Michael Tracey - Is Ukraine a Massive Blunder?

him on Twitter. Mister Tracy, coming to us Live alf Deutschland. So I know you're over in Germany right now. Let me let me start there. Actually, what's the feeling in Germany about the largest war in Europe in eighty years? Yeah? Well, first off, greetings, I would do a German greeting, but I'm just so pathetic at even adopting like basics of the linguistic context that I was supposed to be in.

And in part because you know, coming to this conference with this was the Munich Security Conference that just concluded in here in Munich where I am now, and like so it's all these people flying in from all over the place, so there's not really an expectation that you

have to acclimate it all to the local customs. So nobody really expects that you're going to speak German, and they probably wouldn't anyway, frankly, but it was even less of a burden to do so this time for this trip, which is kind of embarrassing because now I feel like an arrogant American. When we have more time, I'll tell you when I went to a Swedish counter terrorism conference and ended up partying late night at a nightclub with Danish,

Swedish and I think Finnish federal police. So you know, fun things could happen in that part of the world. Okay, so how do they feel or what's the sort of tenor or what's the just general sense that you can pick up from the conference. Well, first of all, I should disclose that the whole system that this conference had set up for press was quite peculiar, and you'd almost get a sneaking suspicion that they didn't really particularly want the press to have full access to the conference that

they could make inferences about what the tenor was. So just let me explain it to you real quick, because this is amazing and no journalists who I spoke to at this conference had ever seen or experience anything like it or even heard of it. So as best I can tell, it's like an unprecedented thing, at least for this particular conference, and maybe just you know, conferences of this sort writ large, with this being you know, a pre him and security conference for the you know, basically,

you know, the rules based international order. So you have to sign up ahead of time to get a press credential, which is standard. But once you arrive and our issue the press credential, you can't just then waltz in to the venue as you might anticipate, right. You have to go to a press sort of monitor or a selection of staff who have this booth or this room setup, and in order to get into the main venue, which is a hotel right in the center of the old

city of Munich. In order to get into the hotel, you then you have to declare a specific purpose or a specific destination or a specific task for why you're entering the hotel number one and then number two. You also have to be escorted the entire time. They actually call it an escort system, that you're in the hotel by one of these like twenty year old German guys who they have lined up ready to accompany journalists as like a chaperone or a babysitter, and you know, you

could try to lose them. I've heard of instances where like journalists where it's able to sneak away and like you know, hide in the bathroom or something to have a bit of free access. But you know, they were pretty you know, uh insistence on making sure that you

never left their site, and it was very odd. Um, definitely not the embodiment of press freedom that you would expect based on the rhetoric of these people, where they're always talking about how we have to stand up for liberal values and defend the rules based in international order because we cherish principles like you know, freedom of the press, whereas these authoritarian countries they cracked down the press, which you know is true in certain respects, but that tends

to kind of obscure how you know, Also the high minded liberal order countries or entities can engage in a bit of chicanery themselves in that respect. Um, but that just a little bit of a sort of ephemera of people are curious. So how giants as how freaked out of the Germans about the war in Ukraine right now, or rather, what's the opinion of the Germans about the war in Ukraine. Well, so there is a new or

Newish Defense Minister who came into office in January. His name is Pistorius and he entered that position right around the time when there was that whole hubbub about whether Germany would send these leopard tanks to Ukraine. And then there had to be a deal struck between the Biden administration and German Chancellor Shoals for the US to at least pledge in theory to send m one Abram's battle tanks, whereas in the meantime so as to enable in the

meantime Germany to send these leopard tanks. And you know, just going based on the rhetoric of the of the new Defense minister and also the Foreign Minister, which is a woman who's from the Green Party Babback, they're getting almost very conspicuously strident in their rhetoric because you would expect, in ordinary circumstances Germany to be among the more resistant countries in one of these like transatlantic coalitions, so it would be the US, the UK, you know, maybe the

Baltic States and Poland and so forth, at least in the context of Ukraine being most strident and most aggressive in pushing certain measures that they would like to take in terms of the conflict with Russia, whereas Germany and you know, to some extent France would be more wary, right given for a variety of historical reasons. Also, you know,

Italy and so forth would be in that category. But what's notable now, and this is sort of a break with precedent or a break with what have been the more convention expectation, is the rhetoric is hardening even with the German officials like Pistorius, the Defense Minister gave it speech or declared at one of his appearances at this

conference that Ukraine must win. He gave like a maximalist declaration as to what must happen militarily in the war for victory to be achieved, which is beyond the kind of declarations that you would have gotten even maybe just

six months ago from the German government. And in terms of the woman who's the Foreign minister, Babback, she's been one of the most hardcore advocates of accelerating the kind of interventionist policy in Ukraine from the outset, which is ironic because she's a member of the ruling coalition as a Green Party member. So the Green Party is one faction within the ruling coalition of Schulz Right, and so they have Green Party members that get appointed to positions

of state such as Foreign Minister. And she's been agitating for months and months and months for Shoals to be more assertive and more you know, antagonistic toward Russia essentially. And why is that ironic? Well, first of all, the Green Party is kind of what have what most people probably would have thought for a year ago, the Dovish Party right, like the peace nick crunchy party, where you know they'd rather like strum an acoustic guitar and sing

Kumbaya than do anything even related whatsoever to the military. Um. But they're among the most strident now. And why think that is? And if you look at their wait, why is it's interesting? Yeah? Um? Why is it? Yeah? It's a good question. And it also relates to why the Democratic Party is so unified. That was my next question.

There's a more dissension and among the Republicans even though they're like there's definitely a majority support for the policy, but there's a little bit more dissension, right, Yeah, because I think it has to do with this with the ideological contours of the war that have been imparted onto it. Or they look at the conflict, meaning just the generic

liberal kind of mainline opinion, especially within elite circles. They look at the conflict in Ukraine and they heighten like the cosmic significance of it to the point where they're imbuing it with these dimensions of some sort of you know, apocalyptic battle between authoritarianism and democracy, or fascism and liberalism, or one of these like grand ideological crusades. Right. That's

why they're always invoking World War Two. That's why World War two, now more than at any point that I've been alive anyway, is the most potent analogy and kind of conferring moral salience. Yeah. This is a good versus evil conflict, is the basics of it. This is this is the the good guy, the bad guy, the cowboy and the white hat, the cowboy and the black hat.

Putin is Hitler, Right, That's that's how this is lined up. Yeah, And they also then can relate that to their domestic political foes, right, because you know in the US, I don't have to tell you it's not just a it's not just the determination to stop Putin that's informing the fury with which a lot of Democrats approaches this ue.

It's that it also they also view it as connecting or you know, intersecting with their domestic struggle against insurrectionists and fascists and you know, white nationalists and so forth, because Trump was seen as this colluder of Putin's right, and so Putin was depicted starting in twenty and sixteen. Really, and Hillary Clinton, believe it or not, initiated this, or I don't know why you wouldn't believe it. I'm sure

you would. She sort of initiated this conception of Putin that was sort of new circle of twenty and sixteen that he wasn't just this you know, revanchist Russian former KGB agent who we had to be suspicious of, right he was also this like exporter of right wing authoritarianism and trying to undermine liberal democracy by subverting the rules

based international order to demodeological interventions. To democrats, there is a Putin Trump axis of evil, if you will, I mean this is what this is what they've created over the years of the Trump over the Trump presidency, and

now it's extended. And I do remember with some of the not just hyperbole, but the outright fabrications from the Trump from the Trump era about Russia and putin specifically, some people, and I believe you were among them, if I remember from your Twitter, were learning, Hey, maybe just creating Russia as this almost cartoonishly evil country that is trying to destroy America from within and with fate, whether it's be a Facebook or democracy. Maybe this will have

long term foreign policy implications. I think we're actually already seeing some of those foreign policy implications right now, and I want to return to that in a second. And also the notion of this doesn't stop till Russia loses what does that actually look like? But I want to take a moment for our sponsor here, because if you're a Team Mobile subscriber, they're investigating a data breach that expose a sensitive personal information of thirty seven million customers

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to this a few things. I feel like we're being told a lot of contrary because because I really want to drill down into the what the strategy is that kin make a quick Can I make a quick point about the ideological dimensions that I wanted to make, and then we'll move on to the other stuff before I forget. I think it's like setting. Sorry to interrupt, but in terms of forward, go for it. What do you got? Usually I'm just free flowing nonsense out of my mouth

and people have to tell me to study every so often. Therese, I'll just ramble for hours on in terms of the ideological dimension right, I think the whole the reason why liberals are and even leftists some degree like you would associate with a Green Party, have been so enlivened by this conflict is because it fits so perfectly into their pre existing sort of ideological warfare that they were already

waging even if there had been no invasion last February. Right, But that's not the full story, right, That just one component as to why the consensus around this issue is

so intractable. You also have other factions of ideological consensus as represented for example by Poland or the government of Poland, where you have a socially conservative party in power, the Law and Justice Party, rather rather conservative country overall all, at least relative to the rest of Europe, and they're among the most vehement, if not the most vehement, in terms of supporting the more and more aggressive measures in Ukraine and being really beating the drum harder and harder.

I mean, that's where Biden is right now, right where he just gave his speech. So that that I think that fervor that Poland exhibits kind of comes from a different ideological angle. But again, the reason why the consensus is so potent is because you have like different interlocking ideological schools of thought that can become equally sort of

vigorous in their support for this particular cause. So you asked me just to answer quickly, what is like the tenor at this security conference, because obviously I was able to do stuff and talk to people and whatever, notwithstanding

the ridiculous press restrictions. I would just summarize it as it's like an ideology overload, Like it's people overdosing on these ideological intoxicants that they've been hopped up on for a year from whatever particular direction where to the point where they almost can't be reasoned with in many respects, and they're just full steam ahead toward a particular end goal that they can't quite articulate. I have theories as to what the end goal actually is. Maybe we'll get

to it. But yeah, that's just basically how I would answer it. It's just this really strong, to say, to put it mildly, fervor that has overtaken this like Western so called security establishments, such that they're really radicalizing rapidly in a whole variety of areas, even once that are just tangentially related to Ukraine, like they essentially institutionally endorsed regime change in Iran as well at this conference. And then there's this whole China issue that is kind of

trending in the same direction. So it's um, yeah, no, no, it's so I want you to tackle this for me. You have. On the one hand, in Wall Street Journal recently editorial said, not only should we give them, meaning Ukraine, another ninety billion or whatever whatever they need, we should just send the F sixteens now because why wait, because

we're just this whole incremental game, what's the point. And on the one hand, you have them saying effectively this national security apparatus, that Western national security apparatus that the US is leading, and obviously NATO's as the other big component of it, saying or making it seem at least like there's really no real risk here of anything getting

going really bad for US. And yet on the other side you have Zelenski saying, if China is support if China does for Russia what we are doing for Ukraine, and even a fraction of what we're doing for Ukraine, Zelenski said, that will start World War three. Well, how is one in an escalation to World War three and the other has no risk of anything bad happening. That's what That's what I'm wondering. How they can make sense

of this for me? Right, I don't know exactly what Zelenski meant by that, because he could have meant it in a sort of more superficial sense, and that if China did become a bonified co belligerent in the sense that it was furnishing Russia with armaments that it would be using Ukraine, it would sort of just expand the geographical remit of the conflict to where you could say it's now a global conflict. Is that what he meant

by World War three? Or does he say that? Or is he suggesting if there's gonna be some like you know, Pacific Theater opened up in the war, and it's going to be something more recognizable as But even either one of those would be right. It's escalatory, that's the point. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, I mean, I think there's a conventional wisdom now that's congealed around the idea of escalation or whether there's risk in kind of ramping up these weapons provisions and going

further and further with the tactics employers. Remember, it's not just the weapons. People don't I think, fully appreciate this or appreciate this enough. It's such that the US is dispatching this endless supply of weaponry in an unprecedented like you know, arms funneling operation that as soon as March of last year dwarfed the most recent precedent, which had been under Terry Truman in terms of unarmed supply operation in Europe. Now it's like, I guess, you know, it

just has no precedent at all. Really, that we can reasonably sort of invoke to kind of contextualize what this mission is. But it's not just the weapons themselves, it's this it's the operational coordination of the warfare itself that the US is first and foremost undertaking in Ukraine. Remember when Ukraine launched its counter offenses last August and September, right where that that were more successful than maybe people thought, and they took back a fair amount of land around

you know, Kharkiev, and then later her song. It was reported in the New York Times and elsewhere. Shortly thereafter that, the US generals literally were involved in the process of drawing up the war plans themselves. Right, So it wasn't just we send Ukraine a couple of Javelin missiles and hope for the best, you know, and you know, wish

them good luck in coming up with tactical plans. No, the US is intimately evolved in creating and formulating and then executing those tactical practical plans because some of the systems were giving them also require require US training and an active monitoring and assistance. So some of these weapons hand someone in ak and say go shoot the enemy.

That's one thing you give them a Patriot missile battery, there has to be US training and US support for that to actually function, right, right, I mean one of the reasons that the Biden administration had cited as to why they were not going to send those Patriot batteries

that he announced in December. But when they were asked about this, meaning when Pentagon officials were asked about this, you know, last March or so, would the US entertain the idea of sending Patriot batteries to Ukraine, it was dismissed as just a nonstarter because to operate those Patriot batteries, these Pentagon officials said, would require US forces on the ground, and we don't want US forces on the ground. That's what Biden says, is the red line that the United

States is not going to cross policy wise. And then sure enough, you know, like nine months later, the Patriot batteries are deployed. Now, who knows who's going to be rating those. I mean, do I doubt that Ukrainian soldiers can garner the knowledge necessary to at least in part operate the missiles. No, I don't necessarily doubt that, but

I don't know for sure. You and I and nobody knows what the actual operational ratement will be in the management and opera and execution of those well to be what they're set up from my previous life and our patriots system, someone has to train them, and to your point, they could learn how to do it themselves, but there has to be active assistance in that phase of getting them up to speed so they can operate what is a complicated and very expensive weapons system. Is it your perception?

I feel like the biggest um, the biggest debate right now, or maybe maybe the center of the problem is absent US troops in Ukraine. I think the perception of the national security apparatus is Putin won't do anything to us or to escalate unless we actually send in troops. Therefore, why not send F sixteens? Abrahamstad like the whole all of it, Just go with all of it? Are they right? You know? I think that that logic is actually coherent,

meaning I wouldn't endorse that logic necessarily. But if you do believe, say that it is true that Putin will not escalate short of some sort of more overt, unambiguous, direct US military intervention, then they have a point when they're saying it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to deploy these different weapons systems so incrementally and haltingly, right, because you're saying that that's all under the escalation threshold, So why not just do it all at once rather

than yeah, you know, dither for for months now. I don't think that's necessarily an accurate assessment. But if that is your assessment, then at least it's internally coherent to make that argument. But my question is, do you think that's an accurate assessment? Well, I don't think there's really

a basis to believe it's accurate. Here here's the conventional wisdom that seems to have emerged around this question of escalation and so called red lines, which I hate because it's a cliche, and I guess I just hate all cliches, but this one in particular because it like obscures the gravity of the subject matter in a lot of ways.

They think that because there's there, you know, conventional wisdom now among people who will always want to escalate anyway, So they were going to try to like fashion whatever

arguments they could to justify that. But those people now have like settled on this sort of circumstantial argument, or this argument based on what's happened so far in the conflict, where they're saying, look, you know, back in the fall, there was that period in October where Putin seemed to allude to the idea of potentially using the Russian nuclear arsenal for some sort of reprisal. He didn't make a direct threat, but you know, there's a clear allusion to it.

It was in actually the speech that he gave him September twenty first, when he announced the annexation of those four new oblasts, right. And so then you know, Russia annexes the Oblasts, they have these so called referenda, which I don't think necessarily would hold up to scrutiny if you wanted to sort of decipher what it means to have a free, fair election. They're under older occupation. That's

sort of a separate issue. But so then no, Russia then formally declares that those four Oblasts are part of Russia, right, and they also assert that the Russian nuclear arsenal can be used in the event that parts of Russia are existensionally threatened. Now you have parts of Russia that are in a hot war zone. So theoretically based on what is understood to be there nuclear doctrine, although who knows what the actual nuclear doctrine is. I mean mean, people

just kind of pontificate somehow. There are more people in the United States, like on CNN who are experts on the Russian nuclear doctrine in the American doctrine. I don't know how that came about. Yeah, but it is true that those territories were incorporating to Russia, and you could make like a theoretical argument if you're Russia, that the

nuclear nuclear use is warranted to defend those oblasts. They think that meaning these national security types and whoever would be of the sort that would populate like Immuniq security

conference there. They've convinced themselves that because or as they're claiming to be convinced that because Putin's red line was crossed in that the United States didn't back off from like Zappariga, Oblast and whatever when he annext them and made them part of Russia, that that means his whatever red lines he suggests that he has, or that might even postulated that he has, they're they're not really there, and it's just all a bluff and so that gives

us license. These people say to themselves, just press on even more aggressively forward because we know that Putin really is all talk. Now, I think that that makes no sense, because Putin not doing a nuclear reprisal just because one so called red line wasn't crossed doesn't mean he wouldn't do it for an additional one. Like one doesn't that one thing doesn't lead to the other there in the logical construction, it's just like an assumption or a conjecture.

And second, you don't even know I mean, these people don't even know what a red line is. I mean they use that term because Obama said it once at a press conference in twenty twelve regarding Syria, and then it just became this like constantly invoked cliche that really has no tangible content to it other than what people are speculating might be like the point of no return for a certain world in like military and national security

analysis circles. It is used all the time. And when they talk about war gaming, which is another thing, by the way, that doesn't I've partaken in war games in my past life, I've seen and the problem with war games is not a game, and so you have no idea how the war is actually going to go, gives you, at best a very rough approximation of how conventional force on force would react if the following dependent variables are all true. That I'll said on even just the redlines issue.

The notion that there is an axiomatic where that there's a dogmatic and immediate response that you would get from an action independent of everything everything else going on, I think that is it is a problematic way of thinking about it, right. I mean they could say, well, redline as if someone goes to take the capital city or something. Well, I mean certain red lines are so obvious you don't

need to say them. And others I think would be more situational, which brings us back into Ukraine and what Putin is willing to do here in order to see this thing through, which I think, by the way, is he'll see it through with whatever he can, however he can.

I wanted to ask you go ahead, sorry, I was just gonna make a quick a quick point on that, and the certainty that these people have meaning like this conventional nat SEC community, who I think probably the one demographic on Earth that I can most confidently say is just full of crap almost twenty four to seven and almost universally with so few exceptions that like, they don't even really factor into whether you can just declare them

universally full of crap. One thing that they don't factor into this whole newfound certain city that they have about Putin's decklessness or how he's really just you know, feinting when he suggests that there could be lines, is we have plentiful evidence that there have been escalatory tit for tat exchanges between the United States and Russia that have heightened the intensity of the conflict. Right and here, let's

just to give one example. And when I say the US and Russia, you know, I'm including Ukraine within the US side of that dichotomy because Ukraine only exists as a state right now because of the sponsorship of US, and not even just the military portion of the Ukrainian state either the civil state as well, like the USA. I d is just paying all the state pensions and benefits of state employees in Ukraine. But that's side issue.

But when Ukraine, remember it did that truck bombing attack on the Kirch Bridge in Crimea in October, which was odd because or odd the standpoint of it had certain kind of classical markers of what we've come to believe would constitute a terrorist attack. But of course it wasn't called that at all in Western media because that would impune Ukraine and can't do that because you know, the high principle always is to be a partisan for one of the warring parties rather than be you know, truthful

about stuff. Sends to be the case with warfare, at least as I have observed it when that happened, which is obviously a fairly adventurous or audacious act on the Ukraine Special forces part given the kind of centrality of CRIMEA to like what seems to be Putin's sort of conception of his sort of historical epoch as leader of Russia, and that bridge is one that he personally oversaw the construction of and opened it relatively recently. Once that happened,

Russia did escalate in turn. So that was an escalation in the sense that it opened up sort of a new sphere of warfare and a new newly audacious sort of tactic of warfare. And then Russia did the same in that it reciprocally then began what became a months long campaign of bombing civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, the electrical grids and whatever. It was not even not even ambiguous if that was portrayed by Russia as at least in

part retaliation for the truck bombing on the bridge. Right, So when people in these national security cliques say that, oh, the red lines are all of bluff, we've you know, Putin has belied with his actions, any idea that we should be concerned about this in terms of esculatory potential.

What they I think willfully or I think there or even though either they willfully ignore it or they're so ideologically intoxicated that they can't bring themselves to even be able to perceive it anymore, what they're not mentioning is that there is a huge array of evidence that there is this kind of center synergetic esculatory dynamic in Ukraine where we do we can anticipate that Russia will escalate given escalatory behavior that you know us, the US does,

or that Ukraine does in tandem with the US. So that dynamic exists. It's just a point of like how high does the escalatory ladder reach to the point where it becomes something truly kind of clismics such as nuclear use. I want to come back to the very important, I would argue central question of is this all from the US perspective and what the Bide administration has done to this point a massive blunder. But hold that for a second. I want to come back to it. I want to

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some people complain about but eventually no real consequences. Well, I guess it depends on what the desired outcome is

or what objective is being pursued. Because given the objective that was articulated around when the war started, or at least in the first several months, you could make an argument that far from being a blunder, it's actually been a grand success in that when Lloyd Austin and Anthony Blincoln first made their triumphant entrance into Ukraine after the war started in April, Austin made a comment that became fairly well known and widely remarked where he said that

one of the chief aims of US policy in Ukraine was not merely to enable Ukraine to achieve victory on the battlefield, but to quote weak in Russia. And unless you think the Secretary of Defense is just off his rocker and freelancing without any sort of authorization or without commenting on a policy ambition that really does exist, I think it was fair at the time and still fair now to believe him when he says that is a

goal of US policy. Right. And there was also a column that was published by Neil Ferguson and Bloomberg in March of last year where he claimed to have overheard a Biden administration official blabbing at some function where the official blurted out that the whole point of this Ukraine interventions policy was to quote bleed Russia dry, Right, which then kind of gives a little bit more explanatory power to why certain decisions have gone the way they have. Right.

So we talked before about the people who are complaining about the laxity of the deployment of different weapons systems, right, they want it done faster, and they don't want any sort of more hindrances in terms of which styles of

weapons can be sent. Well, if your whole object is to just bleed, rush, or dry, then maybe your idea would be to just prolong the conflict and escalate it incrementally and gradually, rather than dumping everything into the war zone at once, because the idea is just to have Russia burn its resources and eventually weaken it to the point that something can be done in terms of potentially

fostering regime change or some other resolution. So yeah, in terms of a blunder from a more i guess substantive perspective, so kind of doing away with like whatever framework the actual advocates of the intervention have adopted for themselves that yeah, yeah, well yeah, or like what is what will reduce the incidents of just mass death and suffering and destruction. I always get a kick out of these people who have been hardcore champions of US interventionist foreign policy, because in

Ukraine they've gotten their way. I mean, they always erect these boogeyman of isolationists as though everybody's kind of, you know, chomping at the bit. These isolationists are all chopping at the bit to just undercut US policy because they're they're so sinister and they have such outside influence, whereas I mean, there's no isolationist. Isolationism is not the policy of the US is following in Ukraine right now, Certainly the interventionists

have gotten their way. I mean, there's a massive, sprawling, multidimensional intervention as of as we speak in Ukraine, and it's going on for a year, and it's escalating pretty much by the week. But they'll they'll sort of posture

as having the moral high ground. Right, So the people who maybe are skeptical of intervention in US foreign policy, they're morally blighted, they're sinister, they have ulterior motives, maybe they're paid by Russia whatever, or doing propaganda or spreading disinformation. Whereas the people who are champions of this policy, they have the moral high ground, they understand the stakes. They're

like humanitarians of some kind. Meanwhile, look at the fruits of the policy that they've been voted for the past year. The German intelligence services, at least it's reported by Drshpiegel a few weeks ago, said that there are hundreds of bodies, hundreds of dead Ukrainian soldiers piling up every day in the war as of at least late January, and then also a heck of a lot of Russian casualties apparently,

although we don't know the precise figures. Let's just I don't know, give a ballpark estimate of I don't know, six hundred, seven hundred. If there's at least one hundred a day right just on the Ukraine side, then like a lower tier estimate would be like a thousand killed

in action a week, right, something like that. You have the you have the moral standing or you you presume yourself to have the moral standing to pontificate about the humanitarian virtue that you embody by your advocacy of this interventionist position when the results of it are a thousand,

like twenty year olds blown to bits every week. I don't really I'm not sure that you have the really the right to be pontificating, as I just jump in really quickly here, because if it were either a Democrat interventionist or there are, as you point out at the beginning of our discussion, the right, there's more or dissent about this issue than on the left. I don't I do not see any Democrat pundits of any platform or standing a considerable platform who are opposed to what's going

on in Ukraine. I do see, you know, Tucker Carlson, for example, very prominently is a skeptic of what's going on with US intervention in Ukraine. But the people that aren't skeptics, what they would say to you, Michael, is Okay, yeah, there's a lot of casualties going on, but if we weren't giving the Ukrainians to fight, it would be an invasion by Putin with genocide and tyranny and even more casualties.

By the way, I don't subscribe to this theory. I'm just saying, what do you what is your response to what would clearly be their attack at that point of view, Well, right, they have to immediately resort to conjuring up one of these counterfactual scenarios and make everybody really intimidated by this hypothetical prospect of you know, mass genocide or you know, who are doing a blitzkrieg throughout the rest of East of Europe, or one of these other more you know,

extreme scenarios that they conveniently don't have to ever prove are true, because they're intentionally bringing up a counter factual that can't be proven or disproven, whereas I have the luxury of looking at the facts on the ground and what has actually been done and what is in the observable record, and what can be empirically verified. And that's

the fruits of the policy that they've promoted. I mean, they're they're the ones who have been chanting stand with Ukraine for a year, waving flags, demanding escalations in weapons provision and just being general advocates of the overall sort of policy framework that's been employed in Ukraine by the US.

And yet somehow the mass death and destruction and economic turmoil and you know, basically just total obliteration of Crans state capacity and so on, none of that they bear any responsibility for, because they'll claim, oh, what do you mean, it's all just Russia. Now, of course, Russia is a belligerent in the war. They're fighting the war. They're responsible for the warfare that they undertake. Right, But this idea that the United States hasn't pursued a policy explicitly that

was intended to facilitate the intensification of warfare. And then we see intensified warfare on the battlefield and the casualties associated with that. And there's no culpability at all or no responsibility that is borne by the United States for it. It's just a deflections. They are understandably resistant to being called to account for the ramifications of what they promoted, because what they what those ramifications are, we can see with our own eyes. It's the ad miseration of Ukraine

and and with no end in sight. Well, that's that's I don't know that I would be so smug if I were in their position to somehow act like you've been morally vindicated or tactically vindicated, or indicated in some other sense. Given what seems like a rapidly expanding disaster, where do you see it going? Because right now it sounds like it very much sounds like this, because Biden has said it, We're in it until the end, whatever

it takes, whatever it costs. That is the explicit policy of the Biden White House and and really of the of the uniparty. If there is such a thing and a natural security there there really is, I think almost more than anywhere else a uniparty um. That is the position and Vladimir Putin is not backing off of this. I don't think anyone believes he's going to back off of this, even if they have another one hundred thousand

casualties this year. So where do you see it going? Well, a lot of the fretting among if you want to call at the uniparty, or at least you know, the sort of mainline consensus of the national security operators who were the most sort of art enthusiast for this gambit.

The main fretting that they do, it seems as regards the ultimate outcome of the war is they're concerned that, you know, Kevin McCarthy is all of a sudden going to become an anti war activist and decide to cut off aid to Ukraine, which was always such a ridiculous concept.

It was kind of manufactured as this mid term election talking point by you know, Democrats and the media who wanted to like paint McCarthy and the Republicans as somehow stooges of Putin, and it wasn't actually in accordance with anything McCarthy had ever really said or espoused. He made one fleeting comment about how supposedly the Republicans don't want to give Ukraine a blank check anymore. But you know, everybody pretty much agrees with that statement, or he says

they do, Democrats and Republicans alike. I mean, Marco Rubio says, oh, of course, we don't want to give Ukraine to blank check, but we have to still send them tons of military equipment. So like everybody can just claim that they're not in favor of blank check. It didn't mean anything when McCarthy

said it. I mean he was actually criticizing Biden early on in the war, starting last March or so, for not being aggressive enough in sending, for example, or facilitating the transfer of those MiG jets early on that Poland

wanted to deploy. And McCarthy was a critic of Biden from a hawkish perspective on the war as at least an earlier juncture, as have been the core leadership of the Republican Party, and that both the House and Senate at least tophonic Steve Scalise, Kevin McCarthy all hardcore Ukraine

interventionist hawks. Now maybe they sort of like modulate their rhetoric in certain contexts, given that they know there's a bit more consternation about that position within elements of the Republican colition, but doesn't change the fundamental policy that they're still clear and on the record as in support of same within with the Senate, with you know, Mitch McConnell, John Thune, Rick Scott, etc. McConnell was here, as you might know, at the Munich Security Conference with his blue

and white striped tie saying that look what you should and he was right about this. What McConnell said was because of course all these people at who want to ask him questions of this event, they're all asking like, what can you do to make sure that the the the you know, Maga isolation as Republicans don't get their way and the House Republicans and Senate Republicans make sure that aid continues to flow uninhibited. He'll always he'll say a variation of or he started saying, a variation of

a one that I think is actually just true. Whether it's good or bad as another question, but he said it's true. He said, don't really fixate on the handful of sort of eccentric personalities, like especially in the House, who get a lot of airtime, or forget about like the social media chatter on this or the media commentary TV commentary. Look at who the Republicans actually have impositions

of legislative power in the Congress, and he's right. The heads of the three main committees that would be overseeing the drafting of any any forthcoming Ukraine AID legislation are among the most ardent hawks in either party on the subject. Mike McCall, Mike Turner, etc. On the you know, the Foreign Relations Committee, the Armed Services Committee, the actual committee chairs. So people who would be exerting power over the formulation of this procedurally in the House, they're all even they're

in that crowd that criticized Biden for not being hawkish enough. Okay, So in terms of where the whole conflict is going, I think that whole side of it, meaning people are always cautioning or pointing out the specter of somehow Republicans becoming an anti war caucus and cutting off the provision

of AID. I don't think that's a particularly realistic possibility, or I don't at least don't see much evidence that anybody should let that sort of dictate how they understand what the trajectory of the war is, because it seems like there's every reason to believe it'll just kind of the status quo will continue in that respect, Where do I see it going? I mean, you know, I'm hesitant to answer that question in a speculative sense because that

always makes people look bad. Like we had. There's this talking point that goes around now where we're told everybody believed, or people will say and even like the Polish president said it last night introducing Biden in Warsaw, and like Alexei Navalni I saw saying, and everybody says it, it's just like a matter of like just it's an article

of faith. It's part of like the war mythology. Now that everybody believed somehow that Kiev would fall within three days, and they were all wrong, because Ukraine showed how we're sourceful it is and how bold its fighters are and warded off the Russian menace heroically, and that's why we then have to have this indefinite commitment of perpetual warfare provision to Ukraine. Right, So I think that coal narrative

is a bit of a misnomer. And let's like, you know, cleverly constructed war propagandic because everybody did not quote believe that there was one briefing that Mark Milly gave in early February where he suggested that Russia could or may sees Kiev Kiev in one of several possible scenarios, and then that was just extrapolated into oh, everyone unbelieved that this was going to be happening with absolute certainty, which

was again not the case. But you can see why Ukrainians or pro Ukraine advocates would want to hype that as supposedly what happened, because it kind of gives their endeavor this like heightened purpose and it's like this animating sort of force for their argumentation. Here's what I can say, is happening. I've rather almost try to figure out what is happening then what may happen six months from now,

because I don't freaking know what is very unpredictable. Well, what is happening is because you have this Western security establishment, so to say, And I hate even using the word West or Western in this context without scare quotes, because it's such like a ridiculous conceit or the West, what does that even mean? I mean, it's so sort of

annoying and self aggrandizing. What is happening is you do see a hardening of the ideological zeal of the core decision makers who are party to the development of the just policy orientation of these security and state apparatus. Is Biden being a chief example. I mean, I actually think people under rate the significance of Biden's sincerely felt ideological

convictions on this. Like people think that Biden is just senile and or his interest in Ukraine is all about how like he wanted Hunter to get like sixty thousand dollars a month from the Barisma board. That's like an

ancillarily related dimension of Biden's relationship with Ukraine. But I am inclined really to take on his word when he makes these incredibly zealous statements about how awesomely important he views the conflict to be, and it would be consistent with what his foreign policy views and what his emphasis has been in public life as a member of the Senate going back decades and then as Vice president. This is bright within his ballywick as something that he thinks

is actually extraordinarily existentially civilizationally important. You can pull up clips of him in the nineties, like being the person that Bill Clinton and then later in the two thousands, George W. Bush designated to usher through NATO expansion in

the Senate. You know, so while he might not have been like a long time zealous, he might have been like it have been a long time audiologue with regard to like Afghanistan, right, which is why he allowed for or you know, ordered the withdrawal in twenty twenty one. In terms of Europe and um, you know, Soviet Union and slash Russia relations in the United States, this is something that he actually, you know, been deeply, seemingly ideologically invested in for a long time. So I'll take him

at his word on that. And that's actually all the more reason to presume that the commitment is going to be indefinite, or at least there's no reason to think that the current trajectory will change. And what is the current trajectory. It's these escalatory spirals that are hit for tat and have this center just a sort of relationship with one another between the US, slash Ukraine and Russia.

That although people, I thought people claim that the red lines were never crossed and Putin was bluffing right as we were talking about before, We're at a point. Now, I mean if I if I told you a year and a half ago, or if you told me a year and a half ago, right, that the US would be essentially functionally effectively in a hot war with Russia in that you have this incredibly intense operational involvement in

the actual combat that the US's engineering. You have the weapons provision, the diplomatic side of it, the economic subsidy, and so forth. If you had told me that and given me some examples of like what this has manifested as like, for example, in December of last year, there was a drone strike three hundred miles inside Russia, Okay, on an air base that housed part of Russia's strategic nuclear fleet. Ukraine did another audacious act and did a

drone strike on that base. Now that's the US sponsoring Ukraine's ability to do that. Whatever direct operational world the US might have had in that particular action sort of beside the point. It's only because of the US sponsorship of the Ukraine military you can do anything at all. Right now, if you had told me that that happened, right, or that the US would be declaring through the words of the President that nuclear apocalypse. Mr Biden said this

in October. Nuclear apo apocalypse is a greater threat than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, or you had told me just a dozen or more other insane things that are that exemplified this conflict, I mean even just a few weeks ago or two weeks ago or so.

The Washington Post reported that when the Ukraine military fires any rocket attacks on any at any Russian tar good, that every single time, or virtually every single time, the United States is effectively firing the rocket in that it's providing such precise and granular real time intelligence that it's essentially a second party to the actual conduct of the strike through a base that the US has on the periphery of Ukraine somewhere somewhere in one of these other

countries like Romania or Poland. I mean, that's that's insane. That's like direct war with Russia. Okay, So people don't people, but people have been habituated or they've been acclimated to how jarring and insane that is over the last year because of the way that they've approached this issue policy wise, mean, the bind administration, Congress, etc. They've done the escalations incrementally.

The war first started, supposedly, it was like this limited humanitarian aid mission with a couple of rifles and javelins, and that was it. Now we're furnishing Ukraine and entirely new military with F sixteens potentially, or at least that we know now, Abram's tanks and Patriot bat reason everything else. It's like, it's not Michael. We got to leave it there, Michael Tracy. Everybody check out his substack. Michael will have you back with more time to talk about this and

other subjects too. Thanks for being here on the show Man. We appreciate you all right, enjoyed it. Thanks