The Ricochet Podcast - #UkraineUnderAttack

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Is anybody else wondering why we’re seeing more coverage about politicians chattering or journalists ducking from skirmishes than, you know, military movements, logistics and strategy? Our hosts sure do, and that’s why they’re eager to hear from Eli Lake, Bloomberg’s foreign policy columnist. Eli gives his take on the Russian pipe dream, Europe’s need for a wakeup call, and how Biden can get... Source

You have to show vaccination, but you don't have to show a test result, which is great. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Petereter robinson i'm james lilacs and today we talk to eli lake about what else ukraine let's have ourselves a podcast i can hear you welcome everybody it's the ricochet podcast number 582 join us at ricochet.com won't you why because then you can listen in order to all 581 episodes that preceded this one. You need something to do while you're buttering around the house, right? I'm James Lilex. You're in Minneapolis, home to a not insubstand community.

Peter Robinson is in sunny California. Rob Long, bouncing around the world as usual. Looks like you're in New York at the moment. In New York. Here we are. Here we are here we are war in europe and um yeah i'm a guinette peter rob well you kind of have to say that now don't you don't have to make it clear that you're you're not in favor of this um it does i mean i don't know like we were just talking before i don't know whether you want to get into it now we want to have a good guest here who knows a lot about this stuff um it it it does have echo i mean more echoes of 1939 than ever but that's a trap i'm glad you raised that point okay hold on go ahead go ahead but i think it's a trap you know it's a trap to

see it all that way um here's what i here's what i do a little psychoanalysis and i'm going to do a little bit of um 50 000 foot view the psychoanalysis of the russian mind has been that they have complained about encirclement since queen victoria longer than that but that is really where the great game started between russia and the west you're all around us we don't like the fact that you're all around us. You can take it. And then when the air bases, you can take the you can make use of air bases in Turkey and in Japan and in Finland, not Finland, but Scandinavia and Germany.

And you encircle us all around. And the argument in the Soviet Union was make peace with india make inroads with india pakistan was going to be a u.s ally but they so india tilted to the second world that all changed but the only people using encirclement really and only people who've ever used encirclement as an actual strategy are the russians if you look at the arrows of how they are entering ukraine they're entering from the east from the water from crimea which they can they took over in 20 something 14 12 2014 yeah no no 2018 from the north belarus uh and even from the south i think is coming only people doing the, the only people encircling anybody are the Russians.

It's classic Freudian projection, right? You ascribe to your enemy the very strategy that you do. And then my final theory here is, which I will then fall silent while Peter tells me either I'm right or I'm wrong, is that the reason that we are here today is because communism sucks communism is a disaster it destroyed russia yes they never recovered from the russians

but i had 20 minutes of some kind of vague democracy but basically they went from czars to communist dictators to autocratsats. Communism destroyed them, gave them a false sense of confidence, which is what, by the way, I saw this in Cuba too. And they are now a nation that is acting in shame, which is what Putin is trying to do, reclaim Russian pride, Russian strength, which by the way, they never had.

It's just that these crackpot philosophers, Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin convinced them they had it because they had nukes. They were never a great power. And now we all have to pay the price because communism sucks. The encirclement thing is amusing, too. It's a, you know, here we are a country that spans 10, 12 zones and you guys are all around us. Yes. It's kind of how it works. What do you want us to do? Do you want us to be like Bugs Bunny and get out a big saw and carve off Europe? And so it floats away so that there's an estuary between us and you,

we don't, I mean, yes, we're going to encircle you, but we're not out for anything that you have. I mean, we're not out to conquer you we don't care no one's i mean the idea somehow when you brought this up rob i i i keep thinking the the standard russian psyche seems to be we are a great power we are great people we are a great civilization and we're also the biggest whiners on the planet i mean it's just i think that's really good i think that's true i mean the i i mean, Peter will vouch for this because I think he probably knew more of these people than I did because he had to fight them every day.

But the Soviet appeasers of the 60s, but definitely the 70s and 80s would say would like, the John Careys of that era would say, you know, we haven't circled them put yourself in their shoes right put yourself in their shoes uh and the truth is that we we didn't and we weren't and that was never a

case they were invaded by the by napoleon and hitler napoleon they were kind of blameless hitler they you know they made a deal with hitler they thought it would last it didn't um they did exactly what neville chamberlain did but he was buying time uh so historically this is i think this is all fascinating because it it spans at least by my depth by my count one two three four five six presidential administrations since the fall of the soviet union which by the way was caused in no small part by peter robinson whose incendiary speech led to this incredible destabil instability in europe and now here we are so you're welcome thank you peter for creating uh it's all the vacuum fault yeah so take issue with all all i can do no no no all i can do is riff all i can do is riff we have a guest on who actually knows something and by the way one we don't want to start

attacking journalism again because we're too good at it and it's just too easy so we set that aside but i've been frustrated in these last 48 hours just to find good reporting not on what it means for the west no what does putin is he crazy no on the military situation maps the maps the tiktoks the explainers if you were where's the where's the colonel saying even the colonel on fox news i thought didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about. How do you feed people? How are the Russians feeding their troops? How are they keeping up the supply lines?

Where's the gas coming from? All these questions that I remember from the Second World War, do they even apply now? Are they going to be able to take, they don't seem to be mounting a vast land invasion. Okay, so we'll ask, I intend to ask all those questions of our guest but all i can get to i keep thinking history history the small point but it's not nothing you mentioned 1939 i'm not drawing any lessons from this i'm just saying oh wait a moment. This is what it was like on September 1st, 1939, when the Nazis went into Poland. Totally unexpected. Dive bombing. Refugees streaming toward the interior of Poland, streaming to the east. Shocked in the west. Of course, it was much, much worse. But this, for the first time in our lifetimes, we're seeing on Twitter and TikTok and YouTube, we're seeing streams of refugees, children screaming as bombs fall from the sky.

This is a minor event by comparison with 1939, but it explains, I feel for the first time, I really feel what it must have been like for our parents' and grandparents' generation when this war broke out. Or, of course, if you can project from the visceral shock, I always honestly have been a little puzzled because Pearl Harbor was so far away. Hawaii is a long way away now, but Hawaii was a million miles away from the eastern population of the United States. But I feel I can understand the shock now. All right, that's the first thing. And here's the second thing. Russians, as best I understand the history, Russians are Scandinavian. They're Vikings who come down the rivers and settle in Kiev. And here's their problem. They occupy, essentially, a vast defenseless plain. And for 1,500 years, it's worked its way into the psychology of Russians.

They're over there. They're over there. They're over there. We are encircled. The Golden Horde, we were talking about Napoleon, it goes back a thousand years before Napoleon, when the Khan surrounded the Kievan Rus and made them spend several centuries paying tribute. So you get this Russian, what Russians do, what they know how to do is to be afraid of encirclement. And then bit by bit by bit, they push out, they conquer, and they really and. You've got to push farther. You've got to push farther. So we have Catherine the Great conquering the Crimea. She establishes a naval port in Crimea in 1783. And then it's the great accomplishment of the 19th century czars that

they reach all the way to the Pacific and they establish a naval port at Port Arthur. And then the Japanese encircle them. The Japanese fight back. I mean, Japanese actually kicked their butt in 1911. They kicked their butt. The disasters of the twilight of the czars. So what you've got is these people who every bit of their history is, we are encircled. Yes, yes, yes, we're getting bigger and bigger,

but we have to to defend this and from their point of view it does make a certain sense but what i just what i'm so struck by what was it that faulkner said in his nobel prize address his history isn't the past isn't dead it isn't even past right and here you have vladimir putin this crazy but cunning little man, behaving as Russian rulers have behaved for a thousand years. It seems as though there's no escape. I think there's always tricks to these rivers of history, right? One is that, oh sure, one i mean it made a kind of a sense it wasn't just expansion made sense that the soviet union this nascent communist republic

or whatever dictatorship in the middle of the 20th century just starting uh where you had all of the great powers had amassed armies on the continent of europe and many of them wanted to keep going from berlin all the way up to moscow right it made sense to create a buffer i mean in a weird way that i don't think that was delusional on their part i think that was actually made sense um and then you have this but you basically have this economic basket case a country of really no account gdp i think is um belgium belgium but you know for size smaller than mexico um does oligarchical uh economy great disparities no real growth no real technology nothing except nukes right and the nukes change everything and the nukes mean that there was no it was never

we're never going to send troops to ukraine that was that's never going to happen um it's always going to be ukraine is now a proxy war um it's maybe the new vietnam it's the if he stays there new afghanistan um and this was inevitable and this is a crisis that he but he feels he needs to um initiate and has been working towards it faster or slower since 2008 or 2007 right um and we've been told we've we've been told that our inability to understand their fear of encirclement and the rest of it is one of the reasons that he's done this and that uh the integration of ukraine with the west is threatening to him um and did be act i can see people making that point but you rarely hear anybody making the other point which is that ukraine uh feels a certain animus and suspicion toward russia yeah yeah right and so this is why the russians have

to invade right so if you're if you're going to grant the legitimacy of the Russian claim, go ahead and do so. Understand that on the other side, they, too, have an opinion about Russians and their expansionist techniques and the fact that they would like to preserve themselves, their culture, their language, their history, et cetera, from them and see means to do so, which means tighter integration, perhaps, with the people who aren't going to invade them and aren't going to trump up some stuff about the Nazi resurgence. So, so, yeah, I mean, you know, the history of it is sort of interesting because George H.W. Bush at the fall of the Soviet Union went to Kiev. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Kiev. Kiev, as we're now. And Kiev, Qatar, Peking, Qatar, chicken, chicken. And he and he gave a speech. he basically said you know uh nato will not be expand nato is not going to expand um uh national these countries need to have national identities but but nato is not going to be part of guaranteeing the national identities and conservatives at the time or i should say william sapphire at the time

uh columnist for the new york times lambasted him said this his speech was he called a chicken kiev because he had he'd gone and given away the store um on the other hand it sort of made sense it was sort of probably the right thing to say at that time and then clinton came along and clinton's idea was well let's just change that uh and we will start expanding nato because clinton's a liberal democrat and kind of from a certain era where you keep thinking that international uh international treaties and international treaty organizations are the greatest and you want to have more and more of them little you know which is kind of how we got world war one but whatever right and then george w bush

basically said i'm not interested in russia all. When he ran, he ran against nation building and towards China. So we've got to pivot towards Asia. That, of course, that all was thrown upside down. And we spent eight years absolutely convinced, eight years of some of them, which were spent, I think, on this podcast or maybe right before it. Talking about how the coming twilight struggle between the nation, the Islamic Islamicist nations and us. This is an existential fight, which turns out it really wasn't existential because now we're right back in 1939. And we're thinking we're talking about essentially the new czar and what the new czar is doing to expand his empire. Just kind of goes to show you that we just don't never americans tend to look at

everything in terms of well what happened during whose presidential term and that will tell you why right but it really this has this is uh the great strength of people like putin and she president she i think in china is that it doesn't really matter to them who the president united states is they have a strategy and they're going to execute it Xi, President Xi, I think, in China, is that it doesn't really matter to them who the President of the United States is. They have a strategy and they're going to execute it. Yeah, maybe not. Because I think that these guys take the measure of who happens to be in control at the time and at the top and what their view of the world is. And that influence, I mean, yes, they have their have the plans they have the strategies g perhaps more than putin but i think that they are more inclined

to push the advantage when they see a weakness on the other side right i mean they may see i mean putin may see american culture as decadent and filled with all sorts of elite effete nonsense that means it's ready to be pushed over um and he probably thinks that whether or not it's trump or whether or not it's biden but if he has somebody in office who is more likely to go his equivalent of the crazy ivan than to back off and mouth the usual institutional post-nationalist pieties i think he's going to take that into his calculation i disagree i mean if we're talking about these two presidents i I disagree. I mean, there's no evidence. I mean, half of the Trumps, the people who support Trump today, think that they side with Putin. The idea that Trump would have – look, you play the cards you've got, and the cards are sanctions.

Some. Well, but either way, like Michael Flynn, his – What's he said? I've missed that. Well, you know, he like he under he he understands this issue right his way so the idea that you look look every president has had a moment i mean look if i had to rank them i'd say the absolute worst the nadir was obama right but um but trump led him back in the g8 you know he was kicked out of the g8 became g7 again because of crimea trump went back in so like also again everyone's playing a strategy like okay i think

he just wants this one little thing because we can't think of it as a big term that's true he doesn't want this one little thing he wants like so do you do do you go right rewind the clock restore the greatest you know re you know avenge the greatest historical tragedy, the dissolution of the USSR, et cetera. But do you decide to press your advantage when the guy who comes into office cancels the pipeline or the guy who comes into office without getting anything whatsoever in return lifts the sanctions and says, come on in you know maybe i you know every president gives him a gift he got into he wanted to make back in the g8 and trump let him back in you know everyone gets a gift that there's no pipeline yet it was just a like everybody wants to like make peace with this guy that's which is completely normal it's just that our obsession i mean i was flipping around the tv last night our obsession with American politics and American partisan politics makes us blind.

So there would be no time for the maps that I so desperately want for any of this stuff because they're too busy showing on CNN. They showed an endless clip of one of their CNN reporters ducking from fire like that's news. Like, I don't care. Show me a map. Where are you? Where is he coming in from? And they won't do it. They won't because they're too busy to tell you this emotional story or trying to turn it into some kind of domestic politics thing, which I think it's incredibly attractive and appealing to do that. But it leads to zero understanding what's happening.

Well, the maps and the stuff on the ground in the news that is not somebody cowering while there's firing going on or an emotional story of somebody in the subway you can find on reddit you can find into it was hard to find but there are all kinds of plates there's all kinds of references that i've bookmarked so i can see give myself an idea what's happening because unlike seemingly previous wars where you did as peter said where are the arrows you yeah we it's it's it's greatly distinct so yes um we should probably post up some of those on the ricochet within this podcast and the link um but i gotta i gotta mention something else though and that is yesterday was straight i'm sure everybody had a day yesterday where they were just no attention

span whatsoever i just kept hitting the news just kept hitting it i would do something else than five minutes later my hand would drift to my phone because I wanted to see something. And it wears you out. And it reminds you that time to time, you got to take time to restore yourself. And one of the best ways, of course, you can do that is just turn it off and go to sleep. I mean, you can look at all the things that make your daily life great, the food you eat, the fact that you got good tire in your car. I know I'm proud of that. When we have ice in Minnesota and I find myself slipping around, I'm glad I got those tires.

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And now we welcome back to the podcast, Eli Lake, Bloomberg opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. Two things which seem to be somewhat relevant today. Journalism fellow at UT's Clements Center for National Security. And you can find his writing in the pages of Commentary, Tablet Magazine, and the Liberty's Journal of Culture and Politics. Eli, before you came on, we were talking about the absence of maps. We want maps with arrows.

We want to know what's going on. It's probably not going to age well if we discuss what's going on at this moment. But there was a general feeling after the first day, which is supposedly the day when everything goes well, because that's the day where you know where everything is, where all the other forces are. You know what you got to do. There was the feeling that the first day did not exactly go as putin had planned is that just wishful thinking graveyard whistling or what it's hard to say at this point but we do know that at least the ukrainian side has reported that in the second day of fighting uh 1 000 russian soldiers have been killed. Make of that what you will. I don't know. And we also know that the Russians

have taken over the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and there have been some... That's the one piece I'm happy to have them keep. Sure, but I mean, there are also reports that, you know, as a result of the fighting, it's hard to say. I mean, I don't know, but there have been reports that have bubbled up, and it's hard to confirm at this point

that there may be radiation leaking from the chernobyl plant at this point and then we know that the russian forces have surrounded and i think there's now fighting inside of ukraine the former president peter poroshenko gave an interview in which he was holding a rifle in the street saying that all ukrainians are going to fight and i and that. And that's certainly very inspiring. Eli, Peter here. Here's what I can't find and why I'm just thrilled to have you with us. In the last 48 hours, I've been flipping around like a madman, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Twitter, anything, just trying to find military analysis. So here's what, as best I can figure out, is likely to be happening, but it's nothing but a layman's supposition. I'll put it to you, and you correct it. All right?

So here's what's going on. Putin's got 140,000 troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers. That's actually not that many troops considering the territory of Ukraine. So as best I can tell, the Russian idea is this. We achieve total air control, which they more or less have done. We show everybody that we've got rockets, attack helicopters, we can attack any point in that country they want to, and they've done bombing attacks as far west as Lviv, meaning we scare everybody to death really fast. But instead of trying to hold capture and hold ground,

we're going to try to capture the government. What we really want to do is scare everybody to death and install a new government, not go into the difficult work of capturing and holding ground acre by acre by acre. Does that sound right? Is that what they must be thinking? Well, I think that might be the Russian plan at this point, but it's a pipe dream in the sense that, I mean, the notion that there's going to be a, you can install a new puppet regime and that Ukrainians are going to accept it. There will have to be some measure of force, I think, to kind of keep the rest of the country from revolting. So the idea of a lightning attack just won't work.

Is that correct? I mean, listen, I mean, when the Soviets... Eli, make it up. You know more than I do. I'll believe anything you say. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they sent in the Spetsnaz, their special operators, to basically, you know, assassinate the Afghan president that didn't like and install somebody. And that did sort of work, although they were saddled with a very costly occupation of Afghanistan

that was the equivalent of their Vietnam War. So they may be successful in putting in a puppet regime, but that does not preclude the grinding slog and quagmire that will be coming. I mean, the assumption is that it's hard to say at this point whether Putin is so isolated that he has

kind of lost his rational faculties. This is Hitler in the bunker time. Well, I mean, does he really believe that the two successive elected governments in ukraine are occupation forces that most ukrainians or russian speakers actually would like to be part of russia and would welcome this does he believe that russian forces will be you know greeted with pastries and flowers um because he shouldn't believe that. There's nothing

that would suggest that that's true, based on everything that we have seen from the Ukrainian population. I mean, there have been some Ukrainian oligarchs that have fled the country. But, you know, I have to say so far, I'm impressed by Vladimir Zelensky's bravery. I'm impressed by the former President Poroshenko's bravery at this point they're standing tall and i think most ukrainians have made it very clear that they don't want to be occupied by russia so even if they have a blitzkrieg lightning plan it doesn't mean that it's going to work out that way all right one more question if i may and then i know rob i can rob and james want to get back in and it's a question in. And it's a question about, I guess it's a question about command structure might be the analytical term. But here's what I have in mind.

Two groups of people, as best I can tell, have benefited hugely from the presidency of Vladimir Putin. One is the oligarchs, these disgusting people who've made billions of dollars and now have $200 million yachts bobbing around in the Mediterranean. And over the last 48 hours, life has gotten worse for them, not better. Their bank accounts are being monitored. Sanctions are being placed upon them personally. And their families. And their families. And the second group would be the military, because Vladimir Putin has lavished the military in relative terms, lavished the military with money, materiel, equipment, training. And in the last 48 hours, the military chiefs have said, I think, something like, hey, wait a minute. This could get nasty.

These people are going to stand and fight. They may not have air control. They can still kill a lot of our guys. So the people whom Putin has rewarded and who would be his principal backers who benefited disproportionately are now suddenly being punished disproportionately. Does this not create all kinds of problems in the governance of Russia, in Vladimir Putin's ability to get people to do what he tells them to do? Well, that is the hope. And at this point, nobody could tell you with any kind of certainty. But I would imagine, and I'm speaking in very broad terms here, I'm not giving you inside information, but the smart strategic move is to not just have the Treasury Department sanctioning the oligarchs and other senior Russian officials, but now to have the CIA come in and target as many of those oligarchs and say, awfully nice yacht you have

here. Maybe you'd like to keep it. But if you do, you've got to start working with the good guys. And that can be depending on them. I mean, I don't know. By the way, the CIA and the FBI have tried this before, just as an aside, but I think it's an instructive story. One of the oligarchs that has been identified by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Mueller team is Oleg Deripaska, somebody who has sort of taken the role as an aluminum baron, also kind of doing these off-the-book dirty projects of trying to influence and sow divisiveness on behalf of the Kremlin.

Divisiveness in this country or the west well this country but like also in small countries in europe and things like that that that ola daripaska runs this with a kind of former gru guy named constantine kalimnik who famously had these contacts with paul manafort i'm not trying to get into the whole russiagate stuff but the point is that you know in 2015 2016 um a former british spy named christopher steel and a senior justice department guy uh named bruce orr had a plan to approach garapasca and try to flip him and they showed up at his home i think in new york uh or they sent fbi officials to do that and this is so so this a constant, this is this is something that the FBI and CIA have been trying to do for some time. Having this renewed pressure,

and particularly Boris Johnson, God bless him in the middle of this political scandal has really come out very strong, in my view. Having the Europeans kind of going after the Russian laundromat, as they call it, and going after these oligarchs, that may create opportunities to exploit those fissures. And once we get that, it's not just like having an intelligence operative to kind of be our eyes and ears inside the inner circle. It really then, a lot of devious kind of inside political warfare can be done because once you start getting the oligarchs to turn on putin that's the real way to sort of attack his power base at this point i would as a as an old neocon i would love it if uh it was as simple as let's get the world behind alexei navalny no but he's in prison and um you know his party is now outlawed it's considered a terrorist group and but but the

way to really do it is you have to sort of work with um you know you've got to find your sammy the bull gravano right uh to to turn on on on the gambino's if i can step on rob for a second here bruce or you mentioned bruce or it was a bit of a flashback now we know why nelly or had the ham radio license because she was secretly communicating with the oligarchs to flip them you're right i mean sending one yacht to the bottom of the drink does tend to focus the minds of the rest of them but isn't it sort isn't it a bit much to expect the oligarchs to be able to depose putin when he's got the backing of the military isn't that really critically what it comes down to the oligarchs can fume and fuss and say we're broke but it's the military isn't that really critically what it comes down to the oligarchs can fume and fuss and say we're broke but it's the military that counts well yes and no um because

the oligarchs have a lot of money that they can influence elements of the military too i'm sure but the real question i think you're raising which is the right one is that until now the rational calculus of any oligarch was anything that the cia or the fbi can do for me uh putin can do worse so right getting on the wrong side of putin was far worse for one of these oligarchs than uh being targeted in some ways by the west and part of that was because they kind of, you know, that they were tolerated and they were allowed to kind of keep their money in these European capitals and send their kids to your,

you know, European and American universities. So, um, in that respect, if you can try to change the calculus, I mean, I think that if you have grown accustomed to living an extravagantly wealthy life and you like all these very expensive, nice things, and then somebody says we're going to try to take them away.

And maybe you don't have the wherewithal to kind of move all your shell corporations to Switzerland or some other place in time that can focus the mind that may. I hope it shakes loose some of these folks, and that would be a very good thing. But the key thing is that Putin has already proven that he is willing to take on oligarchs that get out of line. That's what Mikhail Khodorkovsky was all about. He actually sent somebody who was quite wealthy and powerful in Russia to a g, you know, that's what we're up against in Russia. But at the same time, again, I think a lot of these people really like money. And I don't think they're driven by an ideological fanaticism. I don't even think they're really driven by like a kind of Putin-esque, you know, nostalgia revanchism for, you the lost uh romanov empire i think that they just like being uh you

know rich gangsters uh and if that that's that's a that's an easy calculus to try to do and and maybe maybe now the the the kind of the the the if the western pressure gets greater maybe then that will as i said shake loose some of them hey eli that's, thanks for joining us. It's Rob Long in New York. So whenever I'm faced with something like this, I ask myself like four questions, right? What does he think he's doing? What is he actually doing? Is he stupid or is he really smart?

And I just can't tell. So what I think he thinks he's doing is um taking back the the breakaway republic on the west side the west the western part of the country uh making proving to the west that kia that ukraine is a is a too high a price for them to pay to allow ukraine to join NATO, right? Because NATO would be, if Ukraine joined NATO, it would be to protect, we would be sending troops there yesterday if there had been a treaty signed. So that's what I think he's, I think he thinks he's doing.

What he's really doing, ironically, is like kind of putting maybe a period against what was a de facto decision, shrugging decision about ukraine anyway but galvanizing and unifying i mean nato's never been stronger there are now more troops we're sending troops to germany nato is going to have more troops under its command by the end of the week i think that is that stupid or is that just is he is he really smart and i guess i i want to ask that question but also these oligarchs and the military everybody around him what do they think he's doing well i think that putin who's now in know, starting his eighth decade of life, is thinking about his legacy and sees himself in this sort of long sweep of Russian history as evidenced by the speech that he gave on

Monday. So I think he believes that reconquering a former colonial possession of the Russian empire is something that will cement his legacy. So I think that he's thinking in those terms and not in terms of sort of, you know, the practical considerations of somebody who has to sort of, you know, run his country. Is he smart? Well, here's how I would look at it putin gambled in the following sense he uh was told from the outset that the united states would not be militarily defending ukraine which we all knew yes and couldn't you know not have given a surprise yes i mean i think you can i think it's there's a fair argument on either side about whether it would have been smarter to be ambiguous about it but it's not a threat that the in any way

the the u.s and this in 2022 could have possibly kept which is you know it's just there's no political will to fight for the survival of ukraine but in that moment remember we're not sending troops but if you do it there will be the most devastating sanctions you've ever seen that's what biden kept saying over and over and over again but didn't spell them out so my kind of back of the envelope theory is that putin was believed that biden was also, you know, it's interesting because Biden said great powers can't bluff, which is why he took the military stuff off the table. But I think he thought he was bluffing in terms of the sanctions, because I think he was counting on the following. One, he was counting on the fact that because Europe and particularly Germany is

so dependent on Russian natural gas, that they could only go so far in terms of a sanctions regime, which, by the way, is so far true. So far true. I was going to say, we kind of back down on energy sanctions. Yes, on the energy sanctions, and also SWIFT, and also sanctioning Putin himself. Now, it's possible these are in reserve if he does even worse things. So he was counting, and he also was counting on the idea that whatever penalties were imposed, he would be able to ride it out. So the worst message that anyone could send was what Biden said yesterday, which is we'll see in 30 days. wrong he placed the wrong bet is to say is then is to say your relationship with the free world and the most desirable part of the planet that people want to live in is changed forever you

are no longer going to be recorded in you know these international fora we are we are going to take the steps now to truly separate our economies. We are no longer going. I mean, I would I would I would hope Biden would never do this, but a Republican president, not Trump. But somebody would should say as long as as Russia has a veto and is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, then the United States will no longer acknowledge that the U.N. Security Council is a font of international law and then establish a shadow we should have done that 30 years ago yes well i i agree we should have done it 30 years ago but now it's like become it's a farce yeah it's a farce and the farce was so clear this week when you had the ukrainian ambassador saying you're sitting as the presiding country on the u.n security council when you are the cause of you know the gravest

violation we've seen in however many decades of the u.n charter so in that yeah yeah so i guess what i'd say is like if we if we've given in on for now on tough tougher energy sector sanctions and we've given in for now on swift which is the international banking system if you don't have access to swift you can't wire money back and forth um are those cards we're holding back saying if you behave if you pull it what what are we waiting what are we waiting for or is it are we blowing it i guess let me let me put it like this um and this is going to sound odd because i'm usually kind of associated with a more hawkish or aggressive foreign policy. I would have much rather had Biden have a very somber speech with the country and saying we are going to take steps now to make us resilient so that we can impose these kinds of measures.

So, you know, Biden has to reverse a lot of his dumb policies that limit U.S. energy production and exploration. He has to combat 100 percent in support of the Israeli pipeline to Europe and try to really sell that as an alternative to Nord Stream 2. He has to figure out what are the implications of taking a really big, like Russia's not a huge economy, but like a much bigger country than Iran out of the SWIFT system. And what are we going to do with our banking system to make sure that it doesn't cause all these unintended consequences? So I don't think that the United States and it's this isn't partly Biden's fault, but it's it's really like the last it's since Clinton. I mean, like, yeah,

whenever you want to date it, you could say 2007. You could I mean, I don't know, George W. Bush. I mean, like someone should have been thinking ahead to say, all right, you know what? This bet that we had that we're going to like constrain Russia by enmeshing it in the international system has totally failed. So now we have to extricate Russia from the international system. And what do we need to do to prepare ourselves for that? So another example, there are rare earth minerals from both China and Russia that they have a near monopoly on, but not entirely. So

what we need to do is figure out other sources for those rare earth metals and start like a consortium with our allies to make sure that they will have that material to build cell phones, car batteries, and things like that. There's all kinds of stuff. And also we need to, you know, build up our defenses and make sure that our troops are more combat ready, just in case. All of those kinds of things are the preparations that are needed in order to impose these measures on Russia without also, you know, creating a kind of impossible situation for the United States. And that is, that would have impressed me more than being vague for two months about crippling sanctions and then coming out and i think that some of the sanctions are very serious

like the sovereign debt stuff and other things that as i said i really am praising the uk right now for going after the oligarchs and it's good that the united states so some of it's good but if you want to go further we'd have to kind of prepare for that. And that's the part that's missing from Biden is that he has to understand the world's changed. This is we have to understand. And now we have to prepare ourselves to really separate from Russia. And there's no turning back. There should not be any more off ramps for diplomacy with Russia. Right. He has made it really clear he wants Kiev. He wants to take it over and he will you know it's very possible that russian forces will kill vladimir zelensky and his cabinet that's a really serious thing and there can't just be the usual we condemn it you know the u.n security council and you know

magnitsky sanctions or whatever there has to be a fundamental break. And I think then both Putin and the oligarchs who would like to spend all of their stolen money in the West will start really kind of having maybe a come-to-Jesus moment, I hope. So is it a possible American strategy to just let him do it and let him walk into the swamp let him try to occupy a country and get i mean because we were not sending troops there and we just so simply arm the the insurrection forces and and wait it out until he has to depart ignominiously in failure i don't know if i would consider that to be much of a strategy only in the following sense what did he say in his speech i mean he wasn't just talking about ukraine he was talking about when poland was a possession of europe the baltic states so i think like he's putting it on the

table and what he also sort of vaguely threatened nuclear retaliation to any country that helped ukraine this is somebody who at this point is either rationally betting that the United States and the West doesn't have the will to stop him or has lost his mind and is no longer a rational actor. I don't know the answer to that. And I don't really trust anybody who would tell you one way or the other. No, great. But the no. Yeah. So I like I don't know. I don't think that really is a strategy at this point. We have to treat him as, you know, a dangerous, aggressive actor on the world stage that needs to be thwarted. Great. So we got two old guys here, one of whom is sleepy and senescent, the other who is perky and senescent. You mentioned before the needs to to work on the Israeli pipeline, which is absolutely completely right.

We got to get the stuff from Leviathan into Europe. We got to get that in the market, bring the price down. But I can imagine telling Biden that he's got to change his attitude on that pipeline because that's between that and Keystone and Nord Stream, that's like three pipelines the guy's had to think about. And that's a lot of pipelines. He really needs to take his nap. And he does because he probably is at that age where he falls asleep very quickly. You might be different. Me, I have no trouble getting to sleep. My wife, different stories. Got a lot going on in our heads sometimes, and it's hard to turn it all off. And you know, that can make for a bad day the next day. There's no underestimating the importance of a consistent nighttime routine. A better tomorrow always starts tonight.

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Is he going to die in office? Like the way these things usually go, he goes, takes a long nap. Right. Because it's just he the price is too high. You mean Putin is going to die in office or Putin? I mean, do you do you have the idea? I mean, I guess what I'm just thinking about in terms of gangsterism, that when the mob boss just kind of loses it and makes everyone pay a very high price,

he goes to bed, he doesn't wake up. Wow. Well, that's an interesting scenario. And I don't want to venture out because I don't know. You're saying, will there be some figure that will kill him or something like that? Yeah. It's been known to happen in Russia. Sure. I'm glad that the presumption wasn't like, well, you know, if you look at the early vote returns coming out of, you know, like St. Petersburg, it looks like, you know, there's a new, that's not going to happen. We know that. Right. I don't want to get take don't take this out of context but the hope is is that you know put

enough pressure on the on the on the on the oligarchs around him that make his rule possible and uh they either persuade him to pull back or they persuade him to take that long nap and that is a fair kind of strategy it's it's fraught though with risk and it's I mean who knows if it'll be successful? The bottom line is that we have a huge disadvantage in this regard because we are not the monsters that the hard left and now, unfortunately, the national conservative right sort of imagines about. America is not what Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn says. We are not as cruel. We are more civilized than a thug like Putin. So Putin can do far worse to you than we can. And that's been a huge imbalance. It's one of the reasons why the KGB

was more successful in just the spy wars than the CIA, because even though the CIA did a lot of dirty stuff, it was not nearly as horrible as the KGB. And that's sort of the lesson now. But I don't know. I mean, I'm kind of of the view now that it's time for the gloves to really come off on that side of things and to try to sort of foment something like that if we can. So, Eli, you've been talking about what we should do. Let me ask briefly about Europe. So, the hope expressed here and there on our side, broadly speaking, conservatives, is that if any good comes of this, it will chasten the Europeans, make them recognize that they do actually have to do what Donald Trump and others, Irving Kristol wrote columns about this back in the 90s. Step up. Defend themselves. In the short term, that means chipping in more to NATO.

Okay. So on the one hand, a contrast here. On the one hand, we have Boris Johnson imposing pretty stiff sanctions. And that is, as best I can tell, a brief, we'll see how he pursues it, but a brief political real profile and courage. He's a former mayor of London. He knows in detail what I've heard loosely over and over again over the years, that some double-digit percentage of the money that supports business in the city of london is russian right he's talking about shutting down a big piece of the city of london's business that takes guts and he's done it on the other hand we have in germany well let me just put it this way. Stalin's great dream was a neutral Germany, and he never affected it. Vladimir Putin has... Tell me I'm both. I'm wrong, I hope. Go ahead. their ridiculous decision 10 years ago to cut off of nuclear power nuclear power is the way for

germany to become more energy independent and that has to be the as much as for right now they just do that because i don't expect the germans given their history and i also don't want the germans given their history to rediscover a kind of national militaristic pride. So... Uniforms, leather, lovely after all. So I guess what I'm saying is that I kind of understand why the Germans are, you know, so willing to kind of buy into this

idea that all of our problems can be solved, you know, if we just needed a five-star hotel in Vienna or Geneva or something. And but the rest of Europe and the United States and the U.S. State Department and, frankly, the Democratic Party and, you know, anyone left in the Republican Party, we have to give up on this, that the idea that any kind of geopolitical problem with a rogue state like Russia can be solved by finding the right diplomatic formula, well, that's been discredited. This was a hope in the 1990s that we were at the end of history, and the best thing we can do is just trade with China and Russia, and eventually they'll come around and be more like us. That did not happen. We should just stop thinking that it should happen and stop repeating that mistake. And that that would be and limit. And I think the Germans are kind of always going to be that way.

But we can we can probably maybe get the French and certainly the British and other, certainly all of Eastern Europe now is kind of in agreement with us, you know, the conservative Americans on this and, you know, kind of work there. But if we can just get the Germans to be energy independent, I mean, that will go a long way and also take the corruption in their own system more seriously. The very fact that the former chancellor gerhard schroeder is like the ceo of the pipeline project from with russia at this point is breathtaking it's a disgrace and yet he's still a kind of a member of polite society and his own party you know kind of still

you know kind of treats him like an old i mean that was a that was a huge blow and we should have been much more attuned to it so it's kind of thing, I think, we can hope for. I don't think we're ever going to get a Germany that's going to be kind of a meaningful military partner. Nor should we want one, is what you're saying. Exactly, nor should we want one. But we can certainly ask for that from other European countries, and I hope that this is a wake-up call. Sort of a sub-question, then I really am done. You've got a life to lead.

I don't want to keep you forever. I don't know, it's a lot of fun. Can we suppose that turning their backs on energy technology was so deeply un-German that they'll sort of awaken from this weird dream of their own accord. I mean, the idea that the French are going to be building a dozen new nuclear plants over the next decade or some number like that, and we in Germany, oh no, we will make do with windmills. It's ridiculous, and it's un-german somehow to turn their back on technology i mean the the reason am i missing something even no no this was after fukushima

remember right and it played into i think like something very deep particularly in the german left that it's like they associate nuclear power with nuclear weapons and they, you know, somehow this is still tied to war guilt. Yeah. Well, I kind of, I mean, I'm not an expert on Germany, but I've talked to some and,

you know, just because I've been curious about this in the last month, like what's wrong with the Germans and everything like that. And the answer is that, you know, they saw Fukushima and it played into sort of, there was a receptive part of their politics, particularly in the green party that was really open to this.

Like this is an environmental disaster. And I just think that at a certain point, like that, that sort of won the day. And then that's what led them to embrace the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and figuring out this kind of alternative. And it's, it's a little bit like the U S greens that tell us we've got to get off

fossil fuel without like telling us what's going to replace fossil fuel and how we're going to get from A to B. And we just have to say to them, like, you've got to reverse this at this point. And there's a clever, by the way, political way that we can do this, like just simply saying, like, you know, let's let's just drill, there's got to be a way to kind of persuade sensible liberals, you know, the kind of liberals who voted against the San Francisco scoreboard that, you know, we're not, we're not, we're not saying that your entire climate change agendas is a fantasy. We're not, we're not arguing about that, but like, can you understand that there are real geopolitical consequences to hindering American energy production at this point? And that, at least for the time being, that Russia really poses this major natural security threat.

I know you agree with us on that. I think there's got to be a kind of way that we should be thinking about ways to kind of bring people together on these issues instead of using it as like a wedge that like if you elect a Republican, then you're going to finally get like these important steps that we need to take, you know, to isolate from Russia. You know, I'm just, my hope is that there's a way to kind of persuade a lot of Democrats of this as well.

My fear is that a year from now, we will see a New York times headline that says a year after the invasion, a wary Europe seeks rapprochement with Russia. No, I'm very worried about that too. That they'll swallow it and that they'll crawl back because there are things that they need that's my fear and it seems most likely and it may be what putin is counting on but there's also the possibility which is probably less likely but also possible this served as a slap in the face a wake-up call that that put the that opened people's eyes to the myriad innumerable delusions that they've been coasting on,

on this cloud of transnational end-of-history goodwill. As you said, meeting in a hotel in Vienna and having a good lunch and signing some papers. That actually is a fiction, and that Putin ripped through it, and it exposes all of the fictions of the end of nationalism, the end of nation states, the end of the follies of the green policies. Because, I mean, good luck convincing some people in California that they should put that green dream on hold for a while because they believe it's right around the corner. If we just spend enough money and make enough solar panels and the rest of it, we can get there. We can get there. The only thing that's stopping us is the oil lobbyists and the subsidies that we give to the petroleum industry. I mean,

it's possible, though, to change their minds. And when you look at the intellectual and diplomatic political apparatus of Europe and the people, how do you think the people's reaction to this will affect the politics of Europe going forward? it are are we seeing perhaps a a glimmer of reality start to influence policies more than they have before okay so first off i i my hope is that european voters will fully turn against putin and hold uh their leaders and elites accountable but another force that has historically held the Europeans in check, because they've always been like this, has been the American president and an American diplomacy. And so we also so Joe Biden is going to, for the next three years, be part of this equation

or maybe more if he wins re-election. But the idea is that before this crisis, Joe Biden believed that uniting Europe with America and repairing what he believed the damage that Trump did was basically, you know, acceding to the demands of outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel with Nord Stream 2 and to be more reasonable and to, you know, kind of bend American policy towards this, you know, fuzzy European consensus of, you know, forever engagement. Instead, what we hope, I'm hoping that Biden will be, and again, there's a difference between hoping and thinking he will actually do it, is that in that period running up to that New York Times headline in a year that Biden says,

absolutely not. We are the, you know, we are providing your security and we can never let, you know, Putin off the hook for this. And that, and so there's another factor. So I hope the I hope the Germans and French and Spaniards and, you know, British become, you know, begin to hold more from their leaders in this regard. But on the other side of it, I also want the American president to hold the line in the way that kind of Reagan had to do in his first term, in the way that, you know, it's, you know, in his best moments, George W. Bush did. And that's what I'm hoping for. Well, Eli, we spoke to you after the Afghan disaster. I've spoken to you now after the Ukraine disaster. Don't take this personally, but I invite me back when China invades Taiwan. Don't take it wrong.

We're starting to think you're just plain bad luck. Yeah. So, you know, if we can look back in a year and say we didn't have to have Eli on once again, it'll be great, but we enjoy having him. It's like fire insurance. Every time that you're here. Eli Lake, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Eli. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Yeah. Rob, you, as a matter of fact, now have to step up to the rostrum. I do.

Yeah. as a matter of fact, now have to step up to the rostrum. I do. And tell people in these difficult times where we're being told that $5 gas is the price that we're going to have to pay to stand up for our values, as Psaki said, that they should actually take the crowbar to their wallet and liberate a few dollars and do what with it, exactly? I would like people who are... First of all, it's sort of fascinating

to talk to somebody like Eli who kind of knows the whole sort of almost 360 degree view of things. It's like, I mean, I kind of felt like we should have had him on first and then we should have talked, but okay. That is not the way we go here. But then we wouldn't have the pleasure

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day mondays through thursdays 7 p.m et so 4 p.m pacific on the call-in app c-a-l-l-i-n you just have to download the app and you can join it's loads of fun it's really great it's kind of like old style um talk radio uh and gabriel's just fantastic um and to fit that show's title, we are launching right now a competition for the best nightcap cocktail recipe. So members are going to share their favorite nightcap, both alcoholic and booze-free, if you tend to that. Both categories will be announced on Wednesday, March 16, on the episode of The Nightcap by special guest Peter Robinson and Colin CEO David Sachs. David, you might remember, has been a guest on the podcast. Fascinating guy. If you don't follow him on Twitter, find him, David Sachs, S-A-C-K-S. He's writing really, really, really, really smart, insightful, insightful stuff about California and politics and covid.

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And so it's a members-only event. Make sure you sign up today at ricochet.com slash join. You know, getting back to normal, one of the things that I noticed in the last few days was how we used to ask ourselves, when will it finally be that we're just not saturated in covid news all the time well yeah right well this was it this was the uh you know covid all of a sudden is joining the chandra levy gary condit uh realm of things that are suddenly

instantly just poof god i saw somebody who did tweet out they were looking at a picture of people ukrainians in the subway taking refuge and they said you know ukrainian vaccination rate is only 30 for all those people to be packed into that space and they're not wearing masks and i thought it was like it was like hearing that madonna has come out with a new single and wants to be relevant again. It was just pathetic. It's like, I'm sorry, we're not going to do that here. We're not going to apply you. It's done.

It's gone. It's over. All of a sudden, something else has come along. I mean, just so, yes, the people whose lives were given great meaning by COVID seem frustrated at this point because people are actually transfixed by something else of great importance. Or not great importance. Plenty of people shrugging their shoulders and saying it doesn't apply to us at all. Why do I care? Why should I care?

You know, I did. Can I just say, I just am realizing that I did forget to say that for for a Ricochet winter membership pledge drive, we have free membership for college students. So if you have a dot edu web email, come and join. We want to hear your voice too. And also we're going to do more in-person events. I sort of said that, but I didn't really, we're going to do have an events in New York and DC. And so, cause we want like, this is only over, this COVID thing, when we declare it over. And so we're declaring it over. Sorry, I just realized I didn't say that part.

That was an important part. Well, we're glad that you did. And Peter, anything you would like to add to Brother Rob's remarks, you being one of the others? Or is there a piece of news that we haven't talked about that you want to surface i i'd like to add to your remarks it's not just covet that we've forgotten about at least for the time being or at least it's not just dr fauci who's feeling frustrated right now our former secretary of state and current climate czar john kerry yes gave a an gave an unbelievably surreal interview earlier in the week in which he complained that the worst aspect of the Russian invasion of a sovereign nation was that it would distract from the fight against climate change.

Unbelievable. As if only the armored troop carriers were all electric vehicles it would be fine right well if i mean if your if your ultimate goal is bending the entire economies of the world and everybody to a particular standard and means production and controlling the output so that the world will not heat up by a degree and a half again yes that is going to be the dominant thing but like i was saying to eli like i'm hoping a lot of these things we've had the luxury to endure and i sound like peter robbins there uh my emphasis of that word the luxury seemed exactly like that no i mean it was nice to sort of float along and feel as if they're

as if we could really concentrate on these things and debate gender ideology and intersectionality and the rest of it. But they all seem like the smallest of concern. They're revealed as such, perhaps to those who didn't see them as such before. They've always seemed to me to be ridiculous diversions for a great society to concern itself with, to tear itself apart over. So yeah, I more we the more we look at this and great games and geopolitical strategy and revanchist russia the more people are going to be frustrated that we're not talking about the important things which is why it's necessary to sever jk rowling from recreation so that people can read harry potter without feeling bad i i i

mean true yeah true as somebody else on twitter said, I guess this is the apogee of the weak men breed bad times point in the phase of history. And I thought that's an interesting way of looking at it as the cycle goes, because the hard times come and then those hard times breed strong people and societies. It's almost as if history seems to roll in cycles dependent on the immutable nature of human beings. Almost. Who aren't terrific, by the way. That's our problem. Of the crooked timber, right. But yes, we're not.

But we've got substantial accomplishments. We do marvelous things. Are we done? I think we are. Let's get out. We'd like to thank all of our sponsors, Bowling Branch and Beam, and of course, Ricochet itself.

Support them. Your life will be better because of it. I know we've talked a lot ad-wise about sleeping, but sleep is important. Don't stay up. Don't spin. Go to Ricochet

and find a place where you can unburden yourself of the things that have been clattering around your mind. It's been great fun, and we'd like a five-star review for it.

Thank you very much. And that's it. Rob, Peter, we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next that's it. Rob, Peter, we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet 4.0 next week. Next week, fellas.

Ricochet. Join the conversation.