Show 323 - Gas Up the Cold War

He's Dan Carlin, and this is Common Sense. My apologies for not getting this emergency broadcast of Common Sense out more quickly.
As fate would have it, I'm in the midst of a very, 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, do that audio, then do this audio, and have your voice holed up and all that.
I'm a little gravelly as it is, so I apologize. And if there's any, you know, brain-damaged commentary today, we're going to blame it on all that.
It's nice to have an excuse, isn't it? And I expect that in the not-too-distant future, all of this will be outdated. 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took a few notes on my phone on a walk the other day, and as I look at them now, they all, I mean, many of them appear outdated, overtaken by the pace of events.
The events I'm speaking of is theussian invasion of ukraine which happened the other day maybe four or five days ago now 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 so you know my personal angle on all this um first of all i'm just generally an anti-war person not for any religious or ideological or philosophical beliefs per se just because usually they fail to achieve the carl von clauswitz goal right the policy or politics 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 but 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. It depends, though, because horizons matter.
So, for example, look at the United States and Britain's toppling of the democratically elected government of Dr. Mohamed Mozadeh in Iranan in in 1953 right on a short-term basis they achieved the carl von clauswitz policy by other means but in the long-term basis the blowback from that still affecting us today so maybe it depends on the horizon that you set your you know your measurements to 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 you'd be better off having a policy by other means other than the military means most of the time 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? 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? 100 years ago, you would have had a few newspaper accounts and some active interest groups, but nothing like this, right? 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 there's a very big difference as i think we all understand between invading and defending from a moral standpoint. I do feel compelled at the outset here to acknowledge that 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 and that's not okay 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 imagine that there would be some sort of muscular military police force around the world that could break up those kind of fights and save those kinds of people from being caught in the middle of arguments between governments 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 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 luckily I have kids I'm getting questions that I 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.
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.
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. 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 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 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.
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.
And of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis has some similarities to this, one of which is it has to do with spheres of influence and having your adversaries close by. Nobody likes that.
And the bigger the power, the less they they like it the problem that a person like yours truly has on this subject is very different from a problem that say someone who's danish i'm just throwing that out there might have on this 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, you know, you have no right to tell people what to do. 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.
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, 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 and so when cuba um had a revolution and the person who took over from the revolution fidel castro announced that he was a communist um and began to bring in our adversaries in the cold war the soviets their advisors their military people and eventually their, right off the coast of the United States.
As you might imagine, we weren't happy about it. And we haven't been happy about Cuba ever since.
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.
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.

You know, and 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 but the whole thing happened because of an adversarial alliance member coming really close to u.s territory 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 okay so fast forward to now and this gets back to my personal um viewpoints that you ought to be aware of i have have been talking for a very long time about how poor of an idea i have always thought that expanding nato military cooperation closer and closer to russia's borders is um 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 the very first name guest we ever had on common sense and you can imagine how long ago that was was paleo conservative pat buchanan 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 meet to move closer to russia's. 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 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 it crossed all sorts of ideological boundaries

the people that were warning against this but they all of us were shouted down by the people

that suggested 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 but the problem is is

big big big countries like russia don't stay down forever and when they get back up they're

I'm going to remember how they were treated 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 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 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 but look at their history who wouldn't right within living memory look at their history who wouldn't 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 they're scared to death and continually worried about the russians and i used to tease them about this some of my friends who who live next door to russia 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 and you know you think okay well you know i'd feel the same way with with their history but they're the ones right now who are saying see we told you so now let me point out that at no time did i see what has happened in ukraine now the russian invasion happening uh even the other day before the invasion when we were all wondering what the heck this arms build up on the on 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 to at least comment on events and whatnot on twitter um at hardcore histories that 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 um 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 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 and that is the difference between what vladimir putin is saying and what's really going on 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 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 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 so does that mean they're not well let's just try to take this on multiple different levels the first level is let's take vladimir putin at his word and all of this is in large part because of worries about western military might moving closer and closer to russian borders we've just completely made all of that much more likely hasn't he i mean in a carl von clauswitz policy by other means goal here if vladimir putin wants less military hardware on his border the germans which is you know shocking to some of us are going to up their military budget the swedes are talking about defense how much have you screwed up on the clauswitz 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 right so again take him at his word um he's in big trouble i mean he may have nato in ukraine more quickly than he otherwise would have because of this now this is though the part of me that then thinks okay try to think about if this looks like such an error uh maybe 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 um so far and you can't believe the fog of war is the fog of war. You know what to believe but so far if we can judge um this is a more costly affair and a less decisive affair so far than he might have expected got punched back on the nose by the brave resistance of the ukrainian people the funny thing about it i hope i don't insult anybody here but i think but I think of the Russians and the Ukrainians similar in a certain way.

They are both really tough and sometimes a little bit crazy in the best of all possible ways from a soldier standpoint. Fearless, that kind of thing.
and the stereotype that we always had when i was you know when we would be war gaming 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 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 and angry russians just like angry ukrainians is a fearsome foe but the russians traditionally on the offensive have been much less motivated often seem a little lackluster 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. Ukraine is different, as you all know by now.
It's enormous and populous. 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 because of the terrain right afghanistan's mountainous terrain lends itself to that he was saying uh and you know ukraine is flat but i suggested that he look at The Second World War history in those areas had partisans everywhere.

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 what did Mao say they swim through the population like fish in water and you can't tell if you're a russian which ukrainians are peaceful and following your occupation rules and which ones at night time are putting on dark clothing smearing you know grease paint on their face pulling out a rifle and shooting at you and that you know you end up with a dynamic here and it's a pretty well established one 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 you get into the collective punishment thing where you say listen uh if you don't stop these partisans and make them halt their behavior we're going to kill you know some more of your other people 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? You get so outraged, you join those guys.
And the problem with partisans, as the people in Ukraine probably are already well aware of, is that they often get treated mercilessly. 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. 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 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? I mean, he was, 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 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 it's one thing to say that it's another thing to be on the ground living it 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 and we haven't seen these images in a while and there's something both horrifying and at the same time like i said there's an awe inspiring thing to see people tweeting from ukraine 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 um i am vulnerable you should know to that um that idea that ernst junger and a lot of other people like ernst junger the famous first world war um very very he monarchist, so that's pretty conservative. But he had that real 19th century view of war.
Von Moltke did to the German general that 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 uh deal with this 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 uh stigmatized whatever 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. What is Putin doing, though? I mean, to me, this is already a loss on any number of fronts.
I mean, what Putin has done here, folks, is he has reestablished the Cold War overnight. There's no more argument.
He's also taken off a mask he can never put on again. You could always try to portray yourself as, 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 they have a vlad derangement syndrome what are you going to do vds but now there's no fooling around everybody knows what they're dealing with 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 that I wonder if Putin and Russia's interests are actually aligned with one another at this point.
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. I don't know what they from a Clausewitzian sense.
I don't know what they're after. But it's possible that what Russia might gain from this is nowhere near as valuable as what Putin might gain for this.
There's all sorts of reasons, by the way, that an authoritarian does things like this. Staying in power, for example, or getting his people to forget about something else that's going on.
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.
Take your eye off the fact that I'm poisoning my opponents politically, not allowing any change, attacking protesters, et cetera, et cetera. I've talked to people who suggest that over the last, you know, 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.
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. 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? 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.
The individual psychology of one human being is inordinately important in situations like this and when they have wiped out anyone who can push back against them you get the kinds of situations where 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 he's being shot up with all kinds of drugs i mean he's a 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 i mean at the very end when he he basically says let's destroy Germany and take everything down with us at the very end. And I mean, total authority.
Think of how dangerous that is. 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 countermand his orders secretly.

And if they get fined out, they're going to be killed. 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 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 what sort of layers of oversight and protection does the russian system have 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? And in a system like that, what would you do about it if he wasn't? One thing Putin certainly knows, and I think we all should remember 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 there's a lot of ways this could happen even when he's consolidated his authority and power to such a degree artificial ways and you know non- know, non-artificial ways.
Beware the Ides of March, right? Anything can happen, especially when, you know, 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. But when you do something like what Vladimir Putin has done here in Ukraine Ukraine you make a lot more enemies and you turn up the amplification level and when the sanctions start affecting people who are also powerful some of whom actually have their own private armies well you never know wild cards are everywhere and one of them is very cesarean so you never know this is going to be obviously a boon for defense contractors all over the world we're going to see defense spending now uh 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 you're going to see countries become militarized that had the luxury of not becoming militarized which i I'm sure a lot of Americans will be.
Thank goodness. Finally, they're going to carry their weight.

um i do think that's a good thing and i as i thought i had said earlier that i um never had wanted to leave in any of my discussions about not encroaching on russia's borders militarily 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 um who 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 and i was talking about article five which is the nato article that says every nato country has to treat an attack on one and one is an attack on all and i said it's just normal that someone in your situation is going to be more um understanding of your situation 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 union russia right an alliance between poland ukraine romania bulgaria the baltic states etc geared towards collective security in the case of a russian attack against any one of them 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 and of course something like that would have the danger of sucking in nato eventually as well 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 one of the things we had talked about in the first world war um and the way that that war got underway the dynamic involved early on the impetus same thing with the cuban missile crisis is that if at the start of all these things you feel like you have rational actors moving the geopolitical chess pieces around logically 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 you go from you know 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 intensity of everything is increasing exponentially and eventually those two lines cross 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 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 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 a choice in the matter to not 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 and another 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. 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 right 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 eight to 15

minutes you know between the time the missiles are launched from the other side to when they land on you so you see them 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 and what would we do if he wasn't 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 um rise to the occasion and he's done a very similar job to the ukrainian people right i mean clearly vladimir putin did not see this coming if i am vlad putin what i want to do now is get the hell out i mean i would i would prefer to put in my own government then get the, let, you know, some of my 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 and maybe five years from now, someone will do business with me again.
Although I'm cynical about that. You know, the Chinese are going to do business with them anyway.
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 escalation the very fact that putin put his nuclear forces on alert is a kind of brinksmanship, right? You could also imagine 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? 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 we used them twice in 1945 and then never again well that's over with right 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 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? I hear the typical American partisan howlings about the conduct of the president in this whole thing.
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.
And it's difficult for me to even deal with people who maintain this level of fanaticism and that hate their countrymen. The way I basically look at it here is what Joe Biden did, what President Biden did, and I wasn't sure of the strategy because I've never seen anything like it 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 build-up before they went into ukraine 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 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 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 that was that was a similar sort of thing but not to the same degree now as i was wondering at the time if the russians don't invade ukraine and all of us i mean i 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 so you're going okay if president biden's wrong about this he's going to look well some people thought he might just claim see they didn't invade it's because It's because of the way, you know, we handled this.
But once they do invade, then you realize, OK, 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 licking Biden's boots or they'll have something that they say about all this. But but that just shows that you have no ability to to to step back and give credit where it's due.

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. 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 okay what would you have preferred right i mean if you're acting if you want somebody to play the the poker game well um that seems like a pretty interesting way to play it to me again we're in the middle of this thing so it'll be a five or a ten year from now sort of look back that will determine the wisdom or lack thereof of a move like that but as i look at it now i'm going that's pretty inventive 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 i mean 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.
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 this.
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 the 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

it doesn't work that way not in this system still have too much control of nuclear weapons in one hands but this isn't working that way and and to block vladimir putin's moves now that he's made those moves looks pretty freaking smart 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 i don't want everything this is going to entail but i'm not the one who invaded ukraine sometimes it's not up to us what we want i think as i said this is a mistake unless vladimir putin has seen his own personal victory conditions diverge from his countries, 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. It happens to all of us.
But worth pointing out that most of us getting up there in age, the speed of our cognition slow maybe the clarity and flexibility of our thought diminish most of us don't have our hands on any nuclear launch button seems to me that that's something maybe that ought to have an age limit attached to it too. Or just multiple people who are required in order to push it.
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 soon i hope the damage can be limited to what's already been done 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 i think you're proving right now that you can it's that it is sometimes a tough position to find yourself in 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 this is a tough position to be in to be on the front lines, i think you've proven that um you know 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 and i think that the inability of russia's government to keep you in the dark is going to 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 you are a great country too and one of the famous august people on the planet and i'm not so sure we won't see you step up and help, as only you can at this point, fix this situation. Because your president has led you into a terrible military blunder here that is going to hurt you all long term.
And I don't know about you,

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

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.

It's cost enough Russian and Ukrainian lives already.

We'll see what happens next.