[SPEAKER_01]: All right, we are back with another episode of the Kyle and Lone show.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I am very excited to introduce our guest today.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is somebody who I have not interviewed before, but I have been reading his articles over the past few months.

[SPEAKER_01]: They've all been fantastic, great analysis on foreign policy.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, introducing Andrew Day, he is the senior editor at the American Conservative and the host of the American Conservatives.

[SPEAKER_01]: tack TAC right now podcast and you're welcome to the show how you do it today.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm doing great.

[SPEAKER_04]: Thanks so much for having me on Kyle.

[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_01]: I got a number of topics I want to touch on with you including a new article that you have published today.

[SPEAKER_01]: So Trump made some provocative statements after at the UN yesterday.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to get your thoughts on Americans, enemies, [SPEAKER_01]: First up here yesterday on true social, this post that got a lot of attention from Donald Trump, he's calling Russia a paper tiger saying that Ukraine could win the war and even maybe take some Russian territory at the end of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Andrew, what do you make of this statement from Donald Trump when everything seems to be going so bleep for Ukraine?

[SPEAKER_01]: That he's saying, no, no, the Ukrainians are in position to win, the Russians are in trouble.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, the question of what to make of this statement is rather difficult when to answer.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, the meaning is not apparent.

[SPEAKER_04]: And so some interpretation is required.

[SPEAKER_04]: And indeed, the interpretations have kind of, you know, span the whole spectrum of possible interpretations.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like some people think that this indicates that he has made a major shift in favor of Ukraine.

[SPEAKER_04]: And he's going to deepen America's involvement in supporting Ukraine in its war.

[SPEAKER_04]: with Russia other people think that this is somehow a sign of him you know prepping his walking away from Ukraine and letting Europe handle it and then you have people in between who say uh...

you know that there's going to be basically no change in policy [SPEAKER_04]: The reason that some people think that this shows that he wants to deepen his involvement is because there's certainly a lot of bluster and bomb-fast in the post that suggests that he's in a kind of pro Ukrainian mood.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, he said that Ukraine can take back all of its territory and maybe even go further and plant that they might even be able to take some Russian territory.

[SPEAKER_04]: That is very different from what he previously said previously he had been saying that Ukraine is going to have to give up some territory as part of a peace deal and I applauded him for saying so it seemed very realistic and I was hoping more people would kind of acknowledge that obvious reality.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, on the other hand I can't remember his wording exactly but he did say some things that suggested that he was kind of handing things off to Europe that he's giving up on trying to push for a peace deal.

[SPEAKER_04]: He wants to get out of negotiations.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think he said he [SPEAKER_04]: people kind of interpreted that as I'm sort of kind of washing his hands of this conflict.

[SPEAKER_04]: So I don't know it's really hard to say.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think one thing that we can say based on this tweet and conjunction with this Wall Street Journal article that just came out is that he's been talking to some of the hawks that surround him, you know, famously trump kind of changes his position depending on who he must recently talk to.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yesterday he talked to [SPEAKER_04]: president Zelensky of Ukraine.

[SPEAKER_04]: He also apparently has been talking to Keith Kellogg, the Ukraine on-voi, America's on-voi special on-voi to Ukraine.

[SPEAKER_04]: And also Mike Waltz, the former National Security Advisor now, the UN ambassador, they're both Russia hawks, apparently they convince him that [SPEAKER_04]: Russia is essentially losing the war or it's battlefield gains are very unimpressive and that Ukraine might eventually be able to not only stop the Russian advance but reverse it and take back its territory.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's not going to happen.

[SPEAKER_04]: People should not be optimistic that that's going to happen.

[SPEAKER_04]: Even Antony Blinken didn't think that that was going to happen.

[SPEAKER_04]: So if that's the basis of our approach to the Russia Ukraine war, no matter what Trump is up to, I hope that he doesn't honestly believe that that's the case because it does not correspond to reality.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I guess do you have any idea on what approach Trump may take from here?

[SPEAKER_01]: Even in this post, he is saying that we're not going to send the Ukrainians weapons.

[SPEAKER_01]: Europe is going to buy weapons from us and then give them to the Ukrainians, which there's obviously a massive funding gap there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Zelensky says they need $60 billion.

[SPEAKER_01]: Europe has so far pledged two billion.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean that the numbers just don't work out.

[SPEAKER_01]: So either the U.S.

[SPEAKER_01]: is going to have to start giving Ukraine a serious amount of weapons, or this idea that Ukraine is going to take that territory is simply ridiculous and actually were more really on the brink of the collapse of the Ukrainian army simply because they can't buy the weapons they need to continue to fight the war.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I would guess that there is basically going to be no change in policy except that Trump is not going to try to talk to Putin to get a peace deal.

[SPEAKER_04]: And you know, Putin was kind of unreceptive to Trump's efforts to get a peace deal.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, obviously, I think Russia does want to have better bilateral relations with the U.S., but Trump clearly underestimated how difficult it was going to be to help resolve this war because Russia sees this as a matter of national security, obviously, Ukraine does as well.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think Trump is kind of genuinely stepping back from the peace process, from the negotiation process.

[SPEAKER_04]: He's kind of giving up on that.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I think he's going to continue this scheme whereby NATO countries by weapons from America and then deliver them to Ukraine or deliver things that were already in their stocks, to Ukraine to kind of make sure Ukraine can keep up the fight for a little while longer, at least.

[SPEAKER_04]: If you read the fine print on that, actually the U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: is financing.

[SPEAKER_04]: It's subsidizing the financing of those sales, in fact, which is a kind of trick being often does, for example, with Israel a lot of times, based [SPEAKER_04]: They buy weapons for most, but we give them the money that they used to buy our weapons.

[SPEAKER_04]: There's a little bit of that going on in this new scheme.

[SPEAKER_04]: But I think that Trump basically is going to continue that scheme.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I do see this situation a little differently than I see the one with Israel.

[SPEAKER_04]: Because with Israel, we can say in principle, that if the U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: stopped funding Israel, then it's related wars would stop.

[SPEAKER_04]: It wouldn't be able to do what it's doing in Gaza.

[SPEAKER_04]: With Ukraine, it's a little different in that if we stop funding Ukraine's military, [SPEAKER_04]: And it's going to end in the kind of Ukrainian capitulation on the battlefield, and I think that Trump would find that to be an embarrassing situation.

[SPEAKER_04]: He would see it as a kind of weakness.

[SPEAKER_04]: He often talks about how our withdrawal from Afghanistan made us look weak in the eyes of the world, and it was poorly handled, and it was botched, and embarrassing for President Biden.

[SPEAKER_04]: And there's some evidence to back up that Americans really didn't like the sight of that botched Afghanistan withdrawal, and that Biden's poll numbers suffered from it.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think that Trump wants to avoid a similar such situation in Ukraine, so I think he's going to keep on funding the Ukrainian military and just kick the can down the road and hope something becomes out of it somehow.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there's kind of another problem to Trump's approach the Ukraine war, and that is he seems to be willing to expand the economic war on Russia.

[SPEAKER_01]: two rushes current trading partners, and they've particularly talked about Brazil, India, and China.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I know there's this bill in the Senate that has 80 co-sponsors, an unbelievable number, that would place 500 percent tariffs on at least India and China, which is obviously an absurd.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think Lindsey Graham even called it the most draconian bill.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's the sponsor of it by our co-sponsor of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: The most draconian bill that he's ever seen in his history in the Senate.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so how concerned are you that Trump is going to drastically ramp up the economic war against all these countries, for Ukraine, which, of course, I think we probably have some negative end results for the American economy.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I'm concerned about that just because Trump is so unpredictable when it comes to imposing economic penalties on other countries, it seems like he kind of turns this tariff dial up and down, he based on his personal whims, even though it can cause a lot of turbulence in the economy and uncertainty for even our own American businesses as they're kind of working out what their supply lines are going to look like.

[SPEAKER_04]: So that is definitely something to be concerned about.

[SPEAKER_04]: And basically, the situation is that we've already put Russia under unprecedented sanctions.

[SPEAKER_04]: They're always prepping and yet another sanctions package.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think they're finalizing their 19th right now or something absurd like that.

[SPEAKER_04]: And you know, clearly Russia has been able to withstand these sanctions.

[SPEAKER_04]: It is true that Russia's economy is showing some signs of weakness right now.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm sure it's grossly exaggerated in the American media and among Russia hawks, like Michael McFall, the former U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: ambassador to Russia who always thinks that more sanctions is just going to drive Putin out of power or something like that.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's not right, but it is true that there's like a gasoline shortage that some people think that there's a recession, possibly on the horizon.

[SPEAKER_04]: It might be the case that Putin wants to find an off-ramp for his wartime economy.

[SPEAKER_04]: What bothers me about this sanctions discourse is one, as I was alluding to earlier, [SPEAKER_04]: The only option left after we've put all these sanctions on Russia is to sanction its trading partners, which I think is just a fundamentally bad idea.

[SPEAKER_04]: It's going to be totally counterproductive.

[SPEAKER_04]: Those kinds of things end up driving our adversaries together or driving India away from us as it starts to think of us as an unreliable partner.

[SPEAKER_04]: So I think that that would be totally counterproductive geopolitically in addition to its economic consequences, but one point that I haven't seen made enough is that even if it's true that Russia's having these economic troubles right now and that this presents some kind of potential opening for ending the war in Ukraine, the response to that should be, I think, to talk about sanctions relief.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, at this point, the carrot of sanctions relief is more enticing than the threat of more sanctions is deterring in my analysis at least, and so I think that Europe and America need to kind of bite the bullet, you know, don't worry so much about their pride right now, don't worry about losing face, and they need to say, okay, Russia, at some point after this war is over, we're going to have to have some kind of stable notice within the between the West and Russia, [SPEAKER_04]: We're going to have to have some kind of economic reintegration.

[SPEAKER_04]: We can't just have these two factions of kind of the global north of the like European world, just hating each other and always having all these tensions.

[SPEAKER_04]: And so looking ahead to that, let's start talking about sanctions relief.

[SPEAKER_04]: Some ways that after this war is over, we can kind of get relations on a better footing.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think that that's the kind of thing we should be talking about when we're thinking about.

[SPEAKER_04]: Russia's potential economic downturn because otherwise, you know, it's economic downturn does not immediately lead to peace in Ukraine.

[SPEAKER_04]: That only happens if we give them an off ramp in the form of sanctions relief.

[SPEAKER_04]: But of course, everyone is in this hawkish mode.

[SPEAKER_04]: They want to put as much pressure on Putin as possible.

[SPEAKER_04]: So far, it's not working, obviously.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, fantastic analysis there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, one other thing going comes to the U.S.

[SPEAKER_01]: Russia relationship, is it seems or having more of a spill over into like, maybe dread conflict between Russia and NATO.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I want to play from this clip a down Trump discussing a Russian war planes entering Estonian airspace at the U.N.

[SPEAKER_01]: earlier this week.

[SPEAKER_03]: Mr.

President, do you think that NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft if they enter their airspace?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I did.

[SPEAKER_02]: Would you back up, NATO allies, you said that you thought that they should shoot down the air correction aircraft, would you back them up with the United States help them out in some way?

[SPEAKER_02]: Depends on the circumstances, but we're very strong toward NATO.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, what he's talking about here is, you know, Russian aircraft, allegedly, Russia denies, but entered the, you know, the very tip of U.S.

[SPEAKER_01]: Estonian airspace over the Gulf of Finland, flew long at, they say for 12 minutes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of NATO allies are talking about repeating what Turkey did in 2015 was [SPEAKER_01]: when a Russian aircraft flew over their territory outside of the bombing in Syria, they shot it down.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, are you concerned about, you know, this war in Ukraine really spilling over and maybe putting the US in direct conflict with Russia?

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I think that that has to be the concern that people have, you know, even if the probability is something low, something like 5% or something, whenever that probability goes up, we should be concerned because Russia, US War would be potentially catastrophic for the entire world.

[SPEAKER_04]: So it's something we should take very seriously.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, the context for this violation of Estonian airspace, I guess we could say a alleged violation because Russia denies it, is that they also have some drones go into Polish territory, Polish airspace, [SPEAKER_04]: and they had another drone go into Romanian territory, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: So Europeans are feeling nervous, obviously, you know, Europe has a lot of false positives when they're looking for things that Russia is doing like sabotage attacks and stuff.

[SPEAKER_04]: But I think in this case, there is a, you know, genuine reason for concern.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm definitely someone who thinks and is willing to say that the Western world kind of provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, right our president's ever since the Cold War ended have totally mismanaged to this relationship with Russia, like Clinton expanded NATO because he wanted to get some central and eastern European votes in the Midwest and he bombed Serbia and then [SPEAKER_04]: You know, ran rough shot over international norms and institutions in a way that kind of pissed Putin off and he also promised Ukraine that it was going to join NATO and he pressured European countries to promise Ukraine the same.

[SPEAKER_04]: Obama played some sort of role in the My Dawn Revolution slash coup obviously he participated in this Libya regime change situation.

[SPEAKER_04]: And then Trump, as he often brags, let lethal weaponry go to Ukraine, which Obama hadn't been willing to do.

[SPEAKER_04]: And then Biden, I mean, I don't need to say everything he did that provoked Russia.

[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm someone who sees things that way, but at the same time, I think we also should be a tender to the fact that right now going forward, Russia is provoked at this point.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like it is kind of, you know, hostile toward the West.

[SPEAKER_04]: It's extremely hostile toward the West.

[SPEAKER_04]: I talk to a lot of Russian, [SPEAKER_04]: national security elites and people who work at think tanks and diplomats and stuff like that and they really, really hate Europe right now, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: So I think that there's a chance here that Russia kind of overplays its hand that its appetite kind of grows with the eating its feeling its oats and Ukraine that the Russian elites I talked to seem to kind of overestimate how well they're doing in Ukraine and how weak Europe is relative to Russia.

[SPEAKER_04]: Um, so I can imagine that they're trying to do something they're trying to signal resolved and that Europe can want to do the same and that, you know, you could have this kind of escalation spiral security dilemma situation that leads to war.

[SPEAKER_04]: That would be catastrophic.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, the last thing that I'll say.

[SPEAKER_04]: Trump's second answer to that second question or his first answer to the second question, whatever, is what he should have said to the first question.

[SPEAKER_04]: He said, he was asked first, you know, should NATO shoot these planes down and he said, yes, they should.

[SPEAKER_04]: And then he was asked, would you, the US back those NATO countries up if they did that?

[SPEAKER_04]: And he said, well, it would depend on the circumstances.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's the answer that he should have answered the first time.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like [SPEAKER_04]: What should NATO do if there are Russian aircraft and the airspace of NATO countries?

[SPEAKER_04]: They should judge it based on the particular circumstances.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like they have intelligence agencies, you know, they have people analysts who can look at this.

[SPEAKER_04]: Because there is a chance of misperception.

[SPEAKER_04]: There's a chance that Russia accidentally violates the airspace of NATO countries.

[SPEAKER_04]: I don't think our response should be to just immediately shoot them down.

[SPEAKER_04]: And you know, you mentioned Turkey after Turkey shot Russian aircraft down correct me if I'm wrong, but they immediately had like diplomatic context with Russia and they kind of resolved it and put their relationship on a better footing.

[SPEAKER_04]: And it does not seem like that would be the outcome of Europe did the same now given the hostility between these two.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, next up, Andrew, I want to move on and ask you about your new article out today.

[SPEAKER_01]: The headline of it is, America's forever enemy's one piece.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is, of course, published at the American Conservative.

[SPEAKER_01]: And in the article, I think you point out something that people really miss.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you say that, you know, neocons and liberal interventionists have created this idea where there's an absence of a people or global struggle between democracies and our [SPEAKER_01]: kind of existential block of countries that the US has to deal with, but you point out that all these countries China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela [SPEAKER_01]: are actually willing to work it out with the US.

[SPEAKER_01]: They don't want to be enemies of the United States of America.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so talk a little bit about this.

[SPEAKER_01]: I guess first, just how we got cemented that all these countries represent some sort of like threatening block to the United States that we can't finally have to deal with and be opposed to.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, thanks for highlighting the article, which I mentioned published today.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, the kind of the starting point for the article is a lot of people, you know, market conservatives, people who favor foreign policy restraint.

[SPEAKER_04]: They point out that our founding fathers, you know, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in particular, they warned against permanent alliances and entangling alliances, and a lot of people mentioned that in reference to Israel, which is, you know, obviously our most counterproductive entangling alliance.

[SPEAKER_04]: But the founder is also warned against permanent enemy enemies they didn't think that we should have these countries that we're just kind of inherently hostile to or that we hold grudges against over decades as we do currently in the case of Iran They thought that would be bad for US interests and that [SPEAKER_04]: and pursuit of US interests, we should be able to have good commercial relations, good diplomatic relations with whichever countries are willing to do the same.

[SPEAKER_04]: And what I want to argue in this article is that all of the countries that you hear mentioned and this litany of our enemies, you know, China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, every single one of them has shown a willingness to cooperate with us when Washington is willing to do the same.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's one of the things I actually like about Trump, even though I can be kind of critical of him on foreign policy, especially.

[SPEAKER_04]: is that, you know, he's willing to go talk to Kim Jong-un or to, you know, talk to Putin and have him come to Alaska.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I think that that's healthy, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: I don't think that we should establish all of these preconditions where all these enemy countries have to do everything we tell them to do and then we'll talk to them.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think that Trump's approach is generally better.

[SPEAKER_04]: As far as how these new conservatives and liberal internationalists are interventionist rather, you know, settled on all these countries.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, that you would have to ask them.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think that there's a bad incentive structure.

[SPEAKER_04]: There's probably a lot of factors like the military industrial complex kind of wants there to be enemies because otherwise why would the US government pay for all these weapons?

[SPEAKER_04]: Why would we grow at the DOD budget?

[SPEAKER_04]: Or sorry, the Department of War budget?

[SPEAKER_04]: to a trillion dollars, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: So that's a factor.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think a lot of people who get involved in national security issues, you know, this might not kind of silly or something, but I actually think it's important.

[SPEAKER_04]: They have these personalities where they feel really tough, like when they're talking about US national security and they're in pursuit of like feeling and talking tough, they have to have enemies that they talk about, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: And then also there's just institutional inertia.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, think about our policy towards Cuba, for example, which I didn't mention in [SPEAKER_04]: or our policy towards Iran.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, if not for Israel, I don't think we would have any beef with Iran except for the fact that right after their revolution, there was like a hostage situation that is totally exaggerated in American accounts.

[SPEAKER_04]: So what I argue in the pieces that each of these countries would be willing to make deals with us, you know, Venezuela at the beginning of the Trump administration, he sent [SPEAKER_04]: And they worked out this arrangement where there would be these twice weekly deportation flights from the U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: to Venezuela, Venezuela continues to facilitate those flights in fact.

[SPEAKER_04]: Maduro says he wants to talk it out and yet I think Trump just has this urge to do something like a militarized urge to show that we mean business in the Western hemisphere and that's why we're taking out these alleged drug boats, which I'm very skeptical or in fact trafficking drugs, by the way.

[SPEAKER_04]: And even if they were, they're not trafficking the kind of drugs that kill Americans, fentanyl, cancer, Mexico, like fentanyl is the drug that's contents of thousands of Americans every year.

[SPEAKER_04]: So this is all messed up and the priorities seem all out of whack.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like we want to have an enemy.

[SPEAKER_04]: We want to be strong and we express our strength through attacking people.

[SPEAKER_04]: Um, so that's what I wanted to argue against it.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, it was kind of an honor of the UN General Assembly going on this week.

[SPEAKER_04]: It was kind of in the spirit of like thinking about international cooperation and kind of allowing myself a somewhat utopian framework for understanding international politics.

[SPEAKER_04]: But I really don't think it's purely utopian in the sense of, you know, not possibly existing.

[SPEAKER_04]: I really think in each of these cases, [SPEAKER_04]: If we kind of extended the knowledge branch and said, okay, we want to have better bilateral relations with you.

[SPEAKER_04]: We want to make trade deals with you.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, we want to cooperate on various international issues that touch American interests.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think every single case they would be receptive to that.

[SPEAKER_01]: It absolutely, you know, I remember one Trump was mean with Kim Jong-un in like 2017.

[SPEAKER_01]: And there was all this hysteria about how Trump was going to, or maybe it was 2018.

[SPEAKER_01]: Trump was going to give all this way to Kim Jong-un.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it was like, what is he going to give North Korea Hawaii like what does the U.S.

[SPEAKER_01]: actually have to give North Korea other than sanctions relief?

[SPEAKER_01]: And as we have seen like with Iran, it could be reapplied any time just at our way many ways.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so it never really made sense to me that we can't negotiate with these countries because in a lot of cases, there's really not a natural threat there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, one of the things you point out in your article, and I think this is maybe where I would meet some instances I was talking to because conservative about this.

[SPEAKER_01]: They would say, yes, but Biden ruined everything, and so now, Russia has a defense pat with North Korea, China, and Iran have deep military ties, you know.

[SPEAKER_01]: Russia and China have existing military ties with Venezuela, and so maybe there's not like a coalition.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think Brits is like a pending military alliance to rival NATO.

[SPEAKER_01]: However, you can't point out that all these countries have certainly increased their ties, and now people might say, well, before we could have dealt with them, but now that they're all this one group, we have to deal with them a different and more militaristic way.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, what I would say to them is that the correct lesson to learn from the Biden administration is that this democracy's versus autocracy's framework is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, when you, you know, when Biden comes into office and he says, okay, you know, he did this because he wanted his, his domestic political framing and his foreign policy framing to be coherent with one another.

[SPEAKER_04]: So he's he wanted the theme of his administration to be defending democracy.

[SPEAKER_04]: defending it against Trump at home who he sees is this like want to be strong man authoritarian and defending democracy globally against these autocratic countries so he had these democracy summits and he would invite some countries and not invite other countries and what happened is those other countries especially the smaller weaker ones were saying hold on it looks like the Biden administration is putting together some coalition some military security related coalition [SPEAKER_04]: improve my relations with China.

[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe I don't want to recognize the sovereignty of Taiwan anymore and I want to say that okay China controls Taiwan because I want China to have diplomatic relations with me because I need a backer.

[SPEAKER_04]: I need a patron given what the US appears to be up to.

[SPEAKER_04]: You have to remember state leaders tend to be very paranoid.

[SPEAKER_04]: So even if that's not what Biden thought he was doing even if he thought that this was like a defensive thing from the US standpoint, the western standpoint [SPEAKER_04]: That's how it was received abroad, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: And then Iran, you know, they're obviously totally freaked out about what the US is doing.

[SPEAKER_04]: We've like bombarded all of their neighbors.

[SPEAKER_04]: Now we've bombed them under Trump administration where partners and we fund the military of Israel, which is like constantly assassinating their nuclear scientists and stuff.

[SPEAKER_04]: So of course, they want to go to Russia and China and have better relations with them.

[SPEAKER_04]: As I said, this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[SPEAKER_04]: And what people need to understand is these countries are not [SPEAKER_04]: like naturally allied with one another.

[SPEAKER_04]: They don't have an affinity that goes beyond the just this interest-based calculation about what the Western world and its democratic supposedly allies around the world are up to.

[SPEAKER_04]: So I think that if Trump has already kind of pulled back on that rhetoric about democracies versus autocracies and I think that that's very good.

[SPEAKER_04]: And now we can kind of have bilateral relations with these various countries.

[SPEAKER_04]: And if they're also having relations with one another, [SPEAKER_04]: is like a deal breaker.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, China has diplomatic relations with all sorts of countries.

[SPEAKER_04]: It has good relations with Saudi Arabia, and it has good relations with Iran, and that redowns to the benefit of China often.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, they don't have this idea that we live in this like mannequin struggle between good and evil.

[SPEAKER_04]: right and I think we should kind of take a page out of China's book because the current situation where we're doing this like Cold War 2.0, except it's you know about democracies versus autocracies instead of communism and democracies or whatever, that's not the kind of world I want to live in and it just seems totally unnecessary to me.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like, I don't think that China, for example, wants to spread communism around the world.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's not the Chinese ideology.

[SPEAKER_04]: If it was, I would see things differently.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like, I would want a more, you know, alert posture to what China's up to.

[SPEAKER_04]: But in my analysis, that's not what's actually going on in China.

[SPEAKER_04]: So we can drop the Cold War to framework.

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[SPEAKER_01]: All right, Andrew, before I let you go today, Chris, I want to skip the Jolani clip and actually just play this last clip of Tucker Carlson discussing Trump's relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, BB's running, or this is a fact, I'm not guessing about this, because I talk people he said it to, is running around the Middle East his region and his own country and telling people, point blank, just stating it, I control the United States, I control Donald Trump.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's saying that, and again, I'm not guessing at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's a fact, and I dare them to say that's not true, because it is true, and they know it's true.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, I'm an American, how do you think it makes me feel?

[SPEAKER_00]: Even if I didn't vote for Trump, which I did, I did vote, I came paying for Trump, but even if I, even if it was Joe Biden, [SPEAKER_00]: I'm an American.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can't treat it's too humiliating.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can't handle that and I shouldn't have to put up with that.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is a country of nine million people.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying it's not even attacking the country.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm attacking my leaders who are allowing my nation of 350 million people to be forced into doing things that are bad for me and my children because of some other country like that is a violation of the most basic arrangement we have [SPEAKER_01]: So, Andrew, I just wonder what you think of Tucker Carlson's comments there, does Israel have this much influence over the White House?

[SPEAKER_04]: Well, they appear too.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, my first reaction to Tucker Carlson's comments are, you know, people talk about the overton window shifting.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, the overton window is obliterated.

[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if that makes sense in this metaphorical context.

[SPEAKER_04]: But it's kind of amazing to me to see, you know, fairly mainstream conservatives with huge audiences saying stuff like this.

[SPEAKER_04]: and I totally agree with it.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, at least it seems to be the case.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like, you know, Israel bombed Qatar, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: They were targeting Hamas negotiators, but they bombed Qatar, which is like a major non-NATO ally of the United States.

[SPEAKER_04]: Trump cares a lot about U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: relations with the Gulf countries.

[SPEAKER_04]: This freaked out the Gulf countries.

[SPEAKER_04]: It freaked out the Middle East broadly.

[SPEAKER_04]: I know some people speculate that Trump played some sort of active role in this [SPEAKER_04]: campaign like he was like a deception campaign that he participated in to get the Hamas negotiators to convene to consider a U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: proposal so that Israel can more easily kill them.

[SPEAKER_04]: I don't think that that's what happened.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think that the U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: basically found out from its own intel sources as its own sources on the ground and then they called Netanyahu and he said, yeah, that's what's going on.

[SPEAKER_04]: We're bombing cutter and that Trump was totally pissed.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's what's been reported.

[SPEAKER_04]: He's had, you know, statements reported in the Wall Street Journal that suggested he was really pissed off about it.

[SPEAKER_04]: And yet, [SPEAKER_04]: Is there any consequence for Israel?

[SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't seem like if the next thing I saw about Trump in Israel was that he was prepping some sort of six billion plus aid package, which I'm sure we're going to pay for.

[SPEAKER_04]: The U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: tax dollars because it's alluded to in these reports that it's part of this tenure memorandum of understanding which involves the U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: giving Israel money so that they can buy our weapons.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's the consequence of Israel's strike, which I genuinely believe pissed Trump off, which suggests that Trump doesn't feel like he has the leverage to political [SPEAKER_04]: that the difference in power between these two countries would suggest.

[SPEAKER_04]: So I think that Characrossen is spot on.

[SPEAKER_04]: You know, he's not the first person to say this Netanyahu himself when he thought that he wasn't being recorded during a private conversation with, I think, settlers or something a long time ago.

[SPEAKER_04]: He said America is the thing you can move very easily.

[SPEAKER_04]: Kishor Mamboobani, the diplomat, had a New York apartment.

[SPEAKER_04]: He wrote about in his book, how he had Netanyahu over and he served him like a liquor [SPEAKER_04]: He said the reason that Israel has, you know, benefits from America even though it's such small country, the reason it doesn't have to be worried about being overwhelmed in population size by all these Arabs around it is because it controls the U.S.

[SPEAKER_04]: Congress.

[SPEAKER_04]: Netanyahu himself says this.

[SPEAKER_04]: So when Tucker Carlson also says it, I don't think it should be super controversial.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think we should just now incorporate this into our kind of baseline understanding of the facts.

[SPEAKER_04]: This is the situation.

[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know exactly why it's the situation, other than normal things like donors, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: But it seems to be the case, and it's a huge problem in Tucker Carlson's opinion and in mind.

[SPEAKER_04]: You're, think you're muted.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry about that.

[SPEAKER_01]: It just won't think, yeah, what when Tucker Carlson says, I think he really accurately, that's humiliating.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like as kind of a proud American somebody who actually like loves his country, that we, [SPEAKER_01]: sell out our foreign policy to this little country in the Middle East just it really it's humiliating you feel like how how can we not be the empire like the columnist state should do our bidding when we give a country [SPEAKER_01]: $4 billion in arms a year when we asked them to do something they do it and they told the line they don't attack other allies and yet Israel is able to get away with all of this.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I would hope that American first at some point would translate to like American pride on the global stage, which means not only confronting enemies, which were very good at, but also raining in allies who are acting brilliantly like Ukrainian Israel.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think we are going in that direction eventually I mean if you'd like the public opinion polls it's obvious that the only cohort in America that still supports Israel and large numbers are basically conservative boomers like that's all Israel has left in terms of American support.

[SPEAKER_04]: So these things are changing.

[SPEAKER_04]: They've already totally lost the left in the democratic party young conservatives have turned against Israel clearly.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I think it's a young conservatives are attentive to the thing that you just mentioned, maybe especially in the context of Trump in particular, because he's supposed to be like this strong leader who always gets, you know, no one ever gets an upper hand on him literally the way he shakes hands with foreign leaders is kind of ridiculous.

[SPEAKER_04]: And yet with men, Yahoo.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I don't want to use following which on your program, but Netanyahu has made Trump his bitch, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: Like, that's what appears to be the case.

[SPEAKER_04]: And that is disconcerting.

[SPEAKER_04]: It's humiliating, as you say.

[SPEAKER_04]: And it's pretty infuriating, too.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like, our money should not be going to, you know, I consider what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide.

[SPEAKER_04]: Like, that's another element to this.

[SPEAKER_04]: We should not be funding that, right?

[SPEAKER_04]: Not just because I don't want to lose my tax dollars or something, but just because I never voted to play an act of role in that thing that I hate.

[SPEAKER_04]: and find totally morally objectionable.

[SPEAKER_04]: So hopefully this situation is changing, but I think in the Trump term, he's like the most pro-Israel president that America has ever had, and I don't need that that's going to change.

[SPEAKER_04]: Even though there have been reports that like Biden, he gets very frustrated with Netanyahu personally, I don't see much of a change in policy going forward in this administration, but hopefully, hopefully Biden will be the last pro-Israel Democrat, and Trump will be the last pro-Israel Republican.

[SPEAKER_01]: Andrew Day, thank you so much for your time on the show today and sharing your brilliant analysis with our audience.

[SPEAKER_01]: If people want to follow you, you are a K day 89 on at, of course, you're a senior editor at the American conservative and the host of tack right now.

[SPEAKER_01]: So check out all that stuff.

[SPEAKER_01]: And really, I mean, [SPEAKER_01]: People should be going to the American Conservative every day.

[SPEAKER_01]: Almost every single day at anti-war.com we'd link to an article from your website because even if Trump is in the White House, you could really depend on you guys to maintain your principal positions and your just as critical a Trump is you were with Biden, which you often don't see without lets that maybe are like the American Conservative, but you really stayed strong to your principal.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I appreciate it and I hope to have you back [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, any time, and I appreciate all the work that you're doing and that all you libertarian anti-work types are doing, you're awesome, you're keeping us informed, so thank you.

[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.