Bulwark Takes - What Is Trump’s CIA Director Doing in Moscow?

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise trip to Moscow has raised major questions: Is he there to warn Putin, negotiate over Ukraine, or deliver a message about Russia’s escalating covert attacks across Europe? Reporter Michael Weiss and former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos break down Ratcliffe’s unexpected visit, the intelligence warnings about possible Russian provocations against NATO, and the growing campaign of sabotage and attacks targeting European infrastructure. Plus, they turn to the U.S.-Canada trade war and the extraordinary strain being placed on one of America’s closest allies.Sleep cooler this summer with Boll & Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at BollAndBranch.com/bulwarktakes with code bulwarktakes.

Hey and welcome back to The Bullwork Takes. I'm Michael Weiss and with me, as ever, my esteemed colleague and friend and comrade, dare I say, Mark Palmeropoulos. We have hijacked their feed yet again to talk about some breaking news and some not so breaking, but still very topical and interesting news. Starting with CIA director John Ratcliffe's surprise visit to Moscow. Nobody saw this coming. Nobody had this on their bingo card. There was news reported a few weeks ago that Cash Patel. The FBI director is scheduled to travel to Moscow and meet with Russian officials in October. But this visit, Mark, not unprecedented, but unexpected. It comes, what, 24 hours after Ukraine's Independence Day celebration, an in-gathering of all Western officials who support the coalition or part of the coalition to support Ukraine, but absent any real significant American officials, Mike Pence, the former vice president was in Kiev just a day ago, but nobody from the current administration. Now we have Rathcliffe going to Moscow.

There's a lot of speculation as to why. You and I have discussed offline, and I put out on X, my, I guess, semi-informed speculation or hypothesis as to why he's doing this, largely based on precedent, right? I mean, Bill Burns goes to Moscow in 2021 to basically warn Vladimir Putin, don't even think about invading Ukraine. That didn't go quite as planned. You mentioned that, nope, did work. The SVR goons have sent their guys to D.C.

to meet with Mike Pompeo and CIA when you were still in that organization. Love that visit. Loved it. We do liaison all the time. But in this case, I think what's interesting is this is coming amid a strange concatenation of reports. Number one, U.S. intelligence briefs, the Poles, the Scandinavians, and the Baltz several weeks ago. indicating that there is credible intelligence that Russia might do something provocative. What that means could range from what they're already doing,

sabotage operations trying to blow up both hard and soft targets, military facilities, weapons manufacturing plants all across Europe, but also shopping malls, museums that commemorate Soviet occupation and so on and so forth. They've been doing this for years since the start of the full-scale invasion. The Russians could do cyber attacks against European targets, or frankly even American targets, or on the more extreme end of the spectrum, they could send little green men into NATO territory,

launch a, quote, incursion into NATO space, probably somewhere in the eastern flank, the Baltic states or Scandinavia or Poland via Kaliningrad, which would either trigger Article 5 or not, right? This would be the big test the Russians would do, would the Americans send the cavalry in to actually fight a conventional shooting war with Russia? So my view, and again, we don't have any more information other than Rackcliffe goes to Russia,

is that he's probably there to issue a warning. You know, if you guys do X, we will do Y and Z. What's your take on this? I mean, what do you think based on your service and what you know of the organization that he heads? That old, the organization that he has, my old outfit. So, you know, first of all, my phone, of course, blew up. Holy shit, the CI director is flying to Moscow. A C-17 is stopping in Riga and then going into Moscow.

So first thing I reacted to, and I just have to say this because it's meaningless, but it's funny, is that I thought of snacks. What do snacks mean? Snacks meant last time my family traveled on the director's C-17. My son, who was eight years old at the time, ate the entire snack cohort for the security team. So that's what I was thinking of. The C-17, it's got a nice little fancy VIP pod. Looks like 70s business class.

And my son ate everything. It sounds like business class. Unlimited snacks for an incident. Yeah, they rolled pot in, but my son went crazy and they watched the mid-air. Anyway, that's what I thought of when I first heard the C-17. But a couple of big things in this. First of all, you're 100% right. It's not unprecedented. The key thing about the CIA and at first, the KGB, now the SVR or the FSB, the

Internal Service, SvR, the External Service, is that we have ties. The CIA maintains liaison ties with the Russian intelligence services. are our enemy, period. But that's what you do in the intelligence world. You talk to your enemies. So not really much to freak out about these things happen. You noted Bill Burns went in 21. Amazingly enough, he actually, I think he spoke with Russian presidential advisor, Patricev, correct? I think he was the national security advisor at the time, whatever the Russian figure. I'm ahead of the FSB himself. Right. I think he actually got on the phone with Putin, but whatever it is, providing a warning, don't invade Ukraine, Putin didn't listen.

I think John Brennan, when he was CIA director, he went in 2016, and clearly we hosted, when I was in the senior ranks at CIA, we hosted, I think it was Norishkin, who is the SvR chief, as well as Bortnikov, who is the FSB chief at the time. This is under Mike Pompeo to talk about the stupid idea of counterterrorism cooperation. Anyway, these things happen. But I think the big question on this is why now? Because there's optics in this just before the midterms. Not really great. Russia is our enemy, period. End of story.

And the CIA is providing all this intelligence support to the Ukrainians. To do what? To kill Russians. So what in the world is Ratcliffe doing there? I think your theories on this are very well founded in reason. We don't know. We shall see. Of course, social media can be a really fun thing.

And, you know, my feed then exploded. And one, Ratcliffe is telling, telling Putin, hey, don't interfere in the elections. We got this. We can interfere in our own elections. Or he's like, hey, could you do us to solid and impose some tariffs on Canada? Right. You know, like we've got our own coalition forming here. Or how about, hey, don't mess with NATO with all of the, you know, because there is significant concern.

And we could talk about it in a second. There's been briefings reportedly, I think you reported it, in fact, that that U.S. intelligence has been briefing NATO allies that Russia might pull something. So maybe Rackliff is saying, like, hey, we're going to destroy NATO anyhow. You guys don't have to do it for us. I mean, I'm being really facetious and stupid now. But this is a, you know, it's certainly interesting. And we'll see what happens. The one thing that I think everyone should be a little sober-minded about, and you have led the charge in this. And you've actually helped me because I go through my Trump derangement syndrome hysteria all the time. It's kind of ingrained in me is that,

look, Ratcliffe is probably the most pro-Ukraine member of the administration. And the idea that he's going there to kind of somehow screw, you know, to cut a deal with Moscow to screw the Ukrainians, it's possible, but I don't, I probably unlikely. And I think it's more of giving some type of warning. That's not to say that, you know, Ratcliffe wouldn't do this to, to, if he was ordered to do so. But I just get a sense that's not what this was. And, you know, I will say that these things come out. We're going to, you know, there will be enough leaks because the one thing that CI Director Rackcliffe and his PR team, who don't like me very much, let's just tell you,

like, the public relations staff at the agency are not, because I've had big fights with them about lots of stuff. But what thing they're really good at is leaking to reporters, don't be surprised. If you get an email, you know, behind the scenes saying, hey, this is what we really talked about. And then Axios will break it. And then we'll have this big scoop. And so I think we'll get a sense of what this is. But it is important. It is interesting. Anytime a senior U.S. official visits Moscow, you know, when you think about the state of relations between the U.S. and Russia is important. And I wrote something down here. You said the word Kakadens.

What the fuck does that mean? Kekadens. Kekeda Nation. I don't, come on. You might have gone to, you went to Dartmouth, right? Yeah, we were talking about quixotic. Where did you go? I went to Cornell.

I missed that in life. You went to a better Ivy League school, I guess. That's, you know, that's not even from Dartmouth. That's PJ Woodhouse. That's, he was a concatenation of circumstances. Holy crap. It's a famous phrase in all those books. I can't, I used to write in my cables, though.

I used to throw a cave in each cable. I think I said this last time. I used to throw kind of a fancy word in. I wanted to say, though, I mean, if you're going to send somebody to both deliver a warning and possibly also try to, let's call it broker a ceasefire or some kind of like cessation, cessation of hostilities, he'd be the guy to do it because, you know, I like in Rackcliffe to what John Bolton was in term one. John Bolton, you know, big security hawk.

The Russians respected him, though, because they knew they couldn't fuck with him the way that they're going to play with Steve Whitkoff or Jared Kushner, right? Or one of the, you know, the lesser jellyfish specimens of the current administration. And this is a guy, as we said, you know, he has brokered this deal somehow gotten Trump to sign off on sharing intelligence with Ukrainians. And the key here, from what I understand, is giving the Ukrainians very specific detailed information about where Russia's air defect. are all around the country, not just along where the energy infrastructure is, but now where the warehouses for wild berries, you know, the logistics hubs for these commercial retailers or wholesalers, I guess, but that sell dual-use material that wind up in the Russian war machinery. We give them the information, if you're going to fly your drone swarms, avoid this area,

because this is where they'll be shot out, right? And that's something that only the Americans, and now actually the French are very gung-ho on this, too, have been provided to the Ukrainian. That's all Rackcliffe, right? So if you're going to send somebody to Moscow to say, listen, we know where you're up to, knock it off, or else you know what we can do and we can do more of it and we can make things even more unpleasant for you. I mean, remember in term one, Jake Sullivan, Jake Sullivan, I think was quoted in the New York Times saying, oh, well, we warn the Russians if they screw around with our elections. We could black out all of Moscow, right? I mean, the escalatory ladder. We're very low on the wrong, actually, in terms of what can happen. And we're not even getting into. unconventional capabilities. We're not talking about WMD here. We're talking about what can be done at a plausibly deniable level or what the kids in academia and think tankistan call hybrid warfare, a term I absolutely detest because it just makes things seem a lot less menacing. But what it really is, it's war, right? And the sabotage operations or the terrorist attacks, as they should be known,

that have been occurring, there was a sort of abatement of them for a little while, I think, in like the 20 to 24 to 2025 period. Now they're escalating again, right? So we've got just reported today a second drone incident in Leipzig, Germany, which was targeting Ukrainian aircraft on the tarmac and the airport there. I mean, this had the potential of going sideways very easily if this thing had blown up prematurely or even on time. It could have killed loads of people. I think it was a German air technician who literally stomped on one of the drones that he found, right? In Romania, I think they've clocked dozens of drone incidents in the last year, most recently a seaborne one, and now, I think, another aerial incursion. Weapons facility in Estonia, which I know very well, that went up in

smoke very recently, and I don't think there's been an open attribution yet, but all signs point to the usual suspects. And in Bulgaria, Emco, which is an arms manufacturer, a weapons dealer, headed by Emilian Gibrev, the first victim of the GRU Novichuk poisoning, by the way, before Descripal. They poisoned him, his factory manager, his son. They poisoned him twice, actually. They blew up, or it is suspected, that the GRU has now also set fire to one of his facilities in Bulgaria. So it seems like the Russians are getting their groove back, so to speak, in terms of like attacking Western NATO military infrastructure. And so the potential for the U.S., for instance, to get dragged into a war with Russia is increasing. And to me, it makes sense.

Send a guy like Rackliff over there. Say, look, we know exactly what you're doing. you better knock it off because the costs are going to be severe. So the interesting thing is, so I think you make a lot of great points. I do wonder, based on this absolutely dysfunctional national security process, how this visit came about. Was this something that was scheduled? Was this something that the agency came up with on its own? Marco Rubier is the National Security Advisor.

I can't imagine him chairing a deputy's committee meeting on this and saying, oh, this is what we have to do? And, you know, does Trump even know or care? You know, does this actually, does this visit go to that level? It goes to that level if it has to do with trying to solve the war in Ukraine. It doesn't go to that level if it has to do more of what's going on what you're talking about. Or, you know, I know there was some speculation about prisoner swaps. I think you made a good point in one of your posts like, yeah, the director usually doesn't do those things.

Usually it's handled by lower level agency officers. But I do wonder, you know, where did this kind of kind of, what is it? What does it stem from? I mean, I'm going to, like, there's a provocative statement that I'm going to make, but I'm actually quoting somebody. And it's, and I can't say the name of this person, but it is a former deputy director of operations of the CIA. That's the chief spy.

And when I was in the senior ranks, he used to say 100% correctly, Russia is a terrorist state. This was back in 2017 and 2018, and it's only been exacerbated. I think everybody saw on social media. the videos of, I think it was a young Ukrainian child who was being hunted by a Ukrainian drone, that's revolting. Of course, all the attacks on civilian infrastructure. And what you're seeing what the Russians are doing in terms of actually literally trying to bomb aircraft. That's terrorism. Russia is a terrorist state. The idea that that doesn't really take hold more. I mean, look,

I don't want to kind of come down on all of our European friends and brothers and sisters there, but there should be a lot more hysteria about this. Maybe there is, and I'm missing it. But for God's sakes, I mean, this is a, you know, Russia is a menace to the continent. It is by far the biggest danger to kind of European civilians. And let me throw one other thing there. This is why we should care. Maybe what I want to make sure is our listeners understand why this matters.

There's a shitload of Americans who travel and live in Europe. If Russia conducts a terrorist attack, and I'm going to call it a terrorist attack, in Europe, ultimately 100% Americans could die. And so I think there's a lot to be concerned on there. This message is sponsored by Bull and Branch. There is nothing worse than getting into bed on a hot summer night and realizing you're not actually going to cool down. You toss the covers off, flip the pillow over, looking for the cool side.

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I interviewed the former president of Lithuania, I think, in 2015 or 16, and she used this phrase, terrorist state. You know, back then, I guess it seemed a little more provocative to Western years. Like, well, why are we likening Russia to al-Qaeda or ISIS or anything like that? And she's like, well, you know, I mean, in our part of the world, we're accustomed to this kind of barbarity being perpetrated against our people during occupation and you know at the end of World War II what the Red Army got up to and now I mean you know as you say going after soft targets these are not all military targets right I mentioned shopping malls Leroy Merlin the big shopping chain in central Europe they bomb one of those in Poland bus stations

museums in Latvia low order graffiti you know vandalism attacks in in France. They painted Stars of David on the walls in Paris, remember that, to try and gin up anti-Semitic sentiment, attacking or graffitiing or vandalizing the walls of the NATO centers, cyber centers of excellence, whatever they're called in Estonia, now blowing up a facility, possibly in Estonia. This has been going on all over the place for the last several years. And in fact, I mean, the line that I keep getting when I report this out, and we've done several investigations at the inside and v square. European governments are very afraid to come clean to their populations and say the Russians

are doing this because one of the secondary effects is psychological. It's not just about destroying, say, ammunition and weapons destined for Ukraine. It's also about trying to persuade the West. It's not in your interest to support Ukraine because this is the blowback you're going to get. We're going to come after you and we're going to attack you and possibly kill your people, right? But I mean, you know, look, this goes back to even the first invasion in 2014. GRU Unit 29155, the kind of black ops elite unit of Russian military intelligence, they were blowing up ammunition weapons depots in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic in 2011.

Three years before the takeover Crimea, that was in the midst of the Obama-Pooten reset, where our relations with Moscow were supposed to have been normalized and made predictable and reliable, I think is the term of art that's used by the State Department. And they're doing this all the day. And there's always collateral damage, right? Civilians always end up getting injured or killed when they set something off. Security guards, villages in these areas in Bulgaria and Chequia that get the windows blown out and stuff. And again, I think our problem is we don't want to acknowledge the menace, the danger, the threat.

Because we don't, we fear retaliation, right? We fear what is necessary for ourselves to respond. And this is something you and I talk about all the time. Policymakers fear this. If you say Russia is a terrorist state, what do you do against a terrorist state? You do what, you know, Jim Mattis did in DeraZur, Syria when the Russian Wagner group tried to attack some special operations forces. And, you know, 300 member or a small contingent of U.S. Army Delta force killed 300 Wagner in about six seconds. And that, which is the only way, the only thing the Russians understand.

And I mean, you know, I go back, I remember times when I was years ago when I was working jointly with the FBI. in New York City. And the FBI Russia squad would tell me about the days past when, you know, something bad would happen to one of our diplomats in Moscow. They'd go out and they'd beat up a Russian. They would literally go beat the shit out of a Russian in the streets of New York. That's the only way they understand. And so policymakers are terrified at this. So when we were saying, I gave you that kind of that incident when our former DDO, Deputy Director of Operations, was saying Russia is a terrorist state.

So you'd have kind of the analysts that the agency would get all nervous about this. But then the policymakers would totally freak out. This is a crazy man, except he's right. Because it puts them into business and what are you going to do about it? Stop talking about it. Stop complaining about it. Stop declaring Russian intelligence officers persona non grata. That means they're kicked out of a certain country.

You have to go back and do something extreme sometimes or they don't understand this. And, you know, the easy way, so I'm not sounding like a total crazy person, you know, while I would love to have some, you know, MQ9 drones over my. Moscow doing things that we did to the Russians like we used to do to al-Qaeda, that's not going to happen. What we should do is help the Ukrainians do what, kill more Russians. I mean, anything that if Russia blows some shit up in Europe, we should provide the Ukrainians with as much means possible is to kill more Russians. And that's it. And the idea that we haven't done that enough to us to an extent to deter the Russia, it drives me nuts. And I'm just,

this is me as a, you know, a street kid from New Jersey talking. Well, you know, but you're not, You're not alone in this. And what's interesting is the conversations I've had with European partners about, well, what are you going to do? You keep admiring the problem, right? You're always on the defense. You're always saying, oh, we need to, it takes a long time to kind of piece together, do the police work to investigate, was this a Russian attack? And if so, you know, the Russians are relying on organized crime syndicates, riffraff, kids, teenagers looking to make a few hundred euro to set something a light in their hometown. They're not sending their operatives. and officers into the field, largely because of international sanctions. A lot of these operatives have been blown by, you know, investigative work and by what CIA and FBI have uncovered about prior operations, right? So they stay back in Moscow. Your investigative work has been better than the intelligence community. I'll say what you've done at The Insider has been extraordinary.

You have moved European governments to act far more so than my old colleagues. I hate to say that, but that's just a fact with some of the stuff you've done. Nice and flattering of you to say. But, I mean, with a point I was going to be nice anymore. No, please. I can mock my hair or something again. The point I was arriving at is we're now getting to the place in time where European governments and intelligence services are saying maybe it's time to get on the front foot and to start

doing things either preemptively or to send Chicago rules from the Untouchables film. You know, they put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue. So I'll give you an example. I'm probably going to get a little bit in trouble for saying this, but fuck it. I think I've said it publicly before. So a few years ago, the GRU, Russian military intelligence, hired a bunch of basically on the shelf organized criminals from like the 1990s period who lived in Estonia to go around and to smash the vehicles of government officials. And they smashed in the windows of the then Estonian Interior Minister of his car, right, outside of his flat. Several months go by. The GRU officer, remember, there's this cutouts, right? They were doing this remote.

remotely just reactivating old, you know, networks in the Baltics. G.I.U officer who either authorized this operation or was responsible for handling the cutouts comes out of his flat in Moscow and finds the windows of his car have been smashed in. Right. So this is the kind of language you have to speak. This is the message you have to send back. You are not immune. You are not, you know, insusceptible to blow back yourself. You do it to us, we'll do it back to you. And maybe now it's at equal levels. But at a certain point, the West is going to discover or realize we have to actually escalate and do it at the way that they do it, covertly, plausible deniability. Oh, it wasn't us. Oh, that's very unfortunate. Your car got

smashed up. That's very unfortunate. There was a blackout in Moscow. It's a very unfortunate thing. You know, one of your generals got blown up by a scooter bomb. Whoops, it must have been the Ukrainians. You know, I mean, that's the game that will have to be played. That's the only game they understand. I mean, there's, you know, as you know, I was a Middle Eastern hand for the agency. And there's a famous story in Beirut, I think it's been written about in multiple books, when we went through this terrible spade of U.S. hostages being taken. And so one of the groups took some Russian diplomats hostage. You know this story, I think. And so the Russian diplomats were being held hostage. So the Russian intelligence service, the KGB at the time, kidnapped the family members

of this terrorist group, cut their nuts off, stuffed it in their mouth, killed them, and returned it to the terrorist group. The hostage was released. and this is, I'm not admiring the KGB for doing this. I'm just saying that's, well, in some ways maybe I am. But, you know, this is the language they understand. End of story. And, you know, you have to get a little dirty with them. And until we do that, and Europe does that, this shit's going to go on in Europe.

Because I really, I still think the Russians, and I guess you're correct, the GRU probably, thinks that Europe is their playground. And until we kind of deny that, that feeling of safety and comfort, they're going to keep doing these things. Well, so I'm going to use this as a perfect opportunity to segue into the other topic I wanted to discuss, which is the similarities between what the Russians are doing, again, relying on civilians or criminals, petty thieves and crooks and, you know, just ruffians, and what the Iranians are doing. So there was a very good piece in the New Yorker about the IRC's own terrorist operations all over the world.

I mean, the UK, here in the United States, wherever, targeting mostly dissidents, but now, I mean, you know, they're relying on their militias and proxy groups in Iraq and formerly in Syria to fire bomb synagogues, kill Jews, Americans, you know, go after cultural institutions and all that stuff. But they're not sending their operators into the field. They're hiring, I mean, in some cases, guys in the hell's angels, right? People who don't necessarily know who they're working for, they're just told, hey, you don't want to make some quick, easy money, deliver this package. I mean, I think one of the anecdotes was a guy was pretending to be a jilted ex-lover or boyfriend of a girl he wanted to scare, and he hired somebody and said, oh, it's fireworks and just set them off, and that'll just frighten her and I'll get my sweet revenge. It turned out it was a fucking bomb. So they're using these unwitting cutouts to commit acts of atrocity and terrorism on Western soil, and they don't have to leave the confines of their administrative buildings, right? They're sitting there in Tehran or they're sitting there in Moscow. And, you know, the thing that occurs to me is, is maybe it's not a coincidence that the GRU and the IRGC are both using the same playbook here because we know the Russians and the Iranians have a very strong intelligence relationship and also a military cooperation. Shah had drones to Russia, Russian missiles to Iran,

and now Russian intelligence targeting packages for American troops in the Gulf, right? That's been confirmed by CIA and U.S. intelligence. Maybe Ratcliffe is going there to talk about that as well. 100%. That could be it too. I mean, there's certainly has been a, some additional reporting about Iranian threats. This is also the idea of, you could call it, asymmetric warfare. But it's, you know, look, Iran is going to have tools in their toolkit. And the war is not over now.

If we go through this kind of economic Armageddon, Iran is not just going to sit back. And so what are they going to do? They're going to do things such as cyber attacks and perhaps attacks against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. And, of course, they're tried and true method of terrorism. And what makes it more difficult for U.S. intelligence, for U.S. law enforcement, and my old life, the CIA, is that this is not looking at Iranian terrorist networks in the United States or in Europe, because they're out, as you said, they're outsourcing it.

So if they outsource it to some criminal gang in Alexandria or Virginia, that makes it much harder. Oftentimes, that gang doesn't even know what they're doing. They've been hired to kill somebody, which is what they might do anyhow. And so that means what? We don't have a cell structure to try to penetrate. We don't have signals intelligence kind of streams to look at. And so, you know, as we kind of, as what the FBI clearly is doing right now and has been doing for the last six months, uncovering every stone looking for potential for Iranian terrorist activity globally against the U.S. They're doing the FBI here, CIA and our foreign partners overseas.

If you outsource it, it makes it harder. And so that's, that is definitely a concern. No doubt about that. Yeah. Well, finally, I want to talk about Canada, the gift that keeps on giving and our new trade war. I mean, you know, it's amazing to me. We go to war with Iran, the strongest adversarial country in the Middle East, but not a peer adversary by any means. And I think it's safe to say we lose that war because the Iran is in control of a choke point, a waterway through which 20% of the world's oil supply flows. We haven't achieved our strategic objectives. The President of the United States is exasperated with his own campaign. You want it out of it almost as quickly as he got into it. I think it's safe to say we lost this war.

And you'd think from there there'd be some taking stock, some recalibration of the way America does. And instead we pivot to let's go to have an economic war, trade war with our closest geographical neighbor, a fellow member of NATO, a member of five eyes, one of the closest intelligence partners the United States has. And oh, by the way, a country that after September 11, 2001, went to war on behalf of our country being attacked by terrorists and fought very valiantly and lost a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan. And we want to repay the favor by imposing 50% tariffs on their good. I mean, you know, and we, and it's also, this is, this is actually, to me, a little bit boring because we already did this. Trump already tried this, what, a year ago? So now we're back to the old toolkit, the old kit and caboodle with, you know, explain to me from where you're sitting.

I mean, what do you think is going on here? Why Canada? I mean, J.D. Vance made a crack about, you know, he's like, oh, you know, the 51st state. Oh, Freudian slip. I mean, is this a serious thing? Like, obviously, trade war is always a serious thing. But do they really think that, you know, part of their hemispheric policy is they're going to take over Canada? or make them somehow so economically supplicant to the United States that we might as well just control their policy, both domestic and foreign.

I mean, what are you hearing from your context? This makes me absolutely crazy, as you know, because you hear that kind of my ranting and raving, whether it's to you directly or on social media. So first of all, the only war we should have with Canada is over hockey. That's it. It's hockey. Whether it's an ice hockey game or, I mean, I think back in the Middle East one time, I was posted in the Levant. And we used to have a weekly street hockey game with the Canadian embassy.

So it was the intelligence community folks. And then I would list all the U.S. Marines. I'd give a bunch of sticks. None of them knew how to play hockey at all. And we should just beat the shit out of each other and then drink beer. That's the war with Canada. And it was awesome. When you say beat the shit out of each other, you mean they cleaned your clock every time.

They're Canadians. No, it was the U.S. Marines and me against the Canadians. And I remember the Canadian Intel chief was very annoyed because I enlisted a whole bunch of these guys. And like literally we would get into fights there and then drink beer afterwards. And it was great. And that's the only war we should be having. So, okay, let me be serious now.

And those were great times. But 158 Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan when they deployed 40,000 members of the Canadian military, a small military. So 158. That's a shocking percentage. They deployed special operations forces. As you know, conflict that you knew well in the fight against ISIS and Iraq and Syria. Canadian soft was on the ground.

We had Canadian F-18 pilots flying over Libya in 2011 with our little Libya adventure. There is Canadian counterterrorism cooperation. If you remember the Millennium Plot, I think a Montreal resident Ahmed Rassam was going to blow up, trying to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. And there was a joint U.S.-Canadian effort. The Canadians were integral and then uncovering his whole al-Qaeda terrorist network. So great counterterrorism cooperation. They remember the Five Eyes, as you noted. That's the incredible alliance of intelligence services on signals intelligence on human intelligence.

They're a member, a key player in NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. I'd to write it down. I forgot what it was. But that's our defense in the north against any kind of hostile air incursions. You know, I can go on and on. And, of course, and something that's near and dear to your heart, they've been involved in some really interesting kind of Cold War intelligence coups. when Canadian intelligence helped us. You can jump in here right after this

because I know there's one incident which you're very familiar with. But the bottom line on this is they are a tremendous ally. What in the world are we doing? This is insane. And here's why it matters. I have a ton of Canadian friends who are all out of their mind on this and they're pissed.

But the one thing that what they tell me they've done is they've actually united French and English-speaking Canada and impossibility in all of their hatred of the United States. And what is Canada going to do? do it. They're going to turn elsewhere. They are signing defense agreements with European defense firms, not buying American military equipment. They're tilting, unfortunately, towards Beijing. This is so stupid. It's an own goal. It's crazy. The problem is, I think Trump believes it and the people around him. And, you know, Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, who just made a jackass

at himself, you know, recently saying that Canada didn't have a military. 158 Canadians were killed in Afghanistan. So all of this is very distressing to me. I, you know, I'm ranting raving about it. But national security is a team sport. If we do this to our allies, we will have no friends. And one other thing, Michael, on 9-11, remember U.S. airspace was closed. 33,000 passengers and over 200 flights landed in Canada, and the Canadians took them all in. So come on, what are we doing? This is an abomination. And if you talk to, you have a lot of friends across the aisle, too. I amazingly enough do too. I have Republican friends, many of them. They all think this is nuts, the foreign policy hands. But Trump gets crazy. I don't know.

if that harp lady, whatever's yapping in his ear, why he's on his Canada kick. But this is just stupid. And no one around him, I guess, has the balls to say anything, just cut this shit out. I mean, arguably the start of the Cold War was the defection of Igor Gusenko, Soviet chief, GRU officer, who was stationed in Ottawa. And he basically just gave them the full suite of operations. There's this kind of naivete coming out of World War II that, well, the Soviets were allied with the United States and Canada, fighting fascism and Hitler. Of course, we're not going to spy on each other, you know, wink, wink.

And this is something Truman and also McKenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister believed at the time. And here comes Gousenko with this treasure trove of actually we're spying all over you, including recruiting Canadian communist MPs and people who were involved in atomic espionage. And, you know, RCMP, basically they ran this guy. They brought him to the United States. He sang to the FBI.

There was a whole commission about all the intelligence stuff that he gave over. And it actually reshaped the way that the Truman administration understood the threat posed by the Soviets. I mean, arguably the beginning of the Cold War. So Canada has been integral in fighting every struggle with us, including the Twilight struggle against Soviet communism. So, yeah, I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me. Here's the thing, right? I think there are two prevailing schools of thought. Number one, Trump is just, his mind is rice pudding.

He doesn't really know what he's doing. He just knows that he's, he's angry, he's resentful. He wants things, and he knows that he has a better chance of getting them from our friends and allies than he does from our adversaries because he treats our adversaries with utter deference. I mean, just abject humiliating sort of friendliness. And then he treats our allies and friends like shit, like there are our adversaries. And then the other school of thought is, no, actually, don't discount. There's a grand strategy or a grand design to his scheming here. And it's really to destroy the West or to destroy NATO, weaken our alliances, and basically bring the Russians in from the cold and, I don't know, establish these warm and fuzzy relationships with our historical adversaries.

And, you know, admittedly, it's hard to figure out. I mean, I tend toward the former explanation. I just don't give him that much credit. I mean, again, he thought he could go to war with Iran, do regime change on the cheap, no boots on the ground, an air war, slot in Amman and Ajad, Holocaust denying former president, arm a few Kurds, and call it a day. This is not a guy who says to me grand design or a big strategic thinker here. But I mean, what do you, like, put yourself in the mind of, again, your CIA former case officer.

Donald Trump is a foreign dictator, and your job is to anonymize him, profile him, send back to Langley, this is what I think is motivating this guy. What do you make of Trump and his just? There is, there is, that's a great question. I love this question. I can only imagine what the psychological profile of foreign intelligence services are. They're probably short. It's probably a one, you know, our, you know, policymakers level one pager, this is an easy one

pager. He has no ideology. He believes in nothing. He is transactional on everything. And the final piece is that everything is right now. It's here and now, what he's feeling. Everything's based on a whim. And that's how you, that's how you describe.

crazy whiplashes. He hates Zelensky, beats the shit out of him in the Oval. Well, Ratcliffe says, hey, the Russians suck. Back a winner. So I'm going to back a winger for a little bit until you're not. So don't take too much time in trying to figure him out. He is a transactional. I guess you could call it apolitical is the wrong word. But there is no ideology. There's no Trump doctrine. There's no nothing other than, of course, personally enriching him and his family. To me, it's pretty easy. And that sounds a lot like Middle Eastern Dictict. I dealt with all the time. And in a way, it's also, it can be more dangerous because it's so unpredictable.

It's so erratic, right? Just when you think you have a policy to contain him or to deter him in some way, he just pivots in the other direction or he just changes the channel to something else. Even our adversaries, I think, this is the danger. Their attempt to try and barter with him or negotiate or calm him down, that can come to dust very easily because he just decides, oh, I'm not interested in it. Right now, it doesn't seem like he's particularly interested in the Ukraine. war, or not as much as he used to be, because now he's still got to solve this Iran thing that he got himself into. And there's no end in sight for that.

Anyway, always great to talk to you. I want to also just put it out there to any of the listeners and people in the comments. We are open for feedback in terms of you should talk about this or here's a topic. We'd love the two of you to discuss. It can be Marx, Red Sox fanaticism. It can be my... my coiffure, which I know has been an obsession of both Mark and his wife, Cynthia, for many years. And I have to say, it's, yeah, well, you got, you don't have to worry about that anymore, but, you know. When I go to the barber, like, there's like six barbers lined up. I go to a barber. There's a whole bunch of folks there. It's like 30 seconds. I don't care. Yeah. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, sure, you can't screw this up. So, in some ways, it's an advantage. Yeah. Well, Darth Putin, it's a great parody account on Twitter. He said I have imperialist hair. So that's right. I like that.

But anyway, I want to. But anyway, I want to. to thank you guys for listening. I hope to do this again soon. And you've been listening for the bulwark takes. I'm Michael Weiss and Mark Polymeropolis is my co-pilot. We'll see you next time. Cheers.