00:00:07.000My name is Nicholas J. Fuentes, and we have a great show for you tonight.
00:00:11.000A very exciting week ahead of us here on America First.
00:00:16.000Tonight is a big episode, lots to talk about.
00:00:19.000We have what appears to be a little bit of a financial meltdown, a mini financial meltdown on the stock market, and also for a lot of our crypto investors with Bitcoin.
00:00:31.000We have the withdrawal of troops from Iraq this weekend, or the beginnings of it, which is Big news, of course, and a redeployment, it looks like, perhaps in Afghanistan.
00:00:41.000Things possibly heating up in Central Asia for the United States.
00:00:46.000We have another government shutdown, which may happen this week if an immigration fix is not passed, and the Democrats may not even be here for that.
00:00:56.000And, of course, last night was the big game.
00:00:58.000Last night was the big football contest.
00:01:01.000Patriots, Eagles chucking the old pigskin around the field, and don't we love it?
00:01:07.000Big American tradition, big American tradition.
00:01:46.000We have a very special pre recorded video prepared for you.
00:01:49.000Big surprise for the audience in that regard.
00:01:53.000And then a very exciting call in show.
00:01:55.000We can reminisce about our favorite episodes, our favorite moments on America First.
00:02:00.000Was it the time that Nick Fuentes got a call from CNN because he told people that we should hang the globalists?
00:02:08.000Was it the time he went to Charlottesville and then he never showed up to work again at RSVN?
00:02:13.000Was it, I mean, there are just so many countless memories.
00:02:16.000And I can't wait to relive them all with you tomorrow.
00:02:19.000And then Wednesday, this I have not announced on the show, but I announced earlier on Twitter, we have a very special guest coming with us, Ricky Vaughn, one of the top influencers during the 2016 election on Twitter.
00:02:32.000He had something like 65,000 followers, and the engagement was well beyond that.
00:02:37.000He'll be joining us on Wednesday for a little talk about the alt right, the dissident right, what direction we're headed, and that should be good.
00:02:44.000But with all of that out of the way, with all of that, Exciting stuff out of the way.
00:03:58.000I think a lot of people read a lot into it that it's this expression of where our society is at.
00:04:03.000I don't know if that's necessarily the case, but I look at the NFL, I look at the Super Bowl yesterday, and I think my overall, I think my prevailing problem when you watch programming like the Super Bowl last night is not so much that people are using their leisure time, not so much that they're watching something that is purely recreational and not maybe serious, not political, not that people have passions about it, that they take pride in their team and pride in their city and their mascot and all of that.
00:04:33.000But I think in particular, if you look at the NFL, what was disturbing about the Super Bowl last night was not that people are having a good time with their friends and family, but look at this institution in particular, where you have this monstrosity.
00:04:46.000First of all, you look at the scope of the NFL in terms of the money, in terms of the infrastructure there.
00:04:53.000You look at how the stadiums are built, for example, how these stadiums are billions of dollars, and they're built in a lot of ways using taxpayer money, a lot of how they're constructed and how the NFL is.
00:05:05.000Builds their stadiums is crony capitalism, and so you have that.
00:05:08.000Then on top of that, you look at the actual programming, and what is it?
00:05:12.000When it's not commercials, which are these neoliberal, corporatist, social engineering projects, you watched the T Mobile commercial yesterday, it's just outright brainwashing.
00:05:23.000We believe in equality, and looking at all these babies and everything, and how many of them had either an interracial couple or a homosexual couple or this or that.
00:05:33.000When it's not the commercials, then it's the football, and who's playing in the football games?
00:05:39.000Wife beaters, dog fighters, drunk drivers, drug abusers.
00:05:44.000I mean, are these the people that our youth are going to look up to?
00:05:47.000So I watch a program like the Super Bowl last night, and I am hard pressed to find a single redeeming quality about this kind of programming, which they say is family friendly, which they say is for the youth, for the kids.
00:07:21.000You have cars set on fire, people climbing on police cars, looting stores, breaking windows.
00:07:28.000And I tweeted about this a little bit this morning.
00:07:30.000And I promise we're not going to spend too much time on the Super Bowl because there's so much news to get into politics.
00:07:36.000But it is worth mentioning because this is such a cultural phenomenon.
00:07:39.000You think about football and the cultural influence that it has or that it had, maybe formerly the place that it occupied in the American zeitgeist.
00:08:46.000There's a certain unholy appetite inside of us that wants to see this kind of a thing, that wants to see these surreal, absurd scenes of a man eating horse excrement, for example, that we saw last night, or the fires.
00:09:08.000But I think there is this primal, there is this sickness in us where we see chaos unfold these days in the news media, whether it's a car chase or it's a shooting or something like this.
00:09:22.000And I think that betrays inside of us a deep seated resentment for the modern world, for this urban decay that we see around us.
00:09:33.000You know, I think it's a striking difference between people's reactions to, say, the controlled demolition of a cathedral in Europe.
00:09:40.000And we see this all the time when they have to destroy an historical cathedral or an historical building that stood for centuries or in some cases millennia to clear the way for a parking lot or a mall.
00:09:51.000We see that kind of a thing, and there's similar impulses like, oh, oh no, something's being lost.
00:09:57.000And then when we see, you know, a modern building being set on fire, a Macy's storefront being destroyed, You know, people in the Walmart or the 7 Eleven throwing products everywhere, and there is kind of this sick desire for that.
00:10:10.000And I think that betrays this deep seated angst.
00:10:14.000We want to see the modern world burn, I think, in a lot of ways.
00:10:19.000I think this structured, Apollonian, rigid world, it's choking us, strangling our animal impulses, it's not giving us productive channels to direct those energies.
00:10:31.000I think it tends to create these excesses.
00:10:48.000But I see these things and I can't help but wonder is there something more going on there?
00:10:52.000Because we do see this nihilist, surrealist, destructive streak in the American people in the 21st century and really in the past 30 years.
00:11:02.000And I think that's what it comes down to in a big way.
00:11:54.000So I don't know what this advertisement has to do with that.
00:11:56.000I don't know what it has to do with that.
00:11:57.000Do is selling phones, but they do this one minute spot for the Super Bowl, and it's an overhead.
00:12:04.000You know, they're panning over like a bunch of little babies in a crib, and you got your white baby, and your black baby, and your Asian baby, and your Hispanic baby, and you have this weird like nursery rhyme in the background, and this mother saying something like, it just is very creepy stuff.
00:12:22.000Basically, this John Locke blank slate stuff like, babies have not been taught to hate yet.
00:12:28.000We are all equal, and that's how it's going to be, and we're not going to let our differences get in the way of each other.
00:12:35.000And I just see an ad like this where it's pink and they do this baby stuff, and there's a woman talking, and it's this very manipulative type of ad, and the message is about equality, you know, racial egalitarianism.
00:12:48.000And I just got to think to myself, what does this have to do with selling phones?
00:12:52.000How does this help T Mobile sell phones?
00:12:55.000You got to wonder, do they put an ad out like this, and do they sell more phones?
00:13:00.000You know, what was the company that used the Martin Luther King speech to sell trucks?
00:13:06.000I got to think, what is the response to these things?
00:13:09.000Because you know that people are pulling their plans today in response to this.
00:13:12.000You know that conservatives, Republicans, Trump voters, maybe they read too much into it.
00:13:17.000Maybe they see it for exactly what it is.
00:13:35.000You really think these soulless technocrats, you know, the managers and the CEOs and the owners of T Mobile, you think they're so concerned about, oh, my values.
00:13:44.000You know, they're getting their phones constructed in China using slave labor, and they care so much about getting racial egalitarianism to be the number one thing in the country, to be our default position here.
00:15:18.000Look at what's going on in Philadelphia.
00:15:20.000And then, right snuck in there last night, was this announcement by the Associated Press from Western contractors and an American led coalition base in Iraq that American troops are starting to be withdrawn from Iraq and that a deal has reportedly been reached between the Iraqi government and the American government to start pulling.
00:15:42.000U.S. boots out of Iraq, which is a very big announcement, right?
00:15:48.000And I'm sure this is part of President Trump's broader strategy not to telegraph our moves in advance to the enemy or to the world.
00:15:56.000So that's probably why we haven't seen a more public, a more loud announcement.
00:16:00.000And I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of denial about this later in the week if the DOD or the State Department were asked about this and they said, you know, that's not happening or this is not a total withdrawal because that has been the policy of this administration to not telegraph, to not reveal what we're doing in advance.
00:16:19.000Because what happens is you tell Iraq or you tell the world that we're pulling out, we're going home, we're sending our troops home.
00:16:40.000You know, why would they continue fighting?
00:16:42.000Why would they continue resisting now if they were guaranteed in a month or whatever the timetable would be, whatever a reasonable timetable would be, they could expect to encounter no American led resistance in the region?
00:16:54.000So that's probably why you don't see a big announcement.
00:17:32.000We're seeing the focus switch from Iraq and Syria and the defeat of ISIS, now shifting the focus over into Afghanistan and the fight there.
00:17:42.000And I think this is a really important topic, and so I wanted to do kind of a deep dive on Afghanistan tonight, and we can really get to the bottom of it because I look at an announcement like this where they say we're bringing troops home from Iraq, and I say, wow, what a great thing.
00:18:01.000And how many thousands of people have had to die?
00:18:04.000How many trillions of dollars have we spent there?
00:18:06.000And to achieve essentially a stalemate, to achieve something that we basically had in 2008, we really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the sense that where we are now in terms of stability, in terms of where the Iraqi provisional government is at, we are about as stable as we were in 2008, right?
00:18:27.000And because of our preemptive withdrawal and the Israelis and some of these other dubious actors funding religious extremists in Syria and in Iraq.
00:18:39.000So it's a great thing on the one hand to see that we're pulling back out of Iraq and not like we have a major presence there.
00:18:44.000It's worth noting that we have something like 20,000 troops in Iraq, 20,000 troops in Germany.
00:18:50.000The numbers are much higher and we'll be talking about that in a moment.
00:18:53.000But 5,000 is really not a wild number.
00:18:56.000But nonetheless, it's good to see that we're pulling people out of Iraq because it was a wasteful war, it was one that shouldn't have happened.
00:19:05.000And for people that don't know about this, I'm always amazed to.
00:19:08.000To look at millennials, Generation Z, younger people who we've been at this war, in some cases for people their entire lives, we've been at war.
00:19:18.000For people that have been born in 2003, we've been in these countries for their entire lives.
00:19:23.000And many young people don't even know why they're there, why we're fighting there.
00:19:27.000In the case of millennials, we've technically been in conflict with Iraq as far back as 1991, even a little bit further back.
00:19:34.000So it's really been a prolonged engagement, even though the invasion's only lasted since 2003.
00:19:42.000And I'm still amazed at how many people just simply don't know why we're there, why we invaded, what year we invaded, what was the cause.
00:19:48.000You know, a lot of people still seem to think that we're in Iraq because of 9 11.
00:19:53.000When, as a matter of fact, we went in in 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and we deposed Saddam Hussein in a relatively quick amount of time.
00:20:01.000And it was because there were rumors that he was developing weapons of mass destruction.
00:20:04.000And we went in there in 1991 with 750,000 troops.
00:20:12.000And we went in there with coalition forces to stop Saddam Hussein, who had invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait.
00:20:19.000And of course, the danger was that he could have kept going into Saudi Arabia.
00:20:23.000Kuwait is a major supplier of oil for the world, as is Saudi Arabia.
00:20:27.000Saddam Hussein was in clear violation of the United Nations and really the entire Westphalian world order that he invaded a sovereign state.
00:20:36.000And so we went to war against Saddam in 1991 with a broad coalition to repel him from his invasion in Kuwait.
00:20:42.000And there were bombing campaigns throughout after that.
00:21:04.000He was a rogue actor, a provocateur, causing all kinds of trouble.
00:21:08.000And so we bombed him for 12 years until 2003, when there was good intelligence from people like the Israelis, which we give them $3 billion a year at the time.
00:21:21.000I think it was about $3.5 billion a year for this kind of intelligence that told us.
00:21:25.000Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
00:21:31.000And of course, that was a bad thing because you have one country who gets nuclear weapons, and then you have countries like Libya, Syria, Iran, Egypt, who also start looking into their own nuclear weapons, and you have a real problem.
00:22:19.000It was a very big success in terms of the invasion.
00:22:23.000You know, we're talking about a third world army here, a third world Arab despot who did not have.
00:22:31.000An army that could contest America's conventional military might in any way, shape, or form.
00:22:37.000So we went in there, we took them out very quickly, and then we saw that the real problem was going to be well, okay, now what?
00:22:42.000We took out Saddam Hussein, now what's the problem?
00:22:45.000And that's what we've been essentially doing in Iraq for the past 15 years now what?
00:22:51.000We battled a pretty terrible insurgency for the first five years of the war, where you had car bombings, you had people going home in body bags, IEDs.
00:23:01.000We were not prepared for a prolonged urban insurgency like there existed in Iraq.
00:23:27.000There was the Anbar Awakening, where we had cooperation with some of the Sunni militants and other elements in Iraq to stabilize the country.
00:23:35.000And then, of course, it all started to fall apart when Barack Obama withdrew the residual forces that were supposed to remain as a stabilizing force in 2011.
00:23:44.000ISIS came around in 2013, and here we are today after we destroyed ISIS.
00:24:57.000People say this was in response to the 9 11 terror attacks, and in large measure it was.
00:25:02.000But it's worth noting that the plans for a U.S. ground invasion of Afghanistan arrived on the desk of George W. Bush on September 10th, 2001.
00:25:29.000But he got those war plans a day before 9 11.
00:25:31.000So we were considering this even before the first plane hit the first tower, right?
00:25:36.000Or any plane, I guess, hit World Trade Center 7, right?
00:25:39.000Or did a plane hit World Trade Center 7?
00:25:41.000I guess that one just collapsed because it got a little too hot.
00:25:45.000But we did invade in the weeks after 9 11.
00:25:48.000And the purpose, the stated purpose, was that we would go into Afghanistan where the Taliban government allowed terrorists.
00:25:56.000Like Al Qaeda and Saddam, or excuse me, Osama bin Laden, to use their country as a safe haven.
00:26:02.000They said that the 9 11 terror attacks were planned in Afghanistan.
00:26:06.000They built training camps, terrorist training camps.
00:26:09.000Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were gaining strength there.
00:26:12.000And they were able to do that because this is a feudal, illiterate, backwards country.
00:26:18.000This is like a Stone Age country that was not properly governed, that was at the time governed by the Taliban, which allowed this kind of thing to happen.
00:27:06.000This was the peak deployment in Afghanistan, 100,000 troops in 2011.
00:27:11.000So we started in 2001 with 1,600, and we built all the way up to 100,000 by 2011.
00:27:20.000And the problem that we saw in Afghanistan was the fact that from the time we got in there, we were trying to get this war off of our hands in the sense that we never really wanted to win it.
00:27:31.000We never really wanted to overwhelmingly decide the fate of Afghanistan.
00:27:36.000We never really knew what our victory conditions would be.
00:27:39.000We never really knew how to achieve them.
00:27:41.000I don't think we really even wanted to achieve them.
00:27:42.000I think we wanted to go in there, kill the terrorists, take out the Taliban, but I don't think there was ever the political will to really lay down the law.
00:27:50.000George W. Bush eventually got us there to the kind of troop deployment we would need to start making some gains and start winning.
00:27:56.000But of course, once Obama got in and he started announcing timetables to wind down our engagement and wind down our involvement, what happened in Afghanistan is the reason why President Trump doesn't telegraph his moves today.
00:28:09.000You announce your timetable for withdrawal, and the terrorists bide their time.
00:28:13.000The Taliban waits them out, and we are at Where we are in the present situation.
00:28:18.000So that's a little bit of a brief history.
00:28:22.000President Trump, during the course of his administration, has almost doubled the amount of troops in Afghanistan since the beginning of his presidency.
00:28:31.000We started out in early 2017 with about 8,500 troops in Afghanistan, so slightly more than in Iraq, and we've gotten up to about 14,000.
00:28:40.000And we don't know the exact numbers, but these are reasonable estimates from various sources.
00:29:25.000And I could tweet, Donald Trump said in the campaign that he was going to make America great again, but he's invading Afghanistan, more like George Bush 3.0.
00:29:34.000I could get on the show and I could rail and I could yell and scream about Trump is a puppet for the Israel lobby and he's sending these troops in.
00:29:53.000I think it's a lot more difficult to actually get an understanding of what's happening on the ground.
00:29:58.000Why it's happening, and why this is the least bad option here.
00:30:02.000You know, we're not wild about the fact that we have to have troops in Afghanistan.
00:30:07.000We're not wild about the fact that this engagement is happening.
00:30:10.000And President Trump has said that he wanted to end the war in Afghanistan when he got into office, but then he reviewed our security situation.
00:30:19.000And he found that after looking at classified intelligence, that actually it'd be much more prudent to leave some kind of a residual force or to have more troops.
00:30:27.000Now, it's important before we get into the what and the why.
00:30:31.000How this is a good thing, why this is not going back on Trump's word.
00:30:35.000I think it's important to look at the scale of things.
00:30:38.000I think it's important to keep a sense of proportion.
00:30:41.000People talk about Afghanistan like this is the Iraq War, this is global military engagement.
00:30:48.000To give you a sense of scale, to give you a sense of proportion, when we're talking about deployments, when we're talking about troop numbers, there's 14,000 troops in Afghanistan right now.
00:30:59.000We can't really fathom what 14,000 men looks like, what that might be.
00:31:03.000I think for people that don't engage with this stuff on a more, you know, a deeper level beyond the surface, people that are watching the nightly news are not getting the numbers here.
00:31:12.000But to compare this with previous wars, as I said earlier in the show, there were 750,000 troops in Iraq in Desert Storm.
00:31:21.000So in 1991, that big war that was so popular, at least at the time among a mainstream audience, 750,000 U.S. troops in Iraq in Desert Storm.
00:31:51.000Compare that to the most recent major invasions, major ground wars, you know, the 1991 desert storm, the Persian Gulf War, that was 750,000 compared to 14,000.
00:32:04.000Compared to Iraqi freedom in 2003, 200,000.
00:32:09.000The peak of the war in Afghanistan, 100,000 versus 14,000.
00:32:14.000That's a very, relatively speaking to other military conflicts, for people that are saying Donald Trump owns this war, this is Donald Trump's war, he's a neocon, it's really not quite the same.
00:32:25.000If Donald Trump were launching new invasions, I would be losing my mind.
00:32:30.000If Donald Trump were ratcheting up the amount of troops in both countries to 50,000, 60,000, I would say this guy's out of his mind.
00:32:38.000But you're talking about in Iraq, in Syria.
00:32:40.000In Syria, you have maybe 2,500 people.
00:32:43.000In Iraq, you have 5,000, and they're winding that down.
00:32:46.000In Afghanistan, you have, they're building it up dramatically, and you're only at 14,000.
00:32:50.000And not like we're taking American lives for granted, but we have to have a sense of proportion here.
00:33:10.000And maybe that's not fair because we're talking about major invasions against large conventional militaries in the case of Persian Gulf and Iraqi freedom.
00:33:19.000We're going against Saddam Hussein, who has tanks and planes and modern weaponry, which is not the case for the Taliban.
00:33:26.000And it's not the same kind of conflict with Afghanistan and the Taliban.
00:33:32.000Iraq, you're fighting people that are waving flags, you're fighting armies.
00:33:36.000In Afghanistan, you're fighting tribes with flags.
00:33:38.000You're fighting people in mountains, you're fighting people in hillsides, you're fighting people in the desert.
00:33:43.000Poor people with rockets and caves and rags.
00:33:46.000It's a very different kind of conflict.
00:33:48.000But you also compare this to any of the other deployments of the U.S. overseas.
00:33:52.000There are 1.3 million U.S. military personnel overseas at any given moment.
00:34:00.000And currently, 49,000 stationed in Japan.
00:34:04.000Remember, 14,000 in Afghanistan fighting a neocon war.
00:34:09.000There are 49,000 in Japan, 38,000 in Germany, 28,000 in South Korea, 12,000 in Italy.
00:34:17.000So, you have about roughly the same amount of troops, a little bit less, in Italy right now as you do in Afghanistan.
00:34:24.000Also, worth noting, and this is again not to trivialize, I almost hesitate to use this figure because any American casualty overseas has to be meditated on.
00:34:37.000Any American life that is lost in a desert, any American life that is lost in the Pacific or in the European theater or in Africa, you know, in Nigeria or in Yemen, like we've seen earlier this or earlier in the last year.
00:35:02.000And so I hesitate to say this, but again, we have to have a sense of proportion.
00:35:07.000If you're talking about casualties in Afghanistan, whereas in the early stages of Iraq, in Afghanistan, you had casualties in the hundreds or in the thousands, and it was this major bloody conflict, again, you simply have to have a sense of proportion.
00:35:22.000In the past, Two years, two and a half years since 2016, the number of casualties in Afghanistan is 30.
00:35:31.000So, you have more casualties, I believe, in Navy ship crashes, in accidents, in mishaps on bases, I think in shootings on bases, than you do in Afghanistan in the past two years.
00:35:47.000About 15 in 2016, about 15 in 2017, one this year.
00:35:52.000And so, again, you look at the numbers here, and it's just simply not the same order of magnitude.
00:35:58.000It's simply not the same scale as a major ground war, as a major ground invasion, and things can certainly change.
00:36:05.000Before we get into why we're on the ground, why we're on the ground there now, why we continue this war, why we're still at it 17 years later, no end in sight, it appears like we're losing.
00:36:16.000First, to get a sense of the proportion, what we're talking about when we talk about Trump's mini troop surge in Afghanistan, it really is not, this is not a massive engagement, this is not a massive conflict.
00:36:27.000The proper way to look at our involvement in Afghanistan is like simply another U.S. military commitment overseas.
00:36:36.000You know, people who are outraged about Afghanistan, but not outraged about our involvement in South Korea or Germany or Japan or Italy, they're simply not being consistent.
00:36:46.000And I know many people would say, bring them all home, bring them all back.
00:36:50.000And then I would say, you know, you're being unreasonable there.
00:36:52.000Then, you know, you're kind of caught in a trap where if you say, well, it's okay that we have them in Germany, you know, you're being inconsistent.
00:36:59.000If you say, bring everybody home tomorrow, this is not totally a reasonable position to have.
00:37:10.000People might say it's because of terrorism.
00:37:12.000Can't have a safe haven for terrorism.
00:37:14.000And certainly I would agree with this.
00:37:16.000Certainly in a big way I would agree with this in the sense that when ISIS took control of a third of Syria and half of Iraq, I think that's right, or vice versa, maybe.
00:38:01.000You need the government to give you a pass, essentially, on that.
00:38:05.000And so when we're talking about terrorists getting a safe haven, that is not a laughing joke.
00:38:10.000That is not a neocon myth that terrorists should not have land, should not have a government.
00:38:16.000To be able to subsidize these activities or get away with these activities.
00:38:20.000So I would say that that's not the strongest argument, but I still think that's a very solid argument that if Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, if it fell to ISIS, which they have a presence there, and Al Qaeda certainly operates in the Arabian Peninsula and other places as well, but they do have a presence here, there would be a significant risk to the United States and to Europe even.
00:40:04.000And the real reason why we're in the region, if you're looking at it from a geostrategic perspective, geographical strategic perspective, you look at the countries that surround Afghanistan, why it might be important that the United States has boots on the ground, why they might have military bases, a base of operations in here.
00:40:23.000You look at where it is situated, and it's neatly situated between Iran, Which is on its western border, Pakistan on its eastern border, China on its northeastern border, and this is western China.
00:40:36.000And in the north, you have the Central Asian stands.
00:40:40.000You have Turkmenistan, not to be confused with Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, or excuse me, Kyrgyzstan up here.
00:40:51.000And so you see where Afghanistan is situated, and this is actually a very ideal place for the United States to project power.
00:40:58.000If you look at the map, More broadly, and you can pull up a map of the world.
00:41:02.000You look at where Afghanistan is situated, really in between the eastern Middle East, this Indo Pakistani region, and also Central Asia.
00:41:13.000This is probably one of the most dynamic regions.
00:41:16.000This will be one of the most strategically important regions to come in the next 20 to 50 years.
00:41:23.000This provides not only a check on China, Western China, where the United States has a base of operations in Japan.
00:41:31.000In South Korea, in the Philippines, and all over the Pacific, in Eastern China, in East Asia, this affords them a base of operations against China in the West, in Central Asia.
00:41:42.000And now Russia and China are competing for the Central Asian countries.
00:41:47.000Russia has this economic confederacy with these countries, sort of this currency alliance with these countries to keep them in their orbit.
00:41:56.000These are all former Soviet colonies right here, these stands.
00:42:00.000These were not countries prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, these were part of the Russian Empire.
00:42:06.000For a long time, they were considered Russian, and that is an economic way of keeping them in their orbit.
00:42:11.000Russia is now contesting China over these countries.
00:42:14.000China is competing for influence, they're building up infrastructure in these countries, and so this is going to be a theater of a 21st century kind of economic conflict, proxy conflict between China and Russia, and an important region, I think, a growing region that'll be important in the next couple of decades.
00:42:34.000Then you have, of course, Iran, where Iran has their influence growing.
00:42:38.000A military base now south of Damascus in Syria.
00:42:43.000They have Shiite supporters, which they frequently have mobilized in places like Qatar, Bahrain, eastern Saudi Arabia, the eastern province in particular.
00:42:52.000And they have influence now in Iraq and Syria as well because the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was out there putting down ISIS.
00:43:00.000And some might say that that's in violation of the United Nations or whatever.
00:43:11.000American presence to counter Iran over here.
00:43:13.000We have an American presence on Iran's western border, which would be about over here in Iraq, and we have one on their eastern border in Afghanistan.
00:43:23.000So, this assures that Iran is contained, that there is some semblance of an American hand here on Iran, that they can never really get too out of hand.
00:43:32.000They can never really fully develop maybe a nuclear arsenal.
00:43:35.000They can never really fully achieve their ambitions of regional hegemony when they have the United States boot on their neck right here in Afghanistan.
00:43:43.000And then, of course, this region, which is very important Pakistan and India.
00:43:48.000Of course, it's important not only because you have a conflict between Pakistan and India in the Hindu Kush.
00:43:54.000In the Kashmir regions, which has the potential to spiral out of control.
00:43:59.000God forbid, it could even spiral into a nuclear exchange.
00:44:04.000But also, these two powers, the Indo Pacific region, will be a very decisive strategic region in the next 50 to 100 years when we're talking about China.
00:44:17.000As China rises, as India rises, as Pakistan rises, as the world sort of shifts away from.
00:44:25.000Europe and from Russia and from the United States and over to a more Pacific focus, we will see these countries, China, India, dominate the world order.
00:44:37.000These will be your new hegemons here in the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean region, and it'll be important for the United States to have some kind of power projection capabilities because, at the end of the day, when you talk about American power, when you talk about American might militarily, fundamentally what you're talking about is The projection of military force.
00:44:59.000And what that comes down to, a lot of people don't think of it this way, but what it comes down to more often than not is how far can their planes fly without having to be refueled?
00:45:08.000How long would it take them to establish a beachhead in a country with ground troops?
00:45:13.000How often could you mobilize ground troops in secret or in some clandestine way?
00:45:17.000How could you assemble them on a border?
00:45:19.000How could you get a plane to fly over certain countries?
00:45:21.000How could you get permissions to get rights to fly in a country's airspace?
00:45:26.000This is one of the major complications with.
00:45:29.000A war in Iran, for example, for a nation like Israel.
00:45:33.000Israel could not project power against Iran because the distance between Israel and Iran is very great.
00:45:40.000And of course, if they were going to send a ground force, it would have to go through a number of countries.
00:45:44.000If they were going to do any kind of Air Force raid, they would have to get rights to fly over a number of countries, and there would be refueling and all kinds of other logistic complications.
00:45:54.000So when we talk about American power projection, to have a base of operations in Afghanistan, If costly, maybe there are 14,000 troops that are stationed there indefinitely.
00:46:04.000Maybe it costs a little bit of money indefinitely.
00:46:07.000Think of it as no different than having a base of operations in Estonia, in Germany, in Italy, in Japan, in South Korea.
00:46:14.000They fundamentally serve the same purpose.
00:46:16.000And that's why when people talk about.
00:46:35.000We won the big war, we defeated the big enemy.
00:46:38.000That kind of a victory won't happen, and that's simply because that is not the objective in Afghanistan.
00:46:43.000The objective is to stop it from becoming a haven for terrorists, but also to project power against China, against Pakistan, against Iran, Central Asia, which is in some capacity a proxy for Russian influence.
00:46:57.000Russia has military bases, I believe, in Uzbekistan and in Kyrgyzstan.
00:48:07.000But if you're looking at it pragmatically in terms of money and pipelines and all these other things, currency, it simply can't happen in a matter of years or months or any kind of timetable like that.
00:48:19.000I think it'll be negotiated eventually.
00:48:21.000America's role will be negotiated down with China, cooperatively with China and Europe and Russia.
00:48:27.000And other growing powers in the world, but that's not something that's going to happen anytime soon.
00:49:10.000Unfortunately, we don't have time for stuff about the government shutdown, which I guess that's okay because we'll be talking about it all week.
00:49:15.000But we have to get to your super chats here.
00:49:19.000And we'll see what is being said here in the super chats.
00:49:22.000Rata Punks says Nick, Renegade Broadcasting, check out their documentaries.
00:49:29.000Let me turn down the gain here now that we're back.
00:49:31.000I'm probably blowing people's ears out here.
00:49:34.000Check out their documentaries on their YouTube channel.
00:52:53.000I heard about the helicopter crash at the Rothschild estate, but I did not hear about this hunting lodge and all that, so I'll have to look into that.
00:53:04.000Right from wrong, don't forget the importance of pipelines here.
00:53:07.000Well, yeah, I mean, that's the other thing with Afghanistan, a mineral rich country, natural gas rich country.
00:53:14.000And also, you have to look at it from the perspective that China and Russia are now vying for control of Kabul, where Russia and China have gone in and they've offered their support.
00:53:24.000And if We allow Russia and China to take over our position in Afghanistan.
00:53:30.000Not only do we lose an important strategic base and country, but also China and Russia are emboldened to consume more, to consume more allies and colonial holdings, neo colonial holdings of the United States, which is not great.
00:53:47.000Daniel G., all three executives worked at the Standard Hotel.
00:53:50.000It's a very high class boutique hotel chain, probably where child sacrificeslash trafficking occurred.
00:53:57.000You know, and also Afghanistan, you know, speaking of trafficking and things, Afghanistan is responsible for 90%, 90%, excuse me, of the world's opiate production.
00:54:09.000So, you know, you want to solve the opioid epidemic.
00:54:13.000A lot of it, 90% of it comes from Afghanistan.
00:54:17.000So it looks like that's all of our super chats here.
00:54:20.000And remember, if you want your questions asked, you got to post them up on the super chat, throw some shekels our way, throw a little dough our way, help support the show.
00:56:53.000Even if you don't use the goodies, it does help us out if you support the show.
00:56:57.000It helps us get new stuff, which we're planning on making some significant investments here in terms of camera, microphone, set, some other things that we would really like to invest some money in now that we have our stuff together, now that we don't have dubious partners and things, funneling money or whatever.
00:57:15.000Or I don't know, maybe just not spending it wisely.