The Pete Quiñones Show - The Complete Cold War Series w/ Thomas777 - 1/3

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

5 Hours and 3 MinutesPG-13Here are episode 1-5 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/ 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.

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Search Trump Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Thunbiog, Kush Faragea. We embark on a new journey today. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm very well. Thanks for hosting me. 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 we had teased about... talking about the Cold War. But 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. 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 as ulterior. It's just because the way the news cycle doesn't properly provide context to historical events, particularly where there's military variables involved and 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, there's one sense of when intervention and force is is legitimate um and that that is totally ideologically driven

it's not it's not driven by strategic variables of of a realist or even particularly concrete nature you know it's very much based on a 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 russia the russian federation as it existed 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 the d'etante.

Dayton was born at two things. For those that don't know, detente was, it 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 and the Soviet split. The Soviets were interested in hedging China with India, you know, being a huge populous country. Pakistan was kind of the American response to that, you know, creating, 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 kind of full development of the all-volunteer force and the full development and implementations become known as the Revolution and Military Affairs, you know, than tailoring 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, with a full cadre structure and 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 take a hands-off approach. So from about 1973 onward, you know, kind of strategic paradigm reigned. However, during that period, the technology that underpins strategic nuclear weapons

dramatically improved. You know, only 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, it, it, it, 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, uh, this endured until 1979. What happened in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Uh, and that really alarmed people because, for reasons we went into in a moment beyond the obvious. It was misunderstood why, 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. 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 hub for Soviet strategic nuclear forces was in Kazakhstan, or was, 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, you know, launched 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 Brezhne was at the helm, and Dropov was really kind of 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 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, it was far more, uh, opaque. And, uh, and drop off reigned formally as, uh, as, as, 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 the implications for the strategic nuclear balance and the ability of the Soviet Union that survived a bolt from the blue nuclear assault,

which was a real concern for reasons why. get into and it's um it's difficult 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 to the only with the narrowing temporal window of decision making in the event of nuclear war this was really becoming out of it was really kind of becoming removed from human hands You know, technology is its own momentum.

And society is 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 peripheral breaks can't just be put on an apparatus of that scope, scale, and complexity.

You know, like, I'm not trying to be as a terrible. I mean, this is fundamental to understanding the paradigm. 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. I kind of deal with this now. By the 1980s,

where true parity existed within the superpower in terms of strategic nuclear forces in being as well as capabilities, a bolt from the blue strike 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 15 minutes in the case of the United States. um i'm not going to bore people with the details of how that would have played out it would have involved things like an s o bm uh assault launched at the depressed trajectory the spoof early warning systems detonating a ground burst detonation thus an emp would knock out remaining early warning but the point is like imagine the situation where okay you know 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 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 countervallel, counterforcement, not countervester. value, whether it's going to be, you know, full-spectrum attack, that it's, we're at the point with this 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 what's considered early morning detection. If you could code those indicators into variables that could be rendered as inputs, 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, and I'm going to get into this now, because this is a perfect kind of way to kind of slide into it. As Dayton 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. He was a general, a very brilliant guy. Odom was rare because he kind of had the

logistical brilliance of Omar Bradley, but he was also a real warrior. You know, he was like a soldier general. He understood combat. He really understood nuclear weapons. 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 was the sciop not the psychological operation the s iop 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 um 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 countervalue and counter force assault against the Soviet Union. All Warsaw Pact states where 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 Warsaw Pact. There's another menu option that was the reverse. There's another one that was just strictly counter, strictly counterforce, no countervalue. A lot of this came from the fact that we were talking about a moment. ago about satellites, okay? Until about 1980,

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Search Coopera and discover our latest offers Coopera Design that moves finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited subject to lending criteria terms and conditions apply Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland US satellites that would provide data on the basing location of enemy forces there were always several weeks out of date because these satellites to take their pictures

the little film would be deposited in a canister, that canister 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 the Soviets did, which was kind of cunning in its simplicity, rather than availing their land-based ICBMs to super-hardened 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. There'd be this ominous little footage from the Moscow military parades. These SS19, these huge ICBMs on these trucks, you know, literally. Okay, they were moving them around every single day. You know, and that despoof enemy targeting. And there's led to totally crazy stuff.

Like by the mid-80s NSA satellites and DIA satellites, they were photographing the soil in 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 of the 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 with 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 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 Bolton of the Blue assault or an unforeseen escalation of conventional war, wherein, you know, the enemy just, you know, goes all in. you know, escalates 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 superhardened 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 a 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 another de facto president. You know, he's the Lord High Executioner in 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. That's a very dangerous situation, among other things.

And also, like I said, patently and a guy's a fusional. Carter said that's unacceptable. So what Carter did was he ordered Odom to draft 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 and the code would constantly change but these men and a handful of women or 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 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 1980-45, but the system was in place wherein 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 it began America was was planning an event of nuclear war to fight and win a nuclear war this cause I got the consternation from people who didn't really understand deeper parodies even some people who should have.

You know, people have 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 and 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 which you kill an enemy society, which is a horrific metric because in the case of the Soviet Union or America, as in 1970s, 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 multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles.

You had decoys. get ways to spoof early warning radar. We had hypersonic missile platforms that that wouldn't that didn't even travel on ballistic trajectory. Like it was totally obsolescence.

And as William Odom said, 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

nation, 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 it was like, you know, 80 million other people because, oh, we failed in our effort to maintain peace to the balance of terror. Like, there's something crazy about it. But that's basically what ushered in the final phase of the Cold War.

Now, I want to fast forward a bit to 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 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 maccadie saw the pentagon itself but you know one of the reasons in this place and people act like CIA is kind of the the seat of the deep state power it's really not and um it was really really loathed by a lot of very hawkish cold warriors so something happened in 1974 um

something to this day that is that is corralled by the intelligence services called the national intelligence estimate it's 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 i'm not going to deep down to that because it's just too much kind of collateral stuff but the uh it was the belief of uh everybody from you know kind of hawk and senators and congressmen you know to pentagon types to guys in army intelligence you know to uh to uh to uh to ronald ragan himself who you know as early as 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 uh to those

to whom they were accountable civilian or military the claim was that they were consistently underestimating soviet capability as well as just kind of internal dynamics within the Soviet Union relating to the leadership cast. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th

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with crises, both in 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-un-O 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. Okay?

Now, the focus of Team B, 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, 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 can 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 seems like overly specific and esoteric, I mean, 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 a study the accuracy of land-based Soviet and Warsaw Pact ICDMs, okay? The circular era probable. Traditionally, the Soviets larded their launch vehicles, the boreheads, that had absolutely massive throw weight. So even if they lost a substantial amount of them, you know, it's an 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 was kind of the opposite. America's idea was eventually 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 should have some light on. And finally, and most importantly,

the third team within Team B their role is to study Soviet strategic priorities and how this interface with policy orientation. Basically, what's the Soviet doctrine on nuclear war? Like, when would they truly escalate? And beyond that, 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, FOY 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 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 Poindexter, people like El Hague who didn't last long, admittedly. These guys were ultra-hawkish, but they were not neocon.

However, neocons very much had Reagan's ear. And Reagan himself is something of a neocon. He was in Roosevelt New Dealer who had a kind of sol in the road to Damascus moment in the post-war years. Okay. I mean, that's a whole other 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.

You were surrounded by men who had gone on to very story and powerful roles in 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. Boyce tried to insulate himself with his own loyalists. And I think he did that in large measure, you know, people like Baker or people like Skowcroft, who's, kind of a complicated figure in terms of his values. He had neoconish tendencies, 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 he'd 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 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 that was real that wasn't been tried Bush found the speed of things very alarming a few months before Bush took before inauguration days Bush actually tapped Henry Kissinger, and he asked him to contact Gorbachev's 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 Gorbichaw, Gorichov was kind of put out by this, as well as taking it back, you know, and Gorbachev said, well, why? Why? What Kinder articulated was exactly what Bush instructed him to. He said, look, there's a danger here of a structural and political nature. A reckless U.S. president could totally derail a 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 could be a complete Weimar-style collapse, which also did happen to some degree. What Kissinger relayed in essence was Bush had told him, you know, 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, it's 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' detra. And he was even tapped by CNN during the Gulf War, like not infrequently, so like 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 constabulary force to manage internal strife or ethnic conflict or things like this um 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 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 uh

it seems unrealistic to us. I mean, regardless of the merit of such things on their own terms or such concepts, how you're talking they are. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 Euro, search Cooper, and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves.

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28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. 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 Union as quite literally evil. That was not hyperbole. That's the way they looked at it. 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 a fortunea or whatever

in ordains or if we destroy it, you know, by dismanling 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 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 these people spoke very openly of this Dick Cheney went on 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 um this uh this is the

effect of really kind of really kind of driving a wedge between Bush and Gorbachev. And this was exacerbated because one of 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. I think part of that was kind of inherent snobbery, because Valens said was very much a proletarian. I think Bush beat him as a rail arouser. What Bush did was he met with General Jarl Zeltsky.

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 Charles Zelsky 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 strongmen in the several satellite states. But Poland, I mean, Poland was under martial law from 1980-on-on-ward, but Gerald Zeltsky was a tragic guy. He looked ominous, he was always in uniform, and he'd wear these really dark sunglasses. Gerald Zeltsky's eyes were ruined by snow blindness. 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 it was telling too 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 the communist Poland was more of a contrivance even than the DDR or anything else within the Warsaw that structure

which is interesting but Bush and Gerald Zelski had a certain rapport and Bush went as far as to convinced Gerald Zelsky to stand for president 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 Zelski 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 Bloc and go

on thumping his chest and and trying to stick it to the Soviets that their system was crumbling and he also would loomed really large over US policy you know in 1953 in 1956 and 1968 the Soviets these were Tiananmen Square level

interventions or and crackdowns on the people first in East Germany then in Hungary then Czechoslovakia there was an understanding among not just 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, 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 sitting here saying, again, 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 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... Consider this. William Crowe, he was another general who was kind of, he would have been considered something like a minister without portfolio and he served the 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 issuing 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 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 Crow's words, he said it's as if 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 released that is basically, you know, fact. you know oh the east berlin says that you know the that the regime is stronger than ever that must be true or you know the like burrow's the general secretary and he says there's going to be no you know they're not going to they're not going to drop the plain 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 that this this was literally what they were saying and i mean that

anybody again thinks the CIA is like the seat of shadow of government or the intelligence community is got to consider that. Defense intelligence really, I mean, forgive the tangent, but defense intelligence, the DIA, they really got to 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,

the Yeltsin was not this kind of great democratizer. I mean, 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 mean, 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 what Gorbachev was, you know, kidnapped by the coup plotters. Yeltsin proceeded to race to the Russian White House. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design, they move you even before you drive.

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From home essentials to seasonal must-habs when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge warehouse sale, 28th to 30th of November little more to value declare himself for all practical purposes present to the russian federation upon ascending to that role and i mean there was a referendum insinuating him into that role he declared the soviet union to be abolished so the officers 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 Dictot, 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 Stalinist hardliners who hated Gorbachev. Now, why did they back Yeltsin?

I mean, the kind of conventional wisdom is, 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, theoretically and literally bought off. I can't prove that with receipts, but 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 as he was sidelined. I mean, never in some disgraceful way, but the fact that Putin himself, 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 of the regime employs them. I don't mean that that's what he actually is, but, if he also has got this arch-capitalist or former you know neoliberal

ideologue like he would not have had men like Putin in his orbit he just would not have he would have had him take he would not have made him take him taking up a shot or something but these guys would have been pensioned off and and sent far away from 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 um it uh there's also something that people got to consider the other kind of factor

or constellation of factors that roped pushes vision and uh 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 has 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 a Slovakia together. What happened was Helmut Cole, who I think was about

as nationalist as any chance of the Buddhist Republic could be, or can be. When Tugeman's Croatian declared independence, Cole recognized 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 a very proximate way not as indirectly the Slavic Orthodox identity became paramount again that's why Bosniaks became very

Muslim again there was a whole lot of a national soldier'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 you know he and his people recruited a bunch of Germans to go fight for Croatia and this was very real this is not some this is not 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 a 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 Pete 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 superpowered them. But, I mean, don't mean, wrong. There's many, many guys in Washington who don't care about Ukraine or Russia.

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 is 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 verbal 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 uh that's i think we're off stop for now um well let me let me let me ask you a question yeah you'll keep going a little bit um what would happen if ducaus would have got elected in 1988 that's a pretty interesting question and it's interesting you raise that because the other

day on twitter i was talking to some of the fellows um 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 ton could be preserved. Dukagos was definitely from that latter tenancy, and that

was held against him. You know, there's that famous people think, Dukagas, this kind of Harrodine scream moment is when he was riding in a tank, like looking like an idiot, with like a helmet on, like the wrong way. He looked like Snoopy. He looked like Snoopy. Yeah. But I, I,

actually, Stevie is kind of a badass, though. Like, Stevie fights the Red Baron, like, yeah, yeah, because he looked,

like, but yeah, but he looked, and even if Dukakis had been more kind of a, like, a,

like, a manly, like, photogenic guy, it was so, it was so, it was so much, like,

yeah, I'm tough on defense. Look at me in this tank, you know, you know, yeah, yeah, you know,

to hell with Ivan. But it's, but it's, but a Dukagagas cabinet, um, I mean, I think Dukagas was, I think Ducagis was a tackling dummy.

It was a foregone 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, you know how voters are, especially in those days? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I was one of them.

Any, even a guy like Mondale, kind of an old line, more run-of-the-mill Democrats, and Chicago was kind of a weird nominee. You know, because he was like, like, I'm not being pressed, but he was like this ethnic politician. frankly. Even a more traditional kind of Democrat, he would have had real

problems, especially if you had a hostile 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 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 an overly conciliatory executive who'd approach the Soviet, who'd approach kind of the failing Soviet Union as, hey, we want to reestablish detain. That could have been a game changer, maybe. One thing the TMB codery was right about,

if they were right about anything. I think, well, for itself, I think, is the source of this, and I agree with it and I think I think I say about Wolfowitz at all. He said that Soviet Union by 97475 outside of the third world nobody had any respect for Marxist-Leninism. People on Soviet Union, their quality of life was better than the third world, but not by a hell of a lot. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items,

all reduced to clear. From home essentials to season Must Habs. When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Teramar.

Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000. thousand euro search cooper and discover our latest offers cupra design that moves finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from vogue financial services arland limited subject to lending criteria terms and conditions apply vogue financial services are limited trading as cooper financial services is regulated by the central bank of arland uh nobody believed that you know the soviet union was leaving the world and the sciences or something all the soviet union had was arguably the world's mightiest military. Are you 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 were 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 memoirs made this point, about every decade, okay, 953, 962, 973, and 83, 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 it continued to, like, the late 90s, just even. And so, like, by 1995-96, you know, nuclear weapons are basically all in now, space, you know, and it's okay, like, now's like a three-minute warning time. You know, basically, like, the Soviets, like,

blank, 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 doesn't be the world would have ended, 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 life on Earth forever. Like, not in, like, horror movie terms, like, The Terminator, but it if, like, a hundred 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 of the Soviet Union, even guys who I think believe, I know this, even guys who believed 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'm not even saying people are dumb or something. They just don't have a comparative basis. People think that's something like the Soviet Union of 1985, it's not like, you know, the office you work at, even if a big company, you have 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 got kind of a, I've got kind of a, like, like, 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, on chief executives of history, but, um, there, like, what I described didn't happen, okay, and some of that we owe to people like Bush, okay, uh, yeah, the Cold War. have happened in the first place you know work did not have happened but it did happen so that's where we were at you got to judge things in their epaac so that's I realize that's an incomplete answer but that's the best

I can do yeah 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 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 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, Dukakis 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. Like, 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. 7777 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-MAS 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. I'm not just saying that 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.

That's where the intrigue of that is. Oh, yeah. No, it's really, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm very, I'm very, I'm 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. I got Thomas 777 here. And we're going to get into some stuff not only about the cold, Or maybe we'll talk to 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 live, you were talking about the election results. And I agree with you. I think that warrants mentioned, not just because that kind of thing's important, but what's happening in Russia and in Central Europe at present, I believe it's, 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 in the context of the Cold War. And also, some of the fellas on Tegraam 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 with the Second World War. But along last, moving forward, we'll cover all of those. but I just briefly

I'm not some poll watcher like our friend Scott Greer DJ Scotty G internet serial thriller and a beltway killer but uh but no I'm not making fun of him he's a good dude and he's been nice enough to host me on a show

a few times and I don't know why anybody would do that if they're a reputable person because I like that seems like thanks a lot of grief thanks a lot of I really appreciate that no no what I'm saying is like it seems like it would cause you a lot of brief and like not a lot of benefit. I mean, you're, 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 deal with stuff that is a magnet for censorious 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, you know, on, on, on, on, on, on, during election 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, that, uh, that, that, uh, that sling blade guy in Pennsylvania, uh, like Boba Federer person or whatever his name is. Federer woman, fed a fetter person, I don't know, but 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. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal mustabs.

When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range.

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Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. But the Republicans, they won huge in Florida, like statewide. And 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, unless I'm missing something like that's, that's a win. And they obviously got 2020, they got the way that was 2024 unless they join the kind of witch hunt against their guy, Mr. Trump. Desantis turned 10, 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 president, I haven't been on it for a minute, but, like, this morning,

like, I got all these, like, Twitter alerts of these, like, Republican-type guys who were, not, 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's some crushing defeat or something. So then I'm 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 disband, this is a. I'm not pretty impressed with the Sanis. 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 corn flakes. But again, I'm not some pole 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 or they just kind of like if 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 Beto. 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, 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, 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. I mean, frankly, W's a sentence he was kind of weird. I mean, I don't think, I don't think it's weird that, I mean, W frankly,

had his shit together a lot more when he was younger. But I thought it was weird that, I mean, Texas really liked him. You don't forget that W was actually, 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 should.

but he's you know he he he he did not you can't simply buy your way uh to uh to competitiveness no even especially if anything that might work against you when i say like texas okay a guy like bush so i mean i yeah it's but i thought it was weird that of all i i thought it was weird he struck me as like the 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 day he's like Those were issues that were kind of still up for grabs. So I don't know.

Back in 0, back in 06, 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. Oh, he seemed like he had, um, the guy, I think Bush had some, 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 they drunk.

But I think he probably relapsed, frankly. I mean, he was acting like somebody who did. Okay. Um, because yeah, I mean, the guy, it's not like he, man, I think also like you had some health problems that we're not let on do because yeah it wasn't just i mean so i remember some of his apologists just like oh he you know it's just like nerves he's not used to the office it's like texas is a huge state man and like he's not it was not some freshman congressman he was a fucking governor you know you 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 I can do that. But yeah, it was like two different people. It was really weird. I'll see you got that footage you're talking about. We can dive into the Cold War. That's something I know a hell of a lot more. I know what hell of a lot more

about than I do 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 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 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 discreet 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, 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 uh from uh between the truman administration the roseville administration was dramatic i don't people on our side don't like truman i mean i i've got i truman was not an evil man he was not uh he was not um a gangster like roosevelt um he didn't have the hubris of roosevelt um i've got mixed feelings about trum 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. He quite literally inherited this bizarre situation whereby Germany was occupied by the four powers, the United States, 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, that 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. He was a protege of Pershing, blackjack Pershing, who was an understated figure in gunnery histories.

As in May, 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, 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, in 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. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive.

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Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. 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 um if you look at a map of divided Berlin um it's strange because uh the soviet sector kind of bulges uh east Berlin uh extended uh to Mita which is kind of a 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 the traditional structures and

administration and the machinery of garment 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, 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 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, being 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 and 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 true Truman took trubert took trubert took the OTH of office with a hospital Congress. The, 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 Capitol Hill as kind of the, you know, the opposition. And even people who are interventionists, you know, even like hawkish Republicans who, uh, who, who, uh, who are not isolationists, you know,

they were demanding essentially that 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 other conclusion can you come to? You know, in one of the despite what despite that kind of public face like pretty much everything I'm going to get into the Berlin Aeroft in a minute

and what that signifies but pretty much all the negotiations with Stalin from from 1945 onward were in basically bad faith about we're talking about the stands in Germany

because again I mean nobody was going to 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, journey 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, this is what underlies the Ukraine war, is it not the fact that the fact that the independence facilitated by Fril Merkel and Mr. Putin 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. 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 probably there's there's there's more there than um than we have time to cover right now but i i i think that that it's not a mystery but it is anigmatic as to what exactly roosevelt's intentions were and especially one considers too that i mean roosevelt no uncertain terms knew that he was not going to live on long okay um so i what it how exactly he 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 Biden. 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, 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 allied administration that divided Germany was um there was a what was implemented was called the common commanditura and uh it was representatives of uh the united states the soviet union the uk and france meeting in uh this kind of mini uh executive council um and uh there were supposed to come to, they were supposed to go to terms on how Berlin was to be administered. You know, and Berlin being, you know, to Moldov's point, you know, Berlin being quite literally, you know, the got of heart and lungs of Germany, and Germany being, you know, the

axial pivot of Europe, the idea was, well, once the status of Berlin has resolved, you know, the status of Germany proper will be resolved, and then, you know, this will just be a, you know, a done deal. which seems incredible anybody could entertain that possibility is anything realistic. 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 spoke English. the American delegation, nobody spoke Russian. A couple people were 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 basically demanded that in the eastern sector of Berlin, there could be like no, no, quote, profiteering at the expense of workers and things like this. You know, like it was basically like a radical socialist manifesto saying that, you know, the only legitimate capital producer in this arbitrarily designated eastern sector of Germany, you know, it was Moscow and nobody else.

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, un ceremoniously removed. moved the Soviet flag, took all their files, cleaned out their offices, and the Soviets just never returned. You know, they were, they, they, uh, they, they essentially like, it was basically like a soft boycott, um, that killed the enterprise because it had, it had no, it had no, no second reason to force of law without all four, uh, representative of all four 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 personages of the Third Reich. Generally, because they want to cast on those punitive light 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 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 some kind of you know independent power

and to itself that they wielded any great um authority or power of rejection capability however uh it was in fact part of the german state okay even if you don't even if even if that is now people didn't recognize its legitimacy as a sovereign regime. You know, 20 million Germans lived there. Berlin was within its borders. And it was

quite literally at the front lines of the geotrategic divide for 40 years. Now, who came to run the DDR? Well, the Soviets tapped Walter Ubert.

Walter Ubrich was even an exiled member of the KPD. You know, he'd been even an inactive 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 Ullbrick to group.

There were various functionaries, prisoners of 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 what was called the acriman group who was deployed to sax and he the sabatka group to to uh to mecklenburg you know all named after their their cadre leader you know and an anti acriman of the so named acriman group uh he was part of the he was a function 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 point post-war coterie of uh of germany they were the old like kpd control group so that meant that you know not only they've been they've been gone for 10 sometimes 20 years they hadn't been

they hadn't been a home you know so they were it's not like they had uh 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 um any kind of genuine expression of a popular will is is possible but this was especially contrived and famously when ubrick arrived um you know everybody knew who he was you know because he he was uh um you know he arrived in in um you know in uh in what had been east prussia initially you after it had been you know like liberated by the soviets and uh there were germans who were some of the cobbiness

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, 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? You know what I mean, like he, they, uh, 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 up around. 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, or from Vladivostok, you know, like, what, 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 Mr. Ubrick is, you know, he's a German national, you know, so is Ackerman. So 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 i don't i don't think that was the point i think the point was you know the it was 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 a nothing but a hostile occupation in all but name but in any event um and then when i see the s cd the in the in the in the in the in the Soviet occupation sector there was a the the kpd declared uh it merged with the social democrats and became the party of socialist unity Okay, the ruling party in 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 Kennan'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 crucips quote secret speech. 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 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, Kenan said that there's not going to, there's never, there's no one, you're not going to come to, come to terms of the Soviet. Union. Okay, he said, so get that out of your head right away. In policy terms, he said the Soviets

are never going to give you what you, 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. 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 any of America's move outside the out of its immediate sphere of influence is legitimate. And that owes to a few things. It owes the, it owes the, it owes the, the, It was the traditional Russian fixation on security 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.

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 as not much different than the Third Reich. And they view the Third Reich as the distilled essence of evil. And they view the United States and the UK as capitalist states in 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 Kennedy made the point that, you know, unlike in the other, States, unlike in the UK, you know, where a political discourse is kind of this, it's almost 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 this entire planet, the fate of this entire planet, quite literally, in political and structural terms, political structural terms and sociological ones, is 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 double-edged sort of technology, you know, and, you know, the quote-unquote what we view is progress, but what they view as, you know, very, very traumatic process. And beyond that, just within, you know, 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 viewed it as something that, you know, was not, was not, it did not animate him towards, you know, some kind of impassioned defense of. 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 white and why it endured it 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, you know, long after, you know, Gus Hall and his friends had any chance of turning, you know, the teachers union into a,

some kind of communist client, you know, in places like Angola, you know, in places like Nicaragua, in places, you know, like Indonesia, there was still cashed to commune. So, Kenan said, there's got to be a broad spectrum attack on communism, particularly, you know, in terms of, in terms of swathing anxieties about the developmental. model of the West. You know, that means not disturbing and upsetting 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, is, is, is suitable for American goals. You know, that means that, you know, not overreliance on on the military aspect of competition, but, you know, demonstrating, uh, demonstrating, uh,

American systemic superiority, every can see you 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 inspired people like Kennan. So the way people read the Canon, the long telegram and the Canon memo is, Oh, we've got to challenge the Soviet Union militarily at all costs,

basically like in every theater where they assert themselves. 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 Kenan did not appreciate being forced to go out of the court of public opinion to co-sign, you know, what became containment as policy with what was fleshed out in his 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, speaking of Tehran, the Tehran summit, 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 in the world where, you know, the UK just simply, you know, just simply declared these people and it's diminutive. to have like you know to they have like rights of British citizenship now you know and like these these territories in Africa you know they were being um that were there were being seated to indigenous rule and and divested from you know from the 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 UN jurisdiction is it going to be under the jurisdiction of the former colonial authority. You know, this was not clear, and this caused huge problems. And it led to, it led to, what I consider to be begun the first active crisis of the Cold War. One of the many horrible things we can say about Churchill, and they are many, and I'm not trying to resort diperbole.

As it became clear post-Yalta 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 under the character of Roosevelt but of you know the emerging kind of geopolitical culture

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 college 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 you know the USSR 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 what that hell is 90% influence in power political terms the whole thing that's the whole thing that's the way

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. You 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 a, 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 bull, but that's another issue. But at 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. He was 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 it's hugely important, especially today. But I don't want to jump into that now. But to continue, the real kind of key incident, in my opinion, or like a series of events, what started the Cold War is the Berlin blockade, okay? And as people probably imagine,

even people who, you know, don't reel out of the Cold War, you know, 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.

And the western half, the only way you could access it, a civilian or military, vehicles was by dedicated access routes. There's roads for the duration of the Cold War that were literally dedicated access routes for like U.S. military and civilian and West European traffic

to pass through the DDR 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, these routes were later kind of formalized like structure. as a matter of law but uh it was uh the uh the soviets weren't simply allowing uh 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 uh they did not they did not outright blockaded it um before but what uh was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back was uh the uh as the united states as a true economic policy kind of took shape, I mean, just had a 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, the infrastructure was destroyed. You know, people weren't being fed. And it became imperative first and foremost introduced a viable currency.

So the United States introduced 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 I saw him to the economic agents 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 pressure and other things but um people have an idea of it it's just kind of uh it's kind of at now where you know and like the in like the booness republic like dutch bank or whatever just uh just saying like okay this is the successor to the rights market that's not what happened it was the us occupation authorities who introduced it and um and very much

sold the nascent West Berlin government on it. But the Soviets went nuts when this happened. And they banned the Deutsche Mark from the eastern zone of occupation. And yes, they were literally arresting people for using it. So in the eastern occupations, I think 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 jump, I guess.

I mean, I don't even have a particularly punitive view of the DDR. And I mean, that should be clear to anybody. But the introduction of the new currency, when, you know, before with it, in the course of all the failed four powers administrative bodies, you know, the one thing that the Soviets had opposed, unconditionally was you know the introduction of a of a private enterprise and the eastern 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 treated they couldn't treat it 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 in the cards in 1994, 647, 48, especially not by, you know, the shock therapy,

the introduction of, uh, of, um, of this new currency backed by, uh, you know,

backed by American dollars. Okay, that, there's no way. But the, uh, it was, uh,

things changed, the, the Deutscheberg was introduced on June 17th, 1948, or June 18th, June 18th, 1948.

The next day, Soviet guards suddenly cracked down. You know, suddenly people, they're relatively kind of free ingress into East Berlin. You know, people were being stopped and searched. People were being turned back. You know, trains are being halted. Any freight shipments, any old water transport,

they had to secure special permission from the Soviet authorities, not from the East Berlin authorities, from the Soviets themselves. And kind of the final, kind of 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 you're an 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, you know, Eastern Germany proper. So, I mean, if they came to war, there was, those, those guys in West Berlin were dead. You know, they, they would have been slaughtered. I mean, so that this was an ominous thing, you know. And that same day, the 22nd of June, the Soviets announced that they were introducing the East German mark in their own zone of occupation. 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, or like other things, like food, like specialty food items. But they were, like, designated foreign currency shops. I mean, kind of like the hoops that these Marxists when the States jump through, they've got to maintain the fiction that their currencies were actually worth something is really, really weird. You know, I mean, it's, it's got like, you know,

the old movie Brazil, satire movie, I think, yeah, yeah, like, Terry Gilliam. Yeah, it reminds me of that in some basic way, but it was a June 24th, the Soviet-severed land and water connections between the non-Soviet zones in Berlin. So all ground rail or water traffic was cut off. Like nobody got in or out of West Berlin.

Okay. The, 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, in, it, in a battle, 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 and it's 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, this was like a very critical situation. And the entire United States Army, just total forces in being

by 98 have been reduced to about half a million men. 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 bolsterly Soviet attack, total Soviet military forces in the Soviet sector were 1.5 million. Now, the United States at that point, at that night still had a monopoly and the atomic bomb. But, I mean, what do you, if communist forces stream into Berlin, what are you going to do? You're going to launch an atomic assault in Berlin and waste ruin people and all the Berliners? I mean, this was very, very dangerous. And frankly, it was a gamble the sort of Stalin did not usually take.

But interestingly, it was Lucius Clay. He was the commander of the U.S. occupation zone. You know, he said it was voted. Curtis LeMay, interestingly, LeMay wanted to do a, he wanted to mobilize atomic capable B-12. 29s and assault the Soviet sector, like, you know, like nuke them, you know, and, 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, after this, after a massive atomic assault of Soviet forces with B-29s. But that, that, that suggestion was not abided, obviously. But I, I, well, I mean, it was not some kind of madman. I'm, I'm, I'm quite fond. of May in history and I think he's kind of unduly characterized as this kind of like Jack D. Ripper type, you know, like in, in a strange love. But, uh, loses Clay. It was, uh, in concert with a, uh, a lot, a lot of civilian types who, you know, were still, we're still kind of, uh, we're still kind of insinuated into, into government and quasi-military roles away to, uh, the war only being three years passed um us army corps of engineers uh us army air forces the berlin

airlift uh was really uh was really got of an amazing was really kind of an amazing not just a policy coup but sort of strategic rooking of stallin but it it it it demonstrated it the feasibility of air power. And not just in military capacities, I mean, which was obvious, but 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 literally 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 in and out of Berlin that kind

change 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 it's not any kind of a it's not any kind of small thing um i mean there was guys like le may himself and these guys particularly guys who fought with the army air forces in the pacific you know they developed these uh they you know they they developed these these assault routes from the marionis islands and things and uh 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 the Berlin airlift, the Berlin airlift changed that. It, it, uh, it, uh, but LeMay was, he, uh, he, uh, he, uh, uh, but LeMay was, he, uh, uh, he, uh, uh, in terms of staffing decisions, he did end up appointing most of the key figures in executive roles who made the air lived happen. General Joseph Smith, not to be confused with like the father of Mormonism.

He was, he'd been, no gold tablets here. No, but Smith had been, like, there's a huge amount of guys who served under LeMay, 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 LaMay had a B-29 command like in India and then in the Marianas you know loses clay wasn't under Lame'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 think for better or worse you know and I'm not trailing the UK you know the UK remained airstrip one in a real way obviously because of this and owing you know like we like we talked about

what this is kind of inconsistent and frankly ignorant signaling about the status of uh UK-US relations post bellum it wasn't clear like what role the UK would have your 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 the interest in the United States and preserving for any reason. But, I mean, they're also. I mean, it solidified the quote, I hate that term special relationship,

but there's all kinds of, like, things that are far less than admirable that that entails. But it purely, like, collaborative strategic terms, it solidified the U.S.U.K. Concord, particularly as regards operational coordination 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, the South Carolina was really early on an operation today, but I mean you're talking about like you're talking about like radios the cutting edge of like commanding control technology in 1948 like think about that it's uh like stuff so this like it's less reliable than like the walkie talkies you played with this kid in like the early 80s you know what I mean that uh but the um the uh that was uh that was the uh that was the honest of the Cold War and uh in real terms and i don't think anybody would i don't think anybody would dispute that um and there were

shenanigans too like the there was one single municipal election for all of berlin in uh in in 946 and the um the uh the social unity party they didn't poll pathetically yourself i'm they only pulled like 20 percent um you know and that that's what put the christian democrats on the map not just in west berlin but it's like the boonist republic like conservative party but the soviet basically they're basically they were like you know okay to hell with it like we're not we're not going to pursue a political solution you know with because obviously they weren't going to they weren't going to get you know because like Berlin had been like the that had been like the communist heartland you know like in the vibar years uh i and people people post a question like not just

curious like readers but like historians who like are deeply understand you know uh rush of 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, it makes total sense from Stalin's perspective. Stalin was, if Stalin was a guy, even the 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 the actual election, like a legit election and let's see what's more we got on the ground. Okay, about 20, 20, 25%. It's fair. We could build countries around that. But this is never going to happen again. You know, but that's, I think we're going to about an hour. I think we'll stop there.

And we'll 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 catalysts 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 if that's good that sounds great plugs and well on

yeah we're I'm very happy to report that I mean you might see that I've got I've got this cool like backdrop I'm in the apocalypse I bought my production values and also like I got 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 I'm back on Twitter now because Elon is apparently given people like me a 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, in about in a few days when the YouTube channel does launch,

I'll upload a lot of this stuff there. And it's Thomas TV in front of these Thomas, 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 her TV. Well, it's Dave TV.

I got Thomas TV. So, yeah. But thank you, Pete. I really, really appreciate it. No problem. We'll pick it up again next week. Thanks, Thomas. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cignanez show,

part three 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 in concerns all kinds of theoretical matters, 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 created the contemporary strategic landscape, you know, and it endured for 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 you're 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 I don't just want to be taking off a list of what I consider key events or something. However, 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 890 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. 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 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 de-rescated 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 couldn't tell you anything about their own heritage and are not very racially conscious at all, there remains this kind of adivistic fear of Russia. And that's not just some kind of hackneyed polemical take

that people like Lavrov drop 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,

this book by Michael Proudin, and it was released in a review of its titles. The value I've got, it's under the title, 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, D. Okay. Now, why was this so significant? Well, you know, the Europeans since 1095,

had intermittently been at war with the Saracens, you know, Saladin and his descendants. You know, this was the 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 truly European armies, you know, going off to war, I guess, a con, and civilizational enemy. However, some kind of concord had been, had been reached with the Muslims, okay? I mean, sometimes, you know, sometimes there's relative peace that reigned, you know, in the kingdom of Jerusalem, you know, after the Battle of Hatin and the Muslim conquest, things deteriorated.

But, you know, there's just kind of like an ongoing thing. But in the 12, you know, in 1220, suddenly 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 this is the scourge of god and he's he's punishing you know the infidel moslems 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 They forced the men into duty of Janus, basically, you know, and they drive them, you know, out front. And, you know, they take the first blow 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 Ceresans. You know, other people said, there were Jews who said, like, well, you know, King David has come in. 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 emergent 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 SS Juncker Shules,

the, the Prouding's book was actually given to officers, okay? And that's significant Himmler didn't assign the Himmler and Paul Hauser 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 my graduation was this book by Proudum both because it's you know it's always saying you know this is your enemy you know this is what you know you're a knight of the new

blood order of of Europe you know in the SS and this is what we're fighting against you know because we're the were the watch on the Rhine. Okay, but also, um, after,

you know, 300 years of, of the Westphalian, uh, paradigm, it, you know, uh,

the reality of true total war was, was emergent again, okay? And, uh, that, uh, they cannot be emphasized enough.

And even, it sounds corny, but you can glean things from, you know, uh, you can discern symbolic, psychological things even in kind of trashy media you know and i watch uh 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 uh patrick suezi

and c thomas howl you know the that's actually kind of an interesting movie like it's a period piece mostly but you know we're like the black history teacher when when the when when the town first gets assaulted by like the soviets and the sanninistas and the cubanos he's teaching a class about gangis con okay and that's like not an accident there's really like on the nose okay um but so when you consider that you consider that you know europe is literally this kind of indefensible peninsula that um you know it that that's the way you 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 um the entire kind of um the entire european uh military orientation and uh you know in the and uh

and the you know the the the striving eastward of a 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 ode to uh oh to the united states allowing with it to to crush uh imperium europa under the German Reich. But you know, nevertheless,

you know, these these things reemerge again and again. It's almost like a 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 I what I want to talk about today is the war in Korea. of and this bearers directly than 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 there was true violence in Europe of uh 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 where it was lead in the air

between you know mass conventional forces they happen in Asia and it's not accidental and that's not uh it wasn't just a matter of you know well you know this is a place where this is a place these are this is a theater where you know the soviets the americans respectively can push and not risk triggering you know the the apocalyptic conflict diet that's going to lead to general nuclear war and interestingly or fascinatingly in the final phase of the cold war which we'll get into later um the real catalyst behind rations

Reagan's five 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 and supporting fleet elements you know to essentially like force force the Soviet Union was up back to fight a two front nuclear war if you can think a nuclear war is having a front or rather two theater nuclear war and this 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, really kind of rook the Soviet ambitions. It wasn't just the Revolution and Military Affairs and the technological edge being lost. But getting into the Korean War, and again, I hope that wasn't too like scattershot. We got into Berlin Air Lift last episode, you know, and the Cold War, you know, the Cold War, the Cold War, it formally kicked off by then, okay? And then in 19449, the Soviets developed their own atomic capability, you know,

we can get into the Rosenbergs, maybe next episode if you want. I didn't know if you wanted to cover that because it's kind of controversial 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 Alger 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 Acheson, who he's, there's been a lot of revisionist takes on him that are pretty unflattering. But Ashton was kind of a peculiar, I think he was kind of a feat aristocrat type of the worst sort. but that's just my opinion. There's definitely been worse, chief diplomats. But Atchison's great blunder, I think it's an arguable. In January 13, 1950, you know, mind you, this was as, 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, the threat of massive escalation. This was creating problems as, you know, the Cold War, you know, began to heat up in earnest quite literally. But there had not yet been an open challenge to Truman. Okay, there had not yet been, I mean, other than the Berlin blockade, which was, I mean, that was not a conventional provocation, you know, only to the bizarre occupation regime and the fact that um you know germany was permanently in limbo as a matter of law um you know because

there it was it was it was quite literally under occupation authority and there was no there was there was no end in sight and no pathway to a permanent peace treaty emergent um but the the uh you know the first true kind of challenge uh to uh to uh to american burgeoning american in germany 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 U.S. diplomats. Like 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 national. enemies and that's the diplomats must have instincts to know when to resort to such measures

and must 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 actual potential you know relatively hidden as need be a sustained credibility but the Anderson 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 and 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, are key, like U.S. C lanes and things. But basically, it's, it's, it's like, it's quite literally like a containment barrier,

um, uh, you know, uh, bulwark against, uh, against the, against the, 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, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the understanding was, um, that America was not going to defend Korea, okay?

Now, why Stalin and Mao copied Korea is, uh, is what's significant. Because Korea was not, uh, Germany. Um, and the reason why Korea today remains dysfunctional is because it, uh, It borders both China and Russia, and so then striking distance of Lattie Vostok. It's a stone's throw away from Japan. Quite literally, nobody wants to 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 is far less of a, of a potential conflict dyad that that could result in true catastrophic escalation. It became that way because of MacArthur. 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 Acheson was in Maryland that is at his gentleman's farm. Henry Nitz, who people, the name people were recognized from our earlier episodes. Nitz said was the Secretary of Defense.

He was on a fishing trip in New Brunswick. But Nitz said decades later, he was the principal architect of the Team B exercise. He was a huge early neo-conservative, okay? a 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. So he was a hugely significant guy.

Okay, and his first, his first kind of challenge of political nature was, uh, was budding heads with, with, you know, Mr. George Kennan that we, we discussed earlier. I mean, Kenan, obviously, from what we discussed

about him and, you know, from what we've talked about his kind of basic traits of character and 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

um Kenan 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 Mitzza um 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. They're 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 provide a conceptual model of where this is going to jump off. You know, and what going to force is it's going to entail. You know, and what feeder is going to be the primary area of operation. So they totally disregarded it, okay? But to give you an idea of kind of how Fubar, the National Security Establishment was,

neither Truman nor Nitsyn nor Acheson. It wasn't until they returned to Washington from their respective vacations that they found out that Korea was under assault because they saw the newspaper headlines. There was no structure in place of

notifying national command authorities of a wartime emergency and branded. 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, Kenon, at this point was something of administer without portfolio. okay uh he was he'd been dismissed as you know the kind of quasi regent of department of state in moscow um he'd ended his tenure as a special consultant to uh the national security advisor but he i mean kenan was always in the executive orbit okay um because he was a brilliant guy and he uh he was the foremost expert on the soviet union and the russian and russian culture okay the evening of i'm sorry the evening of june 25th, getting double time to the 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 Asia and the Chinese, their Chinese proxies are going all in, we're going to fight a world war over Japan, okay?

Which is very interesting. And Taiwan is interesting because Taiwan is absolutely zero strategic significance today. And it shows you like the raw delusion of these bizarre fucking idiots like, like Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Biden that they protect. that it's 1950 and that this matters or that they actually have not only there's no stake in Taiwan but this idea that I mean if an American carry group

showed up declaring to the Taiwanese in 2012 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 incredible but in 1950 had Taiwan fallen and had that been

you know the like Moscow and Stalin's ambition Kenner was absolutely right. And as we will see, as we get deeper into this series, the Soviets put remarkable pressure on Japan. The Soviets were always seeking out a weak spot as kind of their counterweight to the situation in Berlin, especially, and the Inter-German Border generally.

And that's what underlay cruise shifts on it and the serves a fairly reckless deployment, a 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 for incentivization, America would have had real problem in that regard.

So, Kenner was not just dropping wild doomsday scenarios. What he was saying was very possible. As it was, I think Stalin was testing Mao's loyalty, and the Sino-Soviette's split as complicated. there's profound cultural variables there as well as political ones as well as things as simple as as well as things as simple as you know the

like dang who was you know who was the shadow executive I mean basically after Mao and after the gang of four got eliminated he was finding as somewhat greedy and 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 uh nature of of the

of the Cold War paradigm um 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 they were loyal to Stalin I mean Stalin was a remarkable person I maintain he was probably the most powerful man whoever lived okay um hands down but the uh as kennan came to realize uh china very much was the soviet union's proxy and they treated them very much like a client state i mean a very important client state one with potentially great uh power political potential and uh military mobilization potential but nevertheless they very much treated them like uh like a somewhat inferior race okay um not to be crass about it that is

the reality of the situation. Can it maintain, you know, in that same vein? Well, here, first of all, like, how is Truman able to corral this whole coalition effort? And again, the parallel with the Gulf War stands out here, although the way in which the coalition was corralled is quite different. The USSR was boycotting the United Nations at this point, okay? No, as people probably know, the Soviet Union had a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The UN Security Council acts as the DeFegro Hire 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 they simply were, their seat was vacant. And why were they boycotting the UN? They were boycotting the UN. because their proxy China had not, the UN had not permitted them to be seated. Okay, there was this absurd situation where the Americans were demanding that Chankai-shek's government on Formosa, he recognized as 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 that, there's something that's something satirical about that. but this is why the Soviets were boycotting the UN. Thus, when Truman, through Atchison, you know, 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, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, civilized community of nations that assaulted Korea, this, this marvelous, nascent democracy, you know, we, we've got to rush to its defense. So that's what happened. Okay. Truman, uh, true,

wasn't any kind of, wasn't any kind of pure Wilsonian, but he was like a liberal internationalist. So this, this kind of stuff really got him excited. He really, he really dug that 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 comedy games that, uh, you know, of a political,

theatrical nature that facilitated it. But, 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 a medal of honor recipient

who fought for the union army and the war between the states macarthur himself uh he was awarded the medal of honor in this in this anti-banded action in the poncho bia era but it was strange and like it seemed very much like macarthur kind of coveted this medal of honor and he created circumstances we're in 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 it was a navy show okay now the grunts there those guys suffered like nobody else okay and they fought harder than anybody else and not saying that

at all. But the army in 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 to. You know, you're in this green hell. A lot of time, they weren't getting the gear they needed. You know, things have become totally savage by this point.

But, you know, all that aside, I mean, that there's enough there to constitute an episode in its own right. But the key takeaway is that there's a reason why MacArthur was not given some theater-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 set in the Pacific, where he was. basically under the thumb a guy's like Nimitz, okay? Because he was a cowboy, he was a glory hound,

and by this point he was basically running Japan like some kind of swaggering Cardillo, 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, MacArthur is in his element with this, you know, if he sticks the mission orientation of liberating Republic of Korea, but if McArthur decides he wants to collect more medals and Mercer of Lady Vostock, he's going to start

World War III. Now, I know there's like this stupid cliche of fucking idiots 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. And Kenan, what Kenan did was Kenan, 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 MacArthur a free hand in operational terms so long as the mission

remains limited to the liberation of the Republic of Korea and not the 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 Kennan was, they were saying he'd been 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 what the huge gets in school about this. but the Korean War was incredibly unpopular.

It was incredibly brutal, it was incredibly bloody. You know, it was and 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 guys 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 theaters. but um this uh this really uh this really canon really got kind of sandbagged until uh until the isanauer era um and well we'll get into that too as we progress also we're going to come back to kennon again and again not just because it i've got a huge esteem for kennin but he's a key player in the cold war and like i said it uh i i give nixon all credit for the facilitating the sign of soviet split because he's the man who actually facilitated it in an executive role but conceptually this was this was George Kennon's kind of augury and instinct for for for hard power politics but um

as the war dragged on um Truman did increase naval patrols and and just overall naval presence the Pacific and especially in the Taiwan straight and hugely a huge significance Truman began basically bankrolling the uh the front of war in Indochian against the Vietnam. Okay? And, you know, America's involvement in Indochina goes back to the late 40s in some capacity. 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, 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 all

ultimately kind of resolved in the sort of massive escalation or yeah massive escalation of forces in being in in the Pacific you know in the Reagan area you got to look at it's all part like a common paradigm okay you can't look at any these things in isolation um now um what Kennan did do during this time is he started writing a lot um in in policy journals 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 Kenneth 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 a civilian world. And Kenan's

plan for, I mean, we think of history of the rearview mirror. because that's inevitable. Everybody comes a Monday morning quarterback when they're looking backwards. Kenna 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 he thought that. And frankly, had Gorbachev and Reagan not found a way to end that, that paradigm, there actually would have been

at some point. You know, being in 1993, 2003, 2003, it would have happened eventually. I'm sorry you're calling it, so I've been on the weather. But

the Ken of view was this. Okay, this was Kenan's kind of grand design 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. He said there's got to be some kind of 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 you know We're fighting a general war on the peninsula against the 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 this 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. He was like, 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, they're the third most powerful state on this planet. This is ridiculous. He's like, concomitant, we need to allow a plebiscite. to determine Taiwan's future. And Kenyon's like, don't worry that 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, and finally 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 is 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, not even a token 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 is long forgotten to history other than there's a you occasionally come across copy mostly like grad 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? That's a whole other story, but just for context, if it seems weird that Kennan is, like, emphasizing that look, like, we've got to basically,

like, take Japan out of the Cold War entirely. That is why, okay? And in turn, he said, finally, um, he said that, we're entering into a catastrophe, he's like, we're entering into 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 mixed, like a mixed combined arms force that's capable of dealing, you know, a concentrated and devastating blow on a limited front. but basically anywhere on this planet. And that was very pressing too, okay, because that kind of thing became dominant by the end of the Cold War definitely

and even beyond, although the strategic landscape is totally changed and arguably the reason why that notion has gained legs is for totally different reasons. But I mean, there's all kinds of things. factors and play to that, you know, like political, technological, and others. But, um, Kenon, uh, uh, Kenon, uh, I guess what I'm getting is this. Kenan had, he wasn't something of auger in light or anything, but he, well, put

Kenan ahead of his peers, particularly in the issue, not of the, of Korea, but also Asia generally. You have an understanding of, uh, you understanding of causation and politics, causeality 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 it has to do with the way humans perceive threat at scale part of it has to do with just how decisions are made in uh

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, kind of had instincts for all this stuff. And he kind of understood the implications that there's 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 discern the trajectory of, of, of the, 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.

Have we lost that now, or is 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. But 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're some brilliant game theorist, you know, you got sent to Harvard, and then you got sent to some Pentagon Fund and think tank to figure out how to wage nuclear war. You know, if you were like a brilliant economist, you know, you'd, you'd, you'd, you'd, you'd, 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, 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 like weirdos, freaks. 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 guys 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 a 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, the, you know, look, okay, like, like, 50 years ago or even 40 years ago, like in the early 80s, I got like Elon Musk, he'd be like working in government. He would have been like making, he would have been going on TV debating Carl Sagan. It's 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 splited first right potential like that's what he'd be doing like now who the hell's gonna go who the hell's gonna go debate with aOC about whether like kids should learn about anal sex or not in seventh grade like that like who the hell is gonna 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 Bightens. You know, it's, it's for, it's for, it's for, or it's for, or it's for, 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, like, striver, narcissist's 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 to 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 flowing 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 totally destructive and like an enemy of the people and stuff, even in a, 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 there's something of a there's more than there's more than a modicum of fraud to it too you know and people see through that um like a highly intelligent guy aside of 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 he's 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 sidi on the map okay that's why the cold war i mean dynamic people were in government because of

the Cold War. Okay, that is why they were there. Like, they weren't there as 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 were there to fight the Cold War, and that's it.

And, uh, the Cold War was something that comes, like a paradigm like that happens 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 like cubo in 63 or 62 you know uh you know um the 73 war and like able archer even even even as horrifying as that stuff was like people realize like you know these were these were these were apoccal earth 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 owned on Twitter by like, by people anonymous, anonymous accounts. Yeah, like anonymous. And they're like high school kids too. Yeah. It's like, like, there's point of smart high school kids. The point is, yeah, these guys are going to get embarrassed by just

like 16 year old John's from Oh, boy. 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-drae guy. He's the one who's keeping real space tech a lot. 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's an eccentric weirdo, but, I mean, all these guys are. But, I mean, I'm glad he's around and he, you know, I, he's a great man. And, like, not in the sense of I love him, I think he's awesome. them but in by any objective metric but that's you know government you know government is going to attract losers when it doesn't i mean they were this is i don't go too far afield and i'll wrap it

i'm sorry but i mean uh i i government is going to cease to exist as as as we know it today in the next 200 years like i'm not saying like the state will wither you know like some utopian anarchist or something, you know, kind of like low-key, like Trotskyers or something. But you're not, it's just not going to have, you know, a century of now, people, stuff like, you know, the 20th century features that created this regime are going to be so remote as to be, like, not even intelligent anymore. So, like, a lot of what government does as its make-work business the day-to-day is just not going to exist anymore.

And plus it'll 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, 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 see you, but. Well, 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 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 idiot. You know, it's like innocracy, like snuck up on us in a decade. No, it's totally nuts. Like I said, I found it jarring. Like, you know, 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, okay, I mean, whether you were 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, like a hero. I really looked up them, you know. But these, you know, to go from that kind of very heavy. severe and will good and bad ways regime, you know, to Bill Clinton, and it's kind of like married man as circus freaks. Like,

it was bizarre, man. Like, it was jarring. But, I mean, that's why, like I said, it was a joke, I think these boomers were, like, who, like, flying to, like, you know, rages about Donald Trump. You know, there's, like, the same assholes who were, like, telling us

30 years ago, like, you're going to get with the times, man. You know, 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 your outrage And some reality TV show stars is the president It's like you guys made this shit happen You know like you're the ones you said

They're like we're a bunch of squares and fish Just an idiot who you don't want like white male stuff to rule man And you know we gotta like get with the times So it's like you know yeah yeah And it's really 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 don't worry about anything not because look, I'm so awesome, I'm, like, fearless, but I, you know, I, I, 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's, that's why, you know, that's, that's, you know, 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 in the hour. But like I said before, it went live, man. I'm, the fellas 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 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. You can find me there. You'll seek and each you'll find. I'm on Substack at Real Thomas 777.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 taught or yeah more like a week and a half ago perhaps but you know talking with the berlin air 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 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 in and you know uh containment as policy you know not just as some sort of theory abstracted from from concrete military decision making you know you've 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 lesser degree you know policy towards

the communist for the next 40 years. And it's also too, that's when America truly dissinuated 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 or biological reasons,

support of broad ignorance. But the idea that Vietnam was just kind of over the opportunity, you know, owing the design of you know profit years and finance years and things that's nonsense and the uh it in arguably you know the far east was there it was far more dangerous during the middle and late cold war than than the european theater i mean obviously if we come to europe that would have been catastrophic because basically a single conflict diet and had it been triggered or traversed the potential for catastrophic escalation was was was was ever present

But there was many, many, many like that I had's 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 rescillation 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. also it um it it's 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 not I mean he was he was an odd whatever he was about Truman he was honest he didn't have character issues he wasn't corrupt but um in the toilet um the Korean war was incredibly unpopular and you know, the, uh, the republic rift between Truman of Carthor, which led to McCarthy's dismissal. The public generally sympathized with MacArthur, not just because, you know, he was kind of this heroic person.

The indigent that had been very deliberately created by, you know, by media. Um, but also the view of, the view of Truman was that Truman's objects, you know, as stated, were to quote, restore peace and security on the Korean Peninsula, you know, there was, and you know, basically to reestablish the status of a 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 the prevailing and, you know, and, you know, in guarding the prevailing peace, but to quote, protect our forces. You know, and that's, 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's not why you go to war. And, you know, we're talking about, you know, not just men's lives, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you, you, you're really an obligation to the country, you know, not just to those men and, and, and, and, you know, to the country at large, you know, to, you know, not, not, not to, well, isn't it also an insult to the, 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 kind of discouraging and any enthusiasm, you know, for the war effort. And it, so, I mean, I, for good, for good reason, you know, Truman was kind of sad, 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 a you're America in the Cold War you know kind of a

precursor to what ensued during the detente era after you know Saigon 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 preventing 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 at peribural effigy but he in power political analyses he's really second to none okay and he 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 uh the the the Stalin and the Soviet Union ended up in pretty in a pretty precarious position only to the Korean War um the uh the you know there's a basic ambiguity as to where American sphere of influence stuff in Soviet interest began in the region um American did not have the forces in being um even outside of Japan really but even that is our 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 um you know the uh in the aftermath of Korea you know the the Department of Defense it asked for the defense budget to be tripled and it got its way um and it truly integrated military alliance developed in Europe under American Supreme Command I mean that's built NATO 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 Near East and the Orioles. and throw huge amounts of hardware at them. And, you know, 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 Speck War Center's, you know, literally named for him.

But, you know, this was really, like, like Speck 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 green lit it when When Mao was able to convince him

But 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 Republic of Korean forces got pushed back to Busan And the perimeter was this tiny little corner literally the Republic of Korea until uh I mean those guys fought fought hard and not putting shade on the South Koreans but I mean you know they they were they were

they were totally routed it wasn't it wasn't until you know the the inshine landings you know cut the country in half basically and you know the American and UN forces essentially fought this kind of desperate rear action and and push the communists all the way back like literally to the Yellow River I mean, obviously that, you know, that's what triggered intervention by the red Chinese. But, but, but, um, but being, um, you know, this was not, despite with someone like the, the, the Cold War Hawks alleged, this is not Stalin, 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 to move on Berlin or something. Like that was, and then, but it just, you know, didn't go as planned. like that's not what happened at all.

But, you know, the, uh, what Stalin was really doing, in my opinion, is, uh, 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 was not some sort of, you know, equivalent to Western Europe or some sort of equivalent to the, you know, the capital base, uh, and resources, human 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. It was literally space wherein, you know, the Red Army could deploy in depth to protect itself or to stage, you know, what they characterized as a preemptive assault against NATO. So, occupying Poland with hostility, you know,

creating like a client regime in Bulgaria. Like these things were not profiting the Soviet Union. and these things were huge drains okay but what the soviets had was uh the soviets had china and even though china was you know very very underdeveloped at that time um in power political terms you know pure military terms there's incredible power potential and frankly a uh a communist block that's literally from uh you know from berlin uh uh to uh to hanoy contiguously i mean that that's a good that that's about that's about a fifth of this planet. Okay, just the

raw kind of geostrategic momentum of that is incredible. So, um, this, 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 towards, towards, the Chinese and, and the Chinese war against the Americans.

Um, but it also, it did lay the foundation for the sign of Soviet split. it 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. 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 Cruzev is because Cruzev was not the man that Stalin was. And, you know, Stalin was a remarkable figure. I mean, whatever else we can say about him.

And, 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, some, under some, under some apparatus like cruise, shift or under, you know, some kind of, you know, under some kind of, you know, oxygenary dictator-like the provision of. But that's about outside of scope of what I wanted to cover here. What it did, and what it did do on the communist side,

and kind of like the victory column, as it were, I mean, China did fight the United States to withstand it 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 that that emboldened the that emboldened Hocheon that emboldened Paul Pot you know that emboldened you know a hundred uh um insurgencies of you know um on every continent that uh you know the United States is not invincible you know um and that uh I think that I think they can't really be overstated and you know when people

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 the wake of the Korean War you know it was it was a year before

Stalin died it was March 10, 1952 you know someone died basically right after a cessation of hostilities in uh in Korea and uh it was uh 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 um you know and it and did a jury neutrality enforced on germany how that would be enforced i was never really clear because negotiate and reach that point i would assume you know uh some kind of u.n manned um would have 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 big problem was you know the strategic amount so on the fact

that you know NATO was at their doorstep what became NATO and then you know was at their doorstep um I realize NATO was was was a incorporated in 949 but it was about 10 years in my opinion before it became a truly you know like integrated combat force um other than just uh you know kind of uh you kind of a you kind of a mandate for you know operate within the borders of these at least nominally sovereign states but uh the reason you know 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 uh of uh uh of the entire kind of Cold War apparatus. I mean, that that would not, that's not what he would have been doing. But the, it's also to the fact, I mean, it was doomed to fail because, I mean, this was submitted in here eight months

before the president election, you know, and it, I realize, you know, I realized 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 a 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 what everybody feels about isnair in history you know like he was he was viewed as the man to wage the cold war okay and that

that's really what kind of catapulted him into office um but even even taking eyes and the equation um obviously uh obviously eight months out from a from from a presidential contest nobody's going to you know nobody's going to be willing to undertake you know some kind of shift um in uh in in status relations with the soviet union you know in in in 952 of all of all years but um what i want to kind of segue into is the person of conroy had had an hour like before i said a recording i said i wanted to get into the culture of the bundus republic and and how they came about and why it came about. Do you understand that?

You got to understand Adnauer. You know, Adnau was the first, he was the first post-war chancellor. I mean, if you consider West Germany, you know, like the real Germany or whatever, and, you know, the successor state of the German Reich, you know, he was the first post-war chancellor. And if you reject that, which I don't think people do with some might.

I mean, I don't consider the current German state, particularly legitimate but that but in terms of you know linear political um uh legacy it i 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 fancy 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, of, of what, of what chiefs of state represent, both to the people whom they ruled, but also to, you know, allies and foes alike. And there was a perfect example of that. And now he 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. And there was a remarkable guy. And he was born in the Catholic Rhineland. And he was born literally

you know with the kind of zenith of Bismarck's Kutrachov and for those that don't know Bismarck the kind of arch Prussian Protestant he did not trust Catholics he purged Catholics from the kind of civil

apparatus which uh by that point was quite robust you know Prussia was really kind of as modern state you know they had they had kind of the you know real pension system um

if they 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 i'm not a particularly i'm not some big government uh you know kensian type or anything at all but even you know i stipulate that um pressure ran with uh with true uh you know kind of military efficiency and all the best uh you know in almost laudable ways but um 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 the physical violence but they really were locked out of political and cut fair as well practical purposes and this made a huge impact on the end

RR okay not only because he was a Catholic but you know his family was really politically engaged you know adenauer himself obviously this is you know was his career path um he he considered this you know very very unjust and because he actually was devout you know um adenauer 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.

And he found his way to the center party, which was the Catholic party, you know, really of the epoch. It was 1905, 1906, and now he was like the city council of Cologne. A few years later, it became the Vice Mayor of Cologne.

You know, he was going to say, it's not of a political prodigy. okay and he uh he again too he wore his catholicism on his sleeve but he was respected pretty much by everybody i mean even by the even even kind of the most you know 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 kind of the way that you know Carl Schmidt disdained you know the he was not the kind of the parliamentarian who believes in endless discussion and superficial compromises

and I 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 and in affairs of state um it uh you know he uh he was dedicated of rooting out disorder, inefficiency, irrationality. He was very much a moralist. You know, he had no tolerance for corruption. But he, you know, he had no time for ideologies of the right as well as the left. You know, I think, I think of him as somewhat like, I think he had something in common with people like Dolphus in Austria, okay, frankly.

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 a secularist, you know, very, very much, you know, Catholic in his orientation and, and in his evaluation of, of what, you know, the metric is for good government. But, I mean, Austin's political culture is very different than the one that had now emerged from. and um the uh the kind of the kind of the kind of quasi clericalism of somebody like dulphus you know like adenar wasn't running around you know like like it's still in priests and in the civic apparatus or something like that okay but he but he was uh he was not at all kind of the secularist parliamentarian and like i said that um that people sort of associate with with with you know compromisers the of the of the um of the Kaiser Reich and the in the vimer era you know i mean there

the the uh the kind of the kind of toxic parliamentarism that that Schmidt lamented I mean yeah obviously reached Zenith and Weimar for obvious reasons but this kind of thing is Ruth Heiserreich you know like it really it really did I mean that's that's important to bear in mind but and also he became he became nationally known during the great war he he involved himself you know as a as a as a as a as as as as as as as as a very much in managing ever through him any you know food shortage or just board of the embargo it was an early like a like sausage derived from soy and think 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 a bailing Colon as a base of supply and as a hub, you know, to reconstitute forces and things like this. You know, he really, really rose to the occasion, you know, and became something of a hero of figure in the minds of people, not just in Cologne, but, you know, he became quite well known about the Reich. However, he, he was somebody who became something of an intermediary between elements and Berlin, which is interesting.

And when it became clear that, when it became clear that, 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, you know, with the stipulation of the French would not occupy it. And the foreign element would set foot on its source. you know it being this kind of like you know nominal autonomous zone and uh both the prussian uh governments and and and um and uh and the vimer regime were totally against against any plan for bringing up prussia with the vimer regime and this this was in 1919 so yeah

i mean immediately before i immediately after the advocate 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 a very subtle kind of in its um and it's cunning and that kind of became characteristic of Anner um it uh he also to uh when it was the treaty of versailles which was presented formally in june nineteen nineteen and now knew as anybody did it was in the know that some sort of punitive regime was going to be coming down the pipeline. And I think his idea was that, you know, the less kind of like the more like devolved,

the rake 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, the sovereign you know in all kinds of ways so um it's uh 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 gust of stressman and uh you know i've i've made the point before i think in in our

in one of our previous series that that stressman was a compelling guy and i think and i think that I think he's not, I think he's not really given to do. I think of him also kind of counterfeit of 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 just, you know, a rival for the chancellorship because Adnara did in fact covet the office. but uh he uh you know he viewed his vision as fundamentally at odds with what was you know possible and feasible um and uh that's really kind of sabotaged uh

the kind of sabotage and nervous designs um the idea was uh you know for the the coalition of the christian crats and the um and the um and the um and the center party you know to uh to constitute the ruling quorum and and um add an hour true to forum he'd he'd manage 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 ad an hour but it also it eng 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 and in terms of its ability to to pass legislation and and and take you know executive take unilateral action when required and and it'll and have something of a mandate across the aisle which was remarkable for 1926 but it has kind of is this personal collision with stress men ended all of that. I mean, that could be a whole episode into itself, but what's significant is when, you know,

the National Socialists breakthrough in, or breakthroughs in 1930 and 32, Edna never wasn't just Mayor 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 support around, but in elite circles they certainly, but also just, I mean, you know, the Prussian being the political, you know, the political core of the German Reich,

um, defended and not sat on the Prussian state council, um, meant that he was either going to have to, some kind of, come to something to Concord of the National Socialists or stepped aside and uh interestingly um it uh went on the night of the long knives and i was actually arrested and uh allegedly for his own protection and he wasn't a harm in any way and he was released after the um after the uh you know after the after the dirty work of or the the the bloody business of um route the the revolutionaries was done

but he wrote a 10-page letter to Gering who by then was Gowler, Prussia, 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, you know, fly your national flags and Prussian buildings.

I build up of you know, our public facilities, you know, to the national socialists so you could hold your meeting you know because I wasn't I wasn't gonna I was I wasn't gonna exclude the 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 your to be a valid uh there's testimony between

valid on most matters but on some things because he's no reason to lie about it I do and um according to Speer Hitler made the point that it 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 a and now refused to he he didn't not only refused to join the party but 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 know you're free to go by your business but you know

have a nice life you've got nothing coming and and i never 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 you know he came to certain epiphanies about, you know, the German nation and what configuration of state was going to allow it to survive. The Germans survives the people and whatnot, which I think is basically true. You know, Adnard was not some, he wasn't some intellectual or some student of history. He wasn't that guy like de Gaulle or like Adolf Hitler. You know, he is this kind of guy. The Polestar, like we talked about, was his Catholic faith. And, uh, you know kind of like a kind of a pragmatic sense of how to of how to constitute a government you know that the germans could live with as a people you know but that you know if it's 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 but 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, how 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 of State, a very, very tight intelligence apparatus that allowed it to identify, you know, who, you know, who, you know, who should be in a very, insinuated into these roles. And I think within the boundary rationality

of what America and the UK and France wanted to accomplish in Germany, Adnan was the only man who I think could have done that. And kind of finally, what Adonauer had going for him in their eyes,

he was constitutionally anti-Russian and anti-Soviet. What he did say, when a few topics he would kind of kind of authenticate 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 Russia and the Russians and, you know, the kind of Machiavellian newette

that, you know, kind of ultimately brings Germany to concord with the Russians and other times the odds depending on you know the depending on the characteristics to the extent strategic landscape as well as the the internal political situation and uh and now were said you know that that that that ends now you know the Russians are if not our enemies they're there they're certainly our adversaries you know we we're going to stand with the west and with Europe and with the Atlantis is concord at all costs um

He refused to recognize the DDR at all. He said it's not a legitimate state. You know, he denied that many diplomatic representation. And I mean, that probably is what, more than any other single variable is what kind of made an hour acceptable to the occupation authorities. But it was everything taken together. I mean, there was, you who hated the Soviet Union or a diamond. you know, ambitious guys who, you know, hadn't been national socialist, but who hated the Russians.

I mean, it's not like Edna hour had like a rare resume in that regard, but this kind of, um, that he had a rare credit, um, and an unusual sort of integrity, I think, that coupled with this sort of unconditional cold warrior stance, um, made him, uh, you know, kind of like the natural choice. But again, I mean, it's, in fact that, the fact that the men in charge could dominate that he was the 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 is literally considerably illiterate. I just, I realize I'm going to make 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, at an hour He said that people need to receive, you know, Vermachian SS veterans deserve to be respected and their patriots.

And he said that, you know, we're not going to put, like, shame on these men. But interestingly, the reason why Otto Reamer and Hans Rudell, who both were, were, uh, Riemer was, uh, he stands the Socialist Reich Party, you know, which was, uh, which in my opinion was the legacy party, the NSDP in real terms. 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's a German right, the National Socialist right, who absolutely despise Adnauer. But they, that, and I understand completely, like I get it. But it's not as simple as they had now it's being like some NATO lackey or some, you know, or some social Democrat who saw an opportunity and who spent the war years, you know, you know, just toying along wherever you had to,

you know, avoiding the front. Well, so like avoiding the a higher or the authority and suddenly, you know, he, you know, he started, you know, waving a, waving a, waving a NATO banner as soon as, as soon as the Soviets were in Berlin you know you he had genuine integrity okay I'm not gonna like I I obviously my ultimate slides with guys like Reber but but in history I mean but that's that's that's that it's I wanted to dedicate basis this entire

episode and now we're into the sentencing because that's 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 um nato because like again i really knew nato was constituted in nineteen forty nine but it there wasn't really much to it then okay and there's still 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 uh sensibility, you know, people make the point a lot that the, you know, the, the, the, uh, the, uh, um, Western Army, uh, had, uh, such boring uniforms. That was by design, because, uh, the original, I,

concept included was to be, you know, a European defense community, um, wherein, uh, there'd be a common command structure, you know, no one state, you know, would have, uh, uh, a, uh, would have, uh, uh, would be dominant in, you know, in executive officer roles or in command authorities. And, you know, the uniform for the post multinational force, it was supposed to be devoid of anything that could be affiliated with, you know, national showmanism or something that could be, like, identify with any particular country or cultural tendency. So you're left with the...

So 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 which are like dope you know he always died of so But it's um you know it's uh it's uh it um I think uh the key take we also like I said was that the uh I'll get into uh later on um in this series series to the like ultimately in the final phase of the Cold War the key the key strategic battle in a strategic battle space was was the Pacific you know and that that's one of the things that underlay the Department of the Navy under Jim Webb you know and a 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 that's, yeah, I mean, the fact that people like Kenan, who talk about the inherent danger of the Far East and they kind of, you know, getting a flutty of possible conflict, I mean, they're proven of, 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 half a dozen others that, you know, were kind of something short of, you know, open conflict, but but very much not conditions at peace.

And I mean, there was a, I mean, that that wasn't anything in Europe. I mean, yeah, I realize again, as I stated, that there was really only one conflict diet, and possible in Europe. and it was a catastrophic one but um that uh had the Korean War not happened or had it resolved some other way uh the entire course of Subson Lunas would have been different um and it um and had MacArthur got his way um some kind of uh something of a opening at war with uh with and the problem is i mean I stipulate that um what was referred like we thought it was referred was referred to the tautology of well you know we've 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've got to push for a total victory in Korea, but doing that means fighting China. And fighting China means, you know, landing the Changach's nationalists there and waging war to the end until, you know, until the communist regime falls. Well, if you do that, then you're at war with the Soviet Union. you know and then what and I mean there's this this it's not the the Cold War was it was important not to it not just important but I mean and it was a question it was an existential reality that uh conflict paradigms couldn't just be considered in binary terms and I mean that even um even up to the 80s there was something too uh I'm not talking about like the fools like uh um who caused you

the kind of, you know, the kind of peace movement just calling for, like, you know, liberal dissuant. I mean, but some of the people, you know, who really kind of, like, opposed the, the Reagan, um, uh, and team B notion, um, it's, you know, the cold war is nothing you can just turn off. And it wasn't just a question of, you know, pursuing a court, like 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. It was an incredibly dangerous time. But, excuse me, I'm getting over a flare-ups. I realize that sounds crummy, I'm sorry. But I'm going to wrap, I think that I'm going to wrap up this episode.

And like I said, I realized was a bit dry, 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. We'll take that up next episode, too, because, yeah, obviously, getting into, yeah, we'll get into Eisenhower into Kennedy era, yeah, go 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 777.7.7.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. topics but you know I take up current events to particularly war and peace kind of of stuff when it's timely to do so you can find me on Twitter at Triscalyan 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 gonna transition to YouTube and you know, perhaps one or two other video platforms on the first 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 Cignonette's 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 get 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 dope because they make a lot of what I do possible. Not much has gotten done the last couple of 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 going to 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 hanging 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 as Brezhnevon. onward okay and Brezhnev became general secretary in a in 1964 okay but uh the early Cold War you can think of as you know Stalin's tenure um through Mr. Khrushchev's regime and not not just temporally can we think of that as the early Cold War but that was before parity set in you know strategic parody 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 over practical purpose is obsolete not not because the technology is obsolete for say but because they don't really have utility in a in a tadical or strategic sense outside of a very peculiar paradigm and 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

the basic conceptual model indoors. And I'm going to get into why it is in a minute. But first we got to understand the Cuban crisis, you got to understand the character of Mr. Crucief. Crucift 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 consolidating. of offices that constituted the executive seat of power in the Soviet Union. Sometimes that was a trifecta of source. Sometimes it came down to the rule of one man. But it superseded in a single office, okay? And after the death of Stalin in 1953, there was a lot of palace intrigues, as it were. Okay, it was one I could probably imagine. between Stalin loyalists, you know, between and reformers,

as well as, you know, between men who represented some of these common to the same faction, but, you know, who had personal designs on power. And cruise ship 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 among some revisionists. you know cruciiff really was something of a reformer you know he was 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 by that in a moment but cruciv he he wanted to normalize the soviet union

okay now this presented a problem were few of her reasons on the one end 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, of nascent globalism. And 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, Croogey had to present a face 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 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 of victory in the Cold War. The only way to really animate these post-colonial states and these developing countries to take up the cause of Marxist Leninism was a sell-in a limit of 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 marvellianism is you know it calls for the 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 um in tactical terms somebody like Mao was was far more an Orthodox Marxist Leninist, then, you know, the, the Eastern Bloc cadres that succeeded Stalin. Okay. So, notwithstanding the fact that I don't believe Mao had any great understanding of Marxism, I don't think you understood it at all, particularly. But on the tactical sides of political revolutionary, somebody like Mao,

or probably more precisely Ho Chi Men, was exactly what Lenin envisioned when he, when he contemplated, you know, 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 veneer of 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 this was a very delicate minuet. And it, frankly, led the foundation of the Sino-Soviette. which we'll get into in coming episodes,

but that's about outside the scope for now. When Crucciv 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 the first man-made object in orbit. The first man-made object in space was a V-2 rocket, so you can thank the German Reich for that. But, you know, Sputnik was a...

this was a big deal okay like a lot of people uh people in the 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's 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 how that really kind of was the key initiatory or 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 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 level 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 there's a reason why

the DDR was the Jew and the Crown of Warsaw hat, okay? And it wasn't just because it was the westernmost point at which 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. The Soviets came to realize that West Germany as a basing hub for American nuclear weapons was going to become the reality.

And this had already been accomplished in terms of low-yield tactical nuclear forces. It hadn't escalated beyond that, in part because the strategic balance was still unstable, and we're going to do what I mean by that in a moment. but the Soviets were very, very aware of this. So the problem was twofold. You know, the problem was the fact that they were literally hemorrhaging people by the sieve that was Berlin, because the inter-German border had been shot since 1953, but Berlin being 110 miles within East Germany,

represented a kind of, it represented a kind of metaphorical valve, as it was, where in people could pass rather freely between, you know, the eastern occupation zone in 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 to 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 boonis republic so there's the

practical problem of uh of uh of the soviets losing the human material they needed to wage the cold war quite literally there's the political problem of uh of credibility um you know uh in that you know if if you claim to represent the real germany and um the uh you know the will of the working class in the government situated 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 permanent division and mobilization of Germany essentially allowed America and the NASA-Natal alliance to potentially maintain a permanent splendid first strike capability if they chose to deploy strategic nuclear forces. At that time, there were not hypersonic cruise platforms available so we'll get into that later obviously but the solution of this was somewhat fascinating there's a terrible human cause so I'm not being flippant but on on August 13th 1961 at midnight the East German border police the National Volks army and elements of the group of solely force in Germany it begins construction on

at Berlin Wall. Okay, and it wasn't clear at first what they were doing. Ubrick had actually suggested this based on analysis from National Volks Army Engineers. The Soviets did not think it was possible. And the Pentagon, interestingly, an army corps of engineers said it's probably impossible. But to emphasize the point I just made about, you know, 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 marvel 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 this 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 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 force. 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 and threaten 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 development of the crisis,

let's get into what prevailing conceptual models were for strategic planning in the nuclear age. The two primary models were presented by Hans Morgenthau, who I think I referenced in the last episode. Morgan Thao was a traditional realist. Mearsheimer is a neorealist. As I indicated, he deals with and dealt primarily in structures. and institutional features and how they affect outcomes as regards, uh, 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 didn't he mean by that? He was saying, what he was basically saying is that, you know, the bounded rationality to states at war or political actors generally. You know, 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. It begs the question as to how, you know, as the how, as the how, as the world this has been demonstrated in historical record, like an Aguilada Morgan that I would say, well, over time, you know, there's, 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 Oswald, Hungarian Empire, you know, in the Westphalian era, at least, over time, this bears out. okay the um the competing model i mean maybe not so much competing in absolute terms but um the uh the kind of game theory model you know that relies more on codable variables if you were if you will um you know uh based upon you know the availability of war fighting 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 thrived during the Cold War and it doesn't really exist anymore, at least not in public life. Schelling's old point was that deterrence is accomplished not by the propensities of the individual men

who are the human decision makers, nor by the relative balance of forces on each side, but the stability they're in, and the stability they're in comes down to available technologies. and in the nuclear age that it comes down to the ability of each side to basically threaten the other with a retaliatory strike when attacked that you know makes a bolt from the blue assault cost prohibitive you know um unacceptable damage will be endured in other words okay showing seminal attacks was the strategy of conflict okay throughout the Cold War this kind of a

informed policy and some other more either directly or obliquely and to literally until 19 until the night of November 9 1989 shelling's a controversial figure about his influence can't be cannot be denied um now based on both based on either of those models uh 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 that awareness had been even if those blinders could be as it were it could be overcome i mean even if there was a situation a total uh information awareness um there's the availability of delivery mechanisms

and uh whether you know their operational status um would have caused a situation where it could have served either side's interest to strike first without waiting for um 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's 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, 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 as 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 technical and military aid to Cuba, including men who were qualified to operate to operate strategic nuclear platforms. August 1962 is probably when the actual missile platforms arrived in Cuba. They were not yet operational, but this is when,

This is when the disassembled components first arrived on the island. September, interestingly, the Kennedy administration declared that if QAW became a base for Soviet nuclear weapons, it would be viewed as an act of war. So this was on everybody's mind before the crisis ensued and before the crisis ensued and before the reveal 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 a 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 Cristobel 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 a massive air assault um possibly including nuclear forces and a subsequent invasion of the island um you know the uh the destruction of the weapons platforms the overthrow of, you know, the defeat and utter annihilation of the Cuban army,

the overthrow of the cashier 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, you know, these intermediate range platforms are going to be obsolete in six months. And 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 platform. And even with it not the case, McNamara said you know

despite despite propaganda of the contrary and despite crucial'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 the Soviets can't win do nothing

but that wasn't really the issue the issue the issue was twofold I mean, there's the Monroe Doctrine, obviously, and that always is controlling on questions of 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, you're essentially making hash with your own line in the sand, as it were. 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 if America won't fight 90 miles off its own coast to prevent the deployment of strategic nuclear forces a credibility gap develops

to whether America is going to fight and sacrifice 100,000 men to defend West Berlin. You know, I mean, God love McNam era, but there's, you know, there's a calculus beyond the beyond the merely strategic that matters in these things, and particularly in the Cold War, which was as much political as it was, you know, a military contest and, you know, about, you know, who could accomplish what within, you know, the proverbial balance of terror. October 17th before a formal policy decision was reaped, 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 therein indicate additional sites in 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, I mean, this was not an illusory threat. however anyone feels about it. And the character of Castro 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 the Soviet foreign ministry and Proust's office itself, that in the United States assaulted Cuba, the Soviet Union should go all in and just treated as an act of war against the communist bloc and launch other 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 conflict. And he reiterated that the Soviet Union and the wars up pact 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, Castro 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 or something. response would have been if there was a massive invasion of Cuba. I mean, there's there's it's more than a real possibility that you know, there would, they would have, they would responded by launching whatever munitions that were currently operational. Okay. And again,

even if that, you know, even if that, even if that, even if that was a war, the Soviet Union could not win, that, that would, that would, that would, that would, that would, that would, that would that would, that would meant 20 to 30 million dead Americans, you know, um, within hours. Uh, Thursday. October 18, Kennedy was visited by the Soviet Foreign Minister Grameko, who asserted that the Soviet 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 was signaling to give Grameko an out, I believe. Okay. And this also raised the question as to why why didn't Cruiser 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-Normberg era.

Why didn't, why didn't Cruz are trying to de-escalate the situation? I've got my own ideas on that. But what's inarguable is why Prusuf deployed these weapons in the first place when, as we just acknowledged, you know, and as McNamara at the time observed, you know, this actually didn't rectify the strategic

imbalance on its own terms, and it had the potential for catastrophic escalation so why why did he do that i believe that this was supposed to be his trump card as regards uh berlin i believe that cruciph uh was going to demand um on the open floor of the united nations that uh nato abandoned west berlin and uh when uh and and and when steven or whoever you know haughtily would just say you know it's laughable of course we're not going to do do that. At that moment, Cruciff would reveal, well, you know, we've got operational

weapons platforms in Cuba 90 miles off your coast. You know, if you want them to be removed, you know, you'll seed Berlin to unconditionally our sphere of influence. Which seems like a craziest hell idea, but Crucif was a gambler.

You know, for all of his tendencies towards reform and a conciliatory posture in absolute terms. He viewed none of this as being truly possible in power political terms unless the Soviet Union could negotiate

from a position of, if not absolute, 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 is key not just understanding the Soviet Union in its epoch, but I think the kind of Russian national character. 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 uh i i i think that's i think i think i think this is key okay um putton himself is is something of an unusual executive uh even for russia but generally in structural terms what the kremlin does reflects this same kind of tendency in common i i don't i think that's constant it doesn't change oh oh go ahead are you going to say something no no okay October 20th,

Kennedy finally decides on the quarantine. Plants are drawn up to blockade the island of Cuba, notify the American people, and prepare for war if the Soviet Union ops to sue for war to break the blockade.

During this time, Curtis LeMay, maintained, evociferously objected. And, you know, I made the point again and again about, you know, the May being really kind of a towering figure in, you know, in, you know, really, really throughout the Cold War. But especially just to deforse the man's personality. 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 used to 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 do is the deep state today. You know, you got Curtis LeMay, you know, demanding, you know, demanding Kennedy given assault order, you know, backed up really by, really by, you know, you know the entire pentagon apparatus and in those days you know strategic air command was king you know it had very much eclips the army in terms of its you know clout and policy uh 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 uh at all familiar with my content But, you know, the guy did, Kennedy did have balls and he did have backbone, okay, that can't be denied. What really solidified Kennedy's position, though, he consulted with General Walter Sweeney of Tackle Air Command, who, you know, and, you know, going back to the Second World War, you know, the first. 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 LMA. I don't think that's true. I think it was because Sweeney was the man who, such that experts existed in those days on, you know, how to knock out, on how to knock out strategic nuclear platforms.

You know, Sweeney was it. And Sweeney said that, you know, even the best possible mission outcome, he cannot guarantee 100% destruction of the missiles. Okay. So again, you know, this raised the question as to, well, I mean, the moment, there's a possibility that's not, you know, and 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 Soviet 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 in a proverbial fog of war situation, 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. 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 assisting of McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Curtis LeMay, Bobby Kennedy, who probably should not have been in on the conversation because he was the president. and there's a conflict of interest there but you know he was for better or worse um but that's uh you know the the smoke-filled room uh with all the personalities mentioned i just mentioned present you know you see this like dramatized on like history channel stuff like that's that's what they're

depicted they're depicting the executive committee of the national security council okay um ultimately um Kennedy wrote directly to Khrushchev um which uh seems like a breach of protocol uh but the Cold War was strange

in this regard you know is this really in my opinion I said the president too you know there's like people talk later in the Cold War by the by the Carter era it was the quote you know like Bafone 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 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 of precedent. But regardless of that, the merit of that or the efficacy of that, or the effectiveness of neutralizing potential crises, it was probably the correct move for Kennedy to directly write to Crucef by Telegram. And he did this prior to addressing the American people by television,

which was frankly, like, you know, a sign of respect and allowing Cruces to safe face. You know, and the key, the key phraseology of the telegram was quote I have not assumed that you were any other sane man would in this nuclear age literally plunge 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 the man himself and not go through diplomatic channels, that was the correct statement, I believe. So again, we've got to give credit or credit as 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 an incident, you know, proceeding a formal declaration of war.

So that's another thing to consider as well also. Like we talked a lot about, even though I don't really accept the near summer 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 once 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. it creates an elevated danger okay um there's there's a sociological question there 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 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 geost strategic significance you know because any if you were going to wage war in latin america which uh was a very 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 uh um and indicated a a um a Soviet willingness to fight and to keep

uh you know to fight at least defensively if Cuba was assaulted you know I mean it it uh it it became clear immediately that the Soviets were intending to fight for Cuba like to what degree they're going to to do that, whether the missiles were operational or not, the Soviet Navy was going to fight.

And 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, you're dealing with a potential conflict diet that will result in the Third World War at some point, you know, down, um, down a, down a, down range of, of, of, of, of hostilities. Wednesday, October 24th, crucible responded to the Canada, 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. 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. But any negotiation, Friday, October 26th, was the date of the infamous casual letter, urging cruise shift to initiate a first strike.

against the United States an event of invasion of Cuba, whether Cruthiff responded or not, or whether Gramego responded, whether the ambassador to Cuba had any sort of formal response to 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, 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 a, of just a general, like, countervalue

with salt nuclear assault if cuba had been invaded i think it's somewhat remote um i don't think i'm reading too much into this statement by castro i mean why this was a private communication at cruci 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 Cruciff 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 Crucci 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, Cruchiff really was drunk and the execution of his official duties a lot, you know, which, which, owes in part owes, you know, to his apparent instability. This was the source 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? 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 Grameco or from somebody in the Politburo standing committee or its 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 break 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. 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 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 think the, I think Soviets 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 the concession, if you want to look it like that, to remove the missiles from Turkey. And that night Robert Kennedy met secretly with the Soviet ambassador, and they reached a basic understanding that the Soviet Union. and would draw their strategic nuclear platforms from Cuba under the United Nations supervision. In addition to an American pledge, you know, this pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret

understanding, as it was referred to, you know, 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 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 uh the fact that it was not an above-board concession defeats the entire purpose of any of any political theater that you know might have might 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 in the minds of people

like shelling and frankly even people like hermann con there's a sense that um 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 war monger's kind of fantasy and it wasn't just you know something that you know cynical uh careerists and in the national security establishment like to say or bandy about 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 a middle-aged man in 1962, um, who, whose entire, uh, career had been as a, you know, in public service,

um, directly insinuated in the national security establishment, like your entire, your entire professional life have been characterized by, by, by, by by negotiating crises of a of a basic national security and conditions of general warfare or a crisis short of but approaching general warfare you know this just seem to be the reality of the 20th century strategic landscape so that being said if eventually you know conflict is inevitable um 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 Warhawk warmongers 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 there were personalities you know insinuated in in in in in the highest authority in the cold war who who definitely were like that you know who definitely did not have the national interest in mind um or they thought they did but you know they were clouded by you know matters of uh of a of a pride or whatever i mean i think a thomas power is being one of those types frankly but this is uh but that's what's essential to keep in mind because like i said even people even people are somewhat, you know, sympathetic to, you know, politics of the right or, you know, revisionist perspectives. You know, they continue to cast people like, they're going to cast people like LeMay as, as what I just said, these kinds of strange love or Jack D.Ripper type characters. But it, uh,

forgiving of 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 a 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 and the strategic balance in the Cold War and this really endured until 1983 in 1983 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 Able Archer and one of the things that created the conditions that 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 detot 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 a we'll get into

Johnson, Vietnam, and Nixon next episode. Nixon's going to take more than one episode, but we'll at least get into Nixon's first term next time incident toward discussion of of Johnson and Vietnam.

All right. I mean, we'll see, depending on how long you're willing to go. But yeah, 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, thing. 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 of 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, got massacred. i mean by the cubans and by the angolan out forces like holding roberto he basically sold british intelligence and cia 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 um 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, I think, I think they had good intentions within the unrationality of what they were trying to accomplish. And, uh, I think, uh, I, yeah, it was naive, maybe, 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 self-styled uh you know and self-styled uh counter-revolutionaries but they also they underestimated the strength of uh of of castro and the gameness of uh 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 army, you know, and they met them head on. You know, the Cubans, the Cubans were basically constantly deployed throughout the Cold War. You know, like, they really believed in the margans won in its cause.

Did, what air cover made a difference? I mean, 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, let's say, let's, say this uh let's say this kind of like you know mercenary army you know had uh had ground assault aircraft and an air cover all day you know cuba couldn't have just like comedy's cub wouldn't have just like falling apart the minute like these guys marched on on havana i mean it i think cuba still was i mean they're down for the cause i mean in this day as much as anybody can be i mean it it uh i mean i read it like that i don't think it was realistic it 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, to go a little bit outside the scope, but let's say let's see 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 1962,

okay, 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 uh and uh in the u s air force pounding the hell out of cuba you know and killing half million people you know like what would that were you i mean affecting some permanent hostile

occupation of cuba like would have been a bloodbath you know like think like think like think about that like that would 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, even 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 I, you know, U.S. efforts in, you know, in the cone of South America. And then later, you know in uh in in in in in in central america in the panama canal zone you know to resist uh 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 uh if latin america had truly gone red um in these key locations um that would have that that that would have that would have totally changed things. But notice what Nixon and then later Reagan administration didn't do is didn't go in heavy, you know, they made a, they went with a very small footprint, okay, and they developed very effective counter-relutionary

congregates. You know what I'm saying? The contours weren't like nice guys or something, okay? Like DeBuisin was not a nice guy. Neither was general finish. 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 go to Nicaragua with 50,000 Marines and kill everybody. Like that, no, that that doesn't work. So that's my, but it's complicated. And I'm not a military guy. But again, I don't think what I'm suggesting can be disputed in any kind of absolute. sense. But yeah, that's just, that's my take on it at the

got to be 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 i i and that's what's key is that the and that was i mean that was yaki's all point about the cold war okay yonke's old point was that look yeah east germany is is is a horrible regime um in some ways it's you know

uh in in in some ways it's 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

dispute anymore, okay? It's like, you think, you think, um, you know, I mean, it's like, how can anybody, how can anybody dispute that? You know, I mean, it, um, well, I mean, it's just like the, the state, I mean, that, that, that's, that's that, 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 in, you know, in, 58, 59 or whatever, like even before, you know, he wasn't, he wasn't, wasn't some guy like me like you know looking at history in the rearview 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 some crazy of some crazy zionist or a you know

elite or or these or these kinds of davos types you know declaring that you know they you know they you know we we need to import as many you know third world populations as because, you know, this country is, you know, too Orthodox or too Catholic or, you know, or too white or too German. I mean, that's, that's an existential problem that can't be overcome. Okay, like, if you got a fucked up government in Romania or Croatia, it's like, well, yeah, okay, government's not part of the world

or it's fucked up. There's never 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. with um you got to look at these things there's nuance there's yeah there when you yeah yeah yeah yeah when you read when you read yaki especially when you read the enemy of europe you're you're experiencing nuance no exactly and it's also let's too 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 um you know that the the the cold war happened basically as the concord fell apart between

Washington and Moscow you know and the idea was you know uh everybody in Washington who you had any meaningful authority was perfectly okay with you know essentially half half the planet being uh you know being under the being under the heel of Stalinism so it's it's either here or there you know like whether somebody like me and um in um in the you know 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 were it not for America. The, you know, communism would have would have, would have been annihilated from this planet 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 Real Thomas 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 biweekly schedule. You can find me on Twitter at Triskelian Jihad. The T is the number seven. It's one word otherwise. We're going to launch the YouTube channel January 1st. I know that that's been long in coming. I decided to push it back to January a few weeks back because I want to do it right.

And I've got a great production team helping me, which is what I needed, because I'm kind of a tech retard. 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.

Until the next time, I can't wait.