Transcription
And certainly, it's mass murder on a scale we would never accept or should never accept. When you look at the behavior of the Biden administration and now the Trump administration, it leaves me, at least, with a sick feeling in my stomach. So, John Mearsheimer recently hammered US foreign policy, calling it mass murder on a grand scale. Who he thinks is implicated in this disastrous policy and why there's a striking amount of continuity in US foreign policy regardless of who the US president is at the time. So, let's get his take on this. Please like the video and subscribe to the channel.
Immediately after the war started, Putin put out peace overtures to the Ukrainians to come to sort of come to some sort of peace agreement so that they could end the war. Then, remember, the war started in February 2022, and they're negotiating. This is the Ukrainians and the Russians are negotiating to end the war almost immediately after it starts. The famous Istanbul negotiations, and they don't reach an agreement, but they're making major league progress towards reaching an agreement. And what happens is that the Americans and the British, in the form of Boris Johnson, come in and tell the Ukrainians to walk away from the negotiations and to continue the war.
Uh, so this supports your basic point that we have been more enthusiastic about this war at different points than the Ukrainians have. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact, and I think this reflects Victoria Nuland's thinking, that we don't have to do the fighting. We don't do the dying, and we can use the Ukrainians for that purpose. We can use the Ukrainians to bleed the Russians white. The Russians are now a great, Russia is now a great power. This is a problem for us in their mind, and we have to weaken Russia. And Ukraine is the perfect opportunity to do that. Yeah.
Just think about that, too. How sick and twisted that whole mentality is. Even while you're propagandizing to the American public that the US is there to support democracy or all these nonsensical ideas, it's that you're actually using innocent Ukrainians who are conscripted and sent to the front lines. It's a form of slavery. It's slavery to the state to fight against Russians. Not generally because a lot of them want it, but because the US wants it. It's part of the grand US empire-building scheme. That's why John Mearsheimer has said that the US led Ukraine down the primrose path. It's a path that looks like it's roses, but at the end is thorns. It's death and destruction and devastation. And that's what we've seen for three and a half years now.
And there were so many off-ramps to this. He talked about Istanbul, but the US didn't exactly have to overthrow the Yanukovych government or assist to those ends in 2014. Now, did they? No. And they replaced the democratically elected government with a provisional government that ushered in the era of Zelensky and the antagonistic posture toward Russia that was, you know, aimed in that direction by the United States. And there were many other, you know, junctures in US history since the '90s that played a role in that, but that's where we're at.
My last question for you, sir, concerns grand strategy. I've been inspired by your work, you know, intellectually and more. I cannot, you know, in this moment, I'm just shocked at, especially with a lot of the people in the Trump administration. I know them personally. I know you do as well. And we heard for years about the folly of uh being obsessed with the Middle East, of American security doctrine, just having this religious devotion, you know, to NATO, to Europe, to the Middle East. And as I watch, you know, our the consumption of US weaponry, of US attention and diplomacy on Israel, um, on, you know, an obsession really with Israel, and then also similar obsession here with Ukraine, and then even, you know, determining our relationship with India and with China on the basis of Ukraine. It just seems so counter to any grand strategic interests of the United States and of Asia, which will comprise some 50% GDP, you know, in the next couple of years. So, yeah, it's America last.
Just at a very, you know, 50,000-foot level, does this just confirm really, uh, that not only will we have the 2020s be a Chinese decade, but one where, you know, the US really is just choosing the last bastions of this Cold War and 1990s, you know, mentality? And when we had the opportunity, which it seems to be right now, we just decided not to take it.
Yeah, I think that's an accurate description of what's happened here. Uh, I mean, the Trump administration and the Biden administration both argue that the principal contingency the United States should concern itself with is a war against China in East Asia, and that our principal goal should be to contain China in East Asia. That was the consensus opinion inside both administrations. But what's happened is that we can't get out of Ukraine. We're pinned down in Ukraine. And, uh, the situation in the Middle East is even worse. Uh, if you look at, uh, what happened in the war that we picked with the Houthis, remember Trump said, "We're going to go out and beat the Houthis." And, uh, after about a month, uh, Trump said, "We're quitting this war. Those Houthis are mighty formidable." But of course, the real reason that we quit the war was that we were running through our inventories of weapons at record pace.
Yeah, that's no doubt true. And it was to even get into that because the Houthis had withstood a civil war, you know, prolonged by the Saudis who invaded Yemen and, you know, fought back against them vigorously for over a decade. The US on the side of the Saudis still there, you know, in enacting a starvation blockade that's killed about a half a million people. But, you know, whatever. And if your mentality is that you have to contain China, getting into a proxy war with Russia is about the stupidest idea you can, uh, possibly have. And to prolong that war and not end that war because all it's done is driven Russian, uh, Russia closer into the arms of China. It's created a powerful Sino-Russian alliance that, you know, is two of the biggest nuclear powers in the world. We're not in the unipolar moment anymore. The US just can't throw its weight around. That was stupid back then, but it's even stupider, more stupid now to try to do that.
Ukraine is emblematic of that. What the US wants out of Ukraine is to chip away at the influence of Russia. It's only been counterintuitive if you actually wanted to contain China. And I think it's stupid to antagonize China, too, for the same reasons. I think it's stupid to antagonize Russia. And if you're a non-interventionist, you should want to trade with these countries, have good diplomatic relations with these countries, and not wage proxy wars against them when they are also becoming nuclear superpowers and our inventories are not very deep. Uh, and then we get in the wars that Israel gets involved in, the wars that Israel is fighting, especially their war with Iran. And there again, we're using up all sorts of, we, American weaponry and and and we're pinned down in the Middle East, right?
Uh, the Biden administration at least had the good sense not to get sucked into a war with Iran. The Israelis, of course, were trying to suck us into a war with Iran in 2024, but they were just quick clarification. Biden did bomb Iran in some targeted strikes. So it's not exactly true to say that he wasn't sucked into a war. If you believe that undeclared wars and undeclared military strikes are parts of wars or at least components and are acts of war, Biden was participatory in that too. But largely, he's right. But the Biden administration, which did few smart things strategically, at least in this case, avoided a war in Iran. But Trump foolishly, uh, on June 22nd of this year, uh, decided to go to war against Iran. So we're stuck in that, uh, situation now, and, uh, the question is, how do we get out?
So I think from a strategic point of view, what's going on with regard to Ukraine and what is going on with regard to, uh, the Middle East is disastrous. And then there's the moral dimension. We don't want to lose sight of the fact that the United States is complicit in a genocide in the Middle East. Uh, yeah, that's sad, but true. We're funding it. Taxpayers are funding that. And Trump isn't doing anything to use US leverage, what it has with Israel, which is, you know, considerable. It was $20 billion that the US threw into Netanyahu, the war criminal's pockets last year. And I think we're on track to do something like that now. And he doesn't threaten to withhold any of that aid despite what's happening in Gaza, which is a bloodbath, which is a genocide, which is a starvation campaign. He's not willing to do anything to curtail that travesty.
As the world looks on in horror, and as even figures prominent on the right like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are really slamming that kind of policy, it's not only America last, it's completely maniacal and evil. That what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. And for those people who don't want to call it a genocide, I would think you at least have to acknowledge that this is mass murder on a scale that we haven't seen in a long time. And certainly, it's mass murder on a scale we would never accept or should never accept, uh, from a close ally. But nevertheless, uh, here we are, uh, supporting Israel hook, line, and sinker as it executes a genocide. So from both a strategic point of view and a moral point of view, when you look at the behavior of the Biden administration and now the Trump administration, it leaves me, at least, with a sick feeling in my stomach.
Yeah, he's not alone with that one. Certainly does for me, too. But everything about US foreign policy is disastrous. And like he kind of makes the point here, it didn't matter if Trump was in office or whether Biden was in office because the deep state still remains regardless of the names. The military-industrial complex still survives. The Israel lobby still survives to continue funneling money to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, to, you know, Israel's coffers, into Ukrainian coffers, while we get into these stupid empire-building projects. You know, I'm with Ron Paul that the real America First policy is to just take care of our own, focus on domestic policy. And even if you don't agree with libertarian prescriptions for domestic policy, I think we'd have to agree that, you know, just focusing inward rather than outward and becoming a world empire, maintaining hegemony throughout the world would be a better course. And I would say that even about socialists that are really good on war, that it would be better, you, you know, in the hierarchy of considerations, to devote money and resources inward rather than outward, despite how against I am of any kind of wealth redistribution schemes that come from government. Rob from one to take to another. But right now, the US is basically robbing from the US taxpayer as a whole and redistributing those funds to overseas fruitless forever wars, regime change operations, and proxy wars.
And right now, with Gaza, we can't help but, you know, acknowledge the reality there. You're seeing it. There has been a shift, especially upon younger people, even younger conservatives turning against this stuff and wondering why this is spilling over into the culture war too, with DEI carve-outs just for American Jews, despite the fact that American Jews, in a relative sense, outperform nearly every other ethnic category, including whites. And, you know, we were supposed to be told that, hey, you know, these Republicans ushering in, you know, a new era. We're going to be against woke madness. But they just harnessed that wokeness in a red flavor. And that is conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. You're just an anti-Semite if you raise any legitimate, uh, dispute or criticism toward Israel or US policy toward Israel, just like you are a racist or a sexist or a homophobe if you raised any legitimate criticism toward the liberal woke regime when Biden was in office. But that's what we got now.
It's endless wars all over the place. Trump has not been the non-interventionist that he sometimes campaigned on. His rhetoric was sometimes good on Ukraine. It wasn't great on Israel. He boasted about how pro-Israel he was in his first term. He escalated the war in Syria, escalated to some extent the bombing, um, in Afghanistan, that wasn't really that connected to Israel. But he also moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. That was provocative if you were critical of Israel. And he signed the Abraham Accords, which his own DHS said is only going to inflame tensions with more countries in that region. So that's where we're at.
I don't see an off-ramp. I don't see much evidence to believe that Trump is willing to do what it takes not only to end the war in Ukraine. He just has to disengage. You don't even have to come to a peace agreement. Just withdraw US aid there. Let the Europeans handle it. Let Zelensky face reality and sign a peace under those conditions where we aren't bankrolling them. And he won't use US leverage to end the genocide in Gaza. He won't say, "Netanyahu, you have to stop this madness in Gaza. You can't annex it. You can't occupy it. Or we're withdrawing your aid." Because he's controlled by the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby has immense influence over members of Congress, too. It's not just Trump. And it wasn't just during Trump's presidency. This was a phenomenon during Biden. It's very bipartisan. AIPAC boasts about the fact that it's bipartisan, and they, you know, essentially own the voting patterns as it pertains to Israel of 361 congressmen. That is a majority. I think there's 535 total. So that's where we're at.
But let me know down below. Do you think Mearsheimer is right? Does US foreign policy make you sick to your stomach? Do you see any way around this? What are some good solutions? Let me know down below. Please like the video, subscribe to the channel. Also, subscribe to Breaking Points. Great program. And please consider becoming a YouTube member. If you click the join button below, you can help support the channel. I'll tip my hat to you in appreciation if you do that. And I'll also, as thanks, give you the gift of all my videos before they go live on YouTube to be able to view those before the general public. And until I see you guys next time, no more war, no more debt, no more inflation, and no more empire. Peace out, guys. Catch you in the next one.