The War Room is a podcast on the history of the Cold War and the events that have shaped it. Hosted by Senior Editor-in-Chief Stephen K. Vance and Senior Producer-In-Chief Editor- in-Chief Ben Burquam. This episode features an interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department.
00:08:07.100My favorite headline is the F-16s coming right away to – Lockheed Martin is already going to buy –
00:08:15.080already going to build them without a purchase order.
00:08:16.700We're now going to have close air combat support because it – ladies and gentlemen, just to understand, the narrative has gone from defend Ukraine to liberate Crimea.
00:08:27.600Steve Cortez, your thoughts and analysis of this, sir?
00:08:34.500This is an absolute catapulting forward of the mission, an acceleration.
00:08:38.460It wasn't, by the way, just the FT reporting, which was critical, about Lockheed Martin and its executives, who are not dumb people, right,
00:08:45.180knowingly getting their production ramped up in anticipation of replacing the F-16s that are going to be sent to Ukraine.
00:08:52.780Also over the weekend, Politico reported very much the same, and I'm quoting from the Politico story.
00:08:57.820A contingent of military officials is quietly pushing the Pentagon to approve sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.
00:09:04.740It continues, Ukraine has kept American-made F-16s on its weapons wish list.
00:09:11.160How nice that Ukraine, that Zelensky has a weapons wish list.
00:09:14.860You know, a lot of Americans have a wish list for their life to pay their bills right now, and this is critical, Steve, because I think there's two aspects to this.
00:09:22.680Not only is it reckless and dangerous and really absurd that the United States is pretending that we have a vital U.S. national security interest in the Bloodlands battle in the Black Sea,
00:09:34.980but at the same time, not only do we not have a U.S. national interest, at the same time, we cannot afford this kind of intervention.
00:09:42.080We are borrowing the money, the American taxpayer is borrowing the money to send over there to exacerbate, to massively exacerbate a conflict in which we have no strategic national interest.
00:09:55.040And you're so smart, Steve, to put this in historical context.
00:09:58.800Let's remember that this is a Slavic struggle between the Ukrainians and the Russians that has existed for time immemorial.
00:10:06.060They have been fighting for centuries over these lands, and in all likelihood, they're going to fight for centuries further.
00:10:13.320And these borders, by the way, this is also important, I mean, to put this in historical context, these borders have always been ephemeral.
00:10:19.360They have always been moving and vague and fought over, right?
00:10:25.840The United States, we have no reason to intervene.
00:10:29.300We have no reason, frankly, to care about what happens in this struggle.
00:10:33.220And I would say to those who are pro-intervention, and a lot of them have an R after their name, make the case to the American people and follow the proper procedures.
00:10:44.660Go to the U.S. Congress and get, if not a declaration of war, then at least a resolution, at least have the decency to make your case in the legislative body of the United States of America.
00:10:58.100No, we have to have, for all the constitutional conservatives in Conservative, Inc., and particularly those that are Zelensky fanboys, how about this?
00:11:09.900Here's, it's just like, I want to make sure, and I talked about this on John Frederick's show a little earlier.
00:11:14.640We have two things before us that are central, that are massively signal, not noise, and have to be remedied now because we can't go forward on both of these.
00:11:26.080Number one, the debt ceiling, the debt crisis, the financial crisis, the Treasury, you know, he's going to meet on Wednesday.
00:11:54.940It's not because every year you're going to have a trillion to $1.5 trillion deficit that's going to have to be financed by the Federal Reserve.
00:12:02.480You're just going to have to print money.
00:12:03.880And so we need to see their model for the nation, the financial situation of the country laid out in a mathematical model like anybody would ask for it, number one.
00:12:13.940Number two, all conservative and constitutional conservatives, all of you, you must demand immediately that Joe Biden come before the nation, the Biden regime come before the nation in the House and ask for a war powers resolution.
00:12:30.900Right. And in that, he should lay out the vital national security interests of the United States in this situation.
00:12:38.620Our strategy, our objective, the interim objectives, and the amount of money it's going to take.
00:12:44.140And exactly when, and he's got to be upfront, when American combat troops, the 101st Airborne that's on the border of Romania, when are they actually going to be in the fight?
00:12:56.940She's the one that took the 31 tanks over there back in 14.
00:12:59.920It's impossible to put those tanks in theater into Ukraine.
00:13:04.060It's impossible to put the F-16s unless you have American logisticians, you have maintenance, you have training, and that has to be American.
00:13:13.340If you want to spring offensive, right, if you want to spring offensive like the Wehrmacht, if you want to spring offensive and you're going to be riding shotgun with tanks that have iron crosses on it, you, the American taxpayer, just think about it.
00:13:26.940On the 80th anniversary of Stalingrad, and remember, the Bolsheviks and the communists and the KGB and the FSB are criminals.
00:13:39.540But the Russian people were our allies, okay?
00:13:42.400The Russian people were our allies, just like Lao Baixing and the Chinese people were our allies.
00:13:48.080And they were double dealt by Mao Zedong and the criminal gangsters in the CCP.
00:13:52.900And quite frankly, they weren't exactly choir boys over with Chiang Kai-shek.
00:13:58.240The leaders of both of those were bandits, okay, and thieves and criminals of both the Russian and the Chinese people.
00:14:05.020Without the Chinese people and without the Russian people taking the hammer blows of the Nazis and taking the hammer blows of the Imperial Japanese Army, there would have been no victory in World War II, at least in the time frame.
00:14:15.780And trust me, there have been millions more American boys and girls dead in that war.
00:14:20.860We are hurtling to, this is 1937, and right now they're doing a bait and switch.
00:14:26.760We must force Biden to come to Congress to make the case for the liberation of Crimea.
00:14:33.960Before you start a spring offensive, what do we do?
00:14:40.960Josh Hammer, Newsweek, is going to join Cortez, Ben Burkroy, and myself in the war room.
00:14:57.240Will the lack of a red wave during the midterms lead to a more emboldened Biden, more wasteful government spending, higher taxes, a deepening of inflation?
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00:16:29.600Of course, that should be the southern border of the country.
00:16:32.300We're interested in the territorial integrity, the sovereignty, and the self-determination of the citizens of the United States, and particularly, you know, now that every town is a border town, you know, the popular sovereignty, the sovereignty of that.
00:16:44.780But we're going to get back to Anne-Marie Slaughter.
00:16:47.600We're going to get back to all this because it's very important.
00:16:49.780People don't realize, and this is where we're getting ourselves into because most people don't truly understand the history of World War II, and it's not your fault.
00:16:57.800It's been presented as the good war, and it's, you know, Studs Terkel and Brokow with the best and the greatest generation, and you can't question the valor, the valor and courage of my dad's generation, those people that came up in the 1920s, 1930s, and fought in World War II.
00:17:17.820But the, but it's presented as the good war, and it's taught to American kids, Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Holocaust, that's it, that's World War II.
00:17:29.160That's not, World War II was a war of annihilation, okay, annihilation, and from 1914 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, about 250, 200, 250 million people were slaughtered with political violence.
00:17:47.520In the bloodlands, by the way, what we're talking about from Poland all the way down, principally Ukraine, 14 million people between 1930 and 1945, 14 million people, right?
00:17:59.160Killed by political violence, not even in the war that was being fought, and that includes the 5 million that Stalin starved to death in the Ukraine, and the Ukraine being Kansas.
00:18:09.940So the people essentially in Kansas were starved to death, right? Couldn't eat the crops that they built.
00:18:15.480There was also the Holocaust with 6 million. Principally all the camps were in the bloodlands, and all of the, all the Jewish people killed essentially were Russian or Polish Jews.
00:18:27.480There were some from Hungary and Germany and all that, but all from the bloodlands.
00:18:32.220People don't understand, as World War II went on, the violence, the degradation, and the annihilation got worse.
00:18:42.140It got worse. As things often do in war.
00:18:45.400It's the law of unintended consequences, and people get their backs up, and people start to get angry, and it becomes vengeance.
00:18:50.220The original goal is dropped, and that's what you're seeing here.
00:18:55.540Remember, this has gone in this last week.
00:18:58.420Did we have a big national debate on tanks?
00:19:00.300Once you put tanks in, you've shifted the type of war you're fighting.
00:19:04.280Now it's combined arms, and they're talking about close air support with F-16s, right?
00:19:09.740The F-16 combat aircraft, combat patrol up above with American pilots because these guys can't fly F-16s.
00:19:15.240It's not going to be a fly F-16s. I don't want to hear it, right?
00:19:20.160You're about to get into an offensive war to liberate Ukraine.
00:19:24.900Steve Cortez, before I bring Josh Hammer here, what are the odds, what's the over and under on liberating Crimea without tactical nuclear weapons, sir?
00:19:35.000It is a zero in my view, and I say that because, look, if you put Vladimir Putin and the Russian people in that kind of a corner,
00:19:43.400they will feel that they have no other option than to go nuclear.
00:19:47.200And here's the point, Steve. Again, the asymmetry of this, right?
00:19:51.100In other words, it's not a balanced risk-reward. What does Crimea mean to the United States?
00:19:56.380What is the vital U.S. national interest in retaking Crimea, a place that has now been fully in Russian hands for almost a decade,
00:20:04.200and a place which, as you point out, has been fought over for many, many centuries,
00:20:08.220a place that is always in hot dispute but thankfully is of no consequence to the United States.
00:20:15.020So this kind of escalation, this kind of acceleration, okay, it only serves the interests of the Davoset, of the defense contractors,
00:20:24.320of the Washington war machine, of the oligarchs both in Russia as well as in Ukraine.
00:20:28.880It does not serve the interests of regular Russians, of regular Ukrainians who are suffering the most of all,
00:20:35.180and it certainly does not serve the interests of the deplorables here in the United States,
00:20:39.040who right now are borrowing mountains of money to spend on a war in which we have no U.S. national interest,
00:20:45.320and at times, or in time, may well be called upon to risk the lives of our brave sons and daughters in a needless, endless war,
00:20:54.840and yet another intervention from the very same people, by the way, Steve, I think this is important,
00:20:59.100the very same people, the supposed experts of the Washington Foreign Policy Establishment,
00:21:04.100who brought us through two decades of needless war all over the world, are looking to do it again.
00:37:58.980The oligarchs are funding New America.
00:38:01.840New America, in turn, is pushing a massive escalation of this war in Ukraine and trying desperately to get the United States and its allies in NATO to directly intervene,
00:38:12.000not just indirectly, realize who these people are and what their aims are.
00:38:16.500You know, Steve, I often bring up on the show, qui bono, which is a Latin phrase that was a principle of jurisprudence in the Roman Republic and their courts particularly.
00:38:48.040It certainly is not the young Americans, the brave young Americans who wear our uniform, thousands of whom are deployed on the border of Ukraine right now,
00:38:55.660inviting a very, very dangerous conflagration with the second most potent nuclear power in the world, Russia,
00:39:02.060over a battle, over an ethnic battle that has no relevance to the United States.
00:39:08.940But it's important for us to know who these people are, what their motivations are, what their incentives are, and what the funding is most of all.
00:39:16.800By the way, they're not on the border.
00:39:18.600The 101st is not on the border of the southern United States.