RadixJournal - September 28, 2022


The Die Is Cast

Topics
neo-Cold War war and territorial loss decisions
Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Zelensky Pussy Riot Kissinger Tucker Carlson Max Blumenthal Putin Boris
Heads, I Win; Tails, You Lose The Cheerleader Who Got In The Game

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

142.45

Word count

1,708

Sentence count

95

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with Peter Bergen and discuss the current situation in Ukraine and Russia, and how it could lead to a new Cold War. I talk about the possibility of a new cold war, and why I don't think it will happen.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I did get a certain sense that a neo-Cold War would be stabilizing in its way.
00:00:08.540 You know, most of the, you know, 40 some odd years after the Second World War was fairly stable and or was mostly stable, in fact.
00:00:23.920 And so it's a kind of like there's this ambiguity and there's a kind of cold, cold war going on that's a bit of a culture war of, you know, Russia takes in Edward Snowden and Russia, you know, prosecutes Pussy Riot.
00:00:50.160 And we promote Pussy Riot on television and there's this kind of tit for tat in that way.
00:01:01.080 And, you know, there's a lot of ambiguity there.
00:01:05.820 I mean, you could still travel to Russia.
00:01:10.440 Putin can still be the kind of plus one in G8 summits and so on.
00:01:16.460 And I think a Cold War just kind of makes everything clear and thus stabilizes Russia internally.
00:01:27.740 And I think there's some actual benefits to that.
00:01:30.500 But, you know, for that to occur, you can't have a military that's caving in.
00:01:37.360 You know, you can't, I don't know what to say.
00:01:43.080 Like, you know, you can't just, I don't know, turn into North Korea or something.
00:01:50.020 I don't think it's nearly that bad, of course.
00:01:52.820 But you see my point in the sense that there has to be some kind of plausibility and then an ability to have stability.
00:02:02.140 Like there could have been the seizing of the regions that are currently, you know, undergoing referenda.
00:02:10.740 And a kind of new line in the sand with Ukraine as a buffer state. 0.65
00:02:17.500 I mean, I can see that as kind of stabilizing in its way.
00:02:20.900 But, again, if you're losing and you're, you know, success breeds success and failure breeds failure.
00:02:30.260 I mean, it's, I don't, I think I kind of thought that that's where we would be months ago.
00:02:37.820 But I don't think that now.
00:02:39.360 I think we're headed towards escalation and maybe also collapse.
00:02:45.040 That's, that's probably true.
00:02:50.000 And the one scenario, come to think of it, that could kind of transition the whole situation to a cold war of sorts is if the collective West basically tells the, tells Ukraine that they have to,
00:03:11.380 they have to basically give those, so to speak, new territories to Russia and otherwise, no, no more help.
00:03:22.100 Otherwise, they'd be left on their own.
00:03:25.700 And if they do give those territories to Russia and acquiesce to that, then the rest, what's left of Ukraine will be effectively, you know,
00:03:35.100 there'll be, there'll be a Marshall Plan and there'll be speed tracked into the EU, perhaps, you know, all kinds of benefits will accrue to them.
00:03:47.980 But I don't know to what extent that is something Zelensky can sell to, to his people.
00:03:56.780 If he were to accept something like that, he might destabilize Ukraine itself.
00:04:01.880 There might be, it might descend into chaos because right now they're winning.
00:04:06.060 They're, they're not, they don't see any reason for that.
00:04:09.220 And obviously they understand the nuclear threat, but right now for them to say, okay, you know, we, we, we accept our defeat.
00:04:19.020 We accept that we have to cede a quarter of our territory to, to this invading force.
00:04:25.500 I'm, I'm not sure how that can be done, but that's one scenario that could lead to that cold war, the stabilizing cold war.
00:04:34.160 And that's what I was talking about early on.
00:04:37.400 I don't, I don't want to inflate myself too much, but I was Kissinger before Kissinger.
00:04:44.420 But I remember at the very beginning of this in March, there was this talk of a no fly zone.
00:04:52.740 And there was a poll, like one of these snap polls that probably shouldn't be taken too seriously at all.
00:04:59.740 But it was like 60% of the American public wants a no fly zone over Ukraine.
00:05:05.680 And I think that expressed a sentiment of just outrage, emotional outrage, you know, just like, why are you doing this?
00:05:14.240 These poor people, they're getting slaughtered, stop, you know, kind of thing.
00:05:18.400 And, and it was this notion of America as an exceptional power.
00:05:22.040 And we can just put a halt to a conflict if we want to.
00:05:27.300 And then there was the response to that, which was, well, a no fly zone means that you're going to have to shoot down a Russian plane.
00:05:37.480 And that would be a war with, between Russia and the United States or Russia and NATO.
00:05:42.080 And that's just, you know, a huge escalation.
00:05:45.600 So this is unrealistic.
00:05:46.420 And even like AOC did a Instagram live or whatever, she was explaining this in the way that only she can.
00:05:58.580 So it was, it was clear that like the establishment was kind of saying, no, no, no, no, you know, we're, we're not going to do that.
00:06:05.020 Um, and, uh, I remember there was a Tucker Carlson segment where he, um, he was, uh, someone interviewed, I think it was actually Max Blumenthal, who is a, uh, absolute Russian asset at this point, which is kind of surprising knowing his history.
00:06:21.920 But anyway, um, he was interviewing this, uh, Hispanic Congresswoman from Florida and, um, you know, she's not terribly sharp.
00:06:33.840 She's one of these kind of well-dressed women who looks like a newscaster or something. 1.00
00:06:38.240 Maybe she was in her previous career, but anyway, she was like, you know, oh yeah, we want to know fly zone.
00:06:42.720 We got to put a halt to this.
00:06:43.940 And they're like, you know, that means war with Russia.
00:06:46.120 And she was like, well, I don't want that, you know, and they were kind of making fun of this woman.
00:06:50.080 But I basically said, um, you know, look, let's just accept the lost territory as lost and, you know, let's not perpetuate bloodshed and let's actually declare a no-fly zone over territory that is still Ukraine.
00:07:12.760 And we can just base it, you know, because obviously, you know, Russia, at least hopefully doesn't want to get into a shooting war with the United States.
00:07:23.880 They don't, they know that there are consequences for them and not just for the United States if a Russian plane is shot down.
00:07:30.540 So I was kind of suggesting this, um, that you just kind of tell Zelensky, you know, this territory is lost, it's over, but we're, you know, you're going, the great benefit is that, you know, the Western half of your country is going to be part of perhaps the NATO alliance and your European union, et cetera.
00:07:52.060 So it's just ultimately better. You kind of have to take a, take a loss, take your lumps and then move forward, but, you know, which is reasonable.
00:08:00.680 We've all been in that situation in life many times. Um, and I do think that, you know, I would stand by those comments.
00:08:07.020 I think that's a good strategy, but it's now over. And, you know, again, as, as Boris just said, there's the, that feel of victory and that, that drive to go all the way.
00:08:21.880 And you can't, I, I don't, I agree that even if Zelensky kind of saw that option as reasonable, which of course it is, uh, he would say, no, you know, we're going all the way with this, um, every bit of territory from the, what was it? 92 or 93 referendum.
00:08:47.480 Um, it would take, that is ours.
00:08:52.060 And one, one other thing that will weigh heavily on his decision, um, is this far into this war, um, it seems like the consensus number for the people killed for the casualties in this war, probably around 50,000 on each side.
00:09:17.480 So the question that he won't be able to answer. So if you're giving up what they had seized initially, essentially, or in the first couple of months, you know, why did, why did we lose 50,000 of our people and many more, um, uh, injured and crippled and, and many more yet, uh, civilians like Mariupol alone.
00:09:42.160 Um, as they're saying about 80,000 civilians have been killed there. So, Oh my God.
00:09:50.300 Um, so yeah, right. But it is, it is a kind of sunk cost fallacy though, which, you know, if you're a businessman, you should think in those terms, you know, like, yes, we invested all of this money into this project, but if we keep doing it,
00:10:07.020 we're just going to lose more money, we're just going to stop it. And it hurts to like throw away $10 million or something, but you just have to do it. Um, I, uh, I, I remember on social media, there's, uh, Warner brothers spent a hundred million dollars on a Batgirl film.
00:10:26.220 And they just canceled, which is kind of funny because they're just like, we're just going to continue to lose money. So stop. So that you can do that in business. Um, but war is just different.
00:10:40.020 You know, it's just, it, it doesn't like, it's not just, you lost $10 million and maybe you can make that back in a few years. It's about pride and emotion. I mean, it's like, you're on a football team, you're driving down the field.
00:10:56.220 And then your coach is like, well, you know, we're up by seven and there's only two minutes left. So let's just kneel the ball or something. I mean, the, the players want to do it. It's like, let's, you know, that, that just feeling of power and momentum and drive.
00:11:11.020 It is, um, and, and, and, and not to mention, you know, the, the loss of life and thus feelings of revenge or making loss meaningful. I mean, it's the most powerful force in the universe.
00:11:24.540 Exactly. The loss of life is, is key here. I mean, I'm sure that argument could have been made reasonably if we were just talking about territory and, and maybe destroyed, uh, infrastructure and financial cost, financial loss of it.
00:11:43.080 But the lost lives, I mean, you can't, you can't really, as a politician and businessmen make different decisions than politicians, you know, as a politician, you, you can't just say, well, sorry, some cost move on.
00:11:57.080 Right. That's, that would be suicidal.