Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/22/26 Daniel Davis on Ukraine, Davos and the future of America’s Policy Towards Europe

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

Scott brings Daniel Davis back to run through some of the latest developments related to American foreign policy. They discuss how close the war in Ukraine is to ending, whether US-EU cooperation is starting to fracture, whether Russia has been effectively weakened by NATO since it invaded Ukraine in 2022 and more.  Discussed on the show: Daniel Davis / Deep Dive Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1and subscribe to his YouTube Channel. Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.comYou can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries in five years.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. All right, you guys, introducing the great Daniel L. Davis, host of the Daniel Davis deep dive here on the YouTube's, where you guys already watch them every day. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, sir? I'm doing all right, Scott. Thanks for having me,

as always. Happy to have you here. So for those not familiar, Danny was in Iraq War I and Iraq War II and Afghanistan, and he was the great whistleblower in 2012 about the failure are of David Petraeus's surge and tripling of that horrific war there. And now he is current day military and foreign policy analyst with a very sharp eye on, well, everything blowing up, basically. Let's start with Ukraine. There's still talk all the time about ongoing negotiations and even positive statements about how well they're progressing and this kind of thing.

It seems, Danny, that we just have to iron. out the permanent security guarantees for Ukraine and who's going to give them and what all do they mean? Well, pardon me, but that sounds like quite a sticking point, like maybe even the cause of the war in the first place. So I was wondering, but look, I don't know because a lot of things have changed. A lot of people have died and this war has been very expensive for Russia as well as for Ukraine. And so I don't know, man, there's got to be political reasons why people on all sides might be wanting to find a way to end this war sooner than later and maybe even possible. short of their goals if they could get a good enough deal.

I don't know, but what is your read? And I guess probably I should have asked first, maybe if you could stipulate how things are going on the ground in the war, whether it's just the same old status quo or any major changes in the battlefield situation. The only difference on the battlefield of what it's been is in the city of Kupiansk, up in kind of the northeast, yeah, the northeast part of the country, where Russia had taken it over and then the Ukraine side had a counterattack that drove Russia out of a good chunk of it. They haven't driven them all the way out, but they over like about a month of time now.

So it's not just a minor skirmish. They push Russia quite a bit out of what they had before. But as with the incursion they had into Kursk, that seven-month incursion they had a year or so back, you can't sustain it. So whatever you've gained now, it's just going to be a temporary pickup. up. It's going to be got a few headlines. It made a few people notice, although not that many. It came at high cost for the Ukraine side, but they'll eventually lose it because they don't have the wherewithal to hold on to it. They can't keep it. And Russia has more than enough capacity to eventually drive them back out. Meanwhile, in all the other areas, in the Sumi province,

in the Karki province, especially in the Zaporosia province, and elsewhere, even in the Donetsk and the Donbosso at large, Russia continues to move to the west or to the south. in the case of the two northern provinces. So Ukraine is on the losing side literally everywhere, except for the temporary setback in the Kupiansk area. And the bigger issues remain unchanged, which is that the Ukraine side doesn't have enough manpower. They don't have enough people that they can bring on,

that they can even force mobilized to bring into the war. They're bleeding people in a massive number, massive quantities on a regular basis, and that means both killed and wounded, plus they're also bleeding out in terms of, of AWOL in desertions, people are fleeing the battlefield. By some Ukrainian estimates I've seen recently, one said it was somewhere around 200,000 that they have lost,

and people have abandoned the fight in the past year. One said it was half a million. You can pick your number. Who knows what the truth is, but it's some large number on top of all the others. Meanwhile, on the other side of the line, of course, the Russians continued to expand their total sources, because whatever they lose in manpower, they more than make up for and add two.

So they keep expanding. They're by most accounts over 1.5 million active forces right now. And that's with all of the losses that they've had throughout the, you know, closing in on now the fourth full year of war. And then their capabilities in the defense industrial base continue to expand. Their missile types capabilities and numeric numbers keep expanding. They have new versions of these glide bombs and things. that are having extended range in greater explosion power. You know, the Erestic missile has now been used twice in an operational case.

It's already in production. We can't stop it. We can't even have a chance. We don't even slow it down. And that's just one of many different calibers of hypersonic missiles, et cetera. So every way that counts to winning a war of attrition, not just a battle, that Ukraine is doing well and has been for a month on the battle in Kupiansk, after it's already changed hands two or three times,

is utterly meaningless in the arc of the war of attrition. And that is all the things still stay in the Russian side. So Vladimir Putin is perfectly content to just let the status quo continue on. It's still up for debate whether he's going to at some point really bring in heavy pressure and just use mass and sheer force to be able to crack through probably some thin defenses. There are definitely some places where they could have some thin defenses and punch through, but they have chosen not to do that. that. It turns out they don't really need to, even though that's not the way the West would do war.

I didn't think they would do it this way, but that's what they've chosen and they can succeed. Whether they succeed fast or succeed slow, they're going to still succeed because the fundamentals can't be wished away. So the bottom line is the arc of the war remains unchanged and it is irrevocable on the Russian side. They will win the war. It's just a matter of how long it's going to take. Man, okay. So there's so much there. I want to go over, but I think before I go back and follow up, Let me keep going with the diplomatic part. Trump met with Zelensky in Davos and they had a good little talk. All that remains to solve the war, everyone agrees is what about the security guarantees?

But is that not the sticking point in the whole thing for all sides here? Well, for more than a month now, you've been hearing European and Ukrainian sources say we're 90% of the way there. We've gotten almost all the issues. We just have to iron out a few. The same language, they're using it right now, which means that that 10% hasn't budged. And that 10% is the literal issues that are at stake here. And security guarantees in the way that they're being talked about in the West, which is basically at Russia's expense, and that means that the capability of having a huge and massive-sized military, 800,000.

Russia is apparently willing to contemplate about 80,000, so about one-tenth. You have the issue of NATO. NATO doesn't want to get rid of that possibility. You want to keep it on the table. That's the core reason why Russia started the war in the first place. So they would never under any circumstances agree to any version of that. Yet that's what they're on the West are still trying to see into. Now, you mentioned that Trump had talked with the Zelensky at Davos.

A lot of people made something of that. Said, yeah, we're going to send now with Koff and Kushner, I guess back to Moscow again, just based on what they were talking in Davos. But Russia says, yeah, sure, bring them on in. That's fine. As long as everybody understand, it's the issues that we reached at Alainc, Ashridge, Alaska last year is still on the table, which is everything Russia said in June of 2024, which is the administrative borders of all four of the Oblast, plus Crimea, plus demilitarization, plus denotification, plus guarantees of neutrality and,

no NATO. So they say, yeah, as long as you understand, that's where we won't budge from. Sure, come on over. And I think that message is getting through to Zelensky as well, because I don't know if you heard, I actually had it on my show earlier today. Zelensky's speech that he gave after that was pretty telling. He said, have you ever seen the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray? He actually brought this up. He said that's kind of over and he literally said that. And you could see the disgust on his face because he saw the year ago, I was here and we talked about X, Y, and Z, and it's just the same day over and over. And I'm, I was thinking, yeah, you think?

No kidding, dude, because we're not going to do something that's going to potentially have a war with the nuclear-powered Russia. Nobody is going to give you stuff that you need because it doesn't exist, number one, number two, you don't have the manpower to use it if it did exist. So the longer you keep talking about the impossible, then, yeah, it's going to be Groundhog Day. So bottom line is that we still have the unwilling to acknowledge reality on the Western side, Russia is very keenly aware of reality and understands that reality is on their side and they're going to keep going until we either have a negotiated settlement on the terms that they'll accept that they've talked about since June of 2024 or they will win it on the battlefield and that remains unchanged. Okay. Now look, I'm just jealous of protecting my thesis in my giant book that I wrote and so I have a conflict of interest here, Mr. Davis. Maybe I'm wrong.

Okay. help me where I go off the story with my kind of construction of the syllogism here that a literal war guarantee to the Ukrainian regime that after this war if you'll agree to whatever other terms and all that you have our word America's word and Western Europe's word that if Russia ever attacks you again we definitely got your back next time and we will absolutely definitely put troops on your soil and help to propel them out for you with you. Now, the thing about that is, if I'm right and you help me to understand better, that first of all, that's completely absurd. And you'd have to be the dumbest SOP south of 100 IQ points to believe that these nations would be willing to fight a war against Russia on Ukraine's behalf someday, even though we can see in our trial period, right.

now for the last four years that actually know those states are not willing to send their troops to die and to risk escalating a war between NATO and the Russian Federation for Ukraine. So any security guarantee that they gave the Ukrainians is completely laughable and stupid on its face and not even Zelensky or anyone in his regime could possibly take that seriously that they would mean any promise to do that. And on the flip side of that same card, Mr. Davis, it would seem to me that when the Russians say, hey, listen, one of our real big things here is that we don't want Ukraine in NATO. And we want NATO to sign a treaty saying that and America to sign a treaty saying that.

And we want Ukraine to change their constitution back to say permanent neutrality. You'll never join the NATO alliance. And then I wonder, because this is a little bit unclear, especially for, from Moscow's point of view, do you think? To what degree is a solid war guarantee from Germany, Poland, France, Britain to come to Ukraine's aid in the next war, equivalent to NATO membership anyway and good enough reason for the Russians to keep fighting, actually just based on this sticking point that they continue to want to stand by, that they want to give these guarantees about a future conflict here?

well i mean sure when you say it like that it sounds dumb but but there's not another way to say it i mean i've just been pulling my hair out uh just not i can tell why i you're worse than me even i'm going ball too over this terrible yeah so let me let me take a few more pieces out here uh because yeah i mean we're now into 2026 we're we're literally what we're just barely one month out from the conclusion of the four full years of war and will be entering into the fifth. And we're just as detached from reality as we've been in each of the previous four as we were before all this when the balance of power was fully known and we knew we couldn't

survive a war of attrition. But I don't know. I guess they wanted to try it anyway and think that maybe reality can be spun away. We got four years of proving that that's not the case. But here we go again. And why we would want to continue to pursue. pursue the unattainable and the impossible. It just belies any kind of logic unless you say, well,

privately, a lot of these leaders are fully aware that that's the case, that they can't win, and that they're not going to get these terms. And they may be, and there's some plausible suggestion of this, that the Western people are well aware of this, and they're okay with dragging this thing out because they want to start building up their military capacity. they want to start building up their defense industrial base, and apparently they're putting some money behind that, growing their militaries over the next number of years.

And if they have to sacrifice the entire country of Ukraine to get that done so that Russia won't want to come after them, I guess they're willing to do that. But there's no reason why Russia would ever want to do that. They have, going back to 2007, they had been saying about Ukraine and NATO was something they'd go to war over, but they have always said the opposite, that they have no interest in going and,

conquering Ukraine or the rest of Europe because, I mean, there's nuclear warheads that are involved. You have Article 5 things that are involved and Russia doesn't want to get into a war. It can't win and that it would cause profound damage to its entire country if they started. There's nothing to gain. So there's no logical reason why they would want to. All of that together makes you pull my hair out because there's there's no reason to think that what the West is trying to accomplish and wants to accomplish is even attainable. But that's where we are. Yeah.

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And they will always do you right. That's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. at rrbi.co. All right. I'll have to get back to Baletsky in a minute if I don't forget. But let me talk about Greenland for a minute and what it has to do with all this. So it's a huge controversy. And from what I saw, the most recent thing I saw Trump's already climbing down and saying,

well, he's just going to have some bases in Greenland, which is what he already had the right to do under the 1951 treaty anyway, whatever. I don't know. But I'll say this, though, that in the controversy, over Greenland. It's been just huge. And the European leadership is just completely freaking out over that and throw in the Canadians with them. And the prime minister of Canada gave this speech where he says, man, the liberal rules-based world order. We can't believe it's being turned against us now. What that always went was America writing exceptions for the international law for

itself to go ahead and do what it wanted. And so, such as, say, for example, in Serbia and Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and wherever. So Ukraine. So now they're saying, well, geez, the fact that Trump is willing to pick this fight within the West over Ukraine, pardon me, over Greenland, and to such a degree that this is, if it's not the end of NATO entirely, that it severely threatens its credibility and legitimacy and believability by the European leaders themselves. And I actually didn't see this myself, but I believe a guy who interviewed me earlier and brought it up in a question, he said that, I believe the chancellor of Germany said that considering how America is treating us now and turning their back on us and this kind of fight over Greenland and everything, maybe it is time that we go ahead and start talking to Putin.

In other words, we've been, you know, Europe's big brother protecting them and they've been talking a lot tougher. then they actually, you know, have the strength to follow up with. And now that America seems to really be turning away from them, they're saying, okay, well, maybe now we have to be reasonable, right? We've been given them this moral hazard this whole time. And so regardless of the stupidity of the Greenland thing, it seems like that could be a real beneficial thing for world peace. If NATO breaks up at least de facto, it becomes, you know, strongly reduced

and America's obligation to be the dominant force in Europe ends up really receding even potentially, I don't know, dare I dream that Colonel McGregor gets his way and we start pulling forces out of Germany and Italy and coming home. That would be great. That would be the best silver lining to Donald Trump's insane belligerence that I could possibly think of.

But I wonder how you take the temperature of the various politicians involved in this stuff. So I had seen that Friedrich Schmatz had made that comment about talking to Russia. I didn't see that it was in the context of Greenland. If that's the case, maybe it did. I just didn't see it. I may have got that.

That's also on top of Maloney from Italy, who also said it. So it's spread now. And of course, I've always had Fido from Slovakia and Victor Orban from Hungary. So now then that group is starting to grow as people are starting to recognize, yeah, this ain't going to work. It's not going to fly. Back to your point about Greenland and its nexus and all. of this. However, Trump appears to have, is going to change the terms and just back down because he

had said with some vehemence about 24 hours before all of this that, no, we have to have Greenland. We can't just get a 99-year deal or something. We can't get a lease. No, we have to control it. We have to have full control. Now he's signaling today. We still haven't seen any details that now he's, as you say, he's now he's talking about basically just abiding by the terms that already existed. in 1951 about we can expand our military footprint on there if we deem the requirement, which both Denmark and Greenland had been offering from the beginning and saying, hey, just abide by the terms of the deal. You can expand on that, but you're not taking over anybody.

And the idea that we would even want to by itself was absurd and insane that we would spend somewhere around $700 billion and take on all of the requirements to take care of that population that right now Denmark is doing was just off the charts and saying, would we want to spend extra money on that, which wouldn't add anything to our national security except for add more to the national debt? And I think maybe all that stuff has finally come to rest on Trump's recognition, even in his state, and he's going to recognize it. So that's cool. But here's the problem that the damage done from the fact that he took it up to this point and made it clear in light of his lawless actions in Venezuela, the grotesque lawless actions there,

seizing tankers on the high seas, blowing up people, summary executions of those accused of running drugs. The already attack on Iran in 2025, the attacks in Nigeria, then in Iraq and Somalia, several other places, and now the apparently likely bigger attack on Iran that's coming possibly before the end of this month. And then he was willing to push all the way up to the edge on our allies here. they see that the rule of law has ceased to exist, and even among their allies, they said they can no longer trust the United States. I just had a meal with a diplomatic friend of the United States, I'll just say. Somebody from here in Washington, D.C., I won't say which country, but they say, this person said that they're basically pulling their hair out because they believe, and this is, this was privately, so that's why I won't even tell you the country, that they agree, that I agree with what they said, too, which is, I think that, President, President Trump is in genuine cognitive decline, and he's in some sort of dementia to where he is not, he doesn't have his coherence about him.

So they're afraid that he can do literally anything, even something that self-evidently doesn't make sense like this Greenland for a. And so they're already wanting to put some distance. But as this person told me, and I also agree here, is that the nature of the United States itself and how it's so dysfunctional even inside of its own borders with itself. and a lot of this rhetoric precedes Trump in some regards. He's heightened it, but a lot of people, if Trump goes away, if it's a 25th Amendment, if he has a, you know, God forbid has a heart attack or something or resigns or anything else or just comes to the end of his term, there's going to be no shortage of a lot of people who are going to want to have the same rhetoric

and grab all that magot-top power, all the people in the United States that believe that and carry it on forward. So they don't see any reason to think Trump or no Trump that all that stuff's going away. and they're starting to distance themselves already. Now, my assessment and my reading, and I don't have any inside information on this, but just reading the evidence that we have is that I think that NATO recognizes that its future, they do not want to put their national security in the hands of an unstable United States and a NATO country that is detached from the rule of law or any kind of morality other than

whoever's in the Oval Office. And so I think that they're going to start to form their own alliance. So I think that they're recognizing it's time to do what they probably should have done decades ago. And that's to provide for their own national security. So whether we leave or are kicked out, I think that NATO is dead. I don't think it's going to survive too much longer. It may just limp into a years-long death. I don't know, but I just don't see it surviving in its current form that it was at the end of the Cold War.

Hey, guys, Scott here for Moondos artisan coffees. It's the Scott Horton Show-flavored coffee, breakfast, blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee and it'll forge you on there to Moondos artisan coffees. Get it. They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course. And so they're Moondos and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton's show coffee is the number one bestselling coffee at Moondos artisan coffees right now. Just go again to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. Well, I hope you're right about that. And it's clearly unnecessary unless you're

just Washington, D.C. and you want what you want, but Germany and France and Poland don't want a fight. And as we've seen, it's been America incentivizing them to pick this fight with Russia all along unnecessarily. They could have joined into a common European home, as they called it back then, created an EU army. Branson Britain got nukes. So they can guarantee Germany doesn't need to make their own nukes. They can have an alliance with France and Britain. And they can have an EU land army for whatever local policing mission type thing. There ain't no reason the world that has to be the American people's business at all. Never did.

The whole thing. I mean, and just look at who's been in charge this whole time. Clintons and Bushes and Biden and McCain. These are the most irresponsible stewards of American power that you could have possibly relied on to call these shots and make these decisions this whole time. And look at what they've wrought. It's been a disaster.

Yeah. like, why do we need to be there? I don't know. The Germans never felt the need to militarize in the face of the Russian threat in any time in the last 25 years. Why? Because they knew the Russians weren't coming because there's all a bunch of crap. America's starting all this and getting them into this. So I sure hope you're right.

I mean, man. And whatever, dude. Trump can be Trump the Great for a day and be horrible again tomorrow. But at least even if he's actually. accidentally doing the right thing. I'm in support of it here. All the belligerents about Greenland and the embarrassment there notwithstanding because I really don't care about that. But now, so let me get back to the war here real quick because one of the things that you brought up there was about the thinking in Washington and Europe about keeping the war going and how they must

recognize. They have to have recognized from the beginning. And I think we know that they did that the Ukrainians can't win. The point was to make the war last as long as possible because the Ukrainians don't matter, but the Russians do. And inflicting costs on the Russians is the end. That's it. There is no like, I mean, they talked about their fantasy is that Putin was going to fall and Russia was going to be broken up into 15 pieces and all of this crap. But at the very least, what they're trying to do is inflict the most Pyrrhic of victories as possible onto the Russians. Of course, they're going to win at some point. We're going to make that take as long as possible and cost as many rubles and as many dead young Russian men's lives as possible in order to get from that point

to this one. And that's what's going to make it worth it. And I don't know how true this is. It could have been holy CIA war propaganda. It could have been absolute gospel truth. I have no way to measure it. But I read a thing and almost certain it was the Wall Street Journal saying that Russia's economy really is suffering here. You know, when they say GDP is at an all-time high. Yeah, but that's like Kenzie and BS about aggregate demand. where the government is ordering military supplies, that's all a net negative from the real economy, supporting people's standard of living there.

So maybe you can have a slight argument for like juicing overall industrial production or the velocity of money getting into the hands of people or whatever. But ultimately, this war is a cost to Russia, even if they can delay it. And so that seems to be, you know, just the thinking of it, if it, whatever counts as the thinking in Europe, if not in Washington anymore, maybe all of Washington except the Trump White House, that that's really their goal here is to just make the war last so long, which is, of course, so reckless because that just means they're providing more and more opportunities for things to go sideways and for somebody to

read a radar scope wrong and get us all new or something like that. So I guess I wonder what you make of that. And then also I wanted to revisit the thing of what you said about the desertions on the Ukrainian side because it's only in Washington's eyes that these people don't matter. In fact, they do. And in fact, their country's being completely destroyed. And you said the conservative estimate, that's what I had read. The conservative estimate is a quarter million desertions. And that includes at least hundreds of people who have died in the river trying to cross into Romania. And it's like a very turbulent river of people drowning trying to escape the country. It's just been horrific. And so, um, yeah. Let me start off with this assumption that we can harm Russia and

for however long from here to there where that end is finally reached is that as long as there's a big cost on Russia, it's cool. As long as, uh, however many Ukraine are dead, that's irrelevant. Uh, they don't matter anyway, but at least it was harm in Russia. That's the belief. A couple of things that really need to be pointed out. Number one, yes, there, the Russians have have a wartime economy. And a lot of it is based on the war. time production, et cetera. So that's kind of, I won't say been deceptive on their economic strength. It's just it is. That's what they've done. And it is maintaining its pace, even though Western Europe is way below that. So if it's good for Russia, why is it not bad, even worse for the Europeans when

their economy isn't being able to keep this up? But like every country that's ever been at war, to include the United States, once the war is finally over, you're going to retool and you're going to reorient, etc. And you're going to move on with normal economic activity. That's just the way it works. I don't know why anybody would think that that's a positive thing for our side or that somehow that has the implication of a collapse. I don't know of the Russian economy because there's no evidence of that. There's no lines to draw. But the second thing is that this assumption that we're weakening Russia is not correct. We have because of these actions, Russia is profoundly stronger now than they were when this war started. Number one is just in the

performance, the tactical performance and the operational performance to their forces because they had virtually no combat experience at all prior to this and it showed so much in the first nine months especially, they made some egregious mistakes. They don't make those kind of mistakes anymore, certainly not at that

level. And they have learned a great deal about how modern war is being waged because they are setting the standard for how a lot of modern war is being waged. And they understand the pace, they understand the risks, the securities, where you can take some gambles where you need to be safe, how to make sure that you can succeed over time,

how the logistics is going to work, and obviously some specific things like the drone warfare, the counter drone warfare, the air war, the air defense war, and the industrial capacity, the rate that you need, how you need to, how much you need to do to your economy to keep all this going, the manpower, the training, the rotations in and out to keep the troops safe and all that, all of that stuff they now have, they're virtually experts at. The only ones that are even close is Ukraine's side. As bad as they've been beaten and as lower as they are on all these dynamics, they have performed profoundly better than I think anybody in the Westwood right now

because we don't have any experience in virtually anything I just mentioned. We just looked at it from afar. So in the event that there was a conventional clash, obviously if it goes nuclear, then nothing matters and we're all dead. But if it was a conventional clash, we would have our ass handed to us, Scott. We would be crushed because we have created the condition. whereby the Russian army is now the absolute cream of the global crop right now to include even on our frontline battle tank the Abrams battle tank is proven to be completely obsolete correct in the out in terms of the way we used to use it it still has a role tanks still have a role armor vehicles still have a role but they are substantially subordinated to what they were and if you're not aware of that if you use them in the wrong way you'll have the same thing happen as what happened to Ukraine at 2023 oh man All right. I want to let you go, but I want to ask you one more thing. Could you please elaborate a little bit more about the new missiles?

More hypersonics, more new, better improved hypersonics being deployed. This is all diplomatic language just as well as they are successful strikes on Ukrainian targets. So tell us about the missiles and how you interpret their latest use. Yeah, we've had at least two operational deployments of the Ereshnik. And that's the biggest one because it has a, it has a, multiple warhead reentry vehicle, and we've seen them. It looks literally like lightning striking from the sky, and the warheads are going so fast. They're just streaks of light. Nothing that exist in technology, not even on the Russian side,

exist that can knock those things down. Absolutely nothing. It doesn't even exist. And then you have normal hypersonics. You have normal ICBMs, which both, you actually everybody who's got nuclear weapons. They're virtually all impenetrable, the meaning we can fire ICBMs at Russia, and there's nothing they can do about it.

They can't knock them out of the sky. If Russia fires them back, we can't knock them out of the sky. But now with this arrest, Nick, now then there's also conventional warheads that we can't do anything about. And that's kind of a new situation here. With these hypersonics that Russia has, and now they're put into serial production, and they're advancing in different, what's the word, different series already. So they've gone through like a first stage and now a second stage. And in some cases, they're developing a third stage with the drones, for example.

They started off with the garen and then they went to the garen twos. And now they have some jet powered garen three. So just in the course of this four-year war, they've already gone through four or three generations of those ones. And you can imagine there's other things in development with these arrestings. We're just now trying to get hypersonics. I don't even know if we have any in actual production yet. And I know we're trying to come up with some, but we don't have any of those.

Even the glide bombs, the what we have, I think we call them the GBUs from our aircraft. The Russian side has been using them for years now, but they have now advanced their capacity and their targeting capability and their ability to get through electronic warfare and strike their targets, but now they've also nearly double the range and the payload. So they're able to go even further. So the Russian jets have to have to can now stay from even further outside of the range of air defense on the Ukraine side. So they don't have to put them at risk. And there's nothing the other side can do to stop them. So those are all some of the major, major issues that shows the advancement that the Russians, none of which would

have happened if we had stayed in the ABM treaty, number one, and number two, if this war had never started, because Russia wouldn't have developed any of these probably, or they'd still be on the drawing boards. So congratulations, West. Good job on helping Russia get advanced. Yeah, absolutely. W. Bush and John Bolton and their war against the anti-ballistic missile treaty. I mean, Vladimir Putin was the first foreign head of state to call W. Bush on September 11 to say, I'm with you, man. I'm at your service. You want to help invade Afghanistan. Let me help you kill bin Laden. Dude, we'll be pals. I'll do whatever you say. Come on. And Bush turned right around and tore up the ABM treaty. And which, by the way, everybody always forgets this, but that also

killed new start with the Russians had already signed and ratified in which Bill Clinton had negotiated, but the Senate hadn't ratified it. I don't know if he had even signed it. It was still up for Bush to sign it and the Senate to ratify it. The Russians had already ratified, Stark 2, and then they unsigned it and dropped it. And Stark 2 would have banned all multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, one warhead per rocket for everybody. And then that in the INF tree, which Trump, I think, is the one that got rid of that one too. That's right. That's what actually led to the Eurasianic of primarily.

Yep. And also, I mean, that's a huge part of what led to the Ukraine more as well, because now not only do you have these dual-use, these dual-use launchers in Europe, now it's not even illegal for you to put Tom Hawks in there. And now you're threatening to bring Ukraine into NATO where you could install those same so-called anti-missile, anti-ballistic missile launchers that can host Tomahawk cruise missiles that now even legally can host, can hold, can be tipped with hydrogen bombs. So huge part of what even started the war there. So yes, absolutely, just the height of treaty, the height of folly, the way they've tore up these nuclear treaties, it's the wars.

But anyway, thank you, man. It's so good to have you on the show, Danny, and maybe next time we'll catch up on the latest horrific news coming out of Syria. But I'll let you go for now. But thank you very much. Yeah, I always say it sounds weird to say I look forward to it, but I guess I kind of do. So I'll tell you later, man. All right. See.

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