The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Jeffrey Sachs on Diplomacy, Conflict, and the Path to Peace

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

I had the privilege of welcoming my friend Jeffrey Sachs back to the podcast. Jeffrey joined me earlier this year, and given the unfolding crises around the world, I thought it was a good time to sit down again and talk current events. I expect our conversation will generate disagreements from many listeners. Open discussion of sensitive issues however is important and one of the things that both Critical Mass and The Origins Project Foundation defend and promote.Jeffrey is one of the most incisive thinkers I know. His career has spanned academia, global governance, and public advocacy, and his work has had a profound impact on economics and diplomacy. As one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard’s history, he established himself as a brilliant scholar early on. But he didn’t stay confined to academia. For nearly two decades, he was a senior advisor to the UN Secretary-General, tackling some of the world’s most complex challenges.Our conversation this time focused on two hot-button topics dominating headlines: Ukraine and Gaza. On Ukraine, Jeffrey traces the roots of the conflict back to the U.S.’s decision to expand NATO eastward—a move he argues broke assurances given to Russia in the early 1990s. He described how this decision sowed mistrust and led to today’s crisis. Jeffrey believes diplomacy is the only viable solution and floated a bold idea: a direct negotiation brokered by none other than Donald Trump, to secure Ukraine’s neutrality and end the bloodshed. I presented to him the concerns of a Ukrainian journalist who has asked me to present Jeffrey with various questions. the concern that a diplomatic solution will embolden Russia to more dramatic land grabs is certainly real in the Ukraine.On Gaza, Jeffrey’s criticism was equally sharp. He views the Israeli government’s policies toward Palestinians in the occupied territories as untenable and unjust, likening them to apartheid. He insists that a two-state solution, grounded in international law, is the only way forward—a sentiment shared by much of the international community but ignored by Israel’s leadership, which he argues is using the United States as its handmaiden to perpetuate policies designed to create an Israeli state encompassing much or all of the territory in dispute.. For Jeffrey, the failure to pursue this path perpetuates unnecessary suffering and cycles of violence.We didn’t agree on everything. I’m skeptical about the practicality of some of his solutions, and the basis of some of his arguments about the obstacles to peace. Nevertheless, we agree on two things. Diplomacy is always preferable to war, and a two-state solution is the only solution that might, in principle provide long term stability in the Middle East—even if the practical route to get there and ensure Israeli security in the process is rife with obstacles . Whether we agree or disagree, our conversations are always rich, nuanced, and thought-provoking. Jeffrey’s willingness to address hard truths, even when they provoke controversy, is one of the reasons I value his perspective so much. That and his encyclopedic knowledge of history and economics.In a world so polarized, reasoned dialogue is more essential than ever. My discussion with Jeffrey reaffirmed that respectful dialogue is not just possible but necessary if we are to make progress on the complex issues of our time. Once again, that is one of the purposes of our Foundation, and this podcast. I hope you find this conversation as stimulating as I did.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I had a great good fortune to have a good friend and colleague revisit the Origins podcast, Jeffrey Sacks, one of the world's foremost economists, one of the youngest people ever attended at Harvard, a senior advisor of the United Nations for a long time, and a public intellectual in every sense of the word. Jeffrey has written a lot about a variety of hot-button issues over the past year or two, and I thought it would be great to revisit several of those issues now, pressing issues that will affect our lives in the near term and maybe even the longer term. So I decided to have a conversation with Jeffrey about Ukraine and Israel,

two areas that create lots of emotion and sparks when people discuss things, and I thought it would be good to have a little light as well as heat. So we discussed both of those topics, and I think you'll be surprised by some of the viewpoints that Jeffrey expressed. I agree with him about a lot of things and disagree with him about some, and I hope like me that while you may not find your views completely changed by this conversation, it'll cause you to rethink your perspective of these issues. And like me, you'll be further informed, which is always a good thing.

It was a fascinating conversation that took longer than either of us expected, and I think it will surprise you in certain places, as it indeed did surprise me. You can watch it ad-free on our Critical Mass Substack website, or, of course, you can watch it later on on our YouTube channel. If you want to subscribe to our Critical Mass site, it will help support directly the Origins Project Foundation. the nonprofit that that that uh produces this podcast and if you watch it on youtube i hope you'll subscribe because that will help us know uh how many people are watching and there's no cost for that and i hope you'll it'll give you a chance to get notifications of many of our other podcasts as they happen of course you can listen to it on any podcast listening side as well so no matter how you watch it or listen to it i think this provocative discussion could change the way you view the

world about some really important issues as any discussion with Jeffrey does mine. With no further ado, Jeffrey Sachs. Well, Jeffrey Sachs, thanks again for coming back on the podcast. It's always an amazing pleasure and enlightening. And for me, too. Good. I'm glad. I hope we'll continue that. It's always enlightening for me. Well, I want to, we've talked so many times about other things. I want to, I want to get to the heart of over this holiday season. Just two simple topics I want to focus on because they're important. And those two simple topics are Ukraine and Israel. Easily solved both.

I agree. Well, you do talk about it as if it's easy to solve. Now, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, I should warn you, is that I was in, I've been in Eastern Europe a few times and Slovakia and also. Kazakhstan recently. But I was interviewed by a Ukrainian journalist for something else, actually, for a profile of me for Charlie Hebdo, which I was honored to have. I'm a great fan of Charlie Abdo. But I wrote to her and said, I was going to be speaking to you. And she gave me some, some, her perspective, because she's listened to you. But first, I want to, I want to put this in

perspective, because you've given a number of times, and I've watched and read, succinct descriptions of your take on how Ukraine got to where it is. And we've talked about this before, but I think it's probably worth reviewing briefly for the present audience, starting in February 9th, 1990. So if we, you know, I'm just going to let you give a riff. And, you know, I've made notes on your, on your past things that I may bring up. But, but, you know, 1990, 2002, 2010, 2014. 14 and then other treaties.

Back in 1990, of course, there was still the Soviet Union and Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. What was happening in 1990 on February 9th, 1990 in particular was the process of German reunification. The Berlin Wall had come down in November 1989. and the negotiations between the United States and Germany on one side and the Soviet Union on the other side on the implications of the end of the Berlin Wall were underway. Strangely enough, of course people don't really know this and didn't even know it at the time. Even as late as 1990, essentially World War II had not ended. There was an occupation of Germany, and the Soviets legally were occupying eastern Germany, and the Western occupation was the merger of three occupation zones, the U.S., British, and French,

and they had become the Federal Republic of Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peace that Gorbachev was bringing to the region and the end of the Cold War, Helmut Cole, the German Chancellor, immediately took up the cause of German reunification. That required the Soviet legal approval. Basically, finally, in 1990, the end of World War II, which in terms of fighting had ended in 1945, but without a treaty. And negotiations ensued. And the point that the U.S. and Germany made was that allow unification to take place was the request to Mikhail Gorbachev. And we will not take advantage of the Soviet Union and its goodwill in doing that. And specifically, we will not aim to take advantage in security or military terms.

And what James Baker, the third, said on February 9, 1990, specifically, is that in the context of German reunification, NATO will not move one inch eastward. And it wasn't only Baker saying this. It was Hans Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Germany, reiterating this point. And there are tapes and there are documents. And this wasn't a casual statement or a trial belief. This was part of a legal negotiation to end World War II and to proceed with the peaceful reunification of Germany. Sad to say, the United States cheated on this soon enough. Already by 1992, the Soviet Union had ended.

Russia was what is called the continuation state, not just the successor state, but the continuation that would have all of the rights and responsibilities that the Soviet Union had. It's also, therefore, in legal terms, the repository of a whole raft of agreements on arms control, especially around nuclear weapons, testing of nuclear weapons, and so forth. So sometimes it's called the successor state, but even more precisely, it's the continuation state. But the United States, being the United States, said, well, we run the show now, and now we'll do what we want. And the idea inside the Defense Department at the time where Richard Cheney was the Secretary of Defense, and later, of course, he would be vice president starting in 2001. and his deputy was Paul Wolfowitz, they became the start of what later became known as the

neo-conservative foreign policy. And what that meant specifically was the belief and the pursuit of a policy in which the United States would claim, aim, and act to continue to secure dominance over all the rest of the world. And the term that was used was full spectrum dominance, meaning in all battlegrounds, in all potential war zones or conflict zones, and across military technologies, across air, water, Navy, Air Force on the land, and in other domains as well, economic and financial. If one goes back to read this neocan new view of American the world. It's it is American exceptionalism, but it is American hubris to the ultimate degree. Suddenly the United States was going to run the world.

Now, when Clinton came to office on January 20th, 1993, he was informed, as all our presidents are, by the deep state, that is by the permanent establishment, by the military industrial complex, by the CIA, and so forth. Here's the plan and get on with it. And by 1994, the Clinton administration had agreed to a strategy to expand NATO, not just to the immediate east, which was the first wave of expansion that covered three countries, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, but eventually all the way to Russia's border and maybe surrounding Russia, and in particular surrounding Russia in the Black Sea region. The idea already formulated in 1994 and then spelled out in print in 1997 by Zbignubersinsky was that the entire Black Sea region would become a NATO region. The

Black Sea would become a NATO lake, in effect, surrounding Russia. If you look at the map, that means Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia. And it happened to fulfill that plan in 2008. A formal commitment was made of membership of Ukraine and Georgia. Well, suffice it to say that this did not sit well with the Russians. from the very beginning. It was a cheat. And it is a cheat. And it's such a typical American cheat.

It's hubris, it's self-regard, it's we love freedom and motherhood and democracy. And we couldn't do anything bad anyway. And we're peace-loving and we're defense-minded and we don't threaten you, but we do have our way on anything we want to do. And that was the attitude. Madeleine Albright, Clinton's secretary of state, used the phrase that were the indispensable nation. Whoa.

Okay. So that went on and then... Applying, I guess that other nations are dispensable? That is exactly what it's saying. We are the indispensable nation. In 1999, our... I should ask just to be clear. During this period, as well, of American cheating, was Russia doing any cheating?

No, Russia was basically on its back in economic crisis. Yeah, they were in economic crisis. Yeah. Okay. And in 1999, Clinton decided because he was terribly advised and a person of poor judgment in general, in my view, that we would take on Serbia. and he invoked NATO to bomb Serbia 78 straight days. When Milosevic, the head of Serbia, not a nice guy, by the way, but Milosevic said right at the beginning, no, we don't need war, I agree.

But Madeline Albright wanted war. She really wanted to teach a lesson. She wanted to show how tough the United States is. And, interestingly, she wanted to break Serbia into two parts, which is the result of that. 78 days of war. Kosovo, which was an autonomous region in Serbia, declared itself independent. The United States recognized that. And lo and behold, the largest military base of NATO in Southeast Europe was put into Kosovo, the base called Vanda Steele. Oh, this is so much

defense, you can love it. So that was 1999. Then came 9-11. By then Putin had come into office. He, and I know it for many people, was pro-European, actually explored maybe we could join NATO. It was kind of laughed off from the United States. When 9-11 came, he immediately said to President Bush, we'll help. We want to fight terrorism alongside you. We'll support you. This was not animosity. This was not aggression, quite the contrary. Then in 2002, what I regard as the kind of the unsung major part of this story was that the United States walked out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. And what is important to understand about this is now we're getting to the guts of survival because we're talking about nuclear arms and one of the central. pillars of the nuclear arms control framework. Russia was always afraid of a first strike, and the idea that a first strike could be deterred was that there would be survivability of Russia's nuclear arsenal and a possibility of Russia returning a strike on the United States, and that's what gave strategic stability.

so-called mutual assured destruction. Then came the United States already during the, during the Reagan period with Star Wars, but it wasn't feasible and it was provocative, but not feasible. Although it didn't stop us spending well over $100 billion. Absolutely. And part of the result of that was in 2002, the U.S. said, okay, now we can do anti-ballistic missiles, actually do them. Aege missile system that we've developed can take out some ballistic missiles. Not the new ones

that Russia has, by the way, not the Oreschniks, but some of the slower ones. In any event, when the U.S. walked out, that was a kind of body blow, I think, to peaceful cooperation between the U.S. and Russia, because Russia viewed that directly as a clear unprecedented threat to Russian survival. And Russia complained bitterly. In 2007, President Putin spoke at the Munich Security Conference and gave a very tough, very clear speech, not a threatening speech saying, what are you doing?

You know, this is, we wanted peace, we expected peace at the end of the Cold War, and it's been nothing but putting our nose up to it and one provocation after the other. And he said, don't go any farther. And then, of course, 2008, maybe to prove the point at the NATO summit in Bucharest, President Bush Jr. insisted that the NATO countries commit to enlarging NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia. Now, what's important to understand is this was not a spur of the moment. It wasn't a George Bush, Dick Cheney thing, though, of course, they endorsed it. This was a project that went back to 30 years ago to 1994 and was spelled out vividly in the grand chess board by his big new Brasinski and also an article called a grand strategy for Eurasia in the Council of Foreign Affairs magazine Foreign Affairs. Okay. So, it's a Council of Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs.

Now, this was 2008. Can we go back to the right after pulling out of the treaty in 2002? Yeah. Wasn't it also, wasn't that also followed fairly quickly by U.S. putting missile systems in Eastern Europe? So the U.S. announced immediately that it would put these Aegis missiles first in Poland and then afterwards in Romania. It took several years to do. Putin kept making the point. How do we know what you're putting in those silos?

Those could be nuclear first strikes. We don't know. And the Russian and the United States response was, none of your business. It's just the weirdest, the weirdest possible way to bring us closer and closer to conflict. And that is the American attitude. It's the literal position. It's none of your business what we do. We are the United States of America.

And as Obama famously joked, but it's no joke. It's obnoxious and it brings us closer to war. Russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons, was the slogan or the quip in the mid-2010s. Okay, so this came and all of this was very provocative. One of the current European leaders at the time was not a. head of state, but was in a senior position. I don't want to identify the person. And talked to me after the Bucharest summit, basically saying,

what is your country doing? Everyone knows this is wrong. This is provocative. This is dangerous. And internally, we have learned, thanks to Julian Assange, and his leak of a memo that our current CIA director, Bill Burns sent to Condoleezza Rice in 2008 when Burns was U.S. ambassador to Russia, that expanding NATO to Ukraine could absolutely lead to a Ukrainian civil war.

Russia didn't want that. Russia was against NATO in Ukraine across the political class. This wasn't because of Putin. This was a unanimous view of Russia. Stay away from our border and don't provoke an internal conflict in Ukraine. Now, my experience is the United States leaders never know how to leave well enough alone. This is the big failure of the United States.

If the other side doesn't react, do more. If the other side threatens nuclear escalation, say, ah, that's a bluff. Do more. This is the American attitude. We are the United States. You are nothing. And that was manifest after 2008. Now, the Ukrainians, interestingly, did not want NATO.

And the opinion surveys up and down until 2014 show a large majority of Ukrainian saying, please stay out, just don't make things more complicated. And in 2009, they voted in a new president, Viktor Yanukovych, who became president in 2010, and his foreign policy was neutrality for Ukraine, which incidentally was the foreign policy announced at the time of Ukraine's independence in 1991. So, Ukraine announced independence and neutrality, sorry, and the U.S. view of neutrality is to hate neutrality. The U.S. hates neutrality more than it hates overt opposition. If you say you're neutral, that really means you're against us. we don't allow for neutrality.

This is America's, again, another kind of our stupidity. Either you're with this or against us. Exactly. So in late 2013, over a, it really was a kerfuffle that was made into a grand crisis. Yanukovych delayed signing an agreement with the European Union to open what would be a tenure process for membership. And he delayed it because Putin said, don't do this without bringing us into these negotiations. We have a currency union with you. Not a currency union.

We have a customs union, excuse me. In other words, we share common tariffs. We have open trade. You can't just decide you're going to join EU without some implication for Russia's trade. And we need to be party to this discussion. Well, for Europe and especially the United States, the main attitude towards Russia every moment is, who the hell are you? This has nothing to do with you. So Yanukovych postponed signing this roadmap, which would have been 10 years of negotiations, by the way, so it wasn't anything imminent.

And then out came people pouring into the streets. This is partly real and partly contrived. The U.S. knows how to do this. It's became known as a color revolution. And this is actually the work of the CIA, the National Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, a number of NGOs. This has happened in many, many places. It's a game. It's a geopolitical game because who runs the media?

Suddenly new TV networks overnight spring up, new newspapers, new social media. Who's paying for all of that? let me give you a hint. It's got three initials, USA. And I know some of that first hand. I was going to ask, I mean, you know, often one can see if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck. But it's nice if you can also know it's a duck. So this has the earmarks of things that were done in many places by the U.S.

But is there documented evidence about 2014? Well, yes, in several ways. But one thing to say is, suppose on the January 6th insurrection in D.C. in 2021 that a number of leading Russian politicians had come and spoken to the crowd and said, we're with you, we're with you. And a Chinese senator came and said, we're with you. That would be taken as sufficient evidence. to say, get the hell out of here. You have no business being here. They'd be on a plane immediately. The U.S. senators, Lindsay Graham, who I regard as one of the great jerks of our republic, John McCain, our assistant secretary of state at the time, Victoria Newland, out handing out cookies to the demonstrators famously bragging about how the U.S. has invested $5 billion in projects to build U. Ukrainian democracy and so forth.

That is all without any doubt. I can tell you also, Lawrence, that I happen to be in Kiev, not at the moment of the coup, which was February 22nd, 2014, but a few weeks afterwards, because the new government called me and said, would you come talk to us about our economic crisis? And I went and I was shown around the Maidan where people were still milling around several weeks later. And I was told how much money, American money, had gone to this demonstration, to this kiosk, to this setup. So it was to me personally that I heard some of this. And that was a surprise.

At the time, that was a surprise to you. You went there not knowing essentially. For those of you who are listening, I'm putting my finger in my mouth. Because it was so disgusting to hear this. I hated it. And I went home that evening after meeting with the prime minister and didn't go back to talk to them. Because I don't want to be part of a U.S.-led coup. Okay.

Or a U.S. participated coup. There are many, many more things to say about the Maidan, but the United States should keep out of other countries' demands. domestic politics, period, just like we expect the other countries to stay out of our politics. It's a kind of basic golden rule. Do not do internally to other people's politics what you would not want to have them do to your politics. But we don't follow any semblance of a golden rule. We are the United States of America. We do what we want. That's the overall. mantra of all of this. So as soon as that happened, events accelerated. The war started on February 22nd, 2014. We say that it started eight years later, but it started then, because that's when the

fighting started. Immediately the eastern two oblasts of Ukraine, Lugansk and Donetsk, had units of the Ukraine military, break away and declare people's republics of those two oblast. These are the Russian ethnic areas. And the ones that seize power are Western Ukrainians with a long lineage, by the way, of Russophobia, basically. And this is what Bill Burns was saying in 2008, that this could stoke a civil war, actually, and a civil war began. Putin also immediately organized, you could say it's a grab, or you could call it a referendum, or whatever you want, but he immediately organized a process to claim Crimea. And this is also very important to understand and very basic in this story.

Crimea, the peninsula in the Black Sea, has been home to Russia's naval fleet in the Black Sea since 1783. It was established as the home of Russia's Black Sea fleet by Catherine the Great. And for centuries, then, it was the home of Russia's very important Black Sea fleet. This was not lost on Western leaders. The war between Britain and France on one side and Russia on the other side from 1853 to 1856, which we call the Crimean War, was a war launched by Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III together to push Russia out of the Black Sea. And in fact, there was 19 years after the end of the Crimean War in which Russia's naval fleet was banished from the Black Sea. And this was part of big power gains or big power politics. So Putin said immediately, we're not going to let NATO after this coup take Crimea.

Are you kidding? And so he took it back. And it makes perfect sense. And that's when the war started that was taken back. He could say, and the Russians do say, and it's arguable that there was an overwhelming referendum for Crimea to become part of Russia. You could say it's just the most brutal real politic, which is the United States was trying to make a grab, the same way Palmerston had 160 years earlier.

and Putin was having none of it. However you interpret it, that's when the war started. Okay, let me let me, this is great, and I want to continue you, but I think this is a good point to interject her first question, by the way, this is from this Ukrainian journals, because it's about Crimea. It says, you know, she tells me to have fun with you, and then she says, I'd like you to challenge him on Ukraine's neutrality. He often talks about Ukraine needing to be neutral to satisfy Russia,

But you could remind him that Ukraine was neutral in 2014 when Russia decided to annex Crimea and invade the eastern part of the country. As it was still neutral in 2022 when the full-scale invasion began, despite so-called security guarantees from Russia under the Budapest memorandum, why would neutrality work now when history shows it hasn't stopped Russian aggression? And he says, is this naive a day or a lie? I'd like to tell him that when he describes this war as a proxy conflict, He erases Ukraine's agency.

Ukrainians have made it clear that they reject Russian occupation and don't want neutrality. How does he reconcile his stance with their right to self-determination? So, okay, Rasmund. Yeah, you know, in my world, I don't know if it's absolutely true in physics, but temporal priority usually determines causation. And in the case of Crimea, the first event was the coup. The second event was Crimea. If Putin had seized Crimea and then there was a coup, that would be quite a different history. But what happened was there was a coup and then immediately after Crimea.

So I just find that not exactly to the point. Okay. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but on the other hand, the temporal, the order of events is significant. Okay, so in any case, that's good. I wanted you at least respond to that. Go on. And by the way, when it comes to agency, sad to say, the agency that Ukraine should have used,

but it didn't know how because it doesn't have enough experience, especially of the United States. The agency should have been to say to the United States, thank you, but we're on our own, please. Because I quoted to them the old adage of Henry Kisner, that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. And I tried to tell them you're going to get in a hell of a lot of trouble if you go down this path. You're going to get wrecked. And the United States wrecks countries for a living

under the guise of saving them. So we're not saving Ukraine. And no Ukraine, well, Ukraine has the right to ask for NATO membership. But if the United States has any sanity and prudence, it should explain to the Ukrainians, for your sake and ours, the answer is no, thank you. And so it's not Ukraine's right to choose NATO. It's the United States absolute responsibility to tell Ukraine, we're not going down that path. And truly, yes, okay, Cuba had the right, perhaps, to say to the Soviet Union in 1961, 62, sure, come station your offensive nuclear weapons here. But if Khrushchev had been more clear thinking at the time, he would have said, Fidel, this isn't going to work out well.

So we think it's not a good idea. Unfortunately, Ukraine, like many inexperienced countries, loves the United States and trusts the United States and when a president of the United States says, we have your back. Oh, my God. It's hard to resist. I keep telling them, they say they have your back, but they don't have your front. You're going to get shot in the front. And that's what's happened. It's been 600 or 700,000 dead. Ukrainians, and for nothing, because they're losing on the battlefield. And it's completely predictable and I predicted it precisely, I have to say almost precisely because I told them repeatedly don't get into this. And then in the spring of 2022, to their great dismay, even disgust,

I said, you know, stop this, negotiate this. This will not end well if you continue in this direction. They said, oh, you're a Putin apologist and so forth. There's a no, I'm a friend of Ukraine. I want to save you before this gets worse. Well, the, okay, before I respond, I respond with two more of her questions, but this is a great summary. There were two other issues that at the same time that are in a global context, which are probably relevant to Russia's attitude about security guarantees and the ability to work with the West. the walking out of the international nuclear force treaty and the Iran nuclear weapons treaties in 2018-2019 were both examples of which I think you've argued and I think I agree with you suggests that the United States is not willing to be a fair player I guess when it comes to

international treaties. Yeah, let me say there's a third one extremely direct and relevant for this, which is that when Lugansk and Donetsk broke away in 2014, a war ensued. And Russia helped to broker a peace agreement between Ukraine and these two breakaway regions that became the Minsk one and then the Minsk two agreements. And the idea of the Minsk two agreement wasn't that Russia would annex these territories or that they would lead Ukraine, but rather that they would have autonomy because they were the ethnically Russian regions in the far eastern part of Ukraine. And not only was that agreement signed,

but it was ratified by the UN Security Council afterwards. So it had full backing by the Security Council. What day was that? Mince II was 19, it was 2015. Okay. Yeah. And, uh, With Minsk II, the Germans and the French were to be the guarantors of Minsk II in something that they called the Normandy process. Now, I happen to know that the U.S. and the Ukrainians blew it off. And the U.S. attitude was, ah, you don't have to take that seriously. And the Ukrainian attitude was, well, we only signed at gunpoint. We're not going to honor this treaty. So here is a UN Security Council-backed treaty guaranteed by France and Germany, and it was completely unobserved.

Quite the contrary, the U.S. started flooding Ukraine with the big weapon systems during the Trump period, by the way. And Minsk was completely ignored. And the Russians didn't just forget about it. They kept saying, mince too, mince too, mince too. Ukraine, among other things, was supposed to put into the Constitution the autonomy of these eastern regions. Well, it was completely rejected. And that was another example alongside the U.S. walking out of the Iran Agreement, the JCPOA, which it did in, it notified in 2017, did in 2018, I believe, and then the international, I'm sorry, the intermediate nuclear force agreement,

which the Trump administration walked out of in 2019. And Biden, sorry, you're tired. Putin had a very, very astute observation in an interview in Figuero, the French newspaper, in 2017. And he said, as of 2017, he said, I've dealt with three presidents by now. You know, they come into office with some ideas. But then men in dark suits and blue ties show up

and explain to the presidents the way things really are. And you never hear of those ideas again, said Putin. And so Putin's view was, yeah, the United States is not serious. They treat us like shit, if you'll excuse me. They don't honor any agreements. They don't respect us. We don't have, we're told repeatedly, we have no say in anything. By the way, I could, we didn't even discuss the Iraq war, an ally of Russia. The Syrian war caused by the United States, an ally of Russia. The NATO destruction of Murmur Qaddafi's government in 2011. NATO once again. So Putin took a rather jaundiced view by the end of all of this, by ABM, just chronologically, anti-ballistic missile treaty. Seven countries joining NATO in 2004, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, 2008 invitation to Georgia and Ukraine,

2014, a coup that brings down Yanukovych, 2011, two wars started by the United States for regime change operations. 2017, abandoning JCPOA, 2019, abandoning intermediate nuclear force agreement. And this brings us up to 2021 because Biden comes into office. And at the end of 2021, on December 15th, Putin puts on the table a document which you can find online. The title is roughly draft Russia, U.S. security agreement. Yeah. And I read it immediately. And I called the White House.

And I said, negotiate. You got the makings of a deal here. because the core of what Putin was saying was the same for the preceding quarter century was stop NATO enlargement. And I talked to Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, and said, Jake, take the deal. Come on. And he said, no, there won't be a war. And NATO's not going to enlarge. And I said, oh, NATO's not going to enlarge, but you're going to have a war for something that's not going to happen? He said, no, no, no, it's our open door policy. I said, Jake, there's no such thing as an open door policy for military bases.

Come on. Get real. Anyway, they did not get real. Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, reported that in January 2022, Blinken told Lavrov that as the U.S. Secretary of State told the Russian foreign minister that the U.S. reserves the right to put missile systems into Ukraine. Even that, not just NATO membership, but specifically missile systems, telling Lava, that's our prerogative. It's not your business. So this is when the SMO, the special military

operation was launched on February 24th, 2022. And within a week, Zelensky says publicly, okay, neutrality, neutrality. And the Russians say, okay, let's negotiate. And the Turkish foreign ministry says, we'll mediate and talks open up in Ankara. And I flew to Ankara, not during the negotiations, but immediately afterwards because I wanted to be briefed on what happened. and they actually reached an agreement to the point of initially an agreement. And then the United States stepped in and told Zelenskyy, fight on. And in fact, that was the time that our defense secretary, Lloyd Austin,

publicly stated something that he probably regretted stating. But he told the truth, which in Washington is called the Washington Gaff, when a truth accidentally escapes your lips. And he said, our purpose is to weaken Russia. Not to secure Ukraine, but to weaken Russia. Okay, so he told him, continue fighting. And Boris Johnson, who is a fool, but was actually the prime minister of the UK, went to Kiev in April, 2022, and told them, you have to keep fighting. court neutrality. And then later, Boris Johnson said, and again, it's, he told a glimmer of the

truth. He said, we have to win this. This is, this is Western hegemony at stake. In other words, this isn't about Ukraine. This is the game of risk. If anyone's played it, the U.S. wants its piece on on every spot of the board. And, you know, risk is a great game. It's a lot of fun. You played it 50 years ago. Oh, I hate it because you always end up hating, hating everyone else in the game. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, you know, at least as you roll the dice and you take your little token off the board, this is real life. But they're playing that game. Now, I'm really intrigued. I heard you'd gone to Turkey. You know, this, one doesn't hear about this. And, but it is, there is, documented evidence that there was basically an agreement that was initialed. Do we have access to that

agreement? Parts of it have been published. And also Napali Bennett, who was the Prime Minister of Israel, was informally Kibitzer or a mediator as well. And he gave a remarkable several-hour bantering interview where he said, yeah. And then at the last, last minute, they stopped it, meaning the United States and the interviewer is kind of shocked. And Bennett says, look, I'm just an Israeli prime minister. It's not my business. What they do. I was just an intermediary. I can't second guess the United States. But yeah, they stopped it. They said it would look weak to China. You know, they're playing games, really playing games, game theory games. They're not solving.

problems. Okay. And that's, okay, this is a great summary of Jeffrey Sacks summary of the situation up to the war and, and, and, and, and, and ongoing. And the 600,000 deaths, at least, if not more. Yeah, we don't have the accurate count, but that's a plausible count. Plausible count. You said that I'm sympathetic because I found something similar, but the New York Times stop publishing your statements of this? Absolutely. Yeah, well, they never published my statements on Ukraine, period. Because they started from the beginning, beginning in February 24th, 2022.

This is the start, and it's because Putin's a madman and he's got to Peter the great complex and he's trying to recreate the Russian Empire. just a kind of fantasy story that kind of juvenile PR narrative. And The New York Times is prone to that, but it went on and on for a year. And I asked a research assistant, get on the website and count how many opinion pieces use the word unprovoked to define the war, whether it was an editorial or an op-ed. And my research assistant found 26 articles in the first year that defined it as unprovoked.

So I called the editor and I said, look, this is ridiculous. And could we have an honest, grown-up discussion about this? And after three months, we did get on the line with a group of the editors. And I described the evidence. And they said, well, we'll agree to disagree. And I said, okay, let me have 700 words. And I don't even care if it's in print. I just put it on a website.

You know, the marginal cost of that is, I think, precisely zero. If not precisely zero, it's got a lot of zeros after the decimal point. And they wouldn't run it. Wow. And they haven't run anything since. They called me again on another issue. And I told them what I wanted to write. And then the guy called back and said,

well, our editors don't want to go that way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, look, I'm going to get to our other two questions. This is a great, but let me just ask you to prognosticate right now, as I will in a minute about Israel, too. But so the situation, what do you see happening with the new Trump administration? Well, not, forget Trump per se.

What do you see happening in Ukraine? We'll talk about Trump more detail in a bit. But every day Ukrainians are losing maybe 2,000 lives dead and seriously wounded. So it's just terrible what's going on. What about Russians? Of course, Russians are also losing a lot of people, but Russia has a big artillery advantage. It's got air superiority. It's got missile superiority.

And so the deaths are much lower, but they're significant, no doubt. but Ukraine is kind of bled out and they don't have enough reinforcements and so the Russians are basically making breakthroughs across almost the entire contact line which is a thousand kilometers you know I was intrigued to hear about these North Koreans coming I mean when gets this at least the media

make it seem like Russian armies drained and they had to get North Koreans to help out do you want to comment on that? Well first of all wars have an Info war aspect to them. And I try to listen to Russian side media as well as American side media every day. I spend actually a couple of hours a day systematically listening to both sides. And in terms of mainstream media, of course, overwhelmingly Western.

But I very carefully look at websites that are pro-Russian, pro-Ukrainian, U.S., mainstream media, and so forth. And my take is that Russia is really in doing grave damage to Ukraine with a significant force superiority. And when it comes to the North Koreans, actually there's an order. Capture at least one. Show us one. And so far that hasn't happened. So whatever is the real story there, we haven't seen anything. There's a lot of propaganda.

A lot of the propaganda on the U.S. side comes from organizations that are paid for by the military, literally, arms contractors that fund think tanks and so forth. So you have to triangulate this in the sense of listening to all different sides. And my view is that the Ukrainians are losing badly, and that's understandable because they're much smaller, much weaker. Sure, it's hard to imagine. I mean, apriori, you know, it's like Canada trying to fight the U.S. I mean. That's right. That's exactly right.

And the NATO superiority myth, it turns out, we didn't have stockpiles and warehouses of filled with the 155 millimeter artillery shells and other basics because the wars that the United States had fought were much shorter term. They weren't prolonged ground wars and so forth. And so I think we're watching a war of attrition and the Ukrainians have been attritted. And it's pretty devastating. So without diplomacy, you just, what do you foresee? Well, if there's no diplomacy, just a lot more suffering from Ukraine and if Western leaders get really desperate because their honor is on the line, their reputation is on the line, they already escalated last month crossing another one of the U.S. self-imposed red lines that Ukraine could not strike deep inside Russia. They gave that up. And the Russians have seen. said, you've really crossed a big one right now. And we say typically, oh, these just bluffing,

we can do what we want until cabooey. And so either the Russians continue to win, which is the most likely scenario, or the idiots on the Western side escalate to trigger a nuclear war, which is not inconceivable. So, okay, I mean, there's a lot of statements that this, could trigger nuclear war and Putin has talked about it. And the answer of the answer of the United States is don't worry about it.

And anyone that ever tells you don't worry about a nuclear war you should classify into the category of absolutely insane or lying through their teeth because you should worry about it every single day. And by the way,

I like to quote President John F. Kennedy in this, and I will quote him because I just grabbed it on my phone. I figured you were going for something good. Yeah. He said, above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankrupt

of our policy or of a collective death wish for the world. And we do exactly the opposite of what Kennedy advised. Although with the Cuban missile crisis, he kind of did that too, right? He basically forced a retreat, right? Anyway, that's a different. No, no, no, but not a humiliating retreat in the sense that in the end, the U.S. I mean, it's actually very interesting, complicated story. We'll do another show about that. I actually wrote a book about that. But I'm going to avoid that question. Oh, I'd love to. Okay. Good. I'd love to learn about it. Well, you know, that's, and it's absolutely true. And in fact, in some sense, well, we've talked about this before. But and of course, you know, with my background in the, in the bulletin and the doomsday clock, the not, we are, we violate the

not, have violated the nonproliferation treaty every day since it's been signed by, because one of the requirements is that the nuclear countries are supposed to eventually disarm or at least go in that direction and not not encourage proliferation within or outside. And that's exactly the opposite of what's going on. That's exactly right. You know, our whole approach is what Jay William Fulbright, when he was chairman of the Senate, Council on Foreign Relations called the arrogance of power, which is we can do what we want. We can't. Even when we were so much more powerful, we couldn't do what we wanted. We lost a lot of wars. We had all sorts of terrible outcomes. But now we don't even have that kind of preponderance of power because, frankly, the technology has spread. Russia is very powerful militarily. China is very powerful militarily. We need to learn actually to deal with each other in a way that doesn't. doesn't get us all killed. Absolutely.

And in fact, yeah, of course. And, well, put, it seems so simple when you say it. And it is, by the way, except if you're playing the game of risk. Risk, exactly. Where your aim is not the safety of people. It's not security. It's not to stop war. Your aim is to get the pieces on the board.

It's just that's a board game. This is real life. Get out of the board game, for God's sake. You know, in chess, it's fun. You're aiming to kill the king of the other side. But, you know, you should grow up and say, I'm not going to do that in real life. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's, you know, early on, and I remember the first conversation we had it,

I mean, when I looked at the war, I thought, how can people possibly ever think that Ukraine is going to deceive, going to defeat Russia? They're going to defeat. I mean, you know, I mean, you could imagine a war of attrition. You can imagine like Afghanistan where they hang on for 20 years or Vietnam or whatever, you know, eventually the country departs. But it's hard to imagine that. It seemed to me, you know, naturally that diplomacy is going to end up saving a lot of people's lives.

And I was sympathetic because more or less that's what you said. And of course, you've been involved in that through the UN in many ways. And Lawrence, you're a physicist. Facts matter. Logic matters. Systems matter. And by the way, most physicists, most physicists, most. not everyone, because there is Edward Teller and a few others,

but most physicists have been kind of peacenics because they know that mutual destruction is not exactly, you know, what we're after. Yeah, exactly. They know it's not, it's not an end game. Well, it's an end game because there's an end. Yes. Okay, but having said this, and I'm sympathetic, and I really, in this context, it seems,

there will either be a war of attrition, which Ukraine has to, Oh, so how to save Ukraine? My plan to save Ukraine is straightforward. Okay, go ahead. Why don't you say it? And then I'm going to read her two statements, which says your plan is wrong. Okay.

My plan to save Ukraine is simply that Trump calls Putin, because obviously Biden can't do this and isn't going to do it, but Trump calls Putin and says that NATO enlargement business was a stupid idea. and why don't you stop shooting because you are killing a lot of Ukrainians and we'll settle the rest of the territorial issues, you know, in the next months. But let's end the war now. We commit NATO not just for five years, ten years, period. And you commit that Ukraine is going to have its sovereignty other than the parts that are going to end up in Russian hands. and that's going to be part of this. And after that, there's going to be peace.

Now, can that stick? Of course it can stick. Because the starting point of this was not Russian aggression. The starting point of this was NATO enlargement. Stop the provocation and we'll stop. But I mean, even aside from the question whether when Trump says something, whether it'll be on or later on. That's true too.

Yeah. Yeah, but even a subject, can Trump say that? Could Trump politically, given the, sure, he claims to be more independent of the military and dustle complex, but could he really say, oh, we're not going to, would that be a politically accept a move for Trump to say, oh, I'm changing U.S. policy, we're not going to put NATO, won't that appear like a caving in to a strong man approach? And is that really politically viable? I think if the Russians say that day, we stop all shooting, the war ends, we have no further territorial claims than the ones we've made. And maybe we're not even going to get all of that.

But I think it would be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump. That would be good. I would love to go to Oslo to celebrate his Nobel Peace Prize. Really? Okay. Yeah, sure. And that, that I think will, would be the end of it. Okay. I mean, I think that would be something they would attract him. Yeah. I want him to win three, one for Ukraine, one for the Middle East, and one for Asia. Okay. Well, that's, that's remarkable. It would be nice. Yeah, I'm betting on zero, but we'll see. We'll see.

Exactly. Okay, having said that, let me read to you the journalist's views about diplomacy. And she says, he's among those who claim that diplomacy is a solution with Russia. So as a little Ukrainian, I wonder, how do you negotiate with a regime that openly denies Ukraine's right to exist and repeatedly breaks agreements like the Minsk Accords, she claims they broke the Minsk Accords, or the Budapest Memorandum, with an evader that doesn't only seek the territory, but Russia was by forces Ukrainian population on occupied territories, deports 20,000 Ukrainian children to Russia,

bombs Ukrainian's cultural monuments, museums, publishing houses. Putin himself says Ukraine is a myth. Does diplomacy mean not only territorial concessions, but also Ukrainians giving up their national identity and erasing their culture and language? There's another part of this question, but let me just go that far. Well, of course it doesn't mean that. diplomacy means actually you spell out the terms.

Of course, I don't accept those premises for the reasons we've been discussing for the last hour. So I would just refer to our earlier discussion. But the idea of diplomacy is not, oh, okay, we'll stop and you stop. You actually put this on paper. And you put it on paper in a way that everybody sees in the world. and that is quite explicit and that has the judgment of the world behind it. One of the things that has surprised the United States

is that the U.S. has pointed to Russia and said, look, they violated every law. You need to sanction them. And most of the world has said, we don't really see it exactly that way. You know, you kind of provoke them and we'd like a peace agreement and so on. It's interesting. The U.S. couldn't win public opinion on this worldwide. The only opinion won is the NATO countries, Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, maybe, and a handful of others.

So it's basically a very small subset of the world. And the rest of the world saying, you know, it's not all one side. You have to understand. So if you now make an agreement, that's clear, that's explicit, that has responsibilities on both sides, it can hold. And by the way, I would refer your questioner to Austria, 1955. The idea in 1955, Austria, which was an occupied country, because, of course, it was part of the German Reich, Hitler's Reich. it was occupied by the Soviet army. The Soviet Union said, declare neutrality, and we'll go home. And that happened in 1955. And neither the Soviet Union nor Russia ever bothered Austria again.

This little country that was occupied by the Soviet Union, they were safe and prosperous and wonderful country. And what happened was, incidentally, the Soviets did this. They went home and they said to the Americans, look, this is the point. Do this for Germany. Have a neutral Germany. We'll unify Germany. We'll end World War II.

Remember, this was just 10 years after the end of World War II. George Kennan, our leading scholar statesman at the time, said, that's a good deal. He went on the airwaves in the wreath lectures of 1957 of the BBC to say, do this. Let's have a demilitarized, unified Germany. The Cold War would have ended then, in my opinion, and in George Kennan's opinion, the United States said, hell no, Germany, that's our base of NATO. We'll never do this. We don't trust anything.

And the Russians, the Soviets said, yeah, look at Austria. No, we don't want to look at Austria. So this is, I'm afraid, I've had this conversation with Ukrainian friends, former friends, they don't regard me as a friend right now. I'm trying to help save Ukraine, believe me. Well, yeah, no, I have no doubt you are. It's a hard, it's, of course, it's very hard if you're in the Ukraine right now, seeing what's going on. Let me, in that context, there's sort of a two part. Well, one further part and then the question, not just ending the war, but justice. But anyway, She says, and then the, quote, territorial concessions, doesn't that, and this is she, I mean, one hears this a lot in Western media, but in any case, doesn't that set a dangerous precedent that rewards aggression? If Russia gets land by invading Ukraine, what's to stop that then victorious Russia going after Moldova or even Estonia and Poland, and given that Putin formed now in alliance of authoritarian regimes, what would stop them, say China from following the same playbook. I have to admit, having grown up in the 60s and heard this in Vietnam, I'm a little, you know, I heard the same argument.

But I don't want to minimize what she's saying. So what do you comment? Well, what stops them from going on is, first, they can't because it's been hard enough for them to win in Lugansk and Donetsk. they're hardly going to cross Europe. They could not and will not do so and could not do so. And they wouldn't keep any friends in the world that they absolutely depend on, even in their current context. You mean they wouldn't keep Iran, China, and North Korea? Of course not.

I mean, China would definitely not stand by if Russia were to invade Europe. Okay. No way. Okay. Yeah. No, I can't see it. No, they don't want to. What China understands is, and is very clear, that enlargement of NATO to Ukraine was a direct threat to Russian security. So what the Chinese say is set an agreement in which Russia's security interests are respected. But China also wants to respect security interests of other countries, too, including the European countries. They just think that, pushing the U.S. military up to the Russian border is a no-no, as I do. And so they think it's

completely imprudent. Yeah, so I don't accept. Yeah, I don't accept the premise that somehow you reach an agreement that's explicitly about how to make peace and then Russia just blithely continues a war that it couldn't fight anyway. Well, well, that's an interesting question. Again, I'm trying to be devil's advocate. Yes, sure, sure. We agree. But nevertheless, could one say the same thing about the United States, though? I mean, how could you imagine the United States blindly signing an agreement and then proceeding

against its own best interest to do the opposite? I mean, that's exactly we've been arguing in some sense. In one way or another, the United States has been doing. Yeah, so exactly. I'm trying to teach the U.S. some manners. Let me put it that way. The manners are you reach an agreement and then you honor it. And because of that reputation, that not always supports your immediate agreement and sustains it,

but it enables further agreements to be reached. So it's like teaching good manners. But to hit her point, she argues that Russia broke the Minskakords and the Budapest memorandum. I don't know if that's... Yeah, but, you know, it's not even... The Minsk accord, I can tell her, my Ukraine. friends said, no way we're going to do the Minsk Accord. Angela Merkel, who was the guarantor of the Minskakord, said in an interview, I think now probably a year ago,

oh, that was just a holding pattern. This was a time for Ukraine to build up. I don't know of any serious analyst who says the Minskakords were broken by the Russian side. They were broken obviously by the Ukrainian side, which had responsibilities in order to implement them. Okay. And I know, what about the... We've already talked about all of the rest of the broken promises which I listed, which were on the U.S. side. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess I'm trying to... I mean, what it sounds like to listen and listening to this is that Russia hasn't broken. doesn't break agreements than the United States does. That's mostly true, by the way, just because the U.S. is more powerful.

Okay. And the U.S. acts with more impunity because of that. Yeah, but I also assume that if Russia could, yeah, I mean, if they could break, you know, having been schooled by Noam Chomsky, countries act in their own, in their own perceived self-interest. So I assume if they could break agreements and get away with it, they would like any other country. That's probably true. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, but what about the Budapest? memorandum, which I'm not, you know. Yeah, the Budapest memorandum was a context for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons. The complication for the Budapest agreement, it was in the context of the U.S. commitment not to expand NATO and the Ukraine commitment to be neutral. So a lot of violations took place on both sides. Russia violated the Budapest agreement, but again, I would talk about

temporal priority. This has a history. The United States broke a fundamental promise on NATO enlargement, and Ukraine, because of a U.S. coup or U.S. participated coup, broke a commitment on neutrality. Okay. Well, last thing, and Ukraine, it's the question of justice. I'm going to assume your answer, which is that any diplomatic agreements has to address this. She says also remind him that Russia has committed widespread war crimes, 160,000 officially recorded targeted civilians, deporting children, systematic rape, torturing people in occupied areas. Should justice for these crimes be sacrificed in the name of ending the war?

That's your last question. Yeah, basically wars are hell and both sides have committed many crimes. Wars are awful. The wars need to stop. Good. Okay. Now, that is a good segue if you're willing to go to Israel. Are you willing to?

Sure, let's not spend as much time, but let's say, touch that. I know we spend a lot more time in Ukraine than I thought, but okay, good. If you're willing to be great. Yeah. I plan to, yeah, anyway, to finish Israel by now. But in any case, wars or hell, there are three articles of yours

that I read recently just to update. You know, one for September, one from October, one November. Israel's ideology of genocide must be confronted and stopped. It's the lack of a two-state solution that most threatens Israel and the ICC arrest warrant. It's also complicit, you know, is also an indictment of U.S. policy and complicity. But Douglas Burry has argued when people argue about what's going on in Gaza, and I wasn't going to start this way, but it's reasonable after what you said about war being held, is that there are, it's awful. And civilians are inevitably the people who suffer.

and what he said was regarding Hamas, you can't, you're not sort of allowed to start a war and then say, oh, you know, after you're losing, say, oh, you know, we can't let us lose. And, you know, oh, we didn't, you know, did you mean it, let's just stop now? How would you respond to that statement of Douglas Murray's? Well, Hamas didn't start this war.

Okay, well, that's, okay, that's, I think the point you're making is this, this has long, a long history. Certainly the events of October 7th. This war goes back at least to 1921. Okay, good. I think really at least to 1917, and in fact, even before that. And my colleague, Rashid Khalidi, has written the 100 years war on Palestine. which is an excellent book, by the way. And the war didn't start on October 7th.

This was one event in a hundred years of conflict. It was certainly an unprecedented, well, I would think. Maybe you're going to say, unprecedented provocation. It was a military disaster for Israel that day. Yeah, but did it not then turn into a military disaster ultimately, well, I mean, not just for a mosque, but that eventually for the people of Gaza? Well, the people of Gaza were living a catastrophe because every few years, Israel was killing thousands of Gazans, mowing the grass, as they say. Gaza was famously called the world's largest

open-air prison. And this is part of an even larger story of an Israeli apartheid regime. ruling over Palestinian people basically since 1947 and that's part of an even longer story of the difficulties that came from the Valfort Declaration

in 1917. Okay, look, let's, yeah, okay, great. I think we can go through this. I wrote, written a series of questions based on the writing, and why don't we go through them and that may speed this up a little bit? Okay, good. Yeah, yeah, because a very long, complicated story.

It's obvious a long, it's, You know, it's, yeah, exactly. But I want to just start with your article in September. We don't hear this, but you say Israel's fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian state in what the Knesset calls the land of Israel, meaning land west of the Jordan River. and you point out to call the land west of Jordan River, the heart of Israel is breathtaking. Do you want to comment on that?

I mean, one doesn't hear that Israel is opposed to a Palestinian state. Oh, Israel, in this government and also in this political environment is dead set against a Palestinian state. Juridically, actions of the Knesset, actions of the cabinet, rhetoric of the, of Benjamin Netanyahu for more than 30 years, his political party for 50 years. So this is the core of the issue. The core of the issue is two groups of Israelis claiming we need control and will maintain control of everything.

One group is largely on the security side saying there's no way we'll ever let there be a state of Palestine next us, that would be a dagger to the heart of Israel and will never permit it. And the other side says, God gave us this land, read all about it in Deuteronomy, and that's just the way it is, and God will provide. And this being a theocratic state with a large zealous, fundamentalist population, that latter view, which to my mind is not my cup of tea, I have to say, is a very significant part of the public outlook, but both play a role. So you think of Israel as a theocratic state at this point?

Well, it is, of course. They declare themselves to be. It is this state of the Jews. It's the Jewish state. It's, and Jews have prerogatives that non-Jews do not have. And that's, that's juridical as well as practical. Yeah, I mean, you hit the two things that I want to discuss. I mean, the religious fundamentalism is, as you point out, is just absurd, you know, going to the book of Joshua and using it to justify what's happening now.

And I think it was behind one of the, you know, my late, I'm going to be doing an event in honor of my late friend Christopher Hitchens in England in a couple of weeks. And I was just listening to him. And, you know, his point was that the whole idea of Zionism per se is bad for Jews. but also ridiculous because it's based on religious nonsense. And it's based on, and I get emails every day. It's based on an idea, a claim, very vague, but a claim, this is our ancestral home, so it's ours. And that claim, again, at least the religious side of that claim,

is based literally on the book of Deuteronomy and the book of Joshua. And what's interesting about that is God says all the land from actually from the Euphrates to the Nile. So it's not just from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, but he says, this is your land. I promise this to you. And you should go in and kill all the people inside. Yeah, so it's some Malachites. Yeah, it is not, by the way, a claim that this is our ancestral home because there were indigenous populations there before the Jewish or the Hebrews or the Israelites arrived in biblical times. And according to the mythos or the Bible or the beliefs of these fundamentalists, God gives them not empty land or,

or primordial land, God gives them the power to kill everyone in the land so that it becomes their land. Yeah, no, it's, it's, I find it amazing because you read this stuff. And yeah, okay, maybe if you were living in the 7th century BC, it, it would ring true. But we're in the 21st century. Yeah, no, one could dispute genocide and, and, and I want to dispute that a little bit, but, but, but to, But to justify things on the basis of a, I mean, the Old Testament is a violent, genocidal, awful, immoral document for the most part. I mean, with tidbits of niceness, but. You know, there's some good principles, but there's a lot of genocide in it. And not just genocide, genocide at God's command.

Oh, absolutely. As I say, the Malachites are one of my favorites. But, okay, so let's dispense with that. So arguing, but of course, and I think you would agree here, I mean, as Christopher said, you know, it's an ill-advised notion, but that's not to say that when a state exists, it should be, it should be, it should be, it should disappear and the people be expelled. So that's not the same as saying Israel shouldn't exist. It exists. But by the way, it's a, it's almost the opposite because a reasonable position is, The world's complicated. Populations have moved, jostled, been conquered, been expelled. Everyone's a colonized. And at any moment, God, we should find a way for people to live together peacefully.

Because if you want to reorder things, well, maybe, you know, the Iroquois and the Sioux should have all the land that they had and Manhattan should go back to Manhattan. And, okay, maybe that's right. But the whole world would have to move or... Yeah, it's a different world now. Right. And so I'm actually of exactly the opposite view that we have seven million Jews and we have seven million Palestinian Arabs and let's make this work. Okay, exactly. And that's why it seems that and we'll get to it. That two-state solution.

It doesn't seem like this. I mean, again, it's like it's, it's, you'd think it was brainless to imagine anything else. I mean, you'd think it was just so obvious that two groups of roughly equal populations. But you do point out that in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted about 90% of the population. In 1947, they were 60% of the population after the UN partition ban. And the partition plan, in fact, proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now you say that Israel asserts claims over 100% of the land. That's assuming that they assert claims over what is Gaza and the West Bank. That's right. Yeah, that's the Netanyahu Smotrich Ben, Goevere coalition and the Knesset vote.

Now, so. And again, there are two classes of arguments. One really is the primordial argument. This is ours. You go someplace else. This is ours. Okay. And we've discussed that, and I utterly rejected both on pragmatic and moral grounds.

And then the second is there's no alternative because otherwise they're going to kill us. Well, that's the next one. Obviously, you want to get to. But before you do, you keep talking about it. There's two words that are used a lot, apartheid and genocide. Yeah. They both strike me.

Well, they're harsh. They're harsh, and I'm not sure I buy it on a whole grounds. I mean, apartheid in the sense that, I mean, Arabs in Israel, if I'm not mistaken, have right of voting and they're not restricted in any sense. Am I incorrect? The Arabs live in Israel. There are two issues. One is there are about five million Arab Palestinians who are living in occupied territories. They have no rights at all. Okay. So that's the, that is the preeminent issue of apartheid. Okay. And you call it and I call it apartheid because this government is claiming the right to rule over them. It's not saying, oh my God, we have to find a way not to rule over them. We have to. We have to.

to find a way to a Palestinian state so we can leave. It's saying we are going to be here permanently. And so that's the sense in which the apartheid is the most real. Well, if they say that, if they do say they were going to be there permanently and take over in the sense, and yet not give any voting rights, then it is apartheid. But let me just say in Gaza, Gaza did have a government, Hamas was ostensibly elected. And therefore, I mean, to argue, it seems to me that that Gaza people have no they have no political rights in Israel but that they have no internal rights

to govern Gaza again I want to at least ask that question no no no what happened is Israel vacated Jewish settlements in Gaza but set a perimeter of complete control

around Gaza anyone coming in or out of Gaza was under Israel's control. Everything that Gaza has, whether it's imports of food, medicine, power, water is under Israeli control. There is no sovereignty there. It's a complete police rule. This is before October 7, 2023. So this was not a sovereign state. They have no port. They're not allowed to have a port. even though they're a coastal country. You think Israel's going to let them have a port?

Of course not. They're not allowed any rights at all. That's why it was called the largest open-air prison. Yeah, okay. And again, I'm trying to be, well, I'm trying to at least raise the question. Yeah. Absolutely. So the question one I'd ask is, well, okay, you don't, unless you're evil inherently,

you don't do that. There must be a reason why you think you'd do that. And the essential reason is that, well, Hamas is certainly, I mean, in terms of a police state, as far as I can tell, God's as much a police state because of Hamas. No. No. No, you look at who has the control and the control of the perimeter, the control of every resource needed, the ability to go in every year or two year or two thousand people. Well, that's a level of external control. But what about internal resources?

Who controls that in Gaza? What happened, as you'll recall, is that in 2005, I'm pretty sure if I have the date, right? There were the Palestinian elections. And the United States championed the Palestinian elections. This was to create a Palestinian government. Yeah. And then Hamas won. And the United States and Israel said, hell no.

We're never going to talk to them. They can't form the government. And immediately, the United States and Israel tried to make a coup to violently bring down Hamas. That coup failed. And then the U.S. and Israel took full control over whatever resources would come in and out of Gaza, full control over every practical aspect of life, whether there's water and sanitation or electricity, or food and medicine and so forth, this all came with outside control. Hamas, Israel said, we're never going to negotiate.

Hamas has to give up its claim that Israel doesn't have legitimate right to exist and so forth before we recognize them. This is not nonsense, by the way. You negotiate with an opponent. You don't succumb. But it's not quite nonsense because, I mean, in the sense that Hamas does say Israel has no right to exist, right? They did then, and then later they said, no, no, we will accept the two-state solution. I will accept it provisionally or not provisionally. You grown-ups need to talk with each other.

I don't say you go in there and you surrender or you say that's acceptable or we agree with you, but, or you can shoot us when we sit down or you can bomb us. No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about there was an election. They won the election and now it's time to talk. Yeah, talk. And I hate to quote this here because I'm no fan of Reagan, but you can trust, but then you have to verify. I mean, the question is, if you're going to, I'm obviously a, you know, a big believer in diploma. I think it's the only solution in the long run to everything, but diplomacy. But, but you have to have evidence on both sides and there's reasons on both sides to be suspicious of a, of good faith willingness to negotiate.

Absolutely. But they didn't even try it. No. Okay. They didn't even try it, not even one day. It's a game. These are games. The game was, oh my God, we thought the PLO would win the election.

But Hamas won. Now we have to kill Hamas. That's the game. No. So there's never, there was, you would have to. argue there's never been attempts at negotiations are there was literally no attempt in negotiation okay and and and by the way there's a there's a broader and a broader and very basic and very fundamental point which is that any war depends on financial resources and on armaments

those come from the outside Hamas is not fighting war on Gazan resources. It's fighting a war with the support of Iran or the support of neighboring countries. And Netanyahu, who I abhor, says, okay, therefore we have to take out those foreign states. I say, no, then you have to negotiate with those foreign states. And he would argue that he influenced the neocon arguments from Iraq on, and Syria Well, he is, in my view, he's been, you know, the closest thing we've had to a president of the United States for the last 20 years. And we've been fighting Netanyahu's awful wars all the time. And that's the power of the Israel lobby.

That's the power of the ideology. That's the power of interest groups and many other things. But I find Netanyahu completely disgusting. And his championing of American wars in Iraq, in Syria. Syria, in Libya, in Lebanon, in Somalia, in Sudan. Come on. If I could give them a peace in my mind, it is shut up. You go run your own country, we'll run our country.

Well, I mean, you make that argument that he's argued because he's argued that the support for the people he views as terrorists and a lot of them are, let's make it clear, they are, but. By the way, just what's going on in, in, in, in, in, in, in, Syria today, we are supporting the terrorists. So when you talk about the terrorists, they're literally on the CIA payroll. They're literally on the American payroll. The Al-Qaeda.

Where did that come from? That came from us. Yeah, I know. They're not terrorists until they turn us. As long as they're supporting them. They're not terrorists. They're freedom fighters. There are people until they're not.

That's exactly. But, but, you know, but the argument. his argument is that he's quote-un-o-terrorists, and Amos is, I don't know, unless I'm completely crazy. Amos does seem like a terrorist organization to me. I think it's not the point. But anyway, his argument is that they're supported by foreign powers, and therefore the United States should help them remove the foreign powers, which is why he's been. Right. And my point is the whole premise of Netanyahu, which is that Israel will keep all this

land is the underlying reason for all of this, and it's a completely illegitimate reason. And, I mean, this notion that you then argue that this, I mean, that what is obviously the only long-term solution, I mean, what's obviously the only long-term solution to this region is to have two states. That's correct. Unless you'd kill half the population. That's it. One side or the other kills the other seven million.

And even then it's probably not sustainable. That's correct. So this is the whole point. It's not even complicated. That's where we started the conversation. This is not complicated. There is one viable endpoint, and that is two states. And one side right now, Israel completely rejects that.

And the other side, which is the Arab countries and the organization of Islamic cooperation, and the BRICS and the G20 and the UN General of, assembly all support the two-state solution. So I live in the world of diplomacy. I've spoken with foreign ministers across the Middle East in the last four weeks, top foreign ministers. I have spoken with very, very senior officials all over the world. There is an overwhelming will for two states and within that, Lawrence, for demilitarization, for ending the belligerencies, for stopping armaments of Hamas.

Then groups like Hamas are what they are, which is completely dependent organizations on states. Just like Nan Yao says, he just comes to a different conclusion. You know, we agree, Hamas is nothing but for the states that support it. So he and I agree, he just has a different view. His view is one state, Israel, that's it. And my state is, that's obnoxious.

That can never lead to peace. And Mr. Netanyahu, stop getting my country, the United States, into your wars. That's my point. Okay. But one would have to say it's, you know, I know we've had to have this discussion before. You've worked with the United Nations and yours. You hold it in higher regard than I do, frankly. Yeah.

But, you know, and I don't know if it's true that UN operatives were a part of the October 7th. No. I mean, at least UN health. No. You think that's propaganda. You're sure it's proper. It's worse than propaganda. It goes by the initials of BS.

Yeah, okay. So, but aside from that, the, if you look at, Of course, my history, I mean, I'm being Jewish, of looking back at wars, the question is, can you, and you're always going to say you have to trust, I guess, at some of them. No, no, no, I'm not going to say that. But I mean, by the way, you look at the many times over the history where there have been preemptive attempted attempts to destroy Israel. And it looked to me like they were preemptive attacks, you know, the various wars that end up, that Israel end up expanding their territory because of. How would you react to claims by people now that things are different? Again, I'm trying to be a devil's advocate.

No, no, of course. There's a long story which we should take up at some point. But not now. You know, Israel or the Jewish people have had control over supposedly their ancient homeland for a few hundred years of the last 3,000 years. It raises a question why. Okay, I'll give you an example. In 66 AD, Jewish extremists launched a rebellion against Rome.

Okay, I put this in the category, are you kidding? Are you kidding? Well, they said, you know, this is, I don't know, God told us to do this or we need to do this. And my attitude is, I can't express how I would really say it on polite company, but it is basically, are you kidding, you're going to have a rebellion against the Roman Empire? And, well, they did. And in 70 AD, the temple was destroyed. And one of the high points of Jewish, or I shouldn't be flippant about it,

But one of the most famous moments of Jewish history is a mass suicide on the fortress of Masada. Okay, to my mind, you know, if mass suicide is your kind of national emblem, something's a little wrong with the thinking. And then, by the way, 50 years later, they did it again. So the temple was destroyed, and then there was another rebellion that started in 132.

and that was the end of Jewish presence in Jerusalem for the next basically 1800 years, with the very tiny exceptions, the Barcochpa Rebellion. I would like these zealots to learn a little history, which is they keep saying, and it's been said to me, God will provide, God will provide. The truth is, for the last 2,000 years, The military got them expelled from the homeland for the vast majority of time.

A little prudence wouldn't hurt. A little bit of the idea that the 7 million Palestinian should have their own place to live next door. It's been their territory too. And you could live in peace. And if you don't think so, I will take them one by one to talk to people that ardently want this kind of piece. Okay, and that you think can enforce this kind of peace?

Absolutely. Because by the way, most people, and I'm talking about most governments too, are not driven by zealots. They're driven by practical people that are trying to figure out how to get along the next day, how to make sure there's enough food, water, health care, schools for the children, and so on. Wow, it's amazing. It's really wonderful to think if that's really true that most governments are run by results.

And when you look at wars, they generally have reasons. And the wars in Ukraine, I've expressed my view about the reason, which is the United States can't leave good enough alone. And when I look at the wars in the Middle East, it's because of a failure to have a fair settlement of two peoples. practical, pragmatic. Okay, and okay, last issue of this is, well, they come together. Two terms that are used a lot by, one is genocide, and you've used it. Yes. And, you know, I guess I see genocide, and I think, I mean, I guess you're really believing this is true, but, you know, as an intentional, you know, not accidents of war or inevitable casualties, of war or response to an attack, but a desire to eliminate a population. And you really believe

that's the, you really view, I don't want to use the word believe, but you view the evidence is really that. Well, let me explain. Genocide is a legal term. It's a legal term that was invented at the end of 19, at the end of World War II, basically. And because of the Holocaust. In 1948, a global convention, the 1948 genocide convention was adopted by the world's governments. Everyone can go online, type in 1948 genocide convention and find out exactly the legal claim. And so it's a set of precise terms. Israel is now charged with genocide in the international court of, of justice by a complaint that was brought by the government of South Africa.

And there's been a lot of pleadings, briefs, and then on both sides, evidence, further statements and briefs by other countries, other governments, and so on. I've read the totality of this, and when I say it's a genocide, what? What I mean is that it's in violation of the 1948 genocide convention. Now, this is before the International Court of Justice. They haven't made a final ruling. They made a preliminary ruling that said, yeah, it really could be. I read the complaints and I believe that this is correct.

If the ICJ rules soon that, well, this isn't a genocide, this is a horrible war, it's tragic and so forth. I'll no doubt accept that if because there will be a long opinion and it will explain juridically. I expect the International Court of Justice to rule that this is a genocide in the specific sense that it is in violation of the 1948 genocide convention. So that's the way I'm using the term. Okay. And you and then the other term that one here's is bandied about, which I, is this, which I have no sympathy for, it's just settler colonialism, I don't know. Yeah.

Everyone's, as we pointed out, everyone is, populations have moved in and out. Palestine certainly didn't exist as a, as a, as a, as a place. And, and, and, and many people who are now in Palestine, I'm sure, moved there from, or had to leave other Arab countries to move in. And, and, and as did many Jews, but although there were Jews there then. What's your view on this settler colonialism claim and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and heights. It's not nonsense. It the history of what we now call, uh, uh, Israel and palestine. So Israel plus east Jerusalem, In 1915, 1916, 1917, in the midst of World War I, the British promised this land to three different parties. Now, Britain was not in control of any of it.

This was Ottoman territory, and the Ottomans were on the side of the... the German and Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I against the British, the French, and the Russians. And so Britain was promising this territory first to the Arabs, to one group of Arab leaders, said, fight with us, we give you this land. They promised it to the French. the so-called Sykes-Picot, and they promised it to the Jews as a Jewish homeland in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration. I regard, in general, the British as about the most cynical leaders in the world because they were the world's dominant empire, and they behaved like the Americans behaved today. They behaved with infunity. They were fighting a war. They were using their sway. but they ended up making a colossal mess that's been with us for a hundred years.

In 1921, what we call Palestine, well, what we call Israel and Palestine, basically the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean became British. Britain gained a mandate in the New League of Nations. That's what this territory is. When When Britain gained that mandate, the Jewish population at that time was a little under 10% of the population. And the non-Jewish population, which was roughly three-quarters Muslim and a quarter Christian, was the rest of the population. There's a lot of interesting anthropology and sociology of where those people were, but many

of them had lived there for centuries. This is plain. This was an agricultural region and people lived there and also somewhat of a commercial region, at least on a small scale, as part of the Ottoman Empire for many, many centuries. But under the British mandate and the Balfour Declaration, Britain said, okay, we're going to enable this to be a Jewish homeland. And because of the persecution of Jews and the poverty of Jews in Eastern Europe and after the Bolshevik revolution in what became the Soviet Union and so forth, there was in-migration of Jews into this new so-called mandat. territory. From the first day, the Arabs said, what the hell is this? You're just upsetting

the demographic balance. So it was an anti-immigrant sentiment. And it was, of course, a settler, colonial enterprise in a literal sense. These were settlers coming in under a colonial mantle. And that's where the term originate. So in a literal historical sense, this is precisely what it is. Now, those that were coming in said many things. Some said this is our ancestral home. This is our right. Others said, we're not going to make noise. We're just coming in. We just want a place to live. We won't bother. And so forth. But over time, the Jewish population. continued to expand. The Arab resistance to it continued to grow. And suddenly, by the 1930s, there were two significant peoples, and there was increasing inter-community feuding and violence. And then came, what do we do about this? And the British established a commission in 1936 called the Appeal Commission, which said, oh, maybe there needs to be two separate states, a kind of partition. And in 1947, the UN very much influenced by the pro-Zionist side, said two states, but we get the best part, said the Jews.

They get 56% of the land for 33% of the population. The Arab said, no, we don't accept that. We don't like this drawing of the map. Israel declared independence on that basis. The Arab states attacked. They were defeated. Israel became a sovereign state, and there was no state of Palestine. Gaza was part of under Egyptian rule.

East Jerusalem and the West Bank was under Jordanian rule. And the partition plan was in abeyance. Well, okay, that's the basic history. Yeah. It's not been solved to this day. And I think the P.O. Commission or the 1947 partition, though it wasn't very fair, you know, it's the basis still that the whole world says, yeah, there need to be two states. Now, by the way, Palestine, the Palestinians would end up, I think it's with 22% of the land. It's something much, much smaller in what they're claiming now. And they could have had back then. Yeah, and the Israelis are saying, no way, it's all of ours. And so this is the craziness of it. What's crazy.

I mean, but that's what I'm saying right now they're settled for something, much less they would have gotten in the original partition. But I guess the point I'm making is that this is an excellent history, an excellent summary of the history, but it's history. And it's nice to know the history. But it's 100 years ago, 1921. And you can't, you can't. remake the world in 2024 like it was. Oh yeah and what I'm suggesting is we go with international law

yeah we go with the the decision recently of the international court of justice we go with the 50 years of resolutions of the UN Security Council and what that says is two states on the border of the 4th of June 1967 each of the two states has Jerusalem as its capital one in west Jerusalem one in East Jerusalem and we get on with life. And now what's interesting for me about that, you could say it's not fair. The Palestinians are half the population, but they only end up with 22% of the land or something like that. But the truth is, it is the right focal point for ending this conflict because that solution, which I just outlined, is supported by about 180 countries in the world. And even the United States says so.

But then when it comes to a vote, the U.S. always sides with Israel so far. And so I say we're one vote away from the two-state solution. The U.S. just has to reverse its veto. And great. And the, that, I think more important than 180 countries, as far as I can tell from, is that the country's bordering Israel, I'll support that. In 2002, the Arab League put forward a peace initiative.

It's one of the great hidden secrets because in the Western media, you don't hear what the Arabs do, you hear what the Israelis say. But the fact of the matter is in 2002 and then in every year since then, what's called the Arab Peace Initiative has been reiterated. Maybe something has to be negotiated along some margin, but it's basically two states exactly the way that I just said. I've spoken with Arab leaders in the last few weeks. They're absolutely in favor of this, one after the other. And, you know, Israel might, oh, don't believe them.

But I would say to Israel, you're phony. sit down and talk. Then tell me why not to believe them or to believe them. Yes, let's talk. Don't just preempt this. And I'm so tired of Israel saying this, frankly, I just want the rest of the UN to vote for it, period. Then they can talk with each other, but let there be a state of Palestine without Israel having a veto over it. And then we'll get on to peace. Great. And maybe that answers the last question before I ask you about Trump for a minute. Oh, yeah, but we really have to go. I know we have to go. Five minutes.

Okay, okay. Okay. What next in Israel? What do you think is likely? I know what you want to happen. What's going to happen? Well, and I guess we can't dissociate it from Trump. So maybe let me put it out what would you like to happen for Trump's second normal prize? Yeah, and what do you think is going to happen? I would like Trump to say, okay, I support a Palestinian state. And it's going to be on the borders of the 4th of June, 1967.

and Hezbollah, Hamas, have to drop every armament and no nonsense. There's not going to be any of this shelling bullshit. We're going to clean this up. What about returning the hostages as a prerequisite? Well, of course. I mean, that goes without saying.

Every dimension of belligerency ends now. You get what you want. This side gets what it wants. Both sides live in peace. You stop bickering. If you want to talk to each other, fine. if you don't want to talk to each other, don't talk to each other, and I'm going to go collect my second Nobel Peace Prize. Okay.

That's what you'd like to have happened. What do you think is going to happen? Because I think that's as likely as a snowballing hell. But anyway. You know, I hope that we don't continue with all sorts of illusions. The illusion of Trump and Biden, Trump won and Biden was, ah, Palestine. No one cares about Palestine. We're going to make normalization of Israel with its neighbors anyway, no Palestinian state.

We're going to give F-35s to Saudi Arabia. Maybe we'll sweeten it with a defense pact. This has been the absolute aim of both administrations, and Saudi Arabia was the big prize for it. And we had a negotiator that I would not say was exactly an unbiased mediator's name is Amos Hoxstein. And he was in charge of getting Saudi Arabia to sign on. And the Saudis have been extremely clear, especially in recent weeks. There can be no normalization.

There will be no normal relations with Israel. There will be no peace in the region until there is a state of Palestine. So I'm hoping that President Trump comes into a second term, understanding that the situation is quite different from what it was when he left on January 20th, 2021. Well, that would be, that requires some knowledge on his part. And that's something I, well, look, I hope, but I'm not optimistic that there's been any knowledge of anything that's been going on in his part. But we'll see. in that regard, Twump, two,

are going to survive? Well, you want a third Nobel Prize after all. Yeah, I mean, the third Nobel Prize is we say, you know, Taiwan, that's an internal Chinese problem.

And that will avert a war with China. Yeah, that would be a wonderful thing to do. But again, I can't see it. That's Nobel Prize number three. Yeah, again, I can't see it. I think, you're right. It would be,

but I see no evidence that the Trump administration be any any less. I mean, it's a transactional, he's a transactional man and I did, anyway. Well, anyway, my goal in the next few months is to get him three Nobel Peace Prizes. If you can do it, I guess I'll be happy too, although I'd be hard. Yeah, I'd have to bite my tongue. But there's no evidence for any, you know, the important treaties, NPT, non-proliferation, ABM, you know, all the treaties, see no evidence, any evidence in your opinion that we're going to begin to

consider in this all-important question of nuclear weapons, some treaties in the next administration? I don't think so. We don't know. You know, I don't think if you're making bets, I don't think you'd demand long odds on that. But on the other hand, the situation is so dangerous and so fraught that we better work hard. at it and unfortunately sad for me you know I voted for Biden in 2020 and I found the administration to be an utter failure on foreign policy and disaster and so I'm I don't want to predict I'm not partisan in this I just think we had better do this for our survival and I'll try to use whatever means I can in persuasion to to try to

get the right thing. Well, you unlike me, you have the ear of many of these people. So I'm going to ask you to see if you can get Trump a fourth Nobel Prize when it comes to nuclear weapons treaties. There you go. This is a great idea. Okay. Progress.

Yeah, okay. And then last thing, your quote about Tissinger really got to me when it was like, it had to be an enemy, but worst to be a friend. I think of that when it comes to Trump's friends, namely if I look at the history of people, and I know Elon Musk and there are people who have. It looks to me like being Trump's friend is a biggest danger to one's own personal future. I'm wondering what's going to happen there. Any prognostications?

I don't know. You know, the first term was tremendously unstable. And it depended a lot on who happened to be where. And we have all these cynical, horrible memoirs of how this one manipulated Trump, how that one manipulated Trump like John Bolton, who's another one on my list of non-fabets. Yeah. And maybe Trump has learned something, so let's see. Let's hope so.

As someone would say who believed in God, from your mouth to God's ears. But let me say, at least one of us has at least the ear of people. And I hope, therefore, that your sanity will help the world become a better place. and you certainly have helped me and help the public by our conversation, which has gone on for now exactly twice as long as I think I planned, and probably twice as long as you had, but it's twice as wonderful. But it's fun. It's twice, yeah, I agree. Twice as pleasurable. So thank you very, very much. Great to be with you.

Oh, it's great. Thanks a lot, Jeffrey. And happy and happy holidays to you too. Happy New Year. Okay, take care. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch,

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