 Welcome back to War Economy and State. This is the Mises Institute's Foreign Policy and International Relations podcast. Well, it's March 2024, so that means we're just about two years in to the latest phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Now, as we've noted here more than once, the current war really started in 2014 when ethnic Russian separatists announced that they wanted to take, they wanted to split off parts of Eastern Ukraine and at least be nominally independent or just outright return to Russia. And this also is when Ukraine was annexed by Russia as well. And Ukraine's been in a state of war since then. But most Americans are probably under the impression that the war didn't really begin until 2022, February 2022, when the Russians launched what was essentially a full-scale invasion, I think in its very, very initial phase, at least what was manageable in terms of the resources they had at the time. Perhaps there was an aborted attempt to just decapitate the regime. That's still unclear to me if that was the actual intent. But what has become clear in the last two years is that Russia has every intent of, they're holding on to Crimea. They're not letting that go as well as the southeastern part of the country, which includes places like the Donbass, but also the, essentially what's often called the land bridge from the Donbass over to Ukraine or over to Crimea. So Crimea can be accessed by Russia from two places, from an overland route through southeastern Ukraine, and then also across the Kerch bridge from southwestern Russia down there east, just slightly east of Ukraine across a small, small strait. So this is all then part of a larger Russian effort to maintain total control of the Sea of Azov, access to more of the Black Sea. There are lots of issues here that rarely get mentioned. It's mostly just thought of in terms of, hey, the Russians want to conquer Ukraine. There are a lot of maritime issues here as well as well as larger trade issues through the Eastern Black Sea and the Sea of Azov as well. So the Russians are highly, highly motivated to hold on to all of this. And what's interesting now is that in spite of just a few months ago, the American and NATO regime line still being that, oh, any day now, the Ukrainians are going to launch a new offensive and regain Crimea and tons of new territory. They have apparently just given up on that. So what we find here is that just last week reports about a speech by Jake Sullivan, US National Security Advisor. He talked about how, what the conditions are for peace and victory in Ukraine. And notably, he did not mention that it involved Ukraine reclaiming any of these lost territories. And that, of course, had been the orthodox line for quite some time. Oh, the war will only be over after Ukraine gets all of its territories back. Well, the US State Department is done with that. According to a European PROVDA, it's provda.com.ua. That's just where I happen to see the story, although it certainly carried other places. The headline is, Biden's advisor did not mention regaining territories when talking about conditions for Ukraine's victory. So other people noticed, too, obviously. And what does he say? Sullivan says, I said that Ukraine must win today. What does it mean? It means that Ukraine will come out of this war sovereign, independent, free, and able to deter future aggression with a strong dynamic democracy, et cetera, et cetera. So now the conditions for Ukraine victory are simply mean that some part of Ukraine continues to be a country and a sovereign country that's able to deter future aggression. That's a big difference from what we were told six months or a year ago in terms of what Ukraine victory must mean. And also that no negotiation would be possible. It seems that this is the intermediate step on the way to finally accepting negotiations, because in the past, the line had been, no negotiations will be possible until Russia agrees to give everything back. So, Zach, there's this. There's also a lot more going on that you're going to talk about. But just starting with this, how would you assess the current state of the war in Ukraine in terms of prospects for both sides? Oh, boy. Well, things are bad for Ukraine and getting worse basically every week. Things are improving for Russia. A very notable event occurred recently, which was the Ukrainian retreat from the city of Advidka, or however it said, which basically was one of the most fortified Ukrainian positions on the 1,000 kilometer long line of contact, because this position was on the front line way back starting in 2014. So, that's why it's been so heavily fortified. And the Russians drove out the Ukrainians rather quickly, especially relative to the ginormous slugfest at Bakhmut that went on for months and months and months with the Wagner-Logner mercenary group. That wasn't even the Russian army fighting. It was this now defunct Wagner group, mostly defunct. So, the fact that Russia was able to drive the Ukrainians out in rather short order does not bode well for the expected large-scale Russian offensive that could be happening in the months to come. So, and this point is recognized by military officials in the West. There was French publication accessed a bunch of French military documents, and these documents openly acknowledged this point of like, oh gee, we weren't expecting Advidka to fall so quickly. We're now questioning the Ukrainian's military's ability to stop a breakthrough. And they're like, this could be really bad if Russia attacks like and launches a major offensive. So, people in the West are accepting what you and I have been saying for quite a while that in the long run things aren't looking good for Ukraine, which has now led to some disturbing comments by leaders, most notably Macron of France, that maybe NATO should start putting troops in a non-combatant role in the Ukrainian rear to support them. And so that's of course concerning. And this has been echoed by other leaders, I believe the president of Czechia, a minister in the Polish government, and various Baltic leaders who are gung-ho about kicking off World War III for whatever reason. Well, hey, remember, you mentioned the Wagner group. Remember how Wagner group was going to launch a civil war in Russia and the Putin regime was going to fall? I mean, this just shows how many different narratives have come down to us and all just, it's all amounted to nothing about the many times we've been told that the regime in Russia was about to fall. So, if you can remember, way back to June 2023, this was the Wagner group rebellion where they were mad at the regime for some reason, the Wagner people. I mean, the reasoning barely even matters, right? Because they all, they retreat from their position in Ukraine. They go back to Rostov-on-Don down by the Sea of Azov and then they start marching to Moscow to achieve their goals. And this was all over the American news. Oh, look, look at how they're marching north. They're only a few hours now from Moscow. The Putin regime will fall. And then the whole thing just fizzled out to nothing. And you never heard anything about it again. And then, of course, a few months later, Putin wins his 85% victory, which people need to stop pretending that Putin is unpopular in Russia. Let's say even that the 85% is fake, right? That it's 20% off, 30% off. Well, the guy clearly has a nice base of support somewhere in the country, even if it was just a 50-50 sort of thing. So the idea that the guy's terribly unpopular and everybody's just groaning under the demands of the war, this apparently is not the issue in Russia. And you've got to think more like a Russian nationalist and less like the Russian dissidents who you hear on the international media or who you meet in real life, right? Keep in mind, folks, that the Europeans you meet in America or at your university, these are expats, essentially. These are not typical Russians. And it's true in the reverse, right? Say you spent your whole life meeting Americans, but the only Americans you met were Americans who were living in Europe or were on some sort of like semester abroad program hanging out in Paris. Well, that's not a typical American. And those people are going to have certain ideological views that may have not. There are not many Trump supporters hanging out in Paris. Well, that's a good point, right? If you went around and were like, I've never met a Trump supporter and I've met dozens or hundreds of Americans in my time living in Paris slash Madrid slash London. Yeah, there's a reason you don't meet a lot of Trump supporters who are in graduate school in London. That's just not the base of his support. So you need to keep that sort of thing in mind. And so in spite of all of these productions we've had of the Russian regime collapsing, it hasn't happened. The the front lines, if you look at the maps, if you just regularly visit the maps of the military situation in Ukraine, it is very slow moving, but it's clear that it's moving in a bad direction for Ukraine that as if there's any chipping away any movement on the front line, it's westward or northward from the current Russian lines. And all of these predictions about new Ukrainian offensives, it's just none of it ever seems to materialize. And so I suppose then that's what's fueling a lot of this discussion now in the west about, okay, well, we just need to get some boots on the ground in Ukraine and that will somehow reverse the situation or we need to get some more weapons to Ukraine. Now they've been saying that from the very beginning, but it never seems to actually change the situation as I suppose the French military personnel have noted in their document. Yes. And also the German military personnel, people might recall there was an embarrassing leaked sort of conference call of all these high ups sort of in the German Air Force that someone was in Singapore for some like giant military weapon expo and called from his hotel on the hotel Wi-Fi apparently. And I mean that place must have been one of the most bugged places on the planet at that time. But anyway, we have the full transcript and it was embarrassing because these military officials were basically saying how we want to send these long range missiles to Ukraine, but we'd have to train the Ukrainians, but we don't want to train them. Maybe they basically the military contractor that builds the missiles could do that. And oh, they were talking about the feasibility of hitting the Kerch Strait Bridge. And there are many notable things in the call, but one of the notable things is that they openly say that sending these missiles will not alter the basically strategic situation. And they also note that it would, they could probably send 50 missiles and maybe after that another 50, but that's about it. And they say would probably need about 20 missiles to take down the bridge. And other notable things in the call include stating that there are British military personnel on the ground in Ukraine, which prior to this leak, the German Chancellor had said that. And all these British people were like, oh my goodness, what a breach of trust. How could he say that there are British personnel on the ground? There's also likely French personnel. And so they're like, maybe we could have the British personnel manning slash providing the guidance on firing these long range missiles that could hit Russian territory. So we keep sort of creeping down the escalation ladder. I mean, I personally am not extremely worried about it. It doesn't keep me up at night. But the danger, I say, is less sort of plan, a plan start to World War three and more of an accident, something going very badly that leads to an unplanned escalation. And Russia continues to remind everyone that it has nuclear weapons, because it just wants to, it doesn't want all these NATO forces in Western Ukraine for sure. And it's trying to prevent that. But if we were to listen to these sort of escalatory cheerleaders, it's just who knows what Russia would do. I mean, they could, they've been recently, they have launched a very heavy air bombardment campaign against Ukraine. So it's sort of, are they would they just start pounding the heck out of Western Ukraine and being like, Oh, well, guess you shouldn't have your troops there, France. That's worrisome. But there's also the aspect of this of a lot of just sort of chest thumping and and saber rattling. Because in this report from French media on about the situation, there are French military officials who openly state that France could not really do much at all against Russia. They very choice quote, let me find it here. We must not delude ourselves. In the face of the Russians, we are an army of majorits mocked a high ranking officer, convinced that sending French troops to the Ukrainian front would simply not be reasonable. This gets back to our complaint since the beginning of the war about NATO free riding. The middle, the European armies are a joke. Last July, Germany had 20,000 shells left in the whole country. Denmark was like, we've given all of our artillery to Ukraine. They keep sending air defenses that then lots have been blown up recently in Ukraine. So it's just a not good situation. And there's all this harping about, oh, the West needs to send more aid to Ukraine. And that was very true last year that Ukraine needed more things, especially 155 millimeter artillery shells, which they've just had a huge shortage of. But what the true Ukrainian crisis is manpower. Zelensky said something a few weeks ago that somewhere around 36,000 or something like that, Ukrainians have been killed in the war. That is just ludicrous nonsense. Way more people than that have been killed and even higher than that casualties. And the Ukrainian military has said something along the lines of we need 400 to 500,000 new troops. Why do they need so many if they've had such low casualties? And the issue is about half a million fighting age Ukrainians have left the country. And there's been an effort. There's an effort last year where they lowered the draft age, which really strangely to me is 27, which is a bit odd is the minimum age. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier right now is 43. But so there's talk we need to lower the draft age. And there was a law passed last year to do that. But Zelensky didn't sign it. And now there's been this just never ending sort of back and forth in the Ukrainian parliament to pass a new draft law that would have harsher penalties for people draft dodging, but would also increase the eligibility of people to be drafted. And it's openly acknowledged no one wants to pass this law because it would be very unpopular. So we have a situation where Ukraine is at big risk here, yet the Ukrainians themselves largely don't want to fight. And the Ukrainian politicians don't even want to make it easier to drag them off the street to go fight. So it's really we're looking at an insane situation where the Ukrainians themselves, many actually they lots of them want to continue the war, but very few of them want to actually fight. And now we're talking about sending NATO troops to Ukraine, not to fight, of course, for now. But that's quite insane, really, if you think about it. Well, the whole thing illustrates the great gulf between what the elites want on foreign policy and what regular people want, where let's consider the NATO countries first, right? Where it's, oh, well, I'm not sure that putting boots on the ground in this country would really make much difference. And I strongly advise against it. Obviously, the idea of just putting French troops on the front line is politically untenable for most French politicians, and even for the generals who recognize that they would then just have a lot of their best troops killed if they would do that. And ordinary French people have very little interest in dying for Ukraine. But the military establishment, the sorts of people who go to cocktail parties with NATO elites and spend time in Washington, they're fine with it. They're fine with sending more troops. They're fine with more casualties. They're fine with spending lots of money, and they just don't really care. And you of course, the same is true of the American elites who are always pressing for more war. And that's what these advisor situations always are, right? Oh, we've got American advisors over in this country. This was the scam in Vietnam, right? Oh, we've just got advisors over in Vietnam. And then advisors just always seem to morph into regular troops, and then small amounts of regular troops seem to morph into larger numbers of regular troops. And the next thing you know, a little Jimmy who grew up down the street from you is now, he died from a land mine in Vietnam for no apparent reason whatsoever. And it all began with some advisors who were probably CIA guys who they had put in there. And then that just always accelerates into a need for troops. And it also highlights just how the real risk here is the problem of just slowly ratcheting up the whole situation. It's really, it's the 1914 problem. It's not the 1938 problem, the 1938 problem, which warmongers always think is the issue. It's always 1938. It's always Hitler is every foreign leader. And it's always Nazi tanks rolling through all of Europe. Whereas the real problem here is really more the lesson of 1914, which is we've got a small regional conflict and we have decided to turn it into a continental conflict, because we insist on mobilizing the entire country, we insist on ratcheting up the war over and over and over again, and also holding to a bunch of international agreements real and imagined that pledge our youth to go fight in wars for some other country. And that's that's what happened with World War One, which of course was a pointless war that accomplished nothing. Everyone who died in it died in vain. And that's the lesson that needs to be learned, not acting like this small regional war in Ukraine is a threat to Berlin or Paris or London. But that's what the regime was. And that's why we keep hearing about these these Americans and French and British people increasingly being spotted behind the lines in Ukraine doing who knows what, but of course, helping facilitate the war on into the future. That's the idea is that you the the prolongation of the war really just ensures that lots of Ukrainians are going to die. And as even the State Department now recognizes, they're not going to get the territory back that they've lost. And as that French report even noted, noted is we did not consider the moral strength of the enemy, quote unquote. And what do they mean by that? They of course don't mean that they're like in a higher moral plane or anything like that. They just mean that the Russians are highly highly motivated. And they view this as very, very high stakes. And they're going to fight fight fight to keep that sliver of land that they have gained in eastern Ukraine, because they're ideologically motivated to do so. This this is something deep in the thinking of the the Russian regime and in its many supporters. And it's just simply deemed unacceptable that you would give this up. And you can think in terms of Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson, where he went on this long history lesson about Ukraine is not really or Ukraine is really Russia, or at least certainly eastern Ukraine. And he notes that the part that has been captured from Ukraine right now was really Russia after the 18th century. And that it was once Russia, it should be Russia now. And you're right, there's some admission that, okay, Western Ukraine, the Ukrainian heartland, that can be Ukraine. Fine, we'll accept that. But the the part that was down by the Sea of Azov that was captured, not from Ukrainians, mind you, but from Muslims, the Crimean Khanate, people who actually hated Ukraine and enslaved them at the time the Russians rolled through took that land from the Khanate, and turned it into Russia. And so in the thinking of Putin and his supporters, yep, that's Russia, should be Russia, must continue to be Russia. And when you're thinking like that, that, that, that really animates your willingness to really stick with a conflict, even after taking lots of casualties. Now, the Ukrainians, don't they see that as Ukraine too? Well, apparently many do. But those parts of Ukraine also have high Russian population. And also, they're looking at the decimation of much larger percentage of the Ukrainian population. This is the thing is, Russia could take larger casualties than the Ukrainians in terms of raw numbers, but that's a much smaller percentage of Russia and Russians overall. So it's, you're really just facing not much of an existential threat at all. And there's really no reason to retrench, whereas you can see the Ukrainians might think, okay, well, we need to give up that territory in order to preserve our sovereignty in some way. Russians losing sovereignty isn't an issue for the Russians. That's not something they have to worry about right now. And so you can see just the lopsided motivations here in terms of what's at stake, in terms of the historical narrative. And the French noted they didn't take that into account. And of course, Americans don't, they just pretend all that doesn't exist. And however, if you just continue to escalate this conflict, you are going to end up with a very serious matter. I should note, by the way, that I don't think it's reasonable for the Russians to say, oh, well, if you keep sending more missiles into Russian territory, that could trigger a nuclear war with us. I don't think that's a good reason to let nuclear missiles fly. I do understand why a regime faced with total extinction say Ukrainian or NATO tanks started rolling close to Moscow. There was a convoy of tanks rolling into Moscow across the Western frontier, and they're 100 miles from Moscow. I could see how, okay, that seems like something that would trigger the nuclear missiles to go fly in. However, oh, while you're sending some missiles with no hope of conquest into some portions of Russian, Western Russia, we're going to let the nukes fly. I don't see how they could really make the case to that, to the international community. So I do think it's actually irresponsible for them to be hinting that that's a possibility. But apparently, they do think that's going to deter some people. So they are saying that. Nevertheless, I think that does illustrate just how high stakes the Russians see this, in terms of gaining these Eastern Ukrainian territories. So this isn't like an American war of conquest. When the Americans invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans could have taken it or left it, especially after the initial phase, where it's like, okay, we decapitated the regime or okay, we bombed all the terrorist camps in Afghanistan. I think most Americans thought, oh, okay, I guess we took care of the terrorist threat and now I can forget about it. Totally different issue in how Americans see these sorts of conflicts, because they don't really touch on American history, American ideas of self, American national security in any way. But the Russians see this as all very key to their security. And so it's a very, very different matter. And you need to think more in terms of how they see this. Yes. So two points. One on the nuclear threat. Nuclear war is a purely theoretical enterprise, thus far, in human history. So we don't have much to go on as to how it would play out. But sort of the best case scenario is that Russia would use a very low yield nuclear weapon, probably in the middle of some Ukrainian field somewhere. And this would just be a signal of like, hey, West, back off. We're being really serious. It's not like they'd drop a hydrogen bomb on Kiev or something. But it is really a who knows what would happen. Right. I mean, that's part of the reason they didn't start dropping nukes in Vietnam, though, even though they talked about it, was okay, the Vietcong is doing too well. Let's just send a message with a few nukes. No one was ever able to answer the question of what happens after that. Right. So that's why you don't just start dropping nukes, even if they're low yield. And so, but to go back to the motivation aspect of things, this, the French report, as you say, noted that there are a lot of underestimating of Russian morale. And there's all these reports of just like, oh, the Russians are just a slave army, basically. And there's just all these human wave assaults against the entrenched Ukrainian positions, which is just nutty. This is the most recorded war in human history that's far. There's drones all over the place, recording all sorts of stuff. We've never seen just sort of like a Stalin grad or, you know, battle of the Psalm level of just, you know, Russians leaping out from their trenches into intense Ukrainian fire. And the French report says, yeah, that's nonsense. That's not happening. But there's a very telling sort of, what's the word, demonstrated preference difference here. According to the Russian government. So it's, of course, questionable as to the accuracy of these statistics. But as of December 19th of last year, the Defense Minister Shorguz stated that 490,000 people had joined the Russian military. And that roughly, what was it? Roughly 79% of that number were contract soldiers, which means they are in the military till the war is over. The rest were volunteers who have sort of a shorter term of duty. But people can quibble about how accurate that number is. But the reality is that they have not instituted a second round of the draft. So they have adequate people, it would appear. That is more people who have joined the Russian military in the last year, even if you shave off 100,000, then joined the American military in the wake of 9-11, in the year following 9-11. And America's population has roughly doubled the size of Russia's. So on a per capita level, that's basically twice as much, more than twice as much. So what does this tell us about, you know, the war? There could be various reasons. One might join up. There's a good pay and things like that compared to other options. But it seems to indicate that at least a significant number of Russians view this conflict as worth participating in. In contrast to Ukraine, where half a million people left the country and quite, you know, way back when the draft happened in Russia, a gazillion people left the country. But there's a lot more people in Russia who did stay and did join the fight. Whereas in Ukraine, there's stories all over the news, a very recent one in European Politico, where they interviewed a guy who was 28 who was just like, yeah, I don't leave the house very much. I mean, all these stories of people living in fear, young men living in fear, not even just young men, unfortunately, because there's impressment gangs, you know, wandering around dragging people off the street, sending the troops, them to have three weeks of training before they're sent off to the front line. So it sort of communicates something about the different existential perceptions of the war. So Russia has the advantage in terms of population, in terms of the total size of its armed forces, in terms of its industrial base, and in terms of morale and willingness to fight. And to go way back to your comment about Wagner and the, oh, you know, Progosian is going to depose Putin, which I don't think having a literal like warlord replace Putin would be what the West really wants. But I would argue that after that weird march thing was defeated, and then Progosian was blown up in a plane, I would say that the Russian regime was strengthened, just as I was, would argue that it will be strengthened by this terrorist attack that just happened over the weekend, rally around the flag, external threats. This is sort of well established in political science. It's sort of the same reason strategic bombing generally does not work as a way of, you know, turning the population against the government. It usually leads to more support for the government. So, yeah, I would say that the Russian regime with or without Putin is well entrenched and established. There's support for the war. That's not just voiced support. It's actually people signing up to go fight. And it, I would say that the fact that there's an election this fall here in the U.S., I don't know what effect that will have. Aid has been held up in Congress. I mean, I'm quite shocked. I thought, oh, they're going home over, the Congress is going home over Christmas break. They'll pass it as soon as they get back. Well, here we are, march is over. And aid still hasn't been passed, although there is talk of a new bill in the House that, you know, so the Republican leadership might cave on that. But the point is, even if the aid is authorized, as Mises noted in that lecture he gave in 1918, money is not the essential ingredient to war. It's material, physical things. Printing money will not solve, you know, a shortage of shells. And as far as, as I last am aware, the United States has not published its updated monthly shell production since, I think, October. In October, they were producing, the U.S. was producing 28,000 shells, which Russia fires in one day more than that a month. They were producing 28,000 shells a month. Their goal is to hit 37,000 this April. And the ultimate goal is to get to reach a million shells sometime next year. I mean, I'm sorry, 100,000 shells a month. So it'd be about 1.2 million shells a year, sometime in 2025. Now for contrast, at the beginning of 2023, Ukrainian sources themselves said that Russia was producing 2.5 million shells a year. And they had the vast enormous Soviet stockpiles. I mean, I've seen pictures of shells from the 1970s. But in addition to that, we know I've seen pictures of North Korean shells. So they're importing shells from North Korea. We also know they're importing missiles from North Korea. They're also importing weaponry from Iran. So Iran and North Korea are much more militarized, have a much more built up military industrial base because they worry the United States will attack them versus the West, where a 155 millimeter artillery shell, as of last I saw, is running over $8,000, which you could buy a very nice NVIDIA processor for that amount of money. So it doesn't really even matter if the US passes additional funding for Ukraine, because there's not a ton we can give them. I mean, we can continue to strip our own arsenals, but there's already, it's been reported in the media, the US has rerouted supplies from Ukraine to Israel. So we're already stretched very thin. What if some other crisis were to break out? What if Venezuela were to invade Guyana? You know, that's not in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the planet. That's in the backyard. So regardless of the wisdom of the situation, I am positive the US would not tolerate that, or at least would try to not tolerate that. But it's a question of what can we do, given the state of our stockpiles. So it's really already the US has been reduced to engaging in accounting tricks to send aid to Ukraine. There's a very good piece in Unheard, we'll link in the show notes, discussing how the US is actually reducing some sort of sign-on bonus type things for the National Guard in the middle of a recruiting crisis, so that they can reroute this funding, well, on the accounting level to Ukraine. So it's really Ukraine is in deep trouble because the West can't actually wage this industrial war of attrition. So Well, just as you noted, what's the demonstrated preference we see in the actions of these different regimes? And there's no general frenzy of desire of foreign troops. We should note, of course, that the Ukrainian military in recent months noted that its National Guard, is accepting foreign troops, and that foreign troops are welcome to sign up. Well, where's the flood of French, German, Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, whoever's who want to sign up and fight with Ukraine? Well, there are apparently lots of people in the world who have little signs in their front window of their house that says Slava Ukraine, where those people have demonstrated zero desire to actually fight for Ukraine. They stand with Ukraine, but from their living rooms, where they're actually sitting on a sofa. And we can see this throughout the West. People are not signing up, nor are they really showing any interest in their own country. I seriously doubt that recruiters in the United States or anywhere else are trying to entice young male Americans to join the military by saying, Hey, join up, and you can get to go over to Ukraine and be blown up by a Russian shell and spread liberty. I have a hard time believing that a whole lot of young men think that's much of a convincing argument and certainly have not heard of it in any anecdote anywhere. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the US military is sort of a generational thing. And for many reasons that are debated, basically military, multi-generational military families are saying to their up and coming children, don't join the military. And so I've been into the movie theater a lot. I've seen Dune part two, four times since it came out. And they keep running this National Guard ad. And there's no talk of defending freedom or anything like that. It's like, you can help if there's a flood. Whereas we know the National Guard is they ship it off to Iraq. There were national, there were people from, I believe, the Florida National Guard in Ukraine when the war started engaging in sort of like training exercises. And I don't know how familiar the audience is with video games right now, but I found it extremely amusing that sort of the hottest video game right now is called Hell Divers 2. And it's sort of a riff on Star Troopers and stuff. And it really shows how the idea of fighting for democracy and liberty has become a meme because the whole game is so over the top. And it's very clearly satirical level of fighting for democracy. And like the trailer, it literally has this guy giving the spiel that you can fight for managed democracy. And I've not played it, but I've watched a lot of streams and seen the trailers and things. And it is really stood out to me that it's like that is the level is how much the very idea of democracy has been degraded in the popular discourse to just be this catchphrase to a for literal militarism. That's sort of where in the minds of the youth that the phrase democracy is at right now. So it's when you say Star Troopers, you're referring to the 1997 film Starship Troopers? Oh, yeah, Starship Troopers. Yeah, don't don't miss this movie, folks. If you have not seen this, this is a hilarious satire and militarism. So yeah, Starship Troopers is by the same guy that made Robocop. So if you like Robocop, you'll like Starship Troopers almost as much, which Robocop, by the way, is a satire also, although often underappreciated for its satirical virtues. Tro told through the lens of horrific violence. And so yes, so I can I can picture this video game what you're saying about it. And yeah, I mean, that I think we're reading that's being revealed in just the fact that there is a recruiting crisis in the United States. And that's the fact that Europeans have no interest in spending more on their military capability than they already are, right? The Danes, they spend down, they ship out their military capability. They're not mobilizing to replace all of that in any sort of a quick short order. And they're just sticking with the same budget as always. So it's all slowly being replaced. And they're not rushing to the front lines either with weapons or with men. So all of the indicators are there, as well as in Ukraine in terms of the number of people who are trying to avoid military service there. And just on a theoretical level, right, you can always note that if your regime is telling you that this war is really, really important, and people show no enthusiasm for spending on it or for signing up for the military, well, I got bad news for the regime, you're not nearly as popular or legitimate as you think you are. And because nobody's listening. And if a regime has to resort to the draft, as they often do, it's because the regime is weaker than it thinks it is. It's because people are not actually willing to voluntarily sign up to fight this supposedly intractable enemy who, if they win the war, will destroy you and destroy your life. Well, apparently, great many people historically have been willing to just take their chances. And if people are willing to take their chances in spite of what the regime is telling them, well, they just don't really value the opinions of the regime that much. And it could be that many people in many cases simply view the threat regime or the status quo regime as kind of six or one half dozen of another. That's what that's the calculus people are going through when they're refusing to sign up or they don't want to pay more in taxes. And it's why you do see in some cases, you had pointed out offline these cases of, say, the British during World War II, old men and young boys were clamoring to fight. They wanted guns. They wanted to join some sort of military outfit. That's very different from what we're seeing right now. And that just seems to be the situation throughout the West in general. And I think it tells us where this conflict is going in general. And on a more sort of depressing sort of meta note, I would say it's also just sort of a concern among many areas of society in terms of what it means in terms of the sort of spiritual health of the West of just sort of like the idea of sort of sacrificing yourself for something else is, you know, not in vogue right now. And on the one hand, that's good, you know, there's lots of examples in history of sort of collectivist, you know, the Nazis had many people willing to die for their beliefs and everything, but it just sort of not even on a sort of nation state level, but just as a sort of like, what is the purpose of existence, all that, that's probably too much to get into right now. But I think it sort of speaks to the larger trend of sort of the crisis of the West and modernity and all that of sort of who am I, what am I sort of here for? And it's sort of before people used to, you know, join the military because it would sort of like help mold their identity, help them get their life sort of together. Rob Henderson, an author I really love and recommend everyone check out, basically grew up in sort of a very unstable childhood. He was like in seven foster homes and things. He joined the military and he, you know, attributes it to it's sort of getting his life on track. Same with J.D. Vance, who grew up in sort of a very dysfunctional Appalachian, Appalachian, Ohio family situation. It's sort of like that's sort of a foolish approach today. You know, if you join the military, you could be shipped off to die for nothing. And it's just on the one hand concerning, on the other hand, good in that we the less if the United States literally doesn't have enough troops to try nation building in Venezuela or something, well, then they might not be able to do that. But then that gets to my piece last year about, well, they're probably going to try and bring the draft back because they just don't have enough people. Which again would illustrate just the lack of legitimacy the regime in the United States has if they're needing to come up with a draft to staff these wars that nobody seems to care about. And that's clearly a problem for the regime. So to wrap up then, what would you, let's go to predictions, which will be proven wrong. But all right, how many more months are we looking at here till there are actual real negotiations taking place for trying to wind up this war? Now in spite of course, what the pro-Ukraine people have claimed, right, negotiation is the same as just giving into Hitler, which is nonsense. You can see this in the scholarship vast majority, the lopsided majority of conflicts throughout history are ended by negotiations, by people giving up some on both sides. This is how nearly all wars end. The idea of total victory, unconditional surrender, that's kind of a 20th century thing that had its day and is now over. The United States clearly does not have the ability to force some sort of unconditional surrender on the Russians unless World War III is on the table. So there's going to be a negotiated settlement of some kind. They've been talking about doing it and right, they're putting together, occasionally you hear about these, oh, we're all going to come to the table except where we're not going to invite the Russians. Oh goodness, yes, that was so absurd. These dull, bizarre attempts at quote unquote diplomacy that don't involve the Russians. So it's hard to take those seriously. But okay, so when do the negotiations come where they finally actually do invite the Russians and the Chinese are there also and the Americans, etc.? Yeah, so I think going back to before, we have a presidential election this year, and I'm not sure what the Biden administration's sort of internal thinking on the matter is. I'm very glad we left Afghanistan, but the withdrawal was a big mess and it hurt Biden. I'm not sure if they would want to risk after all the tough talk of we're with Ukraine indefinitely. Democracy is on the line. This is so important. If they're then like, yeah, Russia, you can carve off all this territory, probably would not look too good in the newspapers. So I am a bit tempted to say that the US would not be too eager for a negotiated settlement before the election. If I would say after that, America's position obviously depends on who wins. Trump, I don't even know what to think of his thought. I mean, he's sort of a loose cannon. He could be like, I don't expect him to, but if he like double down, that would not be out of the realm of question or he could just be like F Ukraine sort of vengeance for his first impeachment. That also would be on the table. And you might have seen that Putin was asked who he preferred to win and he said Biden because he's more stable, which is just hilarious. That didn't, you know, make front page headlines or if he said Trump, there'd be another freak out. But in terms of Russia, I believe Medvedev is on the record saying that they're planning the war to go into 2025. I would say lots of things. It depends on what happens in the upcoming months. If there's a wildly successful Russian offensive and, you know, the Ukrainian lines cracking all over the place because they're running out of people, well, it might not really even matter too much, you know, how willing people are to negotiate because Russia might just, you know, carve off what it wants and then fortify the line. And it'll be, you know, North Korea, South Korea situation for decades to come. That's another potential sort of scenario. But I don't think the war will end this year where, in terms of negotiations, it's possible that there might be a negotiated settlement. But I really don't know. It might be more likely that it'll just be a de facto negotiated settlement like the Korean War ended, highly militarized sort of defensive belt. So, but yeah, the future is radically uncertain and probably be wrong, so. All right. Well, I think that's it for this episode of War Economy and State. We hadn't talked about Ukraine in a while in any detail and certainly 2024. Yeah, I agree. It's not going to be, it's not going to be the end this year unless there's some major tactical change in terms of what's going on. But that doesn't seem in the cards at the moment. But things will probably continue to worsen throughout the year and into 2025 from the Ukrainian standpoint. Also, there's the issue of further financial crises in the West and then the ability of Western regimes to actually take money and give it to the Ukraine effort. And that may be significantly pinched as time goes forward. So thank you for listening to War Economy and State. We'll be back next month with a new episode on a different topic, so we'll see you next time.