Arms Control is Dead

The problem with deterrence is it goes on in the mind of your adversary. Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bullwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. I'm Eric Edelman, counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Bullwark contributor, and joined by my partner in all things of the strategic strategy. Elliott Cohen, professor emeritus of strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a contributing writer to the Atlantic. Elliott, we're finally getting some sun and some above freezing temperatures. Is your driveway melted off and cleaned off yet? It's melted off. Of course, now we have all the crud that we spread on the driveway. But the good news is that there'll be a heavy wintery mix and rain all day, Sunday, so if we don't get that at least we'll clear that away. Listen, you know, basically I'm doing okay. I hope you're doing okay. When we when we began our Jack Assyria segment of Shield of the Republic, I was worried that there might not be enough material. And you know, as we discussed before the show, actually we're drowning in a wealth of stuff. So I'm going to tick off at least three pieces of Jack Assyria that struck me this week. And I know you've got your list. So the first is a PEDEG Seth deciding that no military officers should get graduate degrees at Harvard because it's infested with woke stuff. That presumably includes the medical school, physics, engineering, stuff like that. And of course, Hexeth himself got a degree at the Kennedy School. Now you might say that Harvard deserves it for having given us PEDEG Seth. And I would listen to that argument, but this really is juvenile behavior. Second is that the government shuts down El Paso Airport for 10 days so that the Border Patrol can use lasers to shoot down party balloons. And then they realize that maybe it's not such a good idea to shut down a really big airport to shoot down a bunch of party balloons. Or the government of defense to share some of its most advanced toys with the Border Patrol. Right. Like these guys, like you would you would trust Greg Bavina with the sort of stuff. And then my favorite this week is Kristi Noem who continues to cover herself. And somebody who's probably repair more Corilandausky, although they're both married, but we're not going to dwell on that too much. No, we're not going to judge. Flying into a rage at her Coast Guard pilot because she left her blanket or as someone say, "blanky" on an airplane. So she fired him. So she was really mad that the blanket got left on the airplane. But then she realized apparently a little bit late in the game that nobody else could fly the airplane. So she had to rehire him, deflier back. Hopefully she was reunited with her with her blanket. And then she can go back to coasts playing being a seal or ice agent, ice agent, Delta, whatever. So those are just, those are just, you know, a sampling of the the rich array of jackasseries that I saw. What about you? I know you've got a list. Before we leave Kristi Noem and Corilandausky, you know, the anecdote you just recounted comes from a Wall Street Journal, very lengthy Wall Street Journal article, about not just some of those personal pecadillos, but about the vicious infighting among and between various, you know, MAGA elements, including, you know, Kristi Noem fighting with Tom Homan, the the borders are flying into a rage with a director of ice, lions over, you know, differences about, you know, tactical differences about how to carry out mass deportation. And as I mentioned to you in an earlier conversation, all of this reminds me, you know, of the sort of vicious bureaucratic infighting in the Nazi regime between the essay and the SS, you know, which ultimately led to the, you know, to the bloodletting of the night of the long-life knives, except this is the dumb down version of it. This is really the Keystone Cop's version of it. I mean, that's really, or, or like, you know, in the old days when you'd go to a circus, you know, clowns hitting each other over the head with nerf bats and stuff like that and dumping ice buckets of ice water on each other's head. I mean, it's, I mean, there's a serious issue and there's actually one now, I mean, turned to at the end of your section, which is one of the ways which Trump has really gotten himself stuck in this term, as most was first, when he was ready to fire everybody. He's not willing to fire anybody who's really senior and visible because he's not willing to give a scalp to the, to the lips. But, but of course, that means he's stuck with a bunch of bozos. I mean, I, we didn't, I didn't even mention Pam Bondy kind of just turning into this wild-eyed monster in front of the house and salting people who I have to admit that I've better law degrees than she does, you know, being incredibly rude and just, you know, but they're stuck with her, even though she's clearly not up to the job either. Well, I've got my own Jack Assyrie that I can add to this mix and and God knows we're, we've got to stop because then we're going to get onto like more more serious matters. But Thomas Rose, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, has basically begun alienating one of the most pro-American countries in Europe and one of the ones that is perhaps the most sympathetic to the Trump administration, which is Poland, by cutting off relations with the third ranking official in Poland, the president of their upper house, because he had the temerity to suggest that he didn't think Donald Trump really deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. And for that intolerable insult to the honor of the United States of America, Ambassador Rose decided, you know, to cut off all U.S. contact with this person, which has created a bit of a kerfluffle in in Poland. You know, I raised this in part because we still have a huge number of vacancies among ambassadorships. And about 90 percent, which is way out of whack with the norm of the nominations that have been made by the Trump administration, are, you know, political appointees. And, you know, I raised this because I think it may not be completely obvious to a lot of our viewers and listeners, but U.S. ambassadors in the countries, you know, that host them actually are the face of the country in many ways. And, you know, they can cut a very big swath in the, you know, a local society. And, you know, having these clowns, you know, put forward by the administration to represent the United States really comes at a cost, you know, in our standing. And you can see it reflected now in the Pew polls about our standing. I mean, some of it's Trump, but a lot of it is these, you know, idiots who've been appointed to these positions. And not to, you know, we really do need to get on to serious matters, but there's also the nomination of Jeremy Carl to be assistant secretary for international organizations. You know, this is a role that's been filled by very serious people. Our friend, Elliot Abrams had it in the Reagan administration. And this is, you know, a Claremont institute guy who has no, no, you know, apparent qualification, but to add insult to injury, he's a Jewish convert to Christianity who has now espoused some extremely, you know, vile, anti-Semitic and white supremacist views. So much so that at least one Republican senator has said he cannot support him. And I think there are going to be others who will find it impossible to support that nomination either. Yeah, no, he's frantic. There was a story he's frantically trying to delete 5,000 tweets. Meanwhile, of course, the commission on religious liberty had to kind of ease out a former, I think she was a Miss California or something like that who was objective because, of course, the Jews killed Christ. I mean, why would anyone think that's anti-Semitic? You know, just one other thing, I think, along these lines. And I want to make a larger point here, there was an interesting piece in the Washington Post by Mark Tason, who had been in the George W. Bush administration. But I think it's fair to say it's been, let, we can say Trump adjacent, and certainly anti-anti-Trump going after Carrie Lake. Carrie Lake, the utterly incompetent head of Voice of America for basically doing her level best to shut down our Iranian service at a time when really need her. And he's like tearing his hair out. She got to get rid of this person. But again, it is the same sort of thing at the Lord knows it's problematic enough at the cabinet level. But below that, they're also, you know, they've got these wackos. And I think there is a larger significance here, as you know, I've been mere gloom to your doom. Throughout all this, I do think that the administration's pratfalls and incompetence, you are, you are seeing various kinds of pushback. I don't think Tason would have written this kind of column six months ago. And I think there are, and I don't think, I mean, it's pretty clear that the Carl administration nomination is going to get deep six. You know, the vote on tariffs, which the Republicans did not want to take, because then, you know, the Republican members of Congress are going to be in the unfortunate position of either having to vote with the President and say, we love tariffs and annoy all their constituents, or vote against tariffs and annoy the President, which they don't want to do either. And Mike Johnson couldn't stop that. Or even Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, ticking off the Department of Justice for tracking any member of Congress who is looking at the Epstein files, which we'll talk about at the end of the show. So I, you know, my line all along is political gravity still operates. And we're going to be seeing more of it over time. But we can return to that maybe at the end. From your lips to God's ear, so a lot of viewers have in the comments have asked that we at least preview the Munich Security Conference, which is started convening today. And over the weekend, we'll have its big, big speech. So we'll have to review that retrospectively maybe next week in brief. You and I have both attended this conference in the company of the late Senator John McCain in the past. Could you maybe explain what the Munich Security Conference is to people? Of course, it was last year. It was the scene of a kind of, you know, kind of, I would say very ghost speech by Vice President JD Vance, who kind of has sailed European culture. And you've seen a lot of those themes resurfaced in the National Security Strategy that was published in December. But maybe just explain the background in history of Munich Security Conference if folks. I'll pair the, we say it's interesting that he canceled his attendance this year. That will be represented by Rubio. So this began with, I think it was Evl von Klast, who have been a young, very much an officer, but in the resistance, I think he'd been part of the Malka plot, the July plot as a very young officer, who in the 1960s, I'm thinking, thought it would be a good idea to try to bring together American and European defense specialists for a gathering, which was then called Verkunda, which is basically a defense meeting, a National Security meeting. At that time, it was relatively small. You could all fit into one hotel, the hotel Byroschrohof in Munich. Munich would go, there would always be a very strong bipartisan congressional delegation. And then they would bring along the Trubidor as the court gestures of whom you and I were frequently members. But it was really a conference of several hundred people all told, maybe a little bit less, very, very serious, both officials, experts, and so on. It has grown, it has grown and grown over the years. I think personally, I think that's somewhat problematic. So it's sort of like the Davos for the National Security set. I think they've got some ridiculous number of cabinet officials in the heads of state, like 50 or 60. They can't have the main meeting in the hotel, but unless you're a cabinet level official, you're not going to be able to sit in the main room. So people are in all kinds of other hotels, as is often the case. It's a place to go for the meetings that you're going to have outside bylats, as they say, bylateral meetings. But it has become a big gathering and it has been the scene of a number of dramatic speeches. Before the Iraq war, it was sort of a standoff between Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the then German Foreign Minister Yoshikovishir. There's been times, I think we both saw a McCain Lavrov smackdown. I think Putin came once to give a yes. In 2007, Gave a speech with Bob Gates in the audience. It was a very dark speech. So people watch it, people particularly watch who the Americans send and what they say, and then who, you know, the host country, the Germans. In this case, what's interesting is the speech will be given by Rubio and we haven't heard that. That'll be tomorrow. So next week, you and I should talk about that. As you mentioned, there was an interesting advance. It's not coming this year. The one, as for four tastes that we had of all this, though, was a speech made by the Undersecretary of Defense for policy. So your successor, it several removes, Bridge Colby, to the NATO ministerial. So I guess first you have a meeting with the NATO. See, NATO officials, which I read as innocuous. Now normally, innocuous is not good enough. On the one hand, it's a speech that didn't mention Russia. But it was a speech that reaffirmed the importance of NATO, the importance of the Alliance. Then echoed a lot of the themes that we've talked about here. You know, Europeans have to do more on their own. We've got, we're looking at our own hemisphere. We're looking at the Indo-Pacific. But I thought for me, the bottom line there is, no, we're not quitting NATO. So it wasn't the speech that you or I would have wanted. It's not the speech John McCain would have given. But compared to what we thought the administration would be like, or could have been like, I think it's not so bad, it was also a speech by the German chancellor who Friedrich Meritz, who I think is really one of the most formal, certainly one of the most formal chancellors they've had in a while. But also one of the more formidable European leaders. Maybe you want to speak to that a little bit. Yeah, so Chancellor Meritz spoke today. And basically, you reiterated that Europe needs the United States. The United States needs Europe. It was a kind of affirmation of the ongoing importance of the transatlantic relationship and therefore the importance of trying to patch over our differences that have emerged. And Colby's comments today, in addition to the speech you mentioned that he gave NATO the very similar comments at Munich. And the reporting about what Rubio is likely to say. We'll have to see what he actually says. But do suggest that there's sort of an effort to show a more emollient, you know, the Trump administration with a human face, you might say, you know, to our European colleagues. And so that's, you know, I agree with you. That's all well and good. I just would point out just a couple of things. One, you rightly noted that in his speech to the NATO ministerial. And by the way, the fact that, you know, without any disrespect to undersecretaries for policy at the Department of Defense, the fact that he is representing the United States rather than the Secretary of Defense tells you something. You busy working out, yeah, doing push-ups. But, you know, his speech did not mention Russia, as you said. This is becoming a pattern. He went a week or two ago to South Korea and gave a speech that, you know, about US Korean defense ties and relations made no mention of North Korea. He himself, of course, you know, has sort of made his, kind of national security bones a couple of years ago with a book arguing that the defense of Taiwan was, you know, the, you know, net plus ultra of US objectives around the world. And the national defense strategy that was released two weeks ago that we talked about makes zero mention of Taiwan. So there is a bit of a pattern that is emerging, you know, that is creating strategic ambiguity or reasserting strategic ambiguity, but in ways that, you know, I think could be a little worrisome. So, so many keep an eye on. And then, I would just say to that, there are two explanations of this. One deep significance, a pattern, and reveals that what I was thought. The other is, he's just not very good. Okay, well, you can say that I couldn't possibly comment. But I mean, I know what quality looks like. Thank you. Appreciate it. I would say one of the thing about Chancellor Merck's, which is, while I think it's good that he has, you know, said we need to maintain the transatlantic link, not as dire as the sort of Mark Carney speech at Davos, which I think is a good thing. I mean, I think prematurely declaring NATO dead and buried is bad and dangerous for us and for Europe. And so I think that's all to the good. On the other hand, today, the Financial Times reports, that he's quietly been engaged in conversations with President Macron France about, you know, the French nuclear umbrella and how it might be extended to defend Germany against Russia, if, you know, the United States kind of abandoned and extended a nuclear deterrence. And, you know, there are problems there because France is not part of the nuclear planning group of NATO. That probably never will be. French doctrine, very clear that, you know, nuclear weapons meant to defend France. I mean, doctrine can be changed, but I mean, this is not something that is going to be easily accomplished. And they're also technical obstacles to, you know, European deterrents being sufficient to, you know, actually deter Russia. So there's hedging going on in addition to trying to keep the transatlantic relationship going, which is completely understandable under the circumstances. But I just think tells you a little bit about where we are. Yeah, so I look, you and I would be doing the same thing if we were in the shoes of European leaders. And it's entirely reasonable. I think also we're all very caught in the moment, understandably, and worried about the next three years. You know, my, I think there's a good chance that after that, we have something that's sort of a reversion to the mean, but you won't knock at me in the same place. I mean, we've discussed this before. I think this administration has managed to really shake European confidence in the United States and indeed allied confidence in the United States in some pretty fundamental ways. I also think it just I've proposed what you said. As you think about what the longer term consequences are, look, the US European relationship will be scratchy. I've, you know, wrote a piece a few weeks ago in the Atlantic saying, let's remember that it's always been scratchy. But, but at the nuclear point is a very sensitive one. And I tend to think of the long run that you'll have more European states looking at nuclear weapons. But I am, I am, you know, I've said this before, I've been very struck talking to Polish friends, certainly Ukrainians, even Swedes. I think you're headed for a different nuclear order in, in your, you know, it's conceivable that maybe people with deep pockets will pay the brits to begin investing in tactical nuclear weapons. I mean, so I think the, the nuclear and tectonic plates are being to shift a bit. Which actually is probably a pretty good segue unless you have anything else you want to say on this one to the end of new start. So this is, look, I, I, here, I'm going to confess something in graduate school, you know, because that was the thing back then. I had to study all this nuclear strategy stuff and it made my headache and I had trouble sleeping at night. So I just ignored it and hoped it would go away. But you're, you're made of sturdier stuff. I've known that for a long time. So, so let, let me quiz you a bit. First one, the big news, but another piece of big news this week is, okay, new start has, has expired. Could you first tell our, our listeners what was new start? So new start was a my lateral US Russian strategic nuclear arms control agreement that was negotiated by the Obama administration in 2010 and ratified by the Senate went into effect in February of 2011. It had a 10 year time limit and it was set to expire in February of 2021. The Biden administration came into office in its defense with very little time to, you know, consider the treaty. Some, those, those of us who, you know, have lived with this nightmare in their heads for a very long time and have had to have some responsibility for some of this. Some of us advised that maybe there should be some kind of conditional rollover of the agreement. That is to say, to tell the Russians, yes, we'll roll it over for one year or two years, but we expect to see actual real progress on some of the issues that were left unaddressed by the treaty, which I'll get to in a minute. And or inclusion of China in these discussions, because China's involved right now in a very large military buildup of its own, which seems likely aimed at making China nuclear peer of both the United States and, and of Russia. Biden administration in its infinite wisdom chose not to do that and exercise the five year option that was in the treaty that just unconditionally rolled over the treaty for five years, which then said its expiration for February 6th, uh, uh, 2026 last week. The treaty is interesting in the sense that although the Obama administration touted it as as leading to the, you know, some of the biggest reductions in the post-Cold War era, in fact, it was the first treaty that arguably allowed the parties to build up their nuclear forces. The strategic offensive reductions treaty that the Bush 43 administration agreed to with Russia back in 2002 had set, uh, reduced significantly from the, the start to treaty that had been negotiated in the Clinton administration from a level of roughly 6600 weapons down to each side had a range of between 1700. And I think it was 2200, but don't hold me to that number of deployed warheads. And our plans were to go down right to that 1700 level. What was agreed a new start was a level of 1500 warheads, which sounds like it's a decrease of some kind from the sort level, but because of the arcane nature of arms control, which has these, you know, different units of account to be able to try and create a balanced agreement between forces that are eight that are that are different. I mean, the composition of Russian forces in US forces divided among bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine launch ballistic missiles are different. So you have different units of account, but in this treaty, you had, you know, deployed warheads was the metric, but for bombers, each bomber ended up counting as one despite the fact that we know you can load out bombers with more air launch cruise missiles or gravity bombs than one in a plane. So in fact, the numbers were somewhat illusory. There's been a lot of you in cry about this. Frank Miller, my frequent partner in crime in writing about these issues in Frank. I mean, you've basically written something that says, don't worry, be happy. Don't worry, be happy. Yes, I agree. That's the way to put it. The idea, Frank, the truly expert in this, Frank actually was at the direction of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was the person who went through the entire single integrated operational plan and reduced it the target set. So we didn't have these tremendous amounts of overkill that were built into the nuclear war planning where we had seven, you know, warheads on every target. That's an exaggeration, but we had multiple, you know, warheads on targets. Frank and I have written that although there's been a lot of, in the arms control industrial complex, you know, whaling and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments about how this is going to lead to a new arms race, the reality is there's not likely to be much of a new arms race for the following reasons. First of all, the Russians for the last decade and a half have been engaged in a major nuclear weapons modernization program. Couple of different new road mobile ICBMs, a new heavy ICBM that they've built new submarine launch ballistic missiles, upgraded bombers and air launch cruise missiles. So they have been building up their nuclear forces for 15 years and they're coming to the end of that program. They also built a number of weapons that were not covered by the treaty. I mean, first of all, the treaty did not cover so-called tactical nuclear weapons. I hate the term tactical nuclear weapons because as one wag put it, you know, a tactical, whether you think it's tactical or strategic is equal to your square root, you know, of the distance from the ground zero. You know, a, a quote, tactical nuclear weapon in Estonia would have a strategic effect. So these are weapons that, you know, basically they're meant to use as part of theater campaigns rather than large general nuclear war. They have usually shorter range, lower yield and are called tactical because they were not easily visible to overhead satellite photography, which was the means of verification from us. And also people expected them to be used on the battlefield. I'm in bad word. Again, mass armored forces, but that's no longer really, yeah, no longer really a thing. Those were not covered by the treaty at all. And the Russians had a very large advantage. And that's now become an issue because obviously in 2011 when the treaty was ratified, we were not dealing with the bravanshist Russia that had launched two invasions of a neighbor and was threatening all of Europe with nuclear weapons, you know, on its main television channels every night. The PRC has been engaged for a number of years now in a build up which the Pentagon's China Nuclear Power Reports has suggested is by the mid-30s and maybe earlier. They will have deployed about 1500 warheads. And they've shown no interest in despite, you know, repeated efforts by the first Trump administration and the Biden administration to talk about these things. Chinese are not interested because getting involved in these kinds of negotiations would involve a level of transparency that they see as, you know, sort of spying by the West and sign of weakness on their partner. It's not likely to, you know, to be changed by anything that we do. In the meantime, we have a problem because our forces have not been modernized. We agreed to a modernization program as part of the Senate's price for ratifying new start in 2010. But those programs are by and large behind schedule and over budget for a whole bunch of reasons, some of which could have been foreseen, some of which really couldn't be foreseen. But so we're very early in the stages of our nuclear modernization program. And the face of very advanced modernization by our two major adversaries, moreover we face a problem we've never faced since the advent of nuclear weapons, which is how do you deter not one just one adversary, but how do you deter two at the same time? And of course those two adversaries in some situations look at each other as well. Although they also, you know, have announced a partnership without limits. So although, I mean, I remember having one conversation, I forget where it when this was, but it was, you know, where the Russians were making very clear that they would not talk about, let's call, theater nuclear weapons, of which they have thousands. And the reason, you know, when pressed why, they said, Siberia, you know, we've got 15 million people right next to China. Sure. So, so I guess, I mean, let me ask just because we got other stuff to talk about. We got a couple of big questions here. One is, is this basically it for armistice control, A, and B, to what extent do the numbers really matter? I mean, once you've gotten beyond the threshold of kind of a survivable deterrent, you know, they could throw a first punch, but you can still, you know, devastate 100, 200 cities, doesn't matter. So those are two very big questions. If you could, you know, just tell you what your views of both of those are. Yeah, they are big questions and probably require us to bring Frank on and have a real, we should do that. Serious conversation about nuclear targeting, about which he is really expert. I'm really more of an amateur, but so on the first question, I think armistice control, not likely in the near term, but one of the lessons from the cold war history of armistice control is if you want to get the other side to sit down and negotiate with you, you have to have, you have to actually be deploying things they want to limit. And that's why moving forward with our modernization program as rapidly as we can, including by the way, nuclear command and control, a subject about which I'm just finishing a monograph that we can talk about when it comes out later this spring. That's an important part of this as well, because if you can't actually control and, you know, use your weapons and war, you don't have a deterrent. So that's number one. On the numbers question, this has been a debate that has raged since the beginning of the cold war. You know, some people have said, you know, 15 weapons is enough or 50 weapons is enough because if you can blow up a bunch of cities, well, I mean, that was sort of what we had for, you know, deterrent for, you know, quite a quite a while in the early cold war before we had this build up in the 50s and 60s that got us to these astronomical levels of weapons. The question is about deterrence and not one about, you know, sort of what you in a rational world think would prepare the other side because you can't really know because it goes on. This is a point Henry Kissinger used to make. The problem with deterrence is it goes on in the mind of your adversary, you know, and so what you think deters is interesting, but not, you know, dispositive. This was the big mistake, I think, McNamara made, which is, he came up with this idea of assured destruction. If we destroy some percentage of Russian population in industry, that'll deter them. Well, it might have deterred us, but we have no clue whether it would have deterred the Russians. In fact, we have some reason to believe based on what we've learned from the Russians afterwards. They didn't think about it in the, at all the same way we did. So, so there's that. Second, you know, you have to hold at risk as part of deterrence what your adversary values most. And what we have come to learn about these systems is they met what matters most is they're hold on power and their military assets. And so you want to be able to hold those at risk. We've also, by the way, come to the conclusion and, you know, our lawyers do actually under the, you know, operating under the law of armed conflict, do have to review our nuclear war plans and deliberate, you know, deliberate targeting of populations and popular urban population centers is, you know, prohibited, essentially. This does get fuzzy because a lot of the military assets we want to target are located, you know, with, you know, you know, in, in areas where there are large concentrations of people. So inevitably, you're going to, you know, kill civilians. But the question becomes what is, what, what do you, do your adversaries really think you're just going to blow up a bunch of cities for no purpose? You really have to be able to go after the leadership and the military targets. And in that sense, the numbers can, can matter. And to the problem for, deterring too is this, the canonical view of stability in the Cold War was, as you said, the ability to absorb a first strike, but then still have enough that you could have inflict unacceptable damage on, on the adversary. Okay, well, so if the Russians have 1500 and, and the Chinese have 1500 and we have 1500, how many can you absorb in a first strike and then still have enough to deter not only one, but two of them, when the other one's going to have an untouched, you know, untouched arsenal. So it's a, it's a very, we don't have the answer. I don't think we know the answer to that yet. But it probably, you know, this is a little bit like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography, you know, it's, you know, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. You know, 1550 against 3000. That's probably not the right number. I don't think we need to match them weapon for weapon, but we probably do need to do some upload. All right, this stuff continues to give me a headache, but I think you're right. We ought to have Frank Miller on as well. Let's, this time is moving on with several other topics. So the administration's announced that the a second aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, last seen, keeping an eye on Venezuela, is going to move to the Persian Gulf, setting side issues of wear and tear on the carrier's crews and all that. You know, the impression that I think I'm getting is first this sort of confusion about aims on our side. What exactly are we negotiating with the Iranians about is that their nuclear program is that their ballistic missile program is in support from proxies, is that their domestic behavior, not clear to me the administration is what it's negotiating about, but it also seems to me that the the Iranians, as they often have in the past, are thinking that they've taken their measure of the administration and they can tackle with them now. And I'll just say one thing that I'd like to hear your take. The more I read their pronouncements and the more I think about that kind of regime, the more I tend to think that the senior leadership, the people calling the shots, do not have a very good grasp on reality. And you know, they're living in a world which would feel very, very strange to us in terms of how they assess us, you know, what they think is happening to them, how they assess their own strength, how they assess their own ability to endure shocks, their ability to strike back. So I guess my bottom line is if I had to bet, I would say at least there's a very serious chance and maybe even a slight probability that we end up with another round of Iran strikes, but we're not quite sure for what. That sounds exactly right to me. So on the confusion of Ames, you know, Whitcoff initially said, I mean, nuclear program, missile program, proxies. The president of course said when the big demonstrations were going on, help is on the way to the demonstrators. It's been a long wind up, but nothing has actually been there to help the protesters. Secretary Rubio and Vice President Vance have both in comments suggested, oh yeah, human rights and the treatment of population by the regime is something we're going to either have discussed or we'll discuss. Iranians claim the only thing they're willing to talk about is the nuclear program. Prime Minister Netanyahu just was in Washington meeting with the president saying, no, no, no, the nuclear program. It's all entombed in the facilities you bombed in June with midnight hammer. What really worries us is, really, is the missile program. Got to go after the missile program. President basically said, hey, I'm predisposed to diplomacy first. And yesterday, I think he said, it's about a month. We got about a month here while this huge force is sitting out there and additional forces are augmenting it. Another complication is that a number of our Arab allies have said, you can't use your bases in our territory to fly missions against Iran. So that's why one reason why you're getting a second carrier, you're going to need more carrier based assets to fly missions. It's why we've seen more and more tankers going out there, thanking capability, because they're going to have to refuel these guys. And why they've had more stuff kind of on the periphery of the region to engage in strikes. Although the Iranians have said, if there's a strike, it's going to lead to a regional war where we attack all the bases in these Arab neighbors, which has meant that we have needed to augment all the air and missile defense assets in the region. So we've really been driven to a very, very large buildup. And I don't know, President said a month, I don't know how long you can set, you know, leave that sitting out there without actually doing something. And to your point about the Iranians overplaying their hand, which I think is a real possibility. One of the things, according to various reports we've seen that they've proposed is, okay, we could down blend all the 60% HEU we have down to 20%. That would be the big concession they would make. And of course, the Obama era agreement limited them to no more than 3% enrichment to begin with. I mean, so how the President sells this as a huge advance, you know, and, you know, stopping their nuclear program in a huge advance over what existed in the past kind of eludes me. And again, I don't, as you say, I'm not, you know, so what are they going to, what are they trying to accomplish? They're going to go after them, just go after the missiles and say, okay, we got the missile program, okay, that's one thing. If they're really going to try and kind of knock the regime out, that would probably require more than a one and done kind of strike. There's some other straws in the wind. One of which is there've been reports that we've been smuggling a lot of starling terminals into Iran to keep connectivity, because the regime is basically shut down the internet for the whole country, which is which is something. So that's one thing. Second, I hope that's true. I mean, who knows, but I wouldn't be at all surprised. I mean, this is a technically sophisticated population. And, you know, they've always had lots of antennas on the rooftops. Secondly, the regime has gotten even more oppressive when they've been going after pro-government reformers lately. So people, people basically back the current president, Bizeshkin. The numbers of people who are killed and the extent of oppression, I think this has, it's become clear, this is really monstrous levels, thousands, thousands of people. And, you know, the sense that something in the regime has broken, that the population is really, this is just it. So what I can imagine is that they're getting reports, which is say, the regime is fragile. And who knows if they've gotten any overtures from people in the IRGC? Who knows what the impact of the Maduro experience? Because, you know, one thing that I think we have to say, in all honesty, is moving Maduro's kind of, it's worked so far, you know, the Venezuela. There was just a poll today. I was looking at Venezuela's. Very happy Maduro's gone. They're happy that the Americans are holding Delta Rodriguez in the government to all these strictures. Yeah. Right. So, you know, my guess is they may be thinking about that as a approach to that. Trump has said that. He's made the comparison to Venezuela a couple of years ago. I think there's always been sense here that, you know, they can, they learn from their previous experiences and they interpret them correctly or not. You know, we can find out and they may very well be right. And then I've always thought that learning the background, which people don't seem to discuss and I don't understand why is, you ready to just try to kill Trump? And, and I mean, I don't know about you. I would take that personally. And I don't think Donald Trump is as nice a guy as I am. So, I, you know, I would suspect that even though he thinks politics is rough sport, he thinks that that, you know, he would do some part of him that's saying, yeah, I'm really going to swat him and not what I can imagine him doing is authorite, you know, so if you follow that through, what's the logic of the operation? Logic of the operation is probably saying that kills harmony and some of the top IRGC leadership. And then, you know, and then you say to a successor regime, I mean, successor leadership, which would be thuggish, but they have no problems dealing with thugs. And it's probably inevitable anyways. Steven Cotkin pointed out in our interview a few weeks back that then you have a, you know, then you begin making deals. And, and among, you know, part of the deals can be we kind of take the boot off your neck with regard to oil sanctions. You know, we do tend to forget that political leaders are human beings and they, you know, have emotions and emotions play a much bigger role in a lot of this stuff than, you know, than IR theory might lead you to believe. You know, it's sort of like that scene in the Godfather where Sterling Hayden plays a police captain who punches, you know, Michael Corleone in the face when he's trying to protect his father in the hospital. And afterwards, you know, Sonny Corleone is saying, you know, you're taking this very, very personal mic. Yeah. Two other things to talk about. One is, and here again, I'll, not that I'm singing the praises of the Trump administration, but it is very interesting to me that Sterling in the Russian use of Sterling has been turned off. Now, maybe Elon Musk is just doing this on his own and that's conceivable because he, I mean, he's a complicated figure in some ways. But I would tend to think that that the administration is probably somehow involved in this as well. And it is striking that it does seem to have affected their ability to, you know, maneuver their ability to conduct longer range strikes and so on. And I think it's probably part of what they think of as the endgame of a negotiation where they're increasing the pressure, because they're increasing the pressure on the Russians in other ways, including going after the shadow fleet. So, you know, I was wondering if you had any take on that. Yeah. So the Sterling thing is really interesting. I don't know, you know, whether the administration had a hand in it or not or whether that, you know, SpaceX just found out that, you know, the Russians had this massive sanction of Asians effort and got a hold of all these, you know, Sterling terminals elicitly and decided to just shut them off. As you say, it's had a real impact on the long-range, you know, interdiction campaign that the Russians have been waging relatively successfully against Ukrainian logistics. And so it's really slowed up their advance. I mean, I think in January, I think I saw, I just saw the figures this morning. The Russians suffered the largest single month loss. I think it was 9,000 killed, which is like insane, you know, numbers. And you see all these anecdotal reports of labor shortages and personnel shortages. They're recruiting people from Southeast Asia, from India, Africa to go and fight on the front line. And they're really, you know, under some some pressure by the same token, you know, it's the pressure, whatever pressure the Russians are under from the administration, including Ghost Fleet and losing all their, you know, proxies in Syria and in Venezuela and elsewhere. I don't think it's part of a concerted effort by the administration to press or rush. It's unintended consequence. But it doesn't really, in my mind, balance out, you know, the 99% reduction in support for Ukraine from the U.S. And the pressure that we're putting them on to do crazy things like have a referendum and election. You know, by May 15th, so we could get an agreement by June. President saying the Russians really want to deal. Well, I mean, there's always leaks about the Russians have dangled all this, you know, Kirod Dimitriov the head of the, the Russian sovereign wealth fund is dangled all this stuff in front of Kushner and Whitcoff. They're 13 trillion dollars in deals that we can do. I mean, the entire GDP of Russia is two and a half trillion dollars. They do. This is like, they're talking about something five and a half times. Sure. Yeah, we want American capital to rebuild an economy that we destroyed with the stupid war and stupid policies. Who wouldn't want that deal? But I, you know, I don't see the makings of a deal in the negotiations. I just saw that before we came on the air that the Russian, uh, leader of the Russian delegation for the new talks that are going to allegedly take place next week in Geneva is former culture minister Medinsky who was, you know, who presided over previous failed rounds of negotiation and distinction to the ones that were held in Abu Dhabi where he had military, talking to military where they actually seem to have made some progress. So I don't see the mix, you know, makings of a deal here. No, I don't. In fact, I think having Medinsky there is actually a signal that the Russians are not going to be serious because he's, you know, he's sort of an ideologue. And he's not rewrite all the, all the history books with this fan, fan of the Goroquistia version. He's not the guy who would appeal to American interlocutors either, that's what would be curious things, man. Listen to that. I think Whitcough asked him not to send him back. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, but then the question is, you know, what is that time? I mean, I would refer to the, my earlier point about the Iranians that, you know, we think the Trump administration exists in a bubble that whatever bubble the Iranians exist in and that the Russians exist in is, or the Chinese, I think she's in paying as well, it's a much worse bubble. I mean, probably the Russians and Iranians more than the Chinese, but, you know, it's just, it's a, it's a different world. Listen, the last thing I thought we've only got a couple of minutes. I think like you, you know, I sort of followed some of the Epstein stuff and I was disgusted by it. Who wouldn't be? But as, yeah, I mean, it's utterly revolting, but I have to say the more stuff comes out, first, the more revolting at what it is. And I think possibly the more politically significant it is. It's a very interesting piece in the New York Times, by the way, but I think one reason why I think it'll be more stuff that's going to drop New York Times, which has a lot of resources, has two dozen journalists working on this with AI tools and so on. So they're sifting through 3 million documents, 2,000 videos. I mean, it's, it's a major enterprise. And there are a couple of things that really strike me about. First, you know, the level of criminality here may be very considerable, including possibly even murder, you know, torture videos, stuff like that. But I think there, what one political consequence is, I think people don't let go of this one. And you know, it's very interesting that some of the Republican women were the people going after Pambande on this. I think that's significant. But I think there's something deeper here, which is, and I think you see this in the reaction overseas, even more than in the United States. This is a kind of an indictment of the elites that have been running Western countries for decades and decades now. And, you know, there's always tension. You know, people don't like elites, you know, for perfectly good reasons. But I think the idea that they're just kind of bottomless corruption in vinality and perversion is, it's very powerful. And I think it does augur again, an era of very turbulent politics, even when people like Trump are gone from the scene. And I agree with that. I mean, you know, symptomatic of what you just said was the announcement today that Kathy Rumler, who was President Obama's White House counsel, and who, and you cannot make this up, right? Her current position is at Goldman Sachs in charge of reputation management. She's resigning because of the email she exchanged with Epstein, which showed her not only very chummy with Epstein, but trying to help him, you know, arrange his defense around the second set of charges in 2018 and 19 and, and also having received, you know, all sorts of gifts from him that she was outfitted with, you know, clothing and, you know, high-end clothing and, and bags and whatnot. The thing that I think people have not focused on enough, though, is all the Russian connections here. Yes. I mean, one of his main interlocutors was Sergei Beljakov, who was a graduate of the FSB Academy, and who was in charge for many years of putting together Putin's showcase St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. But there are other Russians all over this. A lot of young Russian women, of course. A lot of young Russian women, some of whom may have been trafficked by Epstein's MO, seems to be right out of the, you know, FSB KGB kind of, you know, manual, which is compromised, you know, get people into compromising positions, videotape them, and then blackmail them. You know, I don't, I don't have an answer. I don't know, kind of what it all means. But the fact that he was engaged with these people for a very long time, that he was moving money with them, I think Deutsche Bank was, if I'm not mistaken, was fine for, for having engaged in some of those transactions. He was friends with Donald Trump for 15 years before they fell out, and the falling out was over not Massus's at Mar-a-Lago, which is what the president would like us all to think, but over a dispute about a piece of property in Palm Beach, which Trump ultimately sold to a Russian oligarch at a hefty profit. I don't have answers, and I don't know what it all means. But I think there's something there that needs to be looked at, and I worry that the attention is all on the very prudent parts of this for understandable reasons when there really are some national security you know, elements here that people really ought to be looking at very closely. Yeah, I've got to believe this is not the last time we'll be discussing this. Well, on that cheering uplifting note, Eric, have a great weekend. You too, my friend.