 G'day mate, 40 here. Hanging out at beautiful Bon Manly beach. So thinking about the dramatic difference between reality and the news. And perhaps there's no dramatic example than what's going on in the war in Ukraine. So it's striking to me how the news loves to seize upon one emotional tone for a story. And then it's just almost uniformly adopted. I think people in all professions are scared to differ from the consensus in their profession. Like people whether they're orthodox rabbis or accountants, they want to stick with the general consensus for their profession. And that's true for journalists especially. And thinking about Ukraine and how it's just portrayed as this plucky battle of, you know, the plucky Ukrainian underdogs versus a big bad Russia. And I absolutely emotionally experience it the same way. But think how would you react if you were pushed up against a wall. And you then lashed out by punching and kicking people to create some space for yourself. That's kind of similar to what the United States has done to Russia. It's effectively built NATO, Russia's great enemy, right up to the border, the Russian border. And Russia is reactive. And they've been kicking and punching and sending bombs. And they have set out to destroy Ukraine because Ukraine has become a de facto member of NATO. And John Meersheim has probably made this point more eloquently than anyone. And it's got a video on YouTube saying that war in Ukraine is primarily the fault of Europe and the United States. I wouldn't use fault. I wouldn't talk about it morally. It's just that the United States and Europe has created a situation where one would have to expect a great power would lash out. How would the United States respond if China set out military bases in Cuba or Mexico or Canada? So this is what Meersheim just spoke to the New Yorker. He says, the Russians are having difficulty defeating Ukrainians in ways that we didn't anticipate, of course. The war has escalated. So the Russians are behaving much more ruthlessly toward the Ukrainians than they were initially. And now the Russians are tearing apart the Ukrainian electrical grid, causing immense human suffering, doing grave economic damage to Ukraine. So why have the Russians become so brutal? Because the Russians want to win. And when you're dedicated to winning a war, you invariably look for ways to escalate, to gain advantage on the other side. The natural transition is to become more and more brutal. So what does a Russian victory look like at this point? And Meersheim says it looks like controlling those four regions of Ukraine, those four oblasts that they have annexed, to make sure that what's left of the Ukrainian rump state is neutral and not associated with NATO, not just in any formal way, but also in any informal way. So Ukraine's never formally been a member of NATO, but it is informally essentially become part of NATO. So Meersheim says it's clear Putin's not trying to recreate the Soviet Union. He's not trying to build a greater Russia. It's not interesting conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia. That we have invented this story, that Putin is highly aggressive, that he is principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine. So Putin only went into Ukraine with a maximum of about 190,000 troops, right? That's nowhere near enough troops to conquer Ukraine. So now his goals have escalated since the war started on February 24, but not to the point where he's interested in conquering all of Ukraine. But he's interested in conquering a part of Ukraine and incorporating a part of Ukraine into Russia and leaving Ukraine, you know, weaker, trashed, destroyed. But if the war had gone better for him, he probably wouldn't have been as brutal as he is now. So he probably would have wanted to go to Odessa, says Meersheim, or incorporated all of Ukraine that runs along the Black Sea up to Odessa into Russia. So Kurson, one of the four oblasts that he regards now part of Russia, they've been next to it. They don't control it, they don't control the city today, they say they're going to come back and take it. So is Putin interested in creating a greater Russia? No, this is all about balance of power politics, right? Great powers don't allow enemies to build up on their doorsteps, right? The United States has a Monroe Doctrine and other nations want the equivalent of a Monroe Doctrine. They want to dominate their own neighborhoods. All great powers operate this way, they've always operated this way. And so why is the Monroe Doctrine cool for the United States? But it's uncool for China or Russia or any other great power to have their own Monroe Doctrine. All right, Meersheim makes the point, what's good for the ghost is good for the gander. And so individuals, groups and nations and states have interests and different groups have different interests. But one thing that all groups do have as an interest is a desire to survive, right? They want to be as powerful as possible because that is the best way to learn to survive. The more powerful you are, the more likely you are to survive. And so power is relative. When you've got a neighbor who is increasingly a de facto part of an enemy coalition, that's a threat to you and that's what's going on in Russia. So it's not that Putin has these imperial ambitions. He simply wants to make his nation's state as safe as possible. By making it as difficult as possible to invade his nation, which has happened many, many times to Russia. They've been repeatedly invaded. And so he's trying to create space between him and his enemies, which is normal, natural and healthy. And the Biden administration just did nothing to accommodate his normal, natural, healthy desires for safe space, man. We all deserve safe space. All right, black people deserve their safe spaces, Jews do, Russians do. But everyone wants to save space. There's some distance between you and your enemies. Like I'm walking now on mainly beach. This is a safe space. I could put down my iPhone. I could put down my DJI pocket, create a combo too. And I could go for a swim in the ocean there. And it'd be a safe space. People don't steal phones and laptops very often here. So lots of diversity, but not the kind of diversity results in mass rapes and mass theft and mass murder, mass grievous bodily harm. I don't see a lot of graffiti here. I don't see a lot of trash. This is a safe space. So it makes sense that people would want to control immigration, control crime, control threats to public safety, and that they'd also want to do this vis-à-vis their neighbors if their neighbors de facto become allied against them. So the idea that Putin just wants to, you know, annex all of Ukraine, conquer all of Ukraine is just no evidence for that. Because he didn't enter Ukraine with nearly enough troops to do that. He's never said he's interested in conquering all of Ukraine. He's interested in conquering four parts of Ukraine on the eastern part of Ukraine closest to Russia. And he was not even interested in conquering those four oblasts before the war started. It was only after the war started. The war started February 24. So previously recognized two of those oblasts in the Donbas as independent republics, but essentially balanced the power of politics, you know, forced him to invade. And so what invariably happens when a war starts is that not only do goals escalate, but the means of waging war escalate. And that's as true for democracies as it is for dictatorships. In fact democracies tend to be even more brutal when they wage war because they quicker to moralize war in the terms of good versus evil. So the war has escalated. Putin's means of waging war have escalated. His goals have escalated. And so he's decided that these four regions in eastern Ukraine will become part of Russia. So there's no evidence he had imperial ambitions before the war. And there's no evidence to believe that he ever thought it was feasible for Russia to simply absorb all of Ukraine. So Mishima says on the balance of power evidence, right? We have a huge amount of evidence. There's NATO expansion, the more general policy making Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia's border that motivated him to attack on February 24. So Putin says he recognizes Ukrainian nationalism, recognizes that Ukraine is a sovereign state. So there's no evidence that he's bent on conquering all of Ukraine and incorporating all of it into a greater Russia. And so Mishima wrote a book on lying and politics. And in that book he makes the point that leaders don't bother lying to outgroups, to other countries, because those other countries have no incentive to believe them. So they tend to be fairly straightforward when they're talking about other countries and to other countries, right? And if you just look at the capabilities of a particular nation state, the military capabilities, that tells you what they can and cannot do. So Russia simply is not capable of conquering all of Ukraine. They made no attempt to conquer all of Ukraine, right? Putin went after Kiev. He was interested in threatening Kiev, trying to coerce the government to change its policy on membership in NATO. So leaders don't tend to lie to each other very often, not nearly as much as you would expect. So leaders tend to lie most often to their domestic audiences, rather than to international audiences and to other foreign leaders. So if Putin would have devised this massive deception campaign, where he consistently lied about what the reason was for going to war, that would be unprecedented in history. There's simply no other case. He even comes close to any leader lying time after time for the purpose of fooling the other side. So Munich would be a single example, says Mishima. It's a question that Hitler lied at Munich in point of other instances where Hitler lied.