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Another week, another Tucker interview, another transcription of a juicy part by yours truly. I promise, this is unusual, I haven't listened to two in a row, at all, ever.
This week is Jeffrey Sachs. The part below is just after 1:44.
That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.
And that was all before any discussion of COVID. tl;dl, it's obviously from a lab, we (USA) pretty clearly funded it, and Fauci has been running the germ warfare branch of the DoD for decades. Which lab, and how is unknown, but, in his own words:
Great interview, and I'm glad that Tucker has twitter dot com to host his stuff, rather than be consigned to the fringes of the internet.
Now, I am not a US interventionism fanboy. I believe that a lot of the military and CIA ops the US engaged in the cold war and the Bush II era were net negative from a thriving of humanity point of view.
But writing from what cynics would call a US client state but what I prefer to see as a minor member of the status-quo coalition (Germany), the USA makes a pretty decent hegemon (in Europe, at least). The values which they prefer (market economies, free trade, individual rights) seem to work out better than what other local hegemons have enforced in part of Germany before.
There is a reason why a lot of countries in the former Warsaw pact wanted to join NATO instead of forming a defense pact with Russia against NATO aggression -- they had just spent a few decades at the receiving end of such a defensive pact.
If you take the right to self-determination of peoples seriously, then there can not be a right to preemptively conquer weaker neighbors to prevent them from joining defensive pacts against you.
Also, who in their right mind would want to invade Russia? Europe tried it twice, with disastrous results. Invading a major nuclear power is not a decision anyone borderline sane would ever consider in earnest. What Russia is defending by invading Ukraine are not legitimate security interests, but their status as a local hegemon who can use force against weaker neighbors at their discretion.
The US is not to blame for all the evil in the world. There have been wars for millennia before the US was a thing.
And here I was reading and nodding along with your post.
A warm water port is a legitimate security interest. It has been a legitimate security interest since the age of sail. It will continue to be a legitimate security interest into the future, as long as boats can float.
I mean, there's most of the rest of the Black Sea coast, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Novorossiysk that doesn't get iced up. There are fully landlocked countries worldwide, they don't get to invade their way to the coast as a little treat. Now, moving the Black Sea fleet all there would involve expanding the port facilities, but that's not impossible (they already partly did it due to the constant Sevastapol attacks). Plus, they did already de facto have that warm water port and were in no position to lose it prior to their invasion.
Meanwhile, that warm water port is now being hit repeatedly by strikes, and the Ukrainians are working down the list of Black Sea fleet vessels one at a time, which are going to be a nightmare to replace. Fortifying its claims/access to Crimea were one of the aims of Russia's invasion for sure, it's just that it seems to have been totally counterproductive from a strategic point of view.
Possibly our difference here is that there's a different meaning to legitimate being used.
Firstly, it's probably obviously not legitimate for countries to just straight up steal strategic assets or resources from a neighbour, even if it's useful.
However, powerful countries cannot accept that their security would be at a partial or full veto from a small power, especially if they have the ability to stop it, so under this threshold some could argue Russia had a legitimate right to annex the port. Maybe the US response in the Cuban missile crisis was legitimate by that standard, and a similar case. However, my disagreement here is that Ukraine didn't have the ability to threaten Russia in any meaningful way as of 2022 or even 2014, other ports were available for the fleet, and Russia's navy is at best a very minor source of their overall security. It's hard to put this as a legitimate reason to launch a full scale war to annex territory and create a puppet state (their initial war goal at least), and in reality has been totally counterproductive, partly as Ukraine has a legitimate interest to fight back and sink most that fleet now, and NATO has a legitimate reason to help them. That's the issue with fuzzy or subjective legitimacy, both sides can seem to have it.
As a final spicy take to develop that prior point: their navy is kind of... crap? Pointless? Like, can it contest the waves versus a naval power equal or greater to Italy? What's it really for then? They can do expeditionary operations to friendly countries without it, they can't do expeditionary operations to hostile countries with it.
To be honest, 98% of all navies are crap. There's the USA, the UK, maybe the PRC and Japan, although neither has been battle-tested even against a weaker foe.
Russian navy is primarily an ICBM delivery mechanism, secondarily a delivery mechanism for other kinds of missiles and it's not very good at that. Navies are expensive, good navies are big, and big navies are extremely expensive.
France?
Couldn't even be trusted to sink Rainbow Warrior.
Wasn't that about France wanting deniability, so they used their spies instead of their military?
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