All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - #AIS: Antonio Garcia Martinez & Glenn Greenwald debate Ukraine, moderated by David Sacks

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

This debate was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami and included slides. To watch on YouTube, check out our All-In Summit playlist: https://bit.ly/aisytplaylist 0:00 David Sacks tees up the show: Debating the US intervention in Ukraine This debate was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami! 1:49 Opening statements from Glenn & Antonio 15:29 Debating US involvement, regime change motives, & more 32:01 Final word & wrap Follow the guests:   https://twitter.com/ggreenwald   https://twitter.com/antoniogm   Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

All right, this segment is on Ukraine and we've come into the Ukraine debate because we have two great writers and thinkers up here who are on slightly different sides of this issue of the US involvement in Ukraine. Antonio Garcia Martinez writes is the author of the best-selling book Chaos Monkeys about Silicon Valley. He writes a a substack called pull request and also has a great colon show. And Glenn Greenwald is back with us from yesterday. Also a phenomenal writer has an amazing substack. All of you guys should check out as well. And a great colon show. So in setting up this topic, let me just

say, I think that you know, that, you know, in thinking about the U.S. involvement in Ukraine, you know, there's not a lot of debate about this topic, and in that sense, it's pretty similar to other wars that the U.S. has gotten into. Many of you probably are not old enough to remember when the U.S. got into Iraq or Afghanistan. I'm not old enough to remember the U.S. going into Vietnam. But the thing to understand about all those wars is that they were incredibly popular at the time that we entered them.

And by the time that they ended, they were not. And now, I'm not saying, I'm not prejudging Ukraine and saying it's one of those. I think there's important differences that we should get into. But I think we should at least have this debate and we need more discussion around this. And so for that, I'm grateful that Antonio is a side to participate. And I said we open source into the fans and they just go crazy. WBS Ice, Queen of King Wav, Queen of King Wav. So what I'm going to do is kick it to each of them for kind of five minute opening statements and then we'll just get into sort of more of a back and forth and we'll start with the

intonium. Cool, thanks, thanks David. Thanks for skewing the moderation from like literally the first act comparing it to a rock because I can't appear to say it's not about Iraq at all. But yeah, so let's just start off with, I think probably most people here know that I actually spent some time in Ukraine. Unlike a lot of the independent voices who

decided to apply in from afar about Ukraine, I felt that the American media discourse about Ukraine was completely skewed, and it just smelled kind of bullshit to me. And so I thought I had to go and actually see it. And so I spent some time on the Polish border with Ukraine. This was kind of in the earliest part of the war, kind of early March.

And the western part of Ukraine, which, by the way, is not particularly dangerous or anything, is probably no more dangerous in walking across San Francisco these days, to be honest. But it was interesting to actually go and see. And I took away two things, and I wrote two subsite posts about it that I want to share with you. Two parts of the Ukraine story.

One, the refugee situation is incredible. It is something that you have to see to believe, and even then, you can't quite understand the scope of it. 10 million Ukrainians, fully a quarter of the country, is currently displaced. Something like six million Ukrainians have left in the span of two months. When you stand at the border at Medica,

which is one of the border crossings with Poland, what you see is you're at it and you realize you're at the fringes of sort of normal Western European life and you've entered on the other side of that is hell that people are escaping. And what do you see? You see, again, the men can't leave because they're prohibited from leaving

because they have to fight. And so what you see is old people or women with children, imagine a woman in her 30s with two kids, a little rolly bag and like a cat in a bag. Like that's the typical thing. And just a line of them going over the border, again and again and again, right? And the polls have been amazing

in how they received the Ukrainians, literally millions of Ukrainians, but all the same as an enormous strain. Everywhere you go in Eastern Poland or Western Ukraine, that's a big open area is basically a refugee camp, whether it be a train station, repurposed warehouses, all of it. The human situation is just kind of mind-boggling. The other thing I'd like to share, I crossed the border.

It was weird crossing the border. There's this line of people looking to leave, and there's like you with my little starlink and my little bag and my little body armor walking across the other way, because you can't take cars across. Everyone walks across. And everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy. Because why are you walking in the other way because you can't take cars across. Everyone walks across. And everyone's looking at me like, I'm crazy. Because why are you walking in the other direction, bro? And so, anyhow, walk in the other direction.

How to drive or pick me up. Experience a little bit of Western Ukraine for a few days. And I experience what I think probably nobody here has experienced directly, which is total war, right? A society that's completely and totally mobilized to repel a foreign invader, right? I was in a city called Leviv, which is one of the western cities that's sort of free Ukraine,

and everything there is either men and weapons and trucks going east, or women and children and refugees going west. That's all you would see. That's all that would happen there. And all of society from the interpreter I had, because unfortunately I speak no Ukrainian, to the driver who drive me around, to the hacker I interviewer who was like de-dossing Russian websites, all of them would punctuate

their statements with, we will win, right? And that's when I realized that the big mistake that everyone had made, I think particularly in the US discourse, is underrating Ukrainian resolve and they're a zeal for their own nationalist project, right? After... After spending a day there, and again remember, this is the relatively early days of the war,

the key to stolen circle, it wasn't clear if the bell of Russens was start a Western front, it again remember, this is the relatively early days of the war, the key to the southern circle. It was unclear if the Belarusians would start a western front. It was all still up in the air, but I was starting to think, you know, I don't see how the Russians win this. Like this just seems impossible. Ukraine is the size of Texas, as a population of 40 million people. Roughly the size, imagine the Russians showing up with 200,000 soldiers and trying to control California.

It's going to be very difficult to do. Particularly when literally everybody is staring at you and saying, we will win, which is what would happen. And that's when I realized that this whole story was very different than it's being projected in the United States. And I felt vindicated in going, because I think there aren't that many American journalists there. And I think a lot of the discourse in the US

tends to skew towards Iraq or towards projection of American political domestic neuroses and not the facts on the ground in Ukraine in which you have devastated cities you have women and children refugees You have literally a total war situation that the Western world hasn't seen since World War 2 That's the reality of Ukraine and what I hope to debate here All right, thank you Glenn Great so I certainly have respect for

Anyone's decision to go actually see a place that you want to talk about. I think that there is the question of how much you can actually learn about a country of 44 million people with an incredibly complex history with extreme diversity of thought in terms of the population by going for whatever it is a week or 10 days to a kind of sliver of that country that has extremely different views than another region. For example, if in 2003 you wanted to go before the war in Iraq and figure out what Iraq he's thought, if you went to the Kurdish regions of Iraq, you would hear nothing but I want

the United States to come and liberate us from Salam Hussein. If you went to the Sunni triangle, you would hear if the United States comes here, we're going to make this a graveyard of Americans. And similarly, if you go to Western Ukraine, of course you're going to hear, we want American help, we want to fight the Russians to the end, if you go to the eastern up regions of Ukraine, which are Russian speaking, who identify with Moscow, you're going to hear the exact opposite. So I think, you know, it's commendable to go to a country like Ukraine, I think we have to be humble about our ability to understand the thoughts of the population, the reality on the ground, when you go to certain segments that you select, and that are almost likely to kind of feed back to you what it is that you're already expecting to hear. The other thing I think is very important to note is that, you know, first of all, I'm

a little surprised by the idea that I guess it was implicit that Antonio felt that the media narrative has been off or one sided in the sense that it hasn't been favorable enough to the idea that Ukraine is the victim that needs help in Russia is the clear aggressor. I can't remember ever reading an article on the mainstream press since the invasion that said anything other than that, which is why 80% of Americans, the entire bipartisan class and Washington of both parties, are essentially unified in support of the narrative that Antonio believes, in my opinion, with great sincerity. I think there's been, if anything, a kind of lack of descent available in the United States on the other

side. And this is one thing I want to emphasize is there has been this claim, this sort of implicit claim, sometimes explicit claim that the entire war is united behind the United States, behind Ukraine, against Russia. The reality is, overwhelmingly, most of the world is in fact not united behind the United States and then in a position on Ukraine. Most of the global South, 15 of the most of the 20 most populous countries on the planet, either abstained or voted no when it came time to decide whether to expel Russia from the human rights council. And some of those countries are tyrannies.

Many of them, such as India, the world's largest democracy, Brazil, the second largest democracy after the United States, very much deviates from the consensus in the United States. And sometimes I think for Americans and we're living in a country in which we're bombarded with one message, it's incumbent upon us to ask why it is so much of the rest of the world does not believe that the United States is participating in the war in Ukraine with the nevel and intentions or with the desire to protect democracy or protect against aggression. With, in fact, the rest of the world looks at the history of the United States, not just distant but very recent, and sees a country not devoted to protecting

democracy, but to propping up tyranny, to fighting wars, not to protect it, as in, but to sacrifice it, as in, in its own interests. And so, I think that's one really important thing is to make sure that we're looking at this war, not as a country that's essentially a belliger looking at this war not as a country that's essentially a belligerent in it, but as a country that is just a small part of the rest of the world that has a lot of opinions. The other thing I would point out is war in general is the worst thing that humanity can unleash upon itself.

There is no war that doesn't involve extreme amounts of atrocities, extreme amounts of war crimes, all kinds of hideous things. And if you look at any war, any war, not just the ones that the United States, the United States adversaries have started, but ones that the United States has started, ones that the United States has allies have started,

that we support, you're gonna find enormous amounts of atrocities, and any decent person with any kind of a minimum moral compass who looks at any war like that is gonna walk away, horrified and disgusted and wanting to do something about it. The only difference between what's happening in the war in Ukraine and so many other wars

is that the US media is constantly showing us images and stories about Ukrainian victims as it should. But think about the wars that the United States has itself started or is propping up. Like for example the war in Yemen that has been going on for many years, that is still going on because the United States is supplying Saudi Arabia, not exactly a democracy with enormous amounts of weapons and money and intelligence to fight that war, and think about how much you've heard or seen about the victims of Yemen. How many, many have you heard from talking about their relatives who have been lost in battle, or how many people who we bombed in wedding parties and the like have been lost in battle, or how many people who we bombed in wedding parties and the like have been lost in well.

And so I think what this can happen is it can create an imbalance in our perception. The imbalance isn't that the war in Ukraine really isn't horrible. It is, but that there's really nothing extraordinary about what's taking place in that war, all wars, including the ones we start, the ones that were waging, the ones that were supporting, have the same kinds of atrocities, and the question ultimately becomes, does the United States really have benevolent motives in trying to defend Ukraine instead of sacrifice it? And secondly, does the United States have the ability to foster a positive outcome on the other side of the world involving extremely complex cultures and histories

and two countries of very intertwined geostrategic interests that even if we did have the right motives would you really have the ability by flooding this country with weapons and all the other things we typically do in wars to foster a positive outcome and I think that's why the rest of the world has a lot of doubts. Okay thank you Len so Len went a little bit longer so little bit longer. So, Antonio, why don't I give you a couple of minutes to respond to that, and then I want to ask you both a question. Okay, I think I, I walk into the wrong thing. I didn't realize we were debating Yemen instead

of Ukraine, Glenn, or Indian foreign policy instead of our own. One thing I would say is, one thing you said is just completely wrong. It's not the case that Eastern Ukraine is pro-Russian. If so, how do you explain Mariopol, a city completely destroyed that thought to the last man with civilians literally holding up in a steel plate? How do you explain Mariopoul, a city completely destroyed that fought to the last man with civilians literally hauling up in a steel plate?

How do you explain all the successes in the eastern part of the war? You never actually mentioned the facts of the war. You're always what abouting other countries' reaction to the war. The fact that the eastern front in Russia, the war is going very poorly for Russia. How do you explain that fact that if Eastern Ukraine is actually pro-Russian, that the Russians are doing so poorly there? The other thing I would say, I don't think it's the fact. If you look up most polls, and it's funny, this poll came out instantly, your friend Tucker Carlson,

as well as JD Vance, had to change their line on Ukraine, because they realized that it's hard to be a populist if you've used aren't very popular, right? AP did a poll, and not just Democrats support Biden being tough for on Russian. Republicans do as well, right? And why is that? Because you have a small country that's getting crushed

by a country that's been the historical sworn enemy of the United States as long as anyone can remember. I live out in the middle of nowhere in a red state, Trump country, in the desert outside of Reno, and people are flying Ukrainian flags along with the US flags. I don't think that's because they read New York Times, right? Um, the other...

Applause So Antonio, let me ask a ask questions so we recently had Well previously buying You know the other thing I would say is that you know This in that country don't support it one thing I found one aspect of the story that I found was very interesting Was that all of Europe has shown up on Ukraine's door to help out the Ukrainians, right? Usually, I'm both EU-U.S. citizen. Usually, I read both media. It's like the U.S. that is like the hard line

where I'll pull a teak, and then the EU that's in like geopolitical La-La land. I think in the case of this story, it's been reversed. And I think the U.S. is taking Ukraine and projecting it in its own domestic political narratives, like Lineses, and I think the Europeans actually see their own collective history in the Ukrainian story. Because whether it be the Spanish Civil War, whether it be the Germans, they all remember

what total war actually means, what it is to stumble through the stories streets and be a refugee and a displaced person. Americans don't have an experience of that. They can't really resonate with that. Fortunately for us to be clear, but I think Europeans do. So if you go to that border area, you will see all of Europe as far away as Spain, Denmark, whatever, showing up to actually help the Ukrainians. The last thing I would say is, I think one thing that unites, I think, the old left that you would probably put yourself in with

Glenn, like a Bernie leftist, and the new right is that both consider two key things. One, the US can never act abroad in a legitimate good way. Everything the US does abroad is O is a fiasco, and then two, everything that happens abroad is our fault. Like literally the entire world's events are downstream of a State Department phone call. And I just don't think that's true. Being in Ukraine, it doesn't seem to me as if the US is pulling all the strings on the contrary.

It seems like a very chaotic situation where the Ukrainians turn improvised as much as they can. And so again, on the one hand, I reject the fact that the US can't act abroad. Well, I think it can. If you look at things East Asia, Japan, Korea, Western Europe itself. The US has created the conditions for democracy in the past. Okay but Antony, is there a limit to why is US involvement in Ukraine? So you know we have

Biden basically said that Putin cannot remain in power and then immediately his own press to free walk that back as a gaff. You then had Secretary of Defense Austin say that our objective in Ukraine is not just to expel the Russians, but to weaken Russia as a great power so it can never threaten anyone again. You then had Seth Moulton, the Democrat of the House Armed Services Committee, saying that we were in a proxy war with Russia and then standing for the House Majority Leader, said we are at war with Russia. Do you think we are at war with Russia? and then, standing in Hoyer, the House Majority Leader, said, we are at war with Russia. Do you think we are at war with Russia, and is that wise? No, we're in a proxy war.

We're in a proxy war with Russia. What is the vital national interest in the United States that compels us to be in a war and midly through a proxy with Russia that has 6,000 nuclear weapons? Even if I were to grant that we should be trying to, out of humanitarian motives, expel the Russians from Ukraine, do you believe that we should be trying to desabelize and topple Putin? Let me kind of that with the question, it's funny, I feel like I'm debating two people,

but like I jumped in my tweet. The odds are even worse than the Ukrainians, so I'll take it. But I'm gonna ask you this question in Miami, not too long ago, David. You're the one who said, oh, we're threatening World War III, we're engaging in nuclear brinkmanship. By the way, things that we did all throughout the Cold War, right?

I was raised and is an 80s kid here in Miami. We used to do this thing all the time. At what point would you stop? At what point do you think it's actually worth rolling the dice? At what point between Levyv and Warsaw and your front door would you stop and say, actually, World War III and nuclear war is worth risking? Because that's an answer, I don't get out of the appeasers. At what point do you actually put your foot down?

Well, I mean, look, what I've said is that I'm willing to arm Ukraine under Cold War rules, i.e., the way that we arm the Mujahideen and Afghanistan. So we provided them with stingers, but it wasn't a U.S. flag on the box, and we didn't draw, you know, it wasn't U.S. flags on the trucks. There were a certain set of rules by which we engaged in to avoid the risk of war three with the Russians. Do you feel that's not the case now? I think it's, I know, because we have now defined our objectives

in a much more expansive way. And I'll let one speak for himself, because I think he would not go as far as me. I'm sort of, I'm willing to do a little bit more, but, but no, I mean, look, you have the President of the United States saying that he wants to basically topple Putin. You've got Austin saying that our objectives here

go beyond Ukraine is to basically to kick Russia out of the League of Great Powers. And moreover, you've got the State Department declaring that we're in a global struggle between autocracy and democracy. So we've defined the struggle in mannequin terms. And if somehow Ukraine were to lose, there's like this is a domino theory

where dictators are gonna take over the whole globe. And so I think we've invested you, I would give them some help, but I would not allow the, no American president has ever claimed that the United States has a vital national interest in Ukraine. Name of the President who has done it before, maybe.

Can I explain a point about that? So, first of all, at the start of every word that we fought over the last 60 years, the same climate if we were in the United States would prevail as the one that's in this room. Every time some comment was made that the United States is on the right side we're actually doing the right thing. We're fighting on behalf of everybody in the auditorium. Woo-hoo! A pod, it's really good. It's a good feeling to feel like your country, your government is doing something deeply moral.

So again, I just want to show. And maybe this doesn't matter because you think that most other countries are primitive or arrogant or immersed in propaganda and we were not. But here are the top 20 countries by population. And the ones in yellow are the ones who refuse to support the UN resolution, expelling Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. And you can see that it's nine out of the ten most populous countries

that are on the opposite side of all the cheering that's taking place in this auditorium. This is exactly what has repeated itself. countries that are on the opposite side of all the cheering that's taking place in this auditorium. This is exactly what has repeated itself every time we've gone to war in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria, all Americans across the board, 80%, 85% are on board with the war in the beginning because it feels so good to believe your country is going to do something positive. And then six months later, or a year later, or five years later, every single one of those wars, overwhelming majority say,

it was a huge mistake. That, at least to me, would cause some humility to ask, why does that pattern keep repeating itself? Why am I, as American, an American, always so susceptible to cheering my government's involvement in a war, when the rest of the world is telling you that actually your being propaganda is that the mode of the United States government is claiming to have, which is defending democracy, is not actually their motive, as illustrated by, I don't know, why the rule is we're not

allowed to evaluate other things the United States is doing to determine whether those motives are real, like what we do in Saudi Arabia or what we do in Yemen. And it seems like if someone comes to you and claims that they're acting with a certain motive to determine whether that's really the motive you'd want to look at the history of that person and whether their behavior is consistent with that motive. That's what the rest of the world is doing in the reason why they find these propagandistic claims of the United States so preposterous because so many of them have been victimized by the United States over throwing their democratically elected

governments not in the distant past but in the recent ones. Here's the next 10 most populist countries, 6 out of 10, also DV deviates from the US position and then as far as what David was saying This was Barack Obama so it's not what Antoni was saying people on the far left my friend Tucker Carlson evil far right people This is Barack Obama in 2016 on his way out the door He was confronted in a very lengthy interview by Jeffrey Goldberg, the Neo-Conservative Editor-in-Chief of the Atlantic. You probably did more than anybody else to convince Americans to support the Werner Rock in

2002 and 2003 by claiming that Al Qaeda was an in alliance with Saudah Hussein. And he was demanding to know why Obama spent his presidency refusing to arm the Ukrainians and refusing to confront Moscow? And here's what Jeffrey Goldberg in 2016 quoted Obama as saying, this is Goldberg's quote for Obama, quote, Obama's theory here is simple. Ukraine is a core Russian interest, but not an American one. So Russia will always be able to maintain as schoolatory dominance there.

Quote, the fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Ado country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do. It's realistic, but this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.

And then here is the current CIA director, William Burns, who's also not on the far left or part of the far right, who in 2008, in a memo to Condoleez Arise, when the Bush administration wanted to expand NATO up to Russian borders, warned this is what he wrote, quote, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. And more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle draggers and the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have

yet to find anyone who views Ukraine and NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. This has been conventional wisdom in Washington up until February 24th when it suddenly became taboo to talk about. Russia views Ukraine as the most vital interest to it because it was twice used by Germany to invade Russia in the 20th century and virtually destroy it, and that Ukraine never has been and never will be a vital interest to the United States. Let's go to Antonio.

Okay. Glenn, I think that argument sounded better in the original Russian, to be honest. I mean, I don't know why you're sitting here siting six-year-old Atlantic pieces about Obama. Are you going to address the reality we're talking about? In that list of nations, by the way, you included such human rights luminaries as Iran and China as having voted against it. Let me ask you a direct question. Should Russia be sitting on the UN Human Rights Council,

a country that routinely incarcerates journalists and has a heinous human rights record? I mean, give you look at who else is on the human rights council, like the United States. You're always what about England? Just answer the question. It's not what aboutism to say, you have to look at what the rest of the world is doing

in order to understand the moral framework. Why is it that the United States that still has people in Guantanamo for 20 years with no trial that destroyed the country of a rap, a country of 25 million people that is created the worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen that is imprisoning journalists like Julian Assange with no charges for over a decade now has any moral credibility to say we are more at least appear. I know it feels good to say that, but the reality is the United States, if you look at what it's actually doing, which is going around the world and it's always done this supporting tyranny, not supporting democracy, propping up despots, not fighting them,

if you want to believe that there's a way to go into Ukraine and defend the Ukrainians and all of that, I believe that that's what you want to do, but it would be incredibly naive to refuse to ask ourselves whether that's really the goal of the United States given everything we know about the government. And if the goal of the United States is not the benevolent one that you hope they have and that you have, but instead is a different one, namely not to defend Ukraine and Ukrainians, but to sacrifice Ukraine in pursuit of this broader geopolitical goal that David mentioned that they're now admitting, which is to weaken Russia and bring about regime change, then you're cheering for a war that is completely different than the war that is actually being fought.

No, I disagree. I think you've spent too long in Plato's Cave of Twitter, and you don't stare at reality anymore to be quiet on it. No, no, what I showed you is a Twitter. Excuse me, sugar. Not what I just showed you came from Twitter. Yeah, it came from the six-year-old Atlantic piece. It's even less relevant.

Just this week, the Finnish and Swedish parliaments voted to join NATO. Why is that? Your argument is completely backwards. Russia's not aggressive. Hold on a second. Let me finish the thought. not aggressive hold on a minute right no one

russia's let me respond to the point that you've sat there for two minutes staring at russia's not surrounded by nato it rushes in aggressive because it's around by nato it's around by nato because it's aggressive and countries like finland and sweeten have been living under the russian boot and finland most of all knows it from the winter war

and that threat has been there constantly so i again what do you know that the finish in swedish parliaments who are trying to make a decision for the people don't know what if i were a country and i and i and i have the option to have the richest and most powerful country with the biggest military tell me that if anyone in bay do i'm going to go into war and fight again to i would say yeah i would love that also that sounds like a really great thing of course every country would love to have a pledge from the world's greatest military that if anyone

are you seriously saying that country would like to be Ukraine what do you know what do you know about United the United States intentions that all of the countries I just showed you not including tyrannies many of which are on the United states side but many democracies who have had their democracies subverted by the united states who are saying we do not believe the united states as well intention that every time the united states involves itself in a war it convinces its own citizens that it's going to do benevolent things but the reality is exactly the opposite what do you know that the entire rest of the world doesn't it's not the entire rest of the world the europe Europeans are close to the conflict completely disagree with you. The Danes, the Cuddly Little Danes are seeing

left lethal aid to Ukraine. First Shion country in the Spanish area. The US and the Europeans are in the same place. Let me shift gears so I want to get to another aspect of this topic. So let's start with you, Antonio. What is the outcome that you would like to see here? And right now, the way that victory is being defined would buy Ukraine and buy our State Department is that we kick Russia out of Ukraine maybe

even Crimea too that's the official policy and maybe we destabilize and topple Putin I mean where where where is the like what do you what's the outcome that you think our objectives should be here? My ideal outcome is whatever the Ukrainians want for themselves, which seems to be, if you listen to them, seems to be a liberal democratic Ukraine that wants to join the greater EU-Western sphere. If you look at the May-Dome protests in 2015, this is when everyone revolted against the pro-Russian leader at the time, and there was civilian shootings. If you talk to Ukrainians, there's been 200 years or longer of Ukrainian nationalism brewing,

but the 2014-2015 protests were really a formative peer, where the Ukrainians really said, this is it, we've got our own country. If you talk to them, they're like, we've had seven years of democracy, we're not giving it up now. If you look at things like the mass graves discovered a book on the russians pulled back to look at that and they say if we fail that's the future that awaits us right so they want the opposite of that apparently 80 to 90 percent of the population in karmia is russian and once

be part of russia does that go back to ukraine or is that good russia it's a good question but the ukraineans under zolensky believe that Crimea belongs to them. So is he wrong about that? Doesn't the principle self-determination mean that those peoples should get to decide which country they go with? I mean, that's as much a question for Crimea as it is Catalonia and Spain. You're asking me to speak for Zelensky, yeah. But the Russians have a naval base at Sevastopol that gives them control over the Black Sea.

And if you tell them that what Ukrainian victory means here is a kick out of that naval base and lose control of the Black Sea, you have threatened them, existentially. And you know their policy with regard to nuclear weapons is it's allowed if their nation is exist essentially threatened. So we are playing with fire here. Is that an objective that we are willing to risk a nuclear war for? As we get in Cuba with nuclear weapons there, I don't think we should be. So we need to define our objectives here in a more limited way than just whatever the Ukrainians say. But here's the reality, right? Again, this is one of the things you get into American political discourse.

Everything isn't downstream of American decision. This will come down to the Ukrainians say. But here's the reality, right? Again, this is one of the things when you get into American political discourse. Everything isn't downstream of an American decision. This will come down to the fortunes of war on the ground in Ukraine, which is partially a function of how much aid we give them, obviously. Yes. And we can put strings on those weapons, right? 40 million of weapons are going there

and it's just this month's delivery. So I mean, and it's a good question to ask what happens to those weapons after, which I'm sure is a concern for one of our partners. Do you believe our State Department is working for a negotiated peace? I don't know the inner workings of the State Department. But should they be? No. I think the worst stops in the Ukrainians wanted to stop.

Glad you're familiar with that. There's so many countries all over the world who want the United States to do things that we don't do for them. The Yemenis have been begging the United States for six years to stop sending huge amounts of weaponry and intelligence to the Saudis. And you can say, oh yeah, Yemen is a totally different country. Yemen is a different country, but it's still the United States government. And it is extremely disturbing to me, I have to say, that we suddenly seem to care so much about the lives of Ukrainians and seem to care very little about the lives of all the countries in which we ourselves are the aggressors.

And you can say, well, that's a completely different issue, but it's not a completely different issue because what the outcome is of the United States' role in Ukraine is determined by the U.S. motive. And what you have to do to look at what the U.S. motive is is not pick the rhetoric that makes you feel good. We're on the side of liberation. That's what George Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union speech. We're going to Iraq because we love democracy and we're going to liberate the Iraqi people from Saudi Hussein. That's what Lyndon Johnson said about why we're going to liberate the Iraqi people from Saudi Moussain.

That's what Lyndon Johnson said about why we're getting involved in the war in Vietnam. We love the South Vietnamese Democrats and we're going there to protect them from the South Vietnamese communists. Maybe if that had been true, those words would have had much different outcomes, but that wasn't the reason. That was the propaganda pretense. And so to refuse to say, I'm going to interrogate the authenticity of what U.S. motives are, is it just wash your hands of the reality of the war instead of what you hope the war is?

And that's what I'm going to give you. Let's give it to the last word. Yeah, okay. Anyway, we're going to give you the last word. We're going to give it to the last word since he was a little bit outgunned here, not outgunned because you did more than find on your own, but there was a little bit of two on one. So we're going to give it a 20 last word. David, what were you guys talking about?

Somalia, apparently, or Yemen, apparently, but anyhow. So when I was coming back from Ukraine and I was crossing back, and suddenly I was obviously I wasn't really a refugee, but I was in the refugee line with all the Ukrainians leaving. And you're at the border, it's in the middle of nowhere, by the way. It's not like a big city or anything. And you saw a sign in Polish that said you're entering Poland and the EU flag, right? And as an EU citizen, that flag never really meant much to me. But, and again, not that my time in Ukraine was that bad, but it did feel precarious. And it was a war zone and the sirens going off and all that

stuff. To go back to what seemed like an ordered liberal world seemed magical to me. I had the same feeling. I went to report on Cuba on the internet years ago for Wired Magazine and when I landed at Miami Airport here was like, man, God bless America, I'm glad to be back here. There's a certain order and rules for life. I think the global liberal order is real and I think those who tend to shit on it or at least question its value are those that typically tend not to live outside of it for one and undervalue its importance in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, a debate for the age of 12 done. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm the queen of kinwa. I'm going to the world. What, what, I'm going to have a cashier with me.

We should all just get a room and just have one big hug. Or because they're all like this. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release. What? That beat. What? You're a beat. You're a beat.

What? We need to get married. I'm going to leave. What? I'm going to leave. What? I'm going to leave. I'm going on lead! I'm going on lead!