Scott Horton challenges the Western narrative of a Russian invasion, arguing Putin merely deployed peacekeepers to Donbass after declaring it sovereign, while exposing alleged CIA and Saudi backing for Chechen terrorists in the 1990s. He critiques NATO expansion risks, citing George H.W. Bush's broken promise not to move east and Putin's new hypersonic arsenal as rational responses to U.S. missile defense deployments. Ultimately, the discussion highlights a precarious 10% risk of nuclear escalation, suggesting current tensions stem from American foreign policy contradictions rather than simple Russian aggression. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Escalating Tensions and Independence00:14:39
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
All right, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
Thank you very much for tuning in.
Real quick, before we get the episode started, just wanted to remind everybody I will be in Florida this weekend for the Florida State Libertarian Party convention, and I'm making the runs.
I got a bunch of them coming up the weekend after.
I will be in Pennsylvania.
The weekend after that, I will be in Colorado.
Then I got Texas, Minnesota, a whole bunch of LP state conventions.
I'm going around to all of them to really push everybody to get involved and push for Angela McArdle, who's just going to be so awesome as the next LP chair.
Just saw her do her debate out in California last week, and she's just incredible.
I can't wait till she takes over the Libertarian Party.
It's just going to be so awesome.
Okay, business out of the way.
Now, this episode, we were supposed to record a couple of days ago, but man, I was supposed to do it from the hotel out in California, and I couldn't even watch a YouTube video.
The internet was so bad.
So I apologize for it being delayed a couple of days.
But yeah, it was very nice Marriott out there in Long Beach, but they got to get their internet together.
It was rough.
So now we bring you the episode now better late than never.
So I know we got a bunch of new listeners to the show from my latest Rogan bump.
And one of the people who I had talked about a bit on the Joe Rogan experience there was my guy, Scott Horton.
And I'm very happy to have him on the show today.
He is over at antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute.
He is the author of two incredible books, Enough Already and Fool's Eren.
Fool's Eren was the book about Afghanistan.
Enough already is the book about all of the terror wars.
I highly recommend both of them.
Probably right now go with Enough Already because that Afghanistan one did wrap up, but still really interesting if you want to understand the whole history of that stuff.
So me and Scott had planned maybe about five days ago.
We were saying, let's do an episode about what's going on in Yemen because, you know, I talked about it on Rogan's podcast and they put that out as a clip and it got a few million views.
And so it was the perfect time.
Things seem to be possibly escalating there.
However, Scott's my foreign policy guy and you know in a few days things can change.
And so maybe we'll talk a little bit about Yemen today, but there's no way to not start off with talking about the Russia-Ukraine situation and what's going on there.
So welcome to the show, Scott Horton.
How are you, sir?
I'm great, Dave.
Thank you so much for having me again, man.
How are you doing?
Good, good, man.
Always a pleasure to talk to you.
And, you know, Scott is like a wealth of information on lots of things, but his specialty really is foreign policy.
So let's talk about what's going on.
Let's talk about the latest first and then that every libertarian state convention where you're not giving a speech, I am giving one for the next eight or 10 weeks.
So people can go to libertarianinstitute.org and I have a thing of upcoming speeches.
And I'm going to be in Utah this weekend.
And then I'm going to Connecticut and to Tennessee and Kentucky and all over the place.
I can't keep track of them all.
And I'll be seeing you in Irving when we do our big thing for the Texas LP event.
All right.
Well, that's good.
I mean, as a strategy, it makes sense, but it's really annoying that they have a split doing all these different conventions because I like hanging out with you.
Okay, so let me start with this, because I do want to at least start with an admission.
I did not think this would happen.
I did not think Putin would even go this far.
I really am surprised by this.
And it's, I figured he would not take the bait at all.
Maybe we can get into what you think is going on with him, but Vladimir Putin did.
And at this point, when our foreign policy establishment tells us anything, oh, we have, you know, intel about a false flag attack coming up, which by the way, still hasn't happened.
We have intel about an invasion of Ukraine, which by the way, still hasn't happened.
However, I just, they lie about everything.
So at this point, I just assume this is complete bullshit and it wouldn't make any sense for Putin to encroach on Ukraine at all.
But he did just the other day declare Donbass to be its own sovereign country and then said he was sending in peacekeeping troops, which governments are really great, aren't they?
Peacekeeping troops, you know, nothing keeps the peace like military.
Anyway, so, and he gave this speech that was a little, was a little bit weird, very provocative things, talking about how, you know, the only problem with the communists was that they made certain concessions and stuff like that.
Really kind of a very, I guess in a sense, a very Putin nationalist.
We have nothing to feel sorry for, you know, in our grand history type of speech.
But anyway, I guess as of now, they have sent some people into the Donbass region.
What's going on?
You tell me, before we get into how we should think about this, what is the latest?
Well, first of all, I think I owe you an apology because I think I probably was one of the reasons that you thought it wasn't going to happen because I thought, and this is, I'm not blaming Ray McGovern.
I agree with Ray McGovern.
He's the former chief of the CIA's Soviet division, chief analyst there.
And I had agreed with him that it looked to me like Biden had already conceded enough that when Putin was saying, I want a treaty saying Ukraine will never be in NATO, as Ray said, that's the big ask.
He knows he's not going to get that.
But what he could get is some real assurances that we're not going to bring NATO in in the next 10 years or so, which Biden seemed happy to give him.
I mean, he should have put it in writing, but still.
And he promised, you know, hey, let's set up a verification regime to make sure we're not installing nuclear tomahawk missiles in Romania and Poland and this kind of thing.
So I thought that, nah, he's not going to invade.
There's so much at stake.
And essentially his major demands, you know, people were making fun of me on Twitter for saying Biden already promised not to bring Ukraine into NATO.
People were going, yeah, yeah, yeah, Biden promised.
But the point wasn't that, you know, the emphasis wasn't on promised as much as that there was no reason to think that they were going to bring Ukraine into NATO anyway.
The Germans and the French weren't going to allow it.
Bush promised this back in 08, but there hasn't been a real push by America to bring Ukraine into NATO since then.
And Biden had been willing to say kind of just even off the cuff, as well as on the phone with Putin on December the 30th, that look, we have no intention of bringing Ukraine into NATO.
And he knows that.
In fact, they kind of couldn't bring Ukraine into NATO.
As long as you had this tension on the border area, it was essentially right against the NATO charter to do it.
I mean, I guess they could bend their own law and break their own law to do it.
But, you know, in a sense, by helping the rebels in the Donbass over the last seven years, eight years, Putin has guaranteed that Ukraine can't join NATO.
You know what I mean?
Because they have this unsettled problem on their border.
It's the same reason that we don't have a treaty of alliance with Israel because they don't have settled borders.
You know, that's, it's this same kind of deal, right?
And I know people get mad when you say that, but that's true.
Anyway, maybe that's why they get mad.
But the point is that.
So, yeah, anyway, so my fault there, Dave, for steering you wrong there.
And then what did happen, you're right.
It wasn't an invasion.
You know, I said on Kennedy the other night, probably my biggest clip because Fox Business Channel posted on their YouTube.
So it got a few hundred thousand views was me saying, nah, he ain't going to do nothing.
Vides climbing down.
But what I actually did say was, one, I don't know the future.
So I'm not saying for sure exactly what's going to happen.
So I left myself that wiggle room there.
And two, though, which I meant at the time, but also I said, you know, I just really don't think there's going to be some Pearl Harbor-like attack with some kind of, you know, imagining the blitzkrieg that the Washington Post said was coming.
And so far, at least, I was right about that.
In other words, what's happened is a coup de Maine where Russian soldiers have essentially just walked right in to areas in eastern Ukraine that were already outside of Ukrainian government control for the last seven, eight years now.
They essentially declare their independence from Kiev right after the coup in the spring of 2014.
And then when the government in Kiev attacked them, the Russians helped them essentially defend themselves and keep that area free of Ukrainian forces.
But nowadays, there is a real question.
And as, you know, the New York Times says about everyone who ever gets shot by a cop, you know, Putin is no angel.
And the fact that he's taken this area already means that he's on the move in a quite literal way in terms of boots on the ground and tank treads rolling.
And the Donbass is not only the area that already was controlled by the rebels.
Traditionally, the Donbass is a bigger region than that.
And I read a thing today that said Putin's ministers are sending mixed signals about, no, we're only taking the area that already belongs to the rebels.
And then another minister comes out and goes, oh, no, of course the entire Donbass is what we recognize as independent here.
And so that could be your trigger for war right there.
I mean, if Putin says, you know, tomorrow morning that, hey, all Ukrainian forces within this line of, you know, what's traditionally the Donbass, you better back up because we're taking it all.
What are the Ukrainians going to do then?
They're going to back up and say, okay, okay, but no further?
Or are they going to fight there?
And if they fight there, then what's Russia going to do?
And it could be that Putin is just essentially laying a trap for them to do something that he can then quote unquote respond to and push further.
And, you know, you mentioned in his speech how he was kind of going off there.
And part of what he was saying was, one, as you put it, you know, resenting the communists as the Soviet Union was falling apart for just giving up the Baltics and giving up Ukraine and Belarus to be independent countries and saying that that was just completely crazy.
But then he's also saying, like, look, the proof is in the reality of what's happened.
You can't just let these countries go free because America will then come and hijack them and take them over.
We don't have independent neutral Baltics.
We have American-dominated Baltics.
And we don't have, he goes, look, who's running Ukraine right now?
It's Washington, D.C. runs Ukraine.
It's not an independent nation at all.
Which you got to admit, there's a point to that.
Governments are just the worst.
It's just the governments are the worst of humanity.
It's like, first off, you have Putin here talking about the best thing the Soviets ever did in their, whatever it was in their 70-plus year run.
The best thing they ever did was let these nations have their independence.
And so then, of course, he's going to be like, well, we never should have done this because look, this other government proved us right by coming in and not letting them be independent nations, but instead absorbing them in this military alliance against the Soviet Union that doesn't exist anymore, which is NATO's mission.
And so, yes, now it does in a weird way, kind of at least to his own camp, prove him right that, well, what are you going to do?
Give nations their independence?
Because then look what happens.
George H.W. Bush promises NATO won't move one inch to the east.
And then every president after him absorbs country after country after country until, what is it, seven or eight former Soviet bloc countries that are now in NATO?
And of course, even in the Ukraine, you know, and we'll get into all of this, I'm sure, but, you know, where there's been a ton of American intervention just in the last decade.
And yeah, you, again, you can understand where that would sell well to a certain segment of the Russian population.
And look, this is a good place for me to make it perfectly clear that even though I always, you know, it's essentially my job is as a truth teller, I end up telling the side of the story that you don't get on the TV news.
So as, you know, Bill Kristol or Jonah Goldberg would say, I am objectively pro-David Quresh and I'm objectively pro-Saddam Hussein and I'm objectively pro-Ayatollah and Gaddafi and Assad and Putin and she and everybody, because my government lies about them all all the time.
So then I'm in a position of saying, well, here's what's true, which is not what they said.
And so then it's really easy for people to misunderstand that I am really somehow a partisan of the Ayatollah or of Putin or anybody else or their point of view or their interests or anything like that.
You hear this talking point all the time.
Oh, those are Russian talking points.
Well, no, they're not.
Like, where do you even get Russian talking points from?
And what does that even mean?
I don't watch RT.
But what does that even mean?
It's like, by the way, that I just hate.
What it means is it represents their point of view at all.
That's all it is.
Well, right.
So, okay, Saddam not having weapons of mass destruction was a Saddam talking point.
That's right.
Sure.
Okay.
But it also happens to be the truth.
So like there were lots of Saddam talking points that were bullshit.
And I wouldn't go like, he's been a completely peaceful, benevolent leader.
No, that's bullshit.
But him not having nuclear weapons and him not being in bed with Osama bin Laden, that part was true.
So how about we just say the truth?
And then if one side likes that part of the truth, the others, you know what I mean?
Like, who cares?
It's just, it's such a nonsensical argument, but I do see it a lot.
I mean, I get this all the time on Twitter from random people.
Oh, you know, you're an Assad, you're pro-Assad or you're pro-Putin.
And I'm like, I hate all governments.
I'm just telling you when this one is lying.
The Cult of the Trillion Dollar Economy00:16:17
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Look, let's elaborate here on the Russia thing because we have like the obvious comparison is to the first and second Red Scare during the bad old days of the Soviet Union, when it was not true that they were really a threat to the American Republic in any way.
But it was true that there were American communists who had a severe ideological affiliation with the Soviet Empire and thought that this is the future of mankind and all of this stuff.
Some of them even gave them nuclear weapon secrets out of ideological commitment and favoritism to their cause and this kind of thing.
You know, Alger Hiss was really guilty.
You know, a top-level State Department guy.
I forgot his exact rank.
I think he was an ambassador at one time.
There is nothing like a cult of modern Russia in the United States or a cult of Putin in the United States right now at all.
And frankly, because look at it, just on the face of it, Dave, he's a conservative Republican Christian with a red, white, and blue flag and a slightly, you know, not slightly, a corrupt capitalist economy and a kind of militarized foreign policy.
Well, we already got that, right?
There's nothing for us to want to like to see there.
There have been very, very few conservatives who from time to time have said, well, we admire the way he legislates against left-wing culture and stuff like that.
You see a couple of things like that, but none of that, for even the slightest moment, for the briefest moment in time, amounts to some kind of cult of Russian influence.
No, and even those like you had as a communist.
It just doesn't exist.
Even those conservatives, like the real right-wing conservatives who might be like something like, oh, well, you know, I like that he doesn't allow like transgender, you know, stuff to go on or something like that.
Those people still, despite how much this country has changed, have this weird conservative impulse that they would never be a traitor to their country and support another.
You know, so there's not, and yeah, it's like nobody is ideologically committed to like, I just love the corporatism that Russia has under Putin.
Those are some fine oligarchs.
You know, we ought to aspire to be just like them, you know?
Yeah.
There's just nothing there for Americans to be invested in.
It just doesn't.
I mean, look at that.
And there's also nothing.
There's also nothing.
And this is a big difference too, is that there was, you know, in the post-World War II kind of immediate, you know, then new world order, where you had, you know, kind of these two superpowers emerge after World War II, which was a very different, you know, a very different world than pre-World War II, where really you would have said like the British were certainly a superpower.
And that was done after the British Empire collapsed.
And now you had the Americans and the Soviets.
I mean, you could debate over who really won World War II, but it was those two countries.
You couldn't really argue that.
And Russia with its, you know, just gigantic army that fought off the Nazi invasion and the United States of America with its kind of, you know, Industrial turned military economy that ended up developing the nuclear weapons and storming Normandy and then dropping two nukes in Asia and all of that stuff.
Right.
And in that situation, there was almost like this argument that was like, well, what's going to win out?
Capitalism or communism.
And there were these two people on different sides of that, lots of really smart people on both sides of that, like arguing that, no, this economy is going to take off and be stronger and more powerful.
And there was even all the way up to like the 70s, there were people who were arguing the Soviet Union is going to blow past America.
And that's what was the Nixon clip.
Paul Samuelson.
Well, but what was the clip with Nixon where he says, we will bury you.
What's his name?
Oh, Khrushchev.
Khrushchev says, we will bury you.
And it's not saying like we're going to have a war with you.
He's just saying like, we're going to outlive you.
We'll be at your funeral.
Yes, we're exactly like we're going to be so rich and you're going to just this thing because they believed in this Marxist, like you're doomed to collapse with this capitalist system.
And that's long gone now.
No, I mean, now you have Russia who's got this tiny economy.
I mean, like whatever they're, I think it was around $1.5 trillion GDP.
And now they've taken a serious hit just in the last few days.
New sanctions have just been announced by Joe Biden.
They're going to be in all types of trouble.
The idea that, like, even if they could take Ukraine, which seems even that still seems pretty far-fetched, but the idea that they're doing any more than that, like that Russia is some type of threat to what then march through Europe or something.
There's just, it's inconceivable.
Yeah.
I don't know, man.
I almost entirely agree with that.
And you're definitely right about the $1 trillion.
I mean, I just looked that up the other day to verify that that was right.
So $1.5 trillion.
We spend a trillion a year on our military.
Yes.
Just put that in perspective.
Entire GDP.
Yes.
Just on our military.
And then if you were to include our allies in that, like in the NATO countries and everything like that, it's way over their entire GDP just on military.
Now, just a bit, I mean, they're smaller, a smaller economy than Brazil, a smaller economy than Italy, than lots of other countries.
So it's just on the other hand, I should say, though, that, you know, the worst case scenario here, I mean, look, they do have a 750,000 man army.
They've got mechanized and armored divisions and things.
And all of this is their near abroad.
It's not ours.
All they got to do is roll down roads from here.
What are we going to do?
We're going to load all this stuff up on ships and sail it up the Black Sea or something like that.
And we're going to somehow ship it through Germany or some kind of thing like that.
So, you know, worst case scenario, Dave, is that Putin says, yeah, in fact, I do want to take all Ukraine.
And then maybe I want to threaten the Baltics.
In fact, you know, remember when they promised, and it is in writing, that they wouldn't expand NATO east to Germany?
Well, I think I'm going to make you live up to that now.
And I think there's a danger here that I really like to think that the Americans have not pushed things so far out of whack that this is how stuck in this trap we are now, where Putin is essentially going to say, what the hell?
We all got to die someday.
I want Poland and Romania and Hungary and the Balkans and the Baltics and everybody out of NATO.
NATO is no longer east of Germany, like in the promise, and I'll just keep rolling east until you give in.
The American and Western European reaction to that would be war.
That would be a nuclear war.
I don't think I don't think that they might, might, might just say tough luck to the Baltics, but I think they'll fight for Poland in the same way that they would have fought for West Germany back then.
And I don't know if Putin is really that angry to do this.
I mean, frankly, look at what we're talking about.
He just walked right into the far east of Ukraine and hadn't really started a full-scale war to take it at all.
This far for 20 years, he's been in power.
He's been extremely cautious.
Let's just make this clear for people.
So I don't know about that.
But that, you know, I think in the realm of possibility, though, dude, I think that he could just say, you know what?
I've had it.
It's on now.
And you're all just going to do nothing but back down to me because you don't have the balls to stand up.
Listen, I guess never underestimate how crazy or evil or reckless people who run governments can be.
So I think that that's fair to say.
But just to be clear about what has happened so far so people understand, because it's like there, so what Putin has taken so far, I mean, obviously he took Crimea a while back.
Was that eight years ago?
Right.
So eight years ago.
And so he took Crimea and now he's sent his peacekeeping, you know, this just like when cops come in to keep the peace or something like that, right?
Like peacekeeping military into the Donbass province.
But this is like really the very east part of where this conflict is going on, which is majority ethnic Russians, which both of them have had votes and voted to be part of Russia.
Now, I'm not seven years ago.
Listen, I don't even know.
I don't have like a strong feeling on any of this stuff about like who should be a part of what country.
I don't know.
I mean, honestly, like I'm an ANCAP.
I believe that like towns and villages should be able to have self-determination.
I really believe it down to the individual.
And I believe, you know, areas should be able to be controlled by what the people and the property owners there want to happen to the area.
But it is, you know, it is just kind of interesting that there's like this whole, you know, the talking points out of Washington, D.C. are like, well, we have to protect Ukraine to protect democracy because we care so much about democracy, which is why we fought the war in Iraq for democracy, which is why we support Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the UAE because of democracy.
And also the fact that there was a referendum in the Don, you know, that that means nothing.
Like it's right.
It's all very like weird.
Like, what exactly do you mean by any of this?
Like, what, like, what democracy?
Democracy just means loyalty to America's interests.
Thank you very much.
Exactly.
It's like, we love democracy, except when Egypt votes the wrong way or when like, you know, right.
So it's all, it's all just right.
Exactly.
It's all just so ridiculous.
But just to be clear, Putin hasn't taken any type of step like that.
Like he hasn't yet walked into an area that really doesn't want to be a part of Russia and really like kind of imposed his will and said like, well, you are a part of Russia now.
Like he hasn't taken Kiev and said, no, you are in, you know, like, so again, I'm not like putting it past him, but that just hasn't happened yet.
Right.
That's exactly right.
It is, you know, the far eastern provinces that essentially have been autonomous zones since the war first broke out right around this time, eight years ago, after the seizure of the Crimean Peninsula and all that.
In fact, I think I read that yesterday was the anniversary of Yanukovych fleeing Kiev after the coup of, oh, yeah, it was.
It was right.
It was the night of February the 21st, 22nd was the coup.
Also, the anniversary of Big Jay Okerson's first comedy special.
I'm not saying there's any connection there.
I'm just saying that both of them happened.
There probably is.
There might be.
There might be.
Yeah.
I'm not sure what it is, but it could be there.
So, but yeah, man, it is the case that there's been reported to be some violence.
A couple of Ukrainian soldiers, they say, were killed.
There's been some artillery back and forth and this and that.
But you're right that as of this recording on Tuesday night, there has not been.
an actual battle, yet a single battle between Russian regular forces and Ukrainian forces on the ground, whether, you know, militia guys or military guys or what have you at this point.
So, you know, and by the way, Dave, I read a thing.
I don't know who this guy was.
He had a Russian name and he was a hawk on this.
You know, maybe he's a Russian expat or whoever he was.
But he had this great Twitter thread earlier where he was essentially mocking Putin and saying this is a huge L for Putin.
That what happened today, rather than being the leading edge of this, you know, coming Russian storm, in fact, is him backing down pathetically and taking, you know, a quarter of a loaf and going home mad.
And so here's his reasoning behind that.
Okay.
He says, look, Putin thought that by building up his forces and, you know, coyly, while denying it publicly, but coily threatening full-scale invasion of at least half the country over the last few months,
that what he could do was he would pressure Joe Biden into pressuring the Ukrainian government into finally abiding by the Minsk II peace deal that Germany and France signed with Russia and the Eastern rebels back in 2015.
Now, according to that Minsk II deal, the Eastern Far Eastern Donbass region, very loyal to Russian interests, would have a major veto power.
And honestly, man, I really should read that whole deal closely.
I've read coverage of it, but I guess I never have really read the deal itself.
So I need to go and check on all this.
But he was saying the deal would give the Donbass region this incredible amount of veto power over Kiev's foreign policy decisions.
In other words, it would really put them in a situation like Belarus, where they are much more dominated by Russia when it comes to their military and foreign policy decisions.
And that Putin thought that by threatening this invasion, he would pressure the Americans to pressure Kiev to go ahead and give, first of all, give the full autonomy that they promised and recognize, I guess, bend the knee to whatever degree and accept the legitimacy in a way that they promised to do, but never did do for the Donetsk and Luhansk, you know, self-appointed governments there.
And that then he would abide by the rest of the deal as well.
But as this hawk told it, he thought he could kind of divide the Americans from the Germans and whatever, but the West stayed united and told him, look, we're not going to do that.
We're not going to give in to your pressure in this way.
And so he didn't want to invade.
He was just bluffing about that.
So now he's like, well, I got to do something other than just back down.
So I guess I'll just, you know, Anschloss the Donbass region there in the far east of the country, and I'll just take that.
Demographic Losses and Strategic Bluffs00:03:38
But then that's a huge loss because why didn't he want to take them in the first place?
Well, there are a few reasons.
One of them was there's an elderly population there who are essentially a net drain on, you know, in terms of pensions on the central state.
They have mostly decrepit old industry that would require billions of dollars of investment to really get up to speed and competitive, with some exceptions, but overall.
And also, even though obviously they've been on the outs lately and have been severely marginalized, he's removing probably the most loyal Russian speakers and Russian-leaning people among the Ukrainian population.
Where before they had this kind of 50-50 split, he's now taking 10% away from that, the 50 side on his side.
So he's now, in fact, strengthening the position of the ethnic Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian speakers on the west side of the Dnieper River there and giving them overall a stronger hand.
Right.
They're not in the Ukrainian state anymore.
Right.
So that's such an important, that's such an important point that I think is really worth thinking about to try to understand this thing because it's almost like you can make this Misesian deduction from this that like, okay, so you have in, what is it?
I think in 2000, it's 2014 that Crimea votes to be part of Russia and he takes Crimea.
And then 2015.
He took it first and then they voted.
Okay, fair enough.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, okay, fine.
But both of that happened in 2014.
Then in 2015, the Donbass region votes overwhelmingly to be part of Russia, but he doesn't move in then.
And so within this situation, you're like, it does seem that like, if you really wanted to take Donbass, then that would be the time to do it, coming right off of this referendum and where you could say, look, they held a vote and this is what they wanted.
And so we're going to incorporate them.
And now for whatever it is, whether it's the cost of the elderly population or the industry or the cost of what the reaction from the world would be or what it would do to, as you were saying, the demographic pro-Russia, anti-Russia demographic in Ukraine.
I'm saying the Mississian deduction is that overall, he felt that that action was not worth taking, right?
And so the fact that he is taking it now kind of, there's something just interesting to think about there where you're like, man, this is something he didn't want when it was a way better situation for him to take it.
Whereas now, when it seemingly is such a big, like it's at least a huge narrative loss for him.
Like this is, he handed all of the hawks in the West a huge narrative victory here by saying, see, we were right.
And the way the hawks work in, you know, the West is that they basically have control of the entire corporate press and even the corporate press that seems to be against each other.
Like, oh, when it really comes down to it, MSNBC and Fox News report exactly the same on when there's a foreign policy issue that they want to push war or whatever.
But he has now, the way it works with them is like, even though they said there was this big false flag coming, that all gets like, you know, swept under the carpet.
And basically what it is is just like, oh, no, but see, see, we were right and you were wrong because he's, he did make an aggressive move and move in there.
So it seems like there's way higher costs for Putin now with way less benefit to go take them.
So, you know, it's interesting that he's doing it now and didn't do it then.
Quitting Nicotine with Mepod Promo00:02:43
You're right.
And it's as this hawk was saying on the Twitter thread there that like, yeah, and it was only because he's stamping his feet as he goes home, like Eric Hartman, going, man, he's got to do something so that it doesn't look like he didn't get anything at all.
So he's basically like, I am, and I got to tell you, this seems, and okay, look, I didn't think he would make this move.
So I'm not saying I know this for sure, but this seems much more plausible to me than the idea that he's actually going to roll through and try to recollect Estonia and the Baltics and like all this stuff.
Yeah, I sure hope you're right.
I mean, I think it seems way more likely that he was like, dude, I am just such a bitch now.
If I don't do this, that I guess I got to at least do this.
My problem is a little chastised because I've been a little too optimistic lately.
So now I'm like, ah, geez, maybe I really need to not be so damn sure that it ain't going to be that bad.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I don't know.
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George Kennan and Convenient Terrorists00:15:35
I asked this guy, Lyle Goldstein, he used to be at the Navy War College, and now he's at Defense Priorities, really bright analyst on especially Russia and China issues.
And I talked with him the other day and I asked him the question about, well, what changed?
Why take the Donbass now when before he didn't want it?
You know?
And Goldstein says, I think what changed is Belarus.
Meaning, America tried to do another color-coded revolution in Belarus in 2020.
Remember, they tried to make that guy's wife, the dissident's wife, the new prime minister, and all that.
And it all fell apart anyway.
And they had the polls running it and all that.
And they had already tried to do a color-coded revolution in Belarus in 2005 called the Denim Revolution.
And they did it again.
And Goldstein says he's convinced for whatever different reasons that he was paying attention to in that moment, I guess, that this really changed the conversation in the national security state in Moscow.
That look, man, the Americans are just relentless.
They're not going to stop.
You know, they're going to try to take Belarus from us.
They're going to try again.
It didn't work this time.
They're going to do it again.
And so at this point, they decided we got to start drawing lines around here.
I mean, and after all, again, I'm saying, again, to be perfectly clear here, what Putin has done here is not reasonable by my standard whatsoever.
But it is rational and it's understandable from the point of view, again, not as unsympathetic, but just understandable, understandable, that the situation in the Donbass has absolutely festered for eight years.
It was a horrible war.
It had 15,000 people killed for about a year and a half, year and a quarter or something.
And then we've had nonstop shelling back and forth the whole time.
Yeah.
People and shelling, that means sometimes people get exploded to death.
You know, so that'll tend to leave hard feelings.
And so this should have been resolved.
You know, and, you know, we haven't spent the whole hour talking about the whole backstory and all of this, but the Americans know.
I mean, the Biden government is the Obama government, less Obama himself.
Otherwise, it's Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken and Victoria Newland and Biden himself are the very same people who were in charge of Ukraine policy under Barack Obama.
So maybe they don't want to say on TV, I really screwed up here, Dave, sorry.
But they could at least quietly whisper that to themselves at night when they're off the clock and having a drink that, like, look, we did kind of screw this up and we could act like we know that and try to figure out, you know, a way to move forward here where we can at least acknowledge to ourselves that maybe we pushed our luck a little too far and find a way to accommodate the Russians and what are frankly their real security interests.
And, you know, yeah, I'm the guy from anti-war.com, but you can hear all kinds of real experts talk like this too, who are not, you know, as ideologically, Ron Paulianly committed to non-interventionism the way that I am.
But, you know, John Mearsheimer, for example, who is, I don't know what his take this week is, but I know that overall his take is the crisis with Russia is America's fall.
We did this.
You know, we being meaning Bill Clinton and W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden and their horrible, horrible East European policies have led us into this crisis when we never should have done this at all.
And, you know, I'm working on a speech for this Saturday that's going to last like an hour and 15 minutes or something, where, Dave, because I keep finding all these great block quotes from the 1990s of all of our wisest, you know, CFR sages saying, don't do this.
Don't expand NATO.
Now, there were vested interests who said, do it, do it.
You got to do it.
But man, H.W. Bush's right-hand man, Brent Scowcroft, said, don't do it.
Paul Nitza, who had written NSC 68, and Robert McNamara, who had been the Secretary of Defense during Vietnam.
And of course, George Kennan, as we've talked about on the show before, but just, you know, Robert Gates, who had been the director of CIA and then later, of course, became Bush and then Obama's Secretary of Defense.
William Perry, who was Clinton's Secretary of Defense.
I don't know if people remember him, but he was not some Democratic liberal partisan.
He was a total like weirdo, egghead, four eyes, wonky guy from the basement of the Pentagon who had risen up through the ranks of the Pentagon as Mr. Civilian Genius Egghead who works there on these tough policy questions and whatever.
And that was where he had come from.
He's now an activist for abolition of nuclear weapons, kind of guy who really knows a thing about it, right?
Not some hippie, but like more of like a conservative nuclear, anti-nuclear weapons activist, the one that you might be maybe a little more likely to listen to than just some hippie, you know, a guy who really knows a thing or two about it.
All of these people said, don't do this.
And they said at the time, anyone who's not in NATO will be being excluded from NATO.
And you're just going to change the lines of who's on the in team and who's on the outside.
And whoever's on the outside, the Russians, will feel like the whole thing is aimed at them.
And NATO is not just a cocktail party circuit.
It's a military alliance.
And as George Kennan said, and everyone should really read this, it's really worth your time.
And now a word from X by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times from 1998.
And you put the URL in archive.is there and get around the paywall.
And it's Thomas Friedman interviewing George Kennan.
And George Kennan says, all the people who are telling us now that this is not a problem, that we can expand NATO and it's not an anti-Russia move.
So the Russians won't mind.
And it's just fine.
Once the Russians do react against this, which they will, then those same people will tell us, see, that's just how the Russians are.
They're so aggressive.
And that's why we need the alliance is to defend Europe from their aggression.
But this is all before the fact.
This is before Poland and Hungary and Czech Republic were even brought in on the first round.
So he's just, you know, his prediction is our present tense right now.
And what do these people say?
The Russians' reaction to our expansion of our military alliance onto their doorstep is the reason we need our military alliance.
And it just goes to show what psychos the Russians are and how dangerous and aggressive they are and why we need to contain them.
But essentially, when you look at those predictions in the 1990s by the grayest graybeards in America who told you so, that essentially makes it like falsifiable, proven fact, right?
That like it's not exactly social science, but yeah, exactly what they told you was going to happen happened.
And for the reasons that they told you.
Right.
And one more rant here because you'll remember your point a lot better than me because I got problems with the hole in my head nowadays, man.
I'm telling you, I'm getting old.
Oh, Chechnya.
One of the things that Putin listed in his rant yesterday, which I think it's fair to characterize it as a rant, was he goes, the Americans backed the Chechen terrorists against us.
Now, that didn't get much headlines or anything.
It's a complaint that he made in his Oliver Stone interviews before.
Yeah, yeah.
Which would have really fascinated.
By the way, I recommend people watch that.
It was really fascinating.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a several-part interview with Oliver Stone.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
The Showtime interviews, and there's a book of it and everything to it.
And it really absolutely is worth your time.
But look, man, that is true.
And that sounds like some crazy kooky thing or whatever.
It's not a crazy kooky thing.
It's true.
And I'll tell you, I got three good sources for you off the top of my head anyway.
The first one is the Washington Post has a great story about how the Saudis were backing the Chechen terrorists for years there while America was supporting the Russian state's efforts against them.
Guess who made his rise to power leading Russia's war effort in Chechnya in 1997 and 1999, Dave?
Right.
Vladimir Putin, of course.
That was his stepping stone to power right there, was winning those wars with American support, fighting against terrorists, who also were backed by America.
We know that.
It wasn't just the Saudis, of course.
It was their CIA partners.
And that is in the Stratford league.
Thank you to Julian Assange and to Jeremy Hammond, not our friend Jeremy R. Hammond, Jeremy Hammond, the other guy, the hacker who liberated those Stratford documents and published them through WikiLeaks.
And we know from in the Stratford documents and the emails there that they describe in detail how the CIA worked with the Saudis to support the Chechens against the Russians under the final years of Bill Clinton there.
I guess, you know, I'm not sure starting when, but presumably like kind of all along through there.
And also the great Colleen Rowley, who was the FBI lawyer whose team in Minneapolis could have stopped the September 11th attack if they'd just been allowed to do their damn job in August of 2001 when they busted Zacharias Massawi, who wanted to know how to fly a plane, but not how to take off or land one.
And if they had only searched his computers, it would have led straight to the boys in Florida.
And that would have been the end of that.
But anyway, she also wrote a great piece about this, about American support for the Chechen terrorists in the 90s.
Now, this is a small thing and long ago and far away as far as the American people are concerned.
But do you remember the Beslan massacre?
You remember where these guys killed a bunch of school children and stuff?
These guys were hardcore bin Ladenite terrorists left over from the Mujahideen wars of the 1980s.
And, you know, just like the Mujahideen from all around the world, they all come out of the 1980s Afghan war effort and the Arab-Afghan international Islamic brigades.
And, you know, so these were bin Ladenite terrorists.
Now, seriously, Dave, what if I told you, and I meant it, and it was really true, and I don't mean it.
This is just a hypothetical thing to make myself clear here.
But what if I told you that?
No, man, it's a real thing that Vladimir Putin trained those hijackers and that Vladimir Putin's FSB was in large measure responsible for bankrolling and training Al-Qaeda and their efforts against the United States in the 90s, trying to sink the coal, blowing up our special operations forces training National Guardsmen in Saudi Arabia, blowing up the Kovar towers and killing 19 airmen.
And that was really the Russians who were behind that.
Not just like, oh, yeah, some lie, but that was what was really going on.
You think you might have a chip on your shoulder about that a little bit?
And we go, first of all, this is just what?
Like some conspiracy theory you're not supposed to take seriously at all?
Or what?
It's ancient history.
Yeah.
That 22 measly stinking years ago, Bill Clinton was committing the highest treason in backing the same terrorists who'd been attacking us already for eight, nine years in as long as they're going after the Russians.
And I will say, dude, you know, it's funny that you brought that up.
And I hadn't really put this together or thought about this, but thinking back to those Oliver Stone interviews with Putin, and I will make the disclaimer on this, that just because Putin says something doesn't mean he believes it.
He's also a former KGB, you know, guy and the head of a state, you know, okay, fine.
But he really seemed to believe some conspiracy stuff about America that even for me or you might be a step too far.
Like, what do you have in mind there?
Well, so I don't know if you remember, but he basically implied in that interview that Al-Qaeda and ISIS and all of these terrorists were basically all American, you know, that these were all American creations intentionally.
And he said, when was he said he recorded?
I think it was like at the height of the war in Syria, right?
Because he was sort of 16, I think, maybe something like that.
Yeah, I think.
But I'll give him a little poetic license there in the sense that I don't know that he was talking about everything they ever did or he didn't look at what's going on right now here.
He didn't exactly say it, but he kind of said, he goes, oh, isn't it like, isn't it convenient?
How it's always Al-Qaeda always seems to be fighting for American ends.
And ISIS always fighting for American ends.
And, you know, he did it in that Putin way, kind of like laughing and going, it's so strange.
It's so strange how we're, but he was kind of implying that now me and you would look at this in a little bit of a different way, where it was like, okay, America strategically tried to use these groups when convenient, then fought wars against them when convenient.
But look, you'd have, I'm just saying, obviously, there are situations like in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen right now, where yes, like those terrorist groups are fighting for American interests.
Now, I'm just the point I'm just making is that it is possible that Vladimir Putin and his people actually believe that this is some giant conspiracy and that this is all created by the by DC and the deep state and all of this.
And if so, the scary part about that is that like, ooh, what might he do if he really believes it's really that bad?
You know what I mean?
Like that it's like this whole thing is designed as a you know counter against Russia, which I got to say, I'm sure from the Russian perspective, you could imagine, you know, the Soviet Union collapses and what, like the next year, we're going in and invading Iraq.
I mean, like, I'm sure from their perspective, they're like, all of these wars in the Middle East are a direct, okay, the Soviet Union collapsed.
We're moving in on you everywhere that you have people who we think are allied with you rather than with us.
And, you know, one of the other things I was going to say, this was going to be my rant before, which you're right, I did remember it.
But I got to say, it almost makes me think as I take a step back and kind of think about this and try to be a little bit humble with the like, I didn't think it would get to this point.
And now, what do I think now?
That I got to say, I think Tulsi Gabbard was really right about something that maybe I should have thought about in my order of priorities a little bit more.
And by the way, I think I told you this.
In fact, I remember now.
I did tell you this, but Tulsi Gabbard reached out to me, said some very nice things to me after my Rogan appearance.
She enjoyed it.
And it kind of made me feel bad for some of the things I said about her when she defended that drone strike in Afghanistan.
I was angry that day as I said some things.
But, you know, I crossed the line too.
It was a fair criticism.
She wasn't, I don't know.
Like, I wasn't wrong, but I probably didn't need to call her a terrorist.
But the point is, but I did appreciate the thing she said.
But she did say in her presidential campaign that her number one issue was avoiding nuclear war with Russia, and that that was the most important issue.
And when people ask me what my most important issue is, I tend to talk about the American wars in the Middle East, the genocide in Yemen, and then over the last two years, like the rise of COVID, totalitarianism, and all of this stuff.
And like, I guess there really is something, as even in this little spot, which I still don't think is going to go there, but as we inch one inch closer to it, where you realize that, like, no, there really is something to what she's saying there.
Worst Case Nuclear Scenarios00:05:48
That actually, the number one issue is that we don't have nuclear war.
There is really nothing that even compares to the importance of that issue.
And if you look at it from that perspective and you go, like, however, you feel, as you said before, it's not like okay and it's not reasonable that Vladimir Putin is making these moves into Ukraine or whatever.
But the fact that you look at the, you know, if you zoom out and look at this since, say, 1991 or whatever, that you have George H.W. Bush promising, assuring that NATO will not move one inch to the east, and that now it's all the way to it.
You know, we're talking about whether Ukraine should be.
And okay, it's not a serious conversation about Ukraine being in NATO, but there was a coup in 2014, and there are all types of American arms going into Ukraine that were all the way up to Russia's doorstep and that we're just flirting with this.
You go, this has got to be, I mean, this, you could easily argue that this is the most reckless policy in world history.
There's never been anything that is more reckless than trying to provoke a country that is sitting, is literally a nuclear superpower and nothing else.
Nothing else other than a nuclear superpower.
And that it's just, you know, if it ever did come to this disastrous conclusion, you go, what a monumental blunder this policy of aggression toward Russia has been.
And again, you don't have to be an anti-war.com or a Ron Paul kind of a guy to feel this way about it.
This is, again, these grayest graybeards in the 1990s, when they warned against this, that was the kind of language they used.
They said, this will be a catastrophe.
This will be the worst mistake we ever made.
George Cannon said the founding fathers are rolling over in their graves.
You know, this is just absolutely unnecessary, the most dangerous, most provocative thing.
God knows this could cost us all of our nuclear weapons treaties with them.
They're going to be humiliated.
They're going to freak.
We can't do this.
You know, and just, you know, I got to quote, I could pull them up here, man.
From, you know, their open letters and all this.
They begged Bill Clinton not to do this.
And so, yeah.
And look, I have always said for years and years, I don't know the first time I coined this or whatever.
The single most important issue in the world that faces all of mankind forever for the indefinite future is America's relationship with Russia, period.
And we could fight a really bad nuclear war with China, but humanity would survive.
You know, at least probably a few hundred million people would live or something.
But if we fought a real general nuclear war with Russia ever, that would reduce mankind down to the very lowest imaginable numbers you could think of.
That would be nuclear winner for maybe decades.
It would mean the seven something billion people in the world today would starve.
We'd be down to maybe less than tens of millions in, you know, at the tip of Argentina or something like that.
You're talking about because the ash and the soot is all would go way up above the clouds where it can't be rained out.
And it'll just block out the sun and cause crop failures across the planet.
And so northern civilization would be completely obliterated by the bombs themselves.
Every major city in America would be destroyed, for example.
And then everybody else would just lay down and starve to death.
And it would be, it would set back humanity on the planet Earth for, you know, depending on what technologies could be saved and that kind of thing.
But essentially, you're talking about setting us back, you know, depending on how you measure it, by a thousand years or 2,000 years or something.
The, you know, the equivalent of the, you know, 100 black deaths.
And I guess civilization.
As you put it like that, and I really think it's important for people to kind of realize.
And again, we're not like saying this is going to happen.
No, no, no.
I'm just saying this would be the worst case scenario, general nuclear war.
That's what it would look like.
But it'd still be the end of mankind.
And if there are talks of like escalating tensions between America and Russia, I think it is important to keep in mind what that worst case scenario looks like.
And then try to think to yourself, is it really worth it to have these war packs and to have these military alliances?
And I recommend to people for anyone who hasn't read, read Pat Buchanan's book, Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War, which is basically all about that.
The whole book is about how like devastating military alliances can be, especially when there's really no need for them.
And I know that this sounds kind of harsh sometimes because people who don't want to think about that risk and want to pretend kind of have this empire mentality that we can do whatever we want to do and we have to stop them from doing this or doing that.
But the idea that we should have alliances with any of these countries, I mean, particularly the former Soviet countries, but I would say even many of the other ones.
I mean, look, if Vladimir Putin wanted to just take Ukraine, all of Ukraine, which is much bigger than anything he's done so far, but even if he wanted to, I don't think that's good.
I don't want Vladimir Putin to take Kiev.
I'm a libertarian, and I think it's pretty clear that the people in Kiev don't want to be a part of Russia, that they would rather be their own independent country.
So I think that's wrong if you were to take them.
Preserving Memories as Lasting Art00:02:09
But number one, do I want to send our 17, 18-year-old boys over there to fight and die over that conflict?
No.
And number two, do I want to risk this?
What we're talking about here, the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of humanity over that?
No.
And I don't think that's inhumane to say or anti-American or pro-Putin.
I think that's just kind of basic common sense.
Yeah, of course.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Back to the worst case scenario.
If we had a real nuclear war with Russia, and nobody's talking about invading Ukraine to force the Russians out or anything like that, but right.
If the war were to spread to NATO countries and this kind of thing, and the war became a real nuclear war like that.
And you're talking about a World War II worth of dead in the first afternoon.
Yeah.
60 million dead when the first bombs start going off before the sun goes down that day.
You got as many died as died in all of World War II.
Killed.
That's the kind of thing.
So, I mean, for me, this could also branch into an entirely different discussion about how we absolutely need to abolish nuclear weapons because no politicians can be trusted with these things or military men either anywhere on this planet.
But, you know, at the very least, as long as we do have these things, let's focus on the mutually assured destruction part about how we can never fight.
And so, therefore, we got to figure out a way to get along.
And look, man, I got to tell you, Dave, in the 1990s, I was a new world order kook.
And what I thought was thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Now that we're friends with Russia, we're going to become too good of friends with Russia.
We're going to invite them to join NATO and then we're going to go to war against Islamic South Asia.
Yeah, I saw the war on terror coming pretty early, but I thought that they were going to team up with Russia to do it.
And that that was going to be the whole thing was they're going to bring Russia into NATO.
Now, If you're going to have a NATO at all, they should have had a, they should have really focused on making it, you know, strengthening the NATO-Russia council or even bringing Russia into it, at least to some degree in a way where they can feel like this is not a raid against them and they are kind of partners.
And in fact, one of the reasons I stopped being a new world order cook is some random guy in my cab said, you think the Pentagon is going to share their decision-making power with the Russians like that?
They're going to bring them into NATO.
We can tell the Germans what to do all day, but if we bring the Russians into NATO, they're going to have a say in what we do.
And the Americans aren't willing to treat the Russians with that level of respect.
So it's just not going to happen.
And I thought, you know what?
That's actually a pretty wise question.
And that was before Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld came and took over the thing.
And once they came and took over the thing, it was like, okay, yeah, this is not so much about figuring out how to get Russia to go along with whatever it is we want to do.
It is much more about arraying these forces against the Russians.
And that was clearly Cheney's view.
But so, you know, there's got to be some kind of happy medium here.
I'm for abolishing NATO altogether, like you said, but just all other things being equal, as they say, you know, a lot of these gray beards back then who were warning against NATO expansion said, instead of expanding NATO, we need to have some kind of common security architecture, which includes the Russians.
So exactly what you call that, hopefully it doesn't mean building a one-world white army of the North to dominate everybody in the South, like was my fear back then of like, you know, the one world government stuff and all of that, but just bring Russia into the same, you know, loose military confederation that the Germans and the French are already in.
Which seems like, by the way, by the way, I never thought I'd be at a place where I go, Alex Jones, one world government seems preferable to the worst outcome here, but that really does.
But by the way, it doesn't even seem like it would be that hard.
It seems like the Germans are pretty willing to do business with the Russians.
It seems like a lot of other European partners, you know.
We already have the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which the Russians are members of.
So, you know, obviously, Dave, if we'd listened to Pat in 1992 and abolished NATO then when Russia was at their weakest point, that would have been a lot easier than abolishing NATO now when Putin is all hot and making threats and all of this, right?
You know, you can't get Western leaders to back down and show weakness and all of this.
But maybe if you do like Indiana Jones and kind of swap out one thing with another in a way, that like, hey, guys, what if instead of NATO, we just really boost up the OSCE and then can integrate the Russians in a way to allay their concerns and, you know, whatever kind of thing in a way.
I'm trying to think for the medium in the long term here.
It can't go on like this.
You know, we want humanity to survive Or not.
I mean, this is crazy to have this level of, you know, I don't know, man.
The Hawks like to always say that, no, you can't ever appease any of these bad guys.
You just make them stronger and stronger and make more and more demands and all these things.
But I'm looking at Putin.
It's been 20 years of this guy in power, give or take, a couple of years with Medvedev in there, who was his right-hand man anyway.
And he's been very cautious.
You know, he took Crimea, but again, only after Obama just absolutely forced his hand by not just overthrowing the government twice in 10 years, for the second time in 10 years, but also, you know, that new government threatened to kick the Russians out of the Sevestopol naval base.
Then they seized it.
In Syria, the Russian involvement there has been extremely heavy-handed in crushing the insurrection there and helping the Assad government do that.
But we got John Kerry on tape, the Secretary of State, the serving current Secretary of State at the time, explaining to some Syrian dissidents that listen, when Russia intervened, it was because Putin didn't want a Daesh government in Damascus.
And that's almost the exact quote.
Yeah.
And Daesh means ISIS.
Daesh means the Islamic State.
That's the Arabic acronym.
And so, you know, spelled out or, you know, pronounced out.
So just simple as that.
The UN.
They were incredibly restrained.
And they were incredibly restrained.
I mean, there was that one incident where the American forces killed a whole bunch of like Russian mercenary types and they really didn't make a big deal about that.
And they were, so it is.
So part of that is what makes this situation interesting because this is no question, this is the most flagrant we've seen, Vladimir Putin, in the whole 20 years.
And there's part of that that like you can look at this one of two ways.
You can go, okay, but he's got a history of actually not being nearly as aggressive as the Western media makes him out to be.
Or you could look at it and go, this is something different.
He's doing something different now.
And perhaps it really is, you know, something to be concerned about.
You know what, too, Rewind four years.
And he gave this press conference announcing all his new nukes.
Now, he wasn't kind of ranting and angry like he was in yesterday's speech that he gave, but it was his State of the Union speech, whatever they call it there in 2018, where he announced this whole brand new generation of nuclear weapons.
And he said, you know, something very close to, I kept trying to tell you to listen to me and you wouldn't listen.
Well, can you hear me now?
And it was like, yeah.
And what's he talking about, man?
He's talking about George W. Bush ripped up the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
And then, so that sounds defensive, but it ain't defensive.
It's like wearing armor to a fist fight, right?
It's essentially changing the balance of power in a way to make it easier to be aggressive.
If we can't fight them because of mutually assured destruction, then what does it mean if we ring their country with anti-missile missiles?
It means that we're trying to make it so that we can launch a first strike, take out as much of their nukes as we can on the first strike, and then shoot down whatever they've got left.
And then mutually assured destruction is canceled and we can have our way.
And, you know, Oliver Stone says to Putin in that thing, something like, hey, man, come on, you know, this is all a boondoggle for the, you know, the weapons manufacturers.
Missile defense doesn't even work anyway.
This is all just about the money and all that.
And Putin says, listen, you know, I think that's probably right.
But like, I'm in charge of security around here, man.
What am I supposed to do?
You put me, you put a bunch of anti-missile missiles around my country.
I have to make better missiles, don't I?
You know, and then so what did he do?
In 2018, he announced he's got these new heavy, well, a couple things.
I think a couple years before the announced new heavy rocket that can take out, has enough multiple re-entry vehicles on it.
They can take out every major city in Texas in one shot, one missile, not one bomb, but one missile has enough, multiple bombs on it that they could take out El Paso and San Angelo and Dallas and Fort Worth and Waco and Austin and San Antonio and Corpus and Galveston and Houston and Port Arthur and completely erase Texas from the face of the earth with one missile.
And then it was in 2018 that he announced, yeah, we got these new other heavier missiles and they're designed to go around the South Pole.
We have no defenses whatsoever and we'll attack you from the South.
And even in their animation, they show the rocket hitting South Florida, where Donald Trump was president at the time.
And then he said they have a new nuclear-powered cruise missile that has essentially unlimited range.
They claim can fly around the world over and over, however long they want, and so can evade any defense and get to whatever target they want to use.
Then he says they have a new nuclear torpedo, which is completely untraceable and undetectable underwater where they could take out any of our ports or anything like that with nuclear torpedoes.
And then, of course, the hypersonics, which are these gliders that supposedly can go faster than Mach 5 or even Mach 7, and which reduce warning time from half an hour to five minutes or less.
I mean, if you fire one from the mid-Atlantic, it'd be in DC in five minutes.
And so gives any, you know, anyone on this side much less reaction time in the event of an emergency and the threat, you know, the computer reporting an incoming threat and all this stuff.
And then he goes, well, look, man, what did you think I was going to do?
You tore up the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
You start putting anti-ballistic missile, you know, defensive missiles everywhere.
You leave me no choice but to up my game.
Game upped, your move.
And people should watch that.
You can look it up.
And they have just the same.
I just posted this on Twitter the other night, actually.
They have just that segment where Putin did, what's it called?
Debuts New Nukes 2018.
And it's pretty tough, man.
This is the guy.
And the thing is, again, look, if it was up to me, Dave, I wouldn't make new nukes.
Again, to me, unreasonable, but rational?
Absolutely.
And would the average Russian sitting in his chair do the exact same thing in the exact same circumstances?
Yes.
Oh, by the way, that reminds me.
Our current head of the CIA is William Burns.
And you and I have talked before about William Burns was the ambassador to Russia who in 2008 wrote home to Condoleezza Rice, Nyet means Nyet.
We know this from the heroic Julian Assange rotting in solitary confinement in the United Kingdom at Joe Biden's behest right now, that they published this document.
And it's about William Burns met with Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Lavrov said, man, we have some real concerns about this bringing Ukraine into Russia thing that I mean into NATO thing that you guys keep talking about.
And that's a really important one.
People can look that up.
Just type in Nyet means NIT, William Burns, WikiLeaks, whatever the hell, it'll come right up for you there.
And you can read that.
But then he also wrote a memoir.
And this guy, Peter Beinart, who's kind of a former Zionist and is cleaning up his act a bit, lied us into a rock, but is, you know, kind of a nice guy.
Anyway, he honestly, Dave, he wrote two books about how sorry he was for that.
So, like, eh, all right.
I don't know.
I guess that kind of helps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Two, not too many two books about that.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, okay.
Better than others.
So anyway, he read William Burns's memoirs.
And Burns in there says, look, man, from the highest halls of power to the darkest slum-ridden back alleys, you know, in Moscow, there is 100% unanimous consensus against bringing Ukraine into NATO.
This is not, you know, Putin trying to come up with an excuse for his behavior.
And this is not just a pet peeve of his.
This is the absolute consensus of every single aspect and faction of Russia's foreign policy establishment, and including the drunks down at the bar and everybody.
Just absolutely no one wants anything to do with this.
They can't stand it.
And so I'm very happy to know this is actually part of why I was so optimistic because I thought, hey, our C d our CIA director is no dummy.
And he's got to be telling Biden, well, look, this is kind of your fault, pal.
So, you know, something that didn't take.
Well, all right.
Look, I know you got another show to get to, so we kind of got to wrap up.
I don't know.
Anything, any final thoughts on this that you want to say?
Or what do you, anything you think is going to happen next?
Are you feeling more optimistic or pessimistic about this?
Right now, I'm very hopeful that the new status quo will hold.
Yeah.
And that if, you know, God forbid, if Putin starts saying, I want the whole Donbass, not just what we already have, that maybe the Ukrainians will say, okay, okay, but just the Donbass, but don't come to the Dnieper River and whatever.
I don't know.
I really, really don't want to see a war here.
In terms of American narrative and opinion and TV, man, I watched a lot of Fox News today.
Oh, my God.
I really got to tell you, man, it feels like 2002 to me.
And I already got such a chip on my shoulder over this whole damn terror war.
Truth, Genocide, and Fear of War00:05:41
And it really is like the peer pressure to go along with the narrative of what we all know is true here.
Again, just like Saddam Hussein, it's true that you can say that Putin is a strong man.
Yeah.
Does he sometimes throw people out windows and stuff?
Like, I don't know, but yeah, probably.
You know, I don't know.
Saddam Hussein was a very brutal dictator if you crossed him too.
So then, as Bill Crystal says, if you oppose American policy or the American narrative at all, you're objectively pro-Putin.
You're a traitor.
You're on the other side.
And this kind of thing.
Bill Crystal is the exact same guy saying the exact same thing 20 years ago that helped get us into the Iraq war.
And I'm working on my speech for this Saturday.
And, you know, I don't give a damn.
You know, me, I'm going to do what I got to do.
But I do feel like there's a little devil on my shoulders saying, man, you really want to come out and blame all of this on America or so much of this on America right now when the whole narrative and consensus is so far the other way.
And of course, on top of that is my little bit of embarrassment for saying that, you know, I think that the status quo is going to hold from last week's status quo and whatever and all of this.
So, but I don't care.
I don't have incentives.
I'm not on anybody's payroll in a way where I have to say anything except how I feel about anything.
So that's what we do.
We tell the truth as we see it.
No, listen, I know what you mean, but we tell the truth as we see it.
And, you know, the truth is that I guess what I would say, what really is A bummer to me and a little bit of what they call a black pill is that, you know, all this kind of talk about like, oh, the right wing has kind of gotten better on foreign policy and stuff like that.
And the idea that even Trump was saying, like, why don't we have like détente with Russia?
I mean, he wouldn't use that word, but, you know, why can't we just make a deal with Russia or whatever he would say?
And all of this.
And I just see so much like on social media and cable news and the newspapers, all this.
It's like the right wing response now seems to be like, oh, look, Biden said Putin would respect him and he'd be afraid of him.
And look, he's not.
So look at you.
You're such a bitch, Biden.
It's almost like they're daring him to do something more confrontational.
And it's like, look, this does feel a little bit like 2002, except, man, the stakes are so much higher with this one.
Absolutely.
So much higher.
I mean, like, look, it's all Tom Cotton all day today.
Exactly.
You know what I mean?
And as fucked up as all these hawks.
Yeah.
Like, but as fucked up as the war in Iraq was and as devastating as it was, there was just really, it was all an imaginary threat.
It was, oh, yeah, the mushroom cloud could be, you know, like, shut up.
None of this is going to happen.
We all knew it wasn't going to, it wasn't going to happen.
No one really thought that like, oh my God, Saddam Hussein poses this threat to us.
And if we try to take him out, he might get America.
There was no thought of this.
This is very different.
And so look, I am, I still would say I'm in like 90%.
I think it doesn't go in this like awful direction.
That's kind of how I feel right now.
But that's not comfortable enough.
You know what I mean?
Like 10% is still like way too big of a risk for what the downside is.
So anyway, you know, I don't know.
I always like to leave on a positive note, but you know, yeah, so there you go.
90%.
We're going to be fine.
Just 10%.
You know, something really bad.
You know, if we're not all Ash by this weekend, everyone can come out and see us give good speeches about why we shouldn't fight.
That'll be great.
Well, there you go.
And I have a feeling we won't be all Ash.
And I have a feeling I'll probably have you on again very soon because I have a feeling there'll be more developments and we'll have to do another one of these and talk about it.
All right.
And you're on another show to run too.
They are escalating Yemen and it is the worst thing that really is going on in the world.
Russia is potentially the worst thing in the world, but you know, by a factor of 10 million, but Yemen truly is the worst thing that's actually happening in the world today right now, T.
So I'm happy to talk about that with you anytime.
Yeah, that was a very short version of the podcast we planned.
That's right.
Yeah, we definitely can't talk about it now, but there is a new move to push Congress to pass some new resolutions on it and all that.
There are activists working hard on it.
So we should talk about it as soon as we can.
It is important.
It is an act of genocide going on.
So that is a very important thing.
And yeah, we'll do another podcast and we'll talk about that.
Hopefully this situation gets resolved and we can just talk about that.
But probably I have a feeling we're going to talk about the latest developments in this within the next few days and maybe talk some about Yemen too.
All right, Scott Horton, you are the man.
Everybody, go if you're if you're not Ash, go read Enough Already.
It's an incredible book.
It'll teach you everything you need to know about the history of the terror wars.
And also read Fool's Eren.
That'll teach you everything you need to know about the history of the war in Afghanistan.
And of course, listen to the Scott Horton show.
Go to antiwar.com every single day.
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Thank you for asking.
Yes, sir, sure is.
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