 Hello, and welcome back to War Economy and State. This is the foreign policy podcast of the Mises Institute. I'm Ryan McMake, an executive editor with the Mises Institute. And with me, as always, is my co-host Zachary Yoast, one of our favorite foreign policy experts here at the Mises Institute. We're going to talk a bit this time about the state of NATO, the war in Ukraine, and a lot of related issues in terms of just how much is the U.S. obligated to enter World War Three if NATO requests it. And what are the impacts of that upon U.S. constitutional institutions? So let's just start off, I think, Zach, with some of the news items that really got a lot of play, at least in the people I follow. As usual, the mainstream media didn't really mention a whole lot. But if you pay any attention to foreign policy people, it was fairly important that they had this NATO meeting in Vilnius Lithuania recently. And it was the usual antics from Zelensky. Now, I would expect Zelensky to behave this way, right? It's a small, powerless country. So he just has to kind of like kick and yell and try and get attention for his country because his country spent the 30 years after freedom from the Soviet Union, basically just being corrupt and not doing any work and being poor. Because that's what they chose. And so they ended up being rather powerless. They also gave up their nukes. So even though they were located right next to Russia, they thought, hey, we don't need any. We don't need the most important defensive weapons imaginable. We'll just give those up. So now they're in bad shape. They trusted the West to protect them. They decided they didn't need to work on alliances with Russia in any way, but would instead go all in with NATO and just completely embrace the West and antagonize the Russians. And now the predictable result has come about. So they're in a position where they just basically need to beg and do everything they can to get to squeeze whatever they can out of NATO countries and their taxpayers. Now, I don't know if you actually agree with my little rant there, but that's my assessment of the situation. And so bring us up to date a little bit about what would you say? I mean, I guess I should summarize first, right? Zelensky goes to NATO. He he wants just unconditional support from NATO. He wants them to set out a timeline. And it just seemed that NATO is a lot more cautious about it than Zelensky wants them to be. And that also perhaps the NATO countries are realizing this war is proving to actually be somewhat expensive and it's not an easy quick victory. And so they're holding back and Zelensky doesn't like that at all. And so you're seeing missiles come out of Ukraine to accusing Americans who oppose the war in Ukraine of, quote, being traitors, whatever that means, not supporting a foreign country makes you a traitor. It's just weird what they're trying to, I guess, they think that pressures Americans somehow. So there's all sorts of weird dynamics in that. And I think that the the rhetoric out of Ukraine is becoming more and more shrill as it's becoming clear that they're not exactly on the verge of victory in Ukraine. It doesn't mean the Russians are on the verge of victory either, but this seems to be an issue. And so give us a few of the details then about what what the mood is at Vilnius, kind of what came out of it and what seems to be the relationship now between Ukraine and the people who are actually running NATO. Right. So, yeah, it's quite understandable. Why is Linsky and other Ukrainians are sort of doing what they're doing? I mean, I think sometimes they go a little too far and sort of coming across as sort of entitled ingrates, unfortunately. But it is understandable. And a historical parallel I look to is Charles de Gaulle. During World War II, he was always fighting with the British and Churchill has this funny quote that after de Gaulle stormed out of some meeting in a huff, Churchill was like, well, look at him. He's like, he acts like he's like stalling with 200 divisions behind his words when really if we cut him off, he'd be completely toast, you know. And then he's like, perhaps the last of a warrior race. I would not add that to Zelinsky, but I think it is, you know, from an incentive point of view, the Ukrainians are completely dependent on the West. The war would have would be over if we stopped supplying them aid. So it's understandable why they're upset. And so it became clear before the meeting officially started that, you know, obviously Ukraine would not be invited to NATO and they would not, you know, they weren't really going to get much. So Zelinsky sent off this sort of angry, annoyed tweet, just sort of like, you know, being mad about that, which again is understandable. And it actually infuriated a lot of people on the NATO side. There are articles from like anonymous sources saying that like Americans wanted to reduce the language that did come out even more because they were just so pissed off basically that Zelinsky was doing all this. In the end, the communique that was put forth was sort of a great example of bureaucratic nothing speak. It said, we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met, which means nothing. And the Ukrainians realize it means nothing. They did, NATO did say that Ukraine won't have to go through like this partnership program that lots of the other Eastern European countries had to go through, you know, whenever they're actually invited to join, which I suspect will be never. And there was sort of a symbolic picture that made its way around, which was like all of the NATO people, you know, leaders schmoozing it up on sort of like this outdoor stage area. And then Zelinsky was like standing there by himself and no one was looking at him. And so that was sort of interpreted by some as sort of a symbolism of what Ukraine is right now. I mean, people can't look Ukraine in the eyes because we're using Ukraine as sort of a meat shield. And I mean, Lindsey Graham was explicit about this. He basically told it to Zelinsky's face when he was in Ukraine. He was like, oh, it's such a great deal for America that the Ukrainians are killing Russians. Which the other half of that is that Ukrainians are dying instead of Americans. So it's sort of like, thanks, cannon fodder. So I mean, I think this whole war, I mean, from the beginning, I've said, I don't think it's an America's national interest. And it gets even worse in that it's not, you know, in my view, nothing is being accomplished here. I mean, if Russia was some super dangerous threat, then I might be amenable to, you know, using other people rather than Americans. But I don't think that's even close to being the case. And in a way, for those of us who want to avoid World War Three, I think that the summit was a bit of a cause for optimism in that it sort of indicated that the West is not prepared to, like, double down and make the choices that would be necessary to prop Ukraine up for ultimate victory. And we can talk about the state of the supposed counteroffensive. And we can also talk about the extreme disparity in the current capacity the West has versus Russia for waging, basically, a World War One style of attrition, World War One style war of attrition, which is what the war has turned into. So, well, let's talk about the counteroffensive, quote unquote, which is really just, you know, just more death and destruction all around, not doesn't move the conflicts toward an end at all. And I mean, just while you were talking there about Lindsey Graham, I mean, who needs the blackest of black comedy when you've got this conflict? I mean, just the cynicism that we get from American policymakers, and I'm sure from Russian policymakers too, but that's not my country. So I don't have to pay as much attention to those people. It's just so, so morally, what's the word, depraved even, just the way the Ukrainians are being used here. And I mean, one example of this is the supposed counteroffensive. We were told it's going to be fabulously successful. The Americans were going to send them some weapons, and they were just going to beat back the Russians. But if you've been paying any attention to the locations of the front lines in these wars or in these, in these areas of Eastern Ukraine, there's very little going on. This is this is the French front. This is the Western front, World War One type of stuff where it's just endless churn, artillery, and very little movement on either side. And we talked about this a little bit in our episode from May, when we looked at the the Pentagon leaks that came out back then and how they were already expressing back then a complete lack of confidence that the counteroffensive would go anywhere. And all it's really accomplished is using up lots of American and European weapons without really moving the lines at all, propelling the war to an end. And it's just it's just ongoing. And I think the more this happens and the more you announce some great, glorious counteroffensive well ahead of time, which of course they do is an attempt to drum up support. It's just going to demoralize I think NATO leaders even more so. And at some point it's just going to be okay, what's what's the point here. And it's clear it's already been established that Russia is not going to have an easy time getting past the river there. So it's it's not a matter of the very existence of Ukraine at this point. It's really just a matter of how much of these Russian areas, these areas with a high degree of ethnic Russian population are going to end up back in Russia. I mean, it wasn't, it was only two months ago that we were being told that Ukraine was going to take back Crimea any day now. And I mean, that is so obviously not going to happen. Yeah, they might manage to screw up that bridge a few more times between the mainland and Crimea. But okay, that's that's not how wars are won. So the whole thing is just very, I think, demoralizing for NATO and really just illustrating the fact that this is not going to be what they imagined it to be, which was just some easy victory put Russia in its place. That's just not what we're looking at for the next 10 years. So I did notice that the US was trotting out. I think it was General Milley saying, Oh, yeah, there's been many successes have been obtained through the counter offensive and things are all just going perfectly according to plan. And that's apparently the administration's line. But it I mean, we had an episode six months ago titled Ukraine is not winning and neither is Russia. And that just seems to be there doesn't seem to be much that's changed since then. Yes. So back when we talked about the Pentagon leaks, we discussed how the leaks went into detail about the state of the nine Ukrainian brigades that the that NATO was training for the purposes of this counter offensive. And we at the time remarked how they're going to get like two months of training. And lots of these brigades don't even have all the equipment from the West yet. They're very under equipped, etc, etc. And at the time, I said that, you know, we're sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel here to equip these units. And we don't need the US policymakers don't even, you know, they admitted they don't think it's going to succeed. So then what comes next? What's the point of all this? And it seems that that's playing out now. The offensive has been going on for weeks. And really nothing has been accomplished. I mean, you know, random villages that are sort of in the gray zone keep switching sides, but nothing of strategic consequences happened. And lots of this equipment, which we can't really replace has been trashed. Ukraine admitted like in the first week of the offensive, they lost like 20% of the equipment we gave them. You can find tons of videos online of leopard tanks, which weird people online were obsessing about. There's sort of these cycles of obsessing about random technology. This random technology will prove the breakthrough, you know, and save Ukraine and win the war. It's never happened yet. I mean, there's leopard tanks blown up all over the front now. And so many Bradley's too. And so nothing's really been accomplished. There is rumblings. I mean, there's so many things reported that it's sort of hard to like until it happens. I'm, you know, suspicious, but Ukraine itself has reported that there's basically a buildup of 100,000 Russian troops sort of on the what might be called Northern Front to sort of what could be a counter offensive against sort of the Kharkiv region, which Russia had sort of moved in when the war started. Then they just sort of abandoned it, slash were pushed out because they had barely any troops there. And then they called up the reserves and whatnot when they're like, oh, gee, we can't win this industrial war by, you know, just technology alone. So we'll see if that happens. And I think that's a good sort of next thing to discuss is this style of warfare, because it like sort of the war on terror was quite a high tech war. Lots of air power, you know, our enemies were, you know, the height of their technical sophistication was driving around on a Toyota, shoot, I'm forgetting the name, there's a Toyota truck that all of the rebel groups in the world use with a machine gun mounted on the back. That's not, of course, an F-16 could blow that up. We could have F-16s and TAC helicopters and whatnot flying all over the place without really worrying they'd be shot down, things like that. Well, and it seems the Russians also made this mistake some as well about thinking what the future of war is going to look like, that it's going to be this high tech stuff. And we can see this in our extremely capital intensive war industries production process. I mean, we're building about 150 F-35s every year. I mean, that's not a lot of fighters. And if there were to be like a war reminiscent of World War II or something where like dozens of aircraft are lost every day, obviously that would not be sustainable. So Russia seems to be moving into this sort of industrial wartime footing. In John Meersheimer's words, Russia's domestic armaments industries designed to fight World War I. And it looks like this is sort of a World War I style conflict. So that's of great benefit to them. And there's a really great report that I recommend everyone read. We'll put it in the show notes. It's from the Royal United Service Institute, which is a British think tank. It's called Meat Grinder. Russian tactics in the second year of its invasion of Ukraine. And it's chock full of interesting information, including that the Russians apparently hold probably the world record for the longest ground to air shoot down of an aircraft, things like that. But what is shocking is that Russia's domestic armaments industry can produce 2.5 million artillery rounds a year. This is 152 millimeters. And as we discussed when that CSIS report came out in January, currently the US can produce like 93,000 rounds of 155 millimeter artillery rounds. And when we reach accelerated production, we'll be able to produce 240,000 rounds a year. So we can produce a tenth of what Russia can produce. This doesn't count Russian imports from Iran and North Korea. And on top of this, sort of going back to the NATO summit of why the West is not really interested in doubling down here, despite all of the moral posturing, a report came out. It was like broken by a German media outlet. And then it's been reported in English. But supposedly Germany had 20,000 rounds of artillery left in its arsenal. That's it. That's less than one day of what Russia fires in the current war. I mean, I can't even believe it. It's sort of crazy to think that. And there's talk of increasing American artillery production to like 90,000 rounds a month, which is a huge increase from where we're at now, but not anywhere capable of matching the Russian rate of fire. That Russi report I mentioned estimates that Russia fired 12 million rounds of artillery last year. Well, in the first year of the war. No, no, just calendar year 2022. And this year they expect to fire 7 million rounds. So a big decrease, because they're burning through all of the old Soviet stocks from the 70s. But still, it's a massive, massive disproportion. I mean, most of the casualties in World War One were from artillery. And there have been some Americans who have been complaining, like American military leaders, like we trained these Ukrainians in the Western tactics way of fighting, you know, they need to be aggressive and storm the Russian lines and get up in there. And instead, they're falling back into the old Soviet tactics, which it's worth pointing out, like all of the Ukrainian military leadership were in the Soviet military, all these old guys, of just bombing the heck out of the other side with artillery. And one of the Ukrainian military advisors was like, well, why don't they come here and they can do it themselves was his response. So it's my view, and we can go into this more at length, John Mirsheimer sort of lays it out quite well from a sort of war of attrition standpoint. It is my view that in the long run, assuming, you know, futures radically uncertain, this is more of a sort of expectation than an ironclad prediction. But Ukraine is going to be ground down by superior Russian logistics and population, and specifically the huge imbalance of artillery. And we'll probably, over the next seven, I mean, it's going to take a long time, tens of thousands more people will probably be killed. But Russia will probably grind away and capture, you know, what's called Nova Rusya, basically Odessa, Kharkiv, sort of get to the Dnipro River. That's my expectation. Of course, things could change. But and the end result is Ukraine will exist as a completely dysfunctional rump state that could never join NATO or the EU. And John Mirsheimer predicted all this in 2014. So it's very depressing about how just pointless this whole conflict is. Yeah, I mean, when you're in that part of the world, a lot of the time, the people who favor the war, they think that we're like naive about Russia. And that we think Russia is just a friendly, wonderful country. And we just don't realize the implacable enemy here. Actually, we're the ones who are saying, gee, the Ukrainians should find a way to live in peace with this gigantic country right next to them. And it was the Americans who were goading them into all sorts of anti Russian movements within their own government, and just trying to blatantly favor the West over any reproachment with Russia. And that's what caused a lot of the problems. It's not about pandering Russia. It's just about realizing the realities of being next to a local regional hegemon. But you mentioned that you're allegedly pro Putin or something just by recognizing the realities that that are at play here. I mean, if you're next to China, should you spend all your time antagonizing China? I mean, not even Japan does that. And Japan has all sorts of defense guarantees. So I mean, Japan wants to play nicer with China than Ukraine ever wanted to play nice with Russia, which is just insane. So that's that's just been a faulty reality all along that Ukraine has thought it could create. And it didn't work out. And the US didn't anticipate I think the realities of this war at all as you note the phrase that the US was, I think, doubling down on was over the horizon warfare. And that was that was this whole thing about how well we don't need any troops really in theater. Well, we can just send Tomahawk missiles over the horizon. We can send bombers. And we can just I mean, they would just outright say like, Biden says we can we've developed over the horizon capability that we can keep our eyes on and defend ourselves from any direct threats to the United States, which of course is true, right? If you're actually talking about defensive warfare, if you're talking about defending North America, which Biden is not, then yeah, that's all you need over the horizon is plenty. You've got a Navy there. You've got high tech weapons that could disable any attempt at any sort of invasion of North America. But of course, when they say direct threats to the US, they mean any myriad of things that go on an endless list of vaguely defined US interests in other regions. But it's clear from this that that's not sufficient. If you're actually going to try and do a US power projection into Central Asia, it seems that you're going to hit a wall when you finally start to encounter actual warfare, and that you're either going to need to use foreigners to die for you in large numbers, or you're going to need to actually mobilize your own country that is the United States and start producing huge amounts of armaments, which apparently they're not willing to do at this point. I mean, you could just that would just suck capital out of the economy and destroy economic growth in any meaningful sense, even more so. And it seems the Americans just aren't willing to do that. So the age, I mean, you can go back and look at commentary on over the horizon stuff back in even before the Ukraine war. And there was a lot of doubt even then at its ability to really accomplish all these lofty goals that the White House and the Pentagon had for basically global war everywhere for the United States to intervene on every continent whenever it felt like. And over the horizon sounds great politically, but apparently isn't all that actually effective in terms of dealing with anything, but some dirt poor third world country like Iraq. So seems to be a failed vision for the US military right there and counter offensive not doing well. And so we're kind of up in the air here. It seems that now we're now facing talk about, well, gee, let's, let's just escalate and see what happens. And we've seen a couple of ways that that's been happening. One has been, well, let's just, let's talk about using F-16s more in Eastern Europe and see, see what that means. Now, these are airplanes that could carry nuclear arms. And so that could be perceived as a nuclear threat. Hopefully that will restrain the US somewhat in the use of these, these weapons. And now there's the use of cluster bombs that the US has suddenly decided is okay. Even though we were told 18 months ago that the use of cluster bombs is a war crime because the Russians were doing it, but now apparently using cluster bombs is fine, as long as the Ukrainians are the ones using it, which actually it would be fine to just say that. I mean, not fine in the sense of I would be fine with it, but you could at least see how it would be pretty standard military talk to say, well, they shouldn't use cluster bombs and they forced us to use cluster bombs. But all the self righteousness about how anyone uses cluster bombs is, is a war criminal. And then just forget all that, all that stuff we said about cluster bombs, that doesn't count. And by the way, the US would never use cluster bombs against civilians, which of course is a proven lie. So you could just see how the goalposts are being constantly moved as victory remains far off and how the US continues to embrace these moves that are really escalations in the war from the US side. And so then we're left with G say that this does lead to war and some sort of incursion into a NATO country, is the US then just automatically required to go to war for NATO. And we touched on this briefly before long ago last year sometime, where it's debatable that this treaty with NATO just means the US it's a push button war, right? Oh, NATO country invaded US is at war now. Rand Paul tried to bring this up by noting, hey, you know, the constitution says that the Senate has to be involved in foreign policy decisions. And maybe there needs to be a congressional vote and some sort of declaration of war before the US enters into World War Three. And he tried to basically pass some legislation along those lines in the Senate and it failed. And that that's fairly alarming that so many senators want to commit the US to war without any sort of debate or any sort of actual approval from the elected representative bodies of Congress that are supposed to have the last word in foreign policy. So it seems that this is just another excuse for the regime to tie down the US into another war which could be triggered at any time and they don't want to trouble themselves with any sort of debate or constitutional matters whatsoever. Right. Yeah. And the Rand Paul's point is completely well established within the historical record. You can go back because the first sort of alliance where this was discussed was not NATO. NATO came afterwards. It was the Rio treaty, which is the only alliance I approve of, a standing alliance, which is basically it was the US and most of the Western Hemisphere. Mexico left in 2002, which I consider unfortunate. But it also contains sort of an attack on one as an attack against all provision. And the US Congress at the time had all these hearings clearly establishing that when they signed off on this, it did not mean that someone invoked that their attack were automatically a war. It does not supersede Congress. That's all perfectly well established. Now, I wanted to touch on a few points you brought up regarding the cluster bombs. The whole reason we're sending these cluster munitions is because we cannot, we're out of regular artillery shells to send. We're sort of at the stage of the war. We said in two episodes ago or whatever it was that we're scraping the bottom of the barrel to outfit this counteroffensive. And Biden himself admitted when he was interviewed like, why are we sending these cluster bombs? Well, we don't have enough artillery ammunition to send them. So it's sort of we're just finding whatever we can in the back of the cupboard. And I, because I don't think we should be sending any military aid to Ukraine, of course, don't support sending cluster munitions. But I will point out that in my estimation, these cluster munitions are not going to really be adding too much to the balance of postwar suffering that Ukraine, or what will probably be former areas of Ukraine when the war is over, is going to experience. Both Ukraine and Russia and the US are not signatories to the Ottawa Convention, I think it's called, which bans anti-personnel landmines. Now, both Ukraine and Russia had huge stockpiles of what are called PFM-1 anti-personnel mines. They're also called butterfly mines. They're really small and they're plastic, and they're basically deployed via airburst artillery rounds or they're dropped from aircraft. And they're called butterfly rounds because they're they're sort of like maple seeds that sort of twirl around. They're small, they're plastic, I mean they're, so many kids are going to be killed by these mines. And it's well established that both Russia and Ukraine are using these mines. The whole front is littered with mines. There's been a huge impediment to the counter-offensive as vehicles are just running over mines left and right. And so that is just something to be aware of is that the whole place is already mined a heck. And these cluster munitions certainly going to kill lots of civilians in the postwar, but probably not nearly as much as the mines Ukraine and Russia are already using. And on the point of the sort of over horizon capability, I was stunned when I learned this, but NATO requires, well it has this, you know, really aspirational goal that all of its members stockpile enough arms and munitions for one month of high intensity warfare. And this I discovered in the context of Germany is 20,000 rounds of artillery left, which isn't enough for one day of warfare in Ukraine. So it's, and it's like Germany is hoping to meet this goal by like 2032 or something. So no one, I mean it's sort of, you know, in Austrian economics we talk about demonstrated preference. The demonstrated preference of the West as a whole, including the United States is not adopting the sort of industrial footing necessary to wage a war that would, what a war with Russia would require. So on the one hand I think that's good. On the other hand, if such a war were to break out, it would be quite a disaster for, I mean, everyone. Not that Russia would be blitzkrieging across Europe, but it'd just be a series of disasters for the U.S. And as you said, changing the U.S. economy, I mean I have no doubt in the long run the U.S. would likely triumph just because we're so wealthy. We have such a huge industrial capacity, but it's not like you can go from producing, you know, random junk that they sell at the dollar store to producing artillery shells in a month. I mean we already have a huge shortage of industrial workers, die makers, that sort of thing. So yeah, it's, that aspect is also worrisome. But it's sort of just why I don't think Ukraine will be able to sustain the war indefinitely. I mean, eventually it's going to be slow, grinding, lots of people will be killed, but Russia has the capacity to fight this war, and Ukraine does not. Well, and I think it's just really time to admit that a lot of those myths that we had from the early days of the war are just wrong, right? I mean we could go down the whole list. If the U.S. will just arm Ukraine, it'll all be over in no time at all. It was in early contention, right? The Russians will cut and run. It was the same sort of myths that the like used to tell the losing sides in centuries past. Like the Confederates who would never had a chance of winning that war, at least not with the methods they employed. If they'd used guerrilla warfare, they might have had a chance, but they insisted on these pitched battles and open warfare. So there was no way you were going to win that against the better equipped north. But what they told themselves... They had a pro-industrial base, and they found early industrial war. Exactly. Yeah, one of perhaps one of the first proto-industrial wars, and they just didn't have the base for it. So they told themselves that one Confederate volunteer was as good as five Yankee higher-ups. Right? Well, that's just not true. Are you as good as 10 industrially produced Northern cannon? Probably not. So that just seems to be an issue here, is that the will to win... I recently saw that from Zelensky. Our will to win is so great that we will triumph. Well, will to win doesn't really mean anything. Positive thinking doesn't get you far. Right. This is one of the three factors that Mirsheimer lays out in a war of attrition. There's the balance of artillery, the balance of resolve, and the balance of population. And I highly recommend everyone read Mirsheimer's first book, Conventional Deterrence. Because unlike so many highfalutin thinkers, Mirsheimer has studied and is familiar with sort of the more mundane aspects of fighting a war, not just, oh, the U.S. is great, so we can win. So let's look at balance of population. I've... let's see, I have it here. It's a big difference, as soon as that... Yeah. Mirsheimer estimates that before the war started, there were 3.5 Russians for every Ukrainian. And in that figure, he counts all the people in Donbas who are fighting a civil war against Ukraine. So he says at this point now that 9 million Ukrainians or so have left Ukraine, he estimates there are 5 Russians for every Ukrainian. And also, about 3 million of those Ukrainians who left Ukraine went to Russia for speaking to the sort of fraternal nature of the war. Then let's look at the balance of artillery, which is not surprising at all. We've already talked about, you know, the Russians can produce 2.5 million shouts a year in addition to the, you know, vast Soviet stockpiles, whereas the West is basically the covered spare. So the range is basically Russia outguns Ukraine 5 to 10 to 1. 5 or 10 to 1 in that range, which is just enormous. So whenever you hear, like, oh, the Russians are losing so many more men than Ukraine, just not pass the common sense test at all. I mean, people are like, oh, the Russians are using human wave tactics. It's like, there's this is the most recorded war in human history thus far. Do we have any videos of, you know, hundreds of Russians running across the mine littered field? No, we don't. And then we get to the balance of resolve, which is sort of equally matched. I mean, people, if you take the standard line of Putin initiated this war because he's Hitler incarnate and an evil despot who just wants to conquer somewhere like a comic book villain, then okay. But if you think, you know, sort of through a realist framework, Russia had reasons to initiate this war. If it considers the situation an existential threat. So Russia is willing to face huge casualties. And Ukraine, obviously, the war is an existential threat. So sure, they're motivated, although they still need to press gang people and drag them off the street to, you know, be sent to the front as cannon fodder. But let's look at the history of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union faced an existential threat in World War II, they sustained 27 million deaths and kept on humming along. I mean, we cannot, Matt, like, I cannot wrap my mind around that. 27 million people killed. I mean, I mean, perhaps China during the, it's escaping my name, the sort of crazy religious war with that sort of heretical Christian sect. The Taiping rebellion? Yes, the Taiping rebellion, where some estimates of like 90 million people were killed. I mean, it's just hard to imagine that many people die. And so if you think Russia is in this for, you know, fun, then, of course, it's like, of course, the Ukrainians have much more will. But if you think Russia is fighting this war, because people in the West openly talk about initiating regime change in Russia, trying Putin for war crimes, and there's talk of breaking Russia up. I mean, it's still sort of fringe, but there was some U.S. government, you know, bureaucracy that ran a panel on like decolonizing Russia. And the former head of foreign policy at Heritage, who's now at Hudson, has like a short paper on like, well, yeah, we can break Russia up. I mean, this is obviously an existential war for the Russian state's continued existence. So there, it's like... In their minds, it's obviously a war for... Right, yeah. I mean, the perception is clearly there, right? You could agree with it or not agree with it. Right, yeah. It doesn't matter if you think that Russia's actually existentially threatens, it matters that they think they are. Right. And so it, I think it's sort of our cheapskate American thoughts on war, you know, as we're talking about over the horizon. War, we recognize is super expensive. So we can't imagine people be willing to double down for sort of a World War I style war of attrition, but obviously they are. So we have to face that reality. And the sooner we sort of cut a deal, the better things will be for everyone, but especially for Ukraine, which is probably, you know, at this point, whatever's left of Ukraine is going to be very poor, very dysfunctional, and, you know, not getting into NATO or the EU anytime soon. Yeah, the whole view of war among Americans is just so completely different from what Russians are. I mean, not even we with all of our jingoism have named World War II the Great Patriotic War. I mean, that's the view of World War II. I mean, you think we have our good war. I mean, boy, this is a war where they sustained, as you said, dozens of millions of deaths and just kept going. And it's all just seen as necessary and good in that they defeated the Nazis. So the idea that Americans would sustain that sort of thing, those sorts of percentages is really, I mean, in my mind, said if I was in Russia or this country just decided, hey, we're going to send you into the meat grinder to defend the glory of America in some borderland that is a thousand miles from your home. I'd be like, bye. I mean, I'm out of there. But that's not everybody thinks that way in the world. And so, yeah, Russians have a certain view, a certain resolve. And you have to look at their view of that corner of the world. It's like when the U.S. tried to defeat the British during the Napoleonic Wars with an embargo. And they're like, oh, this will make the British do what we want because we'll embargo all of their stuff. And the British are like, hey, we're facing an existential threat from Napoleon. We couldn't care less about your embargo. That's not going to change our thoughts on anything. And whether they actually did face an existential threat from Napoleon is immaterial. The fact is that they had this huge resolve because they saw it that way. And so American efforts just had no effect whatsoever in trying to bring the British to the negotiating table. So these are just things you have to be aware of. And yeah, the will to victory, I just don't think it's any greater with the Ukrainians than the Russians. And you can say the Russians are wrong and we hate them, and they're stupid and Russian nationalism is out of control, but it's there. And it's a motivating factor. And you just have to recognize that it's something that's going on. And so I think that, however, is going to keep the war going. At the same time, though, it's clear that the defensive side of the war from the American perspective is a lot better than what the anti-Russian people were telling us, right, that, oh, the Russians are going to be rolling through Poland and Austria, and they're going to be reestablishing the old Soviet Union. It's blatantly obvious that that is just not going to happen and that the Russians don't have anywhere near the capability of doing that sort of thing. And the fact that they're not trying to hold on to any area that doesn't have a sizable ethnic Russian minority or majority right now. So conquering Poland just isn't in the cards. And I don't hear it as much, but you still hear it a little bit, that unless American taxpayers keep arming the Ukrainians, the Russians are just going to keep going. But it's difficult to see how that was ever even possible without U.S. intervention, because they would have needed forces to occupy. They would have needed offensive weapons to keep pushing forward when it just doesn't seem that the Russian military is equipped for that whatsoever. Their over-the-rise capability isn't really much at all. They're really well suited to this sort of boots-on-the-ground situation. So no threat to the U.S. It's just, it's clearly no threat to Europe beyond central Ukraine. And yet it just, we're continue to be told by the administration that this is just going to have to go on for 10 years. And a lot of both Russians and Ukrainians are going to die in the process. Yeah, it is odd that people seem to have sort of like a bifurcated brain. On the one hand, Ukraine's all that's keeping Russia from marching down into Paris. And on the other hand, Russia is so incompetent and their soldiers are fighting with shovels because they don't have guns that, of course, Ukraine will easily roll through, recapture Crimea, and Russia won't use nukes in any of this. So it's sort of a very unserious, Robert Nisbet has a good quote that American foreign policy has always been very moralistic. And I mean, we obviously see that here. And I think part of that is because America's never really been invaded. In the war of 1812, oh, they burned the White House down. We've not actually like been invaded. And I think it has skewed our perspective so much. It's a, you know, a blessing we're so safe. But it's also a curse in that people have very unrealistic expectations of what can be done in the world. I mean, in contrast, Soviet Union, 27 million dead. And I mean, personally, Putin, his older brother died in the stage of Leningrad. He was like a child who starved to death. And I think he lost like five of his six uncles in the war. I mean, can any American compare to that who's not a refugee from some war-torn hellhole? I don't think so. So I think it'd be beneficial if people could, and this is one of realism's strong points, is trying to step into the shoes of the other side. This doesn't mean morally endorsing whatever they're doing. But if you can see things from the other side's perspective, rather than sort of approaching with this sort of moral, righteous, like self-righteousness of, you know, the world is really simple. We're the good guys. They're the bad guys. They must be crushed in histories on our side is sort of, I think, would be beneficial for everyone. Well, when that all work doesn't fails to work out, like in Vietnam, then you just pretend it never happened. And you never said those things. That seems to be, I mean, the fact that the internet is forever has not restrained anybody. It seems from just making wild predictions and claims and knowing that it will be, you can reference it and find it 20 years from now. Nobody seems to care. I guess it's the reality TV effect. Just say outlandish, ultra-confident things endlessly, no matter how wrong you are. And then when you're proven wrong, you just move on to the next outrageous prediction. I guess that's certainly not limited to foreign policy. I think it's the volume effect. There's just so much stuff produced on the internet. I mean, I would not envy a researcher in 200 years, I mean, if any of the internet I mean, we say everything will be on the internet forever. I'm curious how true that is in the really long run, but I wouldn't want to have to be sorting through like comments and takes even things in newspapers from this time period because there's so many. I mean, we didn't even talk about the so-called attempted coup because I mean, it's all news now. I did an interview and I said, in a few weeks, most people have forgotten this happens because the news cycle is so fast that it's, I mean, things that happened in February of this year, that might as well be medieval history. Yeah, remember the coup that was going to happen in Russia? Yeah, you're right. We've completely moved on. There's no mentions of it at all and no recriminations, no analysis of what it meant. What can we learn from it? No time. We've just got to get on to the next thing. So that's where we are. Well, there were hot takes the minute it happened of like what it meant, but I would say events since they have proven most of the in-the-moment analysis wrong and yeah, people don't seem too interested. And I mean, I still don't really know what has exactly transpired there, but. Well, that might be good for a future episode if we could figure out some of the interesting facts and right answers. Well, and next time in the future, we also have to talk about recruitment issues with the military. There's a few things I think we could still talk about here. And so, yeah, let's wrap up this episode of War Economy and Stay. We will be back next month with a new episode. So thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.