Russell chats to Dave DeCamp, News Editor at Antiwar.com and host of Antiwar News. They discuss leaked documents revealing stagnant territorial shifts in the Ukraine war, the conflict's role as a massive showcase for the military-industrial complex, and the potential foreign policy pivot if a Republican takes the White House in 2024: winding down in Ukraine and escalating tensions with China.You can follow Dave's work: https://antiwar.com/ Support this channel directly here: https://rb.rumble.com/Follow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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Thanks for having me, Russell.
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Mate, one of the things that you've been reporting on is this sort of curious story that in spite of propaganda there's been little shift in territorial control in Ukraine.
There's been incredible loss of life and it seems incredible opportunity for profit.
So what are these new revelations about there being very little in the way of territorial shift reveal?
Yeah, so Ukraine launched its big counter offensive back in June.
And, you know, there's been a lot of kind of media report with a bit of a slant trying to portray that Ukraine is gaining territory and that they are, you know, that they do have a chance of winning this thing.
And they have been gaining some very, you know, incremental areas.
But a recent report from The New York Times that looked over at all the territory that's changed hands.
This year in 2023, it showed that Russia has actually gained more territory this year.
But overall, it's a very small amount of territory.
Only 500 square miles has changed hands.
Russia gained about 300 and the Ukrainian side about 183.
So those small little areas, I mean, if you look at the map, it really shows, you know, the front lines have barely changed.
And in that time, you know, hundreds of thousands of people have likely been killed.
We don't know the casualties for sure on either side because it's kind of a strange thing that we don't know how many people are actually being killed because both sides are hiding their casualty figures.
But it's pretty clear, and from people that I trust, they believe hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed this year alone.
And lots of Russians are being killed as well.
And this is a war that the U.S.
and NATO have chosen to continue.
The really infuriating thing about this is that before the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the discord leaks came out.
And one of those leaks revealed that the U.S.
did not believe Ukraine could regain much territory.
And there was other signs, you know, officials speaking to the New York Times anonymously really kind of buried in their reports.
We're saying, yeah, we don't think that they have what it takes.
They don't have enough weapons.
Russia has really dug in.
Russia spent the last winter really strengthening their defenses.
So they knew it wouldn't be successful, and they pushed for it anyway.
Right before the counteroffensive started, Secretary of State Antony Blinken came out and gave this big speech against a ceasefire.
And he actually, he didn't just say he opposed the ceasefire, he opposed the pause in fighting.
He disparaged other countries that were calling for peace.
So this is what we're dealing with.
And now, months later, that the lines have barely moved and so many people are dead, they're determined to keep this thing going.
That's what's really, you know, they just want an open-ended conflict.
They want to turn Ukraine into this huge NATO bulwark on Russia's border.
Even in his recent address to the UN, Biden said that Russia and Russia alone can end this war.
Russia solitarily and solely are the cause of this war.
And as you point out, even to talk of peace is regarded as a kind of militaristic heresy.
I wonder what you think the significance is of Lockheed Martin, for example, announcing profit opportunities for up to $10 billion and what the likely motivations of this war are if we're not seeing significant territorial shift and the counteroffensive didn't succeed.
What does this tell us about the motivations?
Well, yeah, there's certainly a profit motive here.
I mean, the US and the UK actually recently, according to a report from the Telegraph, the British are apparently out of weapons to send to Ukraine.
But by dumping all of these weapons in there, you know, this gives the arms makers like Lockheed Martin, like Raytheon, you know, they're replenishing all these stockpiles.
You have all the Eastern European countries, especially Poland,
really increasing their military budget.
I mean, it's a total boon for them.
And sometimes, they're very candid about it.
If you remember Alexei Reznikov, who was Zelensky's defense minister, who was recently fired,
he said, I invite all the Western defense contractors to test their weapons in Ukraine.
You know, he opened his country as a testing ground for weapons.
There's recently a report in the Wall Street Journal that said Ukraine is one giant arms fair.
And it was talking about how specifically Lockheed Martin, you know, when it comes to the weapons makers in the US and the UK, the heavy hitters is always Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Of course, there's others, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman.
But Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, or they call them RTX now, they're really making money.
And the HIMARS rocket systems that the U.S.
has given Ukraine, they're in hot demand now.
They were made by Lockheed Martin.
The Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, those are the ones that could fire off their shoulder.
They were obsolete.
They stopped making them in the 90s.
And now, all of a sudden, there's a hot demand for them.
And they're starting to make them again.
They're calling in engineers who worked in like the 80s, like old guys that are retired to help get the Production going.
So it's very clear.
And who's running this thing is Biden's defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, who came from the board of Raytheon.
Literally his job before running the Pentagon was at Raytheon.
So it's very obvious that this is a big part of this whole thing is the money to be made on these weapons and it's complete corruption and cronyism.
I'm astonished to see that sort of the nostalgia craze for the 80s and 90s has reached actual militarism that it's like sort of speak and spell and Simon Says war weaponry from Tomy and MB Games like the kind of nostalgia craze that you see in our sort of love of serials like Lucky Charms has extended to Bazookas.
What a terrifying and extraordinary situation.
When you said that the Ukraine is like an arms fair I was reminded of the a Spanish civil wars potential function as a kind of trial
for the subsequent global war i.e. in particular that the fascists were supported by
Nazi weaponry particularly from the air and stuff. Seems to me that these kind of practices
have always been available.
The idea that military technology is piloted in potentially lesser conflicts prior to is staggering to consider given that Russia are one of the combatant nations.
Even bigger conflicts, even involving China potentially when you talk about what's going on with Taiwan and perhaps we'll touch on that in a minute.
But for a moment, This is intended in no way to disparage the people of Ukraine whose suffering should be paramount in all of our thoughts and in particular with our advocacy for and even demands for peace.
But Ukraine is understood to be a pretty corrupt country when it comes to politics, which country isn't?
So, when the United States acknowledge that they're aware of corruption in Ukraine, why are they so willing to afford a corrupt government the potential for corruption on this scale?
Yeah, I mean, it's a big question because Ukraine was always notorious for its corruption, you know, in the years leading up to Russia's invasion when they used to ask Biden, you know, when is Ukraine going to be brought into NATO?
And he said, well, like they got to work on corruption, which is something to hear coming from Biden, considering after the coup in 2014 that his son Hunter got a job on the state on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company.
So I always have to point that out.
You know, Biden shouldn't really be talking about corruption.
But anyway, it was well known.
And when this thing first started, when Russia first invaded and they started pouring these billions of dollars in weapons into Ukraine, and it's not just weapons, they also give them what they call direct budgetary aid, which is money, billions of dollars that they give to the government to pay Government salaries to pay for government services.
They're actually subsidizing small businesses as well.
There was a recent report on 60 Minutes, and they talked to a lady who ran a knitwear company.
She was showing off her sweaters that were subsidized by the American taxpayer.
So there's all sorts of other ways that they're spending in this notoriously corrupt country.
And they kind of downplayed that for a while in the beginning of this war, and the media went along with it, but it kind of became impossible to keep hiding this.
Recently, Zelensky sacked six of deputy defense ministers.
That's all the deputy defense ministers.
He fired them over these Reports that they were, you know, buying things at inflated prices and then obviously the implication there is that they were skimming off the top.
So if all six of them just, they just got fired in September and this war has been going on for a year and a half, you know, how much have they been skimming this whole time?
And, you know, just the fact that they are doing this with all this corruption, I think it goes to show that they're just determined to keep this proxy war Going, it doesn't really matter.
And there was recently a leaked document, strategy document from the State Department.
And it was kind of their long term plans for Ukraine.
And it was all about how they got to root out corruption, how corruption is this huge problem.
So they are much more concerned about it than they're letting on.
And it said that they're willing to maybe leverage some of the economic aid, but not the military aid.
That doesn't matter.
Even though, of course, there's the risk of these rockets being sold to all sorts of people.
You know, they could end up all over the world, but it just doesn't matter.
They just want to keep this thing going.
Yeah, it's extraordinary.
Isn't it possible that the recent changes with the House Speaker will mean a delay for this additional $24 billion of funding?
Is that possible?
Is that good?
Is it valuable in any way?
Yeah, so it's really kind of interesting what's going on here.
So Biden wants another $24 billion to spend on this war, and it has the majority of support in Congress still.
But over in the House, there is a decent amount of Republicans who are opposed.
They don't want to give more money to Ukraine.
And because of that, Kevin McCarthy was forced to strip Ukraine aid from this short-term funding bill that they just passed to keep the government funded.
And Matt Gaetz, who is a Republican from Florida who launched the effort against McCarthy, he's been very good on Ukraine.
He has opposed it from the beginning.
And he launched the effort to oust McCarthy after accusing him of making a secret deal to bring the Ukraine to the floor for a vote.
So now there's going to be a new house speaker election that's expected to be next week.
And in that time, they can't do any legislative action or at least From what I understand, a lot of this stuff is very confusing and there's a lot of procedural stuff they can do.
But it's definitely disrupting things.
And the one of the House speakers, one of the Republicans who has announced that he will be running for House Speaker is Jim Jordan.
And he's voted against all the Ukraine stuff the whole time.
So this is significant.
I was kind of more pessimistic For a while saying, you know, they're all going to support it.
They're going to keep this thing going.
But what's happening here is not insignificant.
If the house speaker, the third person, the third, the house speaker is the third highest level official in the U.S.
government.
They're second in line to the presidency.
If the, you know, behind the vice president, if something happens to the president, if the president dies or something.
So having a house speaker that's opposed to this proxy war would be very significant.
Now, Biden gave a speech the other day and at the end he said something, well, he didn't give a speech, he was talking to some reporters, but at the end he said something like, you know, there's other ways we could get the money, but I'm not going to talk about that right now.
So unfortunately there probably is other ways that they could keep this thing going.
I wonder if you ever have time to inquire why reporting that is this specific and oppositional isn't found within the legacy media.
What do you think is the importance of independent media when it comes to proposing counter-narratives?
How dangerous do you think it is to present these kind of stories?
I know people in our sphere that say that this is the subject that will get you cancelled, this is the subject that will get you shut down.
Other people think it's Big Pharma.
But certainly there are interests that seem marshal to assure that the legacy media maintains
simply a position of simple amplification of the message of, let's call it the establishment,
or normalising the agenda of the establishment, whether that's the advance of authoritarianism,
the advance of potentially unnecessary wars.
How is it that you get your information?
Why is it that this information is kept out of the mainstream and how do you feel about
it morally and personally?
Yeah, so what's interesting is that the truth is out there.
The truth, you know, you can read between the lines of the mainstream media.
You know, it's what they're saying is factual, but not truthful necessarily.
And a lot of times, and you know, what a big part of my job is, is reading these reports from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Times over in London, and You know, a lot of times buried in those reports are the kernels of truth, like the fact that they didn't think the counteroffensive would succeed.
They would have a story about something completely unrelated, related to Ukraine, and then buried in there, you see a Ukrainian official say, we don't have the weapons to do this counteroffensive.
We can't do this.
And the media goes along with the narrative, even though they might be reporting on factual things.
It's about narrative control.
And you see that with the unprovoked invasion claim, which is one of the, you know, they're trying to change language.
They're trying to say it's unprovoked, even though everything's provoked.
I mean, murder is provoked generally, unless somebody is a sociopath, but it's always provoked.
And recently, Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, he said, He basically said Putin invaded because he didn't want NATO in Ukraine.
And that's the head of NATO.
And they accuse us that the accusation that we always get is that we're on Putin's payroll or that we're, you know, working for Russia or working for China is the new big one now.
And it's just complete nonsense.
You know, we're us at Antiwar.com.
You know, we're Americans who care about our country and our people and don't want our government out there, you know, causing more destruction around the world.
That's our priority.
And we've talked about these things long before it happens.
You know, I haven't been doing it very long.
I started working full-time in 2019, but the website antiwar.com has been around since 1995.
They were writing about warning against meddling in Ukraine in the early 2000s.
So, we're on top of this stuff.
And then when a big thing happens like the invasion, You know, continuing what we do, we get accused of being Russian stooges or whatever, just because the narrative has completely shifted.
You know, COVID kind of ended.
It didn't end.
But, you know, the Ukraine war became the big thing as soon as Russia invaded and anybody speaking out against it got hit with this label.
And thankfully, things have changed just because of the reality of what's going on in the U.S.
And this war is dragging on.
And what are the results that we're seeing?
It's just a stalemate and death and destruction.
And it's just horrific.
So more people are questioning and polls are showing that the opposition is growing, thankfully.
It's odd, because that's such a predictable outcome, and indeed, as you said, the reporting on antiwar.com, which I recommend all of you use and follow if you want to be well informed on this issue, has been saying, well, Ukrainian war, hold on, that could be complicated.
What about the 2014 coup?
What about the infringement of NATO on former Soviet Union territories?
And when you report on that stuff, when you don't comply, when you don't follow their preferred line, you're right, they do reach for extraordinary slurs, and this one that Like, you could be a Putin apologist or a Chinese stooge.
I don't even know that that actually is how things work.
Like, the Chinese government would, like, approach... I mean, I have no idea what they had to say.
If the Chinese government or Putin, especially with what I've been through, said, listen, we're prepared to give you some support, I'd go, well, let's talk terms.
What are you saying?
You know, like, I don't think that the world works like that.
I think that what's far more common is that the sort of there's a set of converging interests between legacy media and the state that are ideological but certainly financial the way that they are funded the pundits that they use it's such a sort of collaborative porous immersive and
Sort of interlocked network of interests that the sort of simplistic Name-calling that you're a Putin apologist.
That's outrageous.
I watched for example recently Hillary Clinton talking to Jen Psaki on something called inside with Jen Psaki and I thought well, that is what it is It is inside.
It's inside the system amplifying its message and they talked about like, you know, as we know Putin meddles in elections and As we know, Putin is an authoritarian dictator, this is an
unprovoked war.
And all there are in terms of interlocution and communication is just the nodding along.
That is the function of the media.
You don't see questions asked like, you won't ever get you interviewing Antony Blinken,
you won't get you interviewing Hillary Clinton or any figure in power because they avoid
those questions.
I mean, beyond avoiding them, they delegitimize that line of inquiry.
They smear any form of dissent, presumably because when this war started, a lot of people
would have gone, oh, what, Ukraine, Russia, that's going to go on for ages and ages, isn't
it?
You can't beat Russia in wars, they're a nuclear superpower, isn't it?
It's going to just drain resources and won't it endlessly escalate?
I mean, one of the pledges that Biden offered was that you wouldn't see troops like, you
know, he said US troops and as far as I know, that's not necessarily happened yet.
But I know that you referred to that Telegraph article and I feel like the UK are putting
troops into Ukraine for training purposes and there's a suggestion that BAE systems
might start operating out of there.
So you do see this incremental escalation that's completely at odds with even the narrative
they offer you at the beginning of the crisis.
Conflict!
And what do you think about that aspect of it?
The way that the narrative alters and shifts and amplifies?
Yeah, I always think about Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor.
In, you know, the early days of the war, when they were trying to get Germany to send planes and tanks, he said, no, no, no, we're not doing it.
I'm trying to prevent World War Three is what he would say.
I'm trying to prevent nuclear war.
Well, now he's allowed the transfer of planes.
He's allowed.
They're sent the German made Leopard tanks.
So, you know, is he taking his country toward World War Three?
By his previous logic, he is.
And you mentioned the troops.
So, recently, your new defense secretary, Schaps, I'm kind of blanking on his name.
Grant Schaps.
Grant Schaps.
He suggested that the British troops that have been training Ukrainians inside the UK, maybe we should start doing that training inside Ukraine.
And then Rishi Sunak came out the day after and he said, no, that's down, you know, that's down the line.
Don't worry about it.
You know, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
British troops have been in Ukraine.
The Times reported in April 2022 that British SAS soldiers were inside Ukraine training Ukrainian soldiers on anti-tank weapons outside of Kiev.
A few months later, the New York Times reported that some NATO countries had special operations forces in Ukraine, and the UK was listed on there.
And the US also has a handful of special operations forces.
And, you know, that was revealed by the Discord leaks.
They have about 14, according to this leak, this leaked Pentagon document.
And the British had 50, which is a significant presence.
That's not just embassy security.
So they're they're doing things.
And there's also CIA on the ground, of course.
And we don't know what they're doing.
That's part of the transparency issue.
You know, they could be doing, you Who knows how close they are to the front lines?
We don't know.
But if the UK started sending troops openly, that would be another very big escalation.
So, it's something to keep an eye out for.
But it's worth pointing out that they've actually been there.
Now, we don't know if they're still there, but based on these reports from these certain time periods, there were, you know, there's enough evidence that I believe it's safe to say there were British troops on the ground in Ukraine.
Tucker Carlson, God love him, said that it's likely that there will be a hot war between the United States and Russia within a year.
What do you think about that?
I really hope that he's wrong because, you know, that can't happen.
And that used to be the attitude was we can't go to war with Russia with, you know, can't go to war with the Soviet Union, can't go to war with Russia.
They have thousands of nukes.
It can't happen.
But obviously, that attitude has shifted now that things keep escalating.
I mean, we're doing the U.S.
And NATO are doing everything short of having troops there fighting Russia.
They're giving them all the weapons.
They're giving them all the intelligence.
And Russia knows this.
You know, there's been all these drone attacks inside Russia, in Crimea, and they're using Western intelligence for that.
Russia knows it.
Russia has, if they want to go to war with NATO, they have the pretext to bomb a NATO base in Poland.
Right now, we are relying on the restraint of this madman Vladimir Putin that they keep, you know, that's what we hear about him is that he's some sort of madman.
But then they also say, oh, he's just bluffing when he's talking about nuclear weapons.
So, you know, I try not to be too alarmist, but we're at the point now where if you wake up tomorrow morning and the US and Russia, NATO and Russia are at war.
You know, don't be surprised.
It's not going to be a shock.
And, you know, I really hope that this opposition in DC and other places in Europe and Slovakia, they just elected a government that wants to end military aid to Ukraine.
I hope that keeps growing because we really need to end this thing.
We're at that point now where Something could spark it.
You know, there's all these planes, NATO and Russian planes are always having these close encounters.
There was that Ukrainian air defense missile that hit Poland last year and they said it was Russia.
You know, it's just where we're at.
Again, just if we wake up and the headline is NATO at war with Russia, you know, we tried to warn you.
I prefer it to some of the headlines I've seen recently.
Now the reliance on Russian restraint is, it seems extraordinary that that would be sort of part of a strategy and the confusing messaging also around, the confusing messaging around, yeah, he's bluffing, he's mad, he's ill, all of this sort of almost antiquated 20th century propaganda.
Seems extraordinarily misguided and while I'm listening to you I'm thinking why is this important?
Of course it's important because of the potential to provoke a superpower into Armageddon which is being addressed and identified as you said by the German Chancellor even Biden himself a few years ago said you know that would be the end of the world and The very point of a cold war was because a hot war was inconceivable.
A proxy war is even an acknowledgement that America's imperialist interests can be better met.
And these are not the interests of the American people, of course.
To clarify, of the military-industrial complex and the establishment elites that masquerade behind the veil of democracy.
You've seen the show before, right?
This is what we talk about.
What I wanted to say is that the reason that it's important to continually interrogate this is because we've foreclosed on the possibility of a different world where the population of any country, yours, mine, might say, is that what I want to happen with my taxpayer dollars?
If indeed, as claimed, the role of the United States is to act as emissaries and peacekeepers and referees in global conflicts that purportedly have no benefit to them, then It ought to be at the directive of the population.
Certainly, for example, the concomitant Hawaiian fires demonstrated a sort of clear public opinion preference for support on domestic issues rather than foreign wars.
And the idea that that kind of conversation is equated with, you know, Putin apologism or A lack of regard for the plight of Ukrainian people is reductive and simplistic and untrue because of the sheer number of conflicts around the world that America continue to inspire, fund and enact.
And I suppose when I think of what we're doing, when we're dealing with someone like you who has a particular expertise and a background and history dealing with the subject that you're dealing with, I feel like it's important to acknowledge that what we're saying is we're being misinformed and lied to and there are different ways of organizing reality.
It's not like there's just some Invisible trajectory that sweeps your taxpayer dollars into the sort of profitable war machine and it is something that should be discussed and in order to discuss it you have to be well informed and in order to do that you have to have a media that's not just amplifying the agenda of the powerful.
Do you think it is conceivable that people could reject the ongoing support of this of this conflict and therefore demand a peaceful resolution?
Yeah, like I said, you know, I think that the opposition is growing and we are in kind of this new media age, especially, you know, with this show, you know, being on Rumble being, you know, they want to shut you down, but you have your outlets that, you know, they can't control.
And Antiwar.com is a very unique thing because, again, this website was founded in 1995 and they kind of cut their teeth opposing the NATO bombing of Kosovo.
And they had sources on the ground finding out NATO was bombing civilian targets.
And it was kind of the first thing of its kind online.
And now, since then, because of that, they were targeted by the FBI.
They were under FBI surveillance.
But now there's kind of There's so much of this now.
There's a lot available that, you know, ordinary people that might not necessarily really pay attention or try to look for the truth in these, when it comes to conflicts like this, you know, they could find it a lot easier now.
You could kind of stumble across it.
So, I think that's kind of, that's, you know, what I try to do and the reason why I am a news editor, why I just talk about the news all day.
It's my, you know, it's my focus.
Is because if you just follow the news, if you just have the context of the events that have happened, again, it's all out there for us.
You know, if you just follow along, you know, they they lie by omission.
Of course, this is what, you know, Chomsky wrote about is that, you know, one example I always think of recently, Iran seized two oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
If back in I believe it was around April or May.
And the context that was missing from that story was that a couple weeks before that, the U.S.
stole a shipment of Iranian oil.
They forced an oil tanker to sail to the U.S.
and they stole the oil.
So they seized the tanker and Iran responded.
And you don't hear about what caused it, what provoked it.
They never want to include that.
So it's just a matter of knowing, like, it's kind of, you don't need to be super informed, just kind of be aware of what's happening.
And when it comes to Ukraine, and I think it just has to be clear to more people that considering what the US has done to the Middle East and North Africa for the past 20 years, you know, how can they think that they really care about Ukrainians?
How can you believe that that's what this is about?
So I think it's kind of just opening more people up to that reality.
Yeah, and now there seems to be an appetite to... Antony Blinken said that China want to become a dominant world power and want to become sort of a hegemonic unipolar force and replace the United States.
I feel like, is that True.
Is that how China are behaving?
I'm sure they have their own imperialism, colonialism, tyranny, corruption.
Of course, I'm sure.
But do you think that there is an agenda?
I mean, if I imagine for a minute that it was the US that was surrounded by Chinese military bases rather than the opposite, or if China were agitating in some sort of off-coast former territory to meddle with the economic affairs as is happening with Taiwan and the
semiconductors and stuff. I feel that would be regarded as extreme hostility. What do you think about this
attempt to portray China as an aggressor? Is it unfair? Am I being naive, optimistic? What's
going on? If you look at what US policy is right now towards China, when we're
speaking militarily, they're not trying to prevent China from taking over the world.
They're trying to prevent China from being the hegemon in Southeast Asia, a few hundred miles off their coast.
That's what the US is focused on is Taiwan and the South China Sea.
And, you know, it's very clear that China, what China has been doing in a lot of instances is a reaction to what the U.S.
is doing, especially in Taiwan.
I mean, Taiwan, it's an issue that's tough to talk about briefly because it's kind of complicated.
But when the U.S.
and China normalized relations in 1979, the deal was the U.S.
would pull their troops out of Taiwan.
They would not recognize Taiwan as a country.
And they would not flirt with Taiwan's independence.
They would, you know, it's an issue for Chinese people in China and mainland China and Taiwan to work out.
But in recent years, we've seen, especially when Nancy Pelosi went over there, the U.S.
is increasing military aid.
The U.S.
in 1982, they released the third joint communique And that was these things they released when the US and
China were normalizing relations to work out certain issues.
And in this one, the US said basically that they would eventually stop selling weapons to Taiwan.
Now, that's open for interpretation. It's intentionally vague, the language, but this was essentially the deal that
the US made.
And now, in recent years, arms sales have increased.
And this year, President Biden, for the first time, started giving Taiwan military aid, the same way he's arming Ukraine by sending weapons directly from Pentagon stockpiles.
This is unprecedented in the era of US-China normalized relations.
And they're doing all this in the name of deterrence.
They say they need to deter China from invading Taiwan, from blockading Taiwan.
But if you look at the past few years, since the US policy toward Taiwan sort of changed, which really happened in the Trump administration, they started loosening restrictions for official government contacts.
That's another thing that really irks China is, you know, US and Taiwanese officials talking.
In that time, as the US has increased that military and diplomatic support, we've seen a lot more Chinese military activity around Taiwan.
China held their largest ever military drills around Taiwan when Nancy Pelosi went over there.
Nancy Pelosi's visit provoked that.
So, this is the pattern.
And it doesn't matter really how you feel about Taiwan, if they should be independent or not, if you're in the US.
It's just the reality.
The more the U.S.
does this, the more military pressure Taiwan's going to come under and the more likely a war is going to be.
Same thing in the South China Sea.
There's this maritime dispute.
China makes very sweeping claims to the South China Sea.
There's little encounters between Chinese and Philippine vessels.
The U.S.
has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines.
Whenever a Chinese coast guard boat cuts off a Philippine boat, The U.S.
comes out and says the U.S.
Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines applies to attacks on vessels in the South China Sea.
So, that means the U.S.
is saying, if this maritime dispute over rocks and reefs turns hot, we're going to go to war.
So, how is China, with respect to the U.S., not talking about its own backyard, but how is China, you know, the aggressor in this situation when the U.S.
