00:00:00.000A thoughtful and deep conversation with David Sachs about Ukraine.
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00:02:15.000Well, because we're not a democracy, we're an oligarchy.
00:02:18.000I mean, the country is run by a collection of very powerful interest groups.
00:02:23.000And the donors of the Republican Party, the neocons, and the military-industrial complex all support this war, and they're completely bought into the narratives underlying it.
00:02:35.000So I tend to think that's why you have this large majority of Congress supporting these endless appropriations, even though the majority of the country does not.
00:02:45.000Were we a democracy any time in your lifetime or representative government?
00:02:50.000Well, I think, you know, I think our government contains elements of democracy.
00:02:56.000It also contains elements of oligarchy.
00:02:58.000And I mean, this was somewhat by design of the framers.
00:03:03.000But so, I don't want to say it's like not democratic at all, but the reality is, is that the government's actions are strongly guided by interest groups and donors have a massive outsized say in what happens.
00:03:20.000And I don't really understand why the donors are so obsessed with this Ukraine project.
00:03:26.000I don't even know that it's necessarily that good for them, but I think they're completely bought into this ideology that undergirds it.
00:03:36.000So, David, we recently had a fundraiser for Turning Point.
00:03:39.000We raise a lot of money, and we have very strong opinions that are not neoconservative ones, but people still support us for obvious other reasons, other value alignment.
00:03:47.000But the issue of foreign aid in Ukraine came up, and it's not, there wasn't a single defense contractor in the room.
00:03:53.000There wasn't somebody that was going to make money off of the war effort, but they're ideological adherents.
00:03:58.000And it goes something like this, which is 70 or 80-year-old wealthy business person believes firmly in the rules-based international order that was established in post-World War II, and that we must be a bastion of freedom and democracy abroad.
00:04:15.000And that if America is not the superpower doling out cash to fight against authoritarianism, then all the gains of their lifetime will be lost.
00:04:24.000And this is kind of a boomer proxy war.
00:04:27.000And I don't mean that pejoratively, but if you look at who is primarily the most enthusiastic for what's happening in Ukraine-Russia demographically, it's people over the age of 65 because they still look at Russia as the Soviet Union, as the evil empire that Reagan warned against.
00:04:41.000And there is some fear that if Ukraine collapses, that the entire political project of their life will basically be for naught.
00:05:08.000And I think that's basically, I think what happened is that FDR gave us a new form of government in the 1930s, 1940s.
00:05:16.000America basically took over the world and became a globe-spanning empire.
00:05:20.000We don't administer different countries directly.
00:05:24.000We don't have, unlike the Roman Empire or the British Empire, we don't have governors who kind of rule foreign peoples.
00:05:31.000We simply regime change those rulers and we don't like them.
00:05:36.000But in any event, since World War II, America has basically been in charge of the world minus the Soviet bloc.
00:05:43.000And then, of course, once that fell in 1991, you had this unipolar world order and this instinct to kind of take over the world went into hyperdrive.
00:05:52.000You had all the forever wars of the Middle East.
00:05:55.000And obviously, it's all blown up in our faces.
00:05:57.000But yet this instinct and this imperial desire to impose American style rule over the whole world, I think remains this very compelling desire and motive for a certain class of people.
00:06:13.000And it's really fundamental to their view of America.
00:06:18.000I mean, they fundamentally view America as an empire.
00:06:21.000I mean, again, they don't use that language, but they don't see it as a traditional republic anymore.
00:06:26.000They see it as more of this woke empire.
00:06:29.000Yeah, and it's the irony is that the more that you push abroad, the more it actually undermines the dollar and destroys U.S. economic hegemony.
00:06:39.000And so you're actually destroying, if you want us to be an empire, you're actually destroying any ability for us to be strong at all.
00:06:47.000I mean, we canceled Russia in response.
00:06:48.000Saudi Arabia joined BRICS, so on and so forth.
00:06:51.000And we've seen this cascade of effects because of our attachment for Ukrainian democracy.
00:07:00.000Yeah, I mean, look, every part of this story is basically either a hoax or a narrative mirage.
00:07:06.000I mean, Ukraine isn't really a democracy in the way that we portray it.
00:07:12.000I mean, they've banned opposition political parties.
00:07:45.000So, you know, this whole idea that we're standing up for democracy, it's not really, again, a democracy in the way that we would expect.
00:07:53.000It's more of a American client government.
00:07:56.000Then you've got the whole narrative around Russia's motivations.
00:08:02.000I mean, we can go into this, but I just fundamentally don't believe in the whole Hootler narrative that Putin's really the second coming of Adolf Hitler.
00:08:10.000If we don't stop him in Ukraine, he's going to take over all of Europe.
00:08:25.000It should never be used, but it's either everything is Auschwitz, everyone is Hitler, and everyone I don't like is a Nazi.
00:08:32.000Well, yeah, I think this is the neocon frame on everything: the year is always 1938, and the enemy is always Hitler, and any use of diplomacy is always appeasement.
00:08:43.000And again, I think it's because this American empire was birthed in World War II.
00:08:47.000And so it's almost like we're stuck in that founding moment of the American empire.
00:08:54.000So, you know, yeah, I think that that whole thing is a narrative mirage.
00:08:58.000And then, of course, the whole thing is blowing up in our faces.
00:09:00.000I mean, you mentioned BRICS and the, let's not say the decline, but the risk to the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.
00:09:13.000I mean, that is clearly, we are clearly catalyzing global opposition to the U.S. through this war and through our other actions, our other foreign policy.
00:09:26.000And of course, it's bleeding our treasury.
00:09:29.000I mean, you have to see this as of a peace with all the forever wars that we've been involved in.
00:09:34.000So, of course, it's backfiring horribly, but yet we're still somehow stuck on this project.
00:09:41.000I think, by the way, I think this whole idea was really epitomized by, I think it was a Democratic congressman who said that Ukraine is our border.
00:12:12.000I mean, our audience, it's so foreign to the working men and women of this country, like teachers, parents, police officers, plumbers, welders, veterans.
00:12:21.000How does one come to such an outrageous view?
00:12:24.000Well, I think the narrative or the frame they've convinced themselves about is that the U.S. is bound up in this war of democracy versus autocracy, and that we're in this manichean struggle for survival between the free world and again, these autocracies.
00:12:44.000And it's kind of like a warmed-over rehash of Cold War thinking.
00:12:53.000I mean, authoritarianism is undeniably an unattractive feature of governments, but it's a spectrum condition.
00:13:01.000I mean, different governments have different amounts of authoritarianism, and it's unattractive when it occurs in places like Brazil or in the Middle East.
00:13:11.000But plenty of our allies are authoritarian.
00:13:14.000And in fact, you know, the Biden administration is making the United States more authoritarian.
00:13:19.000So this is an unattractive feature of government, but it's not something that requires us to be in a state of war against some of these countries.
00:13:29.000And it's very dangerous for us to be in a proxy war with Russia.
00:13:34.000Even if you don't like Russia, there's simply no reason for us to be at war with them, even via proxy.
00:13:42.000They've got thousands of nuclear weapons.
00:13:46.000And fundamentally, you know, our realist foreign policy interests would dictate in favor of making peace with Russia in order to focus on China to essentially do a mirror image of what Kissinger and Nixon did with China when we basically sought a reconciliation with China in order to isolate the Soviet Union.
00:14:09.000You know, our foreign policy interest is to do something similar here in reverse.
00:14:13.000So, you know, in a whole bunch of different ways, this is just not in our interest.
00:14:18.000It's really lazy and sloppy, shallow thinking from people who are paranoid or drunk on power or who just want to feel important or heroic.
00:14:27.000And David, in the next segment, yeah, please.
00:14:30.000Well, yeah, I think there's one other aspect to it as well, which is the whole Russiagate hoax that I think our domestic politics spilled into our foreign policy there.
00:14:39.000Well, and understand that if it was like Belgian Gate, no one would have really cared.
00:14:44.000The fact that Trump colluded with Russia, they built this up as the adversary of the West.
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00:16:27.000Is there something about Russia, their closed borders, their preference towards nationalism over globalism that makes the U.S. elites hate them so much, or at least the, let's say, Western intelligentsia?
00:16:44.000What is it about Russia that drives them so silly?
00:16:48.000Well, I think fundamentally they blame Putin for Hillary Clinton's loss in the 2016 election.
00:16:54.000And you remember it started with the Steele dossier, that whole phony piece of opposition research that was commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign from a British spy.
00:17:04.000They invented out of whole cloth this narrative, this hoax that somehow Donald Trump was an agent of the Kremlin.
00:17:13.000And then when he won and they needed an excuse for their incompetent campaign, they claimed that somehow Russia had interfered in our elections in order to bring about that result.
00:17:24.000And ever since then, they have kept hanging new ornaments off of this Christmas tree of a hoax where you had the Alphabank hoax, you had the Hamilton 68 dashboard hoax, where literally thousands and thousands of mainstream media stories were created claiming that the Russians were interfering in our politics.
00:17:47.000But the American people have now been conditioned to believe that Russia has been involved in interfering and meddling in our politics.
00:17:57.000And I think that's created an intense Russophobia and has created a view that somehow Russia is a direct threat to our democracy.
00:18:06.000I think the truth of it is that Russia has not been involved in American politics.
00:18:11.000I don't think they care about our internal affairs and I don't think they've been meddling in them.
00:18:17.000If you watched Tucker's interview with Putin, he seems genuinely, Putin does, seems genuinely befuddled by American politics.
00:18:25.000It seems like he has a hard time figuring us out.
00:18:28.000In any event, I just don't think that they, yeah, I just don't think that they care, that the Russians care about the internal workings of American politics.
00:18:38.000There is no proof to any of this, but it has created this intense Russophobia.
00:18:43.000And so I think somehow that our domestic politics have now spilled over into our foreign policy and making Russia enemy number one.
00:18:52.000But I think that, as you say, if we were to look at this in realist terms, Russia would not be enemy number one.
00:18:58.000They are not the peer competitor to the United States.
00:19:21.000In purchasing power parity terms, they are bigger, and they can certainly produce more weapons than the U.S. can.
00:19:28.000So again, just Russia is just not the threat they've puffed it up to be.
00:19:32.000Moreover, we simply have no territorial disputes with Russia.
00:19:37.000We have no vital interests at odds with Russia.
00:19:40.000It just didn't need to be this highly conflictual relationship.
00:19:44.000But it was made into that by our relentless drive to expand NATO right up to Russia's border, which is what turned a country that wanted to be part of the West.
00:19:55.000I mean, again, when Putin came to power in 2000, he was very interested in having good relations with the West.
00:20:02.000And we systematically turned that country, not just Putin, but the entire Russian elite against us with NATO expansion, with color revolutions in their backyard, by canceling nuclear arms control treaties, by putting nukes directly on their doorstep.
00:20:18.000We did a whole series of things to antagonize the Russians and turn what could have been an ally, like you said, maybe a soft ally into an enemy.
00:20:28.000So this was very much a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:20:31.000Yeah, and people forget Kamala Harris went to the Munich security conference right before Putin invaded Ukraine and just read a script given to her by the Intel agencies, essentially saying we now want to have Ukraine in NATO.
00:20:46.000And that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
00:20:49.000And Putin was like, yeah, okay, like you guys are not getting off this, you know, ever eastward expanding NATO agreement.
00:20:56.000And David, I want to remind our audience, there was an agreement that NATO would not expand eastward, that NATO was going to stay in its current composition.
00:21:41.000David, can you comment on that element that we have isolated here, how we made a series of statements that we contradicted and misled Russia?
00:21:53.000That we're not blameless in this equation.
00:22:33.000We killed, I should say, NATO engaged in an operation against Libya and effectively killed Qaddafi.
00:22:40.000So from the Russian point of view, NATO is a hostile military organization.
00:22:45.000And in violation of our promises to Gorbachev, we brought it right up to their border.
00:22:49.000Again, this is just a mirror image of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
00:22:52.000The United States was willing to risk nuclear war in 1962 to prevent the Soviet Union from putting nuclear tip missiles in Cuba because we saw that as a threat to our security.
00:23:05.000The American government does not tolerate foreign troops, weapons, or bases in our hemisphere.
00:25:24.000With each passing day, the Russians are taking back more territory.
00:25:28.000You know, for the first couple of years of this conflict, we were told that the purpose of us arming Ukraine was to evict Russia from their territory.
00:25:36.000Well, last summer, we had this counteroffensive that we had appropriated the first $113 billion towards, and it was a total failure.
00:25:46.000The Ukrainians didn't even make it to the first Servicin line.
00:25:50.000They were destroyed in this gray zone.
00:25:53.000They were impaled on Russian defenses.
00:25:57.000They were destroyed by Russian artillery.
00:25:59.000And they lost all of those weapons, the tanks and the artillery that we had given to them in that futile counteroffensive.
00:26:09.000And by the way, this was obvious within the first two weeks of the counteroffensive.
00:26:12.000We saw all of those leopards and all of those challengers smoking in runes in minefields.
00:26:19.000I mean, the Ukrainians did not have an answer even to the Russian minefields.
00:26:24.000And yet, this summer counteroffensive went on for about four months.
00:26:29.000But this is something that the West encouraged Ukraine to undertake.
00:26:34.000And since then, since the defeat of the Ukrainians in that counteroffensive, the Russians have now been on offense.
00:26:41.000They've done it in kind of a slow grinding, classically Russian way, but they are now taking a territory.
00:26:47.000So, David, I was watching MSNBC very early this morning, and David Ignatius, who basically is the press secretary for the Central Intelligence Agency for the Washington Post, he said something really chilling, that the Ukrainian effort is now to go after Crimea.
00:27:04.000I don't know if you caught this or not, but this goes to show that the West, if they mean this, this could be a trillion or two or three trillion dollar effort to go nowhere.
00:27:16.000Their strategy is to get powerful new U.S. weapons, including these ATACOMs, long-range missiles, that can put Crimea, Russian-occupied Crimea, at risk.
00:27:28.000Crimea is probably what's most important for them.
00:27:31.000If the Ukrainians using these weapons through the remainder of this year could really put Crimea at risk, you might have a situation where going into next year, the Russians say it's time to negotiate some satisfactory end to this war to get what we want.
00:27:46.000The great thing about this aid package, the miraculous thing that Speaker Johnson and the Congress have done is to give Ukraine another year of life in this fight, maybe to get to the point where they can bargain from some strike next year.
00:28:34.000It's been there since 1784 when Catherine the Great established it.
00:28:38.000And 80% of the population of Crimea are ethnic Russians who would rather be part of Russia than the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian government.
00:28:48.000And this has been shown over and over again by polling.
00:28:51.000And yet, the kind of ultra-nationalist, and that's a nice word for them, Ukrainians have had this obsessive desire to get Crimea back.
00:29:00.000And you saw this in the summer counteroffensive.
00:29:02.000The whole idea was to punch through those Russian lines and to sever the land bridge from Donbass to Crimea and somehow lay siege to Crimea and force the Russians to sue for peace.
00:29:29.000Now, what might happen, though, is as a result of the U.S. giving Ukraine attackums, is they might destroy that Kerch Bridge.
00:29:37.000You know, they might destroy the bridge between Crimea and sort of the Russian mainland.
00:29:46.000But still, that will not do anything to change the outcome of this war.
00:29:53.000I mean, the Russians aren't even using the Kerch Bridge anymore to supply their military.
00:29:57.000That's happening over land routes now.
00:29:59.000They have this continuous land bridge from sort of the main Russian territory through the Donbass, through Zaporizhia.
00:30:10.000They now control all of that territory, so they don't need the Kerch Bridge.
00:30:13.000So in any event, this is simply not going to work as a military strategy, but it does reveal this central obsession with Crimea that the Ukrainian nationalists and their sponsors in the West have had now for a decade.
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00:31:22.000So David, you have a tweet out here on Axe where you say that the Russian military is larger and more powerful than even at the beginning of the war.
00:32:37.000These are not people who are forced at gunpoint into service.
00:32:41.000Like we've seen so many videos of young Ukrainians being rounded up and thrown in the back of vans.
00:32:45.000These are patriotic Russians who are volunteering for their armed services.
00:32:50.000And they're being put through training.
00:32:52.000They're not being sent immediately to the front lines.
00:32:54.000They're being put through six months or whatever of training.
00:32:57.000And the Russian military is getting bigger.
00:32:59.000In a similar way, the Russians have this huge industrial base that they inherited from the Soviet Union that's capable of producing massive amounts of weapons.
00:33:08.000And over the last couple of years, they've been ramping that up.
00:33:11.000And they're now producing more of everything.
00:33:13.000More artillery shells, more artillery tubes, more tanks, more drones, more of everything.
00:33:20.000And so this is, again, the Russian way of war is that they may be slow at the outset, but they ramp up into this huge, you know, military juggernaut.
00:33:31.000And that is what Ukraine is now facing.
00:33:33.000And meanwhile, it's the West that has depleted its arsenals and is largely out of weapons.
00:33:42.000We've, you know, we don't produce as many drones or tanks or planes or air defense missiles as the Russians do.
00:33:50.000And as a result, we can't help the Ukrainians win this war.
00:33:54.000We can appropriate this money, but we can't give the Ukrainians weapons we don't have.
00:34:01.000So I think the Ukrainians are in dire straits.
00:34:04.000And David, if they would have accepted the peace deal that was at least floated early, less people would have died and there probably would have been more territorial protections for Ukraine than how this will end.
00:34:17.000I guess I'm asking you to predict, you know, a kinetic war theater.
00:34:22.000Well, just to underscore your point there, there was that peace deal available at Istanbul in the first month of the war, and it didn't require Ukraine to give up any territory.
00:34:30.000They simply had to agree to be neutral, to not join NATO, and they had to agree to honor the Minsk Accords with respect to the Donbass to give the ethnic Russians there some protection because they were being attacked by these Ukrainian ultra-nationalists.
00:34:46.000These were entirely reasonable compromises that we could have made, the Ukrainians could have made.
00:34:52.000It was not, I don't believe it was in American interest to prevent that deal from happening.
00:34:56.000And yet that's what the administration did because they wanted this proxy war.
00:35:00.000They thought that they could weaken Putin and challenge Putin.
00:35:03.000Again, in the famous words of Boris Johnson, we want to challenge Putin, not make a deal with him.
00:35:08.000And so hence this war continued and it's continued in a disastrous way.
00:35:14.000In terms of where I think it's going, the Ukrainians are going to lose.
00:35:18.000Can't provide them with enough weapons to win this war.
00:35:22.000And even if they had the weapons, they no longer have the manpower to use them.
00:35:26.000Remember that famous Time magazine story where they talked about how Zelensky had become delusional.
00:35:33.000The writer was quoting top Ukrainian officials saying that even if the West comes through with all the weapons, we no longer have the manpower to use them.
00:35:42.000And they've been forced to, you can see this in the conscription.
00:35:45.000You can see them rounding up Ukrainians off the streets at gunpoints to impress them into military service.
00:35:53.000You can see this in all the Ukrainians who have fled the country.
00:35:56.000Just a week ago, there was an article in the New York Times talking about how lots of Ukrainians had died swimming across a river trying to flee the country to get into Romania.
00:36:07.000So they have run out of Ukrainians who are willing to fight.
00:36:12.000I mean, all the Ukrainians who wanted to fight volunteered at the beginning of the war.
00:36:16.000So it's just not clear where the manpower is going to come from.
00:36:19.000And then finally, you got the fact that the Ukrainians, or sorry, the Russians now have air superiority.
00:36:24.000I mean, on a weekly basis, they are conducting the equivalent of shock and awe.
00:36:28.000I mean, they are dropping these huge bombs on the Ukrainians and destroying their military positions and destroying their infrastructure.
00:36:36.000So this war is going very badly for the Ukrainians.
00:36:40.000And this new $61 billion that's been appropriated, it may prolong the war slightly, but I don't think it's going to change the outcome at all.
00:37:30.000David, you tweeted out about Zelensky just stealing money.
00:37:33.000By the way, I talked to well-informed Europeans.
00:37:37.000I have friends in Florence who claim that Zelensky has mansions all across Europe and a lot of oligarchs are buying up yachts and ports of entry.
00:37:48.000Are the Ukrainians fleecing the American taxpayer for their opulent lifestyle?
00:37:53.000Well, I can't speak to the mansions, but I can give you two data points.
00:37:56.000Seymour Hirsch, the famed reporter, reported based on his intelligence contacts that Bill Burns had to make, the CIA director had to make a trip to Kiev where he sat down with Zelensky and told him he's stealing too much and that his subordinates were unhappy because he wasn't sharing the spoils enough.
00:38:21.000The other data point was in that Time magazine story that I mentioned, where a Ukrainian official told Simon Schuster, who's the reporter, who, by the way, had written a very positive piece about Zelensky a year earlier.
00:38:34.000He had named Zelensky man of the year.
00:38:37.000So this is not a reporter who was anti-Ukrainian in any way.
00:38:41.000He was predisposed to being very pro-Ukrainian in any event.
00:38:44.000What this Ukrainian official said is that people are stealing like there's no tomorrow.
00:38:48.000And he said this after turning off the tape recorder.
00:38:54.000Look, Ukraine has been known for corruption.
00:38:58.000It's the most cottage industry of Ukraine.
00:39:04.000There's simply a ton of corruption there.
00:39:06.000This idea that we can flood this country with weapons and cash and not see a huge chunk of it stolen, especially when we, especially when the Congress opposed Rand Paul's bill.
00:39:21.000Remember when Ram Paul had that bill to get the special inspector general cigar, you know, that Sopko is the top guy who did all that great work on how our money that was sent to Afghanistan got stolen.
00:39:34.000Rand Paul said, let's get cigar to go look at Ukraine because he's the best at this.
00:39:55.000Well, they did that in conjunction with a speech that Kamala Harris gave where she declared that Putin was a war criminal and guilty of war crimes.
00:40:02.000I mean, look, they were fitting him for the Saddam Hussein jacket.
00:40:06.000They thought that they were going to implement a regime change operation in Moscow that basically they would crush the Russian economy and that either the people would rise up or the elites would turn against Putin and then they would put him on trial at The Hague and then execute him.
00:40:22.000I mean, this is basically, this is what they thought they were going to achieve at the beginning of the war.
00:40:27.000I mean, this is how delusional they are.
00:40:29.000And of course, the problem, one of the many problems with declaring in advance that Putin is guilty of war crimes and that in effect you want to execute him is that he has every incentive to continue this war forever and he's never going to give up.
00:40:43.000It's existential for the Russian regime.
00:40:48.000This is also what makes it so foolish for Blinken to declare that Ukraine will be joining NATO.
00:40:54.000I mean, that is what Russia is trying to prevent with its war.
00:40:57.000So if you insist that Ukraine will be joining NATO, then Russia will continue this war forever if they have to.
00:41:05.000And all the while, the American people largely don't support this.
00:41:09.000I want to finish our conversation here, David, about the changing information consumption ecosystem, which actually gives me hope because this has been a tough conversation because this whole topic just I find so infuriating, which is how people are getting their information.
00:41:31.000David, talk about how people are getting their information, how that is more decentralized than ever, and long-term that should eventually manifest in policy change.
00:41:43.000Well, you do pretty much have to go to independent sources in order to get the truth about this war.
00:41:47.000I mean, the mainstream media has created this total phony narrative around it.
00:41:52.000And the only way to really get the truth is to go to independent media, shows like yours, shows like ours, to hear people like, you know, Professor John Mearsheimer or Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the people who are really explaining the origins of this war.
00:42:07.000If you do that, you get the truth about it.
00:42:09.000But if you don't, you're kind of in this narrative hoax or narrative mirage, I should say.
00:42:16.000And by the way, that was the narrative fallacy of this war is epitomized by that Blinken clip you played where he says that Ukraine will be joining NATO.
00:42:27.000Because on the one hand, what the administration and what the whole mainstream media say is that this war has absolutely nothing to do with NATO expansion.
00:43:44.000It's mostly a business podcast where we talk about current events, markets, technology, but we also cover politics and international current events.
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