 Welcome back to War Economy and State. This is the Foreign Policy Podcast for the Mises Institute. I'm Ryan McMakin, executive editor with the Mises Institute. And with me is one of my favorite foreign policy writers for us, Zachary Yoast. And we do this every month in case you haven't been a listener so far. We get together and talk about some of the foreign policy issues from a more Misesian view, that is to say, more anti-interventionist view. And we're going to talk about, since it's year end, this is where we go on record being wrong about lots of stuff, because we're going to do predictions. So it'll be our annual predictions show. And we got lots of stuff we could talk about, but I don't want this episode to go for an hour or so. We're going to just see how much we can get through and see what needs to be said in a variety of topics. And there's a lot going on. A couple of years ago, maybe there wasn't enough that was maybe salient in people's minds to really sustain a full episode. But boy, there's all sorts of stuff the US is involved in this year, which is to say a lot, because the US is always meddling in lots of places, but seems to be even more engaged now in a variety of things. And so let's just start with the oldest news, maybe, well, actually, maybe Syria would be old news. But let's just talk about Ukraine. Let's just start there. So things don't look great for Ukraine, either politically or militarily. And I'm really somewhat surprised at how things have turned out for Ukraine in terms of US domestic policy, because I've been around long enough. I remember Iraq war. Heck, I even remember Gulf War One or whatever we call that now, the Persian Gulf War Operation Desert Storm, early 1990s. And I mean, yeah, I was in junior high, but I remember the politics around it. And there just was no dissent. This was considered a glorious fight. And everybody loved the idea. Remarkably, however, people, Americans, voters, your more intelligent Republicans don't even seem to care anymore about Ukraine. And the rhetoric I'm seeing around is quite remarkable. You would have never seen this 20, 30 years ago, which is, hey, we just sent where the plan is to send another hundred billion dollars right on top of the current 100 plus billion. They're pushing for another hundred billion or so. And you see people like Thomas Massey and other opponents of US involvement in the war pointing out that with that sort of money, you could do all of these things on the domestic front. And on on this topic, I'm often kind of find myself sounding like our old friend, Anthony Gregory used to back in the olden times. He's a historian now, used to write a lot for for us and for other hardcore liberal libertarian organizations. And his point was, look, if you're just going to blow a bunch of government money on stuff, it seems like it would be better to at least like, I don't know, build hospitals or roads or something with it that Americans could actually use rather than blowing up a bunch of stuff in a useless war that doesn't actually benefit Americans. And so it seems a lot of people are actually really seriously people of influence are making this argument now. And that's not good for Zelensky and Ukraine. So I guess really the question is how much longer does Ukraine have left? Do you think that this is the final year really of active hostilities? Or is this going to go on much longer? Or is Ukraine going to finally admit that they ran out of weapons and it's over? Yeah. What do you predict for the end? What's it going to look like at the end of 2024? Yeah. So, yes, I'm like basically everyone in my defense. I have quite a track record of being wrong about predictions for the Ukraine war. Although I would say because I, you know, agree with the great sage, John Meersheimer have a better track record than many of those in favor of the war. But yeah, it's definitely not looking good. I can't say whether or not the war will be over next year. I think we will find out in the coming months sort of what Russia is planning to do. And that will, of course, affect the outcome a lot. Basically this past year. So here's my now that we are almost two years into this here. We have a better idea of what was going on at the beginning of the war, which helps us better understand what's been going on. At the beginning of the war, Russia invaded Ukraine with less than 300,000 troops, many tens of thousands, which were from the little breakaway republics. So not exactly, you know, crack, sped-snatch troops. And as John Meersheimer has pointed out many times, this is obviously inadequate to actually invade and conquer Ukraine if that was the Russian goal, which it does not seem to be. It in hindsight, it seems the goal was to just sort of be belligerent and threatening and make the Ukrainians cave into the Russian demands of separating from its sort of de facto joining of NATO and alignment with the West and probably a reorganization, reorientation, more federal system for the Russian speakers and Russian ethnic groups in Ukraine. We now know numerous people on the record, including Ukrainian government officials, that there were negotiations going on at the beginning of the war to basically do just that. And then Boris Johnson with the backing of the US flew into Kiev and was like, don't negotiate with these Russians. The West will back you, you know, fight it out. And so that's what happened. And Russia was obviously not prepared for that. And it took them quite a while to shift from basically, you know, threatening Ukraine to fighting the largest sort of conventional war in many decades and part of that. So that's why there was these huge losses of territory last year and why Russia then had the call-up of the reserves, which hadn't been done since like 1945. So that system was obviously very rusty and creaky. All sorts of problems. Well, basically what's been going on this year is Russia has more or less sort of sat there manning its defense in depth lines and just been slaughtering Ukrainians. And now one of the main issues for Ukraine is not just equipment, notably artillery shells, but manpower, because the Russians have spent all year just slaughtering them. And we see all sorts of stories from a variety of media coming out about how problematic this is in Ukraine. Basically, men are being kidnapped, shanghied, sent down the river, however you want to phrase it, just impressed by just gangs of thugs. And basically getting very little training and being used as cannon fodder. I mean, I think we've mentioned it before, stories of people sort of, you know, kidnapped off the street, sent to the UK for training and wounded and sent home from the front all in the space of two months. So... Yeah. And catastrophic wounds in many cases. Right, we're not talking about... Oh, I got shot in the shoulder sort of thing. That's a not... I think it was in either the New York Times or the Washington Post. The number of Ukrainians who lost limbs is higher than German levels in World War I or something. I mean, like 50 or 70,000 people have lost limbs because mines are all over the place. And that's going to take decades to clean up. But... So that's the big issue. Manpower shortages and ammunition, notably artillery shell shortages. And now we're seeing that... We're seeing that as the ship is starting to sink, now there's a lot of infighting going on among the Ukrainian elites who already hated each other, have been fighting over the spoils amongst each other since the Soviet Union collapsed. But now things are getting pretty serious. There was a quite notable piece in Time Magazine where people in Zelensky's own administration openly said Zelensky is delusional. It was basically because he continues to insist Ukraine will achieve total victory, meaning the reclamation of all of the territory that broke away and everything the Russians have captured and Crimea. And I mean, that's cloud cuckoo land. It's almost certain Russia would end up dropping at least a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon in the event Crimea was at risk. So, yeah, that is delusional. And that's not all, though. There's now a great deal of infighting within the military. So his name is Zeluzhny. I'm not sure if I'm exactly pronouncing that correctly, but he's the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. And in an interview with the Economist, Zelensky let out said the war is at a stalemate. Within days, just immediately after that, Zelensky was like, no, no, there's no stalemate, where if you look at a map of what territories changed hands in the past year, it's obviously a stalemate. Everyone's comparing it to World War I. I do not know, but we might see in the coming months once the ground's frozen because now it's a giant mud pit. There will no longer be a stalemate because Russia's just been building up. They've not instituted another round of the draft this year because, at least according to them, they've had like 350 or 400,000 new recruits. They've had a very aggressive recruitment campaign. So they now have amassed a lot more forces. They've ramped up their sort of old military industrial base, which, as John Mirsheimer said, is designed to fight World War I. And, oh, look, we're fighting World War I, basically. So it might no longer be a stalemate for much longer. But then what happened is Zelensky's right-hand man, some major, it was his birthday, and it's very unclear exactly what happened. But it seems he was opening gifts with his son. And one of the gifts was like some like grenade shot glasses or something. And it like, oh, look, it turns out one of them was an actual grenade that we set off. And he's dead and his son's gravely injured. So people, I mean, this is not just like fringe speculation. The BBC reported like, yeah, some people in Ukraine are questioning this. It happened like five days after this spat happened between Zelensky and Zelensky. So some people are like, oh, that was a shot across the bow. Or maybe they thought Zelensky would be there. Could have been the Russians. Could have been Ukrainians. Who knows? Now there's a news story that's broken out in the Ukrainian media. Oh, turns out Zelensky's office is bugged by Ukraine. It's not bugged by Russian intelligence. And the excuse is, oh, that was bugged by the previous president. Back from 2014. So, I mean, who knows exactly what's going on, but it seems to be getting pretty dirty. And there's reports in the media that Zelensky is like going around Zelushny in the chain of command to like his loyalists and avoiding Zelensky loyalists. And yeah, so that's... Well, all these things are just the things that happen in a regime when it starts to lose. And it becomes obvious that you're losing. You could point to any number of wars and conflicts including, say, the Confederacy in the U.S. where as soon as it looks like it's over, the wheels start to come off in terms of internal politics. And the factions start to bust. There's recriminations. People pick which side they're on and which loyal group they're in. Which splinter group, which they think will somehow lead them to victory and all of that. And that's all going on there right now. Because yeah, without another hundred billion from the U.S. isn't even going to be enough. Right. Yes. The U.S. government, as I'm pretty sure we've mentioned before, is funding not just the war, but like the whole Ukrainian state. That's come out to the cause. Ukrainians will not be getting pensions. Right. We're funding like every single school teacher in Ukraine, the American taxpayers. Yes. Schools, pensions, firemen. We all know how the American standard of living is just couldn't be better. How Americans, everything is fine. Our cities are clean. Our bridges are safe. So we just got extra money to go pay Ukrainian school teachers. And in typical U.S. war for democracy fashion too, Ukraine is a police state. There's, if you're a Russian Orthodox Christian, you can't attend divine liturgy because the churches have been closed in many cases by the regime. There's, of course, no freedom of speech. You can't freely criticize Zelensky. Elections have been postponed indefinitely. That's democracy, as usual, that America defends. Right. And earlier this year, a few months ago, everyone would have been shrieking, you know, Russian, Putinist propagandists. How much is the Kremlin paying you off? Now it's just openly talked about. And the mayor of Kiev, Vitaly Klichko, I think his name is, who's sort of even more nationalist than Zelensky, he's on the record saying basically Zelensky's turning into a tyrant and he has this quote, at some point we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man, that one man being Zelensky. And on us just throwing money at Ukraine, in the same time magazine article where people in the administration said Zelensky is delusional, another person in the administration, very foolishly, everything's always on the record when you're talking to the press unless you say, and the press agrees, you can't just say, here's a tip, you can't just say this is off the record. The reporter has to agree that it's off the record. But this guy in the administration told this reporter doing the timepiece, he said, turn off your recorder, because the guy was like, oh, you know, there isn't a lot being done to fight corruption. And this administration official said turn off your recorder and then he said, people are stealing like there's no tomorrow. This is not some Russian stooge, this is a person in the presidential administration foolishly thinking he was off the record. So, you know, Ukraine is not doing well and it depends what Russia does. Well, do you think that Russia, is Russia just going to be satisfied with the territory it currently has? No, no. And this is the other thing of why this was such a foolish mistake for the Ukrainians to listen to the West. Because Ukraine, if it seems pretty likely Ukraine would be intact and there would not have been any annex territories other than Crimea. But it became clear when Russia sort of, you know, got stuck in this big mess, they weren't prepared for, we have to carve Ukraine up and make sure it's a defunct mess going forward. I agree with John Mearsheimer. Russia is going to attempt to, one, claim the whole Black Sea coast, especially Odessa, which historically very Russian city. It's something like in a poll like less than 10% of the population said they would willingly fight for Ukraine. It's just historically a very Russian city. Well, and let's note also that coastline is an extremely important factor. Right. Yeah, strategically it's going to be a problem for Ukraine and the EU going forward. And the way maritime law works now is if you can secure the coastline, you get rights to miles off the coast in terms of drilling rights, shipping rights, all this stuff. So thanks to what Russia has done so far, it now has total control of the Sea of Azov, which very important for those shipping routes from, if Russia can get its act together and put in some decent canals and stuff, it opens up that whole trade route from the Bosporus to the Caspian Sea, basically. Because now you could have a route from the Don River, going up the Don River from the Sea of Azov, through a canal over to, well, what was called Stalingrad. And, yeah. And Volga. The major river in southern Russia, the Volga River. And then down into the Caspian Sea. So you're opening up all of that stuff. And so now you don't have to worry with Crimea and the coastline there. You don't have to worry about any Ukraine involvement through any of that now. And the Sea of Azov's are shallow. You can drill oil or whatever in there you want to do. And so that's, people forget about that. Russia is not giving back myriapole, any of that coastline. And they've actually invested a lot of money in rebuilding it, actually. I mean, but the other thing is, is now Ukraine will not be able to export agricultural produce via sea. You don't have to go through the EU, which is already, this is the other issue where Ukraine is just in trouble. They've alienated more and more Europeans, notably Poland, which even though sort of the EU stooge, whose name escapes me, is now the new prime minister, the president is still very anti-Ukraine, Ukraine aid, basically. He's the one I believe who said that, oh, Ukraine is like a drowning victim who risks pulling the rescuer down under. And there's a big trucker sort of protest in Poland where they're blocking border crossings because of sort of cut rate Ukrainian shipping and the produce is supposed to transit through the EU, but that's not happening. It's actually being sold and undercutting all the EU, subsidized agriculture and everything. So by securing the coast, Russia just foists this problem onto the EU, which that's the thing. At the end, whether that's at the end of next year or into 2025, Ukraine is just going to be a millstone around the neck of Europe. It's going to be dysfunctional. It's going to be just a basket case economically because most of what's going to be left is eastern Ukraine, which is the poorest, most underdeveloped part of Ukraine. Yes, western Ukraine, western Ukraine. I have a weird thing of looking at the world from the US and so it's like the Far East is the West, you know, manifest destiny. We just keep going. So in your office, your globe is upside down. Yes, yeah. But right, yes, western Ukraine, the poorest part of Ukraine. So there is like this big celebratory thing of like, oh, Ukraine has been granted like candidate status at the EU. One thing, just ask Turkey how that goes. They've been there for over a decade. They're not getting in anytime soon. Neither is which is much more than Turkey, by the way. Ukraine isn't even as much poorer than like the poorest current EU country, which I think is Bulgaria. So it's not even the same. Yeah, that or Romania. Yeah. Yeah. So they're not getting in. And here's the other thing. Ukraine as a state one, I mean, they're already don't have much of a future because varying. I mean, there's differing counts of how many people have left up to 9 million at one point, almost like 70% of which are like women and children. They're not coming back if they can avoid it, especially if what is left is rump state. Where you're creating to join the EU. It seems likely the country would depopulate very rapidly. This everyone would move elsewhere to somewhere that's not as poor and economically backwards. Other than all the pensioners, basically. Yeah. So Ukraine has not much future. And it's basically the West's fault. And I had mentioned this in the past, how I'd been at an Atlantic Council event in 2016, where John Mirsheimer was on a panel. And I thought he was on a panel with the Ukrainian government official, was actually the Georgian Defense Minister. But he explicitly said, what's this quote here? He said, these policies, by which he means NATO expansion and integration of Georgia and Ukraine, are basically leading the Ukrainians and the Georgians down the Primrose path. Because on one hand we are provoking the Russians, causing all sorts of problems, giving them incentive to do damage in Georgia-Ukraine. And the idea the West is going to come to their rescue, you believe much too much in the United States. So that was 2016. He said this is going to happen. It's happened, especially because of, I mean, it was accelerated because of what's going on in the Middle East now. But do not trust the United States to back you up. This is like an IQ test for a foreign leader at this point. The US says, oh, we'll back you indefinitely. We'll help you defeat these guys. No, they won't. They'll do it until the Americans get bored with it, or you just cease or after the Pentagon extracts whatever it wants from your country. Weapons contractors get their profit margins back up. And then the US is gone, and then you're done. And that's essentially what's happened. And I remember working at the Mises Institute back in 2015, 2014, when we were suggesting, hey, in order to calm things down with Russia, maybe you should give at least functional independence to the Donbass and these Eastern regions of Ukraine. And we got all these Ukrainian nationalists who would show up at, like, Ron Paul events and try to disrupt the event and stuff. He's trying to give our country away. We have territorial integrity. The Donbass is ours forever, and I will die to defend it. Well, guess what? Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men died to defend it, but it's not going to work. It's for nothing. This was a part of the country that was heavily, of course, ethnic Russian anyway. And just all this nonsense about territorial integrity or whatever. And then they think that they've got you, that they've tricked you or something, like, well, how would you feel if New England broke off and formed another country? Fine, I couldn't care less. So it's very strange how they had to have been talked into it by the Americans. They'd rather die by the scores, be maimed by the tens of thousands, than let some tiny village in the Donbass be part of Russia. Who thinks that's a good idea? But that's how it's turned out. And in terms of not trusting the US, not only has the war screwed over Ukraine, which is now going to be defunct and dysfunctional for the foreseeable future, but also sort of screwed over the EU, which this was pointed out to me a few months ago. So in 2008, the EU GDP was 16.295 trillion. In 2022, and I believe this includes the UK, the EU GDP was 16.64 trillion. So the EU is, I mean, stagnating, and I mean, I've seen on Twitter people be like, we talk about the Euro pores now, but we're not going to talk about that in 10 years because it'll be considered bad taste, just to point... Similar to pointing out how Africa is dirty. And note specifically, I think this war will probably be noted as sort of an important point in this sort of decline because by virtue of the sanctions on Russia and whether it was the US or Ukraine or Poland or some combination of all three blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines to Germany, German industry is rapidly declining because energy prices have shot through the roof. So energy intensive industry in Europe, especially Germany, which just closed off its nuclear plants and reopened coal-powered plants for some who knows what reason, can't compete now basically. So on the one hand, great for the US and probably like China and India, that's for the future of Europe. And it's, I mean, since World War II, Europe, especially Western Europe, but now all of Europe has just sort of been American lackeys who are under the American thumb, which on the one hand, oh good, we can free ride. On the other hand, in the long term, I suspect it'll be looked at as quite a mistake. So I guess you could say our prediction for Ukraine is that they're not going to win. There will be no grand victory. Crimea will not be going back. Neither will the coastline of the Sea of Azov. In fact, they may even push farther and try to get the full coastline of the Black Sea establishing just total Russian. Basically, those have to share it. The Turks and the Russians share the Black Sea. Russians mostly dominating. That's clearly the overall goal. Ukraine will not disappear totally. There will be a rump Ukraine, probably even including Kiev. Everything west of the river except Odessa probably will continue to be Ukraine, but it's going to be very, very poor. And even if the diplomatic situation is not re-issolved by the end of the year, this is going to be more and more the functional reality is that Eastern Ukraine is going to be Russian and Western Ukraine will be basically a province of the EU and impoverished province, impoverished, costly province of the EU with its population, in many cases, drained. Because, yeah, I'm with you. If I can get a work permit in Poland, I am not going back. No way. So, yeah, that looks like that's just going to be the reality. Whether it plays out this calendar year, this next calendar year is difficult to say, but... Right. And it's questionable. I mean, John Meersheimer has said several times, he thinks it's going to be a North-South Korea situation in terms of just sort of... There's going to be... He has a hard time imagining there will ever be an actual settlement for the foreseeable future because the West won't tolerate it, the Ukrainian nationalists won't tolerate it. I mean, Zelensky is really in a tough spot because were he to try to negotiate, it seems he'd probably be replaced by hard-line elements, potentially with Western racking. So, yeah. Next year going just worse for Ukraine. All right. Well, we better move on to... If we're going to finish this sometime this morning, we better move on to the Middle East. Finish it this year. So, the Middle East, the US is less... Well, has expressed less monetary support, perhaps in this case. And I'm not sure how we would describe the difference between US involvement in the Israel Hamas situation, simply because I guess just US involvement in the region has just been so long and well established. And if you look at the amount of money that the US has shipped over there over the decades, it's good, certainly, an immense amount. But it'll be interesting to see how much Americans continue to even be interested in the conflict and also how it has the potential really to play out in terms of a regional conflict. And this is already going on right now. Now we're hearing about Yemen and the Houthi rebels and the Red Sea shipping routes. I see this where now the Western powers are saying, oh, we're limiting trade through the Red Sea because Houthi pirates are too effective that they're shutting down the shipping routes. And I'm thinking, what is this $100 billion navy for that the US has? I mean, the US is involved in wars in Syria, Ukraine, the Levant, it's threatening Venezuela. Oh, but our navy can't keep shipping lines open, which is like the most basic thing that we're told the navy is for. It seems like we'd better off with a 19th century British ships running around. At least they seem to have more enthusiasm about it. And so the wheels just continue to come off of the whole thing where the Pentagon wants more and more to do and yet doesn't perform its basic functions. Oh, and then don't even mention the southern border, right? I guess you would argue whether the military should be involved in that or not. But it clearly has more to do with Americans and their safety than does anything going on in Ukraine. And yet that's the military situation we've got going. So yep, it's the Houthis who are, by the way, connected to Iran. So we're all hearing about how, I noticed in the right wing press we're supposed to get really excited about the fact that Iran is attacking Americans in Syria and Iraq. Okay, well, I got a real easy solution to that problem. You withdraw Americans from those countries, which should never have been there in the first place. And so why are we supposed to care about this? But clearly the state of Israel is trying to get Americans more involved in that, wants them directly bombing Yemen, bombing Syria. They want to, of course, push back if they can, the Syrian border farther north as well as Hezbollah in the borderlands of Israel and Lebanon. We got to push that north. So I think the state of Israel sees a big opportunity here to accomplish some of those larger goals. But what's going to happen to the Gazans in all that? Without taking, I mean, you walk, when you're not blatantly pro-televieve on this, you get lumped in with these crazy people on like the Harvard campus who want to kill all Jews or from the river to the sea and push them all out, push them where? I don't know, but the point is the Jews are also supposed to die and go away. Whether they're, or when they're there in the Holy Land is the basic ideology. Okay, well, yeah, we can all agree that's bad. However, the war against Gaza is, I don't know how you describe it as something other than ethnic cleansing at this point. You've got, and I haven't used that term until right now because I was waiting just to see how much death and destruction they would rain down. But now we're getting close to 20,000 dead in Gaza. And don't try and tell me that, oh, well, yeah, but they killed women and children in Israel. Yeah, the total deaths, including Israeli soldiers, was 1,300 in Israel. And there's not going to be many more because they've already secured the Gaza border. So what you're looking at now is more than, we're going to soon come across the line of 20 dead for every Israeli dead. And then it's going to be what, 30, 40, 50? Could it be 100 dead? Well, we'd be looking at 100,000 dead Gazans by the time the bombing campaign is over. So there doesn't really seem to be an actual end game here that Tel Aviv has in mind except just bomb Gaza into oblivion and hope everybody goes into Egypt or maybe some Western country. That's certainly been suggested. Hey, America and Western Europe, just take all the Gazans, yet another Western subsidy for Israel. So this is a real hard thing to predict. I have no idea where this is going to go. Yeah, well, so to go back to the hoodies real quick, the problem with them is that the West, the West, the US has been backing the Saudi war against the rebels for, I don't know, since 2013 or 14, way back when it started. And the hoodies are still there. So I've seen some analysis I think is correct that the hoodies are the ideal Iranian proxy because they've already demonstrated their staying power. But yes, the Navy, the US Navy in horrible state, drastically undermanned. You can always, the joke is you can always tell which vessels are the American vessels and joint naval exercises because the American ones are always completely rust-covered and look horrible. Yes. So there was just this announcement of like, I don't know this task force. I think it's Operation Prosperity Guardian was announced. And to me, it's quite annoying. The US has to do most of this to begin with. It's like everyone else has a Navy. Everyone else needs shipping. I mean, do we get much via the Suez Canal? Probably not the US specifically. So other people could, you know, step up and take care of that, but they won't. Yes. So moving on to Israel and Gaza, quite a mess, quite a disaster. It's what happened on October 7th, obviously horrible and inexcusable. And now though, it does seem that Israel is, yes, going, that's, there are people in the Israeli government who have basically openly said like, that's the goal. And it makes sense from a long term perspective for Israel, because if polling is any indication, we're at a high watermark for support for Israel in America. It's all going down from here. Zoomers, I mean, the Zoomers terrify me on many levels, but they are definitely not going to be supporting Israel as they sort of American boomers do. So especially like the evangelical sort of Christianity that supports Israel today is not, is also declining. So, yeah, they, in a way, I think they sort of are incentivized to be like, we better do this now because we won't be able to do it, maybe even 10 years down the line. There's a really great piece in Unheard by Eris, I never know how to say his last name, Russinos called the truth about ethnic cleansing in Gaza. And he is not in any way some sort of like lefty, you know, from the river to the sea kind of guy. And he just lays out the history of ethnic cleansing in the last century. It's quite common and it's quite incentivized by the way global politics works today. And I didn't even realize this, but well, so we've talked before, there's just an ethnic cleansing in Azerbaijan of Nagorno-Karabakh, 120,000 Armenians kicked out. Well, Azerbaijan is going to be hosting the next like giant climate summit. And an Armenian friend pointed out to me, Armenia itself voted for that sort of as politicking like to get some like prisoners of war from the 2020 war back. But so, you know, international politics, quite a dirty business. But he also lays out several quotes from Israeli government officials being like, yes, the West has a moral duty to take up these poor Gaza refugees. It's like, what? Like that takes some gall to say, but yeah, there definitely will be a push to, for the West to just take these two million people. Arab states certainly don't want them. I mean, they've been quite destabilizing, led, contributed to the Lebanese Civil War, lots of trouble in Jordan. None of these rich Petro states will take them. Egypt certainly won't take them. They despise of us. Yeah, let's remind people that the West Bank was, for a time, a part of Jordan. And they had a whole attempt in domestic policy. There's going to be this whole, okay, we're going to take in all these Palestinians and we're going to integrate them into our population. And all it ended up being was a nightmare because it created this whole new voting block within the legislature and created additional defense problems for Jordan and of course it's ruling class and they ended up, they were happy to see it go. I think many within Jordan were happy to get rid of the West Bank. And they remember that. They remember how destabilizing, how problematic it was to bring in a large number of Palestinians into their country, which contrary to what Americans think, these groups are all not just ethnically more or less the same because they have the same religion any more than all Christians are the same. And so Gaza looks at that. And of course Gaza or Egypt looks at that. Egypt has very touchy internal politics in terms of who's supporting the current dictator. And if you were around, say about 10 years ago, you'll remember a lot of conflicts over that with the Muslim Brotherhood and all of that. So they don't want a group that's going to come in and just completely rearrange the matrix of interest groups within the country and that's what it would do. And 2 million people will do that or just a million or even just half a million. So that's a problem. One plan that the Israeli various people in the government have put forward is, oh, they should all move to Sinai. And it's like Sinai Peninsula. I don't know exactly what its population is but it's sort of been in a crossroads of the, you know, Near East for thousands of years and there's never been a giant metropolis there. It's not exactly a lucrative, great place to live apparently. So I, yeah, it's quite, it's conundrum and it does seem ethnic cleansing is going to be the solution. And the main question now is where are the Palestinians going to go because no one wants them. And so it's quite tragic for the Palestinians. Israel, I mean, their reaction is understandable but that doesn't mean they are clear to just glass Gaza. Basically, I mean, reducing the place to rubble and totally understand why they feel that way. But I think in the long run it might be a mistake from, you know, in terms of just further alienating Palestinians and the Arab world. Certainly seems probably a lot of future terrorists are going to be created by this action and they have no prediction there other than continued U.S. support for the time. Do you have any sense of what the timeline is going to be on this? Like how many years are we looking at before Tel Aviv? Say that the real goal is to just bomb the place until it essentially disintegrates in Gaza. How do you think they can just do that within the next year? I mean, I think probably, I mean, the U.S. keeps saying wagging its finger. You need to hurry up and get this over and done with. I know that Netanyahu has said something about a timeline. I can't recall it off the top of my head. At least a year, I think something like that. But then when everyone was outraged, she was like, that doesn't mean like full-scale operations will just still be involved in the situation. I have no idea what to expect, though. I mean, predicting short wars, really the length of any war is a pretty bad track record for everyone. It's never over by Christmas. Yes, so true. And even if they do have a stated timeline in Tel Aviv, what does that mean? The U.S. had a timeline for a rack. That was pointless and meant nothing. And they can't just, I mean, yeah, there's over 2 million people there and it's not like they can just move tomorrow. And it's sort of like, as Aris points out in this piece and unheard, it's not like these ethnic cleansing movements of people don't usually result in lots of death and killing. And it's like, he talks a lot about, I think he's Greek, makes sense to talk about this. There was the population swap after World War I where they just uprooted all the Greeks in Asia Minor who've lived there for millennia and shoved them into Greece and took all the Muslims out of Greece and shoved them into Turkey. And he's like, yeah, half a million people went missing. It's like, today there are smartphones. So that whole gruesome, unpleasant process will not be played out on the fifth page of the newspaper. It'll be on Twitter and TikTok. Look at all these Palestinians dying and stuff. So it'll be quite gruesome and unpleasant and just lead to more trouble down the road. Seems to be a safe bet. So here, I'm going to go out on a limb. I'm going to predict that by the end of 2024 we will not have solved foreign policy problems at least. Yeah, I think I'll join you on that. That's my boldest risky prediction. I think, of course, the goal is just to keep the U.S. from an American perspective, keep the U.S. as minimally involved as possible. We can't, of course, hope to get the U.S. out of that completely unless some major change happens in the American electorate. But it just, the World War III can break out there also. Yeah, that's also a risk is that the U.S. I mean, there's a former Israeli general on the record saying like, this is only possible because of U.S. support. And the moment that stops, well, this all stops. So of course, in many Palestinian and Arab minds the United States is inseparable from Israel's role in all of this. So, of course, that risks leading to blowback and all sorts of trouble here. That's just what we need, another terror attack to invade somewhere else who knows where. Well, look at the way that different groups conflate things for their own political benefit. For example, just this terrible thing of equating all Jews with the state of Israel. And, oh, if you're a Jew, you must be in full agreement with whatever Tel Aviv is doing at any time, even if you live 10,000 miles away from Israel. And so if you're just some Jewish student on campus, minding your own damn business. Yeah, you probably don't want all Jews in Israel to be killed. But at the same time, that doesn't mean you're a big fan of Netanyahu. It's not like Netanyahu wins 100% of the votes in Israel when he runs. He's actually, probably the war is the only thing keeping him in office right now. Yeah, I mean, he was sort of in charge when October 7th happened. Right. Like George W. Bush on September 11th, of course. But I don't know, the voters haven't seemed to figure that one out yet. But that cuts both ways, of course, too, is by calling anyone who opposes whatever the state of Israel is doing, you call them an anti-Semite. Because Israel is synonymous with Judaism in that view. And then that just kind of supports the anti-Semitic view, which is, if I attack a Jew in Charlotte, North Carolina, that's the same as striking a blow against the state of Israel, which is just bonkers. But that's something of what has filtered down to us by this trying to equate the two things. And that's very, very bad. Like you can't even equate everyone who lives in Israel with Zionism. Like not everyone who chooses, not every Jew who chooses to live in Israel is necessarily subscribed to the Zionist ideology. Also, something like 20% of the population, like of the citizens of Israel are Arabs. There's that, too. Right. And many of whom are Arab Christians, although far fewer now than used to be the case. Because I would have left, too, if I was a Christian in that part of the world. Yeah, he, Eris in this piece and unheard, has a rather depressing but good line where he points out like Christians in the Middle East survived 2,000 years of the Romans and the Persians and the Caliphates and European colonial powers, but they could not survive the American Empire. That's true. Same in Iraq. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's what he's saying. Just the whole Middle East and it's rather depressing when you think about how much the evangelical community supported the war on terror. Right. Things like that. Yeah, very shameful. Well, I mean, the truth is some of them, the older ones, I think, who remember the 70s, those people simply aren't Christians at all because they're Eastern Orthodox in many cases. Yeah, from the evangelical point of view. So I think that was actually kind of part of it as those people just don't really, really matter. They're not part of the real Christian world. So, yeah, total disaster that's brewing right there right now, but yeah, I think we'll just continue to see the death toll mount in Gaza with there's no clear answer to that at all. But that takes us directly into just domestic politics, which is kind of our last piece of this is right, is the issue of they're going to be asking, they already have been asking running columns in Wall Street Journal and stuff saying, hey, Americans, you should be taking Gaza refugees. So yet again, asking American taxpayers, ordinary Americans to bear the burden of these foreign conflicts. So, oh yeah, you've already, you're already, I think they ran the numbers. Someone who opposes more money for Ukraine ran the numbers and it comes out to like 1,800 bucks per household so far. Right. Just to pay for the Ukraine war. And that's not even taken. How much have you paid already to ship weapons to Israel, to all sorts of other places where U.S. occupying forces are there and they're all very expensive high-tech weapons. I mean, you're paying through the nose through this sort of thing. And you're only now starting to see Americans start to really take notice of that, that how much they're paying for these wars that clearly don't have anything to do with their standard of living, even while inflation is through the roof. I mean, good luck. I know that rich old guys at the Wall Street Journal keep writing articles about how everything's great and the economy is swell. I can't talk to a single person under age 35 who thinks that expenses are not completely out of control. Especially people trying to- This is a rhetorical trick of saying, oh, inflation is down. Well, it's the rate of inflation has decreased. But cumulatively, since Biden took office, it's at like 20%. It's like- But what are you- Yeah, it's quite- I mean, I think the whole vibe session talk is all basically gaslighting. It's like people just think the economy is bad when really it's not. And I think Peter St. Ange does a really great job of just sort of ripping apart all of the official regime statistics and saying basically every week, he's just like, yeah, here's the job numbers, but actually if you look under the hood, not a pretty picture, here's this or that. Here's shipping companies are going bankrupt because the economy is actually slowing down, yada-yada-yada. And so the question is, will that actually have an effect on the electoral cycle? Because foreign policy, so- You watch these debates, and of course I can't stomach a whole debate, but I do watch the highlights later. And they're still trying to out-compete each other in terms of who could be the most belligerent candidate when it comes to a posture toward foreign countries, China, Russia, and even DeSantis is like, on day one, I will start bombing Mexico to conquer the cartels. That still seems to play well, at least to a Republican audience. I don't know how non-affiliateds will respond to that sort of thing, but I have a hard time believing that doubling down to the general population, doubling down on shipping, yep, we're gonna get more involved in Israel, we're gonna get more involved in Ukraine. I don't know if that's going to really help. And so I would be surprised and depressed if that is the position that a lot of the main candidates take. Now, Trump, I suppose, his position is, I always talk about how I'm just gonna bomb all these other countries into oblivion and it's gonna be no big deal and I'm gonna do it in six days. But in the end, though, of course, all it really amounts to is a bunch of military spending with no actual new deployments, but... Yes. And he, I mean, it's, of course, he talked a good talk in 2016 and then he made John Bolton his advisor and Nikki Haley and yada, yada, yada. But he has said just recently, he was like, yeah, I'll cut a deal with North Korea to just accept that they have nuclear weapons. And of course, people were shrieking in horror, but realists were pointing out, you know, well, that's the reality. So you should probably just accept that and come down from Cloud Cuckoo Land that North Korea is ever gonna get rid of their roots. Yeah, so foreign policy, yeah, a general rule of thumb I'm told by political operative type people is foreign policy is never decisive in a presidential election, but I think it can contribute to the vibe of especially the Biden administration, especially if the economy continues to not do well, sort of just this domestic malaise combined with foreign policy disaster. I mean, if Russia, you know, just breaks out in February or something and starts carving up big parts of Ukraine because they have no troops and they have no money and they have no weapons, well, that's gonna seem pretty bad because he's so much on the record of we're supporting Ukraine indefinitely, blah, blah, blah. So that I think can just contribute to the malaise. On the Israel front, that could play a role because there are a lot of, there's Arab groups in Michigan that are like, we are not voting for Trump, but we're not going to vote for Biden. They're at least saying that now and it's because of the policy towards Israel. Right, there's a large area of population up there. Yeah. Yeah, combine with that, I mean, I hope I'm quite wrong on this prediction, but I suspect we're going to have a lot of quote unquote, mostly peaceful protesting next year. The way I view this election, it's sort of like, I mean, there's another prediction I'll make. Trump's gonna be the Republican nominee, even if he's in jail, unless especially if he's in jail, which I doubt will happen before the primary is over and done. And Biden, they're sort of like wounded and caged beasts that are cornered, especially Biden's son, Hunter, of his legal woes. I don't remember what might have been in the New York Times or Politico or something. It was like Biden is obsessed with his son's legal troubles, his only remaining son, his other son passed away. And Hunter himself has said, yeah, I might need to leave the country if Trump wins. So I do think both sides are probably going to pull out all the stops, which is worrisome. And I mean, on the one hand, you might expect in the past that would result in more foreign belligerency. So potentially we could see that directed against Mexico because of the border and drugs and who knows what, probably some of China too. But I don't think it will manifest in Trump coming out and like, we're going to back Ukraine until victory, especially because I suspect he has quite a grudge against Ukraine because of the whole first impeachment thing. So yeah, next year going to be horribly messy. And one side note, going back to the Gaza refugee thing. So apparently Minnesota is trying to change its state flag and the proposed, so Minnesota has a huge population of Somali refugees. It's where Ilhan Omar is representative from Minnesota. The proposed flag that's like going to the committee to be like worked on is like practically the same as the flag of Puntland, which is a de facto breakaway state in Somalia. So people pointed this out on Twitter and were quite like, because there's a huge population of Somali refugees in Minnesota. So it's not like these refugees have no domestic implications as the situation in Michigan, which was an important state. Last time, both in 2016 and 2020 shows. So it's going to be a messy next year, not expecting many solutions to foreign policy woes or much rational discourse on things. I doubt Vivek Ramaswamy will be Trump's vice president. Oh, well, yeah, we have to talk about that too. There's all this talk of Nikki Haley going to be Trump's VP, which I thought was just like crazy, you know, like, there's always so much fear and doom mongering online just for, you know, sort of self-interested reasons. But no, there's like Trump's daughter was like, yeah, you can never say with Trump when she was asked about that and people have put out like statements to that effect. If that happens, this proves conclusively that Trump hasn't learned a damn thing since his first. Yes, if that happens, I'll be flummoxed. I mean, on the one hand, it wouldn't be surprising because he's made such horrible personnel decisions before. I would just spend the election season drinking heavily, I suspect, if Nikki Haley is the VP. But we're Vivek Ramaswamy to be the VP. That would actually, you know, white-pill me a little bit, but I doubt he will be. But perhaps he could have some cabinet position in a Trump administration. But who knows? He's, of course, not perfect either, especially his comments on Mexico like Ron DeSantis. So next year, I mean, this has been an unpleasant year in some respects, and I'm glad 2023 is coming to an end. But I can't say I'm exactly eager to get into 2024 either. Well, of course, I think most of our listeners have learned, Zach, that you do not tune in to war economy and state to hear a bunch of happy news. So, you know, we just deliver what our niche comes to expect at this point. Well, on that note, we're at an hour. So let's wrap up this episode of War Economy and State. This is the end of 2023. For us, we'll be back in January. So, yeah, if you've been listening throughout the year, thank you very much for joining us for this. And actually, I would say that if you are listening and you have some suggestions for topics in 2024, email them over to me. I would be interested to see what you think. But until then, thank you. We'll see you next time.