Latest / John’s Newsletter / Foreign Affairs Fifteen: Episode 19

Transcript

Foreign Affairs Fifteen: Episode 19 · John’s Newsletter

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the foreign affairs 15,
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: a quick taste of this week's foreign news and what it means for Americans.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: The podcast is free for Substack subscribers to john's newsletter
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: for based perspectives and later released on Apple, Spotify and other platforms.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning, john.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Good
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: morning, Simon.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to episode 19 of the foreign affairs 15.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: We rock straight into our irrelevant minute.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: John stump john.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of the last ditch?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, you
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: got me.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is a lesbian coffee shop in a town called Greenfield.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I do know, yeah, the lesbian coffee shop.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I would be shocked if this story hadn't made it over to Milan by now.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely fascinating story.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: It is one of two stories this week that I think are peak woke.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: It is like that sketch out of Monty Python's The Life of Brian,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: where it's like there are 15 different Jewish rebel groups
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: and they're all slightly different and competing with each other.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: And hating each other.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and eating each other.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're still wearing masks in 2026 and just squabbling over absolutely nothing.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's no pie left.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: This shop, this bar rather is losing its money.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bar, I think, and maybe a coffee show.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Who knows?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: But the most fascinating story.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the second one for me was the one
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: about how not painting your nails is now white supremacist and elitist,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: which is kind of the reductio ad absurdum of that philosophy.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think that I would just say what we used to say to my sister, as you know her.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Meanwhile, back on the planet Earth.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Bingo.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why it's the Irrelevant Minute.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I do suggest people check that article out.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's in the Boston Globe, I think.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: The Free Press did another piece about it.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Just absolutely funny.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well worth reading.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Antarctica, first continent of the seven in 14 minutes.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: China.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: China is preparing to build a sixth research station.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know they already had five.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: And under the 1959 treaty that I believe we signed along with Russia and China,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: you can't use military bases or have military bases,
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: weapons, you can't But of course, you can have peaceful equipment.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: And oddly enough, peaceful equipment can often be dual use.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Chinese are obviously doing what we do,
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: which is to put a base there from which they can surveil and dig
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: and do other things.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: But krill, I know you always want to talk about krill when we get to this continent.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: China and Norway are seeking a reduction in the areas that are off limits
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: for krill fishing because they want to catch more of it.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a pretty common theme for China that they are voracious when it comes
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: to fishing in Antarctica.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, I mean, it's neocolonialism.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of what they do in the South China Sea.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: They say this is peaceful.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: And the next thing you know,
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: they've constructed an island after lying to President Obama about doing so.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think we have to push back on these little things.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: They have a strategy generally of pushing,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: pushing,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: pushing,
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: not up to a casus belli,
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: but being aggressive, then not doing what they say, doing slightly more.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: We all shrug our shoulders and they get their way.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think we have to be very careful about this.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Their wants are voracious,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: but if they're violating,
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: if the treaty were to say five bases and they did six,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: which it doesn't, I would push back.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm for pushing back in little things so they can't slice the salami in the way they do.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: But as for krill, you know, I adore it.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So do the whales.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna come back to China in a minute, but we're gonna go to Africa and Ethiopia.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll start with a very, very short history lesson because I had to review my notes.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a country I knew a whole lot about.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: But the oldest hominid,
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: man-like person,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: I guess we could say, ever discovered was in Ethiopia about 4.2 million years ago.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: They arguably were the first Christian nation.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I know many countries fight over that prize.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Their most famous emperor,
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Haile Selassie,
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: also known as Rastafari,
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: inspired a religion that's still going, famously in Jamaica.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And after Selassie was overthrown,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: there were various governments ending up with something called the Derg,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: which was a socialist experiment that ended up starving about a million people,
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: basically,
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: through mismanagement, which is a common theme in history, as we both know.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Socialism does end up killing a lot of people,
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: even though they want to try it again in the West.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 2020,
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: there were going to be elections, but they were canceled due to COVID concerns.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's probably a pretext.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then a rebel group,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: I believe it's called the TPLF, held their own elections, fought the government.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Many more people died.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately, it looks like we might be back there again.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: The president, sorry, the prime minister, Ahmed Abiy, Basically wants the TPLF gone.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: He's been trying to do that all the time he's been in office,
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: but they are strong and well armed, and also have other groups.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: There are lots of fault lines in Ethiopia that will change sides,
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: you know, depending on what their immediate advantage is.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: So john,
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: I guess my question for you is,
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: with all that in mind,
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: is there a bandwidth left in the so called international community to care
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: about what could be yet another civil war in Ethiopia?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think not, and Abe is the problem.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Abe came in and did some peace deals with Eritrea,
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: and others people thought he'd be different.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: He actually won the Nobel Prize for Peace, solved this 30-year war.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: But the Tigrayans that you mentioned,
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: they're the guys who, before he came in, were the power behind the durg and things.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: They were the power behind the throne.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: And then he comes in from the rest of the country,
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: His tribal background is a plurality, not a majority.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: The Tigrayans are a minority, but they're well armed, as you said.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Typical African thing all put together.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: He then tries to go after them.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: He outmaneuvers them.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: They then declare independence.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: You have a civil war.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thousands die.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: He doesn't hold elections.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: He isn't the saintly figure we hoped for.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: And we're back to the same old civil war because you're putting together tribes,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: fighting for plunder,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: fighting for patrimony that really oughtn't to be linked together.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: The great original sin here is that Africa is not divided up tribally.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean,
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: every country has a similar story,
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: although they don't always end up in mass bloodshed.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, Nigeria, kind of work your way through the continent.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Morocco,
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: many countries have some kind of split fault line based on tribal lines
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: that go back, you know, way before time began.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I just get the impression,
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: just from reading the news and trying to find this story,
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: That there's not a whole lot of interest in the world and it may get pretty bad
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: before anyone from the outside tries to intervene.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: But let's move over to Asia and talk again about China.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And John, I haven't paid super close attention to this.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's just too much going on.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I had heard that there was an eight point deal And as far as I'm concerned,
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: it could be no nukes for Iran and seven pandas.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think that'd be a good deal.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe you can break it down.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: What came out of this G visit?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the two pandas in Atlanta are great.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's fantastic.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Things didn't get worse.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, let's start with that.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: Things didn't get worse.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: The trade deal that we had with them,
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: to not have a trade war, that now goes into the new year till January.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: So that's extended.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: That ceasefire is extended, which is nice.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody got along in terms of the atmospherics.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: We agreed we don't want to let a bunch of crazy guys in Silicon Valley regulate
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: while giving themselves a regulatory capture,
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: much like the railroad situation, by the way.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: And both sides are not for that.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: The Chinese because they're behind the Americans because they want to stay ahead.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a race between two there.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody agreed to disagree.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody was polite.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: But the good news is that really Xi doesn't seem likely to make any sort of move
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: on Taiwan, which is the ultimate question until after 2028.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: He just fired five of his seven generals and his Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: The new guys have to get in, put forward planning.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: This takes time.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: He's going to wade through.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Taiwan has an election in 2028.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: America has an election then.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it's an interregnum where it's a very uneasy calm, but at least it's a calm.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's what happened.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: The pandas are the highlights.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'll leave it there.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's an excellent summation.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Moving on to Europe, John.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I listened to your podcast about Germany.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: You talk about Germany a lot.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: The Merkel Awards for the worst, most feckless European diplomat.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Highly contested prize, let's face it.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it is every year.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's a fight to the finish.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: But we had three interesting elections.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: One in Saxony Anhalts.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of the Lander,
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: I believe,
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: where the Alternative for Deutschland,
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: AFD, won Almost 44% of the vote, not quite over the 50% mark.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And again,
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: in Mecklenburg,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Western Pomerania,
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: which is up by the Baltic,
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: where they used to launch the V1 and V2s,
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think, at the end of World War II, they got almost 40% there.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: But again, not quite enough to form a government without a coalition.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And finally,
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: in Berlin,
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: where you have Die Linke,
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: this basically communist party,
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: or at least socialist,
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: far left,
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: communist,
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: won by a Turkish German,
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: and Promising to govern with with some kind of nightmarish coalition and
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: and has some not brand new ideas about taking people's property,
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: it's very Mom Donnie esque,
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: lowering rents, and everybody wins, everybody gets happier.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: So john, in a nutshell, what did these three elections mean for Germany and Europe?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: The European Center is collapsing, which my firm's been working on for a decade.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't solve three basic problems,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: unfettered,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: unassimilated immigration,
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: you grow at under 2%,
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: and you have an energy policy that self-harms based on the Green New Deal,
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: you will fail over and over and over again.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: Merkel did all those things, and now everybody's left to pick up the consequences.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: She's Louis the 15th here, all right?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's coming.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: And every single election, they keep the AFD out.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't get 50, but it's winning the election.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody bands together in a totally incoherent coalition of the Social Democrats,
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: the Christian Democrats, everybody else.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: They accomplish nothing.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: They don't solve these three problems, are unpopular, fail, and the AFD do better.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: And this is happening over and over and over again throughout the continent.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: The same reason the national rally are rising in France.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: The Vox Party is rising in Spain.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Reform is rising in the UK.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's the same exact problem.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't solve your problems and you keep out other people who at least mention
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: the problems, they may not have answers, but at least they're mentioning them.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: You're not a racist to bring it up there.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: They will do better.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so this is just the next...
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Tea leaf being red here.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we've seen this for five years.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's a horse race other than that.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: But the AFD and the populace will keep doing well if somebody solves this.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Watch next year for France.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: The big one is the French presidential election in the spring.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: That could be the time that in one of these major countries,
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: France and Germany being the two major ones,
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: we actually have a populist winning the presidency.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that would be a game changer.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: But this is the thunder in the distance.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward to talking more about France.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: And just a final note on that one,
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: the CDU actually failed to get the 5% threshold,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: which they would need even to be in Parliament.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's the first time that that's happened in Atlanta since 1949.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: No, it goes back to Conrad Adenauer.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's how out these guys are.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: Since Conrad Adenauer, they've been in every Parliament, now they're out.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: People are screaming, either we listen to them or we don't.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: And john, this is gonna be tough for you.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking North America is our next continent.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna have to ask you to be brief on this.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna talk about the midterms, not the big, the big picture.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: I know you could go on all day on this.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Who's the scariest candidate?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start with that.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: Abdul Al Saeed of Michigan, the the senator from Gaza.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yes,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think trying to put lipstick on that pig is a bit like what they're trying to do
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: with Tallarico,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: where they're really putting a far,
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: far left socialist into a Democrat box in a state that typically doesn't like far,
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: far left, I mean, except for parts of Michigan.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, we'll have to see how it goes.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think the closest race is?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, weirdly enough, Iowa is incredibly close.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: If you watch Iowa for the Senate race, it's within about a point.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: Iowa should be a Republican state.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: This is a canary in a coal mine that might call the Democrats are going to win both
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: the House and the Senate's looking pretty good.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because if Iowa's in play and we're spending money in the Republican Party in Iowa,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: God help the Republican Party.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: And it's very, very close.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Texas, though, I agree.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Tallarico thinks God is non-binary in their six genders.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: He's winning.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's up in some polls, let's say.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: Let's not count out Paxton.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's winning.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: All right, we're going to move on to Oceania.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to go an ocean away from the midterms.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Australia is very unhappy that artificial intelligence,
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're going to call it that for now,
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: not superintelligence,
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: because apparently there is some kind of distinction and we haven't gotten That AI,
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: it was Sam Altman's OpenAI,
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: based out of San Francisco, hacked into their national health system.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that happened back in June, but they only found out about now.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think rather than talk about AI and are we scared of it and is it going
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: to doom the world, I think the interesting piece is who is liable for this?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because the legal system is typically what restrains corporate malfeasance in the United States.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Is OpenAI and all these other companies, are they liable for their...
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Machine or whatever it is that hacks into other people's data.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: They are.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: And part of why they're saying the world is coming to an end is they want regulation.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: They want liability taken away from them.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: In other words,
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: stop me doing what I'm doing,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: regulate me, and then lock in my position of dominance in the market.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: The railroads, again, in the 1890s.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: And no, of course they're liable.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: And as the head of Nvidia said, look, we don't need new regulation.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: We just have to hold them accountable for liability.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's why they're scared about this because they're saying,
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: stop me doing all the things I'm doing.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: I don't control my own product.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, then slow down.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was trying to figure out why you had all of these cutting edge companies
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: with trillions of dollars of value,
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: borrowing tons and tons of money,
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: all of a sudden saying, hey, government, stop me from growing, stop me from winning.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, wait a minute, there's something up.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you put the nail on the head there that they don't really want to be regulated.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: They want to be let off the hook for liability.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they want to be able to regulate themselves and capture the regulation agency
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: with their former employees.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what they often want to do is the NGO that they want to have run this,
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: Dario said in his thing,
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: like all of them are ex-employees,
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: like six of the nine are ex-employees and the other three work for the competitor.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is cartelization.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is not serious.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we shouldn't take these men children seriously.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: That is the conclusion I'm slowly coming to.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: Our last con in South America, Argentina.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And Javier Millet gave a speech at the United Nations General Assembly,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: the 81st Assembly this This year,
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: which probably not a whole lot of people watched,
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: but he's always an entertaining guy.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he's doing a bit of a general Galtieri here where he's throwing the Falklands up
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: as a national treasure that has to be taken back from the perfidious British Empire.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: The British, meanwhile, have allowed oil exploration off the Falklands.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the Falklands really don't have anything else.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think they have any.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: They probably have some minerals under the permafrost in there and fish.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: But if they do have oil, that's a big deal.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder,
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: honestly,
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: whether Britain today,
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: especially under this labor government that's happy to give away
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: the Chagos Islands plus a couple billion dollars and to be invaded daily by migrants
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: from all over the world,
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: if they really have not only the balls,
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: but the equipment to fight the Argentines off if they decided to take the Falklands.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: I've played war games on this at various points, and the answer is no.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Weakness begets weakness.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: This is a win rhetorically for Malay because the very people who normally he's
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: against, the statist, Peronist people, are all nationalistic.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so when he brings this, they're actually with him on this issue.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: What he's saying is incredibly popular in Argentina.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: So as his numbers settle into the 40s and he wants
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: to do all this tough economic stuff that we like,
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: To bang the nationalist drum as a winner and pulls people over to him.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: But would they, if there were an attack, do it?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think the British could do it, having hollowed out their military.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: And you know how sad I am to say this, Simon, you know how sad I am to say it.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think they have the stones,
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: as you're saying,
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: to do it anyway,
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: when they're busy doing apology tour after apology tour for the Chaco silence
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: and other things.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: So the weaker they are there, the more dangerous the situation becomes.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: It breaks my heart, but Burnham does not telegraph strength.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: When Thatcher said, this lady's not returning, you believed it because she had a spine.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And she did have a military left.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: There were people with experience in World War II still in 1982.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: God bless her.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Rest in peace.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Our red herring.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: My red herring is Nicole Hannah-Jones writing that article about how, hey, guess what?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: American schools suck.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Who knew?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody knew.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody knew.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: The teachers unions have made it impossible to have any kind of discipline
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: and accountability and grading in public schools in many cities and even out into
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: the countryside these days.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: So people are choosing charters and homeschools.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I call it a red herring because this is not news.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: No, it isn't.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: As long as the Democratic Party is utterly in hock to
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: a teachers union that's reactionary,
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: you're going to have bad schools and they're not going to want testing.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: So you see how bad the schools are and they're not going to want merit pay
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: because they're not working very hard.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a conspiracy between kids who don't want to learn,
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: their parents don't care as long as they get the grade and teachers who don't want
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: to teach.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's the Democratic Party.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody gets an A.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: And our landmine, we're definitely going to see this again and talk about this again.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: But a Royal Air Force base that is used by the US Air Force,
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: there was a terror plot,
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: it appears, four men who are definitely not ethnic English, let's say.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what their nationality is.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: I saw pictures of them arrested, three vans filled with like barrels full of something.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: It sure as hell looks like a bomb plot.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it sure seems like Iran might have been behind it.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the British police,
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: in a sign of how woke and insane they are,
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: is saying, let's not rush to judgment as to who these people are.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: When I've seen that picture, too, I'm rushing to judgment.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: My eyes work.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: And for them doing this,
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: they're merely encouraging,
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: yet again,
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: more plots because they're saying,
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: Norm Macdonald,
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: the great comedian,
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: said after 9-11,
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: isn't this terrible because people are now going to pick on Muslims?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: His joke being, isn't the point 9-11?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then let's worry about who did what and why.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: And in this case, again,
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: let's ignore what's right in front of us when the groups doing this are invariably
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: of one view from one place with one ideological view,
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: cultural view, ethnic view and religious view.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: And if we don't have the guts to defend our own civilization, we're the dodo bird.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: We're cuddling up to the people who are shooting us and the dodo went extinct.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly how I feel about it.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you imagine the Cold War,
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: we had allowed Russians to fly into Europe, get on little tiny boats in France.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: The French did nothing about it.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then when they got to the English coast,
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: instead of arresting them,
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: we said, hey, let's put you up in a military base or a hotel.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Here's some pocket money.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Here's some food.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Don't have to work.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: We'll take care of you until your asylum case gets approved almost inevitably in 10 years.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we're letting people from Iran,
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: they are letting people from Iran,
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Afghanistan,
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Syria, about whom they know absolutely nothing, come in on a daily basis.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Absolute suicide.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: And they're chastising us for noticing this.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: We'll leave it there, John.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see you next week.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to The Foreign Affairs 15.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: The podcast is a joint production of John C. Hulsman Enterprises and Base Perspectives LLC.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: We receive production support from the Ben Franklin Fellowship and
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: the Conservative Partnership Center.