The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - NATO/Ukraine: Playing Russian Roulette with Complex Life | Frankly #33

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Recorded June 2nd, 2023   Description   On this Frankly, Nate unpacks his thoughts on the escalating situation between Russia and Ukraine. US and NATO have been cautiously supporting Ukraine, but increasingly crossing more and more lines that had been previously 'out of bounds'. With the upcoming Defender 23 military exercise on June 12th, NATO is increasingly pushing the boundary of how far it is willing to engage in this conflict. How is the current narrative being put forth by the US Government and media obscuring the public concern towards the risks of World War III and nuclear exchange? How high is the risk of a nuclear first strike - and what are the chances of further escalation after that? What would this mean for humans and the biosphere? In the larger picture of the existence of complex life on Earth, does it really matter who is right?    For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/33-nato/ukraine-playing-russian-roulette-with-complex-life   To Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/cqgNltPFY5s

Greetings. Flipping a coin of sorts, whether to record this, frankly. But I've been an observer of the human problematic for the last 20 years since I left Wall Street. And I tend to focus on what I think is the biggest risk while keeping a view to the long term. I think the biggest risk in the next couple months in the next year is World War III. is nuclear war between NATO and Russia. And even if it doesn't go nuclear, it probably would go there in a conventional kinetic war. The reason for this, frankly,

and I'm leaving in a few hours to go on a 10-day trip, and I wanted to record this, because events are accelerating, is because I think at least living in the United States, We have been lulled into a sense of complacency by the public and political narrative about the Ukraine situation. I wanted to give some context with the core message, which I may repeat two or five times in the next 10 or 15 minutes, is that at this point of the war, a year and three months into it, there's lots of background of 1992, and 2014 Medan Revolution and Crimea and the, you know, all the various Minsk agreements and what happened before.

It doesn't matter who is right at this point because the risks to our civilization, the risks to our global, very fragile financial system, the risks to the biosphere in case there is nuclear exchange, far, far, far outweigh any provincial blaming of some outgroup or ideologies of what some downtrodden X group cares about or whether Putin is a thug. or any of those things are irrelevant to the stakes that we face. So first of all, the narrative. I'm not naturally a counterculture person. I am with respect to macroeconomics and neoclassical economics

because I think most of it is bunk. And it has led us into a global ecological overshoot that's worsening with a cul-de-sac as far as, our options. But generally, I go with the flow because the flow often makes sense. I hate to speak out in this way, but if I have a brand on this channel, the Great Simplification, it's trying to get at the truth of the situation, mostly in the natural sciences, but also in systems. And I'm branching out into a little bit uncomfortable territory with geopolitics, but that's because I have a large network of people that are confirming that this is what's going on.

So as far as the narrative, first of all, the United States totally messed up the narrative of public perception in the Vietnam War. Colin Powell knew that and he changed the policy. There's a book that I'll put in the show notes. I can't remember the name of it. where he specifically changed the propaganda and PR for the Iraq War to make sure that the American public was on the side of the government. I think that happened again in 2002 with Iraq War II, and it's happening again. This situation rhymes with Iraq and with Vietnam. I also know that people that really know what's going on are either trained not to speak out

or they can't because it's their jobs or they're afraid to because to go against the strong narrative by the White House and our administration. Putin is Hitler. Russia needs to be defeated is dangerous to someone's status, their paychecks, their credibility. It's very, very difficult. And Jeffrey Sachs is one of the people that's talking about this reality. There are others, and thankfully there are some voices that are starting to be heard that are urging kind of an end state that is stable. The other example is,

is in our media, we're led to believe that Russia is on the verge of collapse or their military is running. Look, they're using these 50, 60-year-old Soviet tanks. They must be out of resources. And the journalists today don't take a deeper dive in these things. Yes, they do have 20,000 tanks from the 1950s or 60s. They also have millions and millions of rounds of 100-millimeter and munition. They're not using the tanks as tanks because they would be crushed versus an Abrams or a leopard. They're using the tanks as mobile artillery shelling vehicles. And they're cannibalizing them for parts. So Russia, at least on that note, they're not desperate. They're using the resources they have in a very effective way. I think it's really, really dangerous that the United States

thinks that we have such uber military superiority in this situation. This is on their doorstep. They fight differently than we do. And I think the larger problem is nobody is afraid anymore. It was 80 years ago when the bombs fell in Japan and the horror and misery and just absolute shock and tragedy is three generations. generations gone. And we have faced risks like this in the past 50 years, but they were always averted. There were people like Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Archepov who should have holidays named after them because they disobeyed orders and stopped the escalation of what would have ended up into nuclear war. But It never happened.

So it's an example of risk homeostasis that, oh, the zeitgeist is that the nuclear risk are always far more remote and unrealistic prospects relative to reality. But this psychological belief in our leaders and in our population reinforces itself to get worse. The more fear and consequences recede into our distant historical past. The risk is very real now. I'm coming back on the 11th on June 12th is going to be the largest NATO military exercise in history called Defender 23. I'm sure it's truly an exercise.

But with all these things, you never know when there's going to be a flub up or a mixup or a mistake. And then that mistake has to be retaliate against and all of a sudden we're on a path to escalation. I'm not predicting that. How could anyone predict that? I'm just laying out the fact that accidents happen always and the war games that have happened in the past, proud profit, and other ones have indicated that very often, to the point of being almost always, once there is a nuclear exchange or an escalation, it ends up going strategic. Chuck Watson, a friend of An analyst, a Russia expert for the last 40 years was on the podcast outlining the risks

of a moderate nuclear exchange, it would destroy the biosphere. It would drop global temperatures 15 to 20 degrees Celsius for a few years, block out the sun, effectively being much like the asteroid 66 millions a years ago, threw up enough soot to pretty much kill all life on Earth as the all that debris came raining down and was fire on the earth. Where is this in our public discourse? When I was a kid, we had the day after scared the crap out of me in eighth grade watching this nuclear war thing.

We are so blaze about the greatest freaking risk ever to face our species in our world with 13,000 nuclear warheads around the world and military exercises and the U.S. U.K. governments are not being and saying friendly diplomatic things to Russia. Lindsay Graham is bragging about dead Russians are a good investment. What? So I'm very, very concerned about this. Even if we go to war, which would mean boots on the ground, which frankly I think boots on the ground in Ukraine, like officially, because there's boots on the ground now, but officially large boots on the ground eventually ends in war unless it ends in some sort of a stable, uh, um, broken up Ukraine where we have a new Cold War and that, that could be a, a stable state.

Um, but even if we don't have a world war, this sort of event, um, triggers all the other risks that I've been talking about in this podcast. We are financially very, um, uncoupled from our biophysical reality. Russia is responsible for almost a quarter of global natural gas and oil exports. Between Ukraine and Russia, they account for over a quarter of world grain exports. So for most countries in the world that are not watching CNN or Fox, Russia is perhaps more important than the United States from a physical resource standpoint. We don't ever hear that perspective in the United States.

So I think there was an article a few weeks ago in the Atlantic saying protecting Ukraine is not enough. We need to take it to the Russians and cause Russia to collapse, paraphrasing. That is unbelievably systems blind. First of all, Russia is not going to allow this to happen. This is not 1992 collapse of the Soviet Union. They learned a lot from that. This is mother Russia. This is existential for them.

And there's lots of calls for Putin to be overthrown or whatever. Who replaces Putin, which would probably be Petrusiv, would be worse, very anti-West and more aggressive. So personally, I think we have to find a way for Russia to reenter the global ranks of respected nations. You know, I live in the United States. I love my country. But respect to this situation, I am not pro-USA. I am not pro-Russia. I am pro-life.

I am pro-future. I am pro-complex life. So somehow I think we have to find a way to get Russia back into the international order. In any case, it is not just Putin who is threatening the human and non-human future. It's also NATO and by extension any nations who have significant nuclear weapons that are backstopping their geopolitical situation. The truth is, we do not have the right to risk nuclear war. Doesn't matter whether Putin is a thug or not. Doesn't matter what ideology you believe in. It's utterly irrelevant versus the scale of consequences which most humans, based on our media, based on my observation, are blind to. And stepping back, of course, with the things that I care about most and perhaps why many of you are following this podcast,

this is not even primarily a human issue. It is a biosphere and complex earth life issue, which will affect the next half billion years of where life goes and where consciousness goes, if at all. It's as if there were red squirrels and gray squirrels, and gray squirrels had acquired the ability to destroy the world over which nut tree they had access to. It is just exactly that absurd. And it doesn't freaking matter in the intermediate term, even to the squirrels, even though at the moment it feels completely existential to them. The point is that the nuclear alarmist in our world, of which, in my opinion, there are far too few, even if they're not, 100% right. But even if there's a tiny percent chance that they're right, we have no right

to continue this game of chicken with the world's future. So from a biosphere ecological perspective, it doesn't matter what sort of human misery there is in the next 100 years versus the consequences of a global strategic nuclear exchange. I think this needs to be accepted by more. more people, by more media, by more humans and leadership positions, and maybe by today's Vasily Archipov and Stanislav Petrov, who might be in some positions today in any of the evolved nations. Okay, I said those uncomfortable things. This is how I view things. We're in a fragile, systemic, global situation. We're all alive, paying attention, living our lives, this risk goes on beyond our ability to influence.

But I think it's better than more people know how tenuous the situation is, how there's a lot going on behind the scenes that we're not hearing about. And ultimately, at this point, 15 months into this incursion into Ukraine, it no longer matters who is right. What matters is how we get out of the situation. Thank you. I'll talk to you when I get back.