NTK: The Real Reason America Is In Such Danger Right Now…and the Solution

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“This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our Super Secret Studio in the third”

sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello, and welcome to need to know, I'm David Raskov, your host this week. Like every week, we're going to talk to a couple of folks who are experts in can help us understand what's going on in the news.

And that's quite a task these days, because there's a lot going on in the news. So we've gone right to the core of the best smartest people we know. And we have with us, John Wolfstahl, who's a nuclear fellow at Pax Sapiens. And formerly nuclear expert in a lot of places, including the Obama administration. How are you doing, John?

I'm good, David. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us.

And Joe Serencian, who is Vice Chairman at some left wing foreign policy group that I always

“forget the name of, what is center for international policy?”

Center for international policy, follow their work. I'm in the middle of writing an article on why we need a progressive foreign policy. I will send it to you right away. Oh, great. Thank you.

Well, Vice President Matt Duss is a big, big proponent of that. That's exactly what his mission is. So why don't you there? I've even talked him about it before I wrote the article. And of course, Joe also is a nuclear fellow about town.

He's had a lot of important jobs advising people on nukes. And you guys might say, well, why are we talking about nukes? I mean, what does anything have to do with nukes? But of course, on Saturday, when Friday, Saturday, whenever, when J.D. Vance came out of his quote, Marathon 21 hours of negotiating with the

Iranians, he said, well, we can't reach a deal because they won't agree not to renounce their nuclear weapons program. And just as the thought was crossing my mind that there was something wrong with this statement, I looked at my phone. And there in social media, a type large enough to read were the words of John Wolfstahl

saying, slow down a minute there, Mr. Vice President, what was your point? Well, I don't think I referred to him as Mr. Vice President. But no, I'm the true. I was being-- Yeah, no, it's colorful.

If the Trump administration wants Iran to say, we will never have a nuclear weapon,

“then we really are back to the future because that's what they have agreed to since”

1970 in international treaties. What was enshrined in the agreement that the Obama administration, which I was a part, negotiated with Iran, and that the Supreme Leader, who was killed by either Israeli or American air strikes, had said, we will never build a nuclear weapon. So Iran's formal position is we have no interest in building nuclear weapons.

We're not going to build a nuclear weapons. There's a religious edict against building nuclear weapons, at least until you started bombing us. And so that's achievable. What it appears the United States was saying is, Iran, you have to renounce your stated right to enrichment and give up all of your rich,

dranium on day one to which Iran said, make me. Because Iran has maintained this position for decades under sanctions, under threat of military force and now through military force.

And it's quite unrealistic to expect that on the first day of an negotiation,

they're going to cave on that position, having no guarantees from the United States or anybody else about the things that they would like through a negotiation,

and being free of the threat that they will be bombed by the United States or Israel.

“And so we all joked about the marathon quote,”

given that JDVans probably has not worked very much over the last year, 21 hours might seem like a lot of work. But we negotiated for three years under the Obama administration, and produced two very good agreements that were being verified, and that Iran was abiding by, which kept Iran a year away from a nuclear weapon.

Iran could be days or weeks away from taking their highly rich uranium, and turning it into a bomb. We don't know because there are no inspectors in the country. And we don't know where the material is. And the Trump policy has not solved any of the problems that it's pointed to,

or, in fact, has made many of those problems worse. Yeah, well, I mean, that certainly makes sense.

It sounded to me a little bit like JDVans was making an excuse

that he had gone in there with ultimatums from Trump, that the Iranians just simply weren't going to go along with, but Joe isn't one of the problems that we've got, that we had an agreement that we negotiated for three years, and then Trump broke it.

And then when he went back to the negotiating table last year, and they were making progress, he attacked the many way, and then when we went back to the negotiating table this year, and we're making progress, he attacked the many way.

“I mean, why would Iran ever do an agreement with Donald Trump?”

Since he breaks agreements, and ignores the progress being made diplomatically, resorting to force, you know, whenever he gets the chance? Well, that's exactly right. I mean, we often hear the United States, the US can't trust Iran. We'll look at it from their perspective.

They cannot trust us, and why should they? I mean, as John pointed out, we had solved this problem. We had an agreement. The joint comprehensive. I didn't think about it at all. I didn't think about it at all.

We could just put it around around here. I wanted to call it Ruth, but, you know, they didn't like that name. Iran, Iran, deep state radio, we have been referring to it. For now, going on 11 years as the jikpola. Yes, I know, for some Brooks gave it that name.

So I started laughing, because I started telling the name.

“So the Iran nuclear deal, the Iran nuclear deal wasn't just, you know, a good deal.”

It was the strongest non-polliferation agreement I've ever seen. And I've been tracking non-polliferation for 45 years. I mean, this solved the problem. It's slashed Iran's program. It cut it down to a fraction of its original size.

Put it in an iron box and surrounded it with inspectors and seals and cameras. That program wasn't going anywhere. If that deal was still in effect, Iran would not have 440 kilograms of 60% of which uranium the deal prohibited them from going to that level. And those limits would have been in effect until 2031. We still wouldn't have been in it, but they would not have had it.

Can't centrifuges the deal prohibited them from having those advanced centrifuges. We would have inspectors there. We would know exactly what they were doing. We probably would have followed it up with other agreements to extend the deadlines. We could have negotiated other issues with them after building up the confidence that

Agreements work that each side had to be trusted a bit. We could have negotiated missiles. We could have negotiated support for regional militias, etc. All that was the pathway that we had Trump wrecked it when he pulled out in 2018. We often talk about Trump looking, "Well, what's the exit ramp to this world?"

Well, the exit ramp was, you know, six years ago. We already, you passed that exit ramp.

Oh, what was the second exit ramp?

Well, the second exit ramp was in Trump was negotiating this time. This time around with his, his, his so-called experts with cough and concussioner who know nothing about Iran. Nothing about nuclear issues. Don't bring any nuclear experts with them.

Don't bring Farsi translators with them. They just show up. They, and the week before this war started, Iran had offered to do a big part of what they agreed to in the Iran nuclear deal. They agreed to stop enrichment for three to five years.

They agreed to get rid of that 440 kilograms of highly rich uranium. We're worried about that because she could quickly whip it up in their advanced centrifuges into bomb-grade material in a couple of weeks. But they were going to get rid of that. Trump refused.

And after BB Netanyahu whispered sweet nothings in Trump's year, he started this meaningless incomprehensible war with unclear aims. No clear purpose. And now we can't figure out what to do with this war. Has he solved the nuclear problems?

Is Iran further away from a nuclear bomb?

They have their machines are still some of them intact.

The supply of uranium is still we believe intact. At some point after this conflict is over, a couple of months maybe Iran will go dig it up, bring it out and do who knows what with it. So Trump has made the problem on the nuclear front so much worse than it was.

There were ways to solve it. We had, in fact, solved it. Trump wrecked it. And now he doesn't know what to do. Well, you know, another component of the Trump rationale for going to war against Iran.

“Which, you know, I think, you know, objective observers can say was,”

you know, based on on the flimsyist of pretext. But another one of those pretext was that, you know, they were concerned Iran was going to develop nuclear missiles that could deliver warhead to the United States. And that could happen at any minute. John, that seems to me a untrue.

But be and talk about that. But be, you know, along the lines of what you and Joe were just saying, if anything, we're going to come out of this war with the Iranians with a stronger missile program.

Because now they're being supplied with critical missile materials by the Chinese.

We've decided that, you know, the United States is a threat to stability in the region. And that, you know, they're providing them with fuel and parts and other kinds of things. And, you know, they're doing it pretty much in the open. So, you know, it seems to me even on this front Iran may come out of this thing stronger. And it seems to have some considerable capability on hand right now.

Is that, do I have that right?

“So, I mean, I think we have to, any sane person looking at where we are today has to say two things.”

One, Trump has no idea what he's doing and has no plan, right? As I remark to somebody yesterday, it's not a strategy, it's a temper tantrum. So, don't think that there is actually some thought going into this. But at the same time, Iran has been hammered, right? I mean, their military has been targeted relentlessly for weeks and weeks by the strongest military in the world.

We have destroyed anti-aircraft and aircraft facilities, missile production facilities, nuclear facilities, Navy. Doesn't mean that Iran has been defeated, but they have been set back in terms of their military capability. But we'll rebuild one of the reasons that the Obama administration and President Obama said this clearly in 2015 at American University gave a speech. It said the choice is not between the nuclear deal. We've negotiated and some mythical, perfect deal.

It's between this deal and war. And war is not a viable solution because it doesn't solve the problem. It simply pushes it off and makes it worse.

“And I think that's exactly what you're alluding today.”

That Iran will rebuild even if the regime were to collapse and you had some populist regime. They will rebuild their military and they will no longer be under international sanctions. The UN is ineffective. The legal mandate to constrain Iran's oil exports, arms, imports, commerce is completely eviscerated. And China and Russia have both recognized that the United States is in a quick sand, and to the extent that the United States is continually sucked into the Middle East.

It makes Russia stronger in Europe, and it makes China stronger in East Asia. And so I couldn't give you a prediction of how quickly Iran will be able to build up its missile program. They'll be able to threaten their neighbors in they're still doing it today. So they'll be able to build drones. They'll be able to build short range missiles. That knowledge is well known. It's still my take Iran a decade to build long range ballistic missiles that could reach anywhere close to the United States.

And even that, I think, is optimistic, but it would really depend on the state of the infrastructure when the war is finally over.

Yes, so Joe, it looks to me like, you know, this fiasco of war is going to produce a situation where there is almost no possibility that on nukes, on missiles, on control of the straight of war moves, on Iran's ability to destabilize the Middle East, or its leverage geopolitically, where we're going to be better off today than we were the day before the war started. Is that your assessment? Absolutely. You know, for about 25 years, there's been this debate raging in policy circles in Washington about regime change.

And it's been, you know, we should go to war to top of the regime.

“I'm old enough to remember that when we referred to rogue states, we weren't talking about ourselves.”

Yes, so that's right. That's right. The largest rogue state in the world right now. And what we're seeing in effect is a real life, you know, experiment, where we're getting to see the operational impact of this theory that you can use military force to solve difficult military and diplomatic issues.

And you know, we saw it in Iraq, it failed. We saw what happened there. We saw it in a little to extend when we expanded the mission of Afghanistan. It failed there.

And now we're really, this is the biggest test of all. We're trying to say, we don't have to negotiate with these regimes. We can overthrow them. Well, guess what? That's it's failing again and it's failing disastrously. And this is perhaps the greatest strategic defeat the United States has ever suffered. And we've suffered some big strategic defeats. You can see Iraq as a cataclysmic failure that set back US policy and diplomacy for years. Vietnam, catastrophic failure. But this is just hurting us in so many ways. So, you know, just weapon supplies. The US military is weaker now than it was six weeks ago.

We've exhausted so much of our weapon supplies. We've stretched ourselves to the limits moving asset from Asia to use them for no apparent purpose here. We've just destroyed our lion system. You know, when Trump announced his blockade this morning this issue, put it David, the US wants to blockade the Iranian blockade. You know, it just makes no sense. None of our allies are with us. Trump said that we'd be joined by other nations. Zero nations are joining this blockages. Just today, the prime minister of Great Britain said no, we're not joining this. He didn't understand what the point of this strategy was. So we've destroyed our weakening our alliance system.

We've destroyed American moral credibility. I mean, it wasn't very strong to begin with after everything we've done, but this, you know,

“the obliteration of the Iranian civilization will be one of the greatest moments in the history of the world. That's what Trump treated out.”

I mean, it's beyond megalomanious, beyond crazy, it's pure evil. We've launched ourselves into the league of odious regimes of odious dictatorial leaders. I don't think we're going to recover from this. I mean, even if there's a democratic president in 2022. But I think the alliance systems, the trust in the world, I mean, who's going to trust us after this? Now, the US has emerged from this defeated, defeated by a country that's a kind of fraction of the military power that we have.

They have defeated us in war. That's what we need to make it on the stake about this Iran has basically won this. It's an ugly victory, but they're basically won.

The US has lost alliances, weaponry, moral standing, political standing. It is the greatest US strategic defeat in history.

“I would like to challenge that John and in the form of a question, because I think it's a big strategic defeat, but I can go back 60 years, 50 years.”

United States has been spending ever since President Eisenhower warned against doing it. Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars more than any other country, to have the undisputed, unchallengable, greatest military in the history of the world. And every single war that we fought since then, while we may have enjoyed some tactical successes due to the nature of our equipment, had been strategic defeats. And in fact, I would argue that the greatest strategic defeat in US history was the investment of trillions of dollars, many times more, not just in any nation, but that all major nations added up into a defense establishment that was not suited to our strategic needs.

And away from investing in the sources of our real strength, R&D, science and technology, education, infrastructure, and so on.

Now leads the world in most major categories where AI is concerned. Last year passed Japan as the world's largest exporter of automobiles.

And is building internal economic capacity and external diplomatic capacity that gives us gives them a leg up on us. In other words, our strategic defeat has been undermining our position as the world's greatest superpower, your reaction to the thesis. Isn't that right since you want to phrase it in the form of a question to win it win a jeopardy. You know David, I I would agree with everything you've just said and I think it's striking that at a time in an administration that has gutted our investment in health, in science, in research, everything from the environment to cancer treatments to the next pandemic, slashing the ability of foreign students to come to our universities and reinvigorate our technological base.

“We're just going to ask for an additional $500 billion a year in defense. And nobody's saying, well, how are we going to pay for that, right? So we've, you know, we claim to have saved a few billion dollars, which I think is false.”

And we're just going to pour money into defense and it hasn't made us smarter, right? It allows us to target really inexpensive stuff with really expensive stuff and destroy it from great distances. But it hasn't brought us success or victory. And the analogy that I keep coming back to and I'm, you know, me I'm a big sports fan and a movie fan. So you put those together in the great movie, when when we were kings, about the great fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali and George Foreman was undefeatable.

He was a behemoth of a man. And everybody said, Ali, who was in his 30s, was going to get demolished. And Ali went to rope a dope. He went to the ropes that he took every shot that George Foreman could lay on him. And in three rounds, George Foreman was punched out, had nothing left. And Ali just got off off the ropes and laid it a couple of rights and an uppercut and Foreman was down.

“And you know, wrestling is the national sport in Iran, not boxing, but it's probably a close second. And I think that's the app model here, which is that Donald Trump is going to lose interest.”

Gas prices are going up. He's going to lose at the midterm elections. Republicans, some of them will say, you know what, we still just we still agree with this guy, but we don't want to be losers too. And they'll start to run just like Orbin in Hungary, right? It wasn't that Orbin lost popularity. It's that the inflation was 50%. And people are like, well, I'm not with this guy anymore. If you can't bring victory. So I think you're right on the military industrial complex and on the fact that the United States has a tactical success, but it's facing strategic defeat, but it doesn't solve the problem in front of us, which is we're looking at

“as Joe said, alliances are in tatters and Iran that's going to be nuclear capable. And our states that used to be with us in the region now thinking we're more likely to bring death and destruction than Iran is.”

Yeah, I mean, and we could add to that that our primary ally in the region is real is now the primary destabilizing force in the region.

That the biggest most powerful nation in the region, number one or number two trading partner and investment partner of every country in the region is China, it's not us.

So the geopolitical geoeconomic landscape has changed a lot, but Joe, you know, to get back to what we were joking about briefly at the outset. I was a joke, I don't think you were joking. So the reality. It's a laugh a minute around your David. Yeah, exactly. But you guys have lived at the center of the national security apparatus in the US, and there are a lot of very well-intentioned people at the center of this apparatus. And we have extremely talented, capable, you know, well-trained, military, and diplomats and intelligence community.

But if you look at our record on foreign policy, on national security, whether it's Vietnam, whether it's Iran, contra, whether it's the Gulf wars that never ended in produce lousy outcomes,

up to and including this war, whether it's our vassalating on important issues like Ukraine, whether it's our relative position compared to a superpower like China, whether it's the decay of international institutions upon which we base our post-World War II international order.

I can be tough. I can be as tough as a Republican. I need to embrace the center-right model, or they will accuse me of weakness.

“While all this has happened, we've ignored the warning of the last president who has actually seen your military officer Dwight Eisenhower, who said that we were going to be led astray by the military industrial complex in 1961.”

And for the ensuing 65 years have been lousy at national security policy. And it would, you know, at some point when you do something, you don't get the right results for 65 years, and let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard about the winning the Cold War.

Most of the groundwork for how that happened was laid during the Eisenhower era and it was about investing in ourselves and letting entropy take care of them.

When you look at that, you've got to say, "Is that it time for a fundamental change and how we approach national security and foreign policy?" Well, you know, I joined the left, as you say, when I was a college student because of the Vietnam War, it just didn't make any sense to me. And I've been on the left ever since, for exactly the reasons you laid out. I mean, yes, there's more reasons in this philosophical reasons, but for me, it's really been pragmatic. It's been because what I've seen the right wing, the conservatives and the moderates in the middle proposed, doesn't work. You do their strategies and you end up worse off. And it's been going on for years, as I say, in this century, this is the third application of the theory of regime change that military power can solve your problems.

“It does it work. And every once in a while, we get a flicker of hope. You may remember the beginning of the Biden administration when Jake Sullivan came out on the stage in November of 2020. He was the designated national security advisor.”

And he said that the president had directed them, the president liked, had directed them to redefine national security. And they really, I thought, had it. We're going to redefine it. So the national security was, as Eisenhower said, as you said, David was about, you know, taking care of the American people was addressing the income gap was addressing social inequities was addressing racial differences that still plagued us. He had his back that was addressing climate change, perhaps at that point the greatest threat to the future of humanity. That was addressing pandemics, you know, this, this was, was how we were going to focus. It didn't last long.

“And I think for the reasons you stayed, David, that the, the moderates here, the moderates, the centrist and the democratic party are afraid of national security.”

They're afraid to look to week. And they're always trying to court the right to try to get that sliver of the Republican voters to come with them and they think they have to be tough on national security. So they support an ordinantly large military budgets. They're, they want to be tough on national security. It's time to change that. We do need a true progressive national security policy that that deals with the real sources of our strengths, the reason most people in the world, if they have, if they could choose where they wanted to live, they would live here.

Despite everything we just discussed, they would still live here because America does still have that promise to have, has does have that opportunity. If we could just align our government and our national security policy with the common sense of the American people, we'd be much better off than the policies we've been pursuing for too many decades.

So John, go ahead, attack Joe for being a crazy aging hippie. And while you're doing it, and while you're doing it, I am in Boulder, Colorado.

You could be on one side of the street or the other say anyway, the point is the attack, if president president, Joe Serencio went out there and said all this, the mega party, Trump party would say, well Donald Trump wants to spend $1.5 trillion in defense by definition, that makes him strong and jolly. I think there will always be people in the middle and on the right, and even on the left, a few of them, when you say, I would spend less on defense, I don't want to have the greatest military in the world, I will, will attack you, they'll try to get to the right of you because that has been a traditional play now for generations in the United States.

I want to appeal to that, what Americans want at a base level, to the extent that Americans are feeling betrayed by Donald Trump, it's because he didn't bring inflation down, and he got sucked into foreign wars. So Donald Trump, I mean, Donald Trump never intended to deliver for the American people, he was going to deliver for the robber barons that are now running to U.S. government, the both the AI-brows and the oil and gas-brows who are doing extremely well under all of this, both after Venezuela and Iran.

I'm saying, oh, this is terrible for the American economy, it's great for American oil and gas companies.

“So I mean, to that extent, Donald Trump has delivered for his buddies, but for the American people, that argument, I think whoever is going to be running for office,”

has to be willing to stand up and say what you have said today, which is that policy of investing more money than we have in defense hasn't made us safer. It's smart judgment in the White House, but what makes us safer is having a prosperous America that can pay its debts that can educate its people and can take care of its elderly. And if we do that, then nobody who's dare going to touch us because we will be the most desirable country in the world. But right now, we can't do that. Joe, you know what people say, oh, this is crazy left wing stuff, my first response is, oh, you mean left wing like Dwight Eisenhower or do you mean left wing like Richard Nixon who created the environmental protection agency or the education department and the Department of Energy or do you mean, you know,

“left wing like the last major more time president who enjoyed a victory FDR or crazy left wing like Harry Truman.”

I mean, the reality is one of the national health insurance, right, right, but the reality is this the policies that you and I and John are talking about here to make America stronger.

Back to foundational principles of national security, which were outlined by George Kennan and the long telegram in 1947 when after talking about the threat of Russia for the first few pages of the telegram concludes by saying, what we must do to win is lead by example at home. In other words, this isn't crazy stuff, although a big component of it is, what does this all look like in the future and why are we spending trillions investing in legacy systems that are outdated like carrier battle groups or trillions on investing in nuclear systems that we shouldn't have in the future.

“And ultimately are a greater risk than they are a source of security.”

You know, this is not crazy. What's crazy is throwing dump trucks full of gold bullion out the window instead of investing in our sources of strength. I agree completely David and you can, you know, you can even make the case again pragmatically you know, look at what's happened to our military procurement. I mean, we're clear right about this the military procurement policies of the United States have always been a little corrupt.

I mean, some of the founding fathers got rich supply him to mental army, you know, so there's always been that element, but it's really out of control now.

And it me and what it means is that it saddles us with this gigantic, you know, 100 billion trillion dollar investments in systems like the F-35 fighters, supposedly the most advanced fighter for the world or what's its mission to win dog fights, who has dog fights anymore. What are we doing? And we're getting beaten by 10,000 dollar drones and cheap ballistic missiles and tiny mines in the States. We've completely lost touch with what the actual military threats are and what we need to do it. And we're spending $2 trillion on what new nuclear weapons to be prepared to fight and win and nuclear war.

What why? Well, because you make money off of nuclear weapons. These are very big contracts. People get very rich. We spend $100 billion a year under nuclear weapons or golden dome.

We've got to get control of this. We've got to bring these budgets down. We've got to reorient them. One way you do it is exactly what you're saying, talking about the real sources of US train.

People know what that is. Education, health care, housing, taking care of the people, building up the industrial capacity of the United States. You know, imagine how much better we'd be off. We'd be right now if we'd been investing in a renewable energy instead of, you know, we're pressing them or giving them minor age. Imagine we wouldn't care whether the streets of our movies were open or not in a real sense, not like Donald Trump sense, because we wouldn't, we would have broken the tyranny of fossil fuels.

You know, these are the kinds of far-reaching national security strategies we need, not this pursuit of profits and legacy military systems.

“So while we're at solving this massive enormous problem, I think we also have to just be realistic about one other element of something that has to change, which is that you have one person”

who has made the decision to drag the United States into this disaster. Yeah. The constitution says Congress declares war.

I'll just re-reading federal paper number four for a project, John Jay. You might have heard of him. There's a reason there's no Jay Street in Washington.

It's because it turns out Alexander Hamilton and John Jay didn't get along so well.

“Um, but even though I would add that Hamilton Hall is one building away from John Jay Hall at Columbia.”

So maybe there is hope that, you know, eventually this all come together, but there was a concern that you not empower one person with the ability to lead a nation to war. Founding fathers recognize you need one person to run the war once it started and so in order to repel an imminent threat or ongoing threat. But all of the legal systems that we thought were durable have fallen before our eyes. President announced yesterday a blockade, something everybody says and agrees is an act of war and yet Congress is absent.

“You can't get a single Republican other than Rand Paul to say, yes, we need to vote on this. We need to constrain the president's ability to actually wage this war, which is unconstitutional.”

And all of this is just wither. And then as Joe and I have talked about in David, you and I've talked about this as well. If you extrapolate that all the way to nuclear, we rely on the sanity of a man who posted himself as Jesus Christ yesterday to make sure that nuclear weapons are not used unless absolutely necessary. So since we're cheering everybody up, I thought I would just share that with you. Well, I thought you were going to go in a different direction because you didn't talk about what you're doing in your main job these days, which is our weakness has also now triggered a global nuclear arms race.

And that you know, we're going to have to deal with all of these things while dealing with the fact that the world is getting more dangerous. And we still haven't figured out the calculus of how nuclear arms race plus AI arms race, what what that equation works out to. It's like 17 dimensional chess, right? Well, I mean, it is, except we know one thing, right? And that is what we've been doing hasn't been working. So if we're going to deal with this, get out of blank sheet of paper and and put these priorities at the top of the list, I would give you the last word here, Joe.

Taking that kind of approach blank slate, you know, if we could design our national defense strategy from the ground up over to look like is is a liberating experience because then you, you're you're starting with the core assets that you need in the American system education health care job creation to make the country strong and then you say, okay, what are the real threats that we face, what country can actually destroy us as only a handful. Why can they destroy us because they have nuclear weapons, then why don't we orient our policy towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, not this.

If a deterrent that can somehow convince the other guy not to attack us and then what, you know, what is the great strength that America has our alliance system. Or maybe we should be rebuilding our alliance system instead of destroying it, they're very Donald Trump, is it, et cetera, et cetera, you can see you could start putting the blocks in together when you do that, you end up with a system, a structure budget that looks very different from what we currently have. That's the way to sort of break the chain here is to liberate ourselves from the, the, the, the, the, the the the weights of the existing systems and think fresh a blank slate approach.

Well, you know, if, if you, too, could be in responsible for solving these problems, we'd be better off.

“You're a great high in David. Thank you. Thank you. Many things have been said on this program that I grew up with, I'm not sure, you know, it's only two of us are going to solve this problem.”

I mean, you know, it, I mean, not not not to not to just dismiss a lovely compliment, but the challenge here is that it takes an enormous ground swell and a political epiphany.

That has to happen across the political landscaping conference and, you know, that's an act of will by the American people that we have to generate.

It's not.

“I would go further, and this is a point that I want to make in what I'm writing, but.”

And this is the hardest point of all, particularly for people like us who've spent decades in the middle of this community.

It takes a cultural sea change in the US national security community and with it, a changing of the guard. We can't go back to the same people, the same ideas, the think tanks that are factories for reputation management. And expect that the kind of tiny incremental changes that Washington has built to accept. Or the forces that are a foot for the reason the Joe stated, the money, the corruption are not somehow put in check. That is, we conclude here last week in the midst of all the insanity and genocidal threats of the government and and fake ceasefire talks and and, you know,

Malania's press conference and everything else that was going on last week. President of the United States tweeted out that Palantir was a good investment and included it's stock symbol in the tweet. You know, it's it promoting as it happens this company that has given him tons of money. And it was so influential that it's boss Peter Teele was allowed to suggest that his protege J.D. events become the vice president. There's a lot of corruption in Washington, not just inertia, not just intellectual timidity, not just lack of creativity, but all those forces together what we're up against here.

“And I think that's why discussions like this are so important. That's why I'm so glad that you have joined us again. So hopeful you will join us on a regular basis.”

And hopeful that all of you out there listening will join us subscribe to the substectane to know subscribe to the DSR network on YouTube where we're growing fast or or as a podcast via going to the DSR network.com and clicking on membership. Because this this is the discussion we're trying to trigger here and now it's the time anyway. Thank you John. Thank you Joe. Thank you everybody. Thank you David. Thank you David.