Strategies For China and Russia with Alex Christoforou
Alex Christoforou, of The Duran show, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discuss strategies for China, Russia, and Ukraine in this episode.
Alex Christoforou, of The Duran show, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discuss strategies for China, Russia, and Ukraine in this episode.
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Hey, everybody. | |
I'm really privileged to be joined by Alex Cristoforo, who is one half of the team, the Duran team, which is probably one of the best sources of foreign policy information, the most astute and Piercing that I know of. | |
They're a very, very popular online news service called the Duran. | |
His partner is Alexander Mercoris, and he was on here originally, but we had problems, so we're going to just go forward with half the team. | |
Alex Christoforo is a Cyprus and Greek-based geopolitical analyst. | |
He is a journalist, YouTuber, and world traveler. | |
Welcome to the show. | |
Thank you. | |
And I've been following you guys for a while and just loving, you know, really learning so much. | |
I want to have the two of you back to talk about China. | |
But today, if we can, let's talk at least just a little while about Ukraine. | |
You published recently a comprehensive history that showed the role of the Biden administration, the previous administrations, the entire kind of historical neocon infrastructure. | |
And purposely, it appears precipitating this conflict and the desire that they have to, you know, to destroy for a balkanized Russia. | |
You are not a sympathizer with Vladimir Putin, are you? | |
I'm a sympathizer. | |
I'm neither a sympathizer nor against or pro. | |
I just look at the facts and see, you know, where it leads us. | |
I have no, on the Duran, we have no animosity or hatred towards Putin or Russia or towards any country or any people for that matter. | |
We look at the situations and how we got to where we are. | |
And we have been trying on this channel from day one to put an end. | |
To this conflict. | |
But you can't put an end to this conflict until you understand how you got here. | |
And that's what we've been trying to uncover and to share with our audience. | |
And we talk about the history all the time on this show. | |
But why don't you give us kind of, because you've just written a really brilliant synopsis. | |
It was actually from, yeah, we actually did a show with Professor Jeffrey Sachs and he put out an article with the synopsis and we discussed it together. | |
And we've been going over the history of Ukraine for a while now. | |
And it goes back many decades. | |
What has been planned for, and it's not really so much about Ukraine. | |
That's the key to unlock everything that has taken us to where we are, that has brought us to where we are. | |
It's not about Ukraine. | |
It's about Russia. | |
And it really is the story of the rise of this group of neocons and how they've now managed to take over much of the State Department and much of the Biden White House and actually every administration even preceding the Biden White House. | |
There's been this neocon presence that has been growing over the many decades, and it's now come to a point where these neocons are taking us to the brink of an absolute catastrophe, which is a conflict, a direct conflict between NATO, the United States, and Russia. | |
When we say a conflict between NATO and Russia, U.S. is NATO. | |
So you're really looking at the U.S. facing off against Russia. | |
And it's this neocon obsession. | |
With the destruction of Russia, it's on their minds, it's on their brains 24-7, and it's taken us to a very dangerous place. | |
And let's go through some of that history, because there was a time when the Democrats opposed the neocons, and there was a time after the Iraq War. | |
The neocons, of course, got us into the Iraq War, and that was one of their When they published PNAC, the project for the New American Century, back I think in 1999 or somewhere thereabout, they basically said, we want to do eight wars, and one of those was Iraq. | |
And they had to lie to us to get us into Iraq. | |
They had to pretend that it had something that Saddam Hussein had some responsibility for 9-11 wars. | |
And then they had to pretend that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. | |
But two years, three years into that war, when all of those stories were discredited, a lot of those, the neocons were really in malodor across both political parties. | |
And at that point, you know, I think most of us believe that they were headed for permanent exile. | |
So what happened after that? | |
How did they survive, you know, that cataclysm of Iraq? | |
I think that's the million dollar question, isn't it? | |
I always thought that after the debacle of Iraq, that the neocons were done. | |
But they've actually gotten stronger. | |
And since Iraq, what have we gotten? | |
We've gotten Libya. | |
We've got Syria, and now we've got the biggest one of all. | |
Yemen. | |
We've got Yemen. | |
Pakistan and Afghanistan. | |
Afghanistan for 20 years. | |
We have Ukraine now. | |
We have possibly China after Ukraine. | |
Well, Biden just said he wants to go back to Syria. | |
I'm worried about Syria, to be honest. | |
I think everyone is rightly focused on Ukraine. | |
And we're covering Ukraine a lot, but Syria worries me because the United States is in a very vulnerable position there. | |
They're occupying a part of Syria, but all of the people, all of the countries surrounding this occupying force in Syria, they're now pushing for the U.S. military to get out. | |
And Biden is not getting out. | |
He's continuing to build up in Syria. | |
And I'm very worried about the situation in Syria. | |
Something could go awfully wrong there. | |
The Syrian government, Iran and Russia, they were conducting military operations because of U.S. Reaper drones that were active in the area. | |
And the Biden White House came out with a statement the other day, and they said that they've warned Russia to not operate in the area that they're occupying. | |
And they're exploring their options as to how to confront the Russian Air Force there. | |
So, you know, it really worries me because everyone's focused on Ukraine, but something could go wrong in Syria. | |
And of course, you could have a chain reaction, which can carry over to Ukraine. | |
So it's not a good situation in Syria either. | |
Talk about the deadlock right now with Ukraine becoming part of NATO, because that's very, very interesting, because you actually have some of the neocons who are now stepping up and saying, we don't think Ukraine should be part of NATO. And explain that paradox. | |
You know, the Ukraine and the NATO situation is something that has been... | |
In the works, since 2008 is when the discussion of Ukraine entering NATO was seriously considered. | |
And it's at that time period that Russia warned the United States NATO, the collective West, not to do it. | |
Don't put Ukraine into NATO. They accepted many other countries into NATO. Of course, we have the Baker Gorbachev-Bush promise we're not going to go one more inch to the east. | |
Russia accepted many countries to the east to enter NATO, but Ukraine was the red line. | |
And I think a lot of the White House administrations, including the neocons, They believed that Russia was bluffing because Russia accepted all of these other countries into NATO and they didn't really give much pushback. | |
I think they believed that they could also bring Ukraine into NATO. | |
And the year up to the special military operation and the conflict in Ukraine, the collected West, they seemed intoxicated with this idea of bringing Ukraine into NATO. | |
I remember the Munich Security Conference, which took place about two weeks before the February 24th invasion of Ukraine. | |
Everyone at that conference was so excited with the prospects of bringing Ukraine into NATO that Russia was looking on and they sent their final warnings and they were building up their forces. | |
And there was a lot of talk about a potential Russia incursion into Ukraine. | |
But even at that point, the leaders of the European Union and the United States, it seems like they didn't believe that Russia would actually call the bluff. | |
And it was at that conference when Zelensky started to talk about Ukraine even obtaining nuclear weapons. | |
And at that conference, you had Kamala Harris, you had Ursula von der Leyen, you had Olaf Scholz. | |
All of these collective West leaders were at that conference, and not one leader decided to push back against Zelensky's statement. | |
Not one leader came out and said, there is no way that Ukraine is ever going to obtain nuclear weapons. | |
Ukraine is not going to be entering into NATO anytime in the future. | |
There was no talk contrary to what Zelensky was saying. | |
And I think that was the point where Russia said, okay, we have to do something now. | |
We have to find a way to bring Zelensky to the negotiating table to grab the attention of the collective West so that they can understand our security interests and And to make sure that Ukraine never enters NATO. And that's when they launched the operation on the 24th of February. | |
And they almost succeeded. | |
They almost succeeded in bringing Zelensky to the negotiating table and signing an agreement, pledging that Ukraine would not enter NATO. And that's when Boris Johnson flew into Kiev and then the war changed. | |
This was April of 2022. | |
Yeah, end of March, beginning of April, when Putin, about three weeks ago, actually showed the agreement that was signed. | |
And it seems pretty clear that Putin was very confident that if he put troops in, that the West would be forced to come to the negotiating table. | |
And he was probably surprised at that point. | |
He put a minimal number of troops into Ukraine, clearly not wanting to take over the entire country. | |
But just to bring them to the negotiating table. | |
No one was listening to him. | |
No one was listening to his red lines. | |
I think it was 40,000 troops moving into Kiev. | |
So obviously 40,000 troops are not going to occupy a city of 3 million people. | |
That's crystal clear. | |
But he succeeded to a point. | |
And he had the agreement in place. | |
He had it initialed and signed. | |
Ukraine actually even got their security guarantees. | |
So Zelenskyy, he asked for security guarantees as well, and those were in the agreement. | |
So as a whole, the agreement was fair. | |
It provided Ukraine security guarantees. | |
It took NATO off the table. | |
It reverted to an extent back to the Minsk agreements so that the Minsk agreements can start to be enforced as well. | |
And it looked like disaster was averted, but we don't really know what promises were made to Zelensky when Boris Johnson flew into Kiev, but it was after that meeting in Kiev that they tore up the agreement, and that's when the conflict shifted to the war that we have today. | |
And to get back, and that's a very good synopsis, to get back to my original question, the kind of the tide has turned where you now have some of these neocons who are actually saying, well, wait a minute, maybe we made a mistake. | |
I think they felt that they would have already brought down Russia, and the extraordinary resilience that Russia has demonstrated economically. | |
Where they outmaneuvered the West and, you know, all these sanctions that were meant to destroy Russia actually ended up strengthening it. | |
And then Putin's popularity, I think, has never been better. | |
Oh yeah, his popularity is at an all-time high. | |
I flew into Moscow just the other day beyond the ground to see what it's like. | |
And I can tell you right now that you walk through the streets and you understand that... | |
They've managed to weather the storm of the sanctions quite well. | |
I think they're even surprised at how well they overcame the sanctions. | |
And that was the goal. | |
The plan was to implement these shock and awe sanctions. | |
And the belief was that Russia is this country masquerading as a gas station, gas station masquerading as a country, whatever John McCain said many years ago. | |
And they've internalized that. | |
the neocons, they've internalized this belief that the Russian economy is weak. | |
It's the size of the economy of Delaware or Iowa or something like that. | |
And if they put these shock and awe sanctions in place, the economy would crumble, the government would collapse, and we would revert back to, say, the 1990s, where things were good for certain powerful people in D.C. where things were good for certain powerful people in D.C. | |
And You know, it didn't work out like that. | |
Putin, to his credit, the Russian government, not only Putin, his entire team, they've been preparing for this since the Maidan coup in 2014 and probably even before that. | |
They had everything in place to push back against the sanctions, and it worked. | |
It worked. | |
And not only that, they pivoted very quickly east. | |
Very quickly towards China, very quickly towards BRICS. You know, a year and a half ago, no one was really talking so much about BRICS. I mean, it was there. | |
Russia, India, China, South Africa, but it wasn't talked about the way it's being talked about now. | |
It wasn't seen as a peer rival to say the U.S. economic architecture and economic structures. | |
Now it is. | |
And in a year and a half, two years, we've seen a huge change of focus from west to east. | |
You know, that's been one of the terrible consequences for the United States with this conflict. | |
You know, Lindsey Graham said the other day that the U.S. has come out really good for this conflict in Ukraine. | |
We're using Ukrainians to fight the Russians. | |
And, you know, for the United States, it's a win. | |
We're weakening Russia by Ukraine, and it's a win. | |
It's not true at all. | |
The U.S. is going to get hit hard by this, as is Europe is already getting hit hard by this. | |
I live in Europe. | |
I see the economy and what it's like. | |
I see how the people are suffering from an economic standpoint. | |
And it's just going to get much worse. | |
I mean, we've de-industrialized Germany. | |
We're destroying Europe economically. | |
A whole pipeline was blown up. | |
Right. | |
And we've also exposed all these weaknesses now in NATO, where we don't know whether NATO would follow America into war in Ukraine. | |
NATO's boxed themselves in, and that's another worrying part to all this. | |
What does NATO do now? | |
What kind of off-ramp can NATO find? | |
Because if NATO keeps on pushing for escalation, and how can they even escalate? | |
They've given up so many weapons to Ukraine. | |
So much of their power has been destroyed by Russia in this conflict that NATO is in a very tough position right now. | |
But Do they walk it back? | |
If they walk it back and they say, okay, we've lost this proxy war to Russia, then the trust between NATO members is lost. | |
But if they escalate further, they're going to get defeated. | |
Obama, when he was president, said something. | |
I didn't often agree with Obama, but he said something that was very correct in 2015. | |
He said he's not going to get involved in Ukraine because Russia has escalatory dominance in the region. | |
That was in 2014-2015. | |
He understood it then. | |
How come the Biden White House doesn't understand it now? | |
How come NATO doesn't understand it now? | |
This is Russia's backyard. | |
They're not going to win this thing. | |
They can't win this thing. | |
This is Russia's port. | |
It's their only warm water port. | |
I mean, strategically, it's existential for Russia. | |
Yeah, it's existential. | |
Yeah. | |
And they can't lose and they will not lose. | |
But by continuously escalating, Biden has pushed the US into an impossible position and he's pushed NATO into an impossible position. | |
And he needs to find an off ramp, but he has these neocons whispering in his ear. | |
And unfortunately, Biden continues to listen to the neocons. | |
And instead of finding some sort of diplomatic solution with the Russians, I still believe the Russians are open to negotiating and diplomacy. | |
I don't believe they've completely shut that door. | |
But Biden is not listening to people in his administration who are saying, walk through that door. | |
Instead, he's listening to the neocons who are trying to slam the door shut, and they're calling for more escalation. | |
Yeah, I mean, part of the problem is he has a domestic political problem, is if we don't win this war, we've been told that we're winning. | |
We've been told all these lies about the war. | |
And if he suddenly walks away from the war with a settlement that puts Ukraine in a worse position than the Minsk Accords, and a worse position than the April 2022 agreement, Biden politically... | |
You know, is very, very damaged. | |
And the whole neocon ideology is, you know, I would say destroyed. | |
Yeah, yeah, you're exactly right. | |
He's now in the beginnings of a campaign, and he's based his entire presidency, it seems, on Ukraine, which is crazy in and of itself. | |
I don't know why he's invested so much into Ukraine. | |
He should have realized after the sanctions had failed that it was time to negotiate a settlement. | |
And that time was the end of March, beginning of April. | |
He had the deal in place, and it could have been behind him by now. | |
But they decided to keep on pushing forward. | |
That's the problem there. | |
And I agree. | |
He's now in a campaign, and I don't see him pulling back. | |
I just don't see how he can do it at this point. | |
No matter how many Ukrainian kids die, The tragedy is the hundreds and thousands of people that are dying on both sides, but especially on the Ukrainian side. | |
And we're getting reports now on the front lines that the military is not even sending the armored vehicles towards the front line, of which they haven't even been able to get to the first line of defenses. | |
They're still trying to get through this gray zone area and try to get through the mines that the Russians have placed before they even get to the first line of defenses. | |
The vehicles have all been destroyed and burned. | |
They're not even sending Bradleys. | |
They're not sending leopards now. | |
There are reports that the UK told the Ukraine government don't even dare send the challengers in that direction. | |
We don't want to see images of challengers being destroyed and burned on the battlefield. | |
So now the Ukrainians are just sending the troops just on foot to try and break through. | |
This is a horrific situation. | |
Well, Alex, thank you very, very much for enlightening us. | |
And I hope we can get the two of you back next time to talk about China. | |
Absolutely. | |
It would be my pleasure. | |
Take care. |