Transcription
I think that we're seeing a an attempt to redo the same scenario that was played out in Libya and the same scenario that was played out in Syria. Uh, you know, place the regime under siege and weaken them until the point where you can maybe topple them with the help of uh mercenaries. And so I think that for strategic reasons the Russians want to uh help Venezuela defend itself, the the Maduro regime, uh to to survive because Venezuela is uh, you know, part of the multipolar integrations. It's a very important country. It's a very resource-rich country.
And uh, it's very obvious that uh the Trump administration is under pressure from Wall Street to take over Venezuela because, uh, having allegedly and, you know, I was in the oil business for for for many, many years. I don't believe anything that's out there in in terms of official numbers, but the official numbers are that Venezuela has 300, 35 billion barrels of crude oil, uh, reserves, sorry, proven reserves. And so that's, that's uh oil that you could buy, you know, you could negotiate to trade and you can buy that oil, but it doesn't help Wall Street to buy oil from Venezuela. What, what, what Wall Street needs is collateral. And so if they got control of Venezuelan government, you know, Maria Corina Machado having, you know, now a Nobel Prize under her belt and all these good things, uh, she already said that she would privatize all this, that she would privatize the uh state oil company PDVSA and that uh she would open the gates wide to the uh foreign banks and corporations to develop Venezuela's natural resource sector. And so that would be a big boost to the very badly collateral-starved western financial system because they would be able to uh, you know, issue big um, big loans not only to uh the likes of uh ExxonMobil and BP and Shell and so forth to go into Venezuela and secure it all with Venezuelan crude oil as collateral. They would also be able to issue large loans to the government of Venezuela. Again, it would be collateralized with Venezuela's natural resource riches. So, it would be a complete net gain for Wall Street and maybe City of London banks. I don't know.
Uh, it would be a loss for everybody else. That is, you know, you're calling in American troops to go and fight and die. Uh, you're wasting American taxpayers' money to fund the the military expeditions that this is involving. Um, for that reason, I think that invasion is very, very unlikely because, you know, we're talking about the same military that uh couldn't subdue uh Ansar Allah in Yemen, that uh had to withdraw from Afghanistan because they couldn't, they couldn't defeat the Taliban after 20 years of trying, right? And several trillion dollars spent. So I think that they are unlikely to try. And I think that a large part of the reason why is exactly the Russian anti-aircraft weapons, uh, the the SU-34s, the the anti-ship missiles that the that the Russians provided for Venezuelans and then we don't know what else. But I I assume that Wagner mercenaries is probably a cover for Russian military advisors to go in there to help Venezuelans deploy all these weapon systems because they're complex and and uh uh require very, very highly qualified personnel to operate. And this is why I think that the um that the um invasion of any kind is unlikely because it would be uh too, it would be too risky for uh for Trump. But I think that the hope is that they could maybe cobble together some kind of um Argentinian, Brazilian, Bolivian, um, not Taliban, but you know, al-Nusra Front, you know, the the South American equivalent of HTS. Uh, maybe incubate them in Argentina. Maybe that's part of why why they're uh bailing out Argentina and and Milei's government as it is because we know that American military advisors went into Argentina along with some uh, some military assets. And so maybe that's the same scenario, uh, you know, as as as um, as Syria. And I think that this is the reason why maybe the Russians, among others, sent in um, the uh Wagner troops, Wagner personnel to basically provide the defense to the Maduro regime.
I think in the United States, they feel that it's going to be something like Panama in 1989. That they invaded Panama. But Venezuela is not going to be Panama. They're much, you know, they're prepared for that. No, I I I I doubt that they're that stupid. Nema, I think that they understand that this is not Panama. Venezuela is, first of all, it's a very large country. Second of all, it's, you know, it's kind of like Vietnam. It's covered in tropical vegetation. U, the Venezuelan regime has had also 20 years to prepare for this because, you know, I remember in the aftermath of the failed uh regime coup against uh Hugo Chavez in 2003. Chavez gave an interview in which he said, "Well, you know, I've tried everything to have a cooperative, friendly relations with the with the empire." And he was talking about the United States, but the the clash against the empire is inevitable. It's, it's coming and it's going to happen. So, I think that already back then in the early 2000s, they knew that this was coming. So, I think that they have been preparing for this and they are probably well prepared for it. Now, you know, that doesn't mean that uh they couldn't go the way of uh Bashar al-Assad or uh Muammar Gaddafi. But I think that the uh, you know, the it's it's going to be very, very tough and it's going to be very, very tough because, um, among other things, um, they they tried already three times, you know. So the 2003 coup, then there was a coup in 2019, if you know, remember when we had Richard Branson organizing a concert across the border in Colombia and, you know, they did all that and that failed. And then this is this is the third attempt. I think that the the regime in Venezuela is much more robust and much more much better prepared than what they anticipate. And also being under attack allows the Maduro regime to maybe conduct certain kinds of purges to consolidate his regime that would be politically very, very difficult to do in the absence of such a threat. So maybe, uh, rather than being uh South America's Damascus, Caracas could prove to be South America's Tehran.
>> Yeah. Alex, looking at the treaty of friendship and cooperation signed between Russia and Venezuela, you see massive expansion in economics, security, culture, you know, all these aspects. And it shows that Venezuela is really is getting, you know, the situation, the future for Venezuela is going to be totally different from what it was before because they they joined BRICS and the future is going to be defined within BRICS and the participation they have. I know that they have close relationship with the, you know. Yes. >> And they have received probably a lot of missiles from Iran. I do you think if wi-i with with that concept, if they put troops on the ground, which is a suicide in my opinion for the Trump administration, if they go after bombing them, they can bomb them back, they can respond to the United States and it would be humiliating for the United States army if they go in that direction, as we saw with the Houthis with Yemenis in the Red Sea. But it's going to be different. As you mentioned, th this is a country that is really prepared and backed by Iran and Russia, at least to my knowledge.
>> Yeah. Uh, I think you're correct. And uh, I I I also forgot the Bay of Pigs incident, the third. So this would this will have been the fourth attempt. The Bay of Pigs happened, I think in 2020, if I'm not correct, if I'm not mistaken. Sorry. And they they actually u organized a group of commandos to to land in Venezuela and they got caught. It was extremely embarrassing. So that's not going to happen obviously. And I I I agree with you. Uh, there is the there is extensive cooperation between Venezuela and Iran. And we don't know exact, we know some of the weaponry that the Russians have provided, but we don't, I don't know what weaponry the Iranians may have provided. But the Iranians have very powerful um anti-ship missiles that might be part of Caracas' uh arsenal. So, I think that the attempt is going to um boil down to to maybe uh trying to throw in commandos, trying to organize the opposition in Venezuela. But I think that if they do that, they they won't get very, very far. At least not with the opposition.
[Music] What was it eight years ago? They had um, no less, five years ago, six years ago, they had Juan Guaidó. And I think that that was actually, they were in a much, much stronger position at the time with Juan Guaidó than they are now with María Corina Machado. Um, but I wanted to I wanted to add something because, you know, as I look through social media feeds about Venezuela, you know, there's a whole, there's a whole segment of people who are watching this who have the anti-socialist slant. So, you know, once you label a government as socialist, like Maduro's government, then without without looking at any further nuances of the case, they immediately think that, oh, it would be a good thing if this government fell because they're socialist. And then, you know, if if this Nobel Prize laureate María Corina Machado came in, that would be an improvement. I used to live in Venezuela before Chávez, you know, and they they say now they're saying that the poverty rate in Venezuela is 70%. Which may be true, but Venezuela is under under extremely draconian sanctions imposed by the United States. Uh, back when I lived in in Venezuela, which was 1993, 1994, 80% of Venezuelan people lived under the under the poverty threshold by of the World Bank. So it was worse than it is today and there were no sanctions. You know, they were, you know, they were the darling of the United States because they were under, you know, the right-wing dictatorship of Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera and Hunot. You know, these were all puppet regimes of Wall Street and Venezuela was essentially a a colony of Wall Street and still it was 80% poverty rate. I had colleagues at work who were literally unable to read and write. And I haven't visited Venezuela since the 1990s, but my understanding is that, um, certain things have improved in spite of the, you know, draconian sanctions, that literacy rates have have increased dramatically. Uh, certain services like uh healthcare and education are free and available to all people. And uh, the markets appear to be decently well supplied, you know, regardless of the propaganda. Venezuelan supermarkets are well-stocked with with food. Uh, so it's not, it's not black and white. People say, "Oh, Venezuela used to be such a wealthy country before socialism came." Well, it is still a wealthy country, but the people in Venezuela, if if their poverty rate is 70% today, 30 years ago, it was 80%. It didn't improve under capitalism. It was simply a western colony where they extracted natural resources, oil, gold, cocoa, coffee, and stuff like that, and invested nothing into into the civil society, into into the nation's infrastructure. Everything was privatized. Post office, um, transport, water, water systems, trash collection, everything was privatized. Nothing functioned correctly. So this idea that Venezuela is falling apart at the seams because of socialism, it's not true. It's not correct.
>> Yeah. Alex, you know, when it comes to socialism, I talk with Michael Hudson frequently, every week, and with Richard Wolff. And Michael says that he believes that the future is socialism or barbarism. And, you know, when look at we we look at China today, you know, the hardcore of the Chinese government is socialist, but they have the private sector, you know, is half private, half socialist, half government. It's it it works amazingly. When you look at this system, it seems that it doesn't matter, you know, the system when you use the system in favor of the people, you know, we had many reports coming out of China. It shows how, you know, the the development in China is growing, even in tiny cities, tiny towns. And it shows how it works, how it really, you know, helps the society. But you don't see that happening in, you know, I I live in Brazil. You know, Brazil is a, they call it, they call Lula socialist, they call Bolsonaro, you know, but you don't see that much of change when you change the system, the good, the president.
>> Well, I could I could give you a very good example, Nema, because I grew up in in socialism. You know, I grew up up until my um, early 20s. I I lived mostly in uh former Yugoslavia, which was a socialist country under one-party communist rule. And then in 1991, former Yugoslavia fell apart. Croatia, which is my uh home country, became independent. And from that time on, we pretty much copy-pasted everything coming from the West. You know, the legal code, the the economic system, political system, uh, trade systems, you name it. Education, infrastructure, development, everything is practically the same as in the West. And there is no doubt, and I'm not the only one saying it. Pretty much everybody uh agrees in all the countries of former Yugoslavia that life was much, much better under socialism. Okay. Now, uh, the problem is that I I have not heard anybody, and I I have to say that includes Professor Richard Wolff. I have not heard anybody give a proper definition to what socialism is because, you know, we we live um under this false dichotomy between socialism and capitalism. And we believe that countries like the United States and Britain and Western Europe, Japan, that these are capitalist countries, and that socialist countries are places like China, Venezuela, I don't know, Vietnam, Russia, you know, places like that. That that's not true. I mean, in the western quote-unquote capitalist countries, uh, most of the most of the nations are very close to 50% participation of the government in the GDP. So, governments account for pretty much half the GDP. In France, it's more. It's close to 57%. In the United States, you know, it's been the number has been always 30%, but for decades, they never moved it. But we know that the government's share in the GDP keeps growing. In Britain, it's close to 50%. Uh, I think in Europe, I don't know what it is, but it's also inching close to half. So, you know, to to be talking about free market capitalism where where half of your GDP is the government is simply false.
Now, the real difference, uh, I I would have to talk about a concept that is not being taught in economics, but which is absolutely central to economics, which which is called deflationary gap. I studied economics in university. Nobody ever mentioned it. I I, you know, I I learned that later and I had to learn it from forbidden books, you know, books that are not allowed to be sold or at least they were not allowed to be sold some years ago. One of them is Carol Quigley's Tragedy and Hope. Because of the deflationary gap, this concept, which I'll just skip over it. If people are interested, they I have an article about it on my on my Substack. Basically, the government has to step in uh to bolster the purchasing power in an economic system because without the government stepping in, the purchasing power keeps systematically going down for two reasons, two two main reasons. One is that people don't spend all the money that they make every year. They they set aside a percentage, which is probably 5, 10%, they set it aside as savings. So that purchasing power is removed from the market. And then the second, uh, large chunk that's being systematically removed from the markets is uh repayment of debts because money all enters into circulation is debt. When you repay your debt, you extinguish that money. So all the debts that are repaid is the money that disappears. So as money is withdrawn from circulation through savings and uh repayment of debt, that reduces the whole economy's purchasing power. And so for all the participants in the economies, you know, entrepreneurs and firms and the government, to be able to sell their goods and services at the prices that they're asking, it becomes impossible. So they have to lower the prices. So the system enters into into price uh deflation and price deflation has a tendency to be a self-reinforcing process. So you enter into this, what what the economists colloquially call deflationary debt death spiral. And then the government, the economy only stabilizes when you get to depression-level of activity, meaning an economy basically produces the the bare necessities, food, apparel, you know, building materials to repair roofs and stuff like that. And that's that, that it's stabilized at that at that. So to keep the economy always growing, which is some kind of an an imperative that all governments unquestioningly pursue, you have to constantly inject new purchasing power into the system. Tax and spend is not enough. Because if government just tax people and then takes those taxes and spends it in the economy, you didn't create new purchasing power. You merely transferred it from people who earned it to the government, but it's the same amount of money. It doesn't, it doesn't increase the system's. It doesn't grow the system. So the government has to raise debt. And this is why if you look at the at the debts of the American government, the British government, Italian, German, French, Japanese, every government that has this monetary system in operation, their debt levels are constantly going higher and higher and higher. And along with their deficits, they have to, so they have to borrow money, meaning they have to spend more than they collect in taxes. So you'll see the deficit spending is also always going up and up and up and up. Okay. So this is why the government participation in the economy keeps growing and it's it's a mathematical certainty given the monetary system that we have. So this is true of what we call socialist governments and it's equally true about what we call the capitalist governments. But I'll tell you what the difference is. Those countries that we call socialist, the government spending largely flows bottom-up. Meaning the government spends on social programs, uh, generous pension plans, free education, free uh, healthcare, uh, maintaining the the the the infrastructure in the system and so on. The way government spends in capitalist systems is usually top-down. Meaning the government largely distributes to large corporations and banks. It's it's the big corporations that get the handouts and the subsidies. And everybody thinks that's great because, oh, you know, if if General Electric gets a subsidy, if, you know, if, if government media gets subsidies, that's great. Big agriculture, big big banks, big oil, they get they get hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies every year. And everybody thinks that's great because that's capitalism. But if you give money to ordinary people, to unemployed, to, you know, you provide free education and free healthcare and so on, everybody thinks that's horrible, that shouldn't be done. But the effect of this is that in socialist quote unquote socialist systems, people have money to spend and they decide how to spend it. Meaning, you know, they can spend it at a restaurant, they can go buy clothes. So, there's space, there's room, and there's purchasing power available for small and medium-sized businesses to survive. In quote unquote capitalist systems, money goes to General Electric and to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and u um Monsanto and companies like this, huge uh healthcare corporations and so on. People don't have any money. It's the big corporations that have money and then they use that money to lobby the government. The the ultimate effect of that is actually fascism because you're you're creating incentives for uh collusion between large corporations and government. And then the money that you give to the military-industrial complex, that tends to fuel the forever wars. So you don't see very many socialist countries that are constantly at war left and right, but you see a lot of capitalist countries that are constantly in at war, primarily countries like the United States, Britain, and France. And so I think a better definition of the differences between what we think is socialism and what we think is capitalism is very essential to even get anywhere inside this debate because at the moment, there is no debate almost. People who hate capitalism do so on ideological grounds. People who hate socialism also do so on ideological grounds. So you have two camps that aren't even capable of talking to each other than hurling insults. And I have, you know, I'm a former hedge fund manager. I have a lot of friends who are, you know, what they would call card-carrying capitalists. And they have nothing but contempt and insults for anybody who has anything good to say about socialism. And I, you know, sometimes in these gatherings, they they call me a communist. I'm not a communist. I grew up in communism. I was raised through my education system on Marxism. I don't buy Marxism. I don't support Marxism. But it's not so much ideology. It's the way the system operates. So you need an an un-ideological systems engineering framework of mind to be even to be even able to be even to be able to even uh understand what the what the society's problem is.
>> Yeah. I think do you know who made the two sides talking to each other? Or China? Uh, yes, yes, you're you're you're absolutely right, you're absolutely right. But, you know, still, we don't have a good understanding. I don't know if you remember a few years ago, somebody organized this big debate about communism versus capitalism or socialism versus capitalism and they invited the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, arguing the socialist camp, and Jordan Peterson, arguing for the capitalist camp. Neither one of them had any clue what they were talking about. It was again, um, they were not hurling insults at each other, but it was again all ideological drivel. They they didn't move one inch closer to one another in understanding of of what the real problem is. I think there's some areas, Alex, that capitalism has failed in. Those areas which is healthcare, education, you know, social security. These areas are should be in here. In Brazil, we have them under the control of socialism. You know, the socialist policy. It doesn't matter who's the president is. A socialist as they call Lula a socialist or is Bolsonaro, is capitalist. After all, the policy of the government is to protect these people because you have these people within the society who cannot provide themselves with, you know, the healthcare, you know, the education they need. And you always have that those part of society that need, they're in need of that sort of, you know, service from the government. And you have to do that unless the society is not going to grow.
>> Uh, yes, correct. And the problem is again because in these capitalist economies, even even if certain social services are maintained, uh, they are always maintained on spare change while billions upon billions go to uh large corporations. And so this is why in in quote-unquote capitalist systems, healthcare and education fail because they they don't, they don't invest in that. They invest in whatever business big corporations need or or want. Agriculture, like, but not agriculture as in diversified family farms. It's colossal coffee plantations and colossal soybean plantations, you know, producing cash crops that can be traded on world markets for, you know, millions of dollars per cargo. They, you know, they don't gain anything from people producing broccoli for their local community and and carrots and and, you know, apples and oranges. Uh, so this is this is this is a huge part of the problem and this is a problem that needs to be discussed and debated. But so long as you know, people get stuck on labels and then fall back on their like entrenched ideological biases, we never make progress. And I think this is, you know, I honestly think that this is largely by design as well because it's a wonderful way to divide the public against itself. You know, you convince, you convince one group of people that they're capitalists, or you let them convince themselves that they're capitalists. Other ones that they convince themselves that they're socialist and have them hate each other and hurl insults at each other and never ever drill down.
>> Someone else is benefiting from that.
>> Of course. Yes. Of course. Yes. Yes. Exactly.
>> This is amazing. This is amazing to me. Every time I see people are fighting each other, socialist, capitalism.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it gets very, very heated. It gets very, very heated. But it's never a particularly intelligent debate.
>> No.
>> They just hate, you know, like they'll just hate that, you know, welfare queen, that mother who has a couple of kids and she gets, I don't know, 2,000 bucks a month to maintain her kids. And then they like they're they're like so angry that this undeserving person is getting money. But if Lockheed Martin gets a hundred billion dollars a year, oh, that's cool because that, you know, these are businessmen, you know, wearing suits who are producing these slick things to kill other people with. That's awesome. You know, that's capitalism. Yay. You know, fantastic.
>> Yeah. Alex, what we've learned from Russian President, he announced the new missile, the new Burevestnik, and it's a nuclear-powered cruise missile that can hit any target on this planet, and which was a sign in my opinion on the part of the Russian government that they don't want escalation and they have everything to defend themselves against any sort of escalation. This was the final point in my opinion with the new announcement on the Russian part. And here is the reaction of Donald Trump to that, denying the Russian threat after President Vladimir Putin and his top general claimed they successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile.
>> They're not playing games with us. We're not playing games with them either. Uh, we test missiles all the time. And I don't think it's an appropriate thing to put for Putin to be saying either. By the way, he ought to get the war ended. A war that should have taken one week is now in its fourth year. That's what he ought to do instead of testing missiles.
>> Former CIA.
>> Yeah. Let me let me say something, Alex. I really love Paul Carrick Roberts because when it came to the war in Ukraine, he said, "Why is Putin just dragging on and on the conflict in Ukraine?" Because I was so so much, what is he talking about? Because he was talking the mind in Washington. You know that is important to be considered, which we know is not the same when it comes to Russia, China, and Iran. They're totally their sort of thinking is different. Totally different. The but Washington doesn't feel that way. He's talking about one week or two weeks to putting an end to the conflict. You know, Ukraine, just remember what Ukraine was before the conflict started. 700,000 soldiers prepared.
>> Um, yeah, it was uh Ukraine was the large, the second largest military in Europe after Turkey and probably the best prepared, trained up and fortified army in Europe. They they have been preparing for this war for eight years. Um, they have been armed and trained by Western NATO uh instructors and advisors. They received an ocean worth of weapons to fight Russia with. And Russia didn't really want to have this war. Even when they invade, when they launched their military, a special military operation in 2022, they didn't launch it with the intention to invade. They they um positioned themselves close to uh several Ukrainian cities, Kyiv in particular. And then, you know, four days after that, they were already in negotiations with the Ukrainian side and they said, commit to neutrality, commit to never joining NATO, and we withdraw completely. We we will even uh forego our plan of demilitarizing Ukraine. We will withdraw completely to uh pre-invasion pre-war positions, meaning, uh, they would completely withdraw from Ukraine, including the Donbas. And they said, you will negotiate with uh Luhansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic for a special status, giving them a broad autonomy within Ukraine. And Crimea will negotiate it over the next 10 to 15 years, will negotiate its status. So there was no, there was no obstacle to peace then. That was Russia's intention. And so that intention only changed after Western influence derailed the peace process at the end of March 2022. And then Boris Johnson landed unannounced in Kyiv and told Zelensky, "Do not negotiate. Do not sign peace. Fight it out. We're behind you. You're going to win this war." And so that's that's when the nature of this conflict changed. And it wasn't what Putin intended. He did, he didn't intend to fight this war. And then when they began to fight this war, they fought it very surgically. Meaning they didn't do like the Americans did when they went on Fallujah, right? Like, you know, level the whole place. They didn't do shock and awe, uh, like like Kabul and and and Baghdad. They're doing something else. They're fighting the enemy formations. They are using attrition warfare to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Western mindset is, you know, you have to show your superiority by going quickly. And so they they launch an infinity of bombs and missiles indiscriminately. They they level entire cities and then they show the maps with with colors. Oh, look, we took all this in so many days. And then 20 years later, they have to withdraw. You know, those are pyrrhic victories. Those are not even victories of any kind. They had to withdraw from Vietnam. They had to withdraw from from Afghanistan. They they will have to withdraw from Iraq. Uh, their their welcome in the whole of the Middle East is wearing out very quickly. So all of those whiz-bang amazing uh victories that they pretend reflect the power of their military are phony and hollow. And but Russia has a different approach to this war, and it's not being fought to impress Western audiences. It's being fought to remove the strategic uh threats to Russian security, and Russians are focused on that. And I think that if people in the Trump administration listened more to people like Colonel Douglas Macgregor, maybe they would understand. They probably would have understood from day one. But they don't. They listen to these these these morons like like um, oh gosh, Ben Hodges, who's been wrong every day for for the last four years in practically everything he's ever said, and and people like that. And so, well, you know, that this is why I think they can't get Ukraine right, and they haven't been able to get Ukraine right for for many years now. And I I I don't understand why Trump still can't get it right after, you know, he spent, he's had 10 long conversations with Donald with with Vladimir Putin. Uh, his whole delegation has met many times with the with the Russian counterparts. Steve Witkov went and sat with Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov many times. So all of this has been explained to them. So they should know it, which is, which is why I suspect that Trump is not saying this because he actually believes it. I think that Trump is saying this for for some effect with some domestic political audience. I I I honestly refuse to believe that he's he's that dumb.
You know, when I look at the strategy of the United States comparing to the Russia's one, I see, you know, look at the building on a foundation. The United States has attacked the building, the beautiful apartments in that building. But Russia is starting from the foundation. You know what they're doing? They don't care about the building above the foundation. They're just destroying the foundation. The building's going to come down. That's what they're doing, and it takes time, and they don't want to sacrifice their forces in that direction that much. This is >> you know, you know, many people don't understand what Russia has done during the last three years. No, they were fighting the whole West together with Japan, Korea, you know, all together. Even in those, you remember when this the conflict started, India was so shy. China was somehow shy to talk about. Iran was the same. You know, as time went by, these countries have have decided to, you know, to take sides.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. Correct. Nema. Russia has been fighting the combined West, and uh, I I think that what they have achieved is quite amazing. Uh, not only on the military plane, but the fact that the West attacked them with the biggest set of sanctions ever imposed on any country in the in history, and they withstood, withstood that blow. Uh, and Russia only became stronger over the past four years of of this of this war. So I think that what they have achieved is absolutely amazing. And I have to say also that if you if you contrast the way Russians are waging war with the way Israelis are waging war, and you know, I'm when I say Israelis, I mean Israel is part of the West, then you see uh the difference in approach where on the one side, in a in a much bigger war, you have um very careful consideration not to needlessly risk civilian lives, and so you have very relatively small number of civilian casualties in Ukraine versus Israel, which absolutely doesn't care. Well, actually, I think maybe they do care, but they care in the sense of they prefer to kill as many civilians as possible. And so even from the ethical standpoint, I think that when the history of all this is written, uh, I think it will look kindly on on on the way Russia has conducted itself. It has the the Russians have given peace a chance at absolutely every step of the way. And I sometimes even I I I'm in pain when I listen to somebody like Scott Horton, who is he's like an encyclopedia. He knows everything about everything that happens. But somehow, somehow he still comes to the conclusion that um Russia is the aggressor and that they had other options. They didn't have to attack Ukraine.
>> Russ these people, these people who appear on, you know, Democracy Now, they have the same sort of mindset. They, they, it's all nonsense, you know.
>> Yeah. They they forget that the war started in 2014. Russia has stood aside, hoping to avoid war for eight long years, going through Geneva negotiations, going through Minsk I negotiations, going through Minsk II negotiations, implementing the Minsk protocol to a letter and sustaining 14,000 casualties in those eight years. So this was war. This wasn't just people having a picnic on the on the lines of of demarcation on the demarcation lines. This was war. And Russia gave every possibility for for peaceful solution for eight years until they were absolutely pushed into intervening militarily. And so people who say like, oh no, the Russians had other options, which other options? And what do you think they didn't consider in those eight years during which they lost on average three people a day? You know, on an average day, 14,000 people in 8 years, that's three people a day. So what option do you think they didn't consider that you can think of, but they didn't? And they were talking to the to the French, to the Germans, to the Americans, to the Brits. They were meeting conference after conference, you know, negotiation after negotiation. They held monthly telephone, you know, as a part of the Minsk process, they had monthly telephone conversations. The Russ, Vladimir Putin with Angela Merkel and um, not Macron, France. >> They they talked about this once every month for eight years. What, what other options did they have in in February of 2022? I I find that, you know, I I I I find it hard to even listen to drivel like that, especially from people who actually understand what happened.
>> Yeah. Alex, we know that Donald Trump has changed his mind after the, you know, he had a meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin and then he said that the ceasefire is over. We're not going to talk about ceasefire and because ceasefire doesn't work. And it seems that the Russian president convinced him during the meeting that they're not going to, you know, they're not going to accept it. But then he went to the United Kingdom. Then he came out and said, "No, we have to consider the ceasefire, an immediate ceasefire. They're talking right now." The main difference, you know, the same. And you see Støre going to Turkey yesterday talking with Erdogan. I was like, what, what is happening? Obama is appearing three times in London. You know, Støre going to Turkey and Erdogan says that we are we are agreeing with the assessment of the United Kingdom on the issue of Ukraine. And here is what Matt Whitaker, which in my opinion is the final objective of this sort of movement. He's talking about this situation they're in and the policy they want to implement. Happening is our expectation is that countries like Hungary, uh, Turkey, and Slovakia that continue to buy Russian oil and gas will come up with a plan and execute a plan that wean them off of Russian oil and gas. And, you know, Hungary, uh, unlike many of their neighbors, has, uh, not made any plans or made any active steps. And so, we're going to continue to work with them, and we're going to continue to work with their neighbors like Croatia and other countries that can help them, uh, wean themselves off. And, you know, obviously, that pipeline is most likely to be shut off in the coming years as well. And so there's a lot of um planning that our friends in Hungary should do, and and we're going to help them obviously as a good ally make those plans and execute them to get them off of Russian oil and gas.
>> Yeah. Even your country is among those.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Um, look, Nema, I when I hear stuff like that, this I always have to ask myself, are these people this stupid or are they just making some kind of a show, you know, like a head fake? Uh, I'm sure that this guy means every word he says. [Music] Kind of like Keith Kellogg, but the fact that he's there in his position makes me wonder if he was, you know, like if they don't, if they if they don't let certain players out there to do their song and dance with the view of yanking their leash and pulling them back at some point because, um, otherwise it's just too dumb. It's just too dumb. It doesn't make sense. Uh, you're going to cut, you're going to cut pipelines going from Russia to Hungary and to Europe further. That that doesn't make sense. You cannot supply the European market with oil or with gas. Well, maybe, you know, if you if you conquer Venezuela, maybe you can. But, you know, this this all, you know, this is this is all back to imperial policies of the of the 19th century European colonialism, only the United States starring in the in the in the leading role. And the reason why I don't believe it because it's absolutely contrary to Trump's whole MAGA, America First, returning to the Republican traditions of the United States and adopting the American system of political economy versus colonialist British free trade. So I I had to scratch my head and wonder what the hell is going on. And maybe this guy is just, they just let him out out of the house to bark a little bit for some reason.
>> The guy is the US ambassador to NATO, by the way.
>> Well, that would be the role. Yes. You know that that, but NATO, you know, NATO doesn't have any future, so he doesn't either, probably.
>> Yeah. Thank you so much, Alex, for being with us today. Great.
>> Always a pleasure, Nema. Thank you for having me. Take care.