TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #417: An Ex-Intelligence Officer's View on Ukraine with Lee Slusher

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Marty sits down with Lee Slusher for a sober analysis of the war. Lee on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LeeBTConsulting Lee's Substack:https://deepdivewithleeslusher.substack.com/ Lee's website: http://lee-bt.com/ 6:24- Lee’s background 9:43 - War in Ukraine and possible outcomes 16:30 - History leading up to current war 21:13 - Derussification 24:02 - Comparing Ukranian and Russian military 31:43 - Western intervention 38:38 - War’s role in economic crisis and US election 43:23 - Afghanistan 50:04 - If we fight Russia and lose 55:01 - US and EU need to solve their own problems 1:04:16 - How do we get back on the right track 1:11:55 - Taiwan 1:26:37 - Realistic evaluation 1:32:51 - Wrapping up, plugs Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc very important rip i think one of the most important rips we've had in quite some time logan what are your thoughts we're gonna die at some point don't say that it's obvious did you get any knowledge out of this episode stuff i hear my brother talk about a lot all right guys yeah some confirmation and some knowledge his brother spreading to him i sat down with lee slusher founder of bt consulting ex-military ex-intelligence i know what you're thinking freaks oh my god what are you doing you're infiltrated i think if you listen to the episode you'll you'll appreciate what lee's putting And this rip was brought to you by our good friends at River.

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you probably should be. Lee Slusher, welcome to the show. Thanks, Marty. Good to be here. it's good to have you on uh dave column dm me a couple weeks ago and said hey you have to reach out to this guy lee i think he's got a very interesting perspective on the world very interesting background so i dove into your sub stack read a bunch of your twitter page and i definitely agree with him at first with your twitter handle uh bt consulting i thought it was btc i thought you had a bitcoin tilt to it but oh no no unfortunately not i had created another company uh in a different state before i knew i would be moving to virginia and i put all

kinds of thought into it like oh i'm a writer so i'll call it sumerian consulting because you know the sumerians invented language and then when i moved it was just easier to create a new company all together and i said how the hell with it i don't want to put another all this thought into a new name and i said bt is in about time so that's that's the whole origin story of the dave it has nothing to do with bitcoin and so i guess to jump into it before we talk into like the wider geopolitical landscape right now i think talk a little bit about your background where you came from and why you decided to start this consulting firm yeah i started my career about 25 years ago in the u.s army and i was what's called a cryptologic linguist so i had

to study foreign languages and cryptography and then i worked in signals intelligence and electronic warfare. So I got to study Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and then after 9-11, Dari, which is Afghan Farsi. And after I left the military, I continued to work in the Defense Department in various capacities, doing intelligence work, sometimes for the intelligence community directly, but much of it for an army organization that's now deactivated, known as the Asymmetric Warfare group. And I had the opportunity to do basically both real world intelligence operations and the strategic stuff. So in terms of the real world stuff, I deployed to Afghanistan four times, once to Iraq. And in terms of the strategic stuff, I wrote national intelligence assessments,

mainly about things like foreign military capabilities, irregular warfare, that sort of thing. And with that background, I was able to go do things that I found a bit more interesting. I ended up working in Taiwan off and on for a few years as the architect of an effort to revamp their defense planning. And we can get into that in a little bit. I also was in Ukraine in 15 as part of the team that assessed the Ukrainian military for future security cooperation. I've written a bunch for the Defense Department about how Russia took Crimea, Russia's capabilities, all sorts of things like that. And I've worked with a bunch of NATO countries in Europe and in Afghanistan and here in the States. And about five years ago, I started my own consulting company.

And initially with some legacy kind of defense clients, but mainly now going more in the private sector, the real private sector, not the defense contracting private sector. And last year, I started my own sub stack, which is a deep dive with Lee Slesher. So happy to take it wherever you'd like to go. Yeah, we mentioned this before we hit record, but diving into your substack and looking at your Twitter, having been in the intelligence community for as long as you were, it seems that you've broken off and you're going a bit against the grain of the mainstream. You may not completely agree with the strategy that's being employed by the U.S. particularly. Yeah, that's correct. In fact, I disagree entirely. I've written about this for many years now.

and even it especially when Russia annexed Crimea they invaded and annexed Crimea and then the war in Donbass started this was to 2014 that's when the U.S. I think reawoken and started paying attention again to Russia because the focus had been elsewhere it had been on all of this global war on terrorism stuff it had been focused on this pivot to Asia that Obama wanted but then here was Russia again and by this point a lot of the people who had expertise and language skills had already retired and passed away. There weren't that many of us, but I was there and I got to do a lot of the work. And from very early on, whenever I or anyone else I saw tried to explain what Russia thought, its policies, like what it really could do realistically, it would result in raised

eyebrows or, you know, head nods. There was this really cartoonishly two-dimensional view of Russia of what it wanted. Everything was, you know, this kind of Boris and Natasha sort of nonsense. And that path has led us to where we are now. I've written a lot on my sub stack about the war in Ukraine. Rubble and rhetoric is the big piece that's gotten the most views, which basically says that this war, in a war between Russia and Ukraine, Russia wins easily. In a proxy war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine, Russia wins eventually, but with a lot more death and destruction and mostly for Ukraine. And none of it needed to happen. And I was just bewildered over the past year, nearly a year and a half, well, even longer than that, when the current administration came

in, they started talking about Ukraine and NATO, and it was Biden and Harris and Blinken and Austin, all of these people. And I thought, like, what on earth are they doing? Like, are they trying to start a war? And when the war eventually started, I think a lot of people forget our leaders were saying that Russia takes Kiev in a weekend, right? Like this proxy war, at least in my view, is largely a reaction. And that makes things much more dangerous because it's not part of, you know, we did from 2014 to 2020 to build up this massive Ukrainian force. I'm well aware of that. It had some role in the early days of it. But the response seemed very ad hoc to me. And we're playing chicken with, first of all, with a country that has nuclear

weapons. And secondly, over something that really isn't in our national interest at all. And it's doing all sorts of things. I mean, it's killing hundreds of thousands of people. It's using up all of our munitions. It's causing a lot of discord within Western alliances. I mean, we see many weekends we see these massive protests all across europe like get out of nato you know end the war at least talk about peace these kinds of things but the people at the helm don't appear to be interested in any of that but they can only keep that up for so long because reality is is coming back around to hit him in the face and so i think they're looking for well in the in the peace and rubble and rhetoric i explained how a series of excuses that i think these these leaders

will employ when after Russia essentially achieves all of its goals in Ukraine. And I think right now what we're witnessing through the press is the White House trying to desensitize the population to the fact that the outcome is not going to be the one they had promised. In fact, it's the exact opposite of that. And as it comes along, they keep, you know, like early in the year, there was that massive meeting at Ramstein in Germany of all the nations supporting Ukraine. And they pledged this huge weapons package, which we were told from, you know, by all sorts of people was going to be decisive.

And it was going to be not just that it was going to push the Russians back, but it might even allow them to take Crimea. I mean, just all of this fanciful nonsense. Well, a few months later, it's, man, maybe we can't keep up our defense production. Our defense industrial base isn't sufficient to support this high intensity industrial warfare, period. and or to supply our own needs. We can't do both. And then now the message is, well, this upcoming counter-offensive is make or break. Like they're just slow walking it

to sensitize everybody that it's not going to work out. And when it doesn't work out, I think we're going to see some variation of the various types of excuses I wrote about in the concluding section of Rubble and Rhetoric. But I'd like to back up just a moment. I think broadly speaking, there are two possibilities going forward. One is that there is some sort of direct Western

intervention, not the funding of a proxy war as we've seen thus far, but an actual direct intervention, be it from NATO or some sort of coalition of the willing. This is the worst case scenario. If this happens, all bets are off and the potential for nuclear escalation is certainly there. Then the other possibility is for Russia to win decisively enough militarily to really set the terms for peace. Because if we look at any talk of peace, there were various points when Kiev seemed open to it, but the West basically stopped it at every turn and everybody started saying really crazy things like, well, a precondition for negotiations is that Russia simply gets out of Ukraine. You know, not only that it returned to its pre-February 22 boundaries, but that it

get out of Crimea as well. Well, this was never going to happen. So in effect, this was a refusal to negotiate. And so now, you know, Russia is systematically destroying the Ukrainian military and much more of Ukraine, despite the nonsense that we see in the press about shortages and dysfunction and all of this, they're doing quite well. And they're being patient, which is the the smart thing to do they're not rushing in they're building up an army not just to to achieve their goals in ukraine but because they too are worried about a western intervention so their defense industrial base is in full swing they're mobilizing they have hundreds of thousands of people presently in the field and that's not just uh to crush ukraine and to to achieve their

objectives there but it's also that they're on guard for a potential western intervention this is all very dangerous yeah yeah it seems extremely dangerous and as an american citizen who's extremely online has been following this since the beginning i completely agree it seems like the mainstream media and this current administration is completely trying to gaslight the american people about the situation over there and the status of the ukrainian army verse russia and i think it's important to go back to like 2014 because that's another thing that people like to gaslight others about which is you have the videos or the pictures no the videos of like lindsey graham and john mccain uh saying hey we're gonna we're gonna

build up your army and you're gonna go defeat russia and then you have victoria newland in the mix really throwing um uh her weight around in that part of the uh the world and what leading up to february of last year like what were the options that we had and like what actually led it to the point where russia felt compelled to invade it's it's a long slide i mean even before crimea so you have to look a real brief summary of some of the key points since the Soviet Union collapsed, right? The 90s were basically this Wild West period. There was very weak governance. Russia was involved in one, and then a second war in Chechnya. There was a lot of organized crime. The oligarchs were taking over. In came Putin, and by about the mid-2000s, he had

reigned in the oligarchs in various ways, but he basically brought them to heel. He was restoring some order. And once he had his domestic house in order sufficiently, he turned his attention elsewhere. He started resuming the long range bomber flights out of Russia along Ukraine. He did all sorts of things. The Russian view is not a mystery. I think we get, when I say things like cartoonishly two-dimensional, what I mean is we think of the Russians in a way that everything is a lie. Everything is subterfuge. Now, no doubt they are masters at deception, but that doesn't mean that everything they say is nonsense. And we have to find a way to figure out some baseline of what they think and what they want. And the way that I've done that successfully

is you look at a handful of different things. Russia has just many voluminous public policy documents, often that are translated into English. So that's what their official policy is. Then they have, for example, key speeches from leaders, and then they have things like defense appropriation. So in other words, over time, is their message consistent and are they putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak? And they were doing that. But the West with the U.S. at the helm was really blind to this. So I think there's some disagreement, even among people who agree with me on all sorts of other related topics, as to whether, you know, the West has been out to destroy Russia all along. Now, my view from having worked in government and just from looking at the situation analytically is that up until about 2014, we didn't really care. You know, Putin, for his part, he was kind of consolidating and starting to reassert himself abroad. you know we have the georgia war we have all sorts of things like that but nobody was really paying attention outside of these really niche circles like mine

and now what we ended up with was some people think that there was this intentional plan to destroy russia but my view is basically everything i saw was our leaders saw russia as a sort of semi-civilized hinterland that provided resources and the occasional headache. And the only real policy was to maximize the former and minimize the latter. The Western order was dominant. We were going to do what we were going to do, and they were just going to take it. So it's an issue of motive, not that I think we were bent on destroying Russia, but that we just said, well, they can't really do anything. What are they going to do about it? I mean, if you look at the 2008 Georgia war, despite all the many

warnings, despite things being written in policy documents and included in key speeches from significant leaders. No one in the West really objected to Russia having the Sochi Olympics in 2008. And then shortly thereafter, they conducted a war like right next door in Georgia. So it's that kind of disconnect. I don't think the plan was destruction. But then came the coup in 2014. And let's call it what it was. It was absolutely a coup. I think I've seen over the past, whatever, 14, 15 months, I've seen a lot of people reference the electoral maps in Ukraine, right, to show the sort of the pro-Western and the pro-Russian sides. And it has been used for both sides to say, oh, see, you know, we didn't understand them. And on another side, people say, no, no, that's just democracy. You know, the side that wins gets to decide things.

Well, what those people misunderstand is that the things that have been ongoing in Ukraine for quite some time, but most especially since 2014, are things that under other circumstances our government would consider ethnic cleansing. uh you know this de-rucification campaign of telling people that they shouldn't speak russian the renaming of towns i mean we've heard uh for months now about bakhmut in eastern you know in dunbas that's not even his regular name i mean it was renamed in 2016 so there's this campaign to systematically excise the the russianness out of that part of society even though huge swaths ukraine are ukrainian in name only i mean i've had many russian friends over the years whose families kind of are from both of those regions and every time we met we spoke russian and they seemed just like the the other russians i knew it's it's a this system has been ongoing for

for a long time and um i'm sorry i'll pause there no it's it's really perplexing because because again going back to like the mainstream narrative here bring up the asthma of battalion you bring up donbass and you bring up the points that you just mentioned like hey it seems like there is some form of ethnic cleansing or sure at the very least some prejudice that's going on or people are being singled out and uh isolated and picked on and attempted to get thrown out of the country and the media just wants to focus is like don't russia russia man bad like this is this is not happening but and that's been very confusing because is it you see stuff on social media and they'll be like no this is like one off it's not as big as they're portraying uh the asthma battalion

specifically um and like no there's no ethnic cleansing going on like russia is just being a bully but it seems like from what you're describing it was not the case well if people think it's ethnic cleansing or not we can put the definition aside and just talk about things that have happened they're forcing people to speak one language and not their native one they're renaming their towns they're shutting their churches there's outright animosity so it's not simply that you know there there was a pro-western side and a pro-russian side and the former one out in soviet that's democracy there really is a lot of violence and tension there when i was in kiev in 15 as part of this team to evaluate the ukrainians my hotel was more or less across

the street from the headquarters of the azov battalion and they left nothing to the imagination i mean they basically looked like world war ii reenactors and they get a lot of attention now but there are a bunch of other similar groups now what happened ukraine had to incorporate them into its formal military, into the National Guard, because they needed the fight. I want to dwell on this point for just a moment. When people talk about 2014 and the shift, something that gets glossed over is the difference between the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior. Now, here in the U.S., the Department of the Interior deals with national parks and national

resources and stuff like that. In most countries, the Interior Ministry provides a security function, whether it's anywhere from national police to a paramilitary force like france's gendarmerie or all the way up to an actual military force so like many of the russians that we saw fighting in the two chechen wars from the late 90s to the early 2000s weren't actually in the russian military that is the dod the mod they were actually interior ministry forces right even though they had tanks artillery helicopters so in ukraine uh after familiar with the budapest memorandum basically there were some security guarantees to you so they gave up their nuclear weapons and they weren't supposed to be the subject

of military or financial or economic coercion so the ukrainian military from that point in the mid in the early 90s all the way through 2014 it wasn't meant to fight anybody because who was the enemy so all the resources went not to the mod not to the military but they went to the ministry of Interior Forces, that basically in most of these former Eastern Bloc countries, they provide regime protection, they're Praetorian Guards. Not to say that they don't have a legitimate security function, but the Ukrainian military was decrepit. It was the Soviet legacy that served mainly as a jobs program, but it wasn't expected to fight any. And that's one of the reasons why why it was so easy for for russia to do what it did in 2014 but the shift was u.s security

cooperation up until that point had been with the interior ministry forces and at a very low level and the shift in 2014 2015 was to switch to the actual military the force that was designed to fight someone else and not to keep security uh to maintain security in the interior and so that's something that happened there that i think russia could not mistake in any way right i mean you used to work with them the interior ministry sure that's fine but now you're building up this massive army and that can only have one purpose yeah it's it's it's so sad too because it does seem like i mean it is a proxy war it seems like the u.s and its allies in the west are just using ukrainian citizens as cannon fodder essentially with this measuring contest with russia this this

flex on the international stage i think i'd really like to get your perspective on like the current state of the ukrainian army like are the rumors that they're sending tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of troops to the front lines just to be slaughtered within hours true yeah they don't have any real capability left so from 2014 to 2022 we built this massive army well that army got destroyed in the early part of the war last year and then so ukraine hurriedly fielded this other army and they launched it at places like hirsan and that was largely annihilated so now they've had press gangs you know running around for months basically snatching people off the street. I think it was the Times of London had a story a month or so ago

about morale is high. And right beneath that headline or that subtitle was a picture of an old man in a trench. How high can morale be? You're forcing elderly people into the meat grinder, into trenches. So no, their military capability is severely degraded. So what people have to understand is they're they're trying to engage in basically combined arms maneuver combined arms warfare so there's infantry tanks uh artillery they have to synchronize all those things that's difficult that's difficult for the best armies that's difficult for professional armies and ukraine really doesn't have one anymore it's all been you know worn down so what on earth are these poor people supposed to do i mean they're going to be

excuse me so like russia has built tremendous uh defenses i mean they have this massive trenching i mean it's all fortified russia has tremendous overbatch in firepower like way more artillery way better artillery and then they can even use their bombers uh to fire air launch cruise missiles without ever getting in range of the ukrainian air defenses and then they have missile subs and missile boats that can fire from both the Black and Caspian Seas, all in concert with the bombers that can fire cruise missiles and hypersonics and things like that. So basically, you've got this very fortified Russian defense line with a tremendous amount of infantry, very well supplied. Directly behind them, you have way more artillery than the

Ukrainians are going to have. And then behind them, you have these over-the-horizon systems, like all of these cruise missiles uh you know like what we saw the past uh several nights over the past week where they're just methodically destroying both air defense supplies headquarters i mean maybe the ukrainians might be able to mount some kind of operation but it isn't going to amount to much yeah and then talking about like the state of the ukrainian army too i think i saw a headline earlier this week or last week where strategically they're a bit inept as well where we're sending a bunch of weapons to the U.S. and other countries, and apparently they warehoused all the weapons in one spot.

Russia identified it and completely destroyed their weapons depot. Yeah, some of that is legitimately difficult because the front, and Ukraine's a very large country and the front is very long, but there are only so many ways to get to the places where they would need to unleash these weapons. And at some point, there would have to be some consolidation closer to the front. and maybe that can happen when you aren't overmatched so heavily but the russians watch all of this it's not just through satellites or signals intercepts they have people on the ground

who are feeding them intelligence i mean of course they know where this stuff is and they're very patiently very deliberately destroying all those things and either i can't imagine there's much left of ukrainian air defense so at some right now most of what we've seen has been like stand the standoff use of air power right they release their weapons before they're really within range but at some point likely not to in the distant future they're going to be able to more or less dominate the skies and i just i don't see a chance in hell for anything that ukraine wants to do and there seems i i can think of no good reason why this slaughter has to continue i mean they've lost the better part of a generation of young men and they're going to lose their sovereignty and for

what i mean i'm not uh pro-russian or anti-ukrainian or any of that i'm very fond of that entire part of the world and this slaughter is senseless yeah utterly senseless yeah and going back to something you mentioned earlier which is key the ukraine has signaled that they'd like to come to the table to find peace to stop uh just sending people uh to the slaughterhouse and i think a signal toward that direction was linsky picking up the phone and calling g a couple weeks ago um like what like what is happening is like the u.s and the allies basically saying no uh keep going well i want to be very clear that um some of this is supposition because clearly you know i'm not on the phone calls and i don't have hard information but my general take is

everybody sees the writing on the wall washington is looking to distance itself ukraine is looking for a way out but there are still all these other pressures i mean sometimes and all throughout history a lot of these tragedies continue to unfold simply because of inertia i mean there's so many pieces in play and emotion um yeah i think that he has to zielinski has to be looking for a way out. But whether he pursues one or says so publicly, I have no idea. I think the U.S., like I said, is conditioning the public that it's not going to go well. You know, and fingers crossed that some of the more deranged leaders in our country don't try to provoke some kind of intervention. Because we've heard for many months, even from people like retired General

Petraeus, that, oh, well, there should be a Western intervention. When I wrote a piece called that i titled amateur hour armageddon and i did that because as soon as the war started there's all this uh talk about escalation and the potential of nuclear war and understandably so but i hadn't heard anybody explain in very specific military terms how we could get there how do we get there from uh from here not that we want to but how how might it unfold and so i explained it and it's with essentially a western intervention that then goes in and has to suppress russian air defenses or attempt to and at that point the russians have no way of knowing is this operation limited to the battlefield here in ukraine or is it part of a broader move

and there's a lot of history there going back to the gulf war but yeah if that intervention does happen how long does that extend this conflict i don't think anybody can really answer questions like that because there are too many unknowns for much of my career i've people talk about escalation and how the kremlin views escalation you know what steps they might be willing to take people who tell you they know what escalation looks like in the minds of russian leaders at least in my opinion don't know what they're talking about we don't know i'm not sure that they know i mean i'm sure they have some kind of a process or procedure but what actually happens when things ratchet up with all that tension i don't think anybody can reasonably say

So how long could it go on? Well, it depends if, okay, a couple of things. The length of time would require, would depend on the amount of restraint each side showed, right? Is there, are we unleashing nuclear weapons? Is it ratcheting up right away? Or are we just determined to fight some kind of conventional battle in Ukraine? So that's kind of the first high level thought. The second, and I wrote about this in Rubble and Rhetoric, NATO is not what it used to be during the Cold War. I mean, I have worked on NATO operations for many years, and I met interesting people and drank some good coffee, but it's not a fighting force. It's almost more of a club.

I mean, I think of NATO much like I think of the EU. It's a source of sinecures for the credentialed, right? It's jobs for cosmopolitans, that kind of thing. Most of the military capability comes from the U.S., and we have our own problems in that regard in terms of defense, industrial base. We couldn't sustain that fight. So if we, you know, everybody looks at Russia like, oh, is Russia going to escalate if there's some kind of intervention? Are we going to escalate? We don't have the forces.

We don't have the materiel. I don't think we have the public support for any kind of war like that. I mean, it's, there's not a whole lot backing us up. and so nato used to be this really massive very powerful military force i mean the west german army right up until the end was just fierce but it's not like that it hasn't been like that in a long time they got rid of their militaries and essentially we provide their security they reinvested that money in basically in social welfare programs uh so most european militaries are almost token forces and i don't i've worked with many if not most of them i don't mean this

as an insult to the individuals i've met very competent soldiers from all these armies but there aren't that many of them and they don't have the stuff they need to fight so you know this intervention i don't even understand how it would happen without some kind of escalation on our side yeah we don't have the forces just it's broken we we put the 101st airborne over there as it's supposed to look like it's some bulwark against a massive mechanized force. Now, I work with 101st a lot. It's a capable unit, but it's a light infantry unit. It would get ripped to shreds.

We don't have the numbers. We don't have the right kind of people. We don't have the production to sustain that kind of work. We don't have the forward deployed forces, the forward deployed materiel. We don't train to deploy directly into that kind of environment. And if we were to start doing that, Russia could then, their over-the-horizon systems can target much of NATO as it is. So where would we have a staging area to even get started? When you start backing out, then Russia, like it relies on the U.S. shipping over a lot of stuff by sea or air.

Again, we don't have all the stuff we would need, but let's just assume for a moment we do. Russia can contest those sea and airlines. They have fantastic submarines that can sink ships. they have planes that can shoot down ours they have missiles so from start to finish we no longer have this sort of fold a gap uh NATO scenario in which the the European allies hold on as long as they can and then the U.S. starts reinforcing and we fight this conventional war against the Soviets that hopefully doesn't go nuclear it's it's nothing like that I mean NATO militaries in Europe are are small and and don't have any of the capabilities and there's also a loss of

know-how i mean like i said these combined arms maneuver uh combined arms operations are very difficult they have to be practiced a lot and even then you know we mess it up all the time it's it's not easy stuff to make that many people work in concert over a broad area and uh they really haven't been doing any of that they've just been plugging in in small numbers with boutique capabilities to all of our operations over the past 20 years to you know afghanistan and such yeah and that's the really worrying thing particularly about the situation here in the united states economically it's historically when you have economic trouble at home you try to create distraction and war is one of the first distractions that is sure that is pulled out of

the toolbox and that that's what worries me right now is that we have this banking crisis unfolding We have the potential of recession on the horizon. We're going into an election year. And is the situation in Ukraine and Russia used as a political tool to either distract from the very fragile economy or to drum support up for a president heading into an election season? I think those are all very valid concerns, unfortunately. Yeah. um now look i i don't know what's going to happen i have no crystal ball but i can talk about you know capabilities of what it would take to do certain things and the things that we are claiming

we can do and perhaps even want to do we cannot back up and that's just just with looking at you know intervention in ukraine or even just continuing to supply the ukrainians um and then you bring you know taiwan or china into the picture and it's just it's all fantasyland nonsense we are not positioned to do all these things that many people are demanding we do and it's like we could put aside for a moment whether we should do these things i mean i don't think we should but we can even put that question aside for a moment and say can we not not should we but can we even pull these things off yeah yeah i mean when you look back at the last 20 years of america's involvement in wars

particularly afghanistan iraq which you dealt a lot with like it seems i don't know personally i'm 31 years old so i was 10 when 9 11 happened teenager to young man when afghanistan iraq was going on and i don't know personally i'm a bit uh jaded and disenchanted by the whole u.s war machine and so am i it doesn't it doesn't seem like they've been very successful for most of my life and starting a war with russia would just seems like a terrible decision like it's almost like end of empire stuff where getting sloppy expanding your army not really being as successful as you have in the past and using the hammer as a way to imbue force in the world where it's really not going to pay off in the long run. I think that's a reasonable assessment.

We need to get back in touch with what these institutions actually mean. Look, I'm not a pacifist. The world's a bad place, and at times, violence is the answer. We need an effective military. We need security services, but they have to be used for what they are, and they have to be restrained. One of the first things I learned from my drill sergeant in basic training was that the army had two purposes, to kill people and to break things. If you weren't doing those two things, you were doing something to enable others to do those two things. Now, that may sound callous, particularly with contemporary sensibilities, but it's absolutely true. And so if you're going to employ the military, understand that what you're doing is killing people and breaking things.

And if you don't want to do that, then the military ought not be used as a tool with which to achieve foreign policy objectives, which is exactly what happened. And I'm writing another series right now about what I consider to be the impending demise of NATO. And it talks about the transition from a defensive alliance to an offensive alliance. And I'm sorry, was it your question? Nope. Oh, okay. Yeah, there was a policy debate within the White House, basically after the collapse after the end of the Cold War. And so Clinton comes in and he really doesn't have any foreign policy chops. That's one of the big dings against him at the time. It was. And so there's this sort of debate and we can maybe put some faces on it. There's Madeleine Albright who says

we're the indispensable nation and we have this massive military force and why can't we use it for good? And then you have people like Colin Powell who said, you know, whose experiences were rooted in Vietnam. You know, he didn't want to go that route. Well, we know which camp won out. You know, it was the Albright camp. And it happened in Bosnia and in Kosovo. And then as it continued into Afghanistan, I mean, there's a huge stretch of that war, nearly half of it that was completely aimless. I mean, I don't, I'm not saying the rest of it was productive. After the initial months that there wasn't much productive activity or fighting going on. But there was a whole section of that war that was just completely aimless. We didn't really even have a policy.

When Obama came in and they settled on the surge, it was basically a political necessity, right? He got elected as the guy who was saying, we're going to undo these bad things that the Bush administration did. We're going to end these wars. And so his basic plan was, well, re-election is 2012 so by 2011 uh we're going to wind down and so they started winding down iraq immediately didn't go quite well but they eventually got out in 2011 although we went back in um and then in iraq or in afghanistan you know they settled on this whole like pseudo-scientific counter-insurgency strategy that was just nuts i mean i was there i went through the counter-insurgency academy in Kabul and listen to all this and it was uh a lot of it just didn't make any damn sense and and

considering that you know we weren't there to kill people and break things all of a sudden we're there to try to do something very different and it just dragged on and on yeah and as somebody who spent many years of your life in both those wars like how do you feel personally about the pullout of afghanistan and looking back on the last 20 years yeah um the well the well initially of course i i supported the war in afghanistan i mean 9 11 was a big moment and but the but by the time uh the iraq war was winding uh getting ready to kick off I thought it was a bad idea from the start. And I only went over there once, and it was for a particular, a specific mission, and then I got back out of the country.

So I don't think, I think Iraq, I mean, there's, I don't understand any redeeming quality from what we did there. So I think that was just a mistake altogether. I think in Afghanistan, I really don't see anything wrong if we're attacked with going in and killing people and breaking things, as long as we're directing it appropriately. But by the spring of 2002, we basically killed, captured, or caused to flee most al-Qaeda operatives in the country. And of course, Osama bin Laden fled across the border as well. And so by the time early 03 rolls around, there's a lot of mopping up operations. There are a lot of operations that are driven by reports of al-Qaeda and Taliban, but with

dwindling evidence of their presence and sometimes none at all so by that point you know we're basically getting played by afghans who are paying us or who are receiving money saying oh yeah al-qaeda is over there i mean i remember when i studied uh dari and one of the first jokes we were making was um you know everything was al-qaeda's fault like you can't find your pencil maybe al-qaeda took your pencil like that's how farcical it started to get after the initial months and particularly after the first year, year and a half. But we stayed on. So in terms, I mean, I think we should have left then.

In terms of the pullout and the way it went, yeah, that caused some turbulence for me personally. I mean, we should have gotten out of there much sooner, but good Lord, did it need to be a fiasco? Did we need to arm the Taliban with $90 billion worth of weapons? We relied on our enemy of 20 years to provide perimeter security to cover her withdrawal i mean you can't make that kind of stuff up we left our ally we didn't particularly work particularly well with our allies and you know the birds complained about

it openly about uh it was a sort of like an every man for himself kind of thing i mean it was completely inept yeah didn't we didn't need to go that way i mean again should have been out of there many years before then but you know you are where you are and you have to deal with the situation that you have. There was no way, no reason for it to go that way. And I did some videos for a consulting network I belong to called Polygage. And so basically this is July of 21. And these are on my website. It was right after Biden had come out and said, nope, the Afghans can hold. We built up an air force. We've done all this. And the same thing from the Pentagon and the State Department and everyone else. So I did a video explaining precisely how they were

wrong how they were wrong how the afghan the taliban was going to retake the whole country they explained how they were already in the process of retaking the country basically the only places that where the this sort of fictitious government of afghanistan existed was in a handful of major populated areas and you basically had to fly between them because all the hinterlands in between were controlled by insurgents so i did that video shortly after they said everything was going to be okay and a month later the Taliban retake the whole country um and then if you remember there was this uh brief flurry of interest and compassion for the yeah Afghans right for for the girls and for all sorts of people like we're not going to abandon you we're

going to have all of this international funding and everything's going to be okay so I immediately did a video there kind of dispelling that nonsense you know do if you recall there were people talking about taliban 2.0 as if there's this new very sophisticated version of the taliban you know as if 20 years of warfare had made them more cosmopolitan i mean it was completely ridiculous so i made a second follow-up video basically talking about this taliban 2.0 stuff was nonsense the international community is going to drop afghanistan as soon as possible which is exactly what they did and now afghanistan is facing famine and it's basically not even in news uh the threat of widespread famine for a country that's already horrendously poorer

than abused as it's yeah i mean between yeah it's very disconcerting and again emblematic of like late stage dying empire stuff which is extremely hard to stomach as an american citizen with a young family trying to yeah absolutely i want to yeah yeah and it's and bringing it back to like russia ukraine like you mentioned like put aside whether or not we should engage in direct conflict with them but if we were to could we actually be successful and what you're saying is likely not we're not prepared and so let's play that um that hypothetical like we did and we lost like what does that mean for the state of the geopolitical landscape because as we're seeing

now we cut them off from swift it seems like russia china and other bricks countries are teaming up to completely sever their economies off from the u.s dollar system to the best of their abilities and it seems like they're preparing for a world in which they are the dominant economies dominant militaries and the u.s is sort of sitting here like oh no that's not going to happen but it seems very plausible that they could become dominant forces in the world if we continue to screw this up well whether they become dominant um perhaps i don't know but I'd say that the first thing they're trying to do is insulate themselves from our capabilities, right? Whether they're trying to set up a system that rivals and ultimately overtakes ours,

that's secondary. What they need to do initially, and it's something that Russia has been engaged in for some time, is coming up with ways to make themselves less vulnerable and ultimately not vulnerable to our manipulation of the financial system, to all sorts of things like that. so right now that's um it's more the initial stages are more defensive in nature we have to like lavrov gave a speech uh last year and he basically said to never again we we are not going to allow ourselves to be dependent upon you in ways that allow you to manipulate us like this so i think the stages we're seeing now are those stages and some of the early relationships necessary to build the kind of thing you're talking about yeah i mean that's why i like to

focus a lot on bitcoin or my whole career on bitcoin is because i do think a lot of the issues that we're talking about today stem from the fact that the u.s feels the need to preserve its status as the world reserve currency maintainer and i view bitcoin as in a political monetary network that sort of takes that power away from the u.s and doesn't give it to anybody else and sort of levels the playing field in terms of the global monetary system where we're not really forced to project power militarily to protect this monetary system and everybody is just forced to work within this open network and the rules set forth by that and hopefully get along peacefully because the monetary network can't be weaponized and you're not incentivized

to protect the petrodollar in the middle east yeah i mean i think that'd be wonderful the big hurdle of course is that the people who tend to gravitate toward positions of power are the kinds of people who aren't interested in creating that kind of equilibrium or safety right i mean this we're in this problem increasingly over the past few decades in particular because the people in power want to be able to use every lever they can and we've gotten to the point it used to be that maybe they did it a little more deftly or with a little more restraint a little more focused but now it's just entirely you know every ham-handed attempt to smack down anything that isn't within the existing order yeah that's

the other is extremely sloppy everything yeah they don't even lie well even the lies don't make sense And yeah, that's my, when you wrote me and you said we were going to talk geopolitics, I had this, you know, I wanted to explain that I don't have, I'm not a theorist. I don't have some grand unifying theory of geopolitics. But my focus, which is a bit more narrow than that, is based on the following thesis, that we are still led by the architects and the administrators of a failed worldview. and all their power rests in perpetuating all the systems that we now see under threat and in some cases collapsing so what do people like that do well they don't say ah we made a huge mistake let's reconfigure the entire power structure and bring in new people they're going to fight harder as things get more difficult you know we've seen a lot of the level of government kind of

surveillance of its own people that we've seen in our country is something that i just couldn't have imagined in the 80s or the 90s uh not that the government didn't um have means to do that but that there's just this widespread lawless surveillance state um they're not going to give that up peacefully so uh turbulence ahead yeah the patriot act now with the restrict act on the table it seems like patriot act 2.0 and absolutely i know you're you just mentioned like You don't have vast theories of what the perfect solution is to this problem. But if you did, with that in mind, what advice would you give to the government to do to either quell the situation in Ukraine and set U.S. military policy on the right path to sort of clean things up and hopefully bring more peace to the world instead of trying to smash everything? Well, several things. I mean, the current fighting would need to cease and we'd have to accept that that means Russia is going to win.

It's a question of how much more destruction and death there's going to be. So just accept it and achieve peace. But the broader perspective, though, this scheme of which we are Europe's protector, it has to change. Europe has to find its own way. I think there are a lot of problems with the EU. I'm not real bullish on its long-term prospects, nor on NATO. Like I said, I'm writing a series about what I think is the demise of NATO. So they have to find their own way. And I think we forget that Europe is a pretty, it's been a pretty unstable place over time. And so this intense push to expand the union, the EU, and have an ever greater union, at least ostensibly,

is for the purpose of kind of forestalling the kind of violence that had plagued the continent for millennia. They need to come to terms with their reality. One of the things being that union is too broad and there is no common tie that binds. It used to be that most of the Central and Eastern European nations wanted to be in the EU, basically to be brought into the first world. There was a huge economic incentive. Nobody wants to live in the land that time forgot. You see your neighbors prospering and having other opportunities by joining this.

Of course you do. Well, how attractive is that going to be in the future with the economic degradation ongoing in Europe, with the deindustrialization that's slowly underway? I mean, Germany, other countries too, but Germany in particular, you know, their whole approach was built on cheap energy that gave them, you know, a competitive edge in terms of pricing. Because everybody likes German quality, but quality costs. But with that cheap energy, they were able to keep it up. But that's gone. so what i think about it i'm kind of a visual person so when i'm writing or thinking there's usually some visualization i'm trying to explain when i think about the de-industrialization

process in europe i see like a boat that's becoming unmoored from the pier right and when it initially happens the people are still right there it doesn't it doesn't seem like a problem oh no i could even jump off back onto the pier but then it slowly starts to drift off and that's where the dissonance really starts to take over like oh well it's right there but i can't quite reach it and then they just keep shifting and shifting you know more more drift and i i think that's what we're going to see what i don't have a background in economics or finance but just from a broad perspective if their whole industrial uh theory was based on this cheap energy and they can't get it anymore i don't understand what they do i don't understand how they kind of

return to the sort of uh prominence and um that they had before in that regard what's the alternative i mean we see not only the prices of energy going higher we see these harebrained policies from governments when you're shutting down you know their existing sources of energy and for more renewables so how attractive is the eu going to be when this plays out also there's a good i was gonna say i mean germ germany is the economic powerhouse of europe and like you know it's it's been mind-boggling how they just shot themselves in the head with this transition away from nuclear and reliable coal towards unreliable wind and solar like it doesn't make any sense no it's it's called like um and it's really a shame because when i say that europe

needs to find its own way germany needs to lead that process they are the continental power sure poland has has gotten uh you know a lot wealthier and they have a you know a much larger military in the past a couple of decades but germany needs to to chart a course here and i don't know what does germany look like like for example over the past i don't know 10 years or so um maybe not quite that long you know we've seen this resurgence of populism and understandably so people are angry at the elite. And so they're looking for something different. And I pay attention to a lot of European media, particularly around elections. And the story was always the same. Oh my God, you know, these populist barbarians are at the gate and we have to fight to keep them out or

who knows, you know, we'll lose our democracy. And then when the establishment candidates win, sometimes not by all that much, they declare like, you know, emergency over. Well, all those people who were motivated to support the populace in the first place one they're still there and two now they have ever more reason to go that way so give this a couple of election cycles even if it takes that long of the de-industrialization of the anger over the war of people who had lived very comfortable uh prosperous lives suddenly being much less comfortable and prosperous and worried about war coming to their doorstep i don't think that bodes well for the union And so there has to be some kind of new accommodation for Europe, whether it's rapprochement with Russia and then they kind of bring in the gas again.

I don't know. It's a little too far out. But for Europe, I think that's the case. For the U.S., you know, it's interesting that when we used to have a Department of War and not a Department of Defense, the Department of War was more focused on actual defense of the country. But we created the Department of Defense. It was basically conducting war abroad. So all of that nonsense has to stop. There are a lot of myths propagated about why we need to be in different places. And if we pull out, everything's going to go to hell. There'll certainly be a change if the U.S. isn't there. But I think allowing some kind of equilibrium to establish in a lot of these places and refocusing the U.S. military on defending the country, territorial defense. Now, we're blessed, of course. We have oceans and we have peaceful neighbors to the north. But there are some other security problems that we just overlook. I'm not suggesting we need to go to war with Mexico.

People completely underestimate the extent of the cartel violence. I mean, here in my town in Charlottesville, there's this crazy story I just read yesterday. There was a shooting, I think, last year or perhaps earlier this year. And what we found out was this fellow who lived in Maryland, his wife had been kidnapped in Texas. And he and the kidnappers agreed to meet here in my town. And then there ended up being a gunfight and he killed the people. And we're like, what the hell is this? Well, it's all related to an open border and a cartel violence and the kidnapping for ransom and all of that.

And it's even come to a sleepy little Charlottesville, Virginia. So there's there's got to be some coming to terms with what's going on in Mexico. And I know a lot of people tend to default to, well, we have the appetite for drugs. They have the drugs. It's always going to be like that. Well, perhaps that's true, but it doesn't mean it needs to be what it presently is. there's some cartels operating freely on both sides of the border they're making more money now off of trafficking people than they ever did off of trafficking drugs um you know a great many of these people suffer terribly in that process their women and children are routinely sexually

abused so there has to be some coming to terms for the u.s with what's going on in the south yeah somebody lives in texas i completely agree yeah and that and also agree i think we're sleeping on this like when you talk about 100 percent fentanyl in overdoses being i think the number one killer in the united states right now for a particular segment uh of the population in particular age group there is and it almost seems like reverse opium more because from what i can tell looks like the cartels have teamed up with china to get the fentanyl into the country it's just slowly i mean right outside this wall right here on 6th and congress you see the open drug markets like right on the corner i don't know yeah i haven't been to austin in

quite some time there were no no open air markets when i was there that's sad to hear it really is it's sad it's everywhere now yeah and so like as an american as a patriot who served your country like do you think we have a chance to get back on the right track i do um i think there's some kind of domestic cataclysm that will occur or that we have to go through a part of it of course is this economic degradation that we're talking about um you know i'm not a i don't have a background in finance or economics so this is part uh unqualified opinion and part unsatisfied curiosity but when i look at all the analyses of various aspects of the market right the bond market the housing market all these things

i feel like nobody there's no real overarching no ability to really have an overarching analysis sort of like how i said about geopolitics i mean i don't think those analytical frameworks really work too well but if i had to put my money on it i'd put my money on some kind of calamity and once that happens economically um everything else is impacted and you know we have serious social problems you know we have the crime in the cities and racial division and all sorts of other things so i think there's going to be some kind of confluence of those things yeah that uh is cataclysmic or we i think we have a rough patch to go through but i don't think all is lost and um yeah the professor out of vienna i follow uh he he said something that i like he said you know

america has many sources of renewal and i do believe that and he was talking about how in a lot of places or like i would say in russia you know a huge part of the overall population lives in moscow and a lot of the power is focused in moscow well in the u.s we have many cities and we have you know arable land and all of that so i think in the end there are many like he said many sources of renewal i think that's the way i would put it the ingredients are there when we sort through whatever's coming our way for us to uh rebuild agreed i'm an eternal optimist i do think we will right the ship i do think we are going to go through a calamity i think it's actually happening right now um sure with the yes the banking system the debt ceiling um

nobody's going to be buying our treasuries moving forward and the economic calamity i think we're in the middle of it and most people just don't realize it yet absolutely but again that's why i focus on bitcoin too because i think that's an incredible source of renewal for the united states if they're the political politicians and the federal government is willing to allow us to just build the network out here in the united states in our little part of the world bitcoin the network aligns very tightly with the ideals this country was founded on free speech sound money um and the ability to associate with who you want to um it's an open peer-to-peer protocol it has all this and then from an energy perspective we're shooting ourselves in the foot

here to a certain extent in bitcoin mining as an industry even though it's uh picked on a lot by the elizabeth barnes of the world and the new york times of the world and i'm very much involved in the industry and i see it up close and personal it does strengthen our energy systems our grid systems it allows us to take advantage of stranded energy sources like stranded natural gas wells or flared gas like there is so much opportunity for renewal via bitcoin whether it be at the application layer the financial layer or the physical layer with the mining industry and that's why i have this podcast that's why i write my newsletter that's why i invest in the space because i think bitcoin is the ball that we can run with and begin to rebuild a

stronger america on strong financial footing with sound money yeah yeah i think uh like uh washington said you know he didn't want us to have all these foreign entanglements but he wanted the us to be an engine of prosperity and i think at some point we could get back to that model whereby we we aren't invading other countries or we aren't using our diplomats and our business power to basically lecture and coerce them but we could be an engine of prosperity and who knows fingers crossed maybe even an example of good governance but we are not there yeah and i mean one of my theories is that and we saw begin to take play in covid during the lockdowns and all that it's just a return

to individual states asserting their autonomy from the federal government which i'm very bullish on and i i think is the cleanest way out of the calamity is just the state standing up say hey federal government uh you put us in a pretty bad situation we're not gonna listen to what you're saying we're gonna we're gonna run things our way and thank you but no thank you yeah absolutely i mean the mechanism's already there in the in the constitution it's just an issue of us actually following it yeah the political will yeah it's so how do we get this this fire in the bellies of the silent silent majority if you will because you can tell i mean at least i can i won't speak for you but i can tell that many people who are sensible

who are just good people, who want to raise families, work hard, put food on the table, enjoy time with family and friends. They know something's off, not only off, but terribly off. And they're looking for a solution. And typically, they go to the government and say, hey, you need to fix this, but I don't think that's the way out. How do we engender a sense of urgency in the silent majority to speak up and seek options that lead to peace internationally

and then economic strength here at home um well i definitely agree that there's a silent majority it feels that way but uh it typically it's the case that a majority silent or otherwise doesn't get the fire in their belly it's usually you know a smaller percentage of the population that are the actors and the catalysts and you know you've got then they have the people they are against And in the middle, you just have this sort of public that wants to go about its life. I think we're seeing some of the early stages of it with people taking back school boards, with people focused on local elections, people focused on, you know, becoming precinct committee men and women and all sorts of things down at that local level. So I think it's underway. There's just some sort of a tipping point.

i think a lot of what will propel us in that direction is going to result from this kind of calamity that we're discussing right now the people who are active are the people who are inclined to be active uh there'll come a time i think when other people don't really have much of a choice because things are going so poorly yeah yeah unfortunately get bitcoin before you need it is what we say yeah yeah i mean in another topic we haven't even touched on you mentioned in the beginning of the discussion that you spent some time in taiwan but that's another thing externally internationally that seems to be bubbling up um obviously there's a lot of speculation that china would like to take over taiwan uh we just watched them take hong kong

in 2019 take hong kong back um we had john bolton over in taiwan a couple weeks ago their leaders what what is your perspective on taiwan what's going on there i'm admittedly ignorant to the tai taiwan situation outside of the fact that uh tsmc is there and they create a lot of the chips particularly the chips i use to mine bitcoin but outside of that i'm a bit ignorant to the situation over there okay um where to start so it's important to remember right off the bat that the people on the island of taiwan from osa are chinese right there there are different they've been separate from the mainland for quite some time for decades but culturally linguistically they're almost they're chinese they're mostly han chinese so when we

talk about China like taking this or taking that we have to understand that although Taiwan and Ukraine are different in some ways they're similar and really important ones China's not going to lose Taiwan like period just like how Russia is not going to lose Ukraine it's too close it's too near and dear it's it's it's too important to them so the policy for a very long time has been eventual but peaceful reunification China does not want to attack or invade Taiwan they don't want to destroy the place they just want to pull it back under their dominion now they don't want to go to war but they certainly will if things push them in the direction of a military operation being the only way to achieve that reunification so the u.s policy for a very long time has been

strategic ambiguity meaning we're not going to say if we're going to support taiwan in the event of War. We're just going to leave it, the possibility on the table, Beijing, you know, maybe we will, maybe we won't. So stay on. So back off, right? Well, a lot of things have changed. If you go back, we used to recognize Taiwan as a country. We do not. Our leaders talk about Taiwan. It is not a formally recognized country. We switched our recognition from Taipei to Beijing in the early 70s when Nixon was trying to kind of play China against the Soviet Union, right? And in that time, of course we've made china the world's factory they've become much wealthier they've created they have a lot more um not just economic clout but international clout they've been on this

really years-long campaign of kind of convincing and coercing other countries to not recognize taiwan i forget what the exact number is right now but it's i don't know 12 or 13 countries recognize taiwan and they're usually like africa and caribbean places like that so there's there China is using a whole bunch of levers to really constrain Taiwan's options and to say, basically, you're going to come back home. It can be the Hong Kong model, the Macau model, but basically we're not losing Taiwan. They have the diplomatic lever. There's also just people underestimate. They talk like these are two fortresses.

One's about to do battle with the other. At least when I was going back and forth to Taiwan, the greatest number of flights per day were the mainland China. The business ties are there, the cultural ties, the linguistic ties. I'm not saying the two people are entirely the same, but they're incredibly similar. And so like when Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan during the Civil War, he took most of the artifacts that are important to the Chinese civilization. So the museum that all the Chinese go to to see their own history is in Taipei. They fly over there. So we need to realize that these are real people who have an interest in working together.

There's an election coming up next year, and the party that might win could push more in the direction of reunification. It's a possibility. It's not that China has to conduct a military assault, though it could, but it's a possibility. So on the, a couple of important things on that topic. It's, I'm aware of the fact that the Chinese military, the People's Liberation Army, hasn't really fought anyone in a long time. There are probably some qualitative issues there. I'm aware that amphibious operations are extremely difficult under the best of circumstances, and Taiwan does not present favorable circumstances for such an operation. Even so, my view, and I know this preferably aggravates a lot of former colleagues, is that if China wants to take the island, they'll take the island.

I mean, we have tremendous problems. I mentioned the defense industrial base that can't support the war in Ukraine. How on earth is it going to support a war on the other side of the Pacific? People have to stop and think in a really practical way what that would mean. We'd have to put the entire country on a war footing. We'd have to invoke the Defense Production Act, basically take civilian factories and turn them into munitions factories, sort of like how Detroit was producing bombers and tanks throughout World War II, right?

We'd have to do that. Well, there are lots of problems. One problem is we don't have that many factories anymore to convert. Another problem is, does the public want to go on a war footing? You know, we've already had this monumental spending for COVID and all the rest of it. Are we really going to spend many times that in an inflationary, debt-ridden environment to put the country on a war footing? Another problem, even if we were to do all of that, it would take a long time to build up the material and the capabilities we would need to even initiate such a conflict, much less to sustain one, because we don't know how long it could last. Another point is simply geography.

because of hawaii alaska guam the west coast our leaders uh say kind of proudly like oh we are a pacific power well sort of in a certain part of the pacific i mean we are not in east asia power it's a pretty big ocean yeah we have a tremendous amount of influence in certain parts of east asia but it's not where our power resides so the idea that we're going to suddenly like we we don't Even, again, this whole divide between should and could. Let's put aside the should, which obviously I don't think we should push any kind of order. Could we? Well, how do we get there?

Are we stopping Ukraine because we're running out of munitions? Are we going to mobilize the entire country and turn it into a big munitions factory? Are we going to suddenly conscript or grow our military? I mean, a lot of people, there was an article recently in Foreign Policy about how we need to do more to deter China and Russia. And a lot of people online kind of lost their minds and said, this is crazy. You know, these Americans are talking about basically standing up to China and Russia and if we need to, you know, in whatever ways we need to.

Well, what I think people don't understand is that's part for the course in the defense establishment. You know, the thing people were going crazy over this article, I had heard every argument in that entire article many times for many years. You know, it's not the only view in D.C. in the establishment, but it's the prominent one. Like the assumption, the kind of knee-jerk reaction is, well, we've got to do something. You know, we've got these, they're called revisionist powers, right? Because we say that they're rewriting history, you know, and we have to kind of stand in defense, not only of these places, but of history, I guess. these ideas are perfectly mainstream in the defense establishment in the foreign policy establishment that we have to go do something so i ask how like sit down and explain because all these articles talk about what we should do what we need to do they're all very normative or

moralistic or sometimes emotionally driven like oh we just have to we have to find a way you know people things like good leadership you know steely resolve determination all that stuff's important. But if we look across history, it is not the case that those attributes alone enable people to triumph against all odds. The other stuff matters too, and it's typically the less sexy stuff that matters a great deal. So people who are pushing these policies, I simply have to ask, how? With what? We've already depleted things in Ukraine. We don't have the industrial base we used to have. We would have to convert this smaller industrial base at tremendous expense during a time of debt and inflation just to produce this stuff,

which would take a lot of time, what is the goal here? I mean, there's just this really, look, I understand the chips are made there and I get the concerns about that. But what's more damaging, China potentially having this reunification or taking over Taiwan or a war with China? I've heard all these estimates, oh, well, if we lose the chips, it's a you know this much of a you know you can take off whatever 10 15 of the gdp immediately or something like that well that doesn't even make sense though because china's our biggest

trading partner in the world right and like if they take it over it's not like they're going to stop selling chips to us we're going to want to make that money 100 and that's what annoys me so much about these conversations is it's it's a lot of boogeyman stuff like oh you know did you you ever seen dr strange love do you know the big board yeah i mean there's like a big board kind of approach and i saw it for years in government where it's like oh my god the chinese are investing here and they're doing this there well yes there is geo strategic geopolitical competition um undoubtedly that's happening but we're so intertwined not just in terms of you know manufacturing and tech and finance like i just i i still think we could just buy their stuff

um if the one thing yeah i'll layer this grievance the uh there are a lot of the china hawks in the u.s and and most of them are talking about you know great power competition and wanting to rebuild shipyards and all of this stuff and i understand where they're coming from though i don't necessarily agree but they never seem with very few exceptions they don't look at what's going on internally in the U.S. at counterintelligence threats or at, you know, IP theft and things like that. No, look, IP theft has always occurred, but never on this scale and never with the person being looted, basically saying we can't do anything about it.

So that's kind of my big beef with the China hawks is, you know, there are plenty of public FBI reports talking about how the CCP tries to coerce, they'll try to get politicians earlier in their careers so that they can be useful later on. I forget what the exact timing was, but the director of the FBI said they have to open a new counterintelligence investigation something like every 15 minutes. I mean, it's extraordinary. Look, I'm not anti-China and I certainly don't want war with China, but the people who are running around beating the war drum about the things we need to do externally don't really seem to care a whole lot about uh you know the the leaky ship that we're that we're on at present and so that's that's something that i

never really understood no neither do i like we don't need any more war when you get our house in order yeah yeah i'm a very big ron paul guy like let's bring it home and like figure out like let's get our own house in order before we go tell other people what to do is my mindset yeah I mean, we can call them whatever we want. There are people who control the levers of power in society. We can call them the elites, the establishment, the ruling class, whatever it is. But that group of people are very, you know, foreign policy is sort of like their precious jewel. They don't really care much about what happens to large swaths of the country, but this is the thing that they protect.

And, of course, there are a lot of business interests intermoving. but resting that from them um is a i'm on ron paul's side but it's a it's a challenge it's a tall order because this is the thing they value above you know they're part of an international cosmopolitan class they're not necessarily even americans in some respects right they have more in common with the other international cosmopolitans than they do with someone in indiana yeah yeah and so what is the significance of john bolton's trip um is it significant at all is it just him being a dick is it well i i think he can't help but do the latter i don't know the man but he's been in the public a long time i think we can call that

one um i i generally try not to read too much into individual incidents where they're whether So attack, a phone call, a meeting, because there's a constant stream of them. And we're focused on trying to read into this one, and then there's another one tomorrow. But I don't think it's good. I mean, he wasn't there, at least to my knowledge, in any official government capacity. Yeah, is he officially associated with the government? Not to my knowledge. But I mean, I haven't checked, could be wrong, but I don't think he is.

You know, he's been out of power for some time. There is, some people use the term uniparty. you know there is that just kind of establishment that has certain interests and i mean he's a lifelong member of that so the fact that he's not in government doesn't necessarily mean he isn't talking to the other people who are uh or to interests that are non-governmental but powerful nonetheless i don't really know i mean i don't think it's a great thing when john bolton comes to your country um yeah there's there's going to be a push to produce and to sell a bunch more weapons and my guess is that it has a lot to do with that yeah but even when i was

going there i mean you couldn't like clear baggage claim without tripping over defense contractors like so if we're sending even more over there it's uh it's kind of remarkable yeah it's also tiresome it is you know i'm not i am an optimistic person by nature like you and you know i don't like to be a doom merchant but my career is focused on things like afghanistan iraq ukraine like i think that accurate analysis on these topics is inherently unpleasant and so i end up being kind of this purveyor of doom though it's it's certainly not representative of my personality it's not but i don't do it because i like to i do it because i think that's the accurate take well it's not only accurate it's very important because like we

mentioned like the mainstream media isn't getting this information out there like i think what you're doing is extremely important i thank you for doing it because people need to hear these perspectives and when you lay it out it seems pretty straightforward and pretty logical like hey i'm not a melodramatic person i mean i've never been accused of something like that it's it's usually pretty straightforward and logical and if anything maybe a bit dry so yeah i mean i really like your driving of the distinction between should we and could we because the mainstream media the federal government million military industrial complex is going to say should should should use emotion use fear and do all that to gin up support for what they want to

do nobody really dives into the logistics of could we which is extremely important because you can have all the emotion and all the morale built up that you want but if you can't actually execute on the back end it is not a good idea and on that note you know people when it comes to war at least people don't rise to the occasion they revert back to their best level of training with very few exceptions that's not the story we hear in the movies you know it's it's something heroic just sort of erupting out of someone people revert back to their best level of training do we train to do any of these things that we're currently talking about doing do we train at scale for how to deploy so far away and conduct these immensely complicated operations against

adversaries that are far more capable than any we faced in decades no we don't so that's the other thing to consider is you know we don't really practice to do any of this there's just this assumption that well somewhere we have you know in a special access program somewhere we have these super weapons or you know maybe the other side they're they're not as big and bad as as uh maybe some people say they are but you just have to start looking at the the nuts and bolts of it it's we can't do we can't pull these things off it's completely insane we could be focusing on making the country better and instead we're just perpetuating all of this fanatical nonsense and it's extremely scary when you consider the technological advancements that have been made

with military technology like that adds many different variables to the calculus and if you're not training for it like how outmatched are you so on that note i've done a lot of of work with electronic warfare and some analysis of it over the years uh just i'm going to say a little over two years ago i gave a briefing when i was still doing things with the government i gave a briefing to a very senior leader and i was talking about electronic warfare and the the gentleman's response basically was very dismissive it was like when the u.s goes to war we take control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, like next topic. And it's hard to impress upon some of these people that this isn't 1991. Other countries, particularly China and

Russia, have advanced these kinds of capabilities specifically because they knew they didn't have conventional overmatch. They saw what we did in Desert Storm, where we assembled this massive army and just took apart Saddam's army, which was also one of the largest in the world. And they got fearful so they looked for asymmetric ways they looked for ways to kind of counter that and electronic warfare hypersonics things like that but you know russia's electronic warfare capability is extraordinarily impressive um it's like these this two-dimensional view of them is incapable and clumsy like that is to our detriment it is simply not the case there was just another article from cnn today admitting that russia can render highmars largely useless by uh gps jamming which

of course many of us knew all along that uh the jdams like we're exposing a lot of our weaknesses here and giving the other side a lot of real world practice yeah do not underestimate the enemy it's like yeah but we do routinely almost as a matter of policy yeah yeah ah again it's also tiresome and it's really like scary it's like gosh we have a bunch of idiots in control right now but we do we really do and we need to say it in such blunt terms we absolutely do yeah yeah and that's actually one of the things i say pretty often whether it be posturing towards the federal reserve the federal government military industrial complex we need to make fun of these people because going back to engendering action and urgency from the silent

majority they react to comedy like it or not and you literally just have to call these people idiots and point out how stupid they are how idiotic their policies or their beliefs are like the emperor in the united states is not wearing any clothes he's completely butt-ass naked and it's at the again young family i like to think i just want to work hard provide value do good things be a good person hold the door be polite say thank you say please treat people with respect uh and the government's just dragging us into forced conflict and in misery with their military and economic policies yeah they're like i said the architects and the administrators of a failed worldview and they're dragging us along with them yeah well lee again i

thank you immensely for your work i'm very happy that dave uh hit me up and asked me to reach out to you because again i think this type of messaging and laying the situation out like you just have over the last hour and a half is extremely important i think this is one of the more important episodes we've recorded in some time at tftc because most people are not getting this blunt information laid out in the way that you just laid it out because um they're being completely propagandized by the mainstream media and those who would lead you to believe that we need to save ukraine at all costs um what's most important in that phrase is all costs like it is going to cost us a lot if we do go down this route whether it be with ukraine and russia or china and

Taiwan. Well, yep. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm glad Dave hooked us up at it. I had a good time chatting with you, even though the subject matter is not particularly rosy.

No, but hard truths need to be reconciled with where can, where can the freaks find out more about you, your sub stack, your consulting business? Sure. My website has everything. It has articles,

videos, all my social media links, And it's lee-bt.com. So L-E-E-B as in Bravo, T as in Tango.com. You can also just search me on Twitter, Lee Slusher. My sub stack is deepdivewithleeslusher.substack.com. So, yeah, hope you check it out. We're going to link to all that in the show notes, freaks.

Lee, thank you again. Hope you have a great weekend. You too. Thank you. All right. Peace and love, freaks. Take care. Thanks for watching!