Oct. 25, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
35:00
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Now you have, you know, members of the security state, or former members, like Petraeus, like Panetta, like Kinzinger, saying that if there is a nuclear use by Russia in Ukraine, that we must get directly involved in this war. | ||
| We must now bomb every Russian military asset in Ukraine, sink every ship that Russia has in the Black Sea. | ||
| This is what, you know, very respected people in the Beltway are calling for. | ||
| We could, this could tip over into a hot war in which we are a full belligerent at any minute. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the founder of Kraft Ventures and one of the co-hosts of the All In podcast, David Sachs. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Great to be with you, Dave. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| David, when I contacted you a couple weeks ago to come back on, it was because you were getting all sorts of people very angry at you over this Ukraine-Russia thing, and it's bizarre, at least from where I sit, because to me you've been one of kind of the most sober, hey, let's not rush into war, what are we doing here, is this costing us money, and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| That's the voice that you have been. | ||
| But I didn't even know you really cared about international relations to this extent before that. | ||
| So maybe for people that don't know you or why we're even having this conversation, maybe we should start there. | ||
| Why did you get involved in this whole conversation? | ||
| Well, I can't imagine an issue that is more important to all of us than whether we get in World War III. | ||
| And it was Biden himself, it was Biden himself who said just the other day, That the United States was at the risk of getting into what he called Armageddon. | ||
| He said that we face the most serious risk of getting into a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. | ||
| And the one time you can really believe Biden is when he's off prompter, right? | ||
| He's saying things spontaneously off the cuff. | ||
| So I actually believe that this is what he thinks. | ||
| And these are the conversations that are happening inside the White House. | ||
| And so I think we all should be very concerned about where this war is leading us. | ||
| In terms of my interest, I mean, foreign policy has been an interest of mine for a while, but when I saw what was happening on this issue and where it was leading, and specifically, we're in an escalatory spiral with Russia, which is, you know, another nuclear power. | ||
| It's the country in the world that has the most nuclear weapons. | ||
| It's really the only country in the world that can truly threaten our own security because of the sheer number of ICBMs that they have. | ||
| This is the only Achilles heel that we really have. | ||
| Our military is so vastly more powerful than anybody else. | ||
| No one can really touch us except for this one issue of ICBM. | ||
| So they do pose a real threat to us. | ||
| So we need to be very concerned about where this escalatory spiral is headed. | ||
| And look, my interest is really just coming at it from the point of view of being a concerned | ||
| American. | ||
| And I do this podcast called the All-In Pod every week where we talk about this issue. | ||
| And for expressing any concerns about where this war is headed, you're instantly denounced | ||
| as some sort of Putin apologist or agent of the Kremlin or something like that. | ||
| And just to be completely clear, I have no financial dealings with Russia or anyone from | ||
| Russia. | ||
| I invest in American startups. | ||
| So I have no interest in this other than coming out from the point of view of a concerned | ||
| American. | ||
| And for complete transparency sake, you also were an investor in Locals. | ||
| And obviously, then we merged with Rumble and all good. | ||
| A very worthy startup. | ||
| But yes, this is what I do, is I invest in startups, in American companies. | ||
| And David, I can give you my word, I'm not a Russian operative, so you're clear on my end. | ||
| Okay, so look, I actually have not covered Russia, Ukraine a ton on the show because my general feeling is there's so much going on in the United States right now domestically that is wrong. | ||
| I've been just kind of keeping my eye on that a little bit more, but my general thoughts have been You've got two sovereign countries here, you can't invade a sovereign country, but at the same time, once he does it, and the guy with the big guns with the nukes, if you don't give him an off-ramp, we could really be in a lot of trouble, and I think that's sort of where you've been going with all of this. | ||
| Are you shocked the way people have pushed back on, hey, let's not go to World War III? | ||
| In your Newsweek piece, you talked about this sort of confluence of now the wokesters and the neocons, who you'd think have nothing in common, how they're really the driving force of this whole thing now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, let's take an example. | ||
| So Elon Musk proposed on Twitter a simple strawman for a peace deal. | ||
| It was a very, I think, pretty reasonable framework. | ||
| It basically said that, listen, we will do elections in these disputed territories in Eastern Ukraine, not sham elections, but elections under the supervision of, say, the United Nations, peacekeepers and election monitors. | ||
| We recognize that Crimea is a fait accompli, Russia annexed in 2014, that ship has sailed. | ||
| And, you know, we recognize that Ukraine will not become part of NATO, which Russia feels | ||
| is very threatening to their own security. | ||
| But we can give them, we can sell them weapons and give them security guarantees. | ||
| That was roughly the proposal. | ||
| By the way, that, those rough contours of a peace deal have been suggested by many experts | ||
| for over a year to resolve this crisis. | ||
| But in any event, my point is this, that he was denounced by no less than Zelensky himself, who took to Twitter to basically say that the mere suggestion of a peace deal was acting in pro-Russian interests. | ||
| So this is the point in the debate that we've reached, is that if you raise even the idea of trying to find a diplomatic solution to this war, Or if you bring up any of the prehistory to what happened before February 24th, if you point out that the West's desire for NATO expansion right up to Russia's front porch might have played a role in creating this conflict. | ||
| If you bring up any idea that's sort of not on board with, I would say, maximalist Ukrainian demands to take back every square inch of territory that they consider theirs, then you are now pro-Russian and a Kremlin agent. | ||
| Where do you think, or what do you think that says about Zelensky, that he obviously is outgunned here, he's getting a crazy amount of money and all sorts of weapons and technology and everything else from all over the world, but as you say, he's maximalist on get the hell out of here guy with nukes, and that doesn't seem normally how the symmetry of something like this would play out. | ||
| As Kamala Harris said, Russia big, Ukraine small. | ||
| Well, so I think, you know, at the beginning of the war, Zelensky himself was floating peace deals that were not dissimilar from what Elon suggested. | ||
| He said that he was open to taking the issue of NATO expansion off the table. | ||
| And then, unfortunately, Boris Johnson went to Ukraine in April and killed that peace deal. | ||
| And now, since then, there have been so many losses on both sides, but especially the Ukrainians have suffered so much that there's no longer any appetite For a peace deal. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| This is what happens in war, is that people experience so much loss, so much devastation that they get more dug in on their position. | ||
| And Zelensky is following a position of Ukrainian nationalism. | ||
| That is what his country supports. | ||
| Now, I think the mistake would be for us, even though I think we sympathize with their Ukrainian nationalism, their desire for sovereignty, I think that we have to consider what's in America's own interest. | ||
| Zelensky is representing what's in his own country's interest, what's in Ukraine's interest, but we need to think about what's in the United States' interest. | ||
| And the fact of the matter is, we are getting increasingly drawn in to this conflict in a deeper and deeper way, to the point where now we actually might face the risk of a nuclear war. | ||
| And I think it's about time that somebody on the American side started saying, listen, we understand The Ukrainian position on this, we sympathize with you. | ||
| We're willing to give you aid, but what are our limits? | ||
| What is in the American interest? | ||
| And those are the questions we'd be asking right now. | ||
| Do you think this administration has the American interest at heart? | ||
| Well, at the beginning of the war, Biden said some sensible things. | ||
| So for example, what he said is that the U.S. | ||
| would not get directly involved in a shooting war with Russia. | ||
| He understood and said that could cause World War Three, we're not messing around with that. | ||
| And so, for example, he vetoed the idea of a no-fly zone, which hardliners, you know, the Twitter mob wanted, and, you know, various congressional elites, Lindsey Graham and so forth, wanted. | ||
| That was a smart decision. | ||
| Also, when Lester Holt asked him in a press interview at the very beginning of the war, he said, Mr. President, what if there's Americans trapped behind enemy lines? | ||
| Would you send in our troops to go get them? | ||
| And Biden said, No, you know, even in that case, we will not get directly involved in this war. | ||
| He didn't let the press go to him into a direct American involvement. | ||
| But the problem is that since then, we've been on a slippery slope and we've gotten more and more involved. | ||
| So for example, you've now had administration officials brag to publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post about killing Russian generals, providing the intelligence that paints a target on their back. | ||
| About providing the intelligence, the artillery spawning, to sink the Moskva, which is the Russian flagship. | ||
| You've had administration officials bragging about the role they played in this recent Ukrainian counter-offensive. | ||
| Basically, the Ukrainians presented plans to the American generals. | ||
| The Americans said these plans aren't good enough. | ||
| They hand-corrected them, sent them back to Ukraine, and they're bragging about this in the New York Times. | ||
| We also keep appropriating them more and more money, more and more weapons, and more and more advanced weapons. | ||
| And so we are getting more and more involved. | ||
| There's also was a New York Times report about how America now has commandos. | ||
| We have boots on the ground in Ukraine, maybe not pulling the triggers or pushing the buttons on the high Mars and so forth, but they're on the ground directing the flow of weaponry and aid. | ||
| And so they are in harm's way and they could get killed, thereby drawing us in even further. | ||
| So we are very involved in this war, Dave, and we're getting more involved by the day. | ||
| It's interesting because we call it this war, we don't really say our war, but do you think we're in, in essence, do you think, I know we haven't declared war and this hasn't gone to Congress and any of that kind of stuff, but do you feel like we actually are at war right now? | ||
| Like, what do you think the average American should feel like? | ||
| I mean, we're funding it seemingly endlessly, as you said, weapons and training and a whole bunch more. | ||
| I mean, do you think in essence we are at war, whether it's declared or not? | ||
| We are basically at the point now where we are effectively a co-belligerent in this war, in the sense that, like you said, we're providing the weapons. | ||
| We're training the Ukrainians on how to use those weapons, including on American soil. | ||
| We are providing the intelligence. | ||
| We're providing the battle plans. | ||
| We are doing everything except for pulling the triggers and taking the bullets, which I don't want to minimize that because the Ukrainians are suffering a lot of losses. | ||
| But we are this close to basically being directly involved. | ||
| And now you have, you know, Members of the security state, or former members, like Petraeus, like Panetta, like Kinzinger, saying that if there is a nuclear use by Russia in Ukraine, that we must get directly involved in this war. | ||
| We must now bomb every Russian military asset in Ukraine, sink every ship that Russia has in the Black Sea. | ||
| This is what, you know, very respected people in the Beltway are calling for. | ||
| We could, this could tip over into a hot war in which we are a full belligerent at any minute. | ||
| And, you know, I think that we need to be thinking about why would we do that? | ||
| The fact of the matter is that prior to this year, no American president in the history of the United States ever declared Ukraine or any part of Ukraine to be a vital interest in the United States. | ||
| We do not have a vital national interest in who rules the Donbass or Crimea. | ||
| We simply don't. | ||
| That, by the way, is, and Biden realized this at the beginning of the war. | ||
| This is why he said we will not get directly involved. | ||
| It's because he realized that America did not have a vital national interest. | ||
| But we, through this slippery slope, are getting closer and closer to getting into a war with | ||
| Russia, which could be a nuclear war, even though we have no vital interest at stake. | ||
| So if we don't have a vital interest there, putting aside, okay, a certain amount of people just like war or the idea of war or the profiteering off war, you know, a lot of people are saying this is just basically the biggest money laundering scheme in history. | ||
| That's sort of Afghanistan wrapped up and that's somehow how a ton of money laundering happened. | ||
| And now it's just been shifted to Ukraine. | ||
| Do you think there is validity to that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the argument was, this was, uh, I think put, uh, in, in a clever way that the, you know, the idea was that you had Afghanistan on one end and on the other hand was the American, well, sorry, you had the American taxpayer on one end on the other end was basically the military industrial complex. | ||
| And in between was this laundry machine that washed all the money and kept it going. | ||
| We had that for 20 years in Afghanistan. | ||
| It was, uh, an operation that cost us literally trillions of dollars. | ||
| Um, you know, the total bill. | ||
| For all of our misbegotten adventures in the Middle East, these forever wars is roughly $8 trillion. | ||
| And it was only six months after the Afghan war finally was ended after 20 years of us not even knowing what we're doing there anymore. | ||
| I guess we're on some crazy nation building project, but after 20 years of that, we only went six months without there being a new war basically declared that is a full employment program for the military industrial complex. | ||
| Now, look, I think. | ||
| The motivations for this are more complicated than just that. | ||
| I think there's a strong ideological component, but there's no question that if you peel back the layers of who funds these think tanks that are always clamoring for war, that are funding all these, you know, blue checks on Twitter, who basically are clamoring for more and more involvement, it is, there's a lot of defense contractors who basically are footing the bills for these think tanks. | ||
| And it's high time, in my opinion, That these think tanks and so forth and these columnists who were always braying for war disclose who their donors are. | ||
| I mean, they're constantly accusing people on the side who want a diplomatic solution of somehow being pro-Russian sympathizers. | ||
| I've already declared I have no Russian investors. | ||
| I have no Russian interest. | ||
| Can they declare the same thing about Ukrainian oligarchs? | ||
| And by the way, we know what was Hunter Biden doing receiving millions of dollars from Ukrainian oligarchs Just shortly before this war started so. | ||
| There are connections here that I think deserve to be explored. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then just watching the reaction to your Newsweek piece, which I thought was excellent. | ||
| I'm going to quote a couple of lines of it in a moment. | ||
| And then watching when Elon put the Twitter poll up, which we did cover. | ||
| And all of these people who you'd think would have respect for Elon Musk, at least maybe they don't care about his politics, but like, all right, he's an interesting guy. | ||
| Maybe we need to like mix this thing up a little bit. | ||
| Just watching people go after him and try to destroy him. | ||
| More than that, Dave. | ||
| Right, now they're saying, who was it that, was it Lindsey Graham that said maybe we should look into some of his government contracts or something after that, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And David Frum said that we should nationalize Starlink. | ||
| So, but yeah, both of them said that. | ||
| So, but here's the amazing thing, is Elon Musk is the reason why, a big part of the reason why Ukraine is still in this war. | ||
| Without Starlink, which is Elon's satellite communications system, Which allows Ukrainians to get Internet access in the field, in the most remote parts of Ukraine. | ||
| The Ukrainian military effort would not have communications, and this is what is basically powering their tablets and their targeting systems and their drones, is that they have Internet access through Starlink. | ||
| Elon said that SpaceX, his company, has borne this. | ||
| They donated Starlink to the Ukrainian cause at an out-of-pocket cost to them of $80 million. | ||
| Twenty million dollars a month. | ||
| And when Elon finally said, listen, we're not seeking payment for the donation we made in the past, but moving forward, we can't afford as an unprofitable company to keep funding this. | ||
| You know, we'd like to get paid like maybe Lockheed or Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, these defense contractors are making massive amounts of money selling Javelins or Highmars. | ||
| Maybe we'd like to get paid like that. | ||
| There was this hysterical reaction by people like Lindsey Graham, by people like David Who somehow feel entitled to conscript a private American company into funding this war forever. | ||
| And by the way, it's worth noting that David Frum was George W. Bush's speechwriter who wrote the axis of evil speech that got us into the Iraq war. | ||
| You'd think that these people would have a little bit of shame or a little bit of humility, but they just keep coming back. | ||
| I guess that's what your point is, that they recycle these same people, basically, who get everything wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a really important point that the exact same people who are supporting greater and greater involvement in this war by America, who say that any diplomatic solution would be appeasement and would be pro-Putin, they are the exact same people who lied us into Iraq, who lied us into, literally, with the false claims of WMD programs and the false claims that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked up and in cahoots with Al Qaeda. | ||
| So they made that up. | ||
| They also made up this, that somehow we needed to be in Afghanistan for 20 years. | ||
| They lied us into Syria. | ||
| They lied us into Libya. | ||
| Their foreign policy has been a disaster for the last 20 years. | ||
| These are not people who should be trusted as experts. | ||
| And yet they claim, and I'm in a Twitter spat right now with a guy named Tom Nichols. | ||
| They're all writers at the Atlantic, by the way. | ||
| The Atlantic is like the most pro-war magazine, and yet... Oh, you'll get Lincoln Project next. | ||
| It starts with the Atlantic. | ||
| Yeah, Stuart Stevens is hitting me too. | ||
| By the way, Stuart Stevens, this guy is a political hitman for a hire who has literally worked for foreign autocrats, okay? | ||
| And members of the Lincoln Project have actually taken Russian money in the past to lobby on behalf of Russia. | ||
| And these political hitmen are coming after me. | ||
| On Twitter for advocating peace, any event, none of these people should be trusted. | ||
| They are not experts. | ||
| They are, I guess you'd call them failed experts. | ||
| And they claim that they are in possession of special knowledge, special abilities. | ||
| They have special credentials that should make all of us defer to them. | ||
| We'll look in my business, which is investing. | ||
| What do you look at? | ||
| You look at a track record. | ||
| These people have a track record of being nothing but wrong for 20 years, and we need to stop listening to them and taking everything they say at face value. | ||
| Also, have any of them, you know, I've seen some of the Twitter spats that you've got into and most usually they're honestly just insulting you. | ||
| They're not really coming back with the ideas, which surprise, surprise, that's sort of what Twitter is at this point. | ||
| But has anyone come back to you and said, well, actually, this is what the win looks like. | ||
| Like, actually, if we just keep funding him. | ||
| And we just keep giving them weapons and just enough money that actually Russia will fold. | ||
| I mean, a few weeks ago, remember there were like two or three days where people were like, Russia's losing? | ||
| And I was like, well, again, he still has the nukes, but now nobody's saying Russia's losing anymore. | ||
| Right, so you're right. | ||
| In terms of like the responses that I get on Twitter is precious few arguments. | ||
| It's really just one ad hominem attack after another. | ||
| We've seen this before in domestic politics, right? | ||
| It's woke cancellation tactics that they don't Respond to you by citing rational arguments and logic. | ||
| They try to accuse you of something. | ||
| They're not trying to participate in the debate. | ||
| They're trying to shut down the debate. | ||
| And so we see on this Ukraine war is a marriage of this sort of woke mob with these neocons, these sort of hawkish neocons who've been wrong about everything in foreign policy for the last 20 years. | ||
| And this marriage has come together. | ||
| And the reason why it's so dangerous is because it's shaping our discourse in a way To basically preclude and exclude any discussion of a diplomatic settlement. | ||
| And if you basically delegitimize anybody who is basically speaking up for peace as somehow being pro-Russian, you take those options off the table. | ||
| So what is left? | ||
| All that's left is greater escalation, more dangerous escalation, with a logical result that we could eventually find ourselves in a war with Russia. | ||
| I'm gonna either do you a major favor right now or you're gonna be pissed at me, but if I can get Kinzinger or Fromm or one of these guys to debate you, I mean, my feelings on this are clear, so I'm guessing that they won't do it, but if I can get them to do it, would you be down to do it, just to be clear? | ||
| Yeah, sure, I mean, yes. | ||
| I mean, I'm already debating them on Twitter. | ||
| They don't really have an answer. | ||
| I mean, you know, anyway, yeah, I mean, if you read, look, I read all their tweets, so I understand where they're coming from. | ||
| Basically, it's just one, A straw man and accusation after another. | ||
| They really are not interested in finding a diplomatic solution here. | ||
| And here's why this is so dangerous is that if you listen to what they're saying, they believe that the only acceptable outcome to this war is total Ukrainian victory, which they are letting Ukrainian nationalists determine what that means. | ||
| And what the Ukrainians say is that they want back every square inch of Ukraine going back to 2014. | ||
| So that includes Crimea. | ||
| Crimea is where the rubber meets the road on this, because I think that most, I'd say, or many foreign policy experts who've really looked at this understand that Putin and Russia will never let Crimea go back. | ||
| They will be willing to use battlefield nukes to prevent the total loss, their total defeat in this war, and to prevent Crimea from being overrun and retaken by Ukraine. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because Russia has a giant naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, which is home to the Black Sea Fleet. | ||
| If they lose Crimea, they presumably lose Sevastopol. | ||
| They lose the Black Sea fleet. | ||
| That is a vital interest to them. | ||
| This would be like if the United States were to lose Hawaii and Pearl Harbor. | ||
| Putin will never give that up. | ||
| He will be willing to use battlefield nukes to prevent that. | ||
| Now, by the way, that doesn't mean he won't be willing to use them prior to that. | ||
| But I think at the very latest, I think that he would be willing to use them, or so I believe, and so many people believe. | ||
| So this idea that we can just support Ukrainian maximalist demands until they overrun Crimea | ||
| or this turns into a nuclear war, at some point we're gonna have to sit the Ukrainians down, | ||
| sit Zelensky down and say, sorry, we've supported you to this point, | ||
| whatever this is, but you cannot have Crimea back. | ||
| We are not willing to let this conflict go nuclear. | ||
| Did you happen to catch any of Rand Paul when he was asking the Congress | ||
| or he was asking the Senate, basically the House, you know, hey guys, we're giving them all this money. | ||
| Could we just get some receipts on this stuff? | ||
| And basically everyone just made fun of him. | ||
| I mean, all the guy was saying was, hey, if we're going to give him 20 billion a pop, could we just a couple of receipts? | ||
| Would that be OK? | ||
| And we just simply don't do it, do we? | ||
| What Rand Paul asked for was an accountant. | ||
| Literally, an accountant. | ||
| It's called a Special Inspector General. | ||
| But that's a fancy name for an accountant. | ||
| He said, listen, we're appropriating over $40 billion in this bill. | ||
| By the way, the tab now is up to something like $80. | ||
| We need to know where this money goes. | ||
| Because by the way, in Afghanistan, we didn't know how much money was wasted until they appointed a Special Inspector General named John F. Sopko. | ||
| And he has written report after report of the malfeasance and what went wrong Ukraine and how this money was squandered. By the way, that | ||
| guy deserves a Medal of Honor from the next president because what he's turned up | ||
| is shocking. And to now go into a new war appropriating tens of billions of | ||
| dollars, more than we appropriate for our own border security, and not have so | ||
| much of an accountant keeping track of where the money is going. | ||
| And by the way, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Russian Ukraine are basically like one space apart in the listings of national corruption. | ||
| And by the way, I mean, listen, I know Zelensky's a hero to a lot of people, but the Panama | ||
| Papers revealed that he had hundreds of millions of dollars squirreled away offshore with Ukrainian | ||
| oligarchs who have been involved in various corruption scandals. | ||
| So listen, I mean, the corruption in that country is massive. | ||
| For us to be appropriating billions of dollars without an accountant is shocking. | ||
| And I just don't understand how Congress can do that. | ||
| What do you make of the sort of swarm effect? | ||
| Like, right when this thing happened, remember those three days where immediately, okay, everybody has to put the Ukraine flag on their Twitter and Facebook avatar, and then, you know, EA Sports takes the Russian national team off PlayStation hockey, literally, and we're moving vodka out of stores, and all of this insanity. | ||
| What do you make of that, just sort of that collective sort of Listen, I think it was an emotional knee-jerk reaction to the invasion. | ||
| I mean, look, the fact of the matter is the media has not been covering what's been going on in Ukraine prior to February 24th. | ||
| You're not harming some guy who lives in Brooklyn who's a vodka importer. | ||
| You're not harming Vladimir Putin. | ||
| Listen, I think it was an emotional knee-jerk reaction to the invasion. | ||
| I mean, look, the fact of the matter is the media has not been covering | ||
| what's been going on in Ukraine prior to February 24th. | ||
| So the American people tuned in for the first time when the invasion happened, | ||
| and naturally they had a reaction of outrage and revulsion to what the Russians were doing. | ||
| However, did that knee-jerk reaction result in anything good? | ||
| One of the things you saw is that American companies all left Russia and they left literally billions and billions of dollars of assets on the table with the result. | ||
| Now, who paid the price for that? | ||
| American pension funds who own the stocks of these companies who've lost all of this money. | ||
| Billions and billions were lost. | ||
| By the way, if Putin had simply nationalized Those assets and taking them away from American companies, we would have been screaming about theft because it would have been theft. | ||
| So I think some of the actions we've taken in response to the outrage, and I understand the outrage and I understand that people can be genuinely outraged, but this is a time for cooler heads prevail. | ||
| And now we're at the point where the outrage may take us all the way into nuclear war if we're not careful. | ||
| So it is high time to move past the outrage and to start having some cooler heads prevail here. | ||
| Is there anyone politically in America that's in politics, a senator, or I guess it's not the president, that's making some sense to you on all of this? | ||
| Because it's funny, I mean, I'm looking at my list of people that are making sense on this, and it's a lot of tech guys, and it's people that are cultural commentators and YouTubers, but it's not really the political people. | ||
| I would exclude Rand Paul, he's making some sense, there's probably a couple others. | ||
| By and large, that's true. | ||
| So, you know, the people who I listen to, so again, you know, I look at track record, you know, I always try to ask, well, who predicted this situation? | ||
| Who understood that we were about to get into this? | ||
| Who recommended pass for avoiding this conflict? | ||
| And if you go back and look, there were many people, just not the ones that Washington pays attention to. | ||
| Back in the 1990s, you had George Kennan, who was the architect of our Cold War containment policy, warned That if we brought NATO expansion all the way up to Russia's border, it would result in a tragic mistake. | ||
| You had basically back in, in, um, 2014 after the, um, after you had this sort of Crimea crisis, you had the international relations scholar, John Mearsheimer explained that we were on a course that was headed for war. | ||
| I really urge everybody to watch his lecture. | ||
| From 2014 on YouTube, it's gone viral. | ||
| It has 28 million views. | ||
| Yeah, we'll link to it down below. | ||
| Yeah, to get a deeper understanding of this conflict, listen to people like Jeffrey Sachs, who's the international development economist, very liberal guy. | ||
| I mean, this is somebody who I think had a lot of relationships in the Obama White House, who basically will affirm that this conflict began before February 24th. | ||
| It really began years ago with America trying to bring NATO right up to Russia's front porch. | ||
| Remember, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, what provoked that? | ||
| Why was America willing to use nuclear weapons? | ||
| Because Russia had entered into an alliance, a military alliance with Cuba, and was trying to move missiles right onto our border. | ||
| We reacted strongly to that. | ||
| We were willing to get into a nuclear war over that because we realized the military threat. | ||
| But we refused to recognize that the Russians could basically perceive American missiles and bases Directly on the most vulnerable border, which is Ukraine, as a similar kind of threat. | ||
| And it's been our unwillingness to take the NATO expansion issue off the table, which we could have done earlier this year. | ||
| We could have done it in December. | ||
| We could have done it in January. | ||
| The administration refused to do it. | ||
| If we had done that, I do not believe there'd be a war today. | ||
| Do you think the march for the NATO expansion or for Ukraine to get a NATO is going to continue? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, so so here's the tell on this is that the very same people Who say, this war has nothing to do with NATO expansion. | ||
| People like McFaul and various others. | ||
| In the next breath, they will say, we cannot take NATO expansion off the table. | ||
| That is non-negotiable. | ||
| Well, hold on a second. | ||
| If this war has nothing to do with NATO expansion, why can't you take it off the table? | ||
| This war has everything to do with NATO expansion. | ||
| This is a crusade that goes back many years. | ||
| Our State Department has been engaged on this long-term project To basically bring NATO right up to Russia's borders. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that has provoked a very strong response from Russia. | ||
| By the way, I'm not justifying the invasion. | ||
| It was wrong. | ||
| It was criminal. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is that we could have diffused this crisis before the war began if we were willing to use diplomacy. | ||
| And I believe that even today, we could try to engage in diplomacy, take NATO expansion off the table, recognize that Crimea is a fait accompli, And then support some sort of negotiated settlement over this Donbass region. | ||
| If we were just to agree to those three things, which seem very sensible, America has no vital interest in any of those three things that would supersede or that would necessitate us to get into a war with Russia. | ||
| If we were just to do those things, I believe There's a good chance we could end this war. | ||
| And in some ways, is it almost a moot point whether they were to get in NATO or not? | ||
| Because if we're in an endless war that we're funding, whether they're in it or not, we're kind of in it. | ||
| That's the point, right? | ||
| Well, a couple of things. | ||
| So first of all, obviously, Ukraine is more than capable of defending themselves if we sell them weapons without them being in NATO. | ||
| So if this war has proven anything, it's that Ukraine doesn't need to be in NATO. | ||
| Furthermore, however, We need to think about, is it really in America's interest for Ukraine to be in NATO? | ||
| Because if Ukraine were in NATO, they would have an Article 5 guarantee, which means the next time that they get in a war with Russia, and they will, because that feud's been going on for hundreds of years, we will be instantly obligated to get in a war with Russia. | ||
| This is why historically we have not brought them into NATO. | ||
| This is why there was reluctance. | ||
| We stated our intention to do so back in 2008, and we were slowly building towards it, but | ||
| there was always concern that if we were actually to bring Ukraine into NATO, it would obligate | ||
| us to get into a war with Russia. | ||
| And by the way, if you like the feeling of living with a nuclear threat, remember when | ||
| I was a kid, we lived under this threat of nuclear annihilation. | ||
| We had movies like the day after that showed what it was like if we got in a nuclear war. | ||
| I remember that as a kid, it was not a good feeling to grow up living under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. | ||
| We solved that problem. | ||
| We won the cold war in 1991 and now it is back. | ||
| It is back. | ||
| We've been living this year under the shadow of a nuclear war. | ||
| So listen, if you like that feeling, then by all means bring Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible, because we will be forever living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. | ||
| Because, again, Article 5 will trigger us to get into a nuclear war with Russia. | ||
| So it is a foolish idea. | ||
| It was always a foolish idea. | ||
| It is not in America's interest to bring Ukraine into NATO. | ||
| And yet, these crusaders in the State Department have made it their mission. | ||
| And we need to take that issue off the table as soon as possible. | ||
| Sax, that is a primo close. | ||
| However, I am going to ask you one other thing, but I do want to just give a shout out to your Newsweek piece, which was called The Neocons and the Woke Left are Joining Hands and Leading Us to Woke War 3. | ||
| We'll also link to that down below. | ||
| Now, I just want to ask you something sort of personal on all of this, which is that you're obviously doing all right. | ||
| You don't need to be taking the slings and arrows for this thing. | ||
| Yet you're doing it. | ||
| And it's interesting to me, as I said before, that suddenly I'm finding the people that I'm interested in politically are tech people and business people. | ||
| They're not the politics people. | ||
| But it can't be all fun doing this for you, even though I know you care about it and all that stuff. | ||
| But like, you know, you're putting your neck out there. | ||
| You have businesses and all those things. | ||
| Dave, if I saw more people who are part of the foreign policy establishment speaking out, And being just a little bit brave, willing to basically be called a pro-Russian puppet to advocate for diplomacy and peace, then it wouldn't be on people like me to do it. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, I don't care what these people say, okay? | ||
| I've told you before, I've got no business interests. | ||
| I'm not part of this foreign policy establishment. | ||
| I'm not beholden to their sort of insider club. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If we get in a war with Russia, then that's going to interrupt the operations of my My venture fund, let's just say that, okay? | ||
| We're going to have much more important things to worry about than my next ARP investment. | ||
| So it's my obligation as an American citizen to speak out. | ||
| I believe that is why Elon Musk spoke out. | ||
| He is a very informed person, by the way. | ||
| He knows people all over the world. | ||
| He is very concerned about this. | ||
| Just read his tweets. | ||
| He's taking a lot of flack too. | ||
| Bill Ackman recently spoke out, who, by the way, we've been debating each other on Twitter for a while about this, and he recently spoke out. | ||
| So you're seeing more and more people speak out. | ||
| Their only interest here is that they are concerned about America, and they do not see people in the foreign policy establishment and politicians speaking out the way they should be. | ||
| And that includes the Republican Party, who frankly has completely dropped the ball on this issue. | ||
| David, I always tell people if we were just a little bit braver, things would be a lot better. | ||
| So I love that finish. | ||
| Good talking to you, my friend. | ||
| Great to see you. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
Export Selection