Jeffery Slachs says 07-08-2025

Chna is no threat. The risk is from inside. Stop playing with Taiwan the way you're doing. Sorry, it's stupid. Stop provoking things. Anyway, so China's not gonna turn the US into a dictatorship. Maybe the US will turn into a dictatorship. Maybe it will just turn into a plain old plutocracy. Maybe it will turn into a military industrial state as the complete dominance. I don't know. But it's not going to come from China. It's going to come from Inside that's where our risk is ……………. China's not able to defeat us. The only risk we face from China, the only risk we face from China's nuclear war. So stay away from nuclear war. Stop playing with Taiwan the way you're doing. Sorry, it's stupid. Stop provoking things and footnote we provoke the war in Ukraine. I could go on for about 8 hours on that, and maybe it's worth 5 minutes. But we provoked the war in Ukraine absolutely surely, and we'll do the same with Taiwan and we'll lose any wars that happens, but maybe the world will end also over this stupidity and the people in Washington are stupid. I'm telling you. I know them. This is not my surmise. And I just read an unbelievably stupid article in an unbelievably awful journal called Foreign Affairs. What's her name? First name? I don't remember. Carlin is her second name. Oh my God. It's about how we have to prepare for the next war, not I don't think the word diplomacy is mentioned one time. So the first thing is Johnson, Professor Mearsheimer says yeah. China can't defeat us. We can't defeat China. But China could annoy us, and it will annoy us more if China's the hegemon of East Asia. So we have to prevent China from being the hegemon of East Asia so that the United States is the only hegemon in the world, the only regional hegemon. What a thing to do. That could provoke nuclear war. And I said, but, John, that could lead to war between the US and China. Yeah, yeah, it's actually likely. Very possible. He says maybe we could avoid it, but it's quite possible. I said, no, you take the expected value of total annihilation. It's got a big negative sign. It's minus infinity as far as I'm concerned. And so you don't do that. You don't put any positive probability on something like that. So this is the first point of disagreement. The second point of disagreement is essentially about game theory. Everyone here knows the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is a situation where it pays to cooperate, but the dominant strategy for each player is to not cooperate because if the other side cooperates, you cheat and you win, and if the other side doesn't cooperate, you certainly don't play the soccer and so you end up non cooperative, non cooperative and you're off to the races in war. And that's game theory. and that's what's taught at Rand and that's what these people in Washington think and that's how they play and that's how they talk. And the fact is though, you put real people and I mean non economic students. Real people into an experimental game and they cooperate half the time, 3/4 of the time, and then wonder of wonders, you let the two people talk beforehand. Not to make a binding agreement, just to chat. Hey, why don't we both cooperate? For example, no signed contract in game theory. That's called cheap talk. It should have no effect on the equilibrium. But in real human practice. If you put two normal people in the prisoners dilemma game, they cooperate half the time. If you let them have pre play communication they cooperate more than 90% of the time. Human beings. So my advice is, hey, why doesn't President Biden or somebody that actually can function as a president in the future? I actually talked to President Putin. You know, actually understand President Putin's point of view. Why is this war going on? Discuss it. You know, cooperation could rise enormously. There's a second point of game theory which is very important, called the folk theorem. Which is that if you were in a repeated play of the Prisoner's dilemma and there's no set terminal date. Then you should cooperate so you don't mess up trust of the two sides, because you're playing also against future actions and you wanna show I'm trustworthy, you're trustworthy. We can gain from cooperation period after period. And that's another way to sustain the good outcome in a prisoner’s dilemma. So I view international relations theory, realist theory as essentially being the prisoner’s dilemma or the Hobbesian dilemma of nation states in an anarchic environment. And my argument is, it’s not so anarchic. It’s not so threatening, the only real threat is nuclear war.So stay away from that. That’s the bright red line for all of us. And cooperation is just not so hard. And I look to many examples history where cooperation worked. And I wrote a book in 2013 about one such episode because I found it completely amazing when I learned about it, and that was the aftermath of the Cuban Missile crisis, when first of all, Kennedy rejected the advice of all his advisors except one because they all said go bomb these sites in Cuba. And now in retrospect we almost surely would not be here talking today, had we gone on to do that. But Kennedy was very much more cautious, and he spent all the days of the crisis asking, what's going through Khrushchev's mind? He's a human being. What's he doing? And he finally came to the realization, you know, this is not meant by Krushchev to be the end of the world. This is not meant. This is . We can both pull back. And that's what they ended up doing. And then that was October 1962. And in 1963, Kennedy made a campaign for peace that culminated that led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was signed with the Soviet Union in July 1963. And it culminated, I think, in Kennedys assassination because there were enough people in the US government that didn't like his peace initiatives. And so I think it was an inside job. And I think the evidence grows all the time that it was on. But in any event, Kennedy's idea was the two sides can make peace. And when he said that, and he said it in the most beautiful terms, and his speechwriter was a gifted, gifted person named Theodore Sorenson that I got to know luckily because he lived in our neighborhood. When I came to Columbia University and I got to know him, he said in the most eloquent and beautiful words imaginable. We can make peace even with the Soviet Union, even at the height of the cold war. And he said it so beautifully that when Khrushchev heard the speech, he immediately called the American envoy, Averell Harriman, and said, I want to make peace with your president because he was inspired by the words actually, and they made peace and that treaty lasted, and it led to the Nuclear nonproliferation treaty. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is an international treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear wapoons and promoting cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It also seeks to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. The NPT was opened for signature on July 1, 1968. And entered into force on March 5, 1970. Five years later it changed the world. And so that's the optimistic side. Go for peace instead. There's an awful president of ours when he could function still, he was terrible Biden, all he could do was insult Putin every moment. How you gonna make peace, all you do is throw insults at the one who had a country with 6000 nuclear warheads. This is crazy. It's reckless. And the whole place in Washington is filled with people who are playing game theory, who know just what Putin's going to do. You know, we have no alternative but to increase our military. This woman, Carlin, who was a senior official under Biden in the Defense Department that wrote this article says we have no choice but to deter through building our military. She doesn't even mention the idea that there could be diplomacy with China. This woman's an ignoramus. I'm sorry. I've been to China 100 times at least. There's no intrinsic battle with China. None whatsoever. China's not out to defeat the US and couldn't do so in a million years anyway. We'd all perish. I'm trying to never. China's never, by the way, even once invaded a country overseas in its whole history of 2245 years since 221 BC, when the Qin Empire unified China. Did they ever invade Japan? Not once did they ever invade Korea. Not once did they ever invade Vietnam? Yes, 17 years. In that 2000 years, 4 actually 17 years and one month. 1420 to 1436 and then one month in 1979. And the United States, we've never been at peace. All we do is war. And you know what the truth is? We learned it from here. Because the British Empire was the most militarized society imaginable. And unfortunately the leaders of this country, and it turns out not to matter which party, because Star Wars is as bad as Boris Johnson. All they know is the military. It's unbelievable. What's the first thing that Starmer does when he becomes Prime Minister? He goes to Kiev to pledge the endless support of the US, by the way, because Britain doesn't do anything. The endless support of the United States to the defeat of Russia, and then he flies across the Atlantic to try to convince Biden to authorize what authorized means is for the US military to enable deep strikes inside Russia. That's really a clever thing to do, especially. Because Putin said, well, then we'd be at war with each other and we'd be forced to reconsider our nuclear strategy. And then we have our CIA director in this. This would be great for the West End theater, by the way, because it's a kind of parody. The CIA director meets with the MI 6 director on stage recently here and says, oh, don't worry about Putin's bluff. Well, my advice is if you're gonna say that, say that before we're all annihilated, because no one's gonna hear you after we're all annihilated. How do we know he's bluffing? He's not bluffing if this if Russia is fundamentally threatened. So that's, I don't remember what you asked me, but that's my answer. I thank you very much. That was quite remarkable. It definitely isn't sort of the mainstream opinion, I guess. So you talked about how there isn't this kind of struggle with China and how the United States, the US empire doesn't need to position itself as kind of the leader. But there is kind of a struggle between, if not between US and China, between democracy and dictatorship in sort of various countries, various economies, various circles. And the United States is at the forefront of that, at least in economic terms. And of course, with dictatorships now becoming a lot more sustainable, you know, they're not kind of obsessed with this self subsistence. They're all trading with each other. Is there any way in which there is still a fight on our hands when it comes to politics? 好听到这儿暂停一下。这位观众提问非常典型，他完全套用了西方主流媒体的叙事框架，他问题的核心就是民主国家是不是应该对抗那些独裁国家？也想之际，美国作为民主灯塔，是不是要站出来主持正义？这其实是一种被洗脑后的提问方式他根本没有想过这套民主对独裁的叙事本身是不是一个骗局 Well, I'd love for the United States to be a functioning democracy and to be a good example for other countries. I don't believe the US has any right or any ability to put in place a democracy in any other country. Nor do I believe, by the way, that the American democracy functions as a real democracy anymore. On the life and death issues, nobody has asked the American people anything about all these wars for decades. And by the way, I can tell you. And I'm telling you authoritatively and truly, they lie about everything about these wars. And so that's not that's not democracy either. Everything is phony, everything is narrative. And so on the war and peace issues, the public has no say at all. If you were to ask the American people now and in fact Gallup does it do you support Biden's foreign policy? I think the support is you can look it up 25 to 35% perhaps. I don't even think it reaches 35%, whereas the Democracy in this, it's a game. This is the deep state and they have their wars and every war has been phony , some wars, the American people are basically never told about, for example, the war in Syria, and you may actually hear from grown up reporters. Who are lying through their teeth or ignorant beyond imagining that Ohh, the war in Syria. Yes, Russia intervened in Syria. Well, do you know that the that Obama tasks the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government starting four years before Russia intervened? What kind of nonsense is that? And how many times did the New York Times report on Operation Timber Sycamore, which was the presidential order to the CIA to overthrow Bashar al-Assad? Three times in 10 years. This is not democracy. This is a game, and it's a game of narrative. Why did the US invade Iraq in 2003? Well, first of all, it was completely phony pretenses. It wasn't. Ohh, we were so wrong. They didn't have weapons of mass destruction. They actually did focus groups in the fall of 2002 to find out what would sell that war to the American people. Abram Shulsky if you want to know the name of the PR genius. They did focus groups on the war. They wanted the war all the time. They had to figure out how to sell the war to the American people, how to scare the shit out of the American people. It was a phony war. Where did that war come from? You know what, it's quite surprising that war came from Netanyahu. Actually. You know that it's weird. And the way it is, is that Netanyahu had from 1995 onward, the theory that the only way we're going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the government, supporting them. That's Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and the guys, nothing if not obsessive and where he's still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week. He's a deep, dark son of a bitch, sorry to tell you, because he's gotten us into endless wars and because of the power of all of this in the US politics, he's gotten his way. But that war was totally phony. So what is this democracy versus dictatorship? Come on, this is these are not even sensible terms, and even if they were sensible terms under the UN. We can have our democracy. You do what you want. It happens to be the case that China has had a centralized administrative state for 2245 years. Ever since Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi unified the Chin dynasty, there have been a few periods of. Also of a disintegration of the dynasties, but if you look through the Chin, the Han, the Tang, the Song, you know the Mining, the Ching till today, till the PRC. This is the same structure by the way,. This is an administrative state ruling over almost the same. Region, by the way for more than 2000 years, so. And by the way, it has been wondrously effective for a long time at keeping the internal peace. China's only wars were nomadic invasions from the steppes in the north. And then one crazed, well then the Mongols invading, that's part of that. And one absolutely crazed Shogun in this in the 1590s trying to take over China and he made it as far as Korea and was killed. Other than that. This has been actually exceptional statecraft until Britain had the genius idea of fighting a war to sell opium in China in 1839. One of the most noble efforts imaginable. And that's the modern era of China, so I don't buy it at all. But even if it were true, it's illegal under international law. Unwise. And you know, look at the great accomplishment for me. Oh, I don’t know how many ? hundreds of billions of dollars into Afghanistan for 20 years to get from the Taliban regime to the Taliban regime. This is American genius at democracy promotion. They don't care at all about democracy by the way. AT ALL. They topple governments they don’t like that won’t do their bidding . They topple democracies if they don’t like them. they'll topper anybody that they don't like. That's how it's worked all along. They never said, oh, we can't topple most of that in 1953. He's a democratic government. No, they toppled the democratic government in Iran and put in a police state which LED to wonderful long term relations with Iran. Because they really love the American people for that. So this is not about democracy; this is a game. And it's a terrible game and it's secret game, and it's played by the CIA, which is the most important agency in the United States. Because they have complete secrecy. Complete unaccountability. There was one review of the CIA 49 years ago. The Church Committee, and nothing since then. And as one of our directors, they're all, I was gonna say one of the worst, but they're all the same by the time they get there or by the time they leave there, because the agency takes them over. Pompeo said as he was proudly explaining The role of CIA to some Texas students a few years ago and you can find it online. He said, what do we teach at the CIA? To lie, cheat, and steal. And that's a pretty good encapsulation of the methodology. And that's a very danger world being created that way. So China's not gonna turn the US into dictatorship. Maybe US will turn into a dictatorship, maybe it will just turn into a plutocracy. Maybe it will turn into a military industrial state as the complete dominance. I don't know, but. It's not going come from China. It's going to come from inside. That’s where our risk is.