 Welcome back to Think Tech. This is Keeping the World Company. I'm Jay Fidel and the handsome young man is Tim Appichella. Welcome, Tim. Good morning, Jay. Thank you for that compliment. We're going to talk about Congress and Ukraine. You know, it's been, you know, sort of peeking out the edges that the Republicans don't like to support Ukraine. Well, something here, something there. And after a while to get the idea that there's a kind of movement in Congress to not support Ukraine. Although Heddecox Richardson said it was strong views to support Ukraine. I'm not so sure about that because it keeps popping his full head out. And it certainly popped head out when they had to continue resolution a couple of days ago to fund the government. And there were people apparently on both sides of the aisle that worked to exclude aid to Ukraine from that continuing resolution, which I thought was also an indication as there were an increasing number of people in Congress, especially the House, that don't want to support Ukraine. So my question to you was my first question. There are many questions, but why is it important that we support Ukraine? Maybe they're right. No, they're not right. No, it's critical that we support Ukraine. I mean, you just have to be a student of history to know that you have an unchecked dictator that has desires to land grab. And in the case of Putin, he wants to, you know, he's the reincarnation of Peter the Great. And he has great desires to reclaim all the Russian satellite states in Eastern Europe to be once again the great Soviet Union, but not call it the Soviet Union. So just, you know, just know your history that dictators, if they go unchecked, and there is a movement of being passive, or try to work with the devil, so to speak. It doesn't go well. Chamberlain comes to mind. The Prime Minister for England tried to be passive and work with Hitler. Well, look what that got him. So I don't think Putin's any different than a Hitler. And it's paramount that we put Putin back in its box from the start. Had that been done to Hitler on his move to Austria, or certainly the Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland, if we had put him in a box and contained him right then and there, maybe we could avoid, you know, a whole world war. And I think Ukraine has that that recipe in the pot as a possibility that if Ukraine is lost, all the other states that surround Ukraine will be lost. And I think that we didn't get into World War Three with a potential United Nations article five where one for all and all for one has to take place in Poland would probably be the next target for Putin. Well, you mean NATO article five for NATO? Yes, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's what I meant. So, yeah, it's critical that we pay the money now because you could pay the money now and right now it's about $70 billion, or you could pay quadruple five times, ten times that amount when Putin has gathered strength and has taken over several countries in Europe. And now what do we do to extract them? Yeah, what we do to keep American boots off the ground too. That's part of it. That's part of a war. The other thing is, I want to ask you, is it oblique in the first question is, you know, why is it important that the United States support Ukraine? I mean, you can't tell us people in Europe support Ukraine, you know, EU and NATO. Well, you know, contrary to Donald Trump, we need to be engaged in world politics, world economy. It's a smaller world now and isolationism is a thing of the past or it should have been. We should have learned our lessons in World War One and World War Two, that you just can't, you know, hide in the corner and pretend things are going to go well. You have to intercede proactively. And I think United Nations is part of that. And the EU is our economic cooperation with the EU and certainly with NATO. We have to be engaged in the world events. And Trump would have us do otherwise. And guess what? It won't go well for us. And we'll be in a major conflict if we decide to sit back and twiddle our thumbs. You mentioned Trump a couple of times here. How much is he involved in this demolition of Congress against Ukraine? Is he running the show on that issue? Well, he's the pipe piper of the mega movement, is he not? It's not a matter of policy with the mega. And of course, that spills over into the normal GOP, which I used to call the normal GOP, or the non mega GOP. He's the pipe piper. Whatever Donald wants goes. Whether there's any rationality or not is not the issue. Donald is the cult leader of the mega movement. And whatever he says goes and whether it's a horrible policy idea or not is irrelevant. Donald Trump is set on causing chaos in the world. And certainly Ukraine is on his list of countries not to support. Why? Because quite frankly, he really wants Putin to succeed. He loves Putin. He really does. And if the GOP can't see that, and they're just falling like lemons behind him, and now are Putin supporters, and they're opposed to helping Ukraine, what does that say about their patriotism? To democracy, world democracy, and keeping Europe free of tyranny and dictatorships? Yeah, I remember there was a really strange moment where Trump, not too long ago, where Trump said, if I'm reelected by Vladimir, I'm going to give you Ukraine on the first day. And so he has, you know, lots of motivation on this specific issue. It's not just that he wants to destroy the world. He wants, for some transactional reason, he wants to satisfy Vladimir Putin. And he's been open about that. And I make the assumption, you know, on a logical basis, a deductive basis, that it's part of his program. And his program is what the Republicans, the Maca-Republicans in the House anyway, are following. So what you have is they're all responding to and on other cult bases. But let me ask you one more question, and that is, can they do it without us in terms of providing the money? Can the EU and NATO do it without us in providing the money and the weapons? Do they have the resources? And finally, do they have the political will? Would our departure off the stage on this issue just deflate the whole program? Would they stop caring as much? It's two parts to that question. Let me take your second part first. They can't afford not to care. They can't afford to have another world war on the doorstep of Europe. They are students of history. European leaders and their constituents know very well what World War II did to them and destroyed the entire continent. And they can't afford that, and they know they can't afford that. So they have to be proactive. And yes, they have limited resources. Their GMPs are all different. One country from another. I'll just go down a quick list that I pulled off here today. The United States from January 22 to May 31, 2023, we've contributed or have set aside $70.7 billion. The next in line is the EU, $35 billion. The United Kingdom at $10.74 billion. Germany at $10.68 billion. Japan, $6.6 billion. Japan is helping. I didn't know that. Canada, $5.27 billion. The Netherlands goes down to $4 billion. Norway, $2 billion. Denmark, almost $2 billion. Sweden, $1.8 billion. France, $1.47 billion. Come on, France, you can do better than that. And Italy, and I know Italy could do better, $1.34 billion have been contributed from January 2022 to May 31, 2023. Not bad. So if our $70 billion went away, could they increase there as a percentage of their GMP? Yeah, they're going to feel the pain on their economy. But the answer is yes. I think it will continue, and it would increase the Europeans would have to increase their contributions to Ukraine to keep them in the fight. Big question is if they didn't, and if we didn't, what would happen? You know, one of the things I noticed in looking at this is that Ukraine lives on a moment to moment basis. Like a cash basis. If they don't get weapons just in time, they're out of ammunition and their war effort is greatly jeopardized. So it's only a matter of weeks. There are some people that speculate that they're going to run out of gas very soon in the absence of American support and in the absence of European support replacing the American support. And all of a sudden, they won't have weapons to fight, and this is a war of weapons. More than men and women, it's a war of weapons, and it's a war of technology, which is expensive. And so, weary, what happens to the war effort if the Europeans don't belly up, as you suggest? Putin succeeds. He overruns Ukraine. He sets up his puppet governments. That in coordination with Belarus, and he'll take over all the satellite. Again, they become satellite nations of Russia with puppet dictatorships. And Putin is right where he wants to be as Peter the Great incarnated. You know, when this first started out, we all thought, and maybe Putin misled us to think, that he was only after Ukraine. But over the past few months, at first it appeared that he was after the Baltics, too. Estonia, Latvia, that matter, Poland, Lithuania, those places are really scared, because it's not just that he's looking at them and making face at them. He's actually doing things. He's hacking them. He's doing espionage on them. He's trying to turn people, turn public opinion with television messaging and social media messaging against their people. He's trying to have their people turn around and say, we should support Russia. And you know, after all this time, it seems like that does have an effect. But, you know, it seems to me that it's not just the Baltics. It's the Balkans. And that's most recently, you know, he owns, just as he owns Belarus, he owns Transnistria, which is on his border. He owns Moldova, which is just on the other side. He's active in Romania. He's looking at the Balkans, too. It's really interesting how he's trying to create the Warsaw Pact all over again and Russianize, communize all the countries that were there before. And you can see it now. You know, before it was not so visible. Now you can see it. And if I were living in any of those countries, I'd be terrified. If I were living in Western Europe, I'd be terrified. You're right. France and Italy, they're not really supplying enough support. So this is really a time of crisis because now, you know, the mask is off and we get to see what Putin wants and what he's doing under the hood. And let me go to another thing. Well, let me just mention something based on your comment. Look at the signs. Sometimes signs are a valid indicator of what's happening or what could happen. You've had a country that has been neutral for many, many years. It didn't want to stick their toes in the water about conflicts and Sweden and Finland now are going to be part of NATO or are not part of NATO. You have never really expected that. I mean, I'm sure Putin certainly didn't expect it and talking about blowing up in his face. I hope it all blows up in his face, but I'm not sure that it will because he's a busy boy. You know, he's trying to gain influence in all these countries as we have discussed before. He's distributing Russian flags all over Africa and it's making Russia a favorite for a lot of those sub-Saharan countries. Why? I don't know, but you can sell anything with propaganda. You can sell the Brooklyn Bridge. You can sell Russia's aggression. It's really remarkable and he's doing it in this country too. I am sure to a moral certainty that he is also using his internet research agency in Moscow using hacking techniques to work social media and convince people in the United States that Russia is really the good guy here. Well, I think what he does is he has special code language, if you will, like Donald Trump has. I mean, it's stochastic speech. It's implied speech, if you will, for a certain desired goal. And I think Putin communicates through stochastic propaganda speech to his loyal follower, Donald Trump, and then, of course, Donald Trump has his following. So you almost have a direct line from Putin to the MAGA GOP. Trump is the interpreter, if you will. That's my opinion, because whatever Trump says goes and whatever Putin was, Trump is more than happy to comply. Yeah, and what's worse is that the three big social media companies in this country, which are actually global, have all dropped off their monitoring systems. You know, formerly Twitter, X now, Elon Musk, they didn't have a monitor. He fired everybody. And you have Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, they're not doing monitoring anymore. Nobody is requiring them to do monitoring. And the same thing with Google. So, I mean, these, you know, mega corporations, billions and billions of dollars, they're letting it all in. And so you can make outrageous statements and conspiracy theories. You can say black is white and white is black and nobody will stop you. This is really extraordinary and it will lend, you know, lend fire to Putin's claims that he's spreading on American social media. But let me go to one other thing, and it's Joe Biden. You know, at the beginning of this, he was reluctant to send fighters to Ukraine. He was reluctant to do the things that Ukraine wanted him to do. In retrospect, that kind of reluctance really was not the right thing because Russia took advantage of it. And after all, they had attacked their neighbor. They were involved in, you know, Nazi-like aggression leading to World War II, you mentioned. The whole thing about the Blitzkrieg, that's what it was. That's what Putin was trying to do with Blitzkrieg. And we were not responding with the weapons that we needed. They were bothering, you know, all these institutional and residential and, you know, power play, I said, like, just flattening Ukraine. And Ukraine had no way to deal with that. Well, things are a little better now, but it does suggest that as an irony, just as you say in the case of Munich and Chamberlain, and we responded immediately with appropriate weapons of force and rhetoric, we'd be better off today, Putin wouldn't have gotten as far as he has gotten. There are people, and I keep thinking of Mark Hamlin, you know, of Star Wars, who collects money for drones. And some of that money must be going to drones that are very useful because drones have become much more weaponized than just surveillance these days. I keep thinking, you know, that maybe the Ukrainians have a chance. But what is ironic is that we probably could have done a better job had we got into this at the beginning. And you and I talked about it many times, and I don't know why Biden was so passive. Well, here's the irony of this whole thing is Biden was very slow to drag his feet. I suppose one of his rationale was that he didn't want to, you know, accelerate into a World War III. That's why he's been reluctant to give them long range missiles that can go into the Russia border. But you know, it's funny because his reluctance to give Ukraine what it needed right then and there plays into why interest to support Ukraine. One of the major issues is impatience on the American public. They're impatient. This thing is going on a lot longer. And remember, the expectations of the American public has been truncated, accelerated due to technologies. We're just not a patient nation anymore. We want to see the action and we want to see results faster than ever before. And we expect these things. So this dragging on of the Ukrainian war that Putin started is going on too long for Americans. Let me just back that up a little bit. The Brookings Institute came up with some information and some data. 26% back in the early days felt that Ukraine needed to be supported and would do so with one or two years. And all that's changed now. That's fallen down to 18%. Other things that cause interest here to change in Wayne is the GOP at 51% back in March of 2022 felt that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was a threat to the United States interest. That was March of 2022. Now, in adams at that time felt it was 50%. Now, that has fallen in January 2023. Now, this according to Pew Research. That number has fallen for the GOP down to 29%. So from 51 to 29. And the Democrats, believe it or not, have gone from 50% down to 38% that the invasion is a threat to US interests. Yeah, that reminds me that one of the people involved in the funding resolution that excluded aid to Ukraine was AOC. We can never forget that there are some people on the Democratic side of the aisle who don't like Ukraine either. I find that extraordinary that they can't get their act together and they don't see the global picture. Well, they see the finite picture, unfortunately. And what is that? You know, reports of corruption, certain high officials in Ukraine have attempted to, you know, take away with some of the money. These kind of stories don't help the national picture, the big picture. And that is supporting Ukraine is essential for a free Europe and eventually for the United States. Absolutely. And to add to that thought about AOC is that Jim Jordan is one of the front runners for the successor speaker. He's the worst possible choice. He's an idiot. That happened, Jay. Okay, I hope not because he doesn't like Ukraine either. Yeah, no, he doesn't. It won't happen because remember Danny Hasser, the speaker of the house, and he left the office in shame because he is a pedophile. Well, Jim Jordan was a wrestling coach and he had full knowledge that the doctor that was treating or looking at wrestlers, I think the University of Michigan, I may have that university wrong, he turned a blind eye to it. And this swap monster is going to come back to him and it's going to prevent him from becoming the speaker of the house. That's my prediction. He's up to his neck in that allegation and that debacle. That doesn't mean they would elect him, Tim. They elect the strangest people. I don't think they want a speaker of the house that could be a potential gave aid and comfort to a pedophile. I don't think that even for the mega deplorable GOP, I think that's beyond their reach. Well, some say the trope could never be elected as president because he's involved in, you know, four felony cases, four indictments. Who is to say whether that was the same? You got me on that one, Jay. I give up. Right. Well, maybe we all have to give up, but here. So, you know, the question is, what does Biden do now? This is an irony in the fact that he was passive before and now he's caught because there has emerged around him. May I use the term swamp of alligators who don't want him to give any aid to Ukraine? And so he's kind of stuck where he couldn't done it before. And he had the opportunity. He had the support. Just as you said, now he doesn't have the support. And, you know, I'm really not sure what Congress will do if this is placed wherely in front of them. You know, he has this idea that in the next 45 days, you know, before the next funding crisis, he will go to Congress and ask them for a special appropriation just for Ukraine. And I say, lots of luck, Joe. That's probably not going to happen. My guess is there isn't enough support in Congress to pass a bill like that. And it doesn't have the influence. So do you agree, by the way? No. Unfortunately, I don't agree with you on this point. Remember, the House of Representatives, the GOP wing of the House of Representatives, is controlled by the tail that wags the dog. And that tail consists of about 20 mega GOP. The rest of the Republicans, I don't believe they're mega. And their support for Ukraine is still high. I think that the Republicans on this particular issue will have bipartisan support, as it has in the previous votes. I mean, we're up to $70 billion worth of aid to Ukraine. That wasn't done by the Democrats alone. That was a bipartisan support to get those bills passed, that funding passed. So I don't think it's going to be any different. I think the Democrats will ask for a Republican bipartisan support. And I personally believe they'll get it. The unfortunate part with this last round was the Democrats had a made a decision between taking it out and having the government taking it out and have the government stay open or insist that the funding take place and shut the government down. And the Democrats didn't want to own that position. So now that that's been temporarily delayed for 45 days, I think what we'll see is some earnest across the aisle. Horse training, if you will, of positions and policies and whatever Congress does when they do their horse trading. And I think you'll see this bill passed for Ukraine. I don't know if it's going to be the high dollar amounts that we've seen in the past. I think probably the number will be reduced. But at least you're going to see continued support from the United States in a form of warfare and non-kinetic support for Ukraine's aid. Well, for all the reasons we've discussed, time is of the essence and Joe Biden ought to get on it. He's got to get a bill in there and he's got a lobby for that bill and he's got to count votes and make it happen. It's not by no means is it a guarantee. The other thing that I find most interesting and probably the largest irony in this whole affair is his intermove about giving Iranian weapons, including Iranian drones, which they're good at that, to Ukraine. Because somehow the United States has taken, achieved a stockpile of Iranian weapons, guns, ammunition and drums. And Joe Biden... Who asked the United States? The United States. And Joe Biden has control of that ammunition and guns and what have you. And he has the power to give it without congressional approval. He is the commander-in-chief. And so the next thing that he could consider is considering. He's considering and probably will do is give that stuff and the Iranians must be hopping up and down about this. Give that stuff to Ukraine. I'm not sure they use the same size of ammunition or whether they can use all this, but that was in a CNN interview this morning. I had no idea the United States had this cache of weaponry from. That's Iranian. I don't know how they did that. They did. Interesting. Well, it kind of reminds me of Franklin Delano Roosevelt when the United States was clearly locked in its isolationist mentality. And what did he do? He lent military equipment and he couldn't give... He couldn't ship the tanks directly from the United States to England, but he just crossed it across the border to Canada. Then Canada was the giver of the weaponry to England. So it was a weapon lease program. There's a formal name for it and it came out right now. Len Lease. Len Lease, yeah. And that seemed to at least keep England in the battle and from going under. And had it not been for Franklin to do that, I think world history, as we know, would have been different. We all probably be speaking Deutsch. Well, good for Roosevelt. It really made a huge difference to the Allies. It changed things as far as the, what do you want to call it, the leverage of the UK is concerned. And now this may be a significant move. And it is reminiscent. It does echo on Len Lease, except he would just give it to him. And the world would be encouraged by that. Suffice to say, this is all in play right now. It's fluid. Who knows what will happen in Congress? Who knows who the speaker will be and what he will do or she? Who knows how the Democratic Party will form up and the Republican Party to get weapons and money. You can't be sure of what would happen in 45 days in a Congress that is increasingly chaotic. And who knows what will happen in Europe? So it's a war of attrition and it's a war of divide your enemy. And so far I'm not impressed with the way we have prosecuted our end of it. But who knows, maybe this will somehow motivate us. Your final thoughts, Tim? My final thoughts is that President Biden needs to use the bully pulpit more effectively for two things. One is convince the American public that our pending election in 2024 is an issue of democracy, the continuation of the Republic and maintenance of the rule of law. That's one. Two is to make a clear distinction of the importance of supporting Ukraine, despite what Donald Trump wants and despite what the mega-GLP wants to follow of Trump's thoughts and make it almost an issue of national importance. He's not done a good enough job doing that. He's done okay, but he hasn't done good enough. And in my mind, that's what he needs to focus his energies on certainly in the next 45 days. We'll be watching him with our hearts and our throats. Thank you so much, Tim Epicella. This is Keeping the World Company on Think Tech, Allah.