Transcription
The Trump administration has authorized an arms sale of about $825 million worth to Ukraine. This includes 3,000 plus Iran missiles with a range that could go above the attackum's missiles. Uh Carolyn Levit, the White House spokesperson, said that Russia and Ukraine are not ready for peace. I'm I'm curious about your thoughts about this particular move by the Trump administration and and has it blown up the peace process because Russia has repeatedly said that these missiles, this funding, this keeps the war going and Trump has said he's not funding the war at all. He's just selling weapons to NATO. What's going on here?
>> Well, Trump and his team are completely incompetent. Uh so uh first of all every day there's a change of view, a change of statements. Some days it's threats, other days it's a statement about my best friend Vladimir. Um basically this is not tactics. This is incompetence um and uh inconsistency. The president is unable to form a coherent idea of what's happening. He's pushed by multiple pressures. Uh his own promises to end the war. Uh a an American public that is sick and tired of all of this. Arms contractors that want to sell weapons. uh the neocons who are partly uh war proetiteeers and partly war ideologues uh the European leaders who are in the same camp. They're some combination of war mongers and captives of the military-industrial complex. Theirs and ours which are basically the same. Uh so Trump does not have the capacity to find a way out of this. This is a an administration that is failing on many fronts including uh the challenge of making peace. Peace is feasible but it's not self enforcing or or even self creating by design. It it has to be fashioned. There needs to be a framework. Uh it needs to be explained and justified. Uh it needs negotiation. uh not a two-hour meeting. Um none of this is really happening right now. It's very sad. It's uh uh very troubling to have such incompetence in the US leadership. But I think that this is basically the explanation of what we're seeing. This is not clever moves. This is not strategic. This is not even tactical. uh this is uh just flailing around.
>> and and and will it make a difference uh professor sex because uh the contract says a thousand Iran missiles per year are going to be sent to Ukraine. The messaging from the Trump administration is very chaotic. On the one hand, they say they're not going to allow long-range missile strikes into Russia from Ukraine using US weapons. And yet this huge promise to Ukraine whether it is possible or not in the amount that they say they're going to supply Ukraine with these missiles seems to indicate the exact opposite kind of message to Russia.
>> I'm not enough of a military expert to know the full ramifications of this weapon system, but this seems to me to be uh definitely a prolongation of war. We're also in a context where Ukraine is ruled by a small gang that also is enormously corrupt, operates by martial law, and like in the United States, has no uh no relationship to the needs of the Ukrainian people or to public opinion in Ukraine, which overwhelmingly wants this war to stop. Basically, uh it's almost as if we're just in the hang hand hands of gangsters in the US, Europe, and Ukraine. Uh nobody really wants the war to stop other than I would say Russia. Frankly, uh, Russia wants it to stop on terms that it has laid out, which is, uh, neutrality of Ukraine first and foremost, and the territorial concessions after 11 years of war since the Maidan coup, which the US backed in February 2014. Those are actually pretty sensible terms for ending this war, protecting Ukraine's sovereignty and safety over the rest of Ukraine, which is 80% of Ukraine or pre uh 1991 uh pre-war Ukraine. Um, and this should be the basis for finding an agreement. We're not getting there, it seems. Uh again, because it would require a president who is capable of laying out a framework and sticking with it and negotiating on that basis, but we don't have that. So it looks like more fighting, more escalation, more destruction. We know that Russia launched tremendous missile and drone attacks against Kiev in the last two or three days. A lot more of that will happen. And all of this is also a tripwire to further escalation and the I would say everpresent risk of this uh uh hurdling into a nuclear war. That has been true all along and there does not seem to be any will to pull back from this. As incompetent as the US leadership is, I would absolutely put Starmer Mertz and Mcronone in the same level of grotesque incompetence. I don't think any of them reflects the interests of their country, the security of Europe or a reality of this situation.
>> Europe has been scrambling around the idea now of a buffer zone and uh this is supposedly a suggestion around a so-called peace deal. But as you said, Professor Sax, no one is really talking to Russia anymore. Despite the US having engaged in these talks in Alaska, uh it it appears especially Europe. Uh they are very much against even the idea of talking to Russia are now proposing this buffer zone as a way to uh push their version of what a cessation of this conflict would look like. What do what do you think about this? because Europe has been so quick and so eager to uh uh follow along with the United States uh agree to this weapons transfer mediation. Uh what do you think of this buffer zone idea and how Europe has conducted itself over this process of a conflict that is not going in the favor of the US, Europe or Ukraine.
I think the uh main problem is that uh there is no dialogue between Europe and Russia. Zero. Uh the Russians say important things. Uh they talk about uh of course uh NATO, their borders, US missile systems, threats to their security. And the European answer is Putin is a monster. Uh he's a relentless expansionist. Uh he's out to invade uh the rest of Europe. He must be stopped. This is not what the Russians are saying. And the European response to my mind is either deafness uh or recklessness. Uh I don't know which. Uh some European leaders have said things in private to me that are different from what they say in public. In which case the conclusion is it's recklessness that they're gambling uh on uh more war for whatever reason even though they know that what they're saying is not true. Uh some just of these leaders just strike me as fools. uh Starmer for example uh Mertz strikes me as an unrelenting wararmonger. Not a word of uh peaceful solution comes out of his mouth ever. And what's amazing is Germany has a responsibility for peace. Not only it is is it the biggest uh economy in Europe, uh it is the country that invaded the Soviet Union in World War II, ended up uh causing 27 million deaths, divided Europe for decades afterwards, uh reunified on the basis of an explicit commitment that NATO would not enlarge was guarantor of the Minsk 2 agreement that even Germany's former chancellor Angela Merkel said she did not enforce uh she did not take seriously. I'm not sure I believe her about her attitude back when it was supposed to be in place, but she failed. Germany failed. And all we hear from Mertz is no iota of recognition of any of this but rather that Europe must prepare for war. So this is quite alarming. Uh you know we read histories uh we study why did uh terrible devastating tragedies like World War I come about and we debate them in school and uh write papers about them. But now we're living ourselves, watching with the real shock to the complete recklessness of the actions of political leaders when there is an obvious uh imperative to sit and talk and maybe disagree, but to not even try to talk and negotiate is something that is completely shocking to me.
>> What's going on in Gaza, this horrific genocide, and Trump administration has shown very little interest in doing any part to stop that other
>> quite the contrary.
>> Yeah.
>> No, no, no. This is an absolute
>> USbacked genocide. Please, it's not that they're not taking actions to stop it. They are actively supporting mass murder. That is Western values. Just in case anybody understands, Western values are that you can slaughter people that you consider not uh in your camp or subhuman or not in your religious group or whatever it is. That is what is happening right now. And it's active and it's complicit. And just as we speak, the State Department has issued a an announcement that Palestinian uh officials will not be able to come to the United Nations in September because they're calling for recognition of Palestine, horror of horrors, while the United States is uh creating a genocide. This is where we are right now.
>> Yeah. you have the US completely engaged if not it being uh I know a lot of people say Ukraine is Trump's war now uh what's happening in Gaza the genocide there is certainly uh lays at the feet of Donald Trump as you said I want your assessment of this and the framework of of how the United States is mired in a genocidal war on the one hand is mired in a losing world war III potential sparking conflict in Ukraine a potential nuclear conflict over Ukraine. Peter Navaro, a notorious anti-China hawk who now is in an adviser to Trump's manufacturing and trade division. He had this to say about India because right now there's a lot of panic about China, Russia, India uh getting closer is Ukraine comes to us and Europe and says give us some more money. So we everybody in America loses because of what India is doing. the con consumers and businesses and everything lose and workers lose because India's high tariffs cost us jobs and factories and income and higher wages and then the taxpayers lose because we got to fund Mod's war. Okay, the the the road to peace runs at least partly right through New Delhi.
>> We've heard this with China, right? Ukraine is China's war because China keeps trading with Russia. But there is a bigger panic of foot. Uh Modi and Xiinping are working on potential datant uh between each other to ease relations uh between the two countries. Uh historic in some ways and of course Russia and China are closer than ever. I almost thank Trump and Peter Navaro for uniting the world. Okay, it's uniting the world against the US but still it's uniting the world. Uh they are such dumbos. Navaro is a he's an idiot sorry and what they have done within the last couple of weeks is to blow up years of US India relations. Now I always told the Indians uh my friends I have so many colleagues and and friends uh that I discussed this with uh that the US is completely untrustworthy. There's no such thing as a trusting alliance with the United States and I advised India always don't side with the US against China. That's reckless. It's a fool's errand. It's playing the US hegemonic game. It's not in India's interest. Well, I can just say Peter Navaro and Trump have made my case in the most direct and obvious way in the last couple of weeks. I've been speaking to a lot of very senior Indian officials, to the media, uh to business leaders. They broke the US India relations over this. It's not only Navaro's idiotic statements that this is Mod's war. Uh it is uh the 25% so-called penalty tariff which the Indians notice. Thank you. uh and uh the closer relations of uh China and India were already underway for several months because that makes a lot of sense for both of them. But the flurry of activity that has followed Trump's tariff measures against Brazil and against India has been something to behold. And I I have behold it fairly close up. uh Brazil, India, China and Russia uh have been in a tremendous round of high level diplomacy in the last couple of weeks of defense ministers, foreign ministers, head of state visits. A lot has been made of the consequences of how this impacts us dollar hegemony and overall the uniolar world. And it appears that the Ukraine conflict, Gaza, continuing escalations with Iran, all of this is diminishing US standing uh and benefiting bricks to a great degree. I don't know what's falling faster, Trump, Star Mcronone and Mertz's approval ratings or the standing of those countries in the world or the US economy or the role of the dollar. They're all on the way down. Uh this is a failed policy. It makes no sense. There is no strategy. Uh there is no thought. There is a a complete failure to recognize that there's a big world out there. And the Western world can't just boss it around. Let me put some numbers on the table. There are 335 million uh Americans. There are about 450 million in the European Union. Another 55 to 60 million in Britain. Uh and you add that up, it's uh a little more than 10% of the world population. That's it. uh they talk to themselves. They uh have their meetings. They uh make threats to the rest of the world. They impose sanctions. uh uh they're divided among themselves because Trump's at a trade war with everybody. But aside from that, this 10% of the world thinks still that it runs the show. uh Trump which who represents these 335 million people or 4.1% of the world population uh thinks that he by himself runs the world. It's all a delusion. It's all failing. It is all shocking to the rest of the world. Even if you take Gaza, by the way, at least 180 of the 193 UN member states are strongly in favor of a state of Palestine in the United Nations. Uh many will recognize that uh just in the next three or four weeks the US stands almost alone with Israel, Vanuatu, Nauu, Palao, Papa New Guinea, uh a couple of others. That's about it. So the United States is becoming more and more isolated. And how does it handle that isolation? It denies visas to people that it doesn't want to hear from. That's further isolation. It puts on tariffs. That's further isolation. It resents the rest of the world. Well, we don't need the rest of the world. Well, actually, the United States does need the rest of the world. So, all of this is a completely failed approach by the United States. And the failures, I think, are becoming evident everywhere. Some see the killing in Gaza, the genocide in Gaza, the ability of the US to maintain this large military apparatus, even throwing around tariffs and sanctions as being a sign of strength. But you just said that it's actually furthering isolation. Is this the beginning of the end of the US empire's dominance and and what comes next?
>> There is no hegemony. We're in a multi-polar world. The United States cannot defeat Russia. The United States cannot defeat China. The United States cannot defeat India. By the way, it there are many great powers. Nuclear arms is also a great equalizer. Uh this is not a world that the United States can run with its 4.1% of the world population. And incidentally, let's recall Trump is a highly unpopular figure. uh he has uh in the most recent uh survey data of the last couple of days 37% approval rating, 55% disapproval rating. So he doesn't even rule the United States. He in his delusion and his executive orders thinks he does, but he doesn't even have the backing of a majority of the American people. Far from it. So, in this sense, we're already in a multi-olar world, but we can't take too much cheer from that because the amount of destruction, uh, the mass murders, uh, the starvation of 2 million people underway in Gaza, the fact of nuclear weapons means this is all extraordinarily dangerous. We need something more than multipolarity. We need the basic decency of how to live together. And that the United States lacks to this moment. That is an internal failure, not the objective reality of the world. That is a Washington mindset that Washington still runs the world. And that is very very dangerous uh to have that kind of delusion.