The Auron MacIntyre Show - Why Nation-Building Doesn't Work ｜ Guest： J. Burden ｜ 6⧸18⧸25

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.540 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.100 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.020 As the war drums are beating and we're told over and over again,

00:00:40.900 don't worry, this one's going to be done by Christmas.

00:00:43.640 We're not going to put boots on the ground.

00:00:45.880 I can feel that old feeling in the middle of my chest,

00:00:49.740 that worried feeling building up,

00:00:51.960 knowing that ultimately we have been down this path before.

00:00:55.320 And so I thought today would be a good idea to go into

00:00:58.820 why nation building ultimately doesn't work.

00:01:01.940 A lot of people are telling me that we have no intention of nation building,

00:01:05.120 but I feel like that might not be the case.

00:01:07.780 And I thought it was worth our time to review the failures

00:01:11.140 and why we have had failures in this endeavor before.

00:01:14.960 And joining me today to do that is a first-time guest on the show.

00:01:18.900 You've enjoyed his work on Peaky Blinders and in Oppenheimer.

00:01:22.740 Killian Murphy, thank you so much for coming on, man.

00:01:25.040 Thank you so much for having me on, Aaron.

00:01:27.660 You're mentioning, right, the Sillian Murphy meme.

00:01:30.880 It's funny, that started, right,

00:01:33.060 the first time I sort of showed up at a conference.

00:01:35.540 And I think a lot of people were confused

00:01:37.200 because, you know, up until very recently, I didn't show my face.

00:01:40.200 And so now everyone's in on the joke, right?

00:01:42.660 But again, thank you so much for having me on.

00:01:44.980 No, it's funny.

00:01:46.120 First time I met you at the conference,

00:01:47.660 someone described you that way afterwards.

00:01:52.500 I was like, be careful.

00:01:53.220 You're going to dox Burden.

00:01:54.520 That's too accurate.

00:01:55.860 Like, that's actually too good of a descriptor.

00:01:58.680 Between that and having possibly the worst anonymous profile picture,

00:02:03.740 it is not a picture of me, but it looks really close to one.

00:02:08.600 Let's be honest.

00:02:09.680 If I didn't do it, someone was going to connect the two dots there

00:02:13.340 and it was going to happen eventually, right?

00:02:16.200 Fair enough.

00:02:16.720 All right.

00:02:17.040 Well, again, Jay Burden is here with us.

00:02:19.120 We're going to get into regime change and why it has repeatedly failed.

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00:03:14.080 So, Mr. Burden,

00:03:18.200 I've been told from the beginning of this whole episode

00:03:23.320 with what's going on with Israel and Iran,

00:03:26.480 I was told from the beginning,

00:03:28.280 Israel can do it itself.

00:03:30.680 We're not going to get involved.

00:03:32.300 Don't worry.

00:03:33.180 We're basically just there to say,

00:03:35.120 hey, I'll let Israel do its thing. 0.97

00:03:37.900 That's more or less our role.

00:03:39.660 And then I started noticing that the very same people

00:03:42.520 who told me not to worry

00:03:43.760 and that we're not going to get involved.

00:03:46.400 The line started to become,

00:03:48.000 well, of course, we're going to do a few strikes.

00:03:49.800 Like, obviously, that's going to be the case,

00:03:51.680 that opportunity.

00:03:52.560 But Trump has said he's not for regime change.

00:03:55.500 So don't worry.

00:03:56.800 It's just going to be a few strikes.

00:03:58.700 And I can already feel the mission creep

00:04:00.740 before we've even involved ourselves in the mission.

00:04:04.420 We're already watching each step as we go.

00:04:07.140 We're being assured that, no, we're not going to go that area. 0.99

00:04:10.100 Don't be ridiculous. 0.54

00:04:10.940 Of course, we wouldn't try to put this whole thing 0.99

00:04:13.820 through the same process that we did in Iraq or Afghanistan.

00:04:18.120 And that seems like an obvious thing

00:04:20.260 that we should recognize.

00:04:21.380 But ultimately, I'm looking at this,

00:04:23.240 and I'm not going to pretend to be a geopolitical expert.

00:04:26.060 This is not my wheelhouse.

00:04:28.640 There are people much more knowledgeable on this than me.

00:04:31.720 I have listened to them.

00:04:32.660 I try to understand their positions.

00:04:33.980 But if you want to know about political theory, I'm your guy.

00:04:38.000 I'm not Mearsheimer.

00:04:39.140 I'm not one of these guys.

00:04:40.240 But ultimately, many people have pointed out,

00:04:43.380 and I feel like this is pretty accurate observing what's going on,

00:04:46.640 that if we strike, if we get involved with Israel in this, 0.79

00:04:51.260 ultimately, the goal has to be putting boots on the ground.

00:04:53.980 Because we've already been told this is not just...

00:04:55.680 At first, it was just a strike to get rid of nukes.

00:04:58.540 Like, oh, we're taking out nuclear capacity.

00:05:00.640 And then we hear, actually, no, this is a regime change strike.

00:05:04.100 Like, explicitly, we are now involved.

00:05:06.040 The goal is regime change.

00:05:07.940 So this is a decapitation strike.

00:05:09.580 We're taking out the rulers and everything else.

00:05:11.940 Well, I think as we've seen from many other Middle Eastern nations,

00:05:15.840 when you destabilize and take out the regime,

00:05:18.960 you can't just, like, let it sit there.

00:05:21.120 These things immediately turn into cesspools where radicals gather.

00:05:25.580 These different factions break out.

00:05:27.320 Terrible things happen.

00:05:28.240 And the people inside, you know, are, of course, get this horrible, horrible war.

00:05:33.600 But also, they become radicalized against Israel and the United States

00:05:36.880 because they, you know, feel like these are the people who put them in this situation.

00:05:41.600 You know, bad governance is bad, but no governance is actually often worse.

00:05:46.180 And so it seems like, inevitably, someone's going to have to rebuild Iran if we strike it. 0.98

00:05:52.500 And I don't think Israel's going to do it because they don't have the logistical power.

00:05:56.320 They don't have, you know, the geopolitical heft.

00:06:00.460 And ultimately, I just don't think they have the political will to involve themselves in, you know,

00:06:04.520 going in and completely controlling yet another Middle Eastern Muslim area. 0.79

00:06:10.980 And so ultimately, it feels like that job's going to fall to the Western world, which means the United States.

00:06:19.620 Am I crazy in feeling the kind of gradient we're moving on?

00:06:24.080 Is that all in my brain or is there any validity there?

00:06:26.340 So obviously, you're not crazy.

00:06:29.880 You and I, I think, are in the same boat.

00:06:31.880 Primarily, our interests are political theory, not geopolitics.

00:06:35.800 But you and I share something in common, which is that we can look all the way back into the past of roughly 10 to 15 years ago

00:06:42.860 and look at what America has done, and we can see how it worked out, right?

00:06:48.000 We're in the post-Afghanistan world, right? 1.00

00:06:50.780 And we can certainly quibble about how we left that war, you know, how it was handled.

00:06:54.540 But very clearly, that did not work.

00:06:57.740 That was an absolute quagmire.

00:06:59.200 We lost billions in treasure and entirely too many American lives and accomplished absolutely nothing, right?

00:07:06.840 Sure, we got some of them, right?

00:07:09.060 Certainly bad people.

00:07:10.960 But at the end of the day, Afghanistan is still Afghanistan. 0.53

00:07:14.960 Obviously, you know, we got Saddam Hussein. 0.87

00:07:17.780 Is his country a better place?

00:07:19.820 Is the area safer?

00:07:21.120 And you mentioned earlier, right, the kind of early saber rattling about nukes.

00:07:25.740 Well, as I'm sure you remember, Saddam had them too, right? 1.00

00:07:29.820 He had yellow cake.

00:07:31.260 And it turned out that that was a lie.

00:07:34.820 This is the exact same playbook being run over again.

00:07:38.060 And so when we look at regime change, there are kind of several layers to look at it, right?

00:07:41.720 The first, which is the mission creep.

00:07:43.560 That's a very real complaint, right?

00:07:45.960 The idea is, oh, this will be a quick, easy thing will be done by Christmas.

00:07:51.080 We've seen that over and over again.

00:07:52.900 That's not how it works.

00:07:54.600 But a secondary critique is to say, like, okay, let's say you get exactly what you want.

00:08:01.640 What problems does that solve for us?

00:08:03.660 And the answer is effectively none.

00:08:06.520 Iran is not a good country. 0.99

00:08:08.240 I don't want to live in Iran. 1.00

00:08:09.800 I don't have Iranian interest at heart. 0.95

00:08:12.540 But we've seen this playbook over and over again.

00:08:15.500 And much like Charlie Brown in the football, you can't really blame us for staring down the football the fourth time and thinking maybe Lucy might pull the football out and we'll end up flat on our back.

00:08:26.040 This is not, this is far from some kind of crazy prognosis.

00:08:29.840 We've seen this over and over and over again with the exact same results.

00:08:33.460 And it's especially disconcerting and sort of disappointing from someone like President Trump, who ran on an anti-war agenda.

00:08:42.180 Don't forget that the MAGA movement is sort of the sequel to the Tea Party, right?

00:08:46.560 A sequel to another sort of insurgent right-wing movement in America that was very, very conservative.

00:08:51.720 And albeit that had a lot to do initially with, you know, physical concerns.

00:08:56.220 But the foreign policy was right there as well.

00:08:58.640 And to me, there's a very real question, which is if the MAGA movement becomes a vehicle for John McCain or George Bush-esque foreign policy, what was the point of it to begin with?

00:09:10.400 It's become the exact same party it always was.

00:09:13.560 And again, there are certain things I like about Trump.

00:09:16.140 I think he's very funny.

00:09:17.180 I think his opinions on immigration are completely and totally correct. 0.89

00:09:21.020 But at the same time, if the man who went to go drain the swamp has been absorbed into it, what was the point of this whole endeavor?

00:09:31.500 You know, there's relatively breaking news, but there's an interview that has just come out with Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson.

00:09:40.560 And I might end up reviewing that Friday, cutting some clips and going over what happened.

00:09:45.460 But one of the things that Ted Cruz said in that interview that Tucker Carlson challenges is that Iran has made multiple attempts on Donald Trump's life.

00:09:57.520 And he's echoing the sentiment that Bibi Netanyahu put out to try to say that the United States should involve itself in this war.

00:10:05.620 And I've got to say, you know, that's a very concerning accusation.

00:10:11.720 Netanyahu made it about the two guys, you know, the one assassin from the rooftop and the other the golf course.

00:10:18.280 That obviously can't be true.

00:10:20.040 And I think Ted Cruz kind of walked that back on his behalf.

00:10:22.820 But he said there are real attempts to assassinate Trump.

00:10:26.520 And obviously that is far more important to me personally as a cause for war than kind of what has been thrown out there right now.

00:10:38.340 Like if there is real and, you know, incontrovertible evidence that Iran is literally deploying hitmen into the United States to kill the president of the United States, that is a real cause for war. 0.77

00:10:49.600 That is the most just war one can fight if you're if you have another country literally sending assassins to kill your leader.

00:10:58.160 You know, that is a declaration of war.

00:11:00.220 I think everyone could recognize that.

00:11:02.560 And yet this was supposed to theoretically have been happening for years and we did not go to war with Iran over it.

00:11:09.580 But now all of a sudden we're involved in what could be possibly this full blown attempt at regime change.

00:11:18.380 They're now acknowledging it's not just about getting rid of, you know, the nuclear capacity.

00:11:24.120 It is the regime change.

00:11:25.260 And I guess the thing that concerns me is if we already had a total and real justification to go to war with Iran, why didn't we use it then? 0.82

00:11:36.620 Why are we waiting now at this moment after Israel has already begun a unilateral strike while we were in negotiations with this country?

00:11:44.300 First, why were we negotiating with a country that's literally trying to murder or actively trying to kill our president?

00:11:50.280 And second, why did we wait until this moment to strike?

00:11:54.260 It's just one of those things that it just blows my mind.

00:11:57.620 Like one of these things can't be true.

00:12:00.040 I don't know.

00:12:00.620 Again, am I am I crazy here or does it does that make sense?

00:12:03.780 I don't know.

00:12:05.120 That's a very reasonable objection.

00:12:07.160 Right.

00:12:07.340 Clearly, there is a vested interest in war with Iran.

00:12:10.540 We've seen this for decades.

00:12:11.720 One of the things that's been making the rounds on social media is definitive proof in newspapers, media from the last 30 years saying Iran has a nuke over and over again in the 90s, in the 2000s, the 2010s and now today.

00:12:26.580 So obviously, if there was incontrovertible proof, why didn't we declare war then?

00:12:33.920 Similarly, right, if there is this incontrovertible proof of, you know, Iranian hitmen, you know, Persian assassins kind of popping out of, you know, barrels and slashing them with sabers.

00:12:44.940 Like, why haven't we seen it?

00:12:46.560 Because again, like you said, if that's true, like, awesome.

00:12:50.640 Let's let's dig into it, show it to me, because this is a radically different discussion.

00:12:55.580 If, you know, instead of some kind of pasty faced, you know, incel assassin in Butler, PA, it's an Iranian, you know, some sort of commando. 0.78

00:13:04.420 Then again, fair enough.

00:13:06.480 Right.

00:13:06.720 I wouldn't necessarily be in favor of, you know, some sort of rerun of Iraq or Afghanistan.

00:13:11.320 But there's at least an argument to be made.

00:13:14.100 And again, it seems as if this is motivated reasoning.

00:13:17.580 We want to have a war with Iran. 1.00

00:13:19.320 There's a vested interest.

00:13:20.640 There's a lobby that wants to fight Iran.

00:13:23.200 And it seems as if any old excuse will do.

00:13:26.960 Right. 0.93

00:13:27.120 Any reason to quote John McCain to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran is a good enough one for them. 1.00

00:13:33.320 And to me. 0.94

00:13:34.460 Right.

00:13:35.000 It's an important question to ask.

00:13:36.640 What is the goal of this?

00:13:37.880 Right.

00:13:38.200 Because over and over again, we've seen these wars go wrong.

00:13:42.640 And the question is, well, did they go wrong?

00:13:45.400 Right.

00:13:45.700 Well, of course, they went wrong from the stated purpose, which is to turn these countries into kind of verdant democratic paradises.

00:13:53.360 Right.

00:13:53.520 You can imagine sort of a Switzerland set in the Hindu Kush.

00:13:58.000 Right.

00:13:58.700 That didn't happen.

00:14:00.200 Or is the goal to create a forever war?

00:14:03.240 Right.

00:14:03.720 To create another place where unlimited money can be dumped into an impossible cause.

00:14:09.140 And as Moldbug referred it, create a self-licking ice cream cone. 0.98

00:14:12.680 Right.

00:14:12.860 A system that can dispense patronage to thousands and thousands of people or almost unlimited money can be laundered through it.

00:14:21.200 And there's no real accountability.

00:14:23.920 And conservatives were very right to point this out in Ukraine.

00:14:27.200 They were right to say this is a war that does not serve our interests. 0.97

00:14:30.080 This is a massive money laundering operation.

00:14:32.740 And sadly, many of those same people are chomping at the bit to create the exact same circumstance in Iran.

00:14:39.320 And I think it's right to look at that and say, well, did those wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, did they fail at their purpose?

00:14:49.120 And the response to that is, well, which purpose?

00:14:52.400 Because thankfully, Trump has so far shown a desire to keep America out of these useless foreign forever wars. 0.93

00:15:00.360 We all remember when his general staff lied to him about U.S. troops in Syria, which, OK, he didn't get what he wanted, but that seems to be a good faith effort on his part.

00:15:11.600 He's over and over again said the war in Ukraine needs to end.

00:15:15.160 And so it's very disappointing to see apparently an about face on the war, which I guess isn't official yet, but let's be honest, the war in Iran.

00:15:24.760 And one of the other things that's been interesting to me has been the response from both, should we say, legacy conservative media and also from the members of the Republican Party, because I'll put it this way.

00:15:39.160 When you have when you have Ted Cruz sort of beclowning himself, right, unable to make a cogent defense, it goes back to my earlier point about it seems as if this is motivated reason.

00:15:50.840 There is no real argument. It is just something they want.

00:15:55.380 And look, like Cruz has made strides in some areas. He's failed in others.

00:15:59.860 But to me, if that's the best argument you've got, if the champion Harvard debater, right, the guy who wrote the Harvard Law Review can't come up with an argument that passes muster.

00:16:10.580 Well, why is this something that we as a nation should support?

00:16:13.600 Yeah, the fact that in that interview, he went straight to, well, the Bible says we have to be loyal to the secular modern state of Israel.

00:16:24.600 Well, just, you know, like, I know that's a belief that some people hold, but the fact that he openly stated that as his real driving decision making factor was rather concerning, again, as the Harvard debate guy.

00:16:41.840 But you did jump to the cut to the quick of kind of where I was going with this is why, you know, these things don't work or why we participate in things that we know are unlikely to work in the way that we want them to.

00:16:56.280 And you're right to go directly to the money, the fact that defense contractors and weapons manufacturers and all these other services that are going to be tied up in here, the money starts flowing.

00:17:08.020 It's completely unaccountable. It's all going to the super important cause.

00:17:11.900 So you can't question any of any of it. It's all kind of behind the veil due to its military and intelligence nature.

00:17:17.620 And so you just don't know what's going through and who it's going to.

00:17:21.220 And of course, I've had friends who specifically their job is to go into villages in the middle of Afghanistan and just handbags of money to warlords to keep them from blowing up troops along the side of the road.

00:17:35.300 Like this, this money goes everywhere and it goes to the worst possible people and everybody's getting paid.

00:17:39.860 And so nobody has an incentive to say no.

00:17:42.920 But I do want to, well, that's the most practical and correct answer to give about this.

00:17:47.820 I do want to go back to kind of why regime change as a general idea, a nation building as a general idea is difficult because obviously regime change happens all the time, right?

00:17:59.700 We know regimes rise, regimes fall, sometimes from outward pressure, inward pressure, or internal pressure, these kind of things.

00:18:07.700 There's all kind of reasons why we see different regimes rise and fall.

00:18:13.640 However, there's a different thing between going to war with an enemy regime, ultimately trying to stop it, and then the actual occupation and rebuilding of the nation.

00:18:25.320 And this is something that I think is very difficult because the U.S. is an empire.

00:18:30.900 I think people watching this show have kind of at least come to that realization that ultimately, even though we don't use the term, the American empire is real.

00:18:40.680 However, the American empire operates as a very strange empire because classically, you would go in, conquer, replace a ruler.

00:18:51.740 You would have regime change, right?

00:18:53.420 But that ruler would become a satrapy, right?

00:18:56.680 It would become a king who is still a ruler of the people, and they would rule in your stead, and they would basically often operate their country the way that they wanted and kind of kick things back up to you, right?

00:19:08.880 Like this is kind of the classic imperial model.

00:19:11.680 This is what many nations, Rome and others, did ultimately to control these things.

00:19:16.900 But the United States does not like that idea.

00:19:18.900 We don't like the idea that we're going to like occupy and have an explicit extortionary relationship, or I should say a relationship of extraction of value from a client state.

00:19:32.300 It happens, but we don't like that one-to-one.

00:19:35.080 We don't like it formalized.

00:19:36.640 And so we create this weird informal thing where we go in and tell the nation, well, we're liberating for freedom.

00:19:43.460 We're going to, you know, democracy.

00:19:45.000 And we look not just to go in and, you know, knock down the bad guys, but we look to go in and completely rebuild the system of government because once we have rebuilt the system of government, we've replaced it basically with our own institutions.

00:20:00.600 We've taken out the natural institutions of that civilization and replaced it with our own, thinking that this will, like, ultimately give us control of that system.

00:20:09.840 And this is really where it breaks down because it's almost become a joke at this point.

00:20:13.820 But, of course, it was a very real doctrine of American foreign policy and specifically conservative understanding of foreign policy to believe that, like, if you just went into a nation and you gave them the Constitution and democracy, well, all the Thomas Jeffersons and George Washingtons and Benjamin Franklins that have been hiding in the caves of Afghanistan were going to flow out and suddenly create this modern paradise.

00:20:36.220 People do the same thing with Iran now, right? 0.99

00:20:38.440 They start throwing up pictures of Iranian women in bikinis.

00:20:41.720 And this is the goal.

00:20:42.780 We can go back to this, not understanding that there are, like, real critical cultural differences that don't just melt away because you apply a constitution to someone.

00:20:51.860 And that's why even though you can overlay, you know, you can put an overcode on the civilization for many years at the point of a gun.

00:21:00.160 But the minute you walk away, Afghanistan becomes Afghanistan again, right? 1.00

00:21:04.100 And that's the problem that we see over and over.

00:21:07.140 Well, there's actually an interesting point here.

00:21:10.200 Iran was not always an Islamic republic.

00:21:13.040 So you could almost say that the mullahs are doing exactly what we tried to do in Afghanistan, take over a culture at the point of a gun. 0.97

00:21:20.140 So not necessarily the most interesting point, but something to mention.

00:21:24.520 But you're entirely right that governance, right, the way that humans organize themselves is a natural thing, right?

00:21:31.120 It is not to say spontaneous, but it is an outgrowth of culture.

00:21:35.760 They're self-reinforcing.

00:21:37.180 And so you can look at, for instance, my people, right, the Scotch-Irish, and see that although governance forms have kind of changed through time.

00:21:44.560 There are certain constants, right?

00:22:02.860 They tend to be fiercely independent.

00:22:05.160 They don't really like being told what to do.

00:22:07.080 And that manifests both in the borderers in, you know, kind of the north of England and also in someone like Andrew Jackson, right, or the hollers of Appalachia.

00:22:16.820 There's a through line through all of those.

00:22:18.980 And while the context for that changes, you couldn't necessarily put a bunch of Scotch-Irish into China and expect them to do well, right? 0.80

00:22:26.100 Is it a culture for which they are not necessarily adapted to succeed?

00:22:29.500 And similarly, right, when we look at the previous examples of regime change, a great example is Saddam Hussein's country, right?

00:22:38.380 That seems to be a culture of gangsterism, right?

00:22:41.200 You have a strong man at the top who's, let's be honest, not a particularly nice guy who has his excesses, but he keeps order.

00:22:48.440 And when we try to send in Marines to, you know, oversee an election, it's like, well, does it turn into America?

00:22:55.660 Clearly not.

00:22:56.420 Well, perhaps one of the best examples of this is the African nation of Liberia, right? 0.76

00:23:01.260 James Madison sent over some freed slaves, gave them a copy of the American Constitution, and basically said, all right, have at it.

00:23:08.540 And Liberia now is perhaps most famous for the Invisible Children campaign, which was to end horrific child soldiers, and the exploits of a man rather crudely known as General Buck Naked, right?

00:23:22.440 A man who was infamous for the most horrible crimes against humanity you can imagine in an absolutely horrible civil war.

00:23:29.680 That country has been ravaged by internal conflict, ravaged by every depravity you can name.

00:23:34.740 And again, the point is not necessarily to kind of throw shade at or to impugn the honor of your very patriotic Liberian listeners, but to say very clearly, the secret missing ingredient was not a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

00:23:50.280 There was something other there that made it work, at least for a time in America, and did not allow it to work in Liberia.

00:23:58.240 And again, this is another problem with, you know, whether you want to call it the post-war consensus or the rules-based international order, which is this idea that there is one legitimate form of government.

00:24:10.260 And any state which does not consent to that is de facto illegitimate and must be overthrown.

00:24:15.440 And look, I'll be honest, I would much rather live in a Western democracy than some sort of despotic dictatorship, right?

00:24:21.780 Given the choice, if I had to live in one rather than the other.

00:24:24.980 But the problem is you can't simply change the structure and the culture of a nation like flicking a switch.

00:24:31.700 And I say this with a lot of historical data on my side.

00:24:35.460 We've tried this over and over and over again, and by and large created nothing but human misery, right?

00:24:43.260 How many Afghanis died?

00:24:45.500 How many Iraqis died?

00:24:47.540 You can ask Madison Albrecht if, you know, she weren't in a somewhat warmer spot now.

00:24:51.360 But point is, right, we've run this playbook again and again and again, and it seems to have immiserated everyone involved, certainly America, right?

00:25:01.260 The actual people of America.

00:25:02.840 It's very useful for certain international interests.

00:25:07.040 It's very useful for certain zip codes in Northern Virginia.

00:25:10.240 But if we can say that the MAGA movement is in any way a populist movement, if the deal Trump makes is rewards for the American people and punishments for their enemies, then this is the worst, the most America last thing Trump could possibly do.

00:25:27.640 And I say this as someone who has been, generally speaking, quite positive on the man.

00:25:32.220 I'm not some kind of, you know, impassioned Trump hater.

00:25:34.980 But fundamentally, you have to call a spade a spade.

00:25:38.320 And this is a very bad move from that perspective.

00:25:40.840 Yeah, and again, to be clear, I think it's important to remember that Donald Trump says a lot of things, right?

00:25:49.560 And so it's one of those scenarios where Trump will say something publicly, he'll wait to see what the response is, then he'll react, right?

00:25:56.620 We've seen this multiple times.

00:25:57.860 We've seen it with the H-1B stuff. 0.95

00:25:59.660 We just saw it when it came to the carve-outs for specific industries for deportations.

00:26:04.780 You know, Trump floats something, you know, he sees the explosion, and then he kind of backs it up, or, you know, maybe he doesn't publicly correct it, but the administration comes around and kind of changes something.

00:26:16.020 People can feel how they want about that communication style, but that means that Trump is somebody who is very open to the public's perception of what he's doing.

00:26:24.600 And so, you know, when you're pushing back against this, the best thing is to do is just to remind Trump of the commitments he's already made, the legacy he's already talked about.

00:26:34.060 In his farewell address from his first term, he said, you know, the proudest thing he had was that he had started no new wars, right?

00:26:41.080 Like, that was a key thing he himself identified in that, and so that's really critical, and I think that that's far more useful than going in and being, you know, I've seen, you know, I've had Dave Smith on the show multiple times.

00:26:53.200 I like Dave, but him going out and being like, we immediately have to impeach Donald Trump, like, that does not help the scenario, right?

00:27:00.080 If anything, that just digs Donald Trump deeper into the bunker of people you don't want him to be listening to, and so I think that that's a tactical mistake.

00:27:08.320 But the other thing I want to point out that you said, which was really critical, and people will point to this, so I'm glad you brought it up because it is important, that, you know, the Mullahs in Iran themselves are an artificial imposition on kind of Iranian culture, right? 0.77

00:27:23.780 Like, this Persian culture is ancient, this is not some, you know, random collection of hill people, you know, this is a proud, long, powerful group of people who have dominated that region many times over, you know, many a Roman consular broke on the, you know, the shores of Iranians in one way or another.

00:27:46.660 And so I think it's important to recognize that one of the reasons Iran is so unstable now is it already had regime change, right?

00:27:56.860 It already had an artificial imposition of something.

00:28:00.300 The Shah does not represent the real Iran, but neither do the Mullahs, right? 0.96

00:28:04.880 Both of these regimes have been imposed from the outside and therefore chafe, right?

00:28:12.060 And this is a huge issue that we have to understand when you don't allow people to live in a certain way, when you don't allow them to live in the way that they are used to living, there is always going to start building up that resentment.

00:28:26.260 The rule will always feel artificial.

00:28:28.900 And this is the thing that continually guarantees some kind of backlash against you.

00:28:34.760 And so this is one of the key problems with regime change is, like, down in the bones of these people, you know, attempting to change customs in ways can be very difficult.

00:28:46.120 I will always remember a story from my buddy.

00:28:48.940 He's in Afghanistan again.

00:28:50.500 His job is to go around and bribe warlords, you know, to not blow up U.S. troops.

00:28:55.460 And he's handing enough money to these guys to completely transform their village, right?

00:28:59.960 Like, indoor plumbing, like, all kinds of stuff you could do, set up clinics, you could revolutionize the quality of life of the people living in those villages.

00:29:10.340 And without fail, the first thing every single warlord did was take the money and build a road to his dad's house.

00:29:17.540 And he was very confused.

00:29:19.300 Like, why are you doing this?

00:29:20.580 Why are the people okay with this?

00:29:22.120 And he found that actually in every single village, not only were the people okay with this, they expected that of that leader.

00:29:28.040 And if he had not done it, he probably would have lost stature and lost his ability to run the thing, might have been killed for showing that level of weakness and not prioritizing that.

00:29:38.440 And it's at moments like that when you realize, like, oh, no, the results of cultures are very much tied to the actual beliefs of the people and the practices of the people in that culture.

00:29:48.840 It's not just this weird thing that, you know, every people are actually just, you know, Western democracies yearning to be free and looking to modernize.

00:29:58.460 Deep down in their core, they hold beliefs that they all agree with implicitly that push them a general direction and either prevent or, you know, accelerate their ability to modernize and all of these things.

00:30:13.760 It's not something you can just walk in and hand to people and expect them to fall into that behavior.

00:30:18.600 Well, and the funny thing is the Persians themselves, long, long time ago, actually got this.

00:30:24.040 They understood this, right?

00:30:25.900 If you read the Old Testament, you'll notice that Cyrus is referred to in a very positive light.

00:30:30.960 He was loved.

00:30:32.540 And well, why was that?

00:30:34.140 Well, it's because he sent the Israelites, sorry, back home from Babylon and gave them money to rebuild the temple, right? 0.83

00:30:43.000 It was seen as a magnanimous gesture.

00:30:45.300 Now, look, Cyrus still called the shots, right?

00:30:48.940 That was still his territory, but he granted them the leeway to govern themselves, right?

00:30:54.840 He wasn't saying, you know, you, you know, remaining tribes need to organize yourself as Persians.

00:31:00.620 You need to, you know, worship Zoroaster. 1.00

00:31:03.520 Oh, that was later.

00:31:04.380 But point is, right, the idea of the Persian gods, right?

00:31:06.980 That was seen, and the ancients understood this, as something people wouldn't stand for, right?

00:31:14.060 Go back to Caesar. 0.52

00:31:15.360 Why were the Gauls always rebelling?

00:31:17.440 Well, they were rebelling for freedom, right?

00:31:19.900 But in the way we understand it, right?

00:31:22.340 Were they rebelling so that they could, you know, send their little girls to school and, you know, have OnlyFans?

00:31:27.360 Like, of course not.

00:31:28.320 They wanted self-rule.

00:31:29.300 They wanted to be ruled by someone who was like them and be ruled by their own laws.

00:31:34.560 Again, this is something in our own tradition we understood about the American Indians, right?

00:31:40.400 Andrew Jackson, who I've now referenced twice, who is sort of burned in effigy.

00:31:45.500 He understood that in order for the Indian tribes to maintain their culture, they needed to have a space where they could have their own laws and customs, right?

00:31:54.820 If they were to become Americanized, they would integrate. 0.84

00:31:57.860 They would disappear, which is largely what we've seen.

00:32:00.380 But he, in very good faith, created the reservation system as a way to preserve that way of life.

00:32:06.880 The idea would be, one, it would be pacification, right?

00:32:09.940 There's no longer conflict for two people, two laws in the same territory.

00:32:14.000 But also, right, if that thing, that culture is going to stay what it is, it must be allowed to express itself.

00:32:20.740 And the idea that we can have a regime change and do anything else other than create this kind of eternal sand trap that we are stuck in as a nation for decades, you know, inflame even more anti-American sentiment across the world.

00:32:38.040 Or sort of do what we did to South Korea, right? 0.77

00:32:41.460 Or it technically worked, but we created this horribly broken society that, as of current day, cannot reproduce itself, right?

00:32:49.060 The one time it kind of, and I really want to put a big asterisk on kind of worked, right?

00:32:54.100 We created a broken society, right?

00:32:56.320 Something that has no vital force anymore.

00:32:58.200 It's not really identifiable as what it once was.

00:33:01.060 And, you know, again, I understand why the Korean War was fought.

00:33:04.740 I think it's more justifiable than the forever wars we've mentioned.

00:33:08.260 But nonetheless, right, even the so-called best case of creating an Americanized country, we play it out a couple generations and where does it go, right?

00:33:17.840 We have a dead, dying culture, right?

00:33:20.500 Something that is not its own anymore.

00:33:22.960 And so to me, you know, even the so-called humanitarian arguments, which, let's be honest, are very, very thin.

00:33:29.460 And we've already mentioned Madison Albrecht, among others, right?

00:33:34.080 But, okay, sure, you know, for a short time, those people may live, you know, bountiful, you know, Western existence of excess.

00:33:43.520 But that culture dies.

00:33:45.740 It goes away.

00:33:46.940 And that's a very, that's a sad, regrettable thing.

00:33:50.100 And so to me, you know, one of the most important things, in addition to, as you mentioned earlier, you know, making your objections known,

00:33:56.580 because we have seen the Trump, or we have seen Trump 180 on things, but also is to deny these people the moral ground.

00:34:03.560 They are not humanitarians.

00:34:05.300 They are not on the right side of history.

00:34:07.800 They're using a horribly broken argument that even within living memory, we have seen cause countless deaths, billions in treasure wasted,

00:34:15.920 and largely made the American people worse off than they would have been if they had never heard or had any reason to care about countries like Afghanistan.

00:34:25.460 So there's a lot that I want to touch there, because you hit some points that I was really going to bore into.

00:34:32.980 So the first thing, you know, historical examples, yeah, you point out, you know, the Caesar and the Gauls.

00:34:39.700 Let's also not forget, you know, the Romans and the Jews, because originally, of course, you know, the Romans go in,

00:34:46.200 they're governing with as light a hand as they can, because the Jews have this weird faith. 1.00

00:34:51.080 Normally, the Romans can just go in and say, you got to worship the imperial cult, just throw Caesar into a temple somewhere.

00:34:58.200 He's one of your gods, and then we move on, right?

00:35:00.500 Not a big deal.

00:35:01.720 The Jews have this weird thing, you know, to the Romans, where like, no, we only worship one God, and that's really important to us.

00:35:08.440 So at first, they try to accommodate that.

00:35:10.440 They're like, okay, well, the Jews get this, like, special thing where they don't have to, you know, worship Caesar, because they're so big on this.

00:35:19.680 They try to give them that cultural space, right?

00:35:22.640 But the more control they want to exert on the Jews, the more they are pressured to, you know, be good Roman citizens and fall in line and do this stuff.

00:35:33.140 And eventually, you know, you get to the point where the Jews are, you know, doing terrorist attacks and things to try to free themselves from the continued imposition of Roman culture onto what they feel is their true way of being. 0.59

00:35:48.940 And, you know, eventually the Romans get so angry that they just destroy the temple, right? 0.94

00:35:53.460 Because they can't get these Jews to, like, worship and just do the minimum things to make them viable in the empire. 0.99

00:36:00.940 That's how often nation-building fails.

00:36:05.620 Even, you know, guys who were famously great about, like the Romans, still had, you know, different cultures that they simply could not absorb.

00:36:14.700 And so I think you're muted there.

00:36:20.580 Professional podcaster, ladies and gentlemen.

00:36:22.680 Just a brief interjection, right?

00:36:24.540 When we talk about the Romans, let's be honest, the Romans had a much stronger stomach for violence than we do.

00:36:30.940 Right. You know, Americans are quite comfortable, obviously, with kind of tiny pixelated images of, you know, bombs dropping into cities.

00:36:38.100 But the Romans crucified a lot of people, right?

00:36:42.540 That was their version of pacification.

00:36:44.420 I mean, even the phrase, right, salting the earth was what the Romans would do. 0.87

00:36:48.500 They were quite adept at total war.

00:36:51.680 And as has often been, you know, raised, how committed are we to this? 0.99

00:36:57.800 Because if we did invade a country of 90 million people by land, which is, I'm struggling for kind words to describe how stupid that would be, right? 0.99

00:37:07.860 That would be disastrous. 0.99

00:37:10.380 That would require a full-scale mobilization, right?

00:37:13.380 The likes of which we saw in World War II or Korea and Vietnam.

00:37:17.380 To accomplish what?

00:37:19.900 Largely nothing.

00:37:21.360 So again, and I'll throw it back to you, but when we pull this apart from multiple directions, right?

00:37:26.760 Can it accomplish its stated goals?

00:37:28.760 No.

00:37:29.420 Are its stated goals good for us?

00:37:31.200 Also no.

00:37:31.880 Are we willing to pay the price of accomplishing those stated goals, even if possible?

00:37:37.180 No.

00:37:38.400 Sorry, I'll throw it back to you, all right?

00:37:40.320 No, all very valid points.

00:37:42.740 The only other part of that I was going to say is you hit on the example of South Korea.

00:37:47.440 And one of the things, as I was making these points on Twitter, the responses that I got back from guys like Wilford Riley and others is, well, of course, nation building works.

00:37:56.220 We've nation built before.

00:37:57.620 And they gave some of the examples you pointed to, you know, South Korea and Japan and Germany.

00:38:02.180 Well, again, we can look at South Korea.

00:38:04.240 Okay.

00:38:05.160 Like you said, yes, technically we protected them from communism.

00:38:09.460 Ultimately, I think they appreciate that.

00:38:11.260 But on the current demographic route, North Korea is going to survive longer than South Korea. 0.95

00:38:17.140 Like democracy artificially imposed on these people has actually been more destructive than the communist dictatorship of Kim Jong-un.

00:38:25.740 Again, I would want to live in South Korea over North Korea, obviously, right? 0.99

00:38:29.840 But the assumption that we just go in and we build this nation and then it works and it's fine, that is just obviously true.

00:38:37.860 Like the spiritual death of that country has occurred.

00:38:41.920 I mean, hopefully they turn it around.

00:38:43.540 But as it's going, that's the situation.

00:38:45.260 And the other two examples that they give over and over again, Germany and Japan, it's like, okay, so first we're saying, yes, we are nation building.

00:38:52.040 Right.

00:38:52.500 Because we recognize that we think it's good and it works.

00:38:55.860 B, we're admitting that we would basically need a world war, as you just pointed out, like a world war scale mobilization.

00:39:01.980 Because the only two examples you can give me that really worked, Japan and Germany, required a world war mobilization in order to do that.

00:39:10.620 And then we occupied those nations for decades.

00:39:14.100 Right.

00:39:14.540 Like, you know, we had our own dictators in those nations telling them, you know, sometimes directly like MacArthur, you know, running Japan.

00:39:23.020 Like, you know, this is not theoretical.

00:39:25.200 Like we, we, yes, you can change the regime if you plan to put your entire military, fight a world war, put your military in the middle of the, of the country and basically deny themselves rule for generations.

00:39:37.100 Yes.

00:39:37.260 Eventually you can start breaking some of their culture apart.

00:39:40.140 But again, look at Japan and Germany spiritually.

00:39:42.880 How are they doing?

00:39:44.100 Right.

00:39:44.620 Like.

00:39:46.020 And also, right.

00:39:47.840 Let's acknowledge it is entirely possible for the great grandsons of the men who conquered these nations to still be there.

00:39:56.040 Right.

00:39:56.640 We still have soldiers there.

00:39:58.140 And, and look, like I get it.

00:40:00.380 Right.

00:40:00.600 A military assignment to Okinawa isn't exactly, you know, the worst thing.

00:40:04.740 But at the same time, right.

00:40:06.440 When we're talking about the commitment required, are you willing to, are you willing to commit generations, multiple generations of our men just being there, right?

00:40:18.760 To occupy it.

00:40:19.640 And again, you mentioned earlier that America is an empire, but we're very uncomfortable with, with saying it.

00:40:25.460 And again, right.

00:40:27.260 A world in which we have soldiers and I can't remember exactly how many off the top of my head, but, you know, dozens and dozens of nations at any given time.

00:40:35.100 And that is an empire, right?

00:40:37.380 We are doing the exact same thing under a, you know, kind of a thin moral fig leaf.

00:40:44.460 And as much as I hate to say it, I'd be more sympathetic to the argument if it was, well, we don't care.

00:40:50.220 Iran is another country. 0.98

00:40:51.400 And if we conquer them, we're going to get XYZ Iranian export that will make the average American better. 1.00

00:40:58.080 But that's not the deal we've got.

00:40:59.780 We will be required to fight for that war, not you and I per se, but us as Americans, and receive absolutely nothing in benefit.

00:41:08.900 It is quite possibly, again, and I'll say this over and over again, a classic example of this kind of America last foreign policy we've been fighting against for 70 years.

00:41:19.680 Well, and again, the culture is just so alien that that commitment, as you're pointing out, would be generational.

00:41:27.280 It would be, you know, many, many generations of our men would be required to go there and do this.

00:41:32.900 And the culture is so alien that we just don't have a hope of ultimately governing it in a way that is going, you know, even if we break their spirit, you know, which is its own goal, I guess.

00:41:45.700 You know, we don't have a way of governing it, connecting with that culture that will allow us to continue to be a part of it.

00:41:51.280 And to be clear, I'm not advocating for this, but if we're going to invade and change any regime, why not go to the UK?

00:41:59.220 Like, that's a country we actually have ties to.

00:42:01.820 We actually have cultural ties to.

00:42:04.220 Many of us are from, our ancestors are from, we speak the language.

00:42:09.200 These guys have nukes.

00:42:10.420 They're oppressing their own people. 0.97

00:42:12.080 They're persecuting Christians. 1.00

00:42:13.620 They're literally demographically replacing their own population with Muslims and forcing the parents of raped daughters to do nothing. 0.98

00:42:23.400 Like, if you want to, if you're worried about the Islamic threat in the West, why don't we just go and, like, stop it in England if you're going to go anywhere? 1.00

00:42:31.720 Again, not advocating for this, but if we're going to make the move, that makes a lot more sense to me.

00:42:37.140 Well, and Arun, to your point, right, if the barometer for why we should invade a country is they did something untoward on American soil, right? 0.80

00:42:47.260 They either plotted to assassinate our president or were somehow vaguely connected to, you know, two planes, you know, tragically striking the Twin Towers, right?

00:42:56.320 Well, if you remember, all the way back six months ago, the UK Labour Party sent activists into America to campaign for Kamala Harris.

00:43:09.780 They directly intervened in our election.

00:43:12.940 And if that was enough to consider Russia our mortal foe when they did it, well, surely if we are, you know, if we are principled liberals, 0.83

00:43:21.920 if we are the kind of people who care about the rule of law, as I've been reliably informed that we should, well, then time to storm the, time to storm the beaches, right?

00:43:32.900 Time to liberate London, you know, time to, you know, drop in the 101st Airborne and get to work, because clearly that's what we do.

00:43:41.300 And I'm joking, right?

00:43:42.480 It sounds ridiculous because clearly, as we've said over and over again, this is not a reason to point.

00:43:48.020 This is not some, you know, grand conclusion to an epic argument. 0.71

00:43:51.200 This is something they want to do.

00:43:53.160 And any excuse will do.

00:43:55.960 Any opportunity, any set of facts they can twist towards this goal of creating another forever war, it will be used.

00:44:05.860 And I just want to reiterate, you know, when we talk about the Uniparty, the swamp, the cathedral, whatever, right?

00:44:11.580 That sort of consensus around the set of issues that Washington will always coalesce around.

00:44:17.980 Largely, that is foreign policy.

00:44:19.700 And largely, that is starting these boneheaded foreign adventures.

00:44:24.340 Because, as we've said, it doesn't serve our interests, Aaron, but it is very good for those people.

00:44:30.320 And that's ultimately what they care about.

00:44:31.880 Well, and finally, before we go to the questions of the people, I just want to point out that, like, obviously a nuclear Iran is bad, right? 0.91

00:44:41.440 This is not, nobody thinks that them having a bomb or, you know, being in possession of this kind of technology and the ability to deploy it is ultimately, you know, good for the world.

00:44:52.760 That said, at some point, we have to deal with the fact that whether we like it or not, the United States introduced a weapon into the world that either creates global hegemony or global or a world where everyone has nukes and they all have a standoff.

00:45:12.780 Yeah, I'm going to nerd out here, but, you know, in Dune, you know, in the Dune universe, every house has its own nukes, right?

00:45:22.020 It has its own, like, cache of weapons that it can deploy at a moment's notice.

00:45:27.640 No one uses them because they're so dangerous and it would have everyone turn against you, but every house has them.

00:45:34.000 And this is what allows, basically, the feudal nature.

00:45:36.700 It allows, everything doesn't have to be centralized.

00:45:38.740 Yes, there's an emperor, but these different great houses get to rule their areas because they have the firepower, ultimately, to devastate each other if they really wanted to, if things really came down to brass tacks.

00:45:50.560 And that's a terrible way for the world to balance its power, but it is now the dynamic, right?

00:45:56.220 Like, we're not going, we may be in a proxy war with Russia, which is still, which is insane, that we're trying to start another war by being still engaged in a proxy war that was supposed to be over in six months last time.

00:46:06.240 But, you know, we're not going directly to war with Russia because they have nukes, right?

00:46:12.520 We're not going directly into North Korea and clearing out that regime because they have nukes.

00:46:17.860 Everybody knows this.

00:46:19.520 Everyone knows we're not going to Pakistan because they have nukes. 1.00

00:46:23.200 Like, and the world leaders are not oblivious to this fact. 0.92

00:46:26.640 So whether, like, they're insane despots who hate our guts and, like, want to use nukes to, you know, put a dirty bomb in the middle of Los Angeles, or they're just rational actors looking at the geopolitical situation and realizing there are only two options.

00:46:42.000 I can be a country with nukes and have sovereignty, or I can be a country without nukes and have no sovereignty.

00:46:47.180 They're going to pursue them, right?

00:46:49.260 The rational step by every actor in the world is to pursue nukes. 0.60

00:46:55.560 That doesn't mean I want them to have them, but I recognize that reality, right?

00:46:59.540 Once someone builds tanks, you've got to build tanks.

00:47:03.420 And the fact that another country is building tanks can't just be a cost of spell, like, forever, because at some point, like, we're going to recognize that the geopolitical situation is one in which every country has this incentive.

00:47:16.420 And so either they live under the umbrella of another country that has that capability or they have it themselves.

00:47:21.760 And if they live under the umbrella, they can be dictated to at will and be invaded, you know, by other countries, basically, with that technology at will.

00:47:29.480 Well, and so I guess my whole point there is saying unless you intend to invade every single country in the world and perpetually control all of their scientific and military development forever, the world will become one in which pretty much every country has this capability.

00:47:48.320 It has to.

00:47:49.040 Otherwise, sovereignty simply does not exist.

00:47:51.180 At this point, possession of nuclear weapons is sovereignty.

00:47:54.880 They are one in the same.

00:47:55.700 And so I just I don't like any of that.

00:47:59.700 But as someone who's just analyzing the situation rationally, I don't see how we ever escape that reality again, unless our stated goal is literally to occupy every nation and ensure that they do not develop weapons like this.

00:48:14.400 Well, and again, this is why, you know, when we consider ourselves realists, right, we are taking up the role of Aristotle, right, in that famous school of Athens painting where he's pointing at the ground, right?

00:48:27.360 What is?

00:48:28.680 Look, I would love to live in a world where nukes just never existed.

00:48:33.100 I mean, I would love to live in a world where any number of things didn't exist.

00:48:36.600 Pick your favorite.

00:48:38.060 But fundamentally, that's not where we live.

00:48:40.280 And so similarly, right, when you're attacking these positions, we saw it with Afghanistan.

00:48:44.700 People will say, well, don't you want X, Y, Z good thing to happen?

00:48:49.440 You know, don't you want little girls in Afghanistan to go to school? 0.99

00:48:52.660 And look, those are good things.

00:48:54.780 You know, I would love for Afghanistan to be a lovely, beautiful country where everyone is safe.

00:49:00.580 But fundamentally, we live in a world of hard constraints.

00:49:05.400 And not only is that ultimately, as we've really beaten to death here, an impossibility.

00:49:10.240 But as you've said, the only way to actually do that, right, much in the only way to get to a zero crime society is to create this obvious nightmarish dystopia where everyone is controlled at all times.

00:49:22.960 And in much the same way, we would rightly look at Orwell's 1984 or any of the other kind of dystopian fiction of the 20th century and say, that's bad.

00:49:31.740 I don't want to do it.

00:49:33.220 Similarly, the idea of having a global empire where everyone, every state, every people is jammed into the same system and controlled at all times is obviously monstrous.

00:49:44.180 We don't want that.

00:49:45.600 No one else wants it.

00:49:47.100 And so even though it's impossible, it's a very bad goal to strive for.

00:49:50.760 Agreed, agreed.

00:49:54.420 All right, guys.

00:49:55.120 Well, we're going to head over to the questions of the people.

00:49:57.760 But before we do, Mr. Burden, where should people be looking for your excellent work?

00:50:01.980 Yeah, so my primary output is the Jay Burden Show.

00:50:05.580 As you can see, I am using my real face.

00:50:08.340 And that's because the Jay Burden Show is what I do now.

00:50:11.320 It's my primary output.

00:50:12.880 It's what I spend all my time doing.

00:50:14.360 And so, of course, what that means is that there is both a paid and a free version of my show.

00:50:19.260 So exact same content, you can find people like Auron, other people who've been on this show.

00:50:24.900 And those episodes come out three days a week for free with ads.

00:50:28.200 If the ads are a little bit annoying or if you want to help me out, then you can find the Jay Burden Show, the premium version, on Substack, on Subscribestar, Patreon, and soon-to-be Gumroad.

00:50:38.800 But again, Auron, thank you so much for having me on.

00:50:41.600 Absolutely.

00:50:42.080 And everybody should go over and help Mr. Burden launch his independent career over there.

00:50:47.800 Very important that our guys are able to get these things off the ground.

00:50:52.020 So please go subscribe and give him support if you can.

00:50:55.280 All right, guys, let's head over to the people here.

00:50:57.940 We got Mellon who says,

00:50:58.780 Every time one of our guys' face reveals, it's a Giga Chad, many such cases. 0.62

00:51:03.980 Lots of winning.

00:51:04.600 Well, thank you very much, Mellon.

00:51:06.420 My wife told me that there was a possibility I'd be getting female attention. 1.00

00:51:10.400 And having met Mellon, you know what?

00:51:12.180 It was bound to happen.

00:51:13.520 But thank you very much, man.

00:51:14.340 Versi says,

00:51:17.720 To the four ladies watching, sorry to dash your dreams, but Mr. Burden's already taken.

00:51:22.320 Beat you to the chase.

00:51:24.500 Oh, thank you, Yev.

00:51:28.420 Perspicacious Heretic says,

00:51:29.520 I do believe Iran can convince the Secret Service that slope roofs are impossible to stand on. 0.99

00:51:35.720 Yeah, that is very tricky.

00:51:37.200 The Secret Service trains for a lot, but the slope of a roof, that's...

00:51:41.740 The Iranian psyops are incredible.

00:51:43.540 You know, they're just breaking the rules of geometry.

00:51:46.240 So, I mean, if they have that power, what hope do we have?

00:51:49.240 I paid for college by standing on sloped roofs, you know, 12 hours a day in the Florida sun.

00:51:54.500 But, you know...

00:51:55.300 That's the interesting thing, right?

00:51:57.200 Illegal immigrants can do it, but not our Secret Service men. 1.00

00:52:00.620 They really do the jobs we don't want to do.

00:52:02.660 It's exactly right.

00:52:03.700 I had to watch, you know, living in South Florida.

00:52:05.880 I had to learn the art of sloped roofs.

00:52:08.200 You know, white guy on a roof.

00:52:09.340 It's like, I don't know.

00:52:10.460 And, you know, they just...

00:52:11.620 It's like, you know, more Dune Raph.

00:52:13.540 It's like Paul in, you know, Arrakis.

00:52:16.220 You know, they have to teach me to walk the sands, you know.

00:52:20.660 Let's see here.

00:52:22.100 Dan says, Dear America, if you really want to do another regime change, can I pitch to the UK as a better candidate?

00:52:27.440 That's funny, Dan.

00:52:28.160 I didn't even see your super chat, but I'm glad that eventually we came to the same conclusion.

00:52:32.480 And yes, I feel at one point, you know, if we're going to liberate anyone and bring the wonders of America, it should be to our Anglo brethren.

00:52:42.360 I mean, surely, you know, we can have a benevolent dictator somewhere in the UK and let you guys, you know, live in your tiny villages and, you know, eat your blood sausages.

00:52:51.720 I feel like we can probably secure that.

00:52:54.420 Well, especially because I think the US-UK wars were tied at one and one.

00:52:58.620 So I think we need a tiebreaker.

00:53:00.260 And that isn't a great argument for starting a war, but it's certainly better than other ones we've fallen for.

00:53:05.760 So I'm willing to throw it out there.

00:53:07.440 Yeah, absolutely.

00:53:08.100 Yeah, we can't just leave that record hanging out there.

00:53:10.320 We got to dominate in everything.

00:53:11.840 We're America.

00:53:12.820 What do you think American exceptionalism was about?

00:53:15.920 Yeah, yeah, we need we need the rubber match.

00:53:17.860 OK, let's make this happen.

00:53:21.040 Senator Brundlefly says, if US if US particularly depends on petrol dollars to paper over its fiscal profit legacy, how do we extract ourselves from the Middle East without melting the economy?

00:53:34.860 A very, very, very, very good point, but also its own kind of problem, right?

00:53:39.960 Like if if we have created, you know, it's the kind of kind of thing.

00:53:42.940 Well, Rome's got to control Egypt because otherwise it doesn't get grain shipments.

00:53:46.780 Well, that's true, right?

00:53:48.600 But at some point, we either make the necessary reforms to bring, you know, that back, scale that down, or your need to control other countries endlessly destroys your empire, right?

00:53:59.360 Like these these are your options.

00:54:00.640 So there's no easy answer to the fact that we have built our entire financial system on something that requires us to basically be active as an empire inside the Middle East.

00:54:12.620 That said, if we continue on that route forever, if we never address that very difficult problem, eventually the requirements of intervention will pull us down.

00:54:22.940 And that's not something we need to speculate on that.

00:54:25.240 That's a proven fact from history.

00:54:26.880 Like, so I hear you, that's a perfectly reasonable objection and concern, but we have to face that problem at some point.

00:54:35.420 Florida Henry says, will Iran be the largest country, size and population we've attacked since World War II?

00:54:41.600 90 million people in the mountains, brutal fighting.

00:54:43.840 A very good point.

00:54:45.120 Again, I'm trying to think if anyone would compare with Iran. 0.95

00:54:50.160 I mean, if you want to be really pedantic, we could say we technically fought the Chinese in Korea, but I mean, the point stands, right? 0.94

00:54:59.400 This is a massive undertaking.

00:55:00.780 This is not some, yeah, you're just not walking in and knocking down, you know, some small two-bit country, unfortunately.

00:55:12.780 Crud State Caesar says, pretty wild that Cruz was arguing in favor of regime change through direct means, but his only example of U.S. regime change working was the USSR, mostly through indirect means.

00:55:24.820 Yeah, I found that bizarre as well in that he's referring to the interview, if you don't have that context in there, that the regime change he talked about working was USSR, but he pointed out that ultimately the way that that happened was, again, the peace through strength doctrine, the military spending, the influence campaign, more than direct military action.

00:55:48.600 Also, very interestingly, and something he didn't address in that, is now we're hearing that Putin is the biggest threat in the world, right?

00:55:54.800 We're literally, again, in a proxy war with him.

00:55:57.140 So did the regime change change anything ultimately?

00:56:00.900 Like, don't get me wrong.

00:56:01.740 I think it's great that the USSR fell. 0.95

00:56:04.020 I think ultimately that whatever you have to say about Putin, probably a better life under him than it is, you know, for the people of Russia than it was under the USSR, but had to help the United States.

00:56:13.980 I mean, yeah, I'm glad we don't have this, like, we're going to get bombed at any moment scenario with Russia, but we are right back to fighting these people again. 0.97

00:56:22.020 And so ultimately, I think the realization is, even in this success, like, we're still basically having the same contest with that world power.

00:56:31.880 Well, right.

00:56:32.160 We ended a proxy war, and 30 years later, we're in another proxy war, right?

00:56:37.260 If that's what's winning, if that's what winning is, okay, so we're supposed to mobilize the entire U.S. population to fight Iran so that 30 years later, we can fight Iran again. 0.98

00:56:50.120 But with a different name.

00:56:51.380 They'll call the leader something different.

00:56:53.840 Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

00:56:55.020 It might be more fun to fight a sultan, you know, or something like that.

00:56:59.700 At least I can get, like, an Aladdin theme going, you know.

00:57:02.500 Um, uh, Senator Brundlefly says, uh, say war with Iran happens and the regime is toppled.

00:57:10.640 You are in charge of the aftermath.

00:57:12.540 What is, uh, what is least bad way to proceed?

00:57:16.720 Uh, an excellent question.

00:57:18.180 And again, I'm not going to put myself out there as some geopolitical expert or someone who's very familiar, uh, with the inner workings of Iran.

00:57:25.160 And if you do want to get a perspective from somebody who, uh, has strong ties to the country and is looking at this with a critical eye, academic agent recently did a stream about kind of the internal history of Iran.

00:57:38.600 Again, because he made the point, I think a very good one, that almost no one who is talking about this is actually talking about the cultural dynamics and history of Iran and what would work in that case or not.

00:57:47.500 I'm not someone who knows enough to say, oh, this is how you would stabilize.

00:57:52.580 What are the factions?

00:57:54.080 How, you know, I, I, I hate playing, you know, expert when I, I just don't know.

00:57:58.460 Uh, but if you do want a stream that might help you understand that, uh, I think, uh, AA did a good one here, uh, last day or two.

00:58:04.960 Uh, uh, just a blank there says Iran with nukes is no worse than Pakistan. 0.90

00:58:11.540 Again, I don't know exactly how to gauge that, but that feels like a reasonable assertion, right?

00:58:16.760 Like in either case, you do have a relatively unstable government with a blood tie or with a blood feud with its neighbor, you know, in possession of a, of a weapon of mass destruction, uh, radical Islamic, uh, bent, you know, again, I, I don't know enough to one to one that example,

00:58:34.500 but seems reasonable simpler with the beaver, letting us know that the burden gang is here.

00:58:42.780 And then, uh, Marcos five, eight, eight says to quote our buddy furious Egypt might raise, uh, 20 million, uh, star is per, uh, Adam in revenue, but 30 standing legions at army costs of 30, uh, million.

00:59:00.500 Uh, yeah.

00:59:01.360 So you're basically where it's going to cost us more over time to constantly be in charge of these places, even though at the time, it seems like a solution to our resource problem.

00:59:12.160 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up yet again.

00:59:15.740 Great talking with Jay burden.

00:59:17.440 If you have not checked out his stuff, please make sure to do so.

00:59:20.840 It's if it's if, if it is your first time on this channel, please subscribe, click the bell notifications, all that stuff.

00:59:26.480 So, you know, when we're going live and if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to the Orr McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:59:34.160 Thank you everybody for watching.

00:59:35.160 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 18, 2025

Why Nation-Building Doesn't Work ｜ Guest： J. Burden ｜ 6⧸18⧸25

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