Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Josh's 'Big-Dick-Little-Dick' Theory of American Militarism

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Josh's 'Big-Dick-Little-Dick' Theory of American Militarism · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Well, is there anything going on at the moment in the world?
• 0:06
  Ha!
• 0:07
  Welcome to 2026, ladies and gents.
• 0:09
  Another episode, our first exciting installment of the year of Josh first has been used.
• 0:14
  Venezuela, Trump, the end of American exceptionalism, or, as I like to call it in a little theory
• 0:20
  I've been working on, the big dick little dick theory of American militarism.
• 0:27
  Bear with me, I'll come to this in a moment.
• 0:30
  First of all, happy new year, happy, I was going to say happy holidays, but apparently that's
• 0:36
  anti-Christian, so Merry Christmas, and also it was a while ago, so maybe not.
• 0:42
  Happy Australia day, if you want to get yourself into some real heat, that's coming up in a
• 0:46
  couple of weeks.
• 0:47
  Ha!
• 0:48
  For those of you not in Australia, we happen to celebrate the National Day on the anniversary
• 0:52
  of the invasion, the conquests of the First Nations people by the first fleet, an impolite
• 1:01
  day on which to celebrate our national founding, since it wasn't really the founding of anything,
• 1:06
  apart from when they first, when Europeans first showed up here, the pickle is that the
• 1:11
  date on which the country was actually founded is January the 1st, and nobody wants to have
• 1:15
  a national holiday on January the 1st, and many people don't want to change January the 26th
• 1:20
  anyway, I just say just pick a random day any time in the year and make up some bullshit
• 1:26
  pretext for it, and be done.
• 1:29
  Nonetheless, my thoughts about Venezuela, oh, before I get there, do you realize that we are
• 1:35
  now closer to the second half of the 21st century than we are to the 20th century?
• 1:44
  Like we're closer to 2050 than we are to 1999, so talk about being in the future, I mean
• 1:53
  not only is it futuristic to be in the 21st century, but it's even more futuristic when
• 1:57
  you're closer to the second half of it than the previous century.
• 2:01
  Is this month, January 2026, the most consequential month of Trump's presidency so far, you could
• 2:09
  argue perhaps it's certainly the most consequential I think for American foreign policy in more than
• 2:15
  20 years, probably since March of 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, sorry, not just the
• 2:20
  United States, not just the United States, the coalition of the willing, the United Kingdom, Australia,
• 2:28
  and don't forget Poland, if you don't get that reference during the presidential debate between
• 2:37
  George W. Bush and who was John Kerry, John Kerry in 2004, Kerry, the Democrat, was being
• 2:45
  critical of George W. Bush's isolationist intervention into Iraq and the troubles that the Iraq
• 2:52
  war was having a few years in, and he said it was, he said it, we've gone in with only
• 3:01
  like England, and I think he mentioned Australia, he was like a few, just a few countries,
• 3:05
  and George W. Bush came out and was like, he forgot Poland, like it was, like how could you
• 3:12
  possibly forget the indomitable force of the Polish military, without which the United States
• 3:20
  would be helpless, helpless. I think Kerry called the coalition, instead of the coalition of
• 3:27
  the willing, the coalition of the bullied and abrived, which was more apt. So anyway, probably
• 3:37
  the most consequential month of American foreign policy and maybe global international law since
• 3:41
  March of 2003, it is still more than three years until Trump is out of office. Believe it or not,
• 3:50
  he's been in power less than a year. Next week is the anniversary of Trump's inauguration.
• 3:57
  So on the 20th of January, 2029, my god, that sounds like a long way, doesn't it?
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  20th of January, 2029, which will be the first day that he's not in office, and I'm not going to
• 4:11
  go into, like, oh, you're going to run for the third term, he'll become president again.
• 4:16
  For all kinds of other reasons that we can talk about on another day, I think that's very unlikely,
• 4:20
  and I think the constitutional system will hold, and things are going to run another time.
• 4:28
  So on that day, when he leaves office, this particular operation in Venezuela,
• 4:33
  it strikes me as going to be fundamental in deciding and determining, and our reaction to it,
• 4:39
  is going to be fundamental in deciding and determining whether or not he leaves office
• 4:44
  with the world completely reshape him, and maybe the United States of America looking very
• 4:51
  different in terms of its territory globally, and maybe even having territorial disputes
• 4:57
  over who owns Greenland, for example, or whether or not this turns out to have been a blip.
• 5:05
  My goal is not to be more insightful than the people who've spoken on this subject in the past,
• 5:10
  week, since it happened. They'll happen a week ago, happen on the second of January.
• 5:16
  Is that right, John? I think it happened on the second. What's the date today? Where am I?
• 5:20
  Who am I? Who am I? Who am I talking to? It's the 12th, apparently, those 10 days.
• 5:24
  It's the holidays in Australia. It's very, it's summary. I mean, the me of fact that I'm
• 5:29
  even sitting here talking to you people, well, look, I would rather be doing nothing else to be
• 5:35
  honest. I love chatting with you. I love seeing you pretty faces in my mind. I can't see you,
• 5:41
  but you know, seeing your chat on the sub-stack and on the YouTube and all the various places we're
• 5:45
  streaming to life, I honestly would rather be doing this than what's sitting at home with my kids,
• 5:51
  trying to entertain them, boring. You know how tiresome conversation with an eight-year-old gets?
• 5:56
  I can't even talk to them. I mean, I start to talk to them about like the monorow doctrine,
• 5:59
  and my eight-year-olds are like, oh, we know what a wonder of pepper pigs are. And I'm like,
• 6:04
  shut the fuck up. We're talking about the monorow doctrine. So they're no good to me.
• 6:10
  And so, you know, give me a little, cut me some slack. I've been, I've got a, I'm rusty. I'm rusty.
• 6:17
  It's been, you know, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it's hard to understand just how
• 6:22
  lconic Australian summers are because they coincide also with all the holidays.
• 6:28
  If you imagine, imagine Greece in August, and that is Australia between about mid-December and
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  Australia day towards the end of January, because we not only have the summer holidays,
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  we also have Christmas and New Year, and so everyone's flat on their back, like a lizard drinking,
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  as Australians say. Why? I don't know. Steve Irwin probably invented it. So my goal here is not
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  necessarily be more insightful than the people you've heard to talk about this over the past
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  10 days. I just think, and sometimes when I do these editorials, it'll be my initial reaction to
• 7:02
  something. You know, the morning after the Bondi terrorist attack, I'll just come on and I'll
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  just dump my brain because I think that it's sometimes useful for us all to just articulate
• 7:11
  ourselves and hear us think, and hear us flesh through things with our sort of first draft of
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  history. And then on other occasions, the day after, I have nothing to say, because I'm up in
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  the hinterland of northern New South Wales, frollicking in waterfalls, as I was on January 3rd.
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  And so I have to wait until I get back, and hopefully by then there's a slightly different
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  utility in this, which is that if you lead a busy life, and you're not a professional journalist,
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  and you just read a few headlines, or you just see what's coming across your Instagram feed,
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  you may have less time and less interest, frankly, than I do in reading a lot about it,
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  and listening to a lot about it, and then trying to kind of sort your thoughts out about it. So
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  hopefully I can do the digesting. I'm like a, I'm a mastercation tool. I'm like some,
• 7:54
  think of me as like a bacteria in your gut that helps break down food for you. I am the bacteria
• 8:01
  of world news helping you to break it down, digest it, and then I vomit it out. I regurgitate it
• 8:07
  like a charming little fly vomiting on food directly into your earholes, ladies and general
• 8:14
  persons. That's what I'm doing here. I am regurgitating nuggets of truth into your earholes.
• 8:22
  So enjoy that. One last beef about the way this is being reported. If you're not, if you're not
• 8:33
  a fluent Spanish speaker, and you're not a professional journalist who spends a lot of time trying
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  to get all the name pronunciations of all the world leaders and capital cities right.
• 8:46
  Can you stop saying Venezuela? And can you stop saying Nicaragua? Can you stop saying Maduro?
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  Can you stop saying Caracas? Come on. What are we doing here? There's too much of this going
• 8:59
  around going around on the media. Just talk like a normal human being. I mean, I sometimes get
• 9:04
  criticized for this, but I feel like I'm a journalist, and so I have to do it. I think it's important
• 9:11
  to say things the way that places are actually said. And also, I'm not selective about it. I'm an
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  equal opportunity. Say it roughly the way that the people who live there want it to be said. New
• 9:20
  Orleans, not New Orleans, Los Angeles, not Los Angeles. You know, it's Nevada, not Nevada.
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  It was Obama, not Obama, as the Brits called him. And unless you say
• 9:37
  Emmanuel Macron, if you say Macron, then just say Maduro. If you say otherwise, just go around and
• 9:47
  be like Macron, Melanie. Tridu. Tridu. Prime Minister. Tridu.
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  Anyway, so yeah, just stop being pretentious about you Spanish pronunciations, especially Americans,
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  because Americans think that like it's somehow culturally sensitive to make sure that you're saying
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  you have to pretend to be Hispanic. So Trump's experiments in testing the limits of norms,
• 10:20
  we already saw those experiments on the domestic stage. I think in the way that he left office
• 10:25
  the first time, right? That was a big deal, I think, to claim that the election was fraudulent
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  when there was no evidence that it was imply that you don't want to leave office, try to install
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  fake electors to come to Washington, D.C. and cause a constitutional crisis on January 6th, excuse me,
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  to try to coerce and cajol attorney's general of states to find,
• 10:54
  mysteriously, for a thousand votes here or there to swing the state to him. And then on the
• 11:00
  day on which the vote count is supposed to happen, put intense pressure on his vice president,
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  who was the president of the Senate, to swing the election, to cancel the votes, to count the wrong
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  electors, when his vice president refused to do so, to encourage violence against the vice
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  president, to encourage mobs to go up to the Capitol building to say that he was going to be there,
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  then to watch the mayhem unfold on television as his colleagues' lives were in danger,
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  as they were running for their lives and to not tell his fans to stand down.
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  His deranged and delusional fans who were relying on non-facts on lies that he was telling them
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  about the illegitimacy of the vote. That was a clear instance in which someone was a chief
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  executive of the country was behaving in ways that were totally inappropriate for the norms,
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  like even just set aside the Republican talking point of whether or not there were questions about
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  that election. There have been questions about American elections in the past. I mean,
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  what the Kennedys big like, what do you call it when you're hustling booze and stuff?
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  Wasn't JFK's dad like essentially a drug runner during prohibition? I might be making this up.
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  And nonetheless, they were shady folks, and there were all kinds of questions about those elections.
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  There were all kinds of questions about Chicago Meryl elections. Nothing's perfect.
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  But the good criminal who's trying to swing an election, when they fail, they just go,
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  well, okay, I wasn't able to do it. And then even if you're a person who in your opponent swings
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  the election, then the remedy is to go through the courts. And if the courts say that they can't
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  find any wrongdoing because the person who stole the election was so good at stealing it that
• 12:42
  you don't have a leg to stand on, you don't go and burn down the state house. You just pack up
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  and go home. You know, that sucks. I got robbed. It's like, you know, someone steals something from
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  your house. You don't go over and rape them. You don't do that. You go to the cops. So that was a
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  weird. So even if you give them the greatest benefit of the doubt to the people who thought that
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  the 2020 election was stolen, it was still an incredibly inappropriate thing to do. And total
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  norm bucking on Trump's part to react the way that he did and to continue to this day to essentially
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  say that he should never have lost power in 2020 anyway. Now we see that same cavalier attitude
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  towards norms and institutions being imposed on to the international stage. And you may recall
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  dear viewer slash deal listener, you may recall that before Trump came to power in like 2016,
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  that was the big concern. People were not saying, oh my goodness, what's going to happen if Donald
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  Trump gets into power, he might not want to leave office. They weren't saying he might, you know,
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  I don't know, deploy the justice department to go after his political enemies. The main fear
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  was about the big red button that doesn't exist except for in the imagination of ad writers and
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  laypeople in the White House, which launches nuclear weapons everywhere. The fear was that he's
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  crazy and he has no idea about foreign policy and he's going to get into a war with North Korea was
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  the main worry. Secondarily Iran. And the first, you know, Trump administration, the first term
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  proved that to be wrong. I mean, Trump had always he ran on isolationist platform.
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  He clearly wasn't interested in foreign wars. He was very critical of the Iraq war,
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  offensively so to such an extent that it wasn't clear during the primary process,
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  the Republican primary process, whether or not he'd be able to make it. He was saying things
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  that you really can't say and be elected as a Republican candidate in a primary context. He
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  was saying that people who fought and died for America in Iraq were not heroes that they were
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  chumps but that they were sent there for a pointless purpose. That's incredibly taboo among
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  right wing military families. He said that the war was a mistake. He said that John McCain
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  wasn't a war hero. I would have been a hero if he hadn't got shot down. I like my war heroes not
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  to get shot down, not to get shot down and then right in the prison of war camp. You know,
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  these were incredibly insulting things and he was not regarded as being a pro-military candidate.
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  He just didn't like, you know, he didn't know much about the rest of the world. He didn't
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  care much about the rest of the world. He wanted to turn America into Manhattan with big
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  Trump skyscrapers on it with his name everywhere. He wanted to make America great, not go, not
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  waste blood and treasure as the cliche goes on trying to rebuild the rest of the world.
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  And he basically stuck to that in the first term. And I suppose it was only a matter of time
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  given that he's now had five years in office before he would sort of start getting restless.
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  And accidentally unbox his shiny train set that he was so disdainful of in the first term
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  and take it out and give the train set a whirl. And once he realized just how great the train
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  set of American military hard power was, he would get delighted and he would jump up and down in
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  the overlovers like a small child clapping. And that seems to be what's happened.
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  So now he realizes that he's actually got this really cool thing where not only can he
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  write bluster on truth social and make everybody worry about whether or not he's going to go to war
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  with North Korea. He can actually just make a call and then all of a sudden a whole bunch of
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  other really highly trained people with incredible toys go and do outrageously awesome shit
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  for him in a kinetic spectacle of extraordinary bravery which he can enjoy the sheen of without
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  having to get his fat ass out of the out of his chair while you just eat his Doritos and watch
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  is he Doritos or is he is he like my body is a temple? No, no he eats Doritos isn't he or cheeseburgers
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  while he's watching it, you know, on a live stream being beamed down from a US satellite. So
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  he stood by the anti interventionist instincts in the first term. There are a couple of explanations
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  for why he didn't go there in the first term for why he stood by his, you know, his sort of
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  campaign promise not to get America involved abroad. One is that he was surrounded by people who
• 17:38
  were much more cautious and who believed in going big or going home when it came to American power
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  like John Bolton who, you know, would say to him, you can't just use this like a toy, you've got to
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  either go and smash them and then, you know, or don't. The other alternative explanation is the one
• 17:54
  that I think is worth bearing in mind in which there's a lot of talk about and which we'll get to
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  in this conversation, which is about spheres of influence in the world and this conception of
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  there being hemispheres of concern and that foreign entanglements mean American military actions
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  that are outside of the West and hemisphere, meaning outside of the Americas. And those are
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  the bad ones, the ones where you're trying to solve the problems of all of these incompetent brown
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  people who can't get their act together. That's the Trump perspective, not mine.
• 18:28
  You know, it's not a foreign war if it takes place in the Americas because the Americas are
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  the United States's backyard. This is the new thesis. Well, it's not a new thesis, but it's new in
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  terms of being at the dominating exercising theory of American power, which since the end of World
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  War II has been as a global power, not as a regional power in a strange way. This is a massive
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  downgrade of American power globally because the whole conceit of the post-1945 world order was that
• 18:58
  we're going to write a set of rules that are advantageous to us, we the West. We're going to
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  create five seats on the UN Security Council that the victors of World War II will sit on, which
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  will be able to veto each other's veto everybody else's ability to do anything militarily.
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  And just when the chess board is sort of set up in a way that is maximally advantageous to our
• 19:18
  ideals and to our goals and to our interests, we're going to freeze that and we're going to cast an
• 19:22
  stone, preserve it in aspect, chuck it in the freezer. And that's the way that's what everybody has
• 19:28
  to get along with. And if anybody gets out of line, we're going to come and whack them.
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  And that was the idea. And that basically put America on the top of the heap right up until
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  they started pulling at the threads of that first with Vietnam. But then they rediscovered it
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  throughout the 80s and 90s. And then they pulled more at the thread with the invasion of Iraq.
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  And now I think the thread is completely unraveled with this latest operation. But you can understand
• 19:55
  the sort of logic of both world views. You can understand the logic of let's ensure our permanent
• 20:04
  hegemony by creating a global system that we sit atop of and thereby maintain legitimacy
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  as the world's superpower because it doesn't look like we're only acting in our own interest,
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  even though everybody knows that we sort of kind of do. And then the alternative point of view is
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  that whole thing is a tissue of expensive hypocritical conceits anyway. Let's just be realists
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  about this and look after our own neck of the woods the same way that any other country does.
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  I think it's obvious that that latter interpretation is a downgrade of power, not an expansion of power.
• 20:43
  But I suppose its advocates would say that it's a recognition of the real way that power works
• 20:48
  in the world. If you listen to JD Vance talking about it or Stephen Miller talking about it,
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  it's all very 19th century. There is nothing but power. Raw power has always been what animates the
• 20:58
  world. It's like this strange kind of iron brand like Uber mentioned idea about how the world
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  works. It's like everything is Hobbsian. It's like, I mean, yeah, in the jungle it is, but we're
• 21:12
  actually evolved human beings who managed to construct complicated societies that subdue those
• 21:18
  instincts and passions so that we can all live safely and I can walk out of this studio down the
• 21:24
  street without being worried about being a victim of random crime because we've established
• 21:29
  this very delicate network of assumptions and institutions from the police to the courts,
• 21:34
  the judiciary, the state that all are carefully designed precisely in order to counter the natural
• 21:44
  state of Darwinian madness that would exist if we were all just, well, when throughout most
• 21:50
  of human history and in most places, I mean, just look at what happens when you have a breakdown
• 21:54
  of the state. Look what happens in failed states where young managers roaming around with machine
• 21:59
  guns doing whatever they want. That's not great. And JD Vance and Stephen Miller and perhaps Donald
• 22:03
  Trump may be correct in their assessment that is the natural order of things. But, you know,
• 22:09
  raping and pillaging are the natural order of things if you don't carefully build ways to avoid
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  them being the natural order of things. And what we did since World War II was go, oh, the natural
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  order of things as we saw in Auschwitz can be quite bad, quite bad. So why don't we not have the
• 22:27
  natural order of things of raw power, tooth and claw. Anyway, now they think these guys think they're
• 22:33
  being insightful by saying, look, this is just the way the world works. So we don't have to keep
• 22:36
  pussy footing around with all of this international law, Malaki. If it sounds like I'm saying that
• 22:42
  the international law component of this is absolutely critical, I don't actually think it is.
• 22:49
  I don't think abiding by international law scrupulously and tying your own hands to it while
• 22:58
  nobody else observes it is necessarily wise or even virtuous reminds me a little bit of the way
• 23:08
  that Israelis feel about the double standard where everything that their state does that breaches
• 23:14
  united nations, you know, code 743 g that was passed about the number of buildings that they
• 23:22
  can build in East Jerusalem or something like that. They get censured for such that Israel has had
• 23:27
  more United Nations resolutions against it than I think all other countries combined certainly
• 23:33
  than, you know, any country like North Korea or Saudi Arabia. And, you know, they're the rulers
• 23:41
  of the enclave of Gaza can come in and slaughter them and there's no like, yes, there's a UN
• 23:47
  resolution against it, but nobody really thinks that that's bad because it's a breach of international
• 23:51
  law. They just think that that's a sort of semi-legitimate prison break. Similarly, you can see that
• 23:56
  phenomenon writ large where anything the West does that is a little bit iffy constitutionally in
• 24:02
  terms of international law is micro scrutinized where constantly all the time the Chinese are doing
• 24:09
  barbarous shit against the Uighurs and all kinds of horrible shits going on all over the place
• 24:13
  and nobody really cares because those people don't make no pretense to give a shit about
• 24:16
  international law in the first place. So I do think it's a little bit rich when everyone is
• 24:20
  ringing their hands constantly about how terrible it is that Trump has broken international law.
• 24:25
  That for me is not the focus of the of the real concern, especially since it was against international
• 24:32
  law to go to war in Iraq. That didn't have UN Security Council approval. That was an illegal war.
• 24:37
  The Gaza war was in many respects illegal. The the Gaza atrocities of October 7th were of course
• 24:45
  against international law. Australia's asylum seeker policy is almost certainly against international
• 24:49
  law. Australian and American support of Indonesian of the Indonesian dictators invasion and
• 24:55
  occupation of East Timor for decades was definitely in contravention of international law. Our support
• 24:59
  for the 1973 coup in Chile and the long reign of terror of Pinochet was against international law.
• 25:05
  We do, you know, a Vietnam war was against international law, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 25:09
  Oh, no, no. That's not what is wrong with it. But let's just tease out the legal stuff anyway.
• 25:15
  So we can sort of park it and put it aside before we get to the big strategic and moral stuff that
• 25:19
  I think is more interesting. One interesting thing about the legal stuff that I've had really
• 25:23
  interesting conversation with Sarah Isger and David French on their podcast. It's produced by
• 25:30
  the dispatch. I don't remember the name. I think it's a legal opinion advisory opinion. So I think
• 25:34
  is the name of the podcast. It's a good if you're interested in like legal stuff. They're great.
• 25:38
  I've got to get them on the pod. It's a weird thing to parachute into another country and seize
• 25:46
  its leader on the basis of the fact that you're conducting a judicial arrest, right? And then you
• 25:55
  take him to a court in New York, a place where has he ever set foot in the United States?
• 26:03
  Certainly not while he's been doing any of the things that he's accused of doing.
• 26:08
  So, you know, like someone abroad commits a crime that contravenes your laws,
• 26:16
  including crimes like owning a machine gun at the time that you were running the drug running
• 26:20
  operation, which is two of the four charges are about machine guns. This is a way that prosecutors
• 26:24
  just throw those in in order to get maximum amounts of penalties because in the United States,
• 26:29
  if a drug is involved, sorry, if a gun is involved in a crime, the penalties snap up exponentially.
• 26:36
  Hence, Hunter Biden, having it happening to own a gun at the same time that he was an addict,
• 26:43
  then the crime is just suddenly much, much, much, much worse if a gun is involved,
• 26:49
  however tangentially. So they throw those on and then they go and they fly into another country
• 26:55
  and they kidnap him and they bring him home. Now those things may not be crimes in Venezuela.
• 27:02
  I'm not sure. The idea that, like suppose China decided that the Australian Prime Minister had
• 27:09
  broken a Chinese law outside of China, but it had ripple effects on China and implications in China
• 27:17
  in some way, everything does. And so, well, everything that the world leader does. And so then China
• 27:24
  like does a covert operation in the dead of night into Canberra kidnaps the Australian Prime Minister,
• 27:28
  takes him to Beijing and puts him on trial for crimes that are not crimes in Australia but are in China.
• 27:38
  Like what what's that all about? It's definitely against international law. There's some question
• 27:45
  about whether or not it's against US law. The other interesting sort of wrinkle there
• 27:52
  is that, oh, it's also relevant that the US claims that Maduro was not the president of
• 27:57
  Venezuela because heads of state have immunity. On the question of immunity, the interesting thing
• 28:04
  there is that Trump has spent his entire presidency arguing that things that you do as president
• 28:10
  you should be immune from prosecution for that. And in fact, he won in the Supreme Court saying,
• 28:16
  that with this very, very expansive vision of executive immunity, where never before had the
• 28:23
  Supreme Court ruled so broadly that anything, any crime that a president commits, as long as it
• 28:30
  was committed in the honest execution of his or her job, is immune, that it's not a crime.
• 28:41
  So the idea is that if he's doing something that is completely unrelated to official duties,
• 28:45
  then that could still be a crime. But if it's anything that is in any way related to the ongoing
• 28:50
  functioning of the state, the Supreme Court's actual ruling is not quite as broad as this,
• 28:56
  but I'm articulating the case that the Trump side was making to the Supreme Court. The basic
• 29:00
  anything that the president does is is immune from. Then the Supreme Court tweaked a little bit and
• 29:04
  said it has to be about the basic functions of the presidency and of the government. It can't be
• 29:09
  something that is sort of just optional. It has to be fundamental. Nonetheless, I'm just pointing
• 29:14
  out that it's a little bit rich for the Trump people to say anything that the president does
• 29:21
  while he's in office is not criminal, even if it breaks laws. Also, here's this president who's
• 29:28
  been doing these things in his other country that break our laws. So we're going to go and
• 29:36
  seize him outside of our jurisdiction and bring him here and put him into the judicial system.
• 29:42
  The point that Sarah Izga was making was that really the judicial system is not what it's not
• 29:50
  supposed to be doing this. Like this is not what it's built for. The judicial branch of the three
• 29:56
  branches of government in America is supposed to be resolving law enforcement, you know, enforcing
• 30:04
  you know, engaging in law enforcement domestically and resolving disputes between Americans. It's
• 30:09
  not supposed to be an arm of foreign policy. The correct response when an executive of a country,
• 30:18
  a head of state, has a beef with something that another head of state is doing is unfortunately
• 30:24
  war. War is the tool that the government, that the executive branch has. They go to the
• 30:30
  legislative branch and they say, this country is doing this thing that is really terrible.
• 30:34
  Here are the reasons I want to get rid of them. And then they use the military. They don't
• 30:38
  use the military to help them, quote unquote, help the justice department, then find a way to get
• 30:47
  a foreign head of state into the court system and pretend that it was a simple arrest. That's messy.
• 30:55
  One interesting thing here is that if the drug running, which is Maduro's drug running, that is,
• 31:02
  which is the core of the claim that the United States Trump has against Maduro,
• 31:08
  if that is part of the Venezuelan government's sort of policy, then that definitely changes the
• 31:17
  question of whether or not Maduro should be criminally liable for running it. Because it's fundamental
• 31:25
  to the conception of presidential immunity in any context that if the president is carrying out
• 31:32
  their duties as president and they break laws in that context, that's very different from if they're
• 31:38
  committing a crime on the side. And this makes sense. If I'm the leader of a country and while I'm
• 31:45
  not technically working as the leader, even though I am the leader, I sneak out of my bedroom
• 31:50
  in the middle of the night and I go and kill a guy and then I come back, that is different from
• 31:55
  if I'm the leader of a country and I declare a war in which people with my knowledge and authorization
• 32:01
  are unjustly killed. You know, we give that second act a pass that we wouldn't give to the first act
• 32:09
  because leading things is difficult and sometimes compromises me to need to be made and sometimes
• 32:15
  mistakes are made. So if Maduro's policy as the president of Venezuela has been we're going to
• 32:24
  make life difficult for America and poke America in the eye and make enormous amounts of money
• 32:29
  by helping drug cartels to get cocaine into the United States, it's very difficult to understand
• 32:40
  how that can be criminal in a judicial sense. It can certainly be a shitty thing to do and he can
• 32:48
  be an awful dictator who is barbaric and deserves to be deposed, in which case you go to war or you
• 32:57
  do some kind of other military intervention if short of full-scale invasion. But you don't
• 33:03
  pull off a military invention intervention and then pretend that it's not a military intervention
• 33:07
  because it's actually a legal proceeding. It is akin to the way in which American military
• 33:15
  campaigns are no longer wars at all and go through Congress at all and there's like this sort of
• 33:20
  fig leaf of them just being operations. You're supposed to go to Congress. In fact, and this was
• 33:26
  a point made by John Dickerson on the Slate Political Gap Fest, if you recall just weeks ago,
• 33:32
  you remember that vanity fair piece where Trump's deputy chief of staff or is it his chief of
• 33:36
  staff now gave this incredible interview and there was like a photo shoot and like people were like,
• 33:41
  oh my goodness, the photo was so close up, you can see the little pinpricks of lip filler on her lip.
• 33:47
  And she was very, very outspoken about Trump and Vance and her thoughts and everything.
• 33:52
  Everyone thought it was like unprecedented for somebody who's that close to the president to be
• 33:56
  giving such a candid interview and she was asked directly about Venezuela and she said that if
• 34:02
  the president and she's not nobody, I mean, your chief of staff is a big deal. She said if the president
• 34:08
  wants to do something in Venezuela, he'll have to go to Congress first. She was asked the question
• 34:13
  point blank. She was like, of course. So what's this whole thing about not going to Congress anymore?
• 34:20
  The point of having Congress is that you can deliberate and take into consideration
• 34:27
  consequences for a military action that might outlive the personal interest of the president.
• 34:35
  The founding fathers of the United States understood that they were going to be different
• 34:38
  incentives acting on a chief executive than there are on the scores of elected representatives
• 34:45
  who represent the people in the legislative branch and that therefore military action
• 34:51
  should only happen when both of them agree and the president can go to, I mean, I don't even think
• 34:55
  they thought that the president should go to Congress. They said that Congress is the, I mean,
• 34:58
  it's explicitly in the Constitution that Congress is the is the entity in the United States that
• 35:04
  has the power to declare war and to conduct wars. I mean, it has the power of the purse strings,
• 35:08
  so it shouldn't, you know, it shouldn't even be possible for a president to launch military campaigns
• 35:12
  without congressional approval, but things have gotten so sidetracked and, you know, ask backwards
• 35:20
  that now not only does the president not go to Congress and not only does Congress not seek
• 35:26
  to be involved in any such questions ahead of time, when they are totally excluded, there isn't a
• 35:31
  peep. There isn't a peep about whether or not they should have been involved in deliberating
• 35:35
  about the long term consequences for America and for the region and for the world of one man
• 35:41
  deciding to do this. So that's weird. It makes me worry about what the complexion of American
• 35:49
  democracy is, even if the elections remain stable and we don't have another constitutional crisis,
• 35:54
  you know, at presidential election time, what does it mean to have a democracy where there's no
• 35:59
  parliament essentially? Let's hope that changes later on this year and that the Democrats can
• 36:05
  take back the House. So you have this, so that's all the legal stuff, right? Yes, it's against
• 36:11
  international law. It's incredibly fishy to be calling it a judicial thing. I still can't quite
• 36:16
  get my head around how, I mean, more learned people than me say that it is consistent with American
• 36:21
  law to be bringing him in because, hey, we did it with Noriega and we did it with, I mean, so what,
• 36:27
  you can be wrong a number of times and I understand why president is like the ultimate, get out of jail
• 36:33
  free card here, pardon the pun, sorry, majority isn't getting out of jail. But you know, so he's
• 36:39
  there and apparently this is legitimate and there is a standing, even though he's not American and
• 36:44
  he didn't commit the crimes in America, they do impact America. So somehow, you know, the American
• 36:50
  justice system has the ability to prosecute him as an international criminal as if he was, you know,
• 36:56
  like any any old common drug run and terrorist. So there's all that stuff. And then there's what
• 37:03
  is going to happen in Venezuela. It's tragic that the opportunity to liberate a people from a
• 37:11
  horrifying communist tyranny has been so tarnished by the craftness of Trump's attempted to exploit
• 37:19
  this for personal gain and for American oil interests. I mean, it does make you miss hypocrisy a
• 37:25
  bit, doesn't it? It makes me miss a little bit the hypocrisy of we're only spreading democracy
• 37:33
  asterisk only to the places that have oil, but the democratic governments thereafter will be able
• 37:38
  to sell us. That was nicer than just simply out, out, out, out and out saying, we're going to take
• 37:45
  the oil, we're going to run the place, we're going to share the oil proceeds with the Venezuelan
• 37:48
  people as if it was America's to share. It's calling and it's sad that so many of the great
• 37:55
  and brave Venezuelans who've been working for years and whose families have been disappeared and
• 38:00
  who found themselves, you know, hanging up, you're beheaded from lamp posts for speaking out against
• 38:07
  the government and the people who've seen that country go from a fairly prosperous place with
• 38:12
  tons of resources, loads of oil, more oil in anywhere else in the world, loads of gold, you know,
• 38:18
  a place that had a really thriving and vibrant culture and middle class in the 80s and 90s
• 38:25
  to a place where everyone who could leave has 8 million Venezuelans have left and where the
• 38:31
  economy has gone backwards to something like what a third of the size that it was. So terrible,
• 38:37
  terrible, terrible situations in Venezuela while they've been run by essentially a mafia,
• 38:43
  this deluded, you know, economically illiterate, dictatorial, socialist mafia,
• 38:50
  and it's great that Maduro has gone but couldn't he have couldn't we have figured out a way to get him
• 38:55
  gone without the all Venezuelans going, well this is sort of fishy and sucks. It's also strange
• 39:02
  when thinking about the future of Venezuela that a, an operation this precise and this limited,
• 39:08
  this scalpel like where the elite forces, the same forces who took out bin Laden, you know,
• 39:15
  they go flying in there with these incredible gadgets, these amazing helicopters that nobody
• 39:19
  else in the world has apart from the United States and they go flying they, you know, do some
• 39:23
  preparatory bombing and they kill 30 odd Cuban guards and you know, they trained at the at a
• 39:29
  replica of Maduro's palace. So like they built since August of last year, they have the,
• 39:36
  the ability to build the identical, so they have CIS assets in Venezuela like human intelligence,
• 39:42
  they have actual spies and then they have all of their other electrical stuff and their satellites
• 39:47
  and their drones and everything. And so they're able to actually map the, the presidential palace
• 39:53
  identically and they build it in a, in Georgia, the state of Georgia, not the country of Georgia,
• 39:59
  they have a facility where they build, they did this for bin Laden as well where they build a
• 40:04
  replica of the place and they train on it over and over and over again and the same people who
• 40:08
  are going to do the operation go in and they have an actor playing Maduro and they have all
• 40:11
  these different scenarios about what Maduro does, what if he pulls up a machine gun, what if he
• 40:15
  goes into his safe house, what if he does this and they run it through. So by the time they get
• 40:18
  there, they're like, we've done this a million times already. It was incredible that the capacity to
• 40:23
  do this, it's in stark difference to the Iraq war where it's like, let's do shock and awe
• 40:30
  and just blow the share out of the place and then just march into Baghdad and now what the hell do we
• 40:34
  do. The problem is, it's like, it's just human nature, isn't it, to go too far in the other direction,
• 40:41
  like the lesson of the Vietnam war was we should never do anything else to help other countries
• 40:48
  in the future and the lesson of the Iraq war was just don't do anything in the Middle East and so
• 40:53
  what happens then, you know, Bashar al-Assad manages to pull off the most horrendous
• 41:00
  behavior in Syria for the next 10 years after that because we're just so cautious about getting bogged
• 41:05
  down in another Iraq that we don't even do the limited things that we could do to save so many lives
• 41:11
  in Syria. So we're always over learning the last lesson and the lesson of the Iraq war was don't
• 41:18
  just decapitate the government and then prevent everybody who had anything to do with the last
• 41:23
  government from doing anything because they're all the people who know how to do shit.
• 41:26
  The debathification program in Iraq after the Iraq war was incredibly misguided and way too
• 41:35
  punitive. It was compared to denazification in post-war Germany and the United States basically
• 41:42
  said if you were a member of the bath party, the ruling, you know, Saddam Hussein's ruling party,
• 41:48
  then you're not going to be involved in the next government in any capacity. The whole public
• 41:52
  service is going to be cleaned out and nobody who was a member of the party is going to be there.
• 41:57
  Well, not everybody was ideologically pro-Saddam Hussein. You had to be a member of the party
• 42:02
  in order to do anything. It was a one-party state. You couldn't say I'm not going to join up with
• 42:08
  Saddam Hussein's club, but I also want Saddam Hussein to give me a job in the sewage system or
• 42:13
  the postal service or, you know, there's so many things in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.
• 42:21
  Everything was run by people who were ostensibly members of Saddam Hussein's bath party. So when
• 42:26
  the Americans came in and said nobody who's a member of the bath party can have anything to do
• 42:30
  with the new government, that just led to the entire government collapsing in a massive civil war
• 42:34
  and nobody who knew how to do anything being able to help because they were prohibited from
• 42:40
  doing so. So now being mammals and homo sapiens and also Americans, in this case, we who are
• 42:48
  particularly prone to this phenomenon of swinging back and forth between polar opposites
• 42:53
  and never quite hitting the sweet spot, we overlearn the lesson of debathification and they say,
• 42:58
  well, not only are we not going to invade Venezuela and occupy Venezuela, we're not even going to
• 43:06
  take out anybody except for the president and his wife and then we're going to leave in power
• 43:10
  the president's vice president and just claim that we're now running the place and that if she
• 43:16
  doesn't do what we say, then what? Then what? The assumption seems to be on the part of the Trump
• 43:25
  administration that because they've gotten rid of Maduro, they can now tell Venezuela what to do
• 43:30
  and then the Venezuelan government will just do it because everybody in the government has seen
• 43:34
  what happens if you don't obey the Americans. But everybody in the Venezuelan government
• 43:40
  also isn't a fucking idiot who thinks that the Americans are going to just keep doing what they
• 43:45
  did on the second of January over and over again. It's a high risk operation. They specifically
• 43:52
  wanted Maduro. It's completely implausible that Trump is going to tell the vice president what to
• 43:58
  do. She's not going to do it exactly and then he's just going to launch another version and do the
• 44:01
  same thing to hear to her with all of the risk associated with pulling that campaign off again
• 44:10
  and again, with increasingly diminishing returns. Once you've done it, you just take the win.
• 44:16
  So then you leave Venezuela with every single other person in place with a military that is still
• 44:22
  loyal to the dictatorship and with opposition activists who are terrified and now tarnished,
• 44:29
  frankly, in the eyes of their countrymen and in the eyes of the government as being associated
• 44:35
  with an outrageous breach of Venezuelan sovereignty and international law. When all they were
• 44:41
  trying to do was bring democracy to their country. So watch this space. It's going to be interesting.
• 44:47
  So also going to be interesting to see whether or not the strategic, I suppose the expectations
• 44:55
  that the Marco Rubio's of the world have and the JD advances have are going to come to fruition.
• 45:02
  It's clear that Marco Rubio being a Cuban immigrant is very focused on socialism in Latin America
• 45:08
  and in Cuba specifically hates the Cuban regime, wants it to fall. Cuba has been super reliant on
• 45:15
  Venezuela. As I said, Maduro's bodyguards were all Cuban. Cuba makes a lot of money from Venezuela
• 45:22
  and oil that is now going to be able to get. I mean, it doesn't make a lot of money. Venezuela
• 45:28
  on oil is the lifeline for Cuba, which it's now not going to get. So I think part of the strategy
• 45:34
  here is, you know, Venezuela is the big socialist boogie man. And if you knock them down, you may
• 45:39
  get a domino effect where all of the other shitty little anti-American communist states that are
• 45:46
  reliant on Venezuela also topple. And if I think if Cuba has a revolution and Caesar's being
• 45:54
  communist, which has been a goal of America, well, you know, ever since before the Bay of Pigs and
• 46:01
  the Cuban Missile Crisis, that would be an enormous foreign policy win for Marco Rubio.
• 46:07
  And would arguably vindicate the Venezuela operation. The biggest strategic play I
• 46:14
  suppose is this question about dividing the world into spheres of influence, right? I thought
• 46:20
  there was a really interesting tweet by Melissa Chen, who I caught up with in London a few weeks ago,
• 46:27
  just before Christmas. She's fabulous Singaporean journalists living in the UK.
• 46:34
  You sort of reasonably pro-Trump, I would say, but not in a deranged way. Just very smart,
• 46:41
  a very lovely human being as well, her and her husband are just delightful, but really thoughtful.
• 46:47
  I just think she always has an interesting take. And she tweeted two days after the Venezuela
• 46:51
  operation, you guys realize the message that the Trump administration has sent to China, right?
• 46:56
  Remembering that Melissa is Singaporean. So she has a better understanding, I think of
• 47:01
  Asian geopolitics than I do. She writes, we went from letting China float spy balloons over
• 47:07
  the US mainland and not even saying a peep about it when Biden was in charge to this.
• 47:11
  Under Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela revolved from a failing petro state into a permissive operating
• 47:17
  environment for foreign adversaries and transnational criminal networks. China had taken the
• 47:23
  most advantage out of this situation. There are over 600 ongoing bilateral agreements
• 47:29
  outlining energy, infrastructure, trade, defense, and strategic partnerships between China and
• 47:36
  Venezuela. 600 bilateral agreements between Venezuela and China. In fact, China sold and
• 47:42
  implemented the air defense system that failed the day of the US operation to capture Maduro.
• 47:48
  It was Chinese tech. A few hours before Delta Force landed, that's the operation to take out Maduro,
• 47:56
  the high level Chinese delegation was meeting with Maduro at the palace.
• 48:01
  Two of all things discussed the multipolar world order amid US pressure.
• 48:06
  I didn't know that, that was, according to Melissa, the operation to kidnap Maduro happened
• 48:13
  on the evening of a meeting between Maduro's people and the Chinese. Little did they know she
• 48:21
  writes that multipolarity was about to take a huge hit. Don't forget also that early on when
• 48:27
  Trump resumed office, Trump took back the Panama Canal by wrestling it from Chinese control and
• 48:32
  just weeks ago some Chinese monuments in a Panama park were bulldozed, triggering rage and condemnation
• 48:37
  from the CCP. This was a complete reassertion of American power in order to claim American dominance
• 48:43
  in the Western hemisphere. Yes, right. Venezuela, oil, China, influence, don't mess in our backyard.
• 48:53
  Then there was that whole awesome follow up operation where I say awesome because it was
• 48:57
  cinematic. Maybe it shouldn't be so cavalier with my, with my compliments. But the operation where
• 49:03
  the Americans boarded those two ships, one in the Caribbean and one in the North Atlantic.
• 49:07
  There was this ship that had been headed for Venezuela and turned around and then went
• 49:12
  back towards Russia. It had had a different flag carrier, but then they painted a Russian flag
• 49:19
  and all of a sudden it was being escorted by a Russian submarine and by Russian, you know,
• 49:24
  warships and the Americans just powered a warship straight up. No, they didn't power a warship.
• 49:30
  They flew helicopters over it from any of our warship and they repelled down onto it. They seized
• 49:35
  the vessel and they were like, no, you're not getting it. You can't be going to Venezuela anymore.
• 49:41
  There's a blockade and there's a lot of conspiracy theories online about what was on the boat.
• 49:46
  What was on that boat that the Americans would risk World War III and nuclear confrontation
• 49:52
  with Vladimir Putin in order to board that vessel. It was probably the arc of the covenant on that
• 49:58
  boat or the Epstein files. I think it's quite simple. I think once Trump had made the decision
• 50:06
  that Venezuela was not going to be ruled by Maduro anymore and that the blockade was going to
• 50:09
  be in place and that everybody else could fuck off out of the Western hemisphere. His attitude
• 50:14
  was simply you don't get to skirt around America's control over the Americas, including South
• 50:21
  America simply by playing pussy-footing around and playing your little games and you almost get
• 50:27
  your boat to Venezuela but then you turn it around and now you're going to be in the North
• 50:30
  Atlantic and the Americans can't come after us and we're going to get a Russian escort and we're
• 50:34
  going to paint all the Russian flag on the side of the boat and we're going to play cutesy.
• 50:38
  I just think Trump was like, no, fuck off. There's a blockade. The blockade is going to reach you
• 50:43
  wherever in the world you want to go, whether you know States of fucking America, stop playing
• 50:46
  games and Putin, if you want to fuck with us, fuck with us and let's see where this goes,
• 50:52
  but you don't think that you're going to get away without a genuine confrontation. We're
• 50:55
  boarding that vessel. That thing was trying to come to Venezuela. It almost came to Venezuela.
• 51:01
  I don't know what it is. That's our territory. That's our water. Venezuela is ours. The whole
• 51:06
  region get out and we're serious. We're going to repel down a bloody helicopter and we're going
• 51:11
  to seize the vessel even as there is a Russian submarine right next to it. Blow us out of the
• 51:17
  water and start World War Three if you think we're not serious. I think that's all that whole thing
• 51:20
  was about and you got to admit, it's kind of fucking cool. It is cool. It's also stupid. I mean,
• 51:28
  the whole thing is stupid. For the reasons that I articulated earlier about 1945 and global power.
• 51:36
  So let's just get to that in order to land this plane. The Western hemisphere, the Americas,
• 51:44
  of which Greenland is a part and geographically, did you know that? Greenland is not part of
• 51:49
  Europe. Geographically, it's on the like, I mean, you know, whatever geologists put
• 51:55
  frame this. It's like on the same continent as North America. It's part of in terms of the
• 52:00
  geography of the planet. Greenland is in North America. Now, it's weird that Trump wants Greenland
• 52:08
  so much as a brief aside because the agreement with your very close friend and ally, Denmark,
• 52:17
  is already that the United States gets to have a military base there and basically,
• 52:20
  Denmark would always have and certainly will now agree to any requests that the Americans make
• 52:25
  of it regarding Greenland. During the Cold War, I hadn't realized that America had 10,000 soldiers
• 52:33
  stationed in Greenland. They had 17 military bases in Greenland during the Cold War.
• 52:38
  Now America has withdrawn. America has withdrawn. Not at anyone's behest. America has been allowing
• 52:43
  its relationship to Greenland to atrophy. They now only have 200 troops there and they have a single
• 52:49
  missile defense base there. But if they wanted to ramp back up from 200 troops back up to 10,000
• 52:55
  troops and from one missile defense base to another 17 bases or 100 bases or 100,000 troops there,
• 53:02
  then even before this, even before Trump, there's no reason to think that Denmark would have said,
• 53:07
  no, you know, bring in money to Greenland. Sure. Keep America happy. It helps everybody. I mean,
• 53:12
  it's good to have troops in that neck of the woods for everybody. So the Greenland thing is just weird.
• 53:19
  And I really didn't understand it until I heard an interview with Donald Trump by a few
• 53:24
  reporters from the New York Times. They didn't publish the thing in its entirety because he didn't
• 53:29
  want to, but they took excerpts and they played it on the daily, the podcast of the New York Times.
• 53:35
  While David Barbaro interviewed Michael Barbaro, the host of the daily, interviewed them about their
• 53:40
  experiences. And it struck me when they were asking him about Greenland. It struck me that
• 53:48
  Trump was quite open about saying that actually possessing it is not a practical
• 53:56
  goal. It's an emotional one. Like he literally says, it's about pride. It's about
• 54:05
  pride. And they say who's pride? And he's like, my pride. It's quite unashamed about it.
• 54:10
  It's about ego, essentially. And remember, this guy's a real estate guy. The other thing that he
• 54:16
  says is you can do a lot more with something you own than something that you're leasing.
• 54:20
  He's not wrong about that. I mean, the world of real estate would you rather own the property
• 54:24
  and do whatever you want to it or keep going to the person who does own it and asking their
• 54:29
  permission to do what you want with it? If the shit really hits the fan, who's named you on
• 54:33
  on the piece of paper saying that it's yours? Your name or somebody else's name who has just
• 54:39
  given you a promise about how you can use it. So I sort of get that. But it's just a completely
• 54:47
  impractical thing. I got to say in the context of the rest of the world that still believes in
• 54:55
  the international order, finding ways to dissuade Donald Trump from being quite so expansionist
• 55:01
  and aggressive, the idea that we wouldn't use Greenland as an opportunity to try to push back
• 55:08
  and reframe and reassert our commitment to the international order is bonkers.
• 55:17
  We shouldn't make the same mistake that we made with Putin between 2014 and 2020,
• 55:24
  where we were just too afraid of creating World War III to do anything. I think there's a case
• 55:29
  to be made for just telling you to... What Trump just did with the tanker by actually seizing the
• 55:36
  tanker in the North Atlantic off completely far, far away from North America, but nonetheless,
• 55:42
  asserting his doctrine of controlling North America wherever in the world that doctrine takes him.
• 55:49
  And daring Vladimir Putin to start World War III, if he objects, there is a case to be made
• 55:56
  for sometimes playing that Brinksmanship game. And the only way that I see creating a limiting
• 56:03
  principle for the Trump administration that will allow the international order to survive
• 56:10
  for the next three years, should we want it to, and we'll get to that in a sec?
• 56:15
  Would be for the European Union, because obviously think about the likeliest way that America could
• 56:20
  get Greenland, right? And if it gets Greenland, Greenland is a country within Denmark. It's not a
• 56:27
  sovereign state. It doesn't have a seat at the United Nations, but it's a colonial possession.
• 56:32
  It's a bit like, if you want to think about, because I didn't even understand, until the past
• 56:37
  week I've been looking into deeply the legal status of Greenland, it's not like... A lot of people
• 56:44
  think, oh, it's sort of like Scotland is to the United Kingdom, is like Greenland to the Kingdom
• 56:49
  of Denmark. It's not because Scotland predated the UK as a country that had a government. Greenland
• 56:59
  was a largely tribal, intimate society that was colonized by what was then Denmark and Norway,
• 57:05
  a single country. And so it's a bit more like thinking about some places, somewhere like,
• 57:10
  saying New Caledonia in relation to the French. France goes in and colonizes these overseas
• 57:16
  possessions. So when you think about it being ripped off of Denmark, and one of Denmark's countries
• 57:26
  being possessed by another country, that would certainly rupture the fabric of an agreement that
• 57:33
  said that that country, you know, Denmark, that is, and the United States had a military alliance.
• 57:41
  So the other two options that America, if America cared about doing this delicately, and it
• 57:45
  remains to be seen whether they do, they could just encourage Greenland's independence and then
• 57:50
  have a, you know, create Greenland as a new state. This is not a crazy idea that, you know,
• 57:55
  there's been a movement for this for quite some time. Many people in Europe regarded as being
• 57:59
  sort of inevitable anyway at some stage. So maybe, you know, as we, as the decolonization process
• 58:06
  continues. So maybe Greenland just becomes independent and then chooses, quote unquote,
• 58:11
  chooses a military alliance with the United States that trumps its relationship to Europe in
• 58:16
  exchange for a security guarantee and becomes a de facto territory that way. Alternatively,
• 58:22
  if they didn't want to do that or if that was too tricky or that was going to take too long,
• 58:25
  and Trump wasn't going to be in office anymore, you can imagine a scenario in which the Trump
• 58:28
  administration just declares that Greenland is part of the United States for all these historical
• 58:32
  reasons, geographically part of North America, and they just send a bunch of warships there to
• 58:38
  make that a reality. And if the Greenlanders don't want to do what America tells them to do,
• 58:47
  then they can try to test Trump's metal. If that was going to happen, I think it's crazy that
• 58:56
  the European Union now isn't preparing for that eventuality by trying to call Trump's bluff
• 59:02
  before he gets there. If you really don't want NATO to fall apart and if you don't want,
• 59:08
  that might make right ethos to be the only way of doing things globally. Then you have to show
• 59:16
  people that liberal democracy in the international order does have a pair of balls larger than tiny
• 59:23
  shriveled frozen peas. I mean, you have to at least have walnut-sized balls. If the Trump
• 59:28
  administration is walking around with basketball-sized cajonas, you can't just let me be like,
• 59:34
  oh, I really hope that he doesn't do anything to invade us and take our territory.
• 59:41
  What can you do? You could just take all of the warships in the European Union
• 59:46
  that aren't otherwise occupied anywhere else, which is basically all of them, including nuclear
• 59:50
  submarines. And you send them up to Greenland on the pretext that you're protecting Greenland
• 59:54
  from Putin, from Russia. We're all in this together. We're doing it on behalf of everybody.
• 59:59
  I know that Mr. Trump, you worry a lot about Europe's contribution to NATO,
• 1:00:06
  as it was show of goodwill to the United States. We're going to do our bit in making sure that
• 1:00:10
  the parts of Europe that are closest to you are well protected and will defend it against Russia.
• 1:00:15
  So you guys can take care of your neck of the woods, do whatever you want. You don't have to
• 1:00:19
  worry about Greenland. Look at all this incredible military hardware that we've got up in Greenland.
• 1:00:24
  So that then, if it were the case that Donald Trump wanted to declare that Greenland was
• 1:00:29
  part of the United States and he wanted to send a warship up there, he would have to create a hot war
• 1:00:34
  by firing on British and French and German and Spanish warships.
• 1:00:42
  Now, maybe he would do that. Maybe a world war between the United States and Europe would break out.
• 1:00:48
  Maybe the United States would win whatever that means. Maybe there'd be a nuclear war.
• 1:00:54
  But at some point, you can't allow those babies to prevent you from standing up for anything.
• 1:01:01
  Otherwise, you're just handing the future to whoever is the most audacious bully.
• 1:01:06
  It's almost like a hecklers veto geopolitically. It just means that anybody who has the most
• 1:01:11
  bluster gets to get their way. The whole point of the post-World War II consensus was that we're
• 1:01:18
  going to be the ones with the most bluster. That's what NATO is. It's a way of saying to the Soviet
• 1:01:23
  Union. It was a way of saying to the Soviet Union, no matter how much bluster you've got,
• 1:01:27
  you're actually where we're so full of bluster that we're taking the bluster out of our
• 1:01:30
  own hands and we're making it an automatic trigger. It's like the Doctor Strange Love Doomsday
• 1:01:34
  machine, which was parodied so well in the Kubrick film, where the Russians had supposedly invented
• 1:01:40
  a machine that was going to destroy the planet in the case of an American first strike.
• 1:01:46
  That was going to ensure that there would be peace forever and that nuclear war would never
• 1:01:51
  happen because no American leader would be so stupid to launch a nuclear weapon against the
• 1:01:55
  United, against the USSR, knowing that certain annihilation was going to take place. The only
• 1:02:02
  downside was that the conceit of Strange Love, the movie, is that the Russians left a few days
• 1:02:09
  in between the activation of the Doomsday machine and the telling of the Americans. In that time,
• 1:02:14
  a rogue American military officer decides to launch a single nuclear weapon against the USSR and
• 1:02:23
  when the American president asks his Russian counterpart, what is the point of a Doomsday machine
• 1:02:32
  that automatically triggers global annihilation if you don't tell us about it when it gets switched
• 1:02:39
  on. The Russian military guy says, well, the premier of the USSR was waiting until Saturday's
• 1:02:47
  party is gathering of high officials in Moscow to announce it to the world. As you know,
• 1:02:53
  the premier loves a party and hence the world ends. You do have to have some of that bluster.
• 1:02:59
  Like you do want to have an automatic trigger. That was what NATO was and I think the EU has to
• 1:03:03
  figure out what its automatic trigger against the United States is, not against the United States,
• 1:03:07
  in favor of the international order, should the United States choose to address against Europe.
• 1:03:12
  So if it was me, I know the EU is never going to do this because it's like hurting cats,
• 1:03:17
  but I don't know why Stama and Macron and just get them all together. How was my pronunciation
• 1:03:25
  there, by the way, of Macron? Stama, Kierstama, would you get Kierstama and Macron to respond
• 1:03:35
  to the actions of Donald Trump in Venezuela against Maduro and they should respond by sending
• 1:03:43
  a lot of arsenal up to Greenland and just make it clear that if you're going to attack Europe,
• 1:03:48
  then you have to attack Europe, bro. You can't do it on the slide. So that's my goal.
• 1:03:56
  Create a World War III if you take Greenland.
• 1:04:02
  The last thing to address is what the world looks like when it's divided up into spheres of
• 1:04:10
  influence instead of having the United States as a global hedgemon enforcing a rules-based
• 1:04:17
  world order. I mentioned earlier, it's actually a downgrade of American power.
• 1:04:23
  Since 1945, America has in fact, where's that quote from Trump? There's a really good quote.
• 1:04:28
  John, can you see? I'll hear it. I'll go. So this brings me to years. I almost forgot.
• 1:04:34
  My big, dick little dick theory of American militarism. Let me kick the tires on this baby.
• 1:04:41
  I remember an interview with some American satirist, maybe that guy from Minnesota who
• 1:04:49
  used to do those whimsical poems and songs and stuff like that. What was his name? Anyway,
• 1:04:55
  someone I'll mention in the chat. And Garrison Kieler. And he was asked by a British journalist
• 1:05:02
  about why he thinks Americans are so sort of arrogant on the world stage and have such faith in
• 1:05:09
  American power. I remember him saying that they don't. That is a complete misreading of the
• 1:05:15
  American psyche. Most Americans are insecure about their role in the world. When you think about
• 1:05:23
  just middle America, you're just going to a nice polite town in the Midwest. If a British person
• 1:05:31
  comes in and starts talking, they think that the British person is far superior. They think
• 1:05:34
  there's all these cultured, intelligent people out there, partly on the coast of America,
• 1:05:40
  but certainly over on the continent and in the UK. When I noticed that when I moved to America,
• 1:05:44
  just speaking with a foreign accent, it immediately makes a large majority of people think that
• 1:05:49
  you think that you're better than them as Americans. Very few other countries have that
• 1:05:54
  phenomenon where they feel like they're being talked down to just because somebody isn't from
• 1:05:58
  there. It's quite strange. And I think Americans have responded to, I'm talking about
• 1:06:05
  particular types of Americans. I'm not generalizing about 340 million people.
• 1:06:10
  I'm talking specifically about the strain of American nationalism and militarism on the
• 1:06:15
  political right. That there's a small town kind of anxious, new world, family-oriented,
• 1:06:24
  community-oriented insecurity about things which has found its antidote in vast expressions of
• 1:06:34
  power. In American flags on every flagpole along Main Street, USA, in extraordinary displays of
• 1:06:42
  American force and valor. And they feel that this is a comforting way to be in a world that
• 1:06:50
  is actually sort of either wildly chaotic and hazardous in all of the shithole countries to
• 1:06:57
  use Donald Trump's phrase, or hoichi-toichi and fancy pants and intelligent in the case of
• 1:07:03
  Europe, but fundamentally sort of decadent and debased in a way that the United States isn't.
• 1:07:11
  So the big dick, little dick theory of American militarism is basically what the rest of the world
• 1:07:16
  diagnoses as American big dick energy is actually a little dick over compensation.
• 1:07:25
  Not necessarily in a bad way, but there's a kind of a humility in American mainstream,
• 1:07:31
  sort of middle American culture. I'm not talking about Trumpism here, although I think that a lot
• 1:07:37
  of these people vote for Trump because they see him as the only expression of their kind of
• 1:07:43
  id in their small town way. That we often, yeah, I think we risk misunderstanding American militarism
• 1:07:52
  as a guerrilla beating its chest when it's actually people who feel like they're somewhat left
• 1:07:59
  behind and somewhat powerless and somewhat confused trying to assert whatever control they have
• 1:08:08
  over a crazy world that looks down on them and we're looking down on them no more if they have
• 1:08:13
  seven billion nuclear powered submarines standing stride the globe trying to bring their apple pie
• 1:08:22
  and pumpkin pie and sweet freedom and home cooking to the benign masses and the hoichi-toichi
• 1:08:30
  fancy pants Europeans with funny accents abroad and this has I've been awakened to this theory
• 1:08:38
  because of this new talk in Trump, the Trump administration about the Western hemisphere
• 1:08:44
  and about thinking about the consequences of dividing the world up instead of having a single
• 1:08:47
  hedgeman. This is what Trump said after the Venezuela operation, quote, to the New York Times,
• 1:08:58
  under our new national security strategy and this is an actual document who's not talking in
• 1:09:03
  airy fairy ways about the strategy. They published in the new national security strategy. It's a very
• 1:09:07
  interesting document. It's actually worth reading. It's very anti-Europe, very anti-European, which
• 1:09:13
  brings me back to my big dick little dick theory of American militarism. It's like Europe is a bunch
• 1:09:19
  of fancy pants dickheads who needed, there are some saving in World War II is the subtext by
• 1:09:26
  good, hardworking, simple, plain-spoken Americans who understood the value of family and community
• 1:09:33
  and faith and had to go and rescue these crazy godless Europeans who always think they're so much
• 1:09:38
  better than us. Now what the Europeans have done is they've pissed that heritage up against the
• 1:09:43
  wall and instead of clinging to the only thing that Europe had going for it, which was its amazing
• 1:09:47
  churches and its great white civilization that we managed to inherit in the United States.
• 1:09:54
  The theory goes and now they've pissed that up against the wall by opening their borders up
• 1:09:57
  and allowing a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different ideas and skin colors and
• 1:10:00
  cultures and they're in decay now because they hate themselves so much. They don't even dare
• 1:10:06
  have pride in Western civilization in the same way that our simple American heartland does. We
• 1:10:13
  at least have still have the the American kernel of an idea of pride in what we've built here
• 1:10:19
  and the Americans are so self-loathing that they're just allowing huge, huge industrial, you know,
• 1:10:24
  deindustrializing suburbs of unemployed young Muslims to run rampant and they don't even have
• 1:10:30
  the backbone to stand up against it. And this is a narrative that is increasingly popular in
• 1:10:34
  Europe as well. You just have to look at the fact that Farage, if there was an election hold in
• 1:10:37
  the UK today, then Nigel Farage would be the prime minister. I mean the default opposition party in
• 1:10:44
  the United Kingdom right now is no longer the conservative party but is an anti-immigrant party.
• 1:10:49
  Ditto the AFD, the alternative for Dutch land in Germany, Ditto, Malin Le Pen in France.
• 1:10:57
  So this is not a, you know, this is something that's in the air. I'm not, I'm just articulating all
• 1:11:02
  of those things to make it clear that I'm not blaming American conservatives for this worldview.
• 1:11:06
  But it's a worldview that has particular purchase in the United States because of the big,
• 1:11:11
  dick little, dick theory of American militarism. So they released this national security
• 1:11:15
  strategy, which was like Europe is on its way out and America is going to have to step into
• 1:11:20
  the void and do business with whoever we have to do business with and we'll just make
• 1:11:25
  shit work and play it by ear basically. So Trump told the New York Times after Venezuela,
• 1:11:30
  under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never
• 1:11:35
  be questioned again. That's the quote. Unround new national security strategy,
• 1:11:42
  American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.
• 1:11:47
  Trump told the New York Times, I read that and I nearly fell off my chair.
• 1:11:54
  It is so unambitious. American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.
• 1:12:02
  I'm sorry, between 1945 and certainly 2002, the American dominance that went unquestioned
• 1:12:15
  was not dominance of the Western hemisphere. It was dominance of planet Earth.
• 1:12:22
  Between 1945 and 2002, American dominance of planet Earth was unquestioned, unquestioned
• 1:12:33
  a bowl. And now Trump's ambition, his make America great again ambition, is to pair back the question
• 1:12:43
  of American dominance to American dominance in the Western hemisphere. I mean, who would question
• 1:12:48
  American dominance in the Western hemisphere? Who would even question American dominance of planet
• 1:12:52
  Earth except people who want to bring it about, who want to bring about an end to American dominance
• 1:12:57
  of planet Earth, namely the Trump administration, people like Stephen Miller, who have a small
• 1:13:02
  bore America first, focus on our own backyard, stop spending blood and treasure abroad. Like I
• 1:13:09
  understand the instinct for that kind of isolationism and I was never a fan of huge unilateral ventures
• 1:13:15
  to remake the world in America's image and try to get Sunni and Shia sects to embrace Jeffersonian
• 1:13:22
  liberal democracy and to try to get Afghani, Pashto tribes in the foothills of Wasira Stan
• 1:13:30
  to embrace diversity, equity and inclusion and ensure that like what was that? There's a funny
• 1:13:35
  anecdote. I think it might be, I don't want to misattribute it, but it was someone who was
• 1:13:41
  involved in the reconstruction of Afghanistan after the coalition campaign to remove the Taliban
• 1:13:46
  and they were talking to like Hamid Karzai, one of the, you know, the new leaders of Afghanistan
• 1:13:51
  back when the Taliban were still not in control and coalition, but US, British, Australia and so on,
• 1:13:57
  NATO troops were on the ground. And the new government representative said to this Western
• 1:14:02
  British, you know, dignitary, I can assure you that we are 100% committed to gender equity in the
• 1:14:12
  new cabinet in Kabul. And this Brit walked away and was like, oh, this thing's never going to
• 1:14:19
  fuck on work. Like this dude has just, he's looked at his Googled what, what Western was want to
• 1:14:24
  hear and he's just saying a bunch of words. I mean, he, of course, he does, of course, he's not
• 1:14:30
  deeply committed to gender equity. And it shouldn't be a requirement of a democracy in one of the most
• 1:14:37
  culturally backward parts of the world. Sorry for saying that, but, you know, when talking about
• 1:14:42
  Taliban-affiliated environments here, incredibly regressive on women's rights, on gay rights,
• 1:14:48
  and so on, more than perhaps anywhere else in terms of the actual attitudes of these tribes.
• 1:14:55
  The idea that we're going to come in and expect the locals to mount these platitudes about how
• 1:15:01
  important gender equity in cabinet is, this guy was like, isn't going to work. I mean, you have to
• 1:15:06
  allow people to rule themselves the way that they want to rule themselves, not according to
• 1:15:10
  whatever metrics we're going to impose on them, which doesn't mean that they should be able to go
• 1:15:13
  around chopping the hands off girls who want to learn to read, right? I mean, that should be the,
• 1:15:17
  that there's your line in the sand. So I'm skeptical of, you know, US grand intervention to try to
• 1:15:27
  overhaul and reshape parts of the world that cannot be overhauled nor reshaped in the way that America
• 1:15:32
  wants to. But the idea that America was the indispensable would be the indispensable power
• 1:15:39
  that if the shit hits the fan somewhere, can ultimately bring the weight of military might
• 1:15:45
  to resolve it. That was unquestioned. And the reason I say between 1945 and 2002 is because the first
• 1:15:53
  time that I was old enough to be aware of an American attack on the image of America as being
• 1:16:03
  the world's savior was the invasion of Iraq, where the Bush administration of George W. Bush
• 1:16:12
  went to the United Nations Security Council, tried to seek approval to invade Iraq and
• 1:16:17
  remove Saddam Hussein did not receive that approval from the Security Council and went ahead anyway,
• 1:16:22
  thereby openly breaking international law. Now in some ways that strategy today seems quaint
• 1:16:30
  because at least they bothered to go to the UN. Colin Powell stood there and he held up a little
• 1:16:36
  vile, a little glass vile. Do you remember this? You old enough to remember this? And he said that
• 1:16:42
  this much, whatever it was, anthrax could wipe out a city. And that Saddam Hussein had a chemical
• 1:16:48
  weapons program, a biological weapons program that it wasn't anthrax, it was some other compound
• 1:16:53
  that they were accusing Hussein of having been linked to. It turned out to not be true.
• 1:16:59
  I don't think as maliciously as some people think. I don't think Colin Powell knew at the time
• 1:17:04
  that it wasn't true, but he probably had reasons to suspect that it was not a slam dunk.
• 1:17:09
  But the idea that you would even bother going to the United Nations, that the Trump administration
• 1:17:13
  would ever bother going to the United Nations and try to get approval for anything is hilarious,
• 1:17:17
  is quaint. So it's incredibly dispiriting to see the ambitions of the United States shrink from being
• 1:17:28
  where capable of making the world a better place in fits and starts and being committed to an
• 1:17:33
  order that encourages people to resolve their disputes peacefully, to nobody will question our
• 1:17:40
  dominance of Caracas. Shit, really? That's the best you can do? Bro, no one was questioning your
• 1:17:48
  dominance of Caracas, but I guess they felt that China was. So I felt like the vision
• 1:17:58
  of American power that held the world together according to rules was never quite enough
• 1:18:05
  for imperialist idealists in America, nor for raw power realists. So when I say that there's
• 1:18:13
  a big dick little dick theory of American militarism, it's sort of an alliance between the people who
• 1:18:18
  think that American ideals are universalizable and should be imposed at the force of a gun on the
• 1:18:24
  rest of the world. And the realists who think might make right and raw power is the way to exercise
• 1:18:31
  influence. They each have some component of this desire to control as a way of compensating for
• 1:18:42
  the fact that they feel like America has been shot on and doesn't really have the control that it
• 1:18:47
  deserves. What happens to a world in which it's divided into spheres and presumably of the three
• 1:18:59
  big, I was going to say wealthy, but Russia and China, that's argued all about three big nuclear
• 1:19:06
  armed powers in their continents, the United States, Russia, and China. Presumably the idea is
• 1:19:15
  that each one of them controls their hemisphere. It sounds like a, you know, despite the bluster of
• 1:19:24
  Putin and Xi Jinping about America's operation in Venezuela, it does sound like a pretty good deal
• 1:19:31
  if you're sitting in Beijing or Moscow. The yanks get the Americas, Moscow gets Europe,
• 1:19:38
  Moscow is not technically in Europe, but you know, close enough. And Beijing gets Asia.
• 1:19:45
  So that's fine unless you happen to be, I don't know, Japan or Taiwan or Australia or Ukraine
• 1:19:59
  or Estonia. Like it's not a great world, if the principle is just, there are no rules
• 1:20:11
  apart from the rules that are set by the most powerful country in any given region.
• 1:20:17
  How do we know it's not a great world? Because that's the way the world has been for all of time
• 1:20:23
  until 1945. Yuval Noah Harari makes the point that it doesn't mean we're going to have
• 1:20:31
  World War III instantaneously. It's not be hysterical. What it means is we don't get to enjoy
• 1:20:37
  what we've enjoyed since 1945, which is peace and security without high cost of blood or treasure
• 1:20:46
  to keep using the cliche. Throughout most of time, when there were feudal societies, when there were
• 1:20:52
  empires through ancient Rome through, look over the course of history up until we built the United
• 1:20:58
  Nations and international rules and the Court of Justice and all these things in the 40s and 50s.
• 1:21:04
  Throughout all of time, countries have had to spend a large amount of their wealth on their own
• 1:21:08
  defense. Like military budgets, even the countries that have high military budgets at the moment
• 1:21:13
  like the United States, they're so pretty low as a share of the total wealth of the country.
• 1:21:18
  People used to have to spend 20 or 30% of the entire prosperity of a country on just making
• 1:21:23
  sure they didn't get steamrolled by the next guy. And they had to devote an enormous amount of
• 1:21:27
  their strategizing and their thinking, people in leadership positions, that is, to ensuring
• 1:21:33
  how could we either invade the other guy or make sure or bribe the other guy not to invade us
• 1:21:38
  or keep an eye on the other guy. Like there's always this constant jostling and we've been living
• 1:21:43
  in a fantasy land since the end of the World War II, where we basically haven't really had to
• 1:21:46
  think about it because we set up this delicate, it reminds me a bit of like, you know, like in a
• 1:21:51
  James Bond film or a mission impossible film where they're breaking into an art gallery and
• 1:21:55
  there's like red lasers all over the place in the room and they have to dance between the red
• 1:22:01
  lasers otherwise they're going to trigger an alarm. You know, trying to do, trying to get
• 1:22:06
  anything done on the international stage since 1945 legally has been like walking through a room
• 1:22:13
  full of red lasers like there are just so many tripwires to stop you from being able to do anything
• 1:22:17
  that upsets the apple cart or that disrupts anyone else's interests. It's like trying to get a
• 1:22:22
  development approval through the most deranged local government council in the world, just an
• 1:22:28
  endless amount of bureaucracy of people sitting in Brussels and New York and Geneva giving ticking
• 1:22:34
  off checkboxes about what you can and can't do. And that's great if you like the existing order
• 1:22:39
  which we do and we should because it served as well because we wrote it.
• 1:22:45
  It's not great if what you want is a world in which the powerful get to steamroll the powerless.
• 1:22:53
  And that's the might is right view that's the Stephen Miller view that's the raw power view
• 1:22:58
  that's the Hobbesian view that's the view of essentially that we should have a globe we should
• 1:23:03
  have an international order that is akin to a failed state. It's 15 year olds walking around
• 1:23:08
  with machine guns. You've all know Harari I didn't get to what he actually says he says
• 1:23:16
  you're basically just going to end up with a world which is where it's very very expensive and
• 1:23:20
  very time consuming to just stay safe. So it just means that medium sized countries and certainly
• 1:23:30
  smaller countries have to spend an enormous amount of money on their militaries have to constantly
• 1:23:36
  be worried and thinking about whether or not they're going to get it get invaded. And this also
• 1:23:41
  comes back to bite big big powers in the ass as well. The Economist magazine had a good editorial
• 1:23:45
  about how America's might makes right policy is going to come back to haunt the United States too.
• 1:23:52
  For a whole bunch of reasons not least of which is that you can't guarantee that you're always
• 1:23:56
  going to be the undisputed hegemon and you can't guarantee that you're always going to want to
• 1:24:01
  impose your will more than even if someone is less powerful than you they may just want the thing
• 1:24:05
  more. Russia wants Ukraine more than the Europeans and the Americans want Russia not to have
• 1:24:10
  Ukraine. China wants Taiwan more than we want it not to have Taiwan. So regardless of the
• 1:24:16
  imbalance of power regardless of who would win a hypothetical war the reality is America has all
• 1:24:20
  kinds of things that it wants to be going on in the world that it is not willing to spend its
• 1:24:25
  money and blood on achieving. So a rules based world order allows you to do that without
• 1:24:32
  constantly fighting everybody. It's not even it's not good for anyone certainly not good for small
• 1:24:36
  powers definitely not good for medium sized powers and also isn't good for world power for global
• 1:24:40
  powers. So the world becomes more poor and it becomes more paranoid if might makes right.
• 1:24:51
  On the other hand I don't want to leave you with the impression that I think that that I give
• 1:24:57
  too much credence to the idea that well if Trump can do it then all of a sudden on what basis
• 1:25:02
  can we object to Xi Jinping taking Taiwan or Putin taking Ukraine. It's true we don't have a leg
• 1:25:10
  to stand on in those cases if our moral theory of international relations is that big powers get to
• 1:25:18
  do what they want in their region which is a bit of a crude caricature of the Trump thesis
• 1:25:23
  because he thinks that you still need good grounds for it you still need standing for it
• 1:25:29
  which Putin didn't have because he was asked about this specifically and the New York Times
• 1:25:33
  interview and he was like well they went into but Putin went into Ukraine and Ukraine wasn't doing
• 1:25:37
  anything against Russia. Venezuela has been pushing drugs into our country and has been
• 1:25:41
  intentionally coming up with a whole bunch of ways in which it can undermine the United States
• 1:25:45
  and break our laws like Ukraine wasn't doing any of that. Nonetheless it's always going to be
• 1:25:50
  in the eye of the beholder so you know try convincing the Kremlin of that but to go back to my favorite
• 1:25:56
  Mr. Chen again on Twitter I liked this one I want it but by the way if you're wondering why I'm
• 1:26:01
  quoting Melissa twice she was going to come on the show I wanted her on the show talking about
• 1:26:07
  Venezuela she's off on some junket and doesn't have a good webcam or microphone but we'll get her
• 1:26:13
  on when once she's back back home she wrote the day right after all the day of the Venezuela
• 1:26:20
  operation the internationalist centrist boomer takes around and as expected they're furious about
• 1:26:25
  the quote unquote illegal action against Maduro and spouting on about international law saying this
• 1:26:32
  gives a green light to the likes of Putin and she to attack other countries with impunity.
• 1:26:38
  My sweet sweet summer child she writes one can simply just post the spider man pointing to
• 1:26:42
  spider man gift and be done with it because international law is kaput those who've been paying
• 1:26:48
  attention know that we've been at war for years just not the kind you read about in history textbooks
• 1:26:53
  these aren't industrial scale wars with armies but non-state actors locked in low-boil proxy
• 1:27:00
  struggles and hybrid campaigns that span the Middle East Africa and Asia these militias
• 1:27:06
  insurgent groups terrorist organizations and proxy forces operate with covert backing
• 1:27:12
  funding or direction from powerful states who provide them with plausible deniability
• 1:27:18
  this allows sponsoring states to pursue geopolitical goals territorial influence resource control
• 1:27:26
  or ideological dominance without risking direct confrontation or full-scale war and believe me
• 1:27:33
  they've been pursuing it the idea that Trump's actions will give Putin a pretext to annex territory
• 1:27:38
  l-o-l or g permission to say seize Taiwan is laughable they don't need permission and never did
• 1:27:44
  they act on their own accord and on their own timeline that resonated with me even as I disagree
• 1:27:51
  with some of that I think it's premature to say that international law is kaput and I also think
• 1:27:57
  somewhat cheeky to equate the kind of support that countries give to non-state actors to do their
• 1:28:04
  bidding with either morally or legally a country actually going into direct war you know there are
• 1:28:14
  as I say I'm going to miss hypocrisy there is a case for hypocrisy it's certainly better
• 1:28:20
  than out than just you know pretending you didn't fart and trying to minimize the amount that
• 1:28:25
  you fart on an airplane is better than just farting like a banshee the entire flight you know
• 1:28:33
  I can absolutely imagine someone coming along and saying oh this was all hypocrisy the whole the whole
• 1:28:37
  no farting on airplanes rule has been dead for a long time why I smelt a big egg bomb just the
• 1:28:45
  other day on my Delta Airlines flight from Charlotte yeah you probably did it happens all the time
• 1:28:53
  thoughts on planes it doesn't mean we should we should remove the general agreement that you don't
• 1:28:58
  fart on planes if you can avoid it and I'd rather you just lied about farting and did it really
• 1:29:04
  surreptitiously than just enormous loud thoughts the entire flight so you know nothing's perfect but
• 1:29:12
  don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good that being said I completely agree with Melissa that
• 1:29:18
  it's hard to imagine you know Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping not just doing what they want to do
• 1:29:25
  and calculating the consequences of I mean not that they would do what they want to do regardless
• 1:29:30
  of what the consequences are but rather that the consequences that they would be factoring in
• 1:29:35
  would be the thing that would determine whether or not they do what they want to do not whether it
• 1:29:39
  happens to abide by international law like they're going to break international law if they can get
• 1:29:44
  away with breaking international law and then not if they won't so if the Donald Trump rule is
• 1:29:49
  I can break international law but you can't and they believe that then they still won't do it
• 1:29:55
  you know if they believe that the threat is credible um where does this leave us I mean
• 1:30:05
  it reminds me a little bit of my feeling after the American bombing of
• 1:30:11
  Fordo and Natanz and disfahan in June in Iran where they tried to take out Iran's nuclear program
• 1:30:19
  incidentally as a quick aside you know we could have also talked for just as long as we've just
• 1:30:24
  talked about what's going in Iran which is fascinating and which is exactly what Israel had hoped
• 1:30:30
  would happen not to bring everything back to Israel Palestine but at the time that everybody was
• 1:30:35
  clutching their pearls and horrified at Israel's flagrant disregard for international law it
• 1:30:41
  comes back to it again international law whenever Western countries breach international law it's
• 1:30:45
  oh it's terrible how dare they do something against international law even after you know their
• 1:30:49
  adversaries have absolutely no consideration of international law whatsoever uh so you know when they
• 1:30:55
  did the whole remember the pages and the chezbollah and then the cell phones blew up and they
• 1:31:00
  had always incredible intelligence operations that had stretched back along before October 7th that
• 1:31:04
  they just pulled off in a quick succession killing the head of hezbollah killing you know the
• 1:31:09
  you know bombing of Qatar and the bombing of Iran convincing Trump to follow up with these huge
• 1:31:15
  American bombs unlike any other to try to set back the Iranian nuclear program in the hope
• 1:31:23
  ultimately was that as well as neutralizing any threat that Iran or at least at least putting it
• 1:31:31
  back by five or 10 years any threat that Iran or as Bala would oppose to Israel that they might
• 1:31:36
  actually show Iran to be a paper tiger which would encourage the Iranian street to be more courageous
• 1:31:43
  about standing up to the mullahs and the Ayatollas and possibly create a revolution in Iran
• 1:31:49
  so the hope now I suppose is that the Israelis and the Americans just allow the Iranians to make
• 1:31:55
  this their own revolution if if it can be such a thing rather than going into quote-unquote help
• 1:32:01
  which only tarnishes the you know the opponents of the regime as being stewed for the Jews or the
• 1:32:08
  Zionists or the Americans which you don't want to happen but after the right after the American
• 1:32:13
  bombing of those nuclear facilities in Iran when people asked me what I thought about it I would
• 1:32:19
  tend to say look I wish that we lived in a world in which Donald Trump wasn't the president of the
• 1:32:26
  United States and the Ayatollas weren't in charge of Iran and Netanyahu wasn't in charge of Israel
• 1:32:33
  and in which international law meant something and everybody got along and there was no Iranian
• 1:32:41
  nuclear program and nobody was being occupied or threatened and nobody was anti-Semitic
• 1:32:48
  we don't live in that world given that we live in the world that we live in and we live
• 1:32:55
  with a region in the Middle East that is extremely combustible wildly
• 1:33:02
  hateful towards not not only Jews but the entire West and incredibly harsh towards the people
• 1:33:10
  of Iran who deserve liberation I don't think it's I think it's a bit weird to be
• 1:33:19
  super upset about American bombs blowing up nuclear installations yes it's hypocritical why does
• 1:33:25
  Israel get them but Iran doesn't get them well it's because Israel is just sitting there doing
• 1:33:31
  nothing with them decade after decade after decade and you know there's a legitimate fear that
• 1:33:36
  the Mullahs would have a different idea about how to use them would certainly use them
• 1:33:43
  not whether or not they would actually detonate them they would certainly use them as a bargaining
• 1:33:48
  ship that gave them the ability to do all kinds of other conventional military activities in
• 1:33:52
  the area which Israel doesn't do Israel hasn't unilaterally invaded Jordan for no reason
• 1:34:01
  um for any reason so I feel the same way now like would it be better to live in a different world
• 1:34:09
  than the one that we live in yes it would be better much much better to live in the world that I
• 1:34:15
  thought that we lived in when I was growing up in the 1990s where Bill Clinton just played his
• 1:34:21
  saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show and we all laughed at Seinfeld doing a show about nothing
• 1:34:25
  um we don't live in that world unfortunately and I've become much more humble about my knowing
• 1:34:34
  about what is right and what is wrong geopolitically um I don't have enormous confidence that my
• 1:34:45
  stuffy old center left international liberal faith in the world order of post world war two
• 1:34:55
  is actually up to the task of managing a 21st century in which rogue actors and the Chinese Communist
• 1:35:02
  Party and re-energized Kremlin in an ailing uh former superpower are doing whatever the hell they
• 1:35:11
  want I'd like to believe that if we didn't have Donald Trump and if we adhered and redoubled our
• 1:35:17
  efforts to the international order we would be able to create a sufficient corum a sufficient kind
• 1:35:23
  of uh consensus globally to sideline to persistently sideline illiberal anti-democrats
• 1:35:31
  but I'm not as confident of that as I was 10 years ago and it doesn't strike me as obviously
• 1:35:38
  malicious or insane for the Trump worldview or in fact indeed the even say in a worldview that
• 1:35:46
  Melissa just articulated in that tweet to say you're living in fairyland if you think that you
• 1:35:53
  can bind yourself to rules that nobody else is playing by anymore and that the world is not
• 1:35:58
  just going to be taken by people who play a savvier game of four-dimensional chess the new are while
• 1:36:05
  tying your hands up with rules that were designed for another era um I think the world will be much
• 1:36:14
  poorer and more paranoid and bloodier uh if the Donald Trump vision of dividing it into regions of
• 1:36:26
  hegemony and influence persists but I don't see how it won't persist because I don't
• 1:36:34
  I'm not optimistic that the anti-Trump forces has have a sufficiently compelling or motivational
• 1:36:40
  or visceral articulation of what the world should look like to bring enough people along in their
• 1:36:45
  wake we're not really trying we're not doing a good job of articulating what liberal democracy
• 1:36:51
  can mean uh when it is not hitched at the wagon to sort of this raw power sense of just
• 1:36:59
  thumping triumphalism the little bit little dick big dick theory of American militarism
• 1:37:05
  if we had a large capacity and commitment to sustain uh the liberal democratic world order
• 1:37:13
  so large and so committed that it would occlude any attempt by um bad actors to bring it down
• 1:37:22
  then I would certainly be behind that and I am I don't want this to sound defeat us because I
• 1:37:26
  am still behind that project because I think it has a more than 50-50 chance of winning if
• 1:37:30
  enough of us get on board but I am less scornful and dismissive than I perhaps was of the
• 1:37:37
  countervailing militaristic view which is more of a real politic acknowledgement that bad actors
• 1:37:44
  are going to do bad things and there's nothing virtuous about refraining from getting in the
• 1:37:50
  mud and playing that game with them it reminds me a little bit of the uh you know the old story
• 1:37:57
  that I think I've told before in the podcast the I'm sure you know it the old iconic story about
• 1:38:02
  the the peasant farmer in china who is raising a son by himself in a little village in ancient times
• 1:38:11
  I don't know if he's in china it doesn't have to be there and he's they've got a bunch of horses
• 1:38:15
  and he's 15 year old son is riding the horse one day and gets bucked off and breaks his legs
• 1:38:21
  and the neighbors and all the townspeople come over and say oh it's so terrible what a terrible
• 1:38:26
  thing that your son has broken broken his leg is not going to be able to work on the farm and you
• 1:38:30
  going to get poor uh and the farmer goes well we'll see and then the next day the people from
• 1:38:37
  the army come over because they conscript consripting or able bodied young men to go and fight in a
• 1:38:41
  distant bloody war we're all going to get ground up uh by enemy fire and they don't take his son
• 1:38:47
  because his son has a bad leg so he can't go to war and get killed and all the townsfolk come
• 1:38:51
  over and they're like oh isn't that fabulous now your son isn't going to kill you can stay here
• 1:38:55
  it's great and the farmer just says we'll see and then the horse escapes and the prize horse escapes
• 1:39:02
  while the kid's leg is healing and runs away the favorite horse and the townspeople come over
• 1:39:07
  and goes it's horrible your horse is escaped I can't believe that you're not going to have your
• 1:39:13
  most productive horse to work on your farm and the time I go well see and the next day the horse
• 1:39:17
  comes back and he's got a whole bunch of great horsey friends now they've all of a sudden they've
• 1:39:21
  got five times as many horses they used to all the father all the farmers friends come over and go
• 1:39:24
  it's fabulous you've now got all these horses who can work your farm and the farmer just says
• 1:39:29
  we'll see and you can keep telling that story as long as you want to uh making up as many
• 1:39:36
  positive and negative things and every time the farmer can say we'll we'll see
• 1:39:43
  so happy 2026 uh will January of 2026 turn out to be the most consequential
• 1:39:50
  year for American foreign policy in a generation maybe the most consequential month in uh
• 1:40:01
  Trump's presidency will we all be okay will the liberal world order survive we'll see
• 1:40:11
  thanks take care yourselves see you next time