Jan. 28, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It would be a lot easier to deal with the regime now in a targeted fashion. | ||
| And I'm not saying we go to war with Iran, although if anybody thinks that that war would, you know, I mean, it would be messy for a while, but, you know, we've got the ability, right? | ||
| And look, are the Saudis going to get upset about it? | ||
| Absolutely not, right? | ||
| Are they going to come out publicly and go, yeah, yeah, no. | ||
| But a number of countries in that region, I would have no problems with Iran, the regime, again, getting punched in the nose and told, you know, in no uncertain fashion, this has got to stop. | ||
| You have got to stop this. | ||
| This does nothing for the community of nations. | ||
| And, you know, but again, I don't think that's going to happen. | ||
| And nobody wants that to happen. | ||
| But I don't see any other resolution to this. | ||
| Joining me today is a former CIA officer, a security expert and host of the President's | ||
| Daily Brief podcast, Mike Baker. | ||
| Finally, welcome to Urban Report. | ||
| Thank you very much, Dan, appreciate it. | ||
| I'm glad to have you for a couple reasons. | ||
| I see you on Rogan, I see you on Gutfeld, all the usual places. | ||
| The podcast is great, but you're kind of doing me a favor by being here today, too, because I've been doing a lot of racehorse politics, a lot of primary Oh God. | ||
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Who's going to win, battle it out, all of that stuff. | |
| And I'm actually really looking forward to taking a little bit of a break from that and talking mostly about war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, good. | ||
| Lighten it up a little bit. | ||
| The several impending wars. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The world's on fire. | ||
| So let's cheer people up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you tell people just Briefly before we dive into all that because I normally don't even keep notes in front of me But I was like there's a lot of places on this planet that are aflame right now And I want to make sure we don't miss any of them. | ||
| Yeah, it's exactly right But before we get to any of that Can you just give people a little more your background for someone that that may not know who you are and then we'll and then we'll dive in. | ||
| Sure yeah, you know I was with the agency the CIA for about 20 years going on 20 years and I I was in what they call the Directorate of Operations. | ||
| So the agency is broken up into different segments, right? | ||
| You have operations, you have the Directorate of Intelligence. | ||
| They change the names occasionally, but basically it's always the same four groups. | ||
| And the Intel Directorate, that's where all the smart people are and they write the reports. | ||
| They take all the intelligence, they take everything that's coming in, right? | ||
| And you have the really smart writers, the analysts, all those people. | ||
| And then they have an admin, essentially, section that does all the logistics, and they really keep the place running. | ||
| Because it's not like just admin for, say, a company that's making widgets, right? | ||
| You're running Intel operations around the world. | ||
| So it's a bit of a different game. | ||
| And then there's the science and technology group, and they make all the amazing gadgets, right? | ||
| So think about... | ||
| Well, I disappeared on a rabbit hole on that one. | ||
| Battery tech. | ||
| Are you wearing any of those things? | ||
| I am, as a matter of fact. | ||
| I never travel without a couple of gadgets. | ||
| But they, you know, everything from spy satellites to the U-2 program, battery technology. | ||
| If anybody's walking around with a defibrillator, right, they can thank the agency because they led the way in terms of miniaturization, right, because you needed small batteries for operational reasons, right. | ||
| But I was in the director of operations and spent all my time overseas, which was great. | ||
| I take it that's probably going pretty well these days? | ||
| We started a private sector company that does basically intelligence and security, risk mitigation. | ||
| It's Portman Square Group. | ||
| And we're now- I take it that's probably going pretty well these days. | ||
| It's gone well, yeah. | ||
| With the way things are happening in the world. | ||
| I think, you know, it sounds mercenary, but we do well when there's a little bit of chaos. | ||
| And most of our work is overseas. | ||
| You know, we do a fair amount in the States, but the majority is overseas. | ||
| And we've got offices in a number of places. | ||
| Great people. | ||
| It's been a wonderful experience because I had no business experience at all. | ||
| None. | ||
| And so when it came time to get out of the agency, because I was raising my daughter, I had to do something, right? | ||
| And I didn't really have a lot of skills, so I thought, well, I'll stay in what I know, and it worked out. | ||
| I started it with a wonderful friend of mine who came from the British teams, and we just got really lucky. | ||
| And we met wonderful people, and the best thing we did was we hired smart people, right? | ||
| And then we gave them the objective, and then we Set them on their way, right? | ||
| And that was... There's a few things I learned from the agency, and one of them was essentially that, right? | ||
| Bring on the best people you can, tell them what the mission is, and then have the confidence that they're going to get on with it, right? | ||
| And now if things go south, okay, then you got to step in and help out. | ||
| So we've been forward, and we've done that, and then I got involved in some TV work and some film work. | ||
| The podcast has been great. | ||
| We just started that in September in the President's Daily Brief. | ||
| Whole new experience. | ||
| I give you a tremendous amount of credit because it's not easy. | ||
| It's a lot of gadgets, mostly hairspray. | ||
| Well, I'm going through an awful lot of glitter and lip balm. | ||
| But no, it's an audio podcast right now. | ||
| They're turning it into a video podcast. | ||
| But it's a lot of work. | ||
| I take my hat off to you, but it's been fun. | ||
| So let me ask you a little bit more about the agencies in general, because I've talked to a couple of ex-CIA guys, obviously, FBI, etc. | ||
| And I always find it interesting when you talk to some of these guys who are out in terms of how much they can talk about and how they can take the stuff that they learned and apply it to either new businesses or just kind of what's going on in the world without breaking protocol, without revealing secrets, etc. | ||
| How do you balance all that stuff? | ||
| Well, you know what, you have to be smart enough to know what you're not supposed to say, right? | ||
| And then you have to be disciplined enough not to open your yap and do that. | ||
| So, sources and methods you never talk about. | ||
| I've got a very good relationship with the agency, I think in part because they know I respect them. | ||
| I had a great time, right? | ||
| I'm not one of those people who left and talks bad about, because I just had a great time. | ||
| I was lucky in that sense, right? | ||
| And had worked for amazing people and worked with people that were tremendous. | ||
| And so, as long as you understand what you are not supposed to say, and you sign secrecy agreements, and those secrecy agreements, they don't have a shelf life, right? | ||
| You know, it's not as if, okay, it's ten years on, now I can go on TV and list out the whole thing. | ||
| So you take that to your grave, and you need to respect that. | ||
| And the agency, they were very good to me when I left because, you know, their point was, well, don't leave. | ||
| You know, at first it was sort of like, don't leave because what else are you going to do? | ||
| I mean, look at you. | ||
| But I mean, they meant it in a kind way. | ||
| And then when I did go to leave, they said, to the degree that we can, you should leave and be able to say that you were here. | ||
| And so that's a process in itself. | ||
| And I didn't really realize the value of that at the time because I didn't, again, no business experience. | ||
| So getting out and being able to do that, that Opened some doors that I hadn't really anticipated. | ||
| And so that was a very good thing. | ||
| How different do you think the agency is now, the CIA specifically, from when you were involved? | ||
| Because my guess is 20 years ago, there was a, I don't want to speak for you, but there was probably a certain level of trust in the institution that now, at least from the outside, seems, seems, let's say shaky at best. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of that and that's real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
| I'll be honest with you. | ||
| When I was in the agency for, you know, again, going on two decades, I don't ever remember having a political discussion. | ||
| We never sat in a safe house. | ||
| And you could spend a lot of time sitting in a safe house waiting for something to pop, right? | ||
| Because, you know, for whatever reason, you know, the target's not available or you're waiting for headquarters to say, yeah, let's do it. | ||
| We never had conversations sitting around talking politics. | ||
| It just wasn't a thing, right? | ||
| And the agency itself is always supposed to be apolitical. | ||
| I mean, it's human, right? | ||
| So people are going to have their opinions and that's fine. | ||
| But, you know, you keep it in check, right? | ||
| And so, obviously, the rub now is that that's not the case, right? | ||
| Both for the agency and the Bureau. | ||
| The Bureau has taken a real kicking. | ||
| And I think that's a real shame because everybody I know, including at the Bureau, and these are operators, right? | ||
| These are the agents at the Bureau. | ||
| These are the officers at the CIA. | ||
| They're terrific, right? | ||
| And they're not political, and they just do what they're supposed to do. | ||
| And the agency's job is very simple, right? | ||
| You protect The interests of the nation, you know, national security concerns. | ||
| And the administration tells you what are your priorities, whichever administration is in charge, and then you just march on and do it, right? | ||
| But obviously the rub is now it's become a political organization. | ||
| I would argue the same thing that's been argued about the Bureau, which is that takes place at a much higher level, right? | ||
| And, you know, the director, Uh, that's a political position, essentially, appointed by the president. | ||
| And yeah, you can get a director who's too enamored with politics, too enamored with being at the White House, too enamored with that, you know, the tightness of that relationship and what it means. | ||
| You can get others, too, who are, you know, more senior. | ||
| I can't speak for now, but I can speak for when I was there. | ||
| It wasn't a political organization. | ||
| And you understood that because we spent our time in some real shitholes overseas, right? | ||
| In some very difficult environments where the tradition was, if the government was overthrown, and they seemed to be getting overthrown a lot, then next thing you know, they'd just sweep out the military, they'd sweep out the intel organization, whatever the organization they had, and they'd install their buddies, their friends, those that they knew would be rock solid loyal. | ||
| And you see how awful that was and what it would mean to that particular country. | ||
| And so, you know, you had a real understanding that that was never to happen with the agency. | ||
| So, yeah, I think we have to always be on guard about that, but the best way to guard against it Unfortunately, is to have a very proactive and curious and demanding oversight by the intel committees up on Capitol Hill. | ||
| And unfortunately, I say unfortunately because my theory is we really don't send our best and brightest to Capitol Hill. | ||
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Right. | |
| So there's a couple of prong problem here. | ||
| It's sort of politics have been injected into the agencies and then the oversight committees, obviously the congressional oversight committees, as you said, these are not the best and the brightest. | ||
| So do you think there's anything that can be done to bring some of that trust back? | ||
| I mean, especially on the Republican side now, you're hearing candidates say, you know, just blow away the agencies altogether and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
| What would look at like a sort of sane reformation as these things have become political? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I hear that talk when people say, we got to fire them all. | ||
| You know, whether they're talking about the agency, they're talking about the FBI or whatever. | ||
| Or just shut it down. | ||
| You think, you know, look, okay, you're obviously too stupid, right, to represent anybody. | ||
| You know, how did you possibly get up on Capitol Hill? | ||
| No, look, there's some very bright people. | ||
| I know a couple of the people on the intel committees that are super smart. | ||
| One of them from Idaho, Senator Risch, right? | ||
| They're some very good people. | ||
| But we also have some morons, right? | ||
| So I don't want to paint them all with the same brush, but I think what would a logical step be? | ||
| I think one of the things that needs to be done is that after 9-11, they created, you know, the DNI position, right? | ||
| And they basically collapsed everything into one organization from the intel community, right? | ||
| All the various intel agencies. | ||
| And the CIA director was kind of pushed to the side, right? | ||
| In favor of the DNI, who then, you know, sort of had that job of sitting in the White House more. | ||
| It's important to have a better line of communication between the director of the agency and the Oval Office, right? | ||
| Now, you know, you can well make the argument that it just depends on the president, right? | ||
| Because some presidents are better at that relationship. | ||
| They pay more attention. | ||
| You know, there was always the rub on Trump that he didn't read the briefings that came in. | ||
| Others read every page, right? | ||
| It just depends on the person. | ||
| But I guess my point is, I think one of the problems we've got is we don't have a better line of communication between the agency directly and the Oval Office. | ||
| It's too important an organization, particularly in today's times, to relegate it to just a member of the intel community. | ||
| Otherwise, I think that you've got to have better vetting of the senior leadership in terms of when they're appointed, right? | ||
| And that, again, is the job of the intel committees in Congress and Senate. | ||
| And then, like I said, once you get below that senior level, people are just doing their job. | ||
| They honest to God, don't give a shit who's in charge. | ||
| Just, you know, on the professional level, just tell us what the hell the mission is. | ||
| Do you have any sense of how much DEI has infected that level? | ||
| The level that you're saying is pretty solid? | ||
| Because my guess is that would be the level that would get hit the hardest. | ||
| It's been hit, yes. | ||
| And it's there, right? | ||
| They've done what everybody else has done, right? | ||
| They've played the game of DEI, and I've seen a couple of the recruiting ads that they've run. | ||
| Look, The agency was an old boy network, right? | ||
| Kind of the original days after World War II, it was very much like a Yale-y operation, right? | ||
| Ivy Leagues and somebody get a tap on the shoulder and then be recruited and yes, you got a very homogenous looking group, you know? | ||
| So, but from an operational perspective, you want a real mix, right? | ||
| So rather than being told that we're doing this because it, you know, makes the world a better place from a DEI perspective, I'd rather see the director instruct everyone saying, we operate all around the globe and we better blend in. | ||
| In this case, there are reasons that you would want people of different colors and different languages. | ||
| You don't have to play the DEI game because you need to have that operational diversity. | ||
| And so, you know, to me, you know, having an equity officer or a DEI, you know, director or whatever is just bullshit. | ||
| It's nonsense, right? | ||
| Just do your job, which is get out there and hire the best and brightest to operate around the globe, right? | ||
| And yeah, I don't know. | ||
| You raise an interesting point with that. | ||
| Let's shift to some of the fires in the world right now. | ||
| There are many fires, but as we sit here right now, just I think about two hours ago, the Biden administration has reinstated the Houthis as a terrorist organization. | ||
| They were a terrorist organization under Trump. | ||
| Biden, one of the first things he came in and did was undo that. | ||
| Now we got a big problem. | ||
| Can you explain who the Houthis? | ||
| Give me like Houthi 101. | ||
| What's going on in Yemen? | ||
| Can you clean that up for the average person that's just watching another fire in the world and going, yeah, why should I care? | ||
| Why does this matter? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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So the, yeah, the Houthis, um, we see the dancing videos. | |
| They've got a great choreographer. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Get the guys out there with Yeah, and I tell you what, Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, is a fascinating place, right? | ||
| It's very interesting, and it's an interesting culture. | ||
| And that's the thing, you look at it and go, okay, well, you guys are pretty fucked up, but it's a fascinating place, great history, great culture, let's get this under control. | ||
| But they basically had a civil war in Yemen, raging for quite some time. | ||
| And I don't want to oversimplify this, but A lot of the violence, a lot of the death, a lot of the instability in that region, if you say, well, what the hell's going on? | ||
| It's essentially a Sunni Shia problem, right? | ||
| So the Saudis, you know, Sunni. | ||
| Iran, Shia, right? | ||
| If you know nothing else about it, they're just, you know, you kind of say, okay, yeah, you got two teams and they're going at each other in terms of their belief systems. | ||
| Iran has been supporting the Houthis. | ||
| They find it in their best interest. | ||
| Iran is, people say this all the time, people say Iran is the state sponsor, largest state sponsor of terrorism. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| It means that they have built up proxies, right? | ||
| In the Middle East, in part to satisfy one of their primary objectives, which is to destroy Israel. | ||
| So they have built, essentially, and sponsored and funded and trained and resourced Hezbollah up in Lebanon, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and The Houthis in Yemen. | ||
| I'll stick with those three for now, but they're all creations, essentially, of Iran. | ||
| If Iran didn't provide them with support and funding and guidance and training and missiles and weapons, You know, we wouldn't be talking about this today, right? | ||
| Because Hamas wouldn't be anywhere near where it is, right? | ||
| But they do Iran's bidding, in a sense. | ||
| I'm oversimplifying a little bit. | ||
| They've got their own interests as well, but that's where they take their guidance from, for the most part. | ||
| So you've got the Houthis sitting in Yemen. | ||
| They claim that they've started this latest issue, this rocketing of commercial and now U.S. | ||
| Navy warships in the Red Sea. | ||
| In sympathy and support of Hamas, right, and against Israel. | ||
| It's not as if the Houthis sat there to themselves, you know, they're in a very tenuous ceasefire right now, and they're in their conflict with the, they don't control, they're not recognized as the government of Yemen. | ||
| The government, the recognized government of Yemen is supported by the Saudis, right? | ||
| The Houthis supported by the Iranians, but there's a very tenuous ceasefire there that exists. | ||
| It's not as if the Houthis would have said to themselves on their own, without Iranian encouragement and guidance, you know what we should do? | ||
| We should take some of these Iranian-provided missiles and anti-ship missiles and start blasting them out and really disrupting global trade. | ||
| That Red Sea Channel, that accounts for, you know, 15%, 17% of global shipping traffic, right? | ||
| Most major shipping lines, Marist, Compagloid, and most major companies, Shell, BP, others, just shut down their operations. | ||
| They're rerouting all their traffic around the Cape of Good Hope. | ||
| That adds extra days, adds about nine days depending on routes we're talking about. | ||
| That's fuel costs, that's crew costs, that's shipping, that's just everything that gets into that. | ||
| Everything starts to become a problem. | ||
| And so the Houthis, it's not like they did this on their own. | ||
| Our problem is, from a U.S. | ||
| perspective and our allies' perspective, is that The Biden administration currently won't address the primary driver of all this, which is Iran, right? | ||
| So the Iranians made the calculation, the regime, not the people, but the history of Iran is fantastic, right? | ||
| And the people are great, but it's the regime and the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, they know Because they've been doing this for a long time, that they can continue to destabilize the region and they're not going to be paying for it directly, right? | ||
| Any response is going to be directed at one of their proxies. | ||
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Right. | |
| So that was a calculation they made. | ||
| The Biden administration is playing that out for sure. | ||
| You know, early on in the conflict, they didn't want to talk about Iran, right? | ||
| Now they've at least mentioned it obliquely. | ||
| This designation that you raise is interesting because President Trump did designate them as a foreign terrorist organization. | ||
| You've got different levels of designation, right? | ||
| When you say, okay, that group Hamas or that group over there, we want to designate them as terrorists. | ||
| You can do that at various levels and it has different impacts in terms of what actions can then be taken against the group. | ||
| So the Trump administration listed Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization. | ||
| And then, I don't know, Trump in February of 21, or sorry, Biden, when he came in, so it was February of 2021, reversed that decision. | ||
| And he reversed it because the UN and others were saying, oh, this is terrible. | ||
| You know, you can't keep them on the terrorist list because it's hurting, you know, Yemen. | ||
| It's hurting the people of Yemen. | ||
| And, you know, they're not getting humanitarian aid and, and, well, You know, most of that humanitarian aid was getting rifled through by the Houthis anyway. | ||
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Right. | |
| It sounds exactly like what's happened with Hamas and with Hezbollah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hamas, the leadership is rich because of all the billions that they control when money and aid goes into Gaza. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So anyway, but with the Houthis, the Biden administration had no choice, I think, from an optic for politics. | ||
| They realized, OK, we now have to reverse our own decision. | ||
| So now they've... Oh, you mean they had no choice now? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you think then the idea was, well, Trump did it, so we're just going to reverse it? | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
| Like everything else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think like everything else with the border decisions, you know, that they took on the border. | ||
| Ridiculous, right? | ||
| But it was that idea that if Trump did it, it must have been bad. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| And so let's let's just change it all because that'll show how righteous we are. | ||
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Right. | |
| So they did that with the Houthis. | ||
| And now, now they've decided to go and reverse their thinking because they have no choice, right? | ||
| I mean, the news, the media has finally picked up on this and said, okay, there's a lot going on here and we're being targeted. | ||
| It's only a matter of time, you know, before something bad happens. | ||
| And then, so I think they wanted to get ahead of it a little bit, right? | ||
| And so what they've done is they haven't gone with the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation. | ||
| They went with a lesser designation, which is the specially designated global terrorist, right? | ||
| So whatever that is, that's an acronym. | ||
| I'm sure it's a government acronym, SGDT. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's still important. | ||
| No, don't get me wrong. | ||
| I'm glad they did it. | ||
| But it's not the strongest action that they could take against the Houthis. | ||
| So what they've done here is they're saying, OK, we're going to designate you as terrorists. | ||
| We're gonna call you terrorists. | ||
| And that can allow us to freeze assets to a degree, but it still allows for humanitarian aid to go in. | ||
| Again, the problem is, if it goes into Hodeidah, if it goes into the port, main port there in Yemen, that's controlled by the Houthis. | ||
| So humanitarian aid, whether it gets to the actual people who deserve it, need it, et cetera, just like with the citizens of Gaza, Yeah. | ||
| It's anybody's guess. | ||
| How much of this, of the craziness that we're seeing right now, whether it's in Gaza or whether it's in Yemen and what's going on with the, with Red Sea and everything is connected back to this $6 billion that just, you know, a couple of weeks before October 7th, they were saying, oh, well, it's, it's fungible. | ||
| Who knows what they're going to do with it after they had originally said, no, we can't go to certain things. | ||
| And then suddenly it was like, oh, we gave them the cash. | ||
| Well, we'll see. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, don't know. | ||
| Yeah, we can't keep track of our own money here. | ||
| I'm sure we can watch it, you know, money going out and flowing out of Qatar for the Iranians. | ||
| Yeah, you know what? | ||
| I think it was definitely the wrong move. | ||
| It was a stupid move. | ||
| It was misguided on their part. | ||
| Did it contribute to what's going on now? | ||
| Not really, because the Iranians have been making bank off of oil anyway, right? | ||
| They've been making money. | ||
| So I'm not saying that the six billion wasn't important, because it was, right? | ||
| And in other additional funds that were going there, that wasn't the only tranche of money that went to the Iranian regime from the Biden administration. | ||
| But they were making money anyway, because we haven't We haven't clamped down on their primary source of revenue, which is energy. | ||
| Same with Russia. | ||
| We've made the same mistake with Putin. | ||
| And the Iranians are selling to China and Russia. | ||
| So they have buyers. | ||
| But it does point to just this misguided Foreign policy that the Biden administration has had towards Iran. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| You know, they were doing what they believed in. | ||
| You know, administration comes in, they're going to make their own decisions. | ||
| But it seems Opposite of what history has told us, right? | ||
| Every time the U.S. | ||
| has extended their hand, right, to, you know, try to, you know, make some deal or negotiate or make peace with Iran, they just...the regime smacks it away, right? | ||
| And they keep on doing what they've been doing. | ||
| And so, I don't know why they expected to get some different reaction. | ||
| So what do you think a resolution of this looks like? | ||
| So now we've, you know, we've deemed them a terrorist organization on the slightly lower designation, but they're most likely not going to stop right now. | ||
| So what does the resolution look like to get those ports functioning again, that route open? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If Iran told the Houthis to stop, they would stop, right? | ||
| That's the only, you know, channel that's going to work with the Houthis. | ||
| If all we do is fire a few counter-strikes at Houthi stockpiles of missiles, etc., and most of those missiles are mobile anyway, right? | ||
| So we have a hell of a time trying to do target identification, you know, create target packages that are going to degrade, you know, their capabilities sufficiently. | ||
| These last counter-strikes they did over the past couple of days with the British as well. | ||
| And there was some other support that came in from other allies. | ||
| Well, you know, according to the military way, they feel like they maybe degraded about 25% of their capabilities, right? | ||
| You know, that's probably really an aggressive estimate. | ||
| I doubt it's that much. | ||
| So, yeah, how do you stop this? | ||
| How do you stop the other instability, right? | ||
| Look, Hamas personnel were in Iran training leading up to 7 October, right? | ||
| Their stockpile of weapons, the stockpile of weapons that Hezbollah is sitting on, everything, it's all emanating from Iran. | ||
| They all have the same, I mean, the Houthis have the same goal. | ||
| Their slogan is on their flag, right? | ||
| Death to America, death to Israel, right? | ||
| That's the objective. | ||
| And so, unless we have an actual deterrence strategy targeting Iran, | ||
| not their proxies, because that's what they expect, and they've made that calculation | ||
| that they're good with it because it's worked for them, then nothing's going to change. | ||
| I suspect you don't think that's coming, though, with this administration. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And I'm not saying it's a good thing. | ||
| I'm getting nobody wants, you know, look, the conflict in Gaza, that's a war that Hamas started, right? | ||
| So the only people that wanted that war, right, were Hamas and Iran, right? | ||
| Nobody else asked for it. | ||
| And so nobody wants conflict. | ||
| Nobody wants war. | ||
| Nobody wants anybody, you know, killed. | ||
| I mean, you know, civilian deaths are tragic. | ||
| But we're going to have to do something because if You know, if we just continue down this same path, as far as the regime goes, they are shortening that breakout window for their nuclear program, right? | ||
| And they're also, at the same time, shortening their ability or the time it's going to take them to have a delivery system that's capable, right? | ||
| Because you get a nuke, you got to put it on something, right? | ||
| You can tell I'm a nuclear weapons specialist. | ||
| You do have to put it on something. | ||
| You gotta put it on something. | ||
|
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Otherwise, the next day in the office, it ain't gonna be great. | |
| You're not gonna send it by FedEx. | ||
| So, it would be a lot easier to deal with the regime now in a targeted fashion. | ||
| And I'm not saying we go to war with Iran. | ||
| Although if anybody thinks that that war would, you know, I mean, it would be messy for a while, but, you know, we've got the ability, right? | ||
| And look, are the Saudis going to get upset about it? | ||
| Absolutely not, right? | ||
| Are they going to come out publicly and go, yeah, yeah, no. | ||
| But a number of countries in that region, I would have no problems with Iran, the regime, again, getting punched in the nose and told, you know, in no uncertain fashion, this has got to stop. | ||
| You have got to stop this. | ||
| This does nothing for the community of nations. | ||
| And, you know, but again, I don't think that's going to happen. | ||
| And nobody wants that to happen. | ||
| But I don't see any other resolution to this. | ||
| Let's connect that to, you mentioned Hamas a couple of times. | ||
| I took my team to Israel in May and my main takeaway of 10 days there was how peaceful it was, ironically. | ||
| That really was my, especially in Jerusalem. | ||
| But when we were up north and we went to some of the stations that they have there right on the border where you can see Hezbollah, literally, you know, a hundred yards away, something like that. | ||
| And we went, we started going down the tunnel and the guy started yelling at me. | ||
| They took us into the tunnel. | ||
| I started walking down. | ||
| The guy's like, you can't walk down there, but you can see it. | ||
| What was interesting to me is that there seemed to be way more concern about what was happening up north than there was related to Gaza. | ||
| Now, there's a problem up north for sure, but clearly Gaza was the thing that was about to explode. | ||
| I mean, Israel's an obscenely tiny country with basically people that want to blow them apart every which way. | ||
| What should they be doing right now? | ||
| They've got north Gaza, but they're still hostages. | ||
| I mean, what's a sane strategy? | ||
| What gets them out of this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First of all, I will say this. | ||
| I was about to say something about Hezbollah, but first I'll give a travel promo for Lebanon. | ||
| Lebanon is a fantastic country. | ||
| Beirut is an amazing city. | ||
| And the Lebanese people are incredible. | ||
| Great people. | ||
| I'm not talking about Hezbollah. | ||
| I'm talking about... | ||
| The Lebanese people don't love Hezbollah. | ||
|
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No! | |
| They're sort of held hostage by them. | ||
| Yes, and you could argue the same for a lot of the citizenry in Gaza, right? | ||
| I mean, they understand that they've been screwed over by Hamas, right? | ||
| All that money, you know? | ||
| Think about how many billions of dollars and what that could have done for the people of Gaza. | ||
| You know, clean water systems, schools, you know, better road infrastructure, communications, all these things. | ||
| But you've got these assholes, you know, who siphoned it all off, and, you know, and extorted the people for using the tunnels for moving commerce and everything else. | ||
| I mean, it's an astounding thing, and yet it's all Israel's fault. | ||
| Somebody's got to pay the bills for the Mandarin Oriental in Qatar. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, yeah, but you're right. | ||
| The military, the IDF, for Israel, Basically, it's a position now where they feel as if they've got northern Gaza under control. | ||
| So they've been withdrawing. | ||
| They've been pulling their people out, right, and equipment. | ||
| And they're doing the same thing slowly in the south, right? | ||
| But the south, as you pointed out, is more of an issue, right? | ||
| More fighters, some leadership still located down there. | ||
| The one truth here, and the hostages, yeah, and although, again, trying to get intelligence on where those hostages are located, I mean, there's been a lot of time that's passed, right, and so the movement of these individuals, right, it's heartbreaking, but again, There's one group responsible for this, right? | ||
| This is not something that Israel asked for, so they've got to deal with it in the best sense. | ||
| And you pointed out a very... I don't think people understand how small Israel is. | ||
| And again, Iran circled them with groups that they helped build that all believe in destroying Israel. | ||
| So they have circled them with these terrorist organizations to accomplish this. | ||
| Hamas was very smart. | ||
| And I suspect the IRGC liaison was involved in this relatively long-term project of disinformation to, you know, essentially lull the Israeli government into this sense of, okay, Hamas doesn't want conflict and Hamas, you know, is good and so we're going to open up more in terms of work opportunities and allow more free flow of citizens from between Gaza and Israel for work. | ||
| And that was a very intense covert action campaign, right, to do that. | ||
| And I think they also realized once we did that, once we took away At least in the minds of some within the Israeli government, this idea that Hamas was a daily, everyday threat, and they wanted conflict, and they were looking across. | ||
| Once you did that, then that opened up the door for the government to kind of look inward, right? | ||
| And then you started getting more infighting within the government. | ||
| And I think that that encouraged Hamas and whoever was guiding the strategy. | ||
| I guarantee you these rocket scientists didn't come up with it on their own. | ||
| And so, Yeah, that part of it was fascinating. | ||
| And then when you think about... Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I guess the point I'm trying to make there is they combined that with the operational side leading up to 7 October. | ||
| Again, guided and trained by the IRGC in Iran and their personnel that were based in Gaza and helping out. | ||
| They understood the importance of dumbing this down, right? | ||
| And so, people talk about what an intelligence failure it was, and it was, definitely, on the Israel part, on Mossad and IDF and others. | ||
| In part, it was driven by the fact that Hamas understood what they had to do leading up to this, right? | ||
| So their communications patterns changed, right? | ||
| They dumbed down their—so there was less SIGINT to pick up or potential communications intercept. | ||
| They had a real understanding of where they were going with this. | ||
| But how do you—you know, if they—if this conflict ends tomorrow, Or ends a month from now, or two months from now, and Hamas in some form is still intact and running Gaza, then the only winners are Hamas and Iran. | ||
| And the violence will continue, and the terrorism will continue. | ||
| So the one key truth that Netanyahu said at the beginning was we have to destroy Hamas. | ||
| We have to make sure they can never ever do this again. | ||
| That's a tough call and it's operationally not feasible in the sense you can't wipe them all out. | ||
| Well, you can try. | ||
| Well, what would you say to people who say there's no military solution? | ||
| That's a big thing you hear in Democrat or left-leaning circles. | ||
| There's no military solution to this thing. | ||
| It's like, there's always a military solution. | ||
| It's not necessarily the most pleasant thing in the world, but it's war. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And I would say those people that talk about, there's no military solution, that's a really simplistic concept, right? | ||
| And usually they have no experience in a hostile environment. | ||
| We did things in World War II that gave a military solution. | ||
| Yeah, but you combine it with other things, right? | ||
| It doesn't, just because you you're focused here doesn't mean you're also not doing other things concurrently on different tracks, you know, whether it's negotiations, whether it's coming up with what does this governance look like when we finish with this conflict. | ||
| They've got to get themselves to a point where they feel they have degraded Hamas because you're not going to remove them entirely or you're not going to destroy them entirely. | ||
| They've got to get the point where they feel they've degraded them sufficiently that they are not a factor going forward, right? | ||
| And They also understand, because they knew going into this, right? | ||
| They knew well before anyone did, what the narrative was going to be as soon as they moved on their operations inside Gaza. | ||
| That the narrative would change to, oh my God, Palestinians are dying, right? | ||
| And look how many are dying. | ||
| By the way, the media never questions the statistics that come from the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| The Ministry of Health from a terrorist organization. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Sure, we'll take that. | ||
| We'll take that information. | ||
| And so they've got to get to that point where they understand that, you know, from their intelligence and what the targets have been able to take out and the leadership they've been able to terminate, that they've accomplished that. | ||
| But they did understand that the narrative would turn quickly. | ||
| I don't think they expected it to turn as quickly as it did, given how brutal the 7 October attacks were, but it did. | ||
| And now you have a lot of useful idiots out there protesting on their behalf and on the Houthis' behalf. | ||
| What do you think, just to bring that back to the domestic side for a second, and then we'll move to another part of the world altogether, when you see all these protests all over the world, but specifically in America, when you see these protests, and they're protesting river to the sea, all of this stuff we've got, you know, they're protesting at the White House, they're pulling on the fence, vandalizing all this stuff, like, are the agencies paying attention to that? | ||
| Like, I think most people are watching that going, doesn't even matter what you think of what's going on in the Middle East, most people are watching that like, Didn't we do this a couple years ago? | ||
| Didn't we burn down our cities a couple years ago? | ||
| Why is no one ever arrested at these things? | ||
| Are you just allowed, if it was a bunch of white people showing up at the White House with pants on, what would be happening? | ||
| So what's going on at the agency? | ||
| I know it's not exactly what the agencies are supposed to be doing protecting the White House, but... | ||
| It's intelligence involved, right? Yeah, we have a good example of what happens when a bunch of | ||
| people show up and rattle fences and break in. We know what happens when they're wearing, | ||
| you know, MAGA hats. That's fine. And they should have been punished, right? I mean, | ||
| but at the same time, the inconsistency of the way they came down on that, and then, | ||
| you know, we disappeared on that rabbit hole, but they were very smart. | ||
| I give the Democrats very, you know, a lot of credit for being clever and sticking to a message because early on in that, they started using that word insurrection, right? | ||
| And they knew what they were doing, right? | ||
| They understood if we can beat this narrative, right, that allows us to then do what they're doing now in terms of trying to, you know, strike Trump off the ballots. | ||
| So in all your years, did you ever see any other insurrection where no one had a set of plans and nobody brought weapons? | ||
| Strolled, strolled around, took pictures. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Can we move this barrier out of the way? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Look, I mean, the people that, you know, there had to be consequences for the people who were violent. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| Right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But, you know, at the same time, the Democrats knew what they were doing. | ||
| They played this one up. | ||
| And then people see in general, I don't think it's just Republicans. | ||
| I think it's both sides. | ||
| Human nature, you know, you want to see consistency, you want to see the same. | ||
| And so they look and they see this, whether it's the Antifa riots or what took place in front of the White House, and they go, how is this working? | ||
| Because it seems not consistent in terms of the way things get dealt with. | ||
| But yeah, the... Is that connected purely to the politics of the agency, the agencies that we were talking about earlier? | ||
| Or is that something else? | ||
| No, I think that's a top-down thing from the administration, right? | ||
| And that's That's a politics thing where they... It's not because the agency has nothing to do with that, right? | ||
| That's a Secret Service issue, Capitol Police issue, not even Capitol Police. | ||
| Yeah, they could have a little bit of jurisdiction, I suppose, maybe. | ||
| Well, I guess I meant more in terms of information snatching on the ground in those groups, figuring out who's connected to who. | ||
| Yeah, that's a bureau thing. | ||
| Yeah, that would also be a bureau thing. | ||
| And you're right, they'd want to know who's there. | ||
| But most of those people out there, Couldn't find Gaza on a map. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, some of them are, you know, being busted. | ||
| They don't even know what they're doing, right? | ||
| They're getting a free T-shirt and a hat. | ||
| And, you know, they get to go out and, you know, and some are there because it makes them feel righteous, you know, and they like that. | ||
| And they get to say, yeah, look, and they get to, you know, I don't know. | ||
| And then some are, you know, trust fund protesters. | ||
| You know, they're wealthy. | ||
| You know, I will say this. | ||
| People talk about, oh, you know, We're all divided, right? | ||
| And it's become very divisive and the demographics are getting sliced and diced. | ||
| The only group I can't stand are privileged progressives, you know, right? | ||
| Because it's the self-righteousness that drives me crazy, and some of that plays into these protests. | ||
| You get others who are out there who have been worried about this cause for most of their lives, so God bless them, right? | ||
| And we have the right to peaceful protest. | ||
| I'm just saying that In these crowds, you've got a lot of idiots. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I would put the pure jihadists with the righteous progressive moron. | ||
| I would say that they're kind of the same bar. | ||
| I don't mean jihadists, I mean like of Palestinian descent, right? | ||
| Who have lived here now and have family over there. | ||
| Okay, yeah, I get that. | ||
| But you look at some of the college campuses and you think, you kids, what the hell are you doing? | ||
| You're doing this because you think it's cool and it's trendy and you're looking for something to do, | ||
| you know, and by God you can get out there and feel clever. | ||
| Queers for Palestine is very different than Palestine for queers. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I think that's how it works. | ||
| You want to go to the Far East now or do you want to go to Eastern Europe? | ||
| Which way do you, depends which way around the globe You choose. | ||
| You know what we could do? | ||
| We could do this monthly and you could have like a wheel of spit. | ||
| That wheel of shit. | ||
| We may have to because none of these problems are going away. | ||
| All right, why don't we go to the Far East then because Taiwan just had elections. | ||
| They looked pretty legit. | ||
| I mean, people were actually holding tickets and there were people checking things and it all kind of seemed like, oh, that's how it could work in functioning democracies. | ||
| But there's a Big situation going on with China, Taiwan, independence, are they seeing American weakness, etc, etc. | ||
|
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No, you're right, you're right. | |
| It was a tidy election. | ||
| It was a tidy election and they sorted it out and they were able to call it, you know. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It didn't take them months. | ||
|
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In one day, yeah. | |
| Yeah, the problem from China's perspective is that the wrong party won, right? | ||
| So they were basically three parties and they were contesting this, but there were only two that were seriously contesting it. | ||
| And one was the Democratic People's Party, the DPP, and the other was Kuomintang Party. | ||
| And the Kuomintang party is very much in favor of closer relations with China. | ||
| China was very much hopeful that they would win. | ||
| They didn't. | ||
| The DPP won. | ||
| The vice president of the government became the president, the new president, William Lai. | ||
| And they've been fairly vocal about the importance of Taiwan's independence. | ||
| And now that word means a little something different, right? | ||
| When you talk to the Taiwanese people, they can be pro, we want Taiwan to be independent and free. | ||
| They don't mean, you know, rattle the cage and be completely separate, you know, from China. | ||
| They still believe in the importance of that relationship, right? | ||
| So we sometimes think about it and go, OK, they're going to have a revolution and declare their independence and everything. | ||
| And it's not really what they're talking about. | ||
| But even having some space between the idea of reunification or basically Beijing taking over Taiwan, that is something that Xi Jinping won't counter. | ||
| So he doesn't he doesn't want to hear that. | ||
| So does it matter in a way what happens in their elections? | ||
| I mean, I know at least temporarily it's good for the Taiwanese people, of course, to be able to express themselves. | ||
| But ultimately, if China wants Taiwan, it's going to take Taiwan, at least with this American administration, something like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that the calculation is more about It's not so much about who's in the White House as how long is Xi Jinping going to stay head of China, right? | ||
| I think he views the reunification idea, bringing Taiwan back into the fold, as his key legacy. | ||
| So I think if you could magically figure out when he's going to finish up being, you know, this sort of this iron-fisted ruler of China, Then you could say, OK, between now and that point in time in the future, that's when something's going to happen. | ||
| And I don't think it's going to be, you know, military. | ||
| They don't want China doesn't want to have to worry about a military takeover. | ||
| And they've talked about this sort of the soft approach. | ||
| And you can kind of see what they did with Hong Kong. | ||
| That was accelerated and helped in part by the pandemic. | ||
| And we were all over here looking, you know, at this. | ||
| And they kind of stamped out the last vestiges of democracy, you know, during that time. | ||
| And it happened. | ||
| Now that's a little bit different, right? | ||
| You know, in a sense. | ||
| You know, Hong Kong was always sort of temporarily leased, sort of, right? | ||
| There was always a sense that it was going back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so it's not quite the same, but they brutally stamped out the democracy movement there. | ||
| And so I think, you know, their view on Taiwan, Despite the fact that there's almost no distance, you know, in the straight there between the two, is they don't want to do it militarily. | ||
| And I think, you know, they are intent on doing it. | ||
| They've been very clear, particularly during the past year. | ||
| She has made some very clear statements that it is inevitable, is what he's saying. | ||
| And so Yeah, the Taiwanese people look at that and go, you know, and there's some that want that reunification, you know, but the majority want things to be essentially the way they are, right? | ||
| And it sort of seems like if they think Trump's coming back in a year, they might want to escalate the speed of that, right? | ||
| That's what Xi might want to do. | ||
| There could be that calculation, but They play a longer game. | ||
| We take everything in very small bite-sized chunks. | ||
| That doesn't typically happen in China. | ||
| They play, whether it's this sort of issue or whether it's an intelligence operation or anything, they play a real long game. | ||
| So I don't think we want to read too much into just a change in administration. | ||
| What does generally sane China policy look like to you? | ||
| Like, I think people hear what you said about Iran, and it's like, you can sort of like make sense of it in your brain. | ||
| It's like, oh, there are weapons in these places. | ||
| There are trade routes being shot at. | ||
| There's people being murdered. | ||
| That's not how we look at China. | ||
| China is doing a lot of other things related to technology, related to releasing COVID, let's say. | ||
| Like there's some other stuff, but it's a little more TikTok, it's a little more amorphous versus just like military stations in countries. | ||
| Right. | ||
| TikTok has been, I mean, people talk about TikTok. | ||
| The Chinese regime would never allow their children to have access to TikTok, right? | ||
| They have a different WeChat. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is a cleaned up version. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So. | ||
| It's not on my phone, it's on that guy's phone over there. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I told him he didn't have to do it, but he wanted to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what is, like, sensible policy related to all that? | ||
| Related to, like, an information war that's happening to our young people? | ||
| I will say that one of the things that the previous president, that Trump did, you know, love him, hate him, right? | ||
| You know, he has a personality. | ||
| He's not my cup of tea. | ||
| I lived in New York for a long time. | ||
| People in New York Who had a chance to watch it. | ||
| He's a tri-state area developer. | ||
| That's where I'm from. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So, you know, you get punched in the nose, you punch the other guy in the nose. | ||
| I mean, people there knew what was happening and what the guy was going to be like. | ||
| Nobody thought he was going to suddenly become a sophisticated, you know, thoughtful individual who was going to be presidential. | ||
| But one of the things that he did that was very smart and I think very useful was to elevate the conversation around China and to Put a spotlight on just how much damage the Chinese regime and their intel apparatus has done over the decades, right, in terms of theft of intellectual property, the cost of that to us and to our allies, to the West, and just the outright theft of research and development, right? | ||
| Fentanyl, I mean. | ||
| Fentanyl, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's, yes. | ||
| So that's a whole separate, you know, counter-narcotics issue that, you know, but, It's their intelligence operations, it's their economic espionage. | ||
| Those things have done damage that we can't even calculate the cost of over decades. | ||
| In terms of lost opportunity, lost jobs, lost revenue streams that could have supported and built up other countries, other businesses. | ||
| They're incredibly aggressive. | ||
| You know, what they've been doing while we, again, kind of get focused in one area, whether it's Iraq, Afghanistan, domestic concerns, whatever it might be, we have a hard time, it seems, multitasking. | ||
| And again, with their sort of their longer view, they have a strategy. | ||
| And so they've spent a couple of decades now traveling around the world. | ||
| People, for the most part, know about this Belt and Road Initiative that China has. | ||
| But they've been going around locking up, as an example, mining rights in South America or in Africa for key minerals, critical and rare-earth minerals. | ||
| And it's the critical minerals that are really more important. | ||
| We call it rare-earth, and people think, well, those are the important ones. | ||
| Well, it's more the critical minerals. | ||
| They've been locking up those opportunities, right? | ||
| They have a monopoly on processing of key minerals that we're never going to get to 100% green because we don't have the ability to process, much less mine, but to process and refine those minerals for things that we need, such as, I don't know, batteries. | ||
| And so you hear this talk about battery technology and how we're all going to go in that direction. | ||
| And that's great. | ||
| We should be doing lots of different things, right, for energy. | ||
| But the Chinese knew that years ago, and they had a plan, and they've been doing this. | ||
| And they also do other things. | ||
| They do things that are more insidious than just going around and cutting deals, right? | ||
| Usually it's in a sort of a usury situation where the country finds out that they're doing a deal where that country then finds out a few years later that they're completely in debt, can't afford the loans, end up having to give up more, right? | ||
| But Some of the insidious things that they do. | ||
| The Chinese regime and the intel apparatus understood the importance of regulatory decisions, regulations here in the U.S., and the impact that would have on things like mining or agriculture. | ||
| And so, as an example, they're not trying necessarily No, they are, but they don't consider it the most important part. | ||
| They're influencing local communities. | ||
| They're influencing local politics, state politics, at that level, right? | ||
| To make decisions about regulations. | ||
| Phosphate. | ||
| Phosphate's a good example. | ||
| It's a very good example, right? | ||
| You like food? | ||
| You like large-scale agriculture to feed the world? | ||
| Better have some phosphate, right? | ||
| It's fertilizer. | ||
| Leading producers of phosphate, China, Morocco, Russia, they're up there. | ||
| So they understood if we go in and we impact local community decisions about access to phosphate mining, and we promote or we encourage through a variety of ways, supporting local activist groups, supporting Operations that, you know, that they're more on a national basis that try to do environmental concerns, right? | ||
| They're trying to do good things, right? | ||
| These activists and the environment, it's not like it's nefarious and they say, if we could just kind of deal with the Chinese regime, but the Chinese regime understands this. | ||
| And so through a variety of cutouts, they're able to support these groups. | ||
| And next thing you know, whether it's down in Florida, you know, with phosphate or it's anywhere else, you know, towns or city councils are saying, no, we don't want that. | ||
| You know, we don't want it. | ||
| We're going to have to do something about this. | ||
| Shut it down. | ||
| That's an enormous benefit to a country that is the key producer of that mineral. | ||
| So that's something that they do, and I've been fascinated by that because it shows, again, it shows this long view. | ||
| And from an operational perspective, sometimes the problems with the CIA is that we tend to have a shorter view, right? | ||
| We're Americans, and so that's just a tendency. | ||
| And so our operations tend to have a shorter timeframe concern, right? | ||
| We don't sometimes think about putting in the hard work of 10 to 20 years or 25 years to develop an asset, right? | ||
| Or to develop a program that's going to eventually produce results. | ||
| And that also gets us exactly back to where we started, which is why you don't want politics in the agency, because then that's going to flip that long-term thing. | ||
| Let's just do a little bit about Russia and Ukraine. | ||
| My basic position on this thing from the beginning was if we were going to do anything there, you got to be really careful because the guy's got nukes. | ||
| So you can't just keep saying, okay, arm him, arm him, arm him, because at the end of the day, If we got that close to the precipice, he's got nukes, so you better watch out. | ||
| And not just nukes. | ||
| He's got those things that you put them on. | ||
| And the things that you mentioned before that they put them on and shoot them all over the place. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that was sort of my position the whole time. | ||
| And I just don't like blank checks to everybody and we're paying pensions for their people. | ||
| All of that stuff. | ||
| It seems to me it's sort of been pushed to the side at the moment because of October 7th. | ||
| So we sort of stopped talking about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Zelensky's at the WEF right now in Davos. | ||
| The war's not gone anywhere. | ||
| I mean, what's going on there right now? | ||
| Yeah, it is fascinating, isn't it? | ||
| Because it was all Ukraine all day long, right? | ||
| And then 7 October happened. | ||
| And naturally, that drew a lot of focus. | ||
| But it is interesting that we, again, we have a hard time multitasking, including in the media, where it's just like, we went for a couple of weeks before anybody thought, is there something going on still in the Ukraine? | ||
| And there is. | ||
| They're in the winter season, which is brutal over there. | ||
| And they understood going into the winter season that there's going to be very little ground movement, right? | ||
| And so it's harder to redeploy troops, it's harder to move supplies, so they kind of hunker down. | ||
| It's very World War I-ish, right? | ||
| You got the trench warfare. | ||
| Literally, the Soviets, the Russians have built enormous trench lines. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Incredible. | |
| I was at the... It's hard to believe people still fight like that. | ||
| It's hard to, you know, I was gonna say, I took the boys, I'm dual citizen, I was born in England, and so, and the boys have their citizenship, so I took all three of them, with my wife, who's the greatest person I'll ever know, and we went to London, and I took them to the Imperial War Museum, and anybody, you know, goes to London, they have to go to the Imperial War Museum. | ||
| It's an amazing place. | ||
| They have a World War I exhibit. | ||
| So we're walking around, this was last summer, we're walking through the exhibit, and I've got the boys, Scooter and Sluggo and Muggsy, and we're walking through this World War I exhibit, and we're reading all about the trench warfare, and we're reading about how it impacted agriculture, and so it created food shortages, and it created all the things that were happening in World War I. | ||
| And it was happening in Ukraine at that moment. | ||
| You think, how did we possibly regress? | ||
| How did we go back to this? | ||
| But we did. | ||
| And so getting back to the present time, the war has shifted its focus. | ||
| Now it's a longer range war during the winter months, right? | ||
| And so what does that mean? | ||
| That means Ukrainians are using their available munitions missiles to go after Russian supply lines further in, or further behind the lines, and sometimes into Russia. | ||
| And they're going after the command and control centers. | ||
| And so there's this long-range battle. | ||
| They're trying to do more targeted strategic strikes on leadership, right? | ||
| And that's a hard lift. | ||
| They're trying to basically cut off Crimea, right? | ||
| And Putin is doing the same thing. | ||
| He did the same thing last winter. | ||
| He's lobbing missiles at infrastructure. | ||
| He's trying to freeze out the Ukrainians during the winter months, right? | ||
| So he's hitting energy sources as much as he can. | ||
| And it's brutal, right? | ||
| And Russia's got a manpower problem, but they have a three-to-one advantage just in sheer numbers, right? | ||
| So they're They're busy conscripting and emptying out their prisons. | ||
| The Ukrainians have their own problems. | ||
| They've got a little bit of internal infighting, in part because of just this dissatisfaction over the lack of success during that counteroffensive. | ||
| They really were banking on that. | ||
| And that had an impact when it didn't go out that way. | ||
| It also had an impact here in the States, where you started to get this idea that, wait a minute, what are we doing? | ||
| It took us 20 years to get fatigued from Afghanistan. | ||
| It took us two years in Ukraine fighting Putin, right? | ||
| Through, you know, you could argue, right? | ||
| You could argue that it's, you know, Ukraine's a proxy, right? | ||
| And you'll hear this from, you know, military personnel. | ||
| They're saying, well, look, this is a small cost to pay to degrade, to the degree that we've done, or the Ukrainians have done, the Russian military, right? | ||
| And it's also shown a lot of weaknesses in the Russian military structure, right? | ||
| We can't, if we stop providing support to the Ukraine, I'm not saying we continue with a certain level, I think we should be more strategic about the weaponry we're providing them. | ||
| Putin will go on the offensive. | ||
| And it's just a matter of time before he would then have success, right? | ||
| And he could well end up in Kiev. | ||
| And that's what he's counting on. | ||
| He's counting on the same thing that the Chinese count on with the US, which is we have a short attention span, we're going to get tired of it, we're going to move on to something else. | ||
| And That's what he's banking on. | ||
| He has shown no interest, really, in serious negotiation. | ||
| And the only interest he would show is if the Ukrainians said, OK, you can have everything you've got right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's not going to give up. | ||
| Putin's not going to give up happily or willingly Crimea. | ||
| So is that the weird part when you hear from our congresspeople and senators when they're like, well, we just have to keep arming them. | ||
| And it's like, well, that just doesn't get us to a resolution because unless you're going to take him out and make sure that the next guy doesn't launch some nukes, they're just not going to end this thing. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the problem, is that nobody's talked about the roadmap for, you know, where's the exit ramp, right? | ||
| And so, but the reality is, Zelensky, you know, came out and said, we're going to take all our territory. | ||
| We're not, you know, we're not going to the table until we get everything back. | ||
| And again, Putin's not giving up Crimea. | ||
| Nobody gave a shit about Crimea, right, being taken over by the Russians years ago. | ||
| It was not like people in the States weren't waving Ukrainian flags and, you know, I stand with Ukraine. | ||
| Well, Obama was president, it was a whole different thing. | ||
| So it happened and we didn't care. | ||
| But now we're like, what? | ||
| Now we're supposed to like stand and say, you know, because it makes us feel good. | ||
| Um, there's gotta be a, there's gotta be a solution here where they're both gonna not particularly be happy, which is the typical way that you end these things is both sides are a little bit displeased, but you know, Putin's gonna, you know, again, he's not going to give up willingly Crimea. | ||
| Um, you know, can they get back more of their territory on the Eastern side? | ||
| You know, that'd be nice to think so. | ||
| But, There's got to be a resolution to this because we can't keep providing at the same level, and our NATO allies, they won't, right? | ||
| We're dickering in Congress about the aid package. | ||
| They're doing the same thing in the EU. | ||
| And that's got Zelensky worried, but it's playing into Putin's expectations, right, that we were going to get tired of it. | ||
| And they're doing their own disinformation campaign, right, to try to influence public opinion here, right, about that. | ||
| And yeah, which is to be expected. | ||
| Anyway, so I guess the answer is, I have no clue. | ||
| It's above my pay grade. | ||
| That seems like a fitting way to end, Mike. | ||
| I have to say this was an absolute pleasure talking about wars all over the world instead of our political wars. | ||
| So I thank you for coming. | ||
| Oh, thank you, David. | ||
| I appreciate it, man. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, 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. |
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