On the latest Sunday Special edition of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec is joined by Raheem Kassam in a deep dive on the tumultuous history of Ukraine. From the Maidan Revolution Coup to the global financial crisis, Poso and Kassam pull zero punches with their in depth analysis of exactly what led to the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. 100 years of blood have paved the way and the fog of war has left countless questions. We answer them all on Human Events Daily with geopolitica...
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to today's Sunday special here on Human Events Daily.
And this is a conversation that we've been meaning to have for a long time, and this is a guest that we've been meaning to have for a long time.
It's very tough to get on his schedule.
His dance card is always, always full, but we finally got him on.
Ladies and gentlemen, here with us today is the Editor-in-Chief of the National Pulse, Mr. Raheem Kassam.
Finally, finally, I feel welcome.
And there's a reason that we wanted to get you specifically.
And it wasn't just because you finally got rid of the purple light on your podcast studio.
It's because we wanted to do an episode all about, I guess we're going to call this the truth about Ukraine.
And to have an honest conversation about what's going on in Ukraine, why we're talking about Ukraine, why we're involved in Ukraine, why the world is focused on Ukraine.
And we're not going to sit here and say, you know, Putin is amazing or Zelensky is amazing.
No, no, no, no, no.
We need analysis.
We need geopolitical analysis.
And I wanted to bring you on because you yourself were there when all of this began in 2014, the Maidan revolution.
Which is something that comes up again and again if you read, I guess I would say, independent media coverage of the situation because in the mainstream media, you will not hear Any talk of this, the Maidan Revolution, this people refer to it as a coup.
By the way, the founder of Stratfor referred to the Maidan Revolution as a textbook example of a modern coup, a color revolution, something we talk about all the time.
Yet when you go to anything, CNN, even Fox generally, they will just say, Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, and they take that as the start of modern history.
Rahim, is that the truth?
No, it's not even close.
The prevailing period of the consequences with which we live, with all of that, actually, I believe, truly started in about 2008 in the financial crisis, and the specifics of which we can get into.
But the Medan revolution itself really was, I mean, there's no real other way to describe it than a coup.
And it was a coup that was not just Before we go down the line of this, what was the Maidan revolution?
Let's say someone has no idea what you're talking about.
coming out of Washington, D.C.
But predominantly, the way I was seeing it from London at that particular point in time was a coup that was being fought by Brussels and for Brussels. - So, before we go down the line of this, what was the Maidan revolution?
Let's say someone has no idea what you're talking about.
How would you describe it in a quick summation? - The Maidan revolution was when hundreds of thousands of people were the numbers we were given at the time.
I certainly, when I was there, never saw hundreds of thousands of people.
But we're told that all these people came together because they wanted a more liberal, Western-focused, forward-looking, progressive Ukraine, and the nasty, prevailing Putin-allied president Uh, was, was trying to drag them backwards into, into Soviet, uh, you know, time.
So this, this president, his name was Yanukovych.
He had been elected, duly elected president of Ukraine, uh, voted for by a majority of the citizens of Ukraine.
You can go and look and I don't even know anybody.
Yeah.
Under international observation.
Right.
That there were any election integrity issues with this whatsoever.
And he pursued, if, if you actually look at the campaign itself, What he pursued was a strategy or a policy of neutrality, of neutrality with Russia vis-a-vis the military.
But he wanted more economic expansion with the EU.
So it was sort of this idea that there'd be an EU economic agreement, but without the NATO component, whereby in they would get try to get the benefits of a financial relationship with the EU, but not necessarily present present a military threat to Russia.
Well, you have to go a lot further back into understanding the premises of geopolitics, especially in that region, to kind of understand all of the geographic and ethnic and all of the different elements to cultural elements, all of it.
But what we're looking at in 2014 is a situation whereby, look, was the president of Ukraine more Russophilic?
Yeah, of course.
That would be like saying, you know, the Prime Minister of Canada has to necessarily take an antithetical position to what's going on in the United States at any given juncture, at any given time, just because you don't like the regime in Washington.
It was a stupid premise to start from, but it was the premise that really began the overthrow of his government.
It was regarding, for me, this is why I bring the Brussels thing up, because a lot of people think And in the United States, it's easy to see why they think that, that necessarily all the bad foreign policy decisions are emanating from Washington D.C.
Were that only the case we may have a foreign policy apparatus in the Western world that we could solve?
But it's not just in one place.
It's spread thinly across the Western world.
And one of the power bases that it emanates from is Brussels.
And I think people need to realize that as well, because when we get into discussing what's going on in Ukraine now, we also have to particularly take stock of the fact that there is a very different Brussels view, a European view, to the American view.
And there is a very different American view to, say, the British in a post-Brexit world view of all of this.
They are not necessarily as aligned on a lot of these things as people think they are.
But what ended up happening in Medan was the replacement of, as you say, a duly elected, a democratically elected government.
I was there when it was happening.
My hotel was in the middle of a street with, when you walked out of the front doors, The government lines about 50 yards one side, you know, not dug in, but sort of, you know, they have the shields in the streets and the protester line about 50 yards on the other side.
And they were pretty much dug in.
What they were doing was welding barricades into the streets in front of them.
And then behind you had tens of thousands of people.
Now, when we went around and tried to figure out what was causing this, who was behind it, why was this really going on?
And I have to be completely honest, I had absolutely no knowledge of that political situation on the ground when I landed in Kiev that trip.
But it became very clear to me two things.
That the protesters who were trying to lure Ukraine into a more progressive situation with Europe and all of that stuff that was going on, all of those people had EU flags.
And there was an EU tent in the middle of the square that were handing out information leaflets.
Here's why you should hate Russia.
Things like that.
But having said that, on the other side, because most of Kiev's Yeah, institutions are liberal, left-leaning, progressive, whatever you want to call them, and European-facing, and in a lot of senses funded by Europe as well, funded by Brussels.
You didn't have much of a counter-protest from the government, from Yanukovych's government supporters in Ukraine at the time, because guess what, Jack?
They lived outside of the cities.
They weren't going to come into Kiev.
To counter-demonstrate against what ended up being a coup.
It was really the Ukrainian people's own fault in that sense of being led down this path by Brussels.
It's a very similar thing to a lot of Eurosceptic nations out there right now, my own included, that we had to have the general public understand what is going on in Brussels for us to opt to leave.
The Ukrainians are now going the other way.
Right.
And this, of course, that you mentioned the Primrose Path.
This, of course, is Mearsheimer's original statement at the time from 2014.
We talk about Mearsheimer's current warning all the time here on the program that the United States is potentially escalating two conflicts in which we could find ourselves in a dual, a two front global war with vis-a-vis Russia.
We're already obviously in a hot war with Russia, but also potentially with China in the Straits of Taiwan.
So what you're talking about, though, Is exactly what Mearsheimer said in that speech, that Brussels was leading Ukraine down the primrose path saying you'll get EU, you'll get EU membership, you'll get a full free visa access, you'll get Schengen zone, which of course means visa free travel throughout the EU, potentially sponsorship at EU universities, jobs, financial investment, you'll get, you'll come into the NATO shield, you'll get all of these things.
And what Mearsheimer's point was that, and of course the response is all you have to do is overthrow your president.
And if you overthrow your president, then you're going to get these things.
And Mearsheimer, of course, responded that you are leading them down the primrose path to be getting wrecked by Russia.
Because of course, Russia has always looked at Ukraine as a buffer state.
The word Ukraine, Ukranitsa, is a portmanteau of the words at the border.
So if you're if you understand Slavic, if you understand the language of the region, what you're saying is at the border or the borderlands.
It's always been a borderland.
And that's exactly how Moscow views the entire thing.
And of course, they view NATO as a threatening military alliance.
And this is why immediately afterwards.
And I remember this.
You were there in Kiev.
I was working as Navy intelligence at the time.
In 2014, I would have just become an officer.
I was prior enlisted, then went officer.
But I remember saying that even, and this is me even as a China analyst looking at it, saying, well, you know, Russia is, their Black Sea base is permanently, permanently ported at Sevastopol, which of course is in Crimea.
I don't think the Russians are ever going to just give that up.
Yeah, and what Mearsheimer talks about is effectively the Contra Sybil, right?
It's from the Aeneid when Aeneas goes to see the prophet and talks about building a new city, a new alliance in modern day Italy.
And it's told, this is what Enoch Powell got in trouble for citing in 1968, that there will be rivers of blood This was, like you said, the primrose path, and it has now led to where Ukrainians have become refugees.
I was listening to a report from Ireland, actually, earlier this week, and they were talking about how it's only a couple of hundred, I think, refugees that are in Ireland from Ukraine, but they are being made to feel less and less welcome as this war drags on.
And as the general public suspects that, you know, it's not these people's fault that they're refugees, but it's certainly the fault of the nation that they come from that they've ended up in a position whereby it's now the Western taxpayer that is being made to shoulder the overreach of, as I would say, Brussels, as a lot of people would say, and Washington DC.
But there are distinctions and there are not just distinctions in what got to this point of war, you know, active conflict in the region as a result.
Between those different power bases across Europe and the United States.
But also, they all see an endgame differently.
And I think one of the reasons that we're not... If you go and look in the media today, and you type in Ukraine into Google News, or go on The Guardian, or the BBC, or Foreign Policy Magazine, they will all tell you the same thing.
Some of the most independent, fair and balanced journalism on Ukraine, by the way.
No, but what is the same thing they're telling you now?
The same thing they're all telling you is, well, we don't know.
We actually just don't know.
Well, hold on a minute.
You know, a year ago you were certain of certain factors here that played into, you know, right down to what Vladimir Putin had for breakfast and how that might affect his thinking over the course of the day.
I remember when he fell down the stairs due to his Parkinson's.
Right.
And suddenly we're in this information vacuum where they're all throwing their hands up and going, well, we don't know.
Well, they don't know because they were led down this primrose path and it hasn't turned out that way.
Now, I want to go back and tease out before we get to Endgame, which I do eventually want to talk about, but I want to go back and tell the start game.
Right.
So you mentioned there that so I was talking about this from the 2014 perspective and thinking that, you know, we had Maidan.
Then, of course, we had.
So that's the overthrow.
Russia takes Crimea.
Donbass kicks off.
But then you get the Minsk Accords.
But then, of course, just two years later, really a year and a half later, you get Brexit, which, of course, that's you.
And then six months after that or so, you get the election of Trump, and that's me, sort of, that you also have a connection there being Paul Manafort.
And Paul Manafort, of course, who we've had on the program here on the Sunday special, who walked us through the fact that he was President Yanukovych's campaign manager prior to being Donald Trump's campaign manager in 2016.
And of course, it was Uh, these sort of pro-Maidan legislators in Ukraine that end up coming up with this, this fake black ledger saying that he's taking all this money.
The whole thing was fake, but of course it interfered in the American election, arguably the largest and most effective foreign interference in the American election.
Why?
Because Paul Manafort actually resigned due to it.
In March of 2016.
So you actually had the resignation of a presidential campaign.
I wouldn't even talk about this anymore, by the way.
And this, of course, is in the midst of the creation of the Steele dossier and Russiagate and everything else.
And the fact that you did have the embassy of Ukraine inside the United States with people working with Victoria Nuland, with people like the Chalupa sisters, Alexandra Chalupa, spreading around these these rumors that eventually become compiled in what's later called the Steele dossier, that there was absolutely a very spreading around these these rumors that eventually become compiled in what's later called the Steele But what what you said is even prior to that, you mentioned 2008 and you mentioned the financial crisis.
So walk me through that.
How does 2008 lead us?
Because remember, prior to 2008 and I understand, by the way, there's people who, you know, we're sort of the elder millennials.
But but for Zoomers and other folks out there, you know, it's it's hard to just to explain what the post 9-11 period.
Now, I've just come from New York.
We were up there taking care of something.
And I.
I remember very vividly what it looked like where there were two smoking craters in lower Manhattan, and I remember this overwhelming sense of someone must pay.
Someone must be punished for what's been done to us.
I later served at Guantanamo Bay.
So, of course, in the wake of that, you get the invasion of Afghanistan, you get the evasion of Iraq, and we're told by the neoconservatives and the neoliberals and that we must take control of the Middle East.
We must turn the Middle East into a democracy.
We must do nation building in the Middle East.
Nobody was talking about a place called Ukraine for an entire decade.
And yet all of a sudden now, if you look at things today, You couldn't even name the Prime Minister of Iraq.
You couldn't name who's in charge of Afghanistan other than nebulous, oh, the Taliban.
But, you know, we've moved on.
And so we're not told that we have to care about who's in charge of these areas, even though at one point they were the most important thing of the world.
So, you know, to use the current nomenclature, you might call it the current thing.
So now the current thing is Ukraine, but why have we always been in search of a current thing?
And I think this is the thesis of what you're getting at with 2008.
So walk us through it.
- Well, the current thing is basically what, you know, was known as the going concern in geopolitical theory for so very long.
It's almost the same phrase, I don't know why we've even changed it.
And the going concern is what motivates nations to act in, you know, geopolitical ways that are perhaps sometimes rational, but more often than not appear to be irrational nowadays.
I just want to come back to early 2000s, post 9-11 world for a second, because you have to go there to understand where we're going to end up very shortly with this current confected crisis.
Philosophically and geopolitically, what the prevailing Western regime, the neoliberal We've been going with the Beattie formulation by the way, the Globalist American Empire, the GAE.
- I'm going with the BD formulation, by the way, the globalist American empire, the DAE. - And I hear that totally, but I think it actually downplays a lot of the malign influence that emanates from London and Brussels on this as well. - I agree with you on that, that it is an axis. - Yeah, but I think it actually downplays a lot of the malign influence that emanates from London and Brussels on this Yeah, but let's take it as a means by describing it.
What they are effectively doing here, this is my perspective on this, is purchasing about a hundred years more.
And they're buying it in blood.
They're buying a hundred years more at the helm.
They're buying a hundred years more of this same kind of conflict going on in Eurasia.
You know, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
We will always have been at war with Eurasia.
And in a large part, that was because of the lack of feasibility of forever wars in the Middle East.
And it wasn't necessarily because of the loss of life, although that played a massive part.
It wasn't necessarily the cash that played a massive part there.
What I think has gone on here is the regime could care less where it wages war.
The elites want war no matter where it is, right?
We're already talking about a next presidential cycle and wondering whether Iran is going to be back on the table.
John Bolton's now giving interviews again to the BBC, talking about his interest in that regard.
But the reason the Middle East stuff didn't sell was because the world order became effectively run by far-left progressive masquerading as liberals.
And for those people, you just can't be killing brown people.
That can't be on the television every day.
It can't be in magazines.
The New York Times cannot have the bloodied corpses of young brown babies everywhere.
And so they had to pick a less pigmented enemy here.
And immediately after the financial crisis, you see lots of different Weights bearing down, pressure bearing down on the big corporate financial institutions.
More regulation, more scrutiny, more ombudsman.
We had a ban on banker bonuses in the United Kingdom for so long.
And so the money necessarily looks to somewhere where the money is less scrutinized.
And so a lot of these institutions, investment, hedge funds, all of that started to look at, well, maybe we don't pull the money back into these places which are heavily scrutinizing our behavior right now.
I wonder where in 2009 did The Guardian call the most corrupt country in Europe?
That was Ukraine.
And not only that, by the way, you mentioned the sort of intersectional issue of waging wars in the Middle East, but there's also the religious angle as well that Ukraine.
Uh, those are Muslim countries and that, you know, places like Ukraine, places like Russia, these are predominantly Christian areas.
I mean, not to say that they're a hundred percent Christian, but obviously it's, it's part of what's been considered, you know, the Eastern part of the church for over a thousand years, going back to the great schism that when you look at this and I want to get into this, this question you have though, by the way.
So I remember there's that great Julian Assange quote.
Where he says, the reason for the war is the continuation of war.
Because what they're doing is a money-washing of the tax bases of your own population.
It's not about extracting the money from these areas, like Libya or Syria, which, I mean, go look at, by the way, the cast of characters in Syria, that the whole country was smashed apart by Barack Obama, by Hillary Clinton, when they were President and Secretary of State, respectively.
And of course, lots of people went along with this, conservatives as well, like Rubio, like John McCain when he was around, like Lindsey Graham.
Of course, you see the same cast of characters in Ukraine in 2014 that were all in on Libya, that were all in on Syria.
But the point is, so the money starts flowing, these write-offs keep coming, this printing keeps happening, and yet you have to spend the money somewhere.
And I think what you're getting at with your point is that so the money starts being pumped out of these central banks, But if you spend the money in a way where it can be scrutinized, like, I don't know, revitalizing New York City, like Rudy Giuliani did, and obviously President Trump, when he was a developer, played a huge part in the revitalization of Manhattan.
But there's an easier way to do it, and there's a way where you, well, not so much easier, but there's a way that you can make a lot more money doing it, and that's by going to one of these far-off areas.
And I remember there's actually reports in the early Iraq invasion Where there were soldiers, and I'll never forget this interview, I want to say it was late 2002, early 2003, just as the invasion was kicking off, and one of the soldiers mentioned, why do we have representatives of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with us as we're going in, in the early stages of Iraq?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
A lot of people will hear the themes that we're talking about and be like, oh, that's a conspiracy theory, or that's a bit of a leap.
Actually, it is the Occam's razor of argument on this point.
Which is that money necessarily looks for the path of least resistance.
I mean, that was their argument for Britain to remain in the EU, remember.
The greatest argument that they made every single day was, well, you know, money and financial services and trade, that all can be done easier if we're part of the same block.
And so what you're really seeing here, we really should come up with a better acronym for this, is the European Union is necessarily a protectionist block for itself.
It doesn't do a particularly good job of being protectionist of itself, but that's what it's there to do.
You also then have a wider consent-- - I've heard their exports are having some energy cost issues.
- Right, right, and energy is-- And energy is a critical part of all of this, right?
Where you buy your energy from, who you get your energy from, what that looks like is, again, a lot of the way that the money flows here.
Actually, on that point, I'd love to throw this out because there's so many fancy ways and models that we could use to describe it, but I'll just say this to folks listening.
Have you ever driven past a gas station because you know the gas costs more there to drive a little bit further to go to the gas station where you know it's cheaper?
Even if you have to pay cash, you might even go to the ATM to pull cash out.
That's exactly what happens on a geopolitical scale all the time, every day.
It's the exact same thing because they want more bang for their buck.
They want more gas, more petroleum for their dollar.
And so I've used this phrase that I always, I borrow it from a professor that I had even when I was in undergrad.
So, I'm interested in this.
French whenever they're solving a murder or you go to the Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot used to always say, uh, search a la femme, right?
You know, look for the woman whenever there's a, you know, some, some foul play, but in international politics, if you want to understand things, search a la petrol.
So I, I, I'm, I'm interested in this.
I'm interested in taking your, your, your, um, metaphor there and kind of butchering it because, uh, it's almost like in this case, we've driven past the gas station, which has cheaper gas, um, because it was not which has cheaper gas, um, because it was not politically correct to buy from the poor brown man who couldn't understand what you were saying and you couldn't understand him.
So you've driven further down the street and you've got more expensive gas, but at least you look the same and can talk the same language sort of thing.
Well it's also that you own that gas station.
Right, well, you are establishing a dominance over that territory, yes.
It's very low-level gang warfare at that point.
Which if I remember correctly, the British had some involvement in Persia, in Iran, over something to do with the gas.
Maybe I'm misremembering this.
I thought there was some kind of of situation that the British were very, there's a company, it's called BP.
I don't know.
I'm just, I'm probably just making conspiracy theories again.
We also had some, some BP in, in, down in Mississippi as well.
It's not, it's not been our proudest company, an export, but I think this bears teasing out.
Speaking of coups, by the way.
Yeah.
Well, this bears teasing out, right, all of this conversation, because we've now jumped from 9-11.
You can make a direct link from a post-invasion of Iraq, post-invasion of Afghanistan world.
I mean, almost immediately post, by the way, right?
Like, very quickly, people like you and I figured out this is a disaster.
And that has informed our opinions about what's going on in Ukraine now.
For a lot of younger people who are watching this, who have sympathies with the Ukrainian side of this rather than a more neutral and peace-dominant side of this, Fine.
We understand.
It's not like we don't understand.
We sympathize with the same things that you sympathize with.
We've just been down this road before, and we know what it looks like and sounds like to be spun a yarn about why people should die.
Which, and by the way, if you want to know where this road ends, go look at Kabul Airport last year, or the end of, you know, was it September 2021?
Just, that's where this road ends.
Well, and that's not even the end though, is it?
Because now look at what's going to happen in that country, look at where that country's alliances and allegiances are going to be, look at how that's going to transpire for the next 20, 25, you know, up to 50 years.
They've just signed a resource deal for, I believe it's LNG, oil, and rare earth minerals with the Chinese Communist Party.
Of course!
Well, because of course you would.
I mean, you've been occupied by a foreign power for decades who promised you the very same thing, the Primrose Path, right?
Welcome into the international community, you will be heralded, your president will be feted in the streets, You know, people will throw rose petals in his wake.
I don't even know the name of any of these people anymore.
And you will not know the name of the leaders of Ukraine in 20 years time as well.
But you know whose names you should be paying more attention to.
Are the leaders of the corporate entities that are now being called up, you know, stand back and stand by to rebuild Ukraine?
Well, and we saw this at Davos.
We saw that we saw them paraded around.
And these are names like Larry Fink.
These are corporations like Blackstone.
Jamie Dimon has been all over the place again.
And by the way, the new chief of staff for the Biden White House is himself one of the former executives from Bain Capital.
And this is how these organizations work.
They sort of have one guy on the left and one guy on the right.
So a group like Bain is perfect for this.
Because here you go, well, everyone associates them with Mitt Romney because, of course, he ran for president.
Romney, he's a guy, he's a man of the right, isn't he?
Or is he?
Because when he ran for Senate in Massachusetts, he ran to the left of Ted Kennedy in 1994.
And then when he was governor, he signed universal health care.
And then when he ran for president, suddenly he discovers conservatism and the pro-life movement and all of these things.
But what it's really been all about from day one is just what you're talking about here, money and the financialization of everything.
Yeah, Mitt Romney's conservatism wasn't even, it was like a caricature of conservatism, right?
You've got the binders of women and all of that kind of stuff.
I hear that runs in the family for the Romneys.
Right.
Well, so I look at all of this and I think back to this, what they're purchasing here, geopolitically, strategically, philosophically, what they're purchasing here.
It's effectively an extension, right?
It's an extension of something that was going rickety and wrong, which is NATO slash EU.
A lot of people, you don't really even have to go that far back.
You can go five, six years back and look at the way that Donald Trump was highlighting to the world what was going wrong with NATO, how we may even need to start all over again.
Suddenly those questions have disappeared, they're off the table.
Well that's convenient, isn't it?
Suddenly this apparatus that has done nothing for so very long, while by the way, You know, marching around the world, proclaiming to be the very basis of peace, you know, and the EU does this as well.
I threw a tweet up this morning as we taped this and I wrote, if the globalist American empire existed, we would expect to see a military expeditionary arm of the GAE with client states of the GAE supplying arms and soldiery to this coalition of armed forces for the purposes of enforcing and expanding the GAE's authority.
But nothing like that actually exists, of course.
Yeah, but again, you see this through far more rose-coloured glasses than I do.
I look at this as, you know, your house is falling down, and so you prop it up with some bricks that you found down the street.
I don't see this as an empire, what you describe as an empire that is flourishing, it is diminishing.
And the European Union is... I wouldn't necessarily say it's flourishing.
Right.
But I think you see more strength in it than I do.
Perhaps.
I think we have to look at this in more of a philosophical perspective, and a generational philosophical perspective, than simply a financial and military perspective, or an economic perspective here.
And that is that a lot of people over the course of the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to start questioning what these institutions are that suck up all of their money, profess to speak for them, and where they have no moral authority vested.
And that was what Brexit was about, right?
That was the first real brick out of that wall.
And I can draw you a little diagram, I was drawing it just as you were speaking there, about the interest of getting out in the EU versus out of the EU and where 2014 fell in that.
So for the video audience there, you can see where 2014 would fit, where the Ukraine's interest in joining the EU is going up and the United Kingdom is going down.
And that is not a coincidence.
That is by design, the European Union understood that it has to have places to expand into if it is not, you know, to shrink with the release of Britain.
All of the scandals which, of course, you know, people want to go back and look at the playbook.
We can.
You and I in October of 2020 going through the Hunter Biden laptop, breaking out the Burisma deals of the Biden family, going in and explaining why it is that Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch, was the number one donor to the Clinton Foundation.
All of this is the same influence peddling that we're seeing.
This is not These are symptoms.
These are symptoms of what's going on, not necessarily the cause of what's going on.
And so when we're trying to diagnose what's actually happening with our world, sure, we can look at these different things, and like a doctor would diagnose different symptoms of a patient, We can examine them and we can learn the way that the disease is flowing, the cancer is flowing, has cancer spread to here as the cancer spread to there.
But we're also talking about the overall disorder that has caused this cancer.
And if you live through the 90s, you know, and I talk about this a lot, that, you know, the 90s were this sort of golden era where there really was a peace dividend and business was booming, the economy was booming and growing up in the 90s.
And I remember this quite vividly.
And I talk about this with my kids a lot, is that we had spaceships.
We had actual spaceships that you could go and see.
I remember going down to Cape Canaveral and seeing one on the lander and it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in my life at that point.
And there was a sense of unbridled progress.
We were going to achieve our destiny and our destiny was to colonize outer space.
This was the goal, right?
This was the goal of everything.
And then 9-11 happens and instead we decide, to invade the Middle East and then try to impose democracy on the third world.
And then we attempt to extend this to every other place around the globe for some reason that I'm not quite sure of, rather than simply focusing on advancing human progress as much as possible.
Because for some reason, and even Jordan Peterson's out there calling for toppling the Iranian government in the name of misogyny and I guess feminism, which is interesting because Jordan Peterson's the guy, he used to point out that allowing women into the workplace wasn't a good idea.
So I don't know, I don't know what happened there, but it's, it's sort of this idea, but why is, well, I think we all know what happened there.
Um, that, uh, it's sort of this sense of, you know, why, why Iran?
Why does Iran matter so much?
Why not, uh, Bhutan?
Why not Kyrgyzstan?
Why does he specifically mention this country for some reason?
Why is that front of mind?
Um, and so we, we need to look throughout all of these issues.
And so when I, when I go back to the corruption and, you know, Biden's got classified, this classified, et cetera, et cetera.
It's all being led towards a specific purpose, and I've said before, I think that the regime, the GAE, maybe you'd like, by the way, GAE better if I said globalist and American empire.
We just add that word, and.
You might like it better, the globalist and American empire.
But of course there's an argument about the directionality.
Is it Brussels in the front seat, or is it Washington, or is it the City of London?
Well, that is actually an interesting question.
I think at first it was Brussels in the front seat, and then immediately post-Medan, the US said, OK, we'll take it from here, guys.
You're only going to screw this up.
You don't know what you're doing.
We have a playbook for this kind of thing.
We'll take it from here.
And that's how we've ended up here, because because the United States and the United States, you know, defense lobby especially will always, always push for greater and faster conflict.
And this is what was really interesting to me.
You mentioned on the show last week about the Rand Corporation report.
And you specifically talked about Ukrainistan.
I see I am a listener.
I wanted to read a bit from that report about the duration of this, the potential duration of this here, because effectively what they're saying is exactly what I said in my Newsweek column that I wrote about this over a year ago, right?
In January 2022, when all of this was kicking off, before the war had started in earnest, this is what you and I were both saying.
So let's quote here from Rand.
Although a longer war might enable the Ukrainian military to retake more territory, there are other implications of the war's duration for US interests.
A protracted conflict, as perverse as it may seem, has some potential upsides for the United States.
While the war continues, Russian forces will remain preoccupied with Ukraine and thus not have the bandwidth to menace others, A long war would further degrade the Russian military and weaken the Russian economy.
A long war would also maintain pressure on European governments to continue to reduce energy dependence on Russia and spend more on their defense, possibly lessening the U.S. defense burden in Europe over the long run.
Well, I mean, if that isn't if that isn't what Donald Trump was saying for so very long about everything that was going on over there, that Trump Trump wanted to use the path of peace to get those things done and made far more progress in that area as a result of that.
They have chosen a path of war and it's leading to less good results.
Right.
And we've covered, by the way, on the show that the.
This region for the Russians, this is an existential region for them.
The Donbas, the Donets River Basin, this is the same region that Stalingrad finds itself in.
This is what connects Russia, which does not have very good sea access, very good port access.
Again, you know, going back to my Navy days, they do not have the ability to power project on the open oceans.
They've never had a strong Navy.
And it's only through them as a regional power, going back to Mackinder's heartland theory, that they're able to impose their influence on Central Asia, on the caucuses, etc.
So if you're able as a military force or an invading power to if you want to the headshot, the proverbial headshot on Russia is if you can sever what's called the Volgograd Volgograd gap.
And this is this is basically where the Don River Meet with the Volga River and if you understand anything about Russia, Volga is sort of like their Mississippi.
It's their main river.
So then you sever their connection from the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the resource-rich Caucasus.
They're done if you can take this out.
And what is the city, or at least 80 years ago this week, what was the city called at the intersection of the Volga River and the Don River?
Stalingrad today.
It's called Volgograd.
And so when we're talking about the Don Bass and this region of Ukraine, this is the front door to that very same region that, by the way, the Germans tried to take this both times in both world wars.
And both times, as we've seen, of course, read World War One history, World War Two, obviously much more famous, the the bloodiest battle in world history, because the Russians understand that if you take that region from them, they are done for.
They're done for completely.
So when we're talking about it in terms of, oh, we want a financial expansion and we want we want to keep the money flowing, want to keep these games going for us, all of those things.
Right.
When I say us, I mean the G.A.E.
writ large.
For them, they look at it that way.
For the Russians, they look at this as an existential threat to them.
And that is why you're seeing these videos.
That's why they'll fight so hard for this area because they will always fight so hard for this area.
Well, and this is what I think is leading to a lot of confusion.
I couldn't have said that better myself, Jack.
Is the Western apparatus, especially the media apparatus, not understanding this existential question as far as Russia is concerned?
And where they do understand it, they still can't make a calculation.
is Russia willing to go the whole hog, the full nuclear nine yards for what would be best termed as their own defense of their own rational self-interest here?
And I think that's why we're headed down really just that there are only two paths here.
The first path, the GAE would like to extract a full mea culpa retreat from Vladimir Putin and then also punitively crush him with more sanctions and reparations and just humiliate into defeat. the GAE would like to extract a full mea culpa Well, I do fear that that would be a World War I scenario leading to a World War II scenario.
You know, a very Treaty of Versailles circumstance for Russia.
The other part of this is, this drags on a little bit longer.
Which, by the way, isn't necessarily achievable with nuclear weapons in the mix.
Right, exactly.
And then secondly, the scenario is that this war drags on a little longer, as the Rand Corporation basically alludes to in their report.
Everybody makes a little bit more money, and then they force the... Well, except Ukraine.
And then they force the two parties around the table and they say, look, you know, this has gone on long enough.
The public appetite for it is gone.
Sorry, Mr. Zelensky, we're going to shuffle you on here.
You can be the, you know, president of some UN council on human rights or whatever.
And, um, and, and we'll just, and we'll just, we'll move on to the next one.
And you and I both know what the next one is here, by the way, which is, which is a greater concern.
Read the tea leaves in Kiev right now, just, just in the past few weeks.
We've seen resignations all across the Zelensky government, resignations and firings at one point.
Tons of people sacked.
You had the interior minister, which isn't like the Department of Interior here in the United States.
This is a resource minister.
He and his entire senior staff were killed in a helicopter, let's say incident, a suspicious incident in Kiev.
And then just this week, Igor Kolomoisky, the number one oligarch who backed Zelensky's bid, and the very same who founded and financed the Azov Battalion, as well as Zelensky's television shows, all these different things, and had at one point been the, I'm not going to say owner, but at least I'll say the money behind Burisma, going back to 2012, which according to Ukrainian reports, State Department backed Ukrainian reports that
Kolomoisky was the oligarch behind Burisma.
This guy is now getting raided.
And so it may be, to your point, that the gravy train is coming to an end.
Yes, there will certainly be people in the way of the longer term aspirations of the people pulling the strings.
And so those things have to be kind of, you know, lined up and dealt with now so that they don't get messy later on.
It's not going to be easy for Russia, though, either.
I mean, you had Putin talking in the last week about, you know, here we are 80 years later fighting the German tanks again.
And it very much does seem like a redux of sorts.
The only difference is this time they've got the entire apparatus of the Western world fighting, not awkwardly alongside them, or rooting awkwardly in their favour, but actively against them.
And this, again, not to sound like a broken record about it.
In fact, I don't care if I sound like a broken record about it.
This again goes back to the heart of what so many British people voted for when they voted to leave the European Union.
I understand that we have different perspectives on Nazism and who the Nazis were between the United Kingdom, between the United States.
You learn different things than we learn, and we see it through slightly different In Britain, it was very common throughout the Brexit campaign to liken Brussels with a totalitarian, German-led, socialistic regime.
And that wasn't called nuts or conspiracy, or maybe it was at first, but it kind of normalised.
And so here you can see where the Russians have their work cut out for them, because even Brexiteers in the United Kingdom Notionally, at least, support Ukraine.
They have successfully driven a wedge between the hostility towards Brussels, the nascent hostility towards Brussels, and what's going on and what started, obviously, in Medan and with the association agreement.
A few minutes left, but perennially, you and I, of course, always cover the rise of the Chinese Communist Party.
We can't overlook the fact that China has this The strange dual role where they're sort of financially still in bed with the West, but potentially militarily still still opened up to Russia.
Now, that's, of course, in China's interests.
But where do they stand in terms of this?
And if Russia does eventually become more of an economic pariah after this, as the West wants, does that make them something of a junior partner to China?
Yeah, I mean this is the best case scenario for China.
If the RAND report talks about how the Americans want this to drag out because it harms the Russian military, well the Chinese want this to drag out because it harms the US, it harms NATO militarily, and if it drags on too long it will harm it in terms of reputation, its ability to actually bring peace, not just talk about it on pieces of paper in Atlantic Council think tank meetings.
And it will also necessarily harm a lot of the broader EU project and the counterweight and the counterbalance that so many of these people have said for so long, right, from the podiums, whether it's in Brussels or Strasbourg or here in Washington DC, that this was what this was built for.
I don't know whether in the long run what we're talking about is sheer stupidity or whether we're talking about calculated losses so that others can make calculated gains.
I suspect it's the latter, but don't rule out the former.
And certainly don't rule out the former as it comes into spring here.
Both sides can make major strategic errors.
We may see this wrap up by summer.
I suspect we'll see it wrap up the early part of next year.
Well, I think that would be, for anyone who is sympathetic, and we traveled to Ukraine last year in the summer, and we saw the families that are caught up in the middle, and they don't deserve this.
And that's what it comes down to, that we play these geopolitical games, but at the end of the day, there's always families that are caught up in the middle.
Raheem, where can people follow you?
And I hear you have a new sub stack out, is that right?
Yes, I have a sub stack.
It's got just over 53,000 subscribers now.
Wow.
Yeah, sort of more than I thought would happen.
I thought it would be a slower burn than that, but I'm grateful for that.
It's at rahimkassam.com or rahimkassam.substack.com.
Either one will get you there.
The National Pulse, we're actually undergoing a massive change, a massive rebrand.
We've got more different podcasts coming on board with the network this year.
We are actually looking at a print version, a very exclusive and limited print version.
I'd like to, as the go-home, producer Angelo sends me a quote.
actually looking at the production of what I think will be a very interesting documentary this year.
So towards the end of this year, at least we should have that too.
So that's the national pulse.com and the sub stack is just Rahim Kassam.com.
Rahim Kassam, thank you so much for joining us here.
Human Events Sunday special.
You know, I'd like to, as the go home, producer Angelo sends me a quote.
I'd like to be able to read you a little, just one line from the great tome George Orwell's 1984, which I've always said that I think that we live not necessarily in 1984, but it's basically a combination of 1984 and Brave New World.
You actually need both.
But here's 84.
And then because it talks so much about war and how war is necessary for the dominance of the regime, he writes, the war is not meant to be won.
