Why Trump is FORCING Zelensky to Sign a Deal on Ukraine (Uncut) 03-01-2025

Why Trump is FORCING Zelensky to Sign a Deal on Ukraine (exposing the masterplan)

Part of the reason that the people talk about ending the Ukraine war for the US to become more involved in Asia is that the military has gamed out what would happen if we ended up with a war with China over Taiwan. And every time they do it, the United States loses. We’re not in a good position.

So if we have more troops and more aircraft in the Asia Pacific region, would that change it? No, that’s the wrong kind of thinking. And there are people in the military who are basically saying, we have to come up with a different way to approach it. You’re watching Capital Cosm.

My name is Danny. And today’s guest is a returning Harley Slanger. Harley, thank you so much for coming back on Capital Cosm, my friend.

It’s my pleasure, Danny. Good to see you again. Yeah, likewise.

We were just talking off camera about the things transpiring in Eastern Europe, notably the arrest of Georgescu, the former presidential candidate there, as well as some things going on in Hungary as well. But it seems like all of Eastern Europe and pretty much all of Europe, if you look at the German elections, there’s definitely something going on there. It’s revolutionary times, indeed.

But I’ll let you kick it off wherever you would like to kind of start the conversation. For you right now, where do you want to start? What is most topical for you at the moment? Obviously, we have the talks between the U.S. and Russia. We have the German elections.

We have the things going on in Romania. What is most topical for you at the moment? Well, let’s start with the German election, since I’m here in Potsdam, which is just outside of Berlin. You may have heard that Friedrich Merz, who is the man from Black Rock, he was the head of Germany Black Rock for six years.

He’s the winner. He only got 28% of the vote. And he’s going to have a hard time pulling together a coalition.

His most likely coalition partner will be the Social Democrats. It came in at 16%. So that would put them at, what, 44%.

So they need another partner. And meanwhile, the second largest party is the alternative for Deutschland, the so-called right-wing extremist party. But it’s the party that’s the most anti-war party in Germany.

But Merz made a statement, two statements yesterday. First, he said he wants 200 billion dollars for the war, or euros for the war. Right.

This is at a point where Germany is in a freefall economically, because of the high price of electricity, the collapse of the auto sector, the breakdown of transportation and infrastructure. So he’s calling for 200 billion euros more for a war, which is essentially lost and could be over quickly. But then the second thing he said, and this I don’t think was covered in the United States, he said Europe needs to be independent.

We need an independence movement against the United States. Now that’s interesting for two reasons. First, it acknowledges that Europe has been marching along the policy dictated by the U.S. and the British, the Biden-Blinken war policy.

But secondly, breaking with the United States. This is also why Macron was in Washington two days ago, why Starmer is there today. They’re trying to convince Trump not to break with Europe.

And Trump doesn’t give a damn what they’re saying. Trump has got his own agenda, which we can talk about. But what’s happening in Europe, as you alluded to at the beginning of the program, is an upheaval.

None of the political parties in government in Europe can even reach 30% of the vote. Macron is at about 20% in the polls. As I mentioned, Merz was 28%.

The Italian government’s a little more popular, but Italian politics are, you know, so chaotic. And then you have Eastern Europe, where Slovakia, Serbia, Hungary, Romania. The Romanian election is really, to me, typical of the problem in Europe, where here you have the person who got 29% in the first round, Giorgescu.

And the EU said it wasn’t a democratic election, so they took away the vote. And now he’s been arrested. And the EU is supposedly, the whole point is fighting for democracy.

So you see these kinds of contradictions, and you have to scratch your head and say, what the hell is going on here? And it is quite bizarre. And then you go to Hungary, where Orban is decreed by the European Union to be an authoritarian dictator. And you see people happy, people out in the street, you see political debate going on.

And you’re told it’s an authoritarian country. So you have to ask yourself, who’s controlling the narrative? And what’s the point of the narrative? And then you look at the Putin-Trump prospects for resolving the Ukraine war, and actually normalizing relationships beyond that. After all this time, at least three years of no communication at all between Russia and the United States.

So Danny, these are revolutionary times. The world is changing very rapidly. And there’s some people who don’t want it to change.

Indeed it is. And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it in the German constitution, as well as a bunch of other European constitutions, that they literally cannot elect a right-wing politician or anyone right of right of center, i.e. an AfD. Isn’t that in the constitution in Germany? What’s in the constitution is you’re not allowed to have someone run who’s a Nazi.

And the question of what is right, what is extreme right, the people I know in the AfD, what they say is, we’re extremely committed to no war. They want to restore relations with Russia. They oppose the Green Revolution, which is part of the reason the German electricity is so expensive.

So how does that make them extreme right? What’s the immigration question? And this is a big issue for all countries in Europe, because they’re going through economic squeezes. And they’re basically saying, we can’t afford to have these immigrants. Same issue that’s in the United States.

Now, they’re trying to manufacture the idea that the AfD wants to re-migrate people, kick everyone out who’s not born two generations inside Germany, which would mean I’d get kicked out also, along with two of my three kids who are not German. But that’s not going to happen. But what you have is a commitment to maintaining the status quo, which is the unipolar order.

Which is the Wall Street, City of London, Brussels banking networks, and their connections with the military-industrial-financial complex dictating the terms. And these terms are, you stick with what we’ve got. And that is the unipolar order.

They’re terrified by the idea that there’s a shift going on internationally. And instead of recognizing that and adapting to it, they’re saying, no, we’re going to double down from what we’ve already got. And so the actual legal language in the German constitution is if someone can be proven to be a Nazi, they’re not allowed to run.

But that’s just not the case with the AfD. They have some questionable characters in there, as does every party. But if that’s the law, what about Zelensky, who came to power on the backs of the neo-Nazi militia of the Azov battalion? So, you know, it’s the hypocrisy.

That’s the thing you have to look at is the hypocrisy here. And, you know, I think sometimes Donald Trump says things that I don’t agree with. But his commitment to ending these wars, if in fact he does do that, that should be supported.

And in Europe, instead, they’re saying, no, we want to keep the war going. We want to keep spending more money. We want to see more people killed.

And that’s supposedly democratic, forward-looking Europe? No, I don’t think so. Interesting. What was the reason that they gave for arresting Drogescu? Because does Romania have a similar clause in their constitution, much like Germany, that, you know, you can’t have a far right or a far left politician? Or what was the reason for his arrest? Well, I’m not sure because I haven’t seen the paperwork on this yet.

The argument that the EU had against him is that the vote was tainted by Russian online and social media networks that were interfering in the Romanian election. But when they had to present evidence on that, they had no evidence. You know, as far as I know, what they’re saying is that he’s lining up, he’s allying himself with the anti-European Union groupings in Germany and elsewhere, and that that’s not acceptable.

Now, what they may say is that he did something with corrupt, with money or something of that sort. I just met with someone yesterday in Hungary, who is a prime minister of a country who was kicked out of that country based on corruption allegations that came from the George Soros organization in their country. So, you know, I’ll wait and see if they actually do have anything on Drogescu, but I’m assuming they don’t.

And they’re just trying to stop the breakaway from the standard City of London Wall Street line in the European Union. They don’t want to see it break down. Right, right.

Has the George Soros or this USAID web of influence worldwide, now that it’s been cut off through USAID, have they been effectively defanged, or do they have other means of funding? Well, the USAID is sort of a coordinating operation for a lot of NGOs. I mean, from the US, you have the most prominent ones, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute. You’ve got a bunch of these kinds of institutions, and some of them actually do humanitarian work.

And someone’s going to have to sit down with, maybe not with Musk, but with somebody and go through step by step, which ones actually are doing rotten things. But here’s the basic picture. To get money from an NGO that’s connected to the US government, there are many ways you can get it.

USAID had something like a $40 to $50 billion budget, very large budget. And they give some money for medical and healthcare issues, housing, doing the, what is it, the Cookie Monster program in Iraq. I can’t remember the name of it now.

But in any case, they put a lot of money out there. But to get the money, there are often strings attached. And this is when the media is talking about the Republicans are just being nasty and fighting against humanitarian efforts.

They’re not covering the fact that these humanitarian efforts have strings attached that go back to the Cold War, the policies that were there during the Cold War. Then on the other side, the Republicans saying, well, we’re just going to cut the spending because it’s all wasteful. Well, that’s just the typical conservative opposition to government.

So what most people are hearing is not the real story. Because the real story is that they do use money for things such as civic organizations, voting, making sure the votes are legal and properly counted, democracy activities, fair media. But the money for these things all go to the people and institutions in these countries that support the line from the West.

And so that means that the U.S. government and U.S. taxpayers are funding movements that go against, that may go against the democratic choices of people. For example, the question of Soros and Hungary, the Soros organization got kicked out of Hungary. And why was that? Because they were running press seminars to build an alternative press against Orbán.

And they were essentially being heavily funded by the United States. Samantha Power, who was the former head of the USAID, went to Hungary with a bushel full of money to try and build up YouTube networks that were hostile to the Orbán government. Now, Orbán said, if you want to have a free press, that’s one thing.

But if you’re coming here to fund opposition, what right do you and the United States have to do that? And Orbán in the last election got almost 60% of the vote. And they were saying that it was undemocratic. So this is where you see the difference between a line of actually doing something to help people, as opposed to real election interference.

And given the whole Russiagate story from 2016 to still today, you know, the idea that Putin was interfering to elect Trump, you’d think Americans would be a little bit more astute about this question of election interference. And yet, if you think about 10-20 billion dollars going to opposition parties in other countries, what right does the United States have, or the British have, because the Foreign and Commonwealth Office does this also, what right do they have to fund opposition movements in these countries? So that’s sort of the issue that has been obscured by the way the media is covering it in the United States, the typical left-right dualism. That’s not what it is.

Right. Well, let’s go ahead and pivot over to the U.S.-Russia negotiations. We have this clip here from Putin.

I think this is a recent clip. Let’s go ahead and watch it, and we can comment on what Putin has to say about these talks. So here we go.

Okay. We’ll see how rapidly the world is changing. Let me note that the first contacts with the first American administration can still hope, at least who are willing to work towards resuming our ties, solving a colossal amount of strategic problems in the world architecture.

Those problems have triggered the Ukrainian and other regional prices. We’ll see how rapidly the world is changing. Okay.

So as we can all, as you saw or heard, he says that the new administration instills hope, which is a stark contrast from the Biden-Blinken administration. Where do you think we are in these negotiations? Are we going to get a Ukraine deal? Is Europe or the UK going to find a way to torpedo it? What’s your current reading of the negotiation process between the U.S. and Russia? Well, first of all, the Russians are very serious about it because they are happy to have what’s called a normalization of relations. That was the main topic in Riyadh, in fact, was not so much about Ukraine, but about reestablishing embassies in each country, reestablishing regular contact between the military and between the political leaders.

In other words, normalization, having normal relations that may have disagreements, but the whole point is you have diplomacy to work them out. The Russians were extremely angry that the U.S. cut that off completely. And this gets back to the other point that Putin keeps making, which is that the issue is not just Ukraine, but do we have the opportunity to discuss on a fair and equal basis difficulties that arise between nations? And Biden completely cut that off, completely cut off the negotiations, because the Russians have been saying for years that they were being lied to about the Western policy toward Ukraine and toward Georgia and toward Russia.

You’re going back to 1990 to 92 when the U.S. said there’ll be no eastward expansion of NATO, and yet NATO keeps moving further and further and further eastward. And that wasn’t even allowed to be discussed. Clinton lied to Yeltsin.

Clinton said, well, we want to have a partnership with you, but it’s not about having NATO expansion. And as he was saying that to Yeltsin, people in his administration were arranging the accession into NATO of a number of Eastern European countries. You had the Minsk Accords, where the West lied to Russia to use the time to build up the Ukrainian military.

You have the fact that the West still says that Putin is making up stories about Nazis, but those aren’t made up stories. Those are real. There are actual members of the Ukrainian security forces who honor every year, January 1st, Stefan Bondera, who was a Ukrainian who brought Ukrainian soldiers into the Nazi SS to kill Jews in Ukraine.

And yet that’s taken off. You can’t discuss that. So Putin is very happy to have a chance to have a discussion.

And of course, the Western media says, yeah, he’s going to put one over on Trump. Now the question that we still don’t know is what exactly is Trump’s thinking on this? And I think that at least in terms of Ukraine, Trump really does want to see the war end because he has other ideas about where the relationship has to go. And this, he’s not so different from the way the Germans think about it.

The traditional German policy towards Russia is Russia has an incredible wealth of raw materials that Germany needs. Germany has technology and engineering and capital. There’s a potential for a big market, so they should be natural allies.

That’s what the British have been trying to disrupt ever since the early 1900s, the European-Russian relationship, and now Russia and China. Now, there’s one wrinkle here that we do have to mention. Trump listened to people like Bolton and others who say we have to use the Kissinger method of splitting Russia off from China.

And there’s an element of that which we still don’t know. I think until Trump talks to Xi Jinping, we’re not going to know. But the bigger picture here is that the confrontations that we’ve seen over the period of the Biden administration in particular, but going back to 1990, all of them assumed that the US would be the dominant military force in the world, and the US and the Western banks could dictate the terms of trade to everyone.

That’s changed. The Global South has emerged as a power. South Asia, China, other parts of the world, especially Eurasia, are now saying we want to have a say, too.

That’s the whole idea of a multipolar world. And you can’t decree there’s no multipolar world just because you’re the United States. Now, that’s where there’s an ambiguity with Trump.

On the one hand, he says he wants to recognize the sovereignty of nations, which means their own development, they can choose what they want. On the other side, you have this idea of America first, which means he still is holding on to some notion of the United States having the power to make the deals. So that’s why I’m saying that it’s not clear where Trump is going.

But it is clear that talking to Putin and talking to Xi Jinping is a hell of a lot better than listening to the people who are trained by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who say that we can never allow a rival to emerge in Eurasia. And so the very act of diplomacy and talking and, you know, I am completely disbelieving about Marco Rubio being the voice of multipolarity, knowing something about his past. Waltz, Witkoff, I mean, these are people you wouldn’t expect this from.

On the other hand, I’ll tell you something interesting I discovered when I was in Hungary. Lincoln’s father, who is a financial guy, a banker, I think Warburg Pincus was his company, he was the ambassador to Hungary in the early 1990s. And he brought in huge amounts of money for the Open Society, the Soros Foundation.

And the Soros records office in Budapest was named after Lincoln and his wife, the father and his wife. So when you look at what Tony Blinken was doing as Secretary of State, you know, he was following the Soros policy and the Brzezinski policy. So any change from that is positive.

I don’t know what’s going to come out of this. Just today, Peskov said there’s still no definitive summit coming up. But Ryabkov, who’s the Deputy Foreign Minister, or Prime Minister, I guess, said that they’re working towards that.

And I think they’re talking about something before May 9, which is the Russian victory in Europe day, maybe having Trump come to Moscow then. Now that’s… With Xi Jinping as well. Yeah.

Now that’s not the 24 hours that Trump promised he would end the war. But that would be a pretty good accomplishment, especially given that Europe, the whole of Europe is against him right now. I don’t know what Starmer is bringing as an option.

One of the things that the French and the British are saying is we can no longer count on the US nuclear umbrella. So now we have to have a French-British nuclear umbrella to protect Europe. And I think the Russians are laughing at that.

And most of the Europeans are terrified by the idea that if the US is gone, you’re going to have to rely on British military power. Yeah. Because they can barely get into a soccer stadium.

It’s like, what, 70,000… Wembley Stadium. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Plus, they have two aircraft carriers that every time they go more than 20 miles outside of the port, they have to come back and get repaired for six months.

And their aircraft carriers, they have to rent the fighter planes from the United States. So, and this is where you get down to the question of the narrative. The line that Putin was unprovoked with the attack in Ukraine, that he was really trying to capture the whole country in the first days, and that if he wins in Ukraine, he’s going to go after Poland, the Baltic states, and then Germany.

There’s absolutely no evidence of that, that that’s their intention. In fact, I think the opposite is the case. They went into Ukraine to try and get the US to pay attention, to negotiate the security concerns.

So, we’re still living in this balloon or this bubble, which says that the Russians are like the old Soviets. They’re our eternal enemy. And we have to be prepared.

We have to have the military capability to wipe out the world in order to stop them. And that’s just, that’s the wrong kind of thinking. Yeah, yeah.

We also have another excerpt from Putin’s speech. He speaks on the subversion coming from Europe here, much to what you just alluded to here, Harley. Let’s go ahead and turn over to that here for a brief moment.

See what he has to say. I understand that most everybody is pleased with the presumption of Russian-American contacts. Some of the forces are interested in keeping hostilities, and they will try to disrupt the emerging dialogue.

We will need to use all the possibilities of diplomacy and special forces to firmly defend our national interests, lives, sovereignty, and liberties of our citizens from any threats. I understand that. So yeah, he’s basically alluding to, you know, France and UK and, you know, the rest of the gang there trying to throw a monkey wrench into the negotiations.

He’s also concerned about this idea of European forces inside Ukraine. And I think on that, I believe it was Hegseth who made the point that there will be no NATO troops in Ukraine. If there are forces, they will not be covered by Article 5 of NATO, which means if they’re attacked, it doesn’t mean all other countries have to come in and fight.

And the United States will have no boots on the ground. So Putin is concerned that they’re going to use the negotiations to set up a Korea-style frozen conflict, as opposed to one in which there can be an agreement on security for both parties, both sides. And of course, the West is saying you can’t trust Russia.

They’re going to use that as an opportunity to rebuild their military and come back in and move West. But this is where I think Putin said in that clip you just showed, diplomacy. We don’t have much in the way of diplomats.

That’s why I say it’s surprising to see Rubio standing head and shoulders above the people who were there before him. Sergei Lavrov is a real diplomat. And the Chinese, Wang Yi, they have the same kind of people who know history and know the customs of these countries and respect the traditions.

You have someone like Blinken or Jake Sullivan who have an arrogance. You see this in Europe, the arrogance of someone like Macron or Baerbock, the foreign minister until recently in Germany, the green politician who knows almost nothing about the country she’s negotiating with. So what Putin is hoping is that Trump could be trusted.

And in that sense, that’s why they’re talking about a bigger issue than just Ukraine. That includes US-Russian joint development of resources, including in Russia, cooperation in the Arctic. And I’ll tell you, the other area where they need to cooperate is the Middle East.

And this is maybe the other weakness of Trump. If he sticks with his statement that he’s the greatest supporter of Zionism of all, there’s not going to be a solution there. On the other hand, what we’re seeing, and I find this fascinating as well, Danny, that Trump said, we’re going to take over Gaza, we’re going to own it, we’re going to turn it into the Gaza Disneyland and Riviera and so on.

And what happens? The Egyptians and the Saudis and the Emirates step forward and say, no, no, no, you can’t boot the Palestinians out. If you want peace, you have to have a two-state solution and we’ll come in and rebuild. He brought them to the table.

Yeah. So was that genius on his part, or was that accidental? Well, I think he’ll take credit for it. But if it means there’s an end to the killing there, it’s all for the good.

And then the question is, how do you cement a, or how do you have mutual incentives for the Israelis and the Palestinians to live together in peace? And this is where the economic policy comes in. You’re going to have to, I mean, casinos and betting parlors, that’s not going to do it. You need the basis for a real economy for the Palestinians.

And that’s why we at the Schiller Institute are fighting for this idea of the Oasis Plan of joint efforts to desalinate water that can help green the desert. And this was part of what Rabin and Arafat were discussing in the original Oslo Accords, the so-called economic annexes. This is where the Chinese could play a big role.

And then you add in the Saudi money, the, I mean, look what they’ve done to Dubai and these places where they’ve made paradises out of the desert. What’s to say that couldn’t be done in the Negev, the Sinai, in the areas that would then create a better chance for a positive future for the Palestinians and the Israelis and all the other nations in the region. So I think those are the tests we’re going to have.

I think that will make the Ukraine issue look easy because the Ukraine situation is being defined by the fact that the army in Ukraine is pretty much exhausted. Yeah. Just yesterday, he posted this video on Truth Social.

I’m sure you may have already seen it, but it’s a controversial one. Let’s go ahead and take a look at it. This is what he plans to do with Gaza.

Trump Disney World. So what’s he trying to communicate here? Is this kind of like what he did with that Jeffrey Sachs video to kind of bring Netanyahu to the table to negotiate a ceasefire? Is he kind of using something like this as a means to bring the Arab countries on the table as well? Or is he actually serious about it? Is he actually serious about creating like a beach resort on Gaza? Well, some of this is trolling. Some of this is Trump.

Instead of getting into fights, I mean, look, what made the ceasefire work was when Witkoff called Netanyahu and said, we’re going to sit down tomorrow afternoon and work this out. Netanyahu said, oh no, tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s a Sabbath.

I can’t have a meeting with you. And Witkoff, who’s also Jewish, said, I’ll be in your office at one o’clock. So he made it clear that there was no way out.

So you have to have some of the hardball, which of course Biden never did. And Blinken, you know, cried crocodile tears for the casualties among the Palestinians, and then they still delivered the weapons. Now, if Trump is serious, and here’s the wild card here.

If he’s serious about this idea of the Abraham Accords, of a rapprochement between the Saudis and the Israelis, or I should say a first diplomatic recognition and agreement, then he has to have something there for the Palestinian state. The Saudis cannot allow the Palestinians to be booted out of Palestine with nothing to show for it. Neither can the Jordanians, who have a large number of Palestinians.

The Egyptians are not going to accept them. So if Trump is serious about solving the problem, someone, I hope, has told him that you can’t just do this by making it a Disney world and throw money in there. You actually have to do something that changes the thinking of the people, especially after October 7th and the aftermath.

So my thinking is, it’s probably him having some fun with this, but at the same time, encouraging the Egyptians and the Saudis in particular, as the two most important of the Arab forces surrounding Israel, that there’s got to be something serious done about Gaza. I hadn’t seen that clip before, but it’s actually… Yeah, it was going viral the other day. He posted it on his Truth Social account, and it’s blown up since then, for better or for worse.

Yeah. Well, it’s the mentality of a hotel man. You get a nice hotel and a pool and some drinks and some scantily clad women and good food, and everyone’s happy.

What is the extent that the Saudis and the other Arab countries could do for Gaza? What’s the scope of what they can actually accomplish? Are you referring to a two-state solution or just something else where they would become stakeholders of Gaza? Well, I think it has to be a two-state solution, which means there’s some political things that have to be done. You have to resolve the rift between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. And you have to realize a lot of the leadership of Hamas has been wiped out, and the people who are now speaking for Hamas have been living in Qatar for the last 10 years, so they’re not that close to the people.

But there’s a resilience in the Palestinians, which is saying we’re not going to allow them to drive us out of our land again. We’re not going to have another Nakba. And so this has had an impact, a big impact on the Saudis.

From what I know, I do interviews with al-Mayadeen in Beirut in an Egyptian radio show, and the responses you get are the people who say we’ve got to get a two-state solution, which means the Arabs have to get more involved. Now, how can they get involved? Well, one of them is diplomatically, but the other is the practical one, money. And it’s not that they’ll make money.

It’s that if there’s no solution, there’s going to be hell in the region. Either an increased genocide of Palestinians, which will cause an explosion in the other Arab countries, or possibly a much bigger war between Israel and Iran. So there’s got to be a solution.

Now, this is where you, if you look back at what was proposed at the Oslo Accords, when Rabin and Arafat met at the White House and shook hands, they shook hands not as friends. As Rabin said, you don’t have to make peace with your friends. You have to make peace with your enemies.

And he said it takes the courage to change your axioms. And Rabin is someone who had been suppressing the Intifada. He had been one of the tough Israeli generals who was cracking down on the Arab youth.

And yet he realized that you couldn’t have peace by doing that. And so he and a younger generation around him, Yossi Beilin, the allies of Shimon Peres, came up with the idea that in order to have a political solution, you have to have an economic solution. And the economic annexes of Oslo have been completely ignored.

And here’s the problem, the reason for that. They were talking about putting together a pool at that time of about five to seven billion dollars for projects that would build an initial industrial base for the Palestinians in conjunction with Israeli companies. And the Israelis and the Palestinians signed on to that.

And Clinton did also. And Clinton tried to raise money for it. And they actually came up with a couple billion.

But the World Bank would not release that money to the Palestinians because they said they didn’t trust Arafat and the corruption. And so instead of beginning these projects that would provide an incentive for both sides to have peace, they fell by the wayside. There was no earth move, no building done.

And so the lesson from that is that if you’re going to have peace, you’d better have a plan for development. Now, what kind of development? You know, a slave labor casino economy for the Palestinians where people from Europe come to have fun with cheap Palestinian waiters and cooks and things of that sort. That’s not a solution.

And I don’t know whether Trump, I’m sure he knows that. So the question then is, how do you create, how do you break the enmity and the distrust? And this is where you other forces coming in. Now, one example is what the Chinese did to build a rapprochement between the Iranians and the Saudis.

Because much of the contest in the Middle East, especially around terrorism in the last 20 years has been the Saudi-Sunni versus the Iranian-Shia split. And the Chinese came in and they basically buried the hatchet. And it was based on the idea that the Chinese would help them with high-speed rail, with nuclear energy, with projects that would work for both countries.

And I think that’s the kind of thinking when Putin talks about diplomacy, and he talks about the Eurasian perspective, the multilateral approach of harmony of interests, as opposed to just cutthroat competition, that’s what he’s talking about. And that’s what’s emerging from the global South. It would be so refreshing to the whole world if the United States were to move in and say, this is what we’re for.

We want to have development that benefits all people. That’s what the Europeans should do. But the Europeans instead are sitting there angry because they have inflation, because they have political parties that are completely hated by the population.

And instead, they’re just looking for a fight. And the idea that Zelensky was going to take on Trump, well, look how that turned out. The idea that Merz is going to go in and read the riot act to Trump, the one who tried it was Macron.

I don’t know, did you see the coverage of the Macron and Trump meeting? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, they were struggling with that handshake session that they had there. It was pretty rough.

Macron came in there prepared. He probably had a grip strength coach and everything leading up to that meeting or something to try to one-up Trump. But yeah, he also interrupted Trump and corrected him nonetheless about the nature of the European payments to Ukraine.

So I don’t think that went really well with Trump. I mean, he played it all very well on TV, but I’m sure that got to him. Well, he doesn’t forget those things.

And he definitely doesn’t like Starmer. That’s clear. And Starmer is going in as a puffed up, arrogant, we’re the ones who are going to step forward to replace you if you’re not there, but it would be better if you were there.

That’s not going to go over. So when we talk about the world changing, it means attitudes have to change, thinking has to change. And for there to be a future, we actually need to change the culture.

We need a renaissance culture with a renaissance in classical science and music and art that gives people a sense of the actual beauty of the human character and our creative capability to solve the problems that we have, as opposed to who’s the toughest, who’s got the most nuclear weapons, who’s got the most troops. I was just going to say, do you see this trend of de-globalization as a positive trend for peace? Meaning that it appears what’s going on is the United States will probably be the, its sphere of influence will be reduced from a world influence to a Western hemispheric influence through North America and South America. Russia’s sphere of influence, now becomes that of Europe.

China’s sphere of influence now becomes that of Asia. I mean, I’m sure you’ll have like spheres of influence in the Middle East, you know, Saudi Arabia, Israel will be the guarantors of the Middle East. Don’t forget India.

And Iran and India. So does this portend to a better chance of peace down the line or the contrary? Well, that’s why I like the concept that Putin put out at the last meeting in Vladivostok of the Eastern Forum, where he said we should be talking about polyphony, harmony, rather than multi-polarity. Because the problem with multi-polarity is that you have, I’ll give you an image, because this is something that the Russians have been talking about.

We just saw the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Summit, which was actually a positive event toward the end of the war, where you had Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. But out of that, they agreed on the United Nations, Roosevelt’s idea of the four freedoms of the Bretton Woods system with credit to rebuild the countries of Europe and Asia. And then Roosevelt died and Churchill grabbed on the Truman and said, no, we’re going to have competing empires.

And so instead of having some kind of sense of harmony, we ended up going into the Cold War pretty quickly. Now, this idea of sphere of influence, this is a great power politics. This is what Mearsheimer talks about, as opposed to the idea of polyphony, of harmony.

And I think this is important, because as you just pointed out, you could end up in a world where you end up with the kind of competition that is, you’re not going to end globalization because it can’t, because there are different capabilities and different resources that exist in all countries. And in that sense, we have to have a perspective of a global world. But globalization doesn’t mean no sovereignty.

It doesn’t mean that everyone has to give up their rights to a super agency at the top. The question is, how do you create a world in which sovereign nations can cooperate for mutual benefit? That’s why one of the things we talk about is the principle of the peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in 1648. That seems like a long time ago.

But Tony Blair came to the United States in 1999 to the Chicago World Affairs Council to say the era of Westphalia is dead. It’s never going to work again. Countries won’t work for mutual benefit.

Now, that’s the kind of cynicism that creates the world we’re in today. So this is where we stand. Can we have cooperation for mutual benefit? For example, could Europe work with the BRICS? Could the United States work with the BRICS? I know Trump is saying the BRICS are our enemy.

But what he did say was that if they go against the dollar, we’re going to crush them. Putin is saying something different. He’s saying we can’t replace the dollar.

The question is, are there other ways to ensure that countries that don’t have dollars can get credit to develop their nations in a sovereign way, an alternative payment and transfer system? So these are very difficult, thorny issues. But if you stop the fighting and begin the talking and take away people like the Boltons and the Blinkens and the Hillary Clintons, and actually have some people like, you know, for example, Jeffrey Sachs is someone who probably knows more about how you could put together an international economic picture than anyone else. I don’t know if you’ve been hearing him recently, but he’s really quite, quite good.

Except he still sticks with the Keynesian side of things. But he can, you could negotiate with him, you can negotiate with the people around Putin, and the people around Xi Jinping. So it’s going to require a lot of difficult compromise.

But if you think about this idea of polyphony, many voices working together, as opposed to competing superpowers or competing blocs, you could have a world with peace of a durable peace. And the testing point to that would be, can you solve the problem in Southwest Asia between Israel and the Palestinians? So this is going to be in a way a very dangerous period still. But a period where if people are go at it with good will and good intentions, can be a turning point in human history.

What do you make of the people who say you have this kind of pessimistic view of these Russia, United States negotiations as being kind of like the prelude of moving US forces from one side of the game board to the other side, mainly, if you look at if you recall the Biden years, as painful as it may be, we pulled out of Afghanistan only to reallocate those resources to Ukraine. What do you think of this idea that that’s what this peace play in Ukraine could be? It’s just a logistical play, because the US can’t be in two places at once. They need to kind of focus in on Iran or potentially even China in the Pacific or North Korea or somewhere else.

Is this a logistical play to just move resources from one side to the other side? Well, this is where you have to look at the intersection of politics and military. Part of the reason that the people talk about ending the Ukraine war for the US to become more involved in Asia is that the military has gamed out what would happen if we ended up with China over Taiwan. And every time they do it, the United States loses.

We’re not in a good position. So if we have more troops and more aircraft in the Asia Pacific region, would that change it? No, that’s the wrong kind of thinking. And there are people in the military who are basically saying we have to come up with a different way to approach it.

I mean, it’s interesting, because I’ve just been reading an Israeli military historian, Uri Barg Joseph, and he’s been making a very interesting point, which is that 75 percent of the retired Israeli generals and intelligence officers want negotiations for a two-state solution. But about 75 percent of the Israeli people want to keep fighting the war. There’s a difference between people who have fought wars and people who haven’t.

And in the US, we’ve had too many of our generals, like Lloyd Austin and Buchanan, the head of the Far East military, who want to fight a war. They want to prove themselves in war. We don’t have the people who’ve been through wars enough to know that you can’t win these wars.

Now, then the other part of this, what is the idea of peace with Russia so we can turn Russia against China? That’s a delusion. At this point, the Russia-Chinese alliance is very deep, probably deeper than anybody knows. Putin and Xi have had something like 14 meetings in person.

They talk all the time on the phone. They have staffs that are integrated, that work together. And more importantly, it’s not just the two of them.

They’re working with India. They’re working with Pakistan. They’re working together on solving problems.

So the example here I would give is what Obama tried to do with the pivot to Asia. Obama was trying to create a counter to China with his Asia-Pacific doctrine. And he couldn’t even get Vietnam and Thailand to go along with it because they didn’t want to fight with China.

So there’s going to have to be a new modus operandi of peaceful cooperation because war doesn’t work. War is a short step away in these great power confrontations from going nuclear, as we’ve seen with Ukraine. We’re lucky we didn’t end up with a nuclear war when they decided to start shooting missiles into Russia.

We’re lucky that Putin has a view that ultimately he’s going to come out on top. So I think a lot of these are what think tanks get money from the military industrial complex to come up with. Strategies for can we shift our forces to the east? You know, the Pacific Ocean is a pretty formidable barrier.

And the ability to… I mean, aircraft carriers, which were so important in World War II, are sitting ducks now. They don’t really give you much of a capability. And so I think that if there are sane military people who will fight for peace and make it clear to people like Trump and to Meritz and Macron and others that you can’t win these wars, then let’s try and see if we can live together.

And that’s what we have an international peace coalition that’s had every Friday for the last 100 weeks, a Friday online Zoom call where we’ve had people from left and right, from Israel and Palestine, from Russia, Germany, get on the phone with people like Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson and Helga Zepp-LaRouche and have in-depth discussions of how we can change the way people think so that we could achieve peace. So, you know, in a sense, I’m optimistic, but also a little trepidatious about the inability of people to overcome their prejudices and their arrogance. And I think that’s going to be the biggest fight moving ahead.

Yeah, I think this is a great place to kind of close things out here, Harley. Anything else you want to talk about that we didn’t get into this podcast? I think I covered pretty much everything I had in line. But if there’s anything you want to talk about, feel free to do so.

Otherwise, tell us where we can find you. Just one thing I would add, we have to, in our deliberations, we have to include the continent of Africa, because by 2050, Africa is going to be the most populous place in the world. Nigeria becomes the most populous nation in the world, I believe, by 2070 or something like that, or 2050.

Yeah. And if you look at Africa today, it’s a very, very young continent. It’s got a lot of raw materials.

It’s been treated horribly during 500 years of European colonialism. But we’re beginning to see a move away from that, with people like Pandora, the former foreign ministers of South Africa, taking on a leading role at the BRICS, with the BRICS, African countries coming into the BRICS. So the question then, when people are fearful about immigration, like across the desert from the Lake Chad area in Africa, or from Somalia and Sudan, most of the migration has been the result of wars that have been conducted by the Western powers, which have included the, in some cases, arming terrorists and Islamic gangs to run operations against governments, and also the International Monetary Fund policies, which don’t provide credit.

This is the other task for the advanced sector. Can we work together to realize the dream of the non-aligned movement? These countries can develop their own full-set economies and become prosperous nations. So, and when you talk about the great powers, you’ve got to keep in mind that the world is bigger than, I mean, the Russian population is relatively small.

The U.S. population seems large, but it’s dwarfed by India, China, as you mentioned, Nigeria. So if we think about the world in that way, and take as our responsibility to be patriots of our nations, but citizens of the world, then we can solve these problems. And if people want to find out more about it, or about the International Peace Coalition, you can go to the website, thelaroucheorganization.com, which has a lot of this material.

It has my daily updates under programs. You click on programs, and the first thing that comes up is Harley’s Daily Updates. I do five days a week, a 10 to 12 minute update with a historical perspective.

And then there’s a, I write a lot of articles, and if people want to be in touch with me personally, I encourage that. I’ve developed quite a big network around the world, and I think that’s helping me to get a better understanding of how this can work. So if people are interested, you can always send me an email at harleysch at gmail.com. I do respond, I do read your comments, and this has been a fun discussion, Danny.

I appreciate the fact that we can do this. Yeah, likewise, I really enjoyed it. And if you guys enjoyed it, write, go Harley, go in the comments section.

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And with all that said, Harley, thank you so much for coming on my friend. And guys, thank you for watching. I will catch you in the next episode.