As the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine continue to grow, Rick Grinnell and Michael Schellenberger join me to talk about how tough diplomacy might have helped avoid some of this. Megyn Kelly is your host, and her show is your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:00.520Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.760Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:00:14.760So much news to get to today as the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine grow.
00:00:20.320In just a bit, we are going to be joined by Rick Grinnell, who's got a lot of thoughts on how tough diplomacy might have helped avoid some of this.
00:00:28.140But first, after facing pressure from Republicans and, more importantly, from Democrats, his own party,
00:00:36.980President Joe Biden just announced a short time ago that the United States will ban Russian oil imports.
00:00:44.300Now, the U.S. only gets about 7% of its oil from Russia, but it's a move the president was nonetheless reluctant to do
00:00:50.660because we've got gas prices hitting an all-time record high right now.
00:00:54.460And there's some reporting out of Fox News right now, and the New York Times as well, sort of dovetails on it,
00:01:00.700suggesting, weirdly, this was a weird race between Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues over in the Congress
00:01:07.580to see who could ban the Russian oil imports first.
00:01:10.680They were going to make them look bad.
00:01:11.880So he ran out to the mic to say, I'm banning it.
00:03:34.880And you can't power societies on unreliable solar panels made in China, by the way, or on unreliable wind turbines.
00:03:41.720We still need these fossil fuels or nuclear plants.
00:03:44.640But they've also been shutting those down in Europe.
00:03:46.600So, unfortunately, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, you know, the Europeans kind of brought this on themselves and the United States didn't do any favors to them.
00:03:55.240And frankly, all the banks got involved in repressing oil and gas production when we should have been increasing it.
00:04:00.820The Europeans are notably not going along.
00:04:04.040And according to what I read, are really not even in a position to go along because since they get it's, I guess, 40 percent of their gas from Russia and gas, as I understand it, is a lot tougher to replace than oil.
00:04:18.080So while other providers might be able to step in and fill the void if what they needed was oil, if you're excited to get tough, much tougher to backstop the gas.
00:04:29.140And even if they said we don't want to shut off gas, right, we'll keep the gas relationship going with Russia, but we're going to follow the United States and shut off the oil.
00:04:40.580Putin has been saying you do that and I'm shutting off the gas because before there was Nord Stream.
00:04:46.140Nord Stream 2, there was Nord Stream 1 and already this is correct me if I'm wrong.
00:04:51.580You're the expert and you know me and the energy and I'm struggling to follow all of it.
00:04:56.080But Nord Stream 1 is what Russia uses to get gas to Europe right now.
00:05:00.080And he Putin has been defensively saying you get too tough with me, Europe on oil.
00:05:05.660You're going to pay the price on gas and don't think I won't do it.
00:05:19.640But the consequences, look, we may have a recession with oil prices at their level now.
00:05:25.220I mean, when oil prices go to to go to 100 and they could go to $200 a barrel, which, by the way, is six to seven dollars a gallon of gasoline for Americans.
00:05:36.120And so, you know, and of course, it's really the worst of all worlds, Megan.
00:05:40.140I mean, I think the other thing people haven't been talking about is that Russia is going to be able to sell that oil to China.
00:05:45.380You know, you saw Shell even bought it and then it apologized like a couple of days later for buying a bunch of Russian oil.
00:05:50.860But Russia is still going to be able to sell that oil.
00:05:52.700There's not really any good solution here.
00:05:56.720I think it's unfortunately unlikely that anything like these sanctions or even more significant is going to stop Putin from invading and taking over Ukraine.
00:06:08.000You know, I think that really, you know, Biden is well within his rights.
00:06:11.020And maybe it's a good idea for him to restrict oil exports from the United States abroad in order to keep oil prices lower at home, gasoline prices.
00:06:19.840But if he does that, that's just going to strengthen Putin's hands even further.
00:06:22.440It's going to make it easier for Putin to basically bribe countries with the offer of of oil and gas or cheaper oil and gas in exchange for them kind of going along with Ukraine or really whatever Putin wants.
00:06:33.860So it's you know, as I pointed out, I mean, the West has had its head in the clouds.
00:06:38.620I mean, we've been in these fantasies of of harmonizing with nature through renewables.
00:06:43.300It's had a lot of I think most people can detect a religious tone to it.
00:06:48.560Obviously, big financial interests, the bankers and importing solar panels from China and becoming dependent on Russia.
00:06:53.820But I do think that, you know, Putin had his feet more firmly on the ground.
00:06:57.960He knew that what he did basically was just build a bunch of nuclear plants to replace the gas they were using for electricity.
00:07:04.180And then he exported the gas abroad and made Europe dependent.
00:07:07.360So that's the same strategy really anywhere.
00:07:10.080I mean, if we want to have greater energy independence, either for ourselves or for Europe, there's no alternative to basically building reliable sources of energy, particularly nuclear plants.
00:07:20.380But if it has to be coal so that you're not so dependent on imported natural gas and then they have to expand gas production.
00:07:26.800And the problem with expanding gas production, as you pointed out, is it just takes a lot longer than than doing, you know, even coal for that matter.
00:07:38.960And really, it's required to learn from our mistakes.
00:07:41.320Yeah, this required years of planning.
00:07:43.120And so, by the way, everybody should should be should be subscribing to your sub stack because it's great.
00:07:47.960It's wonderful access to Michael and all of his expertise.
00:07:51.940And you posted one on March 3rd called The West's Green Energy Delusions Empowered Putin.
00:07:58.260And it really walks us through what happened here, similar to what you just said.
00:08:02.040You write, while Putin expanded Russia's oil production, expanded natural gas production and then doubled nuclear energy production to allow more exports of its precious gas.
00:08:14.300Europe, led by Germany, shut down its nuclear power plants, closed gas fields and refused to develop more through advanced methods like fracking.
00:08:23.780So they were going in exactly two opposing directions.
00:08:29.480And that's that's how they empowered him.
00:08:42.140And you even alluded to something that I haven't even mentioned yet, which is maybe one of the biggest and most important elements of the story is that you now have the secretary of you have the former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
00:08:52.660The former secretary general of NATO, a well-respected French professor at one of their leading universities, basically the equivalent of their MIT in France, all saying that the Russian government financed anti fracking activism in Europe by climate activists to stop natural gas production in Europe, which would have made the continent less reliable, reliant on Russian gas.
00:09:15.120So they're now I mean, and so, you know, I haven't seen the intelligence directly, but I mean, it's would be quite a conspiracy theory for them all to mention it, especially, you know, given that Hillary at the time was trying to tell people that she was better on climate in the United States.
00:09:30.960We also report that the Russians financed almost 100 million dollars in anti fracking advocacy in Great Britain, where they have a lot of shale, but there's a lot of shale in Europe, too.
00:09:43.620I mean, people think it's just in the United States where you can frack.
00:09:47.560So I think that's pretty wild, you know, where you basically have a story where confirmed at the highest levels of government by people that are quite friendly to action on climate change, saying that climate activists funded by Putin were a big part of making Europe dependent on Putin of shaming Europe out of developing its own or just continuing the development of its own energy supplies and instead turning to Vladimir Putin.
00:10:12.280Right. Exactly. And because now you say there are things that they can do so far there.
00:10:16.720We haven't seen it. Germany has said they're going to shut down Nord Stream 2 permanently.
00:10:22.500OK, that's one thing. That's good. But Germany, as you point out in one of these pieces, six nuclear power plants.
00:10:29.280Right. They shut down three and they're about to shut down the other three. And it's totally unnecessary.
00:10:33.200They can help save themselves. Maybe not that easily now that they've already pulled the plug on three of them.
00:10:38.980But you tell me how feasible it is for them to rejigger that.
00:10:42.880Well, yeah, and I should also say in the midst of all there's so many things to talk about.
00:10:46.080I mean, in the midst of all the chaos, there was also a gunfight, gun battle between Ukrainian forces and Russian forces at a nuclear plant.
00:10:53.880So we had this little we had like a nuclear scare lit, you know, was just a minor scare in the history of nuclear scares.
00:11:02.080And the interesting story, of course, the plants, the reactors that have been operating have kept operating because they want them for electricity.
00:11:08.460You know, the irony, of course, both sides have an interest in maintaining those nuclear plants.
00:11:13.000So actually, also that that ended well, certainly plenty of dangers in that region.
00:11:17.840But you can see where people are getting killed. It's by civilian attacks.
00:11:21.080But, yeah, to your point, I mean, nuclear provides this reliable source of energy.
00:11:25.300So, I mean, the bottom line is Germany could just burn more coal or they could do nuclear.
00:11:30.340And the difference is that the nuclear plants emit basically no carbon emissions, a small amount of very, very, very small amount of carbon emissions in their total life cycle.
00:11:38.480Whereas the coal plants are the dirtiest fossil fuel producing significant amounts of carbon emissions.
00:11:44.660That's the bottom line. So I think that's the wake up call.
00:11:47.420You know, it's that this all this stuff about solar panels and wind turbines, they're just not reliable enough.
00:11:52.480They've spread them over so many distances.
00:11:54.900They've captured the best wind and sunlight they can.
00:11:57.800They're just at their physical limit, basically.
00:12:05.440Well, you pointed out when our first interview together how you are you once were part of Greenpeace.
00:12:12.540I mean, you are of the left. You were an activist.
00:12:15.540You really cared about the environment, about American land and so on and so forth, and sort of came to these views on what the right place to go was.
00:12:23.020P.S. It's nuclear organically by you worked during the Obama administration on the Solyndra deal.
00:12:29.200You really were put you were a true believer.
00:12:30.900But after testing all these things out and seeing them fail, you came to realize a lot of these renewables are fraught and are worse for the environment than, for example, nuclear, which has gotten a bad rap.
00:12:42.620And you write in one of your pieces a little bit about this, and it jumped out at me, given what we talked about.
00:12:48.260And people should go back and check out that episode while we're through time.
00:12:51.120You write Germany has spent lavishly on weather dependent renewables.
00:12:54.300Right. So they're going the same way our president is trying to push us right now to the tune of thirty six billion dollars a year.
00:13:01.020Mainly solar panels and industrial wind turbines.
00:13:04.700Same for us. But those have their problems.
00:13:07.360You write solar panels have to go somewhere in a solar plant in Europe needs four hundred to eight hundred times more land than natural gas or nuclear plants to make the same amount of power.
00:13:22.520And you continue farmland has to be cut apart to host solar.
00:13:25.420This is one of your issues that it's not all about carbon emissions.
00:13:30.040If you care about the environment, you have to take a serious look at what solar and wind reliance is doing to our land.
00:13:39.540Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I pointed out I tweeted also yesterday, you know, that nuclear heavy France or that rather I should say Germany, which is moving away from nuclear, as you noted, it closed three reactors at the end of last year.
00:13:53.780And it's going to close three more unless it stops the closure.
00:13:56.120At the end of this year, Germany produces six times more carbon emissions per unit of electricity as France.
00:14:03.360And then everybody says, oh, nuclear is just too expensive or something and renewables are cheap.
00:14:07.460Well, if that were the case, then then French electricity wouldn't cost fifty nine percent of what German electricity costs.
00:14:13.540So you can see the continent wide levels.
00:14:16.100You know, I mean, look, it's like and, you know, as for natural gas, particularly if you don't have nuclear natural gas is the reason that U.S.
00:14:24.600carbon emissions declined by twenty two percent between the year 2005 and twenty twenty, which was five percentage points more than we were supposed to reduce them under the United Nations Paris climate agreement.
00:14:37.000So if you're really concerned about the climate, then you should be in favor of natural gas and nuclear.
00:14:42.420And thus we should be suspicious of people who call themselves climate activists like Greta Thunberg, like Al Gore, like John Kerry, who are constantly either trashing, criticizing or dismissing the importance of nuclear and natural gas.
00:15:21.140You write Berlin was faced with a choice between unleashing the wrath of Putin on neighboring countries or inviting the wrath of Greta Thunberg.
00:15:29.980They chose Putin. That's exactly it. Right.
00:15:32.820They allowed, well, Putin's propaganda machine and Greta Thunberg, who knows nothing about anything, to shame them out of meaningful domestic energy production and got themselves and kind of the rest of us into the position we're in right now,
00:15:48.240where Putin's got the upper hand and he knows it.
00:15:51.140Yeah. I mean, it's a huge scandal because, I mean, look, there's so much noise right now, Megan, as you see on Twitter, people talking about military action by the United States against Russia.
00:16:01.980It's just not going to happen. Like we're two nuclear armed powers. Like, forget about it.
00:16:07.080Anything that gets you close to conflict with another nuclear armed power, you want to avoid.
00:16:11.480Everybody knows the school children know that. So that's not going to happen.
00:16:14.820And similarly, the politicians are not going to want to keep oil prices at super high levels because the public is going to pay for it.
00:16:22.420I mean, we're facing I don't think people totally understand this yet.
00:16:25.340I mean, we're facing very significant, sustained energy prices, which means high food prices.
00:16:32.620We're also potentially seeing some disruption of wheat production.
00:16:36.480I mean, it doesn't have to be this way, but it could be coming from Ukraine, which is a major global supplier of wheat.
00:16:42.400It's considered the breadbasket of Europe. So we could be seeing, you know, energy, food, electricity shortages.
00:16:48.980We could be seeing, you know, it could be a significantly worse situation than Arab than the food shortages that triggered Arab spring.
00:16:56.520I think it's very clearly the worst energy crisis since 1973.
00:17:00.700I now see other people are saying that as well.
00:17:03.500So, you know, and people suffer when you don't have reliable sources of energy.
00:17:08.440So I think it's yeah, I think it's really I think I think it says something about the potential decay of our civilization and really the decline of the West that it really allowed itself to indulge in this kind of, frankly, pretty decadent secular religion where it imagined that we were all going to become part of nature with renewables, even though they were, you know, solar panels are made by enslaved Uyghur Muslims in Chinese factories using coal.
00:17:36.080It's like one of the worst processes for humans.
00:17:40.100I mean, I'm a little bit I mean, I feel a little upset, too, because you kind of see all the concern for the Ukrainians.
00:17:48.300I also feel it for the Africans who have people in the Congo who have suffered significantly producing the minerals for renewables, also for the Muslims in China who have been producing these solar panels.
00:17:58.780So you kind of go, you know, what are we what was this about?
00:18:04.640And it was one that was actively harmful in many situations to people and also harmful to natural environments, while at the same time strengthening Putin and making it so that really there was no consequence for him in invading Ukraine.
00:18:17.620I mean, there's some I know right now, some sanctions.
00:18:44.460So what and you see a kind of petulance that the moral high ground.
00:18:49.660No, I'm just going to say we don't we don't have the moral high ground here unless we get serious about this.
00:18:54.400And I think we see sorry to interrupt.
00:18:56.160I think we see a kind of petulance on the part of people that use their ignorance as sort of cover for their demand, which is sort of like we just have to stop using oil.
00:19:07.220It's like like the whole like are you aware of like the machinery that I think people don't even realize that like we have the
00:19:14.460entire system built up around powerful machines that move us from place to place and that deliver Amazon boxes to our doorsteps and that make it possible to eat food.
00:19:25.180And people are so in the West have been so disconnected from the productive sectors of the economy.
00:19:29.560They've been so disconnected from how things are made, how things are powered.
00:19:33.480And I think it's a wake up call in that sense.
00:19:35.980You still see some of that these kind of petulant demands that somehow we're going to do.
00:19:39.160I mean, we saw Kamala Harris yesterday.
00:19:41.480I mean, I thought one of the most interesting things was like literally the same day that Kamala Harris says we have all the electric vehicle technology we need.
00:19:49.640And it's like, hey, it's just not true on so many levels.
00:19:52.520We don't even have the electricity to power all those electric vehicles.
00:19:55.720And it was Elon Musk who makes not just the greatest electric vehicle ever made, but maybe one of the greatest cars that's ever been made, who goes on to Twitter and is like, we need to produce more oil and gas.
00:20:08.580I mean, Tesla is producing a lot of amazing cars, but nothing close to the you can't just and you can't turn that stuff around overnight in time to deal with a cutoff of oil from Russia.
00:20:17.740So I think people will look back on this time as I wake up to the limits of renewables, to the dangers of not having sufficient nuclear, to the dangers of not having significant oil and gas production.
00:20:30.860You know, it's going to take us a while just to convert our refineries to be able to refine the petroleum from American shales.
00:20:37.280It's going to take a while to build the pipelines and the LNG facilities, which, by the way, the climate activists here blocked.
00:20:43.340Yeah. That's one of the first things Biden did was he got Keystone shut down and he opened up Nord Stream 2.
00:20:49.980So we're less energy independent and so was Germany.
00:20:55.280But you know who was doing really well?
00:20:59.340Let me ask you a quick question about another piece of the Biden plan.
00:21:02.500He was he was touting the other day the fact that he we and our partners had released 60 million barrels from the world's strategic petroleum reserves.
00:21:35.460Unfortunately, these are all these symbolic.
00:21:37.640I mean, people there's like sort of two worlds, you know, like if you go into like energy analysts like on Twitter, like serious people who like, you know, the industries need to pay attention to.
00:21:49.220They're just like this is I mean, the idea that there's some quick fix to this dependence on Russian energy is just considered absurd.
00:21:57.340And then there's like the political realm where the politicians want to seem to be demonstrating their care for the Ukrainians.
00:22:04.240And I want to demonstrate my care for the Ukrainians, too, and and will and do, you know.
00:22:09.060But it's also like we're not being really honest with people about what the situation is here.
00:22:16.040So, I mean, I just think, you know, part of it is like, yeah, like, you know, I think what's crazy is that Joe Biden is in Texas today.
00:22:21.880He's not meeting with the oil and gas guys like the Biden administration keeps saying, well, we have all these open leases and the oil and gas industry won't use them.
00:22:30.460Well, part of it from my interviews is that they are, yeah, first of all, looking to make money after they lost money for a long period of time.
00:22:47.660Part of it was there were some companies that tried to raise money on the stock market by expanding oil and gas production, and they were punished for it, in part because of these climate concerns.
00:22:57.800I've had people say, no, it was also just the cyclical nature of oil and gas development.
00:23:02.200That's true, but there's now a pretty big consensus, including the New York Times main oil reporter, oil and gas reporter, reported on the same thing, which is that you just haven't seen the production coming from the oil and gas industry because they've been sent the message,
00:23:16.100even before Biden, really from the banking community, but also from lawmakers and the public, that we just don't want more oil and gas.
00:23:24.460We would all just rather use solar panels and electric cars.
00:23:27.600And I think the message here from, you know, obviously the crisis in Russia, but now we're hearing it directly from Elon Musk, is that that's just not something you can, you can't just, you know, turn, you know, flip a switch and suddenly, you know, turn over the entire machinery that powers your society overnight.
00:23:44.520That makes perfect sense. This is a, this is particularly on point because there was a contentious exchange.
00:23:50.880I think it was between Fox and Jen Psaki the other day at the, of the administration saying, you know, what's the deal?
00:23:57.340And she was saying, look, there are 900 leases that have yet to be out for oil and gas development that have yet to be, or licenses that have yet to be used.
00:24:07.600So understand, you know, it's not us, it's not our policies that are stopping domestic oil production.
00:24:12.740And your point is, no, but you are the ones who created an environment in which they thought there would be absolutely no market for this.
00:24:18.360They get shamed for doing the very thing that they were created to do.
00:24:22.660And we get patted on the head by Greta Thunberg, or not really, because she doesn't really praise anyone.
00:24:29.300But that's our goal, as opposed to becoming energy independent, like we were during the Trump years, frankly, a lot, a lot closer to it than we are right now.
00:24:39.520Yeah, I mean, look, I think what's missing is leadership.
00:24:41.520Once again, I mean, I see it at all levels of society.
00:24:44.000Frankly, Frank, it's kind of terrifying to some extent.
00:24:48.240You know, the president, really, we should be seriously with a serious strategy to increase oil and gas production immediately.
00:24:55.160I mean, you're seeing this from Elon Musk.
00:24:57.380You're seeing it from Mark Andreessen, one of the co-creators of Netscape and a well-known venture capitalist.
00:25:03.040You know, you're seeing it from people like me who, you know, a longtime advocate of renewables, a longtime advocate of nuclear.
00:25:09.160But, you know, this is a crisis situation.
00:25:12.560You know, you're talking, again, about not just, you know, $7, you know, potentially a gallon of gasoline in the United States, but a global recession, global food shortages.
00:25:23.760You know, it may be that there's a reshuffling of blocks, that, you know, Russia and China are going to get closer after this, which is not great.
00:25:31.680We see sort of the United States going a separate way from Europe on this, which is, you know, that we're going to ban Russian oil, but the Germans are still going to, you know, the Germans and the Europeans are still going to use it.
00:25:41.140So the West is divided, has no strategy.
00:25:45.000The president of the United States has no strategy to increase energy production to bring down prices.
00:25:51.600We're seeing from the European Union call for more unreliable renewables imported from China.
00:25:56.080And now you're seeing the consequence of these sanctions pushing Putin into China's hands, where China is going to get a great deal buying, you know, discounted, you know, Russian energy and food potentially.
00:26:08.560So I think, you know, we're at the end of an era.
00:26:12.760I mean, I think the post it's not just the end of the post Cold War era from the last 30 years, but really it's the end of the post war era that's been around for the last, you know, 47 years.
00:26:22.460It's it's a changing of the and I don't think we've got leadership in place that is really describing the challenge honestly to the American people and describing what it's going to take to become energy independent and to deal with these.
00:26:36.220You know, there's there are real world tradeoffs.
00:26:37.800I think, on the other hand, one of the things I think is important is to do actually what Putin did, which is to build a lot of nuclear plants so that your natural gas reserves can be exported.
00:26:48.580That way we can export our gas to Europe and reduce its reliance on Russia over the long term.
00:26:53.340But again, Megan, these are things that are going to take, you know, years, not days.
00:26:58.120And we need a president who's demonstrates the leadership to be able to explain this to the American people, explain what the sacrifices are that people would be willing to make.
00:27:05.960Because I do think Americans do feel compassionate for the Ukrainians.
00:27:10.340I think we do want a solution and we do want to contribute to a better outcome, including less reliance on the Russians.
00:27:15.800But that means being really honest about what the you know, what's going to solve this and that some temporary sanctions, you know, or permanent sanctions even on Russian oil imports is not going to cut it.
00:27:26.960That there needs to be a significant expansion of nuclear power, natural gas and oil production at home so that we, in part, we can export some of it to our allies abroad.
00:27:36.400It's an all hands on deck situation here and we have the means to do it.
00:27:48.280And if you're like I used to be and think, oh, well, those are dangerous and they leak bad things into the environment.
00:27:54.820I don't want to drink water that has nuclear waste in it or have my kid growing up next to a nuclear power plant.
00:28:00.880But think again, go back and listen to Episode 94 that we had with Michael or just read his book, Apocalypse Never, or look at his TED Talks, which have gazillions of millions of views for very good reasons.
00:28:28.340So one of the things that we didn't talk about with Michael was the fact that the United States is now saying that since we're shutting off 8 percent of our oil imports, we are going to talk to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia about backfilling those numbers.
00:28:45.760Saudi Arabia, the country that Joe Biden, then candidate Joe Biden, promised to make a pariah when he was on the campaign trail.
00:28:52.360Or or we'll just increase our business with them.
00:28:55.020Venezuela, who we effectively ostracized over the past 10 years.
00:28:59.340No, let's with a handshake, replace Russia for Venezuela.
00:33:42.780But for President Trump to kind of hit Chancellor Merkel hard on it, her only response is, well, Donald, you know, I have the Bundestag, and I have to deal with multiple parties, to which President Trump would say, you think dealing with Congress is easy?
00:34:28.960The 80 turnaround from Olaf Scholz is a monumental movement in Germany to reject Merkelism, to reject the CDU at a time when the Germans just don't do that.
00:34:49.980But faced with this bloody war, this admittance to pay the 2% immediately and to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, both absolute policies of Merkel, to change on a dime like that is an admittance that Merkel literally brought them to the place where Germany and Europe are less secure, and people couldn't no longer face that reality.
00:35:20.980But, you know, back on the subject of Poland, before we leave that, though, so Poland is in NATO.
00:35:26.020So if Poland sends jets to create just to help or to create a no-fly zone and then finds itself embattled in a war with Russia, right, if Russia starts bombing Poland or doing something militarily to Poland, then we do have to get involved.
00:35:42.300I mean, like, this is fraught if Poland – I know you say they're stepping it up, but we have to watch that very carefully, do we not?
00:36:00.060First of all, I think that you're right.
00:36:02.460Although Poland is acting as a member of Europe, maybe not even the EU, but just as a member of Europe, and they're defending European land and sovereignty, they also have a dual hat as a NATO member.
00:36:22.400And the slippery slope of them getting entangled in something with the Russians would trigger Article 5.
00:36:30.620Now, I'm an ambassador and a diplomat and try not to talk about the military aspect because I actually believe that our diplomats should be really tough in utilizing all the tools and that we should be there until there's absolutely no more help left.
00:36:49.880That's what's been so frustrating with the Biden administration is that we haven't utilized all the tools that we should have had been using from the beginning.
00:36:58.660We waited for a bloody war despite the fact that the intelligence clearly showed Joe Biden that a bloody war was coming on Wednesday.
00:37:05.300And he kept saying a bloody war is coming on Wednesday but failed to really act in a diplomatic way.
00:37:37.260The, just back home for a second because the number of people who are now pushing, like in Congress, and we've talked in the first hour about how these Democrats in the House, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer over in the Senate, Dick Durbin in the Senate, they're rushing to back the effort to sanction Russia even further and shut down the oil imports.
00:37:56.640And apparently Joe Biden, according to, again, Fox News and the New York Times, rushed out this morning to try to, you know, say we're doing that because the Democrats were getting ready to look tough without him.
00:38:07.180And I guess he personally even called Nancy Pelosi to say, please don't do this.
00:38:19.800And you have been jumping up and down saying, could you just please spare me this whole act?
00:38:25.760Because you guys are the ones who refused to shut down Nord Stream 2.
00:38:32.180It was shut down under Trump with you when you were there.
00:38:36.060One of the first things they did was to fire it back up and re-empower Putin in that way.
00:38:41.040And now when asked about that by a couple of reporters here or there, the Democrats, the White House, what they say is we needed to re-establish the diplomatic ties to Europe and Germany that Trump had so badly frayed, i.e. refer back to comments like you need to pay your fair share, right?
00:41:09.600The Democrats are defining Europe by Berlin and Paris.
00:41:14.120And as you can see from Warsaw and from some other countries, you cannot do that.
00:41:18.900The EU is a different entity today than it was even five years ago.
00:41:25.420Remember, Brexit happened because Chancellor Merkel refused to enforce immigration laws, allowed Syrian and Libyan refugees to come in without rules.
00:41:36.960And the British were like, wait a minute, we can't have that.
00:41:40.080So the Brexit happened because of Merkel's policies.
00:41:44.000This is where we get into Merkelism again.
00:41:45.720Then what you have is when Merkel was done with office and Olaf Scholz came in and the socialists, they flipped the script on Nord Stream 2 sanctions and and defense spending.
00:42:02.240But our Democrat friends here in America didn't see the change.
00:42:17.740And I think that when Putin saw Merkel being done, he had great relations with Merkel.
00:42:24.420And when he saw Merkel done and then he saw an opening of like, well, now I can take advantage of the socialists and the Democrats in Washington are with me.
00:42:59.620We still are under the Merkel policies of getting rid, just as Schellenberg was saying, getting rid of nuclear energy, getting rid of coal.
00:43:08.000And by the way, Merkel did all of that because she was beginning to lose power to the Green Party.
00:43:15.260Now, the Green Party in Germany is different than what we would think a Green Party would be in America.
00:43:20.360Think of the Green Party as soccer moms from Frankfurt, wealthy individuals who really care about quality of life issues.
00:43:29.680And so the Green Party was rising and they were taking votes from Merkel and she was about ready to do something about it.
00:43:37.400All right, let me I got to get this in.
00:44:43.760By the way, the Russians are leading in Syria on this policy.
00:44:47.300When you think about diplomacy, you're you're giving in one area and getting in another.
00:44:53.100And all of these issues together, the Russian hand is strong against the Biden administration.
00:44:58.600It's crazy how we're still dealing with them.
00:45:00.180You know, we're still buying their oil and we're still dealing with them on this Iran deal.
00:45:03.640Meanwhile, we were trying to look tough on the world stage by saying, OK, you know, we're going to cut off whatever and we're going to cut this off.
00:45:09.540We're going to stop the seven percent oil imports.
00:45:11.280But again, through the back door, it's a very different looking relationship.
00:45:15.640Yeah. And there's who knows whether that can even be undone, given how close we've you know, we've been with China, with Russia all over all these years.
00:45:24.420Rick Grinnell, no one better than you.
00:45:26.160Thank you so much for being on today with your insights.
00:46:02.140Well, apparently one of the things that Joe Biden said this morning when addressing this crisis was not to worry because he's going to be sending the vice president to Poland and Romania.
00:46:10.960So she's going to solve this problem, I guess, the way she solved the southern border immigration problem.
00:46:17.320In case you don't think she's up to the job, you just listen to her addressing the subject of energy and how that is affecting us today.
00:46:28.840The freight trucks that deliver bread and milk to our grocery store shelves and the buses that take children to school and parents to work.
00:46:37.720Imagine all the heavy-duty vehicles that keep our supply lines strong and allow our economy to grow.
00:46:45.440Imagine that they produced zero emissions.
00:48:11.600Then President Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Germany, delivering that famous demand to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:48:19.380Today, some 800 miles away, we see another actor turned politician taking on Russia, fighting to save his own country.
00:48:29.340Late yesterday, a defiant President Zelensky posted a video on social media giving his exact location.
00:48:36.760He showed off the darkened streets of Kiev saying, quote, not hiding.
00:49:30.160Okay, and for those of you listening and not watching this, he was in a completely hot pink suit, moving the hips like Elvis Presley would have been proud.
00:49:48.600Just recently, British actor Hugh Bonneville outed Zelensky as the familiar voice behind the Peruvian bear in the Ukrainian versions of Paddington and Paddington 2.
00:50:15.300But the closest he came to politics before actually becoming a politician was on a show called Servant of the People, a comedy series he starred in, hugely successful, about a teacher who becomes president after a video of him ranting about politics.
00:50:31.520The name of that show is actually what Zelensky later decided to name his real political party when he ran for president of Ukraine, in a way, not unlike Trump, just out of nowhere when it comes to politics, at least, going from civilian to, but celebrity to politician overnight, seemingly.
00:50:52.320On April 21st, 2019, he was elected in a landslide victory over the incumbent Petro Poroshenko.
00:50:58.580And in September of that same year, he found himself at the center of an international scandal when a whistleblower, quote unquote, whistleblower, complained that President Trump had, among other things, asked Zelensky to look into the Biden family's ties to a Ukrainian energy conglomerate.
00:52:26.180Joining me now, John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist, and somebody I've been listening to in coverage of this for a different perspective.
00:53:20.660Yeah, the Russian battle plan was sort of predicated on the assumption that Zelensky and his government would sort of run, flee the country, that the apparatus of the Ukrainian state would sort of dissolve within 48 hours.
00:53:35.540And we know that from some of these articles that were accidentally published in Russian that were dated the 26th of February, talking about sort of the post-war Russian vision for Ukraine.
00:53:51.200And as we know, that was 48 hours after the invasion.
00:53:56.020So I think a lot of the Russian tactical assumptions were that the Ukrainian state wasn't really robust.
00:54:05.360It wasn't really real, in a sense, and that it would evaporate as soon as Russian forces crossed the border.
00:54:14.940And I think that's something that Putin was sort of banking on.
00:54:20.320Not only has the state not evaporated, but the Russian or the Ukrainian armed forces have proven a lot more capable and a lot tougher of an opponent than I think Moscow thought they would be.
00:54:36.520We have the weaponry, which we've been sending to them, we among other countries in Europe, and they're making the most out of it.
00:54:42.780But, you know, the civilian death toll being what it is, the two million people fleeing the country and who could who could blame them?
00:54:48.780I mean, you know, these women and children trying to get out of there, save their lives.
00:54:51.480And Putin's forces are killing Ukrainians pretty indiscriminately.
00:54:57.200Now, you do have to be careful of the propaganda war in anything like this.
00:55:00.980But, you know, we've got independent New York Times, you know, reporters out there photographing the murder of civilians by Putin's troops.
00:55:09.640And even Putin's own countrymen back at home to the extent they can get information because he's shut down all non-state run media inside Russia.
00:55:19.800I mean, if you're getting your info from inside Russia, you're getting Putin's messaging.
00:55:23.700But still, we're seeing thousands of Russians take to the street, get arrested for protesting, which you're not allowed to do there.
00:55:30.520And, you know, those who aren't doing that may be under the spell of, oh, he's fighting Nazism inside Ukraine, which is apparently what indeed you'll see some uncertain blogs that have been posted by the Russians.
00:55:42.620You know, they're buying his the ones who aren't protesting are buying his narrative that he's got to oust the Nazis from Ukraine, including Zelensky, who himself is a Jewish guy.
00:55:52.180But OK. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've seen compared to Russia's kind of disinformation propaganda effort in this war, Ukraine is winning the propaganda and information war hands down.
00:56:05.820They've they've shown themselves to be very sophisticated, really, in information warfare.
00:56:11.380And, you know, that's not to say that that we should just uncritically accept everything that we hear from the Ukrainian government or or hear from Ukrainian media.
00:56:24.460Certainly early on, there were several stories, kind of these hero just so stories about, you know, the the soldiers on Snake Island saying F you to the Russians before they were all killed.
00:56:37.220And that turned out not to be quite true or that the goes to Kiev, who the pilot who had shot down half a dozen Russian MiGs.
00:56:44.160That turned out not not to quite be true either.
00:56:46.400But certainly Ukraine has shown itself robust on all these different fronts.
00:56:51.420Right. The the resiliency of the state in the president, Zelensky, the toughness of the armed forces and the sort of just the battlefield capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces.
00:57:02.700And then also the disinformation and sort of information and propaganda warfare aspect of the of Ukraine has it's like Russia's not even trying on that front there.
00:57:13.240There there you know, there was a speech from Putin saying we're going to denazify Ukraine, which is sort of, you know, an obvious and kind of a laughable line.
00:57:23.380That's that's a it's a pretext. It's not it's not really why they're doing this.
00:57:27.200But on every measure, Ukraine has shown this resilience and this toughness, I think, that a lot of people, especially in the West, did not expect.
00:57:36.880And for good reason, Ukraine is famously corrupt, you know, just like Russia is famously corrupt and famously corrupt nations tend not to be resilient in situations like this.
00:57:49.200Well, that's how Zelensky got elected. I mean, he ran a platform of anti-corruption.
00:57:54.120He's like, I'm just a damn actor. Put me in there. I'll I'll try to clean it up.
00:57:58.540And so there's an appetite for doing that amongst the populace in Ukraine.
00:58:02.920Once again, you know, the regular citizens get screwed and the people at the top, the politicians who got Ukraine, you know, into this sort of relationship where they're they are corrupt and they've been a little too cozy with the wrong people.
00:58:14.200Well, they won't be held to account. But OK, so let's shift gears and ask about what you think got us here.
00:58:21.860Like what? And again, I just want to reiterate, being honest about what got us here doesn't mean blaming anybody other than Russia.
00:58:27.900We all know who invaded Ukraine. We all know it was wrong, morally wrong and should be condemned.
00:58:33.620And we all pray it stops as soon as humanly possible.
00:58:37.300Yeah. But we should be honest about what led up to this and what lessons can we glean?
00:58:42.780Yeah, you're absolutely right. We have to get beyond the, you know, Putin is a bad guy.
00:58:47.980Ukraine is the good guy. We have we have to get beyond that.
00:58:50.740And by the way, you know, the online environment for this has been terrible.
00:58:56.580It's it's as though if you if you assign or if you conduct any analysis that goes back more than, you know, a few weeks about what caused this crisis,
00:59:05.060you get accused of being a Putin apologist or a Putin sympathizer, which is just not true at all.
00:59:09.780There's a long history of what led us to this point.
00:59:13.500And I think if you go back and you look at the United States and its European allies and the steps that have been taken going back to the 90s,
00:59:22.360you know, Ukraine was a kind of time bomb waiting to explode ever since the creation of Ukraine.
00:59:29.900In the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there has been a problem, sort of a geopolitical problem with Ukraine having the borders.
00:59:41.480It does having the territory. It does positioned as it is between Eastern Europe and Russia.
00:59:46.280Russia. It's a kind of buffer state. And it's not it's not a situation that that ever was going to be stable in the long term.
00:59:54.720A lot of people don't realize, like the situation with the Crimea.
00:59:58.560Why is Crimea important to Russia? That's the location of their Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol.
01:00:04.640That's the access, the one access point that Russia has to the Black Sea and through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean.
01:00:10.020It's a vitally important geostrategic location. Any regime in Moscow, Putin or anyone else would see a vital strategic interest in holding on to Crimea.
01:00:20.120But the idea that the settlement in the mid 1990s, whereby Ukraine would lease Sevastopol to Russia for like 20 year increments,
01:00:31.460was never like a durable long term solution, especially if Ukraine ever turned strategically and economically toward Europe, toward Western Europe.
01:00:42.120That's not something Russia was ever going to allow to happen because of how Russia perceives its core interests.
01:00:46.980Now, this is the point usually where people say, well, you know, why are you making excuses for Russia?
01:00:52.480It's not making excuses for Russia to try to understand Russian motivations and what Russia sees as its core interests.
01:00:58.860It's obvious. You know, it's like people just have their agendas. I'm fascinated by this. I do want to understand.
01:01:04.440I mean, how are we ever going to avoid these sort of diplomatic atrocities in the future if we don't figure out, did we underestimate him?
01:01:12.380Did we not take his saber rattling seriously? Did we do anything provocative?
01:01:17.460And if so, maybe we did. But I mean, maybe that's just that's that's that's life.
01:01:21.360You know, I mean, right. Us existing is provocative to Putin as well.
01:01:25.620You know, it's provocative. Yeah. To Putin. Right.
01:01:29.900OK, so keep going. So so that was never going to exist in Ukraine.
01:01:32.780It's not it's not America. It's not it's not this big free country with a bunch of with a very strong GDP and oceans on the left and the right and sort of doesn't have to worry as much about its neighbors.
01:01:44.720That's right. And in fact, its current territorial configuration was created by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 as a way for the Soviet Union to have more states, you know, at the UN that were part of the Warsaw Pact.
01:01:59.140So there is a kind of historical iterative process that has that that has created modern day Ukraine with these borders that are not quite tenable.
01:02:11.820They don't make sense. Right. It doesn't make sense that Crimea would be part of Ukraine.
01:02:16.740And yet through the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism, that's what happened.
01:02:23.900That's what's going to need to be adjudicated or settled at some point.
01:02:28.080And one of the ways that we have ignored that and not taken it seriously is is by encouraging the Ukrainian government to maintain this claim on Crimea.
01:02:40.580I think a responsible U.S. leadership would have a long time ago during the Obama administration in 2014, after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and Russia's annexation of Crimea would have gone to the Ukrainian leadership and said, look, we need to figure this out.
01:02:57.860So the the the continued claim of Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea is a recipe for a war.
01:03:06.680And so we need to figure out a negotiated settlement so that we solve this problem before it turns into what we have now.
01:03:12.300The Obama administration didn't do it. Trump administration didn't do it.
01:03:15.940The Biden administration didn't do it. And now we're at war.
01:03:19.600And it's a war that anyone who looked at a map and understood the history could see was coming sooner or later.
01:03:25.160OK, so what what do you think about the notion that that would not have appeased him?
01:03:31.880You know, that you the hungry fox is not sated by one chicken and that really what he wants is Ukraine to be part of Russia.
01:03:44.020He he wants to eat it. He wants to swallow it.
01:03:46.740And what he's angry about is that Ukraine, which is an independent country, doesn't want that.
01:03:52.040They actually have grown closer to the West. They they're a they're pro-democracy and they've found the Western way of life to be appealing.
01:03:59.900And they've kind of turned the cold shoulder to him, leaving him.
01:04:04.560Forgive my pedestrian analogies, but he's sort of like the boyfriend who got dumped.
01:04:09.060He's like, but I still want to be with you. And Ukraine's looking over at us like, well, I kind of like this one now.
01:04:14.760This is actually more attractive to me. And he's behaving badly to take it down to the very basic analogy one can do.
01:04:21.020Sure. No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. But even there, what you just described, you start start to see the outlines of a possible negotiated settlement just because, you know, Putin doesn't get everything that he wants.
01:04:33.440Maybe he gets what he needs and some of what he wants. And maybe Ukraine gets what they need and some of what they want.
01:04:39.760Nobody is going to be happy. But by entering into a negotiation, a serious negotiation process long before we got to this point, we may have there may have been an outline of a settlement where Ukraine got political independence and it was free to turn toward Europe and to make trade deals with the EU.
01:04:58.040But it sacrificed some of its territory to do that. And there was an exchange there and a back and forth.
01:05:06.680And look, we can be tough with Putin and we could have been tough with Putin about this and said, look, you'll get Crimea and maybe you'll get these like these areas in eastern Ukraine as well.
01:05:16.440And in exchange for that, you relinquish any claim to sort of, you know, have influence over Ukraine or keep Ukraine in your orbit and they are free to go their way.
01:05:25.700The outlines of a settlement, you can see if anyone in the West had taken that seriously and had anyone had taken seriously Russia's view of the situation.
01:05:37.440And I don't think they did, which instead you've got this sort of feckless and inconsistent U.S. policy where, you know, the Obama administration wouldn't arm the Ukrainians and the Trump administration did.
01:05:50.120And then the Biden administration, you know, eased up sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
01:05:55.700We've had had a strategic mess in our approach to the situation and our approach to Russia over the past decades.
01:06:03.700And I think all of that has contributed to the war now.
01:06:06.740And again, that's not to say the United States is responsible for the war. Putin is.
01:06:10.840But it is to say that the war represents a strategic failure on the part of the United States.
01:06:15.720Mm hmm. What if we had done that, what would have stopped his ire once what was left of Ukraine, which would still be the bulk of Ukraine, said now we're going to join NATO.
01:06:27.280Now we want to be part of the EU. We're going to join NATO.
01:06:31.360Well, part of that negotiation in offering territory for independence could have been some security guarantee to Ukraine.
01:06:40.180I doubt Ukraine would have agreed of their own volition to relinquish significant amounts of territory without some sort of security guarantees for the West.
01:06:48.720And that could have been that could have been a part of it.
01:06:51.560It's no use, though. You know, the Russia's concerns about NATO.
01:06:55.500I often hear in response, you know, sort of from Western media, it's like, well, NATO is a defensive treaty.
01:07:01.100We're not a threat to Russia. It's just a sort of propaganda that Putin is saying that NATO is a threat to Russia.
01:07:05.900Putin does see NATO as a threat to Russia. Whether or not NATO really is a threat to Russia is almost beside the point.
01:07:14.800And so we have to come up with with a diplomatic and strategic approach that takes that into account and and and tries to mitigate Russian fears about NATO.
01:07:25.060And instead of saying, well, Putin is never going to accept a Ukraine that's oriented toward Europe.
01:07:32.200We should have tried to find a way in which Russia could accept a Ukraine, a reduced Ukraine that may be oriented toward Europe in exchange for something very valuable that we would all agree Russia could keep forever.
01:07:47.460Like Crimea in the Donbass and maybe some other areas.
01:07:51.200But I don't think that these discussions or even this way of thinking ever entered into the calculus in Washington, because we don't have very serious people who are are in charge of U.S. foreign policy.
01:08:07.060That's one of the saddest things of the past 10 years is just the but but also most important, just the unveiling of our leaders is as not having one clue what they're doing.
01:08:16.800And really, I mean, you'll see that in the quieter moments if you get to know any of them, that they're just I mean, these politicians are just like you.
01:08:35.860So that still leaves us with where we are now and what to do now.
01:08:38.780And I know you've been somewhat critical of the, quote, maximalist approach that we're taking.
01:08:43.820And this has support inside our country for creating a no fly zone grows.
01:08:51.680Depends on how you ask the question, John would say.
01:08:54.120But we'll pick it up right there after squeezing in a quick break.
01:08:58.000So, John, support grows, according to the polls within the United States, for the creation of a no fly zone over Ukraine, which is exactly what Zelensky has been begging NATO and the free world for so far.
01:09:17.820Or other than Poland that I guess just today said, well, you know, maybe we should send some should we send some planes?
01:09:39.040I think that's reflected in the polling I mentioned on Twitter the other day, if the pollsters change the question from do you support the U.S. and NATO allies imposing a no fly zone over Ukraine to do you support the U.S. and NATO allies going to war with Russia using war planes?
01:09:56.440I don't think you would see the same kind of support that the polls are showing now.
01:10:00.620But that is what we're talking about when we talk about a no fly zone.
01:10:03.580It means NATO war planes shooting, engaging and shooting down any Russian war planes they find in the skies over Ukraine.
01:10:14.500And I think that we are the media, I should say, is doing a disservice to put out these these sort of misleading polls or these polls that if you if you drill into the polls, they're not doing a very good job of getting clear answers from the people that are being surveyed.
01:10:35.020So I think we need to be clear about what a no fly zone is.
01:10:38.120It means engaging Russian war planes and shooting them down.
01:10:41.580And Russia, Putin has said that he'll consider, you know, anything like that.
01:10:50.020He'll consider the country doing it to be to be a party to to the war, to be a belligerent and he'll respond.
01:10:57.200I mean, up until this morning, we wouldn't even turn off the spigot of Russia, Russian oil.
01:11:03.100So like what we're going to keep taking their oil, but we're going to send our guys up there in the fighter jets and risk their lives shooting down Russians.
01:11:40.220The stuff that's coming from our leaders and the stuff that's coming from our media.
01:11:45.380And I don't think it's it doesn't show that they really thought through these things like it like a no fly zone or or like an oil embargo or these these sanctions that are designed to basically just crater the Russian economy and turn Russia into sort of a international pariah on a permanent basis.
01:12:06.240I don't see anything like strategy behind the decisions that are being made or even the discussions that are that that U.S. and the allies are having in public.
01:12:16.420And and, you know, that's that's evidenced by the what you just mentioned, Biden's decision today to, you know, sanction Russian oil imports, which he had resisted up until, you know, five minutes ago.
01:12:46.280Because I do think the knee jerk instinct was is, you know, when the bully picks on the weak kid on the playground, let's all alienate the bully.
01:12:55.500The bully will sit by himself until he learns not to be a bully anymore.
01:12:58.800I think we need to be we should be careful about cheering on these multinational corporations that decide that they are going to cut off parts of the world or cut off certain kinds of people.
01:13:11.400From their services, you know, whether it's Russians like the entire Russian people, because, you know, decisions that their leaders have made about invading Ukraine.
01:13:24.060It's easy to see what the next step is.
01:13:27.840And we already right before the war in Ukraine and the Russian invasion.
01:13:31.480We saw Canada take extraordinary steps to financially punish protesters who held views that Justin Trudeau thought were unacceptable.
01:13:41.660So it's very easy to see a future in which multinational, very powerful corporations like Visa and MasterCard or Google decide that there are certain people whose opinions render them, you know, outcasts and that they are going to cut off services.
01:14:03.220If the behavior is bad enough, we have a corporate responsibility to step in and cut them off.
01:14:07.760And not to compare domestic protests to what Vladimir Putin is doing, but you're doing the slippery slope argument.
01:14:15.140Well, yes, because these corporations do wield an enormous amount of power and we've seen them willing to engage in sort of what the Supreme Court would call viewpoint discrimination.
01:14:26.780Right. Not just with respect to Russia, but but I mean, imagine the 2024 presidential election.
01:14:36.580Let's say he then says some crazy stuff about why he lost.
01:14:40.900And let's say you have a Facebook account or Twitter account and you, you know, like or retweet something crazy that Trump said.
01:14:48.940And all of a sudden you go to access your bank account and Wells Fargo or Visa has frozen your account because you've expressed unacceptable views.
01:14:57.880That's not hard to imagine at all in the world that we live in right now.
01:15:48.540I mean, that's an extraordinary move for a private company to just ban a public figure from ever using their their product, essentially, because of her views.
01:15:57.340I think we need to get away from this idea that these are private companies.
01:16:01.200These especially when we're talking about big tech, these are much more than private companies.
01:16:05.400These are companies that are more powerful, I think, than anything we could have imagined even a generation ago.
01:16:11.720And the idea that we, you know, it's just like, well, you know, if you don't like it, you know, build your own Twitter.
01:16:16.760Well, look what happened to Parler when they tried to build your own Twitter.
01:16:20.620So our lawmakers in Washington have got to get real about what we're facing with these multinational, extremely powerful corporations,
01:16:31.960especially our tech corporations and our financial tech corporations,
01:16:36.180and come up with ways to regulate their behavior and get strict with them so that they can't go around policing and imposing these sort of ideological tests
01:16:47.360on who they're going to give services to and who they're not going to give services to.
01:16:52.040It's time to get real about this stuff because it's happening fast and we're way behind the curve.
01:16:56.720Well, we also need to be careful about like I'm all in favor of going after the oligarchs.
01:17:01.580I really I have no real I couldn't really care less.
01:17:05.300But things that are actually going to hurt the Russian people, you know, the citizenry, that bothers me.
01:17:10.520I don't think the Russian people are for this war at all.
01:17:13.580I've been there quite a bit over the past couple of years.
01:17:16.320And the average Russian you meet on the street loves America.
01:17:19.760They and they say, oh, our leaders, you know, they mean ours and theirs.
01:17:24.620You know, they're excited about America.
01:17:26.020They like to they like American, you know, whatever fashion and they like movies and so on.
01:17:30.320And they don't have hatred in their hearts for America, for the most part.
01:17:34.200You know, of course, there's always a pocket here or there.
01:17:36.860And I don't think that they have hatred for Ukraine.
01:17:39.280And I don't think that they want to see this battle.
01:17:41.700In fact, most of them have family in Ukraine.
01:17:45.560So I worry about creating a new generation of enemies over there by absolutely devastating the country.
01:17:51.420And so the longer this goes on, John, right, the the more danger we're in of doing that and the more we're really going to be faced with some tough questions about how long we're willing to do this.
01:18:05.320It's not like the people of Russia voted for this war or voted for their leaders.
01:18:09.420To your point, really, yeah, we we do need to have an end state, a realistic end state of and figure out, you know, what is an end state that is acceptable to the United States and its allies?
01:18:21.640And what is an end state that might be acceptable to Ukraine and Russia?
01:18:25.960And what are the steps we need to take right now to start moving toward it?
01:18:30.080Because the idea that, you know, we're just going to impose sanctions on Russia and we're going to, like, you know, destroy the ruble and we're going to destroy the Russian economy.
01:18:39.640And, you know, we just have to wait a couple months for that to happen.
01:18:48.860We're just going to let Russia reduce Ukraine to rubble and wait for the sanctions to, like, hurt the Russian economy and, you know, foment discontent among the Russian people for their leaders?
01:19:00.340That doesn't sound like a strategy, a very serious strategy, and it doesn't sound like a successful one either.
01:19:06.060I think that we need to be thinking on a more constricted time horizon.
01:19:10.440We have a short amount of time to stop the fighting and enter into negotiations before we see horrific civilian casualties and the mass destruction of civilian population centers in Ukraine.
01:19:25.600And it seems like our leaders are just, like, living in a fantasy land.
01:19:29.260It's a good point, because the question is, to what end are all the sanctions?
01:19:35.220You know, we're trying to amp up the pressure on Putin so that he folds.
01:19:43.540We want him to believe that it's unsustainable.
01:19:45.700And there is a real question about whether we're are we underestimating Vladimir Putin?
01:19:49.680Do we do we understand he's not likely to do that anytime soon, especially if he's getting backdoor support from the Chinese and possibly from India with respect to his oil exports and so on?
01:20:02.380It's not like he's cut off from all money.
01:20:06.740Is we can go over here, John, and we can change our little Twitter icons to Ukrainian flags.
01:20:11.200And these morons can dump their Dostoyevsky into the garbage can and think that that does something stupid, stupid as virtue signaling at every turn.
01:20:24.360Well, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said recently and I don't think that he was speaking, you know, in terms of like this is the well-considered official policy of the United States government.
01:20:37.560But he did say this, nevertheless, and I think it does reflect the thinking at the State Department and in the White House.
01:20:43.860He said that their their goal is for Russian forces to leave Ukraine.
01:20:50.400All Russian forces leave Ukraine for Ukraine to be free and independent with its territory intact and that we are committed to that outcome.
01:21:00.200And and we're committed to that as long as it takes.
01:21:02.980Now, that, as you mentioned earlier, that is a maximalist policy that posits an end state for this conflict that ends in total humiliating and crushing defeat for Russia and the Russian forces in Ukraine.
01:21:15.500And if you think that Putin is going to accept that without escalating this in ways that are unimaginable, by which I mean possibly involving a nuclear exchange, then you're not being real.
01:21:32.300And I don't know if Secretary of State Blinken is just saying that because it feels good to say it, you know, and it's sort of an emotional statement that, you know, we're going to we're going to stick with Ukraine.
01:21:42.860And so every Russian troop is out of Ukraine and and we turn return to the status quo, Antony.
01:21:48.460I don't know if he really believes it, but saying it is a very reckless thing to do, because what what it's what it is positing and what it is inviting is a very dangerous escalation on the part of Moscow.
01:21:59.380Because we do not believe, as brave as the Ukrainians have been in fighting these troops, you know, coming into their land, that they are going to prevail.
01:22:19.420But we're not really expecting the Ukrainians to prevail.
01:22:23.200And so without NATO planes and NATO troops.
01:22:26.560That's right. That's the thing that without and as many as many weapons as we want to send, as many CIA operatives as we want to sneak in there without Western military going into Ukraine.
01:22:39.140Ukraine's not likely to win this battle.
01:22:41.140And we don't know when this battle will end.
01:22:43.200It could be years, you know, insurgencies basically on the streets of Ukraine, which was, you know, not long ago, a beautiful country with living, you know, the citizenry living their life the same way we live our lives.
01:22:54.800Right. Like going to school and going to their jobs and walking in the streets and hanging out in the town square in the plazas.
01:23:00.720Now it's going to turn into something like Iraq, potentially, if if this is all we do and Vladimir Putin doesn't fold.
01:23:07.680So what what do you think we should do?
01:23:13.420No, I'm not. And let me just say one more thing on that previous point.
01:23:17.400The Biden administration seems to think that it can go right up to the line of belligerence without being considered a belligerent by Russia in the belief that their opinion about what constitutes a belligerent in this conflict is the only one that matters.
01:23:33.180Well, Moscow has a say in what constitutes a belligerent actor as well, and we have to take that into account.
01:23:41.660And if we take actions that are belligerent, that are acts of war, you know, whether that is establishing a no fly zone, whether that is funneling arms and volunteers into Ukraine, whether that's economic warfare of the kind that we're that it's now taking shape.
01:23:59.860So any one of those things or all of them together, at some point, Moscow could decide, you know, the West is at war with Russia and we're going to treat treat the West as being at war with Russia.
01:24:09.260So I just want to say, you know, we're not the only ones who get a vote about that on the question of the no fly zone.
01:24:16.060No, I don't support a no fly zone for the simple reason that I don't support the United States and NATO going to war with Russia over Ukraine.
01:24:22.280It's as simple as that. And that's what a no fly zone would mean. It would mean going to war.
01:24:26.120So what I mean, do you what do you see here? Is it hypocritical of us to be praising Zelensky, not us as in you and me sitting here, but like our government to be singing this swan song and praising him and how talking in The New York Times every day, how inspirational and so on, when we're not really doing anything that will solve the problem.
01:24:49.340Yeah, the U.S. corporate media is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, apparently.
01:24:57.160And there are other interested parties in the United States and in the West that would very much like to see us continue to funnel arms and materials into Ukraine and who would actually like to see us get involved more deeply militarily as well for their own reasons.
01:25:13.980I do think it's hypocritical, though, to sort of encourage Ukraine. And this goes back to before the war started. We encouraged Ukraine in a vain hope that we would somehow come to their assistance or implied that we would somehow come to their assistance.
01:25:36.500I think we got them to denuclear their country, denucify.
01:25:40.080Yeah, but I mean, even more recently, you know, after 2014 and sort of led them down a garden path that that is going that is now leading to the destruction of the country because we're not actually going to save Ukraine.
01:25:53.640And so it is hypocritical of us and it has been hypocritical of us to to sort of foster that hope on the part of the Ukrainians when there are no warplanes coming from the West.
01:26:04.780There are no troops coming from the West. There are no tanks coming from the West. And we should be realistic with them about that. And that and that maybe gets to the next part.
01:26:14.440We need to be honest with Ukraine's leaders that we're not going to help in that way. And if they don't think that they can defeat Russia, then we need to start talking about how to get to a negotiated settlement to end the fighting.
01:26:24.980I mean, we have said it. Joe Biden has said it explicitly that there will be no no fly zone. We're not we're not sending American troops over there.
01:26:33.760We're trying to handle it in a more behind the scenes way, but we're being open about what we're doing. You know, this is the number of weapons that we've sent. This is the kind of weapons that we've sent. Clearly, we do have people on the ground there.
01:26:45.700You know, we have special ops or we have CIA operatives because we don't. I'm not a military expert, but my understanding is we don't just ship in the arms and say, like, to the good people of Ukraine.
01:26:57.120Like, there's a way we get them in. There's a process. Yeah. So we're there to some extent. Putin knows that. And he also has strategic reasons not to treat our escalating sanctions as more than sanctions.
01:27:13.120He doesn't want a war with the United States. He understands what that looks like or with NATO. He doesn't actually want that. But right now, the off ramp is not obvious. And we're not playing a particular role either.
01:27:23.980I mean, it's like these some guys from Ukraine you never heard of and some guys from Russia you might once have heard of, but not like Putin having negotiations that continue to fail, like three of them that have gone nowhere.
01:27:36.080We haven't articulated what the off ramp might be, in part because I don't think we've thought very deeply about what the off ramp might be for Russia.
01:27:43.560You know, the problem is, as this escalates, and if the war begins to go poorly for Moscow, there is a real risk that Putin will escalate, especially if he feels that his regime itself and sort of the Russian state itself face existential threat.
01:28:00.980Then there's no telling what he might do and how he might escalate to widen the war, to use tactical nuclear weapons.
01:28:10.480So we need to be thinking about this, and we need to be articulating what the off ramps are, and communicating that to all the parties involved, to try to see if we can deescalate the situation and prevent the worst case scenario.
01:28:28.740And right now, there's just not any evidence of that.
01:28:30.740There's plenty of evidence that this is just an emotional-driven thing, that there's no vision, there's no strategic vision or plan in the White House.
01:28:39.940And, I mean, look at the people involved.
01:28:41.980You know, Biden is just completely out of it.
01:28:45.800You know, this is the worst possible scenario for the United States facing a war in Europe to have the group of people in Washington that we have in charge right now.
01:28:55.600Yeah, we're not even, we won't even, you know, push for our own domestic energy production.
01:29:00.300It's like, okay, let's ramp up what we already buy from the Saudis.