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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.
I don't think it's accurate at all to suggest that the war in Ukraine is directly attributable to the US. Certainly, the actions of no country takes place in a vacuum - and US foreign policy has, I think, worked to encourage the start of the war and now works to extend it, and that the war is mostly to the benefit of the US and of no other country in the world. But the chief drivers of the war are Russia in choosing to attack and Ukraine in choosing to defend themselves. I think the idea that the war would just sputter out otherwise is absurd. Both nations clearly have strong interests at stake. I do not believe it is really possible for a hegemon, even the US, to create a war between others ex nihilo. The state of Ukraine, whatever it's merits, is clearly capable of inducing people to fight and die for it. That war might not last very long without NATO support, and we'd see more dying and less fighting, but it would happen.
I think there are parts of the war in Ukraine that are attributable to the US but they are far more near-term than the expansion of NATO. Russia was already de facto at war with Ukraine. That needs to be considered in any question, because Russia didn't start a new war in 2022, just massively escalate an existing one. Why did Russia choose that moment, instead of any other, to escalate? The most probable explanation to justify the timing is the spike in oil prices. It has since been weirdly memory-holed that the oil and gas price spike predates the escalation of the war in favour of the claim that the war triggered the spike. The cause for the spike was a long-term consequence of low investment in fossil fuel extraction due to environmental policies, and the medium-term consequence of the oil and gas glut that happened in 2020, which reduced production, slamming into the rise in consumption as economies got un-shuttered. The US, in part, is responsible for shuttering global economies in 2020. High oil and gas prices motivate Russia to make a move in two ways. First, by making sanctions more expensive to implement. Second, by providing the government a big budget surplus that might be put to use. However, judging by the initial invasion strategy (Russia basically trying to win in 3 days) that this was less intended to outright fund a war of attrition, and more intended to soothe over the costs of integrating captured territory into a victorious Russia while deterring sanctions long enough to make Russia's victory a fait accompli.
While it isn't quite fair to describe Russia as a Chinese client state, Putin starting a war without Xi's approval was likely to go badly. Xi didn't want the Beijing winter Olympics disrupted by a war. Putin announces that he is recognising the independence of the DPR/LPR the day after the closing ceremony and tanks cross the border three days after that.
Putin could have taken the decision to escalate at any time since Q4 2019, and between the pandemic and the need to keep China on side he ends up acting on that decision at the first opportunity. Personally, I think he took the decision shortly before publishing On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians in July 2021.
There's about 8 years between the initial invasion and the escalation. The Winter Olympics would only be a factor for a small proportion of that period. And the main country responsible for disrupting them was China itself, with it's continued use of covid restrictions.
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