 to think tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Keeping the World Company. It's trying to understand the world as the world evolves around us sometimes up, but these days mostly down. And the question before the house is how much like a proxy vote is a proxy war? The meaning of the word proxy is instrumental. And why do we have so many of them? And I don't mean proxy votes. I mean proxy wars. And for this discussion, we have co-host Tim Apichella, and we have scholar and researcher, retired UCLA historian, Gene Rosenfeld. Good morning, Tim. Good morning, Gene. Good morning. Good morning. So let me start with you. This is a title question, Gene. How much like a proxy vote is a proxy war? Well, if you mean in terms of results, a proxy vote counts as much as any other vote. So a proxy war counts as much as any other war. The difference is that someone stands in instrumentally for another party. In this case, let's look at the proxy wars we're in right now, Ukraine and Gaza, where we have Russia quite visibly on one side, but we have proxies on the other side. If you subscribe to the theory that I do, that this is really a war of Russia against the West. And these are wars that are intended to fatigue and a trip the capabilities of the United States to defend its leadership role in the world. Yeah, let me think over one point. In the Dombas and other parts of East and Ukraine, the Russians were using and are using Ukrainians who speak Russian to fight the Ukrainians. Isn't that a proxy? It's a partial proxy, isn't it? Yes. But again, it does not make Russia invisible. I would say the United States is a bit invisible right now, not and to our own detriment. We are basically hurting ourselves by not supporting Ukraine at the moment. And we have an incipient civil war going on in the legitimate structure, political structure of the United States, where a charismatic movement of considerable proportions is attempting to take over the offices of a political party. GOP has become the POT, the party of Trump. Yeah, well, some people say the party of Putin. You know, but let me go to one thing you mentioned that it's about transparency, it's about visibility. Okay, so you have wars that are proxy wars, where the proxy relationship is visible. And as you mentioned, you have wars that are proxy wars, where the relationship is secret, that you don't see it, which is more effective, which should we worry about most, which is the one that is happening in Ukraine. And for that matter, there are secret things happening with the US as proxy. There are secret things happening, certainly the Middle East, this is all about secrecy. What is that a kind of asymmetrical hybrid weapon of proxy wars? There's an interesting situation in the Middle East because Russia is not visible right now to most of the globe in the Middle East. And yet Iran and Russia are helping one another in their building of their own armaments. And Iran is supplying drones to the so-called axis of resistance, the asymmetrical movements like Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah in the Middle East. And Hezbollah is attacking the United States, and the United States is attacking Hezbollah. And Israel is attacking Hezbollah. So all of these different things that are going on in the Middle East are confusing. Why are the Houthis attacking commercial vessels? Why is the United States Navy bombing or sending missiles or drones to Yemen? And why are proxies, proxy movements in Iraq attacking American soldiers and killing them? It's very confusing unless you pan the camera back and you see that this is a war of attrition, against the capabilities of the United States to maintain its leadership role in the world. As much pressure as the Russians can put on the United States, it is putting on the United States via Iran in the axis of resistance in the Middle East. In Ukraine, it's different because Ukraine is, according to Putin, a part of Russia, and it's non-negotiable. And there are nuclear consequences, certain individuals like Medvedev say, if Russia is forced to go back to its previous borders to 1991. Now, I don't know what they are saying about Ukraine, what they would accept or not accept, whether they would take a bite of Ukraine or all of Ukraine. But I don't think they have the capability to take all of Ukraine unless we totally fold our support. So proxy wars are very different. The visibility of both parties differs in both cases. But I think we have to look at Gaza and include it also as a war against the West. Yeah, I was thinking while you were talking about that, I mean, a proxy can be an element in a direct war. It can be one element. And part of that hybrid notion, the asymmetrical notion. And when you think of using people as human shields hiding under hospitals, the Israelis say, look, come out and fight. Let me see you. I want to see you. I want to see the fighters that are against us don't they hide and they use people and they use them as what do you want to call it propaganda proxies. So in many ways, in my view, the fight in Gaza is also proxy. It's more of an individual kind of proxy, but it's nevertheless proxy. Tim, let me turn to you. It seems to me that we have a dynamic going on. You could argue that in every war that you can think of, there are proxies, maybe smaller or larger and some are pure proxies. But do you agree that proxy wars have been going on a long time, people hiding behind the skirts of someone else, people using lesser nations, lesser national actors as proxies for their own designs. Do you agree this has been going on a long time? And can you tell us why you feel that way? Absolutely agree that they've been going on a long time. Let's look at the 1953 behind-the-scenes proxy war that our CIA government basically pushed out Mos Adi, who was a democratic elected leader in Iran. And the Shah of Iran was installed, thanks to Eisenhower in Churchill, because Mos Adi basically put an oil or he nationalized the oil companies in Iran. And of course, you can't do that to the United States because we don't like our oil being shut down or shut off. So there was a behind-the-scenes proxy battle, if you will, that has now had it reared its ugly head in four decades later. We're still dealing with that in a way that we hadn't imagined. You might want to call that unintended consequences, but be as amazed. That's what it is. We can go to 1973 when the United States was behind the ouster and assassination of Salvador Alende as the leader. And who was installed? Pinochet, who committed all sorts of atrocities against his own people. Look at the classic one of pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan. No boots were put on the ground, but we sure taught the Mujahideen how to use a shoulder-based Stinger missiles. And that was quite successful in roosting out the Soviets out of the country. So we have a whole cornucopia of history of quiet proxy wars versus overt obvious proxy wars. I look at Ukraine. No boots have entered the ground or touched the ground in Ukraine, but we've sent in 113.4 billion dollars of military aid and dollars to basically participate in a proxy war. So I'm a little more overt with Ukraine and certainly covert when it came to our dealings in Iran back in the 1950s. You know, Gene, one of my favorite guys on YouTube is a fellow named Simon Whistler. I don't know if you've ever caught his commentaries, but it's very interesting. He's English and he talks very fast. You have to really listen. One of the things he said in a commentary that I saw was that proxy wars avoid direct confrontation. And therefore the level of violence, the level of war is arguably less when you have a proxy war among weaker parties instead of a direct confrontation, which would likely be nuclear, which could be nuclear among the larger parties. Do you agree? Do you feel there's a benefit in proxy wars? Well, I think there's something going on that we haven't really made clear to ourselves and the rest of the world. And that is that we are now involved in a war in which it's being fought by means globally that have never been seen before. The Cold War was a time, as Tim has pointed out, the use of a lot of proxies, the most dramatic of which, of course, was to some extent Vietnam, where you had an extensible civil war and we did have boots on the ground. We took sides. Nevertheless, we did not directly confront either China or Russia in that war. We fought it to supposedly stop the spread of the dominoes in Southeast Asia. And history has not come to the conclusion yet whether that actually succeeded or not. But in terms of what's going on now, Vladimir Putin is a former KGB FSB agent. He is employing psychological operations, PsyOps, in this war with the use of the internet in our elections and the use of false narratives and his speeches, his most recent interview with Tucker Carlson, rewriting the history of Russia and Ukraine. He is employing proxies, such as Iran, and the so-called axis of resistance, everything from asymmetrical movements to states. He is neutralizing China's influence in the world by, in essence, putting China in an agreeable position where it is not active in what Russia is doing, but it's not preventing what Russia is doing. And he is using threats of space war and cyber war and nuclear war through the mouths of his allies and associates like Dmitry Medvedev just recently in terms of threatening the United States not to take one more step, not to pass one more bill of funding or terrible things will happen. All of these means are what you see in elements of agencies like the FSB, KGB, in terms of controlling the narrative, controlling the perceptions, and controlling the responses of the people that you are arrayed against. So we are involved in a world war now with Russia that is trying to avoid the catastrophes on the ground that we're seeing, for example, in Ukraine. Yes, it's less violent and we don't have a global third world war like we did in World War II, but in terms of the outcomes, it's just as potentially devastating. Now some say that Russia, and this happened when the USSR came apart, can't do this on a sustainable basis. It doesn't have the money. It doesn't have the resources. Its economy is 120 is what the U.S. is, and ultimately with the sanctions, I'm not sure how effective the sanctions are. Some people don't think they're effective at all. Putin has found a way around every single one of them, but they're not economically strong. How long can they continue this multi-facade, this multi-asymmetrical war? It costs a lot of money to be out there in so many places. We haven't even begun to examine how far the Russian tentacles are going right now, and those are the ones we could read about. There have to be secret ones, many, many more secret ones. How long can they sustain that? Well, JD Vance just went to Munich where there was an essential meeting of Western leaders to deliver the message that the reason why the Republicans could not fund Ukraine at this time is that it would deplete our own defense in terms of supplies such as artillery shells. Now, this is patently ridiculous because we can produce very quickly what we need and replace it. We have both the money and the manpower to do that, just as we did in World War II, but he's spreading the word that the United States doesn't have the capability of doing this which plays right into Russian propaganda now. Putin is up for election. It's a fake election that as far as the world is concerned. He wants the globe to believe that he really has the support, the backing, the strength and the capacity that he needs to prevail in Ukraine and beyond. As to whether that's a paper tiger, I think to some extent it greatly is. I think the stronger methods and more extreme methods that Putin takes and the greater the threats that are voiced, it speaks to weakness. And I would also refer people to Timothy Snyder's current essay on the internet on weak men, including Putin and the GOP. That was incredible. I saw that. That was incredible. That was one of his best pieces ever trying to tie all this together. But one thing about Putin and propaganda, he was active in electing Trump in 2016. He tried in 2020, probably used the same playbook. And now there's this thing about Smirnov. Smirnov is very scary because they planted it. They planted him and the Trump Johnson, what's his name, the previous House Speaker, all perpetuated the lie. And that was so for a year or more. In fact, they built a funny baloney impeachment on the basis of this lie that came through Smirnov and it came from Russia. The master puppeteer was at work here and playing serious games with public opinion, public policy. And Fox News repeated that lie virtually thousands of times in hundreds of episodes, and arguably they knew it was funny, but they kept on repeating it. So take all that together and what you have is a propaganda war in the United States to break public opinion and to undermine public governmental resolve. Isn't that part of a proxy war? It's kind of like the reverse proxy, undermine your adversary using proxies? Using agents. And he's an agent. They exist. They're usually under the radar. This has become very public. He's been arrested. He's confessed. And it's now being reported as to who will believe it. The more insidious type of propaganda war is when the people you know in your family, among your friends, among your associates, convert to believing conspiracy theories propagated by people like Robert F. Kennedy III, not Fitzgeralds, Robert Kennedy III, who really is kind of a mentally fragile individual, but he gets a lot of press because of his name and he floats these conspiracy theories that then, in fact, we're fairly intelligent people and rational people who don't want to believe what they read in the newspapers. Suddenly, they don't trust our mainstream institutions. Part of asymmetric warfare against another state is to reduce confidence and trust in the institutions that maintain stability, social and political stability. Trump has been a master at this since 2016. And we need to understand that every time we vote, it's a vote against our institutions or for our institutions. Shifting a little bit. Tim, you know we've seen, even if we didn't know before, even if we didn't know a year ago, the power of drones, the power of technology, the power of satellite navigation, as with Starlink, we didn't know just how important those things are and they seem to be very important in the proxy wars that we're following in both Ukraine and the Middle East. So my question to you is, you know, if we have an increase in these proxy wars or skirmishings, what have you, isn't that directly connected to advances in weapons technology? Well, we discussed this about a half year ago where kinetic warfare is not the warfare that we should always be thinking about. Non-kinetic warfare being cyber warfare and certainly the advancement of drone technology is shaping the battlefield in quite a different way. We had a US ship that was almost hit because a drone from the Houthis got through a web of defenses and it was left to one machine gun on that ship that actually took it out as the last means of destruction for that drone. So classic things like battleships and aircraft carriers may be rendered obsolete in 20 years from now because they're susceptible to swarm drones or drones that could travel under the water than suddenly surface. Who knows what technology is going to lead and with every technology, be it from World War I to World War II or prior to World War I like the machine gun was a technology that completely changed the battlefield and that caused the soldiers to look at trench warfare. So yes, drone warfare will definitely reshape how we conduct kinetic warfare for sure. Yeah, it's really a little bit chilling to think that the Houthis can have a weapon that they got from their principal Iran and they can use that weapon to sink a military ship, even an aircraft carrier. That's the nature of these weapons now. And so how do we deal with an insurrection group, a proxy group like the Houthis and others? You know, Hezbollah for that matter, Hezbollah. How do we deal with them now given these weapons, given the pipeline of weapons from the proxy principles? Do we have that in hand yet or is that a work in progress? Oh, we've lost our capability for intel in a variety of countries that's been slowly dismantled over the decades. So our intel is sorely lacking and that needs to be ramped up so we know what's going on. And then of course, then you have the traditional strike them where it hurts, you know, hit those factories that are producing these drones. And again, that will take that will take intel, but it's critical that you proactively dismantle them before the drones are up and flying. That's not easy. No, it depends on intelligence, does it? You know, you're talking Jean about propaganda. And well, the flip side of propaganda is intelligence. And it strikes me that with some of these proxy agents, it's more difficult. It's maybe it's the relationship, maybe secret, the development of weapons, the pipeline of weapons against the proxy target, you know, maybe more sophisticated and dangerous to have on the ground intelligence. And so we have to rely on satellite photography and all those things which may may not be as good as our intelligence in years past. Where does intelligence fit in setting up, setting up a proxy and in dealing with the proxy? Well, first a footnote on what Tim just said. I just finished a book called War Against the Wind, which is about the kamikaze campaign developed by Japan in World War Two, which if you look at it as basically drone warfare. It's sort of drone warfare because you may have a human element, that element is expendable like a machine. And you've devised both underwater and above ground air capabilities to take out ships. And they took out 90 ships at Okinawa, for example, said even though the Japanese navy had been decimated, they had developed this new campaign and it was it really was in essence the front row seat on what we're going through now in World War Three. With regard to intelligence, we have SIGINT and we have human. We have signals intelligence primarily. We have the same leverage on intelligence that we used to have. Right. And we have human intelligence. Now in the Middle East, we have we have possibilities for human intelligence because the Israeli population comes from all over the Middle East. It has capabilities in terms of becoming agents and conveying human intelligence. And I think this is why we have such good intelligence on Iran. In terms of signals intelligence, we just had a break in that recently when a congressman exposed the fact that Russia is developing potentially a weapon that any day now the administration just admitted yesterday can go into space and disrupt communication satellites from all countries, not just the United States by using nuclear capability in space. So this is another dangerous way along with hypersonic missiles that Russia is developing to avoid an all out nuclear third world war and utilize a nuclear and new capabilities such as drones to greatly damage and defeat its enemy, the West. Yeah, it sounds like disruption and creating chaos, undermining a given civil society and economy is what the target would be. If you take out the satellite, you take out a lot of communication. If you disrupt public opinion and misinformed people, you're you're breaking down the society. You're creating a civil war, civil disturbance in that society and making them less likely less able to deal with you. And so that takes me to a point of view about the new Cold War. It sounds to me like we're on two levels with the new Cold War. Let me put this to you, Jim. In the Cold War, it was cold. That was good. We didn't actually blow the world up. But you knew who the players were. You knew it was Russia versus the United States. Now in the new paradigm, whatever you want to call this war, Cold War number two, maybe you have, you have the visible Cold War where Russia is attacking the US and, you know, US is trying to defend itself from all of these disruptive efforts. But part of Russia's disruptive efforts are proxy wars. So actually what you have is a hybrid. It's a combination that's your term, Jane. It's a combination of the Cold War where the parties are identified, dealing with confrontation directly, plus all these third party, all these third party proxy wars. Also dedicated to trying to disrupt things, you know, the Red Sea and satellites in space. It's kind of the same thing. Let's see if we can disrupt the world. And if we disrupt the world, that helps us. So my point though is that we have a new paradigm going on. It's the big players against each other visibly. It's the proxy wars and the secret wars. That's another one. It's actually three levels. Tim, is this the way it's going to be? Are we evolving into this as a paradigm that will last, you know, for decades and decades, maybe through the 21st century or until we blow ourselves up? Is this the way it's going? Is this an irreversible process? Well, the fact that mankind has had wars since the dawn of mankind, the answer is yes, this will continue in a different form. You know, it's, Cold War was, you're right, it was primarily between the United States and Russia. But now we have other visible players. We have North Korea. We have Iran. We have China. But the playing field of warfare is like I said in the previous answer is that's changing. Cyber warfare is far more significant and prevalent than our ability to commit kinetic warfare. So will this continue? Absolutely. As technology advances, so do the methodologies of warfare. And, you know, should we be concerned that Russia could put a nuke in outer space, whether it's intended target is on terra firmer earth or not? You know, China blew up one of their satellites as a test about two years ago. If we want to explore the heavens, we got to stop creating a lot of litter between earth and the heavens. And so for everything, there's a, you know, there's collateral damage for everything we do. And I think our new proxy wars will have unintended consequences that we can't quite predict, but will occur and we'll be dealing with it. For example, I'll talk about that regime change in Iran back in 1953. I don't think anyone anticipated the outcome and the the prolonged animosity between the United States and Iran as a result of that regime change. You know, I want to go to what Tim was saying a minute ago, and that is assassination practice, regime change practice. It seems to me, following on your thread, Gene, that this is part of the asymmetric war, it's part of the hybrid, that if you want to undermine the other guy, you can go directly, you know, to his leadership, its leadership. In fact, you can go to your adversaries, like Navalny, or that pilot in Spain, who was murdered only a few days ago, or Kim Javen, how he murdered his relatives who threatened him in some way in Asia with some exotic poison. And of course, Putin, you know, he does that regularly. So, you know, my question is that part of this asymmetric multi-layered process has to also include assassination of leaders, and it has to include, you know, efforts to do regime change, which I think we are seeing. We are seeing that. We are seeing assassinations and we are seeing efforts to do regime change. That's got to be part of this whole multi-layered, multi-proxy, you know, paradigm going forward, don't you agree? Assassination was basically invented as a tool, instrument of war in the first modern terrorist movement of the anarchists in Russia. They are implying it. This regime in Russia is implying it against its opposition. It's kind of an admission of weakness. They are implying an asymmetric method by a weak, presumably, sub-state group, but it's the state that's implying it because the state is controlled by a small group of people. That's what Navalny exposed. You can go to his video on the Internet, and he basically brilliantly exposed the corrupt mafia-type movement that took over Russia after the Soviet Union fell. This is a very fragile regime. It's only been in place for about 30 years. Its leader is aging and hasn't that many years left, and there is no program for succession. We have been a republic for over 200 years. We have a strong way of replacing leadership every four years, which is amazing in the history of the political world. Russia has absolutely no experience in that. This Russian regime is looking, trying to look strong because it is so very, very weak, killing Progosian on the right, killing Navalny in terms of a democratic Russia, assassinating the pilot. My God, this is a guy who basically was nobody in the Russian military except he brought a helicopter with a bunch of papers over to Ukraine. This gives you an idea of how scared they are. I think that what we need to do here in the United States, our leaders need to be firm, strong, and have a lot of stamina and insight into the psychology of what's going on. Russia is potentially, in Medvedev's words, potentially facing a very chaotic future again, and they've had so much suffering relative to their revolutions and their invasions. The Russian people don't want this by the same token. Russian people who are educated and have some stake in the future don't want this regime to prevail either. One last point, Tim. I'd like to just mention that we have traditionally considered proxy wars as wars by states, subordinate states, proxy states. But what we find now is that the proxies are not states. They're terrorist groups. That's different. They're given weapons and money and training and direction and all that support, but they're not states. What I find very interesting is that you ask the ICJ, International Court of Justice, why they're going after Israel on genocide, but they're not going after Hamas on genocide. The answer is, well, it's not in the agreement. We only go after states, which I find are indefensible. In any event, this is a new part of the new paradigm that you as the principal proxy person, proxy state, can find a terror organization to do your bidding as your proxy. That's different. It's more nimble. It's more flexible. And if somebody destroys them, they can pop up again. It makes it harder to deal with the proxies, doesn't it? And more likely that it encourages terrorism, doesn't it? It's effective. If you don't have a formal uniformed army, you have an informal, you know, civilian hidden civilian base like Hamas. It's affordable and it's very effective. You know, the United States is involved with tons of proxy wars trying to stamp out terrorism. Syria, Cameroon, Iraq, Egypt, Somalia, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, all these countries we are involved with proxy efforts and money because we're dealing with just that, a non-state terrorism group. So I suspect because terrorism is effective and cost effective and I suspect you'll see more of that in the future. Yeah. And the UN less able to deal with it for many reasons. Okay, we're at the time when we ask you to assimilate everything we've said. And this is like AI, you know, give us a little summary of everything we've said and tell us what message you want to leave with us about all these issues. Dean Hugo first. The message I would like to leave is that our leadership in a year where we have political campaigns and we need to speak out and explain in understandable terms to our population what is at stake. We need to understand the role of Russia and its intentions in the world today. This particular regime does not represent the Russia of the past, but it would definitely like to represent not only the Russia of the future, but the world of the future. And if you read Putin's speeches and you understand what he is saying, you know that the whole thrust of what we're experiencing now is to discourage the United States population to confuse us to polarize us to trick us into seeing a reality that does not exist because it's created in terms of conspiracy theories by a small and growing movement headed up by a pathological personality who happens to be running for president. And it's beyond the United States. The stakes are very great. Putin is an aging leader. His regime is held together by greed and ambition and power. It's likely not to outlast him. It's likely to become more repressive as it becomes weaker. And the refusal and the co-opting of the freedom caucus in the Congress is in essence a proxy for Russia in its opportunity to replace U.S. leadership in the United States. So when you look at people who are refusing to pass the bill to fund Ukraine, you're looking straight into the eyes of the Russian establishment. We become proxies for them. Tim, your final thoughts? Final thoughts is you and I did a show in 2015 dedicated to the nature of propaganda and how Donald Trump utilizes propaganda. And back then in 2015, what we both agreed on was that A, the government or some entity needs to educate the Americans on what propaganda looks like, how to identify it, two, how it works, how it's effective. And last but not least, how to counter it, how to reject it or at least acknowledge it and then decide whether you want to reject it or not. Amen. From your lips, both of you, to God's ears, thank you very much. Tim Apachele, Gene Rosenfeld, thank you very much. Aloha.