Chapo Trap House - 452 - Sucker-Bait feat. Derek Davison & Daniel Bessner (9/7/20)

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

We’re joined by Foreign Exchanges’ Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner to discuss Trump’s troop-disrespecting, Austrian domination of the Balkans, who the REAL losers and suckers are, and the roll of the military in America’s declining empire. Please subscribe to Foreign Exchanges on substack: https://fx.substack.com/

Alright, hello. Greetings and happy Labor Day to everyone. It may be a holiday, but you know, we are still lashed to this Wheel of Podcasts. It is me, Matt, Felix, and Amber joining you, but we have two very special scabs to join you on this wonderful holiday, starting with University of Washington historian Daniel Besner, and then making our returning champion the all-time chapeau leading guest episode appearance champion, Derek Davison. How's it going, gentlemen? I'm like, am I getting time and a half for this because it's a holiday or what? No, absolutely not. This is the day we celebrate your bosses and entrepreneurs like ourselves.

Who have you been talking to, Derek? Who's putting ideas in your head? Like Amazon, we are just, you know, brief job listing on Labor Day. Like Amazon, we are hiring spies for our podcast network. Just please report back to us if you see anyone on social media or on your own podcast talking about, you know, podcast unionization, podcast wealth redistribution, anything like that. We would like to hear from it. Come be a Pinkerton for Chapeau. Happy Labor Day, everybody. Well, we got Daniel and Derek. We got you on today, and this is a perfect one. I've

been champing at the bit since, I don't know, about Friday. I wanted to do an emergency pod, but consider this the emergency podcast session because, in my opinion, the single best bit of reporting, news, and comedy to yet another 2020 election has finally dropped. I've been waiting on this one for a while. It comes courtesy of the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, probably our favorite human being on this show. I think he really holds the record as someone who probably warms my heart the greatest out of anyone who we've ever talked to on this show. But this is a bit of bombshell, earth-shattering, and I'm surely election-changing news that Donald Trump does not give a fuck about our beautiful dead

soldiers from World War I, and it goes from there. This warrants, you know, we've got experts in our corner. We've got the full-chapel lineup here. Sounds virtual. I'm going to go through this whole piece, but just starting off the top with you, Derek and Daniel, as our foreign policy expert and historian. What do you make of the loser and sucker gate, as I'm calling it? I mean, I think it pretty clearly reflects the reality that since the creation of the all-volunteer force in 1973, like, we've essentially established a Janissary class of soldiers that are totally disconnected in any way, shape or form from our nation's elite, I mean,

from Trump to Samantha Power, right? So there's generations of soldiers who essentially are poor from the South or West or grew up literally outside of a military base and they're totally disconnected from American society, which is why someone like Trump would say something like this. He doesn't even know, you know, it doesn't even enter his mind. He doesn't know any soldiers or things like that. And it's also like, as you guys say all the time, it doesn't make a difference at all. It's just going to totally have absolutely no effect, but it is really funny. I mean, I was stunned for a man like Donald Trump who has always put others before himself

and held, you know, workers and the downtrodden in such respect for him to say these things. I just, I mean, it shatters my worldview. I don't know how to rebuild and try to make sense of things at this point. I think that we're missing a lot of context here. I've been to diners in the Midwest. I've gotten, I've gotten beaten up in a lot of diners because I'm going up to patrons and bothering them and asking them if they thought the Democratic Party lost them when they got rid of Tom Dashel. I'm eating people's fries. I'm generally behaving and imitating the voice of John Leguizamo

in the past. It's part of the assignment that I have for the Atlantic. But the thing is, when you talk to these Midwestern voters, people have had their figures trapped in Chinese finger traps. People who are stuck in giant tires because they're heroes of the Michelin Man, real Americans. But you know, 20, 20 media consumers, they support what Donald Trump has said about this because they, like him, think the Austrians should have stewardship of the Balkans. That was, if you remember, yeah, when he came down the escalator, he was coming out against the black hand. He was saying that Austrians have a blood right to rule over there. And

it just, I'm really amazed by people not catching on to that. Dammit, I had a whole bit about this and Felix beat me too and he did it better. But I just really wanted someone to explain to him in the helicopter, well, okay, so there was this small group of Serbian nationalists. And it's very important. It set off a whole thing. This one weird, they were all like 19 and insane incels, by the way. And it was a whole world war because of that. It is a fascinating thing to start with World War One, the most stupid, incomprehensible, burn after reading war you could possibly imagine. Well, that's why he was baffled because he doesn't have the ideological...

It's baffling, no, it's a baffling war. He doesn't have any ideological filter because Trump really is proof that the powerful, they don't believe any of this shit. They know the world is like we see it. It's an abattoir of exploitation and they just think that that's good because they're the ones doing the exploiting. That's why, as Amber points out, Financial Times, which is for the ruling class, is pretty unvarnished and relatively like Marxist in its analysis because they're talking to each other. All Trump has is he doesn't have the part of the brain to lie to the fucking rubes, which is what the rest of them have beaten

into them at birth and that has slowly been dissolved by dang Cheeto dust and syphilis spider cheats by now. So he's just saying this, and I think my favorite part of it is that he said it in front of John Kelly, apparently, whose son died in Iran because a guy in that position, as they were saying, the ruling class is totally detached from the military except for guys who went through the military to get into power. And that means those guys actually believe this shit to some degree because if they didn't, they wouldn't have joined the military. They would have done something that would have given them more money and more direct power earlier than like grinding up through the ranks in the army or something

or the Marines. So Kelly believes this shit. And so he thinks his son died for a reason. And here's a guy he fought on behalf of representing the class of people that he fought on behalf of and is now a minion of telling him to his face, your kid is a fucking loser and an idiot and a sucker because this is all fake. I was Fascinating, though, because it took him a while to initially, you know, with the I don't get it, what's in it for them comments. He was like, Oh, he must have been speaking to the heroism and the selflessness and the altruism. It's like, so even the idea, like first of all, it took him so long to be like, I think he might not respect what my son

did. That just proves that like an article like this won't be taken. It's not like the troops are going to be. Yeah. I mean, again, it's it's not it's not an indictment of intelligence or or anything. It's just that people want to believe the people they like would like them. That's just human nature. On the on the the World War One issue, Amber, which you brought up, like I would love to do a poll of the people who read this article and got really mad at it and see how many of them still think he was talking about World War Two. Yes, I have the exact same thing. When I first saw when I first saw this headline, it was like Trump reviews to visit the US military cemetery in France. I was immediately

thinking it was like the Normandy beaches one. And I was like, oh, yikes, like even for Trump, even for Trump, that's a fuck. That's a bit far. And then as soon as I found out it was like World War One, I was like, oh, fuck it. This is funny yourself because because everyone I guarantee you're exactly right. Almost everyone who's mad at this is just thinking about World War Two. And and what I like about this, like, you know, I mean, well, we're going to read the piece because the details in it are funnier than anything that you like. It's like pure duck soup. It's pure Marx Brothers. But like the larger meta thing that's funny is that like, if you're president, like the base like the barest minimum

thing you have to do of our like of our civic norms that must be observed is loving and respecting our honored fallen dead, our soldiers who died in wars for fighting for our freedom or whoever's freedom, World War One was a consequence of Bosnian national self determination. I really pray for you if you don't see the honor in fighting the war of cousins and uncles. So if you against uncle cousin against cousin, family friend against family friend, the most important war in human history. But what I love so much about this story is that this is like I feel like so many people have been have been have been waiting for something like this of such a primal violation of our kind of civic religion and codes of behavior

for our leaders to so violently just stick his fucking finger in it and just like just just just fucking stumble into the golf the country club like Rodney Dangerfield and Caddy Shaq and just start like just started asking people's wives if they've ever made $16 the hard way except it's a war widow instead of a golf golf person you know and I just I saw this story and I just want to say I immediately thought this is it there is simply no way the Republican Party or Donald Trump supporters or Fox News can possibly get out of this. There's no way for instance they'll just say this is a hoax and move on or just yeah even better just say actually Joe Biden said that and then everyone will forget about it by like

oh like a day a day later or more likely say what's the Atlantic Jeffrey who well I mean that is I mean Fox News trash their own reporter they spent a whole day basically like tossing their own reporter under the bus when she confirmed some of this stuff well amazing I mean the Goldbergs thing does rely on anonymous sources and you can sort of read through the lines guessing who those anonymous sources are but then like Fox is debunking of those anonymous sources relied on their own anonymous sources and it's very clear like what Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic is doing here with like the timing of this is that you know like this this is supposed to be like a if not an October surprise then like a large bullet loaded in

the chamber aimed at like you know getting him out of the White House that's not to say I don't believe every single word of what's essentially being alleged here because even outside of these new revelations there is already so much on the record with Trump particularly what he said about John McCain and George HW Bush's military career is to you know if you think it's unlikely that he would say the things alleged here then I mean I just I don't know what to tell you but it's Jeffrey Goldberg's involvement of this that adds just another layer of meta comedy because you know he is you know so puffed up on himself about like you know Donald Trump simply doesn't understand what it's like to serve a nation or serve

or volunteer to serve a foreign nation that you're not a member of as well at least as far as Jeffrey Goldberg is concerned but I mean like where's the parade for the prison guards but I mean it's just like he's I love the fact though that he has been reduced to a page six columnist like that undignified fucking position is suited to him it's hot like no one believes him it comes off like fucking goss it's probably true or at least largely true and no one fucking cares because no one respects you and they don't think any of this matters because it doesn't and Amber I think that's it that's an amazing point that's something I thought about a lot how the the liberal thing about Trump is often

like let's not scoop to his level let's not go low like he goes low let's go high let's be better than him but you can't help but play the meta of the champion and the meta is acting like a gossipy bitch how do you take down the media bitch you act like Liz Smith not the political consultant but the columnist yes that's what like like Maggie Haberman has been in a reporter for what like 20 30 years like a fucking long time and she's written some huge stories she's broken some huge things but just because of what the meta is now because of who the president is all her stories are like you won't believe what Hopik said about Craig shoe but they don't have the chops of a Liz Smith they don't

have the chops of a page six writer but just to just to the author of the story before I start reading it Jeffrey Goldberg like the irony here is also really funny because is there anyone who genuinely views the US military and the people who serve in it as bigger suckers than Jeffrey Goldberg considering his career in a war reporting and let's just say intelligence massaging because I mean like he was happy to send thousands to their deaths in the war in Iraq based on his own erroneous reporting and does he tell himself that the people who believed him aren't suckers or that he isn't the sucker I mean how does he square that in his head well I mean this was the deal I think that was made when the military went

like volunteer in the 70s it was that the elites would be able to basically trade like their sort of get genuine flexion to the troops who they don't really give a shit about in favor of not having to really serve in the military at all which is you know throughout most of American history the elite actually did in some sense serve if not meaningfully it served in the military and so what what's so interesting about Trump is he's just tearing the mask off that in every way shape or form so it leads it up to like liberal scolds who like you said throughout all of their actual actions have demonstrated they couldn't give less of a shit about the people who actually go and fight America's wars to then to then

scold him and it's just totally ridiculous and just another indication that sort of the norms of this error are coming to an end but the new world has yet to be born. So this is my question here too when when we saw that shift you know away from the draft with sort of popular opinion I mean broadly the working class was opposed to Vietnam you were more likely to support it if you had gone to college it felt it feels very short cited and I kind of wanted to know because it's like well obviously if you make it a volunteer army the only people are going to volunteer are going to be the people who have to or just have no other option and they could be used as cannon fodder and in some

ways one of the you know one of the major kind of features of like anti-Vietnam sort of propaganda was that these were nice middle-class boys who in maybe a different era either wouldn't have been in the military or if they were like upper middle class they would have been just like the guys having tea in the tents with the opposing generals but obviously in like jungle guerrilla warfare they don't fight like that they don't have that kind of a war tradition right so I guess I'm curious about like how that transition happened so it's actually pretty interesting initially a lot of generals are pretty much against the all volunteer force for that very reason they're worried that you know you're actually who

the fuck would volunteer for it but it turns out that that it was the the best thing they ever did because in the medium and long term what it essentially did was even after sort of the church commissions and the post-Vietnam investigations it allowed the American military American policymakers to essentially do whatever the fuck they wanted with the military because no one was essentially looking over their shoulders right you don't have the middle class actually fighting Vietnam and and what when people don't forget when they talk about the success of the anti-Vietnam War protests that's right to a degree but really what their most immediate success is that they push the war from a ground war to a bombing war right

you get the bombing of the north you get the combat bombing of Cambodia and Laos as a result of these sorts of protests so there's a bunch of precursors right before the all volunteer force which actually suggested that if you're able to remove effectively the bourgeoisie from war fighting then the American military the American Empire will be able to do essentially what it wants and it just one quick thing if you actually go back to the debates the sort of trade was that if you served in the military you'd get socialist benefits there's a really good book called the rise of the military welfare state which yeah it's an amazing book yeah it's amazing book which essentially shows exactly how that went but

I think it was the best move the American military the American Empire ever made it gave them basically a force that they could do whatever the fuck they want within the bourgeoisie didn't care yeah it does those seem like a pretty short-sighted move on the on the anti-war movement well yeah I mean this is the problem I mean the anti-war movement is a very complicated phenomenon I mean the big problem was when they stopped being as vicious when the war switched to bombing you know that was a big problem or chemical and then and then once the draft was suspended it pretty much tailed off exactly that completely exactly all right well like I said this Jeffrey Goldberg piece is too good not to dive into the details of

so I'm just gonna with you with your guys assistance I'm gonna go through this like I said this sure to change plenty of votes and shift the scale and balance of powers in this country literally overnight to the power of the fourth estate Jeffrey Goldberg writing in the Atlantic beginning when President Donald Trump canceled the visit to the American cemetery near Paris in 2018 he blamed rain for the last minute decision saying the helicopter couldn't fly and that the Secret Service wouldn't drive him there neither claimed that's so cool that's like an excuse Felix would make up when he slept in didn't make a hot on screen according to several a power line crash through my window and there I like

I opened up my toilet today and a bird flew out and actually amazing that I'm alive according to several unnamed sources Trump could not visit our honored war dead because quote his alarm clock didn't go off and then his other other and then his other alarm clock was broken neither claim was true as no one uses alarm clocks anymore as their phone essentially has removed the need for such a device I do like it though he said the helicopter could and fly and rain I mean perhaps he was just going to take an F-35 to the cemetery and it literally couldn't fly fair fair fair enough because here continuing it says here Trump rejected the idea of the visit Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he

feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead according to four people with first hand knowledge of the discussion that day in a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit Trump said quote why should I go to that cemetery it's filled with losers in a separate conversation on the same trip to be me in a separate conversation on the same trip Trump preferred to the more than 1800 marines who lost their lives at Bellow Wood as suckers for getting killed Bellow Wood is a consequential battle in American history and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps America and

its allies stopped the German advance turd Paris there in the spring of 1918 but Trump on that same trip is asked AIDS who were the good guys in this war he also said that he didn't understand why the United States intervene on the side of the allies okay I gotta say when I read this a good question who were the good guys in that war speaking of World War one is literally the only sane question to ask about that conflict and the and the answer is yeah there were none the only the bad guys were the officer Corps of every one of the military is engaged in that fucking war but like you know range it's just yeah like think about it like you know it was World War two but like you know oh like oh God for

oh if the allies didn't oh if American marines didn't stop the Kaiser's advance on Paris like oh oh what like a a different set of empires that have come out holding the cards on that or maybe like the Nazis never would have avoided yeah yeah it wasn't something you could compare to like you know an imperial fascism at all it was all just a it was such a clusterfuck and I think people like don't understand that like like there was a a massive you know in the in the American socialist movement a refusal to serve during World War one and during World War two there was some holdover for quite a while because they were like this is just another situation where we're just throwing a bunch of bodies at a conflict

that has nothing to do with us and then eventually like the Communist Party changed their mind and they're like oh no this is actually a pretty big problem we should get involved in this one yeah but they were there's initial skepticism of it was very well founded because World War one was such a bullshit fucking what even was that stupid war well it was incredibly Trump's concern where he's like why did we do it I mean that's just that's that's not him being craven that's just him not knowing his stupid history he should read the fucking minutes of the nigh committee and he'd know we did we went into World War one to make sure that JP Morgan didn't lose all the money he lent the allies and if somebody explained

that to him he would understand oh smart move good move listen yeah I mean imagine like if you went to a restaurant today and you tried to get French onion soup and all they had was like a big bowl of sauerkraut I mean come on like this is stuff you know yeah I mean and needless to say it was World War one that destroyed both American and European socialism to some degree I mean Debs was arrested Wilson arrested Debs he opened all the males he used it to infiltrate the Socialists in the Communists that's just in the United States and then in Germany it fucking split the Socialist Party so you get the USPD and the SPD arguing over the war which effectively leads to years and years of struggle in some real sense culminating

in Hitler so is in my opinion World War one's the worst thing to happen to socialism worldwide yeah absolutely it's it's interesting to read some of the old Rosa Luxemburg speeches very against the war and she's like no no no no no this will end badly so they killed her and threw in a canal yeah I mean you have some really extreme elements of the left at the time thinking it's sort of accelerationists arguing that when they met on the battlefield the working classes would unite against the aristocracy unfortunately that didn't happen this is this is also a pattern you see with kind of every stripe of revolutionary they always think that the revolutionist just around the corner look how much is going on we must

be we must be on the precipice of it's like no it's about to get way worse you think after do you think after they killed Archduke Ferdinand some guy in England was like they've fucked around and found out I'm gonna I'm gonna post my I'm gonna post my favorite my favorite leather helmeted football mascot as a symbol of the coming revolution and just even just a very briefly like all those Italian guys who founded the fascist party were actually veterans of the Austro-Italian front which was like the vicious most vicious front in World War One's history and so there's a lot of arguments historians have made literally connecting the sort of aesthetic of fascism to the experience of this Austro-Italian front

so it was just horrible in every way shape or form well for speaking about other fascist accounts of World War One my favorite would have to be Celine an author who I do not approve of but if you read if you read the first two chapters about you know his experience in World War One which are you know among the most I mean if you if you read nothing else just read those first two chapters and what's so clear in them is that for the the people fighting the war like your enemy was the officer class and military police of your own side because they like nothing better than to execute their own soldiers for like desertion or cowardice or shit like that they were just always looking to line some poor schmuck up against the wall

and fucking pop goes the weasel as you know duck soup says going on here it says here there are the Trump's understanding of concepts such as patriotism service and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late senator John McCain who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese he's not a hero Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for the president I like people who weren't captured I mean we all know we all know that's a classic Trump cut I like the troops who weren't captured which hey it's like he was able at that point to at least put on enough bullshit to say that he liked some of the troops the ones

who didn't get captured who are less losers than the ones who got captured who are less losers than the ones who died they're the biggest losers I mean that was such an incredible moment it seems like it happened now like 20 years ago yes but it was such an incredible moment that he said that and didn't suffer anything for it in a republican primary everyone was just such an amazing right right yeah that's all democratic in some ways it speaks to the idea that actually the republican party is more democratic in the small descents well they're more big D in the descents but they have more sort of a populist bent at this point whether they like it or not and they have like more than the than the democratic

party certainly where they're like no we don't want this person that everyone likes whereas the republican is like no we don't want this person everyone likes and everyone's like yeah fuck you we don't care there's also this sort of weird pathology amongst the elite was was he who are essentially mostly liberal in this country about having not served in the military so I think absolutely sensitive to that I mean like I'm sure we all went to you know we all know these these groups it's just that like and I think that that's affected a been been really important since the 1960s where there's all this nervousness and anxiety about getting accused about like not marshals using martial sacrifice for your country that's

reflected in these yeah beliefs that are just totally wrong Daniel that's really good I'm like that's something I think about a lot because like when you think about you know like the commanding heights of sort of you know for lack of a better term like the liberal elite or like the liberal intelligentsia or media or political class it's like they all form their identities coming out of the 60s for the most part and being very proud of taking part in both the civil rights movement but like also the anti-vietnam war movement and then like you know they love to tell themselves that like you know we we ended a war like you know we marched and we we ended the Vietnam War we resisted the draft and shit like that

and then you know as the country takes a more like right-wing turn and like with Carter and then Reagan and Reagan era it just seems like they've always been trying to like atone for that in some way like they would never come out and just say like oh actually the Vietnam War was good but 9-11 and the war on terror just gave them their opportunity to sort of like atone for insulting the military or are they like believing in this idea that like you know we spit on the troops and they came home or we lost the war on the home front and like we you know we served our fighting men so badly by disrespecting their their valor or their sacrifice even in a war that we didn't agree with and they all really overcompensated

for that when it came time for the war on terror and Iraq and Afghanistan and they wanted to make doubly sure they're like hey hey like you know we may have opposed wars in the past but you know we're different now we're reasonable but it's a generation later so they're doing it not only like they're only not only the people participate not the people participating it's someone else's sons yeah exactly exactly I think that's right and just one quick thing there's a book called the spitting image that the idea that people spit on returning Vietnam troops is not actually true it was the knockout game of its day right I don't know I'm pretty sure that some guys got knocked out and it got filmed I don't think anyone ever got spit

on yeah it was it's a right wing it's a right wing like P.O.W. M.I.K.I.A. sort of conspiracy theory but will just to briefly answer your point no I think that's exactly right you actually see sort of a transformation I think in American masculinity like you have all these bankers in the 80s like using this like hyper militaristic hyperviolent language I think because there's like a libidinal libidinal anxiety about having not served in the military which comes to fruition during 9-11 where they wind up sending like Amber said other people's children to die I mean you see the same shit amongst like Samantha Power Susan Rice all these people willing to send other people's children to save other people's babies you

know it's a classic liberal way to approach war going on here it says short remain fixated on McCain one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination when McCain died in August 2018 Trump told his senior staff according to three sources with direct knowledge of the event we're not going to support that loser's funeral and he became furious according to witnesses when he saw flags lowered to half staff what the fuck are we doing that for guy was a fucking loser the president told him he's doing the Hoffa thing man it's so cool also he was a loser he wanted to be president so badly and he lost yeah and that's not his fault he was from Arizona no I mean McCain is objectively

a loser like all that legacy everyone in that family tree was an admiral like they're fucking you trace it back to the fucking deal with the care of their guy was probably like built a fucking raft out of woolly mammoth pelts and you know sank that ship too just like American aristocracy and like paleolithic men that don't think they're and then what is his legacy two felled runs for presidency the guy who started a robo call that his adopted daughter was an illegitimate black child that he had he campaigns for himself a soul for him and his legacy his progeny one son no one ever fucking hears about or gives a shit about and a daughter that everyone hates everyone on earth yeah the heel of the view

she is no literally I don't think anyone likes her and she's on there to draw animus from the audience and that they get a pleasure out of that she's like a wrestling heel the only one yeah yeah the only like you know tardy right wing hysteric blonde that doesn't even have a gay sycophant yeah well I mean he has one he has one amber well yeah one one that I can pick up yeah that's true but yeah like the person who got who made her own position for his campaign as a blogger without asking the campaign and then got fired from a job she invented for herself yeah when they found out she had done it just he definitely raised a great no not even a meadow uh janice yeah janice was more successful I think yeah

that's true she would not have been able to kill richie preal I guarantee you yeah janice survived at the end she would have just accused richie of preal of antiseptic come on come on what the fuck are you talking about janice no one's given more money to is real than me and my brother so this is your uh trump's understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became president according to sources with knowledge of the president's views he seems to genuinely not understand why americans treat former prisoners of war with respect nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military on at least two occasions since becoming president according to three sources trope referred to former president george hw bush as a loser for being

shot down by the japanese as a navy pilot in world war one world war two bush was bush escaped capture but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught tortured and executed by japanese soldiers uh felix so i feel like i you talked about this earlier though but like i george hw bush was alive but incredibly diminished when these comments uh first surfaces like if trump could not have called george hw bush a loser for getting shot down in like the 70s or 80s you know in the 70s like could you imagine what would have happened like george hw would have been like in his because hw's public image was that he was like a nice nerd like watch this 60 minutes interview that's on youtube where it's like so clearly set up by bush's people where they're

like are you too nice to be president and it's like yeah that's his problem that's his problem what would have happened if that happened in say 78 well first um ivana would have had a car accident i think yeah a tragic car accident where her brakes didn't work um suddenly uh osha uh every housing regulatory body they started having problems with the trump empire uh then donald gets caught with a kilo of coke that just wound up in his desk he goes to prison that would have been he would have wiped his bloodline off the fucking map it would have been over but bush when he was just like wheeling around grabbing women's asses and he didn't he didn't notice i mean the the story about bush on the plane is interesting he did get shot down and he did escape but the

account of the story changed a lot yeah this is what i was gonna say like there's there's question there are lingering questions about uh whether he stays he was the pilot of the plane and there are lingering questions about whether he hung around long enough to give his crewmates time to bail out or if he like ditched them yeah it's it's not like lbj where lbj completely made up what happened to him which is awesome i think the only guy who ever gave him any shit for that whoever crossed that line with bush i think was bob dole i think bob dole like made some backhand cracks a few times well campaigning against him like maybe he left those guys die unless i said i'll sketch i remember but he i could believe him had

the gun back because dole was a fucking pimp look what happened to bob dole is hw shot the erectile dysfunction gun from the CIA like it's like yeah no you didn't fuck you didn't fuck with that guy but uh yeah no i mean i do think generally though like world war two no like yeah i guess if you're gonna have military commendations for this bullshit like yeah the guy the guy's got shut down world war two but now now it's like having a ceremony for the harlem globetrotters they got injured during a game you're gonna fucking you're you're gonna fucking f18 now when you get shot down you are a loser you fucked up in some way yeah those things are i mean unless unless it rains and they just melt they're not supposed to be shootoutable by what who's our

who's air force is is is going to be competitive with ours yeah what do you do swear a grudge against pigeon for the rest of your life so it says here um well when lashing out at critics trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults and members of the bush family have publicly opposed him but his cynicism about service and heroism heroism extends even to the world war one dead buried outside paris people who were killed more than a quarter of a century before he was born trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible in parentheses goldberg includes you the president did not serve in the military he received a medal of deferment medical deferment

from the draft during the vietnam war because of the alleged presence of bone spurs and his feet in the 1990s trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted quote his personal vietnam why does he make why does he make me like him why does he do this that's a great show yeah i uh well what i think is interesting about this is like goldberg not so subtly is like oh trump doesn't understand military service because he doesn't understand altruism but in goldberg's own account of when he served it's straight up he tells you oh i was a nerdy fat kid who couldn't get laid so i had to go and feel power over somebody right yeah like that's not why everyone does it but like jesus christ do we think it's all

jeffrey jeffrey goldberg's version of serving in a military was like when dick chaney hunted those pheasants whose wings were cut like jeffrey goldberg served by beating up guys who were already captured and disarmed like the lowest difficulty level there on purpose it it must have been a very personal war for him to be fighting guys who are in hunger strike yeah but i i i yeah because goldberg's acting like yeah the sacrifice joining the military is an act of sacrifice for others but i mean you can think of it that way but i don't think if you're at the top you usually do you either think it's for losers or if you want to do it it's because your fear of death is overwhelmed by your desire to kill and trump for all of his faults is literally too cowardly to be like actively

like violent that way so it's like no that's that's good i i would rather just pile up my creases like wealth and gaudy extravagant life i don't need to shoot somebody and it's the same it's the same like extension to his like not necessarily anti-war but like conflict avoidant foreign policy he's a really staked guy yeah he doesn't want he does you know he can't what if he wants to build a golf course there like he doesn't want to because if he gets in too big he could lose and he doesn't want to put himself in a position where he could lose yeah fatalities from like airstrikes and drone strikes have risen during trump but anytime there's a threat everyone thinks there'll be like a massive troop buildup like we're gonna send a bunch of guys into

a place it never happens because even that scares him yeah he's fine he's fine he's fine with signing a piece of paper and you know ten times as many fucking civilians die but which is which is why obama is responsible for his for because people will point to the rise in like drone strikes and civilian deaths under under trump is proof of eye you guys were mad at obama and look trump's even worse and you say his anti-war no obama built for him a perfect push button military machine that was totally tech uh technological and removed the any political consequence for doing uh uh like maintaining the the order like mowing the lawn or whatever exactly like and and and that means that a guy like trump oh yeah i'll just keep pressing this button you tell me there's a bad guy

i'll go ping pong and then he doesn't think for a second about how many people are gonna die because there will never be a political consequence for those people dying because they're not americans yeah and i think that that's by design yeah of course oh we're just to the degree to which like any like major like ground troops oriented that like remember how terrified everyone was after the assassination about iran and it was yeah uh oh and i was like i don't know let's wait it out and it kind of worked because the he likes to rattle the saber but he doesn't he doesn't he's not a big fan of sabers well the thing is is it would have required iran to like be would have an escalation would have required an escalation on the power half of iran and the thing is that would have

required them to act like us and no other country on earth gets to act like us they can't afford to act like us and so they can't even if they want to they are constrained from doing this insane shit we do so we cannot like build up a symmetrical escalation all right well now here here we get into the john kelly story uh hell yeah this is just like fuck that guy this is pure this is pure marks brothers you're rolled down his face like iron eyes kody when he heard that shit so he says here on memorial day 2017 trump visited arlington national cemetery a short drive from the white house he was accompanied on this visit by john kelly who was then the the secretary of homeland security and who would a short time later be named white house chief of staff the two men were set

to visit section 60 the 14 acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in america's most recent wars kelly's son robert is buried in section 60 a first lieutenant in the marine corps robert kelly was killed in 2010 in afghanistan he was 29 trump was meant on this visit to join kelly in paying respects to his son's grave and to comfort the families of other fallen service members but according to sources with knowledge of the visit trump while standing by robert kelly's grave turned directly to his father and said i don't get it what's in it for them kelly who declined to comment for the story initially believed people close to him said that trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of america's all volunteer force

but later he came to realize that trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices it's like it's like i love that idea that like even even in the most even in the most benevolent reading of it of like it's his really awkward way of uh paying tribute to the selflessness of his act is like you could not come up with a worse thing to say to the father of a dead son over his grave just being like what was in it for him i don't get it and then he become his chief of staff after that what a fucking cuck yeah absolutely not a man not a man not a man grub creature no well i mean just like now that he's been fired from that job still won't go on the record and say this guy's an asshole you're right yeah that's the kind of person you're dealing with

here that's that's military mindset man yeah yeah but i mean they've created a whole upper echelon of yes men of like absolute room temperature iq button pushers at the top of the military right which is why there's no worry about a coup yeah exactly they don't have an imagination yeah no imagination the mental gymnastics you have to do to be like oh actually he meant it as a compliment it's like it's it's like battered wife syndrome yeah it's horrifying because all the none of the aristocrats are in the military anymore it's just like it's just middle-class drivership now and aristocrats are kind of the only americans who aren't beaten down like if mit romney's son died in like i don't know whatever they do some like a dressage accident dressage accidents he jumped

he do you think you want a polo do you think he would take this from trump he would cast a spell on him he would put on the special underwear and cast a spell on him and curse him but like yeah just like a guy like kelly like uh i just have to respect the president no nothing they're just yes man that's how you get that job yeah well and and you're just a fucking like this is the sort of person who pick up artists techniques work on like nagging works on like you have such a simple fucking mind that you're like thank you like when someone is saying something horrible to you you can't even really get mad at trump for saint like this is just like yeah that's how he sees the world like he's the best thing he could he could say to you and under

any interpretation is like your son got a really bad deal i wish your son had a better your son was hot i wish i was his agent yeah yeah but it's like the real villain of the story is is kelly what a fucking pussy imagine you die try like you know that kid fucking and listen to impress his dad you know john kelly was oh god yeah old withholding piece of shit and and and you fucking die in his dumb fucking war yeah and this fucking slob is like your son made one of the worst deals of all time by dying and you're like yes sir i'm sorry like what a fucking pussy this is literally like uh more more cucked than debonglio being like but i love the police after they fucking arrest his daughter it's like you are a fucking like i'm at this point you start to

feel a little conservative because it's like you are not a man you become like an old fucking like italian widow you call yourself a man this this makes the bungler oh look like fucking tony soprano amber to your point about to your point about this is the type of disgusting disgusting worm that's your child what a fucking loser what a loose and what did you get out of it like what like you get to you get to consult for like Dracula associates yeah you got to have him like spitting fucking a kfc breading into your face for two years before he fires you and calls you a loser in front of the president of the united states calling you and he'll take it he'll fucking take you and then you just go off yeah and you become like a some a rathion desk filler yeah if

i was running the atlantic the cover story would be like the biggest bitch in america it would be a black and white picture of don kelly uh sorry jiv felix to call him in the atlantic amber to your point though about uh how this is the type of brain that negging works on i'm imagining a trump standing with robert cal sorry john kelly over his son's grave and just negging him by going your son's grave looks pretty good but uh here in arlington i've seen a lot of other ones that look just like it all right uh this this next part is a is a section that i really like just picking out here it says um yet another related explanation concerns what appears to be trumps pathological fear of appearing to look like a sucker himself his capacious definition of

sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country as well as those who are taken prisoner or are wounded in battle quote he has a lot of fear one officer with first hand knowledge of trumps view said he doesn't see the heroism in fighting several observers told me that trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured and this worry manifests itself as a discuss for those who have suffered oh who amongst us does not have a similar fear of dying or being disfigured this uh this made me think this made me think of a a version of johnny got his gun where it's donald trump and the message he's banging out with his head and morse code is the great encarter tweet he's saying that his oscar party is a flop it's not that he's afraid of dying

or being disfigured everybody is as you said the thing is for some people there's some a force greater than their fear that can compel them it's some it's often coercion in our army it's largely economic coercion but it can also be a principle a good or a bad one but he doesn't have any of that he can't be coerced and he sure should would never sacrifice himself for any concept or other person so for him it is nonsensical i think it's also interesting that he uses the word heroism here which is a very specific kind of romantic individualist word and he doesn't use the word like duty or responsibility or you know should you be called to violent action you know and you're not a pacifist but you you don't want to go to war but you say like this is the just situation

which i would intervene i would hope that you would go into it thinking i have a responsibility i have a duty to mankind to blah blah blah blah i wouldn't i would hope that you wouldn't think i'm going to be a fucking hero because that's like just how you end up with like the myline massacre yes exactly yeah and it just shows trumps genius because he just recognizes that there's nothing in the american empire there's no fucking defense it's just going on expeditionary missions around the world right there's no urns younger type of storm of steel heroism and sort of maintaining the outpost of empire and i think trump like on his you know deranged level understands that in a way that john kelly doesn't well he's speaking of that today so you guys might not know this yet

it happened today he was being uh trump was being interviewed and this isn't him dropping another uh thing that you're supposed to keep yourself that all the people in power know but and don't believe but smile to everyone else to keep them fighting today he said i'm not saying the militaries in love with me the soldiers are the top people in the pettigar probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy he's doing smithley butler now he's doing another one from gfk yeah this gets you the heart of why liberals hate him because he is breaking fucking kayfabe he is saying stuff that they all know but you that you cannot generalize

because that will disinvest any sort of like social uh like legitimacy to fucking government which we need to keep it going right he's almost like he's on a on a vestigial level here i think he understands that these things are unpopular but he also uh like is has been dead set for four years now on selling as much hardware to as many countries as possible uh to keep those same companies happy i mean it's not like yeah i think it's like you know i'm abandoning the defense contractors it's a good deal right you sell the weapons you don't use them idiot did you guys ever watch the um somewhat maligned uh uh terry gilliam movie the adventures of baren winchousen of course yes okay so um when they have vulcan uh they imagine him as uh basically an arms dealer

and uh you know he's the god of fire and and his his final um sort of monologue that he gives is that like well we're gonna make a thing where you just press a button and it goes all the way to the other side of the world and it kills a bunch of people and you know the little girl protagonist like that's horrible he's like yes but then you don't have to see a single person die and i think like it's a pretty like heavy handed but really like prescient idea of like like the sense of like technology becoming a business of of mass murder that you don't have to pay attention to that you that you can ignore that is that is um that is tidy that that that doesn't weigh on your conscience and i think about it all the time because it's like the movie's like

from the 80s or something and it's like god it's become so efficient it's been so fucking efficient that at this point you think of like dead soldiers it's almost seems insane half the time they're just playing video games yeah and amber that people have been arguing that from the 1930s like this is the dream of liberal warfare like the the national security state is a liberal institution and i have a piece coming out on this in jacobin but one of the things that they wanted to do was exactly that was to make war progressive and they literally used that language by making it more efficient and humane i mean the sickest example of that was that after they dropped the atomic bomb laurus norsat is like this is a precision weapon we killed the city in one bomb that's

amazing you know like we made war more efficient and even more humane and i think that the apotheosis of that is like the drone strike right the video game drone strike where you don't even have to like confront your enemy you could just kill them with with a button push and therefore that's the progressive humane efficient economical way of fighting war and that's totally the american way of war it's supposed to be well and i think too like it's there's been a i i didn't know it went back that far but there's been a fear of like the the sort of like technologically advanced war and about how that's but it's almost a distraction it's almost a technocratic approach to it remember when everyone was like terrified of like stealth missiles and they thought that

that was going to dehumanize the whole conflict and there was this whole moral conundrum and the issue was that like the technology was too efficient we were too distant from it and it's almost like for a few years ago when people first started getting obsessed with drones and drone strikes it's almost like the actual technology became a distraction from like well we need to not have the war regardless of right how what lego set we're using to do it but the technology is almost so like baffling and horrifying and dehumanizing and we have no context for it the way we don't have a million movies of of you know the way we have people sitting in fox holes or or running through jungles so it's like i don't know it's just like this weird thing where it's

hard at this point for us to even wrap our heads around what would be an anti-war movement what would be an anti-imperialism movement because the technology itself is so horrifying that it distracts from the actual politics that undergird it no i think that's right and actually all of this is a response just to get back to world war one it's all a response to world war one the idea is that you'd be able to fly over your enemy's troops you'd be able to fly over the western front and bomb germany and end the war you know in a day right and so this is the dream and even though it never fucking works out that way this is still how military people talk about ending wars they end they talk about ending wars in one strike and so there's this whole mystification around

how americans could fight wars that is just totally completely ridiculous and trump again is like just underlining the absurdity of the logic of the system and i think that's why people like him well daniel i actually i'm i wanted to shift yours just really quickly in here and i do want to talk about um a piece that you just wrote for foreign exchanges about american empire and it's sort of endless search for enemies to justify itself or you know like a like it's it's this self-fulfilling prophecy of empire and i just like you know it's a pretty broad view of it but there's one element of it that i wanted to bring up because it's something i've been thinking about recently and you talk about how you know obviously like you know world war one uh we've established

pretty much uh there were no good guys in that i mean it was just a wholesale slaughter for uh basically equally evil competing empires world war two is the example that everyone has of like the one fucking time that the u.s military was used in a way where you could make some argument historically or morally that it was like necessary or very simply speaking we were the good guys and i understand like it's in the civil war yeah civil war as well but i mean like in terms of like two good wars yeah um and then obviously the cold war following right after world war two but the point you break up that i think it's an interesting one is how 9 11 and the war on terror was like this huge gift to empire the military industrial complex just see the american war making ideology and and

self mythology about it but the interesting thing is looking back on it now how quickly it sputtered out like the the jihadist and radical islam as this like global never-ending specter of evil that we have to remain constantly vigilant against and be like justify all these wars fighting in the midst of the bush administration it seemed like that that was this like immovable leviathan like this was never going to go away people were always going to be juiced up by this idea of like another 9 11 happening and we'll justify any retaliation to prevent that but looking back on it now that really hasn't been the case and they're trying to juice up china yeah i mean and it's really interesting you we're all around the same age if you guys remember in the 90s there's this huge

like holocaust remembrance thing yeah and if you actually look at m grand like the holocaust thing goes off the fucking charts and you get schindler's list and the ultimate get saving private ryan which are basically justifying american empire in my opinion but what's really interesting is i think that's a reflection of the fact that the american empire like needed something to do in the 1990s right because the thing was your the idea was you're gonna you don't need nato anymore right there's no soviet union you don't need to have these hundreds of bases you don't need to spend so much on your military and actually military spending does go down um for a little bit but there's nevertheless a search for the enemy because the structure the material structure

remains in place um and you get this throughout the 1990s like the united states is going to like stop a future rwandan you get the interventions in bosnia you get the intervention in kosovo but presumably for humanitarian reasons but like will was saying with 9 11 it provides this like evil this like very evil person um sorry this very evil image of the jihadist and you get like very explicit references to the nazis like do you guys remember islamo fascism oh yeah yeah yeah so that's just like the the muslims are nazis right uh but it was pretty clear i think pretty pretty quickly that you know there's not a serious threat posed by any middle eastern nation not iran or north korea or obviously not middle east but any nation and let alone

lone wolf terrorists so you still see like um this drift in american empire that is still happening i think now and they're trying to reconcile it with this new cold war with china and you see like max boot and all the you know the old standbys come out in favor of this new cold war because um and i want to emphasize this a liberal empire needs an enemy right it's not like the mongols where you're just going to conquer everything it's liberal it's like the british and the french they're they need to have a civilizing mission they need to have a liberal goal the american empire needs to have a liberal goal the problem though is that there's no such fucking thing as a liberal empire i mean there is but they're just horribly um evil and you can't

reconcile that so you get what is like like the the k-fabe that matt was talking about now where there's just no logic for this horrible all-encompassing thing that is not only horrible but it's destroying the environment by making it impossible to deal with fucking climate change so it's like this horrible situation right well we just need green green tanks though it'll be fine yeah do you remember that that was that was the warren plan yeah was that there would be solar panels on fucking aircraft carriers right yeah we're gonna send millions of tons of hunks of metal and gasoline powered fucking airplanes that don't even work all around the world that's so advanced neoliberalism that's like israeli levels that's like you have a vegan diet in the idf

but yeah that was incredible i mean i yeah to what daniel said do you guys remember this that during the insurgency this was i feel like this is a great example of this or anything insurgency when it became clear this wasn't the type of war that we thought it would be yes we rolled over the derelict iraqi republican guard in a matter of weeks but then the insurgency just ran us through the buzz saw the line for the bush administration from cockleys right specifically was that oh this actually happened in germany post war this happened after yeah yeah yeah what she meant was there were like like small groups of losers who tried to sabotage reconstruction and try to abduct troops and it was just so so much so much piddlier than what we

were dealing with exactly but it was just yeah another thing where it's like no no no no this is the good war this is the war that has a beginning and end that you can stick your teeth into right it's this it's this deranged thing because we never had an enemy after after the um cold war until 9 11 that we could do anything that that had any kind of romantic potential to it that had a good storyline to it and the problem with 9 11 is that eventually people and you saw this in you know in the big short when they were not in the big short and uh in uh vice when they were they were trying to figure out like how to sell the word of the public they did like focus groups and they're like wait but so is this a country what where what's what country are we fighting

so it was like this very ephemeral thing and people sort of lost attachment to it they couldn't be like oh it's the fucking it's the fucking ruskies it's the fucking commies like it's like we never had a moment where we had such a perfect enemy because they were powerful they were impressive uh we wouldn't have gotten to the moon without them like essentially we were dependent on them they held our feet to the fire and then after that i feel like we've been scrambling ever since to find an an ideological enemy and a national enemy like communism in the soviet union and none of it makes any fucking sense like what remember when we tried bosnia and like i remember being like why are we in bosnia what's going on in bosnia and later on you learn about it and it's

just like oh holy shit what this was a clusterfuck there's never been anything right that do ever since yeah i mean i think the the the attempt as daniel said earlier the the attempt in the 90s was to replace the enemy with another romantic story that the united states is going to go around the world spreading peace and freedom and harmony and democracy everywhere um and and it just you know it it fizzled out because i think for americans that's a that's a an impossible case to make i mean for any population to tell them you know our military is going to spend you know from now to the end of time just hopping around the world uh engaging in these ill-defined missions to uh you know spread sunshine and happiness all over the world it's just impossible to sell but when

you get that enemy and when you know 9 11 happened and that you got that that hook um i mean you can see in in the way that the like the the multitude of ways that the bush administration sold the iraq war that there was still some residual kind of sense of okay we're gonna have to make it the iraq war they couldn't just say because it was so difficult for them to be like so there are these terrorists and they're like well why don't we just get them when do we have to have war on a country that like people i think instinctively were kind of skeptical and at least initially of the idea that a bunch of fucking loonies stealing a goddamn plane and crashing it into with some kind of like um you know uh a state sanction act right right and there was there was

a sort of smorgasbord of reasons for that war like it was sort of choose your own justification you know they have they have weapons of mass destruction uh they were secretly supporting al qaeda but if you're still hung up on this stuff we were doing you know five or ten years ago uh also we're gonna liberate the iraqi people from saddam's tyranny and spread democracy to the middle east and it's gonna be like this beachhead of democracy the the imperial uh feminism or the you know the genocide side of the Kurds they would they would try to at the at the end kind of tack on humanitarian stuff in there right and it's like you know there are worse things than like wearing a veil like being fucking bombed well and also like there was just total ignorance like

americans had no idea that wearing the veil in a certain society might be actually participating in the public sphere as a woman which is actually a progressive act so there was just total ignorance there but i think it's just important as a historian of the cold war the more we learn about the early cold war it was like so obviously driven by the united states like stalin did not want to fight a cold war with the united states it's very very clear that they wanted to avoid that and it's really you see it from 45 onward the americans pushing more and more and more to fight this cold war and creating a military industrial complex creating a military intellectual complex creating the national security state in 1947 the act which creates the cia the do d you know everything that

we know now they essentially justified a permanent mobilization of the world war two wartime economy for peacetime by virtue of the soviet union and i think that the anti-communism was actually epiphenomenal to the american desire to control the world which emerges from this christian millenarianism which precedes the founding of the country which argues that the only way you're safe is if literally everyone in the world is like you and so that is what or dead or like you and that is what they they put that crazy ideology this christian millenarianism on to stalin and the soviet union and they're trying to do the same fucking thing right now with china which has no illusions about governing the world that's only an insane american could possibly think that and also like the the

it's just it doesn't work as well like i had this in the book it's like yeah which we try to we miss our our departed love the soviet union we're basically mourning for it because it was like a perfect ideological enemy and yes china looks lovely and red but she's just not the same it just doesn't work as well and then that's right it's the millenarian thing and then later on as kind of the ideological stuff i think became subsumed by a much more um just like just like bloodless profit motive thing the influence of the uk in the cold war is totally understated like to the point to where i think thatcher was a more effective more intelligent i mean well not just because her brain wasn't putting a more influential player in the cold war towards the

end than reagan the shit she did was amazing that bitch was ruthless and she was brilliant and she believed in capitalism more than she believed in profit she lost money in order to smash the miners she called them like kami she called them like uh she smeared the president of the union as a Stalinist it was absolutely amazing and i don't know if it's that if that shift happened because by the end like the us was just sort of going on autopilot but we kind of believed in it less more broadly i mean in fighting the the you know the communist devils i think we kind of believed in it less we were just sort of on autopilot towards the end and i think it was like thatcher that brought it over the that brought it over the line in the end i mean absolutely

reagan meets with gorbachev i think the first term is different than the second term but in the second term reagan was way more conciliatory than thatcher ever was total i think i've said this in the thing he's like you know he's like i could work with reagan he was like yeah maybe we shouldn't all have nuclear weapons he's like thatcher though i could not work with that woman she was just a fucking ruthless bitch like what he didn't say that he's a gentleman gorbachev but it was just it's this insane thing where it's like the project took on a mind of its own and it it stopped even having like an ideological base that you could say out loud it went from belief to ideology over the course of one generation maybe i just like um and just just to screw up things up here

in terms of like casting the the new enemy for the american empire and like i i you brought up max boot is you know china is clearly who they're trying to cast now in this new new cold war and i think people forget like up until basically monday september 10th 2001 most of those like real like neocon guys obviously they had long been planning for iraq and iran but like their whole ideology for like a 21st century american like military and economic hegemony was about all about confronting china and then they just changed that on tuesday morning but now like you better believe all those plans all those ideas are like the papers have already been written and i guess just for the close things out with daniel and derrick like how do you see china being fit into

this new cold war like you know how do you see like in terms of like the defense into intellectual complex like what they're trying to do with china now how do you see that going forward um well i guess derrick i'll go first i mean i think briefly you have to recognize that a lot of people who are still making a lot of policies where we're today like trained in soviet studies like people like condolees arisen bob gates are literally soviet specialists so they're i mean even though they're not in power but a lot of people under them as well so there are a lot of times they're actually using a framework developed to understand the soviet union um and they're placing it on china so that's the first thing i think that the thing that people generally point to is the fact that the

us and chinese economies are much more intertwined than the us and soviet economies ever were right so there's a hard capitalist limit to some degree um with regards what you're going to be able to do with them so what i see happening is that i think that met like lobbyists of the military industrial complex remember defense contractors spent 120 million dollars on lobbying like way more than any piece organization but also people associated with what uh like i term the military intellectual complex like people who basically make their money off of thinking about us war and us empire people like max boot but also people in think tanks what i think these two groups want is to essentially fight a cold war with china that never goes hot that never goes proxy war that never does things

like that remember of course during the cold war the us tried to overthrow regimes covertly 66 times and in 44 of those cases supported authoritarian regimes and i think there's like a general recognition that they don't want that again so what essentially they want uh and eric i'm curious what you think they want a structure of a cold war with china without the actual fighting of the cold war with china which i think is ridiculous and clearly impossible and will result in a lot of death and a lot of money spent uh and also more importantly for me um moving uh resources from butter to guns like moving things that could go to a social welfare state to fight a lot of pointless wars with china yeah i mean i think you know there's a lot of dimensions to this and

and you know one of the the ones that stuck out to me most recently is um you know they're they're trying so hard to make the case that china is a is an existential threat to the united states and to some extent the chinese government is not playing the game that that i think a lot of people in the us want it to play um and you can see that most clearly in this this effort to basically just manufacture and like invisible nuclear stockpile that china has like hidden underground that doesn't it doesn't exist uh you know the best you know most estimates of china's nuclear stockpile put it in like the 200s maybe and you know up into the 300s which is a fraction of what the united states has uh but you will have people even as they you know the the pentagon just put

out a new reports that you know uh we assess that they have a you know it's somewhere in the 200s in terms of uh the number of warheads but they're gonna double that in you know the next 10 years there's no evidence that they're actually gonna do that but this is like you know manufacturing uh a threat that's much greater than than the one that actually exists um i also think i mean i part of me thinks you know part of the resistance on the you know when you talk about people like max boot and the sort of national security republicans who have become never trumpers um like this the pandemic uh could have been a god send for these guys in terms of uh you know making a real strong strong push you know anti-china like you gotta you know cut business stop doing business with these

guys and divest from from china and and you know get get away from the stuff because look how unsafe they are and they're you know there's this huge danger but trump fucked up our response so badly that the story has instead become you know how badly mismanaged it's been and i feel like you know on some level uh there's a missed opportunity for those guys to kind of add the the the pandemic to a litany of uh sort of manufactured grievances against china about just one quick thing i think that we are going to see and actually feel like some curious what you think about this if we'll if we'll see more confrontations in east asia um because i think that china is going to try to push the united states out of east asia the us will not maintain regional hegemony there forever

so my prediction is that in the next 25 ish years there's going to be increasing confrontations between china and the us in that region that could actually get pretty serious if the united states maintains the fantasy of trying to be the global hegemon in every region at every moment for all time yeah i um i mean it's hard to it's hard to see the future of what type of president we would have i think if we had like a president cotton or like a president rubio or even a lot of democratic choices um what was said about uh the impossibility of fighting the framework of a cold war without it ever even approaching medium temperature is totally true somewhere along the line that damn is gonna break exactly i feel like i feel like if we had a liberal interventionist president who's

at the smith power school or which is pretty much every democrat or a more standard republican and you're going to see a troop buildup that's made to get some good news cycles good headlines you're gonna get what happens whatever you have like a border confrontation or something like that and i think you'd at least get a fucking proxy war i i'm definitely not an expert in east asia but i think just even now even stretch to our limit now even with trump being as disinterested as he is with these types of wars the amount of like small confrontations not killing each other but ships losing where losing track of where they go ships getting lost shit like that i i think it's bound to happen unless we pull back i mean what's what's unfortunate is and what's infuriating

is the samantha powers people the people who talk about being pragmatic of doing good in the world under this realistic framework they don't seem to realize that our trend line is not very good that we're stretched quite then and increasing our presence anywhere now is insane it's the most insane fucking crackpot thing you could do we we ran we ran out of sanitary wipes as a country you're gonna fucking you're gonna contest east asian territorial waters what the fuck is wrong with you it's as crackpot as anything the trump people say or any of those brexit psychosay about critic and new anglosphere it's as insane as those nationalist turks we make fun of on twitter who who are like we're gonna take vienna it's maybe more insane and i think yeah we're in the next

30 years unless there's some pullback unless there is someone who like a bernie recognizes that this is coming to an end and we need to negotiate our exit from the world we are due for something very tragic i think to your point felix one of the things that's going to be interesting to see um you know if if biden is elected i mean we sort of know how trump approaches this stuff but if biden is elected and then beyond that whatever whatever monster slouches toward washington at that point um it's going to be interesting to see how the u.s approaches india um because i do think india has become the sort of um you know the proxy that that you know we want to develop to take on china it's another large country potentially you know could be you know economically

much stronger than it is they've already started having some border clashes with china and the border i mean that border is taylor made for a fight because it's so badly defined uh pretty much all all the way across um that it's it's you know kind of the perfect excuse for a for some kind of a clash so i i think that's going to be interesting to see you know where the us india relationship goes and you see china is is very much aligned with pakistan right now right they're trying to encircle india and you see and i was just in india in december and there's so much pro us stuff you know it's it's incredible so i think you're actually for the way that i frame it to my students is that we're seeing the first post post cold war alliance system emerge right

where you get india and israel allying with each other in meaningful ways and you'll get capital transfers and weapons transfers right now and i think that's what china's do i think if i had to guess what she is thinking he's like in 30 years we're going to push the united states out of the eastern hemisphere to whatever degree is possible and that would be my guess of what his like grand ambition is see you guys were all so pro you guys were all so pro marianne williamson but what did i say we would immediately declare war on pakistan for making yoga illegal there's a you know i would sort of equate coming full circle here what a world war one type pre-world war one type setup we have here because yeah you mentioned that india is incredibly aligned with america and very aligned

with israel i mean yeah you're net yahoo actually have to apologize i think for posting a picture of vishnu because that alliance is so important but china also sells a ridiculous amount of arms to israel we have these horribly it's Byzantine interconnected weapon sales systems uh that you know you see things like russia selling s 400s to both sides of the azerbaijanian Armenian conflict that like this is more complicated and more alarming and has greater potential for disaster than the system of cousins that the world worked on before i would add to that shows uh just very quickly i i just think that shows how we as the left need to be more um sophisticated analytically in how we connect nationally oriented military power and control of violence to international

transnational capitalism i think that's actually a really important analytical thing to do and it's actually really difficult because like philips was saying there's all these strange relationships at subnational levels which are also connected to the government but the military is a national institution but to what degree is it really it's relying so much on private mercenaries so i think it's actually really significant lacuna in the left's thinking about geopolitics and i would add to that alliance system i would i would say you know you've got to talk about the gulf states as well that are now kind of making you know common cause with israel you know you've got uh saudi arabia investing billions of dollars in india to such an extent that its relationship with pakistan

is now in tatters because the saudis won't criticize what's happening in kashmir so it's it's yeah i mean i think that we've got a a big web of new alliances forming that that you know you have to wait and see how they're all going to rub up against one another i think that is a good place to wrap it up for this episode derek and daniel i want to thank you guys so much for joining us derek and daniel if people want to read more of your stuff where can they find it uh well daniel's first piece which is which what we've been talking about here at foreign exchanges just went up today uh it's called the american empire and existential enemies um he's going to be writing at fx for a piece a month for hopefully you know indefinitely i hope people will

subscribe and support this effort so we can keep keep doing this the website is fx.substack.com and you know come check it out check out daniel's piece and and the other stuff that we're doing there and and subscribe i think fans of the show will know that since day one we have always supported the work of derrick davison and the fx network um please please rehire kurt sutter derrick i mean he's come on he he's he's he's i know he's had he's had some difficulties with you know work environment in the past but i mean come on he's a genius give him another show please i'll i'll i'll see what i can do i can't make any promises here i uh i cannot recommend foreign exchanges enough i'm really excited to see the additional edition of daniel do it it's uh i think it's

the best foreign policy newsletter you can read i i recommend that everyone hearing that subscribes it's uh it's one it's a great one-stop shop to you you feel you feel like you feel like the president you're getting a daily briefing not daily but you're getting a brief once again derrick and daniel thank you so much for stopping by happy labor day to all of you guys respect and love to all of the fallen troops once again as chopper trap house just i want to make an official statement the only suckers and losers out there are the people listening to their show or subscribe bye bye thanks bye bye now

i just went ahead and chopped up everything oh god please make them hear me they won't hear me