Dr. Sarah Paine: Why The World Is Turning Away From America

Are escalating geopolitical tensions hurtling humanity towards World War III? Dr. Sarah Paine highlights the historical roots of geopolitical conflicts and demonstrates how shifting away from a rules-based maritime order guarantees economic collapse. Dr. Sarah Paine is a renowned geopolitical strategist, historian, and retired professor from the U. S. Naval War College, specializing in Russian and Chinese imperial history and maritime strategy. She applies historical models such as the Peloponnesian War and World War II to decode the actions of leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. In this episode, she explains: ■ The Maritime vs. Continental Divide: How the world is split between maritime powers compounding wealth through free trade and continental empires burning wealth through territorial conquest. ■ The Cost of Isolationism: Why sudden, aggressive tariffs and the abandonment of key international alliances rapidly accelerate inflation, shrink global influence, and destabilize the U. S. economy. ■ The Death Ground Principle: How threatening an adversary's very existence removes all their strategic alternatives, transforming struggling nations into highly lethal, unyielding military opponents. ■ The Illusion of Dictatorial Stability: Why the lack of a peaceful transition of power in dictatorships guarantees that the death of a leader like Putin will trigger profound, unpredictable instability and violent internal power struggles. ■ The Power of Negative Objectives: Why a government's most vital job goes completely unnoticed, focusing on preventing catastrophic disasters before they happen rather than chasing highly publicized achievements. Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:11 How Did the World Get So Close to World War III? 00:05:09 Was the Iran War a Catastrophic Mistake? 00:07:11 Where the Trump Administration Went Wrong 00:09:22 Putin's Biggest Mistake in the Russia-Ukraine War 00:17:25 Should America Stop Fighting Other Countries' Wars? 00:20:17 Why Americans Are Tired of Paying for Foreign Wars 00:21:22 The Deadly Military Strategy of Death Ground 00:24:55 How Rising Gas Prices Could Affect Your Future 00:27:07 Will Ukraine Seek Revenge Against Russia? 00:30:58 What Happens Next in Putin's Russia? 00:37:36 What Would Happen if Putin Stepped Down? 00:40:25 The Real Reason China Is Backing Russia 00:41:28 What Would It Take to End the War in Ukraine? 00:43:25 Why Europe's Economy Is Under Pressure 00:45:36 How the US Tax System Shapes America's Future 00:50:24 Ads 00:50:25 Why the US Midterm Elections Could Change Everything 00:52:33 What's Happening to the Democratic Party's Core Voters? 00:55:54 What Happens to the World if Nothing Changes? 01:02:04 How Will History Remember Volodymyr Zelensky? 01:04:38 Why the World May Be Turning Away From America 01:06:05 Why People Unaffected by War Should Pay Attention 01:10:44 The 3 Levels of Warfare That Shape Every Conflict 01:13:56 Is NATO Expansion Really Threatening Russia? 01:17:40 What Would a Trump-Putin Deal Mean for Ukraine? 01:23:50 Can Ukraine Actually Defeat Russia? 01:25:59 Who Is the Real Enemy in Today's Global Conflicts? 01:32:14 Could Russia Ever Become a True Democracy? 01:33:00 What Happens to Russia After Putin Dies? 01:34:13 The Global Crises We Can't Afford to Ignore Follow Dr. Sarah Paine: Website - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/rO7WS9 •Articles •Lecture series •Research Contributions •Publications Books The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/GXnzc4Q The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/69v4VIT The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/1RVXdGi Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier, 1858–1924 - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/9ZCr1CC Edited Books The Routledge Handbook of the Second World War in the Pacific - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/8lf26P1 The Strategy of Sanctions: From Antiquity to the 21st Century (free download) - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/7u2V1tu Deterrence and Denial: The Power of Fleets in Being - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AMFaHy9 Nation Building, State Building and Economic Development - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/6NGx1Y3 The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ Shop The Diary Of A CEO collection: https://thediary.com/collections/shop ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 ◼ DOAC Bookshelf - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BBnuCf6 Sponsors: Pipedrive - https://pipedrive.com/CEO Bon Charge: https://boncharge.com/DOAC for 20% off Function Health - https://functionhealth.com/DOAC

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:44Speaker 00

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• 0:56Speaker 01

  We're potentially barreling our way into a world war. And it looks like World War III. And once wars start, it's really hard to stop them. But we have reckless people running some very large and important countries around the world, and they're all lying about it. And here's the problem with normalising lies. The Soviet Union collapsed in large part because it was built on lies.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  And you might be one of the most knowledgeable people that I think I've ever spoken to on the subject of World War III, but I don't know what [bleep] going on.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  So history's moving really fast. It's like the logjam's busted and we don't know which way it's going to go. And it's tremendously frightening. Putin decided to kick over the chessboard by invading Ukraine. Donald Trump decided to get into a recreational war in Iran. And this war has trashed the US economy. It has blown the US alliance system, but it also has the collateral damage of taking down the world's economy. And this is the problem with having these dark personalities running countries like Putin. He doesn't care how many people he kills. These people are historically unqualified.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  But Trump has made a deal with Putin for diesel exports.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Oh, this is disinformation. Russia has no capacity to export diesel in sufficient quantities to make any difference whatsoever. As usual, he's lying.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Trump's not going to back out of Iran. It doesn't sound like Putin's going to back out of Ukraine.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  They're going to go forever.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  If we continue on the direction of travel we're on now, what does the future look like?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Well, you've got to prevent these things from breaking out because once they break out, then things are really over. So I can give you cutouts. Here we go.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on the show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Dr Sarah Paine. You might be one of the most knowledgeable people that I think I've ever spoken to on the subjects we're going to speak about today. And they are subjects that I think are incredibly timely, based on everything that's going on in the world. What I see is war over here, war over here, conflict over here, Putin invading this place, Trump's gone into Iran. What I see on the streets of Paris where we were yesterday is rioting and I see disorder. But I don't know where, what the first domino that fell that caused everything that we're seeing now occurred or what the sort of background context is. So I'm going to ask you, where does this all start?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Well, history doesn't start. It's a long continuum, but I'll try on some concepts that might be helpful. The way countries used to organise themselves and often they were empires, was by land was the currency of power. So the continentalist world is all about taking territory for others, right? And when you're doing that, you're burning wealth because you've watched it in all these places. Then later, an alternate possibility came. It originated from maritime powers, but ultimately it becomes a maritime world order, which is something different. Britain is a maritime power. But then you get to the Industrial Revolution, where suddenly you can compound wealth.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And that's a game changer because it changes the currency of power, which formerly in that continental world I've just described, it's all about land. It's changing the currency of power to industry, commerce and trade. That if you do those things, you get compounded wealth. And with that, you can buy your armies or do whatever you want. And then the maritime order is about compounding wealth from just having universal rules. Like you've been travelling all over. Your little piece of plastic works everywhere, right? That's based on rules-based order. And then you've got a small company and you operate in various countries. No one's taking you down for your money that you're making, right? All your transactions are working across the world. This is the rules-based order.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  If it goes away, the billionaires who've been funneling their money into the continentalists, their world will disappear too. They will become casualties of it. And then when I think about what's important on this planet, it would be you, the young. Like, please tell me what is more important for the next generations that follow? Just tell me, what is it? Nothing.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Are you concerned about the next generation?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Why?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  We're potentially barreling our way into a world war. We have reckless people running some very large and important countries around the world. And as you've noticed, once wars start, easy to do that part, really hard to end them. Why? Because whoever's losing doesn't want to lose. So they keep doubling down long after they've lost.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  You made a comment there. You said you think we're sort of barreling towards a world war. People, you know, have probably said that every year since World War II.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Ah, do you have negative and positive objectives here? Ah, yeah, here we go. Negative and positive objectives. So a positive objective, you make something happen. Like, I don't know, I want to snatch Maduro and put him in a New York prison. We can verify that the guys in a New York prison, you snatched him. That's a positive objective. A negative objective would be preventing something from happening. And how can you prove how many times a world war was avoided in the last whatever years? You can't. And it's also controversial, right, on deterrence? Because you can say, ah, I've invested in whatever it is and this has deterred everybody. Then it's prove it. Well, you can't prove it.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  And yet, the example I use as a parent, if you have a little kid, a lot of it's negative objectives, preventing the little kid from getting run over. You hold their hand on the street. If you're living in New York, how many times in a day, just walking up the street, did you save that child's life? Because you were hanging on to their hand before they, you know, took off in front of, into traffic. So negative objectives are incredibly important. And since I'm on this topic, governments, I believe, are primarily about negative objectives, preventing disasters. So disaster number one would be like foreign invasion. But other things, preventing bridges from collapsing. We inspect them, preventing all kinds of malpractice across professions. We licence people, having everyone be illiterate.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  You have, you have education. And so governments don't actually get credit for what they do because on a normal day, it's normal. So you think, well, my government hasn't done anything for me lately. Untrue.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  And that applies here to the idea that, you know, people have probably through history said that there was going to be a war a lot. And so is there particular writing on the wall at this moment in the time?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  What is that writing on the wall?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Well, the Iran war is probably one of the most incompetent wars in human history.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Was that a mistake?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, let's do some concepts of how to analyse that.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  One is, in a war, if you're doing it right, if you really must have a war, you put all the costs on the person you're fighting and then you minimise costs yourself. Well, this war has trashed the US economy. It has blown the US alliance system. Yes, Iran is hurting without a doubt. But it has also had the collateral damage of taking down the world's economy. So this now transforms the United States to an annoyance, to just about everyone's primary adversary for threatening their economies. That's breathtakingly incompetent.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  What was the misunderstanding?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  I'm not privy to the decision-making. So let's do another thing about assessment. This is when you do an assessment, before you even do a war, you need to look at not just my strengths, and if you're the, if you're Iran, your weaknesses, which clearly that was part of the assessment. We're strong, we figured all that out. But also your strengths and my weaknesses. Oh, and plus, all the other people who might be interested. And clearly that was absent. Or the people who should have been saying, hey, the first thing they're going to do is shut down Hormuz, weren't there, right? It's like a hot water bottle. If you cork that thing, it means anybody who lives there, who doesn't have an alternate coastline, cannot get things out by sea.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Does that make sense?

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Narrow seas in wartime, easy to shut down. Ukraine shut down the Black Sea. These places closed down in wartime because between shore artillery and mines and other stuff, things don't move. So when the United States had its big base in Bahrain, was that's where the big naval base is. Okay, how are we going to get to the naval base? I don't think so. So then, where are we going to go? Oh, we're going to have to go to Diego Garcia. That base would be 2,500 miles away. And that little base is like in the middle of nowhere. That would be a mess.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And this is why I asked the question about the misunderstanding because you'd think lots of smart people at the White House would have figured out.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  You're talking first Trump administration, when there was a guy named General Mattis around. We now have Major Pete. And Major Pete is really good at identifying blacks and women and firing them. I mean, great Pete.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And now they're doing testing on testosterone. I kid you not. And I don't know if you remember when you were an adolescent and testosterone's peaking, if we think there's a correlation with that in your greatest reasoning powers. I don't know. All right. Good luck with it, Major Pete. So these people are not, they're historically unqualified for a job. That makes them profoundly dangerous. They've undermined the futures of their own children and they're undermining the prospects for the Republican Party, which they care about.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  What do you think they thought was going to happen?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  How do I know? I'll give you another thought about just generics, what I call type A and type B American hubris. Type A American hubris is all decisions in the world that matter, they happen in the United States. Okay, good luck with that one. And the second one, type B American hubris, which applies to some of the tech bros, is just because you're really good at something, it doesn't make you really good at everything. And you need to have the humility to understand the limits of your expertise and when you need to listen to others. And another piece of it is listening to divergent opinions. So I can't find my blind spots, but maybe you can. And it's really important to talk across political divides, but this, what's going

• 11:52Speaker 01

  on now is just straight up yes men. And they've committed pivotal errors. They have permanently damaged US national security.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  It's the first time in my life that I've heard of a US president start talking about taking other people's countries. It's almost like Trump was talking about taking Venezuela.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a continentalist.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  And taking.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  He's a real estate guy. Yeah, he sees real estate.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  He was saying he was going to take Canada, make it the 51st state, I think. And then he thought that Iran would be a walk in the park, that he would behead the leader, the people would rise up. I mean, this is what they said.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. What's fascinating, if you study, so there's another one, what I call half-court tennis. Half-court tennis, you're only looking if you're American, Team America, and you just, you cross it the net and you're not even looking at things, right? And let's talk about football, and I don't care whether it's American or European football, it works either way, that those who are real football enthusiasts, they know not only about the home team, but they know about all the teams, right? All the major ones. And you all, you know about the players, too. This is a recreational sport. And then in foreign policy, you're not studying the other side? And I don't know if you've seen Iran's Lego videos.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Oh, you need to, on the plane trip back, you need to look at Iran's Lego videos.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Oh, where they're taking the piss out of America.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're taking these little Lego characters. What they demonstrate is the Iranians have a deep understanding of Americans, whereas Americans don't know up from down on what's going on. Here's another, maybe a concept that'll help. Situation or problem? In life, there are certain things that, as desirable as they are, are just not attainable. Right? It'd be great if everyone on the planet was a multimillionaire, right? It's not feasible. And if you're going after an unfeasible objective, you're going to overextend yourself. It's going to have a very bad ending to it. A problem is something that maybe you can solve.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And the United States, the greatest generation understood that Soviet Union, lethal threat, we couldn't solve it. Right? You try to solve that and it'll be the nuclear end to all of us. And so then what you're into is managing it. And then you use various elements of national power. One of them was sanctions, so that you're going to depress Soviet growth. And then, unlike now where we're terrifying everybody, crazy land, what you're trying to do is maximize the growth within your alliance system. So for those who behave, you want to maximize their growth. Those who can't behave, you want to minimize theirs, so that over time, the relative threat diminishes over time. Does not solve it.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  And then you're also trying to get accurate information out, not propaganda, but accurate information, hoping that in generational change, that maybe the other side reassesses. And if they don't, you're perfectly safe behind the castle walls and you're handling this thing at affordable costs, because the sanctions are really costing that much more than you're costing you. A problem, if you can, if you can figure it out, by all means, solve it. But we're trying to solve Iran? There are 90 million of them.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  All right, now to give you some data on how to understand this, because I was trying to figure it out. Nazi Germany, and it had extended borders. It's not just what Germany is today, it probably includes Austria and other things. It had a population, I think of about 80 million, isn't Iran like 90 million? I think the occupation force, as best I can tell, and I'll defer to some World War II historian tells me I'm wrong, is about one and a half million was the occupation force after World War II, just to occupy Germany. But that's not taking into account all the millions of people coming from Russia, everywhere else. So when you're talking Iran, equivalent size, it's not feasible. And like, why would you want to do it? They're a bunch of Iranians.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  You want to contain the, the nuclear thing at affordable costs, and that was the, the Obama deal. Right? That was, all the permanent members of the UN Security Council signed on to that and the EU, and they thought it was the best they could do, had this really intrusive inspection system to get Iran to dial back its nuclear capabilities. Was it perfect? No, but it was feasible and it mitigated the threat to make it bearable. Now, what's the lesson for Iran? What do you suppose the lesson is for everybody now?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Called get a nuke. Right? With these wars, it's like, if you don't have one, you're toast. We have incentivized proliferation. Putin with his war initially, and then us with this Iran thing. It's profoundly self-defeating.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  You referred to it as a pivotal error.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Which is another one of your.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Your concepts.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think that these concepts, the reason for doing it, is you can use them for other things. All right, pivotal error is, once you've made it, the choices that you had before, they're a lot better than the ones you have now, and you never get the old ones back. So you think about Vladimir Putin, his invasion of Ukraine, pivotal error. Russia is just, has burned through its Cold War arsenal. Putin would have been much better when he did the easy walk-in with little green men into Crimea and Donbass, of just sitting with that and slowly destabilizing Ukraine over a number of years. Right?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Instead, he has massively contributed to Ukrainian national identity. National identities often come out of wars. In fact, Britain massively contributed to the development of the US national identity during the American Revolution, because it was all these separate colonies that by the time that revolution was over, had a much more cohesive sense of nation. And all these national institutions that grow up as a result of it, and you see Ukraine's doing that as, as well. So pivotal error. And then for us, on the Iran war, we've lost our alliance system. Sure, someone else can reassess and we'll try to restore stuff, but we will never be the trusted partner ever again. It's done.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  You said the post-World War II world is collapsing. And we are now going into a second Cold War that could end in nuclear war.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  What is, what is it that's collapsing, Sarah?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Well, isn't it the way systems work is by norms? That we follow norms. And the way I think about it is like traffic. So most of us, whatever side of the road you're supposed to drive on and whatever country you're in, you do that. And then there's stoplights and you do that. And I get it, the people speed and all that stuff, but mostly people are following the, the rules of the road. And there aren't nearly enough, if everyone decided to just do whatever on a given day, there aren't enough policemen ever to enforce that. It would just be mayhem. Right? So the rules-based order was always based on norms, of following them. And the US legal order was based on norms of everyone more or less following them.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Give me an example of some of those norms.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  When you lose an election to go, I congratulate the other side and I'll do better next time, instead of, oh no, they cheated.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Now, the United States is pulling out of this order. The existential threat that this is posing has led to the most rapid institution building in Europe. It's incredibly fast.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Institution building?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. You've got the Baltic Eight.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Who's that?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  So you've got Nordic countries, right? You've got Finland, Sweden, Norway, and then Denmark. That makes four. And the Scandinavian countries, and then you've got the Baltic, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And then Iceland's part of this as well. And so they've been organizing all sorts of security things together. There's remilitarization going on. There's also work on spaceports all over the place. Britain is, since the 60s, has had spaceports. So has Norway, Sweden. Britain's going to build a new one up in the Shetland Islands. And it's because you all are going to be launching your own satellite system. And I think also you all are sick of our credit card payment systems. You're going to do that locally. There's an app that's been put out.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Apparently, if in Europe you want to buy stuff, your app will tell you immediately whether a product is American or not. So you don't have to buy that product. It's called the B-word, boycott, which is happening to America right now as a result of doing all of this. And you've seen Prime Minister Carney of Canada traveling everywhere, organizing the middle powers. That'll be the new world order. It's unfolding. And the United States is, it's gone rogue. As America, it's, we are on the right side of two world wars. Made an incredibly positive contribution in many, many ways. And what we're doing now is so negative, and it's profoundly negative for the futures of our children.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Would you say to the people that say, Sarah, we should stay out of these wars? We should stay out of the Ukraine situation?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  By all means, do not send combat troops all over the place, which is what we were doing in the Middle East. You position people like Ukraine to succeed. You don't have to send any troops there, but give them what they need to solve this. That is a cheap thing to do. The uncheap thing to do is blow our alliance system. So now people are boycotting us. There are all kinds of industries in the United States that are being hurt by this, from, what is it? Kentucky bourbon makers have to shut down? Kid, you're not. Because Canadians won't buy our booze. And you think about, if you have a business, let's say Canada's only 5% or 10% of your business. Well, if they boycott you, that might be your profit margin.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Right? Canada's arranging to sell its energy to Europe and other places and trying to de-risk from us. And it's entirely our fault. We threaten them.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  People say that, you know, we don't want to, we don't want to have to pay for someone else's war, Sarah. It's gonna, we don't know how long it's going to last. It's going to cost so much money. What'd you say to those people?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  It goes back to limited and unlimited objectives. An unlimited objective is regime change, and the most unlimited variant is genocide as well. So Hitler had both, right? And Putin has very unlimited variant because he wants to not only take over Ukraine, but he also wants to shoot up a good part of the government, down to small children. That was, he was trying to execute the Zelensky family. What person does that sort of stuff? In addition, he wants to eliminate the purveyors of Ukrainian culture. You know, kill them. And that's called genocide. So you can have a whole continuum, right? You can have the most unlimited thing of genocide plus regime change, and you come a little over, and it's just regime change.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And then the limited stuff means, I only want half your country to, all the way down to, I don't know, I want you to be polite to me at football games, whatever it is. So this is where Russia comes in. I believe, and I could be wrong, and the key on being right or wrong is you should constantly reassess, don't worry about being wrong, what you do. When you realize you got it wrong, you say, I got new information, and here's why I think differently. But I believe that Russia has unlimited objectives, that Putin wants to restore the old Soviet empire. There are many problems with that. One of them, is you think about Russia. Russia's been the backwater of Europe forever, under the czars.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Can you think of one Russian product that you have ever wanted to buy?

• 23:58Speaker 00

  No comment.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Okay. And let me give you a little hint. Smirnoff's is a British company. Right? They don't even produce the vodka. So it's these manufactured goods, no. It's just a basic, primary goods. So it has a failing economic model. Then during the Cold War, it's exporting communism everywhere, setting back a living standard everywhere. When you do that, it involves a lot of deaths because there are children who aren't getting vaccines, all kinds of things that are not happening when you're doing that. So that's what Russia's done. And now Putin thinks, based on his sheer legacy of incompetence, that now he has the right to rule everyone else. What's really going on? He's a continentalist.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  And so he wants to steal everyone else's stuff. Right in the beginning of the Ukraine war, people were stealing washing machines. That'd be a rather heavy item to steal. Like, who would do that? Someone without washing machines. Right? And the Ukrainians don't want to live that way.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Did you underestimate them?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. That's typical. There's probably Russian type-eight hubris. The Russians are superior to all others because they can't figure out what they're superior on, so they're going to come up with something that's abstract, like their soul. Well, prove it.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Zelensky told me that when the Russian soldiers rolled in, that he found that they had brought food for three to 10 days. So they thought the war would be over in three or 10 days. And also that they brought uniforms to celebrate, to do a victory parade, because they thought the war was going to be that easy.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  And what they were met with is Ukrainians, civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at their tanks.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you look as if you have another question.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  It's just, it's interesting because, yeah, it's, again, we were just talking about underestimating Iran, but there is a hubris as well that's taken place with the Russians. They've underestimated the culture of the people. Death ground.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you have an unlimited objective, what you're doing is, if I have an unlimited objective against you, I'm putting you on death ground. What does that mean? It means if you don't fight, I'm going to just come kill you. And so your only alternative is to fight, because they're going to just kill you. So if you have these unlimited objectives, expect one hell of a fight. And it can transform the most dysfunctional country into a lethal adversary, as Hitler discovered with the Soviet Union back in the day. Stalin had shot a lot of his officer corps.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  He'd created famine in Ukraine, which is a breadbasket, which is exactly what Putin has done to Ukraine now, and what the United States is undoubtedly doing to Iran. My understanding is the Ayatollah who's gone was against having nukes. No one says who comes after him is against having nukes. If they're on death ground, as long as Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu are in power, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to cause trouble until those two people are out of power. Right? And so people who want to keep Netanyahu and Trump in power longer just understand it's going to make Iran go on longer.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And then I'm terrified that Trump will do something like drop a tactical nuke somewhere, and then things are really over. The United States will be forever this despicable country. The only country in the world that's ever dropped nukes on anyone, twice on Japan, and then we're going to do a third on Iran?

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Do you think that's plausible?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  I have no idea. If you had told me 10 years ago that where we're at is, was even remotely positive, I would say, you're insane. What have you been smoking lately? The United States was going to toss our alliances, tell Canada, you're our 51st state, and then tell Green M.P.S. we're going to take Greenland from you and therefore behave yourselves? I would have thought that just ludicrous. Who would do that?

• 28:04Speaker 00

  What do you say to people who are experiencing their gas prices go up at the pump, they're seeing costs rise because of this war, because of the energy shock that's taken place because of it, and they want, they want it to end. So they're saying, listen.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Vote.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Vote.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  One third of Americans voted for where we're at now. One third voted for anything but this. And then one third couldn't get off their couch. Get off your couch and vote because it matters for your children, that in the United States, Americans need to start talking to each other. This, only my party can win? Crazy. A two-party state is absolutely necessary because how do you see blind spots? Also, you will watch Trump? You want your gas tanks prices to go down? He's not going to reassess on this war. He's just going to keep on going. The way you reassess in democracies, since people are reluctant to say, gee, I got it wrong, and we all get it wrong, is you elect in the other party.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  But if I just think about what's going on here in Europe, because I'm thinking about a particular friend who's been doing some tweets recently, and she's been tweeting that because the costs in the UK seem to be rising.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Petrol and other things, we should just let, this is what she said, she said, we should just let Russia take the Ukraine, and then that'll mean that energy will be

• 29:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  stabilized.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  I get it, where she's coming from, I get it. But it's one of the staples in war colleges is the enemy gets a vote, meaning that the Russians are going to come for you whether you like it or not.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  How do we know that?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  You don't know, right? You don't know. But I can look at Russian history, they're continentalists, they go forward, forward, forward. And then I think you've got some kind of map that shows what Transnistria and all those places.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Oh, this one.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. So if I can do it this way. So these are the places that Putin has taken. Well, this one's earlier, and this one comes to the end of the Cold War. This is his buddy.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  So he's basically taken Belarus, but politically.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that's right. And so, and he's taken all this stuff from Ukraine. But these places he took, wait, see, Putin comes to power in the Second Chechen War, and Russians like that. That's how he rises. And then in 2008, he goes after Georgia and helps these two places separate. But if you look at it, if you could draw a circle here, it's a continental, I don't know if you ever watched The Jetsons, the cartoon where you've got a spaceship, it's round, continentalists is looking at their dashboard, it's about 360 degrees around their little spaceship on all those borders, and you want to extend outwards. So this is the, the plan A. And then after you get plan A, they keep on going.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  It's been this way for a long time. And for your friend to be like, what evidence do you have? Show it to me that they're going to stop. Show me that. What in their, in their history gives you that? I understand that you wish it to end. This is another tragedy. So we had the Cold War that ended on Western terms with Bush Senior and Helmut Kohl did a masterful job at war termination, truly masterful on, on Western terms. And then we had the magical, this is when you were growing up, the magical inter-Cold War period, where China and Russia turn inward, and the United States is more or less following

• 31:36Speaker 01

  the rules, so that you don't have opposing sides funding, opposing sides of insurgencies all over the world, and wars just torch wealth, right? Think about, if Putin keeps any part of Ukraine, it's a glowing mess, right? It's been leveled. You're just destroying things.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  But they're going to continue to fight as well, aren't they? This is what Zelensky told me. He said.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  They're going to go forever. What did he say? He's the real person.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  He said something to me which I found to be quite illuminating, and I don't think people consider. He said to me, he had gone and found, just one example, a trench, what the Russian soldiers had left, where there was 500 tortured bodies in it. These bodies were tied up.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  And they were of all ages. And he said, it's, he kind of implied that it's very naive to think that the families of those people in those ditches are just going to allow there to be a sudden stop to this, and that they're not going to continue to want revenge. And Zelensky said to me, he said, after seeing that, and he said it, he said, and I probably shouldn't say this, but he said that he wants revenge. He says, if you see what I saw, you would want revenge too.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  The Russians are, it's unspeakable, what they've done. In most of my life, Germans wore the crown of infamy for what had happened in World War, less so World War I, but it's World War II, where they just, it's really, it takes heinous to a new level. Well, Vlad the Bad, he is now owns that crown for Russians going in because Germans have reformed their educational system, and there's no German now who has any responsibility for what happened back then. But there are lots of Russians who have responsibility for going on right now. And, oh, another piece of Russians, they go, oh, Soviet Union, has nothing to do with us. That's, you know, we're Russians, that was the Soviet Union. Excuse me. Russia

• 33:26Speaker 01

  is what ran the Soviet Union. It's yours, you own it. And you think about, like, the way French, French use the word France, it includes all five republics, includes all the monarchies, includes Napoleon and stuff. We all know it's France. It's just the Russians who are trying to say, oh, it's the Soviet Union. We had nothing to do with that. No, you had everything to do with that. You're unrepentant. So for your friend, if you look at the long arc of Russian history, it's terrible. It used to be under the Romanov Dynasty, at least, they aspired to have connections with Western Europe, although I think Nicholas II said, well, you know, we're 200 years behind, so we're going to do, do it our way. Well, once you get the communists, they want to overthrow the entire

• 34:11Speaker 01

  capitalist world order, and Putin hasn't changed. The continentalists are profoundly dangerous. What they want to do is divide the world into spheres of influence, like the old empires of Eurasia. And so they're going to be fighting on the edges of these spheres of influence about who gets what.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Who are the continentalists? Russia, China?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yep, Russia, China, Donald Trump. He's claiming Canadian territory. He's claiming Greenland. He's kidnapped a head of state. I get it, the guy's reprehensible. I'm no fan of Maduro. I mean, look at the war. We've discussed all the problems from the war in Iran. You're talking about your friend in Britain who's being wrecked by the petrol prices. Okay, whose fault is that?

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Trump's.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Trump would say it was Biden's fault.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Oh, everything's Biden's fault.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  He, you know, he often, his favorite line is to say, this war never would have happened if I was in power. That's what he says all the time.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, except he started this one. So it was fascinating, in having studied foreign policy forever, it doesn't make me write about anything, but it's really rare, or like domestic policy as well, that you do a policy, whatever it is, put a new law in effect, and then there are consequences of it. But the consequences usually roll out out over years. So it's hard to say, did this law exactly cause this outcome? It's hard to say. Not in this war.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Which one?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  The Iran War.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  It's just obvious. Every time you load up at the pump, you have a weekly reminder that Donald Trump's war has done a number on you. It's not Biden.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  He would say we couldn't let Iran get nuclear weapons.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  It's much more likely now that they will get nuclear weapons, doing what, he's incentivized them to get nuclear weapons. Here's my, my thing about Donald Trump. Is he known for, for providing accurate information? You know the answer to that question, as do all of your viewers. And here's the problem with normalizing lies, which is what's going on in the United States. A, no one likes being lied to, right? If you're an insider trader, maybe you like it if you, you get your little truth, and then you, everyone else is being lied to. All right, the Soviet Union was a society that collapsed in large part because it was built on lies. Here's how it worked. If you, since it's all run by a plan, this communist plan, so you're running your little, let's say, they even

• 36:35Speaker 01

  had podcasts, and you decide however many cameras you need a new year, and how many you got on stock, or whatever you think your staff is, you're going to exaggerate what you think you need, because you aren't sure the plan's going to give it to you, and you're going to understate what you have, again, because you're not sure you're going to get things. So everyone's doing that across an economy. They're aggregating all that data. It's garbage. The further up the food chain you go, the more ludicrous the data is. But there in central Moscow, they're coming up with a plan that's going to allocate things. They're grossly misallocating capital, labor, and they don't notice that it's a disaster until it's metastasized.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  And it shatters the place. Another thing to give you, an economy doubles at different growth rates according to the following equation, the natural log of two over whatever that growth rate is. If your economy grows at 1% per annum, it'll double in 69, 70 years, something like that. If you grow at 3%, so it's a 2% differential, you'll double in 23 years. So if you do dumbassery, like tariff yourself, or you get into a war that's gonna send prices up and just mess things up, or if you're a little smarter and you sanction the other

• 37:56Speaker 01

  guy, so only the other guy is experiencing this, and you knock off 2% growth, instead of waiting 23 years to double, you're gonna wait 71, that's a long wait. So, these are the things that people aren't considering of the cumulative effects of making the kind of errors that we're making, also the advantages of sanctions over wars. Sanctions don't solve problems, but you're shrinking the opposing piggyback. And if you cooperate with allies, you're growing yourself. So it's a form of chemotherapy. You don't eliminate the tumor, but you try to shrink it back.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  You have a PhD in Russian, is it history?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  So what does Russian history tell us, is, and I guess geopolitical history generally, is likely to happen next as it relates to the Russian-Ukraine situation? And is it dependent on what other allies do? Or do you think there's already a pivotal error that's been made by Putin?

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Oh, it's already done. He's just gonna go forward.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  He's just gonna go forward?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  He's just gonna escalate and keep going forward. Yep.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  Because he can't, I mean, he can't go back. He doesn't, I mean, not that I know of.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Well, this is the problem with dictatorships. What's wonderful about elections, so they throw you out of office, but no one kills you, no one takes your bank accounts away. It really takes a lot of the, the white knuckle event out of it. And in Russia, Onur Stalin, when he was busy shooting everybody, he dies and eventually you get Khrushchev as his successor. That successor generation decided they wanted to make it so you didn't get killed when you left office, that they send you to your little dacha, or that's your summer house in Russia. Putin's problem is, this is the problem with dictators, for many of them, there's no off-ramp where they're alive.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Right? What happens to Putin when he, he gets swapped out of power? If he just dies naturally, okay, then that happens to all of us. But he's arranged it so there is no retirement plan, except something really ugly.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Why? How?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  A dictator? Well, how would you ever replace Putin in Russia?

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Can't he just step down and go off to his mansion and chill out?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Probably not, because there will be people who will come kill him on his immediate entourage. He's the whole protection racket that's running stuff.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Is it possible for him to be overthrown by the Russian people?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  It is possible, because it just seems like he's got such a tight grip on.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Ah, well, that's the thing about dictatorships, is they seem eternal until the day they shatter, and then it's impossible to predict.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  How do they shatter?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Oh, the Romanov dynasty. Nicholas II, like Vlad the Bad, decided to get into a recreational war that he didn't have to, which is the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, 1905. And why Russia, this is the whole thing about Russia, why does Russia need more territory? It is the largest country on the planet, right? They have tons of resources. Their problem is they have no economic model to develop it, because they refuse to go by the norms of having rules so people can start businesses, like a young person like you, who can start a business. And then when you start doing well, you can actually keep your money. That's not what happens in Russia, you'll get shaken down. So Nicholas II does that war, he loses it, but then there's another concept, opportunity cost.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  So if you spend all of your money fighting that war, what are you not doing? You're not building a railway system here in the western part of Russia. So come World War I, Nicholas can't deploy his troops very well. He's got no way in for his allies to supply him, because Russia's, this is Russia's stuff, main ports for getting things by sea are here, the Baltic, or here, the Black Sea. Well, those things shut down in wartime, right? Nothing goes through them. So if Nicholas hadn't done his dumbassery here and built railways, he might have had a different outcome. And why does he get overthrown? Because there are food riots in St. Petersburg, that was the capital in those days.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Okay, better railways, you would have delivered the bread better. Also, you might have gotten food aid from other places. These opportunity costs are huge. Now Vlad the Bad has done his magic here. Who's supporting him? Well, China is providing what's vital for him right now.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  Why are they supporting Vladimir Putin?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Why not? Oh, God.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Why don't they just stay out of it?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  From their point of view, they want the United States just out of everyone's business. And they also don't particularly like Russia either, so if Russia's gonna go weaken itself here, China will benefit from this. China needs their resources. My graduate dissertation was a history of the Russo-Chinese border, and Russia took territory from the Chinese sphere of influence greater than all of US east of Mississippi. It's all this stuff that was a part of the Chinese sphere of influence. You wanna tell me the Chinese don't remember that?

• 43:01Speaker 00

  So China are supplying Russia with resources they need?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, to make missiles and things.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  They're charging them for that?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  They're making money from it, but they're also weakening Russia.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, because they're, Russia has been sanctioned on its energy and other things, so China's getting all these things at much reduced prices, and they're driving a hard bargain. And the Russians in the past had all these nuclear weapons and other things to dissuade the Chinese from playing Mr. Tough Guy, except Vladimir Putin has squandered all of that. He can't even deal with Ukraine, let alone this. So they've done a massive pivotal error. They're in real trouble. And then they're not even, they're not having kids, and so the, the long-term effects are getting better and, or worse and worse from them.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Russia have the missiles just to flatten the Ukraine, don't they?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  I don't know the details.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  But they have like nuclear weapons.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do. They do. This is beyond my expertise. And in order to have them, you have to maintain them, and the Russians are consummate liars. Who knows? Who knows? My understanding is that India and China have told Russia that would be a massive no-no if they do that. But when people get cornered, then others have no influence over them, and when they're totally cornered. So I don't know the answer.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  So it sounds like, from speaking to Zelensky, he will not yield an inch of Ukraine.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  Putin. And it sounds like Putin has to walk away looking like he got a victory of sorts for his people and for his power, and really for the message, you know, to some of these other people that he sits on a border with and to NATO, I guess. The two things can't be true, in my view.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  No, that's the problem with unleashing unlimited wars. World War II, yes, the Allies won, but at obscene cost, right? Tens of millions of Russians died, millions of others died. What is it supposed to be, 55 million people died in that thing? You wanna do that over again? Really, these unlimited wars are ugly. It is not the way to handle things. It is far better to deploy your diplomats and lawyers to international institutions. Sure, the deal isn't perfect for what you wish you had gotten, but the wealth will

• 45:25Speaker 01

  compound if you have people your age to go start their businesses, have laws that allow them to do it, instead of trying to poach everyone's stuff. That is the way to, to do things. So yeah, of course, Ukraine won't give up, and we should support Ukraine, because they're doing the heavy lifting for all of us. That's the answer to your friend. You wanna be fighting on the front lines? No. So help them. And morals matter in this world. They matter. Honesty matters.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Civility matters. All these things matter. Oh, and there's another piece I think matters. What do governments do? Primary things. Protect your national security, that's number one. And protect your prosperity, try to increase your prosperity, those are two. So for your friend, what is gonna protect British national security? And that will involve Europe, because if Britain's alone, it's not gonna do well without Western Europe being healthy as well.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  Has this somewhat fallen at an unfortunate time? Because Europe is not doing the best economically at the moment, and there are lots of sort of internal conflicts taking place. I mean, I was, I was in France yesterday, and I left my hotel, the streets are on fire. At nighttime, there's balaklav and people running into all the shops and smashing them to pieces. And, you know, then I think about the UK, you know, maybe not in a worse position, but I actually, I mean, I read, just before I, I came out here to speak to you, I read a headline from the Sunday Times that reads, this is in today's newspaper, "Britain is Going Broke, It's Just A Matter Of When." "With $3 trillion debt and interest of $110 billion a year, the new Chancellor has little

• 47:15Speaker 00

  room to maneuver," from Jessica Cook. This is like the sentiment that, that is quite unprevalent at the moment in Europe. So when you, you think about spending money.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  On another nation, you know, this is probably one, there's a lot of people that are against it.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Europe feels weak.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And here's the story for your generation, because I'm gonna age out of this mess, but you're gonna have to live with it. Think about the generation, it's the end of World War II, Europe's leveled.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Everyone's indebted right after that war. And that generation, within 10 years, had set up the institutional architecture that held the peace in Europe for the next three generations. That is quite an achievement. And what's going on now is history's moving really fast. I mean, it's just, it's like the logjam's busted and we don't know which way it's going to go. And it's tremendously frightening. But on the other hand, it is a tremendous opportunity to, before the concrete sets again, for people to get moving. What is it? When the going gets tough, the tough get going? Get going.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  And do well.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  And work on the next set of institutions that will help growth rates in Europe that have not been great, that need to be better. Probably part of that has to do with streamlining regulations. And then that's beyond my capabilities of, of understanding. Americans think all their problems are about immigrants coming across the border, right? And I'm all for having legal immigration. Why would you have, you know, people should have to follow rules, et cetera. But you don't have to be cruel on how you expel them. You can do that humanely. Being gratuitously mean, I don't see it. But so people, well, as in Europe, identify that there's this problem that for the young, it's just hard to make it. What's going on here?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  And this feeling there are no opportunities and it's just hopeless. Okay, that's probably a correct identification of problem. But in the United States, I suspect the answer is not immigrants. It's probably our tax code. So tax code is what sends money one way or the other. It's what's going to make money available for spending things one way or the other. So in the United States, you've got a handful of people who've become billionaires really, literally over the last 15 years. Can't do that without the tax code. And then there's, I know another piece in the United States. You know about monopolies, right? You own all of a particular industry and then you can set prices of what you sell stuff at.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  But then there's monopsony, which means you hire such a large percentage of the workforce or in what a particular area you're at, you dictate wages. Well, we got problems with wages in the United States that they've been driven downwards. And people are working 40 hour weeks and more than that and they can't make ends meet. What's going on here? They're being underpaid. And then the money is just being funneled into a handful of families' coffers. I think in the United States, there are apparently a thousand families that are worth a billion or better. It's not actually very many people.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Because the world is different now and there's a sort of digital assets, or at least assets that you can move digitally. Is it harder to use the tax code as a tool for fixing inequality?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I mean, you'd have to talk to a tax specialist, but the US tax code.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  That allows people to become hugely wealthy is, is an error.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Well, this is where there's a missing podcast in the United States, which it would be someone actually reading the tax code and breaking it, literally breaking it down into pieces and then talking the human connection of it all. And there's a lot of there there, but it hasn't been. I guess it would be too boring to read it. I think actually there's a lot in there.

• 51:21Speaker 00

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• 53:31Speaker 01

  They are.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  For people that don't know what the midterms are, which is probably most of the world, what is the significance of the midterms? And what is it?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Well, you're electing a percentage of the US Senate and all of the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives, each term is two years. Senators are six years and the Senate seats are staggered. Right? So you're, you're doing a selection of them. And then you're doing governors as well and.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  So let me repeat this back to you and tell me if I've got it right. So essentially in the midterms, right now, Trump has power because he controls the House and the Senate.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  In terms of there's more Republicans than Democrats.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  And the Supreme Court.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  And the Supreme Court. But in the midterms, it's very likely that he will lose the Senate.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  That I don't know. There's much speculation.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  The polls suggest.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Those polls were originally, he might well lose the House. Maybe the Senate. Now it looks like both. But then if he's going to be sending ICE agents to all the polling stations and, and then people are going to walk away with the voting machines.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  And he's offering people $5,000 if they vote for Republicans.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Well, this is called the end of the norms. And if Americans, it's, it's going to be a national IQ test for the United States and on how they vote. Because every time they go to the pump, they know why their prices have gone up. What's sad is people often identify with party. Parties come and go. The party, the Republican party today isn't remotely what it was with Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan. It's a different party. It's all about one guy. And you should identify around what your goals are. And I recommend protect national security, promote prosperity. You can look at this war and go, it's wrecked both. And whether you like the guy or don't, it's his fault.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  And it's the fault of the party that has enabled him at every point. And Pete Hegseth, who's a major, right? It's, it's not, it's an okay rank, but not to run the Pentagon. The Republican Party confirmed him. It was an act of supreme dereliction of duty of doing that. They could have demanded another General Mattis and we might not be in Iran today.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  And if Trump loses or the Republicans lose the midterms, essentially what it means is they are going to have to cooperate a lot with the Democrats.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  No, they're not going to cooperate. They've made clear they're not cooperating with Democrats.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  But to get things passed.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  That would be bipartisan. They've rejected being bipartisan. The, the old Republican Party, yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  But how do they get things passed then?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  They won't.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  But Trump has executive power, so he can still sign executive orders.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is another thing about norms. He just does things and changes facts on the ground. If it later turns out to be illegal, he's already done the thing. Right? There's this golf course in, in, that he cares about in Washington. He's cut down all the legacy trees. I mean, imagine, what is it? Richmond Park in London. Imagine someone goes in there and just levels all the 800 year old trees. There's no walking that back. That's how, that's what he does.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Does the West have an enemy? And if so, who is the enemy? Because we often think, oh, it's China. Oh, it's Russia.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. The, well, let's forget about the West. Let's talk about democratic core.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Okay, what's democratic core?

• 57:02Speaker 01

  The democratic core in my books are the democracies. And so it's Western, it's through Central Europe. It would be Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, definitely Canada, the United States. No, I mean, we're threatening to invade Greenland. That does not make you the democratic core when you do that. You don't, I mean, we're threatening to make Canada our 51st state. Who the hell does that?

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Why do you think Trump is saying that?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  I have no idea. I'm not a psychiatrist. Well, you follow his recent speeches. Can you follow them?

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Well, I'm asking you because you've studied dictators.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  I haven't studied senile narcissists. The problem with, say, little Taiwan and China, it's like, why would? Look at Taiwan. It's like 1, 250th the size of China. I mean, give me a break. It's a little teeny tiny place. Why does China give a damn? They're a bunch of Taiwanese sitting there. Why would you care? It's because it's showing that you can have a vibrant democracy in a the preponderant ethnic group of China is the Han. And their rather racist ideas were that, well, the democracy is not and the Han are mutually exclusive. Well, the Taiwanese have proven that that's nonsense. And for these dictators, it's like, why not hold a fair election, boys?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Because they wouldn't be elected. That's why. If there were fair elections, Xi Jinping would no more be the head of China, nor would Vladimir Putin be the head of Russia. Right? And they regard that as the existential threat. On the other hand, what is it the sorts of societies that produce massive wealth? The democracies. Why? Because we tolerate each other. We give each other legal protections. We allow people to start their businesses and keep the fruits of their, what they make from these businesses. Whereas these other folks, if you think about when China became wealthy, it's when it joined the maritime rules based order. And when it was following the rules.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Now, it hasn't done it yet. It can compete compounding wealth, but not if it's going to be launching some wars. That'll be it.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  China seems to stay out of wars.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  What do you mean with Vietnam? It's been a while, but China has created over a succession of wars. Basically, the Qing Dynasty falls in 1911, 1912. And then you have what's called the warlord period. Where all the different, their provincial leaders are all duking it out with each other. And eventually that coalesces into a bilateral communist nationalist fight circa 1927. So all that's going on in the background. And then you have the United States, in its infinite wisdom, the first America firsters in 1930, in response to the Great Depression, decide they're going to put huge tariffs up. And the economists come to President Huo and say, buddy, don't do it.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Because everyone else is going to respond in kind, and he does it anyway. And then we're into a massive trade war, right? America puts up tariffs. What do you suppose everyone's going to do? Put up their tariffs. And then you're tanking economies globally, and it deepens the Great Depression. So here's trade dependent Japan going, now what? We always cooperated with these people. Now they've shut us off. So they decide in those days, the only solution is we need an empire large enough so that we can become self sufficient. So they move into Manchuria in 1931. So the reason why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor later on is because the United States is sending aid to China. And the Japanese want us to stop. So they attacked Pearl Harbor, which in those days, Hawaii is not a state, doesn't become a state until 59, looks like it's a US colony.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  And they thought we'd wise up and quit, but no, we doubled down and would come after Japan. So think about massive warfare that's tearing China apart, starting right after 1911, 1912, continuing all the way through 1945. Then you have the Chinese Civil War. That does not end until 1949. And then you have all of Mao's political campaigns, antiritist. Well, you have, oh, you have the Korean War. That's the other one from 50 to 53. So that's another war. And Deng Xiaoping does his number on Vietnam. And that's, it's costly and it's short and quick. And before then, there's the 62 border war with India, where Chinese trounced India and turned India into a permanent enemy.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  That was a mistake. Then you have antiritist campaigns, Cultural Revolution, where Mao is churning things so that he remains in power. Oh, and while all that's going on, you have the Great Famine, which is created by his great leap forward. Keeps exporting food because that's where he gets his pocket change and people are starving. So after that, you think the Chinese want any more wars? Right? They're, they want to chill out of this thing for a while. But basically, all those people who did all that fighting and might have a sense that maybe you don't want to do any more of that? They're all dead.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  If we continue on the direction of travel we're on now, what does the future look like?

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  It looks like World War III. I, back to the negative objectives, you've got to prevent these things from breaking out. Because once they break out, look at Iran. Is Donald Trump going to want to back down? No, he's going to want to show that somehow he's won.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  This is a, a chart showing how many nuclear warheads each country has. When you say that World War III could be next if we continue on this trajectory, my rebuttal is, but we now live in a nuclear powered world where if any one of these players gets into a serious situation, they could basically wipe out life for everybody on planet Earth.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  So does this keep us safe to some degree?

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Mutually assured destruction?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Putin has already taken that little thing and flipped it over. When he is threatening NATO countries, he has been violating the airspace just in the last few days, sending drones into the territorial waters. I thought of Bulgaria and Romania. You can correct me if I got that wrong. And they were shot down there. At some point, you're into Article Five territory. Europeans don't want to do it because it'll, it'll be an ever loving mess.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Article Five being NATO.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Then you have to, you all go to war together.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  That's part of NATO's treaty to defend every end.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Well, that was the strength of it is while the generation who remembered World War II, while they lived, they were really careful not to trigger that. And that's not true of who we've got now.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  If Putin invaded Poland, do you think World War III would begin?

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  You think so? And what would World War III look, look like? Because my memories are all tanks and trenches.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  I have no idea, but you can get on a nice computer program and you can pick your megatonnage of your nuclear weapon. And then you can put it over a city of your choice. And you can look at how many people die. It's obscene. And this is the problem with having these dark personalities running countries. Like Putin, he doesn't care how many people he kills. There's a problem when people like that reach those positions. Right? We human beings have real trouble identifying dark personalities until they become Adolf Hitler and go, oh, whoops, there are concentration camps going on here. And I think it's because most of us can't imagine wanting to inflict

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  that kind of obscene pain on other people. But you can see the consequences of putting them in power. It's really ugly.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  Trump's not going to back out of Iran. It doesn't sound like Putin's going to back out of the Ukraine.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  There is a solution for the United States. Is with the next Congress, impeach and convict him. And then just say, sweetheart, you're retired.

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  Someone else is going to have to then step into his shoes.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Oh, well, yeah, but this is the problem with the pivotal error. Whoever will do it will back out on really bad terms. And I think the Republicans want the Democrats to do that because then you can go blame the Democrats and said, no, it's your war. In fact, on wars, look for those who start them. Those are the ones you want to blame, not for those who end them.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  How do you think history is going to remember Zelensky?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  He's a hero for all time. Oh, he's, he's, you met a great statesman. There are very few of them. He's one of them. Yeah, think of him. He could have left Ukraine, right?

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  He told me Biden called, called him and offered him a ride.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. What was the famous, I don't want a ride, I want, what is it?

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  I want ammunition.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's also a man who can really communicate. And I cannot believe that we're not supporting him. It is the most, one of the most clear cut wars of aggression you can possibly imagine. And then the brutality with which the Russians are treating people. And you're going to ask yourself, who are these people doing these sorts of things? There's something wrong with them. And you don't want them anywhere near the rest of Europe. And I get it. It's really scary. But it's scary because of these people.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  The Russians.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. You need to get Ukraine totally on its feet and Russia to cease dropping ordinance on everybody and give them a massive timeout from the middle powers that Carney and friends are busy organizing even as we speak.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  They've done a lot of work in the last few years.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  And they'll do more.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Do you think the world is pulling away from the United States? I mean, Europe and-

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're fleeing. So the United States takes good old Maduro. So what's everyone else doing? Well, when you have a heart attack, like the United States can just take your leader away. What would you do? You're going to counterbalance with China as the less lunatic option. So here's the United States wanting to proclaim this a US preserve. Well, what we've done is guaranteed that these folks are going to be incredibly welcoming.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Isn't that a real paradox of strength? That the minute you use it, you kind of lose it in a weird way, almost?

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Well-

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  Because them, United States really flexing their, their power and threatening people and going into Iran and going into Venezuela has actually made everyone else feel less, less safe. And-

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Oh, we've killed our power.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  So they've gone and partnered with each other?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  And actually, what do they call it? Peace through strength or strength through peace?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Probably strength through peace, but I don't know.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  Something like that, yeah, where you just-

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  Everyone knows you're strong, so you don't ever have to really prove it. And that's kind of what keeps up the illusion.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  If you look at global wars, war and what they are is over the nature of the world order of whether it's going to be these continentalists ruled by dictators who, if you lived in Russia, if someone wants your business and if they're connected, that's it. They take your business. It just, oh, and by the way, you're going to be put on the front lines. You have no choice. It's just the way it goes. Or are we going to keep going with democracies? And democracies, the only ones with really high per capita standards of living. Right? Democracies are the ones that are really capable of generating wealth. It's been wonderful. And then there are many things that I find appalling. But as the United States is picking on immigrants.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  So they're worried about the one off illegal who murdered someone. And that's terrible. I get it. But I'm thinking about the tech billionaire immigrants who are now buying our elections. Elon Musk has put $160 million into the state of Texas. He's a dysfunctional South African. What right does he have to buy our elections? I used to live in Texas and they have a saying, don't mess with Texas. Really? So you want Elon to be messing with you in this way? And then the other ones as well. There are many of the tech billionaires, not all of them, but many of them are foreign born. No problem with that. No problem coming to the United States. Every problem when you're trying to take down our democracy.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  And just so you pay, you're afraid of paying higher taxes. You're afraid of people regulating your media platforms so that, that there's some way to slow down on the lies that are going through. Americans that miss it, who in the dangerous immigrants are, there are a handful of them. And they're trying to buy our elections right now. How dare they?

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  I mean, in recent weeks as well, America seemed to have turned against Zelensky and the Ukraine.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  America didn't, Donald Trump did.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Donald Trump has certainly.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  He's not America. He's himself.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  That's incredible. Yeah, he's killed the US legacy. Well, isn't a guy who goes through serial bankruptcies and because he's rich and has lawyers, he just leaves the trash behind him and he moves forward.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  America did vote for him.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, a third of America voted for him, a third of America didn't. And the other third wouldn't get off the couch.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  They need to get off the couch. And reassessment, it's not a bad thing. It's sure Americans were correct that it's not working for Americans. Therefore, they wanted to, they voted for the guy who was going to throw over the chessboard. Well, it turns out that was worse than the alternatives. Right? And the thing is not to double down on that. Like, for instance, if I buy a lousy pizza, I thought it looked really good. I'm not going to go tell you it's a good pizza. I'll tell you it's really lousy. I bought it here, don't ever touch it. Okay, you do something really consequential, like you vote for someone who gets into a war that's tanked the economy and then you're, you're not going to reassess?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  I mean, isn't life, that is, you live, you learn things. Like at your age, you think you've learned everything you've got to learn for the rest of your life? That, that everything that there is to know that in your life, you already know it right this moment?

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  Of course not.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Right? And it'd be like death in a way, if this is it. And so presumably as you keep going, you'll go, oh, I used to think this, but now I think that.

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Do you know what? I'm 34 years old now, I've just turned 34. And I say that in part because when I sit here and I hear people like yourself who understand history better than I do, tell me that there's a danger or a threat of a World War III, there is part of me that has grown up with such privileged order that just can't imagine it.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  I can't imagine bombs flying over my head. And I, I've just never seen it before.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Would you like President Zelensky's memories of the things he's had to look at?

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, he told me.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, he started out like you. He hadn't seen any of this either. And then he doesn't have the pleasure of averting his eyes.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  What is your message for people like me that have grown up in very sort of privileged Western lives, democratic societies, who are seeing all this stuff happen around the world now? And to some degree, I guess, we're at risk of turning a blind eye because we, we haven't, we don't know history that well. And our history is a short one and it's an orderly one. And things happen, but they happen far away.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Well, I feel like starting on an apology, that what my generation is leaving you is such a mess. And you're supposed to make it better for the people who come after. And not all, there are many who've made it better, but currently the United States is making it a lot worse. And I cannot tell you the sorrow I feel for the negative things that the United States is doing right now. On, for young people is I urge you to read and to keep learning throughout your life, to talk to other people, talk across these silos that divide us and be polite to each other.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  And vote. Get out there and vote. And it's your civic duty. It isn't that hard. You can arrange your day so you can show up and vote.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Do you not think there's just so much going? I don't know whether this was always the case to history, but for young people these days, in part because we're so connected to the internet, we're seeing war over here in the Middle East. We're seeing war in Ukraine. We're seeing Iran, we're seeing this-

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Your draft day.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  -flesh of Gaza. We're seeing this thing called AI coming in and they're telling us we're going to have no bloody jobs. You've got global warming over here and they're saying that everything's going to flood or burn. And forest fires everywhere. It's a lot.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is a lot, but here's the flip is when I meet people, and you've met many more people than I have with your job, there are many more wonderful people all over the world. The dark personality types are actually very few in number. And all the rest of us, if we all do what we can in our various spheres, because we all do different things, we will get through this. So I'm a retired professor. What little can I do?

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  I can give you concepts. Ah, go into disinformation. That's what Putin does. Then when you believe it, but don't know it's lies, you're spreading misinformation. So that's a problem.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  What other concepts haven't we covered that are pertinent?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I know we haven't covered. All right. So let's talk about tactical level, tactile.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Anyway, the tactical, the tactical level of war would be, I got a tank. It has certain capabilities, certain range. It's got certain armor, certain things can take it out. Oh, are you, I love it.

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  Good little tank down here.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Guys in there.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Thanks. Okay. But then at the operational level, you're either going to fight a battle or succession of battles, which is called a campaign. And then you're going to put together tank units and other different units. And you're going to use, I don't know, have an information campaign, whatever. And it's probably to take that hill or do whatever. But then there's a level that really counts, which is this one, the strategic level. Like, why are you fighting in the first place? It's like, hey, Donald, what are you doing in Iran? So at the strategic level, for politicians, it should be protecting our national security and promoting national prosperity. That's what it should be.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  And in the war in Iran, you're worried about non-proliferation, except that war is incentivizing proliferation in the worst possible way. And it's doing in an incredibly costly way. So here's the problem with the Republican Party. This war and the guy who's running it and his truly incompetent administration, they have enabled him to do all these things that have, by blowing our alliance system, that's the alliance system that will protect their children, their grandchildren. It's bad for them. So they're at the operation. So if now we're going to apply this to politics, because they're not doing war, you can have tactics. Which might be, oh, since you were talking to President Zelensky.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  So one tactic, which I've described before, is when Trump had him in that Oval Office evil interview where the two native English speakers, Trump and Vance, are going after Zelensky, who must have thought it was a routine photo op and they're trying to humiliate him in public, you remember this. So that would be a tactic, right? Other tactics would be denying who won the election. Joe Biden won the election. The evidence is in on that. All the rest of it's lies. At politics, operational level, is you've got to win the election. So that's where the Republicans are all focused, right here. They're going, if we dump the orange guy, we won't get reelected. Maybe.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  In fact, if you dump the orange guy in first term, it would have been so much better for you. Or better yet, don't support him in the second term, be so much better for you, you'd actually have a functioning Republican Party on your hands. Instead, you've killed the party and you've destroyed your children's futures. Who the hell does that? It's focusing on this operational level. So officers, they love focusing on the operational level. They want to use this to kill a lot of people and go, ah, when I kill more of your guys than you kill my guys, must mean I won. Oh, really? Vietnam War? They took a multiple of our casualties. They won that thing. There's no South Vietnamese government left.

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  You know, the people with this Ukraine-Russia situation that say, well, NATO promised it wouldn't encroach on Russia's borders and it came closer and closer and closer. So those people might say, well, you know.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  They do say, you're repeating Putin's propaganda points.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Yes. All right. Well, let's do the history of all of this. First of all, the United States didn't go around and try and strong-arm everyone and say, you must join NATO, you must join NATO. It was absolutely the opposite. These folks were stampeding to NATO's doors.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  Which folks?

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Everybody who was in the Soviet bloc. So Germany used to be divided, but you have Poland and Czechoslovakia used to be one thing. But Austria was neutral, but Hungary, and then Yugoslavia was bigger anyway, it was all those pieces, Romania, Bulgaria. At the end of the Cold War, all those people wanted NATO in the worst possible way. Why? Because they know Russia wants empire. And already what Russia's doing is they're bringing in all their cadres, whom they trained during the war, and they're like Bulgarian communist expats, Romanians, Hungarians, putting them in place. And then they're taking over the power ministries, which are the military, the Department of

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  War, whatever it's called, because that determines whom you can shoot. In those places, it's the interior ministry. In our country, it would be the Justice Department, because that's who gets arrested and you control the courts. And then if there's an information ministry in those days, you want to control who has access to information. And then also, they wanted agriculture, because when you're going to collectivize and decollectivize, that's going to determine patronage possibilities. So our generals are writing back and going, they're doing all this stuff and we can't stop them. And so they do it throughout Eastern Europe. They wind up doing massive purges of people who had run for other parties, murdering loads of them, murdering many leaders.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  I'm not kidding, they're murdering people. They're putting people in jail forever. And then they say, you have to do this communist thing. And so they're stuck with it. And then there are Germans who aren't too happy with it, and the Russians are beating them up at 53. And then you have Hungarians saying, look, we need to do some adjustments here because the communist thing isn't working. They're correct. Russians send tanks and they shoot their head of state, even though they promised they wouldn't. And the Russians have never atoned for what they did and never acknowledged all of this. And so now they've made up this story that you're purveying, that you get from others, that, oh, it's NATO expansion that did all of this.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  And I think I've given you serious facts to tell you why people living in these countries were terrified of Russians. They're brutal when they come in. They're incompetent. So I was living in the Soviet Union when it still was, '88, '89. So this is early Gorbachev, but the supply system's falling apart. And went into one of their grocery stores and it had a total of 77 items. And I think that compares to, I don't know, a candy rack as you're exiting some convenience store, right? If you went by the meat counters, the smell from the rotting meat just about knocked you down. You just avoided all of that. And then occasionally they would have items called "importnaya," imported, i.e. anything

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  from anywhere else is better than what we've got, because you can sell it on the basis of calling it imported. I was eating rotting Hungarian apples, because at least they could produce apples. I made applesauce. Oh, it was the Romanians who made some pretty good canned tomatoes. It was just incredible what Russians couldn't do. So, I mean, I think I got the evidence of why, the reason these people want to be part of NATO is because of what Russia does. So Russia looks at the entire world. So I've talked about half-court tennis. Boy, that's, they're like half-court, whatever it is up there. They look at it as that everyone else is picking on us, instead of, excuse me, have

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  you ever threatened other people? Have you ever done anything vaguely naughty to anybody else? Right? It's huge what they've done to other people. And then they have the nerve to say that these people are threatening them. Excuse me, look how large it is.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  Russia, yeah.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Why do you need more territory? Why can't you develop what you have? I mean, a great example, talk about a lousy piece of real estate. Let's look at the Scandinavian countries. They aren't whining. And look what they've done with their resources. They're these fabulous functioning states. Russia could have done that. Instead, it's trying to steal things from others. So for your friend, the further back you stop these people, the safer you are. Also, why should Ukrainians become the slaves of their murderers? Why? Why? What's so privileged about you and Britain that you could just sort of go, oh, well, that's great.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Who cares? Morals matter. And this is where the norms matter. Honesty matters. I can be wrong. By all means, let me know that I'm wrong and I'll try to square it away. But hear other people out. Keep doing what you're doing. You need to have accurate information from many points of view so that people can come to their own conclusions. What Americans have done is forgotten their core values, which are, in a nasty document from your point of view, it's the Declaration of Independence.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  But in there, it talks about the rights of life, and it's not the right to take someone else's life, but preserve your own liberty. Not the liberty for me to tell you what to do, but the liberty for me to make my own choices. And pursuit of happiness, not as you define it, but as I define it.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  It appears in the last week or two, because I think it was diesel prices in particular have gone up at the pump to something like $6, Trump has made a deal with Putin for diesel exports, in part because of his war in Iran has caused this sort of global energy shock.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Oh, this is disinformation.

• 1:24:29Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  The disinformation, Russia has no capacity to export diesel in sufficient quantities to make any difference whatsoever. The correlation for when diesel prices go up is with the Iran war. Once the Iran war hits, and it has to do with who produces what grades of oil there and what kind of refineries they have in order to refine diesel, because refineries apparently are set up to produce certain grades of output. And yes, you can change a refinery to do a different grade output, but I believe you're talking millions of dollars in a certain amount of time to redo your refinery.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  So the diesel stuff is absolutely Trump's war's fault, and he's trying to blame Ukraine. It's despicable. As usual, he's lying. And so Americans, really, you want the liar in chief. How well has it worked for you? Really, I mean, are your grocery prices, are they better? Or are they worse? Are they better in the last two years? Or have they gotten dramatically worse in the last two years? I think it's pretty obvious. I was at a supermarket recently and oatmeal was like $10 for a little dumb package of it. Mind-blowing. Just mind-blowing. Thank you, Donald Trump.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  And then tariffing all this food imports from Mexico and Canada. I'm not making it up, right? I haven't been, I never used to be partisan, but I'm looking at the Republican Party and thinking, how can you do this? It's your children, too. You're wrecking the United States. And you're doing it not temporarily, but you're doing it for as long as anyone who's alive at this moment and will remember it.

• 1:26:25Speaker 00

  Can the Ukraine win against Russia?

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Sure. It is winning right now.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  Because it's able to defend itself.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Ukrainians have developed all these different kinds of drones. And I get it, Starlink's messing up with some of their interceptors. But they've been developing ballistic missiles that are going to happen rapidly. And, oh, the United States, by Musk doing the kill switch on Starlink, has made it so no one's going to be serious is going to be buying Starlink. India was thinking of it like, no, not if in the middle of the war you're going to turn it off. And what is it, the shares for whatever the French alternate company is? It's gone way up in the last few days. You can check whether I got this right. But if you're looking at going, OK, so Elon, maybe short term gain, but long time loss on all of this.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  And then for US Patriot missile systems, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been president during the Biden administration, when the second phase of the Ukraine war kicked off, he would have gotten that company to mass produce it and saying, look, you're not going to be making your money on unit costs. You're going to be making it on the quantity.

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  But people are saying, you know, with Trump turning his back on Zelensky and Putin being in bed with China, President Xi there, Zelensky has no chance.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  No, that's bull. No, he's developing his own missile systems. Russia can't replace, it can't afford to replace all these refineries. It's based on Western tech.

• 1:27:56Speaker 00

  The oil refinery.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't remember what percentage of the refining capacity that Russia's down to. I don't know whether it's less than half now, slightly more than half. You can Google and get the data. And then the Ukrainians have gone after Yandex and whatever their, their equivalent of Google and blowing away these things.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  Russia has lost up to 50% of its operating oil refinery.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  That's why I was telling you, I didn't know, because it varies, right? They start fixing it, then another one gets hit. And Ukraine, and Ukraine's doing that on its lonesome, no Starlink involved in that because it's over Russian, Russian territory. And they're developing stuff more rapidly. And who's going to be buying all these? Because they're producing more than enough of some of these things. They're going to be the go to defense supplier because our stuff in the United States is way too expensive. And this Patriot stuff, this is why it's just breathtakingly incompetent. The fact that we have a shortage of these interceptors and this fighting's been going on for N number of years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt started telling people how many tens of thousands of airplanes he won. And people thought he was nuts. And he got the businessmen around the table. What do you need? You're going to make it happen?

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  It happened.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  Do you think if funding does dry up for Zelensky, external funding from Europe and from the United States?

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  I don't think it will from Europe. Why? Because Europe, Russia will be coming for the rest of Europe. It will be coming. They are on death ground too, with Putin's little model. Think about how European attitudes on security changed on a dime because of the 2022 war. That hasn't changed. And I don't know what, there, there's tremendous disinformation that good old Vlad the Bad is putting out to get people thinking that he's winning. He's not. He's wrecking his country. So I have no idea whether his, his little friends will put something special in his breakfast some morning. Probably not. He's under enormous stress at 74. I don't know. I wouldn't want to be living with his stress levels.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Wrong age for it. And alternatively, at what point do the young men at the front lines riot? At what point do they take their guns and just go after their commanders?

• 1:30:13Speaker 00

  I mean, we saw that almost happen, didn't we, with?

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Progozhin.

• 1:30:16Speaker 00

  Progozhin, yeah.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. At what point does that happen? And also, when, when you think about these kids that are being sent to the front, they're only children. This is not Russia on Stalin's day, the pre-birth control Russia.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Right? There, these are very special young men that are going to the front. They're the only ones. And there's also at what point that their mothers put their foot down.

• 1:30:44Speaker 00

  The economic cost of the war in Ukraine on Russia has been profound, shifting the nation's economy towards a high risk war footing, where record defense spending, consuming roughly 40% of the national budget, boosts artificial GDP numbers while draining funds from health, education and civil infrastructure. The heavy state spending, coupled with acute labor shortages caused by military mobilization and the emigration of hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals, triggered persistent inflation and forced the Central Bank of Russia to hike interest rates above 20%. Simultaneously, Russia lost its lucrative European energy export markets, saw 300 billion in central bank reserves frozen by Western sanctions and faced severe domestic fuel shortages following repeated long range drone strikes

• 1:31:29Speaker 00

  to its oil refineries, which have caused oil refinery capacity to drop by up to 50%.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  So that's called winning a war? I don't think so.

• 1:31:38Speaker 00

  They can't go on like that forever.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  No, they can't. So, but as long as Vladimir Putin lives, he will keep doing it. And apparently his cronies there want to go, are going to go down with the ship. The offerant would be for the, the West under the table to offer them something like a safe passage out with however many billions they need in return for giving Vladimir Putin a retirement plan.

• 1:32:07Speaker 00

  Who is our enemy?

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  The continentalists.

• 1:32:10Speaker 00

  So China and Russia?

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  The United States. Donald Trump is what the future is. Yeah. I mean, telling Canada, we're going to take them over. It's either a really bad joke, which I don't think it is, or it's actually where Donald Trump lives.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  And we have a Republican Party that hasn't thrown him out of office for doing that. So the democracy, what is it? It's, I think it's apocryphal, but it's a pretty good one of Churchill, that democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the alternatives, right? Because it's messy and you're arguing all the time. And the people like Xi Jinping will think, oh, no, we're, we're superior because we've got this orderly thing, except you guys double down on poor decisions. And you keep doing the same thing. And the longer you do it, the worse it gets. And the young in Chinese, China are not happy with the way things are. The much better thing is really multi-party system. Accept the outcome of elections.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  Try harder the next time and allow, have, try to keep developing fairer and fairer laws and rules.

• 1:33:23Speaker 00

  Is it possible for Russia to have a democratic leader, do you think, after Putin?

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Not anytime soon. I think the story is that Russians today are actually for the war. I've never heard that there are a bunch of Russians who think that they shouldn't own Ukraine. I've never heard that there is a, there's Russians who think that the costs of the war, they don't like. And they don't want to lose children in Ukraine. But I've never heard any of that Russians think it's a bad idea to take Ukraine or that.

• 1:33:56Speaker 00

  So what happens when Putin dies? What is the system in Russia? And is there an election, a democratic election? Is it?

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Give me a break. No, it's a free for all. But think about, well, how do you have a democratic election? You have all these institutions for how the votes are counted. And look at the United States. We're having trouble. We have these deeply embedded democratic institutions. And now we're wondering about who's going to be fiddling around with the counting. So Russia's got none of that. They're, Putin's really good at doctoring his elections. So no, you're going to have, so he dies. All right, how to think about this? Think of him like a family tree. There's Vlad the Bad up top, or like, he's sort of like a mafia don. And then he has his consigliere underneath him, right? And then they've got their consigliere underneath them.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  And so there's this whole network. So when you, he dies, he's gone. And then it's which one of these guys, or is it some from over here? Who's going to take over? And you know what? They don't know either. Right? And it's a massive free for all. And now we got a lot of Russians with military training, which wasn't the case before. And whom are they going to line up with?

• 1:35:10Speaker 00

  So there might be a bit of a civil war in terms?

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Possible? Unknown. But what it means is profound instability for, and then it's a Humpty Dumpty situation. It takes a while to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. That's where, I think in terms of these dictatorships, depending how bad the shatter is, it'll take longer to put it together. But I'm going to make up a number and say 10 years. So the democratic corps should have a plan for when various dictators die. It's why you have a war plan. You just have them on the shelf so that when the unexpected event finally happens on the day you never knew, you've got at least some previous thinking. And then you have got something to start, like a first draft where you adjust it. But we ought to be thinking in these terms.

• 1:35:51Speaker 00

  It could be worse. As in someone else could go in there that, that's even more.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Oh, you could have loose nukes. That was the, the fear at the breakup of the Soviet Union is all these loose nukes. And that was one of the reasons they were taken away from Ukraine. And Ukraine was willing to have it taken away because we promised to protect them. And we broke that promise. That's a problem. Because if you want to be a big boy on the block, if your promises mean nothing. I mean, this is where Trump's having trouble with leverage over Ukraine. Since they know that he's, he's sold them out and he's always going to sell them out. It's like, it means he has no leverage over them. It's over.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  It was back to your comment about power, that the best strategies, the ones that really work are win-win. So that you get something out of it, I get something out of it. So of course we'll do it. And that's why the maritime order is strong. If it's a win-win, everyone plays well together. And you look at Europe, they've been, each country's been ponying up to help Ukraine. And one at a time, and sometimes together.

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  What is the most important thing that's happening in the world at the moment that we haven't talked about, Dr. Sarah Paine?

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Wars are negative sum. They destroy wealth incredibly rapidly. The only infinite game, positive sum world order is a maritime. It's maritime because, what is it, 90% of the world's trade goes by these oceans? This is how you, the world's original network that reaches everything are these seas, right? A container ship will take 21,000 containers, whereas a choo-choo train, I don't know, 600 if you're look, containers if you're lucky. Yeah, this is the efficient way to get things around. As flawed as international institutions are, they are the feasible thing that avoid this. If you get into this, it's all over.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  So better to build institutions. And if you can't reform the UN to make it better, then you create a parallel institution. And then your government gradually says, hey, we're not, no longer doing the office in New York City. We're moving to whatever this new one is. All right, you care about Uighurs? This is the Chinese practicing genocide. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, by the next year, he was summoning his experts on the Soviet Union, saying, well, what happened? Because the last thing the Communist Party of China wanted is to go the way of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And what they told him is that the Soviet Union had been organized on the basis of ethnicity.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  And what the Russians had always had, a Russian who ran each of these places and the ministries and things within them. But then the number two would be the token number two. And then they would sponsor all kinds of dictionaries in the Uzbek language. And you could do your folk dances and your embroidery and all that stuff. And while the Soviet Union was holding it together, it looked great. But when it shattered, it meant it was really easy for it to shatter on these ethnic lines. And Xi Jinping, I suspect that explains his genocide of all the Muslims. And in the Uighurs, what he's done is he's put the men into concentration camps, the children into what this country used to do to Native American children.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  It's terrible, putting them under these schools where you're, it's cultural genocide. You're bringing them up to be like honorary white people. And so they're bringing up these kids to be honorary Han. And then the women, I don't know, white slavery, whatever it is. Because China's got a shortage of women of childbearing age.

• 1:39:37Speaker 00

  You've written so many fantastic books. I've got several of them here. I'm going to link everybody to your lectures online, the full-length lectures online. So if you're listening right now, you can see a link below to Sarah's full-length lectures, or 14 of them?

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  No, there are seven. Well, there are other things that people have posted. It would be the Sarah Paine Lecture Series, and you can see the logos on top. They have this kind of look to them.

• 1:40:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  And they start with zero, and then they go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and then there's finale. So there are nine total.

• 1:40:09Speaker 00

  What an interesting time to be someone who has your experience and education. How does that feel? I mean, you studied this your whole life, and now it's the topic of conversation.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  Well, when I was a little younger than you, I thought, I want to learn about Russia and China. That'll take me a long time.

• 1:40:27Speaker 00

  Why did you care?

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  Oh, because I'm born in 57. That's the year Sputnik went up.

• 1:40:33Speaker 00

  Sputnik being rocket.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, this satellite, where the Russians put a little dog, who was on a one-way trip. They sent Lika up there. And, and the United States is terrified because this meant that the Russians could eventually have ballistic missiles coming after us. And we were behind on all of that. And that's when the Cold War, so you could argue, you can pick your year when you think the height of the Cold War would be, but that might be one of them. So that's the year I'm born. And I grew up where everyone's talking about Russia being the evil empire and curious about that. And growing up as a little kid during the Vietnam War and then watching that unfold poorly. And I thought, well, I want to learn more about this.

• 1:41:19Speaker 00

  Dr. Sarah Paine, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:41:24Speaker 00

  And the question left for you is, what makes you emotional?

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  What makes me emotional?

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Sorrow?

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Watching sorrow, watching other people suffering?

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Watching children suffering? Why should they? We have adults that are willing to allow tremendous numbers of children to suffer. Like, go back to the Republicans. You need to make it better for children, for the generations that follow. So you lose the next election. Do the right thing. It's past due.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  Don't support continentalists. And I'll say it over and over again. What is more important than the generations that follow?

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  So do something for them instead of grifting.

• 1:42:26Speaker 00

  Dr. Sarah Paine, thank you so much.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

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• 1:43:39Speaker 00

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