Welcome to Tucker Carlson show. It's become pretty clear that the mainstream media are dying. They can't die quickly enough. And there's a reason they're dying, because they lie. They lied so much it killed them. We're not doing that. Tuckercarlson.com comma, we promised to bring you the most honest content, the most honest interviews we can without fear or favor. Here's the latest.

Do you drink coffee all the time? Nonstop.

Me, too.

Nonstop. Nine or ten cups a day.

Yeah, it's good.

I like coffee. And I drink it straight until minutes before bed.

I do, too.

Oh, do you? Yeah.

And we will never drink as much as Voltaire drank.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, is that right?

Like 40 cups. Yeah.

Oh, is that right? Oh, yeah.

And it worked. Okay. So the one thing that we know, we heard about the movement of russian troops into eastern Ukraine in February of 2022 was it was unprovoked. Here's a selection of what we know about that.

The russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity. This is a premeditated attack. Russia's unprovoked and cruel invasion has galvanized countries from around the world.

Russia's unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine. Russia conducted an unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.

This unprovoked russian war of aggression has got to be met with strength. Vladimir Putin decided, unprovoked, to start this war.

So was it unprovoked?

Well, we did hear that a lot of times. Yes, we did. I actually asked research assistant of mine to count how many times we heard that in the New York Times in that first year, from February 2022 to February 2023, in their opinion, was 26 times unprovoked. Of course, things aren't unprovoked.

It's almost a brand name, the unprovoked invasion.

It's the lazy person's dodge for actually trying to think through what's going on. And it's very dangerous because it's wrong. It gets the whole story completely wrong, and it misunderstands the trap that we set for ourselves as the United states to push Ukraine deeper and deeper and deeper into this hopeless mess that they're in right now.

So in what sense was it provoked? What started this?

Basically, it started very simply, which is that the United States government, let's not call it the us people, they had nothing to do with this. But the us government said, we're going to put Ukraine on our side and we're going to go right up to that 2100 kilometer border with Russian. We're going to put our troops and NATO and maybe missiles, whatever we want, because we are the sole superpower of the world and we do what we want. And it goes back, actually a long way. It goes back 170 years. The Brits had this idea, first surround Russia in the Black Sea region, and Russia's not a great power anymore. And that was Lord Palmerston's idea in the crimean war, 1853 to 1856. And the Brits taught us what we know about empire, and they basically taught us the idea. Russia, it needs an outlet. It needs an outlet to the Middle east. It needs an outlet to the Mediterranean. You surround Russia and the Black Sea, you have rendered Russia a second or third rate country. And Zbig Brzezinski, one of our lead geostrategists of the current era, wrote in 1997, let's do this.

Let's make sure that we basically surround Russia in the Black Sea region. They got this idea that will expand NATO so that every country in the Black Sea around Russia is a NATO country right now. Well, back then, Turkey was a NATO country, but we said, okay, we'll get Romania and Bulgaria and we'll get Ukraine and we'll get Georgia. Now, Georgia, not our Georgia. Atlanta, Georgia. Georgia of the Black Sea.

We used to call it Soviet Georgia.

Yes, Soviet Georgia, if you want to call it that.

Home of Stalin.

It's not NATO, North Atlantic. It's way out there on the eastern edge of the Black Sea region. People can look at a map. But we said, yeah, we'll make Georgia part of NATO, too. And the reason was very clear, and Zbig was very explicit about it, that this is our way to basically dominate Eurasia. If we can dominate the Black Sea region, then Russia's nothing. If we make Russia nothing, then we can basically control Eurasia, meaning all the way from Europe to Central Asia and through our influence in East Asia, do the same thing. And that's american unipolarity. We run the world. We are the hegemon. We are the sole superpower. We are unchallenged. So that's the idea.

But why would you want that? Why would the Brits want that? Why does the US State Department want that? What about Russia, which is not actually much of an expansionist power, is so threatening?

It's not about Russia, it's about the US. It's about Britain before that. I think it's a little bit like that old game of risk. I don't know if you played that as a kid. But the idea was, have your peace on every place in the world. That was the game. And you read the american strategists, whether it's Zbig Brzezinski, although he was a very moderate, or the neocons who have run us foreign policy for the last 30 years, the neocons are very explicit. The US must be the unchallenged superpower in every place in the world, in every region. We must dominate. It's quite a load for us american people. What they say is, we are going to be the constabulary duty holder, fancy word for saying we'll be the world's policeman. They say it explicitly. They say, that's lots of wars. We have to be ready for all these wars. To my mind, it's a little crazy, but their idea was, after the end of the Soviet Union, well, now we run the world to come back to Russia. The idea was, well, Russia's weak, it's down. We're the sole superpower. They're on their back or on their knees, whatever it is.

And now we can move NATO where we want and we can surround them. And the Russians said, please don't do that. Don't bring your troops, your weapons, your missiles right up to our border. It's not a good idea. And the US, I was around in those years, involved in Russia and in central Europe. The US was, we don't hear you. We don't hear you. We do what we want. They kept pushing inside the us government in the 1990s when this debate was going, should NATO expand? Some people said, yeah, but we told Gorbachev and we told Yeltsin we weren't going to expand at all. Now, come on, the Soviet Union's done. We can do what we want. We're the sole superpower. Clinton bought into that. That was Madeleine Albright's line. NATO enlargement started. And our most sophisticated diplomats. We used to have diplomats at the time, we don't have them anymore, but we used to have diplomats like George Kennan said, this is the greatest mistake we could possibly make. We had a defense secretary, Bill Perry, who was Clinton's defense secretary, who agonized, God, I should resign over this. This is terrible, what's going on?

But he was outmaneuvered diplomatically by Richard Holbrook and by Madeleine Albright. And Clinton never thought through anything systematically, in my opinion. And so they decided, okay, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, first round, and then Brzezinski, in a 1997 article in foreign affairs magazine, which is kind of the bellwether of foreign policy wrote a strategy for Eurasia, where he laid out exactly the timeline for this us expansion of power. And he said, late 1990s will take in central Europe, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic. By the early two thousands, we'll take in the baltic states. Now, that's get close to Russia. By 2005 to 2010, we'll invite Ukraine to become part of NATO. So this wasn't some flippant thing. This was a long term plan, and it was based on a long term geostrategy. Now the Russians are saying, are you kidding? We wanted peace. We ended the cold war, too. You didn't just defeat us, said no more. We disbanded the Warsaw Pact. We wanted peace. We wanted cooperation. You call it victory? We just wanted to cooperate. I know that for a fact because I was there in those years what Gorbachev wanted, what Yeltsin wanted. They didn't want war with the United States, nor were they saying, we're defeated.

They were saying, we just want to cooperate. We want to stop the cold war. We want to become part of a world economy. We want to be a normal economy. We want to be normal society connected with you, connected with Europe, connected with Asia. And the US said, we get it, we get it. We won. You do everything we say and we determine how the pieces are going to go. So in the early two thousands, Putin comes in first. Business for Putin was good cooperation with Europe. You go back to the early two thousands again. I know the people I watch closely. I was a participant in some of it. Putin was completely pro Europe. Yes, and pro us, by the way, and we don't want to talk about this. We don't want to admit it, because we don't want anything other than unprovoked. So everything is phony. What we say, everything is a lie. But just to say, the US kept doing unilateral things that were really outrageous. In 2000, in 1999, we bombed Belgrade for 78 days. Bad move. Absolutely. We bombed a capital of Europe for 78 days.

What was looking back, what was the point of that?

The point of that was to break Serbia in two, create a new state, Kosovo, where we have the largest NATO military base in southeast Europe. We put bond steel base there because we wanted a base in southeastern Europe. And again, you look at the neocons. It's nice of them. They actually describe all of this in various documents. You have to make the links. But in a document called rebuilding America's defenses in the year 2000, they say the Balkans is a new strategic area for the US. So we have to move large troops to the Balkans because their idea is literally the game of risk, not just you need good relations or peace. We need our pieces on the board. We need military bases with the advanced positioning of our military everywhere in the world. So they wanted a big base in southeastern Europe. They didn't like Serbia. Serbia was close to Russia anyway. We're the sole superpower. We do what we want. So they divided the country, which they now claim you never do. You know, you never change borders. We broke apart Serbia, established by our declaration, a new country, Kosovo. We put a huge NATO base there, and that was the goal.

So that was 1990, wasn't to save.

The oppressed muslim population.

Excuse me.

It wasn't to save the oppressed muslim population.

It was very much to save the military industrial complex, to have a nice location in southeastern Europe.

It killed all those people, wrecked the city.

You know, it was a little bit sad, but we do lots of sad things and lots of destructive things, lots of wars. We're the country of perpetual war. We don't look back. We're not even supposed to talk about this because this was unprovoked, remember? So in 2002, the US unilaterally pulled out of the anti ballistic missile treaty. Unilaterally. Well, that was one of the stabilizers of the relationship with Russia, and it was one of the stabilizers of the global nuclear situation, which is absolutely dangerous. And the US unilaterally started putting Aegis missiles into first Poland, then Romania. And the Russians are saying, wait a minute, what do we know? You're putting in this? You're a few minutes from Moscow. This is completely destabilizing. Do you think you might want to talk to us? So then comes 2004, seven more countries in NATO. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia now starting filling in the Black Sea. Romania and Bulgaria. Suddenly they're now north atlantic countries. But it's all part of this design, all spelled out, all quite explicit. We're surrounding Russia. In 2007, President Putin gave a very clear speech at the Munich security conference, very powerful, very correct, very frustrated, where he said, gentlemen, you told us in 1990 NATO would never enlarge.

That was the promise made to President Gorbachev, and it was the promise made to President Yeltsin. And you cheated, and you repeatedly cheated, and you don't even admit that you said this, but it's all plainly documented, by the way, and as you know, in a thousand archival sites, so it's easy to verify all of this. James Baker, the third, our secretary of state, said that NATO would not move one inch eastward. And it wasn't a flippant statement. It was a statement repeated and repeated and repeated. Hans Dietrich Gensher, the foreign minister of Germany, same story. The Germans wanted reunification. Gorbachev said, we'll support that. But we don't want that to come at our expense. No, no, it won't come at your expense. NATO won't move one inch eastward. Mister president. Repeated so many times in many documents, many statements by the NATO secretary general, by the us secretary of state, by the german chancellor. Now, of course, all denied by our foreign policy blob because we're not supposed to remember anything. Remember, this was all unprovoked. So back to 2007, Putin gives the speech and he says, stop. Don't even think about Ukraine. This is our 2100 kilometer border.

This is absolutely part of the integrated economy of this region. Don't even think about it. Now, I know from insiders, from all the diplomatic work that I do, that Europe was saying to the US, european leaders, don't think about Ukraine. Please, this is not a good idea. Just stop. We know from our current CIA director, Bill Burns, that he wrote a very eloquent, impassioned, articulate, clear, secret as usual memo, which we only got to see because WikiLeaks showed to the american people. Maybe we would like to know once in a while, but we're never talking.

What our government's doing, what they're doing.

And how they're putting us at nuclear risk and other things. Okay, this one did get out. And it's called nyet means nietzsche, no means no. And what Bill Burns very perceptively, articulately conveys to condoleezza Rice and back to the White House in 2008 is Ukraine is really a red line. Don't do it. It's not just Putin. It's not just Putin's government. It's the entire political class of Russia. And just to help all of us, as we think about it, it is exactly as if Mexico said, we think it would be great to have chinese military bases on the Rio Grande. We can't see why the US would have any problem with that. Of course, we would go completely insane. But.

And we should.

And we should. Of course. It's. The whole idea is so absurdly dangerous and reckless that you can't even imagine grown ups doing this. So what happens is the what for what I'm told by european leaders and by long, detailed discussion, Bush Junior says to them, no, no, no, it's okay. Don't worry. I hear you about Ukraine. And then he goes off for the Christmas holidays and comes back, whether it's Cheney, whether it's Bush, whatever it is says, yeah, NATO's going to enlarge to Ukraine, and the Europeans are shocked, pissed. What are you doing?

You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right and left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson network, and we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tuckercarlson.com podcast, our entire archive. Is there a lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running Tucker carlson.com podcast. You will not regret it. So Bush did not make that decision.

Bush did not make the decision.

Right. I mean, it sounds, if I'm hearing.

What I'm saying, what I'm saying, yeah, no, Bush did make the decision.

Okay.

But you know, what I'm saying is he had told the Europeans, I hear you, I'm not going to do it.

But it sounds like he was influenced by the people around him.

Oh, no, that could be. Yeah. I don't know whether it was CIA or whether someone explained to him or whether someone said, george, mister president, this is a longstanding project. You know, it's not something for a european country to object to. I don't know what happened there. But what I do know is that he came back and told the european leaders, no, we're doing it. They said, no, no, we're not doing it. And then they had the NATO summit in Bucharest, and this was 2008. And the Europeans, Chancellor Merkel, the french president, all of them, George, don't do this. Don't do this. This is extraordinarily dangerous. This is really provocative. We don't really need or want NATO right up to the russian border. Bush pushed, pushed, pushed. This is a US alliance fundamentally, and they made the commitment. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. The dodge was, okay, we won't give them exactly the roadmap right now, but Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Because in those days, the US and Russia met in a NATO partnership. Even then, Putin was there the next day in Bucharest saying, don't do this. This is completely reckless.

Essentially, this is our fundamental red line. Do not do this. The US can't hear any of this. This is our biggest problem of all, because the neocons who have run the show for 30 years believe the US can do whatever it wants. This is the most fundamental point to understand about us foreign policy. They're wrong. They keep screwing up. They keep getting us into trillion dollar plus wars. They keep killing a lot of people. But their basic belief is the US is the only superpower. It's the unipolar power, and we can do what we want. So they could not hear Putin even that moment. They couldn't hear the rest of the Europeans. And by the way, they said Georgia would become part of NATO again. The only way to understand that is in this longstanding Palmerston Brzezinski theory. This isn't just haphazard. Oh, why don't we take Georgia? This is a plan, okay? The Russians understand every single step of this. So another thing goes awry. What goes awry? The Ukrainians don't want NATO enlargement. The Ukrainians don't want it. They're against it. The public opinion said, no, this is very dangerous neutrality. It's safer.

We're in between east and west. We don't want this. So they elect Viktor Yanukovych a president that says, we'll just be neutral. And that's absolutely. The US is, oh, what the hell is this? Ukraine, they don't have any choice either. Yanukovych becomes the enemy of the neocons, obviously. So they start working, of course, the way that the US does. We got to get rid of this guy. Maybe we'll elect his opponent afterwards. Maybe we'll catch him in a crisis and so forth. And indeed, at the end of 2013, the US absolutely stokes a crisis that becomes an insurrection and then becomes a couple. And I know again, from firsthand experience, the US was profoundly implicated in that. But you can see our senators standing up in the crowd. Like, if chinese officials came to January 6 and said, yes, yes, go, you know, how would we like it if chinese leaders came and said, yeah, we were with you 100%. American senators standing up in Kiev saying to the demonstrators, we're with you 100%. Victoria Nuland famously passing around the cookies. But it was much, much more than the cookies, I can tell you. And so the US conspired with a ukrainian right to overthrow Yanukovych, and there was a violent overthrow in the third week of February of 2014.

That's when this war started. This war didn't even start in 2022. It started in 2014. That was the outbreak of the war was a violent coup that overthrew a ukrainian president that wanted neutrality when he was violently overthrown. And his security people told him, you're going to get killed. And so he flew to Kharkiv and then flew onward to Russia. That day, the US immediately, in a nanosecond, recognized the new government. This is a coup. This is how the CIA does its regime change operations. So this is when the war starts. Putin's understanding, completely correct in this moment, was, I'm not letting NATO take my naval fleet and my naval base in Crimea. Are you kidding? The russian naval base in the Black Sea, which was the object of the crimean war, and in its way is the object of this war in Sevastopol, has been there since 1783. And now Putin's saying, oh, NATO's going to walk in hell. No. And so they organized this referendum of the. This is a russian region and there's an overwhelming support. We'll stay with Russia. Thank you. Not with this new post coup government. An outbreak breaks out in the eastern provinces, which are the ethnic russian provinces, in the Donbas, in Luhansk and Donetsk, and there's a lot of violence.

So the war starts in 2014. So saying something's unprovoked in 2022 is a little bizarre for anyone that actually reads a normal newspaper to begin with. But in any event, the war starts then, and within a year, the Russians are saying very wisely, we actually don't want this war, we don't want to own Ukraine, we don't want problems on our border. We would like peace based on respect for the ethnic Russians in the east and political autonomy, because you, the coup government, tried to close down all russian language, culture and rights of these people after having made a violent coup. So we don't accept that. So what came out of that was two agreements called the Minsk one and the Minsk two agreements. The Minsk two agreement was backed by the UN Security Council and it said that will make peace based on autonomy of the Donbas region. Now, very interesting. The Russians were not saying, that's ours. We want that. All the things that are claimed every day, that Putin just wants to recreate. He thinks he's Peter the great. He wants to recreate the russian empire. He wants to grab territory. Nothing like that.

The opposite. We don't want the territory. We actually just want autonomy based on an agreement reached with the ukrainian government. So what was the us attitude towards that? Us government attitude? Us government attitude was to say to the Ukrainians, don't worry about it. Come on, don't worry about it. You keep your central state. We don't want to see Ukraine weakened. At all. We just want a NATO in a unified Ukraine. Don't go for decentralization. We tell them to blow off the very treaty that they've signed. Then we accuse Russia of not having diplomacy, by the way, which is par for the course. Oh, you can't trust them. We blow off every single agreement. We blow off not moving one inch eastward. We blow off the anti ballistic missile treaty. We have so many NATO led wars of choice in between. I didn't even mention in Syria, CIA attempt to overthrow Assad in Libya and so forth. And we blow off the Minsk agreements. And actually, Angela Merkel explained in a rather shockingly frank interview that she gave last year when asked why Germany didn't help to enforce the Minsk agreement. Because Germany and France were the guarantors of the Minsk agreement under something called the Normandy process, she said, well, we just thought this was to give some time to the Ukrainians to build up their strength.

In other words, they were guarantors of something in a phony way. And the US was absolutely lying about this. And I know senior Ukrainians who were in government and who were around the government who said to me, Jeff, we're not going to do that anyway. That was at gunpoint. We don't have to agree with that. So all that diplomacy was blown off. The war continued. The US pumped in arms, built up armaments, was building up what would be the biggest army of Europe, actually a huge army that Russia was watching. What are you doing? You're not honoring Minsk. You're building up this huge ukrainian army.

Paid for by NATO.

Paid for by the United States. Basically, yes. And in 2021, Putin met with Biden. And then after the meeting, he put on the table a draft Russia US security agreement. Put it on the table on December 15, 2021. It's worth reading. Very plausible document. I don't agree with some of it. It's a negotiable document, something you would negotiate. I thought the core of it was stop the NATO enlargement. And I called the White House myself at that point and said, dont have a war over this.

Whod you talk to?

I talked to Jake Sullivan and I said, dont have a war over this. We dont need NATO enlargement for us security. In fact, its counter to us security. The US should not be right up against the russian border. That's how we trip ourselves into world War III. No, Jeff, don't worry. No war. There's not going to be a war. Don't worry. We've got a diplomatic approach. I said, Jake, this is a basis for diplomacy, negotiate. Well, the formal response of the United States is that issues about NATO are non negotiable. They're only between NATO countries and NATO candidates. No third party has any stake or interest or say in this Russia. It's completely irrelevant. Again, to use the analogy, you know, if Mexico and China want to put chinese military bases on the Rio Grande, the United States has no right to interfere and no interest in it. And no interest in it and no bilateral. And this was the formal us response in January 2022. So unprovoked, not exactly 30 years of provocation where we could not take peace for an answer. One moment. All we could take is we'll do whatever we want, wherever we want, and no one has any say in this at all.

So can I just go back 1212, I guess, 22 years. Putin told me and I checked. I think it's true that he, in Clinton's final days, asked Clinton if Russia could join NATO, which seems almost by definition like a victory. NATO exists as a bulwark against Russia. If Russia wants to join the alliance, then you've won. Right? Why would, why would the us government have turned that offer down? And do you think that is real Russia?

And actually Europe used to want, before Europe was completely a kind of vassal province of the United States government wanted what they call collective security, which was, we want security arrangements in which one countrys security doesnt ruin the security of another country. And there were two paths to that. There were basically three paths. Let's say one path was what they call the OSCE, the organization of security and cooperation in Europe. Really a good idea. It's western Europe, central Europe, Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union. And the idea was, let's bring us all together under one kind of charter and we'll work out a collective security arrangement. I liked it. This is what Gorbachev was saying. We don't want war with you, we don't want conflict with you, we want collective security. Second arrangement, that actually makes a lot of sense. But people say, is this guy out of his mind? But it actually makes a lot of sense. Gorbachev disbanded the Warsaw pact. We should have disbanded NATO, said NATO was there to defend against a soviet invasion. There's not going to be any soviet invasion. In fact, after December 1991, there's not even a Soviet Union.

We don't need NATO. Why is there NATO? NATO was established to defend against the Soviet Union. So why did it continue after Gorbachev and Yeltsin? The neocons, thankfully. Thank you. Read the document. It's all explicit. This is our way of keeping our hegemony in Europe. In other words, this is our way of keeping our say in Europe. Not protecting Europe, not even protecting us. This is hegemony. We need our pieces on the board. NATO's our pieces on the board.

Why would European. Why would Germany allow foreign troops garrison garrisoned on its soil for 80 years? I don't understand. Why would european countries allow that? Would you want foreign troops in our town?

Tucker, when. When you had your wonderful interview with Putin, he answered everything except once you asked him, what are the Germans seeing in this? And Putin said, I don't get it. And I thought, oh, my God, thank you. I don't get it either.

Is it just broken by war guilt? Is it masochism?

I mean, honestly, it's not masochism. It's not war guilt. There is. There are basic mechanisms that I don't understand. Truly, after being around more than 40 years in this and knowing all the leaders, and I know Shultz and I know others, I don't understand it. But when the US has a military base in your country, it really pulls a lot of the political strings in your country. It really influences the political parties. It really pays. I know it's. I'm naive, you know? In other words, the Germans are not. They're not free actors in this. That's the point.

If men with guns showed up in your apartment in New York and just camped out there, you probably wouldn't really be the head of your household anymore, would you?

It's probably true. But, you know, your question of, why would the Germans want this? It's the same question of, after the US blew up the Nord stream pipeline, why wouldn't the Germans have said, before or after? Why did you do that? This is our economy. You just blew up. But they don't. And so they're so subservient to the US interests. It's a little hard to understand because it makes no sense for Europe. But like you said, you know, there are people in your house. Maybe that's the bottom line. I've spoken to european leaders who have said to me, I can't quote it because it's so shocking, and I won't quote it because it was said confidentially. But basically, they don't take us seriously in Washington. And I said, yes. I didn't say it was the bubble over my head speaking to a european leader. But maybe if you pushed a little bit, you would be taken more seriously. Not in this way of just defeat, but it was said to me in such a sad way, I just felt, oh, God, don't tell me that you're a leader in Europe, but we're occupying.

Their country with soldiers and guns. How could we take them seriously? They're a bitch. I mean, honestly, no.

I don't know. It's really sad. And it's doing a lot of damage to, it's doing huge damage to Europe. It's destroying Ukraine, by the way. That's the first point. It's destroying Ukraine. It's doing a lot of damage to Europe, wasting a hell of a lot of lives and money in the United States, which the neocons don't count. And almost nobody stands up and talks about it. And your first question about being unprovoked, we even have a story about it. It's, the story's complete bull. It's complete nonsense. It's for people who don't want or don't remember, don't want to remember anything before February 24, 2022. But there's a whole long history to this that's absolutely kind of absurd and tragic. I mean, it's, it's absurd. It's utterly tragic. 500,000 Ukrainians dead for nothing.

Do you think that's the number?

I think that's probably the number, yeah. That's the best number that I know.

I mean, we talked about this last night at dinner. But one of the most shocking things, just as someone who lived in Washington to me, is if you ask any of the senators, as I have, who voted to keep this war going with us tax dollars, how many of your beloved Ukrainians have been killed? They have no idea and they have no interest in knowing.

And they don't care at all. And sometimes they say they don't care. Mitt Romney said, you know, it's greatest bargain, no american lives. Dick Blumenthal said the same thing. Basically, this is a great bargain, no american lives.

But isn't that evil? I mean, at some point, it's certainly hypocritical. They're telling us, we're doing this for Ukraine, for our friends in Ukraine, the standard bearers of democracy. But also, don't you have an obligation to kind of care about the people you kill?

I think so. You think so? I think Americans think so. I don't think that the security apparatus thinks so because the security state, you know, you got to be tough to play that game of risk. You got to know there are going to be some collateral losses. Some millions of people have died in american wars of choice. But if you're a big boy. You can't let that deter you. So I think it's pretty deeply ingrained that a few hundred thousand lives here and there. Come on, we're talking about who runs the world after all.

It's really, really dark.

I think it's extraordinarily reckless just to circle back.

But also, look, if the pretext for all of this is some sort of moral authority were for democracy there, for.

Authoritarianism, this has nothing to do with morality. This has nothing to do with morality. It has nothing to do with western values. It has nothing to do with american values. It doesn't even have to do with american interests from what I can see, although it says that they say that american interests are at stake, well, we've spent maybe $7 trillion on these reckless perpetual wars since 2001. Is that really we've added to the debt? The debt's gone from about 30% of national income to more than 100% of national income. We've had these disastrous wars. Is this America's interest? No. I mean, maybe we could have actually rebuilt a bridge or a road along the way or no, it destroyed our country even at a mile of faster rail in our country or something. But no, we had to spend trillions and trillions on wars. So to my mind it's all completely perverse. But what I find amazing is that once in a while you have to look, but once in a while you'll actually find the truth expressed in such a vulgar way. No, they don't count the ukrainian lives. They literally say, no american lives.

We're not even so sure about that, by the way.

But no Americans have died.

Yeah, it's not a large number, but it's some. But they don't tell us the truth about that either.

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So just to circle back to the provocation, I watched as a complete non expert, the administration send the vice president to the Munich Security Conference in February of 2022 when it was clear that things were getting really hot and watched Kamala Harris say to Zelensky on camera, we want you to join NATO. When everybody, even me, a talk show host, knew that that was the red line for Putin. So the only conclusion I could reach was they want him to move across the border into Ukraine. They want a war.

What is your take, Tucker? Just to say until this moment, every senior official in the US or the secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, says Ukraine will join NATO. And one thing everyone that's listening should understand, Ukraine will never join NATO short of a nuclear war because Russia will never allow it, period. So every time we say it, all we mean is the war continues and more Ukrainians are destroyed and we're willing.

To risk nuclear conflict.

And some people definitely are because they're idiots. Really? Because that, my resentment gets very high when we reach that level. But we here talk about nuclear war these days. We here, we're not going to be blackmailed by this nuclear threat and so forth. Well, God damn it, you better be worried. We're talking about a counterpart that has 6000 nuclear warheads. We have 6000 nuclear warheads. We have a lot of crazy people in our government. I know it. I'm adult enough to know over 44 years of professional life, that there are a lot of intemperate people in our country. We have a lot of allies that say, oh, we can do this. We have a president of Latvia tweeting, or Xing or whatever the verb is these days, Russia. Delenda est. In other words, Russia must be destroyed. Playing off of the old cato, the elder Carthago. Delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed. Honestly, a president of a baltic state tweeting that Russia must be destroyed? This is prudent. This is safe. This is going to keep your family and my family safe? Are we out of our minds? And all through this, Biden hasn't called Putin one time.

I speak to very senior russian officials. You speak to the most senior russian official. They say, we want to negotiate. Of course we'll talk. Zelensky, quote unquote, made it illegal. And the United States says, well, we won't do anything that the Ukrainians don't want. This is insane, by the way, as if this is really between Ukraine and Russia. This is about the United States and Russia. This, everybody should understand. This isn't even about Ukraine and Russia. This is about the US being in Ukraine and Russia. So the ones that need to talk are Biden and Putin, period. And I keep saying, if I may say it again just now, I keep saying to Biden, if you want to use my Zoom account, please use it. I'll lend you my phone. You make the call, start negotiations. I don't like my family being at risk of nuclear war.

Why won't they?

Because they believed up until now, I think they can't quite believe it now. They believed up until now that they would get their way through bluff or superiority of force or superiority of finance. They gambled because they were gambling with someone else's lives, someone else's country, and someone else's money, our money, the taxpayer money. But they were gambling. Not with their own stakes, but they were gambling. They're not very clever. They gambled wrong all along. Putin said, no. For us, this is existential. For you, it's a game, apparently, the game of risk. You need your piece on that board. As if american NATO forces in Ukraine is somehow existential for the United States, as opposed to a neutral Ukraine. They thought that they would get their way. And I spoke with senior officials all along who just thought Russia won't object or can't object or will be pushed aside or will fall to its knees with us financial sanctions or will succumb to the US Himars and attack them. Just one absolutely naive idea after another. But you might ask me, how can they have such naive ideas?

Well, that was my question. Yes.

And I'm sorry to put words in your mouth, but I would say, well, I'm old enough to remember Vietnam. I'm old enough to remember trying to overthrow Bashar al Assad. I'm trying to. I'm old enough to remember Libya. I'm old enough to remember Afghanistan. We screw up nonstop. This is not clever, what we're doing, but the people.

What's so interesting? So you've been an academic your whole life. I think you're one of the youngest tenured professors at Harvard, but you've also been, I think, uniquely a diplomat, on and off, mostly on, for, you know, decades. So, you know, the people who are making us foreign policy personally. Well. And the quality of the person engaged in that seems to have declined just dramatically.

I think that's true, by the way. I think it's true in general of american politics. Maybe it's an illusion, but when I was a kid in college, I did my summer internships in my senators office. Senator Phil Hart, he was a man of great integrity, of great intelligence. He was a Democrat, but he had lots of republican friends and colleagues. There were big people there, and they were serious people. Fulbright and Frank Church and really wonderful, impressive people. Chuck Percy Luger. Really impressive people who wanted the US to do right, to do good. And I admired them. And it was on both sides of Republican and Democrat. And you feel it's not like that right now. It's really not like that right now.

And I don't see it. I don't see wise people on either side. I hate to say that I don't think it's a partisan divide. They all seem crazy and dumb to me.

We chatted. Rand Paul's the only one for me that makes sense on foreign policy right now. He says, stop this. That's so many damn wars. It's putting us at incredible risk. But you don't hear the Democrats. They line up 100% for more military spending, continue the war. We have people that completely shock me that are saying these stupid things about no us lives, as if ukrainian lives don't matter. Nobody wants to talk about negotiation. No one says anything honest. No one calls. No one even wants the truth out of the White House or the executive branch, which is another role of Congress, which is, don't take us for a ride. We're an independent, separate, equal part of government. And it used to be that Congress kind of resented when the executive branch lied to it?

Yes.

You don't see that they crave the lives. You don't see that resentment. You see partisanship. If it's a republican president, then the Democrats go after him. If it's a democratic president, Republicans. But nobody from one's own party even tells their president, stop bullshitting us.

Yes.

And that's very serious.

Well, and these are not small lies. So the two of the biggest lies are that Ukraine can win, whatever that means. Never defined. Push Russia back to its January 2022 border. To that Ukraine will join NATO. And neither one of those things is true.

They're not only not true, if you are able to watch you or someone outside the mainstream, it becomes obvious that these aren't true. But if you follow Admiral Kirby and the White House every day, he's a liar. Lying with a smirk on his face, which I can't stand because he can't even control his smirk because he tells us I'm lying. You know, as he's talking, it's unreal. But if you. Or if you read the New York Times, which is sad and pathetic, you won't know. But if you actually listen to any independent outlets, which I do, because I'm traveling in the world most of the time, actually, not. Not in the US. You know, that these things are. Obviously. Someone asked me a couple of days ago, Ukraine's getting. It's getting blasted on the battlefield now. Some days are 1500 dead. Typical. 1000 dead. Russia has air superiority, artillery superiority, missile superiority, everything. And the Ukrainians are getting blasted. And now the us press is reporting the Ukrainians are falling back, and the tone has suddenly changed. So someone asked me a couple of days ago, why did this sudden change on the battlefield occur?

And I said, excuse me? He said, yeah, why did this sudden change? He said, there's no sudden change. This whole trend has been obvious for more than two years. We're in a war of attrition, and the bigger party is blasting the hell.

Out of this much bigger party. Much bigger.

Exactly. But you wouldn't know it by any of our narrative, official, congressional, or our kind of mainstream media, because they don't tell the truth until I'd say until. But even after it's staring you in the face, then maybe they'll say something that's a little bit true.

That just feels like North Korea to me, or what you imagine. North Korea is this news vacuum where. Where everybody is under these huge misimpressions. Nobody has any reference point in the truth at all. People don't even know they're being lied to. You travel constantly. Is this the most sort of cut off country from an information perspective in the world?

You know when, I'll give an example. When the US put on sanctions on Russia in March 2022, just after the beginning of this latest phase of the war that started in 2014. I know senior us financial officials and they, oh, we've got them. This is going to crush them. I said, I don't think so. I was in Latin America last week. They're not going to do this. I was in India the week before that. It's not going to go like that. So what happened was the only ones that applied the sanctions are european, the United States, and a few allies in East Asia. Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore. The rest of the world said, we're not part of that. We don't sign up to this. We don't like this, we don't agree with the NATO enlargement, we don't like this narrative. And the sanctions prove to be pretty useless compared to what this grandiosity of the us strategists thought. So it comes to this question, what does the rest of the world think? The rest of the world doesn't think much of the United States. What it's doing, it seems to them, is a bizarre country.

Why are you pushing NATO enlargement? Why are you bringing us into your war? We don't really want this. Interestingly, most of the rest of the world is not against the United States, by the way. They said, just don't make us choose all these things. This isn't our battle, and we don't even like what you're doing. Just make peace, calm things down. And we, we don't want bad relations. So it's not as if the world's antagonistic, but Washington does not get this at all. I probably speak to more world. I don't know. I speak to a lot of world leaders in developing countries all the time. It's my job as a development economist. So I'm talking to world leaders, foreign ministers, heads of state and so on. And I know their understanding and position very clearly. I don't know whether the White House or Blinken or anyone else in the administration understands even these basic points, but it was obvious to me. Do you know blink obvious to me a little bit. Not will.

From the outside, it seems like Blinken is a driving force.

I doubt it.

Who do you think is?

I think there's a big, deep project of the security apparatus that goes back 30 years. I think the CIA continues to be a driving force. I don't know. National Security Council is obviously a driving force. The Pentagon's obviously a driving force. The Armed services committees, it's not one individual, but it's a project that is long dated and it doesn't turn. And we don't have a president that's very flexible of mind. We don't have a president that is on top of any of this. It seems to me, not a nimble president. Not nimble, not effective, not necessarily in charge, not necessarily making decisions. I don't really know. But what I do know is that it's not improv, it's a rudder that stuck. I would say. In other words, they can't do something different. And each, what is improv is that the last thing they tried didn't work. So now they need to quickly improvise something else as the rudder is stuck. So we continue on the same destructive path and it's not working. So, oh, my God, we've got to do something else. That's the improv part. But what is not changing is goals, direction, strategy, or this most basic point, which for me is kind of, it sounds so simple minded, but I actually, from a lifetime of experience, really believe in it.

We don't talk to the other side.

We also seem to be huffing our own gas a bit, believing our own lies.

We believe that we need to lie because maybe if your rudder's stuck and you're the skipper, you have to say full speed ahead. In other words, if you can't move the rudder, you have to give some self justification for why we continue towards.

So, for example, since you are an economist, the economic effects of kicking Russia to Swift, et cetera, et cetera, of these very serious sanctions imposed against Russia two and a half years ago. Big picture, it seems like that's a country with an economy based on natural resources and manufacturing. Ours is largely an economy based on finance, lending money and interest and real estate, which is more durable, which is more real. I mean, that's my perspective. What's your sense of it?

I think the basic point on the sanctions is if you have oil, if you don't sell it to Europe, you can sell it to Asia. Well, yeah, it wasn't so hard. And they figured that out.

Even I know that, though.

They figured out how to get those tankers in, they figured out how to get insurance cover, and they figured out how to do it, and they're making a lot of money. And the sanctions didn't have any effect. And what they also didn't understand, and I think it's also important for people to understand in all of this neocon strategizing, they had this glimmer of insight. And actually, Zbig Brzezinski was very good on it. He said, by all means, the one thing never, never to do is to drive Russia and China together.

Well, exactly.

And he said very explicitly. And he says, in 1997, in his book the Grand Chess Board, I think it's called, he says, but this is so unlikely. This would be so crazy to do. And this is exactly what these dunderheads have done. Hey, it's Glenn Beck, and I want.

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Tucker that's preborn.com. tucker, are you feeling the impact of the recent changes in the timeshare industry? Now more than ever, the costs of timeshare ownership far outweigh the benefits. My friends at Lone Star Transfer are the only company I trust to help you get out. Our listeners positive feedback demonstrates why I have supported them for many years now. For over a decade, they successfully helped over 20,000 owners. Lone Star transfers exclusive options help timeshare owners like you get out faster and easier than any other option in the country. They are the only company that will give you a written guarantee and release you from your timeshare in a specific timeframe. With an a rating at the BBB and thousands of five star reviews, customer service is their top priority. For a free consultation and a guaranteed solution, call 833-284-4739 that's 833-284-4739 or@lonestartransfer.com dot. Who are the neocons how would you describe them? What is a neocon?

A neocon is a group of true believers starting, that really rose to force in the last years of Bush Sr. It was Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, but it became absolutely bipartisan. Victoria Nuland is kind of the ultimate. Her husband, Bob Kagan. Robert Kagan is kind of the public intellectual of the neocons. I mean, he is, I know Bob well.

He's an idiot. Yeah, well, he's your public intellectual.

He's the guy that writes the tomes. But he's a child. I think that this has been just about the most disastrous foreign policy imaginable. How can you go from peace in 1991 when you have a chance for creating a peaceful, cooperative world that could actually be prosperous and do good things together to this mess that we're in? It took a strategy so stupid, so reckless, so blind. And that's what the neocons gave us. They gave us a strategy which said, we now run the world, and explicitly, we will be the world's policemen. We will fight the wars that we need to fight whenever and wherever we need to fight them. We will make sure that there's never a rival. Well, you do that long enough, you end up in lots of absolutely destructive, stupid wars. And the rest of the world doesn't just sit back and say, oh, thank you, us. We're so grateful you're the leader. They say, come on, you're 4.1% of the world population. There's another 95.9% of the world population that actually would just like peace and some cooperation and not you to be telling us what to do. So this strategy was explicit, clear, adopted in the last years of basically a 1991.

After the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, Clinton was, he's just not serious, consequent, or experienced enough. He wasn't a rigid neocon, but Madeleine Albright was a true believer, and Clinton drifted in that direction. And that's also partly something to understand, which is when you have the biggest military machine in the world, when you are so powerful, the war machine is always revving. There's always some case for war. The neocons basically said, yeah, we're the policemen, we're the constabulary. This is our duty. And said, you have to be in each of these conflicts, because us reputation also depends on this. So they invited regional wars and everywhere and all the time, and believed, of course, we could clean out governments. We didn't want regime change by war, by covert operations and so on. And it became not a little movement it became the dominant drive. So Clinton kind of drifted. His administration was divided between Madeleine Albright and Holbrook on one side and William Perry on the other side. But he went with Albright. By the end of Clinton's term was NATO enlargement, bombing of Belgrade. And we were kind of off to the races.

Then came Bush junior 911, global war on terror, but basically 911 as the opportunity to implement the project for the new american century, which is the document that defines the neocon agenda. And it's such an interesting document because very clear, it was very carefully studied. And it's also important to understand the US is a big ship, so it doesn't turn quick. So you prepare a path or it's this stuck rudder, as I said. And you can read in rebuilding America's defenses, which was a kind of campaign document for the incoming Bush junior administration, what we should do. And it defines this neocon agenda. So Bush Junior introduced all of these things, the unilateral withdrawal from ABM, the war in Iraq, the expansion of NATO to seven more countries, the commitment to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. Then comes Obama. You don't think of him as a neocon especially, but who becomes the point person for Eastern Europe and Ukraine? Victoria Nuland. So interesting. Victoria Nuland was the deputy national security advisor of Cheney.

I remember very well.

Yes. So she was Cheney's advisor then she was George W's ambassador to NATO during the commitment to enlargement. And if Obama weren't a neocon, you would say, well, that's not someone I'm going to hire. But all of a sudden she lands as Hillary's assistant. Now Hillary's absolutely neocon to the core. And there's Victoria Nuland and she goes from being Hillary's assistant to becoming assistant secretary of state for european affairs and becomes the point person in the overthrow of Yanukovych at the end of 2013 and early 2014. And Obama is not, he's also very inexperienced, obviously no experience at all in foreign policy, but he wasnt by nature a neocon. But the system keeps you moving unless youre a president that knows how to keep a foot on the brakes. And we havent had many presidents like that. Eisenhower was one who knew how to put his foot on the brakes because he really understood this system. John Kennedy learned it, but only after the Bay of Pigs, and it probably was, was killed by our government for trying to keep his foot on the brakes. And there have not been many other occasions when presidents kept their foot on the brakes.

So in 2011, Obama does the absolute neocon play of saying, almost out of the blue, by the way, why don't we overthrow Bashar al Assad, Syria's president? Well, that's a little damn weird. But suddenly you start hearing, Assad must go. I was on morning Joe when that statement by Hillary was made. And Joe Scarborough looked at me and said, jeff, what do you think? I said, well, how are they going to do that? That sounds like another pretty stupid idea. And it turned out that was 2011. We've had 13 years of war in Syria. Hundreds of thousands dead. Destroyed the country, of course, destroyed the country. And who's President Bashar al Assad? And interestingly, I can tell you. Yeah, I can tell you, in 2012, the US, there were protests, there were things that were going on in Syria. But the president said, okay, we'll send in the CIA to overthrow the government in Syria. And if anyone is wondering, we do this dozens of times. So don't have any illusion that this is unusual. It is the job, the terms of reference, of the CIA to overthrow governments in other countries, I don't approve.

I think it leads to war, destruction. It hasn't passed Putin's notice that that's the job of the CIA. So it's another reason he doesn't exactly want the US on his border and so forth. Okay, so we start arming the jihadists. Crazy things in Syria. Yeah, I can say it. I'm just thinking, because. And the US says Assad must go. So the UN starts a diplomatic process to try to find peace, which is the job of the UN. It's not to implement us regime change, it's to try to find peace. So the UN succeeds in getting all of the parties to agree to a peace agreement, except one, the US. Yes. So the idea that you couldn't find peace, you couldn't find all these different factions in Syria. There was an agreement reached, but there was one obstacle to the agreement. And the obstacle was the US said, on the first day of this agreement, Assad must go. And the response was, why don't you have it? A process. There'll be in two years, an election or three years, don't overthrow the government. The first day we have all this in place. And Obama, well, I don't know if it's Obama, probably Hillary, but whatever, said no.

So that's why there was no agreement.

But what was the motive? Like, why would you want to overthrow Bashar al Assad?

Very strange. I've never heard an absolute intelligent reason for this, believe me. Their idea is we can do it. Why not? One argument was that the neocons had a list. And this is actually what Wesley Clark, who was NATO supreme commander in the end of the 1990s. I know Wesley quite well and he's also spoken about this. He said the neocons had a list that they were going to clear out in the two thousands. All of the governments aligned with. With the Soviet Union or with Russia. Now Syria has a naval, Russia has a naval base on the Mediterranean. And so Assad is therefore an enemy or not an enemy. He doesn't rise to the level of being an enemy. Someone whose peace you can take off the board and put in your own peace. That's all. So the idea is incredible arrogance. They don't think, honest to God, I don't know. Whoever gave that order knew nothing about Syria that I can guarantee you.

But the downstream effects of that were horrifying.

Well, unbelievable.

But created ISIS.

Yeah, but we probably created ISIS pretty directly because we funded jihadists all along the way. That's our story since 1979, actually. So this goes back a long time. They don't, they're not clever, they're not honest, they're not transparent, they are arrogant to the hilt and they don't talk to anybody else, including to us, the american people, including to Congress, including to counterparts in other countries. And it gets you into trouble when you're so flippant and flagrant because remember what was happening in Syria? They did exactly the same thing in Libya. And you look at Libya, they decided to take out Gaddafi. Why? No one really knows.

He was cooperating with us at that point.

No one knows because some people say Sarkozy knew that Gaddafi had contributed to Sarkozy's campaign, that it was personal vendetta. There are a hundred theories. The fact that there are a hundred theories shows that the whole thing was bullshit, to use a technical, diplomatic term. You cannot even know right now why. What you know is that they misused a UN Security Council resolution to protect the people of Benghazi, to launch a months long NATO aerial bombardment of Libya until they brought down the government, unleashed war in Africa for the next 13 years, until today, which is still roiling all of the countries of the region. They do these things because they can, because it doesn't count. Maybe another theory which is even maybe true. What difference? It's money, it's a business. We're running a business, we're trying weapons, we're doing this. Maybe it's all a success from somebody's point of view that you have all these wars going with this big military machine. I don't know. That is a theory which is not completely dismissible, because what you can't do, Tucker, is look and say, my God, we had a geopolitical reason to do this.

This was really part of american security. We really needed to overthrow Assad. We really needed to take out Qaddafi, because if we didn't do that, something else would happen. You cannot even concoct a crazy narrative ex post that explains that. So these are not deeply explicable facts.

But the pattern is recognizable immediately. Here you have a country with unchallenged, for a moment, unchallenged power, starting wars for not any obvious reason, all over the world. When was the last time an empire did that? But.

The British, that was the last time. I think we learned everything from the British. They were nonstop wars, skirmishes, when you're an empire, and if anyone still plays risk, I don't know, I played it 60 years ago, I have to admit. So I'm not sure if people still play the game. But risk, you're trying to get your piece on every part of the board. When you have your piece someplace on the board, if the neighboring spots are not yours, you better have wars with them or they're going to take you out. And so every place becomes an object for war, because it becomes next door to wherever you have your bases, your concern, and so on. So we have military bases in, I would say, 80 countries, probably something like that. Of course, the count is not public, so people put together their own list. We have about 750 military bases around the world. Each of those places has a neighborhood. Each of those places has the next door, which, oh, well, we don't have a base there. We better have a base there. And so that's the logic, which is if you're at the outer end of this, well, you better continue, because otherwise your outer limit is what we don't learn.

Actually, it's another analogy which I found to be useful. The Romans, by around 110 AD, with Hadrian said and Trajan. Okay, we've reached a good limit. And they stopped trying to expand.

Yep, they built a wall. They kind of left it there.

Exactly. And they said there was a war that I find analogous to Ukraine. They had a war in Germania, so called east of the Rhine, in what is now Germany, in nine Ad, which was a war of expansion by Augustus to tame the german tribes. And they lost that war, the war of the Teutonburg forest. And they lost that war in nine aD. They basically decided after that, not entirely. They didn't say, well, this is the end of the Roman Empire. They said, okay, we'll just leave Germania.

Yeah. There are limits to our power.

There are limits, and that's fine. Why don't we behave like that? We're not threatened by Russia. We are not threatened by Russia and Ukraine being neutral is not a threat to us security. It builds us security, period. That's what I said to Jake Sullivan. It's not even a concession, Jake. It's a benefit for us. Leave some space between you and them. That's what we want, some space so we don't have an accidental tripwire. That's the real logic of this world. Give a little space, we don't have to be everywhere. We're not playing risk. We're trying to run our lives. We're trying to keep our children safe. We're not trying to own every part of the world.

So speaking of increasing our risk, I think the unstated but very clear objective of all of this is to kill Putin and replace him and break up Russia. That's my read on it.

If you read even this project for a new american century, rebuilding America's defenses, it says maybe Russia will be decentralized into European Russia, Central Asian Russia, Siberian Russia, they call it, and a far East Russia. This is essentially what you're saying. They talk. There's even some commissions in Washington decolonizing Russia. Their hope, the CIA's hope, if they would ever tell us the truth about anything. But they don't get any of this right. But their thought, probably in this deep long term vision, was, after the Soviet Union fell, so too will Russia disintegrate. It will disintegrate along its ethnic lines. It will disintegrate along its geographic lines. Why is that a US project? It's a US project only because from my point of view, the US resents that there is a country of eleven time zones, and it's so big that it is, on its face, a denial of us global hegemony. In other words, how obnoxious of them to be there. But the problem is they don't see it that way.

But just if you're looking at this purely through the lens of, like, what's good for us interests, which I do think is their job, actually, yes. But chaos across eleven time zones and innumerable ethnic groups and religious divisions with 6000 nuclear warheads, that's really a threat to the world.

I couldn't agree more.

Is it not? Am I missing something?

No, you're not missing anything. And the fact of the matter is I was an advisor to Gorbachev in 1990 91. I got to watch close up. I was an advisor to President Yeltsin in 1990 119 92. I actually, it's literally true. As weird as this sounds, I well, maybe not to you. You're about the one person for whom it's not weird. I sat in the Kremlin, sitting across from Yeltsin the day the Soviet Union ended in a really not even quite that day, literally. It was even more remarkable and bizarre than that. I was leading a little economics delegation to talk about the collapse of the economy that was underway and Yeltsin came from the back of the room in one of these giant Kremlin rooms and walked across the long room and sat down right in front of me and said, gentlemen, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over.

That's incredible.

Like that. And then he pointed to the back door, he said, do you know who is in that room over there? It's the leaders of the soviet military and they have just agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And that was the first words I heard out of his mouth sitting directly across from me. So what a moment. Yeah, that was of course the most unbelievable moment had. And you're sitting in the Kremlin and you hear that suddenly. And then he went on to say, he spoke very beautifully for a few minutes, what does Russia want? And he must have used the word normal ten times in that short speech. We want to be a normal country. We're done with the communism. We want to be normal. We want to be friendly, we want to be part of Europe, we want to be part of the world economy, we want to be normal. Mister Sachs, can you help us be normal? And I said, mister President, the world will be so grateful for this opportunity for peace that I am absolutely sure that the United States and the rest of the world is going to come to your assistance.

And I said this most remarkably wrong fact because I believed it. I knew that that was America's interest, I believed we would follow our interest. And I had had a very unusual experience, wonderful experience two years earlier when I served as Poland's main outside economic advisor, helping them to develop the plan for becoming a market economy and part of Europe. And in those days I helped Poland raise many billions of dollars of emergency support to stabilize a very shaky, unstable economy. And in those days, in 1989, every, everything I recommended was adopted by the United States government almost immediately. I thought, hell, im pretty good. I once went in one morning to Senator Dole and I said, Poland needs a billion dollars to stabilize its currency. And he said, mister Sachs, come back in an hour. And I came back in an hour. And there was Brent Scowcroft and our national security advisor, senator said, you know who this is, Mister Sacks. I said, general, it's an honor to meet you. And Skokroft said, what is it? What's your idea? And I handed him my one page, about a billion dollars. And he looked and he said, will this work, Mister Sachs?

And I said, I think this is the right way to stabilize the currency. He said, well, we'll get back to you. And at 05:00 p.m. as Dole asked me, I called Dole and he said, tell your friends they have their billion dollars within 8 hours, basically. Okay. So I said to Yeltsin, this will be great. You're going to get all the support. We're going to go mobilize a financial package for you. We're going to help you stabilize the ruble. We're going to get a stabilization fund for the ruble, we're going to get this and that. And of course, every single thing I recommended that had worked in Poland, they rejected in Washington. And I just for the life of me, what the hell is going on here? Stabilization fund. It worked. The Zwalte was stable, the polish currency stabilized. No, Mister Sachs, I'm afraid we don't support that. And one after another knocked down. So I did not understand the geopolitics that I was at all. I didn't get it. I said, are you kidding? They want normal, they want peace. This is our greatest moment. This is the greatest moment of the second half of the 20th century.

The scourge of nuclear war has been lifted. The Cold War's overdue something. No. So thats it.

What do you make of Putin?

Hes very smart. He has led Russia very effectively. And because he emerged from the KGB, he understands the US, the way the US operates, because we became a security state, we became a state where the CIA has absolutely extraordinary influence and Putin gets that. And so he really understands how we operate. He doesn't like it, but he understands it. And his background, especially because his background comes from the KGB, his counterpart was the CIA. He does not have illusions about the United States. And I wish we were proving him wrong, but we're not.

How influential is the CIA in the operations of the us government?

Definitely in many, many places. It is the instrument of regime change. The US is the only country in the world that relies on regime change. As I would say, the lead diplomatic. Let me put it a different way. Not diplomatic as the lead foreign policy instrument. In other words, most countries, virtually any small country, any middle power country, when it doesn't like another country, it either has to deal with it or it comes begging to the United States to take out that country. And we are the country that makes a living by overthrowing other governments. And that's not a good vocation for us. It almost always ends in disaster, in bloodshed, in continued instability. But that's the job of the c that became. It's half the job of the CIA. CIA is also an intelligence agency. It collects information and makes analysis, and it gives intelligence findings. And I have no problem with that role at all, although I don't want them to spy on us. But I think that making intelligence findings for the us government is necessary. But being a private army or a hidden force that overthrows governments, stokes unrest, that puts people in power, that runs covert operations, I'm against it.

So if a big part of the CIA's job is taking down leaders of foreign countries, how long before it does that here in the United States? I mean, it doesn't. Doesn't seem unlikely that, like, why wouldn't they do that here?

Yeah, probably 61 years ago was their first run at this with President Kennedy from, I think it's best guess, not sure, but best guess that this was at least maybe rogue CIA or maybe official CIA, or maybe compartmentalized CIA operation. It was clearly someone's operation, not Lee Harvey Oswald. All we know and all of the evidence points in that direction. It used to be said, why is the United States the only country in the world that's never had a coup? And the answer was, well, we're the only country that doesn't have a us embassy.

Well, of course we've had a coup. I mean, murdering the president, but we.

Probably had a coup in broad daylight on November 22, 1970, 219 63, and we never quite got over it, and we never looked into it. On the contrary, we covered it up from the beginning. And drip by drip evidence comes, including the most recent evidence, that that magic bullet, which was one of the justifications of the absurd account of a lone gunman, was also debunked by the, I think, now 88 year old secret service agent who said, I actually put that bullet from the back of Kennedy's seat in the limousine on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital. So there's so many things wrong with the official. I mean, it's preposterous. Almost nobody believes it or should believe it. But it's also interesting for all that we're discussing, most likely it was a government coup in broad daylight, with the tremendous amount of evidence that it was a conspiracy at a high level. And yet it passed for the last 61 years without any official practical note of that fact.

Do you think that was the last time the CIA tried to influence domestic politics in this country?

Well, I'm sure the CIA influences, influences domestic politics all the time in this country because we know about extensive surveillance operations. But it's interesting. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the church committee hearings. And Frank Church was a very unusual figure from Idaho, a pretty staunch republican state. And he was a young, gifted patriot whose favorite senator was Bora, a conservative republican senator. And he was just an upright, very decent person who saw more and more, my God, the things we're talking about. Something's not right. People are getting assassinated in other countries. Our government, it doesn't look clean. And one thing after another in a series of events led him to chair the only time a Senate investigative committee actually looked deeply into CIA operations. That was 1975. Fascinating. You know, what made it possible was just a confluence of events. Nixon had resigned. Ford was an unelected president who came from Congress, who didnt want to take on Congress, so he didnt resist churchs investigation, even though his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, was telling him, go after this guy. Weve got to crush this investigation. But Ford said, no, no, we can't in any way Supreme Court.

And I don't want to get into another huge fight. Hoover had died. J. Edgar Hoover had died in 1972, I believe. So the FBI couldn't resist the same way Bill Colby had become CIA director. And he didn't want to inherit all the shit from the past CIA. There came this one moment when all these pieces enabled, actually, someone to look into what this organization was doing. And the first thing they discovered was no one had ever looked into any of it before. Nothing. Second, they discovered, this is an army of the president of the United States. This is a private army. And they debated, is it a rogue army? Does it do it on its own? Or is it an army of, of the president? But it's an army. And it's an army completely outside of our oversight and control. Then the third thing they found is they're assassinating lots of people. They're assassinating Americans, by the way, through these unbelievably crazed LSD experiments. But they basically, they weren't the ones to put the bullet through the head of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. But they tried and they supported the overthrow of Lumumba. And of course they were trying to kill Castro and many other things.

So they found unbelievable things. Now, that was 1975. Since then, we're 49 years, there's never been another church committee of its kind. It's unbelievable how many things have happened since then. The list, believe me, is very, very long. I've seen some of it, but so directly I can't. It's just shocking to me, but just an insight into how our country works, which you know very well, but to me, I find it so weird. I was asked to help Aristide in Haiti. Yes, okay, Haiti's oh so poor, so unstable, so desperate. And Aristide asked me for economic help. That's what I do, that's my expertise. So I flew down to Port au Prince and I had a very good meeting with him. And at the end of the meeting he said, mister Sachs, they're going to take me out. They're going to take me out and what do you mean? They're going to overthrow me? Okay, sorry to be so naive as I am. I said, no, we're going to make this work. We're going to make this work. No, no, no, they're going to take me out. I said, no, no, I'm going back to Washington.

We're going to help with the inter American Development bank and World bank and IMF and oh, I'm so naive. So of course, then they decide to take them out. And the way they do it is destabilize the country. So the first thing is, close down the IMF, close down the World bank, close down the inter american squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. The next thing is you send in some mercenaries who are going to create trouble, come over the border from Dominican Republic. The last thing was rather remarkable, which was the US ambassador showed up at his door literally one day and said, mister president, you have to flee. We have a plane waiting for you, otherwise your life is in danger. And they led him to a plane with an unmarked tail, and 23 hours later he was in Central Africa Republic. So this is what's called a coup. A coup in broad daylight, Central African Republic. Absolutely.

I thought he went to Joburg, I don't know why.

No, no, he went afterwards. But the first, the landing was Central African Republic, if I remember correctly. So I. What do I do? What can I do? Well, I called up the New York Times reporter on the beat and I said, there's been a coup. On broad daylight. I don't you got to cover this. The reporter told me, my editor is not interested.

A coup in our hemisphere.

All the news that's fit to print.

So I have one. It's amazing. So I wanted to ask you about that. I mean, you said there had been no, correctly, there have been no real oversight hearings into the intel agencies in 50 years. Yes, but the congressional committees are only one part of the oversight the constitution prescribes. And the other part, of course, is the media, right. Supposed to provide oversight of government. And one of the moment I really wanted to speak to you was the day that I saw the clip of you on Bloomberg News.

I think you were one of my favorite moments.

And we just described, and it was within hours of this massive natural gas pipeline, Nord stream disintegrating. Can you describe what happened?

Yeah, so the US blew up Nord stream as it promised to on probably dozens of occasions, but the most recent of those occasions was President Biden said, I think it's February 7, 2022. I may have the date a little bit off, but he said in a statement to the press, if the Russians invade Ukraine, Nord Stream is finished. And the reporter who asked him the question, I think from Germany, but international, said, well, mister president, how can you say that? How could you do that? And he looks and he says very gravely, believe me, we have our ways. Okay, so this is, and then you can go back and find 1000 clips of Victoria, Newland and Cruz and everyone saying, this must stop, this must stop. We'll never let it happen. It will be destroyed, it will be ended. Okay, so then it's blown up, okay, and you, and then the America, you know, well, before we get to that, I was on Bloomberg soon afterwards. I don't remember whether it was the next day or the day after. And I said, you know, I think the US did this. Mister Sachs, how can you say that?

And I said, well, first the president said it was going to be over, and then there's actually some readings of planes in the vicinity and so forth. And there was the tweet by the former and now current foreign minister of Poland, thank you USA. With a picture of the, the water bubbling over the blown up pipeline, Roddick Sikorsky's tweet and Applebaum's husband. Yes, there was a bit of evidence that, well, yes, the United States had done this, thank you very much. They said they would and they did it. I was yanked off the air within 30 seconds. I could watch, I could imagine, because he was listening to something in the earplug, which I could only imagine. Get that son of a bitch off the air. And they just. This interview is over. And he stopped. And then another anchor berated me for a few minutes, few minutes after that. And. Okay. That was the last time I had a word on mainstream media, I have to tell you.

Seriously?

Yeah, yeah.

But you've been famous because I live in this country. I know. You've been famous for decades.

Yeah, I was on everything. MSNBC.

A lot?

Yeah, a lot. Constantly.

But it's so interesting that your sin was saying something true that the media really should be on. I mean, this is the largest act of industrial sabotage in my lifetime. It's the largest.

It is a big deal.

Carbon emissions.

Yeah.

Ever.

You know, it's a. Look, it's a big deal. It's an act of war. It helps to understand what this Ukraine war is all about. It helps us to understand that this is a war between the United States and Russia, fought on many means. It's important to understand it. It also has a deeper economic significance because it's part of a long standing us idea of not letting Germany and Russia ever get too close together economically. So there's a lot to that story, and.

But the media is covering that.

Look, if you can kill a president in broad daylight and get away with it for 61 years, if you can walk a president of a neighboring country out to an unmarked plane and not have it covered, if you can have a, quote, unprovoked war that you provoked over a 30 year period, you can do lots of things. And this is just one of the things that you could do. And I discovered that some of our press, like the New York Times, which opined after the blow up, that looks like Russia did that to their own infrastructure. They're reporters. They're top reporters. Know better. They tell me. Yeah, Jeff, of course. Of course. But they don't cover it, because we're living in an environment where the people in power think it's a game, and they think that it's not their job to tell us they're playing risk with our lives. They're playing risk with ukrainian lives. They don't have to tell us the truth. We don't have to have any serious discussion. We don't have to call anyone for a real hearing or even much less a congressional investigation. We're not living in that kind of world.

We're living in a world where it's almost daily that the government says what it wants. Kirby at the White House says it with that damn smirk of his, and pretty much everyone knows its lies.

But why haven't. It's just interesting because you're from a very specific class, you know, well known academic economist, diplomat, frequent tv guest, and, you know, there are a bunch of other people in that world. Yeah, but you were pretty much the only person to say, no, that's a lie, and I'm not going along with it. Why? Why you? Why didn't you do what all of your peers did?

I do it because it came as part of my life course, working mostly internationally, talking with the leaders abroad. I care about my credibility a lot, which is, you know, I'm not always right, but I try to always be right. Yes. And I have a lot of discussions every day with foreign ministers or with senior diplomats or with heads of state. And for me, I don't hold an office. I don't do anything other than try to have reasonable ideas and speak as truthfully as possible. So it's kind of a career approach, which is. I'm trying to be accurate.

Right. But there should be a lot of people like you in your world.

Yeah, I know. For me, I'm not interested. And I would not take a job in the us government. For example, I quote it anyway. With all the things I've said, I can imagine the congressional hearings would be. Did you say that about the us government? Did you say that about the us government? But in any event, I'm not looking for a job. I'm not looking for a USaID grant. I'm not looking for a us government grant. So in that sense, also, I'm not. I'm not exactly, I hope, trapped in that way. I'm just trying to be accurate. And what I'm really, really trying is to help the United States government understand they're operating on dangerous, dangerous trajectories and with a lot of delusions. And it's very risky for everybody. And I also have a big measure of resentment. I don't like the risks that were being put under. Tucker. Yes.

I don't agree with that.

I don't like it.

You got children.

This is not a game. I got grandchildren, and I really care about this and I don't like the games. And I want people to tell the truth. And we. If we told the truth, we could actually stop the wars today. I don't mean that sounds crazy. It's not crazy. If we told the truth about Ukraine, if Biden called Putin and said that NATO enlargement, we've been trying for 30 years, it's off. We get it. You're right. It's not going to your border, Ukraine should be neutral. That war would stop today. There'd be lots of pieces to figure out. Where exactly will the borders be? How will it go? I don't say that there won't be issues, but the fighting would stop today if the government of Israel either were told or said, there will be a state of Palestine and we will live peacefully side by side, the fighting would stop today. These are basic facts, basic matters of truth, that if we actually spoke them, if we actually treated each other like grownups, we would resolve what seemed to be these insurmountable, insurmountable crises. They're not at all insurmountable. They just require a measure of truth.

How have you been treated by your peers for saying things like, I hear what you just said, and I think it's indisputable. It's also very honorable. You seem to be acting out of the best motives, traditional american motives, I would say.

Yeah, I like that.

So I admire you for saying that. How have your peers responded to you?

They think I'm a little crazy. I think.

What would be crazy about what you just said?

Well, when I said that this war has a reason, that it's not that Putin's evil, that we provoke this and that it could stop, I got most of my remaining interlocutors saying, jeff, what is the matter with you? You're Putin apologist. How dare you? When I say this about Israel, I lose another group. But because there are things you're supposed to say here, because this idea of us hegemony, this idea of us dominance, it's pretty deep in american academia also. I mean, it's not a shock to tell you, but all of these special organizations, the think tanks or university special departments or research units, they're funded by the us government. They're funded by the security state. They're funded by large donors that are all part of this story. So it's not absolutely simple to get out of that. I think Mark Twain, I think he was the one that said it. It may have been Mencken, but I think it's attributed to Twain that said, it's impossible to convince a man of something when his job depends on believing the other. And I think that's true of a lot of people, which is, I can't really say that.

I don't know if it's true. But anyway, why are you sticking your head out so much?

I got to ask you about, first of all, thank you. I think that's the crispest and I think, most honest description I've ever heard of the lead up to what's happening in Ukraine right now. So thank you for that. So given the credibility that you've just gained by that explanation, where do you think Covid came from?

COVID The question is which lab and in which way? It almost surely did not come out of nature. It almost surely came out of a deliberate research project that had a core idea, which was to take a natural virus and make it more infectious. And we have one major blueprint of that, which is a research proposal called Diffuse, which was submitted to the Department of Defense to the unit called DARPA in 2018. And it is a kind of cookbook for how to make the virus that causes Covid-19 and the virus is called SARS CoV two. And what's distinctive about SARS CoV two is that it has something called a proteolytic cleavage site, and specifically something called a furin cleavage site. And it's just some pieces of the genome that make this thing damn infectious. And what's interesting about it is that for this class of bat viruses, which are called beta coronaviruses, which is what SarS comes from, and what Covid-19 comes from, for that class of viruses, and there are several hundred known, none of them in nature ever had that particular piece of the genome.

None.

None other than SARS Cov two. And that piece of the genome, the Furen cleavage site, was an object of research attention from 2005, because it was understood that if a virus were to have that, it would make the entry of the virus into human cells easier, and it would make the virus, therefore, infectious for humans. SARS one, which was the first outbreak of a virus like this in 2003 in Hong Kong, was most likely a natural virus that came from a farm animal, and it was not so infectious. It killed some thousands of people. But with SARS one, you got very, very sick for weeks before you were infectious to someone else. And that meant that it was not so hard to stop by isolating people who had the symptoms. With SARS CoV two, you are infectious even without any symptoms. Sometimes you're completely asymptomatic. So what's the difference of SARs one and SARs Cov two? The fur and cleavage site. And in 2005, already, so almost 20 years ago, that experiment was done that said, oh, take SARS one, add in a furin cleavage site, this thing becomes really infectious. And there are a series of experiments, 2005, 2000, 920, eleven, that are called gain of function experiments, where you deliberately manipulate the virus to make it more infectious.

By 2015, we had a full blown research program funded by NIH, by Tony Fauci's unit on beta coronaviruses. Already, with the lead scientists focusing on this furin cleavage site, it's starting to get. Ah, so they're starting to do more and more targeted experiments.

May I ask why? Why would you want to take a virus like that and make it more infectious?

There. The overarching answer is called biodefense. And then the real question, which I don't know the answer to, is that bio warfare or is that true? Defense? Nih, starting in 2001, became the Defense Department's research unit. So, remember the anthrax attack that came after 911?

Very well. Yes, after that, I'm sorry to ask you a question. Do we know, or are you satisfied? You know what that was?

That probably came out of Amrit. It was probably a us, you know, some us scientists either for sure provoking or doing some crazy things or disgruntled or boosting up the DoD budget. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I know that after that, DoD put its budget through Tony Fauci's unit, which suddenly became the largest unit of NIH, and Fauci became the head of what is politely called biodefense. But one only suspects that it is. We're not supposed to do biowarfare.

It used to be called germ warfare, right?

And I don't know. And they say, well, it's for vaccines against biowarfare. It's to defend against it. It's to defend against natural outbreaks. But what it is, is a tremendously dangerous research program that involves a lot of manipulation of very dangerous pathogens. And by 2015, the ability of scientists to manipulate these viruses was reaching astounding proportions. And we've got a real genius who was part of this group named Ralph Barrick at University of North Carolina, who is a genius. And what he could do was if you gave him 30,000 letters of the DNA code, AG, CCGA, and so forth, and I mean, give him the letters, he'll turn that into a live virus. I think that's pretty damn remarkable. In other words, you give him the designer virus, he'll give you the live virus, and he created what's called a reverse genetic system to make these viruses and to put in pieces into the viruses with a technique which he also called no see, um, meaning you suture in a part, but you do it in a way that you can't identify, that it was put in. In the lab. So it's without the fingerprints, as it were.

And it's clear that this area of research picked up a tremendous amount of steam because a lot of american scientists were shouting, this is so damn dangerous. Stop it. And Fauci was saying, no, this is important. This is really crucial. We're going to continue to do this. There was a brief moratorium at the end of the Obama period, and then the moratorium was lifted during the Trump administration. And even during the moratorium period, we know that the research continued on many grants. It's clear when you look closely at this that they were getting closer and closer to this insertion of the furen cleavage site into SARS like viruses. Now, in 2018 came this proposal. As always, this was a highly classified proposal. We only learned about it after the fact by a whistleblower. We never even would have learned about it, even in all of the commotion of the pandemic. But for a whistleblower, a brave whistleblower in the Department of Defense, who said, the public needs to see this. And when you look at the defuse proposal, really, you say, holy shit. Because on page ten, it says, we have collected more than 180 previously unreported beta coronaviruses.

And on page eleven, it says, we're going to test them for whether they have a proteolytic cleavage site, which is a furin cleavage site. And if they don't, we're going to insert a furen cleavage site into them. It's the goddamn cookbook for how to make this virus. So here comes the. The Defense department turned it down, supposedly. I mean, probably did. And then comes the question, well, so what happened? Well, the people that wrote that little cookbook said, not us, we didn't do anything like that. Now, it got turned down. Nothing to look at here. And there are all I know, because people have told me, oh, Jeff, it's not just that it got turned down. They had done the work even before they submitted the grant proposal. That's not uncommon in science, which is you do a lot of the work beforehand. So I've heard that on good authority, I can't verify it personally. And there are so many strands now that say, yeah, something really screwy was going on. For example, there's a very weird paper, weird to me, by Barrick and the head of what's called Rocky Mountain Laboratory, which is a NIH laboratory under Fauci's authority, that reports this completely bizarre finding.

And the finding sounds very technical, but it says, the Wuhan Institute of Virology type one virus does not, infect egyptian fruit bats. Okay. That's the title. So you say. So what the hell is that? What that is is that obviously in 2019 and 2018, they were doing experiments using viruses from Wuhan in the Rocky Mountain labs with their collection of bats. Okay, so one theory. And the bats in Rocky Mountain labs is called an egyptian fruit bat. It's not. Not the kind of bat that carries this virus in China, which is in Yunnan, which is a different kind of bat. But they tried it in Rocky Mountain lab. I scratched my head and said, what the hell? We have Rocky Mount lab doing experiments with Wuhan viruses in Montana, in NIH labs with Ralph Barrick, who was one of the principal investigators of the insert the fur and cleavage site into the virus. I'd like to know more about that. Thank you. You. Isn't that curious? Then there are other scientists that have pieces of this puzzle. So the answer is, we don't know exactly. One theory is that it was concocted in the US and sent over to Wuhan, to this Wuhan Institute of virology for testing in their bat.

In their bat collection, which is the chinese bats rather than the egyptian fruit bats. That's plausible. That's one person's theory. There are other theories that even a related research group, German and Dutch, may have played a role because they have in Wuhan research. But when the virus broke out in that period at the end of 2019, early 2020, there's commotion among the scientists. What the hell is this? Where'd this come from? Oh, my God. Did we do this? How'd this escape? Or whatever? Nobody knows, of course. So they start having secret calls. And one of the most important of these calls was on February 1, 2020. That was then memorialized by one of the participants in a long memoir, all of which became public through a Freedom of Information act. Subsequently, because our government has lied to us about every single moment of this from the start, hasn't told us anything about any of this. It's all whistleblowers or Freedom of Information act. That's the only way we know any of what I'm describing to you right now. No one has told the truth at all. So on the February 1 call, the scientists say, oh, God, this looks like a lab stuff.

One of them says, I can't figure out how this could have ever come out of nature. And they're all looking at the Furen cleavage site because they know. This group of scientists knows. That's the object of research. That's the goal. It's never been seen before in a virus like this. It's the signature right there. I did this. But four days later, that group authors the first draft of a paper called the proximal origins of SARS CoV two that says it's a natural virus.

The same people wrote it.

The same people who privately said it's out of a lab, most likely.

So it's just, that is provably a cover up, then.

That's a cover up. This paper is a fraud. It has not been retracted until today. And it's a fraud.

Where did it run?

It ran in nature medicine in March 20, which I think is considered one.

Of the most credible medical journals. Right.

When I read it, when it came out, it was, I think, the most cited paper in biology or in medicine by far in 2020. Everyone wanted to know where this virus came from. I read it and I went around knowingly telling everyone, oh, it's not a, it's natural. You have to read proximal origins of SARS Cov two because it never occurred.

To you they would lie in nature.

Medicine, because this is the top of the heap of the scientific journals and the scientific establishment and the top nature. There are two great science magazines in the world that have a history that is so deep. One is science, that's the US one, and the second is nature, which is the british one. And nature is the one that originally published Darwin. It's so illustrious and I was so smug. Oh, you didn't read nature SARS Cov two, proximal origin, because you believe that stuff when it's written there. It's a fraud, that paper.

And it stands to this day.

To this day, they have not retracted it. There is last week a call by several scientists to the editor, a very clever one, calling for its retraction because this is interesting, all in the weeds, but its like everything were talking about the nonstop lying. The paper was to an important extent honchoed by somebody named Jeremy Ferrar, who at the time was the director of British Welcome Trust, which is a huge foundation that supports biomedical research. And Farrar was working with Fauci to make it look like nature. And so he was part of this. He was part of this group, but he's not a named author. And at the bottom of the article, there's more details than you want to know, but at the bottom of the article, it. Thanks. Welcome trust. Well, under the rules of science and under the rules of a journalist, if theres a contributor who financed the thing but is not mentioned as a contributor to the article, that is per se a violation of conflict of interest standards. And that wasnt revealed. So just last week, a group of very illustrious virologists called for the retraction of this. I've called for the retraction of it because it's an outright fraud, because we have slack messages and other email messages and other, other emessaging that says, I don't really believe this, or, you know, it's, in other words, it's clearly, it's clearly a fraudulent paper.

But they, they're not moving to this moment.

How can you. So there's a lot of debate about a pandemic treaty, who is, of course, pushing it. Lots of countries are, as well as you well know. How can you prepare for a new pandemic without establishing the origin of the most recent pandemic?

And more than that, we're going to have another pandemic. If it came out of a lab, they're still doing this work. It's not as if they said, oh, oh, my God, we really blew it now. We stopped gain of function researchers. There's gain of function research going on all over the place. And interestingly, Tucker, last year, almost like Monty Python, but it's so serious. Boston University put out a paper based on gain of function for manipulating SARS Cov two. And NIH says, you didn't ask for approval before doing that experiment. And Boston University says, we don't have to ask for approval. It's not on your grant. We just, we're doing it like we want, and it shows. We got a shit show going on in this country right now. If a university thinks it can do whatever it wants, and if NIH has a different opinion and we have no rules and they're doing work on dangerous pathogens. Yeah, we're going to have another pandemic. Even if this one didn't come from it. This line of work is really dangerous. And who's watching it? Well, we don't know because it's DoD, because it's confidential, because no one tells us anything.

And interestingly now the House investigation committees trying to get at some of this. The Democrats completely surrounded Fauci and said, we don't want to have a look at this, and said, this is republican grandstanding. It's nuts. What could be less partisan than where this virus came from? And we can't even get Democrats in the House now. I think a few of them are coming along, but for a time, it was completely partisan. The Republicans could investigate in the House, but in the Senate, where the Democrats are controlled, they were saying no. And Rand Paul asked me to come in and meet his counterpart, who was the chair of the committee, Peters and I did. And now, by the way, they are moving in the Senate because you got these bright red lights flashing. Holy hell. Let's find out what happened.

Is it strange to all wake up one day and all of a sudden see actual threats to the existence of humanity right there? Nuclear war, bio warfare, possibly AI. Yeah, but just right there. I mean, what big picture? What is this? Did you ever think you would, after living in the most prosperous country in the world your entire life, find yourself in a place where the country you live in is basically causing the potential extinction of humanity?

I think it's really true and important to understand that since 1945, we've been living this way, and we don't know it. We're barely aware of it. But the ability to screw things up in this world is very high. The ability to have terrible accidents. Oops, where'd that virus come from? The ability to have a nuclear war, even by accident, but much less when you're in the face of your opponent and talking about defeating them and so forth? A war between two nuclear superpowers that we have normalized. Yeah. Oh, we're not at war. We're just feeding them all the weapons and they can. And the British, who are the worst at this. Yeah, they can use the weapons wherever they want. You know, no. No constraint, no control. We've been living this way, but we don't know it, because like everything else, the narrative doesn't permit it. One day, Biden said in, I think it was the fall of 2022. This is pretty dangerous. We could be on a path to nuclear Armageddon. He didn't say that in a speech to the american people, because he doesn't give speeches to the american people. He doesn't talk to the american people.

He doesn't have press conferences. He said it at some fundraiser, as usual, and then someone reported it. What was the reaction of the press the next day, almost to a paper? The reaction was, how dare he say these things? How dare he scare the people? How dare he say a word like Armageddon? There was, I think, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, if I remember correctly, this unforgivable, this kind of slip of the president of the United States. So Biden, for a moment, blurted out the truth, no doubt by accident, no doubt because he was in some fundraiser, probably trying to impress some donor, but the reaction wasn't, oh, my God, what does this mean? How do we consider this let's go back and think about unprovoked. Unprovoked. Unprovoked. And maybe we could decide how to step a little bit back from, from the cliff and. No, absolutely the opposite. Completely the opposite. And I've seen, I mean, not only you could have a pandemic that kills an estimated 20 million people and not really care to find out where it came from. You can be on the brink of nuclear war. We can have Ukraine shelling the Zaporizhya nuclear power plant.

Do you know our newspapers won't say that it's Ukraine shelling the power plant. All they will, and Ukraine is shelling the nuclear power plant. I can reveal as if it's a, as if it's a surprise because the Russians are inside the power plant and the Ukrainians are trying to take back the power plant. And so these shells come to the nuclear power plant. And then our lovely crazy, our lovely newspapers say each side accuses the other of shelling the nuclear power plant. And I happen to know, for, you know, the reasons that I know some of these things, that the, of course, it's Ukraine shelling a plant that the Russians are inside of, not Russians shelling the plant that they're. But you can't get officialdom to say this. You can't get the newspapers to say this. That's pretty serious to be shelling a nuclear power plant. I mean, are you out of your, I put that on the list that we've been adding to. Are you out of your mind? Right. Don't do that. But they're doing it in the country.

In the world that has actually had a profound nuclear accident already.

Exactly. You might mention that maybe they would know something about it, that there would be some reticence about that.

So that leads to my last sincere question, which you may or may not answer. But you know, you're telling the truth about things that are big things. They're big things, like the biggest things. And in a world where you're just absolutely, as you've noted repeatedly and correctly, you're just not allowed to do that. And you're telling the truth about people who don't care about the deaths of millions, who have caused the deaths of millions. So are you worried because you do have credibility. You're not a crank, and your job and your career give you prima facial credibility. It's a big thing for you to say these things. Are you worried about the risks to you, really?

I'm worried about the risks to me of a nuclear war, for sure. I really am. I spend a lot of time with diplomats. I really like diplomats, by the way. It's even when countries hate each other or war, good diplomats smile and talk to each other. And one could say, oh, how cynical. But it's actually quite nice. I believe the human touch is what can keep us alive. Actually, I don't think it's a naive idea. It's actually a quite deep idea.

Russia has one of the greatest diplomats I've ever seen.

I think Lavrov is absolutely remarkable. Remarkable. And I've known him for 30 years.

Have you really?

Yeah.

It's funny. In a fair world, in a meritocratic world, he'd be very famous, even if you disagree with everything he said, because he's so obviously smart.

He's astoundingly smart and astoundingly capable and. And he's astoundingly someone that we should be speaking with. I agree to find an answer to this. So the thing that makes it. If I were, you know, shouting in the wilderness and it just felt, it's insane, no one's listening, I'd have a very different reaction from the one that I actually carry day by day. Almost everyone I talk to around the world is worried, shares the things we're talking about, understands the risks, makes you feel completely normal, not abnormal in any of this, says, please keep doing this. Can you find a way to talk here or there? I've spoken twice in the UN Security Council or testified twice in the unit Security Council in the last two years. I want to make the diplomacy work because our lives depend on it. And we stopped all diplomacy in the United States, all of it, except what we call speaking with our friends and allies. But diplomacy is not speaking with your friends and allies. Diplomacy is speaking with your counterparts, even your adversaries. That's what diplomacy is, and we've got to get it back.

Do you think the average American. I said that was my last question, but I do have one more. Do you think the average American, even sort of informed people, has any sense at all of how close we are to annihilation?

I think people are worried, and people are not happy campers and people do not agree with the foreign policy of this administration. But people are also very confused because we don't hear anything clear, except when you interview President Putin and we get to hear what he says and think of. I mean, that was a monumental occasion, Tucker, and an extraordinarily important one, but how rare it is. And that's what made it also so extraordinary, because you're not supposed to do that. We're not supposed to listen to that. So I think Americans are. They know that something's wrong. They don't know exactly. How could they know what exactly is wrong? The level of trust in government is extraordinarily low. That low trust has been, unfortunately, amply deserved, because our government lies and lies and lies, and it doesn't even try to tell the truth anymore. It tries to make a narrative. So I think people sense something seriously wrong. But, God, I hope our lives are in the hands of a few people. And they better learn some prudence, because they have not had it for a long time, and they don't even understand what it is to talk to a counterpart.

And my absolute core bottom line is, until Biden speaks directly with Putin and starts talking, our lives are deeply at risk. And it's unimaginable to me that we are in open war, as we are, and we're not even trying to find the path to peace right now. And we have crazy statements that the president of Finland said, the path to peace is through the battlefield. These people don't understand anything. And I was just going to mention two quick things in closing. One, I spent a lot of my life studying the cuban missile crisis and its aftermath. And I wrote a book about Kennedy's peace initiative in 1963, which was remarkable because he actually, in the height of the Cold War, reached the partial nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev. And they both knew we had to pull back from the brink because they both had had advisors that would have led us to nuclear annihilation. And they were just completely, completely shocked as the two people who had saved the world, but just barely how close we had come. But one of the things that most people don't know about the cuban missile crisis is that even when Kennedy and Khrushchev had reached an agreement, we almost had nuclear war after that event because of the disabled soviet submarine.

Do you know this event? Because it's one of the most remarkable little known facts of modern history, and it's worth understanding. After Kennedy and Khrushchev reached the agreement to end the cuban missile crisis, Kennedy removing the nuclear weapons from Turkey, and Soviet Union removing the nuclear weapons from Cuba, and the US promising never again to try to invade Cuba, there was a disabled soviet sub at the bottom of the Caribbean that had been sent over during the crisis, and it blew a gasket, as it were, and temperatures inside 120 degrees, and the sailors fainting, and the ship deeply disabled. And this was 1962, so the communications did not exist. The ship was out of communication. They had no idea what was going on, so they decided to surface. And as they surfaced, american navy pilots were dropping charges on the sub. And it's not absolutely sure, but one story is that the Navy pilot, one navy pilot, for fun, was dropping live grenades on the sub as it was surfacing rather than depth charges. And the pilot thought that they were under attack and that there was a war above the surface. Now, this was the lead sub of a squadron of seven in the Caribbean, and it was the one sub in that squadron that had nuclear tipped submarines, nuclear torpedoes.

Excuse me. And under us doctrine, any attack by a nuclear weapon was to be met by the full force of the us nuclear arsenal with an attack on. Across the Soviet Union, China and all of the eastern european countries estimate 700 million dead. And that was to happen with any nuclear attack. And Curtis Lemay was the head of the us air force at the time, and he couldn't wait. I think it's fair to say.

Yes, it's fair to say.

So what happened was this skipper, the commander of the vessel, ordered the nuclear torpedo into the torpedo bay to be fired because he thought the ship was under attack. And by miracle, a guy named Arkhipov, who was the person who saved the world, whose name nobody knows, and I'm pretty sure I have the name right, was a party official that had a higher rank than the ship's captain and said, I don't think that's a good idea. I think we should surface. And he countermanded the order at the last moment. And the ship surfaced and they found out there was no war and no crisis, and that was the end of it. And we came within a moment of a full nuclear annihilation. Now, that's a true story if people want to read about it in detail. The most remarkable book about this is a book by the late historian Martin Sherwin called gambling with Armageddon, which is a absolutely phenomenal work. And Martin Sherwin, some people may recall, is the historian who's the co author of Oppenheimer, which became the screenplay. He's a wonderful historian who died a few years ago, and he tells this story in unbelievable, riveting detail.

Now, I take this not only as a literal event, but as a metaphor for our reality, which is something can always go wrong. Stay away from the cliff. Exactly. Stay away from the cliff. This is how close we are. Talk to President Putin, negotiate with China, make a two state solution to stop the war in the Middle east. Stop carrying on like you run the world because you don't.

Thank you for this, and I hope that you are heard everywhere.

Well, thank you. Thanks for all your great leadership in this, Tucker, because you're playing a huge, huge role.

Just bumbling along. But that's the greatest kind I've ever heard. So thank you. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made the complete library tuckercarlson.com.