Show 323 - Gas Up the Cold War

Speaker 1 He's Dan Carlin, and this is Common Sense.

Speaker 1 My apologies for not getting this emergency broadcast of Common Sense out more quickly.

Speaker 1 As fate would have it, I'm in the midst of a very,

Speaker 1 you know, time-consuming and intensive part of the hardcore history creation process, and it just, it's difficult to both talk that many hours in the day, right?

Speaker 1 Do that audio, then do this audio, and have your voice hold up and all that. I'm a little gravelly as it is, so I apologize.
And if there's any,

Speaker 1 you know, brain-damaged commentary today, we are going to blame it on all of that. It's nice to have an excuse, isn't it?

Speaker 1 And I expect that in the not-too-distant future, all of this will be outdated.

Speaker 1 In fact, I took a few notes on my phone on a walk the other day, and as I look at them now, they all, I mean, many of them appear outdated, overtaken by the pace of events.

Speaker 1 The events I'm speaking of is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which happened the other day, maybe four or five days ago now.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the shock that that's created. And I thought, well, the first thing that we ought to lay out here is my own biases and history on all this so that everybody's on the same page.

Speaker 1 So, you know, my personal angle on all this.

Speaker 1 First of all, I'm just generally an anti-war person,

Speaker 1 not for any religious or ideological or philosophical beliefs per se,

Speaker 1 just because usually they fail to achieve the Carl von Clauswitz goal, right? The policy or politics

Speaker 1 by other means, right? Your military is supposed to be a tool for achieving that. And so often, you know, the difference between means and ends is noticeable and costs a lot in blood and treasure.

Speaker 1 And if I look at any of the major U.S. military involved events of my lifetime, I don't see any one of them that meets that standard, right? Where it achieved the Carl von Clausewitz goal.

Speaker 1 It depends, though, because horizons matter. So for example, look at the United States and Britain's toppling of the democratically elected government of Mohammed, Dr.

Speaker 1 Mohamed Mosadihan in Iran in 1953, right?

Speaker 1 On a short-term basis, they achieved the Carl von Clausewitz policy by other means, but in the long-term basis, the blowback from that's still affecting us today.

Speaker 1 So maybe it depends on the horizon that you set your, you know, your measurements to.

Speaker 1 I tend to be a long-term sort of guy, and most of the time, the military is a very blunt instrument to achieve the policy by other means.

Speaker 1 You'd be better off having a policy by other means other than the military means, most of the time.

Speaker 1 And I think that this is even more true in the modern world than it used to be because look at the blowback that Vladimir Putin is getting now for everything that's going on in Ukraine, right?

Speaker 1 You wouldn't have had to have dealt with this to anywhere near the same degree. I was going to say 100 years ago, but how about 25 years ago?

Speaker 1 100 years ago, you would have had a few newspaper accounts and some active interest groups and what, but nothing like this, right?

Speaker 1 This is a whole different thing and adds even more fuel to the argument that this is an instrument that has a very hard time in the 21st century achieving your policies slash politics by other means if it involves horrible images and invasion.

Speaker 1 There's a very big difference, as I think we all understand, between invading and defending from a moral standpoint.

Speaker 1 I do feel compelled at the outset here

Speaker 1 to acknowledge that

Speaker 1 there is a ton of attention here where there have been other spots in the world, trouble spots where civilians and people get caught up in the gears and history and have shells and bombs dropped on them that aren't getting this kind of attention.

Speaker 1 And that's not okay.

Speaker 1 So when we have war and cruelty and atrocities, these are the sorts of things that people like yours truly, with their rainbows and unicorns' view of how they'd like to see the world organized.

Speaker 1 Imagine that there would be some sort of muscular military police force around the world that could break up those kinds of fights and save those kinds kinds of people from being caught in the middle of arguments between governments.

Speaker 1 So let's acknowledge that people all around the world have been in this sort of situation for as long as I can remember and maybe forever, certainly in the post-Second World War world.

Speaker 1 The reason this is different, as I know many of you already understand, but we have a lot of young people listening and some of this stuff is very new to them and I have to remember that.

Speaker 1 Luckily, I have kids and I'm getting questions that I sit sit there and go, hmm, I never would have thought about that. Of course, you have that question.
Maybe I can answer a few of those today.

Speaker 1 And if you think it's elementary stuff, well, maybe it's designed to be. Fill in a few of the foundational blanks that people might have.

Speaker 1 After all, this is the sort of stuff a lot of us learn by living through, and we haven't lived through anything like this in a while.

Speaker 1 This is the sort of global event that has the potential to go sideways in a way that many of the other conflicts that we can compare this to in relatively recent memory didn't.

Speaker 1 The Iraq war, you know, Desert Storm, Desert Shield, the taking of the Gulf War, none of those things were going to go nuclear, right?

Speaker 1 Even things in the European part of the world where there might have been a little bit of friction between, say, the two former superpowers from the Cold War, something like the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, even that never threatened to go nuclear.

Speaker 1 The last time we had any threat to go nuclear was probably the 1980s. The last time we had any serious threat of something going sideways was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Speaker 1 And of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis has some similarities to this,

Speaker 1 one of which is it has to do with spheres of influence and having your adversaries close by.

Speaker 1 Nobody likes that. And the bigger the power, the less they like it.
The problem that a person like yours truly has on this subject is very different from a problem that, say,

Speaker 1 someone who's Danish, I'm just throwing that out there, might have on this.

Speaker 1 A Dane might say that nobody should have spheres of influence and that any country should be able to join any alliance they want. And, you know, you have no right to tell people what to do.

Speaker 1 Now, as an American, it's a harder thing for me to say without looking like a geopolitical hypocrite because the United States has stuff like the Monroe Doctrine, which I may be wrong about this, but I believe is still in effect.

Speaker 1 I don't think anybody ever repealed it. They may have clarified a few things.
But since the relatively early 1800s in the United States of America, our sphere of influence has been defined,

Speaker 1 you know, legislatively as being not just North America, but South America too, right? It's a two-hemisphere sphere of influence, and no one else is allowed in here.

Speaker 1 And so when Cuba

Speaker 1 had a revolution, and the person who took over from the revolution, Fidel Castro, announced that he was a communist

Speaker 1 and began to bring in our adversaries in the Cold War, the Soviets, their advisors, their military people, and eventually their missiles, right off the coast of the United States.

Speaker 1 As you might imagine, we weren't happy about it.

Speaker 1 And we haven't been happy about Cuba ever since.

Speaker 1 And it almost turned into a nuclear war. And the famous letter that the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had sent to the American President John F.

Speaker 1 Kennedy at a certain point in the crisis, where it looked like we were reaching a point of no return. He said we should not pull on the ends of the rope of war.

Speaker 1 You know, he said, eventually you'll get a knot that's too hard to untie, and you'll have to cut it. And we both know what that means, right? And they were able to pull back from the brink.

Speaker 1 But the whole thing happened because of an adversarial alliance member coming really close to U.S. territory.

Speaker 1 And it was going to be a face-off moment, one that we considered once they started putting dangerous weapons there to be worth the Third World War over.

Speaker 1 Okay, so fast forward to now, and this gets back to my personal viewpoints that you ought to be aware of. I have been talking for a very long time

Speaker 1 about how poor of an idea I have always thought that expanding

Speaker 1 NATO military cooperation closer and closer to Russia's borders is.

Speaker 1 I was talking about it during the Clinton administration on the radio. I have a long history with this, so you ought to know that.

Speaker 1 The very first name guest we ever had on Common Sense, and you can imagine how long ago that was, was paleoconservative Pat Buchanan.

Speaker 1 And we talked about his book, A Republic, Not an Empire, and we specifically focused on the triumphalism after the end of the Cold War that caused military forces from the West to move closer to Russia's borders.

Speaker 1 And we were saying at the time that this was something that was going to backfire because it was the kind of move that was made because at the time the Russians were weak.

Speaker 1 And the argument being made by people like yours truly and Pat Buchanan, who are nowhere near each other on the political spectrum, and a small group, but a profile, I mean, high-profile group, this was debated at the time, crossed all sorts of ideological boundaries, the people that were warning against this, but all of us were shouted down by the people that suggested.

Speaker 1 I remember one person said to me, what good is a victory in a Cold War if you don't take advantage of it? It's an understandable sort of an attitude, isn't it?

Speaker 1 But the problem is, is big, big, big countries like Russia don't stay down forever. And when they get back up, they're going to remember how they were treated.

Speaker 1 And so my argument this whole time is we ought to treat them like a power that's going to be a power again someday and not put into place a bunch of structures and whatnot that will cause us problems down the road.

Speaker 1 Now, if you've listened to any of those shows that we've done, you'll know that at no point was the plan to leave the countries you know, that were next to Russia undefended and sheep waiting for the slaughter.

Speaker 1 The interesting thing about both sides is that, you know, the Russians, and we forget this, they have a kind of a historical geopolitical PTSD.

Speaker 1 But look at their history, who wouldn't, right?

Speaker 1 Within living memory, look at their history, who wouldn't?

Speaker 1 But the interesting thing about it is all the people that live next to Russia have a geopolitical, historical PTSD too, but theirs is of Russian domination, right?

Speaker 1 They're scared to death and continually worried about the Russians. And I used used to tease them about this, some of my friends who live next door to Russia.

Speaker 1 And I would always joke that they have Russia on the brain, right? All they're thinking about all the time is don't trust the Russia.

Speaker 1 And you know, you think, okay, well, you know, I'd feel the same way with their history. But they're the ones right now who are saying, see, we told you.

Speaker 1 So now let me point out that at no time did I see what has happened in Ukraine now, the Russian invasion, happening.

Speaker 1 Even the other day before the invasion, when we were all wondering what the heck this arms buildup on

Speaker 1 the border meant, I was thinking, I mean, at one point, I think I tweeted, and, you know, even when I'm not here, it's really the only social media I use, but I do try to at least comment on events and whatnot on Twitter.

Speaker 1 At Hardcore History is the account we usually use, but after a show like this will be on at Common Sense. at DC Common Sense.
Haven't used it in a while.

Speaker 1 But on the Hardcore History Twitter feed, I'd even said, I mean, is it a gun that's being cocked so that someone like Putin says, see, we're very serious when we say we don't want NATO expanding into new areas?

Speaker 1 And of course, now we know it's not. Now, we should examine something right at the outset here, because I think it's vitally important.

Speaker 1 And that is the difference between what Vladimir Putin is saying and what's really going on.

Speaker 1 Because in terms of when invasions of countries happen historically, usually, I don't ever want to say all the time, but usually the justifications that are publicly given for this are not worth the paper they're printed on, right?

Speaker 1 It's a bunch of things that, I mean, Germany attacked Poland to start the Second World War in a defensive maneuver, if you believe their contemporary accounts.

Speaker 1 The problem with someone like yours truly is that the public statements in that case where I just said you should never believe what they are for why Vladimir Putin said he attacked Ukraine, are the very things I've been warning about for, well, 25 years or something.

Speaker 1 So does that mean they're not?

Speaker 1 Well, let's just try to take this on multiple different levels. The first level is let's take Vladimir Putin at his word.

Speaker 1 And all of this is in large part because of worries about Western military might moving closer and closer to Russian borders.

Speaker 1 He's just completely made all of that much more likely, hasn't he?

Speaker 1 I mean, in a Karl von Clausewitz policy by other means goal here, if Vladimir Putin wants less military hardware on his border,

Speaker 1 the Germans, which is, you know, shocking to some of us, are going to up their military budget. The Swedes are talking about defense.

Speaker 1 How much have you screwed up on the Clausewitz level if your goal is not to have your neighbors spend more on military hardware on your borders if the Swedes are talking about it,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 So again, take him at his word.

Speaker 1 He's in big trouble. I mean, he may have NATO in Ukraine more quickly than he otherwise would have because of this.

Speaker 1 Now, this is though the part of me that then thinks, okay, try to think about if this looks like such an error.

Speaker 1 Maybe we don't know what's really going on, right? Maybe he's outfoxing us. Maybe this has something to do.
Maybe this is just an excuse for something, right?

Speaker 1 So far,

Speaker 1 and you can't believe the fog of war is the fog of war. You never know what to believe.
But so far, if we can judge,

Speaker 1 this is a more costly affair and a less decisive affair so far than he might have expected.

Speaker 1 Got punched back on the nose by the brave resistance of the Ukrainian people.

Speaker 1 The funny thing about it, I hope I don't insult anybody here, but I think of the Russians and the Ukrainians similar in a certain way.

Speaker 1 They are both really tough and sometimes a little bit crazy in the best of all possible ways from a soldier standpoint.

Speaker 1 Fearless, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the stereotype that we always had when I was, you know, when we would be wargaming or talking about military history of the Russians, and I mean over eras, is that they were a different sort of military when defending from attack rather than when they were the attackers.

Speaker 1 And I don't mean in a tactical situation, right? Because in the Second World War, they were often the attackers, but they were the attackers who had originally been attacked, right? They were mad.

Speaker 1 And angry Russians, just like angry Ukrainians, is a fearsome foe. But the Russians traditionally on the offensive have been much less motivated,

Speaker 1 often seem a little lackluster.

Speaker 1 And when we've seen the Russian military in relatively recent history, it has been in situations where they have such overwhelming dominance on the ground that even lackluster performance doesn't really hold you up too much to achieving your short-term Clausewitzian goals.

Speaker 1 Ukraine is different, as you all know by now. It's enormous and populous.

Speaker 1 I was reading somebody on Twitter who had said to me something about, well, you won't have the same situation with guerrilla fighters and partisans as you would have in a place like Afghanistan.

Speaker 1 Because of the terrain, right? Afghanistan's mountainous terrain lends itself to that, he was saying.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Ukraine is flat, but I suggested that he look at his Second World War history, and those areas had partisans everywhere.

Speaker 1 Remember, partisans don't necessarily need, you know, difficult terrain to hide in, but it helps. They can hide within the populace, right? What did Mao say?

Speaker 1 They swim through the population like fish in water.

Speaker 1 And you can't tell if you're a Russian, which Ukrainians are peaceful and following your occupation rules and which ones at night nighttime are putting on dark clothing, smearing grease paint on their face, pulling out a rifle and shooting at you.

Speaker 1 And that, you know, you end up with a dynamic here, and it's a pretty well-established one.

Speaker 1 The dynamic is because you can't tell the difference and you don't know who to punish, and the bad guys, from the Russian viewpoint, hide with the innocent people, you start killing the innocent people.

Speaker 1 You get into the collective punishment thing where you say, listen, if you don't stop these partisans and make them halt their behavior, we're going to to kill some more of your other people.

Speaker 1 And it's happened in the Second World War all the time, but the dynamic, the rinse-lather-repeat dynamic in these situations is that the atrocities against innocent people push more of the locals into the arms of the partisans, right?

Speaker 1 You get so outraged, you join those guys.

Speaker 1 And the problem with partisans, as the people in Ukraine probably are already well aware of, is that they often get treated mercilessly.

Speaker 1 So I have a hard time encouraging that on anybody's part. I just will say that what we've seen from Ukraine so far is incredibly brave.

Speaker 1 And, you know, and I don't mean to denigrate militaries anywhere in the world when I say this, but this is expected of soldiers. It's always

Speaker 1 a different level of awe that I have when I see the civilian populations, you know, grabbing weapons and being ready to resist. It's, you know, what did Churchill say, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, he had intended when it looked like the Germans might invade Britain to give everybody there a weapon. And the line he was using was, you can always take one with you.

Speaker 1 And he'd said somewhere, I'm quoting from memory here, but you know, if you thought about the population of London, even, if everybody took one with them, the German army'd be gone.

Speaker 1 It's one thing to say that. It's another thing to be on the ground living it.

Speaker 1 Although just the memories, for example, of the European populations, you know, in Holland and in London, of course, all those people being bombed and whatnot, being in the subways, enduring all this.

Speaker 1 I mean, we haven't seen these images in a while. And there's something both horrifying and at the same time,

Speaker 1 like I said, there's an awe-inspiring thing to see people tweeting from Ukraine.

Speaker 1 You know, the lights are off, the power is out, my phone only has a little bit of juice left, but the, you know, and showing pictures from outside their window.

Speaker 1 I am vulnerable, you should know, to that

Speaker 1 idea that Ernst Junger and a a lot of other people like Ernst Junger, the famous First World War,

Speaker 1 very, very, he was a monarchist, so that's pretty conservative, but he had that real 19th century view of war.

Speaker 1 Von Moltke did, too, the German general, that war doesn't just bring out the very low qualities in humanity, which they certainly do, but they bring out some higher qualities that have to come to the fore because war puts people in situations where those are required and watching the citizens of Ukraine deal with this.

Speaker 1 And frankly, not to give credit to the invading side here, but seeing the citizens of Russia come out to protest the actions of their government when that means they're going to get damaged, hurt, stigmatized, whatever.

Speaker 1 Also, I mean, there have been a lot of things that have happened during this whole thing that makes me kind of proud of us as a species and the Ukrainians in particular as a nationality.

Speaker 1 What is Putin doing, though? I mean, to me, me, this is already a loss on any number of fronts. I mean, what Putin has done here, folks, is he has re-established the Cold War overnight.

Speaker 1 There's no more argument. He's also taken off a mask he can never put on again, right? You could always try to portray yourself as,

Speaker 1 you know, I have critics and they're just crazy about me and they're just mad and they just hate my guts. And I don't know what to do with those.
They have Vlad derangement syndrome.

Speaker 1 What are you going to do? VDS.

Speaker 1 But now there's no fooling around. Everybody knows what they're dealing with.

Speaker 1 And I'm wondering, because this seems like such an obvious bad thing for Russia. I mean, just look at the economic angle.
Look at the

Speaker 1 that I wonder if Putin and Russia's interests are actually aligned with one another at this point.

Speaker 1 It's something we should recall, right? Because I always say, I can't figure out how Russia is doing in a conflict like this because I don't know what their victory conditions are.

Speaker 1 I don't know what they, from a Clausewitzian sense, I don't know what they're after.

Speaker 1 But it's possible that what Russia might gain from this is nowhere near as valuable as what Putin might gain from this.

Speaker 1 There's all sorts of reasons, by the way, that an authoritarian does things like this.

Speaker 1 staying in power, for example, or getting his people to forget about something else that's going on.

Speaker 1 Take your eye off the economic situation or whatever it might be. Take your eye off the fact, you know, so many people don't even have indoor plumbing, whatever it might be.

Speaker 1 Take your eye off the fact that I'm poisoning my opponents politically, not allowing any change, attacking protesters, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 I've talked to people who suggest that over the last

Speaker 1 two decades, really Putin has slowly but surely gotten rid of anyone who would push back against him, whether from a military civilian or maybe even as part of the oligarchy.

Speaker 1 So there are less people to tell him not to do something or that this is a bad idea or you may have misjudged this situation.

Speaker 1 Absolute power corrupts absolutely is the old line, right? And Putin is part of a system of government that is organized like a pyramid, right?

Speaker 1 It's a hierarchy where there's a single person at the top. The apex is Vlad Putin.
What that means, though, is it creates a situation where you can't talk about governments and oversight.

Speaker 1 The individual psychology of one human being is inordinately important in in situations like this.

Speaker 1 And when they have wiped out anyone who can push back against them, you get the kinds of situations where

Speaker 1 people can lose their minds and still be calling the shots. This is what becomes scary, right? I mean, you look at Hitler at the end, and he is terribly sick.

Speaker 1 He's being shot up with all kinds of drugs. I mean, he's a dangerously sick and messed up individual, and yet he still is calling all the shots, total authority.
Think of how dangerous that is.

Speaker 1 I mean, at the very end, when he basically says, let's destroy Germany and take everything down with us, at the very end, and I mean, this is hours before he shoots himself, then they will counterman his orders secretly.

Speaker 1 And if they get found out, they're going to be killed.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, even at the very end, that system with Hitler at the very top of the pyramid didn't allow for any pushback, even if that person is no longer sane.

Speaker 1 Is Putin sane? Is he healthy? I mean, he's 69 years old. You could certainly be in great physical shape at 69, but if you said somebody wasn't, it wouldn't surprise anyone.

Speaker 1 What sort of layers of oversight and protection does the Russian system have

Speaker 1 if he is? I mean, the same thing was wondered about, by the way, with Joseph Stalin at the end, too. I mean, is he actually operating with all his faculties?

Speaker 1 And in a system like that, what would you do about it if he wasn't?

Speaker 1 One thing Putin certainly knows, and I think we all should remember, is that the thing that would change this situation the most quickly and the most radically would be for Putin to leave the scene.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of ways this could happen, even when he's consolidated his authority and power to such a degree.

Speaker 1 Artificial ways and,

Speaker 1 you know, non-artificial ways. Beware the Ides of March, right?

Speaker 1 Anything can happen, especially when

Speaker 1 people already are out to get you if you're the head of a major country anywhere in the world, right? You're getting death threats just as part of the job.

Speaker 1 But when you do something like what Vladimir Putin has done here in Ukraine, you make a lot more enemies and you turn up the amplification level.

Speaker 1 And when the sanctions start affecting people who are also powerful, some of whom actually have their own private armies, well, you never know.

Speaker 1 Wild cards are everywhere, and one of them is very Cesarean. So you never know.

Speaker 1 This is going to be obviously a boon for defense contractors all over the world.

Speaker 1 We're going to see defense spending now in the way we had it in the Cold War, which is where instead of making trade-offs, like, do we really need this new system? People don't even ask.

Speaker 1 You're going to see countries become militarized that had the luxury of not becoming militarized, which I'm sure a lot of Americans will be. Thank goodness.

Speaker 1 Finally, they're going to carry their their weight.

Speaker 1 I do think that's a good thing. And as I thought I had said earlier, that I never had wanted to leave in any of my discussions about not encroaching on Russia's borders militarily.

Speaker 1 I never wanted to leave the post-Warsaw pact countries out in the cold, but I thought they could. And I've had this conversation with friends of mine.

Speaker 1 who border Russia, actually, that you can't trust us the way you can trust somebody who's in the same situation you are. It's only natural.

Speaker 1 And I was talking about Article 5, which is the NATO article that says every NATO country has to treat an attack on

Speaker 1 one as an attack on all. And I said, it's just normal that someone in your situation is going to be more

Speaker 1 understanding of your situation.

Speaker 1 I had suggested, you know, you could have a Warsaw Pact, but instead of it being a Soviet Union satellite alliance, you could have a Warsaw Pact that was directed at the, you know, post-Soviet post-Soviet Union, Russia, right?

Speaker 1 An alliance between Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, etc.,

Speaker 1 geared towards collective security in the case of a Russian attack against any one of them.

Speaker 1 And while it's not NATO, I imagine it would deter the Russians from deciding an easy conquest of something like Latvia seemed possible if it meant going to war with all those other countries at the same time, too.

Speaker 1 And of course, something like that would have the danger of sucking in NATO eventually as well.

Speaker 1 So let's talk about that danger, which is the danger that you didn't have in some of these other wars in the last 30 or 40 years, the danger of it going sideways.

Speaker 1 One of the things we had talked about in the First World War and the way that that war got underway, the dynamic involved early on, the impetus, same thing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, is that

Speaker 1 at the start of all these things, you feel like you have rational actors moving the geopolitical chess pieces around logically.

Speaker 1 But the farther into the game you get, the more you start setting up forces that are on the other side of the dynamic that are pulling. And I think we use this exact analogy.

Speaker 1 You go from pushing events and dictating events to having, as a world leader, your options start to become narrower and narrower just at the time that the

Speaker 1 intensity of everything is increasing exponentially and eventually those two lines cross.

Speaker 1 And we can go from having people in situations where they would never want to use something like nuclear weapons to people who feel like they have no choice.

Speaker 1 And you see this after lots of wars where you look at it at the end and you go, well, nobody benefited from this. This is horrible.
How did it ever come to this? Whoever wanted this?

Speaker 1 And when you look at how it develops a lot of the times, you'll see that nobody wanted it. But at a certain point, you went from having having a choice in the matter to not.

Speaker 1 You went from pushing events to having events pull you. And that's a danger in any sort of conflict dynamic.
But when nuclear weapons are involved, it's a different kind of danger.

Speaker 1 And another problem that you have, although we have this problem too in a place like the United States, but in a system where you have a hierarchy designed like a pyramid and one person at the apex position, there are not enough controls over the nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1 Now, nuclear weapons, by their very nature, argue against the kind of control and oversight that someone like yours truly would like to see, because missiles are very fast and the mechanisms of oversight are not.

Speaker 1 You're going to call Congress to have a meeting and make sure we all want to launch this retaliatory strike against the other side when you have 8 to 15 minutes

Speaker 1 between the time the missiles are launched from the other side to when they land on you.

Speaker 1 So you see, the weapon system itself argues against real oversight, but I think we're seeing how dangerous that means these things could be to all of us when it's down to one guy, a guy who may or may not be completely in control of his thinking.

Speaker 1 And what would we do if he wasn't?

Speaker 1 I should say something about Ukraine's leader who has turned out to be, you know, you never know, right? You never know who's going to turn out to be these people who just

Speaker 1 rise to the occasion. And he's done a very similar job to the Ukrainian people, right?

Speaker 1 Clearly, Vladimir Putin did not see this coming.

Speaker 1 If I am Vlad Putin, what I want to do now is get the hell out. I mean, I would prefer to put in my own government, then get the hell out, let, you know, some of my

Speaker 1 secret forces and whatnot, my little green men or whatever it might be, prop up that government, but get the heck out so I could start doing damage control.

Speaker 1 And maybe five years from now, someone will do business with me again.

Speaker 1 Although I'm cynical about that, you know, the Chinese are going to do business with them anyway.

Speaker 1 But as the Russians get bogged down here, you're going to see the intensity level ratcheting up, and that's when you worry about things like

Speaker 1 escalation.

Speaker 1 The very fact that Putin put his nuclear forces on alert is a kind of brinksmanship, right? You could also imagine

Speaker 1 the ratcheting up of the stakes here if he decided to use a nuclear weapon in a relatively non-populated area against some piece of infrastructure, right?

Speaker 1 Some power plant in the middle of nowhere, and you use a small nuclear weapon on it as a way of saying that that line in the sand you think that will never cross, right?

Speaker 1 We used him twice in 1945 and then never again. Well, that's over with, right?

Speaker 1 That precedent has been demolished, and now you better think again, right? We've used nuclear weapons. That just shows we could, I mean, that kind of brinksmanship.

Speaker 1 Somebody wrote that I was reading the other day, you know, that Vlad Putin has gone from playing chess to playing poker. Do you feel lucky, punk?

Speaker 1 I hear the typical

Speaker 1 American partisan howlings about

Speaker 1 the conduct of the president and this whole thing.

Speaker 1 And, you know, that's because we all get wrapped up in it. The poison of our political system right now is both disheartening and exhausting.

Speaker 1 And it's difficult for me to even deal with people who maintain this level of fanaticism and that hate their countrymen.

Speaker 1 The way I basically look at it here is

Speaker 1 what Joe Biden did, what President Biden did, and I wasn't sure of the strategy because I've never seen anything like it.

Speaker 1 The closest thing was during the Cuban Missile Crisis with Biden releasing intelligence information, including photographs and other things, to show what the Russians were doing during the buildup before they went into Ukraine.

Speaker 1 At the time, you're looking at it going, okay, this is unusual because the intelligence community never likes to do anything that would divulge means and methods to the other side.

Speaker 1 So if you determine that this is important enough, so you're willing to do that, you're going, okay, this is an important enough thing for them.

Speaker 1 And they did some of this during the Cuban Missile Crisis, too. Remember the photographs at the United Nations when they're pointing out the missile silos from the satellite?

Speaker 1 That was a similar sort of thing, but not to the same degree.

Speaker 1 Now, as I was wondering at the time, if the Russians don't invade Ukraine, and all of us, I mean, I didn't find very many people who weren't living right next to Russia, because those people always think they're invading, who thought they were invading.

Speaker 1 So you're going, okay, if President Biden's wrong about this, he's going to look,

Speaker 1 well, some people thought he might just claim, see, they didn't invade. It's because of the way, you know, we handled this.

Speaker 1 But once they do invade, then you realize, okay, this is pretty brilliant, I think. And I don't say this as a fan of Democrats.
And you're going to, I know that some of the listeners will say, so

Speaker 1 licking Biden's boots, or they'll have something that they say about all this, but that just shows that you have no ability to step back and give credit where it's due.

Speaker 1 It was a pretty interesting decision to say, we're going to tell you what our intelligence says Russia's next move is going to be before they make it, so that everybody's watching when they do and has already had the context and framework crafted the way we would like to have it crafted.

Speaker 1 So when he does what we tell you in advance he's going to do, you will react the way that we've set it up for you to react, hopefully.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 What would you have preferred? Right? I mean, if you're acting, if you want somebody to play the poker game well,

Speaker 1 that seems like a pretty interesting way to play it to me.

Speaker 1 Again, we're in the middle of this thing, so it'll be a five or a 10 year from now sort of look back that will determine the wisdom or lack thereof of a move like that.

Speaker 1 But as I look at it now, I'm going, that's pretty inventive.

Speaker 1 And I think those of you who think that this is all the president of the United States, whether they're Republican or Democrat or whatever, deciding all this by themselves, do not have a clue how this whole thing really runs.

Speaker 1 I mean, this isn't Vlad Putin's situation, and there are a bunch of powerful, august, well-read, historically literate, and combat experienced people who can weigh in on on this.

Speaker 1 And then it is the president's job to make the decision, you know, which interpretation he likes or how he can blend the various pieces of advice together to craft something. So you really sell the

Speaker 1 both civilian and military advisory structure here short when you assume, you know, Joe Biden's going to go into a room by himself, come up with this policy, come out and enact it.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work that way. Not in this system.

Speaker 1 Still have too much control of nuclear weapons in one one hands, but this isn't working that way. And to block Vladimir Putin's moves, now that he's made those moves looks pretty freaking smart.

Speaker 1 I don't like any of this in terms of how it worked out because I don't want a more militarized Europe. I don't want another Cold War.
I don't want the massive defense spending.

Speaker 1 I don't want everything this is going to entail, but I'm not the one who invaded Ukraine.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's not up to us what we want.

Speaker 1 I think, as I said, this is a mistake unless Vladimir Putin has seen his own personal

Speaker 1 victory conditions diverge from his country's, which again, we've seen with authoritarian rulers all the time. They have their reasons, or maybe he's just not the man he was 10 or 20 years ago.

Speaker 1 It happens to all of us.

Speaker 1 But worth pointing out that most of us getting up there in age, seeing the speed of our cognition slow,

Speaker 1 maybe the clarity and flexibility of our thought

Speaker 1 diminish.

Speaker 1 Most of us don't have our hands on any nuclear launch button.

Speaker 1 Seems to me that that's something maybe that ought to have an age limit attached to it, too.

Speaker 1 Or just multiple people who are required in order to push it.

Speaker 1 I don't know where this is going to go. My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine.
I hope we get to see the Russian forces leave your country soon.

Speaker 1 I hope the damage can be limited to what's already been done.

Speaker 1 And I fear that you are going to become the, you know, bleeding, ragged edge of the new Cold War. And the only reason that upsets me is not because you can't handle it.

Speaker 1 I think you're proving right now that you can. It's that it is sometimes a tough position to find yourself in.

Speaker 1 Look what happened to the people in Korea during the Korean War, the people in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, the people in Afghanistan during the many Afghan wars.

Speaker 1 This is a tough position to be in, to be on the front lines.

Speaker 1 But I think you've proven that

Speaker 1 you deserve all the accolades you get. And to be honest, for you Russians out there, I'm not so sure you don't deserve some kudos either.

Speaker 1 And I think that the inability of Russia's government to keep you in the dark is going to,

Speaker 1 you know, allow you to play maybe a role in this that your fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers never had a chance to do.

Speaker 1 You are a great country, too,

Speaker 1 and one of the famous, august people on the planet.

Speaker 1 And I'm not so sure we won't see you step up and help, as only you can at this point,

Speaker 1 fix this situation.

Speaker 1 Because your president has led you into a terrible military blunder here that is going to hurt you all long term.

Speaker 1 And I don't know about you,

Speaker 1 but I wouldn't like to have a bunch of Russian people angry with me.

Speaker 1 Doesn't seem like Vladimir Putin can whip the Russian people or their troops into that same kind of anger to make them really effective, but he might be able to whip them up into that kind of anger directed right back at him.

Speaker 1 It's cost enough Russian and Ukrainian lives already.

Speaker 1 We'll see what happens next.