Very pleased to be joined by the historian and author and apple Bomb, one of the most insightful commentators on domestic and global affairs, and particularly this revanist movement we see in the United States across Europe that is hostile to the liberal democratic values and the systems that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, and though imperfect, have largely kept global peace for eighty years and have certainly advanced human progress at a level that I think
sometimes both Beggar's imagination and is not widely known. But welcome an apple.
Bomb, Thanks, thanks, glad to be here.
There is a person that you remind me of historically who I've never met, but who I've read a great deal of, and that's Dorothy Thompson. And she had the distinction of being the first journalist an American kicked out of Hitler's Germany, out of the Reich. I think, wrote the greatest column explaining fascism and the affinity of people towards it in a New Yorker column You know speculated guess who the Nazi is as a dinner and parlor game.
She talked about the collapse of democracies as an eyewitness before Senate testimony in nineteen thirty seven. She was an FDR New dealer, but was absolutely opposed to his court
packing scheme and deeply worried about it. When she talked about the collapse of democracy, her main point was that people just are not willing to fight for a concept and an idea that they think has failed them with regard to their life, their economic prosperity, but they are willing to fight for that economic prosperity at the expense of their democracy. And so as we stand at this moment in the United States where Biden, if the election were tomorrow, by all accounts and all the polls, would
lose the election to Trump. I don't think we're faded to that. We have at least dephonic on national television talking about the January sixth perpetrators three years later, or hostages, so on and so forth. How do you see all of them in its totality in the highest lens.
So let me unpick a little bit what you just said. You know, one is the question of are people willing to fight for an idea as opposed to fighting for their own economic interests? And you know, I know that it's it's quite fashionable to say that, you know, democracy is too complicated a concept people. You know, people don't understand these questions a rule of law and justice and you know, it all takes place on a higher level, and everybody just wants to know where their next meal
is coming from. I actually disagree with that, and I think there is quite a lot of proof of that over time, both in our country but also in other countries. And we can come back to that as well. I do think that we live in a moment when the ideas have become muddied and you know, and have ben and we we we lack people who clearly explain them or people who are able to organize movements around them, and I think that's you know, that's a that's a
part of the problem that we're seeing now. I would say that the third thing I would say is that we you know, way the way you started your statement, you know, you talked about this eighty years of relative peace and prosperity, rules of international order that at least kept the peace in some parts of the world. You know, it meant that we didn't have another big war in Europe. It meant that conflicts were contained, even if they weren't
always prevented. You know, we took a lot of that for granted, we were all you and me and you know, people our age and years older and ten years younger. We're very, very lucky to live at a particular moment in history when it was just assumed that peace was
the norm and democracy was the ultimate aspiration. And we're now returning to something that's more normal historically speaking, or more you know, closer to what Dorothy Thompson was describing in the you know, in the nineteen thirties nineteen forties, were returning to a time when democracy is a thing that has to be fought for against different kinds of
forces that want to undo it. And preparing again to do that, and beginning to think about how to do that, and how to mobilize people again in a way that we haven't had to mobilize them in a long time. Is the challenge of the current moment. You know, I like to a good metaphor for a way to think about how we're where we where we are right now is is actually the metaphor of running water. You know, we all live in a society now where we just assume that water comes out of the tap.
Right.
We don't think about where the water comes from. We don't worry about the pipes, we don't know really how the technology works. We don't care about it. We just turn the tap on and we get water. We are now returning to an era before that, when we had to think about water. You might have to go to the well to get the water, or think about buckets or prepared during the day to assume you have enough on.
In other words, something that was automatic to us and didn't require that much thought, which was the existence of democracy and the rule of law. We're now going to have to begin to fight for, to think about, to go back to basics, to understand it. Better to talk about it more if we want it to continue, if we want to if we want to have that sense of automaticity. You know that this is automatically where we live, then you know, in the society that we live in,
we may have to do more about it. You know, all of us got used to this idea that democracy was something that was done by specialists, you know, political consultants or politicians or people who live in Washington and the rest of us. All we had to do was show up every four years and vote, or maybe not vote because it wasn't that important, and then the system would keep going. Actually, it turns out that it might be a system that we have to be involved in.
We have to think about, we have to care about it, you know, it has to be part of our lives. We have to worry about it in ways that we didn't before. And so I think that's the that's the that's the change that we're living through.
You know.
It's it's not so much that people won't fight for it, or don't care about it, or prefer their own economic interests. It's that we have to have to think harder about how to mobilize around it, how to push it, and how to make sure that it remains real. You know, it's a it's not a and it's not like a battle that will be won and then it's over and we can all go back to making money or painting
paintings or doing whatever we were doing before. It's a struggle and it's going to go on, probably for the rest of our lives.
You know.
If we want to maintain a political system where you know, freedom and the rule of law and you know, a certain tolerance for you know, for political and other kinds of minorities is the norm. Then we will have to many more of us will have to be engaged than we ever were.
It's shocking to watch Trump or at least Stephonic or there's fifty other examples I could give you where somebody looks into a television camera and says the red chairs blue right, that the convicted Falons are now hostages. And you're sitting there saying, what are people conceivably going to believe this? Is it possible that they could leave this?
And you kind of step back in the historical perspective and you say, you know, we live in a country where the casualty estimates of the Civil War were revised upwards about ten years ago after a really deep analysis, and so had you had a nation of thirty four million people where there were somewhere between seven hundred and fifty thousand to eight hundred fifty thousand casualties in eighteen eighty five the political era of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant
dies and he's the most famous American in the world, and he's revered. You get to the beginning of the twentieth century, Grant is routinely mentioned in the same breath as Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, and by nineteen thirty he's gone. And by nineteen thirty, in fact, a military genius was a butcher, Harry genius was a drunk, a near great president was corrupt, and all of the noble virtues are assigned to the loser, a trader Robert E.
Lee the myth of the lost cause. If you could come out of the American Civil War within a few decades or maybe a few more. On top of that, with the entire narrative of what happened topsy turvyed I think Taitasi Coach speaks about this. The North won the war, the South won the myth, then certainly it's possible. And this is the lesson, I suppose of all dictatorships, is to invent and manufacture their own reality and their own truth under the velocity of their under the velocity of
their lives. And so when you look at the propaganda element of this, the streme of invective and vitriol that's directed at Biden, at the pro democracy forces, the and from my perspective, the incapacity for a number of different reasons, some structural, not to be able to respond to it. How do you think about that as central to being able to communicate about the exigent threat, the existential threat ahead.
When I think of the explanation, despite all the technology, all the advances in filmography, I'm not sure that there's a better explanation of who the fascists are and who we are than Frank Capra's nineteen forty two film, which was Why we Fight and how the country got right into World War Tip. How do you think about that?
So you're right that creating myths and you know, coding the past with lies and reconstructing what happened, you know, is a is a trade of every dictatorshipt you know, probably going back to Rome, but certainly the ones of the twentieth century. You know, we're famous for doing that. You know. The the construction of a of a historical mythology and a kind of series of events that justify the present is, you know, is as old as autocracy. You know, the the you know, there was a communist
mythology about the heroism of Stalin. You know that that was entirely false, based on a completely fake account of the of the Bolshevik Revolution and the and the and the nineteen twenty wars. You know, Hitler had had a fake story about his own life and his own trajectory.
You know.
And you know, once again, I would I would stress the idea that I think for a long time Americans half convinced themselves. Certainly, I mean that I was convinced when I was growing up that this this quality didn't
really apply to us. You know, that we had a we had a better and clearer understanding of history and uh and uh, you know, and there and the and the narrative of progress was was was somehow solid, you know that okay, where there was the revolution and then this the Civil War kind of corrected the revolution, and then we had the civil rights movement that corrected that, and you know, now we were on to something, to
something better. And I think what we forgot was that bad ideas never die, you know, they they don't go away, you know, just because they've been defeated. You know, just because Nazism was defeated doesn't mean that it doesn't come back in different forms. Just because you know, white supremacy was defeated in the in the Civil War, doesn't mean it doesn't re arise, and being vigilant about the return of bad ideas and constantly being aware that they can
and will come back, and not being complacent. I think Americans became very complacent in the twentieth century because of you know, we enjoyed so much success. We forgot that, we forgot what could lead to failure. You know, is a you know again, something that needs to be done now, I mean almost constant reminder of of you know, what happened in our history and how we have to continue
to overcome it is important. But your other point is about truth and untruth, which is you know again, Autocracies are always based upon, you know, an attempt to discover or ascempt sorry, an attempt to distort or rearrange reality. And another element that we have to contend with now is that there are many more ways to do that than there used to be. You know, it's not just
the dictator telling a story. You know, the dictator can now have you know, hundreds of trolls, you know, paid and unpaid, who can echo and repeat that story for him. The dictator can you know, can use you know, other forms of technology. I mean, we haven't we haven't seen the full impact of AI yet, but I'm sure that we will in the coming election campaign. You know, the you know, there there are lessons that have been learned
over the over the last several decades. You know, if you repeat lies enough, if you provide a constant stream of them, you know, if you confuse people, if you produce this. You know, the famous expression is firehood of falsehoods. This is the kind of Russian invention. You know, if you continually put out lies one after the next, you know, you begin to loosen the idea of truth itself, and then people feel, you know, they're not rooted in reality anymore.
They doubt this, you know, all sources of information, whether it's the media, or whether it's the government, or whether it's universities, and then they begin to doubt everything. And people who doubt everything, and people who don't know what to believe and aren't oriented, are much easier to manipulate. So so you know, you're seeing right now several things going on at the same time. One is this, you know,
return of bad ideas. The second is ever more sophisticated ways of you know, convincing people that nothing is true at all, and that they don't really know. They can't, they have no way of knowing what reality is, so they might as well go along with, you know, with with whatever is easier.
You know.
It's it's interesting. I mean, at least dephonic is a
particularly confusing in some ways version of this. I mean, it's somebody who's clearly educated, right, who's clearly intelligent, who must know she's lying, you know, who, who who must understand that, you know that January sixth perpetrators were insurrectionists and not and not heroes, and they're certainly not hostages, you know, And yet has you know, is so profoundly cynical that she's using again all these tools, you know, the the you know, the false language, you know, the
being reinforced by you know, by waves of internet emotion. And she's doing it in order to, you know, in order to obtain power. I mean, whether it's power for herself or power for her party, you know, remains to be she I mean, maybe she wants to be vice president,
maybe she wants to be have another leadership role. And you know, we've we we really forgot that that's you know, that's normal behavior throughout history that people, you know, people are opportunistic and cynical, and they lie to get power.
Well, it's an important part of the coalition, right. You have the fanatics, you have the ideologues, but none of it happens, none of it comes to life without the cynics. Let me, let me ask you turn this towards Ukraine and to the war, and towards the global security situation. Nineteen twenty three Hitler's punch. We are one hundred and one years on, and we are one hundred years on now from the birth dates of men like Jimmy Carter
and George Herbert Walker Bush. Jimmy Carter just missed the war. He graduated in Napolis in nineteen forty six. George Bush was the youngest fighter pilot, naval aviator in the Pacific. But when we think back towards you know what's called the Greatest generation. A lot of the young men who landed on the beaches and who were buried under the crosses were born in a twenty four after the nineteen one hundred years ago. It was their birthdates. And there's
something true about history. The sixteenth century was deadlier than the fifteenth and the seventeenth. Then the sixteenth, the eighteenth more than the seventeenth. The nineteenth was a very deadly century. It was a preface to industrial war, and things went completely off the hook, as you know in the twentieth century, where by the time you reach the midpoint with mankind's possession of weapons that can extinct civilization, one hundred million dead in the Second Global War of the first half
of the cent history has been broken or postponed. But there's a lot of time left in the twenty first century to exceed the Butcher's bill of the twentieth century. And so my first question, and I'm going to ask a bunch of them put together, who is winning the war in Ukraine and Russia? And two, it seems to me that Donald Trump's security vision is very clear. He
views the world in a nineteenth century sense. He's a mercanti list in some regard a moral but he doesn't understand why the United States would extend a security guarantee to Taiwan. He looks at that as China's back yard and doesn't care. He looks at Ukraine as Russia's backyard. And whoever the strongest power in Europe may be, let him fight it out. If that's what they want to do. And I think that Trump looks at the Western hemisphere
is my territory. I don't think you ever have to look forward to Trump trying to send an American army, let's say, to the Middle East. I think that's anatomatic to him. But I think there's a real lack of imagination about an American army rolling south into Mexico or
into Venezuela, or into other places in the hemisphere. Trump ideologically doesn't necessarily want a foreign war on the other side of the world, but all dictators want a war, and Donald Trump's personality would suggest that he too would not be indisposed towards sending that. So when you look at the world and you look at it an American president that would, I think, within a week functionally abrogate
Article five of NATO. That pretty quickly would realign the world in the sense that the United States is not is not coming to help you, the United States is going home. Talk about that in the context agreement disagreement, but also in the context of this of this war in Ukraine. United States weapons supplies to Ukraine are tenuous at best. There is an unbelievable hostility towards the Ukrainian nation from this MAGA right, that is fully in league
with the ambitions of Vladimir Putin or useful idiots forum. However, however, you see the world to talk to a warning community, if you would, about this moment in the next moment, as this security situation continues to unravel in a way that I find very, very worrisome.
So what you're talking about is Trump's dislike of the idea of collective defense. So Trump is not interested in America having allies and in working with other countries to preserve regions of stability.
I don't want to cut you, I don't want to cut you off there, but I want to take for an academic purpose, right, I want to take the Trump position on this. Is the German army is it prepared to fight? It is not. The Canadians have the capacity maybe to send a battalion to Haiti, maybe not. When you look across the Western European nations, what countries have a military that's ready to fight today.
Well, I'm speaking to you here from Poland that's one of them. And the Poles would fight and are and think about it, frequently. I believe the British and French
can fight, and they periodically do. I believe that if there were a war that you know, that that that that you know, that challenged Europe, I believe you would find Dutch soldiers, you would find Scandinavian soldiers, You would you might even find Italian and Spanish soldiers that will fight, and you would even find some Germans who would fight. You know, much would depend on how all the contest was organized and how people understood it. But you know,
and you know you would. You might also have without the United States as an organizing power. And that's, by the way, the United States is most important function in Ukraine. It's not just that the US gives money. Actually, if you if you look at the numbers and you count EU donations, which of course come from the Member States, the US and the European Union give about the same
amount of money to Ukraine. But the US has a fundamentally important organizing leadership function and of course has a military that it's not just the scale of the military, it's also the commanded control systems, the experience of leadership that the you know, the rest of Europe as a whole doesn't have. So, you know, I think you would find you would find people who would fight, you just wouldn't find the leadership and the and the you know, the the you know, the the galvanizing force that the
US can provide. You know, I don't think it's the case that you know, Europeans are I don't know, incapable of warfare anymore. I think that's a you know, it hasn't happened here in a long time, but you now have a sense of, at least among some Europeans, you have a sense of existential conflict that you didn't have before. You certainly had that at the beginning of this war. And you know, it's not universal and it's not everywhere,
but it's that it's quite powerful. So so I don't I don't think we're you know, what the US does is the you know, just returning to the beginning of our conversation, is the US in a way brings the organizing ideas and principle. You know, people people would fight for freedom, and they would do so under American leadership because as they do believe in that idea and they believe in in you know, and certainly Europeans believe in the idea that you know, larger countries shouldn't be able
to occupy and and and destroy smaller ones. People understand that the Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine is a tutalitarian occupation. You know, when the Russians come into a region, they arrest all the local people, they create concentration camps, they kidnap and deport children, They commit human rights, human rights abuses on a scale that nobody has seen in Europe. And you know, since the generation of you know, Jimmy Carter and George Bush Senior, maybe before that, so people
understand that. But but it's the American leadership and America and military leadership and thought leadership kind of ideas leadership that that the US can bring and those things are of course Trump can't bring those because because Trump doesn't understand those ideas and he doesn't really believe in themselves. He doesn't himself care about human rights abuse or kidnap children. You know, he's he he he admires cruelty, and he
admires absolute power. And the United States has always stood for the opposite.
Of that absolutely, and and that is that is the key point. He admires Vladimir Putin and definitely much wishes to emulate his role.
Yeah, and I think I think, I think it's important that people also understand it's not just Putin. He admires she Absolutely, he admires you know, the North Koreans. And he's he said so, He's told us so repeatedly. He you know, he says it over and over again. And the you know the idea that you sometimes hear on the maga right that well, you know, we're fighting the wrong war. We should be fighting China, that's our real rival,
not Russia. That's not how Trump thinks, you know. Trump, Trump, you know, admires dictatorships and he admires you know, autocracy, and he would admire it in different forms. He would, he would he would feel the same way about Taiwan that he feels about Ukraine.
I say this as somebody who grew up in New Jersey and share a culture with Trump. I'm gonna explain this perfectly. He has a kosinostra philosophy. Uh, it's territorial. He's got his family, they got theirs. And there may be issues between us where are boundaries of butt, But generally speaking, so long as you respect the boundary, there'll be peace. And that is and that is the Trump philosophy.
It is not it is not built around the maintenance of an international system sustained by American heart and soft power and the rule of law and international treaty that you know is the culmination of really hundreds of years of advancement in human progress. An extraordinary thing to behold in twenty twenty three. But I wanted, I wanted to I wanted to ask. In Ukraine, the Russian army is sustained in some media accounts five hundred thousand casualties, Its
officer corps has been decimated. What is the Russian capacity to keep fighting? What is the Ukrainian capacity to keep fighting? And what does a cease fire line look like in Ukraine that stops the war or holds it in place
for some period some period of time? Or do you subscribe to the notion that Zelenski holds that he will liberate every inch of Ukrainian territory held by Russians, which is an American in a position I deeply appreciate, but I wonder if it is achievable, and whether the entire weight of America's national security and foreign policy position should be behind something that is not achievable.
So let me I mean this will sound paradoxical, but the war will be over when the Russians feel they can't win. So you know, the war will end when the Russians go home, when they feel they've lost, when they give up the idea of conquering all of Ukraine.
And when that happened, we don't. I can't tell you exactly when and how that will happen, but we will know it like there will there will be a you know, there will be whether it will be a putin, will change, or there will be a leadership change, or there will be some change political change in Russia, not necessarily regime change, just a change of movement that you know, the moment when they decide they don't want to do it anymore
is when the war is over. And I think at that moment then we can negotiate where the borders will be.
Are we getting there?
So the only way we can get there is for you know, is for Russia to run out of steam, out of energy, out of people, out of ammunition. We could get there, and I you know, I've just been to Ukraine. Actually I went right before New Year's right,
you know, in December. And you know, if we can can can continue to help Ukraine, if we can help Ukraine build up its defense industry, if we can help Ukraine create a you know, a professional, long term, long standing army, which is what they're trying to do.
Now.
If we convince the Russians that we aren't going to leave, that we will be there and not just convince them, you know, tactically or in a narrative way, but convince them because it's true, you know, then it is a matter of time before the Russians begin to ask what are we doing this for? You know, there is you know, it's not Russia, it's you know, we are not winning. We are not winning hearts and minds. We are not conquering territory that it will then be easy to hold,
and so the so the so the so. The victory depends a lot on whether you know, we can win. But it's both a military battle and a psychological battle. You know, we convince the Russians that we aren't leaving, we are staying. We do stay, we help Ukraine create a permanent you know, in a kind of a permanent war economy if you will. I mean, the Ukrainians sometimes talk about Israel in the sense of, you know, being or or South Korea, you know, being a state that
is permanently ready to defend itself. If we help Ukraine become that, then I think, you know, that will help end the war. I mean, the Ukrainians had hoped for some kind of victory, perhaps involving Crimea. That would you know, that would be the blow that would convince the Russians to leave. Maybe they'll achieve that, and maybe they won't. There was more hope for that a few months ago than there is now. But the but you know, it's still about holding on and holding out and convincing the
Russians to go home. And you know, literally the war is over when the Russians leave.
And and of course the central reason looking at the looking at the world through Russian eyes and looking at the world through Vladimir Putin's eyes, why on earth would he ever give up and give in with five hundred thousand casualties when Donald Trump could be elected president in November.
So the so, yeah, it was so the demand side for the for the war continuing is the idiocy of the useful idiots and the American Congress and around Donald Trump and Trump himself, whose position really makes it impossible for Putin to walk away, makes it impossible for the country to communicate what it is you are suggesting needs
to be to be communicated. And so we'll probably have at least one more fighting season, and if Trump goes down in the election, probably the lines as the winner starts next year twenty four twenty five will be the lines around which you know, permanent demarcations and inspires on the game.
Yeah, so it's not the final border, isn't what's important, you know, What's important is that it becomes clear that the Russians are leaving and want to end the war. Is important, have a negotiation right now? Is The reason you can't have a negotiation now is not because you know, Zelenski is a maximalist and he's you know, unrealistic and so on. The reason you can't have a negotiation right now is that Putin doesn't want to end the war, you.
Know, because he believes his position will improve.
He believes his position will improve because if Trump is the president, then Trump will hand over you know, half or all or some large parts of Ukraine. And will no longer defend you, Craine. I mean so literally, Trump is playing a huge role in this war just by being the person who putin. Putin is counting on to give him the advantage and let him win.
Let me, let me, let me ask this question as a historian, is there any American from nineteen hundred and forward that he ever played a role as pronounced as the one Trump is playing the way you just articulated it. So you had Lindbergh in the thirties, he was decorated by Ribbentrop. He wasn't the head of state. Americans forget
though that. You know, the draft was preserved in nineteen forty by one vote, which would have made it impossible had we lost the draft in nineteen forty to have invaded France before probably nineteen forty six, which might have made the task impossible. But is there any American who has played a comparable role in support of a foreign dictator's aggression? And the way that Trump is right now, I mean he is he is the hope of the Russian of the Russian aggression.
Yeah, I mean you could put the best comparison to me of the Magarite is actually to the far left in the uh, you know, in the in the sort of pre war and post warrior I mean, you know, there were American communists who supported Soviet communism, you know,
in all kinds of ways. The difference, of course, is that none of them ever had any power or any significant power, and so you know, they were they were they were in favor of a of a of a of an autocratic dictatorship that wanted to defeat the United States, but they weren't in any position to bring that about.
You know, what's different and unusual and new about Trump is that he's somebody who favors the you know, the aims and beliefs of a foreign dictatorship that wants to defeat you know, American allies, and the end he's in a position to influence that and effect it. So in that sense, he's worse than they are.
Do you think that Ukraine will become a nuclear power?
You know, I don't know. Uh, you know, there's it's certainly an interesting historical puzzle. You know, had Ukraine been allowed to keep its nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union, would we be having this war now? My guess is that we would not, and of course everyone around the world is also. This is another reason why everybody's watching the outcome of this conflict.
You know, if.
Ukraine is to lose because it gave up its nuclear weapons, then what is the incentive for anybody to give up nuclear weapons ever again, or to not acquire them? You know, why wouldn't South Korea want nuclear weapons? Why wouldn't Japan want nuclear weapons? You know, if you, if you, if you, why wouldn't Taiwan want nuclear weapons? I mean, I'm not saying these are countries that all have the have the ability to obtain them, but but the you know, this
is another issue that's at stake in this war. You know, if we you know, we gave Ukraine in the nineteen nineties, We and the British and the Russians actually gave Ukraine this guarantee of independence and and and and of its end of its borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. I don't know how many Americans know that,
but we did. And you know, were Ukraine to lose its sovereignty and to lose its independence after that, then the incentive for everybody else to get nuclear weapons is suddenly much higher. I mean may that may have happened already.
I want to close out with you. I know you are in Poland and it is late in the evening and you've had a long day there. But I do want to talk about the deteriorating situation in the in the Middle East. What does it look like to you? Does this look like a situation that is about two escalate or a situation which is contained inside of God as a six months from now, I suspect this will be a or have become a wider war before we
before we go too much further in this year. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I'm very curious to what you see. And let me and let me and let me just say, I'll lay my cards on the table. I was involved in the Israeli elections that deposed net and Yahoo in the in the coalition after after twenty twenty. I think he is an amorl leader of a moral nation that must must when it fights wars, fight wars morally.
And there's no question when you look at the situation that net Nyahu's premiership is entirely dependent on the continuation of the war. Right so if the if the war ends let's say, hypothetically, if you could wave a magic wand next Thursday, Jimasa is destroyed, it's all over. Hostages are returned on Friday. Net Nyaho is out of power on Saturday. So I look at that situation and I think it is deeply, deeply worrying in terms of the
possibilities for for escalation. Are the Turks blustering or is erdigone person with conviction when when he when he speaks, well, what do you see?
So my fear about Natanyahu is is similar but different, you know, but slight slightly very slightly varied, which is that I worry that Netanyahu is because he's dependent for power on this on the very extreme far right of his coalition, on people who represent a tiny number of Israelis but have a huge amount of power inside the government. And I am worried that those people want an extreme
solution in Gaza. And you've actually heard over the last couple of weeks you've heard different members of the Israeli government talk about different endings in Gaza. And one version is that, you know, we we move in some direction of Palestinian self rule, or you know, I don't know whether a two state solution is still possible, but some some some form of you know, returning Gaza to Palestinian control. And then you have another faction which is clearly talking
about expelling people from Gaza. And of course the expulsion of people from Gaza would I think inevitably lead to a wider regional war. The you know, the idea that you would have population transfer and a you know, very very ugly ugly solution you know, that would inevitate. First of a would involve Egypt, it might involve other other countries in the region. You know. Then I can see
the war ending badly. I don't know that that conflict has been resolved even within Natanya, who's government, you know, whether he himself has decided which direction it's going to go. But I think the choices that are made about how to what to do next in Gaza in the next days and weeks will you know, will will decide whether the war, you know, whether it spreads or not. You know,
I agree with you. I think the you know, it is of course not a coincidence that nata Ya who is the leader now at this time of crisis, because it's his leadership that has helped provoke it and create it, you know. At the same time, it's of course also a huge tragedy he's the leader at this time of crisis because he is completely you know, you know, morally
unqualified to be doing what he's doing. And he is not capable of leading a you know, uh, you know, and he's not capable of bringing about an end to this conflict. That is that that is is any way fair. I mean even if you think it's you know, maybe that's impossible anyway. But but his his leadership, you know, he's someone who has divided Israeli's He's allowed the most outrageous and the most extreme voices in Israel to have
an enormous amount of power. And you know, really the only hope in Israel is that uh, you know, other other parts of what used to be LACUD and other parts of society eventually are able to take control and and change the direction of the war and of the situation.
What a treated is to be able to spend some time with you. It's for everybody who tunes in. It's like being able to attend a private graduate school seminar with one of the smartest learned and most thoughtful observers of what's happening in the world. There is an applebaumb Thank you very much.
Thanks pleasure to talk to you.