't matter is that you have to destroy the institution.
And there's an obsession with destroying universities and higher education to the point where principles don't matter.
I think a lot of conservatives do genuinely care about free speech.
But then you kind of dangle the keys of, hey, we could destroy universities over this kind of fabricated or at least exaggerated anti-Semitism issue.
They get so excited they kind of lunge for it.
This goes back decades, though, right?
I mean, Richard Nixon...
He campaigned against the pointy-headed academics from the Rivalry Towers.
They've been primed for generations on this.
The first time I saw J.D. Vance speak was in 2021 at a so-called National Conservatism Conference.
And he basically just – he could have copied and pasted Richard Nixon's speeches from like the late 60s or early 70s in terms of his – Attacks on academia and the corrupting influence on the youth, etc.
And, you know, trying to rally middle America against the elites, which obviously has, you know, recurring resonance in American political life.
So I'm not arguing it's an ineffective tactic, but it's not a new phenomenon for sure.
And so, yeah, I mean, I do think there is a nihilism.
Would like to burn down the left-wing universities.
Unfortunately, one of the patterns in speech infringements is that, obviously, undesirable targets are used as the introduction to start restricting speech more broadly.
This is the case with Alex Jones.
When Alex Jones was purged from social media in 2018, that was like the canary in the coal mine.
For an expansion of the so-called content moderation policies that ended up being de facto government censorship because the government was incentivizing or pressuring the social media companies to take these censorial actions, whether it was because social media companies were endangering public health with COVID allegedly or abetting foreign interference in elections and so forth.
But Alex Jones, you know, that was like an example where...
People think he's kind of kooky, so maybe, sure, he's somebody who we can justifiably throw off the platforms, but then it got worse.
A lot of the Trump intellectual brain trust, the folks that were at the America First Policies Institute and some of the think tanks that incubated a lot of the personnel and the ideas for the administration, they basically set out to abolish the wing of the Department of Homeland Security that was involved.
Known as CISA that was involved in the pandemic censorship, the 2020 election censorship that they claim is the reason they lost that election.
A lot of the kind of interference coordinated with the FBI that led to content moderation that they claimed was partisan-motivated, and some of it definitely was.
But I think this is where it's all going to boomerang.
So far, they have not shut down this wing of the Department of Homeland Security, and God only knows...
How this could be used, this could be weaponized to suppress speech critical of Israel.
I mean, they could use the exact same kind of government, bureaucracy, the same mechanics that they have spent the last four years criticizing, and they could really apply it again on these kind of Israel issues.
I don't think it's going to stop at private universities.
I mean, I think this is going to expand very rapidly.
And the Trump executive order that he issued, really 10 days or so into the presidency, Is not at all limited to college campuses.
It applies to all Americans in terms of his ordering the Attorney General to double down on investigating anti-Semitism, again, as defined by the IHRA definition.
And so even if you have no affiliation at all with universities, you are potentially implicated.
By that.
And there was also talk about how this might be limited to just foreign students on a student visa or something.
Right.
But it goes way beyond that as well, because obviously everybody, you know, people impacted by this Columbia decision are not solely foreign students.
But even the text of the executive order did not at all circumscribe it to just apply to students.
So are foreign students.
So you can't even justify it on like, oh, he's cracking down on immigration violations or whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is interesting.
I mean, I'm almost positive that that stems from, I forget, Chris Krebs.
He was the CISA administrator in the 2020 election.
His statement that the 2020 election was the most secure election in American history was constantly cited by the media to argue that, like, Trump's own claims were being – Trump's claims were being refuted by his own administration.
Right.
So I think it's as simple as, like, they're willing to get rid of the guy – get rid of the agency that caused him that – Disturbance, right?
I don't know how principled it is.
Like, even today, I don't know if you saw it, but there was an executive order, maybe it was yesterday, where Trump, like, he's going out, he's issuing executive orders to go after individual law firms now?
Yeah, yeah.
Like, which, I don't have any particular brief for, like, Perkins Coie, and they did, they did...
Which doesn't make sense.
Incubate the Steele dossier.
Yeah, they facilitated some of the money.
Do you know who else facilitated money?
The Free Beacon.
The Washington Free Beacon facilitated money.
Paul Singer, who's now a big Trump donor.
Big Trump donor, big funder.
The perfectionists will argue that when the Washington Free Beacon was, because I know I can anticipate the replies, right?
People will say when the Washington Free Beacon was collecting this opposition research, that was before it got...
Transformed into the Steele dossier at the behest of Perkins Coit.
But it was like an initial phase of this opposition research for the Republican primaries.
Yeah, and when he won the nomination, then it transitioned to a Democrat operation from being a Republican primary operation.
Same researchers, likely the same Steele dossier.
Well, I always thought a good question was, why is Paul Singer donating Such huge amounts of money to Trump in 2024. He actually did it in 2020 as well.
When in 2016, he was one of the people who at least was incubating.
He provided the funding that incubated the origins of the Steele dossier because they felt like they had to do this emergency oppo research on Trump because eventually, toward the end of 2015, they realized that he was going to be...
Probably very formidable in the Republican primary.
So what changed in Paul Singer's calculus in the intervening years?
I think my hypothesis is that Paul Singer observed what Trump did on Israel policy in his first term, decided he loved it, then decided he would therefore fund the 2020 campaign, and then Trump kept going even further with the pro-Israel pledges out of office and in the 2024 campaign, and then the floodgates opened even wider.
That seems like the most plausible explanation.
And then even the individual attorneys associated at Perkins Coie, as I understand they left the law firm very long ago, like this weaponization of government against a law firm doesn't make that much sense.
Even if you kind of believe that, okay, maybe they engaged in unethical or illegal behavior, I still have the mindset that they probably did break some campaign finance laws by at least misclassifying the The disbursements from the DNC to the law firm, they should have showed that it was going to its actual purpose, not for like just research or legal fees.
It was concealed for like a year and a half or something.
Yeah, yeah.
But this kind of broad brush, again, this is probably weaponization of the federal government.
Just going after a single law firm because they pissed you off eight years ago.
I mean, I wouldn't necessarily object and I might even actively support.
Reviewing and probably rescinding the security clearances that so many ex-government officials have or people who just interface with the government because that then gets monetized by people claiming they have access.
But if you're just limiting it to one law firm that you have a particular history with.
Yeah, this is a law firm with hundreds if not thousands of people who have no connection to this supposed beef.
It doesn't quite make sense.
Yeah, so I don't know.
I mean, that's the thing with the Trump administration.
Sometimes there are, like, incidental things that are done that you might see positively.
But if it's just incidental because it relates to one of Trump's personal grievances, I don't know how you can really extrapolate that into, like, a fruitful, broad-based policy if it's just kind of, like, ad hoc thing to settle a score.
Well, you know, speaking of...
Fruitful, broad-based policies.
Before you have to go, I want to ask you about why you're in Europe.
You attended this European Council Summit.
Could you just explain what you're doing there, what you saw, and what are the reverberations from this last week's Zelensky press conference catastrophe?
Has that changed the mindset?
One thing that I also want to ask you about is just this news report from the Wall Street Journal that the Germans are even now open to developing nuclear weapons and kind of taking their defense budget and giving it new rules so they can go past their old deficit constraints.
So it seems like even with the drama between Zelensky and some other European leaders and Trump, they're actually engaging in a lot of the kind of goals of having NATO and Europe be more self-sufficient as Trump has intended.
Yeah, so I'm in...
Brussels, Belgium, which is where the European Union, European Parliament, European Council, all these interlocking European institutions that a lot of people who are in them don't even really seem to know what they do.
There's a European Council president and...
But then there's also, who's one guy, and then Ursula von der Leyen is the, I forget even what her title now is, like, I can't even keep them straight.
But it's just a very confusing series of institutions, like, in this supranational structure.
And so, yeah, there was an emergency summit that was convened yesterday where they would be basically...
Declaring collectively to rearm more expeditiously than they had declared in previous instances when they've done variations of this.
But I do have to say, it does seem like they are taking tangible steps to facilitate this mobilization now.
For one thing, you mentioned Germany.
Germany has often been at locker heads with other European countries because Germany has tended to be much more scrupulously fiscally conservative, like resistant to acquiring debt and so forth.
But now they are in favor of an EU-wide instrument being adopted so that debt can be used to finance these increases in defense spending.
So that's a big, you know, that was a big historic break for Germany.
A lot of the, you know, Eurocrat hawks have been demanding this of Germany for a while, like, accusing them of hypocrisy for, like, rhetorically suggesting that, like, we need, Europe needs to enter a new historical phase in its rearmament, but then not changing its fiscal policy to enable that.
So now they apparently are doing that.
And so, yeah, I mean...
To the extent that the European states can facilitate anything amongst themselves in a cogent way, they seem committed to this.
I think that there's...
I have to question this unflinching consensus behind how it's just an obviously great thing for Europe to rapidly rearm.
Militarize, yeah.
Yeah, rapidly remilitarized.
Remember when people were cheering because Germany was sending tanks to attack Russia or something?
People overuse historical analogies, but there might be some historical sort of omens to at least be mindful of.
And the whole reason that the European Union, the European Council, which is like, the European Union is like a parliament, the European...
It used to be just an informal body where your EU heads of state or heads of government would congregate and deliberate in issue statements.
Now it's more of a formalized deliberative process that's supposed to be binding on the member states but isn't always in practice.
Anyway, a reason why a lot of these institutions came about was to institutionalize the demilitarization of Europe after decades of endless...
Conflict.
Which is why they've had to do some things that are outside of their nature over the past, especially three years, because the EU is not set up as even really contemplating...
The EU was not originally contemplated to have any jurisdiction over collective military affairs, really.
So they've had to invent that stuff on the fly.
The European Peace Facility is like the EU instrument that's now very ironically named that was invoked in 2022 to start providing EU-specific military provisions to Ukraine.
So they're ramping that stuff up.
And I just don't fully understand why.
And Trump is also obviously encouraging this.
One of his big grievances is that...
The U.S. gets ripped off.
We gave, according to him, $350 billion to Ukraine, which I don't think is quite right.
I mean, I don't know how he's tabulating that exactly.
And Europe only gave $100 million, so they better equalize.
That's the term he's used.
Well, can we stop and have someone explain why we should want Europe to equalize?
Like, one of the big problems with having militaries of a large size, as Madeleine Albright once said in the 90s, If we have this big, beautiful military, what's the point of having it if not to use it?
That changes the incentives in how states act.
So do we want a radicalized Poland that now they have to take up the mantle to oppose the legacy of Soviet...
Aggression, because they're still all crazed about having admittedly been under pretty unpleasant Russian control for decades.
I just don't think people have thought through the implications of this should it come to full fruition, which seems to be at least preliminarily in progress.
I was at a...
Another issue is that I was at, they had what they declared to be a background briefing, which I didn't agree to, so I don't know why I would be on the hook for that.
Like, I just walked into a room and said, okay, as you all know, this is a background briefing.
But, you know, I guess for decorum's sake, I won't name the guy, but it was an advisor to Macron.
And obviously Macron's been trying to lead the charge in fulfilling his, like, Charles de Gaulle fantasies of, like, an autonomous Europe that's going to be, like, an autonomous France, autonomous Europe led by France.
And this guy was asked because Macron has given, like, a big, gave a big defense speech this week about the need for, again, young Europe to rearm even quicker.
And the issue of an American backstop came up for a potential negotiated settlement in Ukraine, whereby if there was a cessation of hostilities, what Ukraine and the European countries, most of them anyway, other than Hungary, seem to want is for there to be a European military force deployed to Ukraine, mainly British and French.
And so this advisor was asked, again, quote-unquote, on background, what about the American backstop to provide a security guarantee?
And for all the fanfare around Trump's rhetorical unkindness to Zelensky in Ukraine, the Europeans, as this guy explained, are operating under the assumption that it's been conveyed to them.
Yes, the U.S. will be providing some kind of backstop in the event that these European troops are deployed to Ukraine.
So now do we want a situation where we have multiple layers of a quote-unquote security guarantee cling to what seems like, if it's achievable at all, would be a fairly fragile ceasefire scenario in Ukraine and potentially have the U.S. on the hook?
To back up some of these more audacious European countries that are saying they're going to put troops on the ground.
So I think there's a lot that's pretty ominous here that I just don't understand why it's not more widely discussed.
But then again, I often have that response to things that go on in the world.
Well, there's this mainstream discourse, and it's not just like, okay, in The Economist or the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
It's literally every major newspaper.
Virtually every think tank in Washington, every single House defense committee or budget committee or any of the congressional leadership, everyone basically just not in the same bombastic way, not in the same kind of severing ties potentially with NATO or ending kind of the post-Cold War consensus, but the actual meat of what the substance of the echo chamber in the Beltway is that...
NATO countries need to spend more.
They need to hit that 5% GDP defense spending number that was their obligation, but I guess it's not in the treaty.
Well, it used to be two.
It used to be two.
Then it went up to three, and then Trump blew everybody out of their seats a few weeks ago and upped it to five, which would be extraordinary.
And no one's coming close to that.
I guess Poland has had the quickest increases.
I wonder, because you talk about an American military backstop.
Look, if French or British troops are being killed by Russians, there's already a nuclear backstop.
I mean, we're talking about a NATO alliance that's already backed up with weapons that kill us all.
What does this actually mean?
It's the same kind of, you know, just talking to Leighton earlier in the program, like the pivot to Asia, there's this huge talk about...
New long-range bombers, new submarines, new kind of cutting-edge naval vessels to kind of keep pace with China.
But if there's a kinetic war between the U.S. and China, would we only use conventional weapons that will never reach the nuclear weapons standpoint?
That part just doesn't make sense to me.
But I wonder if there are other factors at play.
It's like you look at how Russia has...
It had the fastest-growing economy in Europe last year.
It has not truly suffered in the way that was expected from these sanctions because they've kind of engaged.
Because it's a war economy.
It's like why the United States was too fast in World War II. And I think if you're one of these economic planners in France or Germany, especially Germany, which has had a sagging manufacturing base over the last two years, there's a broad appeal in rejuvenating the economy through defense spending.
And this is not actually about...
Ukrainian defense or kind of creating this, you know, European army that can replace the Americans.
Because at the end of the day, their only true threat is potentially Russia.
And if it does come to all-out war with Russia, you know, I don't think this is going to be solved with more German tanks, right?
Right.
Like it'll be something much more cataclysmic than that.
So I just feel like the pandering, the discussion, the rhetoric isn't actually peeled back.
What does this actually mean?
And then so, I mean, this is why, like, and I sometimes fall short on this in terms of getting too engrossed in the Trump rhetoric, because sometimes you just have to, like, marvel at it and, like, wonder about what the implications are.
But if the end result of his bluster toward Ukraine and his bluster to some degree toward the European countries is that they are, in fact, going to accelerate their military spending.
Then what is achieved is, like, whatever this consensus view had already been.
Right.
I mean, this is actually this is a genuine consensus view.
particularly like Republicans maybe have a in aggregate a different view on Ukraine at this point than Democrats like in the Congress or whatever.
But in terms of wanting the European member states to spend more on the military.
Yeah, there's no discrimination.
Yeah.
And if that's what Trump is achieving, then maybe the rhetoric isn't quite as significant as that.
I'm also kind of bewildered that there's not more cognizance of the apparent conditions that could potentially be placed on Russia pursuant to some negotiated settlement and whether those are even achievable.
Like Lavrov, the foreign minister and others have said repeatedly that this notion of a European quote-unquote peacekeeping force deployed to Ukraine is a total non-starter because obviously those would be NATO troops and even if they're not there under an explicit NATO mission.
NATO missions can always broaden.
It's not like it's a hard and fast legal kind of technicality around what constitutes a NATO mission and what doesn't.
In the Libya war in 2011, there was initially a NATO mandate, and if memory serves, they decided to eventually rescind the NATO mandate once they got to the regime change phase of the operation.
Or there is some technicality that I'm not recalling exactly as to whether that would constitute a full-fledged whole of NATO mission.
I don't think it did.
I think it was just three member states, primarily the US, UK, and France, that were collaborating with one another using NATO operational kind of capacities, but were not embroiling the entire NATO block.
So, I mean, there's a lot of ambiguity around, like, what does it even mean to be a NATO mission?
But the fact is, if there was a...
British and French troop presence there with some kind of quote-unquote backstop from the United States.
That's functionally a NATO presence, right?
So how is that going to be reconcilable?
And Trump endorsed this concept.
I mean, that's why the blow-up with Zelensky was so odd.
He had the perfect runway to have a meeting where they would consecrate this so-called minerals deal.
They had the...
Macron and then Starmer were both there, who were both leading the charge on this European peacekeeping deployment, quote-unquote peacekeeping.
I think Trump even called it a so-called peacekeeping mission, which kind of maybe raises some questions about the veracity of that mission title.
And then Zelensky was about to confirm that the U.S. was going to just...
Basically acquire Ukraine as a quasi-colony or something?
I mean, people should read the text.
I don't know if you did, of that so-called minerals agreement.
It goes well beyond rare earth minerals.
Oh, interesting.
No, I haven't.
I should check that out.
It's basically the U.S. acquiring all, at least half, of all earnings from Ukrainian extractable natural resources.
So hydrocarbons, oil, rare earth minerals.
And then on top of that, The U.S. acquires ownership of Ukrainian physical infrastructure, like refineries and ports.
So this is basically the U.S. I don't know.
Maybe colonization is not the right word.
I'm open to whatever the people think the correct terminology is.
But this is essentially the U.S. seizing vast swaths of Ukrainian state resources.
Trump had characterized this, and also Rubio and others were characterizing this as an effective security guarantee to Ukraine, because according to Trump, this would mean that U.S. personnel of some kind would be on the ground in Ukraine.
Now, if memory serves, Russia invaded Ukraine because they perceived Ukraine being turned into an American-slash-Western outpost for anti-Russian hostility.
So is this like fortification of a US/NATO presence in Ukraine consistent with like the redress of the Russian grievances?
So in terms of what the negotiations will look like, I think people are taking it a little bit too for granted that these conditions would be acceptable to the Russian side, notwithstanding the fact that I think it's significant that they've resumed diplomatic contacts, but they haven't even addressed the essence of the conflict yet, as far as I know.
I mean, from what you're saying, it sounds a lot like...
Trump is attempting to give the Russians no security guarantee for Ukraine while, in effect, doing everything he can to provide a security guarantee, whether that's a backstop for European forces or so many European or American personnel and business ties in the region that it becomes effectively a quasi-American state that if it is attacked, we'd have to respond.
And another question is – so it's also kind of just taken for granted that Russia would desire an immediate ceasefire or a freeze along the current lines of contact.
But in 2022, Putin declared that four oblasts are eternal parts of the Russian Federation, and Russia still does not control the entirety of those oblasts.
So would he be willing to freeze?
And basically concedes that Russia does not control the territories that were declared to be eternal parts of the Russian Federation?
Again, it's possible that he could make a concession on that?
Well, there's going to have to be some swapping of territory if it happens today, because there's still Ukrainian forces in Kursk, although they're having some severe losses right now.
I mean, there's going to have to be some swapping, and you could imagine that would be part of the switch.
Yeah.
Well, apparently that was the logic behind the Kursk incursion.
Although, that's another good example.
Like, Russia now seems to finally have neutered the Kursk incursion or they cut off the supply lines or something.
There was, like, a turning point in Russia trying to counteract the Kursk incursion.
They're still generally making incremental gains in the main front line in, like...
It's like, what incentive do they have now to just agree to a full...
You know, their economy is not collapsing.
It doesn't seem like there's an acute crisis that they have to resolve at the moment.
So, like, are they just going to, like, capitulate to Trump?
I mean, Trump, actually, I don't know if you saw it today, but he did threaten...
He announced he's going to be threatening additional sanctions on Russia.
Yeah, it seems like it's pretty clearly only to negotiate because that's really the only olive branch, that's the only incentive for Russians to come to the table because if we just have the status quo, they're eventually going to win this as a military conflict.
But if there's the kind of incentive to lift sanctions, I mean, that would probably be good for the global economy, good for Europe's economy, and it has a downwind effect on the U.S. given oil prices.
It would be ironic, though, because there's a school of thought in Russia where they actually welcome – this is like the Dugan kind of philosophy, right, who Glenn interviewed recently, and I've spoken to him as well.
I don't think he's quite as brilliant as maybe Glenn does, but anyway.
You know, there's this whole theory now that it's a good thing that these sanctions have been levied against Russia because now Russia can purify itself.
It can free itself of all of these external influences that are always looking to subjugate Russia.
So it's good that it's cut off from the world financial system.
that's like occasion some kind of like cultural regeneration within Russia, also forcing them to revitalize domestic industry.
Yeah.
And then also partner with China.
And then also partner with China.
So like why would they just give up on all that after, you know, all this fanfare over the past three years about how it was actually a good thing?
The journal, the Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article, I think from last year, about a very kind of small train of thought in Iran that's similar because in response to all of these sanctions there's now a domestic Refrigerator and microwave manufacturing industry that just didn't exist before because they have no other way to obtain these kind of basic appliances.
And some of these small, burgeoning domestic Iranian industries want to keep the sanctions because it's actually to their benefit for jobs and just for local commerce.
We should probably...
This conversation is pretty long, but I enjoy talking to you.
Thanks for taking time.
You said we might go for 10, 15 minutes.
Yeah, I think this was about 10, maybe 11 minutes.
