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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.
Well, it looks to me like Russia has some 200km of undisputed waterfront on the Black Sea. Wikipedia lists two ice-free major ice-free ports: Novorossiysk and Taman. I am sure that for a fraction of the price of that special military operation, Putin could have gotten a top-grade port on his coastline.
Also, I am not really condemning Russia too much for sizing Crimea. That operation seems to have been accomplished with minimal bloodshed, at least. My main problem with Putin is his behavior since 2022, when he tried to take Kiev (ca. 250km from the Black Sea, not a great location for a port) in a surprise attack, and opted to fight a war of attrition when this initial attack failed.
Also, I think there can be some debate on in what cases the security interests (legitimate or otherwise) of big polities trump the right of sovereignty of smaller polities. On the one hand, if Lichtenstein entered a military pact with North Korea, I think that the rest of Europe would be correct in denying Lichtenstein the opportunity to station North Korean nuclear missiles in the middle of Europe. On the other hand, I don't think most US meddling in South America was in pursuit of legitimate security interests. Meddling in Panama, Mexico or Canada, as well as the Cuban missile crisis are somewhere in between.
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