RFK Jr. The Defender - Cost of War with Scott Ritter

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:01.000 I'm really pleased to have back on this show Scott Ritter.

00:00:05.000 Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and the author of Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, Arms Control, and the End of the Soviet Union.

00:00:15.000 He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the Nuclear Control Treaty.

00:00:21.000 He served in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War.

00:00:25.000 And from 1991 to 1998, served as the chief weapons inspector with the United Nations in Iraq.

00:00:34.000 Mr.

00:00:34.000 currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia and the Middle East, as well as in arms control and non-proliferation.

00:00:45.000 And Scott, I think I can say about you that many people regard you as a contrarian because you do not always, you're not diplomatic and you don't always follow the kind of the official orthodoxies.

00:01:00.000 And it's gotten you in a lot of trouble over your career, but you've had an extraordinary record of prescience.

00:01:08.000 In fact, Matt By of the New York Times, which, you know, the Times had apologized for its support of the Iraq War, and later it said that your view was the most prescient of all the people who were talking about the war at that time, Americans during the...

00:01:24.000 Late 90s, when you were serving as a weapons inspector and then right up to the Gulf War in 2001, regarded you as this kind of unique truth-teller.

00:01:35.000 Your opinion was something that people could trust, and it was bracing in many ways, the way that you were willing to depart from official proclamations and orthodoxies.

00:01:47.000 I had you.

00:01:48.000 I was a very, very strong admirer of yours.

00:01:52.000 During that period, I had you on my TV show on Ring of Fire with Mike Papantonio and talk to you for the first time.

00:02:02.000 And I'm very, very interested in talking to you now because I'm interested in your take in the Iraq War.

00:02:09.000 You have a long history in the Soviet Union and you understand the uses of power, of military power in that part of the world.

00:02:17.000 I'd love to start kind of with an overview of what you think the military situation is now in Ukraine.

00:02:25.000 The dominant narrative that we see in this country is that the Ukraine is having victory after victory against Russia.

00:02:35.000 And that Russia has really been spanked in this war and humiliated.

00:02:39.000 I know there is an alternative narrative, and I'd love to hear what your view is.

00:02:46.000 Well, first of all, thank you very much for your kind words and for inviting me on.

00:02:50.000 Look, the situation in Ukraine, I think we have to start off and note that this is one of the most violent military encounters that has taken place in the world.

00:03:00.000 The casualties are beyond comprehension.

00:03:03.000 The level of violence is beyond comprehension.

00:03:05.000 That's just not me saying this.

00:03:07.000 This is General Kavoli, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, who spoke last January in a defense form in Sweden and said that what's going on in Ukraine was beyond anything NATO could ever imagine.

00:03:18.000 The U.S. forces and NATO forces aren't trained, equipped, prepared.

00:03:23.000 I think that should shock the average American into the fact is that they don't know anything about what's going on in Ukraine.

00:03:31.000 What's going on in Ukraine right now is that Russia is winning a strategic victory, not only against the Ukrainian army, but against the forces of the collective West.

00:03:40.000 Ukraine has been turned into a de facto proxy of NATO. That's not my words.

00:03:46.000 That's actually the admission of the Ukrainian Minister of Defense Who said straight up, you need to keep supporting us, Wes, because we are your proxy in this war against Russia.

00:03:57.000 And we've had Western leader after Western leader after Western leader acknowledge that this is a war NATO can't afford to lose.

00:04:05.000 Now, that's a curious statement.

00:04:07.000 If NATO is not a direct participant in the conflict, which we're told over and over again, then why is this a war that NATO can't afford to lose?

00:04:15.000 It's because NATO is a Not only equipment and financing, but operational assistance, intelligence assistance, planning, logistics, everything short of pulling the trigger.

00:04:28.000 And some people would say with the number of Western mercenaries that are on the ground with recent military experience in the NATO countries that, in fact, we are providing trigger pullers.

00:04:39.000 But despite all of that, Russia is prevailing. 0.73

00:04:42.000 Russia is in the process of achieving a historic victory in the city of Bakhmut.

00:04:49.000 Some of the numbers are correct.

00:04:51.000 Ukraine could have lost upwards of 80,000 troops in this battle.

00:04:54.000 The Russians have said that the Ukrainian army broke its back here, and I happen to agree. 1.00

00:04:58.000 I agree.

00:04:59.000 There's a lot of talk right now about a Ukrainian spring offensive.

00:05:03.000 You can't attack with words.

00:05:05.000 You can't attack simply by drawing an arrow on a map.

00:05:08.000 You need men.

00:05:09.000 You need men who are equipped and trained, not just to carry out standard military operations, but offensive military operations against an opponent like Russia requires a level of expertise and preparation that simply doesn't exist in Ukraine today.

00:05:25.000 Ukraine cannot win this fight.

00:05:28.000 That's why President Zelensky in a moment of lucidity and honesty last week said if Bakhmut falls, that he will be compelled to seek peace with Russia because there is no alternative.

00:05:41.000 To continue to fight means the destruction of Ukraine as a modern nation state.

00:05:46.000 So that's where we're at.

00:05:47.000 Anybody who thinks that Russia's getting a spanking, I invite them to go to the battlefield. 0.99

00:05:51.000 And if they survive, they'll understand that the only person getting a spanking is Ukraine at this point in time. 0.87

00:05:56.000 I want to make a disclosure.

00:05:58.000 My son is one of those U.S. soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion, and I'm very happy he's home now, but participated in the Kharkiv offensive as a machine gunner for a special forces unit that was mainly foreign soldiers.

00:06:18.000 He speaks with extraordinary admiration about the fighting capacity of the Ukrainian army and of their bravery, their courage, and the way that they have beaten the Russians in battle after battle after battle.

00:06:35.000 Do you disagree with that?

00:06:37.000 I think it's improper to look at the Kharkiv offensive that took place in September and view that as being the exemplar for the war as a whole.

00:06:46.000 First of all, I agree with your son.

00:06:49.000 The Ukrainian soldiers have fought with a tenacity that's beyond imagination.

00:06:53.000 They've shown a level of dedication.

00:06:56.000 Any army that can suffer 300,000 dead in the span of a year, and that's what the Ukrainians have suffered, and then still be in the field fighting, is an army that deserves everybody's respect.

00:07:06.000 So I am not going to challenge.

00:07:09.000 In fact, Mr.

00:07:11.000 Pogosian, who's the head of Wagner, the private military contract force that's spearheading the fight for Bakhmut, We're good to go.

00:07:28.000 But dying and losing.

00:07:30.000 You see, in September, the Russian military was overextended.

00:07:34.000 They initiated this conflict back in February of 2022 with the goal of, within a span of a month, driving the Ukrainians to the negotiating table.

00:07:44.000 And they succeeded.

00:07:45.000 See, everybody who thinks that Russia lost the first part of the war doesn't understand what Russia was trying to do.

00:07:50.000 They weren't trying to take Kiev.

00:07:52.000 They weren't trying to destroy the Ukrainian army.

00:07:54.000 They were trying to compel the Ukrainian government to the negotiating table to bring about a rapid closure to this conflict.

00:08:01.000 And they succeeded.

00:08:02.000 They had three negotiating sessions at Gomel and Belarus.

00:08:06.000 On 1 April, they were ready to meet with Ukrainians in Istanbul where they were going to finalize a peace agreement.

00:08:12.000 Why would Ukraine agree to peace terms with Russia if they were winning the war, if they were spanking the Russians? 0.79

00:08:18.000 Because they weren't.

00:08:19.000 They were taking horrific casualties, and they understood what was going to happen if they continued the fight.

00:08:25.000 But it was NATO that stepped in, because NATO misconstrued the Russian special military operation.

00:08:31.000 NATO said because Russia didn't take Kiev, Russia lost.

00:08:34.000 All Russia wanted was peace.

00:08:36.000 That's all Russia has ever wanted in this conflict.

00:08:37.000 It was Boris Johnson that told Zelensky to pull out of the peace agreement.

00:08:41.000 And then NATO doubled down by providing $40, $50 billion worth of military assistance.

00:08:47.000 It proved to be a game changer.

00:08:49.000 And we saw that game change in September when Ukraine was able to launch a successful offensive operation in Kharkov and then later on down in Kherson, taking back a considerable amount But that offensive stopped.

00:09:02.000 It stalled.

00:09:02.000 Why?

00:09:03.000 Because the Russians solidified their lines. 0.65

00:09:05.000 The Ukrainian military ran out of steam, lost horrific casualties.

00:09:09.000 All of their offensive striking power was destroyed, basically.

00:09:12.000 And then the Russians mobilized.

00:09:14.000 300,000 partial mobilization, probably 180,000 volunteers.

00:09:18.000 They're completing that mobilization as we speak.

00:09:21.000 Ukraine has not been able to match that mobilization.

00:09:24.000 They're begging right now for everything.

00:09:25.000 They need tanks. 0.88

00:09:26.000 They need armored fighting vehicles.

00:09:28.000 They need artillery, artillery shells.

00:09:30.000 They're going to run out of ammunition this summer.

00:09:32.000 The president of Ukraine says that.

00:09:34.000 The chief of staff of the Ukrainian military says that.

00:09:37.000 The head of NATO says that.

00:09:40.000 It's true.

00:09:40.000 And when you run out of artillery in a war that's defined largely by artillery, you lose that war.

00:09:46.000 And that's the fate of Ukraine right now.

00:09:48.000 Russia has mobilized.

00:09:49.000 Their troops are very well trained, very well equipped.

00:09:53.000 Ukraine will never again have the opportunity they had in September.

00:09:56.000 They had a situation where the Russians had overextended their lines in the Karkov district.

00:10:01.000 They were defending a kilometer frontage with 50 to 60 troops with no defense in depth.

00:10:06.000 And well-trained special forces like the group that your son was with were able to penetrate the Russian defenses and go in 20, 30 kilometers sometimes without any opposition.

00:10:16.000 But then what happened?

00:10:17.000 The Russians went through, solidified the lines, and that was the end of that. 0.74

00:10:21.000 No more deep penetration.

00:10:22.000 In fact, every time they tried it after that point, they got killed, slaughtered, because the Russians brought to bear their superiority in firepower. 0.96

00:10:29.000 And that's what the Russians have today. 0.97

00:10:30.000 They have superiority in firepower, superiority in numbers, superiority in combat capacity.

00:10:36.000 Ukraine has some of the best fighting soldiers the world has ever seen.

00:10:40.000 I don't think anybody can take that away.

00:10:42.000 But the special forces units that your son was working with, there was a recent interview with a special forces colonel, Ukrainian special forces colonel, that said, I have lost 80% of the men that I had when I started this war.

00:10:53.000 And the people I'm getting now don't have the training, don't have the physical fitness.

00:10:57.000 They're not special forces anymore.

00:11:00.000 When a unit loses 80% of their troops, they're not the same unit.

00:11:04.000 And that's the Ukrainian army today.

00:11:06.000 There's some guys who have been there from the start, but most of them are dead, wounded, The people that replaced them, a lot of them have been rounded up on the streets by these brute gangs that are going around compelling mobilization at the point of a gun.

00:11:21.000 They're giving three to four days worth of training before being sent to the front line, where the average life expectancy of one of these soldiers is around four hours.

00:11:31.000 That's not how you win a war.

00:11:33.000 Now, again, I'm not going to denigrate the courage and the tenacity of the Ukrainians.

00:11:38.000 One only has to take a look at the casualties Russia has suffered and they have been significant.

00:11:43.000 But Russia is winning this war, and unless something dramatically changes in terms of, you know, force structure and capacity, Ukraine is going to lose this war.

00:11:52.000 One of the things my son told me that was really frightening is he started out as a drone operator for this unit, and he said that as soon as he turned his drone on, the Russians knew where he was and would pound the area with artillery, and the artillery shells kill everything within a football field within 100 meters.

00:12:13.000 And so it's a different kind of war.

00:12:15.000 I mean, we're used to fighting wars where we're dropping bombs in the desert or doing drone strikes with no anti-aircraft artillery and total domination of the skies.

00:12:31.000 But the Russians actually have really good assets and they have very good trained pilots and they have a devastating artillery system.

00:12:42.000 No, look, this is a war.

00:12:44.000 We used to train for this kind of war.

00:12:46.000 When I was in the Marine Corps back in the 1980s, we trained for large-scale ground combat in a European environment.

00:12:51.000 That was back when we had 300,000 troops on the ground in West Germany, and we could fly in another quarter of a million troops in 10 days.

00:12:59.000 And, you know, we were planning to go to war against a Soviet group of forces in Germany, the 400,000, 500,000 strong.

00:13:05.000 But after the Cold War ended, we stopped preparing for this kind of fight.

00:13:09.000 The Gulf War, we won because we brought the best military in the world to bear on the problem. 0.57

00:13:15.000 We fought the world's fourth largest army.

00:13:16.000 So anybody who thinks the Iraqis were not capable of fighting, you don't know the Iraqis.

00:13:21.000 They fought very, very hard.

00:13:23.000 But you can't stand up against an opponent like the United States Army and the United States military in the early 1990s.

00:13:29.000 We had prepared for decades to fight a Soviet army that could bring to bear a lot of violence. 0.84

00:13:34.000 But then we entered the global war on terror.

00:13:37.000 And as you said, we're fighting an enemy that was tenacious, but not capable of dealing death like the Russians and the Ukrainians could do right now. 0.99

00:13:45.000 We haven't fought a campaign against an integrated air defense system since Desert Storm.

00:13:51.000 I mean, there's a little bit of that against Serbia in 1999.

00:13:55.000 But what the Russians have in terms of air defense is mind-boggling.

00:13:58.000 And anybody who thinks that American or NATO air power would turn this around, you don't know what you're talking about.

00:14:04.000 Talk to the Ukrainian pilots right now.

00:14:06.000 The Russians have brought in their fourth-generation fighter, the Su-35, and their radar and long-range missile capability basically makes it impossible for the Ukrainian Air Force to take off.

00:14:17.000 Because they're shot down as soon as they get up in the air.

00:14:20.000 That would be the fate of much of NATO's air power if they tried to engage the Russians.

00:14:24.000 Again, the level of violence, as you said, what's happening here is electronic warfare.

00:14:28.000 See, when your son turned on his drone, it emits a signal.

00:14:32.000 That signal is picked up immediately by Russian electronic warfare, who then triangulate the signal and put artillery down on that target.

00:14:39.000 And so what drone operators have to do is offset their position with an antenna that's set, you know, a couple kilometers away, so that when the signal's detected, the artillery shells land over there. 0.92

00:14:51.000 But that trick, remember, the Russians aren't stupid.

00:14:54.000 They'll do that trick once, and then the Russians will start to search for the signals. 0.99

00:14:59.000 You cut that signal, go on.

00:15:00.000 This is a level of sophistication.

00:15:02.000 We talk about the violence that's taking place, but the sophistication of warfare right now is beyond the imagination of people.

00:15:09.000 Electronic warfare, communications intercept.

00:15:12.000 If you make a mistake, in short, you die.

00:15:15.000 This war is not forgiving for people who make mistakes on either side.

00:15:19.000 The Russians have made several mistakes.

00:15:21.000 They die.

00:15:22.000 The Ukrainians have made many mistakes. 0.99

00:15:23.000 They die.

00:15:24.000 I am very happy your son came home safely, but I think he understands that there before the grace of God goes him in terms of the number of people who did lose their lives.

00:15:34.000 War is an unforgiving business, and this war in particular, because no one has imagined this conflict.

00:15:40.000 We haven't had a situation where this many people died this quickly in armed conflict.

00:15:45.000 I mean, one of the frightening things about this war is, and I think the Polish foreign minister mentioned this the other day, that the plan is if the Ukraine collapses, NATO will then go in.

00:15:58.000 You know, that's, I think, a very, very frightening thought, that we then would get a full-out You talked about the competency of the Russian pilots and the quality of their aircraft.

00:16:20.000 How would they stand up against American aircraft?

00:16:25.000 Back in the day, giving away my age here, we used to run an exercise in Nellis Air Force Base called Red Flag.

00:16:33.000 And Red Flag was a force-on-force U.S. versus Soviet realistic dogfights.

00:16:39.000 But we haven't done that in a long time.

00:16:41.000 We now have resumed it, but we bring a lot of bias into our planning.

00:16:45.000 And so whenever you hear somebody say that we are planning against a near-peer opponent, that means they're planning against somebody that is designed to be inferior to the Americans.

00:16:54.000 So a lot of operational assumptions are based upon certain aspects of superiority that are automatically given to the American side in this war game.

00:17:04.000 That's just not the case.

00:17:05.000 The SU-35 fighter is one of the finest fighters in the world.

00:17:09.000 It's a fourth generation fighter that is easily the equivalent of the F-22 fighter.

00:17:13.000 The Russians have a different way of waging air combat.

00:17:17.000 I'm not saying it's better than ours.

00:17:19.000 I'm saying it's different.

00:17:20.000 It's one you definitely have to train against.

00:17:22.000 The Russians are operating within the framework of an integrated air defense system that is lethal to any mistakes. 0.87

00:17:29.000 We haven't trained on this.

00:17:31.000 And anybody who has been in combat will tell you that unless you train as you're going to fight, the first time you go into combat, you're going to be making a lot of mistakes, mistakes that should have been made in training.

00:17:41.000 But if we're not training properly, that means the mistakes are going to meet on the front line.

00:17:45.000 The Russians have had a year now to go up against a NATO-style military.

00:17:50.000 They made a lot of mistakes up front.

00:17:51.000 They've learned.

00:17:52.000 They've adapted.

00:17:53.000 I'm not going to sit here and say that it wouldn't be a fight.

00:17:56.000 I have too much respect for American professionalism, American pilots, and the American combat team.

00:18:02.000 But I will say that throughout history, if you study the initial combat of American forces in wars, we tend to fight the last war.

00:18:12.000 This war is, again, as General Kabuli said, is beyond the imagination.

00:18:16.000 If we're fighting the last war, that means we're fighting the wars in Iraq, the wars in Afghanistan, the wars in Syria.

00:18:22.000 We're not ready for what's about to happen.

00:18:24.000 That doesn't mean we can't learn.

00:18:25.000 That learning curve is going to come at a horrific cost.

00:18:28.000 And here's the other problem, then, is sustainability.

00:18:31.000 How many casualties can the United States take?

00:18:34.000 We have 100,000 troops right now in Europe.

00:18:37.000 Not all of those are combat troops.

00:18:39.000 We'll call maybe 40,000, 50,000 of them combat troops.

00:18:43.000 What happens when they start taking casualties?

00:18:45.000 Who's going to replace those casualties?

00:18:47.000 And I'm not talking about individual replacements.

00:18:49.000 I'm talking about unit replacements.

00:18:51.000 When a battalion takes 60% losses in a day and a half, which is going to happen, who replaces that battalion?

00:18:57.000 We don't have any left to give them.

00:18:58.000 Where are we going to get them?

00:19:00.000 How are we going to get them there?

00:19:01.000 This is, again, a level of war that people don't understand.

00:19:05.000 If we don't have it on the ground, it's not going to arrive.

00:19:09.000 If we're talking about going to war against Russia, understand not a single ship will land in Hamburg intact.

00:19:15.000 They will be sunk if we're at war with Russia.

00:19:18.000 But here's the good news, sir.

00:19:20.000 With all due respect to the Polish foreign minister, how does he think he's going to get Polish troops into Western Ukraine?

00:19:26.000 Under what authority?

00:19:28.000 NATO has two Methods of authorizing conflict.

00:19:31.000 One is, of course, Article 5.

00:19:33.000 Attack against one is an attack against all.

00:19:35.000 If Russia doesn't attack Poland, where's the justification?

00:19:39.000 And Russia has no intention of attacking Poland.

00:19:41.000 So now Article 4 comes in.

00:19:42.000 That's how NATO goes to war.

00:19:44.000 If you take a look at the conflict in Libya, you take a look at Afghanistan even.

00:19:48.000 These are all Article 4 fights, the fight against Serbia, Article 4.

00:19:51.000 That is where NATO comes together and determines that a security threat exists that warrants NATO intervention.

00:19:58.000 But it requires the unanimous consent of NATO. And Poland is not going to get the unanimous consent of NATO for a military adventure into Western Ukraine that could lead to World War III. So Poland would have to go in alone.

00:20:11.000 And if there's an army in Europe that's not prepared for large-scale ground combat in Europe against a Russian-style enemy, it's Poland.

00:20:20.000 Their army is small.

00:20:22.000 They're talking about doubling up to 300,000, but they're not there yet.

00:20:25.000 It's poorly equipped, and whatever equipment they have, they've given to the Ukrainians. 1.00

00:20:29.000 They haven't replaced this equipment.

00:20:30.000 They're not well trained.

00:20:32.000 So there's zero chance that they would be able to enact the policies that their politicians are giving word to.

00:20:39.000 What Poland's hoping is that they can drag NATO in there with them, but there's no appetite in NATO right now for a conflict with Russia.

00:20:46.000 None whatsoever.

00:20:47.000 You know, you mentioned earlier on that That Russia didn't really want to take Kiev, that it doesn't want to take all of Ukraine.

00:20:56.000 What does, in your view, what does Vladimir Putin want?

00:21:00.000 What did he want when he went in there?

00:21:02.000 And what's his objective now?

00:21:04.000 Well, we have a good idea of what he did want when he went in there.

00:21:08.000 That's the peace treaty that was negotiated.

00:21:10.000 It seems to me that the Russians put on the table what their demands were, and what they got in that peace treaty, what they wanted, was recognition that Crimea is Russia forever.

00:21:19.000 That's it.

00:21:20.000 Belongs to Russia. 0.96

00:21:21.000 Ukraine has to concede that.

00:21:22.000 They were seeking at the time the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, the two Donbass republics.

00:21:28.000 And from the Russian perspective, after eight years of the citizens of Donbass being treated as terrorists by the government in Kiev, bombarded on a daily basis, there could be nothing less.

00:21:39.000 You can't ask Lugansk and Donetsk, the primary majority ethnic Russian populations, to return under the wing of Ukraine.

00:21:47.000 They wanted Ukraine to commit that they would never join NATO. That's been a Russian demand since 2008, when William Burns, current CIA director, then US ambassador to Russia, wrote a memorandum called Net Means Net, where he outlined the Russian position.

00:22:02.000 They will not tolerate Ukraine becoming part of NATO. We knew that in 2008.

00:22:06.000 Russia insists that that's the condition today.

00:22:10.000 Demilitarization.

00:22:10.000 They did not want NATO infrastructure in Ukraine.

00:22:15.000 They didn't want Ukraine to become a de facto extension of NATO as it had after being trained by NATO from 2008 to 2022.

00:22:23.000 So that's what the Russians wanted.

00:22:25.000 And you know what?

00:22:25.000 If the Ukrainians had taken that deal, it would have been a good deal compared to what they have today.

00:22:29.000 Now Russia has taken Tereson, Zaporizhia, Lugansk, and Donetsk.

00:22:34.000 All four of those territories are now, from the Russian perspective, part of Russia.

00:22:38.000 And with all due respect, that's the only perspective that counts.

00:22:40.000 Because they have a constitution that they believe in, just like we believe in ours.

00:22:43.000 And that constitution has been adapted to recognize these territories as Russia.

00:22:48.000 They will never get them, Ukraine will never get them back. 0.95

00:22:51.000 The reason why I say that is because now that it's part of Russia, it's protected by the totality of Russia's military capability, which includes nuclear weapons. 0.72

00:22:58.000 So if there's any dream on the part of NATO that through the use of military force they can recapture these territories, that's like the Russians coming into Mexico and telling the Mexicans they can take back Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico.

00:23:13.000 The United States would view that as an existential threat, and we would use every means necessary, including nuclear weapons, to prevent that from happening.

00:23:20.000 So that's where we're at.

00:23:22.000 What Russia has said is what they're looking for now is the social and economic revitalization of these new Russian territories, that they have no desire to acquire additional territory, but they still require demilitarization.

00:23:37.000 That means NATO infrastructure is removed.

00:23:39.000 It also means that Ukraine's army, We'll now have to pull back 150 kilometers from the new Russian border, because Russia will never again tolerate a situation where Ukraine is firing artillery shells against Russian civilian targets, which Ukraine does on a daily basis, killing two to three, sometimes more Ukrainian civilians a day in Donetsk and other areas.

00:24:00.000 No NATO. And the last one is going to be a more difficult one.

00:24:04.000 I don't know how Russia is going to pull it off, but they insist they're going to be able to do this.

00:24:07.000 And this is denazification.

00:24:09.000 That means to get rid of the far-right, ultranationalistic parties that have taken over the government in Ukraine, to delegitimize, deplatform the ideology of Stepan Bandera.

00:24:21.000 An odious historical character who fought alongside Adolf Hitler, has the blood of tens of thousands of Jews, hundreds of thousands of Poles and Russians on his hands. 0.55

00:24:31.000 He is the national hero of Ukraine today, and Bandera is, from an ideological perspective, he's in the DNA of the Zelensky government.

00:24:40.000 And so the Russians have said that has to be eliminated.

00:24:42.000 I don't know how they're going to achieve that.

00:24:44.000 But the good news for Ukraine is Russia's willing to stop this war And give Ukraine, for instance, the city of Odessa.

00:24:52.000 That allows Ukraine continued access to the Black Sea, which means Ukraine can survive as a modern nation state.

00:24:57.000 They can have Nyepetrovsk, a major industrial facility that gives Ukraine an industrial heartland.

00:25:02.000 They can have Kharkov, again, another industrial city.

00:25:05.000 But if Ukraine continues this fight at the behest of NATO, which we see, we see the United States and NATO urging Ukraine to continue, Russia will take those three cities, and those three cities will become Russian.

00:25:16.000 That's just a reality.

00:25:17.000 That means the virtual death of the Ukrainian nation as we now know it. 0.88

00:25:21.000 What are the implications of the new Chinese alliance with Russia?

00:25:28.000 I mean, the military and the geopolitical and economic implications.

00:25:33.000 Well, we can't call it an alliance because they won't call it an alliance.

00:25:36.000 Alliance is actually...

00:25:38.000 Very limiting, because it provides a structure that holds it together, but it also limits it.

00:25:44.000 What the Russians and the Chinese have said is we have something that's not on the line.

00:25:48.000 There's no limits to what we can do.

00:25:50.000 It also means that there's no artificial restrictions.

00:25:53.000 This perplexes many people in the West, because We're looking for limiting factors here, what we can exploit.

00:26:00.000 The bottom line is we can exploit nothing.

00:26:02.000 There's no weaknesses there.

00:26:03.000 We've tried to do that, for instance, to highlight the differences between Russia's continuing friendship with India and to make that a wedge between Russia and China because China has difficulties with India.

00:26:18.000 What the Russians and Chinese have said, well, that's an issue that we'll talk about over here, but it doesn't affect what we're doing over here in Ukraine.

00:26:25.000 The nexus of Russia and China goes beyond simply uniting one of the world's great economies, China, with one of the world's great land masses and reservoirs of natural resources, which is Russia.

00:26:39.000 You bring those two things together and you create a world-beating team.

00:26:45.000 And this is something the United States and Europe need to wake up to, that thanks to the policy of the United States, we've brought these two nations together and they're not going to drift apart.

00:26:54.000 They are unbeatable in terms of their economy, their resources.

00:26:58.000 And as long as their military ambition is limited to defending themselves, then they won't get involved in the kind of military misadventures that the United States has.

00:27:09.000 You won't see the Chinese army bleeding itself out in the Middle East like you saw the United States.

00:27:14.000 You won't see the Chinese army bashing its head in a conflict with Australia, trying to take Australia.

00:27:20.000 That's not what they do.

00:27:21.000 They will fight for the South Chinese Sea, for these new islands. 0.94

00:27:24.000 They will fight for Taiwan, and they will defend their borders against India and anybody else. 0.97

00:27:29.000 But China's global projection is economic, and there they're unmatched.

00:27:33.000 I mean, if you take a look at what the Biden administration tried to do in the most recent G7 meetings last summer, it was almost embarrassing.

00:27:39.000 It's almost embarrassing because we're encouraging the seven most developed economies in the world to come up with a $600 billion fund for global development.

00:27:40.000 Because we were encouraging the seven most developed economies in the world to come up with a $600 billion fund for global development.

00:27:49.000 After a decade, where China has pumped in $7 to $10 trillion in global development, as if what we were going to do was going to have any impact, it won't.

00:27:58.000 We can't compete with the Chinese on the scope and scale that they have. 1.00

00:28:02.000 And now when we take a look at the economic impact of the pandemic, we take a look at the blowback from the sanctioning of Russian energy, which has created havoc in the European economy and even our economy. 0.54

00:28:14.000 People have to understand, you know, when the Saudi Arabians just agreed to a 500,000 barrel a day reduction in oil, look what oil prices have done.

00:28:23.000 Russia says they're going to follow suit.

00:28:25.000 This blows the pricing beyond the $60 cap that Europe's put on.

00:28:30.000 Nobody's going to recognize that $60 cap.

00:28:32.000 It's a joke.

00:28:33.000 And then you combine that with the fact that basically China and India and Saudi Arabia have all said, we refuse to tie our oil To an artificial pricing mechanism, Brent's standard, which is a European pricing mechanism.

00:28:48.000 They're now going to go to a new standard.

00:28:50.000 I think they're calling it the Dubai standard or something, which means they are totally divorcing themselves from the West.

00:28:56.000 They're the only things that count.

00:28:57.000 This Trans-Eurasian Economic Union that Russia and China are creating and the process of creating We're good to go.

00:29:22.000 And the fact that Brazil just entered an agreement with China to conduct trade using the Chinese yuan and the Brazilian real, I think it is.

00:29:31.000 What he said is they're not using the dollar anymore.

00:29:33.000 And that removes all of our leverage.

00:29:34.000 We have no ability to influence one of the largest economies in South America because without the dollar, we can't sanction you.

00:29:43.000 Think about what he just said.

00:29:45.000 Without the dollar, we can't sanction you.

00:29:47.000 How is sanctioning building economic relations?

00:29:50.000 Sanctioning is the destruction of economic relations.

00:29:53.000 It's the antithesis of economic growth.

00:29:55.000 And yet that's the only language the United States knows how to speak.

00:29:59.000 We don't talk about reaching out and building bridges.

00:30:02.000 We talk about blowing up bridges.

00:30:04.000 We talk about sanctioning people, starving people, strangling people.

00:30:07.000 This is why China is having such great success.

00:30:10.000 I'll leave it with this.

00:30:11.000 Look what they did in the Middle East. 0.99

00:30:13.000 After four decades of America trying to transform the Middle East into an arc of chaos designed to subvert Iran by using Saudi-funded countries. 0.94

00:30:23.000 Gulf Arab states to create trouble from Lebanon, through Syria, into Iraq, down into, you know, in Afghanistan, into Yemen. 0.97

00:30:33.000 This is the Shiite Crescent, which is the Shiite Crescent. 0.63

00:30:38.000 The Shiite Crescent that Abdullah, King Abdullah, talked about in 2004.

00:30:42.000 Yeah, which is unifying all of these, the Gulf states with Saudi Arabia money and Oman and Qatar and Abu Dhabi all the way up to Lebanon.

00:30:53.000 So the Shia Crescent was the youth, the fulcrum of U.S. strategy, which is to unite Saudi Arabia, Oman, the Gulf states, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, all the way up to Lebanon as a barrier against Iranian expansion in the Mideast. all the way up to Lebanon as a barrier against And that was our whole strategy for the past 40 years. 0.90

00:31:15.000 Yes, sir.

00:31:16.000 And as I think you're about to say... 1.00

00:31:19.000 Well, what I'm about to say is that the Chinese came in and said, Hey, guys, this is stupid. 1.00

00:31:27.000 Look, I'll give you an example of how stupid it is and why the Americans... 1.00

00:31:31.000 We were given enough hints. 1.00

00:31:33.000 Back in the final year of Donald Trump's presidency, an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone was shot down.

00:31:41.000 The Iranians claim it flew into the airspace.

00:31:43.000 We claim it didn't.

00:31:44.000 But it was shot down.

00:31:45.000 Donald Trump wanted to launch a retaliatory strike against Iran.

00:31:49.000 And the military wisely said, hey, boss, while we can do that, understand that we will set off a chain of events that we can't control.

00:31:57.000 And the Iranians are going to rain death and destruction on everything in the Middle East, including our bases. 1.00

00:32:04.000 But more importantly, they're going to destroy Saudi oil infrastructure.

00:32:08.000 United Arab Emirates Infrastructure, the entire Middle East oil-producing economy will be destroyed, and then it will take us probably three to five years to build up combat power to be able to defeat Iran, if we could defeat Iran. 0.83

00:32:22.000 But the world economy will collapse in the meantime.

00:32:25.000 And Trump had to pull back because there was a recognition that, yes, while we could do damage to Iran, Iran would do damage to everybody else, and it would be a mutually assured destruction-type suicide pact.

00:32:36.000 Now, we didn't learn that lesson because we continued to promote this anti-Shia crescent policy.

00:32:42.000 But the Saudis woke up. 1.00

00:32:44.000 They had a big wake-up call in 2019 when the Houthi fired a couple Iranian-made drones and shut down an Aramco facility, sending the signal, we can shut you down anytime we want.

00:32:55.000 And the Saudis, you know, they're engaged in something called Saudi Arabia 2030, which is this massive revitalization of the Saudi economy and society, etc.

00:33:05.000 It requires money, money to be poured in, money that can't be poured in if you're busy buying weapons for a war, and if it's ever fought, means the end of your economy to begin with.

00:33:14.000 Same thing with Iran. 0.52

00:33:15.000 Iran needs oil to survive.

00:33:17.000 They need to sell oil to keep their economy functioning.

00:33:20.000 So the Saudis and the Iranians actually have the same policy goals and objectives.

00:33:26.000 Stability.

00:33:27.000 China came in without any military power, sat down, and negotiated an agreement between the Saudis and Iranians to end these four decades of American-driven conflict.

00:33:38.000 And it's working wonders.

00:33:40.000 The Saudis now are talking about inviting Syria, which is one of those nations in the Shia Crescent, Syria to rejoin the Arab League.

00:33:49.000 They're going to normalize relations with Syria.

00:33:52.000 They're normalizing relations with Iran.

00:33:54.000 They're both going to join the BRICS. They're both joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

00:33:59.000 They are gravitating into that massive gravitational pull that now is the Russian-Chinese nexus. 0.99

00:34:06.000 It's sucking them in.

00:34:08.000 And you know who's left holding an empty bag? 0.67

00:34:11.000 The United States and Israel.

00:34:12.000 Of course, we brought Israel in with the Abrams Accord back in 2020. 0.98

00:34:18.000 Israel was supposed to help provide a stiffening to this crescent of chaos. 1.00

00:34:23.000 Saudi doesn't want to play that game anymore.

00:34:25.000 Nobody in the Gulf of Arab world wants to play that game anymore. 1.00

00:34:28.000 They want to actually grow their economies.

00:34:30.000 And to do that, they need peace and stability.

00:34:32.000 And they're willing to make a common cause with the Iranians.

00:34:36.000 I don't think they're going to become best friends.

00:34:37.000 But I do think they're just going to stop this nonsense of perpetual Cold War that could go hot at any moment.

00:34:45.000 That was the American policy.

00:34:46.000 But we have nothing to put on the table to challenge the Chinese. 1.00

00:34:51.000 And this is the problem.

00:34:51.000 The Chinese are going around the world right now preaching economic prosperity and peace.

00:34:56.000 And all we can preach is death and destruction and war.

00:35:00.000 So we have spent approximately the equivalent on weapons as the Chinese have spent on development. 0.98

00:35:10.000 And development without the strings attached.

00:35:13.000 They go to these countries and, you know, they end up getting a lot.

00:35:17.000 They end up getting control of those natural resources.

00:35:19.000 All we have is to offer weapons in exchange for those natural resources.

00:35:25.000 And these countries are beginning to catch on.

00:35:27.000 The big issue is that we project our military power around the globe and the Chinese population Reject economic power, and they're winning this battle because economic power is a lot more attractive. 1.00

00:35:42.000 Bombing somebody into oblivion does not make friends.

00:35:46.000 It does not make permanent allies.

00:35:48.000 It is not a good tool for diplomacy.

00:35:51.000 Investment in somebody's economy wins you a lot of friends.

00:35:54.000 The Chinese are proving that. 1.00

00:35:56.000 100% correct.

00:35:57.000 I've done a lot of travel in the Middle East.

00:35:59.000 And I will tell you this, you're not going to win the hearts and minds by blowing them up.

00:36:04.000 You do just the opposite.

00:36:05.000 You know, there is a great capacity in the Middle East.

00:36:08.000 It is a great capacity everywhere.

00:36:10.000 I say the same thing about the Russian people.

00:36:12.000 We don't understand them.

00:36:14.000 We don't even try to understand them.

00:36:15.000 We allow ourselves to be swamped with Russophobia.

00:36:18.000 We allow ourselves to be swamped with Middle East prejudice, basically, against Arabs and such.

00:36:24.000 And in doing so, we forget that these are human beings that not only have the same emotions that we do.

00:36:30.000 I mean, just imagine...

00:36:32.000 I just ask every American to imagine that once every five years, somebody came in and just blew up your house and killed your children, killed your friends, your relatives, then you spend the next five years rebuilding for them to come in five years later and do it again.

00:36:46.000 And it's a perpetual cycle of death, destruction, and violence.

00:36:49.000 You can never dig out from underneath it.

00:36:52.000 You would not view that as your friend.

00:36:55.000 Now imagine, if you would, the equivalent of FEMA coming in and rebuilding your home, offering the helping hand, helping rebuild schools, etc.

00:37:03.000 The love you feel for them.

00:37:05.000 That's how the world is feeling.

00:37:06.000 You look into China and those who come in with the helping hand.

00:37:09.000 They're rejecting the death and destruction, the helping hand.

00:37:12.000 But here's the important thing.

00:37:13.000 The capacity for give.

00:37:15.000 The capacity to forgive amongst these nations.

00:37:18.000 You know, we have made so many mistakes, so many mistakes in the last 30, 40 years.

00:37:23.000 But if we would just write the course, people would forgive us and would accept us as friends if we would just behave as friends.

00:37:31.000 And that's what we don't understand.

00:37:33.000 The greatest strength America has is the ability to extend a helping hand.

00:37:38.000 Without strings.

00:37:40.000 Not a hand attached to our own moral codes, our own belief system, our own values.

00:37:45.000 A genuine helping hand that says, we're here to help you rebuild.

00:37:50.000 And what happens when you don't have the strings?

00:37:52.000 See, we put those strings on because we have this insecurity that says we have to control everything.

00:37:57.000 But if you actually help somebody without strings, the goodwill that will be engendered is the best mechanism of control because you're not controlling them.

00:38:07.000 They're volunteering to be with you and help you and view you as a friend to come to your assistance.

00:38:12.000 We have to radically change our approach to interfacing with the world.

00:38:16.000 We are a nation with great capacity.

00:38:20.000 Great capacity.

00:38:21.000 We are a nation with some of the best people in the world.

00:38:23.000 The American heart is unbeatable, untouchable.

00:38:26.000 If we could just direct it into doing good.

00:38:29.000 I have seen firefighters run into buildings willing to sacrifice their lives to save complete strangers.

00:38:35.000 That is the American heart.

00:38:37.000 That's what we need to tap into.

00:38:39.000 The ability of America to do what is necessary to do the right thing.

00:38:43.000 We have to stop taking that energy away.

00:38:46.000 And perverting it by turning it into this war list.

00:38:50.000 Because the same dedication, the same willingness to sacrifice that it takes to have a Marine cross the line of departure to close with and destroy the enemy for firepower maneuver to save it, to lay his life down for those.

00:39:02.000 We direct that into him going over in a different capacity.

00:39:07.000 One of a helping hand to help people build without preconditions, without strings, and people would fall in love with America again.

00:39:14.000 And I still think that can happen.

00:39:17.000 We haven't gotten too far down the rabbit hole to prevent that.

00:39:19.000 I'm reminding my uncle, President Kennedy, because my uncle came into office immediately, you know, four days after Eisenhower made his speech, probably the most important speech now in American history, warning against the domination of the military industrial complex.

00:39:35.000 And specifically warning against that this was what was going to happen to us.

00:39:40.000 We would become an imperium abroad and a security state at the moment. 0.81

00:39:45.000 We would lose our democracy and we would lose our friendships around the world.

00:39:49.000 And my uncle came in, you know, and immediately two months into office, he was he got tricked and lied to by his joint chiefs of staff, by Curtis LeMay, Louis Lamentzer, and Alan Tulles and Charles Cabal of the CIA.

00:40:05.000 And they said he didn't want to go into Cuba.

00:40:08.000 He didn't want the Bay of Pigs invasion to happen, and he refused to use U.S. military vessels to transport the troops, you know, the Cuban revolutionaries.

00:40:18.000 And they had to get vessels from United Fruit Company in Texaco to bring them over because my Uncle Jack wouldn't do it.

00:40:24.000 And then he said, when the invasion happened and it was failing, and they said, okay, now you got to send in the Essex aircraft carrier and we got to invade.

00:40:32.000 And he said, no.

00:40:34.000 And he realized that was their plan all along.

00:40:36.000 They knew it was going to fail, but they thought they would trick him into evading.

00:40:40.000 He walked out of the Oval Office and he said to Robert McNamara, I want to take the CIA, batter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.

00:40:49.000 And he never trusted his military advisors again.

00:40:54.000 And when they tried to get him to go into Laos, he refused.

00:40:57.000 When they tried to get him to send combat troops to Vietnam, put tremendous pressure on him to send 250,000 men, he refused.

00:41:05.000 He never sent any combat troop abroad during his presidency.

00:41:08.000 He sent 16,000 advisors, you know, to Vietnam, who technically weren't allowed to participate in combat.

00:41:15.000 Many of them, of course, did.

00:41:17.000 But that was fewer troops than he sent to get James Meredith into the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss.

00:41:24.000 And a week before he died, he signed national security order ordering all troops out of the end of 1965, the first thousand in November.

00:41:34.000 And of course, two weeks later, he was killed.

00:41:36.000 And Johnson reversed, Wyland and Johnson reversed that order.

00:41:39.000 My uncle said he didn't want the face of America that people knew abroad to be the face of a He wanted it to be a Peace Corpsman, bringing food, bringing technology, digging wells.

00:41:52.000 And he started the Kennedy Milk Program to give nutrition to every child in the world.

00:41:57.000 He started the Alliance for Progress to give direct aid to the poor rather than the oligarchs in the military.

00:42:03.000 I'm saying all this stuff because, you know, it's hard to judge the success of any presidency objectively.

00:42:11.000 But if you want to measure the success of the presidency, based upon this metric, the number of hospitals, universities, boulevards, buildings, Our name for that president abroad, none of them can rival my uncle.

00:42:30.000 There is a Kennedy Avenue or Boulevard in almost every capital in Africa and Latin America.

00:42:36.000 There are universities, there's hospitals, there are statues to them in Ethiopia, all over Africa and Asia.

00:42:44.000 And people loved our country at that time, genuinely loved our country.

00:42:49.000 And they looked at us as a beacon of freedom, of moral authority around the world.

00:42:54.000 They wanted our leadership.

00:42:56.000 They knew the difference between leadership and bullying.

00:42:58.000 And my uncle knew that.

00:43:00.000 And my uncle, you know, was during World War II, he was marooned on an island after his PT boat got cut in two with the Japanese, which was an imperial army, looking for him.

00:43:13.000 And his life was saved by two Solomon Islanders who resented the Japanese invasion and the Japanese takeover of their country.

00:43:22.000 And they took a coconut that he had carved his coordinates on and they paddled it 30 miles across the ocean at the British base and gave it to him.

00:43:31.000 So his life was saved by colonial people.

00:43:35.000 And I think that that lesson that, you know, he learned that these are people who should be governing themselves.

00:43:42.000 We shouldn't be governing them either with hard colonialism of the British or with the soft colonialism of corporate military aid, you know, from the United States.

00:43:53.000 And the payoff, you know, anybody can look at it around the world.

00:43:56.000 Just go for a walk in one of those capitals and you'll see something.

00:43:59.000 My uncle used to say that there are children in Africa who are named for Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, but there's none named for Marx and Lenin.

00:44:08.000 Of course, that's not true today.

00:44:10.000 But I think the greatest honor that he would have felt if he knew it after his death was the number of African children and Latin American children whose name is Kennedy.

00:44:22.000 Because people admired our country and they loved our country then.

00:44:26.000 And the economic and security payoffs of that kind of foreign policy are so much higher.

00:44:32.000 I just want to let you know that one of my daughters, Patricia, went into the Peace Corps, and the man she's marrying, her fiancé was also a Peace Corps member, and they both view that as one of the defining moments of their life.

00:44:45.000 The concept of going abroad and selflessly serving on behalf of their nation, but for the benefit of others.

00:44:54.000 That's the legacy of your uncle.

00:44:56.000 It's alive and well and living today.

00:44:58.000 Scott Ritter, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for continuing to be outspoken about these issues and continuing to tell the truth to the American people.

RFK Jr. The Defender - April 07, 2023

Cost of War with Scott Ritter

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