The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Chuck Watson: "War, Rumours of War, and Governance"

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

On this Special episode Nate speaks once again with risk expert Chuck Watson for a critical assessment of the unfolding situation around Israel which adds to the rapidly escalating dangers of our current geopolitical landscape. As tensions rise, the potential risks that geopolitical confrontation in the Middle East poses could spill over into energy, economic systems, and our social fabric - Chuck lends his deep expertise and decades of experience to shed light on these complex dynamics. How do our individual perspectives of where history begins influence who we see as "good" or "evil" and is it even possible to find an unbiased source of 'truth'? What does Western diplomacy look like in a world no longer based on fear - and will the United States risk being stretched too thin trying to preserve the unipolar world of past generations? How do we even begin to navigate the minefield of geopolitical tensions that seem to be growing daily so as to maintain some sort of stability that avoids catastrophic outcomes in coming years? About Chuck Watson Chuck Watson has had a long career in military and intelligence work, with a specialty in natural and human made disaster modeling. He worked for the US Air Force, was an attache to US Ambassadors to the Middle East Robert McFarland, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a Soviet expert. Chuck has worked as an advisor to the military for over four decades with a particular emphasis on big data, open source intelligence, with an emphasis on the Soviet Union and Russia. Chuck is also the founder and Director of Research and Development of Enki Holdings, LLC, which designs computer models for phenomena ranging from tropical cyclones (hurricanes) and other weather phenomena, earthquakes, and tsunamis, as well as anthropogenic hazards such as industrial accidents, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction. Show Notes & Links to Learn More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/94-chuck-watson

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, in our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Greetings. As many of you are aware, there is a growing situation in the Middle East between Israel, Palestine, and beyond to Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the broader Middle East, and the wider world. I'm not an expert on this area other than to obviously know the importance of this region to the rest of the world. Half to two-thirds of the world's remaining oil reserves are within

a thousand miles of Israel and there are increasingly countries choosing sides. So I don't know enough about this to speak intelligently to it. So I invited my colleague Chuck Watson for a special episode to discuss what's going on and what it means. Chuck has been on this show three times before to talk about nuclear war, nuclear weapons, the outcome of a nuclear exchange. the broader perspective of a future using a military lens. Chuck has a long career in military and intelligence work. His specialty is natural and human-made disaster modeling.

He worked for the U.S. Air Force and was a special attach to U.S. ambassadors to the Middle East, Robert McFarland, and later Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a Soviet expert. Chuck has worked as in the military or as an advisor to the military for over four decades with a particular emphasis on big data, open source intelligence, with an emphasis on the Soviet Union and Russia. Chuck joins me today to integrate what's going on in the Middle East into a broader global risk assessment. I'll caution that our conversation is not uplifting, but it's one that I feel is important for more people to understand and integrate into their thinking and their planning. Ultimately, Chuck concludes that we're going to need different modes of problem solving and governance in order to successfully navigate this spiraling global political situation. and I agree.

This was a clear but intense overview of the challenges the world faces with respect to Israel and Palestine, Ukraine, and the broader economic implications of the financial system, interest rates, global trade, etc. Please welcome Chuck Watson. Good morning, Chuck. Great to see you. Hey, good morning. At least it's cooled off a little bit here. cooled off temperature-wise, not geopolitics-wise. Well, no. Are you feeling better?

I thank you for doing this impromptu. I know you're just getting over COVID. Yeah, it was mostly COVID hypersensitivity more so than I think I was over COVID in about 24 hours, the virus itself. I think we've reached a stage now where the immune system reactions of the, about as bad as the actual virus itself for most people. So just to timestamp this since world events are quite dynamic, this is Wednesday, October 18th at 8 in the morning, my time. And you and I talk quite often.

You were one of my very first podcast guests. Our first conversation was almost two years ago recorded in December 2021. before the Russia, Ukraine, NATO incursion. And I asked you on that podcast, what was the biggest risk facing humanity? And you immediately mentioned nuclear war possibilities in the next 24 months. And you said, and I quote, I think the biggest thing is we've got to reduce the level of geopolitical tensions.

So at the time, this was not something on my radar. And looking through the transcript of that podcast, we talked about Ukraine, Taiwan, Africa, and the Middle East. Two months later, the war in Ukraine broke out, and there have been revolutions in Africa. War is now broken out between Israel and Hamas, with the risk of spreading through the region and possibly going nuclear. Tensions with China are high. It feels like we're on the verge of a tectonic shift and perhaps World War III.

Are things really falling apart? And why? Can you give us a big picture update? I think the big picture is that things are falling apart. And part of the reason is that the international order, the systems where countries deal with each other, talk with each other, have just pretty well broken down. And that's a tough place to be because once you start breaking up into these different camps that not only don't talk, to each other, but fundamentally don't share values. And by values, I don't mean like moral ethical values. They don't, you know, you look at how bricks solves problems.

Look at the U.S., the West solves problems. They're radically different approaches to international problem solving. And so the UN system's completely broken down. Yeah, it does feel like things are worse. And how does Israel complains? this situation. Gosh, the Israeli situation, Nate, on my background, I basically lived in Israel for two years. I ran secure satellite communications for the U.S. Middle East diplomatic missions, guys

like McFarland and Rumsfeld and Habib. So that's an area I know something about. And, you know, I can give you just one little maybe snapshot to put it in context. Everyone is so upset with the Russia, Ukraine, about civilians. casualties. Well, there have been more civilian casualties in 10 days of the war between Hamas and Israel than there have been in two years of high-intensity conventional warfare between Ukraine and Russia. Think about that. The level of brutality in the Middle East is really phenomenal, and the question is why. And here in the West,

tend to not like to talk about it that much because we tend to think of things in more secular terms. We tend to think that religion and this kinds of things are something you do on Sunday. But it's a way of life in most of the world. And I think that's one of the areas that in U.S. foreign policy, we don't fully appreciate the depth of feeling of hatred, of animosity, and of resentment and of history that is involved in this conflict. And you know, you can easily that whole concept, then I won't bore you with the details, but periodization.

You think of where do you start history? Well, okay, if you're going to start it on October 7th, then your sympathies will be with Israel. But if you start it two days earlier even on October 5th, then you go, wow, the Israelis were encouraging rabbis to do prayers within the Muslim compound on Temple Mount. And so that was a trigger maybe for promos. And so you start going back.

more and more in time until eventually you realize this is just a lot of complex history with a lot of blood and the level of brutality, I think, is something that people don't really appreciate in the West so much. Well, you know the focus of this podcast is systems, and I often say that we're energy blind, and between half and two-thirds of the world's remaining oil reserves are in roughly 800 miles of Israel. We're also ecology blind on our impact on the oceans and other species, but even at an almost deeper level than that is we're geopolitics blind because we've assumed this complex six-continent supply chain and global peace and collaboration and the upslope of the carbon pulse will continue. And boy, this morning I saw,

that President Biden gave the green light to Israel to do whatever they see fit, and the Arab leaders of the Gulf nations refused to meet with him and his delegation. It just seems to me that there's a further isolation of the West because of this. And I'm kind of surprised so far that the markets haven't done. discounted this into the future. I mean, these are tectonic shifts that are potentially happening. What are your thoughts on that? I agree completely.

And again, that lack of realization of the fundamental shifts. It used to be the U.S. president goes to the Mideast or any region and says, I want to meet with leaders X, Y, and Z. Well, they're going to do it. You know, you would just, the level of influence that the U.S. has, and I'll be blunt, the level of fear. A lot of the reason that various countries meet with us is intimidation and fear because of the U.S., particularly the last 30, 40 years, primarily has exercised its power through military means. It's been an astonishing reversal for me growing up,

becoming of age professionally within State Department and Defense Department to see, the really almost reversal of roles in that our state department is often now much more militaristic than our own defense department. So you're right. You look at what's going on for the president to go to the region and to have at the last minute key leaders, the leader of Jordan, to have King Abdullah to withdraw from and cancel a meeting with the president. That's just astonishing. And it shows the tremendous this decline of American diplomacy and influence through the region. We are at severe risk of isolation. The Russia-Ukraine thing started our road to isolation.

And with Israel, in particular, because of the strong emotional connections there and the whole situation now with the fairly obvious extreme response of, And again, you look at Israeli a bit of a rabbit hole to avoid, but I do think it's worth mentioning that Israel's security has largely rested on the brutality of its response. Being a smaller population, they've always said, we need to kill at least 10 or 20 times as many of our adversaries as they kill of us. And, okay, that works for a certain level of intimidation, but after a certain point, that becomes self-destructive.

and I think we passed that point. So is it kind of a bluff and an intimidation that's been built up over years and decades? Yeah, that's an interesting question. Israeli security has rested really on four pillars. And what we're seeing with the current Hamas wars is at least three of those pillars that have started to collapse. The first one is the myth of Israeli invincibility. Now, that had some merit to it. You look at the early wars, 48, 6773, Israel had a definite quantitative, qualitative advantage over its Arab neighbors, particularly the education level of NCOs and officers.

You know, it looks very the details on that, but they did have a significant superiority in that sense. But over time, that's gone away. once they've moved into more of a police action population control instead of a peer-on-peer military, they lost that edge. So that's pillar one. The second pillar is, of course, U.S. support. Does the U.S. having their back? Well, are countries afraid of the U.S. anymore? You know, you look at the debacle of Afghanistan.

You look at how our weakness militarily has been shown. through our support to Ukraine hasn't worked out. That's become more in question. Now, U.S. remains a very dangerous adversary, but that pillar has some holes in it. Third pillar, brutality. And again, people don't like to say this, but this, I'm using Israeli terminology here,

a brutal response to any action. Again, kill 10 or 20 to 1. That's been the signature of Israeli response that you kill one of our people, we're going to kill 10 of yours. And again, that's very understandable. They're isolated. You know, they're outnumbered. You almost have to go that way, but that only gets you so far. The only pillar remaining is the nuclear deterrent, the so-called temple weapons or Samson options, it's sometimes called. And so that gets us to a question that you raised earlier is that we've always discussed in our conversations, risk of

nuclear war. Well, that was always considered more of a last resort option, but when all of your other means of deterrence start to fall apart and your survival is at stake, then you start to look at those nuclear weapons and start to think, well, maybe we need to use them. And so that's what I'm afraid will happen. If Israel goes into Gaza, if it goes badly, if Hesvila starts a second front, third front even with Jordan and West Bank is a possibility. Once desperation sets in, then you face that choice. Well, are you willing to lose or are you going to go the route of nuclear weapons? And I cannot see the Israelis ever picking the option of submission.

They will use the Masada option. They will go with nuclear weapons. So that's why I think this particular scenario is of such a, extreme risk. Okay. So I want to dive into that, obviously, but let me take another step back first. Boy, it sure seems that this is all happening at the same time that there's this global, growing, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, bricks expanding, and people are kind of rising up. to a global response to limits and poverty and other things kind of against the West. And now it seems like even with the brutal attacks from Hamas that a lot of the international

community seems to be siding with or against Israel. And I'm not paying super close attention to this. and I don't have a lot of background in it, but it really seems potent, the anti-Western sentiment that is different from when you worked in this region, when the U.S. was highly respected and admired. Is that also changing, or what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, Nate, it's interesting because there's a couple of complex phenomena work, and I apologize, I keep using the word complex, but that's what we were going to. Chuck, I'm very aware that every question I ask you, you could talk for 90 minutes on, which is the challenge of doing a short podcast. But go on. So let's take one piece of that, which is the U.S. reputation. Back during the Soviet era, the U.S. was that shining city on the hill. Sure, people realize we had our flaws, but the good intent of the U.S. was never really questioned. I remember during the Persian missile crisis in Europe, or even traveling in the Middle East, people would say, you know,

we don't like some of your policies, but we don't think you're being evil. We don't think you're trying to just gain for your own benefit. You do care about the world. I don't hear that anymore. I very much hear that America is being very selfish, that America is, if you look at things like the deals we do with dictatorships, and you look at how we have sponsored various regimes, where we're friends with dictators, when really we should have been pushing maybe for more liberalization, you look at what happened in Syria. Assad, Bashar Assad was trying to liberalize, but we took advantage of that to try to overthrow his government rather than work for an evolutionary improvement. And we ended up destabilizing

the country. We did the same thing effectively in Egypt, many of the Arab Spring countries. I've got to look at Libya, where now there's open-air slave markets. And we've got to have a secretary of state who was laughing about it. Well, that's just, you know, You might have gotten away with that 30 or 40 years ago. But now with social media, with networks, with widespread independent journalism in the developing world, you can't get away with that. People see the U.S. and see our actions. So that kind of hits the second point of social media and networks and how governments don't control the media the way they use. to. And of course, we've discussed that. And I mean, your excellent podcasts with Daniel and others

about the role of how media has changed the landscape politically here in the U.S. Well, it's radically changed the landscape in the Middle East in that you can't have this control of information. Now, a lot of people will say a lot of it's misinformation, and there's some fairness to that. But this just a landscape where you could control the narrative is gone. And so what you now have is multiple narratives and people choose the ones they feel most comfortable with or they feel is most realistic. And the narrative in the Middle East right now is that the U.S., Israel are in it for their own good and keeping the rest of us down. This is something I learned firsthand with the Ukraine-Russia situation is that there are

two wars. There's the kinetic war, military versus military, and then there's the information war, the propaganda on both sides. And like you just said, with AI and social media and all that, it becomes increasingly difficult to really know what's going on. Last night, soon after it happened, there was a missile that apparently hit a hospital in Palestine, in, in Palestine, in in Gaza and it was immediately said 500 were dead. And now it turns out that it might have been a failed rocket from Palestinians themselves. And it didn't actually hit the hospital. It hit the front courtyard of the hospital.

I mean, I don't know what to believe. But increasingly, there's going to be people on both sides of all these engagements, highlighting things on social media to generate empathy. with citizens around the world paying attention to this. And it seems like the information war is almost as important as the real war because it builds up support for a certain plan of action. Yeah. And it's funny you say that about the, it was probably a GPU 31 J-Dam exploding as an airburst,

just based on the video that was available immediately. at the time before people had a chance to start screwing with it. And it probably was an Israeli strike. I mean, if you look at it, but of course, in a sense, that almost doesn't matter after about 24 hours, because most of the world is going to believe it was an Israeli strike, an intentional Israeli strike. You know, Israel has gone and flooded social media with a variety of, honestly, I'm surprised. at the amateurish nature of some of their counter-narrative attempts. But I think...

Well, it would be good enough to fool me, that's for sure. I mean, people don't have your ability to suss what's really going on, most people. Well, and that's an interesting point, too, because what passes for journalism these days is having expertise in those areas. The problem is, how do you find an independent analyst who is going to look at, you know, at that and give you a neutral opinion that you trust. You know, if you pull somebody from the U.S. military, and well, chances are they're going to follow whatever the U.S. narrative does. Likewise, if you are you going to ask an Israeli spokesperson? Yeah, probably that's not going to give you a

neutral viewpoint. You're going to ask somebody from Gaza or from one of the NGOs? Yeah, again, there's so many agendas. And finding someone who does not have an agenda or a group, trusted group. There's just no trusted space for information. And that's catastrophic from the standpoint of the average person trying to sort out what's going on. So setting aside the nuclear war risk for the moment, which is in reality, of course, impossible to set aside. But just focusing on the information, how does someone make sense of Ukraine and Russia and Israel, Hamas, going forward for the people listening that want to understand what's going on in the world, but understand that a lot of the media is goal-seeked to support a certain narrative.

What do you do? Just tune out and tend your potatoes? Or, I mean, what do you do? Yeah, that's tuning out and tending your potatoes, or in my case, my tomato patch felt back is awfully appealing. So I made a short list of the areas that you should, become at least somewhat knowledgeable in if you want to understand things. Okay, maybe it's not such a short list. History, language, linguistics, international law, economics, engineering, military science, theology.

Okay, that's just half the list and that's not even going into the details. And I hate to throw up my hands and say, I don't know how the average person does it. I've got decades of experience in this, and it's virtually a full-time job trying to create a worldview that I have some level of confidence in. And so I don't know how, for the average person, I don't know how to do that. Somehow we've got to build some institutions where their job and obligation is to be trusted sources of information. And it's clearly not in the media because there's too much of a financial incentive and too much of a governmental regulatory pressure to not be objective. And so I don't know how we do that, Nate.

I don't either. But as someone who's an educator and a scientist and trying to, I think we need an informed public to have any chance of benign outcomes and all these things. And I lose sleep over this, especially with what I'm learning about AI. and the ability to create fakes, and then there's real false flags, and I think people are just not going to know what's really going on. Well, Nate, forget an informed public. I would be happy with informed legislators and informed leaders. Because I look at the horrific knowledge gap among elected leaders in this country.

trying to brief people who are supposedly in positions of power and they don't understand basic science or engineering, much less history or linguistics or any of those other things. And these are the leaders, people who supposedly are, and I know this sounds probably pretty arrogant, but you know, I was raised in, or my professional career started in an era where, you know, you were expected to take decades of studying all these fields before anybody took you halfway seriously. And today, the people making the decisions don't have the background in these fields. They seem to be driven more by ideology and by their own stodep-piped narratives. And it's frightening.

You just look at what's going on in Congress versus the administration right now. And there's a death of expertise. and that is frightening from a governance standpoint, much less from an electorate standpoint. And so because of that situation, we end up having these soundbite cartoon-like summations of a really complex and dangerous situation. Exactly. You look at something that I cite quite often is how, and again, not to defend the president of the Russian Federation, but he'll make a statement, it's immediately pulled out, translated, usually mistranslated into English without context, and then paraded as evidence of his evil. Well, you know, a good example of that is when he was discussing the collapse of the

Soviet Union. Putin called that the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Well, what he meant by that, the context of that is that the way the Soviet Union fell apart. created a lot of the problems that we see in the world today. And I think if you look around, you have to say he's not wrong. You look at the conflict in Ukraine. You look at the conflict in the Middle East. The Middle East was just left negligent for years while groups like Hamas and Hezbollah Aging power.

You look at how Afghanistan was ignored for, what, 12 years until suddenly they were flying airplanes into buildings. And so that context from that statement is missing, yet that gets paraded all over American media as proof that he's evil. Well, that's just one very small tidbit of an example. I could show misquotes from other world leaders just as easily or even our own leaders that show the same thing. So let's segue that back to the Middle East.

is this a completely different segregated war than Ukraine, Russia? Or is the fact that Iran and Russia are backing Hezbollah and Syria and it's all kind of interlinked? Is this kind of an extension of the NATO-Russia situation? No, that's not to say they aren't convolved, but they're completely different. You know, this war has been going on for 2,000 years, at least. So it's, they're not directly related. What is related is that the Mideast conflicts have been tied up in great power struggles. And again, periodization, how do you figure out where to start your narrative and start history?

And probably we're going to have to start it at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled that entire region. And then how did things get split up? You look at World War I, the Sykes-Picot arrangement where they literally, in a cafe in Paris, drew the boundaries on a napkin. I mean, you can't make this stuff up sometimes, Nate. And so those boundaries, you look at Balfour in the 40s and how the nation state of Israel got started and all of that complex history that led us to the point where you now have a situation where you've got an entrenched resident population, the Israelis who feel threatened on all sides. You have a neglected population of the Palestinian Arabs who live there for generations and now have been, lived as a diaspora for several generations, constantly keeping alive the thought of going home again and reclaiming their lands. That has nothing really to do with the U.S. foreign policy or

Russia or even, to a lesser extent, Iran, other than they are taking advantage of that situation for their own political purposes. And that's where it does get convolved. particularly right now what you're witnessing is the, is it the last grasp of the American Empire, or is it the desperate attempt of the U.S. to remain a global unipower? There was an article just recently in Foreign Affairs magazine discussing how the U.S. is still the world's dominant power by far. And you read their argument, and Nate, you would look at it and shake your head and go, what the heck are these people talking about? Because they're mainly basing it on GDP.

Well, as we know, GDP is a horrible measure of the capacity of the country, particularly when you're talking about financialization. And so when you look at, they're talking about, oh, well, you know, we spend more on our military than the next 10 militaries combined. Okay. Well, a rational military analyst looks at that and goes, yeah, but it costs us 20 times more to blow up a given target because of the way that our system works, then it does our next level of potential adversaries. So in terms of resources, those kind of measures and metrics don't work.

Yet this couple of very respected foreign policy authors were arguing that the U.S. is still the dominant world power and we can basically act as a hedgeron. Well, what do you do in that environment? This is another thing that I've come to terms with and learned in the last 18 months is when people say the U.S. wants to do this or the U.S. wants to go to war with Iran or take out their potential of nuclear weapons or the U.S. wants to do something with Russia. It's not really the U.S. There are several and multiple factions within government. that wax and wane in their voice and their power, but it's not a unified thing. It's not like there's 20 politicians sitting around and agreeing on something. There are all kinds of unfolding alliances that somehow get their way.

And so it's not the United States as one entity that is, desiring these things. And as a citizen, you and I are doing this as a pro-social, pro-future, pro-life-on-earth, you know, contribution to the discourse because we, as Americans, we deeply care about the state of the future of our world. But getting back to this question about factions and- Let me jump in. Please. Just for a second, because I think you've raised an important point. that politically there is an incredible uniformity of thought within U.S. foreign policy. If you go back to the 80s, there were basically two schools of thought.

There was a stronger military emphasis on military emphasis on power projection. And there was another school of thought that was more, no, we need to concentrate on soft diplomacy. We need to, you know, things like Peace Corps, we need to engage. there were actually two substantially different schools of thought. Today, there really is an remarkable uniformity of thought within the U.S. Think about how, and I've been on the receiving end of a lot of this hatred for even suggesting that maybe we should talk to Russia, maybe we should have diplomatic outreach. And you look at how the U.S. has very much both parties,

Democrat and Republican are very aggressive, the so-called neoconservative philosophy, which says that the U.S. cannot allow any regional, much less global powers to approach it in terms of ability to project military power. That is a remarkable level of uniformity. Now, there's some details that get people argue over and make more of than there are. there's at least within the Republican Party now somewhat of a hesitate to use the term America first but a little bit more of a well maybe we need to look after ourselves first but it's a very small movement it's not the majority by any stretch the majority of both parties and almost uniformly it's incredible the Democrat Party used to have a fairly significant peace movement within it you can't find a peace activist in the

Democrat Party anymore where they a magnifying glass. So I did want to jump in and say that within America, there is a remarkable uniformity of thought that the U.S. should project military power and use that almost as a first option. I was more pointing out like last week, I guess it's two weeks ago now, October 7th, that on the morning of October 8th,

there was this very detailed Wall Street Journal article pointing that Iran was behind what Hamas did and with all kinds of references, like 12 hours after it happened. And, you know, so there are definitely some strong Iran haters in our government as there are people that dislike Russia, et cetera. And so there are these sub-campaigns happening. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. there's argument as to who we should blow up first, but there doesn't seem to be that much consideration on

maybe we should try not blowing people up for a while and see if we can negotiate or come up with alternative methods. And I know being a little bit sarcastic on that, but it does seem like our kinetic military foreign policy, and that goes to that attitude change within the State Department where State Department is now often more militaristic than the Defense Department. But you're right. There's the Iran first crowd.

There's the Russia first crowd. There's the China confrontation crowd. But what's the common thread through all that? It's confrontation. So let's get back to the Middle East situation. You mentioned that rather than losing that Israel will choose a nuclear option. So Israel has nuclear weapons. What is the nuclear risk here?

And maybe you could talk about the wider context with Iran and the situation in the Middle East. Yeah. So the obvious fear is that should Israel start to lose conventionally that they will resort to nuclear weapons to preserve the state? and I don't think there's any doubt about that. So the next love question is, are there any other actors in the region? Iran's probably pretty close to developing, having the ability to deploy nuclear weapons.

That's why, just as a sideline, I'm not entirely convinced Iran was behind this latest outbreak. I don't think they were quite ready for this. It doesn't, it would seem to make more sense for them to wait until they had a nuclear capacity as a deterrent to rather than starting a major regional war. Of course, Pakistan, the so-called Islamic bomb, Pakistan has a number of nuclear weapons. Those are largely reserved for dealing with India. So would they be willing to part with any, that's a separate question? I think probably not. But given the emotion and

given pressures maybe. So we're talking tactical nuclear weapons. We're talking tactical nuclear exchanges of, you know, the low single digits to tens, which, you know, has regional impacts, certainly changes the political way of- single digits to tens. What does that mean?

You know, under 30 weapons in the, you know, 10 to 50 kill. a ton range, which, again, is some of the stuff we've talked about in our previous podcasts about when you start to look at environmental effects, that's where you're starting to have regional environmental effects, but you're probably not going to get global kinds of,

there clearly be effects beyond the immediate Middle East fallout and particularly impacts from temperature changes, things like that, but they'd be transient for the most part. Now, in the region, of course, you're talking about hundreds of years for within the target sense of impacts. But the bigger

in terms of wider context, one of the fears is that the U.S. gets itself involved with Iran. And I find it hard. We've got some very advanced conventional weapons, but the Iranians

have gone to great lengths to protect a lot of their nuclear infrastructure. And so the question is can we, with assurance, destroy Iran's nuclear capacity without using tactical nuclear weapons? Because it would take something of a tactical nuke to get to the underground locations where they're located or something like that. Exactly, to assure yourself that you have destroyed that target. But there's another factor, too, that I've heard discussed by U.S. military officials, and that's you know, we haven't used a nuclear weapon in 75 years.

So then the question becomes, do people doubt your nuclear determinant? Are you willing to use a nuke? And, you know, this gets into that where one of the things in my list was anthropology and psychology and spite and all those things that you've talked about. And the question is, do you, there are literally senior U.S. military officials who have argued that we need to find a reason to use a nuclear weapon, so people will still be afraid and believe that we will use a nuclear weapon. And they say that with a straight face.

It's like some Rod Serling Twilight Zoom movie that we're watching and living. It is just... I keep looking for him to step out of the... I keep looking for him to step out of the shadows. It's like, Rod, when are you going to step out and tell us? that this is just a bad dream. Well, I mean, not to, you know, go too far off tangent, but would, given what we face, I think you and I agree that the odds of at least some nuclear weapons going off in the next

decade are much higher than the average person expects. And that's partially because we've been paying attention to this and partially because of what you talked about. I think it was our first or second podcast, the concept of risk homeostasis, that if you run a red light 12 times and nothing bad happens, you're going to adjust your behavior to not think about that risk in the same way we haven't had a nuclear war or a nuclear weapon in, as you say, 75 years. So people minimize emotionally what the risks really are. But what if a tactical nuke or a nuclear weapon were to go off? Wouldn't that be a psychological and emotional reminder and wake-up call to the rest of the world

of how horrific and potentially civilization ending a strategic peer-to-peer exchange of those weapons would be? Maybe, maybe not. modern tactical weapons with the precision targeting. One of the arguments, and this gets, you talk about a rabbit hole, this is one that we could easily blow several hours on and put most people to sleep. But the issue of given precision targeting of small tactical nuclear weapons, they're more usable in the sense they don't,

either not city busters. It's not like Shorosha or Nagasaki, where you're trying to target and wipe out an entire city. You're trying to destroy, you maybe have it detonate at or even under the surface to be able to destroy a hardened structure. Now, there's good and bad to that. There's maybe fewer direct civilian casualties in that kind of an environment. The bad side is you're lofting a lot of particulates into the upper atmosphere.

And again, that gets very messy very quickly. But the point is that, and that's another reason why the fear is that crossing that nuclear threshold is much easier now because of precision targeting. And you can convince yourself, well, I can hit just what I'm after and not cause a lot of collateral damage. Again, though, you're right. The psychological threshold. of okay, now you have used a nuclear weapon. Does the other side now feel freer to use a nuclear weapon against your troop concentrations against a port maybe?

Do you start to, and that's where, as we discussed in a previous podcast, the whole crowd profit exercise and this whole attitude of once you cross that nuclear threshold, where's the bright line where you stop? And once you're at war and once you're, starting to sling these things around. I'm not sure that there's a place where you can, where one side of the other is going to stop. You have to be willing to lose.

Again, I keep coming back to, are you, what line are you not willing to cross? At what point are you willing to lose rather than cross some line? I don't think the Israelis have a line when it comes to that. Does the U.S.? I have fears about that? I know that I don't believe that Russia does. in the sense that if it becomes existential,

I think that they would result to a strategic exchange in order to preserve some semblance of the Russian Federation. So let's talk about Russia and Ukraine briefly. Does this Middle East Israel-Hamas situation reduce the odds of a really bad global strategic nuclear war between the West and Russia, which I think is something you and I both have been quite worried about that if Ukraine loses, what will fill that vacuum? Will the West try and double down? And does the result end up escalating? How does the Middle East situation change the Russia-NATO situation?

I think it increases the risk of the Ukrainians doing something really stupid in the short term. Just last, yesterday, of course, the U.S. has been secretly shipping them these advanced tactical missile systems, attack them, that have, they started using them, the longer range missiles. That kind of happened under the radar here with all the stuff going on with Hamas. The problem is that the money is drawing up. You can already see a lot of the pro-Ukrainian Twitter bots are starting to disappear because the money's dried up, which made my life a little bit easier. So you can see that I think that Ukraine's going to get desperate,

and they're likely to try to do something. I think we're going to have a radiological event within the next. few months unless Russia is very careful and rep and pulls this thing to a close in the short term. What's a radiological event? So blowing up a reactor and causing a mass casualty event within Ukraine, I think that has a very high likelihood right now because they're desperate. They need to try to re-engage Western attention,

which right now is entirely focused on, Israel in the Middle East. And the U.S. in particular, if it's a choice between Israel and Ukraine, well, Ukraine goes under the bus. So I think they realize that and they're desperate. So the question is, are they desperate enough to negotiate or are they desperate enough to try to do something to reengage Western attention? Unfortunately, I think it may well be that latter thing. Now, I think the chances of U.S. intervention, just got a lot smaller. We're having to redeploy forces to the Middle East.

If this does start to involve where the U.S. is protecting Israel's northern flank with Hezbollah, and I think you're going to see a massive U.S. intervention in Syria. And if that happens, to try to block the Iranian pipeline of supplies getting to Hezbollah. So I think if it goes that route, then we actually will have a lower chance of any kind of a direct war with Russia. I think it will be very ugly and messy what happens in Ukraine, but it'll get sorted out without us. And then unfortunately, there's the higher risk of tactical exchange in the Middle East of some kind. But at least a strategic exchange will be lower. So in today's world, is it possible for the United States to fully support two war fronts in the Middle East and in Ukraine with munitions and money and everything that, you know, the logistics?

I mean, I know nothing about that, but it seems that that stretches the United States and its allies pretty thin. Yeah, I mean, we weren't even really able to support Ukraine to the level that they needed. So, you know, we pulled a lot of the war reserves out of Israel to send to Ukraine, and that's created a bit of a bind. So now we're having to send our strategic reserves into Israel. So we have very rapidly depleted our reserves. And if they do go into Gaza, if operations start in earnest in the northern front with Hezbollah, much less a confrontation in Syria with their. on. You know, we, we're going to be really stretched to, to handle all that.

We'll be dipping into our actual operational reserves, which is, and we don't have the industrial capacity to replace it in short notice. Why is that? We don't build stuff here. You know, we build, we are basically producing in terms of artillery ammunition, which, again, is the core thing you need in a modern conventional battle is the 155 millimeter artillery shell is kind of the metric you use. And we basically are you, it takes us a year to produce one month's worth of consumption.

So, you know, we're in desperate shape on that. And with no potential in the longer term to get to the point where we could produce those kind of levels. We just don't have the manufacturing capacity in this country anymore. Oh, boy. I mean, we talk about this all the time. And then we joke that about Monday morning that you always give me bad news. And it feels like that again, you're telling me things that I didn't know.

You know, I'm a systems guy. I look at ecology and energy and human behavior. and if you if you kind of squint and see what's happening, any one of these bad outcomes destabilizes the oil, the spice flow to use a Dune reference to the rest of the world from the Middle East, which given the fragility of our financial system, the just in time nature of our medicines and everything else, could be catastrophic, even without the use of nuclear weapons, if the Middle East is destabilized.

And it now seems that from that perspective, there are thousands of potential Archduke Ferdinand pathways and vectors that you and I can't even predict. But how likely are we going to navigate diplomatically this minefield in coming. coming months. Wow, Nate. I don't, I have a really hard time seeing how we get out of this one. The U.S. has really painted itself into a set of rhetorical corners here. And particularly in the Middle East, you know, how do you, you've got a very, you've got a

very intrinsic Israeli leadership, you've created a situation where you've got several million refugees, multi-generational refugee

system, the level of hatred and resentment between the parties is such that it's going to be very difficult to come up with any kind of an acceptable stabilizing solution. You can maybe through enough application of enough force, maybe beat people back down to the

point where they're not actively resisting. But again, does that pop back up in six months or a year or whatever? The long-term solutions are very difficult here. You can go back to at the end of World War I with between Turkey and Greece where there was an exchange of populations and You know, you had stabilization that way, but that's the UN resolutions around Israel are just the opposite because they guarantee a right of return and all of that. So we've structurally created a situation in the Middle East where it's intractable. There's no, there isn't, I don't know where there's a solution because neither side really, everybody talks about the so-called two-state solution, but neither side accepts that. they both want a one-state solution. So I don't know, other than coming in with overwhelming force, separating the parties,

and giving it, enforcing a piece at the point of the gun for at least a generation or two, how do you solve this? I don't know. But even if you did solve that, what happens with Iran, Iraq, and all, of the Saudi Arabia and all of the oil nations, the nations who have the oil that the world uses under their land, how do you solve, avert them from getting involved? Let me ask you this. And I'm really curious as to your answer. So I often say that I got my master's in business from the University of Chicago. And the word energy was never mentioned in the two. years I was there. I've been talking with you a lot in the last few years, and so I know you've had really good calls and are on top of this situation. Yet since the Israel Hamas situation started on

October 7th, the long-term oil futures are up like $2 or $2.50, like six, seven, eight years out. And the short term is up like $4. Like, and the stock market is actually up since this happened. So most people, with voting with their dollars, strongly disagree with the risks that you've just outlined. Well, why is that? Risk comia stasis. You know, we've gotten away for the last 30 years with ignoring the Middle East.

for practical purposes. And okay, there's an occasional flare up, 2006, Lebanon war. Okay, yeah, there's some terrorism, blah, blah. But as you say, the spice still flows. You know, the oil is still coming. So I think people tend to, they think, well, you know, we muddled through last time,

we'll muddle through this time. And that's where we have the hard task here. Is it different this time? because at one point it's going to be different at one point you know that you're going to run out of road at some point and the the people who say that well we'll figure it out what's different this time well for one thing we've blown up the whole energy connection with russia which has as we've discussed such a huge influence. You look at, my God, the Wahhabi Sunni leadership of Saudi Arabia is talking hourly, daily, if not hourly, with the Shia radical, quote unquote, is radical leadership of Iran. How that has never happened. So if you're talking about coordination,

between the different oil producing countries, you know, and they have other markets too. You've got now China's coming and willing to pay for resources. You've got the rest of the world is, you know, we're not the biggest market anymore. We're on the downside of that. People don't need the West anymore is where this is headed. And once that critical mass happens, I think it'll fall apart very quickly.

Except the West does need the Middle East and other places. Yeah, but they need us. Exactly. So what about Europe? I mean, are they strongly supportive of Israel as the U.S. is. And they're getting the double whammy here because they've lost the pipeline. line to Russia and then also if there's something goes in the Middle East, then that's oil and other things that they import. Yeah, because what now a third of their LNG is coming through

the Straits of Hormuz, if I saw that statistic correctly recently? You know, Europe is deindustrializing. And it's hard to see how Europe survives that if there's any kind of a normal winter this year, if this conflict, even if the conflict in the Middle East doesn't continue to spiral. It's hard to see how they're going to make it through this winter without drastic cutbacks. And so from an economic standpoint, you look at, well, again, we talk about GDP, but you look at incomes

and disruptions across Europe are likely to become quite severe, which has, of course, political ramifications. So I just, Europe has been acting against its own interests for the last two years with the whole Ukraine thing. And I, especially Germany, I do not understand other than they have become, they're, they stopped being pragmatic and German foreign policy through the Cold War was largely pragmatic, but it's become much more ideological. And, you know, ideology won't hit your house. So I'm not sure how long that's sustainable. I actually think they with a normal winter, they might be okay this winter,

but every subsequent winter is going to get tougher, especially if they can't rely on Qatar and other LNG imports. But that's a separate conversation. In our first podcast, Chuck, I asked you what recommendations you would have for our political leaders? And you replied that we have to focus on reducing the level of geopolitical tensions. And I asked you how we would do this and you said, don't buy into the propaganda. Don't buy into this adversarial relationship that we increasingly have with other nations. So this is almost two years from now when I asked you that, where do we stand now and how would you change your recommendations to our leaders two years on?

I think I'd use more profanity and yell more because it's essentially the same situation, is that, you know, this whole thing of immediate comic books simplified, oh, Hamas are evil people with blood dripping from their fangs and whatever. I'm sorry, that's not the real world. And yes, what happened the seventh was pretty terrible, but, you know, what the Israeli bombings have done within Gaza is pretty horrific also. And the point being that human beings are pretty crappy to each other. And so at some point, you've got to decide, well, why are they being crappy? And do they have any legitimate interests and legitimate concerns?

And whatever you think of their ideology, the fact is the people of Gaza have been living effectively in an open-air prison camp for years. And when they're not resisting, they get a... ignored. When they do flare up and resist, they get bombed. So don't let, my biggest advice is don't let problems fester. When there's a quiet period, don't go about your life and cash your checks. Go in and fix the, take the opportunities to fix things. Look at, you can apply that to Ukraine. You could apply that to any of a dozen conflict zones around the world. Neglect is what causes them to flare up. And once they flare up, it's damn hard to fix it. And if at all.

Well, you can apply that to probably the personal lives of everyone watching this program as well, when there's a quiet period, get some of this other stuff prepared and done. So is there a common thread through this entire conversation that unites all of these issues that seem so existential and worrisome? Complexity. In a word, it's complexity. These are not simple. And again, as I just said, to avoid comic book kinds of good, evil, right, wrong depictions, sure, there are some cases where that applies, but it's actually fairly rare. There's always context. There's always history. There's always detail that matters.

And if you look at all the problems we face, whether it's economics or AI or geopolitics, a lot of it boils down to the fact that our modern world is so complex. It has exceeded the ability of our governance. It's exceeded the ability of our political structures to handle them. And that, I think, is the existential problem humanity faces us. We don't have a means of governing ourselves that. takes into account and handles complexity. So as you know, I care deeply about the natural world and other species,

the oceans, climate change, the environment, how humans are going to navigate the great simplification. It seems to me, and in recent presentations I've talked about, the four horsemen of the 2020s, it seems to me that geopolitics and our response in this arena trumps all those other things, that none of that other stuff is going to matter until we have a stable or more stable than we have today situation with the major powers in the world, most of which have nuclear weapons. What are your thoughts on that?

I lose sleep over this. I agree completely, Nate. A lot of my research active work is trying to figure out implications of changing climate, that sort of thing, using models that were originally developed for nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and that kind of thing. But you know, it's, you're right, none of it matters. you can try to look at flooding in Africa or try to figure out any of these other problems and none of them matter if we blow ourselves up. But more generically, you can't solve any of these problems. You can have the greatest technical fix in the world. But if you cannot get the political leadership to understand and buy in and to take actions that are perhaps not

to their short-term advantage, but long-term advantage. It doesn't happen. Of course, that's one of the areas that you've talked about extensively with various people is that human nature and going for the short-term high, the short-term fix versus long-term planning and deferred pleasure and all those kinds of things that all interact with the fact that complex problems require solutions where the benefit and payoff isn't immediately obvious, and it's also hard to explain to an electorate or to voters or supporters.

So that means our political system basically is incapable of dealing with it. And so I know that. How do we, I think the key is if you want to fix the environment, if you want to fix geopolitics, if you want to fix resource limitations, You've got to fix governance first because until you get structures in place that let people solve those problems and carry those solutions forward into the future, then they don't get fixed. Is AI and potentially AGI going to make this even worse? Because we've got thousands of wealthy people and corporations and nation states that are in this arms race to get their. first with the best AI. And it seems like governance of the type that you're talking about

requires wisdom and restraint as opposed to amassing more financial, military, geopolitical power. So does AI accentuate the risk vectors that you're discussing, or is that overblown? I tend to think it's a little bit overblown in the sense that, yeah, it makes things worse at the margins, but we've been quite good at screwing ourselves over for a long time. And so maybe it makes things happen a little bit faster. But the flip side of that is, hey, if it triggers a war, then it crashes all the networks and the resources that are required to make AI work. So, you know, it's a self-correcting problem, which is a very cynical thing to say because you're talking about millions of possibly even billions of lives at stake. But, you know, that's being cynical and having gallows humor is the only way you can survive in this business sometimes. But bottom line is, I agree AI is a problem, but I think it's going to ultimately be self-correcting and not in a good way.

So I had planned since this is our fourth recorded conversation to finally give you a chance to answer the questions that I ask all of my guests, the personal questions. But in nine minutes from now, believe it or not, I have a presentation to about 100 college students, which is, of course, very difficult for me to leave a conversation like this. and explain the world to bright-eyed pro-social 19 to 20-year-olds. Do you have any just general thoughts on that and or closing words? Try to, to younger people, particularly those that are getting started, I think it's important that take the world as it is.

And it's not a very pleasant place that humans are often cruel to each other. there's a lot of horror in the world and particularly when you look at governments and how to try to make things works it's unbelievably frustrating but the flip side is people can also be quite kind to each other they can also

they also have cats that they you know and that keep us in line and so you know yeah it's it's a dark discouraging business sometimes, but just understand that the way we survive this is not in spite of our

humanity, but because of it. Well, we've been close to nuclear war many times, and you've discussed that on previous podcasts, where someone didn't follow orders and someone dug down deep into their humanity and made the right choice. And I'm hopeful that in the broader, uh, uh, arena of what's coming that those sorts of situations will happen. But I think we have to be informed. Yeah, and be the one who sees the humanity. Don't be the one who signs on to, you know, dropping people into, you know, we're very much now into identity politics and classifying and grouping people and assigning motivations to them. Understand that the person on the other side of their more than likely has valid reasons for believing what they're believing in. And you need to understand that

and find the commonality rather than constantly looking for the divisions. That's good advice. Chuck, in all four of our conversations, you've mentioned the imperative that we're going to need different governance structures to make it through coming decades. That is an entire conversation unto itself. I would love to have you back maybe as part of a roundtable on unpacking how we could at least take the first steps towards a different governance fit for purpose in this human predicament sort of era, if you'd be willing. Yeah, absolutely, because again, all this other stuff we're talking about are symptoms. We've got to fix governance. And that's the hard question, isn't at night? Yeah. Thank you for your time and your lifetime of expertise on this and to be continued, my friend.

Sounds good, sir. Take care. Good luck with your class. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.