As the war drums are beating, and we're told over and over again, don't worry, this one s going to be done by Christmas, we're not going to put boots on the ground. We ve had failures in this endeavor before, and Jay Burden is here to explain why.
00:08:09.800I don't have Iranian interest at heart.
00:08:12.540But we've seen this playbook over and over again.
00:08:15.500And 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.
00:08:26.040This is not, this is far from some kind of crazy prognosis.
00:08:29.840We've seen this over and over and over again with the exact same results.
00:08:33.460And it's especially disconcerting and sort of disappointing from someone like President Trump, who ran on an anti-war agenda.
00:08:42.180Don't forget that the MAGA movement is sort of the sequel to the Tea Party, right?
00:08:46.560A sequel to another sort of insurgent right-wing movement in America that was very, very conservative.
00:08:51.720And albeit that had a lot to do initially with, you know, physical concerns.
00:08:56.220But the foreign policy was right there as well.
00:08:58.640And 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?
00:09:10.400It's become the exact same party it always was.
00:09:13.560And again, there are certain things I like about Trump.
00:09:17.180I think his opinions on immigration are completely and totally correct.
00:09:21.020But 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?
00:09:31.500You know, there's relatively breaking news, but there's an interview that has just come out with Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson.
00:09:40.560And I might end up reviewing that Friday, cutting some clips and going over what happened.
00:09:45.460But 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.
00:09:57.520And he's echoing the sentiment that Bibi Netanyahu put out to try to say that the United States should involve itself in this war.
00:10:05.620And I've got to say, you know, that's a very concerning accusation.
00:10:11.720Netanyahu made it about the two guys, you know, the one assassin from the rooftop and the other the golf course.
00:10:20.040And I think Ted Cruz kind of walked that back on his behalf.
00:10:22.820But he said there are real attempts to assassinate Trump.
00:10:26.520And 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.
00:10:38.340Like 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.
00:10:49.600That is the most just war one can fight if you're if you have another country literally sending assassins to kill your leader.
00:10:58.160You know, that is a declaration of war.
00:11:00.220I think everyone could recognize that.
00:11:02.560And yet this was supposed to theoretically have been happening for years and we did not go to war with Iran over it.
00:11:09.580But now all of a sudden we're involved in what could be possibly this full blown attempt at regime change.
00:11:18.380They're now acknowledging it's not just about getting rid of, you know, the nuclear capacity.
00:11:25.260And 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?
00:11:36.620Why are we waiting now at this moment after Israel has already begun a unilateral strike while we were in negotiations with this country?
00:11:44.300First, why were we negotiating with a country that's literally trying to murder or actively trying to kill our president?
00:11:50.280And second, why did we wait until this moment to strike?
00:11:54.260It's just one of those things that it just blows my mind.
00:11:57.620Like one of these things can't be true.
00:12:11.720One 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.
00:12:26.580So obviously, if there was incontrovertible proof, why didn't we declare war then?
00:12:33.920Similarly, 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.
00:12:46.560Because again, like you said, if that's true, like, awesome.
00:12:50.640Let's let's dig into it, show it to me, because this is a radically different discussion.
00:12:55.580If, 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.
00:14:23.920And conservatives were very right to point this out in Ukraine.
00:14:27.200They were right to say this is a war that does not serve our interests.
00:14:30.080This is a massive money laundering operation.
00:14:32.740And sadly, many of those same people are chomping at the bit to create the exact same circumstance in Iran.
00:14:39.320And I think it's right to look at that and say, well, did those wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, did they fail at their purpose?
00:14:49.120And the response to that is, well, which purpose?
00:14:52.400Because thankfully, Trump has so far shown a desire to keep America out of these useless foreign forever wars.
00:15:00.360We 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.
00:15:11.600He's over and over again said the war in Ukraine needs to end.
00:15:15.160And 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.
00:15:24.760And 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.
00:15:39.160When 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.
00:15:50.840There is no real argument. It is just something they want.
00:15:55.380And look, like Cruz has made strides in some areas. He's failed in others.
00:15:59.860But 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.
00:16:10.580Well, why is this something that we as a nation should support?
00:16:13.600Yeah, 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.
00:16:24.600Well, 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.
00:16:41.840But 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.
00:16:56.280And 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.
00:17:08.020It's completely unaccountable. It's all going to the super important cause.
00:17:11.900So you can't question any of any of it. It's all kind of behind the veil due to its military and intelligence nature.
00:17:17.620And so you just don't know what's going through and who it's going to.
00:17:21.220And 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.
00:17:35.300Like this, this money goes everywhere and it goes to the worst possible people and everybody's getting paid.
00:17:39.860And so nobody has an incentive to say no.
00:17:42.920But I do want to, well, that's the most practical and correct answer to give about this.
00:17:47.820I 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?
00:17:59.700We know regimes rise, regimes fall, sometimes from outward pressure, inward pressure, or internal pressure, these kind of things.
00:18:07.700There's all kind of reasons why we see different regimes rise and fall.
00:18:13.640However, 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.
00:18:25.320And this is something that I think is very difficult because the U.S. is an empire.
00:18:30.900I 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.
00:18:40.680However, the American empire operates as a very strange empire because classically, you would go in, conquer, replace a ruler.
00:18:53.420But that ruler would become a satrapy, right?
00:18:56.680It 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?
00:19:08.880Like this is kind of the classic imperial model.
00:19:11.680This is what many nations, Rome and others, did ultimately to control these things.
00:19:16.900But the United States does not like that idea.
00:19:18.900We 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.
00:19:32.300It happens, but we don't like that one-to-one.
00:19:45.000And 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.
00:20:00.600We'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.
00:20:09.840And this is really where it breaks down because it's almost become a joke at this point.
00:20:13.820But, 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.
00:20:36.220People do the same thing with Iran now, right?
00:20:38.440They start throwing up pictures of Iranian women in bikinis.
00:20:42.780We 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.
00:20:51.860And 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.
00:21:00.160But the minute you walk away, Afghanistan becomes Afghanistan again, right?
00:21:04.100And that's the problem that we see over and over.
00:21:07.140Well, there's actually an interesting point here.
00:21:10.200Iran was not always an Islamic republic.
00:21:13.040So 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.
00:21:20.140So not necessarily the most interesting point, but something to mention.
00:21:24.520But you're entirely right that governance, right, the way that humans organize themselves is a natural thing, right?
00:21:31.120It is not to say spontaneous, but it is an outgrowth of culture.
00:21:37.180And 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.
00:22:05.160They don't really like being told what to do.
00:22:07.080And 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.
00:22:16.820There's a through line through all of those.
00:22:18.980And 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?
00:22:26.100Is it a culture for which they are not necessarily adapted to succeed?
00:22:29.500And similarly, right, when we look at the previous examples of regime change, a great example is Saddam Hussein's country, right?
00:22:38.380That seems to be a culture of gangsterism, right?
00:22:41.200You 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.
00:22:48.440And when we try to send in Marines to, you know, oversee an election, it's like, well, does it turn into America?
00:22:56.420Well, perhaps one of the best examples of this is the African nation of Liberia, right?
00:23:01.260James Madison sent over some freed slaves, gave them a copy of the American Constitution, and basically said, all right, have at it.
00:23:08.540And 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?
00:23:22.440A man who was infamous for the most horrible crimes against humanity you can imagine in an absolutely horrible civil war.
00:23:29.680That country has been ravaged by internal conflict, ravaged by every depravity you can name.
00:23:34.740And 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.
00:23:50.280There was something other there that made it work, at least for a time in America, and did not allow it to work in Liberia.
00:23:58.240And 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.
00:24:10.260And any state which does not consent to that is de facto illegitimate and must be overthrown.
00:24:15.440And look, I'll be honest, I would much rather live in a Western democracy than some sort of despotic dictatorship, right?
00:24:21.780Given the choice, if I had to live in one rather than the other.
00:24:24.980But the problem is you can't simply change the structure and the culture of a nation like flicking a switch.
00:24:31.700And I say this with a lot of historical data on my side.
00:24:35.460We've tried this over and over and over again, and by and large created nothing but human misery, right?
00:24:47.540You can ask Madison Albrecht if, you know, she weren't in a somewhat warmer spot now.
00:24:51.360But point is, right, we've run this playbook again and again and again, and it seems to have immiserated everyone involved, certainly America, right?
00:25:02.840It's very useful for certain international interests.
00:25:07.040It's very useful for certain zip codes in Northern Virginia.
00:25:10.240But 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.
00:25:27.640And I say this as someone who has been, generally speaking, quite positive on the man.
00:25:32.220I'm not some kind of, you know, impassioned Trump hater.
00:25:34.980But fundamentally, you have to call a spade a spade.
00:25:38.320And this is a very bad move from that perspective.
00:25:40.840Yeah, and again, to be clear, I think it's important to remember that Donald Trump says a lot of things, right?
00:25:49.560And 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?
00:25:59.660We just saw it when it came to the carve-outs for specific industries for deportations.
00:26:04.780You 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.
00:26:16.020People 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.
00:26:24.600And 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.
00:26:34.060In 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?
00:26:41.080Like, 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.
00:26:53.200I like Dave, but him going out and being like, we immediately have to impeach Donald Trump, like, that does not help the scenario, right?
00:27:00.080If 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.
00:27:08.320But 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?
00:27:23.780Like, 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.
00:27:46.660And 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?
00:27:56.860It already had an artificial imposition of something.
00:28:00.300The Shah does not represent the real Iran, but neither do the Mullahs, right?
00:28:04.880Both of these regimes have been imposed from the outside and therefore chafe, right?
00:28:12.060And 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.
00:28:28.900And this is the thing that continually guarantees some kind of backlash against you.
00:28:34.760And 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.
00:28:46.120I will always remember a story from my buddy.
00:28:50.500His job is to go around and bribe warlords, you know, to not blow up U.S. troops.
00:28:55.460And he's handing enough money to these guys to completely transform their village, right?
00:28:59.960Like, 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.
00:29:10.340And without fail, the first thing every single warlord did was take the money and build a road to his dad's house.
00:29:22.120And he found that actually in every single village, not only were the people okay with this, they expected that of that leader.
00:29:28.040And 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.
00:29:38.440And 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.
00:29:48.840It'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.
00:29:58.460Deep 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.
00:30:13.760It's not something you can just walk in and hand to people and expect them to fall into that behavior.
00:30:18.600Well, and the funny thing is the Persians themselves, long, long time ago, actually got this.
00:31:29.300They wanted to be ruled by someone who was like them and be ruled by their own laws.
00:31:34.560Again, this is something in our own tradition we understood about the American Indians, right?
00:31:40.400Andrew Jackson, who I've now referenced twice, who is sort of burned in effigy.
00:31:45.500He 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?
00:31:54.820If they were to become Americanized, they would integrate.
00:31:57.860They would disappear, which is largely what we've seen.
00:32:00.380But he, in very good faith, created the reservation system as a way to preserve that way of life.
00:32:06.880The idea would be, one, it would be pacification, right?
00:32:09.940There's no longer conflict for two people, two laws in the same territory.
00:32:14.000But also, right, if that thing, that culture is going to stay what it is, it must be allowed to express itself.
00:32:20.740And 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.
00:32:38.040Or sort of do what we did to South Korea, right?
00:32:41.460Or it technically worked, but we created this horribly broken society that, as of current day, cannot reproduce itself, right?
00:32:49.060The one time it kind of, and I really want to put a big asterisk on kind of worked, right?
00:32:56.320Something that has no vital force anymore.
00:32:58.200It's not really identifiable as what it once was.
00:33:01.060And, you know, again, I understand why the Korean War was fought.
00:33:04.740I think it's more justifiable than the forever wars we've mentioned.
00:33:08.260But 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?
00:33:46.940And that's a very, that's a sad, regrettable thing.
00:33:50.100And so to me, you know, one of the most important things, in addition to, as you mentioned earlier, you know, making your objections known,
00:33:56.580because we have seen the Trump, or we have seen Trump 180 on things, but also is to deny these people the moral ground.
00:34:05.300They are not on the right side of history.
00:34:07.800They're using a horribly broken argument that even within living memory, we have seen cause countless deaths, billions in treasure wasted,
00:34:15.920and 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.
00:34:25.460So there's a lot that I want to touch there, because you hit some points that I was really going to bore into.
00:34:32.980So the first thing, you know, historical examples, yeah, you point out, you know, the Caesar and the Gauls.
00:34:39.700Let's also not forget, you know, the Romans and the Jews, because originally, of course, you know, the Romans go in,
00:34:46.200they're governing with as light a hand as they can, because the Jews have this weird faith.
00:34:51.080Normally, the Romans can just go in and say, you got to worship the imperial cult, just throw Caesar into a temple somewhere.
00:34:58.200He's one of your gods, and then we move on, right?
00:35:01.720The 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.
00:35:08.440So at first, they try to accommodate that.
00:35:10.440They'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.
00:35:19.680They try to give them that cultural space, right?
00:35:22.640But 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.
00:35:33.140And 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.
00:35:48.940And, you know, eventually the Romans get so angry that they just destroy the temple, right?
00:35:53.460Because they can't get these Jews to, like, worship and just do the minimum things to make them viable in the empire.
00:36:00.940That's how often nation-building fails.
00:36:05.620Even, you know, guys who were famously great about, like the Romans, still had, you know, different cultures that they simply could not absorb.
00:36:51.680And as has often been, you know, raised, how committed are we to this?
00:36:57.800Because 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?
00:37:42.740The only other part of that I was going to say is you hit on the example of South Korea.
00:37:47.440And 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.
00:38:05.160Like you said, yes, technically we protected them from communism.
00:38:09.460Ultimately, I think they appreciate that.
00:38:11.260But on the current demographic route, North Korea is going to survive longer than South Korea.
00:38:17.140Like democracy artificially imposed on these people has actually been more destructive than the communist dictatorship of Kim Jong-un.
00:38:25.740Again, I would want to live in South Korea over North Korea, obviously, right?
00:38:29.840But 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.
00:38:37.860Like the spiritual death of that country has occurred.
00:38:41.920I mean, hopefully they turn it around.
00:38:43.540But as it's going, that's the situation.
00:38:45.260And 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.
00:38:52.500Because we recognize that we think it's good and it works.
00:38:55.860B, we're admitting that we would basically need a world war, as you just pointed out, like a world war scale mobilization.
00:39:01.980Because the only two examples you can give me that really worked, Japan and Germany, required a world war mobilization in order to do that.
00:39:10.620And then we occupied those nations for decades.
00:39:14.540Like, you know, we had our own dictators in those nations telling them, you know, sometimes directly like MacArthur, you know, running Japan.
00:39:23.020Like, you know, this is not theoretical.
00:39:25.200Like 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.
00:40:06.440When 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?
00:40:27.260A 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.
00:40:59.780We will be required to fight for that war, not you and I per se, but us as Americans, and receive absolutely nothing in benefit.
00:41:08.900It 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.
00:41:19.680Well, and again, the culture is just so alien that that commitment, as you're pointing out, would be generational.
00:41:27.280It would be, you know, many, many generations of our men would be required to go there and do this.
00:41:32.900And 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.
00:41:45.700You 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.
00:41:51.280And 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?
00:41:59.220Like, that's a country we actually have ties to.
00:42:13.620They're literally demographically replacing their own population with Muslims and forcing the parents of raped daughters to do nothing.
00:42:23.400Like, 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?
00:42:31.720Again, not advocating for this, but if we're going to make the move, that makes a lot more sense to me.
00:42:37.140Well, 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?
00:42:47.260They either plotted to assassinate our president or were somehow vaguely connected to, you know, two planes, you know, tragically striking the Twin Towers, right?
00:42:56.320Well, if you remember, all the way back six months ago, the UK Labour Party sent activists into America to campaign for Kamala Harris.
00:43:09.780They directly intervened in our election.
00:43:12.940And 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,
00:43:21.920if 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?
00:43:32.900Time 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.
00:44:19.700And largely, that is starting these boneheaded foreign adventures.
00:44:24.340Because, as we've said, it doesn't serve our interests, Aaron, but it is very good for those people.
00:44:30.320And that's ultimately what they care about.
00:44:31.880Well, 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?
00:44:41.440This 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.
00:44:52.760That 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.
00:45:12.780Yeah, 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?
00:45:22.020It has its own, like, cache of weapons that it can deploy at a moment's notice.
00:45:27.640No one uses them because they're so dangerous and it would have everyone turn against you, but every house has them.
00:45:34.000And this is what allows, basically, the feudal nature.
00:45:36.700It allows, everything doesn't have to be centralized.
00:45:38.740Yes, 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.
00:45:50.560And that's a terrible way for the world to balance its power, but it is now the dynamic, right?
00:45:56.220Like, 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.
00:46:06.240But, you know, we're not going directly to war with Russia because they have nukes, right?
00:46:12.520We're not going directly into North Korea and clearing out that regime because they have nukes.
00:46:19.520Everyone knows we're not going to Pakistan because they have nukes.
00:46:23.200Like, and the world leaders are not oblivious to this fact.
00:46:26.640So 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.
00:46:42.000I can be a country with nukes and have sovereignty, or I can be a country without nukes and have no sovereignty.
00:46:49.260The rational step by every actor in the world is to pursue nukes.
00:46:55.560That doesn't mean I want them to have them, but I recognize that reality, right?
00:46:59.540Once someone builds tanks, you've got to build tanks.
00:47:03.420And 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.
00:47:16.420And so either they live under the umbrella of another country that has that capability or they have it themselves.
00:47:21.760And 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.
00:47:29.480Well, 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.
00:47:55.700And so I just I don't like any of that.
00:47:59.700But 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.
00:48:14.400Well, 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?
00:48:54.780You know, I would love for Afghanistan to be a lovely, beautiful country where everyone is safe.
00:49:00.580But fundamentally, we live in a world of hard constraints.
00:49:05.400And not only is that ultimately, as we've really beaten to death here, an impossibility.
00:49:10.240But 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.
00:49:22.960And 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.
00:49:33.220Similarly, 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.
00:50:14.360And so, of course, what that means is that there is both a paid and a free version of my show.
00:50:19.260So exact same content, you can find people like Auron, other people who've been on this show.
00:50:24.900And those episodes come out three days a week for free with ads.
00:50:28.200If 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.
00:50:38.800But again, Auron, thank you so much for having me on.
00:52:28.160I didn't even see your super chat, but I'm glad that eventually we came to the same conclusion.
00:52:32.480And 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.
00:52:42.360I 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.
00:52:51.720I feel like we can probably secure that.
00:52:54.420Well, especially because I think the US-UK wars were tied at one and one.
00:53:21.040Senator 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?
00:53:34.860A very, very, very, very good point, but also its own kind of problem, right?
00:53:39.960Like if if we have created, you know, it's the kind of kind of thing.
00:53:42.940Well, Rome's got to control Egypt because otherwise it doesn't get grain shipments.
00:53:48.600But 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?
00:54:00.640So 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.
00:54:12.620That 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.
00:54:22.940And that's not something we need to speculate on that.
00:55:00.780This is not some, yeah, you're just not walking in and knocking down, you know, some small two-bit country, unfortunately.
00:55:12.780Crud 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.
00:55:24.820Yeah, 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.
00:55:48.600Also, 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?
00:55:54.800We're literally, again, in a proxy war with him.
00:55:57.140So did the regime change change anything ultimately?
00:56:01.740I think it's great that the USSR fell.
00:56:04.020I 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.
00:56:13.980I 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.
00:56:22.020And so ultimately, I think the realization is, even in this success, like, we're still basically having the same contest with that world power.
00:56:32.160We ended a proxy war, and 30 years later, we're in another proxy war, right?
00:56:37.260If 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.
00:57:18.180And 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.
00:57:25.160And 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.
00:57:38.600Again, 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.
00:57:47.500I'm not someone who knows enough to say, oh, this is how you would stabilize.
00:57:54.080How, you know, I, I, I hate playing, you know, expert when I, I just don't know.
00:57:58.460Uh, 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.
00:58:04.960Uh, uh, just a blank there says Iran with nukes is no worse than Pakistan.
00:58:11.540Again, I don't know exactly how to gauge that, but that feels like a reasonable assertion, right?
00:58:16.760Like 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,
00:58:34.500but seems reasonable simpler with the beaver, letting us know that the burden gang is here.
00:58:42.780And 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.
00:59:01.360So 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.
00:59:12.160All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up yet again.
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