The Tucker Interview

No New Ground Broken

I watched the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin. Was it good? Not really. Was it groundbreaking? Not really, except for Tucker. He got millions of views on Twitter and proved that Twitter is the only platform in the world for unvarnished breaking news. Did I learn anything?

I heard Putin lecture us incorrectly on history. His version of history is fiction. For example, the Poles didn’t ask for it from Hitler in 1939. His move into Ukraine isn’t “de-Nazification”. Only a willing and corrupt press would report that. Oh wait, we have that in the US mainstream media.

By the way, the opposite of those above points aren’t true either.

I learned one key point. Putin isn’t leaving Ukraine peacefully.

In the political spin and hyperbole that has followed, I haven’t learned anything either.

Niall Ferguson came closest to teaching me something with his article in Bloomberg.

However, at this point, I don’t want metaphors and look into an uncertain future no one can predict. Here is what I and I think most of the American people want.

Concrete cost/benefit cost/opportunity cost analysis, with the framework used to arrive at those decisions transparent.

Make the objective case, please. If you can’t, then the people saying we should suspend aid to Ukraine are correct.

Without that, it’s easy to say that Putin is a communist so we have to fight him. Of course, the Chinese are communists and we aren’t fighting them, are we? It’s also easy to say I don’t want to spend any money aiding the Ukrainians.

There is no resolution, no consensus.

Since everyone wants to make WW2 analogies, I will educate the people who don’t understand the run-up to December 8, 1941, about America. Everyone likes to think they know about WW2 because they covered it for a day in their middle school US History class, culminating with the woke fact we shouldn’t have dropped the nuclear bomb.

• First, FDR didn’t love Hitler, but his intelligence was telling him that no one could stop him either. Ambassador Kennedy in London didn’t think even the Brits could survive. At the same time, he saw what was going on in China and the broader Pacific and they couldn’t stop that either.

• America had never been attacked by any of the Axis powers, so had no reason to strike. FDR did enact Lend-Lease with Churchill so material could flow to help the British defend themselves. Strategically, a case could be made to defend the island. The cost to try and wrest the continent from Hitler’s domination was far too high at that point.

• Polls in America up until December 8th, 1941 showed that Americans had no real desire to do anything in Europe or the Far East.

We are similar as it pertains to Ukraine today. We haven’t been attacked. It’s not clear that Putin can be stopped other than by an assassin bullet. He seemingly doesn’t have the desire to kill one specific sect of people and wipe them off the face of the earth but does want to put some of the Soviet coalition back together. The appetite for Americans to send their sons and daughters to fight on behalf of Ukraine is pretty low.

Roger Kimball examined the interview itself, but no conclusions were drawn.

Please, will someone lay it out in a plain framework?

One person I know told me the money we are spending on Ukraine is minuscule when you look at the overall debt of the US. He’s right, except that debt is ballooning and we have to get it down.

To be clear, Biden’s foreign policy 100% screwed the pooch here. Trump didn’t want Ukraine in NATO. Biden invited them in. Putin didn’t want NATO on his doorstep. Biden not only doesn’t have the mental capability to be President, he is the dumbest President in the history of the United States with the worst instincts.

My personal impressions are this, correct me where I am wrong. These are also the assumptions I make to undertake the process of organizing a decision tree.

• Putin is more than a bad guy. He’s a horrible strongman. He took Crimea, and he wants Ukraine. He would like to put the band back together and then exert control over Western Europe. He’s a crony capitalist, not a communist. He’s doled out favors to his friends. They become billionaires as long as they toe the line for him. More like a mafia boss than a leader of state.’

• Ukraine is totally corrupt. Zelensky isn’t a lot better than Putin. He’s suspended elections. Ukrainian companies tacitly controlled by the state to funnel money to the Biden family.

• Biden and Obama’s actions are enabling Iran to get the nuclear bomb.

• Biden has unwittingly helped Putin rehabilitate the Russian economy via boneheaded policy decisions. It’s not like the Russian economy is great, but when Trump was President it was crumbling.

• China watches and waits. China has its own internal economic struggles but it wants Taiwan. It is a matter of time before they to move on Taiwan. Fortunately for the freedom-loving Taiwanese, the last Taiwanese election didn’t go well for the communists.

• North Korea, a satellite of China, watches as well. It wants South Korea.

Here are some questions.

• How does supporting a corrupt Ukraine keep everyone in check? If we recall, the Vietnamese government was corrupt and we know how that war turned out.

• If we push the Russians out of Ukraine, do we go on to Moscow to unseat Putin? Do we also free Crimea? If not, does NATO (meaning the United States) have a permanent troop presence on the border?

• Should NATO commit troops, and an Air Force to overpower Russia? It seems it could be done quickly with a low cost of life, assuming Putin doesn’t dip into his nuclear arsenal. What are the lasting effects if NATO did that? There was an international coalition that liberated Kuwait. This would be similar.

• Would Putin dip into his nuclear arsenal if NATO attacked and stopped at the border?

• How does letting Ukraine fall change the strategy and fortunes of the US?

• How does letting Ukraine fall play with China and North Korea?

There are no “hot take” answers. I don’t want to hear metaphors. Putin isn’t Hitler. These questions are deep, nuanced, and worthy of a series of blog posts, not just one. Unfortunately, the people currently running our foreign policy aren’t the ones who should be answering them.