Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Price Of Empire
Aired: 2022-04-14
Duration: 01:05:15


=== Live Show at Libertarian Convention (03:45) ===

[00:00:01]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:09]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:27]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:31]  Here's your host, Dave Smith.
[00:00:34]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:35]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:37]  I am Dave Smith, the Libertarian Tupac, the most consistent motherfucker you know.
[00:00:42]  And he is COVID Jesus, the king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
[00:00:47]  What's up, my brother?
[00:00:49]  Doing good.
[00:00:49]  How are you, Mr. Smith?
[00:00:51]  Very good.
[00:00:51]  Very good.
[00:00:52]  Can't complain.
[00:00:52]  Excited.
[00:00:53]  Looking forward to just a few weeks away from the National Libertarian Party convention, where me and you will both be there because Thursday night, we got a live stand-up show and a live episode of this podcast, Part of the Problem at the, oops, I'm blanking on the name of the theater, but it's a cool little theater there.
[00:01:14]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:01:15]  Hold on.
[00:01:16]  I'll pull it up in a second.
[00:01:17]  But yeah, it's going to be fun.
[00:01:18]  Come see me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein both do some stand-up comedy.
[00:01:22]  We'll put the ticket link in the description of this episode, and then I'll also tweet them out later on today.
[00:01:31]  So you can go find them right there on my description.
[00:01:34]  The Alpine is the name of the venue.
[00:01:37]  And get your tickets because we're legitimately not that far away from being sold out.
[00:01:41]  We just put it up and more than half the tickets are already gone.
[00:01:44]  So grab your podcast.
[00:01:46]  We were like, okay, well, this venue is a little bit bigger than the ones we normally play.
[00:01:50]  So this will probably be good for it.
[00:01:52]  And then like a couple days, I haven't even tweeted the ticket link and they're like getting close to selling out.
[00:01:56]  And now I'm like, shit, should have gotten a bigger venue.
[00:01:59]  But I don't know.
[00:02:01]  Maybe if we sell them both out, we'll find a way to add a third show or something like that.
[00:02:05]  But I don't know if they, you know, we have to talk to the venue about that.
[00:02:07]  But anyway, the point is what Rob said, if you want to come out, go grab tickets right now.
[00:02:12]  And if you are like a delegate or you're going to the national convention, then make sure you make your arrangements so you're out there Thursday night before the convention starts.
[00:02:22]  So you can come.
[00:02:23]  And yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun.
[00:02:25]  I'm excited about that.
[00:02:26]  And then we got a bunch of other stuff coming up.
[00:02:27]  Me and Rob will be in Chicago in June.
[00:02:30]  So we'll be out there in Chicago doing a live stand-up show, two live stand-up shows and a live part of the problem podcast as well.
[00:02:37]  We're getting back on the road.
[00:02:38]  Of course, Rob's got Summer Porch.
[00:02:40]  Summer Porch.
[00:02:42]  Big one coming up is May 5th at the Top Lobster Ranch with the Tower Gang pod.
[00:02:47]  Oh, that's in Florida, right?
[00:02:48]  That's going to be in Florida.
[00:02:49]  Yeah, Top Lobster just, I think he just moved his family down there.
[00:02:53]  He was a New York guy, but he is smart.
[00:02:57]  So he moved his family down.
[00:02:58]  If you don't know Top Lobster, he does like all of the fucking great art.
[00:03:02]  He's like the guy who made the Scott Horton as Charlie Day doing the conspiracy shit.
[00:03:09]  And he did the Libertarian Tupac with me.
[00:03:11]  And the one with me is Murray Rothbard.
[00:03:13]  And he does like all the art for Josh Smith for the Break the Cycle show.
[00:03:18]  Fantastic show.
[00:03:18]  Go check that out.
[00:03:20]  And a bunch of stuff for like Clint Russell at Liberty Lockdown, another great show.
[00:03:23]  And yeah, really, really talented artist, really great dude.
[00:03:26]  And yeah, so that's a fun one.
[00:03:28]  I'm a little jealous that I'm not going to make it to that one.
[00:03:32]  But maybe next time, maybe next time.
[00:03:34]  Okay.
[00:03:34]  So for today's show, I thought I wanted to respond to an article that I happened to see, which was about the war in Russia.

=== Neoconservative Foreign Policy Influence (10:49) ===

[00:03:46]  And then I think more broadly, just kind of the neoconservative vision for foreign policy, which believe it or not, neoconservatism, as much as it's been kind of, you know, defeated in terms of public opinion, these people still exercise a lot of control.
[00:04:05]  And so even to preface it, by the way, it's a Robert Kagan article.
[00:04:08]  We'll get into that in a second.
[00:04:10]  It was published in Foreign Affairs, which is just.
[00:04:16]  God-awful.
[00:04:17]  And he's god-awful.
[00:04:19]  We'll respond to that in a second.
[00:04:21]  But I thought almost to preface the article, I wanted to bring up this thing.
[00:04:24]  Scott tweeted, Scott Horton, of course, the great Scott Horton, because this really kind of summed up everything that everything that I've been kind of talking about and thinking about recently, which is just basically the idea of the Republicans snatching defeat out of the jaws of certain victory, which is something that they specialize in doing.
[00:04:50]  And I think it's also part of the reason why I'm a libertarian and why I'm a member of the Libertarian Party, because it's like, no matter what, these people can never get their act together.
[00:05:01]  And the dominant force in America for the last hundred years has been progressivism, starting from the progressive era, which was, you know, and if the conservatives had any sense, then they would be very clear in what their goal is.
[00:05:17]  But of course, they're always tinkering around the edges and then just embracing progressive policies, you know, and I mean this from the original progressive era.
[00:05:27]  And so the goal should be a complete repeal of the progressive era.
[00:05:32]  And the only politician in the Republican Party who ever truly stood for that was Ron Paul.
[00:05:36]  But that should be the goal is to repeal all of it, to repeal, you know, public schools and the IRS and the Federal Reserve and the FBI and this, like all of it.
[00:05:47]  We want all of this to be gone.
[00:05:50]  But that's never their goal.
[00:05:52]  And in fact, they embrace all of those things.
[00:05:54]  They won't even argue to repeal, you know, forget the New Deal.
[00:05:59]  They won't even argue to repeal the reforms of the great society.
[00:06:02]  They'll hardly, you'll be lucky if you find them argue still to repeal Obamacare.
[00:06:07]  And then, of course, even when they said they were going to do that once they took power, they didn't.
[00:06:11]  And anyway, so in response to this CBS News piece talking about Mitch McConnell said that the vast majority of Republicans are, quote, totally behind Ukraine.
[00:06:27]  And so Scott tweeted, Democrats, three years Russia gate hoax, lockdowns, passports, massive price inflation, woke to the point of demanding sex changes for children, risking nuclear war with Russia, poll ratings in the trash.
[00:06:44]  Republicans, assassinate Putin, fighter jets to Ukraine.
[00:06:49]  And, you know, you just say, I thought it was a perfect way of putting it.
[00:06:53]  Actually, let me hit the retweet button right there because I forgot to do that.
[00:06:56]  But just a perfect way of putting it to just kind of demonstrate like this is it, it's insane.
[00:07:02]  Like all they have to do is sit here and be like, we're against all that.
[00:07:07]  We're against all that.
[00:07:08]  We're not the people who want all of this insanity.
[00:07:11]  And instead, they go, Joe Biden is just being too soft in his flirting with nuclear war.
[00:07:17]  Anyway, it kind of shows you that this like neoconservative influence is really not been removed from the top leadership of the Republican Party.
[00:07:28]  Although I will say that I think this does not at all represent where the average Republican voter is.
[00:07:35]  In fact, I don't think a lot of that stuff that he listed off represents where the average Democrat voter is.
[00:07:40]  It's just that they keep getting both sides to be more afraid of the other one getting in power.
[00:07:44]  And that's kind of the way this whole game works.
[00:07:46]  But I think most Republicans are still more with like what Donald Trump talked about, which is like an America-first foreign policy and the idea that it's like, no, we care about our country.
[00:07:58]  We don't really want to fight wars all around the world that have nothing to do with our interests, which kind of makes sense.
[00:08:04]  So, anyway, this article is by Robert Kagan.
[00:08:09]  He's one of the like top neoconservatives.
[00:08:11]  He's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
[00:08:13]  He was one of the co-founders of the Project for a New America, for a new American century, excuse me, which was really like kind of the neoconservative blueprint about what they wanted to do at the beginning of the 21st century, you know, going into the war in Iraq and a bunch of stuff like that.
[00:08:31]  And that worked out really so well, right?
[00:08:34]  Okay.
[00:08:35]  So Robert Kagan, by the way, also is the husband of Victoria Newland, who you might remember, Rob, was very high up in the State Department under Barack Obama.
[00:08:49]  She's the one in the infamous FDEU tape where they're talking about supporting the coup there in 2014 in Ukraine and talking about who should and shouldn't be in the new government and all of this stuff.
[00:09:04]  She was also bragging in the middle of that uprising about how much they were supporting it and how much American fingerprints were all over it.
[00:09:15]  So anyway, this is her husband.
[00:09:17]  She's a Democrat war hawk.
[00:09:20]  He's been a Republican war hawk.
[00:09:22]  I'm not sure what party he's with now because a lot of the neocons left when Donald Trump.
[00:09:28]  It's nice that these people can find each other.
[00:09:30]  Yeah.
[00:09:31]  They just sit and stare into each other's eyes and think about dreams of dropping bombs in some conflict that has absolutely nothing to do with them.
[00:09:39]  Warhawksonly.com.
[00:09:42]  Oh, that's kind of sweet.
[00:09:44]  All right.
[00:09:45]  There you go.
[00:09:46]  At least, yeah, at least make it like a good family values thing.
[00:09:49]  I like that.
[00:09:50]  Okay.
[00:09:50]  So here is the article in foreign affairs.
[00:09:52]  It was written last week by Robert Kagan.
[00:09:56]  Okay.
[00:09:56]  For years, analysts have debated whether the United States incited Russian President Vladimir Putin's interventions in Ukraine and other neighboring countries, or whether Moscow's actions were simply unprovoked aggressions.
[00:10:12]  That conversation has been temporarily muted by the horrors of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
[00:10:19]  A wave of popular outrage has drowned out those who have long argued that the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine, that it is in Russia's sphere of interests.
[00:10:31]  I already love this, where he goes, hey, it doesn't matter how we got here, but now we got to go fight them.
[00:10:36]  It doesn't matter if we started it, but now that there's horrors over there, we got to get into this fight and help them out.
[00:10:42]  I also love just the assertion that that conversation has been temporarily muted.
[00:10:46]  I have heard it discussed more than ever before.
[00:10:48]  But I guess in the exact card that they want to play, which is look at how horrible.
[00:10:54]  And I agree.
[00:10:55]  The images we're seeing of what's happening over there are absolutely horrible.
[00:11:00]  What percentage of them are going to turn out to be accurate?
[00:11:02]  We're going to find out.
[00:11:04]  I mean, I'm reading reports right now about like basements that Russians have just been raping Ukrainians in.
[00:11:09]  I mean, if that's happening, it's the most horrible thing I've read.
[00:11:13]  I'll believe it if that turns out to be verified in a month or two from now.
[00:11:16]  But just understand the war machine is trying to feed us as much, hey, this is the worst thing that's happened since like the Nazis.
[00:11:23]  And so we got to go in and invade.
[00:11:26]  And I mean, like, just the media gets to pick what it covers.
[00:11:30]  This isn't the only horrible thing going on in the world.
[00:11:32]  And so, like, I know that we're being sold here.
[00:11:35]  Yeah.
[00:11:35]  Well, so, right.
[00:11:36]  So, I basically agree with that.
[00:11:37]  I mean, I think that, look, war is hell.
[00:11:41]  And do I believe that the Russians are doing horrific things in Ukraine?
[00:11:45]  I'm certain they are.
[00:11:47]  And there's no excuse for that.
[00:11:48]  Now, is every single incident that's claimed by the corporate press necessarily true?
[00:11:53]  No.
[00:11:53]  And as you said, we'll probably find out in time more information about what was true and what wasn't and that.
[00:11:59]  But the larger point to me is just that we can be adults and walk and chew gum here.
[00:12:07]  And if someone were to say that Osama bin Laden and his recruits were motivated by American foreign policy and provoked by American foreign policy, that does not mean that 9-11 was justified.
[00:12:24]  Obviously, right?
[00:12:25]  Like it's, you could still think 9-11 was horrific because innocent people died and think that the provocations that the United States federal government made were also horrible because innocent people died.
[00:12:38]  But there's no contradiction there.
[00:12:40]  There's an important part of it, which is that if it was blowback, so then getting more involved might lead to more blowback.
[00:12:46]  Yes.
[00:12:46]  So in this case, if this was U.S. cause because the U.S. doesn't actually care about Ukrainian lives, so then pretending like we need to be more involved over there to help the people, it's simply a lie.
[00:12:57]  Which would be helping people.
[00:12:58]  Exactly.
[00:12:59]  It's the same as U.S. crimes.
[00:13:00]  Like if you go rape someone, we got to go put that guy in jail because he raped someone.
[00:13:04]  We don't want to be him out raping, right?
[00:13:06]  Government's no different.
[00:13:07]  They caused this and they want more of it.
[00:13:10]  And if we let them have more of it, then they're going to look for more of it.
[00:13:12]  These are fucking war criminals.
[00:13:14]  They want to be able to have their wars.
[00:13:15]  They want to be able to print their dollars.
[00:13:17]  And us allowing them to do more of it will only lead to more of it.
[00:13:20]  So exactly.
[00:13:21]  And this is, it's, it's what the great Ron Paul said on the presidential debate stage in 2007.
[00:13:28]  He goes, he just said simply, if we think we can do whatever we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we do that at our own peril.
[00:13:37]  And his point was just that like, this is, it's at our own cost if we do not understand what the, you know, what's happening here.
[00:13:46]  And so exactly, if you understand what caused a problem, then you're, you at least have some insight into what the solution might be.
[00:13:54]  And certainly that insight would not be to continue doing the thing that caused the problem or in these cases, ramp up the thing that caused the problem.
[00:14:03]  All right.
[00:14:04]  Just proof in concept.
[00:14:05]  Where's the footage from Shanghai and the calls to go in there and save the people from the Chinese Communist Party?
[00:14:11]  We don't seem to be hearing those calls, right?
[00:14:14]  That's another thing about all of this, as you alluded to before, but that's a good example of it.
[00:14:19]  It's very, when you let the corporate press control the narrative, it can become very convenient what they choose to focus on and not focus on.
[00:14:27]  I mean, again, to me, I'm not even suggesting they should be, of course not, should be making calls to invade China because we don't have that option.

=== Empire Expansion and Hegemony (17:00) ===

[00:14:35]  Like logistically, it's not possible.
[00:14:38]  This is also a country with H-bombs and stuff.
[00:14:40]  Like we're not going to do that.
[00:14:42]  But I would think it would make sense to say, oh, well, we could easily put enough pressure on the Saudis to end the war in Yemen.
[00:14:50]  I mean, that's the one that we've been like funding and basically, you know, co-conducting this war.
[00:14:56]  And this is like, that's the type of thing to me that like would be like, well, that's the thing.
[00:15:00]  I mean, if this can be ended with a phone call, then end this.
[00:15:04]  But if you're like, well, this could be ended with invading a nuclear-armed country.
[00:15:08]  Like, yeah, that one's probably not as doable.
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[00:17:07]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:17:09]  Okay.
[00:17:10]  So back to the article.
[00:17:12]  Okay, I'll start from that sentence again.
[00:17:14]  That conversation has been temporarily muted by the horrors of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
[00:17:20]  A wave of popular outrage has drowned out those who have long argued that the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine, that it is in Russia's sphere of interests, and that the U.S. policies created the feeling of insecurity that have driven Putin to extreme measures.
[00:17:36]  Got to say, the argument that Ukraine is in Russia's sphere of interest and that America has no interests in Ukraine seemed to be a pretty strong seem it's an assertion at least that on the face of it seems pretty accurate.
[00:17:52]  Okay.
[00:17:54]  Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the anti-interventionists and shut down the debate over whether the United States should have entered World War II, Putin's invasion has suspended the 2022's version of America's endless argument over their purpose in the world.
[00:18:12]  You're much better on history than I am.
[00:18:14]  Wasn't there some sort of a blockade that kind of provoked Pearl Harbor?
[00:18:18]  Well, it's yes, there were definitely actions that provoked Pearl Harbor, but forget even that.
[00:18:24]  I mean, what jumps out at me here, and this is really what's interesting about like the neoconservative worldview, is that like if you're going to compare Pearl Harbor with Russia invading Ukraine, what is the big difference that jumps out at you there?
[00:18:41]  Well, planes actually hit American soil.
[00:18:43]  Yes, one was an attack on our country, and the other is Russia going to war with its neighbor.
[00:18:49]  I don't know who doesn't see that as like drastically different things.
[00:18:53]  Yes, it was like, it is true that once Pearl Harbor happened, a lot of Americans who were arguing this war isn't our business.
[00:19:01]  We shouldn't be involved in it now felt like it was because we had been attacked.
[00:19:06]  But that's very different than a war between two countries halfway around the world where we have not been attacked.
[00:19:12]  But I'm saying you also got to look at the history of the U.S. provoking wars or provoking the American people to be okay with going to war.
[00:19:18]  Yes, I remember the example in the creature from Jekyll Island with us loading up boats with civilians and also, you know, military equipment.
[00:19:27]  And then when those were attacked by German subs going, oh my God, they're attacking our civilians or Pearl Harbor.
[00:19:33]  I'm not as familiar with this.
[00:19:35]  But I'm just saying.
[00:19:35]  No, but that is a great example of the Lusitana, I believe it was called.
[00:19:41]  I might be getting that wrong, but that, yeah, there was basically, and they put it out there and they said basically, like, oh, look, the Germans just attacked this ship full of American people.
[00:19:51]  Like, why would they do that?
[00:19:52]  This is an act of war.
[00:19:53]  But the reality was that there were weapons on the ship and we were shipping them into a war zone.
[00:19:57]  Like, yeah, you might think of that as kind of an act of aggression.
[00:20:00]  All right, back to the article.
[00:20:03]  That is unfortunate.
[00:20:04]  Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin's inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.
[00:20:14]  Interesting.
[00:20:15]  Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9-11 attacks was partly a response to the United States' dominant presence in the Middle East after the First Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post-Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe.
[00:20:40]  So there's a little bit of an admission from Mr. Noconservative there that, yeah, okay, I guess there is now, you know, basically saying what we've been saying, that, of course, anyone who's not a neoconservative gets like, you know, attacked for saying that, yeah, okay, oh, he'll grant you that there is a little bit of a connection here.
[00:21:01]  There is a little bit of a connection.
[00:21:02]  Now, of course, what he calls hegemony is really just the neoconservative word for empire.
[00:21:10]  You know, hegemony essentially just means dominance over the world.
[00:21:16]  But it's like, yeah, okay, this is kind of a response to our insistence that everyone do what we fucking tell them to do, that we are the leaders of the world.
[00:21:27]  Okay, so this is kind of the cost of that.
[00:21:31]  Okay, Putin alone is to blame for his actions, but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the United States has played and still plays the principal role, and Americans must grapple with that fact.
[00:21:48]  Don't disagree with him at all on that sentence.
[00:21:51]  For critics of American power, the best way for the United States to cope is for it to retrench its position in the world, divest itself of overseas obligations that others ought to handle and serve at most as a distant offshore balancer.
[00:22:07]  These critics would grant China and Russia their own regional spheres of interest in East Asia, in East Asia and Europe, and focus the United States' attention on defending its borders and improving the well-being of Americans.
[00:22:20]  Wait, that's a criticism?
[00:22:22]  Well, that is not a criticism.
[00:22:23]  That would be a bad strategy.
[00:22:25]  He's just saying that these people would have you do that.
[00:22:28]  I mean, but in what capacity does that not sound perfect?
[00:22:33]  Hey, leave them to their corners of the world and worry about our own prosperity.
[00:22:37]  I mean, what's he criticizing?
[00:22:40]  Well, he's going to get into it.
[00:22:41]  He's just saying that that's what we're doing.
[00:22:42]  Because if we just sit here and focus on our prosperity, then they're going to build so much wealth.
[00:22:46]  They're going to come here and then eat us alive.
[00:22:49]  Well, let's let him make his argument, but that's right.
[00:22:52]  The United States' attention on defending its borders and improving the well-being of Americans.
[00:22:56]  God forbid.
[00:22:57]  We can't just sit here in wealth and enjoy our lives.
[00:23:00]  Yeah, really.
[00:23:00]  No, no, no.
[00:23:01]  There's no way.
[00:23:02]  But there is a core of unrealism to this realist prescription.
[00:23:06]  It doesn't reflect the true nature of global power and influence that has characterized most of the post-Cold War era that still governs the world today.
[00:23:17]  The United States was already the only true global superpower during the Cold War, with its unparalleled wealth and might and its extensive international alliances.
[00:23:28]  The collapse of the Soviet Union only enhanced U.S. global hegemony and not because Washington eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Moscow's weakness.
[00:23:39]  Instead, the collapse expanded U.S. influence because the United States combination of power and democratic beliefs made the country attractive.
[00:23:50]  This is such utterance, you know what it was?
[00:23:52]  It's called economic success.
[00:23:54]  That's it.
[00:23:55]  Well, hold on.
[00:23:56]  Let me just finish the, let me just finish the sentence.
[00:23:58]  It made the country attractive to those seeking security, prosperity, freedom, and autonomy.
[00:24:04]  So go ahead.
[00:24:06]  No, I'm just saying he's overlooking the main thing, which is the economic success of our country.
[00:24:13]  That's the reason why we're a dominant player is because we had a lot of wealth and we created a lot of wealth because we were free.
[00:24:19]  And then if anything, like, it's not like we went on a conquest and we took over countries and we became wealthy by taking over like, you know what I mean?
[00:24:26]  There was the opposite of the greatness.
[00:24:27]  It's that we got, it's that we got wealthy and then were able to extract that wealth from our people through the government in order to go on these missions.
[00:24:35]  But for him to say that instead the collapse, you know, so it's not that, ooh, Washington saw the United States, saw the Soviet Union collapse and then went, oh, we're going to expand our hegemony.
[00:24:48]  It's just that we were so awesome that when the Soviet Union collapsed, everyone asked us to expand our hegemony, right?
[00:24:56]  Now, look, there is probably some small degree of truth to the fact that there were countries, former Soviet Union countries, that wanted to be in NATO because, yeah, all right.
[00:25:08]  If sure, who wouldn't want all of the money flowing in and all of the defense protection that is offered?
[00:25:15]  Like, but that is at best not the entire story.
[00:25:20]  I mean, look, we, um, it was a decision made by Washington, D.C. and other Western European countries that after the Soviet Union collapsed, they decided they were going to go fight the war in Iraq.
[00:25:35]  It's not that Iraq demanded we come in and fight this war, talking about the first war in Iraq under George H.W. Bush.
[00:25:42]  It's not that they didn't demand that we come in and go fight that war.
[00:25:45]  That was a decision made in Washington, D.C., by the by the Bush administration, the elder.
[00:25:50]  That was their decision.
[00:25:51]  And you could say that other countries wanted American protection or something like that, but it's our decision to be in a military alliance with all of these countries.
[00:26:00]  That's not just something like, oh, we were just so great that like, what could you do?
[00:26:04]  This just happened.
[00:26:05]  It was their decision, not ours.
[00:26:07]  It's obviously part of this expansion of American hegemony or the expansion of the empire, to more accurately describe it.
[00:26:16]  This was a decision made by the empire.
[00:26:19]  It doesn't just expand.
[00:26:20]  Other countries, it's almost like what he's describing here is like, if other countries just started adopting our traditions and norms and culture and laws, nobody's really against that.
[00:26:35]  As long as we were free, I wouldn't want them adopting them right now.
[00:26:39]  But to put it this way is like, oh, no, you're completely wrong.
[00:26:43]  There's no empire that wanted to just expand.
[00:26:45]  We just kind of fell into expanding this empire because everyone thought we were so awesome.
[00:26:50]  Really?
[00:26:51]  Why do we do it by force so much?
[00:26:54]  All right.
[00:26:56]  The United States is therefore an imposing obstacle to a Russia seeking to regain its lost influence.
[00:27:06]  The next paragraph here.
[00:27:08]  Or just not get crushed by NATO missiles.
[00:27:10]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:27:11]  That's right.
[00:27:12]  Or another way to look at it from the, this is the person who is married to the person, you know, talking about what was going on during the Ukrainian coup in 2014.
[00:27:23]  Another way to look at it is that the expansion of this global hegemony has provoked these attacks, as he mentioned earlier.
[00:27:30]  And that if we hadn't expanded it, these attacks perhaps never would have happened.
[00:27:35]  All right.
[00:27:35]  What has happened in Eastern Europe over the past three decades is a testament to this reality.
[00:27:40]  Washington did not actively aspire to be the region's dominant power.
[00:27:45]  But in the years after the Cold War, Eastern Europe's newly liberated countries, including Ukraine, turned to the United States and its European allies because they believed that joining the transatlantic community was the key to independence, democracy, and affluence.
[00:28:00]  Eastern Europeans were looking to escape decades, or in some cases, centuries, of Russian and Soviet imperialism.
[00:28:07]  And allying with Washington at a moment of Russian weakness afforded them a precious chance to succeed.
[00:28:13]  Even if the United States had rejected their pleas to join NATO and other Western institutions, as critics insist it should have, the former Soviet satellites would have continued to resist Moscow's attempts to corral them back into the sphere of interest, seeking whatever help from the West they could get.
[00:28:32]  Okay, go ahead there.
[00:28:33]  I was going to say, it just seems like he's overlooking people's desire to participate in free trade.
[00:28:40]  It seems like he's looking at a lot of this from some prism of like might and conquering and world like, and what you're really just describing is, I mean, what in America was once a free economy, and so we had great prosperity.
[00:28:52]  And then countries, I mean, I'm not an expert on world history.
[00:28:55]  I'm just kind of looking at it from my lens of free trade.
[00:28:57]  And it just sounds to me like you're describing countries that are getting away from the Soviet Union and trying to participate in world free trade.
[00:29:03]  Like this doesn't have to be a fight and might type situation.
[00:29:08]  You see what I'm saying?
[00:29:08]  Like there's a different lens here, which is just that there's economic prosperity and freedom in trade.
[00:29:13]  And so the more that we invest in that, the more prosperous we are, the more technology we can export to other individuals, and the more people look for that for themselves.
[00:29:23]  So here's the thing, right?
[00:29:24]  He's saying that, look, even if we hadn't expanded NATO all the way up to Russia's borders and taken in these like seven former Soviet countries into our military alliance, that they still would have been resisting being, you know, controlled by Russia.
[00:29:45]  And that might be true.
[00:29:47]  Again, might.
[00:29:50]  But if that's the case, then look, if you're saying like it's better that these countries are independent, like then that they're all a part of Russia's influence, okay.
[00:30:01]  But when you bring them all into your military alliance, here's the other way to look at it, which Vladimir Putin has clearly stated is how he looks at it, right?
[00:30:11]  That now you could say he's lying.
[00:30:12]  You don't have to take him at his word, but at least this is what he's saying.
[00:30:15]  So at least grapple with this other perspective.
[00:30:18]  If you're saying if from their perspective, they allowed these countries to have their independence, and then you just see them all joining up in the military alliance with America and essentially being, as Kagan would call it, influenced by DC, as Vladimir Putin would call it, puppets of DC, then what does that say to him?
[00:30:40]  You could also argue that now you're incentivizing him to view independence as kind of not really a thing.
[00:30:46]  And that the only choice here is really, are they going to be puppets of DC or puppets of Vladimir Putin, right?
[00:30:52]  Because once you let them go independent, all of a sudden they're part of this Western military alliance.
[00:30:58]  So that's the other way to look at it here.
[00:31:00]  And so yes, if you're saying they would have resisted Moscow anyway, and they would have all not wanted to be a part of that anyway.
[00:31:06]  Well, the only real way to have proven that is to not have expanded NATO, not brought them into this hegemony, and to see if you're right or wrong.
[00:31:14]  Maybe you're right.
[00:31:15]  I actually think there's a good chance he might be right.
[00:31:17]  But also some of them might have wanted to go back with Moscow.
[00:31:20]  Like, for example, places like Crimea or the Donbass region, which voted overwhelmingly, right?
[00:31:27]  These places that like seem to want to be, you know, more closely allied with Moscow.

=== Counterfactual Reality of Wars (17:14) ===

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[00:33:20]  Okay.
[00:33:21]  And Putin, and this is an interesting one, this next sentence, and Putin would still have regarded the United States as the main cause of this anti-Russian behavior simply because the country was strong enough to attract Eastern Europeans.
[00:33:37]  I mean, this again is like just one of these neocon assertions that they really have no, like, there's not really an argument attached to this.
[00:33:46]  It's just this is, this would have happened either way.
[00:33:49]  You know, it's like, okay, this, you know, Osama bin Laden still would have attacked us even if we hadn't been bombing the crap out of the Middle East, even if we didn't have bases in Saudi Arabia, even if we didn't prop up Israel and dictators and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Jordan and places like this.
[00:34:06]  Even if we didn't do that, they still would have attacked us.
[00:34:09]  It's like, well, you really don't know that.
[00:34:13]  You don't know that that would have happened.
[00:34:15]  And there's more involved in kind of like asserting this counterfactual reality than just than just, oh, well, that guy probably still would have wanted to.
[00:34:25]  I mean, he's a bad guy.
[00:34:26]  He'd still want to do this.
[00:34:28]  Maybe the question is, would he still want to do this?
[00:34:33]  Would he be able to recruit people to his side?
[00:34:37]  You know, in the case of Osama bin Laden, would they be willing to fly planes into buildings?
[00:34:41]  Would they be willing to strap bombs to their bodies?
[00:34:44]  And that's something that you really got to be able to persuade somebody to do.
[00:34:48]  And I don't know.
[00:34:49]  I think it would certainly be much harder to do that without all of those other elements.
[00:34:53]  And I tend to think it's much more rational to think, no, it probably wouldn't have happened.
[00:34:59]  And so again, the question isn't just like, would Vladimir Putin have wanted to do this?
[00:35:06]  Perhaps.
[00:35:07]  Would Vladimir Putin have ever risen to power?
[00:35:09]  We don't even know.
[00:35:11]  But the question is deeper than that.
[00:35:15]  It's also a question of, would there have been any effective propaganda to convince enough of the population that this was, he was acting in this defensive manner.
[00:35:25]  You know what I mean?
[00:35:26]  And almost certainly no.
[00:35:27]  But the neocons always just in sense insist, which is ironic because he does kind of concede at the beginning that, okay, I'll at least give you something to this fact that some of this is a provocation, but it doesn't matter because he would have done it anyway.
[00:35:40]  Well, I don't know.
[00:35:41]  That doesn't, you know, if you go, you know, if you go up to a guy with a big gun and you fucking throw a rock at him and then you just start shooting everyone, and then you go, well, he would have shot us all even if I didn't throw that rock at him.
[00:35:54]  He goes, well, it's probably better if you didn't.
[00:35:57]  I don't know.
[00:35:57]  You know, it's not, it's one of these things that's unfalsifiable.
[00:36:02]  We don't know exactly what would have happened had we not done this.
[00:36:05]  But all of the people who were like sitting next to you, like, don't throw a rock at this guy.
[00:36:08]  He's got a gun.
[00:36:09]  He's going to start shooting everyone.
[00:36:10]  And then you throw a rock at him and you start shooting everyone.
[00:36:13]  It seems more reasonable to go, yeah, that was a stupid thing to do.
[00:36:16]  You shouldn't have done that than to simply just assert he would have shot us all anyway.
[00:36:22]  All right.
[00:36:23]  Back to the article.
[00:36:24]  Throughout their history, Americans have tended to be unconscious of the daily impact that U.S. power has on the rest of the world, friends and foes alike.
[00:36:34]  They are generally surprised to find themselves the target of resentment and of the kinds of challenges posed by Putin's Russia and President Z's China.
[00:36:45]  I always fuck up.
[00:36:47]  They hate us because we're free.
[00:36:48]  That's basically this.
[00:36:50]  You don't understand how much these people just hate us because we like our lives over here.
[00:36:54]  Well, and also the fact that they go, you know, that Americans are often surprised to find out about this stuff.
[00:36:59]  I mean, a big part of that is what we were mentioning earlier with what the corporate press chooses to tell the American people about and what they don't.
[00:37:05]  I mean, if you literally, if you just listened to CNN, you know, or like something like that, and you were, you know, wondering why so many Muslims hate us for propping up Israel, you'd probably have this editor.
[00:37:20]  You'd be like, I don't know that Israelis just want to live their lives and be free and they're a democracy.
[00:37:26]  And all these Muslims keep like shooting rockets at them.
[00:37:31]  So of course, Israel has a right to defend itself.
[00:37:33]  That's kind of, that's the conversation that's happening on CNN.
[00:37:36]  So of course you'd be like, wait, they hate us for that?
[00:37:39]  That's insane.
[00:37:40]  But there's a whole other part of this story that you're not being told.
[00:37:43]  And if you know the whole story, then it does, you kind of would understand like why a lot of people would hate us for that.
[00:37:50]  So anyway, Americans, back to the article, Americans could reduce the severity of these challenges by wielding U.S. influence more consistently and effectively.
[00:38:01]  They failed to do this in the 20s and the 30s, allowing aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan to go unchecked until it resulted in a massively destructive world war.
[00:38:12]  They failed to do so in recent years, allowing Putin to seize more and more land until he invaded all of Ukraine.
[00:38:18]  After Putin's latest move, Americans may learn the right lesson, but they will still struggle to understand how Washington should act in the world if they don't examine what happened with Russia.
[00:38:31]  And that requires continuing the debate over the impact of U.S. power.
[00:38:38]  So this is all the kind of neoconservative revisionist history.
[00:38:45]  But of course, it is the revisionist history that's become like, I guess, technically not even revisionist history anymore because it's become almost like the official history TM.
[00:38:54]  Like that's what you're, you know, what you're supposed to believe.
[00:38:59]  So the idea that the problem that America failed to But wield American influence more consistently and effectively.
[00:39:11]  Let's also be clear here: influence is a euphemism for force.
[00:39:15]  He's not asking that we wield influence, right?
[00:39:19]  He's not saying that we, you know, we go out there and say, Hey, Vladimir Putin, just so you know, we don't agree with what you're doing.
[00:39:25]  He's talking about force, talking about sending in weapons, military confrontation, things like that.
[00:39:30]  The idea of, I always find this just so, like, if in the late 19 teens, America fought, joined in this huge war in Europe, was the biggest war in the history of the world at that time.
[00:39:49]  Okay, like they called it the war to end all wars or the great war, which is now known as World War I.
[00:39:56]  Okay.
[00:39:57]  So the idea that you just start in the 20s and 30s and go, oh, the problem was we didn't use enough force.
[00:40:04]  You see?
[00:40:06]  We fought in this world war, and then there was another world war later.
[00:40:10]  And the problem was really that in between time when we weren't fighting a world war.
[00:40:14]  See?
[00:40:15]  But if you actually look at it, it's like, well, no, I mean, look, objectively speaking, there is no way the war ends up the way it ends up unless the Americans get involved.
[00:40:28]  Okay.
[00:40:28]  So what happened at the end of World War I was a direct result of the United States of America getting involved in World War I.
[00:40:36]  And as you pointed out with this ship and all of this stuff, under very shady pretext, that really did not, there was really no reason for this to be America's war.
[00:40:48]  So again, just a little bit of the context on the history here, which you were absolutely right on before this.
[00:40:54]  But so from America, although it was certainly not a libertarian country, was debatably the most free market country that had ever existed from the end of the Civil War, from 1865 into, say, 1912, the United States of America, so ending it like what, five years before World War I starts, right?
[00:41:18]  So in this period of time, the end of the Civil War to five years before the First World War, America has, and try to imagine this, right?
[00:41:28]  There is no income tax.
[00:41:31]  There is no central bank.
[00:41:34]  There is no federal regulatory state.
[00:41:38]  This is the federal spending is, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of like 2% of the national income.
[00:41:46]  By the standards that we think of government now, it is the tiniest you could imagine.
[00:41:52]  There was truly a free market.
[00:41:55]  And in this period of time, the average, like, you know, lot and life of the average American person grows and shoots up by more than in any other period.
[00:42:08]  We become the wealthiest country in the world.
[00:42:12]  It's the fastest rise in the standard of living for average people in the history of the world at the time, by far.
[00:42:22]  And this is basically, as far as things that happen in the real world, this is about as close to a miracle as you could imagine.
[00:42:31]  Now, you can, you know, you can, I'm not saying you can't look at any little thing there in there that was like bad.
[00:42:37]  Oh, there were bad working conditions here, or bad things happened during this time, or different groups of people were treated bad.
[00:42:42]  But I'm saying if you zoom out and have a perspective of history, that things got so much better for the average person than they had ever been before that time.
[00:42:51]  You know, at the beginning of the 18th century, you know, you're wearing clothes that, you know, even wealthy people are wearing clothes that their mother made for them, knitted for them.
[00:43:02]  You know what I mean?
[00:43:04]  At the beginning of the, or I'm sorry, at the beginning of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, people are ordering things from Macy's.
[00:43:13]  It's just like a different world to the level of which you can imagine.
[00:43:17]  Instead of like everybody doing backbreaking agricultural work, there are people working in factories and producing far more with their labor than ever before.
[00:43:28]  Okay.
[00:43:29]  Then a few years later, then you have the progressive era really start to take hold.
[00:43:33]  They create an income tax.
[00:43:34]  They create the Federal Reserve.
[00:43:35]  A couple of years later, we're in World War I.
[00:43:37]  Okay.
[00:43:38]  Now, because America came into the war late, basically, the European countries were fighting to what most people thought was going to be a stalemate.
[00:43:48]  And basically, they were like fighting to a stalemate, and probably they would have had to come to some resolution.
[00:43:55]  There is no way that that resolution would have been the unconditional surrender of Germany and then Germany owing all of the war debts for all of the countries, taking full responsibility, completely humiliating the people in Germany, right?
[00:44:08]  So, but late in the war, America enters and America enters now as the richest country in the world, and we were fresh.
[00:44:16]  So, we come into a war where everybody else has been fighting on their own soil.
[00:44:20]  We haven't been fighting on our own soil.
[00:44:22]  We come in there, we dominate, and it leads to an overwhelming victory where all of this does happen.
[00:44:27]  It ends in the Treaty of Versailles, completely humiliates the German people.
[00:44:32]  And of course, this was the main impetus for Hitler.
[00:44:35]  You know, like this was what he was railing against when he was talking.
[00:44:38]  Then, of course, in 1929, so the Germany is trying to rebuild here after the Treaty of Versailles and all of that.
[00:44:49]  And they're taking out a lot of debt in order to do it.
[00:44:54]  And after the Great Depression in 1929, basically all the debt was called in.
[00:45:00]  And so this sent Germany into a spiraling depression.
[00:45:04]  And it wasn't until after that that the Nazis actually won some elections.
[00:45:08]  They were the laughingstocks in Germany.
[00:45:10]  They were considered like a completely fringe third party that had no chance of winning, or third or fourth or fifth, however many parties there were at the time, that no chance of winning.
[00:45:18]  So again, and the Great Depression was entirely caused by the bubble that the Federal Reserve created.
[00:45:24]  So this was all the progressive error and interventionism that led to the rise of Nazis, of the Nazi regime.
[00:45:32]  But of course, they just Kagan will just glance all over that as the problem was we weren't not enough force, not enough government force.
[00:45:40]  That's why it all happened.
[00:45:41]  Okay.
[00:45:42]  Sorry, that was a bit of a long rant, but I think it's important to understand what's wrong with what he's arguing here.
[00:45:50]  Okay, so in what way, back to the article.
[00:45:53]  So in what way might the United States have provoked Putin?
[00:45:57]  One thing needs to be clear.
[00:45:59]  It was not by threatening the security of Russia.
[00:46:02]  Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have objectively enjoyed greater security than at any time in recent memory.
[00:46:09]  Russia was invaded three times over the past two centuries, once by the French, once by France, twice by Germany, during, sorry, once by France and twice by Germany.
[00:46:20]  During the Cold War, Soviet forces were perpetually ready to battle the United States and NATO forces in Europe.
[00:46:27]  Yet since the end of the Cold War, Russia has enjoyed unprecedented security on its western flanks.
[00:46:33]  Even as NATO has taken in new members to its east, Moscow even welcomed what was in many ways the most significant addition to the alliance, a reunified Germany.
[00:46:44]  When Germany was reunifying at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, favored anchoring it in NATO.
[00:46:52]  As he told the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, he believed that the best guarantee of Soviet and Russian security was a Germany contained within European structures.
[00:47:05]  Okay, so the fact that they, um, that at a certain point, you have to think here what he's talking about in the um in the 80s.
[00:47:16]  So you're talking about 35 years out is not that long.
[00:47:22]  It may seem like a really long time, but like, I don't know, I'm older than 35.
[00:47:26]  Um, I actually have memories of 35 years ago, not the clearest memories, but I remember, you know, it's not that long ago.
[00:47:31]  You're talking about 35 years out from the Nazis invading.
[00:47:36]  And the idea that at that point, you'd be like, yeah, I want Germany to be unified and under this kind of bigger umbrella because you're worried about the Germans, you know, maybe like going off and doing their own thing.
[00:47:49]  That's not crazy.
[00:47:50]  But that also does, it doesn't matter if you say that, like, look, nobody's invaded Russia and nobody's since the collapse of the Soviet Union, or even to say, hey, look, they were invaded way worse in the past.
[00:48:02]  This is all just like one weird perspective way to look at this.
[00:48:05]  There's a whole different angle that you could look at this from, which is that, right?
[00:48:11]  Just look at it this way.
[00:48:12]  The United States of America's federal government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
[00:48:17]  This has been true over the last 20 years.
[00:48:19]  There's no question about it.
[00:48:20]  We've fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and Somalia and Yemen, all over the place, right?
[00:48:27]  At the same time, over this course, we've been expanding NATO closer and closer to Russia's borders.
[00:48:33]  And at the same time, coming from what is really the driving factor of the war machine, which is what, like the deep state, the CIA, and stuff like this, they've been accusing Russia of war crimes that were complete bullshit, left and right, over the last few years.

=== Federal Government Violence Purveyor (03:45) ===

[00:48:50]  They accused them of intervening in the election to make sure that Hillary Clinton, the rightful president, lost and Donald Trump won.
[00:48:57]  That was bullshit.
[00:48:58]  They accused them of what, the Hunter Biden laptop propaganda in order to overthrow the results of another election.
[00:49:05]  That was complete bullshit.
[00:49:06]  They accused them of having bounties on U.S. soldiers' heads in Afghanistan.
[00:49:11]  That is like an absolute act of war, if true, unfortunately.
[00:49:16]  Also, all bullshit.
[00:49:17]  And one after the other, after the other, after the other.
[00:49:20]  So the question is not, was this as bad as those previous invasions?
[00:49:25]  Or have we invaded Russia yet?
[00:49:27]  Or did Russia once support the idea of a unified Germany under the U.S. hegemony?
[00:49:33]  The question is: is a country that's been invaded three times in the last two centuries now seeing the greatest purveyor of violence, a militarily aggressive country coming closer and closer to its doorstep and also lying, setting the pretense for a war up in front of them?
[00:49:53]  Would that be concerning to you or not?
[00:49:56]  Would you see that as a threat, as a provocation?
[00:49:59]  That's the question.
[00:50:00]  And the answer is overwhelmingly obvious.
[00:50:05]  Does that make sense?
[00:50:06]  Yes, I'm on board.
[00:50:08]  All right.
[00:50:09]  Ripping this guy to shreds.
[00:50:10]  There we go.
[00:50:11]  All right.
[00:50:11]  He's got more of actual history than I do.
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=== Risks to Maintain Global Hegemony (12:39) ===

[00:52:35]  For the 70 plus years since World War II, the United States has actively worked to keep revisionists at bay.
[00:52:43]  But many Americans hoped that with the end of the Cold War, this task would be finished and that their country could become a quote normal nation with normal, which was to say limited, global interests.
[00:52:55]  But the global hegemon cannot tiptoe off the stage as much as it might wish to.
[00:53:02]  I love that.
[00:53:02]  As much as we don't want to be an empire, you can't just stop.
[00:53:07]  It especially cannot retreat where there are still major powers that, because of their history and sense of self, cannot give up old geopolitical ambitions unless Americans are prepared to live in a world shaped and defined by those ambitions as it was in the 1930s.
[00:53:26]  So, essentially, okay, I know a lot of you say we should be a normal country.
[00:53:32]  A lot of you might say, now that the Soviet Union doesn't exist, which was the whole justification for these neoconservatives to believe in empire to begin with, now that it doesn't exist, it's like, great, we don't have to.
[00:53:44]  We can kind of focus on our own country and our own people and our own region and our own lives.
[00:53:48]  We can worry about, you know, maintaining America as a prosperous and peaceful society rather than worrying about a border conflict halfway around the world.
[00:53:59]  Okay.
[00:54:00]  A lot of you think that, but you're stupid because then Hitler is essentially what this argument comes down to.
[00:54:09]  That, well, I mean, you can't do that, not when there's other global powers, because then you'll be in a world where those other global powers, you know, shape the world.
[00:54:18]  But they wouldn't really be shaping our world.
[00:54:21]  In other words, then you'd live in a world where maybe Russia absorbs Ukraine.
[00:54:29]  Now, just to be clear here, that the American people, like what we're talking about here, this empire, this hegemony, costs us somewhere in the ballpark of a trillion dollars a year to maintain.
[00:54:41]  So, a trillion dollars a year has to be sucked out of the United States of America's economy to make sure that we are the dominant force in Eastern Europe and in Southeast Asia and in the Middle East and in Northern Africa and all across the world.
[00:54:59]  Because, again, Hitler, because then it's 1930s, because everything is defined by that.
[00:55:06]  Of course, as we mentioned just a few minutes ago, that's not really the story of the 1930s.
[00:55:11]  The story is not that America was not involved in the world stage and that that's why Hitler rose to power.
[00:55:18]  And in fact, he never would have risen to power if we hadn't been involved.
[00:55:21]  And again, we can walk and chew gum here.
[00:55:23]  That doesn't mean you're justifying Hitler.
[00:55:25]  That means you're explaining the conditions which allowed him to rise to power.
[00:55:29]  And if you want to mitigate the risk of it, invest in economic prosperity.
[00:55:34]  This whole fictional landscape of needing to go to war and conquer people.
[00:55:37]  It's like you win people over by living a better life.
[00:55:40]  All right.
[00:55:41]  And to be clear, and no, you're absolutely right.
[00:55:44]  But then also just to be clear with it, this is the reason why we can't have economic prosperity.
[00:55:49]  It's actually, it's not just like that we should focus on one and not the other.
[00:55:52]  It's like, if we choose this, then we can't have that.
[00:55:55]  You're not going to have a free market economy.
[00:55:58]  You're not going to have a prosperous economy when you're being a world empire.
[00:56:03]  This is that it's, it's, you, we destroy our own soul as we search the world for monsters to slay.
[00:56:10]  Um, and that, yeah, you're not like, you're not going to abolish the IRS when you have a trillion-dollar empire to maintain because you got to get those funds somewhere.
[00:56:21]  And once you create an IRS, they're not just going to tax you for the empire.
[00:56:26]  They're also going to start up all of these other programs because why not?
[00:56:29]  We've already given them the power.
[00:56:31]  And that's the problem.
[00:56:32]  That this is like why war is the health of the state, because it's not just the trillion dollars a year that we have to, you know, spend for this thing.
[00:56:39]  It's also like the spying apparatus that's justified under the banner of we're fighting this war on terrorism, right?
[00:56:46]  It's also the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA and like all of these other things.
[00:56:51]  So there's no, what you're talking about is the prosperity that is a result of the American people enjoying freedom, of us enjoying a free society.
[00:57:00]  And you're not going to enjoy a free society when you build up the empire, when you build up the military-industrial complex.
[00:57:09]  And by the way, even if some great leader who was going to give us a free society or fight to reduce the size of government ever rose up, well, he would be completely boxed in at best by the military-industrial complex and the deep state, right?
[00:57:23]  So you really can't have both.
[00:57:26]  Okay, back to the article.
[00:57:27]  The United States would be better served if it recognized both its position in the world and its true interests in preserving the liberal world order.
[00:57:38]  Liberal world order, another term for hegemony, another euphemism for empire.
[00:57:45]  I was going to say democracy, Freudian slip.
[00:57:48]  Okay, in the case of Russia, this would have meant doing everything possible to integrate it into the liberal order politically and economically while deterring it from attempting to recreate its regional dominance by military means.
[00:58:01]  The commitment to defend NATO allies was never meant to preclude helping others under attack in Europe, as the United States and its allies did in the case of the Balkans in the 1990s.
[00:58:12]  And the United States and its allies could have resisted military efforts to control or seize land from Georgia and Ukraine.
[00:58:19]  Imagine if the United States and that democratic world had responded in 2008 or 2014 as they have responded to Russia's latest use of force when Putin's military was even weaker than it has proved to be now, even as they kept extending an outstretched hand in case Moscow wanted to grasp it.
[00:58:40]  The United States ought to be following the same policy toward China.
[00:58:43]  Make clear that it is prepared to live with a China that seeks to fulfill its ambitions economically, politically, and culturally, but that it will respond effectively to any Chinese military action against its neighbors.
[00:58:57]  It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict.
[00:59:06]  Let's just be clear about this.
[00:59:08]  He's saying that we should have been more aggressive in 2008 or 2014.
[00:59:12]  In 2014, of course, he's responding to Russia walking into Crimea, absolutely minimum to zero bloodshed.
[00:59:25]  Something like five or six people ended up dying, and it's not clear that they were killed by the Russians.
[00:59:30]  After Crimea had voted in a referendum over whether they wanted to be part of Russia, the overwhelming majority wanted to be part of Russia.
[00:59:37]  Putin walked in, had an almost bloodless seizing of Crimea.
[00:59:45]  But man, we really should have just really had some harsh military response to that.
[00:59:49]  And sure, that would have meant risking conflict, but Putin was weaker then, and he's stronger now.
[00:59:55]  But the problem is he still had all of the nuclear weapons.
[00:59:57]  He still had thousands of nuclear weapons at that point.
[00:59:59]  So when you're talking about risking conflict, you're talking about risking tens to hundreds of millions to billions of people dying.
[01:00:08]  And maybe we should act now and take out all the weak players before they get strong.
[01:00:12]  I mean, think about how many people out there must have global Iran.
[01:00:17]  I mean, why haven't we taken out Iran before they go get this nuke?
[01:00:20]  I mean, they got global.
[01:00:20]  It's amazing.
[01:00:21]  Everyone's got global ambitions.
[01:00:22]  We better start knocking everyone off.
[01:00:24]  Isn't it something?
[01:00:25]  Everyone has global ambitions while you're defending hegemony and the liberal world order, right?
[01:00:32]  Better get out there.
[01:00:32]  Better walk off Canada.
[01:00:34]  There is.
[01:00:34]  The last thing I want is Canada deciding that they want to expand into, I don't know where they would go because they're not going to take Alaska.
[01:00:40]  Where else they go?
[01:00:41]  Greenlanders?
[01:00:41]  Well, look, I'm just saying it is pretty, there's something like almost like a psychological component to this of projection that as you're arguing for a world empire, you're saying everybody else wants world empire.
[01:00:54]  They're all trying to take over the world, which is why we have to take over the world.
[01:00:59]  Like, yeah, okay.
[01:01:01]  I don't know.
[01:01:02]  I mean, I certainly think that Russia wants more influence in its sphere.
[01:01:06]  I certainly think China wants more influence in its sphere.
[01:01:09]  I think that's kind of normally what countries want, what governments want.
[01:01:15]  Do you really think they're looking at what America's done and just waiting in line to be next?
[01:01:21]  Oh, yeah.
[01:01:22]  I really want to go fight a war in Afghanistan and bankrupt my whole country and destroy the culture and have everybody turned against each other and be on this completely unstable trajectory.
[01:01:33]  And we don't even have Afghanistan.
[01:01:35]  We have all their prime cave real estate.
[01:01:38]  We don't want nothing.
[01:01:39]  Right.
[01:01:40]  You know, look, and as Scott Horton points out quite a bit, we're a far richer country than China and far, far richer country than Russia.
[01:01:51]  And we're going broke trying to maintain a world empire.
[01:01:55]  So the idea that any of them even have this in them is just, it's just not reality.
[01:02:03]  Anyway, back here.
[01:02:06]  But back to the article.
[01:02:07]  But Washington is risking conflict now.
[01:02:10]  Russia's ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation.
[01:02:14]  It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains.
[01:02:26]  Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Russia, the risk of Moscow using it, is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014.
[01:02:38]  If the West had intervened then, and it has always been extraordinarily small, Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.
[01:02:50]  If the United States and its allies, with their combined economic, political, and military power, had collectively resisted Russia's expansion from the beginning, Putin would have found himself constantly unable to invade neighboring countries.
[01:03:06]  So he's basically saying that, you know, yeah, there's a risk of nuclear war.
[01:03:15]  There is a risk.
[01:03:17]  But I think it's small.
[01:03:20]  So let's stop this guy from what?
[01:03:23]  We should have stopped him from going into Crimea.
[01:03:25]  He's not even, by the way, arguing that because there's thousands of people dying in Ukraine, we have to stop him now.
[01:03:30]  No, no, no.
[01:03:30]  He's saying we should have stopped him when there was next to nobody dying for going into Crimea.
[01:03:35]  And we should have risked nuclear war because, eh, I don't know, it really doesn't benefit him to start a nuclear war.
[01:03:43]  That is a risk that I think sane people who are thinking about this are not comfortable taking.
[01:03:53]  So, in other words, we should risk, however small he may think it is, I don't know how small it is.
[01:03:59]  You know, Putin might have a line where eventually he's like, well, fuck it.
[01:04:02]  This is all I have.
[01:04:03]  And like, I have to do this.
[01:04:04]  I don't know.
[01:04:06]  But the idea that we should risk nuclear war so that Russia does not have more influence or control in Eastern Europe is madness.
[01:04:15]  This is even crazier than any of their project for a new American centuries plans.
[01:04:21]  This is even crazier than supporting the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or in Libya, in Syria, the genocide in Yemen, any of it.
[01:04:30]  The idea that we should risk nuclear war and for what?
[01:04:34]  So that we can maintain hegemony.
[01:04:39]  So that we can have an empire.
[01:04:42]  We have to risk killing potentially hundreds of millions of people.
[01:04:49]  That's the neoconservative position.
[01:04:51]  My God, do these maniacs need to be completely rejected?
[01:04:55]  And I guess they have been largely rejected by the American people.
[01:04:59]  But man, the fact that these guys still write articles like this, musing about risking nuclear war in order to maintain the empire, it's really something.
[01:05:09]  All right, that's our episode for today.
[01:05:10]  We're going to wrap it up here.
[01:05:11]  Thank you guys very much for listening.
[01:05:14]  We'll catch you next time.