Transcription
What's the first thing that Starmer does when he becomes prime minister? He goes to Kiev to pledge the endless support of, uh, the US, by the way, because Britain doesn't do anything. Uh, [laughter] the endless support of the United States to the defeat of Russia. And then he flies across the Atlantic to try to convince Biden to authorize. What authorized means is for the US military to enable deep strikes inside Russia. That's really a clever thing to do, especially because Putin said, "Well, then we'd be at war with each other and we'd be forced to reconsider our nuclear strategy."
And then we have our CIA director in this. This would be great for the West End theater, by the way, because it's a kind of parody. The CIA director meets with the MI6 director on stage recently here and says, "Oh, don't worry about Putin's bluff." Well, my advice is if you're going to say that, say that before we're all annihilated, cuz no one's going to hear you after we're all annihilated. How do we know he's bluffing? He's not bluffing if this, if Russia is fundamentally threatened.
Well, I, I'd love for the United States to be a functioning democracy, uh, and to be a good example for other countries. Uh, I don't believe the US has any right or any ability to, uh, put in place a democracy in any other country. Nor do I believe, by the way, that American democracy functions as a real democracy anymore on the life and death issues. Nobody has asked the American people anything about all these wars for decades. And, by the way, I can tell you and I'm telling you authoritatively and truly, they lie about every goddamn thing about these wars. And so that's not dem, that's not democracy either. Everything is phony. Everything is narrative. And so on the war and peace issues, the public has no say at all. If you were to ask the American people now, and in fact Gallup does, uh, do you support Biden's foreign policy? I think the support is, you can look it up, 25 to 35% perhaps. I don't even think it reaches 35%. Where's the democracy in this? It's a game. This is the deep state and they have their wars and every war has been phony. Some wars the American people are basically never told about. For example, the war in Syria.
And you may actually hear from grownup reporters who are lying through their teeth or ignorant beyond imagining that, oh, the war in Syria. Yes, Russia intervened in Syria. Well, do you know that the that Obama tasked the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government starting four years before Russia intervened? What kind of nonsense is that? And how many times did the New York Times report on Operation Timber Sycamore, which was the presidential order to the CIA to overthrow Bashar al-Assad three times in 10 years? This is not democracy. This is a game and it's a game of narrative.
Why did the US invade Iraq in 2003? Well, first of all, it was completely phony pretenses. It wasn't, "Oh, we were so wrong. They didn't have weapons of mass destruction." They actually did focus groups in the fall of 2002 to find out what would sell that war to the American people. Abe Schultzky, if you want to know the name of the PR genius. They did focus groups on the war. They wanted the war all the time. They had to figure out how to sell the war to the American people, how to scare the out of the American people. It was a phony war. Where did that war come from? You know what? It's quite surprising. That war came from Netanyahu. Actually, you know that it's weird. And the way it is is that Netanyahu had from 1995 onward the theory that the only way we're going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the governments that support them. That's Iraq, Syria, and Iran. And the guy's nothing if not obsessive. And we're he's still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week. He's a deep dark son of a Sorry to tell you. Because he's gotten us into endless wars. And because of the power of all of this in the US politics, he's gotten his way. But that war was totally phony.
So what is this democracy versus dictatorship? Come on. These are not even sensible terms. You know, look at the great accomplishment of pouring in I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars into Afghanistan for 20 years to get from the Taliban regime to the Taliban regime. This is American genius at democracy promotion. They don't care at all about democracy, by the way. At all. They topple governments they don't like that won't do their bidding. They topple democracies if they don't like them. They'll topple anybody that they don't like. That's how it's worked all along. They never said, "Oh, we can't topple Mosaddegh in 1953. He's a democratic government." No, they toppled a democratic government in Iran and put in a police state, which led to wonderful long-term relations with Iran because they really love the American people for that. So, this is not about democracy. This is a game and it's a terrible game and it's a secret game and it's played by the CIA, which is the most important agency in the United States because they have complete secrecy, complete unaccountability. There was one review of the CIA 49 years ago, the Church Committee, and nothing since then. And as one of our CIA directors, they're all I was going to say one of the worst, but they're all the same by the time they get there or by the time they leave there because the agency takes takes them over. Uh, Pompeo said as he was proudly explaining the role of the CIA to some Texas students a few years ago, and you can find it online. He said, "What do we, what do we teach at the CIA? Uh, to lie, cheat, and steal." And that's a pretty good encapsulation of the methodology. And that is a very dangerous world being created that way.
So China is not going to turn the US into a dictatorship. Maybe the US will turn into a dictatorship. Maybe it will just turn into a plain old plutocracy. Maybe it will turn into a military industrial state as the complete dominance. I don't know. But it's not going to come from China. It's going to come from inside. That's where our risk is.
As I suggest, a minus infinity in the, uh, in in the quadrant of hawk hawk, then the equilibrium solution is dove dove. Okay. The mixed strategy is to put zero probability on playing hawk because when you multiply minus infinity times any finite probability, positive probability, you get minus infinity. And so the logic is don't play chicken with nuclear arms. Don't. And to the CIA director, I say don't tell me whether Putin's bluffing or not. I read your memo of 2008 about how much Russia is concerned about NATO enlargement to Ukraine. It was leaked by Julian Assange. By the way, the same guy who's our CIA director was US ambassador to Russia. Then in 2008, he wrote a memo called Niet means Niet, which explained how it's not just Putin, it's the whole Russian political class against having NATO, uh, in Ukraine. And then he tells us now, don't worry about it because they're playing games with you and me. And I really resent it. So if we someday face this catastrophe that you're presenting, there won't be a good answer.
For example, the war in Syria. And you may actually hear from grownup reporters who are lying through their teeth or ignorant beyond imagining that, oh, the war in Syria, yes, Russia intervened in Syria. Well, do you know that the that Obama tasked the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government starting four years before Russia intervened? They don't care at all about democracy, by the way, at all. They topple governments they don't like that won't do their bidding. They topple democracies if they don't like them. They'll topple anybody that they don't like. That's how it's worked all along. They never said, "Oh, we can't topple Mosaddegh in 1953. He's a democratic government." No, they toppled a democratic government in Iran and put in a police state, which led to wonderful long-term relations with Iran because they really love the American people for that. So, this is not about democracy. This is a game and it's a terrible game and it's a secret game and it's played by the CIA, which is the most important agency in the United States because they have complete secrecy, complete unaccountability.
There is no struggle between the US and China. There is no basis for this. We're not in any intrinsic war between the US and Russia. And Russia, by the way, despite every single thing that's said every single day, truly, really does not want more land. It's already 11 time zones. The last thing that they need or want is more land. The war is about completely different things than everything you and I read about in our newspapers every day because our newspapers are telling us stories that ultimately come back to narratives conceived in the US Defense Department and the CIA and that are completely bogus.
So what about this international order? The international order is extremely dangerous because we're packed to the gills with nuclear weapons. And I was also schooled in, uh, Winston Churchill's not exactly correct saying about the Marshall Plan, that it was the most unsorted event in history. Uh, and I believe the Marshall Plan was a completely altruistic, wonderful, uh, act of the United States, uh, after World War II to rebuild Europe. And that's how I was raised and how I was taught. And in fact, it's much more complicated because it was a cold war instrument of policy and there's a lot of dark side to it and it helped to fund the CIA operations and it did many other things. So it's not a completely unsorted act, but it was an effective act anyway. Uh, and it helped to restart the European economies.
The prisoner's dilemma is a situation where it pays to cooperate. But the dominant strategy for each player is to not cooperate because if the other side cooperates, you cheat and you win. And if the other side doesn't cooperate, you certainly don't play the sucker. And so you end up non-cooperative, non-cooperative, and you're off to the races in war. And that's game theory. And that's what's taught at Rand. And that's what these people in Washington think. And that's how they play. And that's how they talk. And the fact is though, you put real people, and I mean non-economic students, real people, uh, into an experimental game and they cooperate half the time, three-quarters of the time. And then, wonder of wonders, you let the two people talk beforehand, not to make a binding agreement, just to chat. "Hey, why don't we both cooperate, for example?" No signed contract. In game theory, that's called cheap talk. It should have no effect on the equilibrium. But in real human practice, if you put two normal people in a prisoner's dilemma game, they cooperate half the time. If you let them have pre-play communication, they cooperate more than 90% of the time. They're human beings.
So my advice is, hey, why doesn't President Biden or somebody that actually can function as a president in the future, uh, actually talk to President Putin? You know, actually understand President Putin's point of view. Why is this war going on? Discuss it. You know, cooperation could rise enormously. There's a second point of game theory which is very important called the folk theorem, which is that if you're in repeated play of the prisoner's dilemma and there's no set terminal date, then you should cooperate so you don't mess up trust of the two sides because you're playing also against future actions and you want to show I'm trustworthy, you're trustworthy, we can gain from cooperation period after period. And that's another way to sustain the good outcome in a prisoner's dilemma.
So I view international relations theory, realist theory, as essentially being the prisoner's dilemma or the Hobbesian dilemma of nation-states in an anarchic environment. And my argument is, it's not so anarchic, it's not so threatening. The only real threat is nuclear war. So stay away from that. That's the bright red line for all of us. And cooperation is just not so hard. And I look to many examples in history where cooperation worked. And I wrote a book in 2013 about one such episode because I found it completely amazing when I learned about it. And that was the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis when, first of all, Kennedy rejected the advice of all his advisors except one because they all said, "Go bomb these sites in Cuba." And now, in retrospect, we almost surely would not be here talking today had we gone on to do that. But Kennedy was very much more cautious and he spent all the days of the crisis asking, "What's going through Khrushchev's mind? He's a human being. What's he doing?" And he finally came to the realization, you know, this is not meant by Khrushchev to be the end of the world. This is not meant, this is we, we can both pull back. And that's what they ended up doing. And then that was October 1962. And in 1963, Kennedy made a campaign for peace that culminated, that led to the partial nuclear test ban treaty, which was signed with the Soviet Union in July 1963. And it culminated, I think, in Kennedy's assassination because there were enough people in the US government that didn't like his peace initiatives. And so I think it was an inside job. Uh, and I think the evidence grows all the time that it was. Um, but in any event, Kennedy's idea was the two sides can make peace. And when he said that, and he said it in the most beautiful terms, and his speechwriter was a gifted, gifted person named Theodore Sorensen, that I got to know luckily because he lived in our neighborhood, uh, when, uh, I came to Columbia University and I got to know him. Um, he said in the most eloquent and beautiful words imaginable, "We can make peace even with the Soviet Union, even at the height of the Cold War." And he said it so beautifully that when Khrushchev heard the speech, he immediately called the American envoy, Averell Harriman, and said, "I want to make peace with your president." Because he was inspired by the words, actually. And they made peace and that treaty lasted and it led to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty five years later. It changed the world. And so that's the optimistic side. Go for peace instead.
This awful president of ours, when when he could function still, he was terrible. Biden, all he could do was insult Putin every moment. How are you going to make peace if all you do was throw insults at the at the one who heads a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads? This is crazy. It's reckless. And the whole place in Washington is filled with these people who are playing game theory, who know just what Putin's going to do, who know we have no alternative but to increase our military. This woman, Carlin, who was a senior, uh, official under Biden in the Defense Department that wrote this article says, "We have no choice but to deter through building our military." She doesn't even mention the idea that there could be diplomacy with China. This woman's an ignoramus. I'm sorry.
I've been to China a hundred times at least. There's no intrinsic battle with China. None whatsoever. China's not out to defeat the US. It couldn't do so in a million years anyway. We'd all perish. And China never, China's never, by the way, even once invaded a country overseas in its whole history of 2,245 years. Since 221 BC when the Qin Empire unified China, did they ever invade Japan? Not once. Did they ever invade Korea? Not once. Did they ever invade Vietnam? Yes. 17 years in that 2,000 years. For actually 17 years in one month, 1420 to 1436, and then one month in 1979. And the United States, we've never been at peace. All we do is war. And you know what the truth is? We learned it from here. Because the British Empire was the most militarized society imaginable. And unfortunately, the leaders of this country, and it turns out not to matter which party, because Starmer is as bad as Boris Johnson, all they know is military. It's unbelievable.
What's the first thing that Starmer does when he becomes prime minister? Goes to Kiev to pledge the endless support of, uh, the US, by the way, because Britain doesn't do anything. Uh, the endless support of the United States to the defeat of Russia, and then he flies across the Atlantic to try to convince Biden to authorize, what authorized means is for the US military to enable deep strikes inside Russia. That's really a clever thing to do, especially because Putin said, "Well, then we'd be at war with each other and we'd be forced to reconsider our nuclear strategy." And then we have our CIA director in this. This would be great for the West End theater, by the way, because it's a kind of parody. The CIA director meets with the MI6 director on stage recently here and says, "Oh, don't worry about Putin's bluff." Well, my advice is if you're going to say that, say that before we're all annihilated because no one's going to hear you after we're all annihilated. How do we know he's bluffing? He's not bluffing if this, if Russia is fundamentally threatened.