0:00 - I'm Ben Rhodes. For eight years, I was a deputy national security advisor for Barack Obama. I'm here to answer your questions from the internet. This is "Geopolitics Support." [upbeat music] @Sean17Henley asks, "So in your opinion, just how close are we to World War III?" I think we are uncomfortably close to it. First of all, look at where the current wars are that are being fought. So we already have a major land war in Europe, the biggest one that we've had since World War II, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has killed probably hundreds of thousands of people and has not ended. We've already seen a major conflict in the Middle East with the Gaza War and Israel taking action in seven or eight countries, and we see this state of war between the United States and Iran that could lead to state collapse in Iran,
0:46 could lead to major refugee flows. So we're 2/3 of the way there, if you look at the map of World War II. And now, the third piece of this could be the Taiwan Strait. China has made very clear that it doesn't see Taiwan as separate from China. They want to reunify Taiwan no matter what they have to do, and the Taiwanese increasingly do not wanna be a part of China. If China were to try to militarily take control of Taiwan, then we'd really be in a situation where that entire map of World War II, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, suddenly, you do have conflict along those fault lines. I think the bigger reason that I'm worried about this is look at the collection of people who are in charge of the most powerful countries in the world today, Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China,
1:34 you can throw in Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. These are older men, they are nationalists, they are strongmen. These are the kind of leaders that can get into conflict. Now, you might say, it seems like Trump wants to avoid the war, doesn't seem like the Chinese are looking for a world war, but that's always the case. The problem is when you start to have territorial expansion again, a Russia trying to take land in Ukraine, a United States that may try to take land in Greenland or other places, a China that may try to take land in Taiwan. Those big powers, they can bump into each other, and given the fact that, increasingly, those countries are not playing by the rules that were set after World War II to prevent another world war, that's why we set up the United Nations, that's why we set up international laws.
2:19 As those rules and laws and institutions are being ignored, I just think we are living with way too much risk of the potential for another world war, [keyboard keys clicking] a conflict among the great powers. @ninzaverse asks, "What if China wins the AI race?" I think it's a bit of a false question because Chinese are gonna get there anyway, so if whether, you know, a large language model in the US is the first to get to some AGI, it's not like the Chinese aren't gonna be there right away too. I think there are some security people who think there's benefits in getting there first or at least maintaining that lead because if they do, they could pose cyber risks to RAI, that there could be a window of opportunity for the Chinese. But put that aside, if you take the premise that we're all getting there, it's actually a race to figure out also
3:06 whose technology does the rest of the world use, and I think this has been an underdiscussed part of the AI race. We know that the US and China are the superpowers, but it's gonna matter a lot whether Africa and Latin America and Southeast Asia and Europe decide to use American or Chinese AI. If you will remember, one of the grievances that Trump had against China in the first Trump term was that most of the world was starting to use Huawei, Chinese telecommunications. Huawei and telecommunications is nothing compared to AI. If most of the world ends up running on Chinese AI, that will give the Chinese extraordinary leverage over those countries. Like, their economies will depend on Chinese technology that could be shut off. There's obviously all kinds of ways that the Chinese can,
3:53 or the Americans, for that reason, can use artificial intelligence technologies to kind of spy and create dependencies on these other countries. So now you're starting to see the AI race become about who is going to win the domination of this technology in other spaces, and Trump is starting in the Gulf, right, by selling extraordinary amounts of computing power, essentially, from US companies to the United Arab Emirates and to Saudi Arabia. I think that this is complicated, though, because the United States often likes to think of this in terms of LLMs, right? Like, if you're American, your experience of AI to date might be with an agent, a ChatGPT or a Claude. And sometimes, we can get awfully dismissive of Chinese AI by saying, well, if you put into the, you know, Chinese model, DeepSeek or something,
4:40 and you say what happened in Tiananmen Square, it doesn't give you the answer, it's censored, it's less good. I remember meeting with somebody, a Chinese investor, been kind of state-backed investor in AI, who kind of looked at me, and he's like, "Do you think we're building these technologies to answer the question of what happened in Tiananmen Square? We are building AI to create industrial efficiency. We wanna dominate robotics." One of the reasons the Chinese are focused on AI so much is that they had a one-child policy for a long time. Their population is getting much, much older, and they want to continue to be able to have extraordinary economic and industrial output. What do you need for that? You need incredible efficiencies to produce more. You need robots to take the roles of younger human beings
5:25 'cause there are less of them in China. And he said to me, "What do you think most of the rest of the countries in the world want? They want robots. They want industrial efficiency. They want economic growth." One of the concerns I have is that the American AI is designed for what American economy is, which is services, right, or, you know, creative economies or white-collar economies. The Chinese AI is going to have these other uses that might be more attractive to other countries. And so, it's not necessarily about who gets to AGI, artificial general intelligence, first. The question is, whose AI is the world gonna run on? And right now, I actually think the Chinese are in the lead on that because they are developing AI technologies that are highly relevant to developing countries,
6:11 and if those developing countries, as they have in other cases, look to China because their technology is cheaper and more useful to them, those countries are gonna have [keyboard keys clicking] massive dependencies on China going forward. PoppyBell123 asks, "Why can Iran and the USA not make amends after 40 years?" It's a question weighing on all of us right now. You know, look, I think there are a couple reasons. At core, this is fundamental to the kind of identity and security of both countries in some ways. The Iranian Revolution happened in 1979 to oust a US-backed autocratic government, the Shah of Iran, and so from the get-go, the US was seen as the kind of power behind the autocratic leader that was ousted by the Iranian Revolution.
6:57 So the Iranian Revolution wasn't just against the Shah, it was against the United States, it was against US domination, so it was in the DNA of the Iranian Revolution to be against America. And you saw, as that evolved into the Islamic Republic of Iran, that lead to, you know, death to America chants and death to Israel chants. This kind of idea that this wasn't just an Islamic Republic, an Islamic state, it was also a country that was at the vanguard of the fight against Israel and the Middle East and the fight against the United States and the world. That kind of infused the Iranian government from the beginning, and then it kind of moved out into groups like Hezbollah, for instance, that the Iranian government backed for many years and continues to back in Lebanon. On the other hand, the United States tends
7:45 to not take humiliation well. If you look at the countries that have kind of humiliated us, we never forget it. So we have a Cuban Revolution under Fidel Castro in the late 1950s against a US-backed corrupt autocrat. And then, you have the US utterly humiliated in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 to get rid of the Cuban government. Ever since, we have been pretty fixated on Cuba well beyond any threat it poses to us, right? I mean, maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis it did, but ever since, you know, we still have an embargo on Cuba, I think 'cause we're still pissed about what happened, and the same thing is true with Iran. We were humiliated in 1979. We were humiliated
8:30 when they took our embassy personnel hostage inside of Iran. That was a traumatic event for Americans. If you fast forward, too, there's been this kind of war of sorts between the United States and Iran over the years, often through Iranian proxies. So, in Lebanon, the US Marine barracks was bombed in the '80s, you know, killing hundreds of US Marines by Hezbollah, you know, an ally of the Iranians. That too gets filed away in the American memory. After the Iraq War, when the United States invaded Iraq and removed, ironically, Iran's biggest adversary, Saddam Hussein, you had a lotta US troops who were killed by kind of Iranian-backed militias inside of Iraq. So, you've had kind of an ongoing state of conflict, really, between the United States and Iran. Add to that decades of US sanctions on Iran,
9:18 which have devastated their economy and harmed their government. At the end of the day, I think what we've also seen is, look, in the Obama years, we tried to at least restart diplomacy. We had a nuclear deal. That wasn't meant to solve all the problems. It was just meant to solve the nuclear problem, but I felt at that time, and certainly experienced, there are political constituencies in the United States that are just dead set against any kind of diplomatic rapprochement with any piece of the Iranian system, even if it's just trying to get rid of a nuclear weapon. They're committed to regime change. As long as there's an Islamic Republic government in Iran, they are a threat to us, they must be removed. That is like a mindset that is deeply embedded in aspects of American politics and government, and right now, under Donald Trump, that is a mindset
10:03 that is very prevalent in his administration. By the way, for understandable reasons, too, a lot of Iranian Americans who had to leave Iran after the revolution, who've seen their families suffer under the Islamic Revolution, they would also like to see that regime go, and this kind of obviously then plays into the mindset in Tehran that the US is our enemy, our existential enemy, and therefore we can't make compromise. So we've kind of been locked in this conflict spiral with the Iranians, and at any time, that can lead to a pretty explosive war because while you're talking about a country of 90 million people, you're talking about a country with significant military capabilities. We decapitated that regime, took out its leaders, the people who are left with the most weapons are the hardest line people, the Revolutionary Guard inside of Iran,
10:48 you've got ethnic minorities inside of Iran, so you've got a recipe that could lead, could, to significant conflict, instability, refugee flows in the event [keyboard keys clicking] of a regime change war. @DireReport asks, "When have sanctions ever, ever produced the desired outcome? Name one single time ever." I love this question, @DireReport. I agree with you. I do not think sanctions work. If you look at the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world by the United States, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, how did that go? Did we change the behavior of those countries? I'll just take Cuba, which I worked on. I helped to negotiate the normalization of relations with Cuba in the Obama administration. Obviously, Donald Trump is now trying
11:34 to squeeze that government out of existence, but the reality is we had the strongest sanctions possible, an embargo on Cuba since the 1960s. All it did is entrench the Cuban government in power. If you cut them off from the rest of the world, you're not gonna get change in those countries, and, in fact, you're going to hurt the very people you claim to help. We said we're trying to help the Cuban people in their fight for freedom and democracy. Well, we have done nothing but make the lives of the Cuban people miserable with our sanctions for decades. We said we were going to change Russia's behavior. Putin has only become more aggressive the more he's been sanctioned. I think sanctions are sometimes a tool to punish people, sometimes it makes people in Washington feel like they're doing something, but we just don't have a lot of evidence that they work in changing the behavior
12:20 of certain kinds of leaders and governments. And, in fact, they have a huge cost. The rest of the world is getting pretty sick of the United States going around taking advantage of the fact that we control the world financial system through the dollar and just smacking these sanctions on people. I think you can say, of course, that the United States doesn't have to engage in normal trade with governments that we find to be reprehensible or some kind of national security threat. But that said, the kind of sanctions that the US puts in place often ends up punishing the populations of those countries more than the governments because what we do is we don't just say that we're not gonna trade with you, Iran. We say that we're gonna punish other countries that trade with you. Well, that leads to fuel shortages, that leads to currency problems in those countries. That really hurts the people in those countries. Guess who figures out the way around that?
13:08 The governments themselves. If you look at inside of Iran, for instance, there's an entire black market economy that developed because of the sanctions on Iran. If you're just a shopkeeper, if you're just a small businessperson, you can't evade sanctions, but if you're the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard, well, you find ways to do it. So I often think sometimes we end up empowering the people inside of the countries [keyboard keys clicking] that we're actually trying to undercut with sanctions. Okay, Raminax asks, "When and how did the word globalist become a negative, insulting term?" I think when we hear the word globalist, we think of essentially political, security, financial elites who've been kind of at the wheel of globalization since the end of the Cold War. I think this became a negative, insulting term really after the global financial crisis in 2008. You'd already had the body blow to the world order
13:55 of the Iraq invasion, which made the security elites look like maybe they didn't know what they were doing, and then you have the bottom fall out of the global economy in a way that harms working and middle-class people all over the world. And I think, at that time, you really started to see this kind of building resentment of the kinda people that jet off to Davos or international conferences, the kinda people who are making decisions as if they know better than people around the world about what's in their interests. And you've really seen this take off over the course of the last 15 years or so, where the resentments of essentially the globalist class has fueled a lot of populism, a lot of anger. So we are living through a period where that system is being broken apart, but we don't really know what's going to take its place. Now, of course, the solution to those who don't like globalism is increasingly nationalism,
14:44 and so we see, whether it's in the United States or in China or certainly in Russia and increasingly in European countries and other places, Turkey, Israel, this rising nationalism, essentially, a focus on sovereignty. We are going to do what we want to do in this country. We don't wanna be a part of free trade agreements. We wanna have secure borders. We don't wanna let people in. We don't wanna be stakeholders in some international system of rules that constrain us. That appeals to some people in the short term, feels good to control your own country, make your own decisions, but the whole reason that we had systems that were more globalist to begin with is nationalism led to two pretty big world wars in the 20th century, and so this is kind of really the tension, the danger of nationalism and where it can lead, which is often conflict, or the danger of globalism, which is these
15:31 out of touch elites [keyboard keys clicking] who seem like they're making decisions that are not in the interests of people around the world. TankSubject6469 asks, "Why the world is shifting towards right-wing control?" And if I had to give a shorthand answer, I'd say this. You have already, I think, by the time, say, Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there's an encroachment that comes with globalization on their traditional identities. Suddenly, there are immigrants from other countries, or in some places, suddenly, the global culture is just becoming unified in a way that makes me uncomfortable, right? It's American pop culture that's coming into my country, or in the United States, there's a view in some more traditional circles that there's this kind of overly liberal culture that is encroaching on my identity.
16:18 So I think people were already uncomfortable with globalization, but the basic bargain was, well, standards of living are getting better. This is ultimately a net positive for me. Then, you have the financial crisis, and all of a sudden, it feels like, wait a second, wait a second, none of this is working for me. Globalization isn't working on me. I'm losing something about my traditional identity. There are these people moving into my country, and then meanwhile, all of a sudden, my standard of living is not getting better. And in fact, what I see is exploding inequality inside my country. I see a bunch of winners at the top, and I see a bunch of people getting screwed down here in the middle and the bottom. What's interesting is even though there's a kind of economic critique that I would make as someone who is to the left of the center on these things,
17:03 the critique being that you cut taxes, you cut regulations, you get the exploding inequality and reckless behavior that leads to the financial crisis, the backlash to globalization was captured by right-wing populists, by right-wing nationalists. I think the reason is that they're offering the kinda oldest form of politics there is, an us versus them politics. It's us, the real Americans, us, the real Hungarians, us, the real Russians, versus them, the liberal elites, the globalists, the migrants, right, whatever class of people that you want to stigmatize. And I think what we've seen is almost kind of a set of dominoes around the world here, because this is not limited to the United States, and I think it's important for Americans to recognize. This is happening all over the world,
17:49 in Brazil and Argentina, in the United States, in Hungary, in Russia, in India, where Narendra Modi is very much a Hindu nationalist, in Turkey under Tayyip Erdogan, in Israel under Bibi Netanyahu, in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte. Again, these are very different countries in very different parts of the world. What they have in common is people unsettled by the disruptions in the world turning to the most familiar form of politics there is, nationalism, us versus them. Let's pull up the drawbridge. I think those of us who are on the center left to the left have made mistakes, a lot of mistakes in our politics over the course of the last 15 to 20 years, because, essentially, we looked at these problems, and we tried to kind of solve the problem almost
18:37 in a technocratic way, right? What can we do to arrest the collapse of the global economy? You know, what can we do to deliver slightly better benefits for people from governments? But we weren't speaking to this anger that people felt against elites. We weren't speaking to the need that people had to belong to something bigger than themselves, and what ended up happening is that the Democrats in the United States or social democrats, those are the center left parties in Europe, or other types of more liberal parties around the world, because we're people that wanna follow rules, because we're people who want strong institutions, even though we might have had a lotta problems with the way globalization was run, we allowed ourselves to be cast as the people that were defending
19:22 these very systems [keyboard keys clicking] and institutions that people were sick of. Sidewinder_ISR asks, "What are some potential, somewhat realistic solutions to the current state in Gaza?" Tragically, I don't really see that many potential solutions, but let's go through some of the possibilities. If you listen to the right wing of the already right-wing Israeli government, their solution is pretty clear, they want to control Gaza. They want to have Israeli settlers move in, they want to move the Palestinians out, and they essentially want to take the land as part of greater Israel. This is not my view. This is what politicians like the finance minister of Israel, Smotrich, say. And already, Israel has essentially control over 50% of the Gaza Strip, even under the agreement
20:09 that they reached with President Trump. So one possible scenario is Israeli control, which would be very messy because where are those Palestinians going to go? Are they gonna be forced out, or are they gonna be kinda put into ever-shrinking pieces of land? Unfortunately, I think that's quite a likely scenario, is that Palestinians are pushed into smaller and smaller parts of Gaza in the same way that we've seen them pushed into smaller and smaller parts of the West Bank. Another solution is this kind of redevelopment of Gaza that takes place in stages, and under the Trump plan, you essentially have some multinational force coming in to provide security after Hamas is demilitarized, and then we skip kinda pretty quickly to the Jared Kushner presentation
20:55 of what looks like Dubai on the waterfront there in Gaza. I mean, this, I think, is nuts, and I don't see any way this happens, certainly, in the next 10 years, because there's a lot of steps you have to get through here. You have to clear tens of thousands of unexploded bombs that are buried in the rubble. You have to clear the rubble, right? You have to gather the dead, right? You have to do a tremendous amount of work just to clean up the destruction of the Gaza Strip that's taken place. Hamas has not demilitarized. I think it's very hard, you know, if not impossible, for a peacekeeping force to be asked to kind of go into a place where Hamas is still the kind of controlling power. There are some elements of it that makes sense. Yes, you would want Hamas to demilitarize. You would want a kinda multinational peacekeeping force
21:40 to come in, but I see some real problems with that course of action as well. I think the best solution to the problem is if you were to put it in a broader context of a Palestinian-Israeli settlement of some kind, where we have a different kind of Palestinian leadership that is negotiated as a part of a Palestinian state that is going to be in Gaza and the West Bank. That creates greater incentive for Hamas to go away as a political authority inside of Gaza, creates a lot more incentive for the Arab states who don't want to necessarily be seen as kind of willing partners to ethnically cleansing Gaza or putting an end to the idea of a Palestinian state. They all of a sudden have a lot more reason to kick in money
22:26 and to kick in troops for some kinda multinational force. The problem is there's no indication from Israel that they're interested [keyboard keys clicking] in any kind of resolution with the Palestinians whatsoever. LTrent2021 asks, "Why is Israel building settlements in the West Bank?" I think the short answer, from my perspective, is that Israel wants to control and ultimately annex the West Bank. And annex essentially means you formally absorbing that territory into your sovereign borders so that the West Bank would become fully a part of sovereign Israel. But we should rewind the tape. Some people may disagree with that, and it's necessary to go through a little bit of the history. So first of all, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel had been attacked by its Arab neighbors, Israel conquered all the land from the Jordan River to the sea here. That included East Jerusalem,
23:11 and that included the West Bank. Between 1967 and the Oslo Accords in 1993, you started to see Israeli settlements being constructed inside of the West Bank. Now, under international law, the West Bank is occupied territory. It is Palestinian territory that Israel formally occupies. You're not supposed to build settlements, essentially. You're not supposed to move into occupied territories and claim it as your own, but that's what Israel started to do over time. Now, with all that history, what we've seen as Israel's moved further and further away from the Oslo Accords and further to the right, let's say, particularly since the election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009, is a rapid growth in the Israeli settlements. And all of a sudden, the Israeli settlements are making the idea
23:57 of a Palestinian state in the West Bank impossible. It's kind of a network of checkpoints and security barriers, and all of a sudden, the West Bank is kinda being sliced and diced, Palestinian homes and structures are being demolished to make way for Israeli settlements. Every time you have Israeli settlements set up, they get the protection of Israeli security forces, and Palestinians are kinda pushed into kind of shrinking territories where they have second-class citizenship. And I think in the coming years, we're going to see either a de facto or an outright effort to annex the territory. Then the question comes, what happens to the Palestinians who are still living in the West Bank? Do they either continue to live under a form of military occupation with kind of second-class citizenship with far less rights, far less freedom of movement, or are they gonna get [keyboard keys clicking] increasingly pushed out into Jordan
24:44 or other surrounding countries? svethan asks, "Why do people use the term genocide to describe Israeli actions in Gaza?" Obviously, it's a very charged question, and I understand the very profound emotions on both sides of this question. I say that as someone who has been sympathetic to those who have called this a genocide for reasons that I'll talk about, but I also say that as someone who comes from a Jewish family that lost a lotta people in the Holocaust, so very complex. But if we're just gonna take the practical question of is this a genocide, first of all, the definition of genocide is an effort to destroy a people in whole or in part. That's the legal definition, and this is important. It's not about the number of people that you killed.
25:30 It's about whether you have an intention to destroy a people, and it doesn't have to be completely destroy them, but to destroy a part. And to give some examples in recent history, for instance, the United States determined that there was genocide in Darfur when certain militias were going in and targeting people for destruction there. The United States also said there was a genocide taking place in Xinjiang province in China, where the Uyghurs were not even really being killed, their identity was being erased because they're basically being put forcibly in these kind of reeducation camps. So I say that to give the context that it doesn't just mean that you're trying to kill every single person. Are you trying to eliminate a people in whole or in part? You've had a significant number of organizations say
26:15 that a genocide has taken place in Gaza. This includes a United Nations Commission of Inquiry, this includes human rights organizations, including Israeli human rights organizations, this includes a significant number of genocide scholars. Why have they said this? First of all, they point to some of the statements made by Israeli leaders themselves. And so, after October 7th, and at the beginning and throughout Israeli military operations, you have had statements that were clearly about more than destroying Hamas. They were statements in which essentially Gaza was put under siege, and we're gonna cut off all food and water and power into Gaza, essentially a form of collective punishment on all the people of Gaza.
27:00 There had been imagery that talked about essentially the total destruction of Gaza City or parts of the Gaza Strip. Then, there's the conduct of the military operation itself, and we've all seen the pictures of whole apartment blocks being leveled. And actually, if you look at the Gaza Strip today, there's really almost nothing left standing. Israel, even if they were targeting, say, Hamas commanders, they were not taking any care to avoid killing significant numbers of civilians. And the death count in Gaza is currently around 70,000. That encompasses Hamas fighters and civilians. A lot of independent observers believe that death count is far higher. But then there's also this question of are they trying to destroy the Palestinian people? And there, actually, I would say,
27:47 at least aspects of the Netanyahu government are pretty clear they wanna destroy the Palestinian people. They say on a regular basis that there's never going to be anything such as a Palestinian state, or you've had Israeli politicians say there's not really Palestinians. They're just Arabs who happen, you know, to live here, and they should leave, right? And so, if you take the combination of these things, the state intent that goes far beyond just destroying Hamas, but also is about collective punishment of the people of Gaza, the military operation that has killed an extraordinary number of civilians, and by the way, that has continued to restrict basic goods getting into Gaza, right, like food and water getting in at anywhere near the levels that are necessary, take the famine-like conditions, they go far beyond just the violence of bombs, but again, people starving
28:32 because of those restrictions of food getting into Gaza, and then the kind of political objective on the Israeli right to essentially kind of eliminate the Palestinians as a category of people with a right to sovereign territory. And so I think, sometimes, this obviously gets much more complicated because, particularly on the further right side of Israeli politics, it's a very religious point of view. This is ours. It's promised to us by God. That kind of runs up against international law and the fact that there are millions of Palestinians that live between the river and the sea. In the eyes of a lot of organizations, that adds up to a genocide. Now, there are other people who will say that's not the case. This was a legitimate war of self-defense. Hamas started this latest war
29:19 with its attacks on October 7th. I would certainly say, on the latter point, yes, Hamas started this latest round of violence with an abhorrent, grotesque attack on Israeli civilians on October 7th. That doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever you want to do in response. You're supposed to follow laws of war that were set up after World War II to prevent genocide, to prevent mass atrocities, to prevent crimes against humanity. So, at a minimum, I feel very comfortable in saying Israel has not followed those laws of war. I think it's quite clear that war crimes are committed, that we saw violence that went far beyond kind of legitimate self-defense. I think this genocide question is, obviously, the most significant war crime that can be committed and the most fraught issue that there is,
30:05 and frankly, this isn't over yet. If Israel wants to demonstrate that they're not trying to eliminate the Palestinian people, well, one way is to have the Palestinian people [keyboard keys clicking] have a legitimate right to self-determination. So, cynicalxidealist points out that, "Some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden." If you read Osama bin Laden's fatwas, his writings, if you watch some of his videos, his critiques of American society and foreign policy have some credence. He talks about imperialism, he talks about climate change, and in part because he was trying to appeal to young people in the United States and Europe, has hit upon arguments, you know, that some people agree with. I also believe it's the case that, look, if you're taking stock
30:53 of the last 25 years, our reaction to 9/11 looks over the top, if not crazy. You know, we've invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, we've gone into Somalia and Yemen and Libya, military operations all across the Middle East and North Africa and Asia. We've spent trillions of dollars. Is it better? So, I think it's a combination of young people kind of looking at bin Laden's words more than his actions, and I'm gonna come back to that, and young people taking stock of this war on terror seems like it was nuts, you know? And concluding, well, maybe this bin Laden guy had some points. Now, I think the problem with this is, if you look at bin Laden's actions, murdering thousands of people is completely unjustified. I think people are separating words
31:40 from what bin Laden actually did. I also think they're ignoring the fact that some of what bin Laden said was intentionally designed to appeal to audiences in the West. If you look at his words inside of Afghanistan, you know, he supported the Taliban, which completely represses women, gives them no rights like whatsoever, right? He certainly believes in violence as a legitimate form of politics. So I think there's kind of an airbrushed bin Laden here. Now, I also think one other important point here that young people may have seized on, which is that if you go back and look at what George Bush said after 9/1, he said, "Why did they attack us?" And he said this in his famous speech before Congress after 9/11. He said, "They attacked us because they hate what they say here.
32:25 They attacked us 'cause they hate our freedoms." I think that was bullshit, and I thought it was bullshit at the time. I don't think Osama bin Laden attacked us 'cause he hated our freedoms or because of what happened in Congress. He hated our foreign policy. He hated the fact that the United States supported these regimes he hated, in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He hated the fact that the United States supported Israel, right? So that may make us uncomfortable, but we have to be able to be uncomfortable if we're gonna be a superpower that goes around the world backing regimes and going to war. So, we have to kinda separate all these things out. Like, bin Laden was a bad guy who did bad things and does not deserve our sympathy, but bin Laden was also not the cartoon version that was sold to us [keyboard keys clicking] by George Bush as some guy who just hated freedom. Okay, a Reddit user asks, "Change my view. Nuclear weapons are the greatest tool
33:11 for peace we have ever invented." Some people would argue that because nuclear weapons are so devastating that, actually, it makes war less likely, and the proof point they might use is that the United States and the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other for decades and never went to war directly because the cost of that war was too high. Now, there's something to this. This was called mutually assured destruction, right? The idea that if both countries have the ability to destroy one another, they're less likely to go to war. However, I think there are a couple of problems with this. First of all, we've seen a lot of conflict despite the existence of nuclear weapons. You often have nuclear-armed superpowers who feel emboldened because of those nuclear weapons to support proxy wars
33:57 or to invade smaller countries. Classic example of this is the war in Ukraine. Putin has invaded Ukraine in part because he believes he can't be stopped because he has nuclear weapons. And sure enough, oftentimes, the Biden administration would say there's a limit on how much military support we can provide to the Ukrainians because we're worried about getting into a nuclear war with the Russians. I think the bigger problem I have, though, is that nuclear weapons provide a sense of security until they are used. I don't know that I feel more secure in a world in which a very small number of people have the capacity to destroy entire countries. Ultimately, it's important if these weapons are gonna exist that there are far less of them, that less countries have them, that they're put under strict controls, because essentially, if you normalize the proliferation
34:43 of these weapons, you're going to just raise the stakes that, at one of these flashpoints around the world, things could go nuclear, and that's obviously nothing [keyboard keys clicking] that would be good for anybody in the world. Okay, __shobber__ asks, "Why and when did USA-China relations become so hostile?" Well, the short answer to this is after Donald Trump's first election, but I think if you step back, there were some structural reasons that were leading things in this direction already. The United States, the world's superpower, China is this emerging power, and you saw between the end of the Cold War up to, say, the election of Barack Obama, China beginning to grow as an economy, beginning to become more confident of itself and, ultimately, on the world stage. But always the idea that analysts have when we looked at China is, well, they're gonna grow, they're gonna get bigger, they're gonna get richer,
35:29 it's better to kind of bring them into the system, right? We brought them into the World Trade Organization, which gave them kind of a lot of privileges that they've taken advantage of. And then, over time, they'll become more democratic, they'll start to follow rules that we see them breaking sometimes. And by the time we got pretty deep in the Obama administration and Xi Jinping became the president of China, this is in 2013, it was pretty clear that that theory had failed. So first of all, China was breaking a lotta rules. They were stealing intellectual property from US companies and using it to build their own companies, right? They were violating trade agreements in a variety of ways to advantage their own capacity to export lots of things to other countries
36:15 without necessarily importing that much stuff from other places. They obviously were violating human rights in essentially trying to erase Tibetan identity inside of Tibet, or ultimately to move into Hong Kong and erase Hong Kong's system, which was supposed to be separate from China's. They're still breaking the rules on trade, on intellectual property theft. They're launching cyberattacks. And so, there was a lot of frustration in the US system that was building up with the Chinese. I think, in the Obama years, it was still the idea, though, that it's better to negotiate these things. It's better to have lines of communication open. It's better to have engagement between the US and China. There's trillions of dollars of trade that flow through us. There's geopolitical hotspots like Taiwan or the South China Sea that we don't wanna see explode, so we may need to be firm at times,
37:02 we may need to impose certain penalties on the Chinese, we may need to build coalitions of countries to have more leverage on the Chinese, but like, let's not upset the kind of fundamentals of this relationship. Well, when Trump came in, he tore up that playbook, and he said I'm gonna essentially launch a major trade war with the Chinese to address what I think has been an imbalanced trading relationship, and we've been in a trade war with China ever since. Once you have that trade war, you saw all the kind of dialogues and ways in which the United States used to communicate essentially collapse, so we're just not talking to each other as much about other stuff. And Xi Jinping, for his part, he says I'm gonna be even more overt in trying to build essentially an alternative to the American world order. I'm getting closer to Putin over here.
37:48 I'm building a whole set of institutions with countries in the Global South, in Africa, in Southeast Asia that I want to be led by China, not by the United States and Europe. And so we've really been living since around 2016, 2017 in this kind of growing competition between the US and China, and it doesn't really show [keyboard keys clicking] any signs of abating. [mouse clicking] Okay, @tulobh asks, "When will Xi invade Taiwan, and should the US send our troops?" First of all, there's no guarantee that China's gonna invade Taiwan, but to understand how we got here, it's necessary to do a little bit of history. Why is this so important to Xi Jinping and China? And why is Taiwan so reluctant to be a part of China? In 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong conquered China, won the civil war,
38:37 Chiang Kai-shek, who had been the nationalist leader of China, he fled to Taiwan with a lot of people, right, and with his military force. Now, there were already people in Taiwan, but Chiang Kai-shek comes, and he essentially takes it over. So, to the Chinese Communist Party, this is a gigantic piece of unfinished business. This is the last piece of territory that they believe is rightfully a part of China, and it's also the piece that was an adversary of theirs for many decades, because, after 1949, for a long time, the United States didn't even recognize the government in Beijing as the government of China. They recognized the Chiang Kai-shek government in Taipei in Taiwan as the government of China. It's just that we said that there was this different government that should be in charge. So that's the basis for why it's important to the Chinese.
39:23 Why is Taiwan reluctant to go along with this? It's very important to understand that, in the '90s, you actually had a democratic revolution inside of Taiwan, not a violent revolution, but essentially, that Chiang Kai-shek government, which was led by a political party called the KMT, was very authoritarian in how they treated the Taiwanese people, and thought of themselves as very Chinese. They thought of themselves as the legitimate government of China, even though they're in Taipei. However, in the '90s, a bunch of uprisings and the kinda post-Cold War movement to democracy led to the KMT essentially being ousted as an authoritarian government inside of Taiwan, and ever since then, you've had Taiwan's politics evolve in a different direction, people who believe that they are not Chinese, they believe they are Taiwanese.
40:11 We've been here for hundreds of years. Now, the current party in control of Taiwan is called the DPP, and in the past, they've been pro-independence. They don't say this out loud because they know it would provoke the Chinese, but everybody knows that the DPP has no interest in being a part of China. There's one other complicating factor to this too. There have been negotiations in the past about ways in which Taiwan might peacefully reunite with China, but have its own political system, essentially one country, China, with two different political systems. That was the offer that Beijing was making to Taiwan. Well, that was the deal that Beijing made with Hong Kong, and you may remember a few years ago, China came in and said that's not the offer anymore. We are going to run this place
40:56 the same way we run the rest of China, and you had a massive protest movement, and it was absolutely crushed. So that sent a message to the people in Taiwan, I'm not sure I trust a one country, two systems policy. So that kinda leaves us where we are here today, where Xi Jinping has made very clear he's not gonna let Taiwan go, this needs to be a part of China. I think people also see Xi Jinping, he's getting older. Is this the kinda guy that's gonna really wanna leave this big piece of unfinished business unaddressed? There's concern in China that Taiwan is only gonna move further away over time, so we have to act pretty soon. There are a couple timelines that I would watch here. One is China's military capabilities. And a lot of experts that you talk to and people who have testified to this from the United States military say that China's military will be ready
41:43 for some kind of operation to retake Taiwan around 2027. Why is that? Well, 'cause China's been spending a lot of money on their navy, on their air force, on their rocket force, but also importantly on making those different military forces be able to work together, which they would have to do in some kind of complex, amphibious invasion of an island like Taiwan. I think another thing I look to is in 2028, Taiwan has its next presidential election. Now, the last one was won by a DP politician, someone who's less likely to wanna talk to the Chinese and more likely to wanna pursue independence. If that happened again in 2028, maybe we are seeing the convergence of the perfect storm. It's the last year of the Trump administration, and I think Xi Jinping thinks, well, Donald Trump's not gonna go to war to protect Taiwan.
42:30 It's an election in which if China's preferred candidate doesn't win, maybe they feel like we're never gonna be able to do this politically, we have to do this militarily, and a lot of analysts think, well, that's when the Chinese military will be ready for this. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll invade Taiwan. We've already seen them intimidate, you know, fly planes and missiles literally over Taiwan's territory or encroach upon Taiwan at sea. China could take some of the outlying islands around Taiwan, or China could impose a blockade on Taiwan and essentially say we're gonna encircle you, nothing's coming in or out unless you deal with us on our terms. There's gray spaces here in terms of how China could do this, but at core, I think it's certainly possible, if not likely, that there'll be some kind of Chinese effort
43:15 to either squeeze or take Taiwan by force at some point while Xi Jinping is president. Now, in terms of the US coming to Taiwan's aid, this is a lot more complicated than it sounds on paper. First of all, you gotta get the entire United States Navy Pacific Fleet to and around Taiwan to break some blockade. That takes some time. So if the Chinese move quickly, it's not like we can just kind of immediately be there. Second, if the United States Navy is going to get involved here, it's going to want to make sure that it's not at risk from Chinese rocket forces. Those rocket forces are usually along the coastline here. So the United States would have to take military action against mainland China to have the security to send its forces in. Well, if we hit mainland China, any war game I've been in,
44:02 then the Chinese are hitting US bases in places like Okinawa in Japan or Guam or potentially as far away as Hawaii. Very quickly, this could become a big war, and that, I think, is what weighs on any US president. Am I really willing to risk an all-out war with China over Taiwan? We've been ambiguous on this question 'cause we don't wanna tell the Chinese, hey, we're not gonna do anything, so, you know, well, have at it. I think the most important thing that we can do is try to help Taiwan become a much larger military force so the cost of a potential invasion goes up to China. I think it's also important to work with other countries like Japan, like Australia, other countries in the region to provide that kind of support to Taiwan. But ultimately, I think we need to have more diplomacy and more dialogue among the United States and China
44:49 and with the Taiwanese about this. Now, there's a lotta reasons that doesn't happen. The Chinese say they don't wanna talk to us about this. This is an internal issue for them. They mean internal, them and Taiwan is an internal issue. The Taiwanese don't wanna be seen to be some kind of country whose interests can be negotiated over its head. Just one more point on the cost to the global economy. Not only is Taiwan itself like a substantially sized place with a substantially sized economy, they make the vast majority of the world's advanced semiconductors, like the things you rely on in your car or your refrigerator just to live modern life. If that essentially goes offline because of the Chinese potential invasion, and then the US is imposing sanctions on China because they've invaded, we could see an economic disruption that is far greater
45:37 than anything from the war, [keyboard keys clicking] for instance, in Ukraine. AbunRoman asks, "What is the pro-China view on its activities in the South China Sea?" First of all, the South China Sea is this very large body of water along Southern China and also borders a number of other countries, like Vietnam, the Philippines. It's a very long maritime border. China claims the entire body of water, and it is actually, on its face, a totally absurd claim. You usually have maritime borders that are not, like, up against the territory of Vietnam, right? Countries control the waters out from their own land borders, and there's international conventions, including the Law of the Sea, that are meant to set maritime borders. China's essentially ignoring all of that and saying this South China Sea, it's just ours, all of it, and we want kind of freedom of action here.
46:24 I actually had one leader of a Southeast Asian country that has a claim on this and said, "The worst thing about the South China Sea is whoever named it," because it does suggest somehow it's theirs, but it should be a body of water that is kind of divided up under international law. Why does this matter to the rest of us? A tremendous amount of the world's shipping goes through the South China Sea because so many things are made in China or in Malaysia or in other Southeast Asian countries that gets shipped through there. So ultimately, it's not just an issue for those countries, it's an issue for the global economy. Since the Chinese have gotten much more aggressive about the South China Sea, particularly under Xi Jinping, they've also started to do things that are pretty ominous, like they take these rocks, essentially, in the middle of the South China Sea,
47:10 and they just build military structures on them, so they're kinda creating kind of a network of almost bases or certainly places where they can project military power. They've harassed fishing vessels and certainly military vessels of some of these smaller Southeast Asian countries. I think what the Chinese would say is, beyond just the kind of crude this is all ours, is that the Americans are the ones at fault. They kind of have a view of the South China Sea that's kinda similar to Putin's view of Ukraine, which is essentially, you're up in our business here. You guys have bases in Japan that's right next to us. We've got Taiwan that's still unsettled. The US Navy conducts operations in the South China Sea. This should be kind of our sphere of influence, our part of the world. Why do you need to have the US Navy coming through here, for instance?
47:57 If we don't kind of extend out a buffer, we're gonna be more vulnerable. I think what the most legitimate claims here, though, are these smaller countries like Vietnam and the Philippines who've just said, hey, can we just resolve these disputes under international law? There are courts, there's arbitration processes where we go, and we determine how to draw these barriers, [keyboard keys clicking] and whose rock belongs to who. @RossKneeDeep asks, "Okay, again, why does Putin want Ukraine?" I think there are two answers, right? One having to do with security, and one having to do with history. When you look at security, essentially, Putin's view was the Soviet Union collapses. This is a catastrophe for Russia. They lose essentially an empire, right? But then, he believes that the West broke all of its promises.
48:44 NATO was not supposed to expand beyond its borders at the time of the collapse of the Cold War. According to Putin, that was kind of a commitment, the soft commitment that was made by the then George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, what you got is NATO expanding steadily through Eastern Europe, and then you got NATO expanding into former Soviet republics, in the Baltics, that's Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. And then, you have NATO membership action plans, that's essentially putting somebody on the waiting list to get into NATO, you have those plans offered to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008. Almost immediately, by the way, Vladimir Putin invades Georgia and ends up occupying two provinces of Georgia in 2008, and then fast forward six years, and he invades and annexes Crimea as part of Ukraine.
49:31 Now, the security grievance that Putin has is essentially, whoa, you are threatening Russia. You are expanding your military alliance, NATO, all the way to our borders. He also had grievances that the United States had pulled out of several arms control agreements that had been negotiated between the United States and Russia in ways that could disadvantage Russia as well. So there's a security argument that Putin makes that we have to start pushing our borders out, and Ukraine, obviously, is somewhat of a buffer, in his view, between NATO and Russia. Now, the history argument is deeper and more emotional, and I think ultimately more important to Vladimir Putin. Ukraine and Russia have a long and intermingled history. The history of the existence of Russia itself goes all the way back to a place called Kyiv Rus.
50:17 Kyiv, being the capital of Ukraine today, used to be the capital of Russia, and so there's this kind of ancient history that binds them together. Now, over the centuries, you've had lots of different versions of a Russian Empire, you've had Ukrainian nationalism, you know, you've had land shift back and forth, so it's a lot more complicated than Putin says. But I think, at core, what Putin wants to do is kind of reestablish not just the Soviet Union. People say he wants to bring back the Soviet Union. I think it's more useful to think of it as Putin wants to reestablish the Russian Empire, the idea that they are these Slavic Russian-speaking peoples that should be under the sovereign control of the Russian state governed from Moscow. When he first moved into Ukraine,
51:03 he said he was doing it to protect Russian speakers inside of Ukraine, of which there are many. He's clearly gone beyond that. But I think Putin sees himself in a very long sweep of history, and in his view, he is restoring Russian greatness, and he's doing that through imperial conquest, and Ukraine is kind of central to his belief in what is Russian land. I obviously reject that view. A huge majority of the Ukrainian people obviously reject that view. But I think it's [keyboard keys clicking] those two forces coming together. [mouse clicking] WorldOfChungus asks, "What is the most realistic outcome of the currently ongoing Russia-Ukraine war?" Donald Trump came into office pledging to end this war on day one. It's proven to be much more difficult, and the simple reason for that is that Vladimir Putin currently believes he has the upper hand
51:51 on the battlefield, despite suffering enormous losses. Now, the reality is you have essentially this kind of 800-mile front line between Russia and Ukraine, where the Russians have been grinding the Ukrainians down. They've been also bombarding the Ukrainians' infrastructure. They believe because they're bigger, they can resupply their army, they can restock it with people that they can send to the front line, whereas Ukrainians are starting to have manpower shortages, they're starting to have trouble finding people in terms of enlistment, they're struggling to try to expand the potential draft. Simple math, if you have a bigger country fighting a war against a smaller country that becomes a war of attrition, Putin believes we have the upper hand. Now, he also believes that because Ukraine is not getting the same kind of military support from the United States that they did under Joe Biden,
52:36 and so he also knows that, well, maybe if these guys are gonna get cut off by the Americans, I can just keep grinding and grinding and grinding and getting a better deal. What does he want? Well, at a minimum, he wants the land that he currently controls to be recognized by the world, and potentially by the Ukrainians themselves, as Russian. That would include the Crimean Peninsula that he annexed illegally back in 2014, but it also includes this huge chunk of Eastern Ukraine called the Donbas that includes areas that Russia currently occupies. And the Russian proposals in these peace negotiations, he is even asking for land that Russia doesn't currently occupy to be recognized as Russian. Now, the Ukrainians don't wanna do that. They don't want to essentially volunteer
53:22 to give away their land. There's another thing that the Ukrainians want. They want credible security guarantees. Now, what does that mean? It means that Ukraine is not in NATO. That means there's not a collective defense commitment to come to Ukraine's aid if they're invaded again by Russia. And the scenario that the Ukrainians are worried about is the war stops for a few years, and then lo and behold, Putin decides it's time to take another chunk of Ukraine. The US has already said that we're not gonna put that on the table for the Ukrainians. So what can reassure them that they can stop this war without it starting again? And you see a lotta countries in Europe trying to put together some kind of commitment to the Ukrainians. Will there be some European force that is on Ukrainian soil? Will there be some long-term commitment to provide arms to the Ukrainians so their military gets stronger?
54:08 Can they join the European Union, so at least they're in a political club, even if they're not in a security club? These are all the things in the negotiations that are ongoing. I think the most likely scenario is, at a certain point, and I don't wanna predict exactly when that'll happen, but this war will have to come to an end at some point in the next year or two. You will have not a formal end of the war, but some kind of ceasefire, a stopping of fighting along a line of control in the eastern side of Ukraine, and a de facto Russia control of the land it occupies, and then an effort to essentially cobble together these security guarantees for the Ukrainians. It's not satisfying. It's certainly not the Ukrainians retaking their territory, which was their ambition in the early years of the war. It would alleviate the suffering in the short term, but it would leave hanging over Ukraine this question
54:54 of will Russia come in again, can we truly be a sovereign country. And that's why there's gonna have to be a lot of work done, even if you get a ceasefire, which is not gonna be easy, to use that time after a ceasefire to give Ukraine a credible security guarantee [keyboard keys clicking] so Russia just doesn't come back for more in the future. Loose-Wheels asks, "Why doesn't the US and EU send troops to Ukraine?" Well, simple answer now, which is that Vladimir Putin has nuclear weapons, and there is a real fear among the US and European countries that if we go to war with nuclear-armed Russia, that Russia will use nuclear weapons inside of Ukraine, and that would obviously be catastrophic. There's a separate question if there is a ceasefire, if there's some kind of end to the war, about whether you'd station US and/or European countries
55:40 in Ukraine as some kind of peacekeeping force. I think this is a much more live option. And in fact, a number of European countries, led by the United Kingdom and France, have talked about assembling this kind of European force. Trump has taken US participation in that off the table, but I think we very well may see some number of European troops in Ukraine as part of a settlement to the war to give Ukraine [keyboard keys clicking] that security assurance that they so desperately want. @DixieBushWookie asks, "Do you think Putin is playing Trump?" I absolutely do, and look, some of this is just obvious on the surface. Putin has been playing for time and trying to weaken the US support for Ukraine and US unity with European allies. Putin thinks he has the upper hand in the battlefield. He's squeezing, he's encroaching further into Ukraine,
56:27 he's bombing Ukrainian infrastructure, and so he acts like, sure, we'll talk to you guys, right? Putin comes to Alaska for a summit with Trump. He talks about peace, but he puts no credible proposal on the table. Now, what is happening while this is going on, the Ukrainians are getting more beleaguered, Zelenskyy is getting beat up by Trump, sometimes very publicly, the US is fighting with our European allies, and so Putin is getting everything he wants. He's taking more land from the Ukrainians, he's dividing the US from Ukraine, he's dividing the US from Europe, so all of his adversaries are getting weaker, and meanwhile, he's just pushing away at Ukraine.
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