TRIGGERnometry - Ex CIA Agent: Why Israel and Ukraine Can’t Win - Andrew Bustamante

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Andrew Bustamante is a former covert CIA intelligence officer, US Air Force combat veteran, and Fortune 10 corporate advisor. He is the founder of EverydaySpy which trains individuals and groups in skills drawn from elite intelligence agencies. Check out EverydaySpy: https://yt.everydayspy.com/triggernometry Check out Andrew on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Andrew-Bustamante Find Andrew on social: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy Sponsored by: - Raycon Everyday Earbuds. Get 20% Off + Free Shipping at https://buyraycon.com/trigger - Try Verso’s incredible longevity products and get 15% off by using code TRIGGER at https://VER.SO Verso Scientific References: 1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.868640/full 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35844164/ 3. https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/10/6/456 Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you know who the lead negotiator is for the United States? CIA Director Burns. That is not a role for a career intelligence official, somebody whose job is to lie and steal and cheat without getting caught. They want to have the ability to deploy fucking airplanes and warships into the Middle East, into friendly territory when we fight China. That's what they want. Zelensky could have reached basically the same outcome,

the same best outcome, could have been reached within a few weeks. Why do we think that Russia, Expansion means Russian tanks. Why does that concept come to mind? Because that's the narrative that the West has made. No, it's because of history. I mean, as a Russian, I can tell you, right? Every time Russia has a strong leader, it expands westwards and very often with war.

Andrew, awesome to have you on the show. We were excited about anyway, but then we started talking while we were waiting and there's so much we can talk about. Before we get into that, tell us a little bit about your career, particularly CIA and another stuff where you've served abroad. and all of that. Yeah, I mean, I'm excited to be here, guys. This is a conversation I've been looking forward to for a while. But my name is Andrew Bustamante. I started in rural Pennsylvania, a brown kid in rural Pennsylvania, ended up going to a military school because it was the best of all the bad options that I had. And then from there, I actually got recruited into CIA, had an awesome experience at CIA, living and working undercover, operating abroad. I met my wife,

who was also a CIA officer at the time. And we ultimately ended up leaving CIA 2014, which was 10 years ago, which is kind of mind-boggling, for family reasons. Because surprise, surprise, CIA is not a family-first organization. And then when we left CIA, we kind of had to start all over again because you feel like you're special at CIA.

But when you leave CIA, you don't get to take really any references home with you. You don't get to take friends home with you because everybody remains undercover. Everybody remains inside that organism that is undercover operations. And you say you were recruited, why and what does that look like?

You never get to know exactly why they're interested in you. I have some theories. One, I was recruited in 2007 as part of the tail end of the surge coming out of September 11th. So if you recall, 9-11 happened in the United States in 2001. Two years later, there was a giant commission

that was completed, a big investigation that was completed. And as one of the findings of that investigation was that the CIA of 2001 was not equipped to handle the rising terrorist threat that was coming against the United States. So they had to plus up people. They had to plus up operations. And one of the big things they pushed for was more diversity in their in their cadre. Because prior to 2001, CIA was basically Ivy League white guys. And it's going to be hard to place an Ivy League white guy in any kind of Arab community. In a cave in Afghanistan, you're probably going to stand out.

Correct. But an ambiguously brown rural Pennsylvania kid, right, has a better chance of being completely forgotten. I mean, I was unknown all through high school, so I was really well trained. That's so interesting. So that was the moment they actually said, look, we need to infiltrate these particular organizations, monitor them, and white guys ain't going to cut it. I mean, you kind of go, all right, in that way, diversity might be a strength. Yes, and that's what's so interesting. CIA took a very practical approach to diversity, not a legislative approach.

Nobody tried to come in and place policies on the importance of having people of color and people of different ages and people of different genders. It was a very practical need. You can't send a male of any skin color to infiltrate a female Muslim society. You can't. You have to have females, even better if you have females who are also Muslim, who are also Arabic speakers, who are familiar with the region. You know, Yale puts out a lot of good quality people, but it's hard to find that from an Ivy League university. Sometimes you need to look somewhere else. And even now, CIA is looking at people who don't even have formal degrees. I mean,

there's all sorts of opportunity that is pushed at what we call the pace of operations, what's required to keep Americans safe because that's the priority. That's the priority for CIA is national security primacy. Andrew, I feel it's really important before we really delve into the conversation. There's people who, of course, aware of the CIA, but there's people who might not be aware of what exactly the CIA does. And there's probably a whole lot of conspiracy as well that's... Probably.

Yeah, there's a lot of conspiracy that is molded in with that. So let's just talk about what does the CIA? do and let's explode some myths which people will definitely listen to. No, that's a great, it's a very fair point, right? So CIA does what's known as human intelligence or in our world, humant. Now, intelligence is a very broad sweeping term and there's multiple subcategories inside that. There's measurements intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence.

So there's multiple disciplines inside the intelligence field. One of those disciplines is called human intelligence, which is the process of extracting secrets from a human being rather than from a radio or from a picture or from something else, right? So CIA, the central intelligence agency, has two purposes. One is it's the primary human intelligence agency in the United States, but then second, it is also the primary analytical resource that feeds the executive branch, which is really just the executive office or the office of the president. So all the intelligence agencies in the IC intelligence community, all the intelligence agencies

feed their raw analysis to CIA, who creates a finished analytical product called the president's daily brief that gets briefed to the president every day. What about the operation side? Because CIA isn't just about gathering intelligence, like CIA takes people out and stuff like that. What about that side of it? That's where part of the myth is, right? So CIA has a paramilitary element, but it's a very small element, just like it has a cybersecurity element. That's another small element. It has an offensive cyber element, a counterintelligence element. These are all small elements inside CIA that are hyper-focused on human intelligence operations. So if you can't get secrets from a terrorist, maybe the best thing to do is just neutralize the terrorist.

In those moments... That's a lovely use of language there, Andrew. In those moments, you need to have that capability. And CIA, being an office that serves the president directly, it doesn't want to ask. outsource that to say, DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. It doesn't want to give that task to the Marine Corps. It wants to be able to do that in-house. So it has what's known as a paramilitary capability. Because there's a lot of people in places like where my mom's from in Venezuela and they're going, aye, aye, yeah, the CIA, they destabilized, da-da-da-da. Can I just say I'm very

offended by that accent? Yeah, that is actually how my mom speaks. And that is very offensive. But they say, you know, the CIA destabilize governments that are perceived to be the enemies or not, or not even enemies, but not, don't act within the interests of the United States. And then they get, they help to depose them, put in their own regimes, et cetera, et cetera. Is that actually true? There is truth to that. But we have to look at CIA very much as a black and white pre 2001 host, 2000. one organization. And it's because when the Twin Towers fell on 9-11, there was really one organization

to blame CIA. And CIA takes that squarely on their shoulders. They failed to do what they were supposed to do in conjunction with FBI, and that was the finding of the 9-11 commission. So you can't have a failure like that on your record and not be forced to completely change. So that's what happened with 9-11. And many people don't realize that when you hear stories of 1990s, 1980s, 1970s CIA, you're talking about an organization that had a few thousand people at most and didn't have any oversight and those people were largely Ivy League white guys who were part of an old buddy network post 2001, even further back after you go after you look past 2003, 2004, when Congress became heavily engaged in overseeing what the CIA did. Now you have an organization

that has multiple thousands of just undercover officers, and then tens of thousands of officers on top of that, and an organization that has a whole different set of rules and obligations that it has to abide by. Many people say that the pre-2001 CIA was the more effective, more dangerous, more nimble CIA. And the CIA now is so heavily bureaucratized that it's been neutered in many ways.

And it just seems to get worse each year from the point of view of what's, CIA is capable of because now that we're so politically divided, it's a organization that was built to support the president. Well, the president switches extremes every four years right now, right? And what does that mean for an organization? How does that organization have continuity, success? If you are part of the organization, how do you have any hopes for a career? Now, the idea that CIA does not work in the best interest of the American people, that is also something that people talk about. That is patently false. The CIA only works in the best interest of the American people. It works

so diligently in support of the American people that it really will do whatever it takes to keep Americans safe, to keep Americans America as the primary superpower, the singular superpower in the world. I mean, essentially we put even the promise of democracy second to making sure that the great American experiment is always the prime superpower. Let me stress test that a little bit because it brings us on to territory that I wanted to cover anyway, which is I don't think anyone actually would say that the CIA is not attempting to serve the interests of the American people. I think what people would say is the way that they see the interest of the American people is not necessarily the way some American people see the interest of the American people. And that's where I think the conversation comes in. And one of the things I think that Francis is trying to raise, and it's interesting to me, and this is a genuine question, I'm not imposing anything, is, For example, 9-11, there are people who will say, well, I don't mean this in a moral sense, Americans' chickens coming home to roost, and America deserved it. But when you lay with dogs, you get fleas.

So when you support the Taliban and the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union, it's not a surprise that you've got some crazy guys with weapons and money and guns and whatever. To what extent do you think, you know, CIA pursuing short-term objectives without necessarily thinking on the 20-year schedule is where I think some of these issues come in, where it's like it comes back to bite you in the arse one, as we say, in the UK. No, and I think you've got a, it's an excellent point for sure. One of the things that we're as a collective world, as a collective Western democratic world, specifically, one of the things that we're coming to discover now is that democracy has its

flaws. And one of those flaws is the cycle of change. So the United States, not the CIA, but the United States, has never been able to think further than six or eight years in the future. I mean, even when it comes to federal budgets, inside the United States, a long, one of the longest federal budget is about five years. Anything after five years is like, what's the point in even planning? So most budgetary cycles are literally year to year. Sometimes you have two-year money, sometimes you have three-year money, and in rare occasions, do you have five-year money? means we can't plan more than five years in the future as a federal government, let alone dictate

to a sub-agency like CIA a five-year objective. So to your point, all of the American objectives are short-term objectives. Wow. Right? That's scary to me, man. The UK's not better off. No. No, no, no, no. Because, I mean, you guys have seen it with your prime minister. The turnover is incredible and unpredictable. That's the person who's leading the country. They're the ones that in many ways dictate who supports them on their staff, how do you do that? And the American people, just like the British citizens in the UK, we're in it for life. I'm not going to ever be not American. I may not live in the United States, but I'm not going to be not American. I'm in it for the next, I mean, if I'm lucky another four or 50 years, how can we only be making decisions two to three

years in advance? No, that's a totally fair point. I've been saying this for a long time. The one advantage authoritarian regimes have is the ability to plan on a 20, 30-year time scale. Now, that has trade-offs, negatives, too. But what I'm asking is slightly different, though, Andrew, which is the reason I think people sometimes criticize CIA operations or decisions and stuff like that is they go, well, did you not think that when you give these cave-dwelling Islamist weapons and money and whatever that, that wouldn't just end in that moment when they defeat the Soviets, it actually will create things down the line and you're messing with things perhaps that you don't understand well enough

in a region that's very old and very complicated and you're pushing buttons here that the results will show it's like it's a completely different example but we were talking about this other day that we've done interviews five years ago when we were completely different people we've changed over time that people now use against us to criticize us for something right well I'm talking about that but on a much bigger scale absolutely and I would say that criticism is fair yeah it's absolutely fair because you can see it play out in the headlines. But the reality of it is that you don't know what the future holds. There's this concept that we have in CIA called the cone of uncertainty. And the cone of uncertainty is if you imagine like a party hat, like a birthday hat, those cone,

conical hats, and you put it with a string that goes through it. The string is the timeline. And then the cone is here at the end. You know exactly what happened in the past. It's a very clear string of events. And then there's this point where the string enters the conical hat. Right there at that moment, you have high confidence of what the next moment, which is hidden inside the cone, you have high confidence what that's going to look like. But as you start looking further into the future, the cone of uncertainty gets bigger. The string could completely change. It could morph. All sorts of unknowns could happen, right?

So when CIA or when U.S. policy or when any democracy makes a decision, they're looking at that cone of uncertainty. and they're looking forward seven days, 14 days, 30 days, 90 days a year, a presidential campaign cycle. They're trying to find a reasonable period to look forward to so they can assess the likelihood of what the future will look like. But with every year that you have to look forward, the uncertainty gets more and more. So it becomes a game of diminishing returns to start what ifing. Well, what if this and what if that? You know what nobody was thinking about in 1988 when they were army. the Mujahideen? Nobody was thinking, well, what if this group transforms into something

called Al-Qaeda and become Islamic extremists that somehow learn how to target the World Trade Center in the United States and that financial capital of the world? Nobody was thinking about that in 88. Hey, honey, it's mom. Did you know if we switch to Verizon we can get four phones for zero dollars, plus four lines for $25 a line? Call me back. Me again. That's just $100. a month for four lines on unlimited welcome plus four phones no trade in needed call me it's mom america's best network verizon that's the one we're talking about i'll send you text america's best network based on root metrics best overall mobile network performance us second half twenty twenty five four two lines on a limited welcome and auto pay see verizon dot com for details

well that would be the criticism i i guess that's what i'm trying to explore here because i think the the people who make that criticism never think of the counterfact or what would happen if we didn't give those guys the guns. And I think that's totally legitimate. On the other hand, should the United States be running around the world giving guns to people who are desperate to use them? Now you're getting into a, I think, a very interesting question. Yeah. Because when the United States makes their decisions, who do you think the primary concern is with regard to blowback? It's the United States. How will this come back to bite us? and what is our assessment on being able to counter whatever that threat is, known or unknown,

estimated, overestimated, or underestimated, what is our likelihood of being able to combat that threat? Versus what's not our problem, right? If we arm a bunch of Taliban to fight Russia in the 80s, and they go rogue and they transform into some kind of extremist group that harasses Russia or the UK or France, I mean, think about it. Throughout the 80s and 90s, it wasn't the U.S., it wasn't the United States that al-Qaeda was targeting. It was Paris. It was London. It was Turkey, right? Thanks, mate. But from an American point of view, when all you're focused on is American primacy, like, I know we're friends, guys, but this is your mess. But we'll come help you if you want to pay us, partner with us, or increase trade.

That's how American government officials think. because if we make a mess that somebody else has to clean up, guess what that means? It means you're too busy cleaning up the mess to compete with us as a superpower. And even better, if you're like the UAE or the Saudis or the Qataris, where you want our weapons to clean up the mess

that we made that you now have to deal with. Do you get what I'm saying? It's a capitalist market in politics just as much as it is in economics. And Andrew, how would the CIA change if someone like Trump came to power? because Trump is very much about withdrawing a little bit, not intervening, letting countries

essentially operate in a far more free way than someone like the Democrats and Biden. Would that have a massive impact or not much at all? Well, what I think is really interesting is that when we talk about a potential Trump presidency, we have precedence to work from. And we can never mistake a campaign promise with a presidential reality.

They, if Trump wins in 2024, there's a couple things we can very likely expect. We can expect a mass exodus from CIA. More people will leave. People have been leaving CIA in the highest numbers ever since his first presidency. Why? Because they have ideological differences with the president.

They don't want to gamble young people, when I say young, I mean young careerists under the age of 35, they don't want to gamble their 30. year government career on a White House that keeps flipping back and forth between extremes. They just don't want to do that. Not when you can go to Google or Amazon and have a perfectly good 20-year career, right, as a security expert or a threat assessor or who knows whatever else. So there's a, there's more attrition than ever before coming out of CIA and not just CIA,

but across the federal government. So we know that Trump will, if he becomes president, we know that he, if he disagrees with CIA, he'll just cut funding. He'll stop using them. because he's already proven that he's happy to go to the commercial market to do what's known as private intelligence. Private intelligence was actually something that didn't really exist in the numbers that it exists in now prior to 2016. When Trump came into office and his own service, the CIA, spent all of its time and effort accusing him of Russian collusion, he was just like, all right, guys, you're not hired. I'm not going to work with you. I'm picking a different plumber. Andrew, why did they do that?

because it's clearly not true, right? I don't know that it's clearly not true. It's very difficult to defend. It's very difficult to prove. And intelligence is not an art of proving things. This is something that people don't understand. Intelligence is an art of assessing what is unknown. If something is known, it's a fact.

It's not intelligence. Intelligence is always unknown. It is a series of probabilities based on things that you don't know for sure. When you have a fact, you turn it over to someone like, FBI law enforcement, right? When you have a theory, it's intelligence. So I think what happened with CIA was you had eight years of an Obama administration. You had very deeply rooted careerists who were, who were progressive, who were liberal politically. And when Trump came into office, they didn't want to be part of some giant Russian operation. There's still very much a cold war

that goes on in the heads of people at CIA. We don't want to lose to the Russians. We don't want to lose to the Soviets. I mean, we don't, we want to defeat them at all costs. It's hard to break that mentality. And the people who are in charge are people who have had a 20, 25, 30 year career, not the people who are five years and seven years in. So if you had a 30 year career in 2016, that means that you started your career in the mid to late 80s. Can you be progressive and liberal and work for the CIA? Aren't those two things mutually incompatible? You would be shocked at what the construct is inside CIA. There are lots of, because they hire so many young people you have a lot of progressive ideas that come in at the start

over time those people like most people i would say when you have real responsibility or when you have real money you start to vary away from your liberal roots and you start to become more at least fiscally conservative if you still even if you still do believe in like liberal causes so what happens is either liberals start at cia and then become more center or center join CIA and shifts more to the right, or people that are fairly right join CIA and just love life. I've really expected that to go somewhere else. So let's say, because the CIA have got a tough, tough job at the moment.

The world is becoming ever more unstable. There's wars happening, proxy wars, etc. So let's say what's happening with the Middle East. What would the CIA's job be at the moment with the conflict that is happening with Israel and Palestine? I love this question because what CIA is doing, what we know they are doing from the headlines, they should not fucking be doing. Do you know who the lead negotiator is for the United States negotiating between Hamas and Israel? CIA Director Burns.

Why is a CIA director? Why is the head of the intelligence, the undercover covert covert intelligence wing of the United States? Why is he negotiating with what we accuse of a terrorist group and Israel's political party? Why is he the interlocutor? That's not a role for an intelligence officer. That's a role for a diplomat. That's a role for a statesman. That is not a role for a career intelligence official.

somebody whose job is to lie and steal and cheat without getting caught. It shows two things. One, it shows how the United States views the conflict between Hamas and Israel. It shows that the United States does not view it through a diplomatic lens. Otherwise, they'd put a senior ambassador in there. They'd put a statesman in there. They'd put somebody from the president's cabinet in there. You know where the diplomats are spending their time?

Saudi Arabia. Because the United States knows that it has very real, diplomatic needs in the Middle East that it must maintain and Israel is not one of those needs. It knows that what Israel is is a fucking mess that they created, that they exacerbated early on and that they need to clean up quietly. And they're hoping that CIA Director Burns will help make that happening. And what do you think is the agenda? How does it get cleaned up, so to speak? So there's there is no good outcome. There's no outcome that makes everybody happy. But CIA is not interested in making everybody's happy. The CIA is interested in making American primacy prevail.

So what America wants is a two-party solution, or a two-state solution in what is currently known as the state of Israel. That's what the United States wants. They want a safe place for Palestinians. They want a safe place for Israelis. And then they want to be able to encourage relations between the Muslim and Arab world, the Israeli world. They want to increase trade. They want to have the ability to deploy fucking airplanes and warships into the Middle East. East into friendly territory when we fight China. That's what they want. That's what the United States cares about.

However they get there the fastest, that's what matters to them. The reason that you have diplomats meeting in Saudi Arabia and spies meeting in Israel is because what you need to have is you need to have the Saudis and the Emirates, two of the leading groups in the Middle East, except Israel, which requires Israel to accept Palestine. That's the mess. Interesting. You think the United States is thinking five years beyond this point? They're thinking two years beyond this point.

But to me that is, look, and I accept it, and as an analysis, it makes sense. I guess the question is, how much of this is a cynical thing as well in that the UAE, Saudi Arabia, have way more cash in Israel? I understand what you're saying when you ask how much of it is cynical, right? It's not cynical if it's economic. Cynical means that there's no real rational foundation for it. The fact that there's real oil in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, that's a very real issue. The other thing to keep in mind is the United States is always trying to counter the Iranian threat. Well, inside the Middle East, Iran's primary enemy in the sphere of influence is Saudi Arabia. So Saudi Arabia always wants to make sure it contains the Iranian threat as well. So you have a Iran regionally as a point of collaboration for the United States and for Saudi Arabia and for UAE on top of that, but then you have this Palestinian issue, which is clearly a point of contention and a long time point of contention. And as long as Hamas and Israel continue to be in conflict,

more specifically, as long as Israel continues to kill Palestinians, that's the real problem. Nobody has a problem with Israel fighting Hamas. What they have a problem with is Israel killing Palestinians in the name of fighting Hamas. So as long as that situation continues, you have a UN that's turning against Israel. You have the question of the international criminal court pressing charges on Israel. You have the United States who used to back Israel and is now backing away from Israel. The United States needs Israel because Israel is one. one of the top three wealthiest countries in the Asian subcontinent, they have incredible trade

and buying power for our weapon systems, our technology, our security interests, right? There's lots of reasons why the United States wants and needs to continue being partnered with Israel, but to do so in a way that distances them. Let me ask you what is a horrible question, but if we're talking about people whose job it is to lie and steal and do all of that for a living and to do it well, and it's purely about the interests the United States, why doesn't the United States just let Israel destroy Gaza completely and end this conflict forever? There's a few reasons for that, right?

Reason number one is... By the way, just for people watching, I'm not advocating for that. But if we're thinking with the cynical hat on, that would be an approach that people might look at. And you know what, I don't, that's, again, I don't think that's a cynical hat. What I would, what we have, we have a process at CIA called the, the analysis of competing hypotheses, A-C-H, the analysis. of competing hypotheses. When you create competing hypotheses, you basically start at the extremes.

So there are two extremes here. Extreme number one, just let Israel just kill everyone, destroy everything, start over from a clean slate. However, Netanyahu plays this thing out in his brain when he's, you know, in his bathtub at night. That's one option. The other option is cut off all support to Israel, sweep in to support the Palestinians, and bring every Muslim country along with you, right? And just completely overthrow Israel. Those are valid options on a spectrum of extremes. So you can't just rule them out. But when it comes to why we can't do that, why the United States can't maintain its role as the world's superpower by letting that happen, you can't, we need the Middle East. The United States needs the Middle East. They need the oil from the Middle East. They need the wealth

from the Middle East. The Middle East has become a financial hub that competes with all the financial centers in the United States. So to ostracize, Dubai and Riyadh and Abu Dhabi is unacceptable. Qatar, Bahrain, the collegi countries control so much wealth and so much oil flow. We would be shooting ourselves in the foot like we did back in the 70s if we try to ostracize or minimize their priorities, their issues. And we know that Palestine is one of their top priorities, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, all of them. So we can't just let Israel do whatever.

Israel wants to do, because to do that would cost us Jordan, which is a huge strategic partner, Muslim country in the region, Saudi Arabia and UAE. So how does this end? Unfortunately, I think the way that this ends is twofold. So first, Netanyahu is not going to get what he wants. He's not going to push out Hamas. He's not going to push out the Palestinians. Egypt is not going to accept that.

Jordan is not going to accept that. there will be some sort of brokered ceasefire, hopefully soon, there will be a long-term truce that's created, and then there will continue to be a two-state solution. No matter how much politicians in Israel don't want that, that's what's going to happen. That's what has to happen. Through the eyes of everything that is democratic, that's what must happen. Where I'm hoping it will go is that countries in the West and countries in the Gulf will realize that the only way to keep this kind of violence from continuing is to force Palestine and Israel to have some sort of economic dependence on each other.

So whether that means you take the entire state of Israel and literally cut it in half instead of making it this weird like hodgepodge of this part belongs to Palestine and this part, even if you talk to an Israeli, none of it belongs to Palestine, but they're allowed to live here and they're allowed to live here and not in between. I can see them literally cutting the entire state in half and just enforcing that the two sides have to live together

and they have to have some sort of economic cooperation because you need the economics so that the Palestinians can become self-sufficient. You've heard Biden talk about the right to self-determination. For both the Israelis and the Palestinians, you can't have self-determination if you can't determine your own future And a big part of determining your own future is having control of your own economy, which the Palestinians have never had.

But the problem is, Andrew, is we're kind of looking it through this lens of, you know, economics and whatever else. And for the vast majority of governments, I would say that makes sense. But Hamas are extremists. They do not want the state of Israel existing. They're rabidly anti-Semitic. So how can you negotiate with that type of government who are Islamic fundamentally? I would argue that part of what you're repeating right now is actually rhetoric and not fact, right? So there is a fundamentalist element to Hamas.

But Hamas is also the legitimate elected government in what was Gaza. And even now in the West Bank, you see an increasing rise of support for Hamas. If you just look at the news, October 8th, nobody trusted the numbers that were coming. coming out of Gaza because they said that, you know, tens of thousands of people were dying, but this was reported by Hamas, which is the currently recognized government of whatever, right? They were always pulling out the idea that Hamas was not a reliable source because it was potentially a terrorist group. Now you don't see any kind of verbiage like that. Now you literally see Gaza officials say this. Gaza officials say that. Well, the fucking Gaza officials are the same

Gaza officials they were on October 8th. So what's changed? What's changed is the rhetoric from the West. And now after seeing that, well, maybe Palestinians and Hamas as a ruling body, maybe they actually do have support on the ground. And oh, by the way, Israel has a split decision about whether or not they support Netanyahu and what he's doing in Palestine. So you've got a huge shift in public opinion on both the Palestine and the Israeli side. So being able to just jump in and say, well, Hamas is an extremist organization isn't 100% accurate.

They still have legitimate grounds to be there because they have been policing and forcing maintaining health, safety, and the movement of humanitarian goods. I guess my pushback to that would be just because a government is legitimate does not mean it's not extremist. So, for example, in Venezuela,

they elected Hugo Chowell. And I think most people, apart from the not-so people on the left, would agree that Chavez was an extreme figure. And he had extreme policies. Again, it's in the eyes of the beholder, right? So what would you call China being ruled by the CCP? Are they extremist in their commitment to communism? What would you call the United States and our commitment to capitalism? And, you know, we, the United States, we are deemed the terrorist.

organization by the Iranians because of our extreme fundamentalism, right? What would you call a state where there is no division between church and state? Because that's Israel. Nobody calls that an extremist state. So it's all in the eyes of the beholder and how you define that. Now, here in the West, we have over-labeled terrorism. We call everything terrorism. We call it terrorism because inside the United States, once you label something as a terrorist

organization, all the rules and all the oversight are much, like, they're relieved, they're reduced. So now it's faster to send troops. It's faster to make money, go that direction. It's faster to cut off and seize assets. You can do anything once you call somebody a terrorist organization. And that's why you see this back and forth, even in legislation about what they call a terrorist organization versus a functioning terrorist group versus, et cetera, et cetera. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality.

An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their cramudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend. Only on Netflix May 8th. So that being the case, what do we do? with Iran? Because Iran seems to be the major problem in this area. You have, I think it's fair to say, an extremist government who have been funding terrorist groups. So what do you do? Do you let them

continue to fund them? Do you apply political pressure? Do you introduce sanctions? What do you do with Iran? The question is so much bigger than Iran. So I'm going to answer your question with a second question, right? Where did Iran develop this methodology? The methodology of funding Hezbollah, funding Hamas, right, funding insurgent groups in Iraq, while simultaneously also making itself indispensable in the Middle East, because Iran is the breadbasket of the Middle East. You sit in UAE, you sit in Saudi Arabia. The headlines say Iran is evil, Iran is evil, Iran is evil. The produce shelves all say grown in Iran. The food that feels, that feels, you know, the food that feeds Saudi Arabia comes from Iran. The food that feeds UAE comes from Iran. So if you want to talk about complexity, how do you label somebody a villain when they are the ones like providing your food? It's like the American Civil War. All the industry happened in the North. All the agriculture came from the South. So I say that because Iran is modeling a methodology called proxy wars. They're using revenue to fund extremist guerrilla groups to execute their will in foreign countries. They learn that from us. That's a good.

exactly how the United States executed operations all through the 50s, 60s and 70s. That's still how we execute operations. Oh, by the way, China's doing the same thing, Russia's doing the same thing, Saudi is doing the same thing. That is the state of the world right now is proxy conflict. It's what happened in Libya. It's what happened in Syria. It's what happened. It's still happening in Yemen. It's what's happening in Ukraine. And you can see how the same elements are present right now in the conflict between Hamas and Israel. So this is what I was going to ask you because I'm not an expert on these things, but just as an outside observer, it's a feels to me like we're at a point when the West has spent so much time signaling weakness

and division and distraction and all of the stuff that people can see with their own eyes, especially foreign people to whom, you know, 53 genders isn't a thing that they take for granted. They go like, what the fuck is this, right? So, and I, when I see Russia feeling more confident to expand and to fight that conflict, when I see Iran more empowered to do things in the Middle East, when I see China talking more aggressively about Taiwan, I see the King of the Hill is weakened, everybody senses it, and now they're all coming for us. Is that fair analysis? I don't think it's an unfair analysis.

I do think it's a bit of an oversimplification. Yeah, sure. Because when we say King on the Hill, like generally what we're talking about or what people might imagine is the President of the United States, which isn't necessarily how I think we should look at this situation. I'm in the United States. I agree with that. So the United States is the leader, the leader of the free world.

At least that's what we've been known as for however many decades. The problem that we're really seeing here is that the West has been introducing concepts for the last few decades that we have all accepted and labeled as democratic ideals, as the path to a functioning healthy society, something that makes us strong. by democratizing as much as possible, right? Let's have more people who vote and more candidates to vote for and more frequent elections, and that's democracy, and that's going to be successful. The truth is democracy in the American terms

is an experiment. It's only a few hundred years old. It's never been proven out. You know what's lasted for thousands of years? authoritarianism, right? I mean, look at the United Kingdom has proven that monarchy can last for centuries.

United States is still an experiment, right? We are still very much in our middle school years, and middle school wasn't very much fun for me. I don't know what they call it. I don't know what they call it in Europe. But what I'm saying is that what we're seeing is that the United States and this great democracy, this great democratic experiment,

hasn't evolved in the last 30 or four years. If anything, what it's done is it's rooted itself in idealism that isn't actually healthy. And now authoritarian regimes are developing and evolving faster, growing faster. You see more and more countries ever than you see more countries than ever before opting for authoritarian rulers, strongman rulers, or ultra-nationalist rulers. Look at Germany, look at Italy, look at what President Macron in France just announced this week that the Europe we know could die, it could go away.

We have to be clear about the fact that our Europe today is mortal. It could die. It could die, and that depends solely on our choices. It could die. It could go away. Meaning the idea of a democratic continent where multiple states agree to work together could go away in favor of multi-centered nationalist nations, which is exactly what Trump represents. exactly what Netanyahu represents. And that's to, and that's what the primary threat is in France

to win the elections this year in France. I guess what I'm getting at is the broad, I know you said it's an obvious simplification. I'm sure that's true. The broader sense of the West is weakened, one way or another for whatever reason, and other people smell that and they're, they're using that to their own advantage as they should. Is that what's happening? I would say, I hesitate to the words weak because I don't want to say that the West weakened. What I want to say is that the West hasn't evolved, right? It's the difference between pitting a 22-year-old athlete against a 42-year-old athlete, right? The 22-year-old athlete heals faster, has more modern training alternatives, has, you know, been in better gyms, with better coaches, with all optimized modern society for the last

eight years. The 42-year-old athlete has had the same access to those tools, but is dealing with a 42-year-old body and all the life changes, the hormone changes that come at 42, the life changes, the responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera. So you just, nobody would think about pitting a 42-year-old against a 22-year-old and betting on one or the other to win or lose in a foot race. Well, in the United States, we've been focusing on our 42-year-old athletes instead of finding a way to constantly reinvent ourselves and bring up our 22-year-old athletes, which is why we're looking at two presidential candidates who are both fucking ancient. How does that happen? Right? And how many people in our house and in our, in our Senate and in

our Congress are five, four, five, six term people? Like, we are not investing in our future. We are and have always been as the United States a revolutionary group. We still literally pat ourselves on the back for winning independence from you fuckers. Right? And look at what we've done. We talk about it, but we don't actually implement it. And the rest of the world is leaning into their advantages in authoritarian regimes and autocracies. I'm glad you mentioned that because one of the things that people talk about, particularly in our space, and I'd love to ask you, and I'd love to ask you this question, which is they talk about the threat from China, particularly when it comes to Taiwan. Do you see China as this massive threat to the West, a massive threat to stability?

or do you think we're overstating it and we're creating a bogeyman out of China? No, I think China poses the most real threat that exists. And that's not just me. That's actual written assessment from across the United States military intelligence community and policy network, right? Everybody views China in the United States. Everybody views China as the next great threat. And it's a great threat not necessarily because of missiles and guns and aircraft carriers. It's because of its economic power.

in the United States, we have enjoyed being the prime economic superpower for decades. Nobody's even close. Meanwhile, in the top five or so, China has slowly been climbing up the ladder. Japan used to be number two. Now China's number two, right? So if you can imagine, the gap between first place and second place is getting smaller every year. Well, whenever you're the first place person in a race and second place starts to catch up, you start to cycle. yourself out. You start to wonder, can I keep this up? And then the rest of the world is watching

even more intently because somebody might be the new number one. And that just gives them more opportunity, more advantage. And even if at the end of the year, at the end of the race, you're still first place and they're still second place. But they got closer to winning. They have more opportunities. You have less opportunities. They have more friends. You have less friends. Right. That's the nature of competition. The reason China is a threat is because they're catching up economically. They're catching up in terms of global influence. Yes, they're also catching up militarily, et cetera, et cetera. The Taiwan issue is really just an indicator along the path of how far ahead the United States really is. Because if China finds a way to take Taiwan, and I believe

they will. I believe they will find a way to take Taiwan, whether it be administratively, militarily, or socially, right? In many ways, they made their first move in January of this year because the KMT, like China Unification Group is who controls their Congress. Who controls Taiwan's Congress? After the elections. All of that came about as a result of a massive influence campaign from mainland China that started well before October, but was heavily reported on in October. So even though people celebrated the fact that it was a pro-independence president,

the whole fucking Congress is pro-China. Imagine like what does that tell you about the country? That country is split two, right? the control of the day-to-day legislation wants unification, the control of the executive wants pro-independence. That doesn't sound like a Taiwan that has made up its mind yet. But in the West, all we hear about is the pro-independence and Taiwan making closer ties to the United States.

The reason that we have a CHIP's act in the United States, the reason that we're bringing chip production domestic, is because we think that Taiwan's going to remain independent? No, we're hedging our bets against it. And the reason that Taiwan is building more, or TSM is building more plants in other countries is because they know it's just a matter of time. Do you think the American global empire is overextended? I don't know that it's overextended as much as I think that it was a functioning successful model that other people are replicating, right?

And that is coming out of World War II, the United States had a few advantages. One, if you recall, we were suffering from a great depression, an economic depression. We were a poor, broke country in the 1930s. Well, what we discovered is from World War II is that war transforms your economy. It makes everything that was poor and broke and absent be flush and wealthy and productive. Same thing's happening in Russia. We've seized Russian assets and put international sanctions on Russia, and their country grew 3.2% in GDP this year.

The currency is stronger than ever. The alliances with China and India are stronger than India are stronger than he's looked in the last five or seven years. How did that happen? Because wartime economies are good things. And we just empowered Russia the same way that Japan empowered us

by attacking us in Pearl Harbor in World War II. But the model coming out of World War II that the United States had was that everybody else was fucking bombed. like infrastructure was destroyed the UK Poland all throughout Europe Japan everybody needed to be rebuilt and reinvented so the United States came in and said hey we can rebuild reinvent and give you guys loans so we basically forced ourselves we thrust our policies our ideology and our currency across the globe because everybody else had been fighting a war for an extra five years longer than we had that model worked really well because it made everybody dependent on the United States throughout the 40s and 50s. Well, then come by the 80s, other countries started to realize how this worked.

And they started to lay their own foundation, China being chief among them. And then come 2001, what does the United States do? We launched this massive campaign against terrorism, focusing all of our efforts and all of our energy under the Middle East. Guess who didn't fight in the war on terror? China. They just continued to build the same model that they had learned from us coming out of World War II. So they're not trying to go to war with the United States because they know from Chinese methodology, Chinese strategic discipline, it's all written in the art of war.

You don't have to fight and kill your opponent if you can starve your opponent, if you can outfarm your opponent, if you can make all of your opponent's friends your friends and isolate your opponent, that's the same thing as winning without a single fire, a shot being fired. That's why the Chinese are investing so much and working in Africa and different Africa. countries with the mining, and also in South America. So they're trying to get their fingers in as many different pies as possible in order to enrich themselves. Correct. And it's working, right? If you look at the Bricks, the Bricks trading block, it used to just be the Brick trading block with four partners. So just who are the partners, just if people who don't know?

Absolutely. So Brick started as BRIC, Brazil, Russia, India, China, as a economic trading block. South Africa joined in, I think, 2010-ish. That five-person group, has grown again as of January this year with four new countries. Saudi Arabia, I'm sorry, not Saudi Arabia yet. They're still undecided. The UAE, Ethiopia, Argentina dropped out, Uruguay, I think, joined. And there's another country that's escaping me. So the BRICS is growing in terms of volume and mass.

The leading country in the BRICS organization is China. They control like 70% of all the GDP that is accounted for in the bricks, very similar to how the United States controls the vast majority in the G7 countries. So here you literally have what is essentially a democratic trading organization, the G7, and a less democratic, I wouldn't say authoritarian, but I would say functioning pragmatist trading block that involves everybody who's our enemy, plus a few people who are actually our friends, right? That economic disparity, that investment of, effort and money really goes to show you what the world thinks about where the future lies

in terms of economic power and development. We tell people you can't get our money unless you play our way. China says you can do trade with us and we won't ever get in your knickers as long as you trade in in UN. Well, this is what I was going to ask you. Do you think you mentioned the word idealism earlier and it definitely seems this way to me. The Western world goes around lecturing everybody about how they're supposed to do this and do that, and you're supposed to have this attitude to LGBTIQI.

Like, we had the World Cup and Qatar, and all we saw on our TV screens is like, you know, the human rights. Like, I'm not saying those things don't matter. I'm just saying when you come to other people's homes and you start telling them how to live their lives, most people are not going to react well to that. So if you've got someone else who comes in and says, oh, it's great doing business with you. I'm a big fan. let's sit down have a cigar, who are you going to be friends with? Right, exactly.

So do you think our idealism, the idea that our worldview and our ideologies takes primacy over economics, over military alliance, over everything, is causing us to lose friends in the world? In many ways, our ideology has caught, our adherence and forced ideology on others, is causing us to lose influence in the world. Absolutely. You can't, I mean, just think about it in terms of person to person. You can't go to your friend's house

and if you're Christian and they're Muslim, you can't come to their house and then tell them, well, you have to cook me Christian food, you have to put up crosses, you have to do this, you have to do all these things. Where's my bacon sandwich?

Yeah, in order to make me happen. How dare you? Right, you can't do that. Yeah. If you intend to keep them as your friend. Right. Now, when they're dependent on you, because you're the last,

landlord and they pay you rent and you're the one that provides them the groceries and you're the one that provides them the heat and you can turn off their electricity at a button press when you go to their house guess what they do they make you some fucking bacon right but that's they're going to be resentful they're going to be bitter they're going to hate you and when someone comes along who's going to give them the light and heat and the groceries without being forced to make them bacon who are they going to pay right and that's what we're seeing right now we're seeing the world when i say the world we're seeing all the developing countries start to realize they have options.

That option, the fact that they even have options, is exactly why China is a threat. Without China, they would not have options still. Their only option would be the United States. That's how our whole economy was built to make sure nobody else had anybody else they would ever choose. Now there's options. And we are too busy fighting over who's going to be the next president,

labeling genders, changing the definition of anti-Semitism so that our college and university students can go to jail, that's what we're doing. That's not what the world needs right now. So that's what I'm hearing out of what you're saying is really the way for the West to, if we actually cared about the values of human rights

and all of that, what we would do is instead of lecturing other people, we would get a shit together and make sure that we were working with other countries in the world in a way that was respect. of their cultures, even if we disagree with them, so that we have more influence in the world,

so that our values remain the predominant values, broadly speaking in the world. Because every fucking time a US president goes to any country, it's always about, is she going to ask them about their human, you know? And it's like, people don't take well to lecture, to being lectured about how to run their own household. Right. No one does.

So how do we, how do you see a way for the West to like, A, realize this and B, start acting in a way that is actually coming back to the point right at the beginning in our own fucking self-interest? I don't think that we have, we've lost our opportunity to change it quickly. Right now, we're at a position where the only way to turn this ship around is to treat it like an aircraft carrier. We've got to turn it slowly now. And that's in part because we've gambled on the wrong horses in multiple occasions. We've made too many mistakes. Think of that. about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, huge mistake. Think about our incredible support for Ukraine

out of the gates. The American people, according to the White House, the American people believe that the war in Ukraine is a fight for democracy. You can't change that overnight. You can't suddenly change your stance on, well, they're not democracy anymore. You can't. Even though there's all the corruption in Ukraine, even though there's all the valid points of mismanagement in Ukraine, of Ukraine partnering with, you know, some shady-ass people to fight against the Russians, right? Now that you've made the narrative that it's a fight for democracy, to turn that narrative in a different direction is going to take time. Same thing is happening in Israel. To say that the Israelis have the right to take on Hamas when there were 2,000 dead Israelis, that was one thing.

It's very different now with the same 2,000 dead Israelis and 35,000 dead Palestinians. The world changes, and it's hard for us to change our narrative. So the way that we start to work towards changing it, in my opinion, is to understand that we need to basically lick our wounds for the next two to four years, get our shit straight, actually play the game that we try to portray to other people, and recognize that we have to become more pragmatic and less ideological about who we partner with. President Biden ran on a campaign promise of bringing the pariah state of Saudi Arabia to justice. Now he's in fucking Saudi Arabia, promising them security guarantees that the United States will give Saudi Arabia if they can help broker a peace deal between Hamas and Israel. How far from our original goal are we? And all of that started when Ukraine was invaded by Russia. He cut off Russian oil, cut off sanctions to Russia, and then had to go to the Prince of Saudi to say,

hey, guys, we need you to produce more oil but not charge more money. To be fair, he doesn't remember what he said last week, mate. So it's going to be a problem for him. There's one thing that I wanted to touch on briefly where you said that Saudi Arabia are, you know, undecided about whether to join bricks. If Saudi joined bricks, that's huge, isn't it? That changes the world entirely. It does. It's really interesting because if Saudi joins Bricks, so the Emirates did join Bricks,

and that went unnoticed by most of the Western world, except for the people who were actually watching economic interests in the Gulf states. That's a big deal. One of the BRICS members, the new members, is Iran. That was the fifth member I didn't our member, right? Iran is a member of the BRICS trading block. So now the UAE and Iran are part of the same trading block. That means you can be enemies and in the same trading block. Saudi Arabia. Because you're have a common enemy. You have a common enemy and a common motivator, right? Trade is your common motivator. Your common enemy is the ideological expansion of the West that threatens to force you to change your own ideology. So you've got multiple competing priorities here. But if Saudi Arabia

joins the bricks, then you're exactly right. What you basically have now is a group where the wealth just exponentially increased. The GDP, the total buying power. If it's, again, it's a game of economics. So now if Brick starts trading in Yuan or Runman B, the Chinese currency, instead of in US dollars, all of those US dollars that those 13 countries possess go into the marketplace. Well, what happens when you have a flood of new currency into the marketplace? The value of the currency goes down. Meanwhile, they're going to buy up a bunch of Chinese Runman B. Well, what happens when you buy a bunch of currency and take it off the market? The value goes up. So now you've got to drop a further declining U.S. dollar, a rising pressure on the Runman B.

The currency alone tells you what the economics of the countries will look like. That's why it's such a big deal if Saudi Arabia joins bricks. Can we talk about Ukraine a little bit? I was interested because just so that you know, in the original days of the conflict, I was very supportive of us supporting the Ukrainians with a view to them getting the best deal possible, which was what was always going to happen, right? There was never a question of Ukraine winning, as in like the fucking Ukrainian flag flying over the Kremlin. That was never going to happen.

But I thought that, first of all, I'm curious to hear your thoughts from why it's not democracy, but also I did see that as an attack on the Western block for the reasons we've already discussed, right? So, first of all, let's talk about the democracy part of it. What's your take on that? Choice hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day. Don't you wish you were getting away? Pack your bags and come on through. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too. Comfort in, it's calling your name. Save on the stay.

Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song. Book direct at Shoreshiltails.com. So prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine was seen as a struggling or developing democracy at best. It had a score of four out of ten on multiple, human rights watch indexes. So it was not a functioning democracy. It wasn't. It was a developing or transformative democracy because it was still very much corrupt. It was still embedded with Russia.

It was still practicing active political oppression, et cetera, et cetera. It was not what we in the West, what you in the UK, what we in the United States, what any of our G7 countries, it's not what any of us would determine to be a democracy. It was just a country that was still on the cusp of whether or not it would accept. Well, it was moving in that direction, I would say, right? And if you look at the region, it's kind of the standout in that region in terms of moving towards democracy. What are the countries that are former Soviet Union countries, other than Latvia, Estonia, the recent joint, like, what other countries in that region were moving in that direction? So it's not about being comparative to me. It's about the

narrative that was presented to the entire, not just Americans, all English-speaking countries were given a narrative. And that narrative was, this place is a democracy and we have to protect that democracy. That was false. It's like someone who's moving towards graduating college is not a college graduate. That's fair. Totally fair. What I think I'm saying is part of the reason that Ukraine finds itself in conflict with Russia, and I've seen this, I have lots of family in Ukraine, whatever is, since 1991, Ukraine repeatedly has made the conscious choice to move in a more westward direction. Right. And that's why it's partly why it's being attacked. So it may, you're probably right to say it's not, you're not probably right. You're 100% right. It's not a democracy like the UK

of the United States. The oligarchs have ridiculous amounts of power in Ukraine, etc. But the direction of travel was Westford, which is why Russia is coming in to prevent that. Absolutely. So, So I would argue we are, in supporting Ukraine, we are defending the democratic movement of that country. I wouldn't disagree with that. Yeah. I wouldn't disagree with that. But is defending a democratic movement enough to make the kind of support that we saw from NATO and from the United States? Well, NATO is a United States as part of NATO.

I would say no. The real reason that NATO and the United States are involved is not because anybody cares about democracy in Ukraine. It's because they all care about. isolation and degradation of Russia. That by definition is a proxy war, just like we were talking about. Or containment, we might say. Containment, yeah. Not necessarily degradation. It's not about wanting them to be destroyed, but it's about making sure they don't continue expanding. They weren't expanding before, right? Like they, Putin invaded, according to the Russian narrative, right? Putin invaded Ukraine because of many, many years' worth of warnings that NATO cannot expand against the Russian border,

We can't take a threat from the West. And that threat continued, like you said, was moving in that direction. So he made a decisive action. Yes. Since that day, and even now with Lord Cameron's announcement just this week, that he doesn't necessarily prevent Ukraine from using UK-based weaponry to bomb inside Russia. Like, the United States has made a hard line on this. American weapons cannot be used to attack inside sovereign Russia.

the UK has never been very express on this. They're still not very express on this. But the general understood agreement that was struck yesterday between Lord Cameron and Zelensky or this week between Cameron and Zelensky was that the Storm Shadow missiles specifically, I mean, if they make their way into sovereign Russia, that's okay, right?

Why would the UK let weapons systems in the UK be attacked go into sovereign Russia? Why doesn't the United States want American-made weapons to go into sovereign Russia. It's because the United States does not want Russia to believe they are being intentionally degraded, attacked, reduced from outside. If they want to have a wall at Ukraine that we defend the wall, that's one thing. It's completely different to go into and across the border. Zelensky's been attacking across the border for over a year. If you can't keep your own country safe, what is the point of going into the other country? The only reason you attack into the sovereign

country on the other side is essentially to create and ferment well in a war you want to degrade their manufacturing you want to degrade their military facilities the oil storage like i i don't know that that but come back to me with to the broader thing which is the russian narrative um and there are two things about that one is the question people like john maersheimer and tucker carson and others never get asked is the counterfactual if you're saying nato expansion is a problem by the way clearly provocative to russia like i don't you can't dispute that Where would Russian tanks be if we didn't have NATO, including Latvia, Southern Lithuania? I mean, Russia is always going to want to control that area.

Russia has to control that area. Correct. Yeah, yeah. So my argument is maybe the fact that American military corporations really are keen on NATO expansion because it means they get to retool eastern bloc countries into Western weaponry has been a bad thing that we've allowed that to run away the way that it has. But if NATO wasn't in Eastern Europe, Russia would control all of the Eastern European bloc, as it always has done, as it always has attempted to do it. When you say control, though, are you talking about military control, economic control or something else? Well, it totally depends, right? It depends on whether Latvia, Stern Lithuania, and you want to go back into the brotherhood of Soviet peoples or whatever.

Who do you think controls Europe now? Well, depends which part of Europe, right? Okay. Who do you think controls NATO? The United States. Does anybody see that that is a problem? I'll tell you who does see that Germany sees that as a problem now. France sees that as a problem now. They didn't see that as a problem prior to Russia invading Ukraine.

So the very thing that you're talking about, this Russian expansion that everyone is so afraid of, the United States has been doing it. Why do we think that Russia expansion means Russian tanks? Why does that concept come to mind? Because that's the narrative that the West has made. No, it's because of history. I mean, as a Russian, I can tell you, right? Every time Russia has a strong leader, it expands westwards and very often with war.

Okay. Because the peoples of Eastern Europe don't all want to be part of the Russian bloc, I would say. But in terms of the Russian narrative, there's another part, too, which is in 2014, I mean, there are some economic interests, I think you'd agree, that Russia is pursuing irrespective of NATO expansion. Russia wants, wanted Crimea back because it needs it back, right? It needs the port. It needs the connection to that area to be able to project power from the Black Sea. So a lot of the stuff that Putin said these aren't our troops in 2014. They were. The Russian attitude to communication is not we're going to say, you know, the exact truth here. Putin said some things and then they've turned out to be completely untrue over and over.

Now, I'm not disputing that NATO expansion is an aggravating factor. I'm just saying if we're being super cynical about it, the United States and Russia are competing for influence in the region. Right. Right. That's what's happening. Therefore, it is in our interest to support the party that we are backing, effectively. Yeah, I agree.

But at this point, I would say we need to wrap up, actually, at this point. So it's funny. So I would actually say the opposite. Okay. Tell me why. Because, so we're both agreeing, it sounds like, that the United States should be supporting Ukraine. Yes. because it serves American interests to support Ukraine.

Yes. Right? Thank you for clarifying that. We're definitely on the same page of that. I don't know that, I don't know that Russia will expand via war forever. I would imagine at some point they'll learn that there's a better way. And Putin is a strong man. What he knows is conflict, the way he knows is war.

And you talked about the impact of the war economy as well, right? And that is exactly why we need to keep fighting in Ukraine. Because if we stop fighting in Ukraine, what we've just done is we've done is we've created this fucking juggernaut in Russia that's dependent now. Wow. Okay. On a military industrial complex that continues to fight. Okay, that's really interesting. I didn't expect you to say that. So if we stop fighting in Ukraine, that juggernaut's not going to stop. Because to stop is going

to kill its own economy, which is the one thing Russia can't let happen right now because it doesn't have the alliances from the satellite states to create its agricultural base. And it's lost assets to the West. It's lost... influence to the West, it's heavily tied now to China and Iran and India through the bricks. Yeah. It has basically become the world's bad guy. Yes. If we just back out of Ukraine right now, Ukraine's going to get bulldozed and all the concerns

that Poland has and France has and Germany has are going to come to fruition. Oh, sure. I didn't mean back out. I guess what I'm saying is from day one, what I've said is the point of supporting Ukraine is to help them get the best deal. And what I mean by the best deal is, look, let's be honest, right? first of all, Crimea isn't coming back to Ukraine. The eastern regions, yes, there are some mineral resources there, and some of them are

potentially quite important. Again, I don't think they're coming back to you. At the beginning of the conflict, they weren't coming back. And frankly, most people in Ukraine didn't really care about losing some land in the east. I'm sorry. I love that you're saying this. I love that you're saying this, because two years ago, this exact conversation would have been just totally...

Oh, no, brother. I said this accused. I said this a week after the conflict started on the biggest TV show in the UK. So I said this. So you and I were saying the same thing because I was on Lex Friedman. Right. Within just a few weeks of the things starting, saying the exact. I love that we were saying the same thing.

So here's what I think is the right outcome because I'm not an American citizen. I'm not in the CIA. I don't just care about the West. I also care about people in Ukraine. I have family there. You know, and I have family in Russia too. I don't want these two nations to be fighting and killing each other, right? But from what I see, and please tell me your opinion, I'm just throwing this out there for you to respond, right?

From day one, I said, the reason we support Ukraine is they get the best deal. What does that mean? That means they lose the least amount of land for long-term security, not a piece of paper with some words on it, actual security. So it's note to membership, which is obviously very unlikely or like a Korean type of scenario, where physically what happened in 2014 and then in 2022 can never happen again. that's that's the best outcome for ukraine that's why i'm saying now when ukraine is let's be honest losing right the thing we need to do is help them get the best deal which means long-term security for whatever they're going to have to give away right what do you see out of what i'm saying i see it

is exactly right like the the best thing that ukraine has ever been able to hope for is getting a good deal from a from a truce or from a treaty yeah Zelinsky made so many mistakes in the beginning talking about not just restoring like like pre-soviet invasion Ukraine, but all the way back to like 97 or 96 Arab boundaries. Like you could clear, you could see he wasn't a statesman. You could see that he was something else, right? Now that we've had to go through the transformation, now that you've seen that now that the American people and Europeans have seen the truth slowly get peeled back about what's happening

in Ukraine between Zelensky and everybody else. Now that we've had all of this, I think we can all agree that the best outcome here is just Ukraine not being completely taken over by Russia. Not that Putin has ever said he wanted to take Ukraine sovereignty. From the beginning, he said he didn't want to take Ukraine sovereignty. Now, to your point, Putin is an expert in information warfare. We talk about it being like communication out of Russia. It's nothing about what comes out of Russia can be called communication. It is all shaped narrative.

It is all informational warfare. It's the same thing that's happening in the West. We just have free speech. Yeah. But that free speech can still be shaped with an overall messaging and narrative that appeals to Western ideals. The same thing is happening out of Russia. So I agree that what we can reasonably expect to see is Ukraine not lose much more. Everybody stopped killing each other.

and then some sort of security infrastructure put in place that keeps what is remaining of Ukraine, Ukraine, along with some sort of support to a new fledgling government that is going to rebuild Ukraine. Because Zelensky can't stay. That's going to be one of the things that Putin guarantees. Franz, I know I've been hogging the microaches, but I just want to – what is your criticism of Zelensky? Because this is interesting to me, right? I think – here's what I would say. He's obviously completely inexperienced in terms of government. I thought that in the early days of the war he was heroic in leading his people. I really did.

What I have seen since, however, is he's firing the head of the army because he said some things that needed to be said, frankly, in my opinion. And look, the corruption side of Ukraine, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the region, like every other country in the region. Like, it's not an outlier. The only reason Russia isn't quite as corrupt is the corruption has been nationalized. Right. And the oligarchs now appointed by Putin instead of being their own men. Right. So what are the mistakes you feel that Zelensky is made in the way that he's prosecuted in this conflict?

And by the way, like everybody would make mistakes fighting the war, right? Yeah, absolutely. What's your analysis? I mean, I think that what you've already summarized is 90% of the problem. Okay. Right. But then on top of that, the idea that this war couldn't have been shut down in the first few weeks, it absolutely could have been shut down in the first few weeks. it absolutely could have been shut down

in the first few weeks. Essentially, the territory has only shifted five or seven percent in either direction over the last two years. But for all the death, all the destruction, all of that for somewhere between two and five percent of change is ridiculous.

Zelensky could have reached basically the same outcome, the same best outcome could have been reached within a few weeks. The problem was the same heroic Zelensky that you're talking about That was just a face. That was an act. That was a set. That was something that was projected to the Western world because at the time he was being coached by Western Powers Chief of which is the United States. So when Putin presented an offer early on, every advisor on Zelensky's side, American advisor, British advisor, NATO advisor, would have said you can't take that offer. Zalinski wouldn't have had the experience himself to know what offer to take. What's a good offer? What's a bad offer? But what he did know how to do,

do was rally the people, right? So now two years later, who looks like the fool? Zalinski. But who was the one that was actually puppet mastering the whole thing? NATO. And we don't take any of the fall for that, right? So that's, for me, when you talk about a statesman, when you talk about a diplomat, when you talk about a true representative of the people, what you're really talking about is somebody who has the courage to stand up for what they believe is truly right for their people. I totally respect your background and your family in Ukraine and in Russia. It doesn't mean I'm right, by the way. The vast, yeah, but I still respect it. The vast majority of the people that I've spoken to, the Ukrainians that I've spoken to, the Americans who have

gone to Ukraine to support the conflict legally or illegally, the vast majority that I talk to are like, it's, they are, they are disappointed and discouraged by how Zelensky specifically handled this conflict from the beginning. That I would dispute. I don't know. now, I think now the situation is changing, and for the reasons that we've discussed, in the first year of the conflict, he was seen universally as a hero in Ukraine. The polling showed that, the people I speak to, you know, that's what I saw. That's fine. And I think that the first year is the first year. Yeah. Well, but that's when, see, this is, and this is what I was going to ask you, because I feel like what should, what ideally should have happened is when the Russians pulled back

from Kiev, when the Russians pulled back from Heirs, when the Ukrainians liberated area around Kharkiv, when they were making all of these gains, that's when the deal should have been done. The problem is when you're winning, you don't and the Western allies

are sending you weapons and they're like why would you do a deal? You're thinking let's get back to, well, let's get back the eastern regions, let's think about Crimea, let's go back to 1991 borders. Do you think maybe that's why they didn't do a deal then. It's just maybe like

they were waiting to see the summer counteroffensive that obviously failed and all of that. So if you're the first counteroffensive was wildly successful. Totally. And that was that's the point in my understanding. That's my, that's the point in which you're saying we could have called it. Hey, let's come to the table right now.

Yeah. We're winning. Momentum's on our side. Really that's what we're talking about is just a shifting in momentum. Yes. All the the amateurs out there are the ones that are talking about winning and losing. Yeah. It's really just a shift in momentum and a shift in advances, right? But when you're talking about that shift in momentum as a time to negotiate, that's one of those times.

I want to know what was happening in the back rooms. Were the Western allies supporting Ukraine saying, hey, you guys, this is a great time to come up with some sort of offer. In fact, there were offers that were being brokered by China. There were peace deals that were being brokered by China. Turkey offered a peace deal on the same period of time. They weren't taken. Well, were they not taken because the administration under Zelensky

was like, we're going to go against what our advisors are recommending and we're going to keep pushing. Or was that deal not taken because the advisors themselves said, hey guys, you're winning, we're not slowing down our support. Let's, you know, let's keep pushing. I would venture to say that the advisors encourage them to keep pushing. I would, I still believe to all of my training and all of my spitey senses that that's what you want to call it, this is a proxy conflict. The United States is using this as an opportunity to degrade Russian capabilities in the long run. Not just like make Russia lose influence. They are literally stealing assets out of, that belong to Russia that are currently being held in European and Western banks. Sovereign assets, they just passed legislation

that means they can take and sell those assets and use them for their own. They just stole money from Russia because of a disagreement over what Russia was doing in Ukraine. That's having that kind of power, having that kind of benefit, that's not because they're trying to protect NATO. That's not because they're trying to enforce democracy. They're trying to degrade a global power competitor, what's known as a GPC country. That's the problem. And Putin knows that. And whoever comes after Putin, when that time comes, also knows that they're being degraded.

The weapon systems are being degraded. Thousands of tanks are gone. Rockets are gone. Missiles are gone. troops are gone, all of the influence, all of the region, the regional damage, all of that is something that Russia is going to have to deal with for the next two decades, just like Israel's going to have to deal with their decisions for the next decade to two decades. This is strategic. It gives the United States and Western allies that much more time to be first place in the race

and it neutralizes Russia. That's, to me, what's really happening in Ukraine. The focus on Ukraine is just a distraction. I know to the Ukrainian people, it's everyday life. But what is American interest in Ukraine? How does any American, how is their life, how is their day impacted in any way by the outcome of Ukraine and Russia? It's not. So why are American dollars? Why are American interests? Why is so much American attention going into what's happening in Ukraine? Because what we do have, what we do value is maintaining a dominance over Russia. Andrew, it's been a wonderful interview. Before we head over to locals where our supporters get to ask you questions, we're going to end

the interview with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? It's a great question. You know, the thing that keeps me up at night is not where we are now, and it's not where we're going in the next one to two years. It's what will we look like in 10 years? I have two young children. I have an 11-year-old son and I have a six-year-old daughter.

I'm curious, if not worried, about what will the Western world look like when my son is 20 years old, 21 years old, legally able to drink in the United States? And when he's starting his young professional career, what will it look like for my daughter when she's 15, 16 years old? It's so difficult to be able to even visualize what the world will look like then. Will we be driven by democracy? Will we be driven by autocracy? Will the United States still be a superpower? Will the United States be at parity with China?

Will my children have to learn Chinese in order to even have a career? These are really interesting and difficult questions for me. And what I find is that most people are talking about right now. And not many people are talking about how to prepare for one of two or three outcomes that are high probability in about 10 years. Ni'how. Sishi. It's been an absolute pleasure, guys.

Head on over to locals where we ask Andrew your questions. Out of Francis and Constantine, who'd make the better spy? This is the better spy. How come? A text says, you're on my mind. A bouquet from 1-800-flowers says, you're my everything. Heartfelt moments belong in the real world, not just your phone. For 50 years, 1-800-flowers has helped millions of people

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