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April 7, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender
45:08
Cost of War with Scott Ritter

Diplomacy and the cost of war are discussed in this episode with Scott Ritter and RFK Jr.

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Hey, everybody.
I'm really pleased to have back on this show Scott Ritter.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and the author of Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, Arms Control, and the End of the Soviet Union.
He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the Nuclear Control Treaty.
He served in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War.
And from 1991 to 1998, served as the chief weapons inspector with the United Nations in Iraq.
Mr.
currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia and the Middle East, as well as in arms control and non-proliferation.
And Scott, I think I can say about you that many people regard you as a contrarian because you do not always, you're not diplomatic and you don't always follow the kind of the official orthodoxies.
And it's gotten you in a lot of trouble over your career, but you've had an extraordinary record of prescience.
In fact, Matt By of the New York Times, which, you know, the Times had apologized for its support of the Iraq War, and later it said that your view was the most prescient of all the people who were talking about the war at that time, Americans during the...
Late 90s, when you were serving as a weapons inspector and then right up to the Gulf War in 2001, regarded you as this kind of unique truth-teller.
Your opinion was something that people could trust, and it was bracing in many ways, the way that you were willing to depart from official proclamations and orthodoxies.
I had you.
I was a very, very strong admirer of yours.
During that period, I had you on my TV show on Ring of Fire with Mike Papantonio and talk to you for the first time.
And I'm very, very interested in talking to you now because I'm interested in your take in the Iraq War.
You have a long history in the Soviet Union and you understand the uses of power, of military power in that part of the world.
I'd love to start kind of with an overview of what you think the military situation is now in Ukraine.
The dominant narrative that we see in this country is that the Ukraine is having victory after victory against Russia.
And that Russia has really been spanked in this war and humiliated.
I know there is an alternative narrative, and I'd love to hear what your view is.
Well, first of all, thank you very much for your kind words and for inviting me on.
Look, the situation in Ukraine, I think we have to start off and note that this is one of the most violent military encounters that has taken place in the world.
The casualties are beyond comprehension.
The level of violence is beyond comprehension.
That's just not me saying this.
This is General Kavoli, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, who spoke last January in a defense form in Sweden and said that what's going on in Ukraine was beyond anything NATO could ever imagine.
The U.S. forces and NATO forces aren't trained, equipped, prepared.
I think that should shock the average American into the fact is that they don't know anything about what's going on in Ukraine.
What's going on in Ukraine right now is that Russia is winning a strategic victory, not only against the Ukrainian army, but against the forces of the collective West.
Ukraine has been turned into a de facto proxy of NATO. That's not my words.
That's actually the admission of the Ukrainian Minister of Defense Who said straight up, you need to keep supporting us, Wes, because we are your proxy in this war against Russia.
And we've had Western leader after Western leader after Western leader acknowledge that this is a war NATO can't afford to lose.
Now, that's a curious statement.
If NATO is not a direct participant in the conflict, which we're told over and over again, then why is this a war that NATO can't afford to lose?
It's because NATO is a Not only equipment and financing, but operational assistance, intelligence assistance, planning, logistics, everything short of pulling the trigger.
And some people would say with the number of Western mercenaries that are on the ground with recent military experience in the NATO countries that, in fact, we are providing trigger pullers.
But despite all of that, Russia is prevailing.
Russia is in the process of achieving a historic victory in the city of Bakhmut.
Some of the numbers are correct.
Ukraine could have lost upwards of 80,000 troops in this battle.
The Russians have said that the Ukrainian army broke its back here, and I happen to agree.
I agree.
There's a lot of talk right now about a Ukrainian spring offensive.
You can't attack with words.
You can't attack simply by drawing an arrow on a map.
You need men.
You need men who are equipped and trained, not just to carry out standard military operations, but offensive military operations against an opponent like Russia requires a level of expertise and preparation that simply doesn't exist in Ukraine today.
Ukraine cannot win this fight.
That's why President Zelensky in a moment of lucidity and honesty last week said if Bakhmut falls, that he will be compelled to seek peace with Russia because there is no alternative.
To continue to fight means the destruction of Ukraine as a modern nation state.
So that's where we're at.
Anybody who thinks that Russia's getting a spanking, I invite them to go to the battlefield.
And if they survive, they'll understand that the only person getting a spanking is Ukraine at this point in time.
I want to make a disclosure.
My son is one of those U.S. soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion, and I'm very happy he's home now, but participated in the Kharkiv offensive as a machine gunner for a special forces unit that was mainly foreign soldiers.
He speaks with extraordinary admiration about the fighting capacity of the Ukrainian army and of their bravery, their courage, and the way that they have beaten the Russians in battle after battle after battle.
Do you disagree with that?
I think it's improper to look at the Kharkiv offensive that took place in September and view that as being the exemplar for the war as a whole.
First of all, I agree with your son.
The Ukrainian soldiers have fought with a tenacity that's beyond imagination.
They've shown a level of dedication.
Any army that can suffer 300,000 dead in the span of a year, and that's what the Ukrainians have suffered, and then still be in the field fighting, is an army that deserves everybody's respect.
So I am not going to challenge.
In fact, Mr.
Pogosian, who's the head of Wagner, the private military contract force that's spearheading the fight for Bakhmut, We're good to go.
But dying and losing.
You see, in September, the Russian military was overextended.
They initiated this conflict back in February of 2022 with the goal of, within a span of a month, driving the Ukrainians to the negotiating table.
And they succeeded.
See, everybody who thinks that Russia lost the first part of the war doesn't understand what Russia was trying to do.
They weren't trying to take Kiev.
They weren't trying to destroy the Ukrainian army.
They were trying to compel the Ukrainian government to the negotiating table to bring about a rapid closure to this conflict.
And they succeeded.
They had three negotiating sessions at Gomel and Belarus.
On 1 April, they were ready to meet with Ukrainians in Istanbul where they were going to finalize a peace agreement.
Why would Ukraine agree to peace terms with Russia if they were winning the war, if they were spanking the Russians?
Because they weren't.
They were taking horrific casualties, and they understood what was going to happen if they continued the fight.
But it was NATO that stepped in, because NATO misconstrued the Russian special military operation.
NATO said because Russia didn't take Kiev, Russia lost.
All Russia wanted was peace.
That's all Russia has ever wanted in this conflict.
It was Boris Johnson that told Zelensky to pull out of the peace agreement.
And then NATO doubled down by providing $40, $50 billion worth of military assistance.
It proved to be a game changer.
And we saw that game change in September when Ukraine was able to launch a successful offensive operation in Kharkov and then later on down in Kherson, taking back a considerable amount But that offensive stopped.
It stalled.
Why?
Because the Russians solidified their lines.
The Ukrainian military ran out of steam, lost horrific casualties.
All of their offensive striking power was destroyed, basically.
And then the Russians mobilized.
300,000 partial mobilization, probably 180,000 volunteers.
They're completing that mobilization as we speak.
Ukraine has not been able to match that mobilization.
They're begging right now for everything.
They need tanks.
They need armored fighting vehicles.
They need artillery, artillery shells.
They're going to run out of ammunition this summer.
The president of Ukraine says that.
The chief of staff of the Ukrainian military says that.
The head of NATO says that.
It's true.
And when you run out of artillery in a war that's defined largely by artillery, you lose that war.
And that's the fate of Ukraine right now.
Russia has mobilized.
Their troops are very well trained, very well equipped.
Ukraine will never again have the opportunity they had in September.
They had a situation where the Russians had overextended their lines in the Karkov district.
They were defending a kilometer frontage with 50 to 60 troops with no defense in depth.
And well-trained special forces like the group that your son was with were able to penetrate the Russian defenses and go in 20, 30 kilometers sometimes without any opposition.
But then what happened?
The Russians went through, solidified the lines, and that was the end of that.
No more deep penetration.
In fact, every time they tried it after that point, they got killed, slaughtered, because the Russians brought to bear their superiority in firepower.
And that's what the Russians have today.
They have superiority in firepower, superiority in numbers, superiority in combat capacity.
Ukraine has some of the best fighting soldiers the world has ever seen.
I don't think anybody can take that away.
But the special forces units that your son was working with, there was a recent interview with a special forces colonel, Ukrainian special forces colonel, that said, I have lost 80% of the men that I had when I started this war.
And the people I'm getting now don't have the training, don't have the physical fitness.
They're not special forces anymore.
When a unit loses 80% of their troops, they're not the same unit.
And that's the Ukrainian army today.
There's some guys who have been there from the start, but most of them are dead, wounded, The people that replaced them, a lot of them have been rounded up on the streets by these brute gangs that are going around compelling mobilization at the point of a gun.
They're giving three to four days worth of training before being sent to the front line, where the average life expectancy of one of these soldiers is around four hours.
That's not how you win a war.
Now, again, I'm not going to denigrate the courage and the tenacity of the Ukrainians.
One only has to take a look at the casualties Russia has suffered and they have been significant.
But Russia is winning this war, and unless something dramatically changes in terms of, you know, force structure and capacity, Ukraine is going to lose this war.
One of the things my son told me that was really frightening is he started out as a drone operator for this unit, and he said that as soon as he turned his drone on, the Russians knew where he was and would pound the area with artillery, and the artillery shells kill everything within a football field within 100 meters.
And so it's a different kind of war.
I mean, we're used to fighting wars where we're dropping bombs in the desert or doing drone strikes with no anti-aircraft artillery and total domination of the skies.
But the Russians actually have really good assets and they have very good trained pilots and they have a devastating artillery system.
No, look, this is a war.
We used to train for this kind of war.
When I was in the Marine Corps back in the 1980s, we trained for large-scale ground combat in a European environment.
That was back when we had 300,000 troops on the ground in West Germany, and we could fly in another quarter of a million troops in 10 days.
And, you know, we were planning to go to war against a Soviet group of forces in Germany, the 400,000, 500,000 strong.
But after the Cold War ended, we stopped preparing for this kind of fight.
The Gulf War, we won because we brought the best military in the world to bear on the problem.
We fought the world's fourth largest army.
So anybody who thinks the Iraqis were not capable of fighting, you don't know the Iraqis.
They fought very, very hard.
But you can't stand up against an opponent like the United States Army and the United States military in the early 1990s.
We had prepared for decades to fight a Soviet army that could bring to bear a lot of violence.
But then we entered the global war on terror.
And as you said, we're fighting an enemy that was tenacious, but not capable of dealing death like the Russians and the Ukrainians could do right now.
We haven't fought a campaign against an integrated air defense system since Desert Storm.
I mean, there's a little bit of that against Serbia in 1999.
But what the Russians have in terms of air defense is mind-boggling.
And anybody who thinks that American or NATO air power would turn this around, you don't know what you're talking about.
Talk to the Ukrainian pilots right now.
The Russians have brought in their fourth-generation fighter, the Su-35, and their radar and long-range missile capability basically makes it impossible for the Ukrainian Air Force to take off.
Because they're shot down as soon as they get up in the air.
That would be the fate of much of NATO's air power if they tried to engage the Russians.
Again, the level of violence, as you said, what's happening here is electronic warfare.
See, when your son turned on his drone, it emits a signal.
That signal is picked up immediately by Russian electronic warfare, who then triangulate the signal and put artillery down on that target.
And so what drone operators have to do is offset their position with an antenna that's set, you know, a couple kilometers away, so that when the signal's detected, the artillery shells land over there.
But that trick, remember, the Russians aren't stupid.
They'll do that trick once, and then the Russians will start to search for the signals.
You cut that signal, go on.
This is a level of sophistication.
We talk about the violence that's taking place, but the sophistication of warfare right now is beyond the imagination of people.
Electronic warfare, communications intercept.
If you make a mistake, in short, you die.
This war is not forgiving for people who make mistakes on either side.
The Russians have made several mistakes.
They die.
The Ukrainians have made many mistakes.
They die.
I am very happy your son came home safely, but I think he understands that there before the grace of God goes him in terms of the number of people who did lose their lives.
War is an unforgiving business, and this war in particular, because no one has imagined this conflict.
We haven't had a situation where this many people died this quickly in armed conflict.
I mean, one of the frightening things about this war is, and I think the Polish foreign minister mentioned this the other day, that the plan is if the Ukraine collapses, NATO will then go in.
You know, that's, I think, a very, very frightening thought, that we then would get a full-out You talked about the competency of the Russian pilots and the quality of their aircraft.
How would they stand up against American aircraft?
Back in the day, giving away my age here, we used to run an exercise in Nellis Air Force Base called Red Flag.
And Red Flag was a force-on-force U.S. versus Soviet realistic dogfights.
But we haven't done that in a long time.
We now have resumed it, but we bring a lot of bias into our planning.
And so whenever you hear somebody say that we are planning against a near-peer opponent, that means they're planning against somebody that is designed to be inferior to the Americans.
So a lot of operational assumptions are based upon certain aspects of superiority that are automatically given to the American side in this war game.
That's just not the case.
The SU-35 fighter is one of the finest fighters in the world.
It's a fourth generation fighter that is easily the equivalent of the F-22 fighter.
The Russians have a different way of waging air combat.
I'm not saying it's better than ours.
I'm saying it's different.
It's one you definitely have to train against.
The Russians are operating within the framework of an integrated air defense system that is lethal to any mistakes.
We haven't trained on this.
And anybody who has been in combat will tell you that unless you train as you're going to fight, the first time you go into combat, you're going to be making a lot of mistakes, mistakes that should have been made in training.
But if we're not training properly, that means the mistakes are going to meet on the front line.
The Russians have had a year now to go up against a NATO-style military.
They made a lot of mistakes up front.
They've learned.
They've adapted.
I'm not going to sit here and say that it wouldn't be a fight.
I have too much respect for American professionalism, American pilots, and the American combat team.
But I will say that throughout history, if you study the initial combat of American forces in wars, we tend to fight the last war.
This war is, again, as General Kabuli said, is beyond the imagination.
If we're fighting the last war, that means we're fighting the wars in Iraq, the wars in Afghanistan, the wars in Syria.
We're not ready for what's about to happen.
That doesn't mean we can't learn.
That learning curve is going to come at a horrific cost.
And here's the other problem, then, is sustainability.
How many casualties can the United States take?
We have 100,000 troops right now in Europe.
Not all of those are combat troops.
We'll call maybe 40,000, 50,000 of them combat troops.
What happens when they start taking casualties?
Who's going to replace those casualties?
And I'm not talking about individual replacements.
I'm talking about unit replacements.
When a battalion takes 60% losses in a day and a half, which is going to happen, who replaces that battalion?
We don't have any left to give them.
Where are we going to get them?
How are we going to get them there?
This is, again, a level of war that people don't understand.
If we don't have it on the ground, it's not going to arrive.
If we're talking about going to war against Russia, understand not a single ship will land in Hamburg intact.
They will be sunk if we're at war with Russia.
But here's the good news, sir.
With all due respect to the Polish foreign minister, how does he think he's going to get Polish troops into Western Ukraine?
Under what authority?
NATO has two Methods of authorizing conflict.
One is, of course, Article 5.
Attack against one is an attack against all.
If Russia doesn't attack Poland, where's the justification?
And Russia has no intention of attacking Poland.
So now Article 4 comes in.
That's how NATO goes to war.
If you take a look at the conflict in Libya, you take a look at Afghanistan even.
These are all Article 4 fights, the fight against Serbia, Article 4.
That is where NATO comes together and determines that a security threat exists that warrants NATO intervention.
But it requires the unanimous consent of NATO. And Poland is not going to get the unanimous consent of NATO for a military adventure into Western Ukraine that could lead to World War III. So Poland would have to go in alone.
And if there's an army in Europe that's not prepared for large-scale ground combat in Europe against a Russian-style enemy, it's Poland.
Their army is small.
They're talking about doubling up to 300,000, but they're not there yet.
It's poorly equipped, and whatever equipment they have, they've given to the Ukrainians.
They haven't replaced this equipment.
They're not well trained.
So there's zero chance that they would be able to enact the policies that their politicians are giving word to.
What Poland's hoping is that they can drag NATO in there with them, but there's no appetite in NATO right now for a conflict with Russia.
None whatsoever.
You know, you mentioned earlier on that That Russia didn't really want to take Kiev, that it doesn't want to take all of Ukraine.
What does, in your view, what does Vladimir Putin want?
What did he want when he went in there?
And what's his objective now?
Well, we have a good idea of what he did want when he went in there.
That's the peace treaty that was negotiated.
It seems to me that the Russians put on the table what their demands were, and what they got in that peace treaty, what they wanted, was recognition that Crimea is Russia forever.
That's it.
Belongs to Russia.
Ukraine has to concede that.
They were seeking at the time the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, the two Donbass republics.
And from the Russian perspective, after eight years of the citizens of Donbass being treated as terrorists by the government in Kiev, bombarded on a daily basis, there could be nothing less.
You can't ask Lugansk and Donetsk, the primary majority ethnic Russian populations, to return under the wing of Ukraine.
They wanted Ukraine to commit that they would never join NATO. That's been a Russian demand since 2008, when William Burns, current CIA director, then US ambassador to Russia, wrote a memorandum called Net Means Net, where he outlined the Russian position.
They will not tolerate Ukraine becoming part of NATO. We knew that in 2008.
Russia insists that that's the condition today.
Demilitarization.
They did not want NATO infrastructure in Ukraine.
They didn't want Ukraine to become a de facto extension of NATO as it had after being trained by NATO from 2008 to 2022.
So that's what the Russians wanted.
And you know what?
If the Ukrainians had taken that deal, it would have been a good deal compared to what they have today.
Now Russia has taken Tereson, Zaporizhia, Lugansk, and Donetsk.
All four of those territories are now, from the Russian perspective, part of Russia.
And with all due respect, that's the only perspective that counts.
Because they have a constitution that they believe in, just like we believe in ours.
And that constitution has been adapted to recognize these territories as Russia.
They will never get them, Ukraine will never get them back.
The reason why I say that is because now that it's part of Russia, it's protected by the totality of Russia's military capability, which includes nuclear weapons.
So if there's any dream on the part of NATO that through the use of military force they can recapture these territories, that's like the Russians coming into Mexico and telling the Mexicans they can take back Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico.
The United States would view that as an existential threat, and we would use every means necessary, including nuclear weapons, to prevent that from happening.
So that's where we're at.
What Russia has said is what they're looking for now is the social and economic revitalization of these new Russian territories, that they have no desire to acquire additional territory, but they still require demilitarization.
That means NATO infrastructure is removed.
It also means that Ukraine's army, We'll now have to pull back 150 kilometers from the new Russian border, because Russia will never again tolerate a situation where Ukraine is firing artillery shells against Russian civilian targets, which Ukraine does on a daily basis, killing two to three, sometimes more Ukrainian civilians a day in Donetsk and other areas.
No NATO. And the last one is going to be a more difficult one.
I don't know how Russia is going to pull it off, but they insist they're going to be able to do this.
And this is denazification.
That means to get rid of the far-right, ultranationalistic parties that have taken over the government in Ukraine, to delegitimize, deplatform the ideology of Stepan Bandera.
An odious historical character who fought alongside Adolf Hitler, has the blood of tens of thousands of Jews, hundreds of thousands of Poles and Russians on his hands.
He is the national hero of Ukraine today, and Bandera is, from an ideological perspective, he's in the DNA of the Zelensky government.
And so the Russians have said that has to be eliminated.
I don't know how they're going to achieve that.
But the good news for Ukraine is Russia's willing to stop this war And give Ukraine, for instance, the city of Odessa.
That allows Ukraine continued access to the Black Sea, which means Ukraine can survive as a modern nation state.
They can have Nyepetrovsk, a major industrial facility that gives Ukraine an industrial heartland.
They can have Kharkov, again, another industrial city.
But if Ukraine continues this fight at the behest of NATO, which we see, we see the United States and NATO urging Ukraine to continue, Russia will take those three cities, and those three cities will become Russian.
That's just a reality.
That means the virtual death of the Ukrainian nation as we now know it.
What are the implications of the new Chinese alliance with Russia?
I mean, the military and the geopolitical and economic implications.
Well, we can't call it an alliance because they won't call it an alliance.
Alliance is actually...
Very limiting, because it provides a structure that holds it together, but it also limits it.
What the Russians and the Chinese have said is we have something that's not on the line.
There's no limits to what we can do.
It also means that there's no artificial restrictions.
This perplexes many people in the West, because We're looking for limiting factors here, what we can exploit.
The bottom line is we can exploit nothing.
There's no weaknesses there.
We've tried to do that, for instance, to highlight the differences between Russia's continuing friendship with India and to make that a wedge between Russia and China because China has difficulties with India.
What the Russians and Chinese have said, well, that's an issue that we'll talk about over here, but it doesn't affect what we're doing over here in Ukraine.
The nexus of Russia and China goes beyond simply uniting one of the world's great economies, China, with one of the world's great land masses and reservoirs of natural resources, which is Russia.
You bring those two things together and you create a world-beating team.
And this is something the United States and Europe need to wake up to, that thanks to the policy of the United States, we've brought these two nations together and they're not going to drift apart.
They are unbeatable in terms of their economy, their resources.
And as long as their military ambition is limited to defending themselves, then they won't get involved in the kind of military misadventures that the United States has.
You won't see the Chinese army bleeding itself out in the Middle East like you saw the United States.
You won't see the Chinese army bashing its head in a conflict with Australia, trying to take Australia.
That's not what they do.
They will fight for the South Chinese Sea, for these new islands.
They will fight for Taiwan, and they will defend their borders against India and anybody else.
But China's global projection is economic, and there they're unmatched.
I mean, if you take a look at what the Biden administration tried to do in the most recent G7 meetings last summer, it was almost embarrassing.
It's almost embarrassing because we're encouraging the seven most developed economies in the world to come up with a $600 billion fund for global development.
Because we were encouraging the seven most developed economies in the world to come up with a $600 billion fund for global development.
After a decade, where China has pumped in $7 to $10 trillion in global development, as if what we were going to do was going to have any impact, it won't.
We can't compete with the Chinese on the scope and scale that they have.
And now when we take a look at the economic impact of the pandemic, we take a look at the blowback from the sanctioning of Russian energy, which has created havoc in the European economy and even our economy.
People have to understand, you know, when the Saudi Arabians just agreed to a 500,000 barrel a day reduction in oil, look what oil prices have done.
Russia says they're going to follow suit.
This blows the pricing beyond the $60 cap that Europe's put on.
Nobody's going to recognize that $60 cap.
It's a joke.
And then you combine that with the fact that basically China and India and Saudi Arabia have all said, we refuse to tie our oil To an artificial pricing mechanism, Brent's standard, which is a European pricing mechanism.
They're now going to go to a new standard.
I think they're calling it the Dubai standard or something, which means they are totally divorcing themselves from the West.
They're the only things that count.
This Trans-Eurasian Economic Union that Russia and China are creating and the process of creating We're good to go.
And the fact that Brazil just entered an agreement with China to conduct trade using the Chinese yuan and the Brazilian real, I think it is.
What he said is they're not using the dollar anymore.
And that removes all of our leverage.
We have no ability to influence one of the largest economies in South America because without the dollar, we can't sanction you.
Think about what he just said.
Without the dollar, we can't sanction you.
How is sanctioning building economic relations?
Sanctioning is the destruction of economic relations.
It's the antithesis of economic growth.
And yet that's the only language the United States knows how to speak.
We don't talk about reaching out and building bridges.
We talk about blowing up bridges.
We talk about sanctioning people, starving people, strangling people.
This is why China is having such great success.
I'll leave it with this.
Look what they did in the Middle East.
After four decades of America trying to transform the Middle East into an arc of chaos designed to subvert Iran by using Saudi-funded countries.
Gulf Arab states to create trouble from Lebanon, through Syria, into Iraq, down into, you know, in Afghanistan, into Yemen.
This is the Shiite Crescent, which is the Shiite Crescent.
The Shiite Crescent that Abdullah, King Abdullah, talked about in 2004.
Yeah, which is unifying all of these, the Gulf states with Saudi Arabia money and Oman and Qatar and Abu Dhabi all the way up to Lebanon.
So the Shia Crescent was the youth, the fulcrum of U.S. strategy, which is to unite Saudi Arabia, Oman, the Gulf states, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, all the way up to Lebanon as a barrier against Iranian expansion in the Mideast. all the way up to Lebanon as a barrier against And that was our whole strategy for the past 40 years.
Yes, sir.
And as I think you're about to say...
Well, what I'm about to say is that the Chinese came in and said, Hey, guys, this is stupid.
Look, I'll give you an example of how stupid it is and why the Americans...
We were given enough hints.
Back in the final year of Donald Trump's presidency, an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone was shot down.
The Iranians claim it flew into the airspace.
We claim it didn't.
But it was shot down.
Donald Trump wanted to launch a retaliatory strike against Iran.
And the military wisely said, hey, boss, while we can do that, understand that we will set off a chain of events that we can't control.
And the Iranians are going to rain death and destruction on everything in the Middle East, including our bases.
But more importantly, they're going to destroy Saudi oil infrastructure.
United Arab Emirates Infrastructure, the entire Middle East oil-producing economy will be destroyed, and then it will take us probably three to five years to build up combat power to be able to defeat Iran, if we could defeat Iran.
But the world economy will collapse in the meantime.
And Trump had to pull back because there was a recognition that, yes, while we could do damage to Iran, Iran would do damage to everybody else, and it would be a mutually assured destruction-type suicide pact.
Now, we didn't learn that lesson because we continued to promote this anti-Shia crescent policy.
But the Saudis woke up.
They had a big wake-up call in 2019 when the Houthi fired a couple Iranian-made drones and shut down an Aramco facility, sending the signal, we can shut you down anytime we want.
And the Saudis, you know, they're engaged in something called Saudi Arabia 2030, which is this massive revitalization of the Saudi economy and society, etc.
It requires money, money to be poured in, money that can't be poured in if you're busy buying weapons for a war, and if it's ever fought, means the end of your economy to begin with.
Same thing with Iran.
Iran needs oil to survive.
They need to sell oil to keep their economy functioning.
So the Saudis and the Iranians actually have the same policy goals and objectives.
Stability.
China came in without any military power, sat down, and negotiated an agreement between the Saudis and Iranians to end these four decades of American-driven conflict.
And it's working wonders.
The Saudis now are talking about inviting Syria, which is one of those nations in the Shia Crescent, Syria to rejoin the Arab League.
They're going to normalize relations with Syria.
They're normalizing relations with Iran.
They're both going to join the BRICS. They're both joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
They are gravitating into that massive gravitational pull that now is the Russian-Chinese nexus.
It's sucking them in.
And you know who's left holding an empty bag?
The United States and Israel.
Of course, we brought Israel in with the Abrams Accord back in 2020.
Israel was supposed to help provide a stiffening to this crescent of chaos.
Saudi doesn't want to play that game anymore.
Nobody in the Gulf of Arab world wants to play that game anymore.
They want to actually grow their economies.
And to do that, they need peace and stability.
And they're willing to make a common cause with the Iranians.
I don't think they're going to become best friends.
But I do think they're just going to stop this nonsense of perpetual Cold War that could go hot at any moment.
That was the American policy.
But we have nothing to put on the table to challenge the Chinese.
And this is the problem.
The Chinese are going around the world right now preaching economic prosperity and peace.
And all we can preach is death and destruction and war.
So we have spent approximately the equivalent on weapons as the Chinese have spent on development.
And development without the strings attached.
They go to these countries and, you know, they end up getting a lot.
They end up getting control of those natural resources.
All we have is to offer weapons in exchange for those natural resources.
And these countries are beginning to catch on.
The big issue is that we project our military power around the globe and the Chinese population Reject economic power, and they're winning this battle because economic power is a lot more attractive.
Bombing somebody into oblivion does not make friends.
It does not make permanent allies.
It is not a good tool for diplomacy.
Investment in somebody's economy wins you a lot of friends.
The Chinese are proving that.
100% correct.
I've done a lot of travel in the Middle East.
And I will tell you this, you're not going to win the hearts and minds by blowing them up.
You do just the opposite.
You know, there is a great capacity in the Middle East.
It is a great capacity everywhere.
I say the same thing about the Russian people.
We don't understand them.
We don't even try to understand them.
We allow ourselves to be swamped with Russophobia.
We allow ourselves to be swamped with Middle East prejudice, basically, against Arabs and such.
And in doing so, we forget that these are human beings that not only have the same emotions that we do.
I mean, just imagine...
I just ask every American to imagine that once every five years, somebody came in and just blew up your house and killed your children, killed your friends, your relatives, then you spend the next five years rebuilding for them to come in five years later and do it again.
And it's a perpetual cycle of death, destruction, and violence.
You can never dig out from underneath it.
You would not view that as your friend.
Now imagine, if you would, the equivalent of FEMA coming in and rebuilding your home, offering the helping hand, helping rebuild schools, etc.
The love you feel for them.
That's how the world is feeling.
You look into China and those who come in with the helping hand.
They're rejecting the death and destruction, the helping hand.
But here's the important thing.
The capacity for give.
The capacity to forgive amongst these nations.
You know, we have made so many mistakes, so many mistakes in the last 30, 40 years.
But if we would just write the course, people would forgive us and would accept us as friends if we would just behave as friends.
And that's what we don't understand.
The greatest strength America has is the ability to extend a helping hand.
Without strings.
Not a hand attached to our own moral codes, our own belief system, our own values.
A genuine helping hand that says, we're here to help you rebuild.
And what happens when you don't have the strings?
See, we put those strings on because we have this insecurity that says we have to control everything.
But if you actually help somebody without strings, the goodwill that will be engendered is the best mechanism of control because you're not controlling them.
They're volunteering to be with you and help you and view you as a friend to come to your assistance.
We have to radically change our approach to interfacing with the world.
We are a nation with great capacity.
Great capacity.
We are a nation with some of the best people in the world.
The American heart is unbeatable, untouchable.
If we could just direct it into doing good.
I have seen firefighters run into buildings willing to sacrifice their lives to save complete strangers.
That is the American heart.
That's what we need to tap into.
The ability of America to do what is necessary to do the right thing.
We have to stop taking that energy away.
And perverting it by turning it into this war list.
Because the same dedication, the same willingness to sacrifice that it takes to have a Marine cross the line of departure to close with and destroy the enemy for firepower maneuver to save it, to lay his life down for those.
We direct that into him going over in a different capacity.
One of a helping hand to help people build without preconditions, without strings, and people would fall in love with America again.
And I still think that can happen.
We haven't gotten too far down the rabbit hole to prevent that.
I'm reminding my uncle, President Kennedy, because my uncle came into office immediately, you know, four days after Eisenhower made his speech, probably the most important speech now in American history, warning against the domination of the military industrial complex.
And specifically warning against that this was what was going to happen to us.
We would become an imperium abroad and a security state at the moment.
We would lose our democracy and we would lose our friendships around the world.
And my uncle came in, you know, and immediately two months into office, he was he got tricked and lied to by his joint chiefs of staff, by Curtis LeMay, Louis Lamentzer, and Alan Tulles and Charles Cabal of the CIA.
And they said he didn't want to go into Cuba.
He didn't want the Bay of Pigs invasion to happen, and he refused to use U.S. military vessels to transport the troops, you know, the Cuban revolutionaries.
And they had to get vessels from United Fruit Company in Texaco to bring them over because my Uncle Jack wouldn't do it.
And then he said, when the invasion happened and it was failing, and they said, okay, now you got to send in the Essex aircraft carrier and we got to invade.
And he said, no.
And he realized that was their plan all along.
They knew it was going to fail, but they thought they would trick him into evading.
He walked out of the Oval Office and he said to Robert McNamara, I want to take the CIA, batter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.
And he never trusted his military advisors again.
And when they tried to get him to go into Laos, he refused.
When they tried to get him to send combat troops to Vietnam, put tremendous pressure on him to send 250,000 men, he refused.
He never sent any combat troop abroad during his presidency.
He sent 16,000 advisors, you know, to Vietnam, who technically weren't allowed to participate in combat.
Many of them, of course, did.
But that was fewer troops than he sent to get James Meredith into the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss.
And a week before he died, he signed national security order ordering all troops out of the end of 1965, the first thousand in November.
And of course, two weeks later, he was killed.
And Johnson reversed, Wyland and Johnson reversed that order.
My uncle said he didn't want the face of America that people knew abroad to be the face of a He wanted it to be a Peace Corpsman, bringing food, bringing technology, digging wells.
And he started the Kennedy Milk Program to give nutrition to every child in the world.
He started the Alliance for Progress to give direct aid to the poor rather than the oligarchs in the military.
I'm saying all this stuff because, you know, it's hard to judge the success of any presidency objectively.
But if you want to measure the success of the presidency, based upon this metric, the number of hospitals, universities, boulevards, buildings, Our name for that president abroad, none of them can rival my uncle.
There is a Kennedy Avenue or Boulevard in almost every capital in Africa and Latin America.
There are universities, there's hospitals, there are statues to them in Ethiopia, all over Africa and Asia.
And people loved our country at that time, genuinely loved our country.
And they looked at us as a beacon of freedom, of moral authority around the world.
They wanted our leadership.
They knew the difference between leadership and bullying.
And my uncle knew that.
And my uncle, you know, was during World War II, he was marooned on an island after his PT boat got cut in two with the Japanese, which was an imperial army, looking for him.
And his life was saved by two Solomon Islanders who resented the Japanese invasion and the Japanese takeover of their country.
And they took a coconut that he had carved his coordinates on and they paddled it 30 miles across the ocean at the British base and gave it to him.
So his life was saved by colonial people.
And I think that that lesson that, you know, he learned that these are people who should be governing themselves.
We shouldn't be governing them either with hard colonialism of the British or with the soft colonialism of corporate military aid, you know, from the United States.
And the payoff, you know, anybody can look at it around the world.
Just go for a walk in one of those capitals and you'll see something.
My uncle used to say that there are children in Africa who are named for Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, but there's none named for Marx and Lenin.
Of course, that's not true today.
But I think the greatest honor that he would have felt if he knew it after his death was the number of African children and Latin American children whose name is Kennedy.
Because people admired our country and they loved our country then.
And the economic and security payoffs of that kind of foreign policy are so much higher.
I just want to let you know that one of my daughters, Patricia, went into the Peace Corps, and the man she's marrying, her fiancé was also a Peace Corps member, and they both view that as one of the defining moments of their life.
The concept of going abroad and selflessly serving on behalf of their nation, but for the benefit of others.
That's the legacy of your uncle.
It's alive and well and living today.
Scott Ritter, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for continuing to be outspoken about these issues and continuing to tell the truth to the American people.
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