Former Deputy National Security Advisor Answers Geopolitics Questions

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,

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,

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.

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

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,

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,

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

'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,

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.

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

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

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,

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

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,

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

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

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?

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

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,

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

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.

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,

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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.

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

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.

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,

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

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

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,

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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,

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

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,

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.

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,

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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,

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

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

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.

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,

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?

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.

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.

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.

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,

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

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,

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

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?

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

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

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,

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.

I think there's another piece, though,

that's really important that people need to understand here.

I remember way back in 2016,

after Trump first came to power,

and there were all these questions

about why did the Russians support Trump

in the previous election, what do they want from him,

the reality is what the Russians want

is not Trump to do something for them,

they want exactly what is happening.

They want the rules-based order that used to be run

by the United States to fall apart

because they felt that that order disadvantaged them.

They want the United States

and Europe, that alliance, to fall apart

because then Russia can throw its weight around

in Europe a lot easier

because the United States isn't coming in

as the big brother to push Russia back.

They want essentially a world

where they have kind of freedom to maneuver.

Vladimir Putin also wants democracy itself

to be utterly discredited.

He wants his system of government,

essentially dictatorial control,

to be as legitimized as democracy, and that's happening too.

I remember I had some conversations with Alexei Navalny,

who was the Russian opposition leader

who was ultimately poisoned and killed

in a gulag by Vladimir Putin,

and I talked to him shortly before he went back

to Russia to be imprisoned,

and what Navalny told me is Putin doesn't need

to convince his people that he is not corrupt

or that he is not a liar.

He just needs to convince his people

that everybody is corrupt, right?

There's no difference between Russia and the West,

and Trump is the perfect proof point for him in that.

Look at the Americans.

They have a corrupt, autocratic president.

They've got a bunch of oligarchs

who surround that corrupt president.

And essentially, Trump is proving to a lot of Russians

that what Putin's been saying all along is true.

Now, I don't believe that.

I think there are still some differences,

as much as I'm critical of Trump,

between what's currently the government in the United States

and what the government in Moscow is,

but there's enough overlap here

that it gives Putin what he wants, which is the sense

that the strongman system [keyboard keys clicking]

of government is the one that's ascendant in the world.

@MurtCrypto asks, So, Trump wants Greenland,

but won't use force?

Can diplomacy actually get him what he wants,

or is this just posturing?

So first of all, why does Trump want Greenland?

Only one person really knows the answer to that question.

I could offer you a couple of possibilities.

Yes, Trump says Greenland could potentially be critical

to US national security.

The Arctic is a critical region.

It's becoming more important because of climate change,

because there's more available natural resources up there,

including oil and gas,

there's more available shipping lanes.

China and Russia kind of are adjacent

to the Arctic region, of course.

So one is a national security purpose,

but I don't really put any stock in that purpose

because Denmark is the controlling power in Greenland.

They're a member of NATO.

The US already has a military base there.

Denmark has said we could have more bases there,

so I don't really see why it's necessary

for our national security when we already have that access.

Second is he may just want the resource bonanza

that comes with Greenland, right?

There's critical minerals in Greenland,

there's oil and gas reserves.

This is not as easy as it sounds, right?

There's still a lot of ice,

and you still have to kinda get under that,

but some of this could just be

Trump seeing potential resources.

Now, even that, the Danes,

the Greenlanders have said we can work with you

to try to access some of those resources,

so it still doesn't feel like it's necessary.

At the end of the day, frankly,

I think Trump is just looking at a map

and is like, this is a big piece of land, and I want it.

I mean, I really think it's as simple as that.

And, you know, it's not an insane thing to think.

I mean, the United States has done that in the past.

Actually, the territory of the United States

has been steadily a period of expansion.

Alaska is a pretty random piece

of territory that we obviously bought,

but that was kind of back in the days of imperial expansion.

In terms of getting it through diplomacy,

there's kind of two ways that Trump could do this.

One that you felt them already try is get some Greenlanders

who have had some serious anti-colonial feeling

towards the Danes, who've been the controlling power there

for hundreds of years, get some Greenlanders

to say, well, we'd rather be part of the United States

than a part of Denmark, right,

or maybe Greenland becomes independent

and then the United States enters

into some agreement with them.

There's a lot of examples of this in history.

It's kind of what the United States did

in Hawaii, for instance.

We had to kinda come to the aid of people that wanted us

and not Japan to be a controlling power there.

It's something that Vladimir Putin has used time and again.

Putin's justification for his invasion

of Ukraine was we are coming to support

the kind of Russian-speaking separatists

who wanna be part of Russia, not Ukraine.

So we've seen leaders use this all the time.

The problem is the Greenlanders have been very disciplined

in saying, no, no, no, we see what you're doing.

We even had, you know, Don Jr. go out to Greenland trying

to find these people, right,

and the Greenlanders, kind of seeing this playbook,

have been very unified in sending a message

that we may have some issues with Denmark,

but we don't wanna be a part of the United States.

Then the other way that Trump has suggested

is just buying Greenland, right?

Writing some gigantic check

to the Danes and to each Greenlander,

and there's only about 50,000 of them.

The problem with that is Greenland has made clear it's not

for sale, Denmark's made clear it's not for sale,

so that really doesn't leave any other option

other than some kind of military force

to just seize the territory.

If you want the land, [keyboard keys clicking]

you're gonna have to take it.

ComfortablePool4684 asks, What do you believe,

out of the things Trump has done

or is going to do, will benefit America?

I think broadly speaking,

some of his critiques are important and useful.

It is the case

that globalization has been very damaging

to certain Americans,

particularly working-class Americans harmed

by trade agreements, for instance.

It is the case, and I have made the argument myself,

that we do have a kind of national security establishment

in both parties that has been unaccountable,

that the forever wars that we've been fighting

since 9/11 have had terrible outcomes

and need to come to an end, that we are overextended

in our commitments around the world.

The problem I see

is I just don't like his diagnoses, you know?

So I think the critique is helpful

and is forcing us to change.

On the other hand, I don't think the answer

to bad trade agreements is episodic

and arbitrary tariffs, right?

I don't think the end

of forever wars is whatever is going on now,

which is we're bombing more countries than we did before

and kind of hoping that those don't lead

to bigger conflicts or quagmires.

I accept the utility

that Trump is saying we gotta end this way of doing things.

But I don't really see

that his solutions [keyboard keys clicking]

to those problems, though, are the right ones.

eyio asks, Why did the Biden administration allow

so many immigrants to enter the US?

Was it, A, not paying attention to how bad it was,

B, a philosophical stance that we should let everyone in,

C, unwillingness to implement harsh measures

to slow it down, D, other?

I'm gonna say it's a combination of all of the above.

And look, I think what happened, Biden comes in,

Trump's immigration policies had been very divisive

in Trump's first term, the family separation policies,

and frankly, the Democratic primary candidates

in the 2020 election took positions

on immigration that were much more to the left

than even the Obama years,

and so from the get, there's a kind of ideological sense

that we're gonna be different from Trump.

I don't think it was essentially we should let everybody in,

but it did lead to a reluctance

to have strict border enforcement policies.

Then, I think what happened is the scale of migration

across the southern border started to just exceed anything

that we'd ever seen before,

and here, I think they were just too slow to deal with this

because this was building over years.

The numbers were going up and up and up,

and the only way to deal with those challenges was

to have pretty strict border enforcement,

and I think Biden was somewhat reluctant to do that.

It's also the case, to be fair to the Biden administration,

that the immigration system has been broken for a long time.

The problem is

that we have not had an immigration reform bill

in this country since really like the 1980s.

I think 1986 is the last time this happened,

so the system has gotten creaky.

And this problem just kinda got on top of him,

and especially got on top of him when you had governors

like Greg Abbott in Texas putting immigrants on buses

and sending them up to Washington, DC or to New York City,

or Ron DeSantis putting them

on a plane to Martha's Vineyard,

which was a bit more of a political stunt.

But I think the reason that that was so important

and, frankly, effective as a political strategy

by those governors is most of the burden

of absorbing these immigrant populations does fall

to these border states.

And all of a sudden,

when you start to have tens of thousands

of undocumented immigrants being shipped

up to places like New York City,

well, that's putting a huge budget strain

on local governments in other parts of the United States

that aren't accustomed to dealing with that,

that is spotlighting for people a sense

that the border is out of control.

If it's not just affecting, you know, people

who are living in Southern Texas,

but it's affecting people all over the country,

then all of a sudden, you can't say this is some kind

of regional interest or regional issue,

and it really did put President Biden in a bind.

Now, while I do think there was a lot of legitimacy

to the concerns that people had

that the southern border was too open,

that you had these unprecedented levels

of migration across the southern border,

I also think that the kind of toxic

and conspiracy theory-minded nature

of our politics did not help here.

I think you had a pretty concerted effort

in certain kind of right-wing media ecosystems to elevate

the potential violent danger posed by immigrants.

So you had, you know, these ideas that whole cities

in the United States had somehow been taken over

by violent undocumented people,

when if you actually looked underneath the hood

of what was being said on X

or on other social media platforms,

there really wasn't much to this at all.

But I think more broadly, on the far right,

there has long been a kind of conspiracy theory,

the great replacement theory,

that essentially, Democratic politicians or globalists

or, in the most odious versions

of this, Jews have some big conspiracy theory

to repopulate the United States

with Brown people who will vote for their interests

and essentially take away the privileges

of white Americans in this country,

or certainly the majority

of white Americans in this country.

That I do not believe is true.

I think Joe Biden inherited a broken border policy.

But in our current polarized political environment,

I actually think that some

of these theories traveled far and wide

in certainly some of the kind of more sensationalist efforts

to say here's this one violent crime committed

by an undocumented person, which undoubtedly did happen

and undoubtedly was a tragedy,

but to make people believe this is happening everywhere.

All these people coming are violent and dangerous criminals.

And it's that mindset

that led not just to the kinda politics

of we need to shut down the border that got Trump elected,

it's that mindset that led to the kind

of ICE crackdowns that we're seeing,

where essentially, they're treating all undocumented people

like violent criminals.

But there was even an effort made by Joe Biden to pass

a pretty strict immigration bill, working with Congress.

Essentially, let's take the Republican version

that we can accept and support it.

And you actually had an agreement

among Republicans and Democrats in the Senate

around an immigration bill that would've sealed the border,

but Trump at that time,

because we were into 2024, he was running for president,

he actually signaled to the Republicans

in Congress don't do this, don't work with Biden.

I don't want this to be solved [keyboard keys clicking]

as a problem.

I want it to appear to be a problem

'cause I'm running on it. [mouse clicking]

shwarma_heaven, a good name, asks, Change my view.

The kidnapping of Maduro is completely about oil,

and the drugs and corruption are just the public pretext.

Well, I'm not gonna change your view

because I agree with it.

First of all, when you had this massive buildup

of US military forces around Venezuela,

it was far beyond anything that was necessary

to deal with drug trafficking.

Second, Venezuela was just not a particularly important part

of the drug trafficking that reaches the United States,

like not even anywhere near the top venue.

You know, Mexico is the country

that this stuff passes through.

When you're talking about fentanyl,

the precursors come from China,

Colombia is a much bigger source of cocaine for the cartels,

so you would not choose Venezuela

as the place to take a stand against drug trafficking.

Yeah, we can talk about corruption.

Donald Trump's, let's just say, his concerns about democracy

and human rights are pretty incredibly selective.

I mean, I don't believe

that he's sincerely interested in democracy,

and actually, he gave up the game

when, after he deposed Maduro, abducted Maduro,

he didn't try to have an election.

He didn't try to support

the democratic opposition in Venezuela.

He just said that's it.

I got Maduro out of there,

and now we're gonna do some oil deals, essentially.

Pretty clearly, all along, this is

about getting Maduro out of the way,

and it's about the fact [keyboard keys clicking]

that Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves

in the world.

@JuddLegum asks, Simple question:

Who is running Venezuela now?

The answer is not Donald Trump or Marco Rubio.

It's Delcy Rodriguez is the current president of Venezuela.

Other than taking Maduro away and abducting him

and putting him in a prison in New York City,

nothing really changed about the apparatus

of the Venezuelan state.

It's still governed by the communist party there.

It's still governed by the person, Delcy Rodriguez,

who was the vice president to Maduro, still has its origins

in Hugo Chavez and his political movement in that country.

So what happens next?

Well, Trump's main interests seem to be about oil,

but the problem with that is Venezuela's oil infrastructure

is incredibly dilapidated, right?

It's not pumping oil out

at anywhere near the pace that would make it

of interest to American oil companies.

So are we gonna go in and rebuild that oil infrastructure

'cause the Venezuelan government doesn't have

the resources to do that?

If we do, that's like a multi-year project

that might take beyond Trump's term in office.

At the same time, the Venezuelan government,

what they want is control.

They don't have an interest

in having some transition to democracy.

So I see a lotta bumps in the road ahead, right?

If people like Maria Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner,

and I believe probably the most popular politician

in the country, well, if she wants

to force some kind of process of elections,

I'm not sure the government's gonna go along with that,

and you could have some real tensions there.

So apart from what Trump's done thus far,

which is kind of occasionally just grabbing a bunch

of barrels of Venezuelan oil and taking some of the profits,

that may be all [keyboard keys clicking]

that we're really looking at here.

Otherwise, I think you have a lot of risks.

ColCrockett asks, What does the US actually gain

from intervening around the world?

Sometimes, it's purely resource reasons,

and if you think this is a cynical view,

listen to what Donald Trump said

about intervening in Venezuela.

I mean, he wanted the oil, right?

And if you look at the kinds of places

that the United States has tended to go to war in,

oftentimes, there's some resource nexus, let's say.

The Gulf War, for instance,

because Kuwait's oil fields had been seized

by Saddam Hussein, or the Iraq War itself,

where, at least as part of the rationale,

I think people were looking at the potential

to develop Iraq's oil reserves.

Sometimes, it's a national security threat.

After 9/11, for instance, the idea was Al-Qaeda did this,

they're in Afghanistan, we have to go after them there.

So we went to Afghanistan to get Al-Qaeda,

but then we had to set up a new government,

then we had to defend that government,

then we had to train security forces

so that government could fight the Taliban insurgency.

And so, oftentimes, in history, whether it's Vietnam

or Afghanistan, you've seen this kind of mission creep,

where what was launched as a war for one purpose became

about something kind of much bigger.

I will say one other thing, though.

A lot of people, I think, that I've talked to

in places that have been affected

by US interventions have said

to me we know what you guys are doing.

It's the same thing colonial powers have always done.

You want to kind of create chaos around the periphery.

If these places are broken, if they're conflict-driven,

if there are refugee flows, if they're weak governments,

or if they're governments that are dependent

on you for their security,

you get to keep your privileged position in the world.

I actually think that it's hard to look at the history

of the last, I don't know, several decades

and not see at least some truth in that argument.

I never went into a meeting in the White House

where people were like what can we do today

to create chaos in the world.

But I do have to acknowledge,

and I think we as Americans have to wrestle with the fact

that these interventions that we do,

they don't make these regions more stable.

You know, is the Middle East better off

for all of these American military inventions

over the years?

I don't think anybody can argue that.

And I think there's something to the idea

that you have these kind of islands

of stability in the world, and the United States

and Europe tends to be our allies, right,

Japan, South Korea, Australia,

and then a lotta what we do

around the world kinda breaks stuff

and makes it harder for those countries to kind of emerge

or consolidate or to be less dependent on us.

So, even if that may not be the kind of stated reason,

I do think some of our interventions kind of

preserve our own position [keyboard keys clicking]

as the strongest power in the world.

@PolPredictionX asks, Will there be another Arab Spring?

Maybe this time, a successful one.

You know, the short answer is I think yes.

The first Arab Spring in 2011 was a mass popular uprising,

essentially against corruption and repression,

the sense that in places like Tunisia

and Egypt and Syria where you had these protests,

people were just sick of governments stealing

from them, government repressing them.

If you look at some of the same countries

in the first Arab Spring, Egypt is suffering

from terrible corruption and economic mismanagement,

worse than the first Arab Spring.

If you look at Jordan, they're suffering

from similar economic challenges,

but also, you know, a lotta pressure

from what's happened in Gaza, pressure

from refugees coming in over the years.

So, in addition to the countries we look at,

like Iran, I think if you look

at an Egypt or a Jordan, the possibility

of mass protest movements is simmering under the surface,

and if there is a bigger war

in the region, that's often a time

that you start to see instability spread.

So I think it's quite possible.

And unfortunately, I don't necessarily see

like a quick path to a better outcome.

I see, once again, power struggles that probably lead

to more military-like governments

that are hopefully [keyboard keys clicking]

more responsive to the people, but might not be.

7472 asks, What's happening

when two countries launch cyberattacks on one another?

Why aren't cyberattacks from other countries an act of war?

Well, first of all, I think it's really important to note

that there are all kinds

of different cyberattacks that can take place.

There's espionage, right?

We're stealing secrets from another country,

or we're embedding the capacity

to spy on that country's systems.

There's theft, right?

Increasingly, we see the theft of resources, the theft

of money through cyberattacks.

There's sometimes just an effort

to burrow inside of a country's networks

for use in some potential future conflict,

and we've seen China do a lot of this

inside the United States.

Like, we wanna get on your power grid

so that if you attack us, you know, we can shut this down.

But we've also seen just kinda outright cyber acts of war.

So Russia, for instance,

when they, you know, go into a Georgia

or a Ukraine, shutting down the power grid.

The United States, in certain cases,

when we're doing a military operation

in a place, will have a cyber dimension to it.

I think people, though, have

to understand the scale of this.

There are millions and millions of these attacks a day

in US companies, on US infrastructure,

certainly across Europe, too,

so this is kind of part of life out there.

Why aren't cyberattacks an act of war, this is a question

that a lot of people have spent

a lotta time talking about and debating

'cause, first of all, it depends on the outcome

of the cyberattack, right?

If there is a cyberattack that steals something,

well, countries have been involved in espionage

for as long as there have been countries, right?

If I send a spy into your country,

and I steal some documents, you know,

we don't necessarily go to war against that,

nor would we go to war

against someone stealing through cyber,

even though we don't like it, right?

I think it gets more challenging

when the cyberattack has a dramatic impact inside a country.

You know, does it cause a disruption

to commerce in that country?

Could it cause a loss of life, right?

If you shut down a power grid,

hospitals go off, people can die.

A lot of European countries are beginning

to raise these questions

as Russia gets more aggressive with its cyberattacks,

when does NATO invoke Article Five, essentially?

Article Five is the declaration

that an attack on one is an attack

on all that requires a response against Russia.

But I think the new world we're in,

with the United States, Russia, and China,

and, to some extent, Iran

and North Korea, is there's an ongoing cyber war.

It is happening right now.

Like, we are in a cyber war every day, really every second,

with these cyber adversaries.

And then the question is, when is the outcome

of a cyberattack so significant

that it might lead to some other response,

some other form of sanctions or military action?

And I think this is gonna increasingly be a part

of the landscape

going forward [keyboard keys clicking]

as cyber capabilities become ever more important.

@imthatvalentine asks, Why does Modi remind me of Trump?

I went into an Indian politics rabbit hole,

and Modi bears a resemblance to Trump to me.

@imvalentine, you're not wrong to think that.

I would put Modi in the club

of these kind of strongmen leaders

who have emerged over the last 15, 20 years.

Now, what they have in common, right, is they are strongmen.

Modi comes from a political party, the BJP,

but it has very much been about Modi

in the same way that Trump is very much the dominant figure

in the Republican Party.

But also, there is this kind of authoritarian playbook

that we've seen in different parts of the world,

where you start to intimidate the media,

you start to use social media to demonize your opponents

and motivate and mobilize your followers,

you might start to kind of intimidate parts

of the private sector to kind of invest in

and be a part and finance your politics,

you certainly start to demonize certain opponents.

If you look at Modi's playbook,

there's an us versus them to Indian politics

that can be reminiscent of American politics.

The very large Muslim minority

in India has been targeted politically

and sometimes practically by the Modi government

in the same way that, in the US,

we see kind of immigrant populations targeted,

including Muslim minorities here in the United States.

There are also, I think, important differences too.

I mean, Modi, his nationalism is kind of deeply embedded

in traditional Indian Hindu nationalism.

Like, Modi comes out of that wing of Indian politics

that was suspicious of the initial dominance

of the Congress Party, the secular post-independence party,

and they wanted a more Hindu, more religious nature

and character to Indian identity.

That is a overwhelmingly motivating project

of Modi's whole career and his tenure as a leader.

Whereas Donald Trump, not a particularly religious guy.

I mean, he's not personally a kind of Christian nationalist

in the way that Modi is a Hindu nationalist.

Another difference is just in the kind of interests

of the United States and the interests of India.

You know, Trump is a strongman of a superpower

who is now, you know, having his way,

abducting the president of Venezuela,

threatening multiple wars.

You know, Modi's someone who's trying to get along

with a variety of different powers.

Like, he maintains his relationship with Russia,

he maintains his relationship with China,

he maintains his relationship with the US,

he's building closer ties to the European Union,

so Modi kind of reflects an Indian foreign policy

that kind of looks at the world like a menu and picks

and chooses who he wants to deal with on different issues.

It's been interesting to me

that there was something of an alliance

between Trump and Modi during Trump's first term.

You saw Modi basically endorse Trump for reelection in 2020

because maybe he liked that they're both these strongmen.

They both have these kind of conservative personas.

And I think when Trump came back into power,

Modi was, you know, perfectly fine with that.

He had a good relationship with Trump.

They've had some scratchiness, though,

in the sense that Trump imposed significant tariffs

on India for a couple reasons.

One, there was a war between India and Pakistan.

That war kind of followed a traditional pattern,

where there's a terrorist attack inside of Kashmir,

which is controlled by India,

India responds, Pakistan responds,

and the whole thing kind of escalates for a period of days,

and then there's a ceasefire.

Trump took credit for that ceasefire,

I think, well beyond any evidence.

I mean, they may have logged in some phone calls

to the Indians and Pakistanis,

but in Trump's telling, you know, World War III was

about to break out, and he ended it.

Pakistan was very happy to say, oh, yes, Mr. Trump came in

and ended this war because it kinda humiliated Modi.

It made it look like he was on Pakistan's level,

you know, not a greater power than Pakistan,

and Modi did not go along with that narrative.

The Pakistanis nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

India notably did not.

It was not a coincidence to me that these tariffs

and sanctions were put in place on India after that episode.

Now, Trump said it was for Indian purchases of Russian oil,

but Trump was pretty late to be concerned about that.

So there have been tensions.

The relationship's gone up and down.

And you have to remember, Modi thinks of India

as a rising superpower.

They want to be someday the world's largest economy.

They don't wanna dominate global affairs

in the way that the United States has

or create an entire alternative world order

the way the Chinese are doing,

but they do wanna be respected,

and they want to be accepted as a power

on kind of equal footing,

ultimately, [keyboard keys clicking]

with the United States and China and Russia

and Europe and the big powers.

A Reddit user asks, What are the geopolitical implications

of year-round Arctic shipping lanes?

So first of all, the obvious point

that, because of climate change,

the Arctic is warming, it's melting,

and it's opening up new waterways, new shipping lanes.

I think simply put, number one, the melting

in the Arctic has also opened up access

to significant resources, right?

So suddenly, you can get at things, oil and gas

or critical minerals, that you couldn't before,

and then the shipping lanes allow you to transport them out,

and so there's a potential bonanza up there

in terms of natural resources.

I think another point is the shipping lanes opening up

can transform the way the global economy is wired.

So, for instance, China is already looking

at Arctic shipping ways as a much more efficient

and faster way for them to export to places like Europe.

If you've been on a plane that has gone

over the top, you know what I'm talking about.

You can get someplace faster

if you can go through the Arctic.

And so China, as a net exporter, an enormous exporter

of goods, stands to benefit [keyboard keys clicking]

from more efficient shipping as well.

Okay, that's it.

That's all the questions.

Hope you learned something.

Till next time.

[gentle upbeat music]