Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:11 - Democracy's Limitations in Divided Nations

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

The world is changing fast—but U.S. foreign policy is stuck in the past. In this in-depth conversation, Scott Horton and Darryl Cooper break down three global flashpoints where Washington’s outdated strategies are fueling instability instead of peace. 👉 Ukraine War: How ultranationalist forces, like Azov Battalion founder Andrei Beletsky, are rising in wartime—and why peace talks with Russia in 2022 were derailed by Western interference, prolonging the Ukraine–Russia conflict. 👉 Israel & Gaza Crisis: Why Netanyahu’s push for West Bank annexation and permanent war risks turning Israel into a militarized garrison state—deepening the Israel–Palestine conflict with no path to lasting peace. 👉 The New Multipolar World: A rising alliance between Russia, China, India, and North Korea signals the decline of American hegemony. Washington’s refusal to adapt to a multipolar order could prove disastrous for U.S. foreign policy and global stability. If you want to cut through the noise and understand what’s really driving today’s conflicts, this discussion is essential viewing. 📌 Topics Covered: Ukraine war, Azov Battalion, Andrei Beletsky, U.S. foreign policy, Israel Gaza war, Netanyahu, Russia China alliance, multipolar world, American empire, geopolitics explained. 🔔 Subscribe for more sharp analysis of geopolitics, U.S. foreign policy, and the forces reshaping our world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a lot of all right you guys will welcome the show it's provoked i'm scott horton i'm the director of some things and author of some things and interviewer of some people and uh this is my good buddy darrell cooper a k a marter made aka the most important and most honest historian in america and a host of the great podcast martyr made and the great twitter account that too welcome how are you i'm good as befitting my new station, I need to get myself one of those cardigans with like the leather elbows, you know, and like a nice wooden pipe. Nice one.

Because, you know, I mean, you can't exactly. There you go. I mean, you're going to take my title as world's greatest historian if I don't, if I don't get my act together. That's right. Get a little shaggy. Get a little rounder glasses there, you know. All right. Well, anyway, hey, ask me about that incredibly conspicuous Mike flag on the

I sent him my microphone, Darrell. You know, you didn't even have to prompt me. I was just about to say, hey, Scott, I noticed you have that interesting mic flag on the end of your microphone. What's that about? Yeah, it's the Scott Horton Academy, see? The Scott Horton Academy of Boren Policy and Freedom. And that's why I have the microphone in this ridiculous position, too, even so you can see it.

Listen, you know Tom Woods, the great Tom Woods. You've been on his show. Well, he's my good buddy. Yeah, everybody knows that Tom Woods. Yeah, everybody knows that Tom is the, the progenitor, I think, of the Liberty Classroom, where he and his friends teach courses on the real history and economics that you should have but did not get to learn in high school and college and things like that. So, well, he built me my own Liberty Classroom. It's called

a Scott Horton Academy, a foreign policy and freedom. It's at Scott Hortonacademy.com. It's not quite there yet, but it's going to be. There's a great splash page there where you can watch a fun video by the great Dan Smots, and you can put your email address in there so that you'll be the first to know when we go live. But the news is that I have finished all the edits and punch-ins on my Terror War course, which is about half, not even about, I guess about a third of it. And then my other course is about the new Cold War with Rush. Basically, each course is me walking you through my last two books. And so I still got to re-watch all of the provoked material and do all my corrections and punch-ins. But then, guess what? James Beauvard, the greatest libertarian journalist

in world history and a fellow at the Libertarian Institute as well as regular writer for the New York Post, author of the book you can see behind me there, Last Rights, The Death of American Liberty. He's doing a course on his 40 years of investigative journalism, everything from Waco to stealing documents from the World Bank and everything in between and good stuff. And then Ramsey Baroud is doing a whole course on Israel Palestine. And he's, of course, a Palestinian refugee from that crisis. And a really great guy regular at anti-war.com a good friend of mine, great guy. And then we got William Bupert on how America lost every war since 1945. And we will have C.J. Kilmer. He's going to come a little bit later, I think. We'll have

C.J. Kilmer on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person, whoever lived. And then I forget this guy's name. I have to remember this one. This is the guy that Tom Woods got. And he's a Lutheran, theologian, a seminarian scholar type from college, Becky, somewhere. And, He's going to teach a whole thing, essentially against all this Darbyite dispensationalist, pre-millennialist, Christian Zionist nonsense that says you've got to support the modern state of Israel, the force Jesus to come back and rapture us all up to heaven and our bodies and all this stuff. I'll call it Walmart Theology from the Left Behind series, and he's going to be debunking all that. So this is the Scott Horton Academy.

It's going to be really great. And I'm really excited. I've got to stop promising when I think we'll go live because time flies. way too fast and and you know cans get kicked down roads but uh everything has really come together really great and we've got you know top-notch people doing their courses and i'm putting you know the final touches as i say uh on my courses so should be coming soon so for people who are interested in what all i've learned over the last 30 years of doing this it's all there for you uh scott horton academy dot com so that's my big thing i'm got to announce for you today yep and even the world's uh greatest and

August historian in all of the history of history, we'll be, we'll be checking that out. So even I, yes, even I have something to learn from that. And you know, for the lifetime subscribers, they might invest based on the presumption that someday they could even get a Scott Horton Academy course taught by the great Daryl Cooper as well there being how, you know, you're a historian, I know, and stuff like that, seems like we could do that yeah try not to lean too hard to the left though darrell sometimes man you and your labor buddies get a little calming for my blood but i know you're often accused of being a raging leftist but yeah i mean i'm a i'm a i'm a i'm a bleeding heart but i'm not a liberal or a leftist

i'm a bleeding heart right winger i guess you know and i think that's up i think that's a line you can you can afford to walk and you know people uh people a lot of times i notice on the right you know they i i almost feel like you know like all of us coming from western kind of christian countries where even if you grew up it you know secular or whatever you're still you sort of you know imbibed the a certain set of values just from your mother's milk you know and one of them is you know we don't like to see innocent people suffer. We don't like unnecessary, like, suffering injustice. I mean, maybe that's more universal one.

But, you know, we just, I think that that's in there. And so when a lot of right wingers look at the state of our society and state of the world, and they think that, you know, they realize that some really hard decisions, some really difficult things have to be done if we're going to turn this thing around and that some people are going to suffer, you know, know through that process. They very often, like, get themselves through it. They almost have to psych themselves up to, like, not feel bad for those people or, like, dehumanize them in a way that, like, allows it to go down easier. But, you know, you can, you can grit your teeth and do

the hard thing and still have compassion for the people who end up on the business end of it. You know, it's a difficult line to walk, but it is possible, I think. And, you know, I try not to let my politics like interfere with just my basic human impulses like that as much as I can at least you know sure all right so we got a lot of news to talk about and i can't keep up with it all i'm always fighting the last war you know how it is i'm a pretty bad general in that way i guess no you're just an american general yeah just an american one um but no i am trying to be a little bit forward looking here uh i know you saw uh the piece we ran at uh the institute and at antiwar dot com on this week, co-authored with John Weeks, my assistant editor at the Libertarian Institute.

And it's called Blitzkrieg Blowback. He came up with that great title. And I think I do talk about this a bit in my book provoked, but I wanted to be out on the record that, hey, I'm warning you, there's a real danger that Andrew Beletsky or somebody close to him could become the future leader of Ukraine. As I've been arguing from the beginning, the Russians kind of painted themselves into a corner by drawing the line regardless of when they finally accomplished this they've drawn the line around anybody who liked them and called those people part of the russian federation now leaving a very right-wing rump ukraine run out of the far west of the country by you know people in laviv who you know they're like romantic types man they're not

i don't mean that in a sweetheart way but i mean that they're not living in a rational world man And they're almost like comparable to the bin Ladenites in that way. I was going to say they created Europe's own little Idlib province, basically. Yeah. And so these are the kinds of people who are like, we don't care that we're losing and that nothing is turning this thing around. We don't want to stop no matter what. And they have repeatedly threatened to murder the present, the previous one, Poroshenko,

or the current one, Zelensky, and Dimitri Yorosh and Andrew Belletsky particularly have threatened to murder Zelensky, both of them have. and um i don't know if you saw this and god i hope i'm not being redundant from last week no last week i don't think we covered any of this oh yeah no no no we didn't talk about this last week so and did you see that um andri perubi from the svoboda party who had been the speaker of the rata for i think seven years and was basically the overseer of the right sector during the putch on the may don in february 2014 some guy ran up on him and shot him in ahead on the streets of LaVive a few days ago and, you know, put him.

I heard that was not, you know, something that was like a hit or anything. It was like just a guy who was upset. Is that holding up? Like, I don't know. I don't know. And I'm sorry because I should have found time today to follow up and see if there was more developments. I guess I had seen one report that said it was like the father of a casualty or something,

but I don't know if that's believable or what. I shouldn't even have repeated that until I know. Just about every man aged 50 or older in Ukraine is probably the father of a casualty at this point. Yeah. Yeah, or every son in his 20s is the son of a casualty because they've really specialized in sending 40 and 50-year-olds out to the front to try to save the younger guys just because they're having such a population crisis there. This is actually kind of misleading earlier in the war when people see pictures of guys in their 40s and 50s out on the front and say, oh my God, they've all. already run out of young men. I was like, no, actually, they're sending the older men to the front first

because they're trying to give these guys a chance to have a baby before they go die, you know, and whereas a 40 and a 50-year-olds presumed already have had his chance. I mean, that shows you the mentality of a people who were prepared for a very, very long war. Yeah, you know, that's crazy, man. Jeez. Yeah. And then, so you were mentioned right before we went on air, too, and it's worth noting. And I linked to it in my piece. So for people who are familiar at all with this narrative about the Ukrainian Nazis,

the most common quote that you'll ever see about this is Andrew Beletsky. And whether they quote him directly or not, they'll quote this one Nazi saying that our great crusade is to save the white race or to lead the white race in the final crusade against the semi-led intermension, which means the subhumans. And this is, it's such a catchy way of saying it, I guess is why it's the quote that's used over and over and over again about. these guys um but the thing is so i found that whole speech of course researching for the book i want to

make sure that that was legit and what's the original source for that and the original source for that is the azob battalion website and i have it you know in the way back machine is is where i have it and i have the link in the article to the full speech and so um you may have noted that they ran this piece trying to whitewash this guy no pun intended in um the london times and in the london times he denies that he ever said that oh that's just russian propaganda and which is funny he's like he's joy reid claiming that they like hacked the azab italian website and posted this nazi speech in his name from back in 2007 um i mean that speech is it's interesting i guess well i'll let you characterize it your own way first because i think it's funny to me the way there's kind of

two like most obvious ways to read the thing but but tell me about So these, like, this combined quote that you put in your article, which was great about it. You know, the way I was going to introduce this is, okay, is this Adolf Hitler, Andre Beletsky, or Thomas Payne? He says, the historical mission of our nation in this turning point is to lead the white peoples of the whole world into the last crusade for its existence against the Semitic-led Intervention. I don't know how Zelensky feels about that. He said, Ukraine must become a single biological organism that will consist of capitalized new people, physically, intellectually, spiritually developed persons from the mass of individuals should appear nation, and from the weak modern man, the ubermensch. Social nationalism relies on a number of fundamental principles that clearly distinguish it from other right-wing movements. This is a kind of triad.

sociality, race, and great power. It's not Thomas Payne, just to dispel the mystery there, and it's not Adolf Hiller. It is this Baletsky guy. And like, you know, like here's the thing, man. I listen to that. And other than the, you know, the stuff about these new Ukrainians leading the white race and all that, all that, that's, let's leave that aside for one second. A lot of the rest of it, I feel very similar to when I read some of the hardcore. right-wing Zionists from like the early part of the Zionist movement, you know, where

now today, you know, that we've had the Second World War, we've had a lot of experiences in the 20th century where those kinds of ideas that I just read have gone terribly wrong and left a mark on all of our psyches and historical consciousness, you know, we feel differently about it than people did back then, where, you know, there is something noble, I think, especially when you're at the beginning or, you know, somewhere near the beginning of trying to really, you know, push forward a national project where you're trying to awaken people to a consciousness of themselves as a people and all that, you know, that's not an easy thing to do when people have not been used to being like a national people for centuries or maybe ever, you know. And you have to do that in ways that inspire them. And to say we need to develop. ourselves spiritually as a people and come together as a nation like all that kind of stuff is actually that doesn't ring poorly in my ears at all like i hear that even you know from again the early zionist despite knowing how that project is turned out and um and i hear something uh something we're

listening to in it um but then you you know the next thing you think is well you know when the rubber really hits the road and you're not just watching a speech you're not just watching a speech like things are you know the world gets in the way of your grand plans and your idealistic vision and all that when the rubber really hits the road and you run up against the rocks a reality just maybe i can come up with a third mixed metaphor um nope i can't uh you know that's when these ideas like you find out how they uh i guess what their what their means and methods of of getting around obstacles are and you know, these type of ideas in the past, you know, it's been through military conflict, through violence, just in general, you know. And I mean, I didn't, you know, I didn't actually

know that until you just told me about the 40 and 50 year olds getting sent out there so the younger people had time to have babies. I mean, you know, that's like, it makes you think of Rome, like when Hannibal wiped out their entire army and they're just like, all right, see you again next generation, you know. And it's like you, when you have that kind of a conscious, And you have this with the Israelis and the Palestinians, for example, over time, you just become, like, you fall into this garrison mentality that becomes just kind of who you are. You know, you're a fighting. Yeah, these guys founding fathers are a bunch of Nazis. They're not Thomas Payne or George Washington or Nathan Greene or anybody worth revering in any way.

They're a bunch of guys who are, I mean, if you look at that in context, like he's not just saying, hey, we need a new nation where we all kind of identify as one thing together. He's saying, we got to come together to destroy the enemy, the Jews, right? That's what he's saying. So, like, where your founding principles sound a lot like the foundations of the Nazi Reich and the Zionist Reich, then, yeah, that's where you're off, right? That's where you're destined for destruction. And look at what they've done. You know, they're not on the principles of freedom.

They're founded on the principles of hatred of the other. And so look at how they are. like you know again to go back to like say those early zionists like somebody like jabatinski talking kind of similar to this obviously minus the war against the semitic led untermension um but a lot of the other stuff like you might hear that kind of thing from like jabatinsky in the 30s about the Zionist movement um but today it's it's very you know obviously like it brings in everybody's ears a lot differently and so you have to think of like what's the personality type and what is the how does a guy look at the world and how is he approaching politics when in 2007 he's going

public and saying that it's not the same as saying something like that in 1935 you know where henry ford and whatever we're like might have might have been in the crowd like clapping for you this is like to doing that kind of thing in 2007 putting it on your website i mean you're a very brazen like there's a brazen anti-sociality about it you know and like a confrontational nature of it because everybody knows what those kinds of words provoke everywhere in the world and especially in Russia. And so just the really brazen confrontational nature of it should be alarming. I mean, it's, you know, it makes you really just, you know, like the time that those ideas gained a foothold before, you know, it makes you really worry about like the lengths that

people who are willing to go out in public and say those things like that, like the lengths they're willing to go through to put their uh to put their ideas over yeah well and so that's the whole thing right is and he does go on there about how you know not just make ukraine independent but turn it into an empire that will dominate eastern europe and the middle east an alliance with iran as the new superman takes over the thing you know um it it's a fun read i was going to say about at the beginning about like kind of the two ways to read it to me anyway i guess you had a third way to read. Maybe there's more. The two ways I read it was, one, like, wow, this is like some really dangerous, like, you know, a really deep look into the mind of a fanatical Nazi lunatic, right?

And then the other is, well, this is just ridiculous clap trap, you know, about the nation state as an organism, as the Ukrainian people, the nationality as its own species. And I think this is same speech where he says, yes, every sperm and every egg belongs to the state for the good of the greater Ukrainian collectivist thing. Like, this is no different than Bolshevism to me. It's completely ridiculous stuff. And so I have a hard time taking it seriously, even though I know it is deadly serious to him. I know it really matters in terms of its consequences, but it's also res just like a bunch of low IQ nonsense. But then, to your point, and I'll stop real quick, is this is the guy who he sat through the Maidan Revolution in jail.

He was there for blowing up a statue of Vladimir Lenin, which can't really begrudge him of that. But they let him out. And then he's the founder of the Azov Battalion. He's the guy that whipped the right sector into shape, along with these other Nazi groups, led by his patriot of Ukraine gang, and they went to war.

And where when John Brennan, the leader of Jabad al-Nusra, and the committer of a thousand drone strikes and the framer of Donald Trump for treason and all that, same guy, when he came to town and demanded that Kiev launched the war, and the military split, like a huge part of the army. I don't know the percentage, but a major part of the army went to the other side, and there was kind of a standoff.

Well, enroll the Nazis into the breach, led by now Colonel Andrew Beletsky. He's the guy who came and led the Azov Battalion. It then became the Azov Regiment, and then later the 12th separate infantry division and then there's a separately inside the National Guard still it's called the 12th special purpose brigade led by a different guy but it's now the the third separate infantry division has now been renamed the third army corps and they're completely outside of the chain of command

and they're known as the most efficient and best fighters on the front they've been fighting in harkey this whole time he's now it's just no different Darrell, then when they brought Abu Muhammad Aljolani and dressed him up in a monkey suit and put him on front line with Martin Smith and told him, look, man, stop cutting off people's heads and doing suicide attacks and we'll let you be the dictator of Syria here. They're doing the same thing with this guy now. MI6 went and groomed him and brought him to London and had him sit down with the Times and say, no, I'm a reasonable gentleman. And so that they can put him in power next, or at least so that it won't seem too dangerous. if he does come to power next, and I think it's very likely

that he'll be the next guy in charge. At least the kingmaker, maybe. Yeah. So when you talk about how he implements his ideals, well, he murders civilians. He puts them under blockade, deprives him of food and water, he drops artillery shells on their heads

and, you know, does a good job of provoking a full-scale Russian invasion is what he does, right? And then losing a war to them, but losing it the hard way and building up his credibility and doing so. So, and one more thing.

Nazis love a good stab in the back theory, and America has absolutely stabbed these people in the back as if you'd written it for them, that like, yeah, we would have been great. The Americans told us they'd help us, and then they left us high and tried to get, you know, Bay of Pigsd, which is just true, right? That's the absolute story of this. Biden making a bunch of promises he never meant to keep. So. Yeah, and it makes you wonder if how Russia is going to react, if a guy like that gets elevated

absolute power. I mean, you could see them overreacting, you know, dramatically. I mean, they've, they've avoided doing that for the most part throughout the course of this entire war, but you start putting a guy in, putting a guy at the highest office of the country who says those kind of things. I mean, you might trigger some, some historical trauma there. I don't know. You know, the, as of Battalion, too, I mean, you know, if it gives like, if it gives just some insight into the mentality of guys like him and the ones who follow him. You can say what you want about the Azav ideology and all that, but from the beginning of the war, everything I've heard is that these were a group of guys

who would die in place. I mean, they will stand and fight, and if that means to the last man, they'll do it. And like, that's something that, you know, maybe from war movies and stuff we think is common. It's not common, you know, especially in an army like Ukraine that's been stood up relatively quickly for a war and everything. To have units that will not break down, they will take 70% casualties and still hold out if they feel. Guys like that are hard to find because it's not just training or discipline or anything.

You've got to find people like that, you know. And so these things, these kind of movements over there have almost been magnets for people, the same way jihadist movements have been magnets for those kind of people in the Islamic world. and um you know the the to have a group you know ukraine is such a mystery to me in a lot of ways like to have a guy like this and so many people who i mean obviously like he's not an unpopular dude in ukraine um people are talking about him as the next leader of the country perhaps um living under a jewish president who's had like mostly jewish cabinet members like throughout much of his administration, and you have guys like this who are also there.

And, you know, it's just, it's such a strange dichotomy. And it makes you wonder, too, like, I get that there were a ton of these guys in 2014. But, man, a whole bunch of them have to be dead, right? Like, there's got to be a huge number. Because these are the fighters. These aren't, like, just a guy who happens to think a thing. These are the guys who volunteered to go fight. And, like, a lot of them are dead.

And so, you know, there's either a lot left over or this ideology just continues to pull up, you know, guys who were, you know, they were 12 years old in 2014. Now they're 21 and they're just being worked into the system by these ideologies, you know. I saw footage, I think just last week or two weeks ago where it was footage from Lviv and it was a bunch of soccer fans all Hiling Hitler. And they all looked like they were 22 and tough front line age guys. and yeah that's one of the things i was thinking back in 2014 as all this was going on um and you wrote about this in your book about how if you go back to 2003 or i don't know pre 2004 orange revolution i don't know if it was o three but uh and you pulled ukrainians even western ukrainians on how they felt about russia and it was like neutral to moderately good you know like it was fine

it was just fine in 2004 happens the orange revolution just have this flood of anti-Russian propaganda. And then you realize that, you know, the 19, 20-year-old as-of guys in right sector guys in 2014 and 15, they were in elementary school in 2004. This is where they grew up. This is the, you know, the propaganda regime that made them who they are. And so they're just, you know, you have a generation of extremely radicalized young men, you know, and it works for the, for what the Ukrainians need if, you know, if the goal is to keep this war going, because, you know, we've learned throughout the 20th century that just pure, you know, like, like fighting for the government of your country, basically,

like it can get you through at the beginning of a war, but it can't get you through to the end of a long, long, hard one. Like, you need something else. Like, people are not going to just continue to just rush headlong into a meat grinder to defend, you know, Zelensky. in his government or just the corrupt officials in the rotter or something. But this kind of thing that this guy is saying, you know, that I just read, that you wrote about, that's the kind of thing that pulls these young guys in and says, I don't care who the president is. I don't care how corrupt they are.

I don't care what's going on. Like, these are the ideas that are animating me and driving me into this. And so, you know, without these guys and without this kind of ideology in the, you know, in the air, I don't, I think the Ukrainians probably would have been unable to find recruits and would have collapsed probably a long time ago, you know. That's right. That's why we tolerate this stuff. Yeah, that's right.

That's what, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans said, when confronted with this was, look, these guys are great fighters. We'll get to that later. Evelyn Farkas, who was an Obama bot from the National Security Council there, has a notable example of that, and Applebaum as well. And Applebaum has made a career denouncing right-wing nationalism in all of its forums. And then when it comes to Ukraine, she goes, what we need in Ukraine is right-wing nationalism.

We need slogans. We need chants. We need anthems. We need parades with torches to celebrate Hitlerians, if that's what it takes. You know, okay. And that is what it takes. As you're saying, otherwise, they cut and run. They break and run. They've had more than 100,000 defectors, probably a lot more than that. People drown. They call it the death river, the river Tisla, between Ukraine and Romania, where people are drowning by the hundreds, or at least dozens, trying to escape. yeah that's um can escape conscription is what i meant to say before i had a coffee yeah it's really you know it's hard for me at this point to i never i'll be honest i never would have thought that the war would have gone on this long if that if you would have told me in 2022 that the rate of casualties would be what it was for both sides i would not have predicted that this war would still be going on in the middle of 2025 and really like as much as we you know you have the sort of Colonel McGregor view of just things that can't go on forever, won't go on forever,

and Russia's big and has a lot of people, and Ukraine's smaller and doesn't have as many people. And so, therefore, this is going to end in a predictable manner. You know, it's like they say in finance and economics, man, like you can be right, but, you know, don't be surprised that the market stays irrational longer than you can stay solvent because it's just, because I don't know when this ends at this point i mean you think this guy if he becomes president he ain't end in the war look so yeah and this goes to what you were right about a few minutes ago and this is what i've been saying and you know i'm not sure i don't want to like dig myself a whole making predictions or whatever but um it's just a slippery slope argument right it's just a logical sort of fallacy type

thing about well look as i said the russians took everybody who likes them out of the country right so well from looking this way in the east there so everybody left in the west uh you know essentially just if you look at like voting patterns or whatever that means that pro russian candidates are never going to win again they used to win that's why america had to overthrow the government every 10 years or so right every 10 years three times in a row america rigged the election 9404 and 14 well 14 wasn't exactly an election but it was a coup nonetheless anyway um they would have rigged it in 15 if the election had been allowed to be held. But point being, so now, as you were just saying, well, geez, what are the Russians going to do if this guy win?

So in other words, if the Russians complete their task, let's say we get a ceasefire. They take Donetsk and Lujansk. Maybe it takes them another few months or the rest of the year to take Donyetsk or more. I don't know. They finished taking Donetsk and Luhansk. They've already said officially, and this wasn't just American officials. this was the the kremlin said they would be willing to compromise and draw the lines where they are in zaproja and kurson instead of the traditional borders of those oblasts so that's huge that's a massive climb down from the russians now

of course they're saying they want the ukrainians to turn around walk out of um dynetsk which i don't think they're going to do but anyway point beam that so let's say that they they get what they want and cease fire Well, now they've left a rump Ukraine run by hardcore right-wingers. Zelensky's got to step down or be overthrown, stand for election at some point. But if it's not Beletsky, it's almost certainly going to be somebody like him. There's another article. I think this is in the Ukrainian press where they said it's narrowed down to General Zelushny, Beletsky, and one or two other guys are in the running,

one of whom is also, I think, an avowed Hitlerian. Zillusioni, the former general is not. But he ain't no liberal Democrat type or conservative Republican either, right? He's definitely going to be a military strong man one way or the other. They're all agreed that the new model will be the Israel model, not part of any treaty, but armed to the teeth and in a permanently militarized state with, you know, the bare trappings of democracy while really being, you know, a right-wing national state. So then to your question. And then what's Putin going to do with that, right? He said de-Nazify, now you got Derfjurer, Beletsky, you know, sitting in the chair over there.

That's intolerable. So this is what I've been saying really since the beginning of the war. If you go back to my first speech, I gave after the war that it only makes sense that they have to keep going. And they're going to have, you know, let's say that they overthrow, they refuse to tolerate the new Nazi junta in Kiev. Well, they still have the forests and the swamps and the Carpathian Mountains in the far west of the country to fight an insurgency from. The CIA backed an insurgency in Ukraine from the end of World War II through 1954. And Khrushchev finally crushed it and then, you know, succeeded Stalin after Stalin died. And so, you know, we have plenty of basis for doing that. We can back

and remember that was plan B. Plan A was tell Putin, don't you do it. Plan B was not let's negotiate a way out of this. Plan B was, we're going to back an insurgency against you like Rand's. Rambo 3 in Afghanistan, and it'll be great. Never mind any consequences that happened from that. We don't need to focus on negative things. And so we just do an Afghanistan-style insurgency here. So then, again, I'm just slippery slope using my imagination and argumentationness here. But, like, I don't know.

From Moscow's point of view, it seems to me they have, through the logic of government programs, they screwed themselves, really, by taking over the Donbass. and now they are going to end up whether it through the next five or ten years or whatever it takes they've trapped themselves into a situation where now they're going to essentially have to take the whole country all the way to the mountains i i just i can't really imagine i'm doing that but you know maybe pushing until they break the military power of ukraine i mean gosh i would not want to uh if i was moscow i would not want to occupy the western provinces man that would be an absolute nightmare well not they kill everybody first you know what i mean which is yeah well that also

i mean you know in addition to the guerrilla war that they be that they be waging you know that that places them nose to nose with europe and well but wait i mean go back a step though if they if they stop at the river still Kiev is on both sides of the river so they take the entire left bank, you know, if you're facing south, they take the entire, you know, east of the country, east of the Neeper River. Now, and or they end up saying, okay, let's say Beletsky takes power and they smash the national government in Kiev. They still have to deal with an insurgency, right? As we were talking about, these guys aren't giving up on any rational basis. They're romantic types. They would rather keep fighting. And so that's the point where I'm saying, well,

so then the Russians are going to have to keep going then, because they're not going to be able to tolerate an insurgency based out of the West, they'll have to crush it. And they won't do a counterinsurgency. They'll just kill everybody. To do, you know, to end something like this, you really have to find a way to let the losing side feel like they saved face. And, you know, just because, you know, I've been doing a lot of reading lately for my next episode on the end of World War I and how, you know, just the sour taste that that left

in the mouth of the Germans and the rest of the central powers. And it just, and not even so much because of, you know, the ideas of stab in the back and betrayal and all that came later as a way of explaining that sour taste in the mouth. And it was because, you know, they just looked around and said, we just, it's impossible that we suffered this much. We went through all of this for nothing. That is just not possible. So if it did happen, it was because we were stabbed in the back.

It was because of, you know, you have to come up with something. And, you know, the pragmatic thing to do, and it's just tough to do with these Ukrainians because they're not really leaving a lot of openings for this kind of thing. As far as I can tell, the Russians, you know, they're pragmatic people, at least the government's quite pragmatic. You know, you have to give them something that they can go home and celebrate, like we did with the Iranians in the recent war, you know, for all of like I, you know, we've talked about that. I don't like most of how that was handled. But, you know, the way Trump ended up

handling it was, I mean, given the situation that was already in place, you know, when we intervened, you know, it was not, let's say it's not as bad as it could have been, you know, in the sense that what he did was the Israelis could come away and being like, we kicked ass, we killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of things. We could come out of the thing thinking, you know, we did the thing that we've been talking about all these years. We destroyed their nuclear program, totally obliterated. And the Iranians could go through it and say, we just face down the United States and Israel and we're still here. So it gave everybody, you know, like it didn't immediately, well, except maybe with the Israelis, but like, you know, it didn't

force the Iranians who were really on like the receiving end of the whole thing into a position where all they can think about is now how they get their revenge, you know, because they can feel like they kind of showed who they were. and represented themselves. Whereas the Ukrainians, and the Russians have to know this. They have to be thinking like this, I imagine, that if they do put them in a situation where you just beat them down to the point that they cannot carry on the war anymore, like that's it, that you're going to see them again in a generation. I mean, it's just, it seems inevitable, you know, unless there's a, like, the only reason we didn't get a third one with Germany is because we kept occupying

the place and took over their school system and their media and everything. else to make sure the next generation was raised up with the brains we wanted to implant into them, you know, and the Russians aren't going to do that. And so, you know, you have to try to figure out, like, how you're, how to extricate yourself from this war in a way that doesn't just leave the problem for your, for your, you know, the people coming after you. And it's a difficult thing. They are, because you, as you said, they have kind of boxed themselves in. I don't know if they felt like they had much choice in the matter at that point, but. I think they did. I mean, i don't agree but i think they didn't think they had a choice yeah yeah i think they had other options

people get mad to me for saying this because you're supposed to just be black and white on the issue that if it's Biden's fault then it ain't Putin's kind of thing yeah yeah i do think that there were more options more cards to be played in terms of tough diplomacy and real threats in fact as i say in the book i think his biggest error there was being coy about the whole thing and saying no i'm not going to invade i'm just building up my forces and I wish you'd sign my treaty but when he should have said yes I am going to invade sign the treaty you know that would have changed the dynamic of the whole thing if he'd just been clear about what did I joke in the book maybe his generals demanded that he not say that

right but then so military necessity required diplomatic incompetence did did you see that uh it was being passed around maybe a year year and a half ago or so uh I can't remember he was he was he was like one of Zelensky's kind of top advisors I don't think He's in the government anymore. Younger guy, I can't remember. He was in an interview back in like 2019 or something. And he was kind of laying out what was going to happen over the next few years. And he was saying that there's going to be a giant war, like end of 2021, beginning at 2022.

That's what's going to happen. And we're going to suffer terribly. And it's going to be awful. But at the end of it, we'll have a place in NATO and everything. And so, I mean, the Ukrainians, at least a lot of them, I mean, they were looking for a I don't know if they would have been scared off by the Russians, you know, stating their plan. I'm glad you brought that up because, okay, so first of all, it would be nice if I could, here, I'll get his name right for you. His name is Alexei Arrestovich, is the guy you're talking about.

And so, yes, he gave this interview where he explains what we're going to do is we're going to get a native, but we're going to have to get in a war with Russia first. But then we're going to win it and we're going to prove our value to the West. and we'll show the Russians where the lines are and then we'll be able to join after the next war and then they go back and forth it's a really interesting thing as you say and this is two, three years before this is the still Trump years

when he explains this stuff to her and this is in early 19 so this is he's an advisor to Zelensky while Zelensky is running for president right this is during his campaign now this is the same guy who helped

I don't know exactly his role, but he was part of the delegation that was negotiating with the Russians at Istanbul in the aftermath of the early stages of the war in March and April of 2022. And he's the guy, there are a lot of different quotes about how close they were in the negotiations before Boris Johnson came and blew the thing up. He was the one who said, we popped the corks on the champagne bottles. We had a deal. It was set. It was great. And then he complains. Oh, and then separately after that, he's the same guy who says stabbing the back. Joe Biden sent Boris Johnson to ruin our negotiations. We had him.

It was just like I said it was going to be. We had our war. We whipped them. We stopped them. We forced them to the table. Putin thought, this is his phrasing, okay? Putin thought, whoa, he bit off more than he could chew here. He didn't want any more of this.

He was ready to deal. It was going to be just like I'd planned it, just like I said. And then Boris Johnson came to town, blew up the deal, said you'll never get support from American Russia again. He didn't say this part, but we already know that part of the story. Boris John said, UK and USA will cut you off permanently if you do this deal. Don't do it and destroyed the deal. And then he says, but then they brought us to Germany and they brought us to, I think, Ramstein Air Base there. And they promised us all these weapons that they were going to give us.

They said the shipments on its way and it's going to be so much weapons. it'll really turn the tide in the war. You're going to kick the Russians all the way out. And he says, and then we waited and waited and waited. And the shipment didn't come until June or July. And then it was much less than they ever promised. It was never going to be enough to turn the tide in the war. And so, in other words, we had everything the way we wanted it.

But then you ruined our deal. But then you promised us that it was worth it because you were going to help us win. We didn't need a deal. We were going to win. And then you didn't give us what it. takes to win. And now look at us. Hundreds of thousands of people killed, much more territory lost than before. Now Harkiv and Odessa at risk and the rest of all of this. And all based on Joe Biden's promises. Same guy. And so, and then, and he's one of the main citations for, yeah, those talks were

no joke. The deal that they were working off of, the Istanbul communique, that was the Ukrainians draft, that the Russians were like, okay, we can work with this. They weren't even working on their own proposal. They were working on the Ukrainians' proposal and they were, you know, there were still some boxes left to check. But both sides were happy to kick cans down the road, including Darrell, the very basis of our conversation here, including the very status of Donetsk and Lujansk. Russia was willing, even at that point, to say, you know what, we'll figure that out later and clearly leaving the door open to leaving Donetsk and Lohansk inside Ukraine. if, for example, we'll finally get you to implement a Minsk II type deal where you really promise special status for the Far East and permanent neutrality.

And then that was the worst, you know, diplomatic foreign policy malpractice. Deliberately so. It's not an accident. It's just the most cynical damn thing since invading Iraq or the dirty war in Syria or you name one. But it's just horrible. I hate it. I mean, it's even worse than Iraq just because in Iraq, you. in the 1990s, you could at least say, like, there's this festering sore here that we don't know how to, you know, let heal as long as Saddam Hussein's in there. And we don't know how to get them out except for a war. And so we're just going to go get them out of there. And like,

that's the reasoning. Okay, fine. Like, because that part is true. There's this big black hole in the middle of Mesopotamia that is just sort of a half-failed state forever, I guess, until Saddam dies. And so you decide you have to go in and take them out of there. You can at least draw a picture in your head of how that made sense to some people at the time this is like there was not a problem this is a problem we wanted to create and that we took we burn calories to create you know like the when you go back to the the deals that the Russians were offering at the very beginning of this whole thing I mean not only are they better than anything Ukrainians can ever hope to get again in now or in the future

they were they were they were workable deals that the ukraine could have flourished as a country under you know there's nothing ukraine doesn't need nato to be a economically prosperous and stable country you know they they need nato because they hate russia and they want to always be in like a militant mode toward russia that's really the only and because we want them and we promise them a lot of things if you know if they'll sort of fight on our side but it's not something that they need for their own prosperity or anything. And neutrality would not have harmed their future prospects, you know. And I mean, I think Arasovic is probably right that Putin did bite off more than he could chew.

You know, the whole initial entry, the beginning portion of the special military operation, I mean, it really kind of, I'll tell you, the thing that has shocked me almost more than anything throughout this entire process is the Russian intelligence failures leading up to it in the early parts of this war. I mean, it's almost inconceivable. It's like on the level of Israeli intelligence failing before October 7th or something like that. It's like you really, because the plan obviously, like, you know, they were not invading Ukraine to take over and occupy Ukraine with 100,000 conscripts and contractors, you know, they were going in there because they thought if we roll in and they know we're this serious, they'll back down. They'll come to the table and then,

hammer out an actual deal because they're not going to listen to anything else. So we're just going to go to a show of force. And for them to think that was going to work when it was so far the opposite. I mean, the Ukrainians were ready to roll from day one and get into a long drawn out war with them to the point where, I mean, you look at Putin. How long did it take him to actually announce a general mobilization? It's like a long time. And he ever has. Well, I mean, not a general mobilization. He did mobilize more at 300,000 more in September That's what you're thinking of, I guess. Which was sort of a recognition that, okay, this is, we're in a war now and we've got to fight a war, you know.

And you're right. That was months later, half a year later. Half a year later. And so it shows this reluctance. And probably, you know, these were, you know, behind closed doors at the Kremlin. There were probably very influential people at the Ministry of Defense and other places looking at Putin because this is not what you said was going to happen. and now we have to deal with this situation. And so he was reluctant to admit that this is where we're at now and we have to treat it like a war.

And so, yeah, I believe Arstovich that Putin was in that mindset when they were negotiating at Istanbul. And if he could find a way out of it that, you know, at least ostensibly protected the rights of the people in the East and kicked the other problems down the road, I think he would have, I think it would have taken that deal. and it's really like it's honestly I mean it's one of the crimes of the century honestly and I don't even mean this century I mean like the last hundred years for us going over there scuttling that deal and keeping them in this unwinnable war especially when we did not plan at any point on seeing it through to the end and you know the Ukrainians

they should have called the Kurds or they should have called the South Vietnamese or a lot of the other you know the tribal sheiks in Iraq, you know, that we're begging for us to come give the help that we told them we'd give if the jihadists ever came back after him. Like, the whole trail of tears of, you know, America, what's Kissinger's quote, or whoever it was about if you, if you think being America's enemy is bad, you should try being one of their friends, something like that, you know. To be America's enemy is dangerous to be our friend. Yeah, there you go. All right, wait. So let me stop you right there. We had to do a little bit of business.

And we've got to change the subject before we run out of time. time. So first of all, for all my Bengali friends, Fool's errand, time in the war in Afghanistan, is now out in Bengali. How do you like that? They're working on translating provoked into Bulgarian. That's pretty cool. Also, my coffee sponsor, Scott Horton's show flavored coffee. How do you like that? They always said, if you keep drinking all that coffee, you're going to turn into some coffee. Well, it happened. I turned into some coffee. So you go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee, and it's a mix of Ethiopian and Sumatra blend. It's really good. I'm selling a lot of it, and I can see resales of it because everybody likes it so much. It's really great coffee. And then I thought

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Come on in. We like you. We got some video cameras running. Careful, no, listen. Before we go, I wanted to ask you about the anti-Israel sentiment and break at the big National Conservatism Conference this week. I don't know if you saw about that. There was a big article in the telegraph about it.

But I think I'm going to go ahead and have Kurt Mills on my show tomorrow. Kurt Mills from the American Conservative magazine. And we're going to talk all about that because Israel is now for real, finally an issue on the American right in a way that it never has been before. As you may know, the National Conservatism Conference, that whole thing is a front. The Edmund Burke Foundation is a front for Israeli settlers that founded the thing. Oh, you guys are moving to the right from George W. Bush and John McCain. You're more like right-wing populist, nationalists now? Us too.

Welcome to Zionism. That's our thing. Whatever you believe is what we're also about is, you know, their whole game. well a bunch of anti-Zionists brought it and there was a big um i don't know how big of a conversation but it was it was um certainly an intense conversation going down about where zionism fits inside the american conservative movement and the maga movement in the in the era of donald trump in the era of the gaza genocide and everything and so it's it's huge and important i don't know if you saw that or you have any comment on that before we move on i saw some tweets about

it i i didn't watch any of the speeches or follow it that much but you know i the the the the movement on the right that has that led to that you know i've been tracking pretty closely and you know it's one of those things that as soon as they started uttering the words america first and things like that this was coming you know because yeah like look israel they could be a right-wing nationalist kind of populist type country and we're we like those you know the right-wing maga types. We love our Bolsonaro's and, uh, you know, uh, bukele's and all that kind of thing. And that's cool. Fine. Um, but man, the, the, the issue with the Israelis has, and this has always been the case. This was the case even before it was an Israeli state. And you're talking about

the Zionist movement dealing with Britain is they just, they cannot help, but show their contempt for their patrons. They just can't help it. They can't, you know, like if Israel, could just with America show a little bit of gratitude rather than just constantly throwing it in people's faces that we got you. We got you right here. Your presidents will come over here and kiss our wall and we'll go over there. We'll send Benjamin Netanyahu to the Congress over the objections of the sitting president and he'll get more standing ovations than the sitting president gets at the state of the, all that kind of stuff. Like, it's just one of those things where if I was an advisor to the Israelis,

I would be like, look, keep doing everything you're doing. But just stop doing that stuff. But they just can't. They cannot help themselves, you know? And when that's the case, you're going to run into trouble with a nationalist movement in your patron country. It's just how it's going to work because people, it's not even so much that people are thinking in terms of America's interests and blow back.

back and most people it's just it just offends a basic sense of honor in a nationalist in a nationalist movement you know where they're just like we're we're a sovereign country we're a big bad superpower and the idea that we're over here kind of dancing to the tune of these you know the this government in israel that can't show us the most basic amount of respect you know and and and let alone deference um right or like let alone let alone any event that that that what we're doing for them is something that is also in the service of our interests. Like, it just doesn't even pretend anymore. You know, we have to protect Israel because they are our forward deployed base in a region

full of people that only don't like us because we back up Israel. You know, it's just a circular reasoning that, and it starts, I mean, look, the Ted Cruz, sort of, you know, some random verse in Genesis that I can't quite remember or quote, that's Ted Cruz. I know the verse. But, you know, there's somewhere in there it says that we have to keep sending in Benjamin Netanyahu as many, you know, missiles as he wants. And we have to run cover for him at international institutions as they, you know, break every military law that we created since World War II. Like that theology is a bunch of 60 and 70-year-olds for the most part. and what people younger than that who do hold to it,

like what amount of them there are, as it falls out of favor and becomes like this weird, kooky thing that only crazy people believe, which is where that's headed. I can tell you from like within American Christian movement, that is where things are headed, that a lot of those people will fall away too. And so that sort of automatic Trump card,

no pun intended, that they've been able to play for so long where it doesn't matter if it's, I mean, you asked Ted Cruz or Mike Freakin' Huckabee, I mean, their position, they will tell you this. And I've never talked to them about it, but I've talked to a million people who go to the same churches, who believe the same exact things. I know these people. And I love some of them. There are a lot of them are great people. My grandpa for a little while was like on this train.

But they will tell you that if supporting Israel leads to the total destruction of the United States, and we've served our purpose in history. We have served God's purpose in history and done the thing that was expected of us, sacrificing our own. That's their position. I mean, there is nothing that Israel could do, nothing that you could threaten the United States with that would make them say, maybe we should reconsider this relationship. And so Israel's been able to play that card for many, many decades. And that card is, it's not going to play for very much longer. And it's one of the things that makes me think that they know that because the Israelis are very can.

any operators usually. And they have to be looking at those same poles that we're looking at and realizing that their era of just total license with unconditional cover from the United States is not going to last all that much longer. And so if there's anything that they need to get done, they better get it done now. Yeah. You know, with the reasoning that, yeah, people will be super angry and it'll leave a mark on us and everything, but we'll deal with that problem when we get to it. I think you're right about that. That's what Dave Smith has been saying, too, is that they've got to see the writing on the wall that even, you know,

never remind the millennials, even the Gen Xers are over it. So once the baby boomers are out, which is any day now, like this is an ongoing process of the baby boomers phasing out of power and influence here, and that those days are numbered. And then hence the headline on anti-war.com today, Secretary of State Rubio says that America will approve of Israel's annexation of the West Bank. They're going to do to the West Bank, the same thing they're doing to the Gaza Strip,

they're just going to carpet bomb those cities and force those people to flee, drive them into the Jordan River or into the Sinai Peninsula and Donald Trump's going to help them do it, Darrow. Except that, the entire left half of America is against it and half of the right. And so now what?

How are they going to do this? Yeah, well, you know, one thing that I wonder is how much humiliation can the leadership in the Arab world like endure because they like honestly like I can hardly think of just a more degraded and and really just I mean like just a pathetic whip little dog it's it's hard for me to imagine being the leader of one of these Arab monarchies and watching what's going on in Gaza knowing that they're coming for the West Bank and they're just you know they're just standing by like it's all good like they're not even making preparations for

the future they're fine with they're just waiting for this whole thing to be over so that they can get back to normalizing relations with the Israelis and you know uh building whatever new economic zone with the americans and stuff and it's just it makes me sick man and yeah what's the name of that uh the Palestinian comedian um awesome yousef right you know the one I'm talking about It's like an Egyptian, like a Palestinian who was living in Egypt or something. Yeah, I knew another one. He did work on there at the start of the war. Yeah, okay.

Anyway, so I saw a thing where he was on with, um, Cumo, the one that Dave debated on, on COVID and all that, right? The former CNN guy, the brother of the governor. The brother of the real Cuomo. Yeah, there you go. And they're both the son of the actual Cuomo, I think, is how much. But then. So, Bossam Youssef, the comedian guy, is on a podcast with Cuomo, and they're going back and forth, and Cuomo's given him, I thought that they had maybe kind of retired this, but he's just, I guess, going through the Hezbarah Dictionary, and he settles on, nobody wants the Palestinians, which must be, they never really explain what they mean by this, but the implication is what, because they're just so filthy with lice and tuberculosis and terrorism that no one wants them around or something like.

like that when first of all like and i wish boston yosef had said yusuf whatever had said to him dude you sound literally like this is virtually word for word what adolf hitler said after the eveyon conference see nobody wants them that proves that i'm right about them right um and then meanwhile we all know why the arab states don't want to take the palestans you're right that they are a bunch of beaten dogs who won't do a thing to help them but they don't want to a bet if you're Israel, cleansing them out of there, because one, or just the eternal shame of that act on the human level, but also, then they lose even the pretense of control over the last of their holy sites, including the third holiest site in Islam, the Al-Aksam Mosque, which is, they call it,

you know, Al-Quds is what they call Jerusalem, and the prophet's night travel land, at least that's what bin Laden called it, where the prophet Muhammad went to heaven on his horse, from right there on the Alaksa Mosque. So this is a third holiest site after where he was born and where he founded his religion in Mecca and Medina. And so if they and whatever other shrines exist on the West Bank and all that, I don't know. But that's the point is if the Palestinians

are finally completely cleansed out of there and they create a greater Israel that's their super duper majority, you know, 80, 20 Israeli Jewish state, then they're going to blow up the mosque. and rebuild the temple and start sacrificing goats and bring on the apocalypse or whatever. And so that's what they won't take them. And if you think of the monarchs, you know, what that means when they think of it being,

you know, something like that happening, the next thought in their head is if then, if we don't do something, our people are going to cut our heads off. And that's the next thought that all of them have, you know, that if you go back, like, it's really amazing when you think about how over the last several days, decades, the only real supporters, the only people who are really willing to step up and offer genuine support for this Sunni-Palestinian movement are a bunch of Shiites and Alibis, you know, it's very strange. And how the how the Gulf monarchies square that, like, in their own brains, I'll just never, I'll never understand. Like, and because the thing is, like,

like, I know people who are friends, good friends, um, including people who are not political. They're just very good friends with leaders in the UAE, for example. And, you know, I know people who know them because they're really into jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts. They love that stuff over there. And that's how they know them. And so they're not even really political. And I've talked to some of these people and heard a lot about them from firsthand sources. And like, these are sophisticated, like, worldly people who want a lot of the same things that we would hope they want. You know, a better future. there are people in the region and blah,

but peace with the Israelis eventually, like under some kind of acceptable sort, all those kind of things. And so, you know, there are people within these countries that, you know, I think that they just see the Palestinians as an impediment to the future they want to bring about

for their countries and for the rest of the region. But, you know, at the same time, man, these are honor cultures and you just have to, I mean, this is something that's going on for a long time. the Gulf monarchies have always been kind of, you know, they'll talk a good game, but they never really, they've always been like that. You know, you go back to when Nasser and the other, like the bathists were running the other countries in the Middle East before we took them out. And I mean, Nassar was in a war with Saudi Arabia. You know, I mean, these people used to, they were, they were mortal enemies. You know, the pan-Arabists were the last thing that the Gulf monarchies wanted to see come to power. You know, why would you want a big pan-Arab secular state? when this place is literally, this country's literally named after your family. You know, they don't want a big pan-Arab state that encompasses, you know, a country that's named after your own family, like Saudi Arabia. And so they, you know, the Arab, the secular Arab

dictatorships, you know, they viewed the Gulf monarchies really as like the near enemy that had to be overcome before the Arab world was ever going to be able to mount a resistance to, you know, Israel or the global empire or anything like that. Like they had to deal with this problem, get these countries on side. And obviously they weren't able to do so. And now they're all, they're all gone. And so, you know, it's a, it's a, here's, you know, here's the tough situation, right? It's like Israel right now, I think, is sort of in the position of France in like early 1919, you know, where it's kind of, they've kind of, they kind of run the table and one of work, basically, you know, they think.

And so just after all of this bloodshed, all of this hatred that's been built up, now they're holding the whip and the other side is face down on the ground and they get to celebrate and humiliate them and do what they want. And when you look back at France Week, when you read the aftermath of the First World War and you know what happened later, you wish you could just show them into the future what was going to happen so that they would temper their enthusiasm in their. triumphalism just a little bit and the Israelis and their supporters are kind of in that mode right now I feel you know where they feel like we're gonna we can behave this way because we can't imagine a potential future where we don't hold the upper hand they just can't imagine it but you know I'm the world's greatest historian ever in the history of history and um that's just that's just not how things work you know no country ever is always holding the whip hand, ever.

We're not, United States is not always going to be that country. The frigging Roman Empire couldn't do it. We're not going to do it. And Israel sure as hell isn't going to do it. And so you have to plan for a future where you don't have total license and just the ability to do anything you want without consequences. And the Israelis are behaving the exact opposite manner, you know,

and recipe for disaster. And look, if you look at, you know, relationships in your life or in business or any other thing, total victory and destruction of your enemies is usually not the best solution for even the medium or even short term much less for the long term you know what i mean as you were saying before you got to leave the other guy and out or they're just going to keep fighting so the interesting thing that the question that i have is if they annex the west bank i mean they'll have to

they'll have to violently expel the palestinians because what there's three and that if you announce that this is now Israel, and these people now, I guess, are Israelis, unless you're going to just go up and give a speech at the UN and say, yes, we are officially in apartheid state, which I doubt they're going to do. They're going to have to deal with that dichotomy. You go back to the 67 war when David Ben-Gurion was screaming, give the West Bank back. This is a problem we don't need. We just went through all of this trouble to get rid of these people, and now you're bringing them back into our fold. And ever since then, you know, the way that they sort of got around. that was this illusion of the peace process that there was always oh yeah this is the case now they don't

have full civil or political rights or any of those things but this that's because this is a temporary stopover until we figure out this whole peace process but you know they have come out and said that that is you know the idea of a two-state solution or anything like that is completely off the table now and forever and so if they do go forward and actually annex it without violently expelling the people, which I have to imagine is going to be, it will not be as easy as it's been for them in Gaza. And I don't mean militarily. I just, you know, A, Gaza started right after October 7th, and October 7th was a freaking nightmare. And the world gave Israel, like, even people who had been critics of Israel for a long time, a lot of people who've been critical of Israeli

behavior, they sort of kept their mouths shut for a few months. You know, they just, October 7th was ugly enough and traumatic enough that people kind of close their mouths for a while because, you know, we're going to give you a little bit of leeway to sort of respond to this terrible situation. They'd be starting this with the West Bank after all of that goodwill is spent. They're starting it at the end of that rope, not at the beginning of it. And they would have to do it against, you know, it's easier to do things like this to a place that's run officially by Hamas. Hamas, you know, say what you want about the Israelis. They're, you know, and they're not wrong that Hamas is a, is a nasty bunch, you know, and, um, well, wait,

here's my counterfactual type thing, though. Let's say that Netanyahu just starts firebombing Ramallah and Janine and telling all the Palestinians, you better run or I'm going to burn you to death. And then Donald Trump comes out and says, listen, I think that Nengi Yahoo, he just needs to solve this problem until it's solved and everything, you know, and then, and then who's going to do it? anything about it? Yeah, I don't. Who is actually going to go in there and stop them is a good question.

I don't have an answer for that. Or even politically, like, is Europe going to declare a full economic war on Israel or they're just not going to? They're going to curl up into a little ball and they're going to weight it out. They're not going to do nothing. And what's Donald Trump going to do? Tell them no. Donald Trump's not going to tell them no, dude.

Donald Trump is going to tell him, now is your chance. You know what he said two days ago? Go harder. Finish it. yeah you know you could be right because and it may just go back to that same thing as they know that the Europeans are not going to do anything the Gulf monarchies are not going to do anything the other Arab states that and Iran that have stood against them are hobbled right now and probably as weak as they're ever going to be and so get it done and everyone will call us

genocidal evil terrible awful people and all that kind of stuff and European leaders they they'll call us names but they won't do anything and then guess what 20 years from now when we're in charge of the levant and all that they're going to still want to be our friends just like in 1933 the united states came crawling back to stalin because the great depression was on and we needed a place you darrell cooper i guarantee you this is what netting yahoo's thinking right now and that yep and then when i'm dead they'll call me netting yahoo the great because i did it regardless of how i needed to i created greater israel I got rid of them, A-Rabs, the way Meyer Kahane always said we should, et cetera, et cetera.

That's his dream, man. And he's got total power. He's got, you know, America is the whip in his hand. I don't know what's stopping them now, you know? Yeah. I really don't. I mean, the only thing, you know, Israel in a way is like sort of, they're a version of what you were talking about in Ukraine where, you know, a lot, there's a lot of Israelis in the United States. and I don't mean Jews, I mean Israelis.

And a lot of those people who have left are the ones who they don't like... They were the more reasonable ones, yeah. Yeah, more reasonable. There's just people who they don't like when they travel around the world and everybody says, you know, you're from the apartheid state

and part of their mindset is like, yeah, kind of, you know, the people who have just sort of a, just a non-fanatical view of the Israeli situation. A lot of those people left, man. And, you know, if this starts getting even heavier, if Netanyahu does push forward and does something like that in the West Bank, you're going to see more of those people leave. And you're going to, what's left behind is going to be more just the distilled essence of the fanatism that drives people like Netanyahu and all of his followers. In alliance with Beletsky's Nazi Reich in Ukraine.

Yeah. Right. And, you know, what that, you know, just like in Ukraine, if they do come to power, you know, what that basically means is just they're going to see. this thing through to the end, whatever that means. Even people on the right, I find, you know, maybe not on like the libertarian side because they're a little more suspicious of democracy. But even people on the right, you know, they see democracy as this universal good that is just in a Fukuyama type way, really. Like this is where everybody should be headed and it will be headed. And if they're not, then we should probably do something about that, you know.

And you see this among Democrats, Republicans, whatever. But if you look at it, and this is what I was going to get into, and we can talk about in the episode, there's a lot of examples of places where, you know, democracy's probably not the best idea. And Ukraine was probably a good example of that, you know, where you have this country that is not a united country. You have an east and a west that are very, very different and separate from each other.

And the idea that one is going to elect somebody that lords over the other and then they elect somebody that gets revenge for that. you know is democracy the best the best course of action for a country like that or is it something that a country sort of graduates to once it reaches a certain level of development very yeah you got to believe in liberty first right yeah and you have to have a majority rule then it's war right democracy has to also mean respect for every kind of minority rights and all those other things yeah yeah and also you know you have to have things a certain level of economic development, for example. If you look at like in the 20th century, we have all these examples of

countries that were undeveloped, that we pushed economic development, economic liberalism at the same time as we pushed democratization. And so you have all these examples, like with the overseas Chinese in, you know, throughout different Asian countries where, you know, you go to the Philippines or Indonesia or something like that. And this tiny little Chinese minority owns all the airlines, 80% of all the conglomerates, they own just a the vast majority of the real economy because this is an agrarian country, you know, that was undeveloped. And what development there was was generally handled by this merchant class. It was mostly Chinese. And so when economic liberalism and globalization kind of, you know, made it to that

country, you're not, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, the son of a peasant is not going to go start a clothing, you know, a wholesaler that's going to compete with Chinese who have been trading overseas for eight generations, you know? And so all of a sudden, instead of having this little economic colony that was all Chinese and they handled what little commerce and overseas import export there was, you had this giant economy and you had all the billionaires in your country or Chinese, you know, and they're like 1% of the population. Oh, by the way, though, we're also democratizing your country. So the other 99% of you now get all the political power. So you have this 1% minority has all the cool stuff and all the economic power. The other 99% of you get all the

political power. And it was disastrous. It was not good being Chinese in Indonesia in the 1960s or many times since then. Back in those, when they had those riots and what was it like 99, 98 or something, those Jakarta riots, it was like it was like the LA riots in 92 where you know you have to watch like an obscure documentary made by a Korean lawyer. in Los Angeles to hear that 2,000 Korean businesses were burned down. The vast majority of businesses burned down in L.A. We're all Korean businesses. And in Jakarta, back in that right I'm talking about,

it was just thousands of Chinese killed, thousands of Chinese businesses, homes, looted, destroyed. And it was very much like a targeted ethnic thing is, again, it's like another example of when the goal of politics and a political system should be to allow people to live safe, prosperous, free lives. Sometimes democracy is the best way to do that. It's not necessarily always the best way to do it, I think, you know? Yeah.

Well, I'm much more an extremely limited republic, if anything, guy, myself, for those very reasons, because it's property and liberty or what's important. And one of the other things, go ahead. Two, I was just going to say one of the other things, too, is, you know, it's really hard to be a democracy. when you have the world empire, like, breathing down your neck trying to, like, control you and overthrow it. Like, imagine if, you know, if you think of, what was the guy who, the long time, like, you know, kind of token opposition to Putin, who was like the State Department's guy.

Huh? Nemtsov? No, no, no, no, no. Oh, Alexei Navalny. Navalny. like this is a dude who came to the United States and received training from the State Department, political campaign training and stuff, who was being, you know, his campaigns were being managed by like Western firms and things like that. And so when you look back at the Russiagate scandal

and the little tickety-tack things that they were like, this is treason, he needs to go to jail for the rest of his life, he's betrayed the country. Imagine if they had found out that Trump had traveled to Moscow and received training and funding and expertise from the Kremlin, you know, they would have thrown his ass in jail and locked, just locked him up forever. And that would be very undemocratic, right? It's just when you have that kind of thing going on all the time, it's really hard to be a democracy because individual representatives and everything are very, very easy to pick off and corrupt. Well, and look, and, you know, this goes back to what we're talking about a couple of weeks ago, too, where I was trying to say, I probably didn't say,

it very artfully, but where I was saying, if you even take Francis Fukuyama's bastardized version of libertarianism, right? Where, you know, to me, libertarianism is like pure American Declaration of Independenceism all the way distilled, right? Where Francis Fukuyama's basically just speaking for Bill Clinton. But then my, what I was trying to say was that even if they had just done the end of history thing, but just without all the wars, just trying to, maybe even being really arrogant about it but just really trying to kind of foist and encourage and do whatever they can not you know sanctions whatever but try to do everything they can to encourage other countries to adopt bottom up types of government sort of systems and property rights and markets

and prices and these kinds of things it would have been such a great advancement it's all the hypocrisy from the wars and all the blood and all the lies and all the law breaking in the name of enforcing the liberal rules-based world order that just makes the whole thing completely bankrupt and backwards and stupid. So I would not expect in good faith, Darfur, the average guy in India or China or Russia, to take the principles of liberty seriously because of the messenger is George W. Bush and his contemporaries, right, are coming to deliver freedom for you. And so, yeah, freedom means we kill you and your family or whatever. burn you rig your election or whatever it means like to all of these different places it just means

westernization or americanism and if you're you know talking about like these ukrainian nationalists or any of these countries like you know a place that elects narendra modi is their president you know they don't want to they don't want to be westernized they don't want to be americanized you know they're very it's a nationalist movement that's in power in their government you know it's the last thing they want even if it's you know uh we want to give you uh endless supply of cotton candy and cocaine, if that gets branded as like westernization, then nobody's going to want to do it if they're in a country that has any pride in itself, you know? And unfortunately, we poisoned a lot of those concepts. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Like, to me, India is a country

that really needs libertarianism badly. They've got this terrible caste system. They have a terrible ethno-religious split between Muslims and Hindus, where it's the second most populous Muslim country in the world after Indonesia, more than Pakistan. right is the number of Muslims in India and so the solution and they've had a very leftist economy they were never members of the Soviet bloc but they had a very kind of commie economy in the post-World War II era and where they're prosperous is where they've adopted property rights in capitalism and markets and in limited areas it has really allowed the caste system to fall away and where and this is the miracle of capitalism is where the average schmuck can own property

and improve it and exchange it he becomes not a schmuck anymore and can now you know really have liberty and build himself up and so india really needs that respect for individual rights on that basis for their prosperity and for their future peace and so it's doubly and triply evil then that w bush invaded iraq calling it freedom then so that this doesn't seem like a reasonable prescription for how to run a society because it sounds like a stupid gimmick. It sounds like marketing blather to say freedom and liberty and property rights and prices and all this stuff in the name of the most corrupt country in the world. Everybody knows that.

There's no capital more corrupt in Washington, D.C., not Beijing, not anywhere, you know. Did you see that, you must have seen it, that was a video. I think she was a NATO official, whatever she was just recently. talking about after that military parade in China, she's talking about, hmm, Russia and China one World War II, like that's news to me. Like something, did you see this? I'm like, who was it? It was like a NATO official or something. It was this woman who was like talking about it, but it was somebody who, I mean, everybody should know better, but like this woman should know better. I just wonder sometimes like what the leaders of places like Russia and China

and other countries are thinking when they hear. like a high government official of ours, say something like that. Oh, they know they all went to a government school. And they all like, they all must, you know,

you just wonder, but you know, you know what funny thing is, I was talking to a cop one time about how he's a buddy of mine who in L.A. He's retired now. And he was talking about how

cops, and this goes back decades, when they got into an interrogation room, they would interrogate people very often. Like they're basically playing an interrogator that they saw on TV. Like that's how they sort of like learn to behave. And then criminals also learned how to be the interrogated

like from TV. And eventually like this becomes, well now you just kind of learned this from the senior cop. And that's just like, you know, you didn't necessarily learn it from TV. Maybe it was reinforced. So this is just how you were trained. And you get like a generation down the line.

And you just like have two guys on opposite sides of the table playing TV characters totally like not aware of it at all, you know. And I wonder sometimes if, you know, I think the conceit or the assumption of a lot of people who, you know, they assume like, yeah, I don't think like this politician is Albert Einstein or something. But he graduated out of Georgetown law or something. He's not a moron, right? That when they say these kinds of things out in public, you know, just these slogan. ridiculous nonsense things. They pretend not to understand the similarities between our claims in the Western Hemisphere and Cuba and whatnot and Russia's and they're near a bro. That behind closed door, that that's all cynical, right? That's all stuff for public facing domestic democratic politics. And behind closed doors, you know, these people are like, yeah, we know the score for real. I don't know about that. Yeah. I think we're in that second generation now of comps where they're playing this character from the West Wing, and they don't even know it. Like, and so in countries that don't have the West Wing, you know, countries like China and Russia, where they're still doing

real politics and, you know, like living in history and in the real world, they must be looking at this. Like, these people are out of their minds. Like, they're just, they, Americans have lost their freaking minds. I think that's a great analogy, man. Smart ain't wise. You know, and yes, and I, you know, I think, to me, the greatest measurement of what you're talking about is, as, you know, I talk about this on the book and in, you know, various shows or whatever it comes up, that over and over and over, they just invoke World War II where Putin is Hitler and they are either Churchill or FDR facing him down, and then they'll switch immediately from that. They'll mix the metaphor even in one place, but there's only two metaphors available. The other one is the bully in the schoolyard, and you have to punch the bully in the nose, which Every single person saying this, by the way, is a dork, none of whom ever punched the bully in the nose, all of whom had to be rescued by the, you know, captain of the baseball team or whatever, who came and punched the bully in the nose for them. And so now they have these fantasies about punching people in the nose. That's all they ever talk about. I've debated Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, three times.

And every time, he just starts talking about World War II again. He doesn't know how to talk about this current conflict at all without just. just saying Churchill this and Neville Chamberlain that and Adolf Hitler and blah, blah, blah, he can't talk about the reality. And that goes for the whole lot of them. That's all they ever say about it. And they don't talk about, I mean, think about the way you and I talk about it. Well, you see, back at 2007 or whatever, no, they don't do that.

It's all, you know, metaphorical, metaphysical. It's not, they're not talking about the actual war that's even in question. So now, wait, we're going to have to go. but so I need to wrap this up with a good question for you to talk about then that like so wait are we not wrapped up I thought we were wrapped up oh no we're talking let's go yeah yeah Chris I think just turned us back on again we're still showing here well after I picked that fight with you last time and it was like yeah he knows he knows better than that again but unfortunately for you Chris I learned my lesson they're like I have two rules in life that I try to operate by one is never

to get into a fist fight with somebody who is in Vietnam and the other one that I say all the time in public is never ever find yourself in a debate with scott horton and i broke that rule one time and you didn't record it so that's too bad yeah no that was a good one in fact i was thinking about that i was too good in that i i don't want to convert you to be a libertarian on everything i need you to be a good right winger on the things that you're good on and so we're we can just pretend that whole conversation never happened um but wait so i have a question for you then to wrap up this topic before we let our wonderful listeners go, which is so then what all the hell does it mean then when Modi and Putin and Kim all go to visit Chairman Xi in Beijing and do a giant

military parade. And these are all nuclear weapons states. And they're all ganging up to what degree. I'm not exactly sure. I'm not going to lie and say to pretend I read 10 stories about what all they supposedly discussed or signed or what. But obviously they have the Shanghai cooperation organization and their various you know there's no real treaty of military alliance between Russia and China but seems like things are going more and more that way obviously America wanted to use India to him in the Chinese now Putin is apparently kicking India out and into chairman she's arms or maybe I'm reading too much into that but you know tell us about I don't think foreign policy magazine put it the new new world order Darrell yeah

I don't think you're, I mean, people who think that India is going to turn on Russia over all this stuff, I mean, it's just, they don't understand. They don't know anything about like Russia and Indian 20th century history. I mean, those countries have ties that go back a long time. And they've been there. Russia has been there for India at times when it mattered, you know, and they remember that kind of stuff. And they talk about it. And so that was just never, it was just never going to happen, not for something as piddling as, you know, what's going to. going on in Ukraine, not to denigrate it for the people who are going through it. But I think what, you know, when I saw that, especially just kind of the way they presented themselves together, like is this sort of very, very friendly, united front and doing it in public in a way that's meant to send a message. They understand that this is diplomatic communication when they go out on camera together, whether they're smiling or laughing or how they shake hands, all this kind of stuff. They know that just like their intelligence agencies pour over every one of those details. So does so does everybody else's. And so they think about these things, especially people

like them. And, you know, what I thought was that, you know, up until, honestly, up until now, but almost up until now at least, but up until very recently for sure, all of these countries, even as their power grew, and even as they found themselves wanting to resist sort of U.S. domination here and there. They were all sort of, they were all kind of separate from each other, interfacing with this global system that we had in place that everybody kind of had to interface with in order to function as a country and continue to move forward. They were all interfacing with it in their own way, trying to carve out their little

spaces of independence and, you know, not, they would talk about, you know, you have things like bricks and all these other things that are, you know, they talk about them as potential replacements for the dollar reserve system or the swift system, all these other kind of things, but they never really pushed forward on it. I think they're just at the point now where they realize that they realize, well, two things. One is that their power relative to the, now that they've actually seen, what is the real power of the empire? What's, what can America actually do, short of nuking you and all that kind of stuff? What can they actually do? Can they actually stop Russia in Ukraine can't you know and what what they found now is they know where the limits are

or they think they know you know and and so you combine that knowledge that new knowledge with a kind of understanding that the Americans are just are just never we're we're just not going to stop as long as this leadership class is in power here and you know they have to that's the leadership class they have to live with, that we're never going to reach a point where, you know, we sort of open up the global system to equal competitors, you know, and welcome them into it in a way that they're not going to have to push, you know, they're going to have to kick the door in. And the only way that they can do that is together. The only way that they can stand up against all this is together. And I think that, you know,

they're not going to get into a military alliance or anything like that. It's just them showing and showing the rest of the world that they're done sort of separately interfacing with this system that the Americans have created. And sort of even making noises in the direction, you know, the fact that like, you know, it's interesting. One of the things Fukuyama like to point out speaking to him is how, you know, yeah, not everybody's a democracy, but, you know, they still call themselves the dead. Democratic People's Republic of because that's, you know, to him, that's the direction history was going. And they had to bow to that, at least rhetorically. But really what it was is it was bowing to the prevailing zeit guys to some degree, but also just, you know, post-Cold war, especially, you know, countries like China still had to sort of mouth the words that showed

they were cool, they're safe, we don't have to worry about them. They're sort of, you know, and I don't think that they're doing that anymore. You know, I don't think that. they feel like they have to and I don't think they feel like they can anymore. And so, you know, again, I would just encourage everybody who like reads about that story and watches some of those videos to just remember, like a guy like she, like you hardly ever even see she smile in public. Like that dude gives nothing away. And Putin's like hardly better than, you know, or worse or whatever you want to say than, than she, hardly different from him in that. I mean, These are guys who are old operators in systems that, you know, they understand perfectly well that every twitch of your eye muscle is being analyzed and poured over by your adversaries, your rivals, and your friends.

And so everything they do in public is for a reason. They're not, you know, they're not doing anything just sort of, this is not Donald Trump, you know, where it's just, who knows, he doesn't even know what he's going to do today when he wakes up in the morning. you know every detail is thought over so but importantly i mean what you're saying is not that this is the new global regime we got to face but simply they're declaring independence from us and saying that the era of american superpower hegemony is over that's all yeah the hegemony yeah acceptable is that not acceptable the middle part of north america can't rule all of erasure forever darrell are you willing to accept that come on yeah And the, you know, the only way we've even been able to justify it to ourselves is that we have had this sort of this, this rhetorical device that works on a critical mass of European and American people that, you know, these countries are, they're autocrats.

They're, you know, they don't respect the rights of women or gays or they, you know, all of, they're just, they're not liberal capitalist democracies, which means that the people there are suffering under the yoke of these evil regimes that, therefore, we have a right to go over and intervene however we see fit to change that situation. But for a myriad of reasons, the fact that we're, you know, supporting a social nationalist in Ukraine, the fact that we're, you know, supporting a social nationalist in Ukraine, the fact. that we're just completely signing off on Israel breaking, you know, again, every military rule that we that we came up with since World War II, all of that rhetoric is really starting to have less and less of an effect, not only on people around the world, but on people in the West. And so, you know, it gets to the point where you have to get a guy like Donald Trump, who Donald Trump really doesn't do that at all. Donald Trump really speaks in the language of like old school imperial domination. If we're going to go to war, we should take the oil, we should take the rare earth mineral whatever it is like he's talking kind of out you know out loud that

way and and part of it is because he's just that guy but part of it also is because starting with the base that is is supporting Donald Trump but really spreading out into other corners of our political ecosystem now the the effect of those old slogans just is not having the same effect anymore and you can't justify the empire with them because everybody even the people pretend to believe them just laugh when they turn their head and you know have to pretend to cough or something and so um and so yeah the the era you know the america's still going to be a superpower you know and they still understand that we can break a lot of shit and hurt a lot of people if we get riled up they understand that they're you know again these are pragmatic people they wouldn't be in the

positions they are if they weren't and um and uh but but but i do think you know while it doesn't mean the end of America as a superpower. It's, it is the end of our global, do whatever the hell we want era. And how we respond to that, you know, it's going to, it's going to determine whether the 20th century is a repeat of the, or the 21st century is a repeat of the 20th. Maybe it was nooks involved. I mean, well, it's a great opportunity for us to do what we should have done a long time ago, which was stop doing what we shouldn't have been doing this whole time. And it's so obvious that everyone agrees about now, you know, a real important point that Larry Johnson, the former CIA officer, made to me that I completely omitted this in my book entirely. I'm such an idiot.

He's so right about this, that one of the things that really drove a wedge between Bush and Putin in the early part of this century, of course, was Putin's opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and which, you know, that's a veto on the UN Security Council. And to Bush, that was, hey, I thought we were friends. Now you're telling me I can't start a war and you're going to try to stand in my way. And Dick Cheney, too, that this was absolutely drew their ire

in a way that, you know, I just completely omitted that. I sort of took it for granted that, of course, they opposed it. The French and the Chinese opposed it to. But, yeah, they really singled out the Russians for a particular ire just based on that.

And yet now we all agree we shouldn't have done that. So how can anybody be mad at Putin for that now? You know what I mean? We've got to let that stuff go and move forward. Yeah. And the last thing I'll throw in before we let our very patient producer off the hook. You talk about just the mentality of the people in the regime who, you know, they were the ones getting shoved into lockers and they don't have never punched anybody in the face.

And so now the idea that they're the big captain of the baseball team is going to go stand up for the kid getting bullied. It's like this fantasy that they're playing out. There's another end of that too, like that because you wonder, Like, we have books. I mean, we have a, we have a freaking term that Thucydides trap, that all of these people who have been through like international relations 101 at Georgetown, wherever they went, they've all heard of it. They all understand it. They know about Britain and the rising Germany and World War I and how, just all of these things that they probably talked about. Like Britain maybe should have been more accommodating to the rising Germany and before 1914 and blah, blah, blah, all those things.

And yet do the complete opposite. And I think it's partly just because, you know, like when you go to Washington, D.C., this is one of the things that just drives me crazy whenever I go there. And maybe this speaks to like something about my own neuroses or insecurity, but it drives me nuts, is if you walk around down by the mall and not necessarily like over by the monument or whatever, but on the business streets, you know, like around that area.

And you walk around, you see the people who are walking around in their suits with their cell phone up to their ears. They like rush to lunch or whatever. and they all men women old young uh busy not bit whatever they have this like air about them this look about them like they are so so happy with themselves like there's the freaking washington monument right over there and i work in that building right there and like i'm in the shit you know like i'm a part of like i'm living out history and here i am right at the center of things like right in the middle of the death star working the controls you know and you take

people who have that sort of mentality and now you walk into a NATO summit you walk into a G7 summit and you're not the most powerful country of all the countries like that are coming to that thing no you're the fucking boss like you're coming in there and everybody yes sir no sir whether they put it that way or not like that's the way they treat you because you are the boss and those people they don't want to give that up they don't want to be like at a place where they have to say yes sir Mr. Putin, not in a deferential way, but in an equal way. They do not want that. They don't want a world where they don't walk into every single room around the world that they're invited into and have everybody drop to their knees. They like that. And I can understand why it's a very

human thing to like fall in love with a feeling like that. But I think that's the reason. That's one of the reasons that this Thucydides trap, you know, thing just because anybody could see. You would think anybody could forget Russia. Look at China. Anybody should be able to look at that situation and say, dude, China has been like the regional power over there for thousands of years. They had like a couple centuries where they were, you know, down and out. But the idea that we're going to take this very intelligent, very dynamic people with a with a very proud history that they're very conscious of, that we're just going to forever make it so that we're the boss like off their coast, you know, and we're going to determine what happens on an island,

a hundred miles off their coast forever. That's just ridiculous. And anybody with half of a brain should be able to look at the situation and say, you know, one of the worst possible things that could ever happen is if we get into a war with China. The second worst thing is if we're just, we're enemies with China. We're not friends with this country as they rise. We should find a way to adjust ourselves to the obvious reality

that is coming down the pipe toward us. And they just don't want to do it. Everything is just completely devoted to how can we avoid that situation? What can we do to bring about another Taiping rebellion or whatever we got to do? You hear that from people. You know, when you tell them these things, they say, yeah, but every like 100 years or so, China goes through a freaking meat grinder and eats itself alive, whether the Taiping rebellion or the, you know, the cultural revolution or whatever.

And so we just got to wait them out. They can't do this forever. They're going to collapse again. It's like, dude, like. They got capitalism now. That really is like mentality. Yeah, exactly. That's a big part of it right there.

You know, they've got the economic and social and political sort of pressure release valves that all of that provides, you know. And who knows, they may be right. They may be successful in bringing about another just unspeakable human tragedy in China and get what they want. I hope not. But I also doubt it at this point, you know, I think that the experience of being such a great country with a storied history and such a proud people that's used to being. you know, is used to being the middle kingdom, the center of the world, you know. The idea, like the experience of just being kicked around by Great Britain, France, and you never exactly been kicked around by the United States in the same way.

But man, that stuff has stuck with them in a way that they are determined not to let repeat itself. And you would think, again, you would think that these people who are in charge of foreign policy in the West, that they could see the way the wind was blowing and just say, you know, look, we've got to, America can be fine if China is the boss of what happens in Taiwan, you know, America will be fine. And America will be fine if Russia has the primary influence in the countries on its border, you know, but they just, they're not capable of making that adjustment. And if they are capable of it, they get run out of town replaced with people, you know, who are who are on. the team. So that gives it maybe like a little more of an air of inevitability than I would like to admit about it. But sometimes it does feel that way, you know. Yeah. All right. Well, look, we're going to have to wrap it here. Everybody tune in next week for more of the school bully and the captain of the baseball team picking on our foreign policy dorks who run our evil establishment here. Thanks for listening.

We're going to be able to be.