The Pete Quiñones Show - The Complete Cold War Series w/ Thomas777 - 1 of 2

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

9 Hours and 5 MinutesPG-13Here are episode 1-9 of the Cold War series with Thomas777.The 'Cold War" Pt. 1 - The End Informs the Beginning w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War" Pt. 2 - How It Starts, and Bonus Election Talk w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War" Pt. 3 - The Korean War w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War" Pt. 4 - Konrad Adenauer and the Bundesrepublik w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 5 - 'The Cuban Missile Crisis' w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 6 - Ho Chi Minh and the Origin of the Vietnam War w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 7 - Robert McNamara, Vietnam, and a World Turning 'Red' w/ Thomas777The Cold War Pt. 8 - How the On the Ground Battles in Vietnam Were Fought w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 9 - Battling the Khmer Rouge w/ Thomas777Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

We embark on a new journey today. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm very well. Thanks for hosting me. The, um, this one is going to be, this one's interesting to me because I was alive for part of this and I was sentient for, I mean, I remember a lot of this. So, um, we had teased about talking about the Cold War, but, um, you said that you had a, we're going to start at the. end and then go back to the beginning. So what do you got?

Well, there's a few things here. I want to explain my rationale before we deep dive into it. You know, I don't want to presume the viewers and the listeners have knowledge that they don't. I mean, I'm not saying that anybody's not smart or anything, but some of this stuff has become somewhat esoteric. It's just because of the way the news cycle doesn't properly provide context to historical events, particularly where there's military variables involved and, you know, political narratives become paramount to characterize these things. but also it's just hard to place oneself conceptually in an epoch that has totally passed. You know, I went through that when people, like my parents, they had to talk about the 50s and the 60s and things.

You know, I mean, all people go through that. But, you know, the reason why I indicated, you know, I'm treating this as kind of the end was the beginning. Everything that is happening today in political terms, in foreign policy terms, in terms of the guiding ideology of Washington, And I say ideology, not ideology's plural, because I really do believe that there's a true consensus there. There's no opposition party in Washington at all. I mean, arguably since 1933, there hasn't been real opposition. But in discrete policy terms, there was now that no longer exists. There's an absolute quorum.

There's one ideology. There's one strategic vision. There's one sense of when intervention and force is legitimate. And that is totally ideologically driven. It's not driven by strategic variables of a realist or even particularly concrete nature. You know, it's very much based on very abstract things and ideological things. But you only would understand why that's the case, and the only way to understand why Ukraine is the designated battleground. And the only way to understand why the Russian Federation, as it exists today, has been slated for annihilation, is to understand how the Cold War resolved.

and why it resolved the way it did. So to begin, I'm going to go back to the last sort of conflict cycle of the Cold War. Very briefly, to speak on detente. The detente was born at two things. For those that don't know, detent was an explicit and series of implicit agreements between the United States and Soviet Union Warsaw Pact to not engage in direct strategic competition. Part of this owed to the fact that America was losing the Cold War militarily, not just in Vietnam, but on secondary battlefronts like Angola, the Indo-Pakistan War was very much an attempt to own to the then-Nassad, the Soviet-Split split, the Soviets were interested in hedging China with India, you know, being a huge populist country. Pakistan was kind of the American response to that

trying to cultivate Pakistan as a proxy but these things were not going well and obviously direct intervention there's this weird period between the end of the military draft and you know the the kind of full development of the all volunteer force and the full development and implementators become known as the revolution

in military affairs you know they entailing them from command and control technology to global positioning technology, you know, to smart munitions becoming the norm rather than the exception. Okay, there's a strange kind of period between those two things where the U.S. Army was operating on a shoestring budget. I mean, not just the army, the whole military, there was no political will in Washington in front of overseas. Communism in the third world, in Europe had become very stagnant.

But in the third world, it had this great animating power. And the Soviets were blessed with a great deal of proxies who were already in being. you know, in cadre, with a full cadre structure and, you know, men under arms that could facilitate military outcomes that very much benefited the Soviets. All they really needed was a constant supply of weapons, and the Soviets could kind of taking hands off approach. So from about 1973 onward, you know, this kind of strategic paradigm reigned. However, during that period, the technology that underpins strategic nuclear weapons dramatically improved, you know,

owing to the early revolution in computing technology, going to improve circular error probable from, you know, things like the space program, you know, and just owing to real satellite technology. We'll get into that a minute what I mean. You know, we take for granted that satellite imaging, you know, gives you a real-time picture of the battle space, but that was not the case until the late 1970s, probably until 1980. Okay, so this endured until 19709. What happened in 197079, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and that really alarmed people, for reasons we went into in a moment beyond the obvious. It was misunderstood why that happened. I know Mr. Trump said it was to fight Islamic terrorism. That doesn't make any sense.

Other people claim that, well, it was the Brezhne of Doctrine. You know, that being that the Soviet Union declared that it would intervene on behalf of the socialist community of nation is to preserve socialism. Okay? That was the rationale, the pretext. What it really was was that outside of Moscow, the primary command and control hug for Soviet strategic nuclear forces was in Kazakhstan. Yeah, it was in Kazakhstan, okay? And that's why, not accidentally that's where Star City is, you know, where the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation,

he'll launch their space vehicles from. So Afghanistan could be flipped or could have been flipped and transformed into a Western client state with basing rights there. The Soviets have been looking at a situation where their strategic nuclear command of control would be decaditated. you know at least a substantial portion of it and that was not acceptable now and drop off even though brezhna was at the helm and drop off was really kind of the the shadow executive of the soviet union you know the soviet political structure was very Byzantine not just because the party in the state were interstitially combined with one another but because who was who was the true executive you know varied you know generally it was a man who had a combination of offices you know like um the uh he often would be a man who held both the premiership and the general secretary of the communist party um other times it was it was it was far more uh opaque and uh and dropoff reigned formally as uh as as as as as you know

the the general secretary from 82 to 84 but i'd argue that probably from about 9069 he was a true shadow executive of the soviet union and he was a very brilliant guy and the world as it's structured today and the fate of the Soviet Union and decisions made therein for better and ill, oh very much to Mr. Andropov, but it was his decision to invade Afghanistan

and he was looking many steps ahead in terms of, you know, the implications for the strategic nuclear balance and the ability of the Soviet Union to survive a bolt from the blue nuclear assault, which was a real concern for reasons we'll get into.

And it's typical to emphasize how dangerous it was to have two superpowers fully mobilized with massive nuclear arsenals on hair trigger alert at all time when the technological curve was really moving towards removing human decision makers from the equation. You know, only with the narrowing temporal window of decision making in the event of nuclear war, it was really kind of becoming removed from human hands. You know, technology is its own momentum. And societies at scale, we're talking about literally hundreds of millions of people. And, you know, thousands upon thousands of aggregate decisions, you know, controlling the trajectory of that massive state, you know, these things can't just easily be moved one or the other. And the proverbial breaks can't just be put on an apparatus of that scope, scale, and complexity. You know, like, I'm not trying to esoteric. This is fundamental to understanding the paradigm.

Do you think they... Go ahead. Let me ask. Do you think that they did that because of, you know, Daniel Ellsberg put out the doomsday machine, which really shined a light on what he saw in the nuclear policy, what was the way in the late 50s, early 60s, how the, how nukes were being overseen,

Do you think that that, because of the way that could have turned into a disaster, they possibly thought that, well, if we turn this over into more of a, even starting to talk about AI and things like that, it would be better than having humans handle this? Definitely. And the progenitor, like the proverbial father of AI is strategic nuclear war planning. The idea was this, okay? And I'm jumping a little bit ahead because you asked, I want to,

kind of deal with this now by the 1980s you know where true parity existed within a superpower in terms of strategic nuclear forces in being as well as capabilities a bolt from the blue strike uh if launched by hypersonic cruise missiles from europe against the soviet union they would have as little as five minutes to render a decision on retaliation the united states would have longer but we're talking about eight to fifteen minutes in the case of the United States. I'm not going to bore people with the details of how they would have played out. It would have involved things like an SLBM assault launched at the depressed trajectory,

the spoof early warning systems, detonating groundburst detonation, thus an EMP would knock out, remaining early warning. But the point is, like imagine the situation where, okay, you know, if, if, if, if, if, If policy is to, you know, even a policy is to launch on warning, not launch on confirmation of assault. It's like, okay, it's two in the morning, you know, American time or in Moscow. You wake up the, you wake up the President of the United States or you wake up the general secretary.

You know, you say, Mr. President, you know, we just received like confirmation, like incoming assault. He's got eight minutes to decide, like, how he's going to retaliate, if he's going to retaliate, what their retaliation is going to entail, what forces are going to be availed to it, whether it's going to be countervallifference but not countervalue whether it's going to be you know full spectrum attack that it's we're at the point which is totally academics that's not possible okay so the idea was you've got to be able to discern absolute indicators before you know not just before launch detection but before even was considered early warning detection if you could code those indicators into into variables that could be rendered as input then your AI can tell you when you're facing imminent assault. But the problem with that is, like, when do you decide, when do you decide to launch?

Is that when there's over a 50% probability of imminent attack, when it's 80%, when it's anything over 10%, you know, when it's 5%. You know, these deeper parodies make this incredibly difficult. But regardless, there was a secondary issue too. I'm going to get into this now, because this is a perfect kind of way to kind of slide into it. As Daytona ended, Carter, who gets a bad rap, and I don't get me wrong.

Carter was not a good president, but he was not a terrible man. He was actually a very moral man, and he did some good things. One of the good things he did was in 1979, Carter attacked William Odom, who was a general, a very brilliant guy. Odom was rare because he kind of had the logistical brilliance of Omer Bradley, but he was also a real

warrior. You know, he was like a soldier's general. He understood combat. He really understood nuclear weapons, okay? I think he's kind of a counterpart, his historical counterpart would be somebody like blackjack pursing. But William Odom went through

the presidential decision-making handbook, and literally such a thing existed for for nuclear war and it was incredibly opaque, it was incredibly obtuse it was not up to speed in terms of the technology of the day

and it didn't give the president any real ability to to it didn't give me liberty of action respect to the war plan now part of this because this was drafted in literally 1965

so basically what it entailed And the core of this presidential handbook was the SIOP, not the psychological operation, the SIOP, the single integrated operational plan. Because this day, there's an SIOP, but it is totally different. And it's changed many times. But as of 1979, it was this arcane document that was no longer relevant. And it basically gave the president a handful of menu options. It was literally listed as response menu.

It was counter-value and counter-force assault against the Soviet Union. All Warsaw Pact states were strategic nuclear forces are based, and the same for the People's Republic of China. There's another menu option that was the same thing for China, but not the USSR and Warsup Pact. There's another menu option that was the reverse. There's another one that was just strictly counter-force, no counter-value. A lot of this came from the fact They were talking about a moment ago about satellites Okay

Until about 1980 Or like 1970 and 1980 U.S. satellites that would that would provide data On the basing location of enemy forces There were always several weeks out of date Because these satellites had taken their pictures The little film

Would be deposited in a canister that cancer would fall to earth and be recovered from the ocean it would be retrieved, developed, then analyzed. So sometimes they're talking about months out of date information. And one of the things that Soviet did, which was kind of

cunning in its simplicity, rather than availing their land-based ICBMs to superhardened structures, they put them on trucks and mobile launch vehicles. Like everybody's seen the footage. I mean, at least if you were a kid, like when I was, you know, there'd be these

ominous as hell uh uh this ominous little footage from the Moscow military parades are these SS19 these huge ICBMs

on these trucks you know literally okay they were they moving them around every single day you know and that the spoof

the spoof enemy targeting and there's like to totally crazy stuff like by the mid-80s NSA satellites and DIA satellites they were photographing

the soil the Soviet Union and East Germany to detect tracks from these vehicles because based on the depth, you could tell if the payload was something other way of an SS-19 or not. Like, it's totally insane. Like, not insane as it's stupid or bad, but, like, totally insane, like, the amount of work

and, like, man hours that went into this. You know, people can't even see what something like that today. But, so what Carter and Odom decided was, there was another thing, too, that was disturbing about the SIOP and the entire, the entire response plan. It was that by the time, by the state of technology of 1979,

it was just accepted that in the event of a bolt from the blue assault or an unforeseen escalation of conventional war, wherein, you know, the enemy, the enemy just, you know, goes all in, you know, escalation to countervalue nuclear assault. It was just accepted that the president would be dead. And all civilian decision makers would be dead. So the only people who would be able to manage the response would be strategic air command, based as they were in superhard in places like Cheyenne Mountain,

as well as in the looking glass aircraft that was the airborne command post. That's really disturbing. It's also damn unconstitutional. You can't craft a war plan and be with an article to be parameters that says, well, the president's going to die. So, you know, General Powers or General LeMay or General so-and-so, he's not a de facto president he's he's he's

lord high executioner and that he's totally in control of the strategic nuclear forces but also he's just like the reigning like government official who's going to survive so it all comes down to him uh that's a very dangerous situation among other things and also like I said it's patling a constitutional

Carter said that's unacceptable so what Carter did was he ordered Odom to draft a a comprehensive response plan, basically bring the SIOP up to speed, account for deeper parodies, account for up to the moment intelligence that could be gleaned from, you know, the then contemporary satellite systems

that would allow for, you know, instantaneous retargeting as needed and things like this. Carter demanded that there be, that part of this plan include designated civilian national command authorities. You know, basically the president in his cabinet would all be issued these ID cards that all had a code, okay? And the code would constantly change. But these men and a handful of women were in the cabinet, the executive cabinet, they'd have to, every day they'd have to report on their whereabouts. And if they left the District of Columbia, they have to report like every hour as to where they were. So they had, and there was a series of military bases and hard structures that they would be designated to travel to wherever they were, an event

of war. So basically, long story short, a system was put into place. This was not completed until about 1980, 4, E5. But the system was in place we're in, there was no way that every civilian national command authority would be killed. Okay? There would always be someone who could manage the war on behalf of the executive and the civilian leadership.

Okay. There was other things too. But what this, basically what this all came down, and taken together, this meant that, owing to the technology of the time, and the kind of the evolving state of warfare, command and control, smart munitions, everything else.

America was planning in a event of nuclear war to fight and win a nuclear war. This cause all got the consternation from people who didn't really understand deeper parodies, even some people who should have. You know, people had this ongoing kind of delusion that MED

mad was one part kind of talking point, one part kind of in joke of within the nuclear fraternity in the earliest days, Mutually assured destruction is not literally mean the end of everything. Assured destruction is a victory metric in strategic nuclear warfare. It's the point at which an enemy society can no longer reconstitute the wage war. It's basically the point, the attrition point at which you kill an enemy society, which is a horrific metric because in the case of the Soviet Union or America,

as in 1970, that entailed about 70 or 80 million people. Okay. but this idea that the only reason nuclear weapons exist is to make sure they are never used like that that's an absurdity and it's also it just wasn't by the 1970s the end of 1970s you had you had multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles you had decoys you had ways to spoof early warning radar you had hypersonic missile platforms that that that wouldn't you know that didn't didn't even travel on ballistic trajectory. Like, it was totally obsolescent.

And, as William Odom said, he said, look, he said at the time, and he reiterated later to one of his biographers, he's like, I had an obligation that if America was attacked with nuclear weapons, I had an obligation, you know, in concert with the president, to fight and win a nuclear war. And he's absolutely right. with the other kind of perverse feature of mad and that kind of whole ethos it's like I'm obligated to commit suicide and so is like you know 80 million other people because

oh we failed in our effort to maintain peace to the balance of terror like it's there's something crazy about it but that's uh that's basically what ushered in the final phase of the cold war now I want to fast forward a bit to uh What exactly happened when it became clear that not just cracks in the edifice of the Soviet Empire remerging, but that there was a genuine structural crisis underway. And part of others developed owes the personalities, quite literally, of George Herbert Walker Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, Mr. Bush, I've got to drop some biographical background on Bush for this to make any sense. I'm not trying to bore anybody.

Bush was a very dynamic guy, frankly, and he's not a well-loved individual, and that's fine. I'm not saying people should like Bush, morally or think that he was like a good man or something, but he had an incredibly in-depth understanding of the nuances of the strategic balance into the Cold War. But he was head of the CIA in 1974

when something very controversial happened. see um the uh as i made the point before in a written context the CIA really lost its cachet in the 60s and subsequently with the gates hearings and it wasn't just that people were morally outraged by things like the phoenix program which they put squarely on the shoulders of CIA when really kind of responsibility if you want to look it that way if you do this as a grave evil kind of rested equally with Army intelligence, Macaddy Sog, the Pentagon itself. But

one of the reasons in this place and people act like CIA is kind of the seat of deep state power. It's really not. And it was really, really low by a lot of very hawkish cold warriors.

So something happened in 1974. There's something to this day that is corralled by the intelligence services called the National Intelligence Estimate. It's become kind of meaningless now because intelligence and the whole intelligence game is

totally different today. And we could do an episode on that if anybody's interested. But I'm not going to deep down into that because it's just too much kind of collateral stuff. But it was the belief of everybody from you know kind of hawkish senators and

congressmen, you know, to Pentagon types, to guys in army intelligence, you know, to Ronald Reagan himself, who, you know, as early as the mid-70s, you know, had his eyes on a White House bid. You know, the believers of the CIA was not feeding, they were not feeding good data to those to whom they were accountable, civilian or military. The claim was that they were consistently underestimating Soviet capabilities, as well as just kind of internal dynamics within the Soviet Union, relating to the leadership cast, as well as relating to probable decisions that the Soviets would make and when confronted with crises, both within and without their sphere of influence.

So it was proposed that what was called Team B be corralled as a competitive analysis exercise. Now, what was the mandate of quote-unquote Team B? It was commissioned to aggregate and analyze data from diverse sources, basically any available intelligence sources that were then relied upon, okay, to judge the accuracy, comprehensiveness, the predictive value of the national intelligence estimate of the preceding several years. Now, the focus of the team B, be, it was 16 experts total, and I'll get into who those men were

in just a minute. They were divided into three teams, okay, or, yeah, teams, or classes, if you will. One of them was to study specifically low altitude Soviet air defense capabilities, which,

again, I don't want to bore anybody, but this relates to things, you know, uh, it, stealth technology didn't exist yet, but it was understood that this was in the wings, and even were it not,

platforms like what became the B-1 bomber, you know, the idea was if you could fly below conventional radar and strike superhardened targets with very, very heavy nuclear weapons. You know, that's the most effective way to knock out these counterforce targets. So even though it's seen,

seems like overly specific and esoteric. I mean, that's, that's why this was such a priority. Okay, the study of low, the fact that this and capabilities of low altitude, specifically low altitude, Soviet Air Defense capabilities in places like Moscow, in places like Kazakhstan, okay? Another team was to study the accuracy of land-based Soviet and Warsaw-packed ICDMs, okay? The circular era probable. Traditionally, the Soviets larded their launch vehicles, the warheads,

that had absolutely massive throw weight. So even if they lost a substantial amount of them, you know, it's a, to ABM technology, those that hit would be absolutely devastating. That's kind of how they resolve the, you know, the issue. I mean, America had a very different, Ameri's evil is kind of the opposite. The Ameri's idea was eventually, you know, to create basically smart munitions on strategic play, in the strategic arsenal and pepper the target area with, sub-megaton warheads, which is far, far more devastating than one massive device.

For reasons I don't fully understand, but I'm sure physics guys could, like, shed some light on. And finally, and most importantly, the third, you know, team within Team B, their role is to study Soviet strategic priorities and how this interface with policy orientation. Basically, what's the Soviet What's the Soviet doctrine on nuclear war? Like, when would they truly escalate? And beyond that, in more in more kind of global, figuratively, in literal terms, like, what is their grand strategy?

Like, how does the Soviet Union aim to increase its power in this kind of uncertain epoch that we're entering? Now, who was on this team? And you're going to understand why I made a big deal about Bush and like Bush the man and his personality. This team was headed by Richard Pipes.

It included Daniel Graham, William Van Cleave, FOE D. Culler, Seymour Weiss, Paul Wolfowitz, and Paul Nitz, who'd been the creator of the committee on the present danger in 1950,

which over time had various iterations, all of which basically, it's not really relevant now, but that was always kind of the that was always that was kind of the political action committee of Cold War Hawks, okay? Now, if you notice from that list

that just ticked off, these are like the fathers in neo-conservatism, not philosophically, but in policy terms. That is not an accident, okay? And these guys basically were saying, well, Bush's CIA is totally incompetent. And they do not know what they're doing. Okay?

And and thus when, Bush was brought on board as Reagan's VP Reagan was surrounded with neo-conservatives as advisors and I would go as far as to argue

people like Oliver North, people like Pointexter, people like El Haig who didn't last long and Middally, these guys were ultra-hawkish, but they were not neocon. However, neocons very much had Reagan's ear. And Reagan himself was something of a neocon.

He was in Roosevelt New Deal. who, you know, had kind of saw on the road to Damascus moment in the post-war years. Okay, I mean, that's all another issue, but, so Bush was basically the company man who was Reagan's press admission of the White House,

and Bush and Reagan did not particularly like each other. And when Bush found himself, elected president, he was surrounded by men who had, going on to very story and powerful roles

in a policy planning corridors and the national security apparatus who were very hostile to his worldview and who did not view him as particularly competent. Okay. Bush tried to insulate himself

with his own loyalists and I think he did that in large measure people like Baker or people like Skowcroft who's kind of a complicated figure in terms of his values. He had Neo-Connish tenens but first and foremost he was loyal to Bush.

And when Bush took office, you know, February 1989, again, not only was this kind of team-be faction that would much later become kind of known to the public as, you know, the neocon cabal, some aspect of it, at least, not only were they insinuated very much into the national

security apparatus, but you know, certain expectations have been raised by Reagan. You know, Reagan and Gorbachev had this tremendous rapport. And that was legit, that was real. That wasn't been tried.

Bush found the speed of things very alarming. A few months before Bush took before inauguration day, Bush actually tapped Henry Kissinger, and he asked him to conduct Gorbachev as an intermediary. Kisner secretly traveled to Moscow, and he met with Gorbachev, and Kisnter explained as

ordered that there would not be a seamless transition of administrations from Reagan to Bush, and when Gorbichov was kind of put out by this, as well, it's taken it back, you know, and Gorbachev said, well, why? what kind of articulated was exactly what Bush instructed him to. He said, look, there's a danger here of a structural and political nature. You know, a reckless U.S. president could totally derail the transition away from communism. You know, there could be a coup of hardliners, which there was, and we'll get into that, but that was not until it appeared. There could be open civil war between the nationalities, and that did happen in some theaters.

there were going to be a complete Weimar-style collapse, which also did happen to some degree. What Kissinger relayed, in essence, was Bush had told him an American president could do much to derail the transition away from communism, but could do little to grease the skids, to facilitate the process more rapidly. Now, to understand what Bush's vision was, it was a lot like Nixon's after Nixon left office.

Now, as you probably remember, or about my age. Nixon kind of got a second lease on life by the mid to late 1980s. He wrote some very good books on the strategic situation. He wrote a lot about the Cold War, which frankly was Nixon's like raison d' detrap. And he was even tapped by CNN

during the Gulf War, like not infrequently. Show him before he died. But Nixon and Bush, their idea was this. Their idea was that we can preserve the Soviet Union as some kind of benign structure, at least for the time being. You know, what has to be paramount is total nuclear disarmament and then gradual demobilization of conventional forces and such that they're drawn down to basically nothing more than the kind of Weimar-style, you know, constabulary force to manage internal strife or ethnic conflict or things like this. in Bush's case it was very much a kind of

it was very much kind of the vision of Roosevelt that you know the United States and the Soviet Union would kind of govern the planet literally with you know Moscow with the junior partner but that you know this massively federated structure that took up literally one six of the earth should remain intact

because the alternative is just too unpredictable and it seems unrealistic to us I mean regardless of the the merit of such things on their own terms or such concepts, how you're talking in the art. There's a singular

fixation among policy planners after Nuremberg of at all costs just preventing armed conflict. And if you look at government as some kind of progressive instrumentality in lieu of looking as either a necessary evil or as

a means by which, you know, the posterity and historical mission of a people is preserved, you kind of view this as the zenith of government. so the bush faction if you want to call it that contra the neocon or pro neogoniogon faction this was their vision okay in contrast the guys who had staffed team b and who had now become these got of uber hawks insinuated the various roles they viewed the soviet unit as quite

literally evil like that was not hyperbole that's the way they looked at it some of this some of this was ethno sectarian owing to the background of a lot of these men. Some of it was not, it was just, you know, guys who were not of that particular background, but who just viewed it as evil incarnate. So their idea was

it had to be destroyed. Now, you know, if we destroy the Soviet Union by open warfare, so be it, if that's what, you know, God or or, uh, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, we destroy it, you know, by dismandling it through, you know, a detonation strategy of, you know, stirring up

the nationalities against, against mother Russia and against each other, you know, if we, if we destroy it by, you know, imposing a kind of looting operation on it, that strips of its natural wealth, strips it of its natural resources and national wealth and control

of such commodities they're in. You know, we can just render it prostrate and impotent. That was the competing viewpoint. And this is not hyperbole. These people spoke very openly of this. Dick Cheney went on a record as saying, quite literally, quote,

fuck them, they lost. When confronted with, you know, the kind of Bush-Baker vision. Which seems incredibly reckless regardless of your politics. But this said the effect of really kind of

of really kind of driving a wedge between Bush and Gorbachev. And this this was exacerbated because one of when a one of Bush's first acts as president

he visited Poland you know and Poland was kind of ground zero of anti-soviet not just the anti-Soviet sentiment but of organized resistance you know like Valencia and the solidarity movement

Bush did not like Valencia it's I think part of that was kind of inherent snobbery because Valencia was very much a proletarian. I think Bush viewed him as a rail arouser. What Bush did was he met with General Gerald Zelski. And again, if I'm butchering these names, I apologize. I'm very bad with that.

I don't, like any Slavic guys or girls listening, like, don't hesitate to correct me in the comments or whatever. But I'm not good with these pronunciations. But Gerald Zelski was an interesting guy. He was the only military man who was a chief estate of a Warsaw Pact state. which is interesting to me at least because tone deaf as the Soviets were like as bad as their optics were they realized in some basic way that they couldn't just install you know these like military

strong men in the several satellite stakes but Poland that's I mean Poland is under martial law from from 1980 81 onward but Gerald Zelisky was a tragic guy you know he he looked to ominous who's always in uniform and he'd wear these really dark sunglasses. Gerald Zeltsky's eyes were ruined by snow blindness. He was a Polish and he was a Polish

National of Noble birth when the Soviets invaded Eastern Poland in 1939 owing to his parentage and pedigree he was sent to a gulag and spent years at hard labor and the glare off the snow ruined his eyes.

But he you know was telling to that he was that the soviets had to rely on him you know there really there were no there were no dedicated polish communists you know it was it was more of a good the the the poll communist was more of a contrivance even than the dDR or any or anything else within the wars up that structure which is interesting but bush and gerlzelsky had a certain rapport and bush went as far as to convince jerlzelsky to stand for president when uh when Poland had their first multi-party election.

And Bush was criticized roundly and uniformly for that. But his notion was that, you know, Gerald Zeltsky, once Moscow's boot is no longer on the neck of the Polish nation, figuratively and literally, a man like Gerald Zelski can really rise to the occasion. And I understand that, even if that's not realistic in context. but this was Bush's notion okay and in Bush's defense what he said later in his own words were he wasn't going to go to he wasn't going to visit the eastern block and go around thumping his chest and trying to stick it to the Soviets that their system was crumbling and he also would loomed really large over U.S. policy you know in 1953

in 1936 and 1968 the Soviets these were Tiananmen Square level interventions or crackdowns on the people first in East Germany

then in Hungary then in Czechoslovakia there was an understanding among not just the Bush but among people on kind of both sides of the divide in terms of how to proceed with the situation developing in the east that

if we push this too hard or get too greedy in terms of demanding results and demanding too much too soon, and we may see some kind of we may see some kind of Stalin's backlash and a full-scale invasion of Poland

and it would be a massacre. So I'm not I'm not sitting here saying again that people should like Bush 41 or should like share that view, but I'm just trying to give a balanced perspective and his view was his view was not born of some kind of Simpleton's delusion, even if it was not realistic. But what ultimately did happen was very interesting and really conspiratorial, kind of figuratively

and literally. And again, we're going to come back to the CIA and its incompetence. And I know people think I overstate this, but I can say, of this, William Crow, he was another general who was kind of, he would have been considered something like a minister without portfolio and he served a European government, but he was close to Bush 41 and Baker and Spokrod and that whole coterie. He said the CIA, literally in mid-1989, he said they were still, they were still showing dispatches that spoke about the USSR as if it was 20 years earlier. They were claiming that Gorbachev was simply abiding the

Brezhneb Doctrine, but, you know, he was reluctant to deploy force because he was trying to lull the West into a false sense of security. And so they were, in, in, in, in, in, in pro's words, he said it says that the CIA didn't never see the news. He said it was as if, like, they'd take just kind of official dispatches from East Berlin or Moscow, kind of knock a percentage off the credibility, but then release that is basically, you know, fact. You know, oh, the East Berlin says that, you know, that the, that the regime is stronger

than ever. That must be true. or, you know, the, like, Gorwood Trump's the general secretary, and he says there's going to be no, you know, they're not going to drop the plan economy and the Soviet Union will remain. So that's, that's just a fact.

I mean, I'm not, I'm not using hyperbole. This was literally what they were saying. And I mean, that anybody, again, thinks the CIA is like the seat of shadow government or the intelligence community has got to consider that. Defense intelligence really, I mean, not, forgive the tangent,

But defense intelligence, the DIA, they really kind of became the guts of U.S. intelligence in a basic way, okay? Them, the NSA, and, you know, a lot of quasi-private entities that, you know, are contracted and things like that. But the, as everybody knows, the great foil to Gorbachev is Yeltsin. But Yeltsin's a sentence. Yeltsin was not. this kind of great democratizer. I mean, he he's viewed that way because

you know, he was kind of the king of the referendum. But you know, it's not people have this idea, I think, because it's Byzantine, literally, but also, like, memories are short. I'm including mine own. I'm not saying I'm like above

this or something. People seem to remember this as, you know, there was a you know, the Soviet Union finally held elections. Yeltsin beat Gorbachev, and then there was some kind of referendum to dismantle the Soviet Union. Like, that's not what happened. When Yeltsin seized the power, it's when Gorbachev was kidnapped by the coup plotters. Yeltsin proceeded to race to the Russian White House,

declare himself for all practical purposes present to the Russian Federation. Upon ascending to that role, and I mean, there was a referendum insinuating it. him into that role, he declared the Soviet Union to be abolished. So the offices Gorbachev held, as a general secretary of the Communist Party, ceased to hold any meaning because the entity that Gorbachev held that office in was abolished by Dictat, which is very strange. Now, who are Yeltsin's backers? It was a combination of kind of radical reformers, you know, these kind of wild west capitalist types

who kind of saw the looming anarchy as an opportunity for great profit potential. But it was also a lot of Stalin as hardliners who hated Gorbachev. Now, why did they back Yeltsum? I mean, the kind of conventional wisdom as well, they just wanted power in the new regime. I don't know if it's that simple, man. I think some of them thought that Yeltsin would rip Gorbachev. Yeah, they'd have to settle for a rough state of just, you know, Russia, basically. But I think they thought that Yeltsin was just going to return things to the status quo after that.

But then he didn't, and why didn't he do that? I think he was basically bought off by, you know, Team B, neocon faction, like, figuratively and literally bought off. I can't prove that with receipts, but I, I've thought about this a lot. I've studied a lot, and I've read a lot of direct testimony in the epoch. I think that's what happened. Now, also, you know, Putin became Yeltsin's successor.

Putin had a variety of roles, like some more prestigious than others, and at certain junctuary, he was sidelined. I mean, never in some disgraceful way, but the fact that Putin himself, and Putin is not some hardliner, but he is a product of the old system, okay? If Yeltsin really was this kind of arch liberal,

I'm using it in these terms and the terms the regime employs them, I don't mean that he that's what he actually is, but if Yeltsin's kind of this arch capitalist or former neoliberal ideologue, like he would not have had men like Putin in his orbit. He just would not have. He would not have taken

out a shot or something, but these guys would have been pensioned off. and sent far away from Moscow, figuratively and literally. But, again, I'm not, I don't speak Russian or read it, and I'm not some kind of expert on the Russian people, their culture, or the Soviet Union. But I am convinced that that's what happened. There's also something,

that people got to consider. The other kind of factor, or a constellation of factors that roped Bush's vision, and I don't want to go off track, because this is its own topic that's very very dense. But, you know, the casting of Slobodan Milosevic

as this mass murdering nationalist, extremist, he was the State Department's guy, and he was the guy who was viewed as the moderate they could work with by Washington. And Boyce very much wanted to keep you with Slavia together. what happened was helmet cole who i think was about as nationalists as any as any uh chance of

the buddhist republic could be or can be when uh tuchman's croatian declared independence cole recognized them immediately and then the die was cast there was going to be war in the balkans and that was key to forming contemporary identities that's why in uh in a very proximate way, not it's indirectly. The Slavic Orthodox identity became paramount again. That's why Bosniaks became very Muslim again.

There's a whole lot of a national soldier that's inclined German guys who, like Ingo Hasselbach, he was not an attractive guy, but he was a skinhead and he was very involved in the right wing in the DDR.

He and his people recruited a bunch of Germans to go for Croatia. And this was really real. This is not some some Ukraine kind of situation of guys, you know, kind of pretending to be things they're not and strange kind of propaganda doesn't really make sense. Like this really was a kind of a kind of return to Europe's identitarian status quo. Now, in the wake of this, you know,

obviously the view that run out was not that won out was not the Bush 41 view and you know the what was also in my opinion kind of the Nixon view although Pied Bush parted ways on key issues what won out was the neocon view literally and what you're seeing in Ukraine is the culmination of this kind of 30 year effort of the detonation strategy of radicalizing the nationalities like that's what it is it also has to do with preventing Europe from you know becoming at all autonomous because

a Russian German concord is really what is the path that's super powered them okay but I mean there are many many guys in Washington who don't care about Ukraine or Russia and that's their notion however the

faction we're talking about they very very much have an ancestral hatred of Russia and they very very much abide this idea that you know, the structure's rotten. It should be destroyed. If we can utilize Ukraine as a kind of torpedo, so be it. You know, if we can, any way we can facilitate

a real detonation on the frontier, we want to do it. It's really that simple. But that's, I know it seems like I jumped around a lot, but these are the key developments to understanding what happened. And like I said, next time, we'll start out with the Berlin airlift. I think that's a good starting point because I consider that to be the start of the Cold War, okay? And from there, we'll go in like linear terms. But I thought that this was important.

I hope I didn't bore anybody or put anybody off by doing it that way. But that's, I think, we'll stop for now. Well, let me ask you a question. and you'll keep going a little bit. What would have happened if Dukakis would have got elected in 1988? That's a pretty interesting question. And it's interesting you raised that because the other day on Twitter, I was talking to some of the fellows about the fact that there was an actual policy divide,

like a real cleft, you know, between national security hawks and people who thought the time could be preserved. Dukagos was definitely from that latter tenancy And that was held against him You know, there's that famous people People think Dukagas is kind of harrow-beam scream Moment is when he was riding in that tank

Like looking like an idiot With like a helmet on like the wrong way You're trying to look like Snoopy He looked like Snoopy Yeah But I actually think Stevie is kind of a badass though Like Snoopy fights the Red Baron Like uh

Yeah Yeah Cogas took like a fucking jig off But yeah But he looked And even if Dukagos had been more of kind of like a manly, like, photogenic guy, it was so contrived. It's him trying to look like, yeah, I'm tough on defense. Look at me in this tank.

You know, yeah, yeah, you know, to hell with Ivan. But it's, but a Dukagas cabinet, I mean, I think Dukagas was a, I think Dukagas was a tackling dummy. He was a 401 conclusion that people wanted another Reagan term, and they weren't going to get that, obviously, and Bush was the closest thing. And even though Bush was very, very at odds with Reagan, people associated them. I mean, just, I mean, you know how voters are, especially in those days? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I was one of them. Any, any, even a guy like Mondale, kind of an old, kind of an old line, more run-of-the-mill Democrat in Chicago, it was kind of a weird nominee, you know, because he was like, I'm not being pressed, but he was like this ethnic politician, frankly.

Yeah. Even a more traditional kind of Democrat, he would have had real problems. especially if you had a hospital Congress, but it's also the, I do believe, and Bush made this point, too. I mean, despite everything I just said about Bush's, Bush very, very, very much believed in negotiating the end of the Soviet, negotiating with the Soviet Union that ended from a position of very,

very profound strength. Okay. And I think that was essential. I think, I think an overly conciliatory executive who'd approach the Soviet, who'd approached kind of the failing Soviet Union as, hey, we want to reestablish detente. That could have been a game changer, maybe. One thing the TMB coterie was right about,

if they were right about anything, uh, I think Wolfowitz himself, I think, is the source of this, and I agree with it, and I have a really nice to say about Wolfowitz at all. He said that Soviet Union, by 1974, 75, outside of the third world, Nobody had any respect for Marxist of Leninism. People in the Soviet Union, their quality of life was better than the third world,

but not by a hell of a lot. Nobody believed that, you know, the Soviet Union was leaving the world in the sciences or something. All the Soviet Union had was arguably the world's mightiest military, arguably the mightiest army that ever existed. If the only thing, the only thing making you a superpower is your military and the fact you've got 8,000 nuclear weapons, that changes things. That means power projection

becomes overvalued. It means the entire discourse within the state apparatus kind of orbits around hard power. And that's very... That's what's happened that's North Korea today.

Yeah. It's superpower scale. I mean, that's... And I... The... So this idea that the Soviet Union was bent on world domination in a very...

in a very concrete and brutal way. I believe that. The United States has been on world domination too, but the United States had a way of subverting other societies other than, you know, we're going to level you and decimate you and genocide you. I mean, America would do that too if they had to do, but that wasn't just like the option of first recourse.

And I have no doubt, and Gorbachev and his memoirs made this point, about every decade, okay, 953, 962, 973, and 883, the world came closer,

very, very close to nuclear war. And each time, arguably, it was, like, even closer. Like, the Cold War

had definitely continued, I mean, let's say, continued to, like, the late 90s, just even.

And so, like, by 1995, 96, you know, nuclear weapons are basically all now

in space, you know, and it's okay, like, now's like a three-minute warning time, you know, basically,

like, the Soviets, like, it's like, okay, we've got to destroy them. I mean, like, what would happen then in a crisis, you know, or, like, eventually it would have happened. That would be the world would have been, but there would have been probably 40 million people dead or like 100 million people dead.

And that would have changed everything, man. That would have changed the life on Earth forever. Like, not in, like, horror movie terms, like the Terminator, but if, like, 100 million people died in nuclear war, like, the world would never be the same. You know, and it's, in ways we can't even imagine. You know, I mean, think about that. So, I mean, one of the things One of the reasons of the Soviet Union, even guys who I think believe, I know this,

even guys who believe in the system, they knew they had to find a way out of the Cold War, like they knew it. Because, again, this technology could not be controlled. And people think it's, and I can say people are dumb or something. They just don't have a comparative basis. People think that something like the Soviet Union of 1985,

It's not like, you know, the office you work at, even of a big company of like 50,000 people. Like, it's not something like any one man or a hundred man or a thousand men can just control. You know, it's like once the apparatus gets in motion towards kind of a nuclear war vector, that's just what's going to happen. You know, and I mean, that was what was happening, you know, and this was not some paranoid fantasy or something. You know, I mean, so that's one of the reasons I guess I'm kind of, I've, I've got kind of a, like our guys in the right say, I've got like a soft view of Bush 41.

I mean, maybe I do. I don't know, but, I mean, whatever, right? I don't care what people think about my takes on chief executives of history. But, like, what I described didn't happen, okay? And some of that we owe to people like Bush, okay? Yeah, the Cold War shouldn't have happened in the first place. You know, World War did not have happened, but it did happen. So that's where we were at.

You've got to judge things in the rap box. So that's, I realize that's an incomplete answer, but that's the best I can do. That's a great question. Thank you. Yeah, it's, he, I just remember them selling, oh, he's from Massachusetts, and they tried to connect them to be like the next Kennedy

or something like that. It was just, it was really terrible. I mean, Bush, you know, God love Bush, but other than, and Bush was actually a great commander-in-chief. And the way he managed the Gulf War with, like, like, like a Prussian officer of the highest caliber would, okay? But other than that, I mean, Bush was not a man

of the people. I mean, that's why he got smoked in the three-way race with Clinton and Perot. But, I mean, the fact that Bush was able to sweep the country against Dukakis, it's like, look, man, it's like if you're getting smoked by Bush, you know, it's like you've got, you're not a viable candidate. So yeah, Dukagos

was a weird, like, a guy like Scott Greer, he'd be a good guy to take that up with. Like, he, I mean, he knows like electoral politics, like the back of his hand. I really don't. I mean, I know the outcome, but I don't have, like, deep takes on that stuff generally. But Dukagos was a weird, he was a weird nominee, man. He definitely was.

He definitely was. I think this is going to be a great first episode. Give your plugs, and we'll end it. Yeah. Thank you, Pete. The main place people should hit me up is on my substack. It's real, real Thomas 777 at substack.com. dot substack.com, I'm sorry.

You can find me on Tgram, telegram at t.m.m.m. slash the number seven, H-M-A-S-777. I bet I got Twitter once again, because Elon seems to not be laying the hammer down on people. You know, for the record, man,

like, I've never actually violated Twitter in terms of service. Like, I'm not just saying, like, I never have. You know, but I've been banned, like, half a dozen times. But you can find me there at Triskelian Jihad The first T is the number seven But I'll post

It's posted up in my substack and stuff So just go there And I mean, for all I know in like two days I won't be there anymore So it's And I am launching the damn YouTube channel Please don't think I'm being a total flake I just had a lot on my plate

In terms of content and like other stuff But I, it is moving forward I got an announcement I think people will be happy about I'm debating the JFK assassination in a few days with a guy that I got a lot of respect for, and he's actually a college professor of the right kind. He's like a right-wing history, but he does agree with me profoundly. So I think people will dig that. I'm going to do it on a live stream.

So I'll hit people to that, and that's what I got. And thank you very much, Pete. I really appreciate you hosting me. I really appreciate people watching and commenting and stuff. I really mean that I'm not just being polite. Well, I can't wait until we go back to the beginning, because that's where the intrigue of that is mind-boggling. Yeah, yeah.

No, I'm very excited, man. I'm very, very stoked that you had this notion for us to do this series. So thank you very much again. All right. Thank you. Take care of Thomas. Welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez show. Got Thomas 777 here.

And we're going to get into some stuff not only about the Cold War. Maybe we'll talk some current events. How you doing, Thomas? Very well. Thanks for hosting me again. Yeah, I was thinking, I mean, your point before we went wide, you were talking about the election results. And I agree with you. I think that warrants mentioned not just because that kind of thing is important, but what's

happening in Russia and in Central Europe at present, I believe the current conflict cycle is resolving. somewhat peaceably, if not ideally, from, you know, my own perspective. But, I mean, it's going to remain relevant for the foreseeable future, and this is approximately caused by the Cold War. And if we're talking about anything of a foreign policy nature or anything relating to the strategic situation as it stands in 2022, where we're talking about phenomena and events and even personages,

like the primary players, are people who can only be understood. stood in the context of the Cold War. And also, some of the fellas on T-Gram are asking some questions about the topic, and we can get into some of those, too. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that they were asking, some of which is kind of like ahead of where we're at on the timeline, some of which relates more to the revision of stuff we were dealing with the Second World War. But at long last, moving forward, we'll cover all of those.

But I, just briefly, I'm not some poll watcher, like our friend Scott, Rear DJ Scotty G internet serial thriller and Beltway killer But uh I'm not making fun of him He's a good dude And he's been nice enough to host me on his show a few times

And I don't know why anybody would do that If they're a reputable person Because I'm like That seems like Thanks a lot of grief Thanks a lot, Thomas I really appreciate that No no no

What I'm saying is like it seems like it would cause you a lot of grief And like not a lot of benefit I mean you're a guy who's You're not like a fringe guy but you're a guy who's not afraid to like deal with like radical things not radical things like oh that's awesome and radical but like you know people have like radical tendencies i don't think i have those tendencies but i i deal with stuff that is a magnet for censorious uh type of uh enforcers that's all i meant but he's got you know he's got a real uh he guys like him and like and like our guy

paul fahrenheit i always tap them for kind of their thoughts on on um you know on on on on during a the season because they're really like clued into that and i am not however uh national elections uh i tend to i tend to pick presidential contests pretty well in primary season but regardless i didn't think there's any big surprises man and i know this morning i got on twitter like that that uh that uh that sling blade guy in pennsylvania uh like boba fetter person or whatever the fuck his name is. Or Federer woman, a federal person. I don't know. He, uh, I mean,

they're that and like the, he goes, you know, the diabolical Dr. Oz going down in flames, made a lot of people upset. But the Republicans, they, they won huge in Florida, like statewide. And, uh, JD Vance captured Ohio. I mean, granted, I'm out of the loop, but I like, look at those things as like a win, man. I mean, I, like,

unless I'm missing something like that's, that's a win. And they obviously got 20, they got the white house 24, unless they join the kind of witch hunt against their guy, Mr. Trump. DeSantis turned 10 districts in Miami that are normally blue-red. Yeah, that's insane. I mean, the state of Florida is now like a safe red state, and that's crazy. I mean, not like objectively, but I mean, considering the last 20 years the way things have gone, I mean, I don't see how there's not a win.

I mean, were they expecting like some nationwide sweep? I don't, I mean, I don't know. They seem, I think they should be happy, but all I saw, I mean, granted, like, social media is its own thing, and sometimes they forget how weird it is. And as I present because I haven't been on it

for a minute, but, like, this morning, like, I got all these, like, Twitter alerts of these, like, Republicans type guys who were, not Scott Greer, he's a very, he's a very, not only is he a sensible guy, but he doesn't go in for that kind of stuff. He had a rebalance view. But a whole bunch of these kind of internet,

you know, GOP, cheerleaders, they were acting like, they were acting like, there was some crushing defeat or something. So, like, I started, like, looking at the returns, I'm like, what the fuck are they upset about me? I'm like, I, by contemporary metrics, that seems like a win. But again, what do I know? I'm a guy who writes about stuff from long ago and speculates about the future. Maybe I don't really, maybe I'm not really plugged into the present date.

But, I don't know, man. And, yeah, the San, this is a phenom. I'm not pretty impressed with Descent. I mean, as a political operator, like, he's dope. He's very good at what he does. And, yeah, it's very impressive the way he's been able to flip, you know, some key jurisdictions at the local level. But, yeah, I don't know what they're, I don't know why they're crying in their fucking cornflakes. But, again, I'm not, I'm not some poll watcher or some freaking beltway expert.

Quite the contrary, you know. What was the move, like, down in Texas when you were there? where people are you fired up about Trump and stuff. Are they just kind of like, whatever? Oh, they just wanted to beat Beto. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they, I mean, there are a lot of people. You know, you go around Austin and you see some Beto signs.

Once you get outside of Austin, once you're in the cities, you'll see some. When you get out of there, out of the cities, you'll see some every once in a while, but it's mostly, you know, I think most of the people from Texas really don't like Abbott, but they really can't stand Betto. Um, yeah, Texas is a weird, Texas is kind of a, I'm not saying bad things about Texas. I like Texas and I like Texas people, but their political culture is kind of strange. You know, like there's a, like Rick Perry, frankly, frankly, frankly, frankly, frankly, he's a weird guy. I mean, I know he's not, I know he doesn't have the cashier that he did, you know, uh, some years back. I mean, like nationally, I never, I never bought the height that he was going to be impactful on the national stage. But he was a weird guy even for like, even as, you know, even as a state whole. Like I, I mean, frankly, he w's a sentence he was kind of weird i mean i don't think i don't i don't think it's weird that i mean w frankly had his shit together a lot more when he was when he was younger but i thought it was weird that i mean to texas really liked him you don't forget that w was actually he had a he had a very strong rapport with his constituency in texas and then in his first term as president like this idea that you know everybody always hated w and he was just a failed politician that's

not true at all i mean nobody has to i don't like the guy and i nobody nobody should but he's you know he he he did not you can't simply buy your way to uh to competitiveness no even especially if anything that might work against you when I say like Texas okay guy like Bush so I mean I yeah it's

but I thought it was weird that of all I thought it was weird he struck me as like the kind of 20th century version of a Rockefeller Republican and I'm like why why is Texas like this guy's home base but I mean what do I know and he was big on gun rights and he was big pro death penalty and I mean

back in them days like those were issues that were kind of still up for grabs. So I don't know. Back in 2006, somebody had put a video together. It was a split screen video. And it was, it was W in the gubernatorial debate in like 92. And then it was W in the presidential debate in 2004. And it was like 90s, right?

Like I didn't see it. Yeah. Oh, in 92, he's just, I mean, no notes, no, I mean, there was no teleprompter. he had everything in his head and he was right and then in 2004 it was uh you know he seemed like um the guy i think bush had some i i think two things i think first of all i'm the last guy i can like put shade on anybody with substance abuse problems so not like saying like oh bush you know that drove you or that drunk but i think he probably relapsed frankly um i mean he was acting like somebody who did okay um because yeah i mean the guy it's not like he

And I think also, like, you had some health problems that were not let on do because, yeah, it wasn't just, I mean, so I remember some of his apologists just being like, oh, you know, it's just like nerves. He's not used to the office. It's like, and Texas is a huge state, man. And like he's not, it was not some freshman congressman. He was a fucking governor. You know, he can't tell him he's like scared of the camera or something. It's, you know, he was not, he was compromised in some way, you know, whether it was health related, going to illness or substance abuse or whatever. And again, like I said, I'm not like putting shade on it. I'm the last person to do this. but yeah it was like two different people it was really weird um i'll see you got that footage you're talking about we can we can dive into the cold war that's something i know a hell a lot more i know what hell of a lot more about than i do uh the goings-on in the swamp i kind of wanted to get into you know there's this big debate like to this day and frankly there's actually some decent scholarship coming out about the cold war not as much revisionist stuff as i would like and that's kind of one of the things i believe i'm like here on earth to do. I mean, I'm not, I'm not being melodramatic. I can really believe that because, like,

there's not, there's a million guys who are World War II revisionists, and that's dope. That's important. Okay, but frankly, there's, there's almost nobody dealing with the Cold War in a critical capacity. So, I think we're doing important stuff here in that regard. And we always are, but in any event, there's a scholarly debate going on as, like, when the Cold War ensued. I mean, you can't, It's tricky because, obviously, when you're talking about a discrete armed conflict, even when it's complicated as the Second World War, you know, you can kind of identify points at which the status of relations fundamentally changed.

You know, in September 3rd, any 39, you know, the Western Allies declared war on the German right. Okay, that's our starting point. Like, yeah, there's hostilities emergent and active before then, but there's not any such point in the Cold War. And the kind of tonal shift, not just in optics and narrative, but in policy from between the Truman administration, the Roosevelt administration, was dramatic. I know people on our side don't like Truman. I mean, I've got, I, Truman was not an evil man. He was not a, he was not a gangster like Roosevelt. He didn't have the hubris of Roosevelt.

Well, I've got mixed feelings about Truman. I don't think Truman should have been president, okay, but if we're talking about his moral character and if we're talking about what constituted his policy orientation with the Soviet Union, he was in a very, very difficult position. And most of the variables that were framing the decisions he had to make had nothing to do with his own sympathies. You know, he quite literally inherited this bizarre situation, whereby Germany was occupied by the four powers, the United States, the UK,

and then France got a seat at the table. I mean, there's a total other issue in the Soviet Union. There was no, not really was there no permanent status of, of, you know, there was no permanent peace treaty in the running. Nobody was even talking about it. And it wasn't even clear, like, what that would constitute. And really, the only thing that had set the tenor of relations at Yalta,

Or at Tehran. Everybody thinks Yalta is kind of where, like, everything, you know, everything kind of was set in proverbial stone. It was not. It was Tehran in 43. That's when Roosevelt ceded Berlin to Stalin, which seems crazy, unless you understand the New Dealer ideology, which we delved into in earnest in our whole World War II series. But beyond that, what's fascinating to me is even men who you would think would have known better. like Eisenhower. Okay, Eisenhower, whatever else can be said about him,

the guy was something of a savant in terms of logistical and engineering military matters. And he was a protege of Pershing, blackjack Pershing, who was an understated figure in gunnery histories. As it may, Eisenhower said, Eisenhower said to one of his adjutants, and this was related by Omar Bradley,

you know, when there was discussion as to, you know, the issue of allowing the Soviets to take Berlin. Eisenhower said something effective, well, my God, like, who would want it? You know, they're going to lose, you know, 100,000 men taking it. And Bradley said he was stupefied by that. He's like, well, what do you mean? You know, like, how, you know, how can you say that? You know, and Eisenhower's retort with something like, well, as a military objective,

it's meaningless. You know, what significance does it hold? You know, and Bradley said, well, you know, in a few, years, that's going to be quite clear. You know, and Molotov, you know, the Soviet foreign minister, old Bolshevik, that he was, like a lot of those guys, he actually had a pretty strong sense of geopolitics, and he said, you know, what happens in Berlin decides the fate of Germany. What happens in Germany decides the fate of Europe.

So if you look at a map of, I mean, I can't pull it up now, but those who are inclined to do so, if you look at if you look at a map of divided Berlin it's strange because the Soviet sector kind of bulges East Berlin

extended to Mite which was kind of the historical core of the Berlin city center that was like the municipal like hub traditionally of Berlin you know that's where city hall was you know that's what parliament was that's all these other traditional structures

and administration and the machinery of government were. So it was obvious why Stalin was making these demands, okay? I mean, it wasn't, and it wasn't just for prestige or something. Roosevelt had no problem with that. But Roosevelt also, the only

kind of signaling he'd given to Stalin was at Tehran, and then before he died, apparently, according to people at Cordell Hall. Um, he said, Roosevelt stated to Stalin as well as to, you know, um, his, uh, cabinet in the Department of State and, uh, in Department of War that, oh, well, you know, American forces, I can't see them staying in Europe beyond two years. Why would they? You know, which, I don't think you can talk about to naivete because Roosevelt was, uh, Roosevelt was not naive, whatever else we can say about him. And, you know, like we discussed. Just in the, you know, earlier, we discussed a couple of times, even before we began a dedicated series on the Cold War. You know, the New Dealer Vision was, you know, a permanent concord between the United States and the Soviet Union with the United Nations. That's kind of a world legislature, you know, the Security Council being, I mean, ultimately, this is what developed, but this is what they had in mind, you know, early on.

So the Security Council, it's equivalent being, you know, kind of like the Upper House, the General Assembly, leaving the lower house you know in america having a monopoly on atomic weapons you know therefore you know being able to reign in the soviets when there were when there was policy disputes how to govern the world but even that aside um the uh you there's no possible outcome where uh where we're neutral germany or demilitarized germany is tolerated okay um you know the uh truman took truman took trubert took the ovoise office with a hospital congress um the uh even though even the republicans gutted as they were because the america first movement had been cast into disrepute and some of these people had actually

been prosecuted and hounded and terrorized sounds kind of familiar doesn't it but robert taft still remained like a strong voice on capital hill as kind of the you know the opposition and even people who are interventionists you know even like hawkish republicans who uh who uh who are not isolationist you know, they were demanding, essentially, that, you know, Germany not be allowed to just fall into the Soviet sphere of influence outright. So looking ahead, unless Roosevelt's plan quite literally was to simply just seed Europe to the communists, you can't really come to any other conclusion, okay? And it's not me just being like the fanatory, making some ideological point.

Like, what are the conclusion can you come to? you know and one of the uh despite what despite that kind of public face like pretty much everything and well i'm going to get into the berlin airlift in a minute and and what that signifies but pretty much all the negotiations with stalin um from uh from 1945 onward were uh we're basically bad faith about we're talking about the stands of germany because again i mean nobody was going to no nobody in america regardless of their political strike was going to allow a neutral Germany, okay, because that meant that there was absolutely no point in fighting the Second World War. And the Second World War should not have been fought,

but within the strategic logic of the war planners in America, at all cause, Germany must be prevented from capturing the East. Whether that's by a Concord, a peaceable Concord, relatively between Germany and the Soviet Union, whether it's by conquest, you know, with Hitler at the helm. I mean, today, as we see, I mean, what, this is what underlies the Ukraine, war is it not um the fact that uh the fact that the fact that the interdependence facilitated by by frail merkle and mr putton was not something that america was going to tolerate because that's the only way that europe casts off the shackles of america and the uk and becomes a superpower okay so even no matter where anybody fell in the political

spectrum you know they were not just going to allow it demilitarized germany but wherein you know just by accident geography and proximity, they were going to be incorporated into the Soviet sphere of influence in some basic way. So there's that. I mean, there's more there than we have time to cover right now. But I think that it's not a mystery, but it is enigmatic as to what exactly Roosevelt's intentions were.

And especially one considers, too, that, I mean, Roosevelt had known certain terms knew that he was not going to live really long, okay? um so i what how exactly saw the world developing after he was gone is uh is is an open-ended question and again i mean roosevelt was a lot of things but he was not joe bighton he was not senile okay and he um it was really it wasn't until the final months of his life he was really compromised and he wasn't really you know running running the country or the war in an executive capacity anyway but it uh but back to back to uh back to uh back to uh back to uh back to uh the topic at hand.

What, to give an idea of how kind of slapdash, for lack of a better word, the L.A. administration of divided Germany was, there was a, what was implemented was called the commanditura. And it was representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, the UK, and France meeting in this kind of mini, executive council. council um and uh they were supposed to come to they were supposed to come to terms on how berlin was to be administered you know and berlin being you know to mullado's point you know berlin being quite literally you know the kind of heart and lungs of germany and germany being

you know the the axial pivot of europe the idea was well once the sense of belin is resolved you know the uh the status of germany proper will be resolved and then you know that this this will this be a, you know, a done deal. Which seems incredible anybody could entertain that possibility is anything realistic. And it's time, it's probably past to being clear that not only did the Soviets have absolutely no intention of allowing a Western military presence in Berlin, but the Soviet delegates, the Soviet delegate, neither him nor any of his adjutant. not have spoke English.

The American delegation, nobody spoke Russian. You know, a couple people were, like, trying to communicate, like, pigeon French, kind of, like, across the aisle. Like, this whole thing, this whole thing was a ridiculous charade. You know, like, the most petty issues would be debated for weeks, sometimes months. The Russians were demanding, they issued something, and the, sorry, and the Wilsonian language is not unintentional. they produce a document called the 14 points which uh which basically demanded that in the eastern

sector of berlin there could be like no no quote profiteering at the expensive workers and things like this you know like it was uh it was basically like a radical socialist manifesto saying that you know the the the only the only um the only legitimate uh capital producer in in this arbitrarily designated eastern sector in germany you know was moscow and nobody else um The, and finally, this carried on for a good, close to two years. And finally, a clerical staff, some kind of skeleton crew remained at these meetings representing the Soviet Union. But by August 1st, 1948, some representatives, unceremoniously removed the Soviet flag, took all their files, clean out their offices, and the Soviets just never returned.

You know, they were, they, they, uh, they, they, they essentially, like, it was basically like a soft boycott, um, that killed the enterprise because it had, it had, it had no, it had no, none of the second reason to force of law without all four, uh, representative of all for occupation, states present. Um, what's more significant to show you kind of the, the dysfunctional state of East Germany, I've noticed that a lot of people, I mean, people obviously, I'm talking about court historians, okay? They're obsessed with the perthinages of the Third Reich, generally because they want to cast on those punitive-like possible,

but even more sensible, even more sensible people. You know, they fixate very much on the individuals who constituted sort of the control group of the party and of the state. You don't find that at all at all with East Germany, okay? Now, I'm not in any sort of the imagination, suggesting that these men were nearly as dynamic as those who constituted the NSDAP. or that the DDR was, you know, some kind of, you know, independent power into itself

that wielded any great authority or power projection capability. However, it was, in fact, part of the German state, okay? Even if that is now people didn't recognize its legitimacy as a sovereign regime, it uh you know 20 million germans lived there uh berlin was within its borders uh and it was uh it was quite literally at the front lines of uh of um of the geotrategic divide um for 40 years now who who came to run the dDR well the soviets tapped uh walter uberts Walter Ubrich was even an exiled member of the KPD. You know, he'd been even an active revolutionary in the Weimar years, you know, into the years of the Third Reich.

And like a lot of communists, you know, he realized that he was going to be prosecuted and imprisoned, if not shot, and he fled to the Soviet Union. Ubrich was deployed to Berlin Before the cessation of hostilities He arrived in April 30th What was called the Ubrick group There were various, various functionaries Prisoners, anti-fascist prisoners of war You know, various guys like Ubrick himself

Who'd fought for the Reds in Spain And then And then found amnesty In the Soviet Union After the ascendancy of the NSAP But these guys guys, and all, and there was, uh, what was called the Ackerman group who was deployed to Saxon, the E, the Sabatka group to, to, uh, to Mecklenburg, you know, all named after their, their cadre

leader, you know, and Anton Ackerman of the so named Ackerman group. Uh, he was part of the, he was a functionary of the communist youth movement in Germany, um, in the 20s, you know, then he joined the KPD, uh, he was sentenced to death and absentia, you know, after 1933. Like, these guys were basically the whole post-war coterie of of Germany. They were the old like, KPD control group. So that meant that you know, not only, they've been

gone for 10, sometimes 20 years. They hadn't been home. You know, so they were, it's not like they had cadres and being on the ground. I mean, even among the colonies which stayed behind, you know, people were like, who the hell are these guys? You know, they had no, they had no

real mandate from people, okay? I mean, arguably, you know, when you're under occupation by the Soviet Union, it can't be said that any kind of genuine expression of popular will is possible. But this was especially contrived. And famously, when Ubrick arrived, you know, everybody knew who he was, you know, because he was, you know, he arrived in, you know, in what had been East Prussia initially. You have been, you know, like liberated by the Soviets. And there were Germans who were some of communist, sympathetic, who said, oh, you have no idea, like, what they're doing to us, meaning the Red Army, you know, this, this rape and this, and this pillage and this destruction, you know, and Ubrich said, you know, that's fascist propaganda. I don't believe that. You know, if you order that again, I'll have you shot. You know, and people were like, who the hell is this guy? I mean, like, they, they, so even, what I'm getting it is that even, even when you consider that people were not enthusiastic about, you know, the KPD or its legacy party coming to, coming to dominate the state apparatus.

Ubrick did a unique, like, lack of credibility. You know, they might as well have just deployed, you know, some, some Russian apparatchik from, from Moscow or from Vladivostok, you know, like, what was even the point? But I believe, in my opinion, it was basically for the benefit of the outside world. Like they were saying, like, hey, look, you know, we're not, we're not afraid of Germans having, you know, sovereignty over their own affairs. Like, you know, Mr. Ubrick is, you know, he's a German national, you know, so's Ackermans, or I believe that's what it was all about. And, I mean, the story's never going to trust in a genuine, I mean, even a genuine, like, radical socialist movement that was truly indigenous to Germany.

Like, the war had changed all that. But I, when people are often, they often say, like, you know, how could the, how could the Soviets think that the people would respond to the SED? You know, it's like, well, I don't, I don't think that was the point. I think the point was. you know, the, it was, it was a kind of, it was a kind of alibi when, um, the objection was raised that, you know, this, this was, uh, nothing but a hostile occupation and all but name. But in any event, um, and then when I see the SED, the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the Soviet occupation sector, there was a, uh, the KPD, uh, declared, uh, it merged with the social Democrats, and it became the party of socialist unity. Okay, the ruling party of the DDR was not the KPD, it was the SED. Okay, just for reference sake. But as this was developing,

there was a, in the West, there was not a clear kind of policy trajectory. Now, enter George Kennan. Kenan was the, he was the de facto ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was actually the charge of the affairs, okay, but, I mean, for all practical purposes, he was the ambassador. You know, what Kenan's, what Kenan's knows known for is the long memo, okay? It was so, so named because it was the longest State Department dispatch ever sent by telegram.

It was over 5,000 words. The long telegram, not the long memo. I find this to be the most mischaracterized document or statement of the Cold War save maybe for crucipes, quote, secret speech. Okay, the term containment was, yes, it was coined by this telegram, but Kenan was not calling for some kind of hawkish military resistance to the Soviet Union.

Like Kenan was profoundly anti-communist. He was horrified by the Soviet Union, but he was not a military man, and he was. He was not proposing any kind of military doctrine. What he, when the long telegrams expanded to an essay length, it appeared in foreign affairs, which at one time was a great periodical. I've not looked at it in years. I assume it's kind of woke and silly like everything else.

Or it's full of crazy people and want to attack everybody on this planet for no reason. But at one time, it was not just had a lot of prestige behind it, but it had real cachet because it was very serious. but the actual title of the long telegram expanded to proper paper form was sources of Soviet conduct. That's exactly what it was about. Canada was a rare kind of Occidental Man, and I'm not trying to be offensive or say bad things about Russian people. But they're very different, okay? They're very different than the West.

Even the best of times, even when they had a more normal government, it was difficult to decipher their intentions. There was not just linguistic barriers, there's cultural barriers that relate to symbolic psychology and historical experience and all kinds of other things. But Kennan's enterprise was, I've got to try to make the Department of State and the Department of War. And more importantly, Mr. Truman, understand the world through the Soviet's eyes. Now, Kenyon said that there's not going to, there's never, there's no one, you're not going to be able to come to, come to terms of the Soviet Union, okay, he said, you so get that out of your head right away. In policy terms, he said the Soviets are never going to give you what, what, what you want. They're not going to, you know, they're not going to abide Roosevelt's vision of, you know, willing the world with Uncle Sam as a junior partner. Um, they're, they're not going to accept the United States as a benign influence in Europe. You know, they're not, they're not going to view, uh, any of America. has moved outside of its immediate sphere of influence is legitimate um and that owes to a few things it owes the it owes the it owes the russian traditional russian fixation on security and in very basic terms the russians need defense in depth and russia is a state that is

in a nation that is constantly attacked by its enemies um so there's that now you add to that the overlay of Marxist Leninist ideology which at that time was still very much interstitially bound up with kind of the Russian political mind they view the United States

is not much different than the Third Reich and they view the Third Reich is the distilled essence of evil and they view the United States and the UK as capitalist states and crisis who at all costs are going to pursue an adversarial posture with the Soviet Union

because the only way capitalist states can keep from cannibalizing one another is to find an enemy from without. Okay, now this is boilerplate Leninism, but the Soviets actually believe that. And Kenan made the point that, you know, unlike in the United States, unlike in the UK,

you know, where a political discourse is kind of this, it's almost kind of like play acting. The Soviet leaders, like, when they say things, they actually mean exactly what they say, even if it sounds crazy. The Soviet Union is not a little transparent, but the official statements coming from the Kremlin are actually exactly what the Soviets mean.

And you can extrapolate that to today, when the Russian government issues a formal statement, that's actually exactly what they mean. Now, don't get me wrong, the Kremlin then is now literally Byzantine. Russian political culture is totally opaque. It's massively conspiratorial. It's all screwed up. But you don't have, like, weird actors, you know, just kind of saying things in Russian political life like you do in the West. It's totally

different. And obviously, American political culture then was that nearly as degenerate as now, but there was some of that, and this was a very important point. And so Kenan's point was what he meant by containment is this.

He said, the way the world's going to be ordered, the way its entire planet, the fate of this entire planet, quite literally, in political and structural terms, political structural terms and sociological ones, It's going to be decided by who can win over the developing world and the third world. And the Soviet Union, Kenan, pointed out, has a lot of cachet there because the third world is full of people who are already kind of radicalized.

They've not had a good experience with the white Western world. Part of that is them scapegoating. Part of that is, you know, just kind of the tragedy of when traditional societies, especially primitive ones, and again, I'm not saying that punitively. That's just an accurate assessment. You know, collide with modernity, you know, and the, and the double. and sort of technology, you know, and, you know, the quote-unquote what we view as progress, but what they view as, you know, very, very traumatic processes. And beyond that, the, just within, you know, we, we, even in the 1950s, you know,

people in America had come to look at Bolshevism and Marxist Leninism outside of, you know, academic corners and things, like the man in the street viewed it as something that did not really deliver, and he viewed it as basically alien. and those who didn't view it as basically alien due to something that was not, was not, it did not animating them towards, you know, some kind of impassioned defense of the ideology,

okay? But in the third world, that was not the case at all. I mean, really until the 80s, Marxist Leninism had great cachet in the third world. And if you want to understand the Cold War and why it endured for so long, that is why, okay? I mean, long after there was any kind of risk of, you know, France,

you know, people in France, going to the polls and voting in some Stalinist party long after, you know, Gus Hall and his friends had any chance of turning, you know, the teachers union into some kind of communist client, you know, in places like Angola, you know, a place like Nicaragua, in places, you know, like Indonesia, there was still cashed to communism, okay? So, Kenan said, there's got to be a broad spectrum attack on communism, um particularly uh you know in terms of uh in terms of swaging anxieties about uh the developmental

model of the west you know that means not disturbing and upsetting uh indigenous cultures where it's not essential to do so in order to uh in order to create a political culture that you know is is suitable for american goals you know that means that you know not over reliance on on on the military aspect of competition, but, you know, demonstrating a, demonstrating American systemic superiority that we can see a way. You know, scientifically,

culturally, technologically, you know, in the arts, like, all of these things. Unfortunately, people are selective in, especially in policy terms, in what they take from these kinds of broad-based

position statements of of inspired people like Kennan so the way people read the Kenan the long telegram and the Kenan memo was oh we've got to challenge the Soviet Union militarily at all cost basically like in every theater

where they assert themselves and that and thus Kenan and this was the bane of his existence for his whole life and he made that clear decade after decade that he was called the quote father of containment But in any event, regardless of the fact that Kenyon did not appreciate being forced

and got to the Court of Public Opinion to co-sign, you know, what became containment as policy with what was fleshed out in his position paper, you know, Truman had a problem. Because Truman was facing an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union that was quite clearly doing everything it could to lock the West out of Berlin and ultimately locked the West out of Germany at all and as we said he had a hostile Congress already people had become very very soured on the idea of the Soviet Union not just as an ally but as a benign influence in the world

and furthermore you know one of the things we're speaking of Tehran the Tehran Summit not not flushing out what the status of Berlin and the status of Germany would be moving forward, it didn't indicate anything as to how, what would become of the world where, you know, the U.K. just simply, you know,

just simply declared these people and its dominions, they have, like, you know, to have, like, rights of British citizenship now, you know, and, like, these territories in Africa, you know, that were being, that were being seated to indigenous rule and divested from, you know, from the French and from the Belgians.

You know, like what? like what how do we manage these places you know like what moving forward like you know who's going to take the lead here you know is it going to be you know is it going to be under some kind of like u.N jurisdiction is it going to be under you know the jurisdiction of the former colonial authority you know this was not clear and this caused huge problems and it led to uh it led to uh it led to uh and it what i consider to being on the first uh active crisis of the cold war one of the many horrible things uh we can say about Churchill, and there are many,

and I'm not trying to resort the hyperbole. As it became clear post-Eyalta in Churchill's mind that the United States was not going to do anything to preserve the British Empire. Like, why, it goes to show you the man's fundamental lack of understanding on to the character of Roosevelt, but of, you know, the emerging kind of geopolitical culture of the epoch, of the epoch.

Churchill decided that something had to be done to guard the UK's fledging interest in the Mediterranean. So he approached Stalin and Molotov without Roosevelt's knowledge, and he drafted, this is an absurd document, what was called the percentages agreement. Quite literally where he wrote out what percentage of influence the Soviet Union would be allowed and the UK would be allowed in key territories of the Mediterranean, like literally writing, well, the U.S.S.R. can have 10% influence in Greece, and London has to have 90%. Like, how any rational person can think that's the way sphere of influence works. And I mean, what that hell is 90% influence in power political terms? The whole thing is absurd. It's crazy. It's literally crazy. But Greece was the first state post-war.

Really, when the Germans withdrew from Greece in 44, a communist insurgency jumped off. And it was very complicated, like who the players were and everything like that. But it was the UK deployed to prevent the communist takeover. People sympathetic to the communists, they refer to it as the second white terror in Greece. There was a lot of mercenary action there. It was actually a very, it was a bloody conflict, okay? But the point is that, you know, this is also a later led, you know, a decade subsequent to the Suez crisis. And that led Eisenhower to kind of, you know, declaring a status of, of relations for the Middle East, you know, and shutting the French and the UK out of it permanently.

And in those days, too, Eisenhower was the last president. It wasn't a holy bold. And that's another issue. But in any event, you know, there was not, whatever Truman thought about containment, you know, however hawkish or conciliatory he felt about the Soviet Union, if you wanted to, continue as president, he's going to have to take some kind of firm line, at least what appeared to be such, and he's going to have to articulate some kind of policy and make clear, you know, what the conflict diets were that if the Soviets traversed them, there would inevitably be war.

And a lot of that owes the experience of Korea and how NATO was formed. And the next episode is going to be the NATO episode, and that's hugely important, especially today but i don't want to jump into that now but uh to continue um the uh the uh the real kind of key incident in my opinion or like series of events what started the cold war is the berlin blockade okay and as as people probably imagine even people who you know don't reel out of the cold war you know uh west berlin was 110 miles into the soviet occupation sector okay it was it was the entirety of berlin was in what became the dDR um and the western half the only way you could access it uh civilian or military uh vehicles was by dedicated access routes

there's roads uh for the duration of the cold war um that were literally dedicated access routes for, like, U.S. military and civilian and West European traffic, you know, to pass through the DDR, you know, to reach West Berlin and then to return on the dedicated access road. And that was the only traffic permitted there. And that was the case early on. I mean, they, these routes were later, you know, kind of formalized, like, structurally as a matter of law. But it was, the Soviets weren't simply allowing, you know, open, uh, ingress. and egress of Americans and British and French, civilian or military

in and out of West Berlin. But they weren't, they did not outright blockaded it before. But what was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back was the, as the United States as a true economic

policy kind of took shape, I mean, just out of necessity. I mean, this just proceeded, you know, a formal political outlook, let alone policy, on West Berlin. But, I mean, the economy had to be rebuilt because people, I mean, their infrastructure was destroyed. You know, people, people weren't being fed. And it became imperative first and foremost to introduce a viable currency. So the United States, to introduce the Deutsche Mark, which is interesting because it's interesting like a lot of people think of the Deutsche Mark because, I mean, the Deutsche Mark was, I mean, the strongest

currency in Europe. And we, I saw an academic agent the other day. You know, the Germans didn't sign the metric treaty because they wanted to get off the Deutsche Mark. It was owing to political pressures and other things. But people have an idea of it. It's just kind of a, it's like, it's kind of an ad now where, you know,

and like the Bundes Republic like Deutsche Bank or whatever just saying like okay this is the successor to the Reichs market that's not what happened

it was the US occupation authorities who introduced it and very much sold the NASA and West Berlin government on it but the Soviets went nuts when this happened

and they banned they banned the Deutschmark from the from the from the the eastern zone of occupation and yes they were literally arresting people for for using it um so in the eastern in the eastern occupations sector of berlin people resorted

to using cigarettes as a de facto currency like no lie i mean that quite literally shows you like what a prison society this was from from jump i guess i mean i don't even have a particularly punitive view of the dDR and i mean that that should be clear to anybody but um the uh the introduction of the new currency when you know before with in the in the course of all the failed four powers

administrative bodies you know the one thing that the Soviets that the Soviets had opposed unconditionally was you know the introduction of a private enterprise and the youth in occupation

though okay because there's no way they're going to control that I mean obviously they couldn't have eventually if the Soviets had played their cards right I'm talking like years later if not decades. I think they could have made East Berlin kind of like they could have viewed it,

they could have treated kind of like, you know, the Chikoms treat Hong Kong. But I mean, that was many years off. Like, this could not, that was not in the cards in in 946, 47, 48, especially not by, you know, shock therapies, the introduction of

of this new currency backed by, you know, backed by American dollars. Okay, there's no way. but the uh it was uh things changed the the dutchmen was introduced on june 17th 948 or june 18th june 18th 98 the next day uh soviet guards suddenly cracked down you know suddenly um suddenly people uh they're relatively kind of free ingress into into east berlin you know people were being stopped and searched people were being turned back you know uh train

are being halted, any freight shipments, any all-water transport, they had to secure special permission from the Soviet authorities, not from these Berlin authorities, from the Soviets themselves. And kind of the final, got to the point of no return, three days subsequent on the 21st, the Soviets halted a U.S. military supply train to Berlin. and set it back. So essentially, the Soviets refused resupply of United States Army forces in Europe.

And a unique idea in Berlin, because Berlin, again, Berlin was 110 miles into the interior of the DDR. There's only, at that time, there's only about 3,000 U.S. combat troops on the ground, about 2,000 British. the Soviets had a comparable size force in East Berlin but the Soviets had 300,000 forces in being throughout Eastern Germany proper So if they came to war Those guys in West Berlin were dead You know, they would have been slaughtered

I mean, so this was an ominous thing You know And that same day The 22nd of June the stories announced that they were introducing the East German mark in their own zone of occupation and it was to be the only

legitimate only legitimate currency and later on which is really really weird in East Berlin I'm talking like into the 80s there were specialty shops

they were like duty free shops where non-East German citizens were visiting they could buy stuff with foreign currency like cigarettes or liquor or like other things like food like like like specialty food items um but but they were like designated foreign currency shops i mean kind of like the the hoops that these marxas lennist states jump through they got to maintain the fiction that their currencies were actually worth something is really really weird you know i mean i it's it's like you know the

old movie uh satire movie i was i think yeah yeah like it's very gellium yeah it reminds me a that in some basic way but it was um a june 24th uh the soviet severed land and water connections between the non-soviet zones in berlin um so all all ground rail or water traffic was cut off like nobody nobody got in or out of west berlin okay um the uh the uh the uh they couldn't cut off obviously like electricity and water because that would have been an own goal because I mean Berlin was literally just divided down the center with this kind of artificial

like what like in a battle map be considered like a salient but it you know there wasn't it was not people sometimes have this idea that there was something like rhyme or reason to how Berlin was divided like there was not so I mean it's not that you couldn't cut off utilities to half of Berlin but not the other half but just the same um west berlin at the time uh at the time it was blockaded it had just over like a month's where it was between like 35 and 45 like days with a food something like 50 days

worth of coal i mean it was like a very critical situation um and the entire the entire united states army just total forces in being by 98 have been reduced about half a million men um the uh The total force in the western sector were about 8,900 Americans, about 7,600 British, about 6,000 French. There was only 31,000 combat forces in all of West Germany. So, I mean, if it came to war, like a Boltonry Soviet attack, total Soviet military forces in the Soviet sector were 1.5 million. Now, the United States at that point, at that night and I'm still had a monopoly on the atomic bomb, But, I mean, what do you, if, if communist forces stream to Berlin, what are you going to do? You're going to, you're going to launch an atomic assault in Berlin and waste ruin people and all the Berliners.

I mean, this, this was very, very dangerous. And frankly, it was a, it was a gamble of the story that Stalin did not usually take. But interestingly, it was Lucius Clay. he was a commander of the U.S. occupation zone. You know, he said it was voted, he said, Curtis LeMay, interestingly, LeMay wanted to, he wanted to mobilize atomic capable B-29s and assault the Soviet sector, like, you know, like nuke them,

you know, and mobilized with inventory that were available in West Berlin, or in West Germany, you know, and then to proceed to liberate West Berlin with them after a massive atomic assault of Soviet forces with B-29s. But that that suggestion

was not abided, obviously. I, I, well, I mean, it was not some kind of madman. I'm, I'm, I'm quite fond of LeMay in history. And I think he's kind of unduly characterized as this kind of like Jack D. Ripper type, you know, like in strange love.

But, uh, Loses Clay, it was in concert with a lot of civilian types who, you know, we're still kind of, we're still kind of insinuated into government and quasi-military roles away to the war only being three years past. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army Air Forces, the Berlin Air Force. was really, uh, was really kind of an amazing, was really kind of an amazing, not just a policy coup, but sort of strategic rooking of Stalin, but it, it, it, it, uh, it demonstrated the feasibility of, uh, of air power. Um, in, uh, and not just in military capacities, I mean, which was obvious, but it, it's always weird and sound, it may be more comfortable with the idea of you know huge amounts of air traffic in and out of a major city you know and there's

there's one of the ideas before like oh there's going to be like pollution and noise and things like you know these like thousands and thousands of sorters um in and out of berlin uh that that kind of changed things uh and that's i mean honestly that's like a lot of time how people become habituated do technologies it's not any kind of uh it's not any kind of small thing um i mean there's guys, like LeMay himself, and these guys, particularly guys who fought with the Army Air Forces in the Pacific, you know, they developed these, you know, they developed these, these assault routes from the Marianas Islands and things. And, you know, there was the experience of the airlift over the quote, hump of the Himalayas, you know, from

India to China. But it was military guys who kind of understood the potential of air power in broad spectrum application you know military and civilian and commercial use like the man in the street really didn't and um the Berlin airlift uh the Berlin airlift uh the Berlin airlift changed that uh it uh it uh it uh it uh but lemay was he uh in terms of staffing decisions he did up he did um he did end up appointing a lot of most of the key figures in executive roles who made Earl have happened. General Joseph Smith, not to be confused with like

the father of Mormonism. He was he'd been, uh, no gold tablets here. But Smith had been, like, there's a huge many of guys who served under LeMay during the war who went on

to like prestige roles, including Robert McNamara, or, yeah, McNamara. Smith had been LeMay's chief of staff, when LeMay had a B-29 command, like in India, and then the Marianas, you know, loses clay, wasn't under Leigh's command, but, I mean, they, you know, they made acquaintance during the war. But the, it demonstrated, it demonstrated what was possible. And it also, it was such a collaborative effort between, I mean, it had to be between the United States and the UK. I mean, for better or worse, you know, and I'm not trash in the UK. You know, the UK remains. to Airstrip 1 in a real way, obviously, because of this. And Owing, you know, like we talked about, when this is the FDR is kind of inconsistent

and frankly, incoherent signaling. About the status of UK-US relations post-bellum, it wasn't clear, like, what role the UK would have here or whether or not the United States would raise a finger to defend, you know, key strategic interests, not just the interest of the empire, which nobody related to interest in the United States and preserving for any reason.

But, I mean, they're also, I mean, it was, it, it, it, it solidified the quote, I hate that term special relationship and there's all kinds of, like, things that are far, far less than admirable that that entails. But it purely like collaborative strategic terms, it solidified, you know, the USUK, um, um, uh, Concord, particularly as regards, uh, operational coordination with, uh, with air forces. And that's no small thing. And before the Revolution and Military Affairs and decades before contemporary command and control, that was incredibly difficult. That really can't be overstated. I mean, so the only brilliant era looked to be a hell of an operation today. But, I mean, you're talking about, like, radios the cutting edge of, like, commanding control technology in 1948. Like, think about that. It's, like, stuff, like, is less reliable than, like, the walkie talkies you played with this kid in, like, the early 80s.

that uh but the um the uh that was uh that was the uh that was the uh that was the that was the that was the onset of the cold war in uh in real terms and i don't think anybody would I don't think anybody would dispute would dispute that um and there were shenanigans too like the there was one single municipal election for all of Berlin in uh in 946 and the um the uh the uh the socialist unity party they didn't pull pathetically yourself they only pulled like 20 percent um you know and that that's what about the christian democrats on the map not just in west berlin but it's like the boonist republic like conservative party but the soviets basically they're basically they were like the you know okay to hell with it like we're not we're not going to pursue a political solution you know because i mean berlin had been like the that had been like the communist heartland land, you know, like in the Vybar years. And people pose the question, like, not just curious, like, readers, but, like, historians who, like, are deeply understand, you know, Russia the era, they're like, why did the Russians

do this? And it was just to get the lay the land, I'm telling you. I mean, that's, it makes total sense from Stalin's perspective. Stalin was a, if Stalin was a guy, he was a personality type today, we consider him like a data junkie. like Stalin was obsessed with informational awareness You know, like you really was And it's, I guarantee you we just said like, well, I mean, let's see

Let's hold an actual election, like a legit election And let's see what's more we got on the ground Okay, about 20, 20, 20, 25% It's fair, we can build covenies around that But this is never going to happen again, you know, but that's, I think we're coming about an hour I think we'll stop there And, uh, well, uh, well deep dive into

I realize this might not have been the most exciting episode But it was important because otherwise we're dealing with a huge phenomenon and they're in the Cold War where no actual kind of starting point or a catalyst has been identified but we'll we're going to get into the Korean War

and the formation of NATO and just the Truman Doctrine next episode that sounds great plugs and well on yeah we're I'm very happy to report that I mean you might see it I've got I've got this cool like backdrop

I'm in the apocalypse Whoops. I bought my production values. And also, like, I got a video editor to join, like, our production team, and he's great. So the YouTube channel is finally going to launch. I'm back on Twitter now, because Elon is apparently given people like me an amnesty. You can find me at Triskelian Jihad. The first T is a number seven. You can find me on Substack.

at real Thomas 777. And, I mean, you can find me, like I said, when I, in about, in a few days when I, when the YouTube channel does launch, I'll upload a lot of this stuff there. And it's Thomas TV in parentheses, Thomas 777. I know that's corny. It's supposed to be. It's a riff on Dave TV. If you're old like me, you remember, your TV. Well, it's Dave TV.

I got Thomas TV. So, yeah. But thank you, Pete. I really, really appreciate. No problem. We'll pick it up again next week. Thanks, Thomas. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez Show, Part 3 with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm very well. Thanks for hosting me. There's a few things I wanted to talk about today, and I want people to not be shy if I'm being too scattershot or not focused enough. The Cold War is such a massive topic, and it touches and concerns all kinds of theoretical.

all matters, you know, which is kind of like my wheelhouse. But it also, you know, in terms of practical affairs and very quantifiable things, you know, it really kind of, it created the contemporary strategic landscape, you know, and it endured for a century. So there's so much there, you've kind of got to pick and choose what you emphasize. I'm trying to go in linear order because, you know, that's, and, whatever your um whatever whatever whatever your emphasis is in in in revisionism you know you need to be as rigorous as you would in any other historical study i mean that doesn't mean just you know

relating relating facts and and documenting events for its own sake but um i don't just want to be ticking off a list of you know what i consider key events or something however if i'm if i'm getting ahead of myself, or if there doesn't seem to be a kind of tie that binds to make the narrative listenable or intelligible, please tell me in the comments. I'm not going to get upset. What was on my mind a lot lately, especially because in the morning, a couple days a week, my dad gives me a ride downtown for stuff I got to do. And, you know, I listen to 8.90 a.m. Talk radio, which isn't, it's not garbage like NPR, but it's garbage of a different sort. And they have all these polemical takes from, you know, these, like, retired, you know, captains and majors,

you know, like, kind of like third-rate, want-to-be war college types, you know, as well as, you know, some of these kind of dissentist-type Republicans or kind of like the token conservatives on the panel on these morning talk radio programs, you know, there's, it's interesting the way these guys talk about Russia, okay, because Russia, kind of like Dar al-Islam, you're still allowed to say basically prejudiced things about it, you know, because it's, it's interesting. not, you know, it's not part of that kind of protected, it's not conceptually, you know, incorporated into, you know, the victimology narrative, okay? But also, there's even as, even as deracinated as people are in America, you know,

especially in terms of these, you know, the kinds of people who populate media, what remains the traditional media at least, you know, even academic types who, who couldn't tell you anything about their own heritage and are not very racially conscious at all, there remains this kind of atavistic fear of Russia. And that's not just some, that's not, that's not, that's not just some kind of hackneyed polemical take that people like Lavrov, you know, drop on the, on the floor of the UN General Assembly in order to make a point or to scandalize people. That really is true. And to understand the Cold War, you've got to really understand why that came about. I've been reading lately, there's this book by Michael Proudon

and it was released in a review of in titles. The value I've got, it's under the title of the Mongol Empire. There's another one, there's another edition, identical book called Storm Out of Asia. But what it's all about is, it's all about when the Europeans made first contact with the Mongols,

you know, in the 13th century AD. Now, why was this so significant? Well, you know, the Europeans since 1095 have intermeatantly been at war with the Saracens, you know, Saladin and his descendants. You know, this was a crusading era, okay? And what was fascinating about that is that it was the only time until, I mean, unless you count, you know, the Napoleonic wars,

which were kind of more convenience than, you know, than a unity of faith, obviously. You know, it's really the only time you had, you know, truly European armies, you know, going off to war, I guess a kind of civilizational enemy. however some kind of concord had been had been reached with the moslems okay um i mean sometimes you know sometimes there's relative peace that reigned you know in uh in the kingdom of jerusalem you know after that battle of hatine and uh the moslem conquest uh things deteriorated but you know

there's just kind of like an ongoing thing but in the 12 you know in 1220 something these rumors came about that there was this huge marauding army it was just slaughtering everything in its path and a lot of people in monasteries and monks, they're like, well, you know, this is the scourge of God, and he's punishing, you know, the infidel Muslims, but he's also punishing these pagan tribes that populate the step.

You know, because all these barbarian people were literally being driven west to the European frontier and saying, you know, there's these men on horses, there's long torsos, and they kill everybody. You know, and they, like, those left alive, you know, they take the women as slaves, and they, you know, they force the men

into, you know, into duty of Janus series, basically. you know, and they drive them, you know, out front, and, you know, they take, they take the first blow when we, when they encounter their enemies and their enemies are everybody but them. And some people thought this was just nonsense, like, these are primitive pagans. They're, you know, they don't know what the hell are talking about. They probably just met the Syracians. You know, other people said, there were Jews who said, like, well, you know, King David has come back, you know, and he's coming to punish you for the way you've treated the Jews, you know, and he's coming to punish Jews, too, who've, like, forgotten God. Well, obviously, it was none of those things. It was the Mongols, okay? And the association of the East with this barbarian element that never really left, okay? And, I mean, it never really left in the European cultural mind and conceptual horizon. But it also never really left literally, okay? Like, I'm not saying Russians are a bunch of Mongols or barbarians. But there was this massive, this massive monolithic force emerged from the step. That was just destroying everything in its path, assimilating everything that was left alive or left standing, like literally into its structure.

You know, that's really what the Soviet Union was, okay? And at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the SS Juncker Shules, the, the, the, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, prouding's book was actually given to officers, okay? Um, and that, that's significant. And Himmler didn't assign the – Himmler and Paul Hauser, they didn't have people reading the international Jew. They didn't have people reading Klausowitz. I mean, people didn't read Klausowitz for the curriculum. But, you know, the book you got on my graduation was this book by Proudum,

both because it's, you know, it's the way it's saying, you know, this is your enemy. You know, this is what – you know, you're a knight of the new blood order of Europe, you know, in the SS. And this is what we're fighting against, you know, because we're the – we're the – we're the – watch on the Rhine. Okay, but also after, you know, 300 years of the Westphalian paradigm, it, you know,

the reality of true total war was emerging again. Okay? And that, they cannot be emphasized enough. And even, it sounds corny, but you can glean things from, you know, you can discern

symbolic psychological things, in kind of trashy media. You know, and I watched, I didn't watch it in years. You know, I liked a lot when I was a little kid. You know, Red Dawn, you know, with Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell, you know, the, that's actually kind of an interesting movie, like, as a period piece mostly. But, you know, we're like the black history teacher when the, when the town first gets assaulted by, like, the Soviets and the San Anistas and the Cubanos. He's teaching a class about Genghis Khan, okay?

And that's, like, not an accident. There's really, like, on the nose, okay? But so when you consider that, you consider that, you know, Europe is literally this kind of indefensible peninsula that, you know, that's the way you've got to understand. That's what you've got to understand the Second World War. That's what you've got to understand, essentially, the entire kind of, the entire European military orientation. and the you know and uh and uh and the this you know the the the the striving eastward of uh of teutonic peoples um and in the cold war this was very much kind of transposed to america okay there was there was very much a racial component here okay even though there was strange things going on in america

you know there was the the fact that the Soviet Union became you know a superpower and was not annihilated owed to the United States allowing with it to crush Imperium Europa under the German Reich. But you know, nevertheless,

you know, these things reemerge again and again. It's almost like a natural structural form that like snaps back in a place, even when people try to corrupt it or mold it into different configurations.

But what I want to talk about today is the war in Korea and this bears directly what we're talking about and the Cold War actually was fought in terms of hot war I mean all kinds of ledgered main and there was true violence in Europe of but it was all I mean there was never there was never a general war fought in Europe during the Cold War there was the Cold War was literally grew hot in Asia

Okay, the Cold War, whether it was light in the air between, you know, mass conventional forces, they have been in Asia. And it's not accidental. And that's not, it wasn't just a matter of, you know, well, you know, this is a place where this is a place, this is a theater where, you know, the Soviets to the Americans respectively can push and not risk triggering, you know, the apocalyptic conflict diet that's going to lead a general nuclear war. and interestingly or fascinatingly in the final phase of the Cold War which we'll get into later the real catalyst behind Reagan's 500 or I mean it's actually James Webb's but I mean the Reagan administration's 600 ship Navy was that they wanted they wanted nuclear battle platforms and and supporting the fleet elements you know to essentially like force the Soviet Union Wars-up pact to fight a two-front nuclear war.

If you can think of nuclear war is having a front, or rather two-theater nuclear war. And this caused a serious problem from a frame drop-off special I mean, Brezhnev, it began really under Carter, but

that's one of the things that really kind of rook the Soviet ambitions. It wasn't just the Revolutionary Military Affairs and the technological edge being lost. But getting into the Korean war um and again i hope that wasn't too like scattershot we got into the berlin airlift uh last episode you know and and the cold war you know the cold war the cold war it formally kicked off by

that okay and then in nineteen forty nine the soviet developed their own atomic capability you know we can get into the rosenbergs maybe next episode if you want i i i didn't know if you wanted to cover the acts it's kind of controversy and people strong feelings about it oh i don't know no no we need to cover that. Okay, we'll do that next. Next episode, we're going to deal with the early espionage issues. We're going to deal with, like, the Cambridge Five, and the Rosenbergs, and Elgar Hiss, and Roy Cohn, who prosecuted the Rosenbergs. But I want to stick to the Korean War in the Orient with this episode. So here we are in 1950. Secretary of State Dean Atchison, who he's, there's been a lot of revisionist's takes on him that are pretty

unflattering. But Asson was kind of a peculiar I think he was kind of a defeat aristocrat type of the worst source. But that's just my opinion. There's definitely been worse

cheap diplomats. But Apsons' great blunder, I think it's an arguable. In January 13, 1950, you know, mind you, this was as we talked about we talked about you know

the desire to draw down conventional forces and rely upon the you know the atomic bomb you know to resolve basically military exigencies you know in the threat of massive escalation this was creating problems as you know the Cold War began to heat up in earnest quite literally

but there had not yet been an open challenge to to Truman okay there had not yet been I mean other than Berlin blockade, which was, I mean, that, that was not a conventional provocation, you know, only to the bizarre occupation regime and the fact that, you know, Germany was permanently in limbo as a matter of law, you know, because there, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was

literally under occupation authority, and there was no, there was no end in sight and no pathway to a permanent peace treaty emergent. But the, you know, the first true kind of challenge, to to American, burgeoning American and Gemini was the Korean War. And I think of the Korean War and why it happened as somewhat analogous

to why the first Gulf War happened. It had to do with incorrect signaling by by U.S. diplomats. When I say incorrect, there really is a correct way to not disclose intentions well at the same time deterring reckless acts by you know by uh by national uh enemies and uh that's diplomats must have instincts to know when to resort to such measures and uh must uh have a basic

understanding of how to code their language such that you know the signals can be clearly read um while still you know keeping uh keeping potential uh keeping intentions and his actual potential, you know, relatively hidden as need be in a sustained credibility. But the United States certainly did not do that. What Dean Anderson did on January 13, 1950, he addressed, he issued a speech to the National Press Club. And what he said was this. When he was asked about, you know, what the policy was towards the communists in Asia,

he said, look, you literally said there's a defensive perimeter in Asia. He said it extends from Japan, do the Rikas Islands, down to the Philippines in the south. So quite literally, if you look at a map, that constitutes kind of a line through the Pacific, okay? Within which, I mean, obviously, you know, or key like U.S. sea lanes and things. But basically, it's quite literally like a containment barrier, you know, bulwark against the Asian landmass, okay? Now, Stalin was paying attention to this. as was Mao. And the way they read that

was that, well, you know, despite the fact that Korea was under similar occupation to Germany, you know, you had a, you had a, you know, you had a Soviet-occupied north. You had a briefly American and allied occupied south. And in the

north, you had this kind of cargo cult, Stalinist regime. And in the south, you basically had a military dictatorship, but the military that was running it was not particularly capable. However, there was not forces in being on the ground in the south. They had left, okay? And the understanding was that America was not going to defend Korea.

Now, why Stalin and Mao coveted Korea is what's significant. Because Korea was not Germany. And the reason why Korea today remains dysfunctional, is because it borders both China and Russia and so then striking distance of Vladivostok. It's a stone's throw away from Japan. Quite literally, nobody wants the United Korea, but the Koreans.

You know, America doesn't, the Russians and Chinese will not tolerate it. Japan would not tolerate it. This both supersedes and transcends Cold War rivalries, now obsolescent, but also, but also was far less of a potential conflict dyad that could result in true catastrophic escalation. It became that way because of McCartan. We'll get to that in a minute.

Okay. Now, what happened months later was on June 25th, the North Korea launched a massive assault of the South. it was a Sunday President Truman was at home in Missouri away from Washington Dean Atchison was in Maryland that is in his gentleman's farm

Henry Nitsa who people, the name people were recognized from our earlier episodes Nidza was the Secretary of Defense he was on a fishing trip in New Brunswick but Nitsa decades later he was the principal architect of the Team B exercise

he was a huge early New York conservative Okay. Massive extreme Cold War Hawk. He was the author of National Security Council Paper 68, which was drafted in April of 1950. And that was one of the most important policy blueprints or policy statements of the Cold War. It provided the roadmap for the permanent militarization of America of both conventional forces and strategic nuclear forces from you know from the time it was written in 1950 until you know the soviet union collapsed you know 40 years later um so he was a hugely significant guy okay and his uh his first uh

his first kind of challenge of political nature was uh was was budding heads with with you know mr george kennan we we discussed earlier i mean kennin obviously from what we discussed about him and, you know, from what we've talked about, where it's got a basic traits of character. It's kind of decency and his basic sense of caution. I mean, he believed very much in strong defense, but, you know, the cautious application of force and the service they're in.

Kennan was one of the few men, whatever people can say. I mean, we'll get into why this isn't a man, but Kenan was really savaged in the era, in the epoch, by his opponents, including people like NHTSA, you know, for being, you know, soft on communism and conciliatory towards the Soviets. But Kenyon, he had been adamant for months prior to the June 25th, that there were definite indicators of communist military activity in Asia and that they were going to assault

somewhere. It was not clear where the theater would be for such activity and what the point of concentration would be and what would be prioritized they're in. But McArthur's stand in Tokyo and just did not, they just disregard them entirely. Like, this guy's an egghead. He's never been in uniform. He doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. And he can't even, you know, provide us an conceptual model of, like, where this is going to jump off.

You know, and what, what, what forces it's going to entail, you know, and what, and what, what, what feeder is going to be the primary area of operation. So they totally disregarded it, okay? But, um, this, uh, to give you an idea of kind of how Fubar, the National Security Establishment was, um, neither Truman nor NHTSA nor Acheson it wasn't until

they returned to Washington from their respective you know vacations that they found out that

Korea was under assault because they saw the newspaper headlines okay there was no structure in place of you know notifying national

command authorities of a wartime emergency and granted I mean this was this was the dawn of the atomic age, but it doesn't matter. I mean, you know, America, for better or worse, had just come off of a total mobilization

and, you know, a massive two-front war. There was unprecedented in scope, scale, and intensity. So, impossible to rationalize as it is. That's the way things were. When Kenan arrived, that night, Kenan, at this point was something of a minister without portfolio, okay? He was, he'd been dismissed as, you know, the kind of quasi-regent of the Department of State in Moscow. He'd ended his tenure as a special consultant to the National Security Advisor.

But he, I mean, Kenon was always in the executive orbit, okay, because he was a brilliant guy. And he was the foremost expert on the Soviet Union and the Russian culture, okay? The evening of, I'm sorry, the evening of June 25th, Kenon double time to the department. Department of State, and he said, look, he said the critical strategic matter here is that Formosa, Taiwan, has to be defended. He's like, if this is a general push, and it may be it will be, you know, he said the secondary assault is the assault in South Korea, the primary assault is going to be on Formosa, and ultimately, there's going to be a massive assault in Japan, okay? If the Soviets are going all in, in Asia and the Chinese their Chinese process are going all in where we're going to be we're going to fight

a world war over Japan okay um which is very interesting and uh Taiwan is interesting because Taiwan is absolutely zero strategic significance today and it shows you like the raw delusion of these of these bizarre

fucking idiots like like Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Biden that they pretend that it's 1950 and that this matters or that they actually have, you know, not only is there no stake in Taiwan, but this idea that, I mean, if an American carry group showed up declaring to the Taiwanese in 2002 that we're going to defend you, like, they'd be totally befuddled and then they laugh in their face. You know what I mean, it's, it's incredible. But in 1950, had Taiwan fallen and had that been, you know, like Moscow and Stalin's ambition, Kenner was absolutely right. the um and uh as we will see as we get deeper into this series um the soviets put remarkable pressure on japan and then the soviets were seeking out a weak spot and it's kind of their counterweight to uh to uh to the situation in berlin especially and and the inner german border generally

and that's what underlay crew shifts on it and the serves and fairly reckless deployment of strategic nuclear forces to Cuba which blew up in his face but the finding a

finding a if the Soviets had been able to find a soft spot as it were in the Asian defense paradigm or structure rather wherein they could squeeze Japan with a combination of, you know,

a hard power threat and soft power incentivization, America would have had a real problem in that regard. So, Kenner was not just, you know, dropping wild doomsay scenarios. What he was saying was very possible. As it was, I think Stalin was testing Mao's loyalty.

And the cytosovia split is complicated. There's profound cultural variables there as well as political ones. As well as things as simple as, you know, the, like, like, dang, who was, you know, who was the shadow executive, I mean, basically after after the gang of four got eliminated. He was finding it was somewhat greedy. And so was his inner coterie. And men like him and men like them can be blocked. but also the reason why

it wasn't just owing to the kind of nascent uh nascent nature of the of the Cold War paradigm during the last years of Stalin's life that

that uh that that that King was in basically unconditional alliance with Moscow is because they were loyal to Stalin. I mean, Stalin was a remarkable person. I maintain he was probably the most powerful man whoever lived, okay, hands down. But the, as Kennan came to realize,

China very much was the Soviet Union's proxy, and they treated it very much like a client state. I mean, a very important client state, one with potentially great power political potential and military mobilization potential, but nevertheless, they very much treated them like a somewhat inferior race. okay um not to be crass about it that is the reality of the situation can i maintain um you know in that same vein well here first of all like how how how is truman able to corral this this

whole uh um coalition effort and again the parallel with what the gulfor stands out here although the way in which the coalition was uh was corral was quite different The USSR was boycotting the United Nations at this point, okay? Now, as people probably know, the Soviet Union had a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The UN Security Council acts as the defecchio higher house of the UN. If you want to look at the UN as like a UN-camera legislature of nations, any permanent member of security council is a veto on any resolution, okay? The Soviet Union was boycotting the UN, so their seat was vacant.

And why were they boycotting the UN? They were boycotting the U.N. because their proxy China had not, the U.N. had not permitted them to be seated, okay? There was this absurd situation where the Americans were demanding that Chankaj Shek's government on Formosa, he recognizes the true government of China. I mean, when you're sitting in Beijing and you've got dominion over 900 million people, you know, declaring like, you know, the guys on that, you know, little island over there are the real government or something. and that there's something satirical about that, but this is why the Soviets were boycotting the UN. Thus, when Truman

through Atchison said, look, you know, this is, this is an egregious violation of international law. You know, the communists are, you know, and in a front of decency and, you know, the, you know, the

more as the civilized community of nations have assaulted Korea, this marvelous nascent democracy. You know, we've got a rush to its defense. So that's what it happened, okay? Truman, uh, Truman wasn't any kind of, wasn't any kind of pure Wilsonian,

but he was like a liberal internationalist. So this kind of stuff really got him excited. He really, he really dug that kind of shit. And frankly, uh, politically it was, uh,

it was a savvy move, okay? I mean, granted, it's, Truman didn't do anything to facilitate it. I mean, it was the Soviets who were, you know,

playing typical kind of commie games that, you know, of a political theatrical nature. that facilitated it. That's what happened. Now, back to Kenan, Kenan is observing all of this, and he's growing very concerned,

because Kenan knows MacArthur pretty well, and MacArthur was just a weird guy. He lived with his parents pretty much his whole life until he was pretty old. He was immature, not in the way that Churchill was. He wasn't like this kind of buffoonish piggy drunk

who was playing with Army. men at age, you know, 25, but he, like, MacArthur had this kind of, his father was a medal of honor recipient who fought for the Union Army in the war between the states. MacArthur himself, he was awarded the Medal of Honor in this, in this anti-banded action in the Poncho Obia era, but it was strange. And like, it seemed very much like MacArthur kind of coveted this Medal of Honor, and he created circumstances wherein he could, he could, he could. he could grab one by kind of spinning facts in such a way that would appeal to the you know to the uh to those

you know commissioning such an award he was not a very attractive guy and aside from that there's a reason why um he was uh he was sent to the pacific theater the pacific theater was a was a navy show okay now the grunts there those guys suffered like nobody else okay and they fought harder than anybody else i'm not saying that at all but the army in the Pacific War they really were not center stage and that's like

one of the reasons I like to fill in the thin red line because it's one of the few reasons that's about the army in the Pacific War you know, not the Marine Corps and you get a sense of these guys being literally in the middle of nowhere and desertion in the Pacific

was almost zero if there was nowhere to desert two you're in this green hell a lot of time they weren't getting the gear they needed you know things would become totally savage by this point but

you know all that aside I mean that there's enough there to constitute an episode and it's own right but the key takeaway is that there's a reason why MacArthur was not given some feeder wide command you know there's a reason why he wasn't given an armored corps in Europe okay

there's a reason why he was sent to the Pacific where he was basically under the thumb a guy is like Nimitz, okay? Because he was a cowboy, he was a glory hound, and by this point, he was basically running Japan, like, like, some kind of swaggering Cordillo, you know, or some kind of like Great White Hunter or something.

And what what Kennan's view was, is I don't know what the hell this guy is going to do. You know, Kenan's view as well, you know, McCarthy is in his element with this, you know, if, if he sticks to the mission and orientation of liberating Republic of Korea,

but if MacArthur decides he wants to collect more medals and Mercer of Ledy Vostock, he's going to start World War III. You know, now I know there's like this stupid cliche of a fucking idiot who are always like talking about like, you know, talking about like general officers, like, oh, there's some crazy generals going to do something.

Like, not that's had times that's a fucking retarded take, but in McArthur's case, McCarthur did crazy shit. And he didn't, he didn't really respect the chain of command. Um, and Kenan, uh, what Kenan did was, uh, Kenan, um, he began very publicly saying, look, and this is fascinating because it presages, obviously would ultimately resolve the Cold War and what Mr. Nixon and Kissinger did. Kenan said, look, he's like, we need to give McCarthur a free hand in operational terms,

so long as the mission remains limited to the liberation. of the Republic of Korea and not to Congress in the North. He's like, concomitantly simultaneously, he's like, we need to offer Beijing inducements to not cooperate with USSR. You know, he's like, we should even offer them a permanent seat on the UN Security Council if they're willing to formally break with Moscow. And we should tell them that, you know, a further inducement is we will recognize them unconditionally as a sole representative of the Chinese government.

Now, John Foster Dulles went berserk when, when Kennan said this. And people were saying that Kenan was, they were saying he'd been, like, gotten to by the Soviets. There's, like, awful, slanderous things. He was literally just shouted down, and this really, really hurt him. Okay, as the Korean War started to go very poorly, and despite what they, I have no idea where the huge gets in school about this, but the Korean War was incredibly amazing. popular. It was incredibly brutal. It was incredibly bloody.

You know, it was and not not only Vietnam in all kinds of ways. Okay. I don't want to go through a laundry list and grotesque things that happened and the awful thing is the guy who had to go there suffered through, but there was a lot of commonality, okay? Not just owing to the fact that

we're talking about, you know, Asian battle feeders. But But this really, this really, Kenan really got kind of sandbagged until the Eisenhower era. And what we'll get into that, too, as we progress also. We're going to come back to Kenan again and again, not just because I've got a huge esteem for Kenan. He's a key player in the Cold War. And like I said, I give Nixon all credit for the facilitating the Sino-Soviet split because he's the man who actually facilitated. it in an executive role.

But conceptually, this was George Kennan's kind of augury and instinct for for hard power politics. But as the war dragged on, Truman did increase naval patrols and

just overall naval presence to the Pacific, and especially in the Taiwan straight. And a huge significance, Truman began basically bankrolling the French war in Indochina against the Vietnam. Okay, and, you know, America's involvement in Indochina goes back to the late 40s in some capacity. And this idea, this kind of Oliver Stone, Howard, is an idea that, like, you know, Vietnam was a lie, man, and, like, a bunch of fish, generals and capitalists just decided to fight a war there. Like, that's not true at all.

And it's not, okay, and you've got to look at Korea, you've got to look at Vietnam. You've got to look at this entire paradigm I talked about that ultimately kind of resolved in this sort of massive escalation or, yeah, massive escalation of forces in being in the Pacific, you know, in the Reagan area. You got to look at that as all part of like a common paradigm. Okay, you can't look at any of these things in isolation. Now, what Kenyon did do during this time is he started writing a lot in policy journalism. Okay, and he kind of, back in those days, you still had public intellectuals that we talked about. And Kenan, first and foremost, among social science types and political theorist types, he was the king, okay? So Kenon started kind of making his case to the American people and it kind of like, you know,

and kind of like the learned, you know, like top layer of the civilian world. and Kennan's plan for uh i mean we we think of history of the rearview mirror because that's inevitable everybody comes a monday morning quarterback when they're like looking backwards kennel was pretty convinced along with everybody else that there's probably going to be there's probably going to be a world war within several years and at some point there was going to be a catastrophic nuclear war that was inevitable in his view and i understand why you thought that. And frankly, had Gorbachev and Reagan not found

a way to end that paradigm, there actually would have been at some point. You know, being in 1993, 2003, it would have happened eventually, but I'm sorry you're calling us, so it's been on the weather.

But the canon view was this. Okay, this was Kenon's kind of grand designed for how to not to de-escalate but like get out of the Cold War without seating ground to the point that America is totally compromised

okay he said there's got to be so good a comprehensive settlement with the Soviets that would terminate hostilities in Korea because if if hostiles just went on indefinitely he's like eventually you know the Chinese who by then were fighting a general war on the peninsula

against the UN the American led UN forces you know he's like eventually they're either going to get the upper hand or we're going to escalate and we're going to find ourselves in a general war with the Soviets and the Chinese. So we've got to find some kind of way of pull a plug on this and go back to pre-war

you know presumably go back to pre-war lines of demarcation in a 30th parallel you know, we got to admit that people's republic China, the United Nations in some capacity, okay, even if we're not going to give them a permanent seat on the security council, we can't pretend this government is not legitimate. There's a billion people

who live under this government. You know, there are they're the third most powerful state on this planet. This is ridiculous. He's like, concomitant, we need to allow a plebiscite to the urban Taiwan's future. And Kenan's like, don't worry the Taiwanese are going to overwhelmingly vote for independence. But he's like, we've got to do it. And we've got to allow third-party monitors, you know, so that it's, they can just be said that, you know, these Taiwanese are under the heel of some cardillo, who in turn is taking orders from the white man or whatever, okay?

And finally, this is This is most significant And this is fascinating Kenan said To prevent massive escalation In the Pacific Theater And to obviate was probably

You know, this paradigm That's probably going to result in a nuclear war He's like, we need to bring about a neutral And demilitarized Japan No U.S. forces there. You know, no No, no, not even a total kind of Japanese army.

You know, he's like, Japan, Japan needs to become just a neutral zone. Okay. And that's the only way moving forward, we're going to keep it off the table as, you know, the, it's kind of like the prize objective in the Pacific. And also, this was long forgotten to history other than there's a, you occasionally come across copy, most of the ones like grand. students come across headlines in the 70s and stuff when the Japanese Red Army faction was killing people because they dropped a lot of bodies but communism had real momentum in Japan. It was entirely possible that Japan would go red okay um that's a whole another story but just for context if it seems weird that Kenan is like emphasizing that

look like we got it we've got to basically like take Japan out of the Cold War entirely that is why okay And in turn, he said, finally, he said that we're entering into a catastrophe. He's like, we're going to an arms race with the Soviet Union. He's like, which we can probably win just because we can essentially like indefinitely outspend them on weapons. But he's like, at some point the Soviets are probably going to go all in and assault us, you know, with everything they have rather than just lose. Okay. So he's like, we need to reduce American capabilities to a mix, like a mix.

mixed combined arms force that's capable of dealing a concentrated and devastating blow on a limited front but basically anywhere on this planet and that was very pressing too okay because that that kind of thing became dominant by the end of the Cold War definitely and even beyond although the strategic landscapes totally changed and arguably um um it arguably the reason why um that that notion has gained legs is for totally different reasons

but I mean there's all kinds of factors and play to that you know like political technological and others

but um Kenan uh Kenan had I guess what I'm getting as this he wasn't something

of augur in light or anything but he put Canada ahead of his peers particularly in the issue not of Korea

but also Asia generally you have an understanding of uh you're understanding of causation in politics causality in politics it i mean causality in human affairs obviously isn't like causality in physics or something um i mean everybody you can see that but uh in politics is a peculiar domain of human endeavor and there's a weird kind of causation in politics i mean part of this owes to what men and command rules have to do to maintain credibility part of us to with the way humans perceive threat at scale. Part of it has to do with just how decisions are made in technology-driven societies

where, you know, that wield such great power over the forces that animate them that, you know, oftentimes once a decision, once a decision-making process, it literally cannot be stopped. Kenneth had instincts for all this stuff. And he kind of understood the implications with their strategic matters as they were happening. And that's what truly makes a political theorist, particularly like an IR theorist, is you can look at, you can look at affairs as they unfold, and you can basically disturb the trajectory of war and peace currents. I can't think of a better way to put it.

But that's kind of the thing. Go ahead, sir. Have we lost that now, or is it just, we're so far gone with leadership, our leadership being, I mean, why can't we see something like this when it comes to NATO? Is it because we're the aggressors? Is it because we're in the wrong? Is it, I mean, what you're describing? I mean, these people, the people you're describing now would be considered enemies of the enemies of the regime.

Well, it's complicated, but a point I made to people again and again, you know, during the Cold War, guys who had the best and the brightest, they were basically corralled into government. I mean, if you were a nuclear physicist, you went to work in Los Alamos. If you were some brilliant game theorist, you know, you got sent to Harvard, and then you've got sent us some penning on funded think tank to figure out how to wage nuclear war. You know, if you're like a brilliant economist, you know, you'd meet with the president

and you'd say like, okay, like, what's the best way? You know, the Marshall Plan was great for politics, but it didn't do a whole lot for, you know, capital and return on investment and for technological development. You know, how can we build up Korea? How can we build up, you know, Taiwan?

You know, how can we build up, you know, these kind of key proxy regimes to fight the Soviet Union? You know, like, nowadays, like, the only people who go to government are real losers. I mean, it's, it's like, it's like weirdos, freaks, like, like, literally, like, half-ass actors, you know, like, weird people who have, like, nothing going for them, but they have some desperate need to, like, be famous or something. Like, any guy, any guy has anything going for him is going to have nothing to do with government. You know, like, why would you? I mean, that's part of it.

Are these people, like, I have a friend, his son is. genius engineering trying to Raytheon offered him an insane amount of money and he's like I just can't I can't work for these people is that what's happening now because because basically we have a corporate run government that the best and the brightest are just going

straight into the corporations and then the I mean look at a look at it look okay like like 50 years ago or even 40 years ago like in the early 80s a guy like Elon Musk he'd be like working in government He would have been going on TV debating Carl Sagan saying, like, no, this is why we need SDI, you know, no, this is why we need to roll back communism.

Like, no, this is why, you know, we need to scrap the ABM treaty and develop weapons platforms that, you know, truly has split of first right potential. Like, that's what he'd be doing. Like, now, who the hell is going to go, who the hell's going to go debate with AOC about whether, like, kids should learn about anal sex or not in seventh grade? Like, who the hell is going to do that? like any normal person that's totally beneath them and they wouldn't like sully themselves that way

but also it's like government is for losers you know it's it's for people like the bitens you know it's it's for it's for people like aOC it's for uh it's for uh or it's for guys or it's for kind of like uh or it's for kind of like you know guys like desantis who have some kind of like like striver narcissists need to like you know

see their face on TV or something like you know people have something going for them like aren't going to want anything to have anything to do with it and I mean but it's also part of the problem I mean like we talked about before and I'm sure people think that I'm flying a dead horse here that maybe I overstate my case but even aside of the fact that we've got like a hostile regime that's wholly destructive and like an enemy of the people and stuff even in like let's say you have like a normal regime of like normal people like the government is structured it's only structured to really fight the Cold War and not much else. I mean, it's like, why does it even exist? You know, like, there's something of a, there's more than a modicum of fraud to it, too. You know, and people see through that.

Like, a highly intelligent guy, aside in the fact that there's nothing government's doing that could possibly interest him now, he's not, he's not going to go, he's not going to go pretend that, like, you know, he's actually accomplishing something by working in some idiotic bureaucracy like you know when you i mean if people want to jerry portnell i mean i'm a big science fiction guy so i love jerry pornell but you know he uh the the committee on the present danger he really kind of took over that uh that role i mean that the committee on the present danger went back to the 50s been the 80s he truly made it into like a uh a into like a military science like political action committee okay and pornell was the guy who put like s ds

eye on the man. Okay. That's why the Cold War, I mean, dynamic people were in government because of the Cold War. Okay, that's, that is why they were there. Like, they weren't there because government is awesome or because they really want to, they want to figure out, you know, how to draft a school curriculum for, like, poor kids or because they want to, like, pass laws, like, make gay people feel better about themselves. I mean, like, they, they were there to fight the Cold War, and that's it. Um, and, uh, the Cold War was something that comes, Like a paradigm like that happened once in a thousand years, if that. And people realize that on some deep level, even when it was horrifying, and even when people

would have done anything to get out of it, you know, when, like, at junctures, you know, like Cuba in 63 or 62, you know, the 73 war and, like, Abel Archer, even as horrifying as that stuff was, like, people realize, like, you know, these were, these were apocel shattering events that I'm participating in. That's why. But I mean, you go back to like, you know, they would send Carl Sagan out to make an argument for them. Now, who is their scientist now?

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, guys who can get, guys who can get owned on Twitter by like, by people, anonymous, anonymous accounts. Yeah, like anonymous. And they're like high school kids too. Yeah. I'm not saying, like, there's a point of support high school kids. The point is, yeah, he's got, they're getting embarrassed by just like, like, 16-year-old John's in public. There's just no one, it seems like there is no one who's impressive anymore.

And if they are impressive, you, like, you know, it's like, to a certain extent, Elon Musk, I think is, is an impressive guy. But he's also, you're also like, what the hell does this guy believe? You know, it's like, you don't know what his ideology is if he has one at all. Yeah, I don't think he does. I mean, generally business moguls don't. I mean, I defend Musk a lot because, I mean, he's a high-speed, low-draig guy. He's the one who's keeping real space tech alive, and he's doing an incredible thing. I mean, just the fact, like, the stuff he's done for telecom is incredible, okay?

And, you know, he's, the things he's introduced are game changers. You know, I mean, not just in telecom, like, across the board. I mean, he has an eccentric weirdo, but, I mean, all these guys are. But, I mean, I'm glad he's around, and he, you know, he's a great man and like not in the sense of I love him and think he's awesome but and by any objective metric but that's you know government you know government is going to attract losers when it doesn't I mean this is I don't go too hard field and I'll wrap it on him sorry the hour but it but I mean uh I government is going to cease to exist as as we know it today

in the next 200 years like I'm not saying like the state will win you know like some utopian anarchist or some you know kind of like low key uh uh like trotsky or something but you're not it's just not going to have you know a century now people stuff like you know the 20th century uh features that they created this regime are to be so remote as to be like not even intelligent anymore so like a lot of what government does as it's make work uh business the day-to-day is just not going to exist anymore and and plus those be like a natural de-evolution. You know, you're going to, like, localism is going to become, just, like, more and more thing. It already is. But, so I think the problem is going to take care of, take care of itself in some basic way.

But that's, that's, um, I, there's something I, I can't, I thought, I thought there was something I wanted to bring up in conclusion. But again, I swear I'm not going to C-E-Ele, but. Well, I, I derailed you. It's just that, you know, when you think, Yeah, when you think back on the Cold War, There were so many, you know, it is as psychotic as it was at many points. There were so many impressive people out there, you know, talking, coming up with technology. I mean, we just don't, I'm not saying we need another Cold War. I'm just saying it's just when you look at what we have today compared to the people that we were looking at then, it's just like, what the hell happened, man? It's like idiocacy

Like snuck up on us In a decade No, it's totally nuts Like I said, I found it jarring Like the Clinton administration Was jarring because I mean Clinton was such a fucking slob But these people like all They had something really wrong with them

And it was like it wasn't even gradual It was like whether you like Bush 41 or not I mean he was a high speed low drag guy You know and that whole And James Baker was when I was a kid Like a teen like James Baker was like a hero I really looked up them, you know. But these, you know, to go from that kind of very heavy, severe,

both good and bad ways regime, you know, to Bill Clinton and it's kind of like merry band, a circus freaks. Like, it was bizarre, man. Like, it was jarring. But, I mean, that's why, like I said, I can't, it was a joke. I think these boomers were, like, who, like, fly into, like, you know, rages about Donald Trump, you know, these, like, the same assholes who were, like, telling us 30 years ago, like, you got to get with the Times, man.

like Bill Clinton is the future. Like, we don't want your white male stuff anymore. Like, you know, it's like, you can't, like, turn around and say, like, you're outraged at some reality TV show stars as the president. It's like, you guys made this shit happen. You know, like, you're the ones who said, like, we're a bunch of squares and fish just and idiots who, you know, want, like, white male stuff to rule, man.

And, you know, we've got to, like, get with the times. So it's like, you know, yeah, yeah. And it's really only a matter of time before people start begging for that to come back. yeah i mean i've got my own i mean i'm very optimistic man i mean i don't worry about anything not because look i'm so awesome or like fearless but i you know i i'm like a calvinist and stuff and like i you know like stuff doesn't really bother me and but also like you know i i see i see causes for optimism all over the place you know i mean there's a lot of like horrible things too but i mean there's always horrible things you know the world is a fallen place man

like that that that's that's why you know that's that that's you know we're all born in sin But at any event, yeah, well, let's, let's wrap up now because I don't want to go into another big, like, sub-topic because it's coming up on the hour. But like I said, before we went live, man, I'm the fellow's invited me to go with them to the American Renaissance conference this weekend. So that's where I am going. I'm going to Nashville. So if you're there, you will see me, if you seek me out. please don't try to assassinate me or something. But I assume

when people come up to me at these things that they come as friends, but Unfortunately, I don't think this is going to come out before the weekends. No, fair enough, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, no, I, in any event, plugs. Yeah, I mean, I'm on, I'm on Twitter still,

because, I mean, apparently, I'm speaking of Mr. Musk, that the woke censorship regime is done. I mean, you can find me there. You'll seek and each you'll find. I'm on Substack at RealThomas777.com as my podcast is at. The sequel to Steelstorm is dropping in January, I promise. I'm sorry for the delay.

It was not my fault, nor was it my dear publisher's fault, the Perium Press. We've had censorship problems on our own. and deplatforming problems, but it will be here in January. I'm sorry it cannot be here for the holidays, but that is where I'm at. I appreciate

it. Yeah, until the next time. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Kenyana show, part four of the Cold War series with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm very well. Thanks again. What I wanted to get into today, we finished off

last week we talked or yeah more like a week and a half ago perhaps but you know talking with the berlin air lift in the korean war and i kind of finished up talking about the korean war and i wanted to talk about the bundest republic and its political culture and how many it developed the way it did and into that the listeners will understand what i mean about why that's significant but you know the korean war it uh it you know like we we discussed in the last episode about I was essential to and, you know,

containment as policy, you know, not just as some sort of theory abstracted from, from concrete military decision making. You know, you've really got to understand the Korean War as kind of the first iteration of that. You know, and as well as,

you know, what became to greater or less than, you know, policy towards the communist for the next the next 40 years. And it's also, too, that's when America it truly insinuated into the Vietnam conflict. You know, like I made the point before, there's all kinds of lives about the Vietnam War

and just misperception, some deliberate, some deliberately confabulated, you know, for polemical biological reasons, support of broad ignorance. But the idea that Vietnam was just kind of an aura of opportunity, you know, owing the designs of, you know,

profit years and finance years and things, that's nonsense. And arguably, you know, the Far East was, it was far more dangerous during the middle and late Cold War than the European theater. I mean, obviously, if we come to Europe, that would have been catastrophic because basically a single conflict dyad and had it been triggered or traversed, the potential for catastrophic escalation was ever present. But there was many, many, many dyads potentially. And how and where, you know, actual warfare would ensue. That was very difficult to predict. And, you know, once hostilities did ensue, it was equally difficult to predict, you know, what the potential of recalation was.

You know, it's also, too, there was more of a fluidity, the sphere of influence and things like this. But that's, you know, that's why Korea is important. And it's also, it, um, it, uh, it's, it's essential to, I think people read kind of the outcome of the Korean conflict, you know, in terms of, um, it's very much Truman came under, you know, Truman left office really kind of in disgrace. I mean, he was, he was an odd, whatever reason about Truman, he was honest, he didn't have character issues, he wasn't corrupt. but um in the toilet the Korean War was incredibly unpopular and you know

the uh the republic rift between Truman of Carthur which led to McCarthy's dismissal the public generally sympathized with MacArthur not just because you know he was kind of this heroic person that had been very deliberately created by you know by media

but also the view of Truman was that Truman's objectives you know, as stated, we're to, quote, restore peace and security on the Korean Peninsula, you know, there was, you know, basically to read itself as the state as quote, in lieu of victory. And in Truman's words, you know, we're waging the Korean War to, you know, not just for the sake of, you know, deterring aggression and, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, one of the officers in the ground referred to that as an absurd tautology. You know, your forces are there to protect your forces.

I mean, that doesn't, that that's not why you go to war. And, you know, we're talking about, you know, not just men's lives, you know, and expecting them to sacrifice their lives in the national interest. You know, you really have an obligation to the country. You're not just to those men and their families and relations, but, you know, to the country at large, to wage war to win. You know, not to... Isn't it also an insult to the men on the ground?

Oh, we got to drop more forces in there because you guys can't handle it. It's like the whole Afghanistan thing. We have these Afghani troops that we've trained and, you know, they have platoons, but they can't do it on their own, so we got to get someone in there. Yeah, yeah. That's a good point. It has the effect of really kind of sapping morale and... and kind of discouraging and any enthusiasm, you know, for the, for the war effort.

And it, so, I mean, I, I, for good, for good reason, you know, Truman was kind of savaged over his prosecution of the war. But also, suddenly, you know, kind of court historians within the right and the left, they kind of, they kind of view this as, as this real low point for, uh, or America in the Cold War, you know, kind of a precursor to what, sued uh during the detente era after you know sagon fell and things but i got a different take on that i mean that's part of the reason we're doing this is is on the you know the earth of provenous perspectives and in dealing with the cold war but in kissinger's diplomacy he's about the only kind of i mean i say kissinger a lot because i you know like we told about before for whatever reason people kind of on both sides the ideological divide they they love kind of burning Kissinger, proverbial effigy, but he, in power political analyses, he's really second

to none, okay? And he made the point, I go a little bit further than he did, but, or he does, but he made the point that, you know, the Stalin and the Soviet Union ended up in a pretty, in a pretty precarious position, only to the Korean War. The, you know, there's a basic ambiguity as where American sphere of influence, stuff and Soviet interests began in the region. America did not have the forces in being

even outside of Japan, really, but even that is arguable. You know, to prosecute a major war in the Far East or they, you know, those forces weren't present before the outset of hostilities in 1950. You know, the

in the aftermath of Korea, You know, the Department of Defense, it asked for the defense budget to be tripled, and it got its way. And it truly integrated military alliance developed in Europe under American Supreme Command. I mean, that's built in NATO, it was the Korean War. Before that, there was, you know, talking about European defense community, there was real hostility to the idea of American forebeing in any real, you know, numbers remaining in Europe. But I'm not saying it's a good thing that this is what happened. But in terms of, you know, relative power between the United States and the Soviet Union and what began the Warsaw Pact, this really just really changed things and skewed the strategic landscape against the interests of the communists, I believe.

It gave the United States a certain credibility in terms of multilateral action, or at least the appearance of it. You know, it basically Congress gave a blank check to Eisenhower subsequently, you know, to beef up these client regimes, you know, in Africa and the East and in the Orient, you know, and throw huge amounts of hardware at them. And, you know, this was, this was the catalyst, really, for the, you know, for American Special Warfare. I don't like Kennedy gets all the credit for that, you know, and that's why, you know, the spec war centers, you know, literally named for him. but, you know, this was really, like, like, Spec War and Special Operations really became a thing, you know, during the Eisenhower era, you know, and this ode to the experience of Korea and things like that. And Stalin, Stalin had been, Stalin really did not want the Korean War to happen. I mean, he didn't have any problem with it. He greenlit it when, when Mao was able to convince him, but when Mao and Kim Il-sung were able to convince him that, you know,

victory would be rapid. And initially, I mean, it did appear that that would be the case. You know, the, the, uh, the, uh, Republic of Korean forces got pushed back to Busan. And the perimeter was this tiny little corner, literally the Republic of Korea, um, until, uh, I mean, those guys fought, fought hard. I'm not putting shade on, on the South Koreans. But I mean, you know, they, they were, they were, they were totally routed. Um, it wasn't, uh, it wasn't until, you know, the, the inshont landings, you know, cut the country in half, basically. And, um uh that you know the american and uin forces essentially fought this kind of desperate rear action and uh and pushed the communists all the way back um like literally to the yellow

river i mean obviously that you know that's what triggered intervention by the the red chinese but but um but point being um you know this was not despite with someone like the the cold the cold war hawks alleged this is not schnaling like you know sitting in moscow you know trying to you know go to America into this Asian war, you know, whereby then, you know, the Soviets would have an opportunity move on Berlin or something. Like that was, and then, but it just, you know, didn't go as planned. Like, it's not what happened at all. But, you know, the, what Stalin was really doing, in my opinion, is Stalin realized that the Soviet Union needed China, okay? The Soviet Union needed China as much as the United States needed Western Europe. Because what became the Warsaw Pact, this was, this

not some sort of, you know, equivalent to Western Europe or some sort of equivalent to the, you know, the capital base and resources, human and material that, you know, America and the U.K. had in NATO. Really, all the Warsaw Pact was, with the exception of East Germany, was a defense court on. You know, it was literally space wherein, you know, the right army could deploy in depth to protect itself or to stage, you know, what they characterize as a preemptive assault against NATO, you know, occupying.

occupying Poland with hostility you know creating like a client regime in Bulgaria like this these things were not profiting the Soviet Union and these things were huge drains okay but what the Soviets had was the Soviets had China

and even though China was you know very very underdeveloped at that time in power political terms you know pure military terms there's incredible power potential and frankly a communist block that's literally

from uh you know from berlin uh uh to uh to haninois contiguously i mean that that's a good that that's about that's about a fifth of this planet okay um just the just the just the raw kind of geostrategic momentum of that is incredible so um this uh this uh this uh that was a lot of what underlay kind of this this the apparently on its on the service kind of odd posture that Stalin had head towards the Chinese and the Chinese war against the Americans. But it also, it did lay the foundation for the sign of Soviets split because the Soviets were not generous and their material support of China. And they very much made it clear that, you know, they viewed China as their client regime.

And they would not, Stalin would not commit to a proportionate response if America deployed, you know, atomic weapons. you know, what they were then as is atomic bombs, you know, against the Chinese. And don't get me wrong. I mean, Mao himself, who I think was something of a crazy person and somewhat primitive, frankly, of mind, I do believe he was basically plain spoken. And he said no in certain terms that, you know, the, you know, the reason why, you know,

Peakein would not give its loyalty to Cruikov is because Cruikov was not the man that Stalin wasn't, you know. Stalin was a remarkable figure. I mean, whatever else we can spell them. But my point being that, you know, the man with Stalin at the helm, the kind of relationship I just described, you know, characterized by the Chinese being very much subordinate to Moscow, grudgingly the Chinese would have accepted that under Stalin.

They would not accept that under, you know, under some apparatus like Cruzef or under, you know, some kind of, under some kind of you know octogenarian dictator like the version of but that's about outside of the scope of what I wanted to cover here

what it did and what it did do on the communist side in kind of like the victory column as it were I mean China did fight the United States to withstands still and I mean that was no small thing

okay I mean yeah the Chinese had certain advantages on the ground but America then had tremendous military might. You know, it was a huge disparity in technology. The Chinese absorbed huge casualties. But, I mean, that, you know, that, that emboldened Hocheon,

that emboldened Paul Pot, you know, that emboldened, you know, that emboldened 100, um, insurgencies, you know, on every continent that, you know, the United States is not invincible. you know um and that uh i think that i think that i think i can't really be overstated and you know when people the people i kind of substantiate my claim that you know the soviet union really

you know kind of developed a not so subtle credibility problem and in uh in in in the wake of the Korean war you know it was it was a year before Stalin died it was March 10, 1952 you know Stalin died basically right after Cessation of Hostilities in Korea. And it was we talked about the Stalin memo or the Stalin note last time.

You know, what was called the peace note and some of the European media. So later on, you know, when kind of the comments this weren't publicized. But, you know, Stalin's notion was a demilitarized Germany you know, as a neutral zone.

you know, Germany being retained a kind of nominal military force under its own authority, but, you know, all, uh, all troops, you know, gone from German soil and a, you know, and a, and a, and a, in a, disjury neutrality enforced on Germany. How that would be enforced, I was never really clear because negotiate and reached that point.

I would assume, you know, some kind of UN man would have been, would have been you know that it was it was managed but be as it may um there's a reason what you don't i mean yeah obviously the soviet union their big their their big problem was uh you know the strategic amount so on the fact that you know nato was at their doorstep what became natal and then you know was at their doorstep um i realize natal was was uh incorporated in 1999, but it was about 10 years, in my opinion, before it became a truly, you know, like, integrated comedy at force, other than just, you know, kind of, you kind of a mandate for, you know, operate within the borders of these, at least nominally sovereign states. But, you know, the reason, you know, the reason why Stalin, um, made the effort when he did, you know, if the Soviets were in this great kind of position of strength and, um, you know, in, uh, in power political terms, you know, if the Korean War was, you know, really going their way and really kind of, uh, you know, breaking the face, not just a Truman, but of, uh, of the entire, the entire kind of Cold War, uh, apparatus. I mean, that, that would not, that's not what he would have been doing. But, um, the, uh, it's also to the fact that, I mean, it was doomed to fail because, I mean, this was, this was submitted in a mere eight months before the president of election, you know, and it, uh, I realize, you know, I realize Eisenhower wasn't any arch war hawk, but he was, he was a military man, and he was, he was viewed, you know, kind of as, the Soviets were afraid of him, number one, and that's, that's all, that's an interesting topic into itself.

But point being, for better or worse, regardless of what everybody feels about Eisenhower in history, you know, like he was, he was viewed as the man to wage the Cold War, okay, and that's really what kind of catapulted him into office. but even taking Eisenhower out of the equation obviously eight months out from a from a presidential contest nobody's going to nobody's going to be willing to

undertake some kind shift in a in status of relations with the Soviet Union in 952 of all of all years but

what I want to kind of segue what I want to kind of segue into is the person of Conray at Adonauer. Like before I said a recording, I said I wanted to get into the culture of the Bundes Republic and how they came about and why it came about. Do you understand that? You've got to understand

Adnauer. You know, Adnau was the first he was the first post-war chancellor. I mean, if you consider West Germany, Ben, you know, like the real Germany or whatever and, you know, the successor state of

the German Reich. um you know he was he was the first post war chancellor and if you reject that which i i don't think people do with some might um i don't i don't get to the current german state he particularly legitimate for that but in terms of you know linear political um uh legacy it i i think i don't think it's controversial to i don't know if i add now as the you know as the first uh real post uh war executive but he uh i know it was an interesting guy and it's kind of fancying to me that he was the man selected for the role

but it makes perfect sense and it goes to show you how America at one time had a real political class of men who really really understood kind of the nuances of power politics and you know the kind of deeper implications of

um of what of what uh of what chiefs of state represent um both the the people whom they ruled but also to, you know, allies and foes alike. And that was a perfect example of that. Ednaud was born in 1876.

So he took office when he was 73. He stepped down when he was 87. I believe that makes him the oldest European head of state in the modern era. Patan, I think, was 84, 85. I mean, Ann Arna was a remarkable guy. and now he was born in the Catholic Rhineland, okay, and he was born literally, you know, with the kind of zenith of Bismarck's Couthertomph. And for those that don't know, you know, Bismarck, the kind of Arch Prussian Protestant,

he did not trust Catholics. He purged Catholics from the kind of civil apparatus, which by that point was quite robust. You know, Prussia was really kind of a modern state. you know they had uh they did kind of the you know real pension system um if they i mean is anybody who can make like a kind of welfare state apparatus work it's the germans and they did um that can't be argued the i'm not a particularly i'm not some big government uh you know teensian type or anything at all but even you know i stipulate that um pressure ran with uh with true, you know, kind of military efficiency and all the best, you know, in almost laudable ways.

But one of the things Bismarck did was he very much purged Catholics from positions of authority. And it was, it wasn't brutal in the sense of, you know, Catholics weren't rounded up and shot or something and weren't availed to, you know, the physical violence. but they really were locked out of political and cut fairs for all practical purposes. And this made a huge impact on the Ann Arroy. Not only because he was a Catholic, but his family was very politically engaged. You know, Adnower himself, obviously, this is, you know, was his career path. He considered this, you know, very, very unjust because he actually was devout. you know um edinor was not um his catholicism was not superficial and it wasn't just

it wasn't just um you know kind of a like a perfunctory uh um identitarian signifier you know he was very very catholic um and uh he found his way uh to the uh to the center party you know way which was the catholic party you know really of uh um of the It was 1905, 1906, and now we're, it was like the city council of Cologne. A few years later, it became the vice mayor of Cologne. You know, he was considered a son of a political prodigy, okay? And he, again, too, he wore his Catholicism on his sleeve, but he was respected pretty much by everybody. I mean, even by the, even kind of the most dedicated portion.

like culture warriors you know everybody everybody respected him you know he was a man of um of high integrity okay um he uh he was adamantly opposed at political extremism but not in not in kind of the way that you know karl smit disdained you know the he was not the kind of the parliamentarian who believes in endless discussion and superficial compromises um edna really did believe that you know, the cunning of reason in history and, you know, kind of the mind of God is what is what guides politics and, and men are kind of limited participants in affairs of state. It, you know, he, uh, he was dedicated to rooting out disorder, inefficiency, irrationality.

He was very much a moralist. You know, he had no tolerance for corruption. But he, uh, you know, he had, uh, he had no time for, for ideologies of, of the right, as well the left you know um it uh i think uh i think of him as somewhat like uh i think he had something kind of people like dulphus in austria okay um frankly um he wasn't a sensible centrist yeah yeah but an authoritarian when called for but also again too i mean very not not at all secularist you know very very much you know catholic in his orientation and and in uh in his evaluation of of them of what you know the metric is for good government but uh i mean

off just political culture is very different than the one um they had now emerged from and um the uh they kind of the kind of the kind of quasi clericalism or somebody like dulphus you know like, Adnar wasn't running around, you know, like, like, it's still in priests and in the civic apparatus, something like that, okay? But he, but he was, uh, he was not at all kind of the secularist parliamentarian, like I said, that, um,

that people sort of associate with, with, with, you know, compromisers, the, of the, um, the, of the, um, the Kaiser Reich and the, and the, and the, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the, the kind of toxic parliamentarism that, that Schmidt lamented. I mean, yeah, obviously,

reached zenith in Weimar for obvious reasons, but this kind of thing in its root Heiserich, you know, like it really, it really did, and that's important to bear in my mind. And also he became, he became nationally known. During the Great War, he, uh, he involved himself, you know, as, um, as, uh, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, He involved himself very much in managing Whatever's remedy, you know, food shortages, board of the embargo It was an early like sausage derived from soy and things this These kinds of alternative food technologies

At an hour was responsible for getting that off-found You know, which was revolutionary in those days You know, he worked hand in love with the army and availing Cologne as a base of supply and as a hub to reconstitute forces and things like this he really, really rose to the occasion and became something of a hero of figure

in the minds of people, not just in Cologne, but he became quite well-known throughout the Reich. However, he was somebody who became something of an intermediary between elements and Berlin, which is interesting. And when it became clear that the French intended to occupy the Prussian Rhineland, he had the Machiavillian notion of dissolving the Rhineland into a new autonomous state kind of like a demilitarized zone that would uh you know with the stipulation that the french

would would not occupy it and uh the foreign element would uh would set foot on its soil you know it being this kind of like you know nominal autonomous zone and uh both the Prussian governments and and um and uh and the bimer regime were totally against against any plan for bringing up prussia for the bimer regime and this at this was in 1919 so yeah i mean immediately before immediately after abdication the what remained of the right government was totally opposed to it but it was a point is that was very that was very forward-looking in its thinking and very much uh very subtle kind of it's um and it's cunning and that kind of became characteristic of Annauer um it uh he also to uh when it was the treaty of Versailles which was presented formally in june 1919 and Nower knew as anybody did was in the know that some sort of punitive regime was going to be coming down the pipeline and uh I think as idea was that you know the less kind of

like the more like devolved the Reich was like the harder would be to you know to kind of bleed it dry it's you can kind of indefinitely you can kind of indefinitely

tie up reparations regime if you know you have this kind of if you have a kind of evolved sovereignty you know in all kinds of ways so um it's uh he he he had germany's best interest in mind in these things he was doing um what was interesting is he uh he very much collided with um with gustav stressman and uh you know i've i made the point before i think in in our in one of our previous series that stressman was a compelling guy and i think he's not i think he's not really

given to. I think of M.O.S. is kind of the countervert to Ramsey McDonnell, who I think it's kind of an unsung figure in British politics. Ednaur looked at Strasseman as being too Prussian. He looked at him as you know, not not just

no arrival for the chancellorship because Ednaur did in fact covet the office, but he you know, he viewed his vision as fundamentally at odds with what was, you know, possible and feasible. And that's really kind of sabotaged and novice designs. The idea was, you know, for the coalition of the Christian crats and the

and the, and the center party, you know, to constitute the rule of and um adenauer true to forum he'd he managed to develop good offices with the social democrats as well um he refused to negotiate with the communists but he'd managed to decouple a lot of key figures of the social democrats from the kpd and um this caused a lot of consternation obviously on the left which was you know kind of a brilliant play by aden hour but it also it ingratiated you know certain people to him that you know moving forward would have facilitated a you know a real you know a coalition that actually had legs in terms of its ability to to pass legislation and and um and take you know executive take unilateral action when required and and have something of a mandate across the aisle

which was remarkable for 1926 but uh it has kind of is just personal collisions with uh with stress men, ended all of that. I mean, that could be a whole episode into itself. But what's significant again is when, you know, the National Socialist breakthrough in, or breakthroughs in 1930 and 32. Edna wasn't just Merrick Colon, but he was president of Prussian State Council. You know, and obviously the National Socialist, one of their key

constituencies, not because they had, you know, so strong to for a round, but in elite circles, they certainly did, but also just, I mean, you know, the Prussian the political uh, you know, the, like the, the political

core of, uh, the German Reich, um, defendant and not sat on the Prussian state council, um, meant that he was either going to have to some kind of, some, come to something to some kind of Concord of the National Socialists or stepped aside.

And, uh, interestingly, um, it, uh, went on the night of the long knives, Edna was actually arrested. And, uh,

allegedly for his own protection. And he wasn't harmed in any way. And he was released after the, um, after the, uh, you know, after the,

after the, after the dirty work of, or the, the, the bloody business of, uh, route the the revolutionaries was done

but he wrote a 10-page letter to Gehring who by then was Gallaud of Prussia and as well as the chief of the Prussian police you know he made the point of Gary and he said that you know when the National Socialist Party was banned I allowed your

people to fly your national flags and Prussian buildings I build buses of our public facilities you know, to the National Socialists so you could hold your meeting, you know, because I wasn't, I wasn't going to exclude

German people and, you know, veteran fighting men at that, which most of you were, from the political discussion, you know, and this is how you thank me is by placing me under arrest. And apparently this really kind of hit Gearing Hard. And according to Speer,

as well as others, and I don't get her spear to be a valid his testimony particularly valid on most matters, but on some things, because he has no reason to lie about it. I do, and according to Speer, Hitler

made the point that Nair was a good man, and regardless of our differences within him, our main national socialists, you know, we leave him alone, you know. And that's basically what happened. I mean, he was, and now refused to, he didn't, he, not only refused

to join the party, but he he you know he basically refused after his arrest he refused to kind of cooperate in any meaningful way okay so he was uh unceremoniously removed from all you know his remaining offices like appointed offices you know and uh you know told uh you're free to go by your business but you know have a nice life you've got nothing coming and adenar actually spent uh some time living in a monastery you know um and in later years he said that this is what he kind of had had, you know, he came to certain, you had certain, like, epiphanies about, you know, the German nation and, and, and what configuration of state was, was going to allow it to survive. The Germans survives the people and whatnot, which I think is basically true. You know, Ednaur was not some, he wasn't some intellectual or some student of history. He wasn't, he wasn't a guy like de Gaul or, like, Adolf Hitler. Um, you know, he is this kind of this kind of guy, Polestar, like we talked about, was his Catholic faith. Um, And, you know, kind of like a kind of a pragmatic sense of how to constitute a government, you know, that the Germans could live with as a people, you know, but that, you know, if not ideal, would allow their, you know, survival in perennial terms.

And at the end of the day, I mean, that's, that's what the function of a government is, is the guarantee of the posterity of a people. what the adenauer being the man that the allied occupation authorities essentially chose to lead Germany is fascinating and again it shows you how you know again at one time

however misguided the Asian regime may have been in you know just in pure in terms of pure competence like America at one time it had very very strong department state um very very tight intelligence apparatus that allowed it to identify you know who who you know

who you know who should be insinuated into these roles and i think within the boundary rationality of what america and in the uk and france wanted to accomplish in germany like ednaur's the only man who i think could have done that um and kind of finally what i had an hour had going for him their eyes, he was constitutionally anti-Russian and anti-Soviet. What he did say, when a few topics

he would kind of pontificate elaborately on in theoretical and historical terms was the relationship of Germany to the east, and specifically, you know, the relationship of the German state to Russia. And, you know, he said,

he talked about kind of, you know, what in his view was the love-hate affair of Berlin with with with with with russia and the russians and you know the kind of kind of kind of Machiavillian new wet um that you know kind of ultimately brings germany into concord with the russians and other times than odds depending on you know the depending on the characteristics the extent uh strategic landscape as well as the the internal political situation and uh and now are said you know that that's that that is now you know the russians are if not our enemies

they're certainly our adversaries you know we we're going to stand with the West and with Europe and with the Atlantis' Concord at all costs he refused to recognize the DDR at all

he said it's not a legitimate state you know he he denied that many diplomatic representation and I mean that probably is what more than any other single variable is what

is what kind of made Adonauer acceptable to the occupation authorities but it was everything taken together. I mean there was people who hated the Soviet Union and red diamond, you know, ambitious guys who hadn't been national socialist but who hated the Russians. I mean, it's

not like Ednauer had like a rare resume in that regard, but this kind of you had a rare credit be and an unusual sort of integrity, I think, that coupled with this sort of unconditional cold warrior stance made him kind of like the natural choice. But again, I mean, it's the fact that the fact that the men in charge could divinate that he was a natural choice

is a testament to the fact that, again, at one time America had a highly competent foreign policy establishment. What's in place now was literally completely illiterate. I just, I realize I'm going to be at that point again and again, people are probably tired of it, but it's something that can't be overstated. But, interestingly, too, you know, in our, he, uh, he said that people need to, he said, you know, Vermeux and SS veterans deserve to be respected and their patriots, and he, he said that, you know, we're not going to put, like, shame on these men. But interestingly, the reason why, um, Otto Reamer and Hans Rudell, who both were, uh, Riemer was he used to have the

Socialist Reich Party, you know, which was which in my opinion was the legacy party, the NSDP in real terms and they were pro-Soviet, they were nakedly anti-American and pro-Soviet and

he was very derisively referred to Adnauer as quote, Rabbi Adnauer and there was a lot there was a German right, the National socialist right who absolutely despise adenauer um but they that uh and i i understand completely like i get it but um it's not it's not as simple as adenauer just being like some natal lackey or some you know or some uh or some social democrat who uh you know who saw an opportunity

and you spent the war years you know um you know it's towing a longer you had to you know avoiding the front well also like avoiding the ire or the authority and suddenly, you know, he, uh, you know, he, you know, he started, you know, waving, uh, waving, waving, waving, waving a NATO banner as soon as, as, as soon as, uh, the Soviets were, uh, were in Berlin, um, you know, he, he had genuine integrity, okay, uh, I'm not gonna, like, I, I, I, obviously, my ultimate slides with guys like, rea, but, um, in, in history, I mean, but, uh, that's, um, that's, uh, that's, uh, that's, uh, that's, uh, that, that's, uh, that, that, I wanted to dedicate basis this entire episode to add an hour into the Senate C, because I realize something of a dry topic, but it's essential to understand. And it could have very much gone a different way. And I make the point about Korean War kind of building NATO, because, again, I realized NATO was constantly in 1949, but there wasn't really much to it then, okay?

And it still hadn't even been decided if, you know, Germany was going to be allowed to, permitted to, you know, rearm at all in any capacity. And then what kind of became the prevailing sensibility, you know, people make the point a lot that the, you know, the

the Western Army had such boring uniforms. That was by design because the original a concept being floated was a European defense community um wherein uh there'd be a common command structure you know no one state you know would

have uh would would would be dominant in um you know in an executive officer roles um or in command authorities and uh the you know the the uniform for the pose the multinational force it was supposed to be devoid of anything that could be affiliated with you know national sovinism or or something that could be like identified with any particular or country or cultural tendency. So you're left with the um

so the the Bundesphere like then is now it like these guys look like bus drivers or something. You know as opposed to like the East German army even if you're like dope you know, like all these times of so but it's um

you know it's uh it's um I think the key takeaway also, like I said, was that the, I'll get into later on in this series, too, the, like, ultimately, in the final phase of the Cold War, the key strategic battle, innovative strategic battle space was the Pacific. You know, and that's one of the things that underlay the Department of the Navy under Jim Webb, you know, and

Reagan's idea for a citizenship Navy, you know, the idea was, you know, to deploy battle platforms like survival battle platforms, to waive what amounted to a two-front nuclear war. We can think of nuclear war as having fronts at all.

But, um, that's, uh, that's, um, yeah, I mean, the fact that the people like, uh, people like, uh,

people like Kenan, uh, who talked about the inherent danger of the far east and they kind of and you know getting a flutty of

possible conflict I mean they were proven right I mean during the Cold War like Asia was pretty much always at war and I mean America fought two major wars there and probably have a dozen others that

you know were kind of a something short of you know open conflict but but very much not conditions at peace and I mean the there was a

I mean, that that wasn't happening in Europe. I mean, yeah, I realize, again, as I stated, that there was really only one conflict I had possible in Europe, and it was a catastrophic one. But that had the Korean War not happened or had it resolved some other way, the entire course of subordinates would have been different. And it had MacArthur got his way some kind of,

of a it's not going to open it at war with uh with and the problem is i mean i stipulate that um what was referred like we thought it was referred to the tautology of well you know we we've got to defend korea because our forces are there and we're going to fight to defend our forces i mean that's nonsense but if the alternative is you know we we've got to push for a total victory in korea but doing that means fighting china and fighting china means you know landing the Changashex nationalists there and waging war to the end until the communist regime falls.

Well, if you do that, then you're at war with the Soviet Union. You know, and then what... I mean, there's this... It's not... The Cold War was... It was important not to... Not as important, but I mean, and it was a question, it was an existential reality

that conflict paradigms couldn't just be considered in binary terms. And I mean, that even up through the 80s there was something too I'm not talking about like the fools like um who got to the kind of

you know the kind of peace movement just calling for like you know liberal to start I mean um but some of the people you know who really kind of like opposed the the the Reagan um uh and team B

notion um it's it was you know the Cold War and not something you can just turn off And it wasn't a question of, you know, pursuing a conciliatory posture or an aggressive posture, you know, especially by the era of deep parodies. Every policy decision had very serious consequences that themselves and other consequences, not all of which could be foreseen. You know, it was an incredibly dangerous time. But, excuse me, I'm just, I'm getting over a flare-out, so I realize that sound crummy. I'm sorry. you. But I'm going to wrap

I think that I think I'm going to wrap up this episode. And like I said, I realized it was a bit dry. It's kind of it's essential the Clay Foundation for some of the, you know, for some of the summit events we're going to talk about. And

we're going to get into the Cuban Missile Crisis in Vietnam in the next episode. And I think that everybody finds that sort of stuff exciting. I mean, at least I do, but you had also You had also mentioned talking about McCarthy. Yeah, yeah, we should. Let's take that up next episode, too,

because, yeah, obviously we're getting into, we'll get into Eisenhower era, into Kennedy era, yeah, about McCarthy, yeah. All right, sounds great. Give your plugs, and we'll get out of here. Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Pete. You can find me on Substack, Real Thomas-777.7.com.

that's where you can access the podcast. We drive a podcast every other week. You know, on the same kind of stuff, you know, revisionism and mostly political theory kind of topics. But, you know, I take up current events, too, particularly war and peace kind of stuff when it's timely to do so. You can find me on Twitter at Triskeleon Jihad. The T is a number seven. but if you search for Thomas 777, you should find me. That's mostly where I'm active these days.

I'm going to transition to YouTube and, you know, perhaps one or two other video platforms on the 1st of January and make that kind of the primary place where I post up content. But for now, that's where I can be found. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cignoness show, continuing talking about the Cold War. I know a lot of people are going to be really interested in this one. Thomas 777. How you doing, Thomas? I'm very well, thanks.

Yeah, I hope so. And I wanted to do some housekeeping stuff because I haven't addressed people directly for a minute. I mean, not like I've got this huge audience or something, but I do have some paid subscribers who are adult because they make what I do possible. not much has gotten done the last couple weeks because I was sick and stuff I think some of you noticed but obviously I'm getting back to dropping fresh stuff now I mean literally right now what we're doing here but I'm gonna drop a fresh pod this week and kind of get back on top of stuff so thank you for being patient I don't like to leave people I mean I realize everybody's cool about such things but I mean people do pay to like read my

stuff so I don't really like to leave them hang like that. But yeah, today, I wanted to get out of the Cuban Missile Crisis today because it's something, it's key not just understanding how the later Cold War developed. I think of the later Cold War is Brezhnev

onward, okay, and Brezhnev became General Secretary in in 1964, okay, but the early Cold War, you can think of as, you know, Stalin's tenure, through Mr.

Khrushchev's regime and not just temporally can we think of that as the early Cold War but that was before parity set in strategic parity and people bandy a lot about nuclear weapons today which is another example in my opinion

of how kind of disengaged the public policy discourses from the realities of things Um, nuclear weapons of a practical purpose is obsolete. Not because the technology is obsolete per se, but because they don't really have utility in a tad or strategic sense, outside of a very peculiar paradigm. And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on where you fall on the issue, that paradigm emerged splendidly in the 20th century.

And what's become sort of dogma in terms of strategic analysis and game theory derived from the precedent to the Cuban missile crisis, more than any other singular event. This was somewhat compromised reliance on the model that I just, you know, from relying upon the data derived. from the Cuban Missile Crisis and the models created therein in terms of strategic forecasting and nuclear war planning and deterrence and things like that. Some of that was itself rendered obsolescent by the emergence of deeper priorities after 1973-74.

But the basic terms remain and the basic conceptual model indoors. And I'm going to get into why it is in a minute. But first we got to understand, To understand the Cuban crisis, you got to understand the character of Mr. Khrushchev.

Khrushchev became, for all practical purposes, you know, chief executive of the Soviet Union in 1958. You know, I mean, there was always kind of a strange, not always, but in most cases, there was an unusual sort of consolidation of offices that constituted the executive seat of power in the Soviet Union. Sometimes that was a trifecta of sorts. Sometimes it came down to the rule of one man.

But it's super. seated uh it's superseded in single office okay um and after the death of Stalin in 1953 um there there was a lot of there's a lot of palace intrigues as it were okay as one I could probably imagine um between Stalin loyalists you know between and reformers as well as uh you know between men who represented uh some of these uh common to the same faction but you know who had personal designs on power and cruci if was emerging triumphant for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which, ironically, in the view of the West at the time, I believe, and even in hindsight, and even amongst some revisionists,

you know, Khrushchev really was something of a reformer. You know, he was kind of a proto-Gorbachev in a lot of ways. People who cited this because his posture was so aggressive in foreign policy as regards efforts to rectify the strategic imbalance. And we'll get into what I mean. mean by that in a moment. But Khrushchev, he wanted to normalize the Soviet Union. Okay. Now, this presented a problem were a few of the reasons. On the one hand,

it was imperative for him to normalize and thought relations with the West, because otherwise nothing was going to get done. Okay, there was going to be some kind of interdependence between the East Block and the West, okay, regardless of what anybody's power political ambitions were.

Okay, that was just the reality of nascent globally. I mean, make no mistake, globalism began in the ashes of the second war, okay? The fact, it wasn't realized until, you know, the night of November 9th, 1989, and subsequent is incidental. This was the enterprise common to both Moscow and Washington, and would form that the system would ultimately take once consolidated was really what underlay the political side of the Cold War. So, Crooge of had to present a face of a, of a, of a. normalcy of the outside world in some basic sense. However, as we talked about, particularly in the last episode, when we got into, you know,

the battleground of the third world and the need quite literally to, you know, to sway the non-aligned world into one's own camp as a path to victory in the Cold War. The only way to really animate these post-colonial states, in these developing countries to take up the cause of Marxist Leninism was a sell-in of them in a basically radical program, okay? That's what was resonant with the people on the ground. That's what the cadres had been marinated in, that kind of thought, you know, during World War II and after.

Frankly, that's what Orthodox Marxist-Leninism is. You know, it calls for the development of a truly revolutionary sensibility where, you know, power flow is from the barrel of a gun, quite literally, okay? In tactical terms, somebody like Mao was far more an orthodox Marxist than, you know, the Eastern Bloc cadres that succeeded Stalin, okay? So I'm notwithstanding the fact that I don't believe Mao would any great understanding of Marxism. I don't think you understood it at all, particularly. But on the tactical side, a political revolutionary, somebody like Mao,

or probably more precisely Ho Chi Men was exactly what Lenin envisioned when he when he when he when he when he when he when he when he when he contemplated you know world world socialist revolution okay so there was this weird dichotomy wherein the Soviets had to present a reformist based to their chief adversaries in the west but you know they had to maintain a kind of aeneer of a of orthodox radicalism you know to their constituents if we can think of them that way or their cadres you know in the third world and um this was a very delicate minuet and uh it frankly led the foundation of the sinus soviet split um which we'll get into in coming episodes but that's a bit outside the scope for now but um when cruciv did take the helm of the soviet union the soviet union had some pretty substantial momentum technologically they were arguably winning the space race you know sputnik was uh was the first uh was the first manmade object in orbit. The first manmade object in space was a V2 rocket.

So you're going to thank the German Reich for that. But, you know, Sputnik was a, this was a big deal, okay? Like a lot of people in the nascent Pentagon at the time said, well, this is just a stunt. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't prove anything. It didn't matter if it proved anything or not. It didn't matter if, you know, there was a direct military application, you know, the parking a satellite in orbital space for a few minutes. The point is that they were the first to accomplish it.

And this developed the kind of momentum all its own in terms of perception. Okay. But the Soviets had a real political problem that became a national security problem that was ongoing, even despite those victories in this era. We talked about the Berlin airlift last episode and, you know, how that really kind of was the key initiatory. instigating event of the Cold War, I think, if we can identify any singular occurrence. Between 1945 and 1950, over 1.5 million people emigrated from the Soviet-occupied zone to West Germany. And most of these people were young. They were prime working age.

It is a disproportionate amount of engineers, men with military experience, people educated in the sciences, women of childbearing age. I mean, this is a real problem, okay? A subtext to the issue of immigration across the inter-German border, a little was never explicitly stated by their camp, was one of the reasons Germany's coveted, it's not just because of geostrategic accident and kind of where Germany is located on the map, okay? It had to do with the human material, okay?

You can control the German population, that literally the human resources they're in that you wield tremendous power in terms of your ability to mobilize for warfare. I mean, that's just a fact, okay? I mean, if people want to say that it's not true or that's eugenics thinking, okay, fine. You can label it whatever you want, it's a fact,

and everybody accepted it, okay? There's a reason why the DDR was the Jew and the Crown of Warsaw path, okay? And it wasn't just because it was the westernmost point at which the Soviet sphere of influence stretched. As this went on, another layer was insinuated into the issue of divided Germany. As the forepower regime fell apart, and it became clear that demilitarization was not, in the cars um the soviets came to realize that was germany as a basing hub for for american nuclear weapons was was going to become the reality and this had already been accomplished um

in terms of low yield tactical nuclear forces um it hadn't escalated beyond that um in part because uh the strategic balance was still unstable and we're going to what i mean by in a moment but uh the soviets were very very aware of this um so the problem was twofold you know the problem was the fact that they were literally hemorrhaging people um by the sieve that was berlin because the the inter-german border had been shut since nineteen fifty three but berlin being 110 miles within east of germany uh represented a kind of uh it it represented a kind of metaphorical valve, as it were, wherein people could pass rather

freely between the eastern occupation zone and the West. And once in West Berlin, the West Berlin authorities under the dominion of the United States, the UK and France, they considered all German citizens. It'd just be

citizens at Germany. They did not recognize East Germany as a sovereign state. So if people with East German passports made it to West Berlin, like they were good to go. They, you know, they'd be granted full rights of the many bailes in the Bundes Republic. So

there's the practical problem of of the Soviets losing the human material they needed to wage the cold war quite literally. There's the political problem of credibility, you know, in that, you know, if

you claim to represent the real Germany and the, you know, the will of the work class in the government situate in East Berlin, yet you're hemorrhaging people. It's a terrible look, frankly. And the entire communist enterprise, again, relied upon the perception, especially in the third world, you know, to represent a competitive system that was an equitable alternative to that in the West.

And finally, as I just indicated, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the permanent division and mobilization of of uh of uh of of of germany uh essentially uh allowed uh america and uh the nascent natal alliance uh to potentially uh maintain a uh permanent uh splendid first strike capability you know if they chose to deploy uh strategic nuclear forces at that time there were not hypersonic cruise platforms available so we'll get into that later obviously but uh the solution of this was somewhat fascinating. There was a terrible human cost, so I'm not being flippant. But on August 13, 1961, at midnight, the East German border police,

the National Volks Army, and elements of the group of solely forced in Germany, it begins construction on the Berlin Wall, okay? And it wasn't clear at first what they were doing. Ubrecht had actually suggested this based on analysis from National Volks Army Engineers. The Soviets did not think it was possible. And the Pentagon, interestingly, and the Army Corps of Engineers said it's probably impossible.

But to emphasize the point I just made about the mentioned material, if you will, of Germany, well, the Germans found a way to quite literally wall in West Berlin. which again I'm not making light of a terrible situation but the Berlin Wall remains an architectural marble that really I don't think I don't think anybody could pull off other than the Germans and I think we can stand by a statement and confidence so that had the effect of lessening tensions you know, there wouldn't be another Berlin airlift type situation, you know, absent a state of general war, it was unthinkable that Berlin would be blockaded again.

However, that didn't obviously accomplish anything in terms of remedying, you know, the problem of, of basing availability in West Berlin. And, I mean, obviously, what's key to keep in mind is that, okay, I mean, the Soviets could base their own, nuclear forces in the DDR, and they could threaten Europe with the threat of a catastrophic nuclear assault, but that wouldn't matter. Like, what it came down, it was the ability to deter a threat in the United States. And obviously, the Soviets had no capability to do that, which is why Cuba became so coveted. now before we get into the actual uh development of the crisis let's get into what prevailing conceptual models were for uh for strategic planning in the nuclear age okay the two primary models um were presented by hans morganthau um who i think i referenced in the last episode you know

morganthau was a traditional realist um meersheimer is a neo realist you know as i indicated he deals with and dealt primarily in structures and institutional features and how they affect outcomes as regards as, you know, as regards deterrence and war fighting. You know, Morgenthau, he basically presented an anthropological model, buttressed by what he called rational discipline in action. Like, what did he mean by that? He was saying, what he was basically saying is that, you know, the bounded rationality to states said war, or political

actors generally. They don't even have to be states. So states obviously are the primary actors in power political affairs, you know, at least from 1648 to the present. That's changing, but it's still indoors. You know, regardless of how pre-rational or even arguably irrational

the origins of war are, like when it's underway, you know, war is guided by this bounded rationality, okay, the waging of it. um it begs the question as to how uh you know as as as as the how as the way this has been demonstrated in historical record like an agglada morgan that i would say well over time you know there's there there's a remarkable continuity okay if you're talking about great powers at war whether you're talking about the british the united states you know russian foreign policy you know even less of regional powers like the austringarian empire you know in the west phalian era at least over time you this bears out, okay? The competing model, I mean, maybe not so much competing in absolute terms, but the kind of game theory model, you know, that relies more on codable variables, if you

were, if you will, you know, based upon, you know, the availability of warfighting technologies was kind of was presented by Thomas Schelling. Shelling was primarily an economist, but he was a game theorist, and he was a public intellectual of the sort that really, really thrived during the Cold War, and it doesn't really exist anymore, at least not in public life. Shelling's old point was that deterrence is accomplished, you know, not by the propensities of the individual men who are the human decision makers, you know, nor by that relative balance of forces on each side, but the stability there. in and the stability they're in comes down to available technologies and uh in the nuclear age that it comes down to the ability of uh each side to basically threaten the other um with a retaliatory strike when attacked that you know makes uh a bolt from the blue assault cost prohibitive you know um unacceptable damage will be endured in other words okay showing seminal tax was the strategy of

conflict, okay, throughout the Cold War, this kind of a informed policy and some, either more, either directly or obliquely, literally until 19, until the night of November 9, 1989. Shelling's a controversial figure about his influence can't be, cannot be denied. Now, based on both, based on either of those models, or both of them considered together, 1962, really 1960 to 1963 was so dangerous because there an equilibrium had not yet

sit in. There's a lack of informational awareness on both sides as the absolute state of forces in being and capabilities even even if even if that awareness had been even

Even if those blinders could be, as it were, it could be overcome. I mean, even if there was a situation, a total information awareness, there's the availability of delivery mechanisms and whether, you know, their operational status would have caused a situation where it could have served either side's interest to strike first without waiting for, you know, an intelligence reveal. you know, as the absolute status of forces on the opposing side. One can think of two men blindfolded, and neither is aware of the arm into the other,

and whether they're trying to draw a bead, you know, to threaten the other to deter future hostile acts, but neither is capable of seeing, you know, his opponent, you know. And that's really what, in part, created, you know, the danger of the Cuba situation. Now, how it first came about, like, why Cuba, again, and more to do with the accident in geography. As early July 1962, Raul Castro, who was Phil's brother and was, in some ways, the shadow foreign policy executive of Cuba throughout the Cold War. Summer 1922, he visited Moscow, and it's believed that this is when the Soviet Union began, large-scale shipments of the tech, of, technical and military aid to Cuba, you know, including men who were qualified to, you know,

to operate, you know, strategic nuclear platforms. August 1962 is probably when, it's probably when the actual missile platforms arrived in Cuba. They were not yet operational, but this is when, you know, this is when the disassembled components. first arrived on the island um september interestingly um the uh the kennedy administration declared that um if qa became a base for uh soviet nuclear weapons uh it would it would be viewed as an act of war um so this was on everybody's mind before uh the crisis before before the crisis ensued and before the uh reveal of uh of the actual basing of weapons on the Island. This gives you an idea of the dangerous game

Cruciff was playing, frankly, okay? Now, it was Sunday, October 14th. That's when the famous or infamous YouTube reconnaissance flight took the photographs that ultimately led to the reveal. It was the subsequent Monday the 15th that, conclusively at the national photographing interpretation, Center. The YouTube film was analyzed and

medium-range ballistic missiles were identified near San Cristobo, without a doubt. Now, thus ensued the most dangerous phase of the crisis. Tuesday, October the 16th, Kennedy, and his principal foreign policy cabinet were briefed on the situation. And discussions began immediately on how to respond. Now, obviously there's two principal courses. I mean, there's three. I'll get into that in a minute. But in terms of action, the two principal courses were, you know,

a massive air assault, possibly including nuclear forces and a subsequent invasion of the island. You know, the destruction of the weapons platforms, the overthrow of, you know, the defeat and utter annihilation of the Cuban army, the overthrow of the Castro regime. and the occupation of Havana, which undoubtedly would, you know, lead to the deaths of, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, including, you know, any Soviet soldiers on the ground. Or, alternatively, sort of a naval quarantine blockade and the threat of future military action. Now, interestingly, McNamara was the man who had the third position, if you want to look at it that way. McNamara said, don't do anything.

This doesn't matter. why doesn't it matter because uh you know these intermediate range platforms are going to be obsolete in six months and um which was true you know and america was about to replace their own jupiter missiles with the polaris system you know which was a submarine launched ballistic missile um platform and even with that not the case. McNamara said, you know, despite propaganda to the contrary

and despite crucible's own statements, you know, the Soviet Union probably has between 30 and 80 viable warheads. Okay, we get into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we can annihilate them. I mean, yeah, you know, 20 million Americans may die, but that's a war that Soviets can't win.

Do nothing. But that wasn't really the issue. the issue was twofold I mean there's the Monroe Doctrine obviously and that always is controlling on questions of

a power political affairs just on principle you can't allow a rival actor to deploy within the Western Hemisphere I mean if you do so it's you you're essentially making hash with your own line in the sand as it

It doesn't matter that, you know, the, I mean, even if the weapons deployed are already obsolescent, it, you know, it doesn't matter. And secondly, you know, as a matter of a political will, if America won't fight 90 miles off its own coast to prevent the deployment of strategic nuclear forces, a credibility gap develops as to whether America is going to fight and sacrifice 100,000 men to defend West Berlin. I mean, God love McNamara, but

there's, you know, there's a calculus beyond the merely strategic that matters in these things, and particularly in the Cold War, which was as much political as it was a military contest, and, you know, about, you know, who could accomplish what

within, you know, the proverbial balance of terror. On October 17th, before a formal policy decision was reeked, Kennedy ordered what we consider to be rapid reaction forces to be moved to bases in the southeastern U.S. Further U-2 flights and the photos derived there. and indicate additional sites, and a total of 16 to 32 missiles. So, in other words, even taking with McNamara said at face value, which I believe, which Kennedy did, and which I believe we can, and, you know, upon reflection, obsolescent or not, if those missiles are operational, that's the potential for an utterly devastating countervalue strike was

definitely there. You know what I mean? This was not an illusory threat. However anyone feels about it. And the character of Castro is is relevant too. You know, Castro, whatever can be said about him was a true revolutionary

in the purest sense. And he repeatedly stated that, and this was revealed later, in communications between himself and and the Soviet Foreign Ministry and

Khrusha's office itself that in the United States assaulted Cuba, the Soviet Union should go all in and, you know, just treated as an act of war against the

communist bloc and launch of our missiles within operation. Decades later, at the height of the conflict in Nicaragua, Castro was convinced that the United States was going to directly intervene

which might trigger a theater-wide conflagration, and he reiterated that the Soviet Union and the wars up pact, you know, should consider a, you know, waging preemptive nuclear war against against NATO. I mean, he really believed this. You know, this wasn't, you know,

it's easy to dismiss that as so much bluster in the case of many men. Like, Cassio absolutely meant that, you know, I mean, I have no doubt about that. So consider that. There's a question as to whether or not, you know, what the Soviet response would have been, if there was a massive invasion of Cuba. I mean, there's, it's more than a real possibility that, you know,

they would have responded by launching whatever munitions that were currently operational, okay? And again, even if that, you know, even if that, even if that was a war, the Soviet Union could not win, And that would have meant 20 to 30 million dead Americans, you know, within hours. Thursday, October 18th, Kennedy was visited by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Grameko, who asserted that the Soviet Union to Cuba was purely defensive. Kennedy had not yet revealed that he knew of the existence of the missiles. He reiterated his public warning of the previous September, you know, that deployment to Cuba of strategic nuclear forces would constitute an act of war, basically he was signaling to give Grameko an out, I believe, okay? And this also raised the question as to why didn't Cruz should try to de-escalate when it should have been clear that Kennedy was signaling.

through a kind of, you know, would pass for secret diplomacy in the post-Norberg era. Why didn't why didn't, why didn't, why didn't, why didn't, why didn't, why didn't, why didn't, try and de-escalate the situation?

I've got my own ideas on that. Um, but what's an arguable is why, uh, why Prusia deployed these weapons in the first place? When, as we just acknowledged, you know, and as,

as, as, as, at the time observed, you know, this actually didn't rectify the strategic balance, imbalance on its own terms, and it had the potential for catastrophic escalations. So why did he do that? I believe that this was supposed to be his Trump card as regards Berlin. I believe that Cruciff was going to demand on the open floor of the United Nations that NATO abandoned West Berlin

and when and and when Stevenson or whoever would just say it's laughable of course we're not going to do that at that moment cruise shift would reveal well we've got operational weapons platforms in Cuba 90 miles off your coast

if you want them to be removed you know you'll you'll see Berlin to unconditionally our sphere of influence which seems like a craziest hell idea, but Khrushchev was a gambler, you know, for all of his for all of his tendencies towards reform and a conciliatory posture in absolute terms. His, uh, he viewed none of this as being truly possible

in power political terms unless the Soviet Union could negotiate, you know, from a position of, uh, if not, absolute, you know, than relative strength. That's what underlay all of this. It was always a political ploy more than a strategic move, if that makes any sense. And that's key not just understanding the Soviet Union in its epoch, but I think the kind of Russian national character. Like, I don't speak Russian.

I've never visited there. I'm certainly not an expert on Russian people, their culture, their affairs, but I do know something about power politics, and I think that's, I think, I think this is key, okay? Putin himself is something of an unusual executive, even for Russia, but generally in structural terms, what the Kremlin does, reflects this. same kind of tendency in common I don't want I think that's constant it doesn't change oh

go ahead you're going to say something no no okay October 20th Kennedy finally decides on the quarantine plans are drawn up

to blockade the island of Cuba notify the American people and uh prepare for war if uh you know the so at union ops to sue for war to break the blockade um the uh during this time curtis lemay maintained um evocifiously objected and um you know i made the point again and again about you know the may being really kind of a towering figure in uh you know in um in uh you know really really throughout the cold war but especially just to divorce the man's personality and i mean think about kennedy

you basically it was waiting an uphill battle to kind of win the respect to the military establishment i mean he was a veteran and a war hero but he was even something of a punk rich kid on the beltway by many and back in those days i mean you had a lot more serious people who, you know, kind of carved out niches for themselves and the national security apparatus. You know, what we view is the deep state today. You know, you got Curtis LeMay, you know, demanding Kennedy given assault order, you know, backed up really by, you know, the entire Pentagon apparatus.

And in those days, you know, strategic air command was king. You know, it had very much eclipsed the army in terms of, if it's, you know, clout and policy and policy authority, you know, things like this. You know, I mean, whatever, I'm not some great fan of Kennedy at all. I think anybody should kind of instinctively discern who's at all familiar with my content. But, you know, the guy did, Kennedy, did have balls and he did have backbone, okay? They can't be denied. What really, what were really solidified Kennedy's position, though,

He consulted with General Walter Sweeney of a tactile air command who, you know, and, you know, going back to the Second World War, you know, the fighter mafia and strategic air command, like, had this kind of ongoing rivalry. I, there's military guys who claim, well, yeah, there's, you know, obviously, you know, Kennedy tapped Sweeney because he wanted to foil the whole. and may i don't think that's true i think it was because sweeney was the man who uh such that experts existed in those days on you know how to knock out um on how to knock out uh strategic nuclear platforms um you know sweeney was it um and sweeney said that you know that even even even of the best possible mission outcome he cannot guarantee 100 percent destruction of the missiles okay so again you know there's raised the question as to well i mean the moment there's a possibility that's not you know and it's it's greater than a slim possibility

that the moment cuba came under assault if these platforms were in fact operational the launch order would be given you know and who even knew the situation on the ground i mean one would hope that the uh soviet uh army technicians responsible for the deployment would have ultimate authority but i mean who's to say you know that can't be guaranteed and um Um, in a proverbial fog of war situation, um, expressly delegated authority doesn't always carry the day anyway. Monday, October 22nd, Kennedy consulted former president's Hoover, Truman, and Eisenhower, briefed them on the situation, you know, asked for their support if, in fact, the country, you know, was going to go to war. He received his, he received, you know, absolute blessing from all three men. he formally established, Kennedy did,

the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Young insisting of McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Curtis LeMay, Bobby Kennedy, who probably should not have been in on the conversation because he was the president's brother and there's a conflict of interest there, but he was, for better or worse. But that's, you know,

the smoke-filled room with all the personalities mentioned. I just mentioned present. You know, you see this dramatized on, like, History Channel stuff, like that's what they're depicted. They're depicting the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Okay. Ultimately,

Kennedy wrote directly to Khrushchev, which seems like a brief of protocol, but the Cold War was strange in this regard. You know, this really, in my opinion, I said the president, too. You know, there's like, people talk later in the

Cold War by the Carter era. It was the quote, you know, like Baffone or the red phone in the White House. That was the hotline of the Kremlin and vice versa. You know, this idea of heads of state directly connecting one another across the enemy divide and a potential crisis, like it seems improper in the traditional kind of laws and customs of war, but the Cold War in some ways was, you know, a breach precedent um but in that regardless of of that the merit of that or the efficacy of that or the effectiveness of of of neutralizing potential crises uh it was probably the correct move for kennedy to

directly write to cruise shift by telegram um and he did him uh he did this prior to addressing the you know the american people by television which was frankly like you know a sign of respect and allowing cruises a safe face um you know and uh the key uh the key phraseology of the telegram was quote i have not assumed that you were any other sane man would in this nuclear age liberally plunged the world into war what he was saying again was basically you know deployment to cuba is an act of war and i'm giving you an out here okay when i'm well within my rights as President of the United States simply to, you know, assault the island, neutralize the threat, and ask questions later.

And regardless of whether it's correct for Kennedy to directly address crucially to the man himself and not go to do diplomatic channels, that was the correct statement, I believe. So again, we've got to give credit or credit it is due to Mr. Kennedy, however else anybody feels about him. 7 p.m. that evening, October 22nd, that's when Kennedy speaks on television, revealing the existence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, announcing the establishment of the quarantine, and declaring that, you know, until the missiles are removed unconditionally and completely, you know, the quarantine will not be lifted. and failure to do so, you know, will constitute an act of war. Secretary of State Dean Rusk formally notified

the Soviet ambassador, which, again, that's not just part of good offices. It indicated the severity of Kennedy's statement. That's essentially what you do when incident, you know, proceeding a formal declaration of war, okay?

So that's another thing to consider as well also. Like we talked a lot about, even though I don't really accept the mere sermon model, about institutions determining, you know, the course of power political events and crisis outcomes, there is a momentum to the apparatus of government, particularly as regards war and peace. And one's kind of the mechanism of war mobilization is in place. It's very, very difficult to put the brakes on it. Okay. The fact that Kennedy was entirely serious about going to war, waging nuclear war over Cuba, that itself created conditions of escalation. I'm not saying that was the wrong thing to do at all. Quite the contrary, is the right thing to do. But this added to the danger at every step, decisions that are made that lead to real world outcomes in the national security apparatus and a state of readiness and deployment. um it creates uh an elevated uh creates an elevated danger okay um there's there's a sociological

question there's a complex question of you know man's relationship to technology i a lot of that stuff is like far beyond my abilities okay to analyze but what i just stated is indisputably true um um tuesday october 23rd following day um assistant secretary of state uh martin he uh started a resolution from the organization of american states um and the oas uh i mean these days we think of it as you know primarily like a trade block and things like that during the cold war obviously it had it had it had profound uh strategic significance you know because any if you were going to wage war in latin america which was a very real possibility throughout the duration of the Cold War.

A quorum of support from friendly regimes they were in was absolutely essential for obvious reasons. The Soviets proceeded to deploy submarines to the Caribbean Sea, which were facing off immediately opposite. the U.S. Navy blockade vessels which again too the indicated

a Soviet willingness to fight and to keep you know to fight at least defensively if Cuba was assaulted I mean, it became clear immediately that the Soviets were intending to fight for Cuba. Like, to what degree they're going to do that, whether the missiles were operational or not, you know, the Soviet Navy was going to fight. And that added another, that added another wrinkle, as it were, because even if the ballistic, even if the nuclear-capable platforms were not operational,

a conventional war in Cuba with the Soviet Union, obviously there was going to be some sort of response in Berlin, okay? I mean, and then it's, you know, you're, you're dealing with a potential conflict diet that will result in the Third World War at some point, you know, down, down a, down a range of, of, of hostilities. Wednesday, October 24th, Cruz had responded to the Kennedy telegram stating that the Soviet Union does not respond to ultimatums under threat, you know, stating, quote,

If we react, we ask these demands, it would mean guiding oneself and one's relations with other countries, not by reason or by submitting to arbitrariness. You are no longer appealing to reason but wish to intimidate us. Thursday, October 25th, was when the crisis could be said to have broke in some ways. Soviet freighters that have been bound for Cuba. Turned back to Bucharest. UN Secretary General, the UN Secretary General called for a, quote, cooling off period during which the embargo would be temporarily lifted, and, you know, only non-military prize would be permitted to pass through. This is rejected outright by the Kennedy administration on grounds that would leave the missiles in place, the removal of which was an express. condition of any negotiation Friday, October 26th, with the date of the infamous

casual letter urging Proustive to initiate a first strike against the United States in event of invasion of Cuba, whether Pruthiff responded or not, whether Ramego responded, whether the ambassador to Cuba had any sort of formal response from the Kremlin, it's not clear. But again, there's an inference that can be drawn here, I believe.

Not only the Cubans not have the authority to launch the missiles, I don't believe they were capable of it. There's an entire protocol to launching a nuclear missile. It's not just a question of pushing a button or having the right code. You know, like in the movies.

So the odds of just a general, like, counter-value assault, nuclear assault, if Cuba had been invaded, I think it's somewhat remote. I don't think I'm reading too much into this statement by Castro. I mean, this was a problem. private communication at cruciv like why would cash will be you know flexing

in that kind of private capacity like it doesn't it doesn't make sense otherwise you know you know what I mean like it yeah yeah but it um the uh finally and

finally uh resolution ultimately came when um cruif wrote a long rambling letter a second letter. A few drafts of which, when the Soviet archives were open, were found,

and leading a lot of people to believe that Cruze was drunk when he wrote or dictated it, which is probably true. It's not just, you know, some kind of punitive revisionist account. Like, Cruciv really was drunk and the execution of his official duties a lot. You know, which, in part, owes, you know, to his apparent instability. This was the source of the, of the quote, you know, demand that America pledged to not invade Cuba. Like, what, in power politics, what, just some open-ended pledge to not invade another country amount? I mean, that doesn't amount to anything.

Even as a face saving measure, it doesn't really make any sense. This is immediately followed up by a second letter from Moscow, which probably came from Gramego or from somebody in the Politburo standing committee, or it's equivalent. This second letter demanded actual conditions be met, primarily the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Now, Turkey and Italy were these Jupiter missiles were intermediate range ballistic missiles that have been deployed in, I think, 957, 57, 58, around there, maybe as late as 59, but I'd have to double check that. I'm sure somebody in the comments will rate me over the calls if I'm misstating the date. They're deployed in Italy and deployed in Turkey. As I said, at this point, there were not strategic nuclear forces based in West Germany. But the Soviets made much of this at the UN in their own propaganda and formal objections to Department of State.

But these Jupiter missiles were on the cost of being obsolete. lead. You know, like we talked about earlier, the Polaris submarine system was due to be launched within months, and it was ultimately fielded in 63, 64. And, um, so, I mean, this is basically meaningless. I mean, okay, as a safe face, as a face saving gesture, maybe it carried some weight, but I, I think the, I think Soviets were, uh, were still very much lagging. in terms of the technological gap as regards strategic nuclear delivery systems that changed dramatically in the 70s

for reasons we'll get into in subsequent episodes but this was the source of this was the source of the concession if you want to look at it like that to remove the missiles from Turkey and that that night

Robert Kennedy met secretly with the Soviet ambassador and they reached a basic understanding that the Soviet Union would withdraw their strategic nuclear platforms from Cuba under the United Nations supervision in addition to an American pledge this pledge not to invade Cuba

and a secret understanding, as it was referred to, to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey. And this, too, I believe, substantiates what I just said about the Soviets not really realizing that the Jupiter platform was going to be obsolete. Because, like, if it was just a face-saving measure, why wouldn't they make it public? Like, they thought these platforms were viable, and they thought they were getting something. you know it because the fact that it was the fact that it was not an above board concession

that defeats the entire purpose of any of any political theater that you know might have might have been utilized by way of it of such a gesture um now the problem with

uh that the problem was this in the view of people like LeMay but also in the minds of people like Shelling and frankly even people like Herman Kahn. There was a sense that eventually conflict with the Soviet Union was inevitable. Okay, and owing to the precedent of the 20th century, that seemed reasonable.

That wasn't just a warmonger's kind of fantasy. And it wasn't just, you know, something that, you know, cynical careerists in the national security establishment like to say or bandy about it because it rationalized, you know, the kind of clout they had. I mean, yeah, there was some of that, but if you were, if you were, if you were a middle-aged man in 1962, um, who, whose entire, uh, career had been as, uh, you know, in public service, um, directly insinuated in, in the national security establishment, like your entire, your entire professional life have been characterized by, by, by, by negotiating crises of, uh, of a basic national security and conditions of general warfare or crises short of but approaching general warfare. You know, this just seemed to be the reality of the 20th century strategic landscape.

So that being said, if eventually, you know, conflict is inevitable, you've got an obligation, you know, to defend the United States at all costs. And if that means preemptively, you know, waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, you know, to absolutely defeat them before strategic nuclear parity is accomplished, then that is in fact, you know, not just the moral thing to do, but that is what you're obligated to do incident to, you know, your office and the duties incumbent therein. And that was really kind of the, this underlay a lot of what was going on in, you know, the proverbial war. room, okay, around Kennedy. It wasn't just, you know, it wasn't, you know, like the way people like Oliver Stone characterize it, like these kind of crazy

Cold War hawk, war mongers, and you know, these kinds of men of, like, better nature, you know, saying, no, we're not going to go to war. Like, it's not, it's entirely the wrong way to conceptualize it. I mean, yeah, again, I don't have any illusions about a lot of these people at all. Like, there were

personalities, you know, insinuated in in roles the highest authority in the Cold War who definitely were like that, you know, who definitely did not have the national interest in mind. Or they thought they did, but, you know, they were clouded by, you know, matters of pride or whatever. I mean, I think a Thomas Power is being one of those types, frankly.

This is, but that's what's essential to keep in mind because, like I said, even people are somewhat, you know, sympathetic to, you know, politics of the right or, you know, revisionist's perspectives. You know, they continue to cast people like, uh, they're going to cast people like LeMay as, as, as what I just

said, these kinds of strange love or Jack D. Ripper type characters, but uh, it, uh, forgiving me if this was kind of dry. It was essential to um, kind of explain, like, how that entire paradigm developed.

of the Cuba crisis, and it's the shadow of it loomed large. I don't just mean, like, in metaphorical terms, but in terms of how policy was conducted as regards deterrence and

and the strategic balance in the Cold War. And this really endured until 1983. In 1983, it was so dangerous. You know, I mean, that's the Able Archer era. That's the way kind of Cold War historians think of it, but What preceded Abel Archer, and one of the things that, you know, created the conditions that led to the war scare was the threatened deployment of the Pershing II platform in West Germany, you know, which really was a game changer.

And, you know, the end of detat really kind of shattered the assumptions that it underlay, you know, deterrence from the Cuban Missile crisis. onward but it's a complicated issue but we'll get into uh we'll get into uh johnson vietnam and nixon next episode um nixon's going to take more than one episode but i will at least like get into uh nixon's first term um next time uh incident toward discussion of uh of johnson and vietnam and right i mean we'll see depending on how long you're willing to go but yeah we'll We'll get into some of that stuff. Yeah, yeah. And again, forgive me if this was a dry episode.

It was essential to kind of lay a foundation for what comes subsequent. No, I think this is a topic of interest for a lot of people. I can't let you go without mention and having you mentioned the Bay of Pigs. Yeah, it, I think what the Bay of Pigs owes to more than anything. I mean, the traditional kind of discourse on it, you know, it's like, do we blame, like, you know, the CIA and Department of State, or do we blame the president, the national security establishment? It's not that simple. There's a lot of, there's a long history.

I was reading about Angola a lot some years back, and, you know, one of the reasons why those poor guys who ended up serving under Callan got massacred, I mean, by the Cubans and by the Angolan forces. Like, Holden Roberto, he basically sold British intelligence and CIA a bill of goods, you know, about the reality of, like, forces and being on the ground and what they were capable of. The anti-Castro-Cuban lobby, similarly, they had their shit together a lot more than somebody like Mr. Roberto. But they had a lot more money, and they had a lot more flash, and they had a lot more kind of clout than they did actual capabilities. Okay. I think there was a lot of people, even in the intelligence community,

and I've got nothing nice to say generally about, you know, the CIA of the era. But I think they had, I think they had good intentions within the down irrationality of what they were trying to accomplish. And I think, yeah, maybe it was naive to think that they could accomplish what they set out to with what amounted to a skeleton crew. of a cowboy-type mercenaries and uh and self-styled uh you know and self-styled uh counter-revolutionaries but they also they underestimated the strength of uh of of of castro and the gameness of of the cuban army and this wasn't entirely clear until later like speaking of angola you know the cubans deployed 50,000 deep to angola they fought the south african defense forces which was a crack army you know and they met him head on um you know the

Cubans, the Cubans were basically constantly deployed throughout the Cold War. You know, like, they, they really believed in the murderers' winning its cause. Did, uh, would air cover have made a difference? I mean, I, I, it wouldn't hurt any, but I mean, I don't, this idea, too, it's like, okay, let's say, you know, let's say, uh, let's say this, uh, let's say this kind of like, you know, mercenary army, you know, had ground assault aircraft and an air cover all day. You know, Cuba wouldn't have just like, Tommy's Cube wouldn't have just like falling apart the minute like these guys marched on Havana.

I mean, the Cuba still was, I mean, Cuba, they're down for the cause. I mean, in this day, as much as anybody can be. I mean, I read it like that. I don't think it was realistic. It, the only, the only, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't think there's a military solution to the Cuba problem, you know, like there, I just don't. I mean, that's my take on it, like at a glance. And we can do a dedicated episode on it if you want. Um, there's a lot there. But that's just, uh, you know, I, uh, my point is it's like, I mean, even one of the reasons that, you know, and, like, jump, you know, to go a little bit outside the scope, but, you know, let's say the counterfactual developed that,

you know, we, I kind of touched on, you know, like, let's say that, you know, let's say America did assault Cuba in 1960, okay? And, and the, the nukes weren't operational and the Soviets didn't do anything in Berlin, and it didn't escalate.

It was just, you know, the Marines and U.S. Airborne Corps, or 18th Airborne Corps and, you know, and the U.S. Air Force pounding the hell out of Cuba killing half million people. You know, like, what, what that? Were you, I mean, affecting some

permanent hostile occupation of Cuba, like, would have been a bloodbath. You know, like, think about that. Like, that would have been a complete freaking mess. You know, like, I don't, I don't, I don't think there was a, I don't think there was a political, I don't think it was a military solution to it. One of the reasons why,

you know, I'm one of the few people, though I'm far from any kind of like Cold War Hawk in the study of history, as I think you know, but I consistently praise, you know, U.S. efforts in the cone of South America, and then later, you know, in Central America in the Panama Canal Zone, you know, to resist Warsaw Pact Ingress, because that was absolutely essential because that would have, in military terms, America was actively losing the

Cold War in the final phase, okay? And if Latin America had truly gone red in these key locations, that would have that would totally change things.

But notice what Nixon and then later Reagan administration didn't do is didn't go in heavy, you They went in with a very small footprint, okay, and they developed very effective counter-illusionary congregaries. You know what I'm saying? The conference weren't like nice guys or something, okay? Like, DeBuisin was not a nice guy.

Neither was general finishing, but they were effective guys, and they weren't just guys who were in it to, you know, get paid and advance their own, you know, kind of cloud and status. I mean, but my point is that, you know, the American national security apparatus treated it as a political problem, not as this like military exigency, you know, like, we're going to Nicaragua with 50,000 Marines and kill everybody. Like that, no, that, that, that, that doesn't work. So that's my, but it's complicated, and I'm not a military guy. But again, I, I don't, I, I, I, I, I, I, I don't think what I'm suggesting can be, uh, disputed in any kind of absolute sense. But yeah, that, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's my take on it at, uh, got a bad at a glance, or in short, rather.

One thing you said early on, about the million and a half, basically Soviets pouring into West Germany. Yeah. Those who hate Germany and want to destroy her have never stopped that attack, have they? Of just pouring foreigners into there to... No, I don't... And that's what's key, is that the... And that was, I mean, that was Yaqui's old point about the Cold War, okay?

Yachti's old point was that, look, yeah, East Germany is, is, is a horrible regime. In some ways, it's, you know, in, in some ways it's literally dystopian, but it's not going to be here forever, and it's not, it's not destroying, you know, the cultural and, and, like, racial foundation of the country, you know, like, you can weather that storm. Like you can't weather the storm of, you know, the U.S. NATO socially engineering Germany out of existence. I mean, that's what we're seeing today. You know, and that's what I constantly like, I constantly brush up against people, you know, not just online, but I mean that this happens to me in person when I'm in at venues where, you know, the issues being discussed. Like, I think I'm like defending Stalinism or something. Like, I'm not, okay, but that's not the point. You know, like, I don't see how this can be disputed anymore, okay?

It's like, you think, you think, um, I, you know, I mean, it's like, how can anybody, how can anybody dispute that? You know, I mean, it's, um, well, I mean, it's just like the, this, the state, I mean, that, that, that's, that's, that's the, you know, Yaki was, was a, was a genius because he was, you know, he was, he was writing about this in, you know, in, you know, in, you know, in 1958, 59 or whatever, like even before, you know, he wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't some guy like me, like, like, you know, looking at history in the interview mirror. you know, I mean, but look at, I mean, look at, look at the former East Block, okay, yeah, those states have terrible problems today, but they don't have the problems of some, you know, some crazy, of some crazy Zionist or, you know, elite or, or these, or these kinds of Davos types, you know, declaring that, you know, they, you know, we, we need to import as many, you know, third world populations as possible because, you know, this, this country's, you know, too orthodox or two kith. or, you know, or too white or too German. I mean, that's an existential problem that can't be overcome. Okay, like, if you've got a fucked up government in Romania or Croatia,

it's like, well, yeah, okay, government's not part of the world or he's fucked up. That's different than having, you know, a social engineering regime with endless resources that's trying to annihilate you as a culture and as a people. You know, like one you can handle the other you can't. I mean,

but I mean, I guess that's a topic for another episode or series entirely. But yeah, I mean, that's the issue with the Cold War. Nobody's... I mean, maybe there's some people claim that, you know, the East Block regimes were good regimes. I mean, I'm sure you can find some Marxist fossil at some college saying that.

I'm certainly not saying that, but that's not the point. You know, you've got to look at these things from outcomes. Yeah, there's. There's nuance there when you're... Yeah, yeah, yeah, say the least. Yeah. When you read, when you read Yaqui, especially when you read the enemy of Europe, you're experiencing nuance.

No, exactly. And it's also, let's take bear in mind, like, the Cold War by design wasn't supposed to happen. I mean, whether it's like, okay, even if you're this arch kind of like anti-communist and everything, it's like, well, okay. You know, the Cold War happened basically because the Concord fell apart. between Washington and Moscow, you know, and the idea was, you know, everybody in Washington who, you had any meaningful authority was perfectly okay with, you know, essentially half the planet being, you know, being under the, being under the heel of Stalinism. So it's either here or there, you know, like whether somebody like me in the historical

record is defending or condemning that system. I mean, you know, it, like the fix, was in, like, by America. Like, it's, these regimes didn't emerge out of nowhere. And, we're not for America. The, you know, communism would have, would have, would have been annihilated from this planet in,

in, in 1941. What the, but yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a great way to end it. Give your plugs. We get out of here. Yeah, for sure, man. You can find the podcast and some of my long forum on the substack. It's RealThomas-777.substack.com.

And once again, forgive my absence from producing fresh stuff the last couple of weeks. But I'm back in the saddle. I promise we'll be back to the regular kind of bi-weekly schedule. You can find me on Twitter at Triskelian Jihad. the t is the number seven it's one word otherwise um we're going to launch the YouTube channel uh January 1st I know that that's been long and coming um I decided to push it back to January a few weeks back because I want to do it right um and I've got a great production team helping me which is what I needed because I'm kind of a tech retard um and

at long last, Imperium Press and I found a printer for Steelstorm 2, so that is going to drop in January. And that's what I got. Awesome. Thank you, Thomas. Till the next time, I can't wait. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez show, continuing the Cold War series with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm well, thank you, man. Today, I wanted

to get in the get them is a somewhat difficult topic to address. I mean, not for the usual reasons, people bandy that, but because there's so many misconceptions, both on the left and the right and then kind of the sensible center. I'm talking about historians, I mean, and there's still a lot of, people still have a lot of strong feelings about it.

Be that, be that as it may, there's a basic lack of understanding, even among a lot of revisionists, of the kind of broader political context of the war, both in strategic terms and in ideological lines and what I think of

as apocal terms I think people who watch our content they've kind of become habituated to some of my vocabulary when I talk about

apocal events you know I'm not just trying to draw up on highfalutin language or trying to create my own kind of you know revisionist Esperanto

I can't think of a better way to describe what I'm talking about and that's a rough translation of a phenomenon on that Ernst Nolte describes, you know, and it basically the way to understand it is kind of practical zeitgeist, you know, but that's, I just wanted to kind of clarify that. And, you know, as I've talked about before, as much as much as they esteem guys like Mearsheimer, they're kind of locked, they're kind of boxed in to kind of like the Klaus of Witsian

conceptual cube, as it were. You know, like a guy like Mirosheimer, if one wants to understand, in terms of predictive modeling, I think there's nobody better than him. And like, for example, like in the run of the 91 Gulf War, nobody modeled the outcome of that conflict with more accuracy than he did. And in fact, most people were totally off base. He's a Klausowiczian thinker through and through in ways both praiseworthy as well as not so praiseworthy. worthy, but he's so fixed stated on on conceptual modeling and on identifying concrete variables that can be insinuated into that

sort of modeling, that he really misses apoccal, like variables of apoccal significance. Okay, nowhere is that more clear than in his discussion of the Vietnam War. Mir Shamar is one of these guys on the political right, like at the time and subsequent, you know, he was constantly, he was constantly issuing the assertion that Indochina was strategically without value. You know, he's got this idea that the global north, you know, Western Europe, you know, the United States in Canada, Japan, Korea, and some of the

some of the upper Pacific Rim in the Middle East that's basically that's basically geostrategic terms that's the only, that's the location of the only stakes worth fighting for but that's not why people go to war anymore

okay and in fact states going to war over commodities or you know to dominate trade routes and sea lanes that's really that really reflects kind of a narrow like a narrow

a kind of narrow a piece of of the modern era wherein that kind of power political competition you know translated very much to the concrete the need to capture sort of concrete

resources you know so it didn't it didn't matter that Vietnam were happening in Vietnam you know if it had happened in Nicaragua if it had happened in um you know if it had happened in um in greece if it had happened uh in uh in borneo like it would not have mattered you know that's that that's where the communist pushed um that's where uh politics kind of conspired and intrigue you know for for for great powers

to to come together in hostile terms um and that's where america staked uh the line in the sand so it didn't matter This is where communism fought, you know, the American-led opposition. You know, what it would self-identified is the free world. And that's what people like, that's what people in the right miss, okay, I think. People on the left in contrast, you know, they teach college kids, you know, bullshit promulgated by people like Chomsky or by people like Howard Zinn, where they claim that like, well, the Vietnam War was just, you know, the Pentagon like murder machine profiting. that's not really true I mean the there wasn't kind of

the logic of the body count did become kind of a instead of into itself and that's perverse in all kinds of ways but that's kind of the case in modern war in the 20th century

and I'm getting into that in the manuscript and right now about Nuremberg because about half of it gets into the 20th century generally and yeah there was you know there was all anytime there's

any time there's a general war on it and Vietnam was a general war okay you had a draft you know you had real casualties you know America was mobilized anyway going to the situation in Europe and the ongoing

the ongoing strategic challenge presented by the Warsaw Pact but I mean anytime and anytime you're dealing with a general war situation or conditions you know with on that spectrum there's going to be there's going to be people and agents and uh and and and um and companies that profit from that okay but that's not

that's not that's not the incentive okay like you know uh america didn't kill three million people and and and and lose a 60,000 of their own um you know and eventually like imposed like a decade long recession on itself just so that it could sell helicopters to the Pentagon or so that Colt could manufacture the Arm of Light and everybody makes money from outfitting the U.S. Army

with the shit that it needs. That's just every basic view of things and that's not reality. And it's something I emphasize to people too and it's hard to be able to put themselves in this kind of conceptual mindset because

the Cold War is like receding like out of living memory but there was real stakes to warfare in the 20th century i mean that's not to say there weren't reckless decisions made and um it's not to say that during the cold war uh you know men in the pentagon and command roles and in the department of state didn't intriguing inspire you know to to go to war when it wasn't absolutely the you know um essential course of action but uh this was taken very seriously because there was real consequences but also you had a codery of public intellectuals shaping defense policy

you know and you really did have a lot of the best and the brightest putting their minds to the waging of warfare you know on the technical side um at Los Alamos would be the zenith of that you know and people quite literally developing um you know more and more effective nuclear

weapons but you know you had like I make the point of people a lot if this was 1970 or 1980 a guy like Elon Musk could be working on SDI you know you'd have guys who are going to work on Wall Street now as quads you know they'd be working for the Pentagon

or the Department of State or they'd be working for these NGOs you know to figure out how to how to wage World War III you know you didn't just have these idiots and these like abject losers like Pete Buttig

or what the fuck his name is you know these other these other freaks that you know we've had in Washington since 1993 you know just kind of just kind of deciding that, you know, we're going to generally deploy in some theater for no particular reason. I mean, that did not happen in the Cold War because it couldn't happen. And it just wouldn't have been like unthinkable.

You know, the degree to which there's a paradigm shift in the public mind. It can't be over-emphasized. But what I want to get into today, I want to get into the political background of Vietnam and why it became such a critical theater. And then next episode, like I said before, we went live. You know, we'll get into the battlefield situation because that's an important topic. It's not just, I mean, I'm not a military guy, and I mean, it's not really my wheel-outs. But I do know something about military science topics in a very, like, abstract sense. I mean, obviously, I don't have experience like brunch to or something that I would not purport to.

But the kind of competing, I want to get into Westmoreland versus Creighton Abram. and their kind of tactical orientation. I want to go a guy named John Paul Mann and David Hackworth, both of whom had profound ideas that they contributed on asymmetrical warfare. And, you know, I want to get into why

the U.S. Army really, really couldn't adapt itself. It started, I single out the Army because Franklin the Marine Corps, as well as the Air Force, like they did adapt pretty well. And in the Air Force, the case, it's pretty remarkable, purpose to essentially like drop nuclear ordinance on the Warsaw Pact at that time and uh and uh you know to repurpose their aircraft um you know for essentially you know uh the way like like like like fire support

you know um and a conventional bombing role that does remark but but today we're gonna we're to talk about politics, which isn't as sexy as a battlefield kind of stuff, but it's essential to understanding it. And in the case of Vietnam, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's paramount, um, or the military side of the things. The seeds of the Indo-China wars, uh, which, uh, I mean, really, we, we could say that it, it, it goes, it's, you know, things come as in 1931. I mean, when, when the general army assaulted China, but for our purposes, Um, what's conventionally viewed as the Indochina Wars is, you know, the French, uh, the French war against the Vietnamese that kicked off in 1946. Um, you know, there was the story defeat that Jim Ben Fu, you know, the Foreign Legion got, you know, surrounded and annihilated. You know, and then, um, the American war, which traditionally is viewed as commencing in 65, because that's when there was the mass conventional buildup, you know, um, he was involvement ended in 73. Saigon fell in 75.

I'd include the the Khmer Rouge conquest of Cambodia within that same conceptual paradigm two, as well as the 1979 war that Vietnam fought against the people's Republic of China, which is fascinating. And that the latter event informs the strategic

landscape today in profound ways. I find it fascinating, but actually sensible. And I attribute this to Robert Gates also, who was a rare, like, sensible man in policy corridors, you know, post-93. But he, Obama, like, in my opinion, owing to Gates' tutelage, lifted remaining restrictions on armed sales to the people's Republic of Vietnam. very obviously to employ Vietnam as a military hedge

against the people of the public of China which is very smart honestly that's it jumped out of me because it was one of the few

one of the few power political moves that not only made sense like rational sense but actually was was strategically sound and you'd never really see US government

engaged in anything sensible anymore but endo China you know it really was kind of the jewel of Southeast Asia there's a reason why the French

hung on to it and it wasn't just prestige and clout the way they did you know Vietnam was not just this backwater it's a comparatively huge country you know a very large population and it was a cosmopolitan place okay

and in geostrategic terms like I said again that wasn't paramount but the French Indochina, according to guys who spent a lot of time, spent a lot of time with geopolitics, you know, beginning in really in the 19th century, like on Crimean War, actually, yeah, probably around like 1812, the final Napoleonic era, is that kind of closed out. And Europeans started thinking a lot about, about them, you know, the then contemporary battlefield. field. People generally associated Indo-China with kind of the eastern

third of the mainland of Southeast Asia, okay, and they viewed it as essential in that regard. Like, you know, not just as like a hedge against, you know, powers emergent within the interior, but you know, there's, it's, you know, it's got, it's got

sea access, obviously, you know, on this extensive coast, you know, things like that. So it's, Americans tend to be kind of geo-strategically illiterate, and they've also got to dismiss everywhere or some backwater, and that's particularly misguiding as a Vietnam. Like, yeah, Vietnam was largely backwards in 1965, but most of this planet was backwards

in 1965, and those places that weren't, like, a lot of them were still, like, in ruins, because 20 years before, like, you know, the world were going to hell in a hand handbasket. And, you know, and uh there were some places including in europe uh mostly behind the wall but not exclusively that i mean still like until 1980s like you know there was visible like battle damage from you know combat 40 years previously so um that's something to keep in mind uh the uh hochi min himself was uh well actually the milu that hochi men came out of uh uh the Vietnamese were looking for an identity in peculiar ways

and um Vietnam is a complex society it wasn't like North Korea or something I don't know if people know the history particularly well it is strange but you know Kim Il Sung you know who uh who became Stalin's protege he was one of the Soviet Koreans you know part of Stalin's

you know issue with the nationalities was you know not just, you know, genocidal programs against people that he considered to be, you know, politically unreliable. But also, uh, trying to simulate populations that he considered to be useful, like into kind of the Soviet sphere

of influence and his Soviet life. Well, the Koreans and the Soviet Far East, he considered to be one of these populations. And Kim Il-sung really had no interest or under, in, or understanding of communism. And if you look at North Korea today, like they, you know it's it's this kind of like pastiche of like 1950 Stalinism and and kind of cargo cult a military dictatorship type of the of the 1980s or something it's it's also a hereditary it's

a hereditary dictatorship which yeah yeah exactly I think Stalin had told them you can't you can't do that and they were like screw you we're just going to do what we want yeah exactly But it's, but people have this, like, people tend to send me to, like, transpose that, that those kinds of tendencies to places like Vietnam, which is very, very misguided. And, like, among other things, I'm sure, I'm sure some people are going to claim that this is me being, like, a chauvinistic white man or whatever. I mean, I obviously don't care, but I, I, um, colonized peoples, they tend to take on the characteristics that they're colonizers, okay? And, um, the French are very sophisticated people, okay? I'm not saying that the Vietnamese otherwise it'd be stupid or something.

I find that VATs actually be very interesting. That's why I've included Vietnam features heavily in my fiction as people will see you in the second book drops. But, you know, so Vietnam, like any place, whether it's Algeria or Vietnam or anywhere

or Morocco that was, you know, colonized by the French. It was not going to be some backwater. or like North Korea, okay? I mean, regardless, even if what the German would probably mention material was not particularly I'm trying to be

delegate here, was not particularly capable of human stock, okay? But the Vietnamese, you know, they're a relatively creative people. And Ho Chiman himself, he was the son of a Confucian scholar.

And he was a mysterious guy. His birth years generally accepted as 1890. but that's never been verified conclusively. A lot of sources, both within Vietnam and without, like, claim other years. His father and his family, like, lived in central Vietnam, which was kind of like a hub of culture as well as political activity. And this endured through, like, the American War in Vietnam. But it owned to his dad, his father's prestige. um you know not just as an intellectual but he was this he was a kind of like he was an imperial

magistrate um like the uh when vietnam became technically an empire like after uh the japanese deposed like the the french in uh 1945 this was before the war on it it was the vici regime um and uh and uh the thirteenth emperor of vietnam uh who who who step down, who advocated 95, but be as it may, there was an imperial court. And Ho Chiman's father, he was like this, he was like one half like cop, one half judge kind of, and he was demoted because, for abuse of power, after some influential local honcho was, was availed to summary punishment in Ho's father's court, and he was sentenced to something crazy, like 100 lashes with a cane.

you know, and the guy died. Okay, so Hocheeman's dad was, I mean, this, he was something, I mean, he loomed large, to say the least, and he was, you know, he was basically a judge and an intellectual and a Confucian, a judge intellectual and a priest, kind of.

I mean, Confucianism is kind of confusing to the Western mind, including mine own, but, you know, this was not, Hoichman was not some guy of peasant stock, like quite the contrary. Hoicheman did kind of rewrite his biography, as communists all kind of did and I mean to be fair

um partisans all do that to some degree even Cromwell did that he claimed Ho Chiman claimed that he was radicalized in 1908 when because he was sent to Hui City to study okay um

and he said he came across his demonstration of these poor peasants um who were bound in this kind of peculiar form of serfdom that existed in Southeast Asia. I can't remember what the French word is for it, but it was basically, like, think of a surf who's bound of the land and who's not compensated for his labor,

but he's, like, you know, paying rent on his occupation of the land, which he can't leave. This was a big deal, in Vietnam especially, and there was this demonstration that the Imperial Court cracked out unviolently. and uh you know uh social justice types of the day including a lot of catholics because uh you know uh obviously you know um catholic missioners very active in indochina or into the french regime but um as well as well it's kind of the socialist international this was like a big deal and ho claimed like well this is when i realized like i was a communist okay i mean well that's true or not who knows but um he was mired in a

revolutionary environment. Owing to the fact, owing to his family's downer mobility and no small measure because of the scandal with his father and this canning victim who died, oh, realized that he wasn't going to be able to, he wasn't going to be able to get a job,

you know, with, with the imperial court. And he said he refused to try and work, you know, in the colonial administration because he refused to serve the French and that's probably true so what he did do was he applied to work on a French merchant ship when he got from

when he got to Saigon and uh in 1911 uh he traveled first to France and then he ended up in Dunkirk uh he hop back and forth between the UK and Marseille uh for a few years and then from 1913 and 1919 he was in London um it's a disputed by some these days, but there's actually a plaque in the New Zealand house in London, you know, which is, which houses literally, you know, like the New Zealander diplomatic mission that said that, like, Ho Chi men worked here as, like, some kind of pastry chef, okay? So, I mean, he was moving in pretty elite circles, you know, albeit in a kind of, in a kind of menial role, but, I mean, he was a young guy, so it wasn't something that would have been seen as improper for a guy of his station,

and he wouldn't just be viewed as like a coolly, you know, because he was, I mean, he was even, he was very young, okay, even though he was a teenager to early 20s. I mean, even though we don't know his precise birthday, I mean, how much it's clear. In 1919, he returned to France in part

because a French socialist named Marcel Cashin, I'm sure I'm butchering, that pronunciation, as they often do, excuse me. He was an activist in the Socialist Party of France. What Kachin

essentially convinced Ho of was he said, look, you know, the Versailles summit, this is our chance to approach the allied leaders, you know, about freedom for Indochina.

You know, because now they'll be receptive, you know, not owing to any particular uh you know interest in our cause but because uh you know something's going to have to something something something's going to have to you know replace the imperial regime and like even they have to see that you know and part of this part of this was kind of rigid marcus you know thinking deterministic rather thinking like you know this this is you know like reading the proverbial signs you know like like an augur would like obviously this is you know, a crucial moment in

the advance of history, you know, we've got to get the attention to these men because capitalists, though they are, you know, oppressors as they are, you know, they're nonetheless, you know, they're nonetheless serving the cause of history as a whole men are, you know. I mean, this is all very clear to people

who kind of understand Marxist ontology, such that it can be said to exist. But what you have been subsequently claim that, What drew him to Paris initially was that he joined the group of Vietnamese patriots. That would have translated to the, again, I can't pronounce the French moniker. But it was this group that had coalesced in Paris, you know, mostly are in the university environments. but they all they did have some power within the cynicalist uh unions that had and there's a number

of Asian workers like who were present on the ground um I mean obviously because um you know the French empire was always uh was always um was always hungry for menial labors menial labor is from the outer dominions but this this particular faction um it included uh basically the guys who became kind of like the core of the Vietnamese nationalist movement including Fan Chu Trin Fan Van Trong These names probably don't mean anything to anybody today

but they were in the interwariers and into the French and China war these guys constituted an early cadre of the political leadership cast resisting resisting French control, political and military.

So, I mean, these were heavy, these were heavy people, okay? And, I mean, undoubtedly, Ho was able to finagle that, like, owing to his background. You know, I mean, he downplayed his privilege and everything like that, but he, I mean, he was a guy who was, I mean, again, he, his father was a, was a, was a, was a very esteemed individual, as well as, owing to Ho is confused. education, you know, he would have had to be, he would have had to have mastered colloquial Vietnamese in a way that most people just would not, you know, he developed the aptitude in French, you know, he knew Chinese letters, um, because you had to study Confucian text, you know, I mean, he was, he was very, very well situated to, um, take it to, you know, to, to make contact with revolutionary cadres, um, particularly in, uh, particularly in,

in um in uh interwar of france but uh and ho uh and his uh his comrades they actually they formally sent their letter to uh to the allied delegation you know clemenceill woodrow wilson um they were unable to obtain any consideration but what it did do was it i attribute this the fact that ho was very he was comfortable with westerners he was familiar with them, as well as his French, was, um, was, was, was beyond competent. Um, it was probably not absolutely fluent, but it was far more so than, you know, your average, your average, uh, Oriental at that time that, you know, you'd run into in Europe, uh, Ho Chi men began identified as the leader of the anti-colonial movement in Vietnam, for better or worse. And we've discussed in the course

of our uh you know of our discussions and I've made the point myself repeatedly on my pod and my long form a lot of what role any man becomes insinuated into regardless of his aptitude or ambition I'm talking politically

particularly as revolutionary if people decide that you know you are the leader well than you are in some real sense okay and this uh the Versailles delegation identifying how even though they effectively snubbed him.

The fact that they identified him as the leader of the Vietnamese resistance, I'd say that that's would launch his career as a professional revolutionary. Is there any evidence of who he was reading, who he was most

inspired by? That's a good question. I speculate, despite the fact, and this is going to seem strange particularly because most people who are familiar with the French left not just younger people I mean people might be

a little bit older they view the French left is kind of the driving forest behind the 608ers and the kind of break with the Warsaw Pact and you know the kind of you know the new left was literally founded by Foucault at least in

in Akadine however in the inner war years particularly at the time of Versailles. The French communists were very, very orthodox Marxist-Lennonists. They

very much believed in the common turn in its orthodoxy probably even more so than anybody probably even more so than the Germans because there was one of the reasons why the SED, not the KPD and the ruling

party in East Germany was because the social democrats and the Marxist Leninist could never come to the table. France did not really have that problem. Yes, France was, I mean, I'd say France was a house divided quickly. I mean, would be a gross understatement, but the French communists, for whatever reason, I owe this phenomenon to very strong cadre building. They were very, very much united. And I would speculate, and again, I'd have to deep dive into it, and it would be very

hard, I think. I mean, it could be done. It would take time to kind of tease out real data on what the primary sources were, but whether we're talking about Paul Pot or Ho Chi Men or Jop, who who Ho Chi men had met at Hui when he was a student there, all these guys, either only did the fact that they were in France or, you know, only of the French influence upon their cadre structure, like in Indochina, they'd be reading Marx and Lenin. you know um and they and they and they and they and they'd be reading you know they'd be reading hagel and they you know they would have become familiar with aristotle and and and and and they would have become and and and Thomas pain and walk but they but they they like marfs and

went in would be their you know their bible as it were um but yeah that's a great question and it's kind of a fascinating subject especially like again you know like we just mentioned uh it's uh like like imagining the french left is kind of like the standard bearer of you know rigid orthodoxy is kind of hilarious but i mean that's that's that's that's that's the way it was um excuse me the uh um this is actually what gives rise the myth i don't know i don't know how much this is bandied about by court historians these days because frankly they don't read a lot of court history on either World War one or on the Cold War,

I mean, any more. I mean, I do it for, like, for dedicated purposes, like, in my writing and research, you know, like, if I say, like, okay, well, you know, I, like, refresh my recollection with what, you know, with what kind of, like, the mainstream historians of the day we're saying about, like, say, like, the French war in Algeria,

you know, and then, you know, so not just for the sake, like, teeing off on that, but just kind of, you know, you know, get a sense of what people take for granted in terms of kind of the, not just, not just the key events that they identify as being essential to understanding the conflict, but also kind of like, you know, what sort of values are insinuated into the narrative, you know, in, in deliberate hindsight. But when I was, like, when I was high school age, if you read like a college textbook or, Like, if you took, like, you know, an international relations class in your high school, it'd say that, oh, you see, you know, in 1919, there was this Wilsonian moment where, you know, Ho Chi Men, he could have adopted a pro-American stance. If only Wilson had paid attention to him. But, you know, because, you know, these, like, mean, white men were just, like, being mean and racist. Like, this didn't happen. Like, I think that that's nonsense for all kinds of reasons. I mean, first of all, it's, like, kind of sending it's fucking stupid. But also, um, um,

it really kind of sells people like Ho Chiman short Ho Chiman wasn't there to be a cooey and like grovel for you know towing concessions he he basically said he basically penned this document

and Owen to his influence of kind of his French patrons who were experienced revolutionaries he they seem to think that Wilson would recognize Wilson and Clemence

so would recognize they didn't know China was going to be a significant potential battle theater. Okay, there was nothing friendly about this communication, you know, and this idea that everybody, if you give Ho Chi men a Coke and a Snickers bar or Hershey or pat him on the head, they'll, like, you know, give you a buck-tooth grin and say, I love G.I. Joe, Coca-Cola. Like, that's way more quote-unquote racist than anything in Wilson's mind. This brings us to, I realize I'm jumping around a lot, but I, as I, as I, we get into this further, like, I

think I shall be redeemed because people will understand, and I want to get out of the way now, I'm going to reference a lot of these things, as we get into kind of the hard and fast strategic analysis, the conflict, and I don't want to have to keep jumping back and saying, well, this is what this was.

People talk all the time about how Vietnam was like this grave kind of failure of collective security, and why do they say that? Well, they say that because of CETO, S-E-A-T-O, like what was CETO? C-T-O is the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. And if you think it sounds a lot like NATO, you'd be right.

Because that's what, that's what its whole notion was. It was created by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, also known as the Manila Pact. It was signed in September 1954, and you guessed it, Manila, the Philippines. Now, who was the driving force behind CETO? It was Vice President Nixon, who upon returning from Asia 953, he said, look, we need some kind of collective security arrangement in Asia, that, you know, tantamount to NATO. There was far more confidential conflict diets in Asia. The strategic landscape was a lot more fluid, and Nixon realized that.

But at the same time, he said that, you know, one of the reasons it's impossible to, you know, develop a meaningful kind of strategic posture moving forward. It's uncertain, like, what, if anything, you know, anyone's willing to commit and what they're willing to stand on as, you know, essential interests. And this creates a credibility problem. George Kennan also was very much behind this idea, if not CETO itself. He said there's got to be some kind of collective security structure of a formal nature. Now, I make this point a lot as people, for a few reasons. people act like NATO is this magical thing

that I mean obviously anybody who claims NATO actually still exists as a fucking moron but also such that it does exist it's profoundly destabilizing but we don't know if NATO was

effective or not what we do know is that there was basic credibility behind it and the Soviet Union considered America to represent a credible threat, you know, if a, if the private conflict,

dyad in Europe was triggered, you know, which was obviously the inter-German border. But at the same time, America periodically had to meet Soviet efforts to decouple European collective security from American strategic

interests, was one reason why America maintained intermediate nuclear forces in Europe. That's another question, and that's a complicated issue. get into that. My point is that it's not treaties themselves that promotes stability. It's the willingness

of the signatories you know, in order to as well as the signatories to establish credibility there are in, okay? And this should be obvious. Where the signatories to CETO. It was Australia, France, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the

USA. I might add this, out of those signatories, Australia, New Zealand showed up to fight the Vietnam War. France had just fought the Vietnam men for eight years and been defeated. Thailand was definitely a combatant in the Vietnam War. I mean, this was very much below board in terms of their special operations forces who were very effective. But Thailand unconditionally availed their base. in their airspace to do anything that the Allies needed. The UK, the UK just, this caused great consternation.

Anthony Eden profoundly offended the U.S. Department of State of the era, and by essentially making it clear that the UK would not come into any kind of collective security arrangement as regards to New China. why they put pen to paper on the Manila Pact. That's another question that's kind of complicated. It owed kind of the weasel words inherent to diplomats, I think. I don't have some kind of hatred of, of, I don't know if I don't have some kind of hatred of diplomats in and of themselves, but there is a kind of lawyer ball they play about, you know, qualifying their willingness to,

out of treaty allegations. And in the case of the U.K. deciding on with CETO, it had a lot to do with claims of, well, this is a, quote, defensive alliance, I mean, which is meaningless and war in peace, as Carl Smith taught us. There's no other thing as an offensive or defensive war. All wars are both offensive and defensive, but

that's a bit outside of the scope. In any event, it was, Cito was headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand. incidentally, too. And again, Dulles, John Foster Dulles was 100%

behind it, too. In fact, he could be viewed as kind of the primary architect. Like I said, Nixon, Nixon was convinced a formal collective security arrangement was necessary. Modeled roughly on NATO. Dulles was the one who pushed for Cito as the answer to that. And it was Dulles,

who um who um who uh who uh who uh who who was profoundly offended by edin's anyone this to commit what is interesting and it goes to do that like the quote special relationship between the united states and the uk i mean there were people in the uk who had fagg realized the u.k lost world war two when eden's a complicated figure and a year later in nineteen fifty five like eden became prime minister but that's um he's he's one of the more interesting post-war uh british executives i think but be as it may like he he he made it clear that the u.k was was was going to sit out anything that happened in in southeast asia and it's an interesting question um you know i mean the obviously

neither eden nor anybody else was a kind of auger but um you know war literally came to the ukays doorstep uh in northern ireland and uh the revisional IRAs um efforts were very much perceived as part of the anti-colonial movement. I mean, I don't want to start some big controversy with people. I'm not sitting here saying that Thadians are a bunch of communists or something like that, okay? But at point being,

everything else aside, even if even if there'd been some kind of hawkish like Proto Thatcher type at Downing Street. I don't, the situation that they actually developed in the UK in the 60s, I don't think they were in a position to be

fighting some general war against North Vietnam and you know halfway across the planet but as it is a counterfactual um the uh the background of what what immediately gave rise

to Cito um from April 26 until July 820th, 19954, there was a Geneva conference on the status

of Indochina. Why was this convened? Well, the French had, you know, had just taken a defeat by the Vietmen at the Mben Fu,

which I would say was, other than Singapore, you know, where the Javis Imperial Army just, just like, smashed the United Kingdom. Singapore was most

devastating defeat ever levied. to a white western power by a rising non-Western state. Jim Ben Fu was the second. Okay, the psychological impact on this was devastating. And the Vietnamese showed that they were a martial race. Okay, they manhandled artillery up the mountainside and bombarded the French positions.

You know, the Vietnamese of a genuine, they've got a genuine aptitude for war. We'll get into that in the next episode as we get into the kind of battlefield realities of the war. But that aside, the characteristics of the Vietz themselves aside, you know, France,

France was a real military power in those days, okay, too. They weren't slouches, you know, and they weren't, they weren't, you know, the France of 1954 wasn't the France of today. You know, this wasn't some half-ass army of mercenaries or something

either. I mean, it was the French Foreign Legion, you know, and these were crack troops, you know, highly motivated. Arguably, arguably the best equipped the army on the planet at that point. You know, I was comparable, you know, the United States,

the year they was comparable with the United States was fighting with in Korea, you know, after mobilization kicked off in earnest. But, be as it may uh there's neva conference uh in the sats of china half of it was it was purpose half of it was purpose to deal with issues resolving from the korean war um you know in the uh and um and the armistice and half was to kind of resolve the french and no china situation which is

the recipe for disaster to begin with okay like you don't take that approach to uh you you know just say yeah we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna knock out two words of one stone with like great conference and you know we're just we're just going to figure out you know the whole status of Asia by you know putting the right you know put it put it put you know putting the right um putting the right paperwork together i mean all the thing's ridiculous uh delegation the delegations um uh we represented on the status of korea it was the soviet union people's republic of china north and south korea and the u s a and the internet China side of the conference was France, the Vietnam, although a non-state actor, you know,

they had former representation, the USSR, the USA, the People's Republic of China, the UK, and the nascent, the, maybe not maybe the beleaguered, I should say, like, six, successor government in Vietnam to what had been the Beishi regime that was deposed by Japan which as I indicated at the start of this conversation at the start of this talk

only had a year to remain in 1995 there was the referendum and the emperor stepped down and Bao Dai was the emperor to be replaced by Diem what was the sense of Vietnam

and I even before. Well, there was two regimes of Vietnam. There's the Democratic Republic of Vietnam led by the Communist Workers Party and the state of Vietnam. Again, lived by Emperor Baudai. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was strongest in the north

and in the center of the country, but it had some followers in the South as well. So basically what you're talking about is you're talking about a country that's a political map of it looks almost like leopard spots at this point. Okay. And the seat of sovereignty that's claimed by the emperor is really a sovereign name only.

Okay. At the time of the French defeat, 65,000 documented members of the Workers Party lived south of the 17th parallel, which is what became the divider between North and South Vietnam. in the Mekong Delta region alone, which is in northern South Vietnam. So, I mean, a key strategic piece of real estate. There was 30,000 party members concentrated. In addition, there was 100,000 others in the South

were, you know, sympathized with the Vietnam or who were, you know, just, you know, card-carrying communists of varying stripes. in short the the Democratic Republic of Vietnam which whose sole representative

was the communists they could claim membership throughout the entire country okay the formal state of Vietnam led by the emperor part of the problem

with this was what was part of the problem those characteristic of those resisting the communist movement globally. You were looking at a house divided. You know, the war

had, World War II had destroyed the right for all time. There was no real political right anymore, okay? There's reactionary elements, you know, who backs people like Emperor Boudai, you know, in various monarchists. You know, there was people who didn't really have a political consciousness, but they,

they were hostile to communists for self-interested reasons you know there wasn't there wasn't uh they're just not really corraling these people you know like you can't build a movement particularly when you're facing off against dedicated cadres you can't just build an a move you can't just build a political a move you can't you can't build a political army based on opposition to something you know what i mean that was that more nowhere was that more evident than vietnam

um and i think that i can't really be overstated because the the Vietnamese who resisted the communists really do get kind of a bum rap. You know, they're either cast as cowards or

just, you know, uh, you know, these kind of these kind of third world kleptomaniacs or are just, you know, pitiable kind of lackeys and coolies. Like, that's not the case at all.

I mean, they were a mixed bag, but there were a they they they had disadvantages from jump and the people who should have been looking out for their interests most aggressively were not doing so i think on the military side i think i think they were um the uh there was uh there's plenty of american commanders in south korea and south korea really came to fight in the vietnam war they deployed their their force levels were about 50,000 men for country size of korea it's a major deployment but But on the military side, you know, it's a very game commanders who very much wanted, you know, to give the South enemies what they needed to win. And, uh, and led these guys into combat very bravely. And these guys performed well with, with honor. But, uh, on the political side, you know, it's like what, um, what's, what do you have in South, what do you have and what became South Vietnam? It's like, okay, you got, you got a cadre of, like, kind of upperly mobile, or a cadre, kind of like, upperly mobile Catholic types,

which the French were still here. You know, you got, you got, you got guys are basically small businessmen who don't like the commies to take their stuff. You know, you got the Buddhists who are kind of, like, put upon by everybody. You know, you got various minorities, like a Montanjaroz, all in Sundry, who, you know, realize their numbers off if the communists win. But, I mean, there is, I know what it probably sounds. like I'm somebody who's like totally fixated

owing to you know kind of the the central emphasis on my research being Nuremberg and kind of the political theoretical trajectory of things subsequent but America's problems in the Cold War really can be chalked up

with the fact that you know it's like well you know if you waging a war of extermination against the political right like it's not that that doesn't you're not lividable to hovel out when you're trying to draw up on your own cadres to defeat the communists.

And in Vietnam, that's a topic that's not particularly emphasized, but I think it's more important than in some theaters. Like, legit. I, um, it's, uh, and

as we'll get into, like, later in the series, um, America learned its lesson in part, um, by, uh, the final phase of the Cold War. And that's one of the reasons why um the um the uh that the contracts are so effective in places like nicaragua where uh honestly um the uh the sanninista regime there's probably invested more in that regime than any other since uh since the vietnam era i mean it's a

client regime outside of immediate sphere of influence i mean but it um in any event uh the uh the uh The, the, the, the Geneva Conference basically all it did was it formalized, it, it, it, it formalized a division that was already burning, you know, even in the, even before the French had been, had been defeated at Diem. Ben-Fu, but what it did was, it created this kind of arbitrary, dividing line to create kind of the fiction that you know there was two sovereign states here that were at war and like that was never that was never the cake

I mean the Vietnam War was a civil war I mean it's not me there's not me having sympathy for the devil or or you know trying to simplify the political and strategic situation a civil war

then seems to be a civil war because great powers you know converge and draw like an imaginary line on the center of the country. That's quite literally what happened. The fact that you had, you know, we'll get into this too. You know, North Vietnam was a crack army.

It was an incredibly game forest as well as like a truly conventional army. This idea that Vietnam was just kind of like weird guerrilla war, like that's bullshit. Yeah, there was aspects of asymmetrical war, particularly in the Mekong Delta and particularly early on, make no mistake. The reason why Vietnam was so bloody and so brutal was because it was a conventional war where firepower carried the date. The North Vietnamese, the only way that they could accomplish their political objectives was through a conventional military victory, and they knew that.

This is one of the reasons why. America deployed so heavily the way that they did was that misguided not in and of itself but we're going to get into why that didn't produce the results that it had to but this is a

this is also another example of how this you know whether or not we accept the kind of whether or not we accept that quote democracy is utilized at present, and even during the Cold War, when it actually had, you know, some kind of identifiable meaning, even if it was only, like, contra-Marxist Leninism,

I return to kind of the Schmidian notion that it doesn't do you any good at war to have this kind of ongoing discussion in policy terms, because even if people are doing so in good faith, which they never are, because this becomes another means of exploiting divisions within the electorate for some sort of competitive advantage. But even if that were not the case, you don't endlessly debate military questions as if they're ordinary policy matters.

And the fact that that's what a general war became led to some really perverse outcomes, both on the battlefield, and in terms of what came to be considered a success, and political terms and I think Vietnam was a rare situation where the political and the military questions

were basically synonymous and the Pentagon on some level recognize that but the way they proceeded in actual policy terms whereas if these were two discrete things that had success metrics

independent of one another if that makes any sense. I'm going to know more of what I mean in the next episode when some concrete examples emerge as to how this phenomenon played out. But ultimately, and I'm going to wrap this up in a minute, what the Geneva Accord led to was this fiction of two Vietnam's, okay? And it created a pathway, or at least a roadmap to unification. that was supposed to obviate any potential crisis of authority. But it was contingent upon, it was contingent upon in plain language,

you know, both purported sovereign governments advocating any use of armed force in order to affect a political outcome and dominate the future state. by way of a single party regime. And obviously, you know, the Hanoi government always claimed that the Viet Cong or the National Liberation Front was independent of their authority. It was a spontaneous uprising. There was some truth to that.

But obviously, Hanoi cadres were operationally insinuated into the NLF. The Saigon regime always maintained that, you know, the NLF was not. nothing but a direct client of Hanoi and that so long as it existed, it constituted a terrorist threat to the unification process

and so none of the terms of the Geneva agreement had to be honored. So, I mean, this outcome was entirely predictable, okay? I mean, there's basically no way that there's basically no way that any other outcome would have been emerging.

But that's that's why the kind of political foundation was so murky and kind of unworkable. You know, it's, um, and I also got to show you that, you know, I make this point a lot.

There's, and I generally don't engage people because it's, it's just like bad faith bullshit. But people don't know what they're talking about, like, you know, they let a debate about colonialism and how bad this was. It's like, okay, so you really think what I just described here, like, you really think that's superior to having, like, the French administering Vietnam? Like, I, I mean, like,

in what way, shape, or form, you know, and you could say that, well, that was just another example of, you know, White Wester's imposing this paradigm. Like, it really wasn't, man. I mean, the reason why it was so dysfunctional in Fubar is because you did have, you did have Beijing, like, having their say. You did have Moscow having their say. And obviously, you know, in having their say, they were deliberately sabotaging the proceedings and creating conditions wherein, you know, a, a cadre-based movement could effectively sabotage any government that emerged in the south

but you can't you can't you can't just you can't just shut down a conversation by saying oh that's just like something the white man imposed I didn't know China you know so it's everybody's always people act like this kind of you know people act like the 19th century regime

that endured really till 19, 1920 of you know Britain France Germany you know dividing up world in these key theaters was this like a bottom situation it's like what's your alternative they like they never they never have

one you know it's like it's like this idea like the world's kind of exists in situ and like it's like a place of plenty in peace but then people screwed up just by like imposing politics upon it it's like I think ontologically like I think people it's like don't like a lot of people even people aren't particularly dumb and it's like can't grasp like the ontological

reality of politics I mean I don't know But in any event, let's wrap up for now because I want to shift gears with what we get to do next. And I realize this might have been a little bit dry, but again, like I said, I'm going to reference all this stuff when we get into the, you know, discussing the battlefield situation and kind of the political maneuverings of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nixon. it becomes important. But yeah, I hope this didn't bore people at death. I hope they got something out of it relating to the topic. So just run through your anything you want to promote and we'll go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed.

I mean, good things are happening. We, you know, like I said, within the next week or so, we're launching the YouTube channel at one list. Steelstorm 2 is dropping this month to be on the lookout for that. I've got some big stuff happening on the podcast, but I'm going to announce that formally on the next pod episode,

which are going to become more frequent. But you'll, I don't want to, I want to get into that, like on the pod. But yeah, that's all I got. You can find me on Twitter at Triskely and Jihad. The T is a 7. Find me at

Substack, RealThomas 7777.com. I appreciate it. Until the next time. Yeah, like it was. Thank you, people. This is part seven of the Cold War series. Thomas 777. How are you doing? Hello, everybody. I'm okay, man. Today, the issue with the Vietnam conflict,

because we kind of got into the last episode, it's not just that the sort of controversy around it that endorsed to this day, you know, in terms of ethics and in terms of policy critiques. I mean, some of that is contrived, some of it's not. But even if we take people's sort of values and partisan ideas out of the equation entirely, the Vietnam conflict straddled, for lack of a better way to characterize it or describe it, in multiple epochs in terms of political and military affairs.

You know, as Vietnam jumped off in earnest, as we'll get into what, which was very much during the Kennedy administration, I know some people have this sort of like, you know, this, this, this, this revisionist notion that O'Kennedy was trying to disengage from Vietnam. That's not true at all. But, you know, regardless of that, the, a paradigm shift in military affairs was underway from the post, new look, Eisenhower era, you know, which was kind of bookended by the Cuba crisis, which, you know, put an end of that kind of thinking. You know, and from that kind of like the first phase of the American War, you know, like 62 to 65, I guess you could say, represented, you know, that is sort of a gray area between, you know, sort of policy orientations. The kind of revolutionary period in the third world were like, you know, the colored revolt, if you want to look at it like that was underway full swing. what what remained of the Western powers

were still engaged you know Spain, Portugal, France who just, you know, been issued crushing defeat at the Mben Fu you know, they were trying to they were trying to find a way to you know, utilize firepower

and the technological edge that they enjoyed you know, in order to advantage them in counterinsurgency warfare Vietnam ended in the 1970s as the era of true strategic parity and was emerging between the United States and the Soviet Union and major powers were disengaging from the third world in direct capacities, like owing not just the fact that

interdependence was causing more and more conflict dyads to emerge where escalation could have brought the superpowers into direct collision like in 1973 in the Middle East, but also just because, you know, there's a certain weariness for, you know, this kind of constant engagement in active combat in multiple in multiple theaters um so vietnam's important for all those kinds of reasons but also just um it there's because of all those things they just described and kind of the you know the the historical situatedness of the conflict in like temporally i mean there was there's a lot of data to be derived from it about

about warfare, you know, where the river meets the road in terms of combat and things and technology and how these things impact the modern battlefield, but also you can extrapolate things about the American system and how particularly wartime administrations, politics is very much insinuated into the decision-making process. I don't mean high politics, although that is the case, too. I mean these kind of like domestic intrigues spill over into the decision-making process as regards, you know, war and peace decisions, and that's really, very bad. And obviously, this gained a lot of momentum, you know, during the kind of, you know, the rise

of, you know, the modern or contemporary, not modern, contemporary, like news cycle, which really began in the 60s and 70s, you know, like reaching its zenith, you know, in like 1990, 1991, where you had the true 20 were on news cycle and the Gulf War on TV. I mean, now, obviously, that's done. I mean, there's certain, like, media is ubiquitous, like, in a way, never, they never meant before, but there's not this bully pulpit of, like, the news media. You know, the terrestrial news media. That's what everybody watches, and that controls, you know, narratives and the parameters of discourse.

Like, that's what I was talking about. But to dive into the topic, there's nobody who's more associated with Vietnam than Robert McNamara. okay and errol morris who i'm a great i've got great esteem for i mean he's this weird nebish type but he he makes great films you know he did a documentary on fred leitre um you know who authored the report he did a documentary on um on donald rumsfeld you know his i mean not to go too far afield from our topic but ero morris really pioneered the documentary style of filmmaking in a way that's become convention and um him letting his subject and his you know obviously his primary uh his primary um efforts are

biographical of historical personages or of people he's just interested in like in the case of leitre but putting the camera on the subject and letting the subject just testify and morris asking his questions off camera or the or the you know the filmmaker or the interviewer asking his wasn't off camera like morris invented that style but he i highly recommend anybody um the fog of war. I think it was released in 2003. That's a pretty good kind of capsule summary of McNamara's career from

you know, it's the testimony of McNamara himself. But because it's only like a two and a half hour film, obviously a lot of things are left out. But I I'd rather recommend that to anybody wants to learn more about McNamara. So let's talk about the man himself.

Robert S. McNamara. The S stands for Strange. His middle name was Strange. Robert strange McNamara. He was the longest serving Secretary of Defense to this day, from 1961 to 68.

Nowadays, even administration is that have a comparatively strong mandate. You know, they play musical chairs with their cabinet postings. But even in McNamara's epoch, it was unheard of for a Secretary of Defense to serve

that long, okay? Like, why served this long. Well, McNamara came from Humble Origins. He was born in San Francisco in 1916. His father was the sales manager of some kind of wholesale firm that literally made shoes and other things like this. Okay, like shoes and boots for, you know, like nurses and factory workers. So, I mean, like part of the upper kind of like the lower middle class, upper working class, he proved himself to be a prodigy of sorts with mathematics. what we consider to be logistics

and data management or I mean logistics is just in those days we consider to be like data management today he graduated in 1937 from Berkeley went out of the Harvard Business School in graduate 1939 obviously right around this time

you know the the new dealer's war was jumping off it was only about you know two years away and when Magnemer found himself in uniform he ended up in the Army Air Corps, and guys of his kind of caliber and intellect tended to be

shuttled that way for obvious reasons. And he, uh, he entered the Army as a captain in 43. He served under Curtis LeMay, who then was a colonel. Um, when McNamara and LeMay, and it's interesting, is McNamara and LeMay and

McNamara gets into this in the, in the fog of war documentary, like, McNammer was probably the closest thing LeMay had like a friend, but like, uh, McNamara was sitting, you know, and he's like, I, I felt like I didn't really know the man very well, you know, at all. And then it's like when, when LeMay died, apparently LeMay's widow, kind of McNamara, and it's like, yeah, Curtis said, you know, really, like, he loved you. He said all these great things about you.

And MacDamara's like, really? Like, I hardly heard the guy say more than one word. But in any of it, Matt DeMarras, as a young officer, kind of a defectal adjutant to LeMay. He kind of demonstrated his chops for, uh, for military logistics and just kind of, you know, applied analysis of, of, you know, the mission at hand. And in terms of like getting results within the, you know, rationale of what the Army Air Corps was charged within the Pacific. LeMay and McNamara, they came up with a way to assault the Japanese mainland from the Marianas Islands. instead of having to, you know, jump the Himalayas,

this has been, it's had been done. And this owed to things I don't quite understand, like, you know, fuel consumption versus load, you know, versus, you know, travel within or above or below the jet stream and all these kinds of things. You know, the complex, the complex calculus of the then nascent science of military aviation. Okay. So the Magamara, the guy really was a polymath.

okay i mean he um and he demonstrated that um really by the time he's about 30 years old when my man got discharged he ended up at the ford motor company in 946 and uh the four motor company it seems strange these days because like a college reason really mean anything but in those days um when it was a rare uh credential and when uh unless you were one of these kind of rich boys went to yale or something if you went to college on merit it's because you were a guy really, really knew his stuff. There was very view, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, a executive officers at Ford Motor Company,

were college educated. Um, so guys like McNamara was in demand. He got recruited there in the, in the, as a manager of planning and financial analysis. Um, he, he, he, he advanced rapidly, um, by 1960, when he was in his early, when, when, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he was in the I was in his late, yeah, it was in early 40s. He was like 43, 44. He became the first president of Ford Motor Company from outside the Ford family, okay, which was a huge deal.

And this was November 9th, which is a date that I think we're all familiar with. And if you were not before, I hope that after watching the stuff that Pete, and I do, you're familiar with it now. November 9, 1960 was when he became first president of Ford. this was one day after JFK was elected and during his tenure at Ford

both as what we now consider a quant and like a corporate accountant and during his like brief tenure as president he's credited with basically like making Ford competitive in the post war period like after like the government pork like went away obviously and this in the 1950s in early

60s, like a huge amount of American automakers, like, just ceased to exist. Okay, I mean, the, all these kind of iconic brands, some of them endured, like, AMC endured to, like, the 70s or 80s. But, like, there's a huge number of automotive brands that went under during the 1950s. It was,

I mean, that, I mean, one part, one part market corrective, one part, it just, you know, just the scaling back of the subsidies they'd enjoy, you know, during the kind of salad days the New Deal for big

manufacturing firms. But in any event, JFK, whatever we can say about him, and I don't want to get into a discussion on the man's merit or character or that of his politics.

One thing that is indisputable is that he, with the exception of the kind of naked nepotism in the case of his brother, but I consider that to be more of a matter of self-preservation. and, you know, with installing him as the Attorney General. With the exception of that, Kennedy and or as advisors,

they had a remarkable eye for cabinet talent. And Kennedy's first choice for Secretary of Defense was Robert A. Lovett, who'd been the Secretary of Defense under Truman, interestingly, from 51 to 53, height of the Korean War. So obviously, Kennedy was looking at it for a man who had served as a wartime secretary, defense, okay, which indicates the kind of hard realism pre-Cuba that Kennedy's not conventionally credited with, but that I think is clear if people know how to read between the lines.

But the reason why he approached Lovett first is because he didn't, he, nobody thought that the Mare would leave Ford Motor Company. So it's like it wasn't even, it wasn't even like within consideration. Not on grounds as Mera or anything. It's just that, you know, the guy was a freaking all-star. and Wabado also had been a progen at George Marshall and I don't think the Marshall plan was this great policy coup. I don't think it accomplished much of anything

other than putting some shine on the occupation regime which needed to be rehabilitated in order to get the Bundes Republic to play ball the way the Truman and Eisenhower and the Truman and later Eisenhower administrations needed it to. But that's another story. George Marshall had Trump at his clout in those days.

And a lot of the side in the fact, again, that he, you know, he'd cut his teeth as a wartime defense secretary, probably with the fact that prior to that he'd serve as marshals undersecretary of defense, and he was very much a protege of the guy. But a lot of it declined. He's like, you know, out of raw fatigue, I think. But also he said, you know, you should approach McNamara. um because i'll probably take it and uh kennedy went through sergeant shriver um and offered him the the secretary of defense position or the secretary of the treasury magnanimor immediately accepted

the appointment of secretary defense um was uh magmer and knowledgeable about defense matter as well i mean i mean compared to compared to anybody since uh cheney let me qualify that i mean i don't people think not incredibly that Cheney's a total piece of shit. When Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Bush 43 I think he very much had a sense

of what needed to be done in the transition era from the as the Cold War is literally ending and I only invoked him because regardless of the guy's character which I think we're going to agree is not something laudable

and whatever other issues he has, he was a highly qualified secretary of defense. No, we did not come up through the military, but he was something of a polymath, and he understood military matters as regards policy or the rim meets the road in a really splendid way. Subsequently, I think the secretary of defense these days is kind of, it's almost like, it's almost like Kremlinology. You've got to look to the kind of big, there's all these like syndicures that don't mean anything anymore, and people's titles don't actually indicate what their roles in fact are like i think right robert gates was the de facto like shadow

foreign policy president i also think that secretary defense has become secretary of state in a real way which is very strange but in the kennedy era um these cabinet positions carried a lot more weight and uh there was a lot more transparency in terms of the man who said who held the office was very much the decision maker with some narrow exceptions you know uh there when you have an executive who was as much of a who is as much of a hands-on sort of authoritarian as FDR, yeah, they're very much for some people who were ciphers and key roles because he simply didn't want them to do anything, but exempting that, you know, if you got appointed Secretary of Defense, you were a pretty heavy hitter, and Magnifer was known

the fourth secretary of defense because until you know the until nuremberg was secretary of war was the cabinet posting but that's that's uh there's a lot to unpack there frankly but that's that's outside our scope but in any event magna was kind of a perfect choice for this era okay because uh the technology and i mean this was this was the dawn of the information age okay like computing as we know it was very much just kind of beginning then it had begun during the second world war but uh In an applied capacity, it was emergent. McNamara understood logistics better than anybody. He understood a highly scaled systems and management of those systems.

And how to identify variables and the bounded rationality of the system in question and what it was purposed for? You can identify what was most essential to production. And that's an odd skill set. That's kind of like what management comes down to in the burden sense. of managerialism. I mean, when I say management, I don't mean some dick who, like, manages a Home Depot.

I don't mean, like, the way you eat, like, Fat H.R. ladies talk about management. I mean, in terms of, you know, actual, actually knowing how to knowing how to optimize the performance of

both the human element and the autonomous element within some highly scaled structure, you know, with all kinds of variables, some of which are more essential than others, you know, but the core ones that facilitate productivity and the most concrete ways, you know, need to be identified.

Like, most people can't do that. And particularly, you know, McNam ever's day, yeah, as it just indicated, you know, this was like the dawn of the information age. And, you know, technology, there's got a punctuated equilibrium of technology, and then we can all agree on that. You know, but it tends, like, once there's,

there'll be one innovation and then you know that that that that leads to others you know in a very kind of um in a very kind of in a very kind of rapid capacity this was under this what was underway but you didn't have your disposal like all this kind of you know you didn't you didn't have consumer tech um that we take for granted and big business in those days you know like you didn't you you were basically like using like a pen and paper an abacist like proverbially and sometimes literally you know to handle like um massive reams of data so uh the kind of like the right man in the role and they were almost always men um not for conspiratorial reasons but for anthropological ones um you know that it was this was more essential then than even today although it still like remains essential but um magnanimous philosophy in his own words was uh he said the senator of defense in the then and era had to take an active role. He said, you know, he aimed to provide aggressive leadership questioning, suggesting alternatives, proposing objectives, and stimulating progress, just as he had done at Ford Motor

Company. That might sound corny on its face or, like, corporate PR. I mean, like, Wagner is the concept company man, but in his case, I think he really believed that. And honestly, I think in a lot of respects, that's, like, what he accomplished? He rejected radical organizational changes. Like I just indicated, there was a lot of people, both within the military establishment and also within the policy establishment.

And this was very insestuous in some cases too. But on Capitol Hill, there's all kinds of people who are trying to force, you know, these kind of top-down changes to the military apparatus. You know, the command structure, you know, the way, forces in being organized, you know, at division level, and, you know, and what weapons systems were going to get privileged over others. Even there really is that. There was, there was, there was debate about the draft and its future.

Okay, this, there was a committee. I cannot remember the name of it. I'm sorry. headed by Senator Stuart Signington He wanted to His committee with him Leading the charge

They wanted to abolish The discrete military departments They wanted to replace the joint chiefs With a single chief of staff And you know not And and give him dominion over They wanted to like an inter-service command structure, okay

You'd abolish discrete ranks Between the services is you have like this unitary command structure that went to this one man who interned was accountable only to the president and his national security captain which in my opinion is a terrible idea but like this was the kind of thing

among other stuff that was being taken seriously then you know and McNamara as soon as he took office he's like no that shit's over with you know like shut the fuck up that's not happening you know we're not well we maybe well be you know we maybe will be fighting World War 3 in you know in a few years

we're probably going to be at or, you know, in a secondary theater, you know, within months, we're not, we're not going to completely upset the, we're not going to completely upset the wagon or the Apple Cart, you know, and start playing games with, you know, with forced structural organization. And that was, and that actually, that, that was, that, that was huge, okay, because things would have, I, I,

Simington's idea was particularly stupid, I think, But there was all kinds of stuff being bandied about that wouldn't really kind of upset the ability of the entire defense establishment to react. And really from after the Cuba crisis, I mean, in 73 and then in 83, I mean, yeah, there was the punctuated crises of a strategic nature that were truly critical. but about every two years like in between there was some kind of like what you can think of as like brush fire crisis of a secondary

theater that nonetheless you know like required an active response and this ultimately this is one of things that led to like the creation of special operations command but that stuff I just go to you know like a unitary command for special operations forces

unfortunately a lot of disasters happened for that to become implemented, but that's kind of always the way it is, not just with the military. But what was Kennedy's policy vision? If you want to understand Vietnam's

escalation, they don't just mean the punctuated escalation that was yielded or exploited, depending on your perspective, by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Vietnam, true engagement of Vietnam began of Eisenhower. okay um in a real capacity and when when kennedy took the oath of office um there was there was

special operations forces types on the ground who were directly engaged with the communists okay so i mean it's this this idea that you know this idea that you know like i said before we went like oh kennedy was trying to disengage from southeast asia but then you know johnson is this this bad guy, you know, just engaged the country at war. I said he could, you know, make money by, you know, bell helicopter selling

stuff to the Pentagon or whatever the fuck. Oliver Stone and Howard's in claim. That did not happen. Kennedy in his speech to Congress on March 28th, the, the core emphasis of the speech was

defense. It was Cold War. It was it was war in peace it was power politics stuff in part because you know Nixon was always not just kind of on the campaign trail I mean Nixon was not just always trying to portray Kennedy as some punk rich kid who's wet

by the ears he was basically was always calling him a pussy you know and saying like he's soft on communism you know he's a rich kid he doesn't he does not have the presence to command nor does he have like the knowledge

you know um which is not wrong because Kennedy was a lot of things but he was like he mentioned they stay in the Kennedys he was a gangster son and he was a war hero when he served in the brown water he like the dude was kind of a bad you know like yeah like yeah he wasn't like a big pussy whatever i mean yeah but the um but i mean politics was politics and being what it is that's you know and i mean it wasn't just nixon other people too they you know Kennedy he had kind of like a boyish charm like our phony you might think that is like he did not you know he didn't come off as a this like heavy personage and especially succeeding Eisenhower like this like the Soviets were genuinely

afraid of Eisenhower um and uh I think for good reason like I'm not I don't think Eisenhower is this rare genius like some people do and uh I think in some ways he was an ugly guy um in terms of his character but he uh he was a ruthless SOB you know and he he definitely had a kind of command presence. I mean, that goes without saying. But Kennedy outlined to the March 28th, 961 speech, what he outlined is he said, look, massive retaliation is a doctrine. He's like, that's over.

Okay, so is the new look as it's been, you know, as it was euphemistically assigned. You know, he's like, we're not going to rely on first, splendid first strike capability nor we're just going to rely on the nuclear deterrent in lieu of conventional forces. Like, it's not realistic. It's totally

inflexible and frankly, it's and frankly, it's totally, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't you don't keep the peace by threatening that several states of the world with, like,

massive, like, genocidal countervally with salt. Um, you know like as a standing policy but it uh um i mean it being somewhat facetious but there really was like um there the kind of milu that herman con came out of and i think Herman con was great and i'm not putting shade on them at all but other than milu of con and van noyman like there were guys like genuinely autistic guys uh who'd uh you know come up through uh academia and game theory and stuff who were suggesting things that, you know,

made sense in terms of, you know, the raw variables of balance of forces and capabilities, but we're just, like, we're just, like, grossly moral offensive, morally offensive in terms of, like, in terms of policy orientation. But, I mean, like, Dr. Strange Love, like, yeah, it's like, it seems like over-the-top ridiculous,

like something of a piece-stick movie, but it was, like, ringing on, like, a real phenomenon. You know, like, Which is kind of funny, but also kind of fucked up. But Kennedy also, to his credit, and this wasn't realized until Carter and a presidential director of 58 and 59. And obviously the technology of that point made it far more critical for human decision makers to assert control over nuclear arms and commanding control. But things were already moving in that direction, whereby not only were, were human decision makers being sidelined.

But the military and specifically strategic air command was very much taking control of these processes. And Kennedy, you know, said that's got to stop. You know, and Magna Mera was exactly the man to kind of see to that. You know, in terms of structuring forces and protocol, strategic forces, I mean, to obviate the threat of, of civilian control and the commander-in-chief role being appropriated

by by a military element. Magdor, I believe, did more to obviate that than anybody in Bill Carter. As we get into the Carter era, we're going to talk about like all that cool stuff. I mean, I think it's

cool. I'm fascinated by the late Cold War and the kind of strategic nuclear paradigm and artificial intelligence they're in. Some people probably think It's boring as fuck, but I think it's really cool. But in any event, what's key about Kennedy's policy speech on defense was, he said, quote, we need to operate with an eye to, quote, prevent the steady erosion of the free world through limited wars.

Now, this is the crux of why America went to war in Vietnam. Okay? the way you got to look at the Cold War is that obviously there's the ongoing strategic nuclear threat of a total war between Warsaw Pact and NATO, which would be catastrophic. I mean, that goes not saying.

But the real issue as a basic stability ensued between the superpowers, it could be imagined and the Team B the team B exercise and the men who

the men who organized and facilitated it and who were instrumentally getting Reagan elected frankly the scenario these guys painted was like look imagine in America where essentially all of Asia save South Korea and Japan all of Latin America save Mexico all of Africa save a handful of the Arab states who are nonetheless

like Soviet-aligned, you know, goes communist or becomes basically sympathetic to the communist perspective and is either staked out, you know, a position of absolute neutrality in the Cold War or as a veil itself as a Soviet proxy. Like, yeah, America

would survive in those circumstances would it basically be this garrison state that was kind of a second-rate power within the Western hemisphere, you know, surrounded by a hospital. Like, that's a very that's a very dangerous world to live in and a lot of the things even if some kind of perennial peace could be achieved

a lot of the things we take for granted just would not exist you know that would have kind of frozen American tech and American wealth at a certain point because just by virtue of dominating the rest of the planet you know like the Soviet Union could have kind of like

remade the world in its own image kind of like how America like remade the world world in its own image after 1989, which is not a good thing. But my point being, like, people who act like the Cold War was this kind of, like, ridiculous, paranoid fantasy, or that it was, like, this excuse to, like, sell munitions and helicopters, you know, by defense contractors, like, it was, in fact, a real thing. And this was the, this was the potential outcome, really until, until Gorbachev and until the Soviets folded their flag.

It wasn't this binary thing, like either, you know, total war or peace or, you know, oh, communism, quote, doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work, but that doesn't matter. All kinds of shit doesn't work that, you know, nevertheless, like, indoors or shuffles on, like, some, like, some fucking Frankenstein's monster or something. Like, that was a very real possibility. And Kennedy's, what he was saying here is, look, if we ignore theaters like, you know, China, we ignore theaters, it's up there in Africa, if we ignore especially, you know, developments in their own backyard. I mean, that's twofolds on the road doctrine, but that aside for a minute, you know,

it's like, we're going to die like a death by a thousand cuts as regards our ability to, you know, influence the course of politics on the rest of this planet, you know, and do you really want to be like a garrison state, albeit a continent-sized garrison state as large as self-sufficient, but you really, do you really want to be like an, like, the American island and like, the red world. I mean, that was, that was not only poignant, but it was very realistic. And I give Kennedy a lot of props

for that, for that speech. Like I said, I'm reading the lines as he intended. Congress to read the lines, but that's I'm not a Kennedy fan or apologists at all. But not only is that, because go ahead, I'm sorry. Let me ask.

Okay. You said that the Cold War was a very real thing. Is that because of was it a continuing ideological war between

the the neoconservatives and who started them and the Soviet Union that whole time? Well, there's wars within there's wars within that camp.

I mean, if you want to know what I think, I agree with Yaki's perspective that the doctor's plots like that epoch, not that incident itself, but that incident was demonstrative. I like a break within the communist camp, like if leadership cast, okay? And it's

also one of the reasons why, like, Israel often just became like massively anti-communist, like all of a sudden, okay? So, yeah, there was that. The Soviet Union became this kind of strange thing. Like, yeah, it was a it clung to revolutionary

socialism until the end of its life, but, like, was it a Marxist-Leninist state? Like, as much as such things existed it was. But what the Soviet Union really had going for it was the kind of Soviet DDR model that was really appealing to the people

in the third world. You know, like Oliver North, when he was undercover, like, doing very shady things, when he landed at Managua Airport, he were laid back under like State Department cover if he liked their teleks or whatever. He's like, I'm at Managua

airport. It's a mirror it's like it's a mirror image of checkpoint Charlie in the inter-German border you know he's like these there's a bunch of Nicarag ones running around acting like they're the Stasi you know he's like this is and I mean that spoke for itself so even when

Stalinism even when the even when the war's up pat kind of like even after 68 and I mean even before like putting 68's got on the formal breach you know with the new left even when like nobody in France

nobody in the Netherlands like even commies I mean like looked like the Soviet Union for inspiration like you better believe that like hundreds and millions of people in Africa and Latin America you know in Indonesia like they did you know like that's they looked at that

as like wow this is a great model for progress and you know where we don't need to suffer you know the we don't need to suffer the pain of exploitation to reach you know the bounty of technology and plenty and modern productive

productive techniques you know all we have to do is like sign on with the soviet block and we'll get all those things and plus like you know they're gonna they're gonna lead us they're gonna lead us to this taluricotopia because eventually we're gonna fight america i mean like that's and yeah within that um like the godfathers of neol conservatism like they became like on that target list ironically like that's why like communism like a frankenstein monster like a lot of people who were like called um which is the meaning was term but a lot of people are called like anti-Semitic people are like

oh how can you say that you know communism was you know emerged from the Jewish world of social existence the Soviet Union hated Jews it's like well there's such a thing is like you know there's such a thing as you know a gullum of Prague okay like you create something and it

gets out of control or it turns on you but it's also too like ideologies aren't any like one thing it's like You can't say, like, communism was Jewish or just not Jewish, or that, you know, the coalition that created it in Russia, you know, consisted of, like, XYZ kind of people and nobody else. The Soviet was a weird coalition of, like, indigenous Slavs, you know, who hated the European overcast. You know, they were aligned with a slightly more cosmopolitan element, you know, of Ashkenazi Jews who, who hated. that same overcast for different

reasons. And these people didn't really like each other, but they had common enemies and common interests. And when that fell apart in large measure because the situation of the Jewish people are internationally totally changed after Nuremberg and after the

Elford Declaration, yeah, they stopped keeping up appearances at all. And yeah, I agree with Yaki, basically, that if you were on the right after about 953, 55 they were running around like a John Birch or like calling for the death

of Ivan, you were a fucking idiot. I mean, basically, because it, Russians definitely, like the Soviet Union definitely wasn't it, and Russia honestly is not really your friend if you're a white Western man, but they're not really your enemy either.

I mean, and it's, they, as a hedge against people who really are your enemy is better that they exist and they not exist. But that's probably a subject for a different episode. But, yeah, the Cold War, the way to understand it in very raw terms, especially in the Kennedy era, before things got a little bit more complicated through the time. And then, like when the Cold War jumped off again in earnest in 1970, 89, 80, but it's not,

it's not reductions to say that there really was a, quote, colored revolt underway. this was the question of the day in power political and military terms it was very much led from Moscow it was facilitated by Warsaw Pact arms logistics equipment food stuff technology manpower everything

and that's what was on the table um yeah there was other like deeper nuances to like the ideology that had created it but in uh and um as the world that stood when kennedy took the oath of office like the cold war was what i just described and that was a really real thing um you know and like i said there were yeah guys like yaki guys like auto reamer yaki was dead by then but what he'd been saying before and what reamer was saying until the day he died was um you know uh if you're a european you know

who's under occupation which all which they all were i mean it's still of his day in those days, you know, the Red Army was also in Berlin. But, you know, I said you need to be very careful about what you wish for and in and in advocating that, you know, the Soviet Union should be destroyed because it's really the only hedge against the traditional enemy of Europe. And I agree with that. But, uh, for our purposes,

I have a size of the world situation, as it wasn't kind of the oath of office, because people's idea like, oh, you know, what a bunch of horse shit. We've got to go fight the communist and now where they'll be over here. Like that was not what was on the table and that's not what anybody thought. And the quote domino theory wasn't this like crazy thing that John Burchard's thought or that crazy generals thought. Like this was actually

happening. Like huge swaths of the planet were going red. Okay? Stalinism had real cachet and you know a huge among huge percentage of the global population and the entire like

raised on detra, supposedly of Nuremberg, was we're going to create this world society. I know we even have a united nations. It's okay, well, if like, you know, at that, at that time, I think there's about, like, I think there's about, like, five billion people in the world. It's like, well, if, like, four billion of those five billion people, like, think that

communism's great, you've got a problem. Okay? I mean, that's what the Cold War was about. You know, it wasn't about, you know, when I walk outside and Terry Hote in Vienna, you know, there's going to be some, there's going to be some Chinaman with a red star in his head and a bayonet, you know, who's going to, like, fucking, you know, charge me and, like, you know, turn me into fucking sashimi

and, like, enslaved my wife and, you know, maybe everybody's go to the drive-in and watch like shitty communist movies nobody likes. Like, that's not what people thought. Maybe some people thought that, but that's not, you know, like, that's not what underlay of Cold War and, like, people like Macontera. Well, let me ask you

another question. It almost makes it sound like you could, like, some somebody would say that they're reactionaries. You know how people on the right are always just, we're all reactionaries. It makes it sound like if the third world is turning red and these dominoes are falling, there's a reason why they're doing it and they're reacting to what they're seeing happening to Europe, basically. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And it seems like... I think that's the case, too. And that's why, I mean, today, there's something interesting. I spent a lot of time I spent a lot of time reading about and kind of studying as much as I can what some of these

Middle Eastern Nazi actors are doing and a bunch of these guys on the popular front of liberation of Palestine General Command who were big time alive with Warsaw Pact like they flipped Islamic like very profoundly

and like very immediately like after the wall came down and like some people be like oh you know those guys are just being mercenary and doing what they have to do to keep money and weapons flowing. I don't think it's that simple, man. I think to your point a lot of these guys, they were basically

they basically had contempt for like the features of capitalist modernity that they consider to be like most offensive, you know, whether it was like sexual ascentiousness or, you know, like the erosion of meaningful roles for men and women

or, you know, like mixing between races or, you know, pornography. Um, And I, there, there is a certain puritanical aspect of communism as it manifested in the third world, but even otherwise. You know, like, that was one of the things, the, uh, that was a, that was a cause and refrain. I mean, there was like, I'll get to fuck the vice and stuff in the DDR, you know, like, I mean, there was, like, not like narcotics, but like prostitution and sex stuff and all kinds of really crummy social ills. But at least the official line was that this stuff's nasty. it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's deplorable uh this is the kind of thing characteristic of the

capital is west like we don't have any truck with that and and this kind of thing should should be identified and stopped out wherever we find it so yeah i think there's an aspect to that uh and yeah that's but that was that was yaki's old point and some of the people he inspired subsequent like hkee thompson and like um and like james maddle a lot of people think it was a crank i actually hold them in a lot of steam. That was the whole point. The whole point was that Washington and New York or in Los Angeles or a lot more, quote-unquote, red than Moscow and East Berlin ever were or will be.

So, yeah, there's an aspect to that. It's a kind of a good question. And it's like a question, it's like a theoretical philosophical aspect to it like we just raised, but there's also like a practical aspect in concrete terms in the way people who are, like, leading their lives. You know, like you raised two. That's why I raised the issue of these Middle Eastern peoples and stuff. Because I also think they're kind of like a bellwether for sort of radical tendencies.

But, I mean, that's my, I've got my own thoughts on that. And that is, like, way too far aside the scope. But, yeah, I'll, uh, I'll, uh, I'll, I'll try and get to the point and, like, wrap this up to really have been rambling for a minute. But the, uh, I can ask questions that get people doing that. I appreciate you asking questions, man. Like, I appreciate that, like, the give and take. I mean, you always insinuate, like, meaningful stuff that a lot of time I haven't thought about.

But also, it just, it helps me because I, I worry sometimes that, like, I go out too many tangents because my brain sort of works that way. But, yeah, I interject whenever you want, and don't, I'm not going to feel isolated or something. but the uh the um the uh yeah kennedy's basically i mean would basically underlay all this too in uh in again kind of like raw strategic terms too like without i mean aside from the politics um kennedy realized that you you need a lot of you for lack of forgive me if this sounds like flippant or silly but you need like a number of menu options in military affairs in terms of your response, okay?

It can't just be either, like, massive assault, massive countervalue assault, or some kind of, like, inglorious retreat, or doing nothing. You know, I mean, that's, it's like, it's like, Highland said, the Starship Troopers, like this, which is, like, a thinly veiled metaphor, a thingly veil critique of, of, like, Eisenhower, Truman and Eisenhower era of military thinking, like, some young officer candidate says, like, this grizzled, like, infantry captain. And like, what the hell do we need conventional inventory for? And the captain's like, let me ask you something.

Like, if a child's misbehaving, do you cut his head off or you spank him? You know, like, you don't just, like, maintain a hatchet to, like, be a misbehaving child. You know, that's, which seems like macabre, and kind of silly, but it's actually poignant. And, yeah, that's something we take for granted as the way things develop, particularly through the Reagan era, and in terms of military affairs, I mean. But in the 1950s, really through like 5960, people were literally talking that way. Like,

hey, we've got nuclear arms. We can threaten anybody with, you know, basically like, countervalued genocide. Like, why we need, why do we need to best around with conventional forces? You know, and that's, that seems crazy, but that, but it wasn't just, I'm not just talking about, like,

I'm not just talking about, like, goofballs, like, in in the media or something. Like, the equivalent of, like, internet guys of the day. Like I mean like actual guys with clouded policymaking circles. You know, and guys who had a chest full of ribbons and a hat full of brass

like, you know, fucking talking this way, man. But it's Matt DeMara and that's why, we'll get into this, I guess we as we proceed in our series, but the roots of the revolution and military affairs are here.

with McNamara, and McNamara, one of the things he diligently worked towards, I mean, the Vietnam War ended up taking up, like, a huge amount of his time and labors, but obviously, but developing a conventional capability, not just for the purpose of flexible response, but to really make, like, a devastating conventional capability, the kind of sphere point of American power, that very much came from McNamara. And he realized the way the world was going and uh part of it was he realized you know what we just talked about that you know nuclear arms are purposed for a very very specific exigency that almost never ever ever occurs but also just you know uh the dawn of the information age the uh you know the the kind of rapid uh

punctuated development of all these applied technologies you know like things were becoming possible in the battlefield that were unthinkable even, you know, 20 years ago, you know, in the then-present. It's the, and McNamara's fortunes really, during the Kennedy administration, I mean, if you need any more evidence that Kennedy really did, kind of marry the U.S. to the Republic of Vietnam in terms of you know global security policy it was

it was McNamara who put together really the first military advisory group that landed in Vietnam like in real depth I mean yeah going back to Eisenhower there'd been you know advised on the ground what became military assistance command of Vietnam you know, McVee, it was during, it was when Kennedy was still alive, it was during the last, you know, like year and a half of his life or whatever, the McNamara raised force levels to about, from a few hundred to about, to about 17,000. Okay, and I mean, this was well before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, okay, in August, 19964 after Mr. Kennedy was dead, of course, but the, the, um, and the Gulf of Tongan is a tricky issue, too.

I don't know how to approach that because it warrants more attention than I'm giving it right now. But people talk about it. Like, I know that I'm going to get like hate messages for this because I do anyway from libertarians. But libertarians have this idea

about the, about, about Article 1 and Article 2 like expressly delegated powers. They do these things like they do the gold standard like something like they're sacrosanct and never ever change or something, but

Formal declarations of war between powers that enjoy equalities of status in a multipolar world where the entire planet's divided up between these aforementioned powers and where like a change in the status of relations comes from like a formal declaration of war and this is a recognized policy instrument that doesn't happen anymore. Maybe that's bad, maybe it's not, but it doesn't happen anymore. And since Nuremberg, it's not thinkable for that to happen anymore. So for guys to come out and be like, well, actually, it requires a declaration of war. Like, no, it's not how things work, okay?

And I'm not going to, like, bore everybody in the next position for next hour. I'm like, why it doesn't work that way, but it doesn't. And you've got to take my word for that. Okay. And Article 2, an expressly delegated power that is not negotiable and does not change with the times, is the president being the commander in chief, okay? And the president's ability to command forces is not contingent upon a 19th century style declaration of war, okay?

However, considering Congress controls the purse strings, it's a good idea to make your case for why you should get, you know, endless money and cargo to wage the war. That's what the Gulf of Tonkin was about, okay? Was it a ruse? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. It doesn't

matter. Johnson was going to get his war somehow or his mandate somehow wasn't Johnson's war. Congress had to find a way to give him the give him the tabula rasa to do so and also signal the Pentagon

that they were willing to flip the bill and this is the way it came together basically to protect the record you know because America I mean here's the fiction of oh we're always fighting defensive wars hey we were attacked and finally like we talked about in the last episode there was a lot of fictions that

went into the drawing of the map and Indochina after 1955. And whether northern South Vietnam are truly sovereign states, that was even really clear because the 70th parallel was supposed to be a stop-gap measure pending

pending country-wide elections whereby there would be a single seat of government. And that didn't happen and the DM government claimed initially that that was because the NLF, you know, the Viet Cong, you know, had resorted to violence.

in order to sway, in order to sway, you know, opinion in their favor, it's a terror. So these elections are definitely postponed. So, I mean, it's not as simple as, well, you know, the Republic of Vietnam's a sovereign country, and it's under assault, and we have an obligation to them moral as well as juristic. But when I'm getting it is that it's not so simple

to say like the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the alleged incident, and the resolution was like some ruse by evil, LBJ to, you know, get a war mandate pursuant to a lie and, oh, by the way, that's illegitimate anyway because there's no declaration of war, like it's 1840. Like, not, that's not the way to approach it. And like I said,

I know people are going to send me like, fuck you messages. I don't care. I'm right and you're wrong. But that's important. And I'm the last person who's going to defend LBJ in the record. But whether it been Kennedy, whether it had been Ike, whether it had been Mr. Nixon, they probably would have finest it a little better than LBJ did, but they would have gotten their war mandate in some similar way, okay?

They just would have, okay? That's not arguable. Obviously, after the Gulf Tonkin resolution was rushed through, basically the escalation over Vietnam like quite literally began like with the air war initially with massive retaliatory airstrikes against naval targets and targets within North Vietnam proper

that were said to be facilitating its its blue water navy capability which supposedly is what it brought American vessels under assault but from there I mean the the kind of fix was in

and people can I mean the fix was in it's where I'm going to characterize it because like I said I believe within the bound of rationality the Cold War the Vietnam War had to be fought and I stand by that position

but McNamara even had that not been the case you know man, if you're a security defense, you know, like any cabinet officer, I mean, you're accountable to the commander-in-chief, okay? I mean, it's not, it's not like McNamara had, you know, first of all, you can't be some conscientious objector

and fulfill your obligations to the office of secretary defense. But whatever McNamara did or didn't do, I mean, he was executing the orders of the commander-in-chief, and policy does not originate with the Secretary-Defense's office, or with the Department of the Army, or with the Pentagon, frankly. However, as we get into McNamara's successor,

his true successor, Melvin Laird, I think the career of Laird, and kind of the trajectory of his tenure and his machinations against Nixon and Kissinger, I think that was kind of the origin of the true modern deep state as we think of it. There's always been shadow government. Shadow government's not the deep state.

That's something that was emergent, in my opinion, and really interest around the 1970s. But in any event, Magmira anyway, he, you know, Magmaer visited Vietnam repeatedly, like, in person. You know, I mean, and not just diplomatic meeting greets, you know, where he'd visit, you know, DM or two and go to some embassy party and then, you know,

take some, like, handshake shots of some general. I mean, he visited. McVee. He spent time that long been asking junior officers like, what's going on here, exactly? You know, you spent time pouring

over, you know, embodying out statistics. They were coming from battalional headquarters, you know, in the field, you know, like docked over whatever, and saying like, you know, this isn't right. This is not possible. So this idea that was just like this kind of

ghoulish warmonger, just like signing off and everything or, you know, somehow enriching himself. I mean, McNamara, we don't even sit here and, like, feel sad for Magnemara. He ended up at the World Bank subsequently. He lived in very good life, you know, but the fact that in public life, he was ruined. You know, it's like, what great stuff that McNair would get from, you know, this kind of 70 years of managing the Vietnam War? Like, it's not, it's not like he got, like, some great benefits from this.

You know, it's not like he pulled up Zelensky and, like, was pocketing a billion dollars in what he would have been at nobody before. like this was like a huge step down you know like Magnemar didn't get anything by by waging the Vietnam war on behalf of Johnson like he really didn't but um we're coming up in the hour

here let's I'm gonna get into Melvin Laird and the rest of McNamara next episode and we can do that whatever you want like even this week and I'll uh I realize I got to cut to the chase it's just somebody is a person that's just kind of towering as McNamara it warrants

a lot of attention like more so than than some people and even some presidents. But yeah, so I hope I didn't, I hope I didn't drag it out too long for your. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah. I figured you would have, like, kind of reined me in if I was, like, too far on tangents. But yeah, no, thank you, Pete.

This was really great. Yeah, I mean, the only reason I interrupted was I had questions. Oh, no, no. I want to take up that question proper, too, like a dedicated episode. Maybe it's like the bookend when he finished the Cold War. That's a hugely important question. And to me, especially, like, I spent a lot of time with it, you know, just only to my own kind of interest in things. So, yeah, no, I interject whatever you want, man.

Like, please do. Like, it helps me organize my thoughts. All right. Do quick plugs, and we'll get out. Yeah, man. As people might have noticed, because I tweeted it out, as well as I announced it on my substatic chat, like Steelstorm 2, you know, my second science fiction novel. it's been printed it's it's in it's in the hands of imperium press i got to touch base and my dear friends there anyway but they physically have it so i'm going to get word from them

when it's going to go up for sale on imperiumpress.org and i'll drop word of that um in the meantime you can find me uh you can find my podcast and some of my long forum at substack it's real thomas seven seven seven seven that substack.com you can find me on twitter um at triskelianjihad the T is a number of seven But if you seek me on Twitter You probably shall find Or just like search Thomas 7777 That's basically where I'm active right now

I am watching the YouTube channel By the end of the month I promise I know it's been delayed and delayed But by the last day in January I mean before then But by the end of January The channel will launch So please look for that too

It's Thomas TV on YouTube I appreciate it So the next time. Yeah, my way, man. Thank you very much. Thanks, sir. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Kenyanez show for part seven. Is this eight or seven?

Eight of the Cold War series, Thomas 777. How you doing, sir? I'm very well, man. Thanks for hosting me as always. Don't feel bad. I only know that it's part Ocho because that was indicated when I joined the meeting. That is Cold War with Thomas Part 8. You know, like Jason takes Manhattan, but it's just like Thomas talks on Zoom.

But be as it may, we're going to continue to flesh out, you know, the career of Robert McNamara and the Vietnam conflict. Not just because McNamara is a key personage, you know, in understanding the Cold War. I mean, he represented a certain type, truly. You know, people derisively would refer to people like McNamara and Tomah. is shelling who we'll talk about probably the episode after next he was another brilliant shelling i mean he was not a brilliant polymath he was instrumental in cold war strategic planning um and uh you know gaming scenarios that uh that were wherein you know a strategy could meaning meaningfully be incorporated into extant technology and weapons platforms um and the degree

to which this shaped policy at every level like cannot be overstated i mean i guess on the one hand that's obvious because we're talking about, you know, I mean, I mean, I mean, the essence of the political is war and peace. You know, kind of the zenith of war fighting technology is a general nuclear war, even if, you know, we stipulate that a lot of the kind of hysteria around nuclear weapons is just that hysteria. But, you know, the shelling was far less of a public figure than McNamara, I mean, for a few reasons. not that I think are obvious, you know, shelling didn't preside over an active

war wherein, you know, American Americans were dying in theater, but McNamara kind of became that I'm a figure that the left kind of loved to burn an effigy you know, proverbially

speaking. And I think he I think it kind of like embodies that era like the era of the technocrat and I don't I don't mean that in punitive terms I mean certainly that there's a lot of men who that that kind of

that kind of sociological structure produced that we're not attractive people and that we're lacking in a grounded morality and we're not you know we're not the kind of men who one would want sort of guiding policy in concrete ways but, you know, McNamara himself was a complex person.

And I make the point again and again, like McNamara was not this guy who aspired to be Secretary of Defense. He wasn't like one of these kinds of, he wasn't one of these guys who really had no way of kind of like capturing clout other than going to Washington and capitalizing on connections. You know, they asked him. He didn't ask them. And like we talked about, it's not like McNamara resigned in disgrace or something.

you know i mean he he went on to be the chairman of the world bank um but at the same time you know his name became synonymous with uh with the kind of gruesome uh calculus of the body count you know with uh you know the kind of the kind of the kind of narrative of people of that came to surround the penkniters you know so it's not like it's like merginamara somehow like profited immensely from his tenure as secretary defense and um You know, his, he, even when, even public opinion precipitously turned against the war, post-Tet, you know, it's, McNamara didn't simply exit stage laugh when things went bad. And I can't, I can't emphasize enough, too, you know, the fact that he served for seven years,

that's an eternity for a cabinet post, particularly for Secretary of Defense, and particularly during, a wartime administration. You know, so like I said, I'm sure a lot of people are going to just claim that I'm some kind of McNamara apologist owing to, you know, owing to, you know, either like emotional factors or, you know, some kind of hero worship. Like, neither of those things are true. But I, at all, anyone who hasn't seen it, like I said, I highly recommend people watch the Errol Morris biopic on, um, on McNamara, where I mean, you, he, he interviews the man

himself, you know, because that's what, what, um, what Morris does. Um, I've reserved judgment until one views that, um, Magnumara quoted himself incredibly well. And, and compared that to one of Morris's subsequent biopics about, uh, Donald Rumsfeld, who just came off just as really kind of, I mean, just really, just a really, really just nasty person. you know i mean in every sense of the word you know uh i think uh i think compared to i think compared to those who followed who were either clowns or just you know kind of you know cynical uh creeps like rumsfeld and i think i think macknamara looms very large um in uh in mostly positive terms but we've left off last episode i believe talking a bit about the

golf of talking resolution and the incident itself i don't want to uh i don't i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to rehash the entire debate as it were that still surrounds the incident that gave rise to the congressional revolution that you know gave johnson the tabular ross to escalate essentially i i just made the point then as i'll reiterate now that for better or worse and i understand libertarian argument against this precedent and I very much understand the kind of constitutionalist objection to it but for better or worse this is how the business of war and peace is conducted and this is how it's finessed in policy terms okay um some kind of incidents is identified as a clear and present danger or constituting a necessity um you know uh demanding intervention um

you know, Congress affords the executive the ways and means in budgetary terms and in command terms to accomplish, you know, the mission in general terms. And then, you know, it's the legislature bows out of the decision-making process in large part, you know, in a formal capacity, you know, until, until something happens or a series of occurrences ensue that brings it back within their direct purview either willing to

revolt of the body politic as it were or you know some kind of perceived malfeasance on the part of the executive in terms of the conduct of the war but we're not here to have a discussion on abstract constitutional theory or on war power

and what it and what its significance is in the post-Nerber era. I just wanted to make the point that the Westphalian practice of literally declaring war as a change of status and relations between equals, like that, that's totally obsolete.

And it doesn't matter if we think that's good or bad. That's the way it is. So the Gulf of Tonk and resolution doesn't stand out as this uniquely, you know, kind of corrupt way of a of a rather morally you know

compromise executive to procure a war mandate I'm not going to say there and say Johnson was had any redeeming characteristics but even like if Kennedy had been in the White House he would have pursued he would

he would have proceeded in much the same way as with Nixon okay as would you know Reagan had he been in the White House. I mean, this is something important to keep in mind, but I won't believe that point anymore. But what the resolution represented was that, and I'm going to, I'm going to jump backwards a little bit as we proceed to talk about Colonel John Paul Van, who I think is very important. His analysis of the Vietnam War, like, as it was underway, I think is essential to understanding the battlefield situation and, you know, kind of the

tactical shortcomings of a particularly of mac v but i don't want to get into that yet but what's important um to keep in mind um in discussing the escalation that was facilitated by the tonkin resolution is that military assistance command vietnam it arrived in country in 1962 and from 62 to 65 there was a proper counterinsurgency campaign underway against the viet Cong and this really you know army special forces was very much purpose for that you know and uh that we talked earlier about you know Kennedy's uh you know Kennedy's a strategic orientation towards secondary theaters, you know, and the need to, you know, not surrender these contested territories to the communists, you know, for, not just for, you know, on grounds of military necessity,

but, you know, owing to profound political implications, a communist victory, you know, in these, in these developing countries, you know, the, and the fact that he, that Kennedy was such a champion of Special Operations Forces is an extremely bound up with that policy vision. But Vietnam pre-Tonkent gulp. So Kennedy in 62 and 63 was commander-in-chief guiding these missions. Yeah, essentially. And I mean, he had, it was McNamara and it was, you know,

Kennedy had a lot of talent around him, you know, who were helping him identify kind of the concrete variables. now that's translated to actual war fighting. But, I mean, obviously, it wasn't just emerging from the mind of Kennedy. But Kennedy did understand military matters reasonably well. You know, I mean, he had been in pretty heavy action in the Navy. You know, he wasn't just some, like, civilian neophyte who had no idea of, you know, what, what this constitute and what the difference was between the heavy army, you know, organized.

organized around armor, you know, and that had a very, very clouds of witsy in view of war fighting, you know, is the advance of fire. I mean, this really did, like, rule the day, you know, and I mean, for good reason, frankly, because the Army's most probable military mission was to fight the Red Army. I mean, but the kind of tactical flexibility that early special operations forces represented this really was like a revolutionary idea you know like people under like 45 or so when they think of the army they or they when they think of the military establishment they think of special operations forces um that's completely the opposite of the way things were during the cold war okay um and it uh and there's a lot of there was a lot of institutional resentment

of the army towards special operations um and i mean that's a whole other issue that's fascinating but point being there's kind of this mischaracterization among court historians that okay in vietnam there's this guerrilla war underway and you know johnson you know being the you know being the kind of fool that he was and you know the army being you know trigger happy as they are they just like looked over the situation and said you know what we're going to employ in massive in massive depth and we're going to throw like as much firepower as we can at the vietnam like that's not what happened. You know, there was a years-long counterinsurgency, low-intensity war against the National Liberation Front by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, you know, by the Arvin Ranger

element, which was kind of their quasi-special forces elements. And like we talked about, the Saudi enemy's army does get a bad rap because there were elements among them that fought hard and were very game fighters. But yeah, there's actually a lot. a fascinating old movie called Go Tell the Spartans, which is about exactly this topic. It's about, you know, like the Kennedy era

of Vietnam War and these green berets of this kind of forlorn outpost. You know, as they realize, the kind of tactical situation is changing. And obviously in the back of their mind, they're terrified, although they'd never, like, let on this is the case of,

of, like, the North Vietnamese army one day showing up and just, like, sweeping through, you know, out of nowhere. I mean, things like that did happen, you know, later on, like against, against the purported, you know, in contrast to what Army intelligence was claiming with the capabilities extant of, you know,

had no way to deploy in the South. But as it may, as things that are going bad in the South, and as DM made it clear that he, he was willing to negotiate. You know, we talked about the kind of murky political status of Vietnam, you know, and it, um, it, there was, there was a lot of, there was, there was, there was great concern that DM was just going to, you know, quote, to sell out the West and come to, you know, come to terms with, with Ho Chi men and with Hanoi, you know, incorporate, you know, not just the

NLF, but, you know, the Communist Party of Vietnam, uh, into, you know, into, uh, into, into, into, into, into the ruling apparatus and i mean obviously that was unacceptable um because that you know that that the precedent that that would set would be completely would be completely at odds with what you know america was trying to accomplish in the developing world and you know we talked about how again like you know the uh the it was it was at base we're talking about a political conflict it doesn't matter that you know um there they're there that that's indochina is not you know a bounty of natural resources it doesn't matter that you know there's not there's not some absolutely essential you know maritime port of call that you know has uh has profound military significance there um you know the

line in the sand was uh was vietnam and um that's that's where the communist challenged and that's you know the challenge that was going that challenge was going to be met or it was not and um the communists had great momentum in the third world even uh really up until up until the late 1980s you know like long after you know long after like stalinist type rule you know and marxist leninist revolutionary ambition and the kind of the armed uh insurgency culture or a political culture around it long after that like lost its luster you know for anybody but you know total diehards, you know, like the kind of people who joined like the Bader Meinhoff gang, you know, in the Western world, this kind of thing had an incredible power to animate people in the third world, you know, and Ho Chi Minh himself was a testament to that. You know, like we talked about, Ho was not some, it wasn't some bumpkin or some or some ignorant, you know, farmer or something. He, you know, he was, he was highly educated. You know, his family was, was wealthy and well situated. and very insinuated into the indigenous political structure, you know, in Vietnam.

So, you know, and he was not an outlier, nor was he anachronism. But be as it may, it, the mass escalation, I mean, yeah, part of that was owing to the fact that the post-new-look army, you know, once conventional, forces you know kind of became uh once again in vogue for like a better way to describe it um the army uh the army remained obsessed with with firepower you know and the idea that you know combined arms and a lot of these nascent technologies um you know and the precursors of the smart weapons you know and as well as like the technologies immediately preceding the revolution and military affairs that that allowed command of control to truly direct fire. But, like, the destructive capabilities of these things, which is awesome.

So there was, in fact, the sense in the Pentagon that, like, look, you know, asymmetric warfare, yeah, there's, you know, there's considerations emergent, you know, within that paradigm and that's got to be accounted for within the battle space itself. and within, you know, and it's got to inform decision-making of how forces are structured and deployed in country. But at the same time, you know, if you can blast the hell out of everything, you're going to get a lot done. You know, and how can the National Liberation Front, you know, no matter, it doesn't matter how hard they are. It doesn't matter, you know, what kind of, what kind of civilian support they have. you know it doesn't matter you know kind of how uh it doesn't matter that they've got this kind of mass youthful male population to draw upon you know if you if you if you apply this kind of pressure in the form of you know just relentless and massive firepower against the adversary

he's going to just crumble i mean there was there was more than you know like a modicum of of that sort of thinking i mean obviously however it was clear, you know, in 1959 and 1969, all the way to, you know, 19704, 75, when the People's Army Vietnam launched its final offensive, it was clear that Hanoi was not going to prevail without a massive conventional assault on the south. Vietnam's a comparatively huge country.

The National Liberation Front had the capability to dominate the countryside very effectively. thus this is what was responsible for the kind of you know hearts and minds campaign all of that um and and the idea of free fire zones and strategic hamlets and we'll get into some of that later but um the but but but but but the urban centers the viacong could not not capture but they couldn't you know and there was a dearth of a necessary civilian support you know which was the true kind of, like, infrastructure, the Viet Cong, you know, like any guerrilla movement, that's what they have to draw upon. But even, like, their big coup was when they, their big battlefield coup was when the NLF captured Hui City, you know, and that's, you know, and, and, you know, just those dramatic shots of U.S. Marines, you know, like, raising the American flag, like, over the Citadel in, in Hue, you know, because it was this horrible, like, pitched battle, but, I mean, just really, really raw.

That's why I think it's cool that Full Metal Jacket focuses on Hway, you know, and Gustav Hasford made Hway the focus of the battlefield segment of his novel for a reason. But the point is, like, you know, they couldn't hold it. You know, it's not like, it's not like the NLF took away and sent it to this massive push on Tet 68, you know, and then the civilian population. came out in droves, you know, allow them to consolidate that, um, that, uh,

their presence there, you know, quite the contrary. So, it was clear that South Vietnam, I was going to have to develop a competent, conventional capability,

butch-rest by, or facilitated by, rather, you know, modern combined arms and hardware, as well as the training of their people, you know, to operate these,

these weapon systems. and weapons platforms or there's going to have to be direct intervention you know by cito ideally we got into cito the other day or some constellation of you know america and allies in order to in order to stave off uh this uh this uh this uh this imminent assault um until until the south could stand on its own and that's what i just said that's what became grand strategy in Vietnam you know um and um as any military man will tell you you know you don't you don't you don't wait until uh the exigency is afoot and then respond to it you know just like

just as you anticipate capabilities um you know not you know just consider you know probable action in terms of uh in terms of judging and you know a potential opposing uh force you preempt the ambitions of that opposing force. You know, you don't wait until the people's army of Vietnam is assaulting across the 17th parallel, you know, in depth, you know, with combined arms, you know, to decide, like, how are you going to react to that? Okay, so this is the logic behind the massive escalation.

and there had been at its peak pre-tonken Gulf, I think it was between 17,000 and 18,500 approximately American forces on the ground in Vietnam. This is by the end of 1967, this had swelled the 485,000

troops. And by the peak, which was the summer in 1968 it was over half a million it was something like 530,000 okay the

and obviously you know as the casualties mounted and as and as the police situation you know kind of like restricted the tactical environment

and what was permissible according to the rules of engagement you know commanders on the ground down to the company level you know their constant refrain was like basically we need more manpower you know we need you know we need to be able to

apply more apply more pressure now and why why was it kind of boiled down to that metric okay well you know we talked we talked when we first kind of scratch the service of the atomic age

I mean, like, it's Advent and what the implications were in policy terms as well as military ones. And obviously, I can speak a lot more about the former than the latter because I'm not a military man. And I, you know, that's not really my wheelhouse. But I do know something about policy as it interfaces with military decision making and the needs of, you know, the needs of the military establishment and to accomplish stated policy goals as directed by the civilian executive. there came the ability to the ability to corral data and the ability to interpret data the ability to apply data to all kinds of problems at scale you know whether you're talking about you know whether you're talking about the best way to offset liability if you're you know if you're manufacturing automobiles you know and thus that was the you know unsafe at any speed that was like the ralph nader book about uh you know the auto industry and it's this macabre calculus of

you know how many how many desowing the products liability issues were acceptable um you know vis-a-vis what would be the cost of remedying these design defects i mean everybody's familiar with that okay um this this was something that was emergent just like across the board you know, in the private sector, in government, you know, in social planning. The military in the Cold War, it, what the victory metric was in these secondary theaters, you know, where the primary challenge was a political one, you know, not a military one. you know um a comparable situation would be what the british were facing in northern ireland okay um uh i mean that that that conflict developed to read differently but uh identifying you know

not just what uh what the tactical orientation should be in order to neutralize the opposing force but what the performance metric is you know of uh those forces in theater well what this came boiled down to was, you know, the, the ability to manufacture enemy dead, quite literally. The logic of the body count became the performance metric. So there'd be demands from a battalion level, you know, originating with, you know, at, um, at longbin, uh, you know, and, and trickling down to company and then platoon level, you know, like, you need to, you to produce bodies you need to produce enemy dead and uh as a standalone metric that's problematic i mean aside from the fact it's macabre and all that and i realize it's it's kind of a gross thing

to talk about um that makes people uncomfortable but this is very much like i mean this this is this is the stuff of modern warfare okay but it took on a significance and to itself in vietnam owing again to the kind of to the kind of the culture of strategic planning but it wasn't just spillover from you know the the kind of the data revolution

spearheaded by IBM and it's got to proto computers you know that were utilized in the Second World War and and you know thereafter obviously you know, the victory metric of in nuclear war

is very much distilled down to, you know, the ability to, like, the ability to yield, you know, enemy dead at, beyond, like, a certain tipping point. You know, that's, that's literally what the term, you know, like mega death indicates,

an assured destruction. Megadeth was not just, you know, the name of, like, kind of a, you know, like a fucking heavy metal man. You know, like it actually, It actually was a term of art, if not nuclear war studies and game theory. But as it may, there is something to this logic of the body count. I mean, if you're, if the burn rate that you're, that you're imposing upon the opposing force, you know, far exceeds.

the population in military age males, you know, who can be trained, equipped, and fielded, you know, to replace those losses, at some point, you know, the insurgency is going to fall apart, or it's at least not going to be able to mount operations, you know, beyond, you know, like platoon level or something. And this did work in a sense. I'm one of the few defenders you'll find in the Phoenix program. We'll get into that at another date. And people who don't really understand it. Like, even people are otherwise sensible, like, it's become this kind of, it's become this kind of horror story that they like to bandy about, you know, that, you know, it's kind of synonymous in their mind.

You know, it's taken on kind of the characteristic of, it's become kind of like the exemplar of, of executive overreach and violence they're in you know but it um something like that identifying enemy cadres

I mean if you have a reliable system of identifying these people and targeting them for annihilation um with a minimum of collateral damage um where possible that's basically how you fight

counterinsurgency warfare or how you wage counterinsurgency warfare and that's what the British Army started doing by the late 90s in Northern Ireland the way they did it obviously was or by the late 80s I mean sorry but not the late 90s

but the um this uh this this this was underway in Vietnam um At the same time that, you know, there was this kind of, there was this kind of like body count driven effort in, you know, being waged by, you know, conventional forces, you know, just to rack up the body count. I mean, obviously this led to all kinds of problems, you know, wherein these numbers were confabulated, you know, civilians were counted as, as enemy combatants. you know, like really, very, very corrupt things happen, you know, of a moral and of material nature. But that happens in every war, right?

Yeah, exactly. And it's also, this didn't like somehow emerge in McNamara. Magna wasn't this ghoulish guy who was like, oh, well, I have an idea, you know, let's, let's transform the military apparatus into this kind of corpse manufacturing enterprise, you know, because that's just a great thing to do. I mean, this was this was the thinking at the time. And frankly, too, I mean, there's a, again, the Cold War was strange. I mean, in some ways, there's commonality to all,

you know, to, to all conflicts where there's, you know, where there's certain variables present, you know, that, that, that cause, you know, combat to resolve in similar ways, you know, adjusting for technology and things, you know, like within disparate theaters and across, you know, across, you know, the temporal divide and stuff. But there were strange things about the Cold War that limited what was possible, not just because the threat of escalation, you know, even in a very secondary theater, excuse me, it was always present. But also, again, if you're fighting a primarily political war, you know, you know,

we're not just talking about, we're not just talking about the, the enemy's ability to field military age males, you know, who are going to be trained as infantry or sappers or whatever. Not every man is going to make it as a Viet Cong that requires a certain radicalism within, you know, within, you know, the quote, heart and mind of that individual, you know, I mean, it's not, if you're, if you're looking to build a, insurgent army, particularly in a situation, like, what the Vietnamese is called the American War, where, you know, basically there's like an 80% chance you're going to die. Like, you're not, it's not like being drafted into the U.S. Army and, you know, to go

fight the Korean War. It's like a very different thing. You know, like you, every man pretty much needs to be a partisan. And yeah, you know, there were, there were, there were, there were, there were LF fighters, you know, who were basically, like, press ganged and, you know, like, joining the Viet Cong and

stuff. But that, that was the minority because you don't get results out of people like that you know i mean so it um the idea that we've got to kill as many of these people as possible in a targeted capacity and you know killing them is a is an end in itself because that's a victory metric in order to kind of alter you know the political conditions on the ground and how these conditions translate to to military power you know albeit in an asymmetrical way like that they that is a real thing, and that's a legit analysis. I'm not saying

legit and, you know, moral terms or whatever. I mean, I'm not rendering decision on that one or the other. But in terms there is a tactical logic to that. It's not, you know, insane or something, or totally off base or the, nor is it the kind of 1960s, you know,

technocrat version of Chateau generalship. And I think that that's important. It's, uh, but moving on. The McNamara became very, very skeptical of administration policy. Not just because Johnson, as we talked about, you know, Johnson viewed escalation and the threat of escalation as a kind of political bargaining ship, which is not how you wage a war. Okay? I mean, that's not, and I mean, first of all, you're playing with the lives of the men, you know, who are charged with fighting that war.

But also, it just doesn't, you know, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't. It doesn't work. You know, that's not the going to thing that yields concessions. And, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't instill fear in the opposing force. You know, it basically tells them that, you know, eventually you're going to be willing to compromise because otherwise, at the end of the day, you know, if that was not the case, you know, you'd be fighting this war. There'd be no restraint on the rules of engagement. Like, don't get me wrong. You know, the, uh, the, uh, despite, you know, despite.

despite the kind of kind of canards like, oh, America was like fighting the Vietnam War with one hand tied around his bald or something. I mean, we killed a huge amount of people in Vietnam.

Okay, like some real cowboy shit was going on. I'm not, I'm not trashing the war effort at all, okay? Like, unlike World War II, I think within the bound of rationality

of the Cold War, like I've said, Vietnam had to be fought. Okay. But there was, was a lot of there was a lot of wholesale

killing of human beings according to pretty loose criteria you know the tactical restraints there was you know the literally the parameters that were imposed on the operational

environment like yeah that had a that rendered victory problematic okay like no doubt about it but it um but the uh but uh but uh but this i but this idea that you know uh america was like hesitating to drop bodies in vietnam going to crazy r o e like that's that's that's that's completely facile but the uh but what i'm gonna realize was that uh you know the dropping more and more deploying more and more men to vietnam was not going to solve the problem

You know, nor was a, nor was a, nor was a, nor was the problem that, you know, the, the bombing campaign wasn't intense enough or something. You know, like, he, he basically reached the conclusions, you know, that, that we're going to talking about now. And, like, a lot of, like, like, like, like, a lot of what I'm drawing upon to describe his mindset and describe some of the extant challenges of, of, of the Secretary of Defense, um, in his epoch, I'm drawing upon his own direct testimony, you know, I mean, among other things, obviously, but Magdimer, in winter 1967, McNamara went as far as this is just freezing troop levels. And

basically to prepare Magnemer said, like, within, you know, we don't have an indefinite timetable, you know, to make South Vietnam, like, combat ready in terms of their forces in being, you know, to stand on their own

against the north. You know, it's, like, basically he said that, the situation is not going to improve on the ground. Either the Army of the Republic of Vietnam can fight now or it's or or or it can't fight. You know, two years from now, the situation is not going to be radically different. This was rejected outright by Johnson. And that's, you know, it was November 29th of 67 that McNamara announced his pending resignation.

He didn't retire until February 6th. or resign, rather. But that, I mean, that I think was a struggle with a camel's bat. Okay, I think McNamara gave it his all in Vietnam for years. He risked his reputation.

He probably risked like a lot of his, a lot of his moral, he probably compromised a lot of his, a lot of his moral commitments, too, frankly. I'm not going to sit here and make a martyr out of him. He took the job. And I mean, if you're Secretary of Defense, I mean, you're,

you're dealing with the deaths of human beings. You've got to be okay with it. But the, you know, he, for, for, this is what he did for, for seven years, almost. And when, when he, when he, when he approached his commander in chief and said, like, this is a situation as it stands. I mean, Johnson Bayes just, like, waved him off, like dismissed him. you know i mean i and i'm not saying that magnum are quit because you know on grounds like massyling ego or something at all but i can't even imagine being in that role particularly consider like what what was underway in the country you know and uh and your

secretary defense like literally the man who uh who you know who you rely upon more than any singular figure i mean in that administration you know to give you the straight story on on the strategic situation, like, he tells you exactly that, you know, and exactly what, you know, what, what, what, what, what, what the, what your options are as, as commander-in-chief,

you know, and you simply dismiss him because, like, that, that doesn't comport with, like, your own conceptual prejudices. I mean, it's incredible, but, um, at LBJ was just a terrible person and a terrible chief executive, you know, it's, um, but that, that doesn't need to be rehashed, but, Who succeeded McNamara was Clark Clifford very briefly. That's not like a Yaley, like old America, like name. I don't know what is, but he, he was kind of a placeholder.

The true success of McNamara was a guy named Melvin Laird. He's kind of forgotten to history, but Melvin Laird loomed really large over the late Cold War. um his deputy uh what was no word about clifford was one of his like one of his chief uh like assistants was paul nitsa you know and paul nitsa was you know he was the co-founder of team b and uh you know until he was like quite elderly like he he uh like nitsa was even like he was he was he was drafting uh he was he was drafting um policy statements uh on behalf of uh the project for New American Century, you know, like, as late as the early 2000s. You know, like, he's, he's, he's one of these, he's one of these kinds of, I mean,

not to sound old dramatic. He's one of these, Nitzel's got on one of these shadowy figures of the defense establishment, you know, who, who really was, you know, who really was kind of like a hidden eminence. But, uh, that's really all that's remarkable about Clifford. Laird, uh, Laird was interesting. And, um, there was, uh, how long, how long we've been going here i don't know if i should um i don't know i should dive into i don't know i should dive into yeah we'll get started on melvin laird and and and then we'll begin the nixon doctrine and then like we'll we'll like deep dive properly into like nixon's war next episode if that's cool because it requires uh i'm not intently dragging

this out but it there's just like a lot here but melvin laird uh some people some people some of you'll talk about him like he was a hands-off secretary defense either willing to you know Nixon being an imperial executive who bullied his cabinet like that's that's complete nonsense other people cast Laird as this guy who uh you know in in and in deliberate ever to strike a contrast to McNamara um you know uh was was was averse uh you know um setting a policy course um in uh like you know um in its own right um emergent from the Secretary of Defense's office. It's not,

now those things are correct. Laird actually was, was very much engaged in the course of policy. And he very much became an enemy of Nixon and Kissinger.

And this had implications for Watergate, which in my opinion was, you know, just a coup against Nixon by what we view today is the deep... state you know i uh there certainly was a kind of shadow government in those days you broke up there you broke up there for a second uh were you referring to it as you said that the people who would

have carried out um watergate would have been comparable to today what we call the deep state oh yeah definitely definitely it's just that the it um like the like government was different in the cold war in certain key ways but I mean so like I'm not I mean yeah okay we get I mean if we want to talk about it in linear terms like yeah I get we can we can look at it as in as

kind of you know the phenomena in common um but the but Laird yeah the I think Laird's hostility to Nixon and Kissinger it took out a very personal tenor which is strange I mean I think

um it uh But in pure policy terms, Larry's vision, I think he was wrong, but he wasn't totally off base. if you'd if you'd if you'd if you'd vietnam as essentially weakening the united states um not just in material terms but uh he said that you know essentially he's like you got a war-weary country now you know then like that they're now being 969 you know he's like if a general war broke out you know broke out with warsaw peck tomorrow you know uh you know uh i i i you know i i you you know, would the country really have the political will, you know, to fight the Soviet Union worse up back in Central Europe, you know, and sacrificed like a million and a half young people, you know, on the, on, on the heels of what we've already endured in the Southeast Asia.

Secondly, he's like, you know, the, the Soviet Union was advantaged, as we talked about before in terms of the fact that, you know, it, it basically had preexisting cadres. on the ground throughout the third world. Oh, we're in a large part, you know, to kind of the anti-colonial movement and other things, and like a basic hostility, you know, to the West in profound terms, not just superficial ones. And but also, like a lot of these movements, like including the National Liberation Front itself, you know, they'd been engaged in combat either against the Axis or, you know, against, or against the Portuguese, the French, or the English, or, you know, any of these, any of these fading, you know, colonial powers, the Soviet Union was able to really kind of spare its own blood and treasure. Meanwhile, it really kind of had the United States' number in terms of its war-fighting doctrine, in terms of its strengths and weaknesses, you know.

And while America was, you know, while America was taking heavy casualties in Vietnam, you know, and, and people were losing confidence in the dollar and things, you know, the Soviet Union was really, was, was, was under, had undertaken a token of revolution in military affairs, you know, but it had done so without, you know, like paying any costs in blood. And Laird had a good point there. And this became very evident post-a-tint, I think. And that's one of the reasons why when Reagan took the oath of office, you know, a decade later, there really was a sense that Warsaw Pact constituted a clear and present danger. That wasn't just propaganda or, you know, a precursor to war fever or something. or an iteration of war fever, what have you. What Laird did do was he said, you know, his big thing, where he and Nixon converged,

he said that, you know, we've got to be more assertive in foreign affairs. We got to strengthen, you know, U.S. influence, you know, over the, over what was then the European community, you know, because the EU didn't exist yet. um you know he's like we got to consolidate um we we we've got to consolidate you know the hold we have on japan and korea you know make sure that's permanent um you know and uh and uh he said that you know absolutely a credible nuclear deterrence is essential to the essential of sound foreign policy but he said that strong conventional defense is is is just as important you know and the uh he came back to this point again and again

like I said, he's like, you know, you're, you're going to basically turn people against the military establishment that were constantly engaged in these brushfire wars. And I understand that point, but I don't accept it, but it, you know, my point is, like I said, like it wasn't, it wasn't some crazy idea. It's, uh, the Vietnamization, uh, regime, you know, Nixon's policy of disengagement with the South, you know, well, well, buttressing its forces in being you know, in material terms as well as in terms of morale and, you know,

transform the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. It is something combat capable. That very much, that policy course very much came from Nixon, but Melvin Lair over the rubber met the road, you know, kind of sought to it being

implemented. So he deserves props for that. One of the early rifts between Laird and Nixon and Kissinger, I mean, basically the entire executive national security staff of the White House, like, other than himself. In 69, that's when the secret bombing of Cambodia began. You know, Cambodia was officially neutral. I mean, they were engaged in their own, like, bloody civil war. There was all kinds of intrigues there. And what's fascinating is that as the Sino-Soviet split kind of set in, there was very much a proxy war between the Soviet Union and Red China in Cambodia,

you know, between the Soviet client, North Vietnamese, like later, just, you know, the Vietnamese army and the Khmer Rouge. But that... increasingly sidelined Laird in these key decisions. And there's an interesting parallel with Iran-Contra there, which Warns mentioned.

I won't deep dive into that now because obviously it would be here all afternoon. But it's, um, Laird, Laird understood, Laird said basically look like this wasn't a matter of pride. You know, it's not a matter of me

being affronted that, you know, despite the fact of the secretary of fence, I mean, left out of these decisions, but he said there's an inevitable, there's going to be an inevitable, public disclosure of, uh, of these bombings. And, uh, public outrage, uh, authentic or not, cultivated or not by, by hostile elements, um, is going to, is, is going to harm, the harm wrought by that is going to neutralize any tactical advantage by hitting these these North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. And Laird was actually

right about that. And again, I mean, what was the anti-war movement and was its focus on these discrete policy decisions, you know, like the secret bombing of Cambodia? Was that, like, authentic outrage? I don't, no.

Okay, not at all. It was it was, it was the it was the 1968 equivalent of Soros Inc. You know, color revolutioning the American Street against Mr. Nixon and the Vietnam War, with, of course,

the help of Warsaw Pacted intelligence agencies. But that didn't matter. The point is, that's what it would be a catalyst for. And, of course, I mean, the... You can almost hear the Nixon rebuttal to that of, you know, we're not... We're not going to let these, like... We're not going to let some, like,

Tommy Coxuckers in Berkeley, like, dictate, like, the course of policy, particularly not, you know, the course of war and peace decisions. Because, you know, bombing, nominally neutral states that are actually communist sanctuaries is bad PR. But Laird was absolutely right. And, you know, you, if you're the President of the United States, you know, you're presiding over the political culture that you're presiding over. And this guy as it may be, you know, like comically improper as it may be, you know, you are dealing with a hostile media if you're a Mr. Nixon or Mr. Trump.

that's going to do everything of his power to remove you from office and these things must be considered now that does not mean that you refrain from assaulting Cambodia if it's a if it's a tactical necessity what it does mean is that you finesse it

the right way and you know you don't do it in secret and cut the secretary's defense out of the equation but that that really kind of that really that really that really was kind of the nail in the car

in the relationship between Laird and um and Nixon and Kissinger and later when when it was disclosed when the bombing in Cambodia was disclosed and um these mass protests broke out which were the precursor to the to the Kent State uh tragedy um which I don't know people I didn't know that until fairly recently um I mean I knew like when the I knew when the Cambodia bombies occurred I knew when Kent State happened I didn't realize that like at least the nominal pretext for the big protest was um was the bombing in cambodia but uh when this was disclosed the media uh nixon um through kissinger very publicly accused laird of uh leaking it you know just uh um which is a pretty pretty pretty serious allegation um i haven't deep dived into the issue

I can't really comment on that. I would have been surprised if that was the case. Laird was a serious guy, however you or I feel, about his politics. He wouldn't have compromised. A guy like Laird wouldn't have compromised, you know, an active war effort, you know, to stick it to Mr. Nixon or to score points with Woodward and Bernstein types. I just can't see that happening. but be as it may um this was yet another um i mean this this was even another dysfunction of the

nixon white house i mean don't get me wrong i think nixon was actually fighting the vietnam war um to win it um and uh next episode we'll also get into the man of creighton abrams general creighton abrams who's exceeded westmoreland um and uh i i i think i westmoreland almost uh almost uh almost uh almost like a mcclellan of his era you know like very much uh very much very much very much very much a bean counter or like a lesser or like a middle level executive and in a particularly innovative company you know in in in an army uniform um um how west morland advanced the way he did name's a mystery but again I don't

there's obviously not a hell of a lot I can add there's obviously not a hell of a lot of inset I have into the U.S. military culture and I mean having not seen it from within but the

Laird we'll wrap up here in a minute so that because the next kind of sub top I'm going to get into is huge but the if there's a legacy to Laird I think he was very much the last, kind of like Secretary of Defense that had any real independence in policy matters, not because he was such an incredible dynamic guy, but because subsequent presidents did not make a mistake that Nixon did. Your Secretary of Defense during the Cold War, in my opinion, was arguably as important as one's selection for Attorney General.

but uh that's um that's a uh that could be uh i guess they could be arguing a number of different ways but um i think this might be a kind of a natural stopping point um i uh you can do your you can do your plugs you can also announce that um twitter is being twitter again you know yeah yeah yeah i think i'm on my seventh third eighth account you know i i i was I was suspended from Twitter the week Elon took over. It's just bizarre. And, like, Ace, they suspended him, and Ace is a legit guy. And, like, he's afraid to speak his mind.

Like, what, what, would, he doesn't, he has, he, like, blogs about, I mean, he's, he's, he's, like, kind of a mega guy. But what, what the hell is he dropping that's offensive to Twitter? You know, like, it's just totally random. And, like, meanwhile, except his love for a docking back for the attack. That's the only thing that really loves me, but it, like, but it, like, makes no sense. sense like even like like the things that even usually throw like their triggers like he or whatever like he like why bad him but it um but the uh but yeah i mean and it's i i behoo people not every time does this happen literally a dozen times it happens like every several weeks every one happens

people act like i die or something it's like i do a lot of just like goofy shit posting on twitter i drop some serious stuff there too but that's like it's kind of a big nothing man like I use it to promote what we're doing so that our people can find us, you know, and tune in for like the stuff we're doing here. But this idea that it's like this awesome platform that we need. We don't fucking need that shit. Like, I built my brand when I was on no social media at all. Okay. I do have an account there that is active.

But I'm going to be low key about it because, like, I don't know. Who the hell knows, like, what they're, you know, what the kind of, um, one can never tell, like, what, what the lay of the land is in terms of, you know, the, I mean, who can predict arbitrary and capricious action, which is by definition is arbitrary and capricious, but I'm transitioning to YouTube

that's like my primary platform. I'm going to back it up on Odyssey and stuff. Yes, I realize YouTube is censorious as well, but I mean, I mean, we're kind of, we're kind of leaving Twitter behind anyway, but yeah, so I don't want people acting like this is like the end of the fucking world. Like, it just, it bothers me,

people act that way but the what the um yeah i mean find me on sub stack real thomas seven seven seven seven com i'm on instagram um just at like number seven hw m as seven seven seven um the youtube channel is launching at the end of the month like i said i'm very excited about it um like i really am it i there's a lot of potential there um and i think people will be very happy with it. And I've got, I'm very blessed to have some really great people helping me produce it because I certainly would be pissing into the wind on the production side or not for them. But yeah, and Steelstorm 2 is available at Imperium Press. That's the second installment in my science fiction series. So yeah, please check it out if you're a fan

on my work product and or science fiction. And that's, that's all I got. Well, once again, Thank you, and until the next time. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Kenyanez show, part nine of the Cold War series. How you doing, Thomas? I'm very well, thanks. Today, I wanted to talk about something that's sort of a forgotten addendum to the Vietnam War. And like I raised before we went live,

there's some pretty haunting things about Vietnam. I don't want to sound how dramatic. And I don't mean in the way that it's presented in most court history narratives. But there are, there's a lot of dishonesty about the conflict, particularly among, you know, in the accounts of men who served in the executive branch. Now, if you go to the Vietnam War Memorial, you know, the wall in Washington, D.C., and I didn't notice this until 2005. you know these uh the black marble or granite whatever it is i'm not a big fan of memorial honestly like the way it's designed i think it's kind of morbid but as it may um each section um is designated by conflict year you know so it's like all the men who died in 1967 and hostile action you know

they'll they'll be like their names the final panel is 1975 um so i figured okay That's probably, I didn't think there were any casualties of the embassy Marines or whatever during an occupation or operation. I think it was enduring wind. The evacuation of Saigon, but I noticed there's like 38 or some names on it. And I'm like, that's not right. And lo and behold, the men who died on Kotang, the Battle of Kotang Island against the Khomeur. Rouge um we're just kind of as an afterthought tacked on to the vietnam war wall which doesn't make any sense uh the battle of ko tang was not the final battle of the vietnam war it was

against an entire it was against it you know it was waged against an entirely different regime in an entirely different country for totally unrelated reasons and i i found that to be kind of grotesque but some years later uh rumsfeld wrote a couple of books okay he wrote his autobiography, and then he wrote his memoirs. And Rumsfeld really cut his teeth in government as the White House chief of staff from the Ford administration. And he talked about the battle of Kotang. Like, it was this great operation.

And, you know, there was only, I think he said there's only three casualties, which is perverse, and we'll get into why. It was just like an out-and-out lie. And this disturbed me. I suppose the rebuttal would be, well, you know, Rumsfeld was recalling things then that were, you know, 35 years in the past. Rumsfeld had a photographic memory. He used to brag about that. And my dad made the point, when my dad got out of the army, he went to work for McGeorge Bundy, and they developed kind of rapport, you know, and my dad used to drive him

around and stuff like that. And my dad met Rumsfeld. during his tenure with Bundy. You know, my dad was just like a nobody, you know, so there was no reason for Rumsfeld to remember him. And then decades later, my dad ran to Rumsfeld at some like CFR thing, and Rumsfeld addressed him by his first name because he just, that's the way the guy is.

So Rumsfeld, what I'm getting is, Rumsfeld did not forget what the casualties were at Kotang, and he didn't just get confused about, you know, what actually happened there. nor do I believe somebody ghost wrote the book and Rumsfeld didn't fact check it so I mean that's

I guess what what kind of jumped out of me is that this was still being kind of swept under the rug like decades later so what was the Mayaga's incident and why is it important? Well on May 12th,

975 a an American cargo ship S.S. Mayagas at a crew at 39. It was off the territorial coast of

Cambodia, you know, which was then ruled by the Khmer Rouge, you know, weeks before it had conquered the capital. They got captured. The Khmer Rouge claimed that they were in territorial

waters. The captain of the Mayagas subsequently claimed, like, they were fired upon by PT boats and, you know, corralled into Cambodian territory. Regardless, this whole crew was seized. This had echoes of when the North Koreans had seized the Pueblo, which was a Navy intelligence vessel in 1968.

And the North Korean. grabbed the Pueblo at the height of the Tet Offensive. And being that it was an intelligence ship, the North Koreans were able to seize encryption equipment. And it's believed that John Walker, not John Walker, land, a different John Walker, who became associated with infamy and treason. He was this naval officer who, as it turned out,

was spying for the Soviet Union for decades. And it's believed that, you know, the North Koreans conveyed this naval encryption equipment to Moscow. Walker then provided Moscow with like the, with the ciphers that they could, you know, that the Soviets could decode, you know, the encrypted language. So, I mean, this was a big deal, you know, and it, um, it, um, and it, you know, there, even if Johnson had a stronger man,

and even if the Vietnam War was going better, the United States wasn't really a position, you know, opened up another front in Asia and, you know, wage war with North Korea. But there's evidence that in part the North Koreans via the Chinese were very much trying to facilitate that. But that's a little bit outside the scope.

But in any event, Ford was not going to allow a repeat of the Pueblo incident. So immediately, obviously, you know, the national security. Security Council convened Secretary of Defense which at the time was Schlesinger

who I've got nothing nice to say about people who remember him at all generally remember him for some incredibly slanderous things that he said about President Nixon but he

you know Nixon played musical chairs with his cabinet kind of like Mr. Trump did although there was obviously there was more kind of rhyme and reason to to Nixon's staff decisions but Schlesinger had succeeded

Elliot Richardson, Elliot Richardson had succeeded Melvin Laird. Like none of these men like stir for more than several months, okay? But he was a holdover from the Knicks administration for better or worse. So is Kissinger, who is Secretary of State at the time.

And what's important what's important to keep in mind during this time is that there was no special operations command U.S. military was kind of a mess. You know, this was only this was less than a year and a half after the draft had ended.

The all-volunteer force was being implemented. There was a drawdown in the number of division-sized combat capabilities. formations um so basically uh the uh the cold war flash points in europe and in asia were really being manned by a skeleton crew as it were and there was not just like rapid deployment capability and there was no special operations command um so you know the kind of instinctive response people

have in reading about the mayagas is like well why didn't you know why didn't so com or its predecessor just like deploy navy seals or something like that infrastructure didn't exist and um also and uh as the crow flies i think the closest uh combat capable force to uh to cambodia would have been located in okinawa in 1975 okay like this was this was this was high to the cold war uh you know this was not america did not have you know forward deployments all over this planet you know that and it didn't have the command of control

nor the force isn't being you know to respond to something like this instantaneously you I mean it seems short-sighted I guess the people today but that's history in the rearview mirror like this was not this kind of thing was not really within the contemplation of the Department of Defense either

it was not the kind of exigencies that were emergent in 1970 in any kind of regular or predictable capacity. But be as it may, like we talked about last couple of episodes. Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge was absolutely a client regime of the people's Republic of China. This created some strange intrigues as, you know, Beijing was decoupled from Moscow in a real way and this was, you know, solidified by

the efforts of Nixon and Kissinger. America had to tread somewhat lightly too in order to preserve that. Just a immediate kind of broad spectrum

assault on Camer Rouge, Cambodia, which they had they were calling Democratic Camp of Chia. that would have caused real problems and that could have that wouldn't have the sign of Soviet split by that point

was that the chasm was too great proverbially that wouldn't have driven the Chinese back into the arms of Warsaw Pact but it definitely would have generated momentum in that direction so that's kind of the subtext of this and that's one of the reasons why I think it's an important, it's not just

you know like a footnote of history it's something that deserves to be talked about not just because the men that were lost there and and the three of them in particular suffered an utterly horrible fate that we'll get into but um it's imperative to understand uh you know how complicated and how strange the late cold war became um and obviously later um you know uh in 1979 the Hanoi government quite literally went to war with China and concomitantly

you know the Vietnamese assaulted into Cambodia deposed the Khmer Rouge and this you know decades long conflict ensued you know between the Vietnamese occupiers and the Khmer Rouge have been driven off into the bush which was very much a proxy war

between the people's public of China and the Soviet union which uh i mean not to be flippant about it because i mean you know this the cost in human suffering was immense but uh creating generating that conflict was kind of a master stroke of the nixon white house and subsequent administrations who uh continue to cultivate that divide and conquer strategy but um there's some uh there's some evidence uh uh if one knows what to look for the chinese had absolutely no interest in sabotaging the kind of strategic alliance with america which was then still pretty fresh but at the same time um you know china was not america's friend and they were just as prone to intrigues as uh as ever i believe

that the chinese probably directed uh the commier rouge to seize them uh to see them uh to see these the Mayegas, or at least once it happened, you know, they, they, they,

they endorsed that move. Um, and I think the, I think the long game for Peking was that, then they could intervene as like negotiator. It would be a way to kind of bloody uncle Sam's nose in terms of global credibility, you know,

cast China as, uh, you know, kind of, uh, the arbiter of, uh, of,

um, of, war and peace affairs in the Orient and plus it would generate goodwill at least in Peking's mind with whatever government replaced the Ford administration

and that sounds totally backwards and strange but that's the way that the Chinese think and thought it is it's an arguable examples are myriad if people think I'm just you know kind of mouthing off they don't like the Chinese or whatever

But this was a delicate situation, is what I'm getting at, you know, beyond the obvious fact that any kind of hostage rescue operation is kind of the worst possible in operational terms, circumstance to emerge. You know, one doesn't need to be some high-speed military type to recognize that. but the way it played out in operational terms was for it was informed of the seizure of the Mayegas had his morning briefing on the 16th like I said the National Security Council was convened Brent Scowcroft who as I'm sure people will recognize um you know later went on to play a major role in the reagan administration particularly reagan's first term

um you know he he basically early on in the crisis was uh what was the one who uh convened uh what ultimately became um you know the parties who determined what the what the operational response would be for better or worse um the uh the uh the um the big concern i mean obviously aside from the you know the issues i just indicated relating to a relating to uh u.s chinese relations and everything else uh america had a major credibility problem and like we talked you know owing to the fall of sagon um and as we talked about i think last episode i'm not just overstating that because it's kind of my peculiar emphasis as a revisionist

this was in the Cold War particularly as a strategic parody set in which in the later Brezhnavera was I mean was kind of the

you know what was the height of that kind of paradigm shift the United States enjoying credibility and its ability to project power successfully you know in the third world

that's basically what but the entire Truman Doctrine hinged upon. And the entire American Cold War strategy in military terms hinged on the Truman Doctrine. Okay. So coming off of a defeat in Saigon, despite, you know, however much that had been mitigated by the sound of Soviet split, in pure military and strategic terms, if America had proven unable or lacking in the will, to respond to the seizure that Mayagas and its crew

in military operational terms that would have had real world consequences and that's really what was on the minds of Ford himself and everybody in his national security cabinet Ford immediately issued a statement declaring that the seizure of the vessel was an act of piracy, which is interesting language, which wasn't really precedented. And the context to understand that statement within, it wasn't

just him, it wasn't just the president relying upon, you know, kind of cringe, polemic. What he was saying was, I mean, this was the era when people were banding that, you know, the president had to have, you know, approval from Congress before he, you know, acted in the article two, commander in chief role. And like nonsense, like the War Powers Act was being floated okay um i don't want to start a constitutional debate but um that kind of stuff was emergent from the hangover over the vietnam conflict that that does not have a leg to stand on according to the letter of the constitution but because that was the tenor of discourse

uh for it to send some kind of message that you know he was not going to he was not going to he was not going to await some kind of congressional debate on whether or not you know he was authorized he was forcing us the Khmer Rouge you know, he was saying, like, you know, this is outside of the bounds of ordinary international relations, and, you know, I'm going to respond to where I see fit. That's reading between the lines. I find that very interesting. I can't think of a more unenviable position to be in than, you know, the American president in the aftermath of Watergate being faced with, you know, a kind of asymmetrical national security crisis like this. that calls for you know immediate decisive action um that i mean that's never a particularly um desirable situation to find oneself in but in that era um and in specifically in that moment you know weeks after the fall of sagon like i can't even imagine but secretary of state schlesinger what he did immediately was he directed the joint chiefs

to order their people in theater to locate the Mayagas and at all cost prevent the vessels movement to mainland Cambodia. Employing all necessary munitions required to do that, but obviously taking care not to harm, you know, the hostage crew. Kissinger, and this is fascinating, immediately went into action, but he didn't contact the Khmer Rouge or attempt to. what he did was he contacted the Chinese liaison office in Washington and he immediately demanded to release the Mayegas and to convey that message to the Khmer Rouge on the ground

whoever the formal diplomatic representative of Beijing was refused to accept the note saying basically I can't take responsibility for this Gizinger then tapped George Herbert Walker Bush, who at that time was leading the counterpart liaison office in Peking.

He delivered the note personally to the Chinese foreign ministry. And he, according to Bush himself, and I don't see why he would lie about this, he conveyed orally that if there was not, you know, if the immediate release of the Mayaga's

crew was not you know, was not realized that that Khmer Rouge would be held responsible collectively and there'd be a massive shock and awe assault on Phnom Penh. And again, this wasn't just diplomatic protocol that both Kisinger and then Bush approached China. I mean, it goes to show you what was underway behind the scenes

and that this obviously, the most charitable view to take of it is that, well, you know, the Khmer Rouge, they were paranoid psychos and it was this kind of backwards revolutionary regime. They grabbed them a Jagas just because they were paranoid. Then when they realized, you know, that it was a U.S. flagged vessel, they freaked out and didn't know what to do. The most kind of punitive view of it is that, you know, what I, the possibility I raised

a moment ago was that the Chinese orchestrated this as, you know, part of a Machiavellian kind of intrigue drama, which they've done in the past, frankly, and continue to do so today, albeit and was punctuated in violent terms. But regardless, Washington obviously was aware that, you know, China was either responsible for this in proximate causal terms or had the power to force a resolution. And that tells you everything you need to know about the relationship between the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. Subsequently, the Khmer Rouge tried to do exactly that. Release the Mayagus crew unharmed, which we'll see. And I think that further substantiates, you know,

my kind of spitball analysis. But like I said, I'm not just speculating or conspiracy theorizing. I think anyone who spends time with the factual record and, you know, kind of read between the lines of American diplomacy speak, I think this becomes clear, okay? Back to the kind of practical operational side of it, though. The, it was on the... The following day, it was confirmed,

that the Miyagas was off the coast of Kodang, which is an island in Cambodian territorial waters, which the Khmer Rouge had fortified after the after Phnom Pen fell, which it later became clear that they'd done so in anticipation of

a Vietnamese naval assault because their big fear was that it would be used as a staging ground to assault the mainland, presumably as, you know, a secondary theater to divert community's forces in being from, you know, whatever across border

loca had been the, you know, the, the, the, that's fairplunk, as it were, of the Vietnamese, of potential Vietnamese assault. Um, I can't speak to how problem that would have been because, I mean, who knows, but it wasn't, it, it, it, it was entirely reasonable to, you know, anticipate that, um, at the time. and with what was underway.

And, I mean, ultimately, the Vietnamese did, I mean, that's what the Poles of Khmer Rouge. It was a Vietnamese attack. So, I mean, this was not just, um, there's not just an alibi of, uh, of the regime, whatever else we can say about it,

um, and its credibility. Um, the absence of combat cable American forces in theater, again, was the big problem. Um, the closest, uh, truly combat cable element was the second battalion, and ninth Marines,

who were then engaged in a training exercise on Okinawa. And on the night of the 13th of May, which was the day after the seizure of the vessel itself, they were ordered to return to camp and prepare for departure by air on May 14th. The problem was this was a heavy... I mean, this is, this was not, this is the proverbial operation where one needs to go into light. I mean, like, again, these days, we would think of it as like a SEAL Team 6 or like a Delta Force kind of operation. And this is not really what people were training for at that time. And there was, by 1975, there was a handful of officers with 2nd Battalion 9th Marines,

who had been under fire in Vietnam. But virtually none of the enlisted matter NCOs had, you know, the idea taken, I mean, however tough these guys were, and I'm sure that they were like a hard dude's, taking, you know, taking a marine element that had not been in combat before and, you know, kind of breaking their proverbial sherry, you know, by having them assault a ship that had been taken hostage in a kind of anti-counter terrorist operation, like that seems like a recipe for disaster. um would ultimately put the kibosh on that um planned um operation was uh a guy named general burns yeah burns um he was commander of the seventh air force he uh weighed in and said look um you know um it's very possible that you know the crew has already been you know taken land side either on Kotang itself

or is being shuttled to the mainland regardless he's like you're going to need more firepower than just you know then then you know can be you're brought to bear you know by

dropping by dropping by dropping by dropping Marines you know by chopper onto onto the vessel itself you know with you know kind of like light covering fire from whatever these i assume like

i assume like hewy i don't know if hughy cobras were fielded then yet but um yeah yeah they would have been but i mean point being you know it uh burns to his credit was thinking ahead um and uh his idea was uh bring to bear uh air force gunships and shoppers to be able to be will, you know, saturate the island with firepower, if need be. And the, you know, the hostage rescue element, he suggested

the 56th security police squadron. These are, like, the Air Force guys who, like, guard, like, air bases. At that, at that time, that's what they were. Like, these days, Air Force has, like, a high speed, like, like,

spec war, like element. But in those days, they basically had these guys who were somewhat like more high speed like MPs you know and again like that's not really that's not really you know the element you want for something like this but

his view at least was more kind of in line with what was to develop than um than um than that then that which was floated uh previously um and um

and this operation was actually implemented. The Utapo Air Base in Thailand, which I believe is still in use. The idea was that these gunships and these Air Force MPs, you know, who are the hostage rescue element, they're going to be shuttled from the Philippines to Utapo in Thailand. to be outfitted for sting. And then from there, they were going to assault Kotang. On the way to Thailand, there was a chopper crash, and like 18 of their number were killed. So as you can see this, it was 18 of the security police and five crewmen.

So, I mean, as you can see, they're just getting like more and more foobar by the moment in operational terms. It sounds like trying to go into Iran and get the hostages. Yeah, exactly. And, yeah, no, that you're exactly right. And this coupled with Desert One, and, you know, which is the aborted Iranian rescue mission. And the lack of integrated command and control of Grenada, that's really what created Socom, you know,

because the need for it became recognized. Well, there was only one lost in Grenada, right? was there one I think there was only one casualty in Grenada right no there was a number and what happened was these Navy seals who were

there was a bunch there was a few there was like you know there's an army command element a Marine command element and then there was these seals who ended up somehow dropped in the wrong place and then they ended up drowning

because they weren't retrieved oh geez yeah it was a whole mess and like it had to do it was literally totally avoidable and it was like a command and control 19 dead 150 wounded yeah yeah yeah i mean grenade is we'll get into grenade in one of the later episodes because it's in political terms of it it bore directly on the uh the uh the sandin east revolution and um

there was there was north koreans on the ground there i mean obviously was the Cuban element there was a couple of East Germans like it's fascinating and um it very much uh it very much is what the I mean however anybody feels about the Reagan administration and You know, some of its alleged overreach. The Grenada actually was, it was being purposed to rapidly reinforce Nicaragua and friendly proxies, like, in theater. You know, that was the only thing to building Grenada was an airstrip for that purpose. And that's exactly what they were building.

But be as it may, after this, after this, after this disaster with, you know, in, at utapo for it can be another national security council meeting um on uh on May 14th um

the uh a communication link had been established with a 7th Air Force elements uh that had departed from Hawaii and we're then circling Kotang and in these in those days

those are close you get to like real time communications I mean that's another thing we take for granted today, but obviously then, like, you were, there was quite literally, like, blindness and theater. If you were the command element in the White House, you know, trying to direct military operations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And then they, in turn, you know, any, any data they were getting from the battle space was, you know, minutes, at least minutes and probably hours out of date.

The, uh, these fighters, uh, they were trying to, What they didn't realize was that the crew by this time of the Mayagas had been shuttled to this fishing boat, which was then attempting to transport them to the mainland, this coastal city called Campong Somme. These guys, their credit, these pilots who were circling in theater, they recognized that that probably was going on. They requested permission to try to shoot the rudders off of the ship that was conveying them. and, like, assault the PT boats that were escorting it. Ford intervened and said that, you know, the use of those kinds of munitions would present too great a risk to the crew. So he put the gabash on that.

At that same time, the National Security Council, they got word back that the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing had refused to pass any kind of formal, communication on the Khmer Rouge, but Bush said that in his, but Bush said that he could all but guarantee that the Chinese are putting pressure on the Khmer Rouge to comply with whatever American demands were. But like, obviously, even if, I mean, like I said, I've got my own theory on this, that this was very much orchestrated by Peking. But whether it was or not, obviously the situation

was rapidly, you know, spiraling out of control. And Bush, uh, would, whether your view of it's charitable or whether it's, you know, not particularly so. Bush was a serious guy and he very much understood the Chinese and had a rapport with them. And, I mean, he was a career intelligence, man. If he relayed that in my belief, you know, this has been conveyed and this is what's happening, I think, you know, that was, I think, I think, I think that was as good as gold. but the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a guy named David Jones

what he presented and this was ultimately followed through in operational terms he presented a range of military opposite the National Security Council and he said you know look like we're not even sure where the Mayagas crew is at this point, you know, whether they're shipboard, whether they're land side, and if they're land side where they're actually located. And he's like, obviously, like, they are, you know, rescuing them on harm needs to be a priority. But he's like, we basically got to, like, waste

the Khmer Rouge because, like, we can't just, like, let this slide. You know, he's like, we've got a, this is a credibility issue above all else. You know, aside, you know, obviously, you know, we're not going to disregard the lives of our people, but, you know, we've got to, we've got to lay as much hurt on the Khmer Rouge as we can. And from that point forward, that was basically accepted by the White House. It came down to three possibilities. Some intelligence suggested that they were still on the Mayegas. Some suggested they were on Kotang Island.

Others suggested that they were on the fishing boat itself route outbound for the mainland and the, you know, the coastal city of Kampong-Som, which is what these Air Force pilots were laid, which turned out to be true, incidentally. But what was ultimately decided was National Security Council decided to, they decided to deploy the Marines to take the Mayagas itself, assault Kotang Island, and together the mass of assault on Cambodia itself, particularly its shipping and, um, uh, it's, it's shipping infrastructure, you know, any of all like, you know, naval military. targets um and uh escalating the penone pen itself you know and like any other kind of like counter value uh targets of opportunity that presented themselves you know if if uh if within you know 24 or 36 hours or whatever you know there wasn't resolution to the crisis um the fishing boat on which uh the mayagas crew actually was and it did arrive at campong some the commyroo's commander at Kampong Sam,

either he had either been, either the Chinese had gotten to him or he just understood what was underway. He issued in order to his men, like, you know, I don't know, you know,

do not harm these hostages, you know, under any circumstances. You know, he asked these hostages, you know, he's like, you know, I mean, by that point of an established, obviously it was an American flag ship. You know, um,

and he uh he asked him if their radio equipment was was operable you know so that they could yeah he's like look we're releasing you you know like can you call off this assault um and uh it was it turned out the radio equipment was not operable but the uh as it uh as it turned out later like one of the one of the guys later just closed he's like he's like i didn't know if we'd be able to reach like any of the aircraft in the air but he's like by that point like I wanted, he's like, I, he's like, I wanted to commit rumors, get their ass kicked. So he's like, I, you know, he's like, I wouldn't have transmitted it anyway, which frankly was the right call, I think. But that's, but by that point, the die was cast.

The, uh, the, um, it was at, uh, the, uh, it was at around just past dawn on, uh, May 16. Cotang itself was assaulted, but as it turned out, Intel suggested that there was only about 20 or 30 Camer Rouge fighters on the island. It turned out that there was over 100, and again, they had a lot of heavy machine guns among them and crew served squad weapons, because, you know, like we talked about a moment ago. They'd fortified the island, and it had. a patient of a Vietnamese assault, which never came, but, um, you know, these, uh, the Khmer Rouge, uh, whatever you can say about, um, these guys were, were incredibly game fighters. Um, this pitched battle ensued between the Marines and the Khmer Rouge. Um, the, uh, the, the, um, the, the, uh,

the, the, uh, the, the, the, uh, the, the, the, uh, the crew of the maegas was safely conveyed, uh, back from this fishing boat like back to meagas itself and uh and and they were they were they were safely um conveyed away from the battle space but uh when it became clear that the crew had been released and was safe um it uh the marines were uh ordered to withdraw um and they began uh affecting a tactical withdrawal, like a fighting retreat, as it were. But the Marine commander on the ground, there was two beachheads. At the eastern, the commander of the eastern most operational area, he conveyed, like, look, unless we're rapidly reinforced,

like, we're going to be overrun. So the reinforcements that have been called off, were then directed back to Kotang to reinforce the Marines on the ground. You know, this and this kind of chaotic withdrawal that ensued. There was a machine gun team of

three Marines that in this kind of craggy, in this kind of craggy area, like on the beach itself, like just outside of the ever kind of shrinking perimeter. you know they'd uh they'd set up a an ad hoc machine gun nest um and they'd been left behind in the wake of the withdrawal um and uh one of the um one of these guys platoon mates had said on board the chopper like you know there's at least three men on the ground there um for some reason this wasn't um this wasn't abided um and i realized like in the middle of a hot lz

like in the midst of a firefight i mean i'm sure things are confused but this uh as it happened um these guys were left behind managed to radio a passing u.s naval vessel and um apparently uh some intelligence officers said well it's probably like a commere ruse trick in their I mean, it seems ridiculous. It seems like something like a corny old movie, like some Cameroos saying like, yo, G.I. Joe, you son more, you'll send more, Marine. I mean, like, I would, I mean, that's,

I'm not making a light of a horrible situation, but that, it seems to me by that point probably, everybody was looking to cover their own ass because it became clear that, you know, they're, like, their head probably been men left behind. These three guys are left behind. And this became this like enduring kind of myth almost. And I remember before I knew anything about the Mayegas, before I'd like, I mean, I was always fancied by Vietnam.

And I mean, ever since I could read, I was reading about, you know, about the Cold War and things. But I knew this guy in the early 90s, he was kind of a sad guy. You know, he's kind of like the troubled Vietnam vet of myth and lore, you know, like he had a drug problem and stuff. But he, you know, he became pretty tight because we worked together, like we delivered pizzas together. you know and he um he he i talked about vietnam and he was really into the pooh-w m i movement you know and i kind of just looked at it was like a sad guy who was troubled by the war and other things but he kept coming back to kotang and saying you know they left guys behind you know in cambodia you know that means they left other guys behind and like uh like i'm not saying

he was right about all these things he claimed but he wasn't just like talking shit you know like And he, um, that's a, this, as it turns out, the, uh, these guys were abandoned on Kotang that, that fed a lot of the speculation that the, that the kind of POW movement, um, you know, derived, uh, their claims from. But it came out years later, these three guys, and they were just kids. I think, like, and they were like, I think they were like 18, 19, and 21, respectively. They were on the island for a week. Um, and, uh, the Camer Rouge, realized that like some of their rice stores had gone missing and that

you know boot prints that obviously weren't you know Cameroos sandals were found and the Cameroos tracked these guys and they found them they were shuttled in the mainland you know I mean God knows what they were

subjected to do by Cameru's torturers but after several days they were or according to the to their jailers, they were beating the death

with the butt end of a B-40 rocket launcher. I mean, I can't even imagine that, man. Like, being abandoned by your own forces, and then falling into their hands in the Cameroos, like, literally on this, like, God-forsaken island. I mean, that's beyond,

that a lot of stuff frightens me. Like, at my age and frankly, I've had some kind of awful experiences, but that, that, I mean, I find that just, like, horrifying even even to think about you know and they're kids they should they're kids they should be home in the driveway working on a car they just thought yeah yeah man and it's like of all people of being captured by the commier ruse of the most horrifying thing i can think of because like it's not

just like the community ruse really were animals like it's not they were i mean like it's not yeah it's not it's not some just like bullshit propaganda or something like it um i mean there's a lot of cases where you know if if you're if you surrender if you're capture it at war. I mean, you're dealing with the opponent. You're dealing with an op-for that are just guys like you. Like, in the case the Camer Rouge, like, these guys were fucking barbarians.

But the, uh... Yeah, they seem like the the descendants of the Republicans and the Spanish Civil War. Yeah, they, yeah, and there's just there's like horrible stuff. Like the... There actually were, like, Daugman instance says,

like, cannibalism, just, like, terrorized people and stuff, and like, they... You know, they, it's one of the few witnesses, again, were kind of the truth is, the truth is worse than a lot of the propaganda that came out. But it, um, but it's also, too, like, I think, um, I think a lot of this was suppressed, uh, for the reasons I said. It was like this, it was this bizarre, like, messy, political and diplomatic situation,

um, relating to the, you know, uh, the intrigues, um, incident to the son of Soviet split, uh, you know, a lot of the, uh, the, ongoing hangover, as it were, from the Vietnam conflict. And you know, like I said, just even the way it's treated as bizarre, think it's having the fact. Like, this was just, uh, this was just, uh, you know, it's just kind of

like, as an afterthought, like, slapped on to the Vietnam War Memorial as oh, this was, you know, that this happened sort of in theater and sort of, you know, within the same decade. So you know, why not just you know, why not just treat it as part of like the same, uh, part of the same

kind of like nucleus of, uh, of conflict events. But it, yeah, I that's the that's the that's the um, that's the story of Kotang man and that's the

and that's the time that's the, I believe and I mean, I've written about this in my fiction, like I believe that a, I believe the U.S. forces engaged that can be a Rouge like fairly regularly. I don't see how they could not have. Like they were running around

Cambodia for years prior to 1970 and then in the aftermath you know even even when um even when the U.S. and China came to terms and

the U.S. began cultivating the Khmer Rouge against you know the pro-Vietnamese element. There's no way that there's no way that American soldiers did not engage the Khmer Rouge in hostile action and theater

but this is the only time of having above board. I mean this was like a real fireflight and it um that's um you know like i said it uh i i um i try and raise the people because i think as a historical writer i think it's important you know to honor the memory of people like these guys who were there but um it's also it shows you how uh it shows you how strange the cold war got um really after 69 70 71 um when it became really like a three-way kind of contest um with the united states kind of like nominally allied with china in strategic terms you know in pursuing the kind of interdependence the the the results of which you know we we kind of see today um

in the globalist structure but it um it was far from uh it was far from some kind of like clean alliance and uh you know the the way what the chinese view as kind of sound policy in terms of how to intrigue against others is incredibly weird. And I'm telling you, like, creating this incident for the sake of trying to exploit, you know, the ensuing chaos for some kind of political and diplomatic cachet. That might seem crazy to, like, the Western mind, but that's exactly the way the Chinese think. If you read about the pointless border war that Mao provoked with Moscow, Um, Mao basically, uh, risked a nuclear war with the Soviet Union said he could go around, uh, humiliating, um, Brezhnev, you know, for a few weeks and acting like, uh, he'd scored some kind of victory. Um, so that domestically, like, you know, he could shore up his kind of fledging personality called credibility.

And like, no, like, even a totally unhinged Western, uh, um, you know, tyrant, like, wouldn't think that way. or wouldn't do that, but that's the kind of stuff characteristic of the regime. And from, I mean, in a lifetime of people like me and yourself, I mean, yeah, the kind of chaos of Mao and the aftermath is something we didn't experience firsthand. But even, even dang, it's kind of credit as like this great reformer and this kind of moderating influence. I mean, the stuff that he would orchestrate in order to do him. in order to advantage himself or advantage, you know, Peking in his eyes vis-à-vis the West. It doesn't make any sense.

So that's kind of the last tragic chapter in the history of what was in China. There's, I mean, there was the Chinese, there was the, there was the Sino-Vietnamese border war in 79. And there was, again, too, there was the, there was the occupation of, of Cambodia, you know, from 79 until the wall came down. China, Chinese and Vietnamese forces fired on each other like four years ago. Yeah, yeah. No, and that's why one of the really interesting things, you know, Obama was one of the last things he did in office was he lifted any remaining restrictions on a military tech transfers to Vietnam.

um like the the people in the pentagon who aren't conceptually illiterate and there's very few of them who aren't they're like literally fucking morons but the um they uh they realize that vietnam's like an essential hedge against the people's republic and it is and um and vietnam's got a real comic capability i mean they're hard people they've got a real military and vietnam's comparatively huge country it's got like 60 million people you know like people think it's like

like Americans, they think all these countries are like the size of Albania or something. Like Vietnam's in a, as a geotrategic hedge, yeah, Vietnam's incredibly important. And an alliance that would make sense. And now that would alleviate some of the pressure of America having to, you know, kind of play between Tokyo and Seoul,

you know, which is increasingly, you know, causing consternation in relations with both countries. as well as their relationship to China. Like, what would be intelligent would be to cultivate countries like Vietnam and some kind of, like, American version of what the Russians are trying to accomplish with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Like, like, not only is NATO, like, destabilizing and pointless, but it also is not how you structure military alliances in the 21st century. It's, like, structurally obsolescent as well as politically anachronistic.

That's kind of a subject to another show, but I hope I didn't, I wouldn't, like, bore people with just kind of, like, relaying the Battle of Kotang. Like I said, I... It's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And next time what I want to get into, I want to get into President Carter's modernization of the command and control aspect of America's Strategic Nuclear Forces.

And how, you know, the advent of AI, as well as, you know, the onset of strategic nuclear forces. parody where in the window of decision making, you know, was reduced in some cases, you know, to five to eight minutes or something. It had just been accepted for a time that the president would die

immediately in an event of nuclear war. So strategic air command would be acting as the Article 2 executive. I mean, that's patently unconstitutional, number one, number two, that's just like ethically that's not right. You don't, like, the United States Air Force and, you know, strategic air commands that then existed.

They don't get to decide, you know, like who lives and who dies. They don't get to decide, you know, when and how we wage war. But also, it raises a fascinating issue. I'm always telling people, too, like, guys like Harlan Ellison, you know, when they were, you know, Harlan Ellison actually came over with the idea for Skynet. And, like, James Cameron, like, ripped them off.

Like, Cameron rips off everything. But this wasn't just, like, some kind of horror movie trope. the removal of human decision makers from strategic nuclear war fighting that was a real thing and by the 1980s it was becoming and

when there's when when launching even on warning when the window of decision making temporally speaking it becomes so narrow that even launching on warning is too late, like, what do you do? It's like, well, you know, you defend yourself by finding ways to code variables that indicate, you know, that indicate imminent assault.

Like before, though, you know, before there's even like conventional, like, launch indicators and mobilization indicators. But then it's like, okay, but then, like, when do you attack? When there's, like, a 10% probability of assault, when there's, like, anything over 50%, when there's 90%, when there's anything over 1%, you know, that's um not you know that that's a kind of like machine thinking that becomes inevitable you know when technology it becomes totally just positive of outcomes but also uh the amount of data that has to be managed and um a strategic landscape like that like humans can't do it you know so we were looking at a situation where the cold war endured like machines would have been the decision maker you know and uh you'd have to hope that you know the the coded uh indicators you know were correct

or at least like couldn't be spoofed you know by by man or by fate but that yeah that's i i'll save it for that when we get into that but that's that's that's that's kind of the that's kind of the key feature the carter presidency i think and i mean i i'm a lot friendlier to carter um and uh you know the way I view his epoch than most people. So we'll get into some of these strategic nuclear command and control issues, some of these war tech issues, and we'll deal with like Carter the man himself

in the next episode. And like again, I really, really appreciate people supporting the series. And I wanted to give Kotang it's due and the men who were there it's due because like I said, it's something nobody really talks about. And that's part of the reason for these series is so we can deep dive into stuff

that people don't really talk. talk about and more mainstream sources. So that's all I got. And thank you, people. Yeah, of course. I'm too quick plugs. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. That will probably change in the next few weeks, but I'm on there again.

You can find me at Rio underscore Thomas 777. I'm recording for my YouTube channel on Friday with my dear friend Kerry. And I'm going to upload that next week some time. So I'll make sure to hype it so everybody knows. My YouTube channel, there's nothing near yet, but there will be is Thomas TV. You can find me on Substack, which is kind of a permanent home. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. I'm going to relaunch a Telegram channel because everybody who supports us, they really like Telegram.

I mean, Telegram really treated me badly, so I wasn't real keen to doing business with them again. but I will launch a channel for the sake of the subscribers and our friends, but I'm going to do that sometime this weekend, and I'll plug that when we're back on there, but right now I just have like a private channel, but I'm going to relaunch a public one.

That's all I got. Awesome, man. So the next time. Thank you, Thomas.