Former Deputy National Security Advisor Answers Geopolitics Questions

WIRED

Former Deputy National Security Advisor of the United States Ben Rhodes joins WIRED for a super-sized edition of Tech Support to answer the internet's questions about the geopolitical climate and how we got here.

Transcript

00:00:00I'm Ben Rhodes.

00:00:01For eight years, I was a Deputy National Security Advisor for Barack Obama.

00:00:04I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.

00:00:05This is Geopolitics Support.

00:00:13Sean17henley asks, so in your opinion, just how close are we to World War III?

00:00:17I think we are uncomfortably close to it.

00:00:20First of all, look at where the current wars are that are being fought.

00:00:23So we already have a major land war in Europe, the biggest one that we've had since World

00:00:27War II with the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has killed probably hundreds of thousands

00:00:31of people and has not ended.

00:00:33We've already seen a major conflict in the Middle East with the Gaza War and Israel taking action

00:00:38in seven or eight countries.

00:00:40And we see this state of war between the United States and Iran that could lead to state collapse

00:00:46in Iran, could lead to major refugee flows.

00:00:48So we're two thirds of the way there if you look at the map of World War II.

00:00:53And now the third piece of this could be the Taiwan Strait.

00:00:56China has made very clear that it doesn't see Taiwan as separate from China.

00:01:01They want to reunify Taiwan no matter what they have to do.

00:01:04And the Taiwanese increasingly do not want to be a part of China.

00:01:07If China were to try to militarily take control of Taiwan, then we'd really be in a situation

00:01:12where that entire map of World War II, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, suddenly

00:01:18you do have conflict along those fault lines.

00:01:21I think the bigger reason that I'm worried about this is look at the collection of people

00:01:25who are in charge of the most powerful countries in the world today.

00:01:29Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China.

00:01:34You can throw in Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.

00:01:38These are older men.

00:01:40They are nationalists.

00:01:41They are strong men.

00:01:42These are the kind of leaders that can get into conflict.

00:01:45Now, you might say it seems like Trump wants to avoid the war, doesn't seem like the Chinese

00:01:49are looking for a world war, but that's always the case.

00:01:51The problem is when you start to have territorial expansion again, a Russia trying to take land

00:01:57in Ukraine, a United States that may try to take land in Greenland or other places, a China

00:02:02that may try to take land in Taiwan, those big powers, they can bump into each other.

00:02:07And given the fact that increasingly those countries are not playing by the rules that were set after

00:02:12World War II to prevent another world war, that's why we set up the United Nations.

00:02:17That's why we set up international laws.

00:02:19As those rules and laws and institutions are being ignored, I just think we are living with

00:02:24way too much risk of the potential for another world war, a conflict among the great powers.

00:02:30Ninzaverse asks, what if China wins the AI race?

00:02:34I think it's a bit of a false question because Chinese are going to get there anyway.

00:02:37So, whether a large language model in the US is the first to get to some AGI, it's not

00:02:45like the Chinese aren't going to be there right away too.

00:02:48I think there's some security people who think there's benefits in getting there first or

00:02:52at least maintaining that lead.

00:02:53Because if they do, they could pose cyber risks to RAI, there could be a window of opportunity

00:02:59for the Chinese.

00:03:00But put that aside, if you take the premise that we're all getting there, it's actually

00:03:04a race to figure out also whose technology does the rest of the world use.

00:03:09And I think this has been an under-discussed part of the AI race.

00:03:13We know that the US and China are the superpowers, but it's going to matter a lot whether Africa

00:03:19and Latin America and Southeast Asia and Europe decide to use American or Chinese AI.

00:03:25If you will remember, one of the grievances that Trump had against China in the first Trump

00:03:30term was that most of the world was starting to use Huawei, Chinese telecommunications.

00:03:36Huawei telecommunications is nothing compared to AI.

00:03:38If most of the world ends up running on Chinese AI, that will give the Chinese extraordinary

00:03:43leverage over those countries.

00:03:45Their economies will depend on Chinese technology that could be shut off.

00:03:50There's obviously all kinds of ways that the Chinese can, or the Americans for that reason,

00:03:55can use artificial intelligence technologies to kind of spy and create dependencies on

00:04:00these other countries.

00:04:01So now you're starting to see the AI race become about who is going to win the domination of

00:04:07this technology in other spaces.

00:04:09And Trump is starting in the Gulf, right?

00:04:11By selling extraordinary amounts of computing power, essentially, from US companies to the

00:04:16United Arab Emirates and to Saudi Arabia.

00:04:18I think that this is complicated, though, because the United States often likes to think of this

00:04:23in terms of LLMs, right?

00:04:25Like your, if you're American, your experience of AI to date might be with an agent, a chat

00:04:31GPT or a Claude.

00:04:32And sometimes we can get awfully dismissive of Chinese AI by saying, well, if you put into

00:04:37the Chinese model, DeepSeek or something, you say, what happened in Tiananmen Square?

00:04:42It doesn't give you the answer.

00:04:43It's censored.

00:04:44It's less good.

00:04:45I remember meeting with somebody, a Chinese investor, been kind of state-backed investor

00:04:51in AI who kind of looked at me and he's like, you think we're building these technologies

00:04:56to answer the question of what happened in Tiananmen Square?

00:04:58We are building AI to create industrial efficiency.

00:05:02We want to dominate robotics.

00:05:04One of the reasons the Chinese are focused on AI so much is that they had a one-child policy

00:05:08for a long time.

00:05:09Their population is getting much, much older and they want to continue to be able to have

00:05:15extraordinary economic and industrial output.

00:05:17What do you need for that?

00:05:18You need incredible efficiencies to produce more.

00:05:21You need robots to take the roles of younger human beings because there are less of them

00:05:26in China.

00:05:26And he said to me, what do you think most of the rest of the countries in the world want?

00:05:31They want robots.

00:05:32They want industrial efficiency.

00:05:33They want economic growth.

00:05:35One of the concerns I have is that the American AI is designed for what American economy is,

00:05:42which is services, right, or creative economies or white collar economies.

00:05:47The Chinese AI is going to have these other uses that might be more attractive to other

00:05:52countries.

00:05:53And so it's not necessarily about who gets to AGI, artificial general intelligence, first.

00:05:58The question is, whose AI is the world going to run on?

00:06:02And right now, I actually think the Chinese are in the lead on that because they are developing

00:06:07AI technologies that are highly relevant to developing countries.

00:06:11And if those developing countries, as they have in other cases, look to China because their

00:06:17technology is cheaper and more useful to them, those countries are going to have massive dependencies

00:06:23on China going forward.

00:06:25Poppybell123 asks, why can Iran and the USA not make amends after 40 years?

00:06:30It's a question weighing on all of us right now.

00:06:32You know, I think there are a couple of reasons.

00:06:35At core, this is fundamental to the kind of identity and security of both countries in

00:06:39some ways.

00:06:40The Iranian revolution happened in 1979 to oust a US-backed autocratic government, the

00:06:47Shah of Iran.

00:06:48And so from the get go, the US was seen as the kind of power behind the autocratic leader

00:06:55that was ousted by the Iranian revolution.

00:06:57So the Iranian revolution wasn't just against the Shah, it was against the United States.

00:07:01It was against US domination.

00:07:03So it was in the DNA of the Iranian revolution to be against America.

00:07:07And you saw as that evolved into the Islamic Republic of Iran that lead to death to America

00:07:13chance, death to Israel chance, this kind of idea that this wasn't just an Islamic

00:07:18republic, an Islamic state.

00:07:20It was also a country that was at the vanguard of the fight against Israel in the Middle East

00:07:26and the fight against the United States and the world.

00:07:29That kind of infused the Iranian government from the beginning.

00:07:33And then it kind of moved out into groups like Hezbollah, for instance, that the Iranian

00:07:38government backed for many years and continues to back in Lebanon.

00:07:41On the other hand, the United States tends to not take humiliation well.

00:07:48If you look at the countries that have kind of humiliated us, we never forget it.

00:07:53So we have a Cuban revolution under Fidel Castro in the late 1950s against a US-backed corrupt autocrat.

00:08:02And then you have the US utterly humiliated in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to

00:08:09get rid of the Cuban government.

00:08:11Ever since, we have been pretty fixated on Cuba well beyond any threat it poses to us, right?

00:08:18I mean, maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis it did.

00:08:21But ever since, you know, we still have an embargo on Cuba, I think, because we're still

00:08:24pissed about what happened.

00:08:26And the same thing is true with Iran.

00:08:27We were humiliated in 1979.

00:08:29We were humiliated when they took our embassy personnel hostage inside of Iran.

00:08:35That was a traumatic event for Americans.

00:08:37If you fast forward, too, there's been this kind of war of sorts between the United States

00:08:42and Iran over the years, often through Iranian proxies.

00:08:44So in Lebanon, the US Marine barracks was bombed in the 80s, you know, killing hundreds of US

00:08:51Marines by Hezbollah, you know, an ally of the Iranians.

00:08:54That, too, gets filed away in the American memory.

00:08:57After the Iraq War, when the United States invaded Iraq and removed, ironically, Iran's

00:09:03biggest adversary, Saddam Hussein, you had a lot of US troops who were killed by kind

00:09:07of Iranian-backed militias inside of Iraq.

00:09:10So you've had kind of an ongoing state of conflict, really, between the United States

00:09:14and Iran.

00:09:15Add to that decades of US sanctions on Iran, which have devastated their economy and harmed

00:09:21their government.

00:09:21At the end of the day, I think what we've also seen is, look, in the Obama years, we

00:09:25tried to at least restart diplomacy.

00:09:27We had a nuclear deal.

00:09:28That wasn't meant to solve all the problems, it was just meant to solve the nuclear problem.

00:09:32But I felt at that time, and certainly experienced, there are political constituencies in the United

00:09:38States that are just dead set against any kind of diplomatic rapprochement with any piece

00:09:44of the Iranian system, even if it's just trying to get rid of a nuclear weapon.

00:09:48Again, they're committed to regime change.

00:09:50As long as there's an Islamic Republic government in Iran, they are a threat to us, they must

00:09:55be removed.

00:09:56That is a mindset that is deeply embedded in aspects of American politics and government.

00:10:01And right now, under Donald Trump, that is a mindset that is very prevalent in his administration.

00:10:05By the way, for understandable reasons too, a lot of Iranian Americans who had to leave

00:10:11Iran after the revolution, who've seen their family suffer under the Islamic revolution,

00:10:15they would also like to see that regime go.

00:10:17And this kind of obviously then plays into the mindset in Tehran that the US is our enemy,

00:10:22our existential enemy, and therefore we can't make compromise.

00:10:25So we've kind of been locked in this conflict spiral with the Iranians.

00:10:29And at any time, that can lead to a pretty explosive war, because while you're talking

00:10:34about a country of 90 million people, you're talking about a country with significant military

00:10:38capabilities, we decapitated that regime, took out its leaders.

00:10:43The people who are left with the most weapons are the hardest line people, the Revolutionary

00:10:47Guard inside of Iran.

00:10:48You've got ethnic minorities instead of Iran.

00:10:51So you've got a recipe that could lead, could, to significant conflict instability, refugee

00:10:56flows in the event of a regime change war.

00:11:00Dyer Report asks, when have sanctions ever, ever produced the desired outcome?

00:11:06Name one single time ever.

00:11:08I love this question, Dyer Report.

00:11:10I agree with you.

00:11:11I do not think sanctions work.

00:11:13If you look at the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world by the United States,

00:11:19Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, how did that go?

00:11:24Did we change the behavior of those countries?

00:11:26I'll just take Cuba, which I worked on.

00:11:28I helped to negotiate the normalization of relations with Cuba and the Obama administration.

00:11:32Obviously, Donald Trump is now trying to squeeze that government out of existence.

00:11:36But the reality is, we had the strongest sanctions possible, an embargo on Cuba since the 1960s.

00:11:43All it did is entrench the Cuban government in power.

00:11:46If you cut them off from the rest of the world, you're not going to get change in those countries.

00:11:51And in fact, you're going to hurt the very people you claim to help.

00:11:54We said we're trying to help the Cuban people in their fight for freedom and democracy.

00:11:58Well, we have done nothing but make the lives of the Cuban people miserable with our sanctions for decades.

00:12:03We said we were going to change Russia's behavior.

00:12:06Putin has only become more aggressive the more he's been sanctioned.

00:12:10I think sanctions are sometimes a tool to punish people.

00:12:13Sometimes it makes people in Washington feel like they're doing something.

00:12:16But we just don't have a lot of evidence that they work in changing the behavior of certain kinds of

00:12:21leaders and governments.

00:12:23And in fact, they have a huge cost.

00:12:25The rest of the world is getting pretty sick of the United States going around taking advantage of the fact

00:12:30that we control the world financial system through the dollar and just smacking these sanctions on people.

00:12:35I think you can say, of course, that the United States doesn't have to engage in normal trade with governments

00:12:40that we find to be reprehensible or some kind of national security threat.

00:12:44But that said, the kind of sanctions that the U.S. puts in place often ends up punishing the populations

00:12:50of those countries more than the governments.

00:12:53Because what we do is we don't just say that we're not going to trade with you, Iran.

00:12:56We say that we're going to punish other countries that trade with you.

00:12:59Well, that leads to fuel shortages.

00:13:00That leads to currency problems in those countries.

00:13:03That really hurts the people in those countries.

00:13:05Guess who figures out the way around that?

00:13:08The governments themselves.

00:13:09If you look inside of Iran, for instance, there's an entire black market economy that developed because of the sanctions

00:13:15on Iran.

00:13:15If you're just a shopkeeper, if you're just a small business person, you can't evade sanctions.

00:13:20But if you're the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard, well, you find ways to do it.

00:13:25So I often think sometimes we end up empowering the people inside of the countries that we're actually trying to

00:13:31undercut with sanctions.

00:13:32Okay, Ramanex asks, when and how did the word globalist become a negative, insulting term?

00:13:37I think when we hear the word globalist, we think of essentially political, security, financial elites who've been kind of

00:13:44at the wheel of globalization since the end of the Cold War.

00:13:47I think this became a negative, insulting term really after the global financial crisis in 2008.

00:13:52You'd already had the body blow to the world order of the Iraq invasion, which made the security elites look

00:13:58like maybe they didn't know what they were doing.

00:13:59And then you have the bottom fall out of the global economy in a way that harms working and middle

00:14:04class people all over the world.

00:14:06And I think at that time, you really started to see this kind of building resentment of the kind of

00:14:11people that jet off to Davos or international conferences,

00:14:14the kind of people who are making decisions as if they know better than people around the world about what's

00:14:20in their interests.

00:14:20And you've really seen this take off over the course of the last 15 years or so, where the resentments

00:14:26of essentially the globalist class has fueled a lot of populism, a lot of anger.

00:14:30So we are living through a period where that system is being broken apart, but we don't really know what's

00:14:36going to take its place.

00:14:37Now, of course, the solution to those who don't like globalism is increasingly nationalism.

00:14:44And so we see, whether it's in the United States or in China or certainly in Russia and increasingly in

00:14:49European countries and other places, Turkey, Israel,

00:14:52this rising nationalism, essentially a focus on sovereignty.

00:14:56We are going to do what we want to do in this country.

00:14:58We don't want to be a part of free trade agreements.

00:15:00We want to have secure borders.

00:15:01We don't want to let people in.

00:15:03We don't want to be stakeholders in some international system of rules that constrain us.

00:15:08That appeals to some people in the short term.

00:15:10It feels good to control your own country, make your own decisions.

00:15:13But the whole reason that we had systems that were more globalist to begin with is nationalism led to two

00:15:19pretty big world wars in the 20th century.

00:15:21And so this is kind of really the tension, the danger of nationalism and where it can lead, which is

00:15:27often conflict,

00:15:27or the danger of globalism, which is these out-of-touch elites who seem like they're making decisions that are

00:15:33not in the interests of people around the world.

00:15:38TankSubject6469 asks, why the world is shifting towards right-wing control?

00:15:42If I had to give a shorthand answer, I'd say this.

00:15:46You have already, I think, by the time, say, Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there's an encroachment that comes

00:15:53with globalization on their traditional identities.

00:15:55Suddenly, there are immigrants from other countries.

00:15:58Or in some places, suddenly, the global culture is just becoming unified in a way that makes me uncomfortable, right?

00:16:06It's American pop culture that's coming into my country.

00:16:08Or in the United States, there's a view in some more traditional circles that there's this kind of overly liberal

00:16:15culture that is encroaching on my identity.

00:16:18So I think people are already uncomfortable with globalization.

00:16:21But the basic bargain was, well, standards of living are getting better.

00:16:25This is ultimately a net positive for me.

00:16:27Then you have the financial crisis.

00:16:29And all of a sudden, it feels like, wait a second, wait a second.

00:16:32None of this is working for me.

00:16:34Globalization isn't working on me.

00:16:36I'm losing something about my traditional identity.

00:16:38There are these people moving into my country.

00:16:40And then meanwhile, all of a sudden, my standard of living is not getting better.

00:16:44And in fact, what I see is exploding inequality inside my country.

00:16:48I see a bunch of winners at the top.

00:16:50And I see a bunch of people getting screwed down here in the middle and the bottom.

00:16:54What's interesting is even though there's a kind of economic critique that I would make as someone who is to

00:17:01the left of the center on these things,

00:17:03the critique being that you cut taxes, you cut regulations, you get the exploding inequality and reckless behavior that leads

00:17:09to the financial crisis.

00:17:10The backlash to globalization was captured by right-wing populists, by right-wing nationalists.

00:17:17I think the reason is that they're offering the kind of oldest form of politics there is, an us versus

00:17:23them politics.

00:17:24It's us, the real Americans, us, the real Hungarians, us, the real Russians, versus them, the liberal elites, the globalists,

00:17:34the migrants, right?

00:17:36Whatever class of people that you want to stigmatize.

00:17:38And I think what we've seen is almost kind of a set of dominoes around the world here because this

00:17:43is not limited to the United States.

00:17:45And I think it's important for Americans to recognize this is happening all over the world.

00:17:49In Brazil and Argentina, in the United States, in Hungary, in Russia, in India, where Narendra Modi is very much

00:17:56a Hindu nationalist,

00:17:58in Turkey under Tayyip Erdogan, in Israel under Bibi Netanyahu, in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte.

00:18:04Again, these are very different countries in very different parts of the world.

00:18:07What they have in common is people unsettled by the disruptions in the world

00:18:12turning to the most familiar form of politics there is, nationalism, us versus them.

00:18:19Let's pull up the drawbridge.

00:18:21I think those of us who are on the center left to the left have made mistakes, a lot of

00:18:26mistakes, in our politics over the course of the last 15 to 20 years.

00:18:30Because essentially, we looked at these problems and we tried to kind of solve the problem almost in a technocratic

00:18:37way, right?

00:18:38What can we do to arrest the collapse of the global economy?

00:18:42You know, what can we do to deliver slightly better benefits for people from governments?

00:18:46But we weren't speaking to this anger that people felt against elites.

00:18:51We weren't speaking to the need that people had to belong to something bigger than themselves.

00:18:57And what ended up happening is that the Democrats in the United States or social Democrats, those are the center

00:19:04left parties in Europe,

00:19:05or other types of more liberal parties around the world, because we're people that want to follow rules, because we're

00:19:11people who want strong institutions,

00:19:13even though we might have had a lot of problems with the way globalization was run, we allowed ourselves to

00:19:19be cast as the people that were defending these very systems and institutions that people were sick of.

00:19:26SidewinderISR asks, what are some potential, somewhat realistic solutions to the current state in Gaza?

00:19:33Tragically, I don't really see that many potential solutions, but let's go through some of the possibilities.

00:19:39If you listen to the right wing of the already right wing Israeli government, their solution is pretty clear.

00:19:47They want to control Gaza. They want to have Israeli settlers move in.

00:19:52They want to move the Palestinians out, and they essentially want to take the land as part of greater Israel.

00:19:57This is not my view. This is what politicians like the finance minister of Israel, Smotrich, say.

00:20:02And already Israel has essentially control over 50% of the Gaza Strip, even under the agreement that they reached

00:20:10with President Trump.

00:20:10So one possible scenario is Israeli control, which would be very messy, because where are those Palestinians going to go?

00:20:19Are they going to be forced out? Are they going to be kind of put into ever-shrinking pieces of

00:20:24land?

00:20:24Unfortunately, I think that's quite a likely scenario, is that Palestinians are pushed into smaller and smaller parts of Gaza,

00:20:31in the same way that we've seen them pushed into smaller and smaller parts of the West Bank.

00:20:34Another solution is this kind of redevelopment of Gaza that takes place in stages.

00:20:40And under the Trump plan, you essentially have some multinational force coming in to provide security after Hamas is demilitarized.

00:20:50And then we skip kind of pretty quickly to the Jared Kushner presentation of what looks like Dubai on the

00:20:57waterfront there in Gaza.

00:20:58I mean, this, I think, is nuts. And I don't see any way this happens, certainly in the next ten

00:21:05years,

00:21:05because there's a lot of steps you have to get through here.

00:21:08You have to clear tens of thousands of unexploded bombs that are buried in the rubble.

00:21:13You have to clear the rubble, right? You have to gather the dead, right?

00:21:17You have to do a tremendous amount of work just to clean up the destruction of the Gaza Strip that's

00:21:21taken place.

00:21:21Hamas has not demilitarized. I think it's very hard, you know, if not impossible,

00:21:28for a peacekeeping force to be asked to kind of go into a place where Hamas is still the kind

00:21:33of controlling power.

00:21:34There's some elements of it that make sense. Yes, you would want Hamas to demilitarize.

00:21:38You would want a kind of multinational peacekeeping force to come in.

00:21:41But I see some real problems with that course of action as well.

00:21:45I think the best solution to the problem is if you were to put it in a broader context of

00:21:52a Palestinian-Israeli settlement of some kind,

00:21:56where we have a different kind of Palestinian leadership that is negotiated as a part of a Palestinian state

00:22:03that is going to be in Gaza and the West Bank.

00:22:06That creates greater incentive for Hamas to go away as a political authority inside of Gaza,

00:22:11creates a lot more incentive for the Arab states who don't want to necessarily be seen as kind of weeding

00:22:18partners

00:22:19to ethnically cleansing Gaza or putting an end to the idea of a Palestinian state.

00:22:23They all of a sudden have a lot more reason to kick in money and to kick in troops for

00:22:27some kind of multinational force.

00:22:29The problem is there's no indication from Israel that they're interested in any kind of resolution of the Palestinians whatsoever.

00:22:34L. Trent 2021 asks,

00:22:37Why is Israel building settlements in the West Bank?

00:22:39I think the short answer from my perspective is that Israel wants to control and ultimately annex the West Bank.

00:22:44And annex essentially means you formally absorbing that territory into your sovereign borders

00:22:49so that the West Bank would become fully a part of sovereign Israel.

00:22:53But we should rewind the tape.

00:22:55Some people may disagree with that and it's necessary to go through a little bit of the history.

00:22:58So, first of all, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel had been attacked by its Arab neighbors,

00:23:05Israel conquered all the land from the Jordan River to the sea here.

00:23:09That included East Jerusalem and that included the West Bank.

00:23:13Between 1967 and the Oslo Accords in 1993, you started to see Israeli settlements being constructed inside of the West

00:23:20Bank.

00:23:21Now, under international law, the West Bank is occupied territory.

00:23:25It is Palestinian territory that Israel formally occupies.

00:23:29You're not supposed to build settlements.

00:23:31Essentially, you're not supposed to move into occupied territories and claim it as your own.

00:23:36But that's what Israel started to do over time.

00:23:39Now, with all that history, what we've seen as Israel's moved further and further away from the Oslo Accords and

00:23:45further to the right,

00:23:46let's say particularly since the election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009, is a rapid growth in the Israeli settlements.

00:23:53And all of a sudden, the Israeli settlements are making the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank

00:23:58impossible.

00:23:59It's kind of a network of checkpoints and security barriers.

00:24:03And all of a sudden, the West Bank is kind of being sliced and diced.

00:24:06Palestinian homes and structures are being demolished to make way for Israeli settlements.

00:24:11Every time you have Israeli settlements set up, they get the protection of Israeli security forces.

00:24:16And Palestinians are kind of pushed into kind of shrinking territories where they have second-class citizenship.

00:24:21And I think in the coming years, we're going to see either a de facto or an outright effort to

00:24:26annex the territory.

00:24:27Then the question comes, what happens to the Palestinians who are still living in the West Bank?

00:24:31Do they either continue to live under a form of military occupation, kind of second-class citizenship, with far less

00:24:38rights, far less freedom of movement?

00:24:40Or are they going to get increasingly pushed out into Jordan or other surrounding countries?

00:24:45Sveithan asks, why do people use the term genocide to describe Israeli actions in Gaza?

00:24:50Obviously, it's a very charged question.

00:24:52And I understand the very profound emotions on both sides of this question.

00:24:58I say that as someone who has been sympathetic to those who have called this a genocide for reasons that

00:25:04I'll talk about.

00:25:05But I also say that as someone who comes from a Jewish family that lost a lot of people in

00:25:10the Holocaust.

00:25:10So, very complex.

00:25:13But if we're just going to take the practical question of, is this a genocide?

00:25:17First of all, the definition of genocide is an effort to destroy a people in whole or in part.

00:25:23That's the legal definition.

00:25:25And this is important.

00:25:27It's not about the number of people that you killed.

00:25:30It's about whether you have an intention to destroy a people.

00:25:34And it doesn't have to be completely destroy them, but to destroy a part.

00:25:37And to give some examples in recent history.

00:25:40For instance, the United States determined that there was genocide in Darfur when certain militias were going in and targeting

00:25:46people for destruction there.

00:25:48The United States also said there was a genocide taking place in Xinjiang province in China, where the Uyghurs were

00:25:55not even really being killed.

00:25:56Their identity was being erased because they're basically being put forcibly in these kind of re-education camps.

00:26:02So, I say that to give the context that it doesn't just mean that you're trying to kill every single

00:26:07person.

00:26:08Are you trying to eliminate a people in whole or in part?

00:26:11You've had a significant number of organizations say that a genocide has taken place in Gaza.

00:26:18This includes a United Nations Commission of Inquiry.

00:26:21This includes human rights organizations, including Israeli human rights organizations.

00:26:25This includes a significant number of genocide scholars.

00:26:28Why have they said this?

00:26:29First of all, they point to some of the statements made by Israeli leaders themselves.

00:26:35And so, after October 7th and at the beginning and throughout Israeli military operations, you have had statements that were

00:26:45clearly about more than destroying Hamas.

00:26:48There were statements in which, essentially, Gaza was put under siege and we're going to cut off all food and

00:26:54water and power into Gaza.

00:26:57Essentially, a form of collective punishment on all the people of Gaza.

00:27:00There have been imagery that talked about, essentially, the total destruction of Gaza City or parts of the Gaza Strip.

00:27:08Then, there's the conduct of the military operation itself.

00:27:12And we've all seen the pictures of whole apartment blocks being leveled.

00:27:17And actually, if you look at the Gaza Strip today, there's really almost nothing left standing.

00:27:22Israel, even if they were targeting, say, Hamas commanders, they were not taking any care to avoid killing significant numbers

00:27:30of civilians.

00:27:31And the death count in Gaza is currently around 70,000.

00:27:34That encompasses Hamas fighters and civilians.

00:27:36A lot of independent observers believe that death count is far higher.

00:27:39But then there's also this question of, are they trying to destroy the Palestinian people?

00:27:43And there, actually, I would say, at least aspects of the Netanyahu government are pretty clear they want to destroy

00:27:51the Palestinian people.

00:27:52They say on a regular basis that there's never going to be anything such as a Palestinian state.

00:27:56Or you've had Israeli politicians say, there's not really Palestinians.

00:27:59They're just Arabs who happen to live here and they should leave, right?

00:28:02And so if you take the combination of these things, the state intent that goes far beyond just destroying Hamas

00:28:09but also is about collective punishment of the people of Gaza.

00:28:12The military operation that has killed an extraordinary number of civilians.

00:28:16And, by the way, that has continued to restrict basic goods getting into Gaza, right?

00:28:22Like food and water getting in and anywhere near the levels that are necessary.

00:28:26Take the famine-like conditions that go far beyond just the violence of bombs.

00:28:31But, again, people starving because of those restrictions of food getting into Gaza.

00:28:36And then the kind of political objective on the Israeli right to essentially kind of eliminate the Palestinians as a

00:28:42category of people with a right to sovereign territory.

00:28:46And so I think sometimes this obviously gets much more complicated because, particularly on the further right side of Israeli

00:28:53politics, it's a very religious point of view.

00:28:56This is ours. It's promised us by God.

00:28:59That kind of runs up against international law and the fact that there are millions of Palestinians that live between

00:29:06the river and the sea.

00:29:07In the eyes of a lot of organizations, that adds up to a genocide.

00:29:12Now, there are other people who will say that's not the case.

00:29:15This was a legitimate war of self-defense.

00:29:17Hamas started this latest war with its attacks on October 7th.

00:29:21I would certainly say, on the latter point, yes, Hamas started this latest round of violence with an abhorrent, grotesque

00:29:28attack on Israeli civilians on October 7th.

00:29:30That doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever you want to do in response.

00:29:34You're supposed to follow laws of war that were set up after World War II to prevent genocide, to prevent

00:29:40mass atrocities, to prevent crimes against humanity.

00:29:43So, at a minimum, I feel very comfortable in saying Israel has not followed those laws of war.

00:29:49I think it's quite clear that war crimes are committed, that we saw violence that went far beyond kind of

00:29:55legitimate self-defense.

00:29:56I think this genocide question is obviously the most significant war crime that can be committed and the most fraught

00:30:03issue that there is.

00:30:05And frankly, this isn't over yet.

00:30:08If Israel wants to demonstrate that they're not trying to eliminate the Palestinian people, well, one way is to have

00:30:14the Palestinian people have the legitimate right to self-determination.

00:30:16So, cynical ex-idealist points out that some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden.

00:30:24If you read Osama bin Laden's fatwas, his writings, if you watch some of his videos, his critiques of American

00:30:33society and foreign policy have some credence.

00:30:36He talks about imperialism, he talks about climate change, in part because he was trying to appeal to young people

00:30:42in the United States and Europe.

00:30:44has hit upon arguments, you know, that some people agree with.

00:30:48I also believe it's the case that, look, if you're taking stock of the last 25 years, our reaction to

00:30:579-11 looks over the top, if not crazy.

00:31:00You know, we've invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, we've gone into Somalia and Yemen and Libya, military operations all across the Middle

00:31:08East and North Africa and Asia.

00:31:10We've spent trillions of dollars. Is it better?

00:31:13So, I think it's a combination of young people kind of looking at bin Laden's words more than his actions,

00:31:20and come back to that,

00:31:21and young people taking stock of this war on terror seems like it was nuts, you know?

00:31:26And concluding, well, maybe this bin Laden guy had some points.

00:31:29Now, I think the problem with this is, if you look at bin Laden's actions, murdering thousands of people is

00:31:36completely unjustified.

00:31:38I think people are separating words from what bin Laden actually did.

00:31:42I also think they're ignoring the fact that some of what bin Laden said was intentionally designed to appeal to

00:31:49audiences in the West.

00:31:50If you look at his words inside of Afghanistan, you know, he supported the Taliban, which completely represses women, gives

00:31:58them no rights, like, whatsoever, right?

00:32:01He certainly believes in violence as a legitimate form of politics.

00:32:05So, I think there's kind of an airbrush to bin Laden here.

00:32:09Now, I also think one other important point here that young people may have seized on,

00:32:13which is that if you go back and look at what George Bush said after 9-11, he said, why

00:32:18did they attack us?

00:32:20And he said this in his famous speech before Congress after 9-11.

00:32:23He said, they attack us because they hate what they say here.

00:32:26They attacked us because they hate our freedoms.

00:32:27I think that was bullshit, and I thought it was bullshit at the time.

00:32:30I don't think Osama bin Laden attacked us because he hated our freedoms or because of what happened in Congress.

00:32:35He hated our foreign policy.

00:32:37He hated the fact that the United States supported these regimes he hated in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

00:32:42He hated the fact that the United States supported Israel, right?

00:32:44So, that may make us uncomfortable, but we have to be able to be uncomfortable

00:32:48if we're going to be a superpower that goes around the world backing regimes and going to war.

00:32:53So, we have to kind of separate all these things out.

00:32:55Like, bin Laden was a bad guy who did bad things and does not deserve our sympathy.

00:33:00But bin Laden was also not the cartoon version that was sold to us by George Bush as some guy

00:33:05who just hated freedom.

00:33:06Okay, a Reddit user asks,

00:33:08Change my view. Nuclear weapons are the greatest tool for peace we have ever invented.

00:33:14Some people would argue that because nuclear weapons are so devastating that actually it makes war less likely.

00:33:22And the proof point they might use is that the United States and the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear

00:33:27weapons pointed at each other for decades

00:33:29and never went to war directly because the cost of that war was too high.

00:33:34Now, there's something to this. This was called mutually assured destruction, right?

00:33:37The idea that if both countries have the ability to destroy one another, they're less likely to go to war.

00:33:42However, I think there are a couple of problems with this.

00:33:45First of all, we've seen a lot of conflict despite the existence of nuclear weapons.

00:33:50You often have nuclear armed superpowers who feel emboldened because of those nuclear weapons to support proxy wars or to

00:33:57invade smaller countries.

00:33:58Classic example of this is the war in Ukraine.

00:34:01Putin has invaded Ukraine in part because he believes he can't be stopped because he has nuclear weapons.

00:34:08And sure enough, oftentimes the Biden administration would say there's a limit on how much military support we can provide

00:34:13to the Ukrainians

00:34:13because we're worried about getting into a nuclear war with the Russians.

00:34:16I think the bigger problem I have, though, is that nuclear weapons provide a sense of security until they are

00:34:23used.

00:34:24I don't know that I feel more secure in a world in which a very small number of people have

00:34:29the capacity to destroy entire countries.

00:34:32Ultimately, it's important, if these weapons are going to exist, that there are far less of them, that less countries

00:34:37have them, that they're put under strict controls.

00:34:40Because essentially, if you normalize the proliferation of these weapons, you're going to just raise the stakes that at one

00:34:46of these flashpoints around the world, things could go nuclear.

00:34:49And that's obviously nothing that would be good for anybody in the world.

00:34:52Okay, Schaber asks, why and when did USA-China relations become so hostile?

00:34:58Well, the short answer to this is after Donald Trump's first election.

00:35:02But I think if you step back, there were some structural reasons that we're leading things in this direction already.

00:35:06The United States, the world's superpower, China is this emerging power.

00:35:11And you saw between the end of the Cold War up to, say, the election of Barack Obama, China beginning

00:35:16to grow as an economy, beginning to become more confident of itself and ultimately on the world stage.

00:35:23But always the idea that analysts have when they look to China is, well, they're going to grow, they're going

00:35:28to get bigger, they're going to get richer.

00:35:29It's better to kind of bring them into the system, right?

00:35:31We brought them into the World Trade Organization, which gave them kind of a lot of privileges that they've taken

00:35:36advantage of.

00:35:37And then over time, they'll become more democratic.

00:35:42They'll start to follow rules that we see them breaking sometimes.

00:35:46And by the time we got pretty deep in the Obama administration and Xi Jinping became the president of China,

00:35:52this is in 2013, it was pretty clear that that theory had failed.

00:35:57So, first of all, China was breaking a lot of rules.

00:36:00They were stealing intellectual property from U.S. companies and using it to build their own companies, right?

00:36:06They were violating trade agreements in a variety of ways to advantage their own capacity to export lots of things

00:36:14to other countries without necessarily importing that much stuff from other places.

00:36:18They obviously were violating human rights and essentially trying to erase Tibetan identity inside of Tibet or ultimately to move

00:36:27into Hong Kong and erase Hong Kong's system, which was supposed to be separate from China's.

00:36:32They're still breaking the rules on trade, on intellectual property theft.

00:36:36They're launching cyber attacks.

00:36:38And so there was a lot of frustration in the U.S. system that was building up with the Chinese.

00:36:42I think in the Obama years, it was still the idea, though, that it's better to negotiate these things.

00:36:47It's better to have lines of communication open.

00:36:49It's better to have engagement between the U.S. and China.

00:36:51There's trillions of dollars of trade that flow through us.

00:36:54There's geopolitical hotspots like Taiwan or the South China Sea that we don't want to see explode.

00:37:00So we may need to be firm at times.

00:37:01We may need to impose certain penalties on the Chinese.

00:37:04We may need to build coalitions of countries to have more leverage on the Chinese.

00:37:08But like, let's not upset the kind of fundamentals of this relationship.

00:37:13Well, when Trump came in, he tore up that playbook.

00:37:16And he said, I'm going to essentially launch a major trade war with the Chinese to address what I think

00:37:21has been an imbalanced trading relationship.

00:37:24And we've been in a trade war with China ever since.

00:37:26Once you have that trade war, you saw all the kind of dialogues and ways in which the United States

00:37:32used to communicate essentially collapse.

00:37:35So we're just not talking to each other as much about other stuff.

00:37:38And Xi Jinping, for his part, he says, I'm going to be even more overt in trying to build essentially

00:37:44an alternative to the American world order.

00:37:46I'm getting closer to Putin over here.

00:37:48I'm building a whole set of institutions with countries in the global south, in Africa and Southeast Asia, that I

00:37:55want to be led by China, not by the United States and Europe.

00:37:59And so we've really been living since around 2016, 2017, in this kind of growing competition between the U.S.

00:38:06and China.

00:38:06And it doesn't really show any signs of abating.

00:38:11OK, Tulub asks, when will Xi invade Taiwan and should the U.S. send our troops?

00:38:16First of all, there's no guarantee that China is going to invade Taiwan.

00:38:19But to understand how we got here, it's necessary to do a little bit of history.

00:38:23Why is this so important to Xi Jinping and China?

00:38:26And why is Taiwan so reluctant to be a part of China?

00:38:30In 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong conquered China, won the Civil War,

00:38:37Chiang Kai-shek, who had been the nationalist leader of China, he fled to Taiwan with a lot of people,

00:38:43right, and with his military force.

00:38:44Now, there are already people in Taiwan, but Chiang Kai-shek comes and he essentially takes it over.

00:38:48So, to the Chinese Communist Party, this is a gigantic piece of unfinished business.

00:38:55This is the last piece of territory that they believe is rightfully a part of China.

00:38:59And it's also the piece that was an adversary of theirs for many decades.

00:39:04Because after 1949, for a long time, the United States didn't even recognize the government in Beijing as the government

00:39:11of China.

00:39:11They recognized the Chiang Kai-shek government in Taipei, in Taiwan, as the government of China.

00:39:16It's just that we said that there was this different government that should be in charge.

00:39:20So, that's the basis for why it's important to the Chinese.

00:39:23Why is Taiwan reluctant to go along with this?

00:39:25It's very important to understand that in the 90s, you actually had a democratic revolution inside of Taiwan, not a

00:39:33violent revolution.

00:39:34But essentially, that Chiang Kai-shek government, which was led by a political party called the KMT,

00:39:40was very authoritarian in how they treated the Taiwanese people and thought of themselves as very Chinese.

00:39:46They thought of themselves as the legitimate government of China, even though they're in Taipei.

00:39:50However, in the 90s, a bunch of uprisings and the kind of post-Cold War movement to democracy led to

00:39:57the KMT essentially being ousted as an authoritarian government inside of Taiwan.

00:40:01And ever since then, you've had Taiwan's politics evolve in a different direction.

00:40:06People who believe that they are not Chinese, they believe they are Taiwanese.

00:40:11We've been here for hundreds of years.

00:40:13Now, the current party in control of Taiwan is called the DPP.

00:40:17And in the past, they've been pro-independence.

00:40:20They don't say this out loud because they know it would provoke the Chinese.

00:40:23But everybody knows that the DPP has no interest in being a part of China.

00:40:28There's one other complicating factor to this, too.

00:40:30There have been negotiations in the past about ways in which Taiwan might peacefully reunite with China, but have its

00:40:37own political system.

00:40:39Essentially, one country, China, with two different political systems.

00:40:42That was the offer that Beijing was making to Taiwan.

00:40:46Well, that was the deal that Beijing made with Hong Kong.

00:40:49And you may remember a few years ago, China came in and said, that's not the offer anymore.

00:40:55We are going to run this place the same way we run the rest of China.

00:40:58And you had a massive protest movement and it was absolutely crushed.

00:41:01So that sent a message to the people in Taiwan, I'm not sure I trust the one country, two systems

00:41:07policy.

00:41:08So that kind of leaves us where we are here today, where Xi Jinping has made very clear he's not

00:41:13going to let Taiwan go.

00:41:14This needs to be a part of China.

00:41:16I think people also see Xi Jinping, he's getting older.

00:41:19Is this the kind of guy that's going to really want to leave this big piece of unfinished business unaddressed?

00:41:24There's concern in China that Taiwan is only going to move further away over time.

00:41:29So we have to act pretty soon.

00:41:31There are a couple of timelines that I would watch here.

00:41:34One is China's military capabilities.

00:41:36A lot of experts that you talk to and people who have testified to this from the United States military

00:41:40say

00:41:40that China's military will be ready for some kind of operation to retake Taiwan around 2027.

00:41:47Why is that?

00:41:48Well, because China has been spending a lot of money on their Navy, on their Air Force, on their Rocket

00:41:53Force.

00:41:53But also importantly, on making those different military forces be able to work together,

00:41:59which they would have to do in some kind of complex amphibious invasion of an island like Taiwan.

00:42:05I think another thing I look to is in 2028, Taiwan has its next presidential election.

00:42:10Now, the last one was won by a DP politician, someone who's less likely to want to talk to the

00:42:15Chinese

00:42:15and more likely to want to pursue independence.

00:42:17If that happened again in 2028, maybe we are seeing the convergence of the perfect storm.

00:42:24It's the last year of the Trump administration.

00:42:26And I think Xi Jinping thinks, well, Donald Trump's not going to go to war to protect Taiwan.

00:42:30It's an election in which if China's preferred Canada doesn't win,

00:42:32maybe they feel like we're never going to be able to do this politically.

00:42:36We have to do this militarily.

00:42:38And a lot of analysts think, well, that's when the Chinese military will be ready for this.

00:42:41Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll invade Taiwan.

00:42:44We've already seen them intimidate, you know, fly planes and missiles literally over Taiwan's territory

00:42:51or encroach upon Taiwan at sea.

00:42:54China could take some of the outlying islands around Taiwan.

00:42:57Or China could impose a blockade on Taiwan and essentially say,

00:43:01we're going to encircle you, nothing's coming in or out unless you deal with us on our terms.

00:43:06There's gray spaces here in terms of how China could do this.

00:43:08But at core, I think it's certainly possible, if not likely,

00:43:12that there'll be some kind of Chinese effort to either squeeze or take Taiwan by force

00:43:18at some point while Xi Jinping is present.

00:43:21Now, in terms of the U.S. coming to Taiwan's aid,

00:43:24this is a lot more complicated than it sounds on paper.

00:43:27First of all, you got to get the entire United States Navy Pacific Fleet

00:43:32to and around Taiwan to break some blockade.

00:43:34That takes some time.

00:43:35So if the Chinese move quickly, it's not like we can just kind of immediately be there.

00:43:39Second, if the United States Navy is going to get involved here,

00:43:43it's going to want to make sure that it's not at risk from Chinese rocket forces.

00:43:47Those rocket forces are usually along the coastline here.

00:43:51So the United States would have to take military action against mainland China

00:43:55to have the security to send its forces in.

00:43:58Well, if we hit mainland China, any war game I've been in,

00:44:02then the Chinese are hitting U.S. bases in places like Okinawa in Japan,

00:44:07or Guam, or potentially as far away as Hawaii.

00:44:10Very quickly, this could become a big war.

00:44:12And that, I think, is what weighs on any U.S. president.

00:44:16Am I really willing to risk an all-out war with China over Taiwan?

00:44:20We've been ambiguous on this question because we don't want to tell the Chinese,

00:44:23hey, we're not going to do anything, so, you know, have at it.

00:44:26I think the most important thing that we can do is try to help Taiwan become a much larger military

00:44:32force

00:44:32so the cost of a potential invasion goes up to China.

00:44:36I think it's also important to work with other countries like Japan, like Australia,

00:44:40other countries in the region to provide that kind of support to Taiwan.

00:44:43But ultimately, I think we need to have more diplomacy and more dialogue among the United States and China

00:44:49and with the Taiwanese about this.

00:44:51Now, there's a lot of reasons that doesn't happen.

00:44:52The Chinese say they don't want to talk to us about this.

00:44:54This is an internal issue for them.

00:44:56They mean internal, them and Taiwan is an internal issue.

00:44:59The Taiwanese don't want to be seen to be some kind of country whose interest can be negotiated over its

00:45:04head.

00:45:04Just one more point on the cost to the global economy.

00:45:07Not only is Taiwan itself like a substantially sized place with a substantially sized economy,

00:45:14they make the vast majority of the world's advanced semiconductors,

00:45:19like the things you rely on in your car or your refrigerator just to live modern life.

00:45:25If that essentially goes offline because of the Chinese potential invasion

00:45:29and then the U.S. is imposing sanctions on China because they've invaded,

00:45:34we could see an economic disruption that is far greater than anything from the war, for instance, in Ukraine.

00:45:40Abin Roman asks,

00:45:41What is the pro-China view on its activities in the South China Sea?

00:45:44First of all, the South China Sea is this very large body of water along southern China

00:45:48and also borders a number of other countries like Vietnam, the Philippines.

00:45:52There's a very long maritime border.

00:45:55China claims the entire body of water.

00:45:58And it is actually on its face a totally absurd claim.

00:46:02You usually have maritime borders that are not like up against the territory of a Vietnam, right?

00:46:08Countries control the waters out from their own land borders.

00:46:10And there's international conventions, including the law of the sea, that are meant to set maritime borders.

00:46:16China is essentially ignoring all that and saying,

00:46:18This South China Sea, it's just ours, all of it.

00:46:21And we want kind of freedom of action here.

00:46:24I actually had one leader of a Southeast Asian country that has a claim on this and said,

00:46:29The worst thing about the South China Sea is whoever named it.

00:46:33Because it does suggest somehow it's theirs.

00:46:35But it should be a body of water that is kind of divided up under international law.

00:46:39Why does this matter to the rest of us?

00:46:41A tremendous amount of the world's shipping goes through the South China Sea.

00:46:46Because so many things are made in China or in Malaysia or in other Southeast Asian countries that gets shipped

00:46:53through there.

00:46:54So ultimately it's not just an issue for those countries, it's an issue for the global economy.

00:46:59Since the Chinese have gotten much more aggressive about the South China Sea, particularly under Xi Jinping,

00:47:04They've also started to do things that are pretty ominous.

00:47:06Like they take these rocks essentially in the middle of the South China Sea and they just build military structures

00:47:12on them.

00:47:13So they're kind of creating a network of almost bases or certainly places where they can project military power.

00:47:19They've harassed fishing vessels and certainly military vessels of some of these smaller Southeast Asian countries.

00:47:25I think what the Chinese would say is beyond just the kind of crude, this is all ours, is that

00:47:31the Americans are the ones at fault.

00:47:33They kind of have a view of the South China Sea that's kind of similar to Putin's view of Ukraine.

00:47:39Which is essentially, you're up in our business here.

00:47:41You guys have bases in Japan that's right next to us.

00:47:44We've got Taiwan that's still unsettled.

00:47:46The U.S. Navy conducts operations in the South China Sea.

00:47:50This should be kind of our sphere of influence, our part of the world.

00:47:53Why do you need to have the U.S. Navy coming through here for instance?

00:47:57If we don't kind of extend out a buffer, we're going to be more vulnerable.

00:48:01I think what the most legitimate claims here though are these smaller countries like Vietnam and the Philippines,

00:48:08who've just said, hey, can we just resolve these disputes under international law?

00:48:13There are courts, there's arbitration processes where we go and we determine how to draw these barriers and whose rock

00:48:19belongs to who.

00:48:20Ross Knee Deep asks, okay again, why does Putin want Ukraine?

00:48:26I think there's two answers, right?

00:48:28One having to do with security and one having to do with history.

00:48:31When you look at security, essentially Putin's view was the Soviet Union collapses.

00:48:36This is a catastrophe for Russia.

00:48:38They lose essentially an empire, right?

00:48:40But then he believes that the West broke all of its promises.

00:48:44NATO was not supposed to expand beyond its borders at the time of the collapse of the Cold War.

00:48:49According to Putin, that was kind of a commitment, a soft commitment that was made by the then George H

00:48:55.W. Bush administration.

00:48:56Instead, what you got is NATO expanding steadily through Eastern Europe.

00:49:01And then you got NATO expanding into former Soviet republics in the Baltics.

00:49:06That's Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.

00:49:08And then you have NATO membership action plans.

00:49:11That's essentially putting somebody on the waiting list to get into NATO.

00:49:15You have those plans offered to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008.

00:49:19Almost immediately, by the way, Vladimir Putin invades Georgia and ends up occupying two provinces of Georgia in 2008.

00:49:26And then fast forward six years and he invades and annexes Crimea as part of Ukraine.

00:49:31Now, the security grievance that Putin has is essentially, whoa, you are threatening Russia.

00:49:37You are expanding your military alliance NATO all the way to our borders.

00:49:42He also had grievances that the United States had pulled out of several arms control agreements that had been negotiated

00:49:47between the United States and Russia in ways that could disadvantage Russia as well.

00:49:51So there's a security argument that Putin makes that we have to start pushing our borders out.

00:49:56And Ukraine obviously is somewhat of a buffer, in his view, between NATO and Russia.

00:50:01Now, the history argument is deeper and more emotional and I think ultimately more important to Vladimir Putin.

00:50:08Ukraine and Russia have a long and intermingled history.

00:50:12The history of the existence of Russia itself goes all the way back to a place called Kyiv Rus.

00:50:17Kyiv, being the capital of Ukraine today, used to be the capital of Russia.

00:50:22And so there's this kind of ancient history that binds them together.

00:50:25Now, over the centuries, you've had lots of different versions of a Russian Empire.

00:50:31You've had Ukrainian nationalism.

00:50:33You know, you've had lands shift back and forth.

00:50:35So it's a lot more complicated than Putin says.

00:50:39But I think at core, what Putin wants to do is kind of reestablish not just the Soviet Union.

00:50:45People say he wants to bring back the Soviet Union.

00:50:47I think it's more useful to think of it as Putin wants to reestablish the Russian Empire.

00:50:51The idea that they are these Slavic, Russian-speaking peoples that should be under the sovereign control of the Russian

00:50:59state governed from Moscow.

00:51:00When he first moved into Ukraine, he said he was doing it to protect Russian speakers inside of Ukraine, of

00:51:07which there are many.

00:51:07He's clearly gone beyond that.

00:51:09But I think Putin sees himself in a very long sweep of history.

00:51:14And in his view, he is restoring Russian greatness.

00:51:17And he's doing that through imperial conquest.

00:51:20And Ukraine is kind of central to his belief in what is Russian land.

00:51:26I obviously reject that view.

00:51:28Huge majority of the Ukrainian people obviously reject that view.

00:51:31But I think it's those two forces coming together.

00:51:35World of Chungus asks,

00:51:37What is the most realistic outcome of the currently ongoing Russia-Ukraine war?

00:51:41Donald Trump came into office pledging to end this war on day one.

00:51:44It's proven to be much more difficult.

00:51:46And a simple reason for that is that Vladimir Putin currently believes he has the upper hand on the battlefield,

00:51:52despite suffering enormous losses.

00:51:54Now, the reality is you have essentially this kind of 800-mile front line between Russia and Ukraine, where the

00:52:00Russians have been grinding the Ukrainians down.

00:52:02They've been also bombarding the Ukrainians' infrastructure.

00:52:05They believe because they're bigger, they can resupply their army.

00:52:10They can restock it with people that they can send to the front line.

00:52:12Whereas Ukrainians are starting to have manpower shortages.

00:52:15They're starting to have trouble finding people in terms of enlistment.

00:52:19They're struggling to try to expand the potential draft.

00:52:23Simple math.

00:52:23If you have a bigger country fighting a war against a smaller country that becomes a war of attrition, Putin

00:52:28believes we have the upper hand.

00:52:29Now, he also believes that because Ukraine is not getting the same kind of military support from the United States

00:52:34that they did under Joe Biden.

00:52:36And so he also knows that, well, maybe if these guys are going to get cut off by the Americans,

00:52:41I can just keep grinding and grinding and grinding and getting a better deal.

00:52:44What does he want?

00:52:46Well, at a minimum, he wants the land that he currently controls to be recognized by the world and potentially

00:52:53by the Ukrainians themselves as Russian.

00:52:55That would include the Crimean Peninsula that he annexed illegally back in 2014.

00:53:01But it also includes this huge chunk of eastern Ukraine called the Donbass that includes areas that Russia currently occupies.

00:53:08And the Russian proposals in these peace negotiations, he is even asking for land that Russia doesn't currently occupy to

00:53:16be recognized as Russian.

00:53:18Now, the Ukrainians don't want to do that.

00:53:20They don't want to essentially volunteer to give away their land.

00:53:24There's another thing that the Ukrainians want.

00:53:25They want credible security guarantees.

00:53:28Now, what does that mean?

00:53:29It means that Ukraine is not a NATO.

00:53:31That means there's not a collective defense commitment to come to Ukraine's aid if they're invaded again by Russia.

00:53:38And the scenario that the Ukrainians are worried about is the war stops for a few years.

00:53:42And then lo and behold, Putin decides it's time to take another chunk of Ukraine.

00:53:46The U.S. has already said that we're not going to put that on the table for the Ukrainians.

00:53:50So what can reassure them that they can stop this war without it starting again?

00:53:55And you see a lot of countries in Europe trying to put together some kind of commitment to the Ukrainians.

00:54:00Will there be some European force that is on Ukrainian soil?

00:54:03Will there be some long-term commitment to provide arms to the Ukrainians so their military gets stronger?

00:54:08Can they join the European Union so at least they're in a political club, even if they're not in a

00:54:12security club?

00:54:13These are all the things in the negotiations that are ongoing.

00:54:16I think the most likely scenario is at a certain point, and I don't want to predict exactly when that'll

00:54:21happen,

00:54:21but this war will have to come to an end at some point in the next year or two.

00:54:24You will have not a formal end to the war, but some kind of ceasefire.

00:54:28A stopping of fighting along a line of control in the eastern side of Ukraine.

00:54:33And a de facto Russia control of the land it occupies.

00:54:37And then an effort to essentially cobble together these security guarantees for the Ukrainians.

00:54:42It's not satisfying.

00:54:43It's certainly not the Ukrainians retaking their territory, which was their ambition in the early years of the war.

00:54:48It would alleviate the suffering in the short term, but it would leave hanging over Ukraine this question of,

00:54:54will Russia come in again?

00:54:56Can we truly be a sovereign country?

00:54:58And that's why there's going to have to be a lot of work done, even if you get a ceasefire,

00:55:02which is not going to be easy,

00:55:03to use that time after a ceasefire to give Ukraine a credible security guarantee so Russia just doesn't come back

00:55:10from war in the future.

00:55:11Loose Wheels asks, why doesn't the US and EU send troops to Ukraine?

00:55:15Well, simple answer now, which is that Vladimir Putin has nuclear weapons.

00:55:18And there's a real fear among the US and European countries that if we go to war with nuclear-armed

00:55:26Russia,

00:55:27that Russia will use nuclear weapons inside of Ukraine.

00:55:30And that would obviously be catastrophic.

00:55:32There's a separate question, if there is a ceasefire, if there's some kind of end to the war,

00:55:36about whether you station US and or European countries in Ukraine as some kind of peacekeeping force.

00:55:42I think this is a much more live option.

00:55:45And in fact, a number of European countries led by the United Kingdom and France have talked about assembling this

00:55:51kind of European force.

00:55:52Trump has taken US participation in that off the table.

00:55:54But I think we very well may see some number of European troops in Ukraine as part of a settlement

00:56:01to the war

00:56:01to give Ukraine that security assurance that they so desperately want.

00:56:05At Dixie Bush Wookiee asks, do you think Putin is playing Trump?

00:56:09I absolutely do.

00:56:10And look, some of this is just obvious on the surface.

00:56:15Putin has been playing for time and trying to weaken the US support for Ukraine and US unity with European

00:56:22allies.

00:56:22Putin thinks he has the upper hand on the battlefield.

00:56:24He's squeezing.

00:56:25He's encroaching further into Ukraine.

00:56:27He's bombing Ukrainian infrastructure.

00:56:29And so he acts like, sure, we'll talk to you guys, right?

00:56:32Putin comes to Alaska for a summit with Trump.

00:56:35He talks about peace, but he puts no credible proposal on the table.

00:56:38Now, what is happening while this is going on?

00:56:41The Ukrainians are getting more beleaguered.

00:56:44Zelensky is getting beat up by Trump, sometimes very publicly.

00:56:48The US is fighting with our European allies.

00:56:50And so Putin is getting everything he wants.

00:56:53He's taking more land from the Ukrainians.

00:56:55He's dividing the US from Ukraine.

00:56:57He's dividing the US from Europe.

00:57:00So all of his adversaries are getting weaker.

00:57:03And meanwhile, he's just pushing away at Ukraine.

00:57:06I think there's another piece, though, that's really important that people need to understand here.

00:57:10I remember way back in 2016 after Trump first came to power

00:57:13and there were all these questions about why did the Russians support Trump in the previous election?

00:57:18What do they want from him?

00:57:19The reality is what the Russians want is not Trump to do something for them.

00:57:24They want exactly what is happening.

00:57:26They want the rules-based order that used to be run by the United States to fall apart

00:57:31because they felt that that order disadvantaged them.

00:57:34They want the United States and Europe, that alliance, to fall apart

00:57:38because then Russia can throw its weight around in Europe a lot easier

00:57:42because the United States isn't coming in as the big brother to push Russia back.

00:57:46They want essentially a world where they have kind of freedom to maneuver.

00:57:51Vladimir Putin also wants democracy itself to be utterly discredited.

00:57:55He wants his system of government, essentially a dictatorial control, to be as legitimized as democracy.

00:58:01And that's happening, too.

00:58:03I remember I had some conversations with Alexei Navalny, who was the Russian opposition leader

00:58:07who was ultimately poisoned and killed in a gulag by Vladimir Putin.

00:58:12And I talked to him shortly before he went back to Russia to be imprisoned.

00:58:16And what Navalny told me is Putin doesn't need to convince his people that he is not corrupt

00:58:23or that he is not a liar.

00:58:25He just needs to convince his people that everybody is corrupt, right?

00:58:29There's no difference between Russia and the West.

00:58:32And Trump is the perfect proof point for him in that.

00:58:36Look at the Americans.

00:58:37They have a corrupt autocratic president.

00:58:39They've got a bunch of oligarchs who surround that corrupt president.

00:58:42And essentially, Trump is proving to a lot of Russians that what Putin's been saying all

00:58:48along is true.

00:58:50Now, I don't believe that.

00:58:51I think there's still some differences, as much as I'm critical of Trump, between what's

00:58:55currently the government of the United States and what the government of Moscow is.

00:58:58But there's enough overlap here that it gives Putin what he wants, which is a sense that

00:59:03the strongman system of government is the one that's ascendant in the world.

00:59:06Mert Crypto asks, So, Trump wants Greenland, but won't use force.

00:59:12Can diplomacy actually get him what he wants, or is this just posturing?

00:59:16So, first of all, why does Trump want Greenland?

00:59:18Only one person really knows the answer to that question.

00:59:20I could offer you a couple of possibilities.

00:59:23Yes, Trump says Greenland could potentially be critical to US national security.

00:59:27The Arctic is a critical region.

00:59:30It's becoming more important because of climate change, because there's more available natural resources up there,

00:59:34including oil and gas. There's more available shipping lanes.

00:59:38China and Russia kind of are adjacent to the Arctic region, of course.

00:59:41So, one is a national security purpose, but I don't really put any stock in that purpose

00:59:45because Denmark is the controlling power in Greenland.

00:59:48They're a member of NATO.

00:59:50The US already has a military base there.

00:59:51Denmark has said we could have more bases there.

00:59:53So, I don't really see why it's necessary for our national security when we already have that access.

00:59:57Second is he may just want the resource bonanza that comes with Greenland, right?

01:00:01There's critical minerals in Greenland. There's oil and gas reserves.

01:00:05This is not as easy as it sounds, right?

01:00:07There's still a lot of ice and you still have to kind of get under that.

01:00:09But some of this could just be Trump seeing potential resources.

01:00:13Now, even that, the Danes, the Greenlanders have said,

01:00:16we can work with you to try to access some of those resources.

01:00:18So, it still doesn't feel like it's necessary.

01:00:21At the end of the day, frankly, I think Trump is just looking at a map and is like,

01:00:25this is a big piece of land and I want it.

01:00:27I mean, I really think it's as simple as that.

01:00:29And, you know, it's not an insane thing to think.

01:00:31I mean, the United States has done that in the past, actually.

01:00:34The territory of the United States has been steadily a period of expansion.

01:00:38Alaska is a pretty random piece of territory that we obviously bought.

01:00:41But that was kind of back in the days of imperial expansion.

01:00:44In terms of getting it through diplomacy, there's kind of two ways that Trump could do this.

01:00:49One that you felt them already try is get some Greenlanders,

01:00:54who have had some serious anti-colonial feeling towards the Danes,

01:00:58who've been the controlling power there for hundreds of years,

01:01:02get some Greenlanders to say,

01:01:03well, we'd rather be part of the United States than a part of Denmark, right?

01:01:08Or maybe Greenland becomes independent and then the United States enters into some agreement with them.

01:01:12There's a lot of examples of this in history.

01:01:15It's kind of what the United States did in Hawaii, for instance.

01:01:18We had to kind of come to the aid of people that wanted us and not Japan to be a

01:01:22controlling power there.

01:01:23It's something that Vladimir Putin has used time and again.

01:01:26Putin's justification for his invasion of Ukraine was,

01:01:29we are coming to support the kind of Russian-speaking separatists who want to be part of Russia, not Ukraine.

01:01:35So we've seen leaders use this all the time.

01:01:38The problem is the Greenlanders have been very disciplined in saying,

01:01:41no, no, no, we see what you're doing.

01:01:43We even had Don Jr. go out to Greenland trying to find these people, right?

01:01:48And the Greenlanders kind of seeing this playbook have been very unified in sending a message that,

01:01:53we may have some issues with Denmark, but we don't want to be a part of the United States.

01:01:56Then the other way that Trump has suggested is just buying Greenland, right?

01:02:00Writing some gigantic check to the Danes and to each Greenlander and there's only about 50,000 of them.

01:02:07The problem with that is Greenland has made clear it's not for sale.

01:02:09Denmark's made clear it's not for sale.

01:02:11So that really doesn't leave any other option other than some kind of military force to just seize the territory.

01:02:19If you want the land, you're gonna have to take it.

01:02:24Comfortablepool4684 asks,

01:02:25What do you believe out of the things Trump has done or is going to do will benefit America?

01:02:30I think, broadly speaking, some of his critiques are important and useful.

01:02:35It is the case that globalization has been very damaging to certain Americans, particularly working class Americans, harmed by trade

01:02:45agreements, for instance.

01:02:46It is the case, and I have made the argument myself, that we do have a kind of national security

01:02:50establishment in both parties that has been unaccountable.

01:02:54That the forever wars that we've been fighting since 9-11 have had terrible outcomes and need to come to

01:03:00an end.

01:03:00That we are overextended in our commitments around the world.

01:03:04The problem I see is I just don't like his diagnosis, you know?

01:03:07So I think the critique is helpful and is forcing us to change.

01:03:12On the other hand, I don't think the answer to bad trade agreements is episodic and arbitrary tariffs, right?

01:03:17I don't think the end of forever wars is whatever is going on now, which is we're bombing more countries

01:03:22than we did before

01:03:23and kind of hoping that those don't lead to bigger conflicts or quagmires.

01:03:28I accept the utility that Trump is saying we got to end this way of doing things.

01:03:34I don't really see that his solutions to those problems, though, are the right ones.

01:03:39EIO asks,

01:03:54I'm going to say it's a combination of all of the above.

01:03:57And look, I think, what happened?

01:03:59Biden comes in, Trump's immigration policies have been very divisive in Trump's first term, the family separation policies.

01:04:07And frankly, the Democratic primary candidates in the 2020 election took positions on immigration that were much more to the

01:04:15left than even the Obama years.

01:04:17And so from the get, there's a kind of ideological sense that we're going to be different from Trump.

01:04:22I don't think it was essentially we should let everybody in, but it did lead to a reluctance to have

01:04:28strict border enforcement policies.

01:04:30Then I think what happened is the scale of migration across the southern border started to just exceed anything that

01:04:36we'd ever seen before.

01:04:37And here I think they were just too slow to deal with this because this was building over years.

01:04:42The numbers are going up and up and up.

01:04:44And the only way to deal with those challenges was to have pretty strict border enforcement.

01:04:49And I think Biden was somewhat reluctant to do that.

01:04:52It's also the case, to be fair to the Biden administration, that the immigration system has been broken for a

01:04:59long time.

01:04:59The problem is that we have not had an immigration reform bill in this country since really like the 1980s.

01:05:05I think 1986 is the last time this happened.

01:05:07So the system has gotten creaky.

01:05:09And this problem just kind of got on top of him.

01:05:12And it especially got on top of him when you had governors like Greg Abbott in Texas putting immigrants on

01:05:17buses

01:05:17and setting them up to Washington, D.C. or to New York City.

01:05:20Or Ron DeSantis putting them on a plane to Martha's Vineyard, which was a bit more of a political stunt.

01:05:25But I think the reason that that was so important and frankly effective as a political strategy by those governors

01:05:32is most of the burden of absorbing these immigrant populations does fall to these border states.

01:05:38And all of a sudden, when you start to have tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants being shipped up to

01:05:46places like New York City,

01:05:47well, that's putting a huge budget strain on local governments in other parts of the United States that aren't accustomed

01:05:53to dealing with that.

01:05:55That is spotlighting for people a sense that the border is out of control.

01:05:59If it's not just affecting people who are living in southern Texas, but it's affecting people all over the country,

01:06:05then all of a sudden you can't say this is some kind of regional interest or regional issue.

01:06:09And it really did put President Biden in a bind.

01:06:11Now, while I do think there was a lot of legitimacy to the concerns that people had that the southern

01:06:19border was too open,

01:06:21that you had these unprecedented levels of migration across the southern border.

01:06:24I also think that the kind of toxic and conspiracy theory-minded nature of our politics did not help here.

01:06:32I think you had a pretty concerted effort in certain kind of right-wing media ecosystems to elevate the potential

01:06:39violent danger posed by immigrants.

01:06:42So you had, you know, these ideas that whole cities in the United States had somehow been taken over by

01:06:49violent, undocumented people.

01:06:52When, if you actually looked underneath the hood of what was being said on X or other social media platforms,

01:06:57there really wasn't much to this at all.

01:06:59But I think more broadly, on the far right, there has long been a kind of conspiracy theory, the great

01:07:07replacement theory,

01:07:08that essentially democratic politicians or globalists or in the most odious versions of this, Jews,

01:07:15have some big conspiracy theory to repopulate the United States with brown people who will vote for their interests

01:07:23and essentially take away the privileges of white Americans in this country, or certainly the majority of white Americans in

01:07:30this country.

01:07:31That, I do not believe is true. I think Joe Biden inherited a broken border policy.

01:07:36But in our current polarized political environment, I actually think that some of these theories traveled far and wide.

01:07:43And certainly some of the kind of more sensationalist efforts to say,

01:07:48here's this one violent crime committed by an undocumented person, which undoubtedly did happen and undoubtedly was a tragedy,

01:07:55but to make people believe this is happening everywhere.

01:07:58All these people coming are violent and dangerous criminals.

01:08:01And it's that mindset that led not just to the kind of politics of we need to shut down the

01:08:06border that got Trump elected.

01:08:08It's that mindset that led to the kind of ice crackdowns that we're seeing, where essentially they're treating all undocumented

01:08:14people like violent criminals.

01:08:16But there was even an effort made by Joe Biden to pass a pretty strict immigration bill working with Congress.

01:08:23Essentially, let's take the Republican version that we can accept and support it.

01:08:28And you actually had an agreement among Republicans and Democrats in the Senate around an immigration bill that would have

01:08:34sealed the border.

01:08:35But Trump at that time, because we were into 2024, he was running for president, he actually signaled to the

01:08:40Republicans in Congress,

01:08:41Don't do this. Don't work with Biden. I don't want this to be solved as a problem.

01:08:46I want it to appear to be a problem because I'm running on it.

01:08:49Shawarma Heaven, a good name, asks,

01:08:51Change my view. The kidnapping of Maduro is completely about oil and the drugs and corruption are just the public

01:08:58pretext.

01:08:58Well, I'm not going to change your view because I agree with it.

01:09:02First of all, when you had this massive buildup of U.S. military forces around Venezuela,

01:09:07it was far beyond anything that was necessary to deal with drug trafficking.

01:09:12Second, Venezuela was just not a particularly important part of the drug trafficking that reaches the United States,

01:09:17like not even anywhere near the top venue.

01:09:21You know, Mexico is the country that this stuff passes through.

01:09:24When you're talking about fentanyl, the precursors come from China.

01:09:27Colombia is a much bigger source of cocaine for the cartels.

01:09:30So you would not choose Venezuela as the place to take a stand against drug trafficking.

01:09:36Yeah, we can talk about corruption.

01:09:38Donald Trump's, let's just say his concerns about democracy and human rights are pretty incredibly selective.

01:09:44I mean, I don't believe that he's sincerely interested in democracy.

01:09:48And actually, he gave up the game when after he deposed Maduro, abducted Maduro,

01:09:53he didn't try to have an election.

01:09:54He didn't try to support the democratic opposition.

01:09:56Well, he just said, that's it, I got Maduro out of there.

01:09:59And now we're going to do some world deals, essentially.

01:10:01Pretty clearly all along, this is about getting Maduro out of the way.

01:10:04And it's about the fact that Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world.

01:10:08Judd Legum asks, simple question, who is running Venezuela now?

01:10:12The answer is not Donald Trump or Marco Rubio.

01:10:15It's Delcy Rodriguez, the current president of Venezuela.

01:10:18Other than taking Maduro away and abducting him and putting him into prison in New York City,

01:10:23nothing really changed about the apparatus of the Venezuelan state.

01:10:27It's still governed by the Communist Party there.

01:10:30It's still governed by the person, Delcy Rodriguez, who was the vice president to Maduro.

01:10:35It still has its origins in Hugo Chavez and his political movement in that country.

01:10:39So what happens next?

01:10:40Well, Trump's main interests seem to be about oil.

01:10:43But the problem with that is Venezuela's oil infrastructure is incredibly dilapidated, right?

01:10:50It's not pumping oil out at anywhere near the pace that would make it of interest to American oil companies.

01:10:57So are we going to go in and rebuild that oil infrastructure?

01:11:01Because the Venezuelan government doesn't have the resources to do that.

01:11:03If we do, that's like a multi-year project.

01:11:06That might take beyond Trump's term in office.

01:11:09At the same time, the Venezuelan government, what they want is control.

01:11:13They don't have an interest in having some transition to democracy.

01:11:17So I see a lot of bumps in the road ahead, right?

01:11:20If people like Maria Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and I believe probably the most popular politician in the

01:11:25country,

01:11:25well, if she wants to force some kind of process of elections, I'm not sure the government's going to go

01:11:31along with that

01:11:31and you could have some real tensions there.

01:11:33So apart from what Trump's done thus far, which is kind of occasionally just grabbing a bunch of barrels of

01:11:38Venezuelan oil

01:11:39and taking some of the profits, that may be all that we're really looking at here.

01:11:43Otherwise, I think you have a lot of risks.

01:11:45Colonel Crockett asks, what does the US actually gain from intervening around the world?

01:11:49Sometimes it's purely resource reasons.

01:11:51And if you think this is a cynical view, listen to what Donald Trump said about intervening in Venezuela.

01:11:56He wanted the oil, right?

01:11:58And if you look at the kinds of places that the United States has tended to go to war in,

01:12:03oftentimes there's some resource nexus, let's say.

01:12:07The Gulf War, for instance, because Kuwait's oil fields have been seized by Saddam Hussein.

01:12:10Or the Iraq War itself, where at least as part of the rationale,

01:12:14I think people are looking at the potential to develop Iraq's oil reserves.

01:12:17Sometimes it's a national security threat.

01:12:19After 9-11, for instance, the idea was Al-Qaeda did this.

01:12:23They're in Afghanistan. We have to go after them there.

01:12:26So we went to Afghanistan to get Al-Qaeda, but then we had to set up a new government.

01:12:30Then we had to defend that government.

01:12:31Then we had to train security forces so that government could fight the Taliban insurgency.

01:12:35And so oftentimes in history, whether it's Vietnam or Afghanistan,

01:12:39you've seen this kind of mission creep where what was launched as a war for one purpose

01:12:44became about something kind of much bigger.

01:12:47I will say one other thing, though.

01:12:48A lot of people, I think, that I've talked to in places that have been affected by U.S. interventions

01:12:54have said to me, we know what you guys are doing.

01:12:56It's the same thing colonial powers have always done.

01:12:58You want to kind of create chaos around the periphery.

01:13:01If these places are broken, if they're conflict-driven, if they're refugee flows,

01:13:05if they're weak governments, or if they're governments that are dependent on you for their security,

01:13:09you get to keep your privileged position in the world.

01:13:12I actually think that it's hard to look at the history of the last, I don't know, several decades

01:13:17and not see at least some truth in that argument.

01:13:20I never went into a meeting in the White House where people are like,

01:13:23what can we do today to create chaos in the world?

01:13:25But I do have to acknowledge, and I think we as Americans have to wrestle with the fact,

01:13:30that these interventions that we do, they don't make these regions more stable.

01:13:33You know, is the Middle East better off for all these American military interventions over the years?

01:13:37I don't think anybody can argue that.

01:13:39And I think there's something to the idea that you have these kind of islands of stability in the world,

01:13:44and the United States and Europe tends to be our allies, right?

01:13:47Japan, South Korea, Australia.

01:13:49And then a lot of what we do around the world kind of breaks stuff

01:13:52and makes it harder for those countries to kind of emerge or consolidate or to be less dependent on us.

01:13:58So even if that may not be the kind of stated reason,

01:14:00I do think some of our interventions kind of preserve our own position as the strongest power in the world.

01:14:07PollPredictionX asks,

01:14:08Will there be another Arab Spring? Maybe this time a successful one.

01:14:12You know, the short answer is I think yes.

01:14:13The first Arab Spring in 2011 was a mass popular uprising essentially against corruption and repression.

01:14:20The sense that in places like Tunisia and Egypt and Syria where you had these protests,

01:14:25people were just sick of government stealing from them, government repressing them.

01:14:28If you look at some of the same countries in the first Arab Spring, Egypt is suffering from terrible corruption

01:14:34and economic mismanagement.

01:14:36Worse than the first Arab Spring.

01:14:38If you look at Jordan, they're suffering from similar economic challenges, but also, you know, a lot of pressure from

01:14:44what's happened in Gaza.

01:14:45Pressure from refugees coming in over the years.

01:14:46So in addition to the countries you look at like Iran, I think if you look at an Egypt or

01:14:51Jordan,

01:14:51the possibility of mass protest movements is simmering under the surface.

01:14:55And if there is a bigger war in the region, that's often the time that you start to see instability

01:15:00spread.

01:15:00So I think it's quite possible.

01:15:02And unfortunately, I don't necessarily see like a quick path to a better outcome.

01:15:06I see once again power struggles that probably lead to more military like governments that are hopefully more responsive to

01:15:13the people, but might not be.

01:15:157472 asks, what's happening when two countries launch cyber attacks on one another?

01:15:19Why aren't cyber attacks from other countries an act of war?

01:15:23Well, first of all, I think it's really important to note that there are all kinds of different cyber attacks

01:15:28that can take place.

01:15:29There's espionage, right?

01:15:30We're stealing secrets from another country or we're embedding the capacity to spy on that country's systems.

01:15:37There's theft, right?

01:15:39Increasingly, we see the theft of resources, the theft of money through cyber attacks.

01:15:45There's sometimes just an effort to burrow inside of a country's networks for use in some potential future conflict.

01:15:54And we've seen China do a lot of this inside of the United States.

01:15:57Like we want to get in your power grid so that if you attack us, you know, we can shut

01:16:01this down.

01:16:01But we've also seen just kind of outright cyber acts of war.

01:16:05So Russia, for instance, when they, you know, go into a Georgia or Ukraine shutting down the power grid.

01:16:13The United States, in certain cases, when we're doing a military operation in a place, will have a cyber dimension

01:16:18to it.

01:16:19I think people, though, have to understand the scale of this.

01:16:22There are millions and millions of these attacks a day in U.S. companies, on U.S. infrastructure, certainly across

01:16:29Europe, too.

01:16:29So this is kind of part of life out there.

01:16:31Why aren't cyber attacks an act of war?

01:16:33This is a question that a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about and debating.

01:16:39Because, first of all, it depends on the outcome of the cyber attack, right?

01:16:43If there's a cyber attack that steals something, well, countries have been involved in espionage for as long as there

01:16:49have been countries, right?

01:16:50If I send a spy into your country and I steal some documents, you know, we don't necessarily go to

01:16:55war against that.

01:16:56Nor would we go to war against someone stealing new cyber, even though we don't like it, right?

01:17:01I think it gets more challenging when the cyber attack has a dramatic impact inside a country.

01:17:08You know, does it cause a disruption to commerce in that country?

01:17:11Could it cause a loss of life, right?

01:17:14If you shut down a power grid, hospitals go off, people can die.

01:17:17A lot of European countries are beginning to raise these questions as Russia gets more aggressive with its cyber attacks.

01:17:23When does NATO invoke Article 5, essentially?

01:17:26Article 5 is the declaration that an attack on one is an attack on all that requires a response against

01:17:32Russia.

01:17:32But I think the new world we're in, with the United States, Russia, and China, and to some extent Iran

01:17:37and North Korea, is there is an ongoing cyber war.

01:17:40It is happening right now.

01:17:42Like, we are in a cyber war every day, really every second, with these cyber adversaries.

01:17:48And then the question is, when is the outcome of a cyber attack so significant that it might lead to

01:17:55some other response, some other form of sanctions or military action?

01:17:59And I think this is going to increasingly be a part of the landscape going forward as cyber capabilities become

01:18:04ever more important.

01:18:06I'm That Valentine asks, why does Modi remind me of Trump?

01:18:10I went into an Indian politics rabbit hole and Modi bears a resemblance to Trump to me.

01:18:14I am Valentine, you're not wrong to think that.

01:18:17I would put Modi in the club of these kind of strong men leaders who have emerged over the last

01:18:2215-20 years.

01:18:23Now, what they have in common, right, is they are strong men.

01:18:27Modi comes from a political party, the BJP, but it has very much been about Modi in the same way

01:18:32that Trump is very much the dominant figure in the Republican Party.

01:18:34But also, there's this kind of authoritarian playbook that we've seen in different parts of the world, where you start

01:18:40to intimidate the media, you start to use social media to demonize your opponents and motivate and mobilize your followers.

01:18:48You might start to kind of intimidate parts of the private sector to kind of invest in and be a

01:18:53part and finance your politics.

01:18:55You certainly start to demonize certain opponents.

01:18:58If you look at Modi's playbook, there's an us versus them to Indian politics that can be reminiscent of American

01:19:04politics.

01:19:04The very large Muslim minority in India has been targeted politically and sometimes practically by the Modi government in the

01:19:11same way that in the US we see kind of immigrant populations targeted, including Muslim minorities here in the United

01:19:18States.

01:19:18There are also, I think, important differences, too.

01:19:21I mean, Modi comes, his nationalism is kind of deeply embedded in traditional Indian Hindu nationalism.

01:19:31Like, Modi comes out of that wing of Indian politics that was suspicious of the initial dominance of the Congress

01:19:39Party, the secular post-independence party.

01:19:42They wanted a more Hindu, more religious nature and character to Indian identity.

01:19:47That is an overwhelmingly motivating project of Modi's whole career and his tenure as a leader.

01:19:54Whereas Donald Trump, not a particularly religious guy.

01:19:58I mean, he's not personally a kind of Christian nationalist in the way that Modi is a Hindu nationalist.

01:20:05Another difference is just in the kind of interest of the United States and the interests of India.

01:20:10You know, Trump is a strongman of a superpower who is now, you know, having his way, abducting the president

01:20:17of Venezuela, threatening multiple wars.

01:20:20You know, Modi's someone who's trying to get along with a variety of different powers.

01:20:24Like, he maintains his relationship with Russia.

01:20:26He maintains his relationship with China.

01:20:28He maintains his relationship with the US.

01:20:30He's building closer ties to the European Union.

01:20:33So Modi kind of reflects an Indian foreign policy that kind of looks at the world like a menu and

01:20:39picks and chooses who he wants to deal with on different issues.

01:20:42It's been interesting to me that there was something of an alliance between Trump and Modi during Trump's first term.

01:20:48You saw Modi basically endorsed Trump for reelection in 2020 because maybe he liked that they're both these strongmen.

01:20:55They both have this kind of conservative personas.

01:20:57And I think when Trump came back into power, Modi was perfectly fine with that.

01:21:03He had a good relationship with Trump.

01:21:04They've had some scratchiness, though, in the sense that Trump imposed significant tariffs on India for a couple of reasons.

01:21:12One, there was a war between India and Pakistan.

01:21:15That war kind of followed a traditional pattern where there's a terrorist attack inside of Kashmir, which is controlled by

01:21:20India.

01:21:21India responds, Pakistan responds, and the whole thing kind of escalates for a period of days.

01:21:26And then there's a ceasefire.

01:21:28Trump took credit for that ceasefire, I think, well beyond any evidence.

01:21:33I mean, they may have logged in some phone calls to the Indians and Pakistanis.

01:21:37But in Trump's telling, you know, World War Three was about to break out and he ended it.

01:21:41Pakistan was very happy to say, oh, yes, Mr. Trump came in and ended this war because it kind of

01:21:46humiliated Modi.

01:21:47It made it look like he was on Pakistan's level, you know, not a greater power than Pakistan.

01:21:52And Modi did not go along with that narrative.

01:21:54The Pakistanis nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

01:21:57India notably did not.

01:21:59It was not a coincidence to me that these tariffs and sanctions were put in place on India after that

01:22:05episode.

01:22:06Now, Trump said it was for Indian purchases of Russian oil, but Trump was pretty late to be concerned about

01:22:12that.

01:22:13So there have been tensions.

01:22:14The relationship's gone up and down.

01:22:16And you remember Modi thinks of India as a rising superpower.

01:22:21They want to be someday the world's largest economy.

01:22:25They don't want to dominate global affairs in the way that the United States has or create an entire alternative

01:22:31world order the way the Chinese are doing.

01:22:33But they do want to be respected and they want to be accepted as a power on kind of equal

01:22:39footing ultimately with the United States and China and Russia and Europe and the big powers.

01:22:44A Reddit user asks, what are the geopolitical implications of year round Arctic shipping lanes?

01:22:49So, first of all, the obvious point that because of climate change, the Arctic is warming, it's melting, and it's

01:22:56opening up new waterways, new shipping lanes.

01:22:59I think simply put, number one, the melting of the Arctic has also opened up access to significant resources, right?

01:23:06So suddenly you can get at things, oil and gas or critical minerals that you couldn't before, and then the

01:23:10shipping lanes allow you to transport them out.

01:23:13And so there's a potential bonanza up there in terms of natural resources.

01:23:16I think another point is the shipping lanes opening up can transform the way the global economy is wired.

01:23:22So, for instance, China is already looking at Arctic shipping ways as a much more efficient and faster way for

01:23:28them to export to places like Europe.

01:23:30If you've been on a plane that has gone over the top, you know what I'm talking about.

01:23:34You can get someplace faster if you can go through the Arctic.

01:23:37And so China, as a net exporter, an enormous exporter of goods, stands to benefit from more efficient shipping as

01:23:44well.

01:23:44Okay, that's it. That's all the questions.

01:23:46I hope you learned something.

01:23:47Till next time.

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