President or Mafia boss?
it seems to me that uh today we are
9:31
forgetting the lessons and particularly in Europe they're forgetting the lessons we learned during the cold war. One of
9:40
the most important agreements that we later negotiated
9:46
during the Reagan administration was to
9:55
place intermediate range missiles in
10:01
Europe to defend Europe against in that case the Soviet Union
10:09
And the point of these was then we got rid of them with an agreement so
10:18
that both sides remove these intermediate range missiles.
10:24
I might say that in those days when we did classified war games,
10:32
it was clear that nuclear weapons were ever used in Europe, they would be used against the very countries that were being defended.
10:42
It was an ridiculous circulation.
10:47
But later we have pulled out of those agreements.
10:53
they are no longer there. And it would seem that the participation of the
10:59
West Europeans and the United States in the war in Ukraine
11:06
is now raising that that danger I think to a very high level.
[. . .]
we have a generation of leaders who did not experience the cold war and seem not to have understood
31:30
the lessons uh that we should have learned at that time.
[. . .]
the fact was that the argument for expanding NATO
34:09
was that some would say out of area or out of
34:16
business. In other words, we had to use it as a an offensive alliance.
34:22
And in effect, it was. And although Russia accepted some of the early
34:32
additions those in central Europe and then of the Baltic countries, I was
34:40
in New York when Vladimir Putin then sort of a new
34:46
president of Russia came on and he gave a talk at Columbia University and I
34:54
asked him directly during that about if the three Baltic countries join
35:02
NATO, he said he didn't think that was necessary, but that in effect he would tolerate it as long as there were no
35:10
bases there. And this is another thing that we began to uh we began to put
35:19
military bases in these countries in Eastern Europe even before the question
35:25
of Ukraine membership came up.
Putin has been under fire for trusting the Americans too much with respect to Minsk with respect to
1:03:33
Istanbul with respect to Biden's pledge personally to Putin on the
1:03:43
30th of December 2021 not to put offensive strike missiles in
1:03:51
Ukraine. That's on the record.
I've [Robert Pape] been modeling the bombing of Iran for 20 years. And I've advised every White House from 2001 to
0:26
2024 on different issues related to conflict. And right now we're coming into the stage three prediction. We're
0:34
like on the Titanic and we're about to hit the iceberg. And when the iceberg hits, there's not enough lifeboats for everybody. So we
0:43
are knocking on the door of the world literally running out of oil. And then on top of that, Stephen, we have another set of problems. For example, and Iran
0:52
is attacking our base in Jordan, and we're in our ninth day of bombing in a row. And the scale of eliminating the drone and missile threat is much
1:00
bigger than people realize because they hide those drones everywhere.
1:05
So, how real is the risk that the US will do some kind of limited ground operation with boots on the ground in Iran?
1:11
It's bordering on 70% now, probably by the end of this week. But I'm concerned about terrorist attack because controlling pieces of homeland territory
1:20
is the biggest risk factor for suicide terrorism. So the choice is do we have a global economic crisis, possibly a recession, possibly worse, or
1:29
do we let Iran control the straight of Hormuz?
[. . .]
we're essentially replaying the Vietnam War. Trump is replaying the
54:43
decisions that Lyndon Johnson made and coming to very similar decisions, which is he believes, as Lyndon Johnson did,
54:52
that even though the military escalation would be a likely loser on the on the battlefield, that loss would take months
55:01
and months to play out. So, there was some chance he could pull a rabbit out of a hat. But if he accepted immediate
55:08
abrupt defeat, that would totally undermine and destroy his domestic political agenda.
[. . .]
There's been a mass exodus out of Crimea in the last weeks.
1:33:59
Ukraine is putting more and more pressure on the supply lines coming into Crimea and also coming into Ukraine from
1:34:07
Russia. And what Putin, I think, is uh is is uh wants to have happen is that um
1:34:15
he will likely escalate more, put more pressure on Europe at exactly the time
1:34:23
in the fall when the world economic crisis is growing because of Iran. And that is going to squeeze Europe, make it
1:34:32
hard for Europe to fulfill the commitment they just made to uh Zalinsky of 80 billion more dollars.
