Bonus Episode – The Great Man and the Briefcase

I don’t normally do content warnings, but I’m about to give one. This is a content warning for anyone who just wants to listen to a straight-up history podcast. That’s what I’ve strived to deliver, and it’s what I will continue to strive to deliver. Most importantly, I try not to get political in my show because it tends to muddy the water. It activates people’s tribal instincts and they stop thinking clearly which is counterproductive when you’re talking about stuff from the past. Don’t talk to me about Joe Biden and the Orange Man, Dan, I just want to hear about the revolution. I get it. But I’m only one man and I only have one platform and I want to talk a little bit about the present, and when you start talking about the present, you start running into questions not of what happened, but what should happen, and things get controversial really quickly. Talking about the present also means talking about what could or might happen. So while my goal with this episode isn’t specifically political, it’s inevitably tied up with politics. That can get divisive, and I don’t want to turn off anyone who just wants to talk about history. While I’ve thought about this story from the present, I’ve started to become conflicted between the rational showrunner who wants to stay on the straight and narrow and the passionate bard who started out first and foremost to tell a story, and the bard in me refuses to stay silent. And if I’ve been longer than expected in the delivery of this episode, I hope it’s obvious from the length that I’ve at least put in the effort. So don’t worry! I’ll be back in a month or so as promised with the beginning of the French Revolution. If that’s what you want, turn this episode off and just wait. I’m serious. Because when I’m done with today’s story I want to get back to the history. Speaking of which, if anyone goes to the Patreon and sees that it’s not billing, it’s not shut down. I’m just not charging for August because this sort of mini-hiatus/bonus episode between the American and French revolutions has interrupted my normal video specials.

A second disclaimer. What I’m about to discuss is a mix of both the factual and the speculative. While I may get heated at times, remember, I’m just a guy on the internet with no special source of knowledge. Speculation and conspiracy theory is just that – speculation and theory. So as we move through the story, and I propose a theory, I, too, am an observer trying to figure things out. I’m just a history fan, sharing my fandoms with you, and while that might sometimes get controversial, I hope at the end of the day we can still be friends, because I love you all.

Finally, as we delve into semi-current events and conspiracy theory, I’m well aware that you guys are a diverse audience ranging from the very young to the old and seasoned, and what is obvious to some may be less obvious to others. For those of you who want to know more about things like the Kennedy assassination, I’ve included links in the description, not necessarily to the most authoritative sources, but to sources that at least make it clear what the hell I’m talking about. Okay. Disclaimer over. Put on your tinfoil hats, and we’ll take a trip to the land of “what if?”

In July’s Patreon episode, I posed a question. Why does the world seem fundamentally broken right now? Why are institutions, from the local to the global, either malfunctioning or outright failing? To answer this question, I told a story. It took me an hour to tell, but the whole story isn’t important; only the summary is, and it goes something like this. After World War II, the United States protected its NATO allies and other friends from the Soviet Union. The US spent more on defense than anybody else and less on social spending, and in return many other countries – collectively known as “the West” but also including others like Japan – pared back their military spending and developed their civilian economies under the American security umbrella. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has reigned as the sole world superpower over a global regime where national self-determination and free trade are the norm. This cannot last, because there is now no bogeyman for the United States to protect everyone from, and with the impending demographic collapse of Russia, China, and Eastern Europe, along with the mass retirement of the baby boomers, the era of endless global economic growth is at an end. America is withdrawing to the New World, and we’re looking at a return to a more normal geopolitical environment, meaning a multi-polar world of regional powers like we had back before the craziness of the 20th Century. The current war will probably be the last big one for a while. Russia is lashing out in her death throes and – don’t fool yourself – there’s still a small chance the Russians might decide to use tactical nukes, and we need to support Ukraine because a weakened Russia means less risk of Russia attacking any NATO countries and pulling the US into a direct conflict. On the plus side, if we’re all still alive in ten years, we should be looking at several decades of relative peace and prosperity, just with a different geopolitical landscape and reduced globalization. The Monroe Doctrine will be back in full force, and with a few exceptions, the countries that have thrived under America’s global system will either need to become regional powers themselves or buddy up with somebody like France or Turkey who is.

        -Now, I like to think of myself as an honest bard, and that’s a true story as far as it goes. But it’s only part of the tale, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell the rest. See, people like to talk about two historical theories – the trends and forces theory and the great man theory. These theories are like two pairs of glasses you can put on to examine history and see different aspects. The trends and forces theory looks at things like geography and technology and natural resources and demographics, and the nice thing about that set of glasses is that it’s quantitative. You can measure how much farmland a country has or what the people’s life expectancy is. That’s the pair of glasses I used to examine the world in the Patreon episode, and it’s a useful pair of glasses for forecasting. The other pair of glasses is the great man theory, and that’s the pair I want to put on today. The word “great” doesn’t mean “great” in the sense of “good”. It means “influential,” and the word “man” is just an old-timey way of saying “person.” In this theory, history is driven by the decisions of influential people, or great men, who occupy positions of power at any given time. So sit back, maybe grab your favorite drink, and I’ll tell you a story about a series of great men who sat in a big, oval-shaped office in Washington DC.

        -The story begins on May 1st 1960. My fellow millennials and I haven’t even been born yet. Our parents are just kids and the first season of The Andy Griffith Show is about to hit the airwaves. The 20th Century’s great wars are 15 years in the past. Of the three great ideologies of the 20th century, one of them – Fascism – is dead. The Cold War is in full swing, with Germany and the world split between the Communist East and the Capitalist West. The United States and the Soviet Union each have their own sphere of influence, and to defend these spheres of influence they’re building nuclear bombs as fast as they can, and the biggest and baddest weapons on the block are the ICBMs – that’s an acronym for InterContinental Ballistic Missiles. These babies can incinerate a city from the other side of the planet, and they can do it with less than 20 minutes notice. That’s just fine, though. See, some eggheads have figured out an idea called MAD – that’s another acronym, Mutually Assured Destruction. Basically, if either side is dumb enough to attack the other, they both have enough missiles to wipe each-other out several times over, and in a war where everybody’s dead there are no winners. Naturally, both sides want to know what the other is doing, and as countries do they set up spy programs.

        -For the US, this means flying lightweight, high-altitude U-2 spy planes. This is the best way to keep an eye on the Soviets’ ICBM program in an age before satellite surveillance. The CIA coordinates with the Pakistani government to launch secret flights out of Peshawar, photograph some Soviet ICBM batteries, and land in Norway. They figure with these high flying planes they can just fly too high for Soviet anti-aircraft to accurately target them, and well above the altitude any Soviet fighters can intercept them at. This works for a while, but on this particular day, May 1st of 1960, a U-2 spy plane flown by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers is shot down by a Soviet anti-air battery. What the Americans hadn’t counted on was that the Soviets don’t have to score a hit. A near miss by their anti-air missile is enough to disrupt the delicate aircraft and send it plummeting towards the Earth.

        -The man of the hour, in the seat of power, is a former general named Eisenhower. He’s a respected elder statesman, the guy who led the Allies to victory in World War II, an apolitical man who almost ran for President as a Democrat before the Republicans recruited him. It doesn’t really matter. Eisenhower is a guy who transcends party. “I like Ike” is the slogan of the 1950s. But now, only eight months from the end of his Presidency, he’s on the brink of a peace conference with the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev himself is a former peasant, a man who worked his way up through the Communist Party, took over after Stalin’s death, and has done much to dismantle the old Stalinist system. For all the fear of nuclear conflict, it seems as if the two powers, at this peace conference, might be able to reach a breakthrough that could end the Cold War and allow the Americans and the Soviets to co-exist. With the shooting down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane, all of that is put in peril.

        -Like many great men, Eisenhower has a choice. He gets to decide whether to admit that the US is spying or whether to cover it up, and some people at the CIA convince him to lie. And against his better judgement he orders the people at NASA to hold a phony press conference announcing an oxygen failure on an experimental high-altitude weather tracking plane, along with the loss of both the plane and the pilot.

        -Unfortunately for Eisenhower, Khrushchev knows more than he’s letting on. It turns out that when Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 took a nose dive, Powers managed to bail out and survive. Attached to his plane only by an oxygen hose and plummeting to the ground, he first tried and failed to destroy the spy camera and conceal his mission before cutting the oxygen hose, parachuting to the ground, and hiding out in the Soviet countryside, ultimately getting captured before he could use the poisoned needle concealed in a coin in his pocket.  Khrushchev reveals the very much living Francis Gary Powers and the US government is forced to admit that it lied. The peace conference is a wash, with Khrushchev walking out after fewer than 48 hours of negotiations. He’s having political trouble at home, and this is an opportunity to show the rest of the Soviet leadership that he’s willing to stand up to the Americans.

        -For Eisenhower, this is a personal low, and he even considers resigning the Presidency. Today, we take for granted that the government lies to us, but back in the 1950s it’s a shock to most of the public. For the first time, millions of Americans learn that their government is allowed to lie to them in time of peace, thanks to the creation of something we call the National Security State. This security state was created by the National Security Act of 1947 to meet the needs of the Cold War, to keep the nation safe during a time of uneasy peace that requires constant vigilance, and includes such institutions as the CIA and the National Security Council. And in their mission to keep the country safe, these institutions of the National Security State are allowed to keep secrets. Big secrets, small secrets. Things like “Who killed JFK?” and “Who helped Jeffrey Epstein kill himself?” And because these institutions are of the bureaucratic variety, they type all of these secrets up in classified reports, and the reports are tucked away in a metaphorical briefcase in the basement of the White House, where only a select few people like the President and the top intelligence and military brass are allowed to look into it. Most people are only vaguely aware of the briefcase, and even those of us who are intensely aware of it have no idea what’s in it. We might think we know. Some of us may even have contributed a page or two to the briefcase at one point. But for the vast, vast majority of people it’s like the briefcase in the movie Pulp Fiction, casting a golden glow across the faces of the privileged few who are allowed to gaze into it. And it’s because of Francis Gary Powers and his little U-2 crash and Eisenhower’s little fib that the American public first becomes aware of the briefcase’s existence. And a trust is broken between the public and their elected government, and Eisenhower seems to know it. And if you ask me, it troubles the old general.

        -A few months later, on January 17th, 1961, just three days before the end of his Presidency, Eisenhower delivers a Farewell Address to the American people. And we’re fortunate that the audio of this speech is in the public domain, so I’ll just play it for you, as I’ll play a few clips today. If I have to read a quote here or there throughout the episode, it’s because either there is no recording or the recording is under copyright. Anyway, here’s what Eisenhower has to say about the National Security State at the dawn of the 1960s: [BEGIN RECORDING]

        “We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

“Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

        “Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology-global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle-with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

        “Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

        “But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

        “The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

        “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

        “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

        “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

        “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

        “Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

        “In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

        “Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

        “The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

        “Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

        “It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

“Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we-you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

        “Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

        “Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

        “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war-as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years-I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

        “Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.” [END RECORDING]

        -Allow me to emphasize Eisenhower’s most ominous words:

        “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

        “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

With these remarks, a call for peace and a warning against the National Security State and the Military-Industrial Complex, Eisenhower gives a few farewells and exits the stage. The old general retires, and a new President is sworn in. He’s the youngest ever elected, at just 43, a fresh-faced war hero named Kennedy. He’s the standard-bearer of a new generation of American leaders, the one that won World War II. With his vibrant wife and four young kids, he brings an air of rejuvenation to the White House, and the chattering class calls it Camelot.

        -Like many young leaders, Kennedy comes to the White House with new ideas. He’s no stranger to war. The son of a wealthy and influential political family, he had tried and failed as a young man to enter the US military, but was disqualified because of chronic lower back issues. This was an era when the wealthy and influential used their connections to get into military service, not out of it, so Kennedy’s father had pulled some strings and he’d ultimately obtained a commission in the US navy, commanding a small torpedo patrol boat, the PT-109, in the Pacific. In August of 1943, the patrol boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer, killing two crewmembers and injuring the survivors, including Kennedy, whose back was badly injured. Despite this, he took hold of an unconscious crewman, grabbed a strap from the man’s life jacket in his teeth, and swam three and a half miles to an island, where he carved his location in a coconut shell and gave it to a friendly native, who was able to deliver it to American officers and arrange a rescue. And now, 17 years later, this man is the new President.

        -Kennedy knows war. He knows it and he hates it, and he pursues a policy of peace through strength. Of course, no President gets to write national security policy from the get-go. When you take office, you’re like a chess player taking over the board in the middle of a game. You inherit a set of ongoing situations and plans, the wheels within wheels of the National Security State, turning ever forwards towards a safer America. One of these wheels is a plan cooked up by the CIA to overthrow a Cuban dictator you might have heard of, a guy named Fidel Castro.

        -Castro is a leftist revolutionary, an intellectual who led an insurgency against the old Cuban military dictatorship led by General Fulgencio Batista. The National Security State fears the existence of a revolutionary state just 90 miles from the American coast, and the CIA has been training a group of exiled Cubans to launch a coup and overthrow the new government. They tell Kennedy that the Castro government is weak, that as soon as the American-backed paramilitaries land on the shore it will collapse and a new Cuban republic will rise from the ashes. These paramilitaries are supposed to land on the southwestern Cuban coast, at the Bahía de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs.

        -The success of the operation will depend on two things: the element of surprise and the destruction of the Cuban revolutionary air force. Neither of these things is forthcoming. On April 7th 1961, 10 days before the planned invasion, the New York Times publishes a front-page story detailing the training of an invasion force by US secret agents. Kennedy famously says: “I can’t believe what I’m reading! Castro doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers!”

        -Then, on April 15h, on D-Day Minus Two, the other shoe drops. A force of CIA-owned B-26 bombers takes off from a secret base in Nicaragua and bombs the Cuban air fields, destroying some but not all of the revolutionary government’s planes. To maintain plausible deniability, the plan is to make it look like these bombers are Cuban air force bombers that have been stolen and piloted by anti-Castro counter-revolutionaries. In order to make this story more believable, the CIA has painted one of their bombers in Cuban camouflage and shot it full of bullet holes before having one of the paramilitary pilots land it at Miami International Airport. But sharp-eyed reporters notice that the paint job is brand new, and that the machineguns are mounted on the nose instead of on the wing like on the Cuban air force’s bombers. Once again, US involvement is obvious, so Kennedy pulls the plug on further air support, leaving the invading paramilitaries to their own devices. The CIA advises him to move forwards anyway, and he authorizes them to proceed, but withholds further American air support in order to maintain plausible deniability.

        -The following debacle becomes known to history as the Bay of Pigs invasion. On April 17th, the Cuban exiles make their amphibious landing, but two of their ships run aground on some coral reefs and two more are destroyed by what’s left of Castro’s air force, sending critical ammunition and medical supplies to the bottom of the Caribbean. Without the planned air and naval support, the invasion fizzles out within three days, and it’s a public relations nightmare for the United States. It terrifies Castro, who quickly changes Cuba’s foreign policy from one of fierce independence to becoming a Soviet ally. Not only has the coup failed, but the attempt has actually worsened America’s national security situation.

        -A year and a half later, in October of 1962, the US and the Soviet Union come as close as the world has ever come to nuclear annihilation. At Castro’s invitation and in response to US placement of medium-range nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy, the Soviet Union moves some missiles of their own into Cuba. Kennedy orders a naval blockade of the island, and eventually the two sides work out an agreement for the mutual withdrawal of medium-range nukes from each-others hemispheres. As part of this agreement, the US pledges never again to try and overthrow the Cuban government, and Cuba becomes a veritable Soviet outpost off the Florida coast. All of this to say that Kennedy has relied on his national security people for advice, and so far they’ve helped him to make a dog’s dinner out of American foreign policy. Kennedy vows to his cabinet that he will smash the CIA into a million pieces.

        -Hoping to score a win – any win – against the Communists, the Kennedy administration turns its attention to a civil war in far-away Vietnam, where American military advisors are supporting the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, a hardline anti-Communist who had cheated his way to an electoral victory in the country’s south, against the regime of Ho Chi Minh, a Chinese/Soviet-backed Communist who had cheated his way to a victory in the north. Ho Chi Minh is supporting a guerilla insurgency in the south, and the Americans are trying to help Diem’s anti-Communist army get a handle on things. But Diem himself is a brutal dictator, a Roman Catholic religious fanatic who engages in persecutions of the local Buddhists, who are a majority in Vietnam. On November 2nd, 1963, Diem is killed in a coup by South Vietnamese officers who are angry about his extra-judicial killing of some Buddhist activists. South Vietnam falls into chaos, and the Communist insurgency threatens to overthrow the military government. Unwilling to risk another Cuba-style debacle, Kennedy orders the withdrawal of the first wave of US military advisors, forbids the sending of more advisors, and schedules the withdrawal of the remaining advisors for after the 1964 election.

        -It’s an election Kennedy will not live to contest. Less than three weeks after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, on November 22nd 1963, Kennedy is making a visit to Dallas, Texas, a crucial swing state and one that he expects to be key to his re-election chances. The day dawns grey and cloudy and a light rain falls over Dallas in the morning, but by the time the presidential motorcade hits the road in early afternoon it’s dry and sunny, and Kennedy decides to forego the bulletproof plexiglass bubble that would have covered the top of his limousine.

        -At 12:30, as the President’s motorcade drives through Dealey Plaza, a series of shots rings out. I won’t belabor the point; this is one of those areas where I’m mostly going to say “do your own research” because the exact details are so mired in mystery and conspiracy theory that I could do an entire podcast on the Kennedy assassination and still barely scratch the surface of what happens on November 22nd 1963. Some people say three shots are fired. Some people say four. Most agree that at least some of the shots came from the book depository building, although many also say they heard shots from a grassy knoll. There’s a magic bullet, one that passes through multiple bones and yet comes out pristine enough for the FBI laboratory to conduct a forensic analysis and determine the rifle it was fired from – a rifle owned by a man named Oswald, a former marine and known Communist sympathizer with a pattern of mental instability. Oswald claims that he’s been framed and that he’ll prove it in court, but is himself soon killed by another man, Jack Ruby, a man who claims to be acting alone but with so many shady connections that conspiracy theories sprout up around him like mushrooms. L. Fletcher Prouty, Kennedy’s Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later writes that the assassination was a coup by leaders of the military, intelligence community, and powerful defense contractors.

        -The assassination is so suspicious that Congress convenes a commission, called the Warren Commission, to investigate. The Commission interviews witnesses in closed sessions, and the CIA witnesses lie and say they never had any previous contact with Oswald when in fact they had, and tell other falsehoods, but the Commission agrees with their version of events and their conclusions are typed up on a bunch of pages, tens of thousands of pages, some of which are made public and others of which are filed away in the briefcase in the basement of the White House. And there’s another Congressional commission in 1992 that orders their release in a further 25 years, but the Trump administration delays in 2017, and the Biden administration delays in 2021, and in 2022 when the documents are finally released they’re so full of redactions that they look like a toddler went through them with a Sharpie. And the classified originals remain tucked in the briefcase, safe from the prying eyes of average people.

        -Meanwhile, the National Security State gets a new President, a defense hawk, or so they say, a Texas man named LBJ. That’s an acronym for Lyndon Baines Johnson. He gives them their military advisors, and then he gives them a little false flag operation called the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and those advisors turn into troops, and the oldest Baby Boomers start receiving draft cards in the mail. And as thousands of American families bury their sons in early graves, the National Security State gets its proxy war and the Military-Industrial Complex rakes in billions.

But Americans are a tough people to keep down. Traditions of liberty run deep, and deep in the south, in that same year of 1963, a preacher named Martin Luther King is sitting in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s been organizing non-violent sit-ins to protest the city’s segregationist policies, and he and other African-American civil rights leaders have been arrested and detained. A group of white pastors has written a letter condemning the protestors and praising the police, and had it published in the local papers. So Martin Luther King writes a response, and his Letter From a Birmingham Jail is soon printed throughout the United States. It reads in part:

        “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

        “Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

        “Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

        “I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

        “Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

        “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

        “I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

        “I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

        “In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: ‘All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.’ Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

        “You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of ‘somebodiness’ that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil.’

        “I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the ‘do nothingism’ of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as ‘rabble rousers’ and ‘outside agitators’ those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

        “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: ‘Get rid of your discontent.’ Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Martin Luther an extremist: ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.’ And John Bunyan: ‘I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.’ And Abraham Lincoln: ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’ And Thomas Jefferson: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…’ So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

        -Over the next half decade, Martin Luther King leads a movement that transforms first the South and then the nation. His non-violent tactics convince the government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He shines a light on discrimination in housing, in policing, and in other areas of life. And as time goes on he expands his campaign to fight not just discrimination but poverty and the all-consuming war in Vietnam. He does this because he sees the issues as inextricably linked. Every dollar spent fighting in Vietnam is a dollar not spent on American schools or roads. Every young man killed is a young man who will never come home to raise a family, another unnecessary bit of darkness in a world so badly in need of light. King’s nonviolent movement threatens the National Security State and the Military-Industrial Complex, and powerful interests try to silence him. It’s now a well-known fact that the FBI engages in a harassment campaign against him, including sending him a blackmail letter in 1964 threatening to expose evidence of his extramarital affairs if he doesn’t kill himself. What happens four years later is somewhat less well-known but should be taught in every high school history class.

        -On April 3rd 1968, Martin Luther King gives a speech in Memphis, Tennessee, his famous “Mountaintop” speech, and it’s famous not just because of King’s oratory brilliance or because it’s the last speech he ever gives, but because it’s somewhat prophetic. See, there have been bomb threats against King and his entourage from some white supremacists, and he ends his speech with the following words:

        “I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

        -The next day, April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King is fatally shot on the balcony of his hotel room at 6:01 PM. The investigation soon focuses in on a man named James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old Army veteran, petty criminal, and failed pornographer who’s currently on the run from the law. Ray is soon captured in London while attempting to board a flight to Africa, and the British government extradites him to the United States where he faces what looks like insurmountable evidence and pleads guilty to King’s assassination in order to avoid execution. He will spend the rest of his life protesting his innocence.

        -Once again, my story is already very long, so I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty details you can look up for yourself. Suffice it to say that the case against James Earl Ray turns out to be far less open and shut than it appears at first glance, and much of the evidence points directly to a conspiracy by people high up in the government. In 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations will find that James Earl Ray killed King, but as part of a conspiracy involving white supremacists. This is curious, since although Ray is a known armed robber and con man, he has no known association with white supremacists other than being a supporter of segregationist candidate George Wallace’s campaign for President. This at a time and place when white supremacist groups are a dime a dozen and anyone dedicated enough to the ideology to kill a civil rights leader is bound to be part of at least one of them.

-In 1999, a Memphis civil court will go a step further. In the case King family vs. Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, King’s widow Coretta Scott King and son Dexter Scott King, among other family members, sue restaurant owner Loyd Jowers for conspiring to kill Martin Luther King. Over the course of four weeks, the family brings over 70 witnesses, alleging a conspiracy between Jowers, the Mafia, the Memphis Police Department, and a mystery man known only by the alias “Raoul.” They present testimony of planted evidence, of city firefighters who would have had a clear view of a second shooter but were mysteriously given the day off, of no fewer than six FBI infiltrators in the Memphis Police Department, and on the presence of a known FBI informant in the lobby of King’s hotel during the shooting. After only an hour of deliberations, a jury of six black people and six white people unanimously rules in favor of the King family, deciding that Martin Luther King was indeed killed by a conspiracy, and that the trigger man was Lt. Earl Clark of the Memphis Police Department. The family is awarded $100 in a symbolic judgement, although James Earl Ray is already dead at this point and is never vindicated. The verdict and public outcry pressures then-Attorney General Janet Reno to order a new investigation, after which the Department of Justice predictably clears itself of any wrongdoing and everyone goes back to pretending James Earl Ray was the shooter.

-Now, I’m not saying the FBI killed MLK. That would require proof, and I’ll be the first to admit I have no smoking gun. But you can bet your life that there’s a report, and it’s been typed up and filed in the briefcase in the basement of the White House.

The night of Martin Luther King’s murder is a night of anguish throughout the country. Riots spread through over a hundred American cities, killing 35 people and injuring more than 2,500. One city that does not riot is Indianapolis, Indiana, where on the night of King’s assassination there’s a political rally being held for Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of John F Kennedy who is known affectionately as RFK. Upon arriving in Indianapolis and being informed of King’s death, RFK is warned by Indianapolis police that they cannot guarantee his safety should he choose to go ahead with his rally. Against their advice, he proceeds to a street corner in the Indianapolis ghetto where he climbs up on the back of a flatbed truck, pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket with some handwritten notes on it, and proceeds to give one of the greatest speeches in American history: [BEGIN RECORDING]

        “I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.

“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.

        “In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

        “Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

        “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

        “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’

        “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

“So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

        “We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

“But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

        “Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.” [END RECORDING]

RFK, brother of JFK, is running for President of the USA. He’s running on a platform of hope, to build on the sitting President Johnson’s vision of a Great Society, to increase funding for nutrition and education. He’s running on a platform of peace through strength, to pick up the torch of his brother’s legacy and make peace with the Soviets. RFK is just 42 years old, even younger than his brother was, and he’s running a young campaign, staffed by a small army of young baby boomers, and he’s known above all as a man who tells the truth as he sees it. When giving a speech at a medical school about his proposed social programs, one of the students asks where he intends to get the money to pay for all this. He looks out over the audience of future high-earners and says: “From you.” This is RFK at his finest, telling the truth and advocating for what he believes is right, even if it’s not politically expedient.

        -This also means speaking truth to power, and stating in no uncertain terms that in a second Kennedy administration, the National Security State will no longer have the final word in American foreign policy. On March 18th 1968, in a speech at Kansas State University, RFK talks for more than an hour about the deteriorating situation in Vietnam, and on what he intends to do to fix it. He begins by taking his share of the blame as one of the architects of Vietnam policy during his brother’s administration, then goes on to argue that the military situation in the Vietnamese countryside is untenable, that the South Vietnamese civilian government is irredeemably corrupt, and that this has made it impossible to win hearts and minds or for American troops to be seen as liberators. From this, he reasons that the only path to American victory would be one that is morally unthinkable – the complete destruction of South Vietnam. He then concludes: [BEGIN RECORDING]

        “The fourth fact that is now clearer than ever is that the war in Vietnam, far from being the last critical test for the United States is in fact weakening our position in Asia and around the world, and eroding the structure of international cooperation, which has directly supported our security for the past three decades. In purely military terms, the war has already stripped us of the graduated-response capability that we have labored so hard to build for the last seven years. Surely the North Koreans were emboldened to seize the Pueblo because the knew that the United States simply cannot afford to fight another Asian war while we are so tied down in Vietnam. We set out to prove our willingness to keep our commitments everywhere in the world. What we are ensuring instead is that it is most unlikely that the American people would ever again be willing to engage in this kind of struggle. Meanwhile our oldest and strongest allies pull back to their own shores, leaving us alone to police all of Asia; while Mao Tse-Tung and his Chinese comrades sit patiently by, fighting us to the last Vietnamese: watching us weaken a nation which might have provided a stout barrier against Chinese expansion southward; hoping that, we will further tie ourselves down in protracted war in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand; confident, as it is reported from Hong Kong, that the war in Vietnam ‘will increasingly bog down the United States, sapping its resources, discrediting its power pretensions, alienating its allies, fraying its ties with the Soviet Union, and aggravating dissensions among Americans at home.’ As one American observer puts it, truly ‘We seem to be playing the script the way Mao wrote it.’

        “All this bears directly and heavily on the question of whether more troops should now be sent to Vietnam – and, if more are sent, what their mission will be. We are entitled to ask – we are required to ask – how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams?

        “But this question the Administration does not and cannot answer. It has no answer – none but the ever – expanding use of military force and the lives of our brave soldiers, in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything in the past. The President has offered to negotiate – yet this weekend he told us again that he seeks not compromise but victory, ‘at the negotiating table if possible, on the battlefield if necessary.’ But at a real negotiating table, there can be no ‘victory’ for either side; only a painful and difficult compromise. To seek victory at the conference table is to ensure that you will never reach it. Instead the war will go on, year after terrible year – until those who sit in the seats of high policy are men who seek another path. And that must be done this year.

        “For it is long past time to ask: what is this war doing to us? Of course it is costing us money – fully one-fourth of our federal budget – but that is the smallest price we pay. The cost is in our young men, the tens of thousands of their lives cut off forever. The cost is in our world position – in neutrals and allies alike, every day more baffled by and estranged from a policy they cannot understand.

        “Higher yet is the price we pay in our own innermost lives, and in the spirit of our country. For the first time in a century, we have open resistance to service in the cause of the nation. For the first time perhaps in our history, we have desertions from our army on political and moral grounds. The front pages of our newspapers show photographs of American soldiers torturing prisoners. Every night we watch horror on the evening news. Violence spreads inexorably across the nation, filling our streets and crippling our lives. And whatever the costs to us let us think of the young men we have sent there: not just the killed, but also those who have to kill; not just the maimed, but also those who must look upon the results of what they do.

        “It may be asked, is not such degradation the cost of all wars? Of course it is. That is why war is not an enterprise lightly to be undertaken, nor prolonged one moment past its absolute necessity. All this – the destruction of Vietnam, the cost to ourselves, the danger to the world – all this we would stand willingly, if it seemed to serve some worthwhile end. But the costs of the war's present course far outweigh anything we can reasonably hope to gain by it, for ourselves or for the people of Vietnam. It must be ended, and it can be ended, in a peace of brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing he and he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop.

        “And the fact is that much can be done. We can – as I have urged for two years, but as we have never done – negotiate with the National Liberation Front. We can – as we have never done – assure the Front a genuine place in the political life of South Vietnam. We can – as we are refusing to do today – begin to deescalate the war, concentrate on protecting populated areas, and thus save American lives and slow down the destruction of the countryside. We can – as we have never done – insist that the Government of South Vietnam broaden its base, institute real reforms, and seek an honorable settlement with their fellow countrymen.

        “This is no radical program of surrender. This is no sell-out of American interests. This is a modest and reasonable program, designed to advance the interests of this country and save something from the wreckage for the people of Vietnam.

        “This program would be far more effective than the present course of this Administration – whose only response to failure is to repeat it on a larger scale. This program, with its more limited costs, would indeed be far more likely to accomplish our true objectives.

        “And therefore even this modest and reasonable program is impossible while our present leadership, under the illusion that military victory is just ahead, plunges deeper into the swamp that is our present course.

        “So I come here today, to this great University, to ask your help: not for me, but for your country and for the people of Vietnam. You are the people, as President Kennedy said, who have ‘the least ties to the present and the greatest ties to the future.’ I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies – and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best, hope of man. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America. In these next eight months, we are going to decide what this country will stand for – and what kind of men we are. So I ask for your help, in the cities and homes of this state, into the towns and farms: contributing your concern and action, warning of the danger of what we are doing – and the promise of what we can do. I ask you, as tens of thousands of young men and women are doing all over this land, to organize yourselves, and then to go forth and work for new policies – work to change our direction – and thus restore our place at the point of moral leadership, in our country, in our own hearts, and all around the world.” [END RECORDING]

        -This is too much for many in the National Security State to stomach. To withdraw from Vietnam would be to permit the spread of Communism. It would mean the end of many profitable contracts for the Military-Industrial Complex. Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s number two man, famously says of RFK: “I hope that someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.” As luck would have it, Tolson gets his wish.

On June 5th 1968, one day after winning the California and South Dakota Democratic primary elections, RFK is shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. That much is not controversial, but once again we begin to slide inexorably into conspiracy theory. According to the official story, RFK is killed by a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan, who is upset about his support for Israel. The murder weapon is an eight-shot Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver chambered in .22 LR. But there are holes in the story, beginning with some holes in a doorframe that’s quickly seized by the LAPD as evidence and then “lost”. Kennedy himself is struck by four bullets, while four additional bullets strike bystanders and all eight are accounted for, so the presence of bullet holes in a doorframe indicates the presence of a second shooter. The fatal shot is also fired at point blank range into the area behind RFK’s ear, which implies that he’s shot from behind, not from the front or the side. There’s a lot to unravel here, and anyone who wants to research the RFK assassination will find no shortage of material, with possible assassins including Thane Eugene Cesar, a bodyguard with known far-right ties who carries a pistol with the same caliber as Sirhan Sirhan’s and lies to the LAPD about it when questioned, as well as a mysterious woman in a polka dot dress. We also have three known CIA officers present at Kennedy’s speech less than a minute before the shots are fired. But my story is long, so I’ll leave you with this: the raw audio of the RFK assassination, as captured by Polish reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski. Now, this recording is made with a 1960s microphone that’s been tucked hastily into a case and inadvertently left on, so the audio quality is somewhere between terrible and horrible, but if you listen carefully you can hear the pops of gunfire. [PLAY RECORDING] Audio experts have analyzed that sequence and come to many conclusions. Some state that only eight shots are audible. Others hear as many as thirteen. I’ll play it one more time so you can give it another listen. [PLAY RECORDING] I don’t know how much anyone can make out of such a fuzzy recording. You can keep rewinding and listening to that like I did when I first listened to it, and if you listen close enough you just might drive yourself crazy. Regardless, if there are more than eight shots, that alone is proof of a second shooter, and taken all together we have yet another very fishy assassination. Make of it what you will. Whatever the truth is, it’s been typed up in a report and filed away in the briefcase in the basement of the White House.

That’s one decade of American history. One decade, and three traumatic murders that rock the country. Three murders that put the adversaries of the National Security State into the ground, and ensure that a steady stream of new recruits will be fed into the abattoir of Vietnam. They say you can’t kill an idea, but along with JFK, MLK, and RFK dies the Platonic ideal of the USA. America has always tried to steer clear of the troubles of the old world. Now she’ll meet them head on. America has always kept to her own hemisphere. Now she has tens of thousands of men in West Germany and tens of thousands more in South Korea, along with all the young men in Vietnam. And all those tens of thousands of young men need equipment. And all the bombers need bombs, and the artillery needs shells, and the rifles need bullets, and the tanks need new treads and to have their engines serviced every so many miles. And every bit of equipment and supplies is sourced from a contractor who makes money, and the tally is charged to the US taxpayer. And the boots and helmets cost money, and the MREs cost money, and the helicopters and the planes and the missiles and the fuel and on and on and on. And because we are monkeys and we’re made of meat, a bunch of young American and Vietnamese men get ground up like hamburger. And these dead American boys are sent home to their families on transport planes, along with their surviving comrades and the South Vietnamese refugees, and whatever supplies the Military-Industrial Complex wants to re-use, and let’s not forget the envelopes with secret reports that are typed up ever-so-neatly, read, and filed away in the briefcase in the basement of the White House.

        - A new generation is being born during this time – Generation X – all of them born after the assassination of JFK. They grow up in a world where war isn’t a travesty but a fact of life, where the Military-Industrial Complex and the National Security State aren’t dangerous tools born of necessity but longstanding institutions that keep America safe, and they grow up watching M*A*S*H and Sanford and Sons and All in the Family. And while the first Gen Xers are in their cribs, the baby boomers are all grown up. They’ve gone into college or into the military and gotten married and start building families of their own. At a place called Kent State University, some students protest changes to the draft, and some national guardsmen shoot at them, and some of the students die, and nobody is ever held responsible, and everybody just moves on.

-At this point in the story, I want to take a small detour and introduce you to a game. It’s a game you may have seen at a carnival, or maybe at a tourist trap if you were traveling in Europe. The carnival barker has three little cups or shells, and under one of them is a little ball. You pay the barker some money and if you can follow the little ball through his little routine you win a prize. So you hand over a few crisp dollar bills and the barker spreads his hands wide to show you he’s not hiding anything, and you can clearly see which shell the little ball is going under. Then the game begins. Round and round the shells zip around the table and you try to track the one with the ball, and you think you’re doing a pretty good job because you’ve got a sharp eye and everything is happening right there in front of you. And finally the shells come to a stop and you confidently point to the one on the left. The barker asks if you’re sure, a bit of showmanship to entertain the crowd, but you and he both know that you’ve chosen the right shell. He turns it over, and lo and behold there’s nothing there. The whole thing was a sleight-of-hand, and he’s already slipped the little ball under one of the shells you didn’t pick. This is what we call a shell game. It gives the illusion of free will by providing the player with a choice between multiple shells, with the promise that one of them conceals a prize, when in reality no matter what the player chooses, it will be just an empty shell.

-Now, consider a two-party political system in which both parties come to a broad consensus on any given policy, and you see the problem. In the late 20th century, both American political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, have broadly agreed that economic globalization under the umbrella of an American-led security alliance is the best way to grow the economy and defeat Communism. No matter which party the voters choose, no matter what that party’s policy on taxes or education or the hot-button social issues of the day, they end up with the same foreign policy. I want to be clear that this is not a conspiracy theory because this type of shell game does not, as in a real-life shell game, require a nefarious con man. Our brains are built to think that way because in everyday life, if you’re getting taken in a shell game, it’s because the carnival barker is conning you. This type of pattern recognition is a well-known feature of human psychology; it’s why we can look at a power outlet and see a face or find Jesus in a piece of toast. So before anyone accuses me of outright tinfoil-hattery, I’ll say it one more time – this shell game is not a conspiracy theory, because on the scale of a nation state no conspiracy is required. All that’s necessary for the shell game to continue is for there to be broad public agreement on smart policy, and in this case there is. Bring enough countries into the American-led system and make them rich enough through global trade, and the Soviet Empire will inevitably fall. Anyone advocating a disengagement from NATO or a return to pre-World War American isolationism is either a Communist puppet or a starry-eyed idealist. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, when something is smart policy for an entire generation, institutions like NATO can develop an inertia of their own and when that happens, smart policies age like vinegar and turn into dumb policies.

Following Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the 1968 election isn’t even close. Republican Richard Nixon wins with a landslide 301 electoral votes against 191 for Democrat Hubert Humphrey and 46 for segregationist American Independent candidate George Wallace. Lest anyone should wonder whether Wallace represents an alternative to the foreign policy shell game, not only is the guy an avowed racist, but his running mate is Curtis LeMay, who is perhaps the most infamous of the Bomber Mafia and one of the most hawkish guys in Washington. Anyway, the vote is split three ways, all of Wallace’s votes come from south of the Mason-Dixon, and the landslide winner is Richard Nixon.

        -Nixon is a Quaker, former California Senator, and had served as Vice President under President Eisenhower. A political centrist and pragmatist, Nixon is known not only as a fierce anti-Communist but also as an environmentalist, and oversees the founding of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. And he’s come to the White House with a new ambition: to turn the tables on the Communists by upending US foreign policy in Asia. See, the Communists are far from a unified block, and tensions have long been simmering between the Soviet Union and China. With the Soviet Union being Adversary Number One for the United States, a détente with China seems like a logical plan, and in 1972, Richard Nixon makes a historical visit to China.

        -Now, I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole about the world’s most populous country. Suffice it to say that China had a bit of a rough time in the century leading up to this. Most recently, it had gone through a civil war where the victorious Communists had ultimately exiled the losing Nationalists to the island of Taiwan, formerly known as Formosa. Taiwan had traditionally been independent, but the Nationalists had conquered it, called it part of China, and continued to insist that they were the legitimate government of all of China. The Communists insisted, just as forcefully, that Taiwan was part of China, and that they were the legitimate government of all of China. Over time, many countries had come to accept that the Communists controlled all of mainland China, and in 1971 the United Nations General Assembly had voted to transfer China’s seat from the Nationalist government to the Communist government. Well, as of 1972, the US still officially recognizes the Nationalists, which has prevented a relationship with the Communist government, and Richard Nixon sets out to change that when he visits China from February 21st through 28th, the first such visit for a US President.

        -On February 27th, the Chinese and US governments jointly issue the Shanghai Communique, a document that serves as a short summary of the visit as well as of the two countries diplomatic positions. It remains the foundation of Sino-American relations, and it reads as follows:

        “President Richard Nixon of the United States of America visited the People's Republic of China at the invitation of Premier Chou En-lai of the People's Republic of China from February 21 to February 28, 1972. Accompanying the President were Mrs. Nixon, US Secretary of State William Rogers, Assistant to the President Dr. Henry Kissinger, and other American officials.

        “President Nixon met with Chairman Mao Tsetung of the Communist Party of China on February 21. The two leaders had a serious and frank exchange of views on Sino-US relations and world affairs.

        “During the visit, extensive, earnest and frank discussions were held between President Nixon and Premier Chou En-lai on the normalization of relations between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China, as well as on other matters of interest to both sides. In addition, Secretary of State William Rogers and Foreign Minister Chi Peng-fei held talks in the same spirit.

        “President Nixon and his party visited Peking and viewed cultural, industrial and agricultural sites, and they also toured Hangchow and Shanghai where, continuing discussions with Chinese leaders, they viewed similar places of interest.

        “The leaders of the People's Republic of China and the United States of America found it beneficial to have this opportunity, after so many years without contact, to present candidly to one another their views on a variety of issues. They reviewed the international situation in which important changes and great upheavals are taking place and expounded their respective positions and attitudes.

        “The Chinese side stated: Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution--this has become the irresistible trend of history. All nations, big or small, should be equal: big nations should not bully the small and strong nations should not bully the weak. China will never be a superpower and it opposes hegemony and power politics of any kind. The Chinese side stated that it firmly supports the struggles of all the oppressed people and nations for freedom and liberation and that the people of all countries have the right to choose their social systems according their own wishes and the right to safeguard the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of their own countries and oppose foreign aggression, interference, control and subversion. All foreign troops should be withdrawn to their own countries. The Chinese side expressed its firm support to the peoples of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia in their efforts for the attainment of their goal and its firm support to the seven-point proposal of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Viet Nam and the elaboration of February this year on the two key problems in the proposal, and to the Joint Declaration of the Summit Conference of the Indochinese Peoples. It firmly supports the eight-point program for the peaceful unification of Korea put forward by the Government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on April 12, 1971, and the stand for the abolition of the "UN Commission for the Unification and Rehabilitation of Korea". It firmly opposes the revival and outward expansion of Japanese militarism and firmly supports the Japanese people's desire to build an independent, democratic, peaceful and neutral Japan. It firmly maintains that India and Pakistan should, in accordance with the United Nations resolutions on the Indo-Pakistan question, immediately withdraw all their forces to their respective territories and to their own sides of the ceasefire line in Jammu and Kashmir and firmly supports the Pakistan Government and people in their struggle to preserve their independence and sovereignty and the people of Jammu and Kashmir in their struggle for the right of self-determination.

        “The US side stated: Peace in Asia and peace in the world requires efforts both to reduce immediate tensions and to eliminate the basic causes of conflict. The United States will work for a just and secure peace: just, because it fulfills the aspirations of peoples and nations for freedom and progress; secure, because it removes the danger of foreign aggression. The United States supports individual freedom and social progress for all the peoples of the world, free of outside pressure or intervention. The United States believes that the effort to reduce tensions is served by improving communication between countries that have different ideologies so as to lessen the risks of confrontation through accident, miscalculation or misunderstanding. Countries should treat each other with mutual respect and be willing to compete peacefully, letting performance be the ultimate judge. No country should claim infallibility and each country should be prepared to reexamine its own attitudes for the common good. The United States stressed that the peoples of Indochina should be allowed to determine their destiny without outside intervention; its constant primary objective has been a negotiated solution; the eight-point proposal put forward by the Republic of Viet Nam and the United States on January 27, 1972 represents a basis for the attainment of that objective; in the absence of a negotiated settlement the United States envisages the ultimate withdrawal of all US forces from the region consistent with the aim of self-determination for each country of Indochina. The United States will maintain its close ties with and support for the Republic of Korea; the United States will support efforts of the Republic of Korea to seek a relaxation of tension and increased communication in the Korean peninsula. The United States places the highest value on its friendly relations with Japan; it will continue to develop the existing close bonds. Consistent with the United Nations Security Council Resolution of December 21, 1971, the United States favors the continuation of the ceasefire between India and Pakistan and the withdrawal of all military forces to within their own territories and to their own sides of the ceasefire line in Jammu and Kashmir; the United States supports the right of the peoples of South Asia to shape their own future in peace, free of military threat, and without having the area become the subject of great power rivalry.

“There are essential differences between China and the United States in their social systems and foreign policies. However, the two sides agreed that countries, regardless of their social systems, should conduct their relations on the principles of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states, non-aggression against other states, non-interference in the internal affairs of other states, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. International disputes should be settled on this basis, without resorting to the use or threat of force. The United States and the People's Republic of China are prepared to apply these principles to their mutual relations.

        “With these principles of international relations in mind the two sides stated that:

a)progress toward the normalization of relations between China and the United States is in the interests of all countries

b)both wish to reduce the danger of international military conflict

c)neither should seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony

d)neither is prepared to negotiate on behalf of any third party or to enter into agreements or understandings with the other directed at other states.

        “Both sides are of the view that it would be against the interests of the peoples of the world for any major country to collude with another against other countries, or for major countries to divide up the world into spheres of interest.

        “The two sides reviewed the long-standing serious disputes between China and the United States. The Chinese side reaffirmed its position: the Taiwan question is the crucial question obstructing the normalization of relations between China and the United States; the Government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government of China; Taiwan is a province of China which has long been returned to the motherland; the liberation of Taiwan is China's internal affair in which no other country has the right to interfere; and all US forces and military installations must be withdrawn from Taiwan. The Chinese Government firmly opposes any activities which aim at the creation of "one China, one Taiwan", "one China, two governments", "two Chinas", an "independent Taiwan" or advocate that "the status of Taiwan remains to be determined".

        “The US side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all US forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes. The two sides agreed that it is desirable to broaden the understanding between the two peoples. To this end, they discussed specific areas in such fields as science, technology, culture, sports and journalism, in which people-to-people contacts and exchanges would be mutually beneficial. Each side undertakes to facilitate the further development of such contacts and exchanges.

        “Both sides view bilateral trade as another area from which mutual benefit can be derived, and agreed that economic relations based on equality and mutual benefit are in the interest of the peoples of the two countries. They agree to facilitate the progressive development of trade between their two countries.

        “The two sides agreed that they will stay in contact through various channels, including the sending of a senior US representative to Peking from time to time for concrete consultations to further the normalization of relations between the two countries and continue to exchange views on issues of common interest.

        “The two sides expressed the hope that the gains achieved during this visit would open up new prospects for the relations between the two countries. They believe that the normalization of relations between the two countries is not only in the interest of the Chinese and American peoples but also contributes to the relaxation of tension in Asia and the world."

        -Within a year, Britain, Japan, and West Germany have taken the US lead and ditched Taiwan for Communist China. Ironically, it will take until 1979 for the US to fully break off official ties with Taiwan and recognize the mainland government. See, in late 1972, Richard Nixon gets caught up in the Watergate scandal. As a refresher, he’s caught using government operatives to spy on his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, and spends the next year and a half trying to hush up the scandal until he’s forced out of office in August of 1974. This keeps the Nixon White House largely paralyzed, and any further movement on foreign policy is put on the back burner. Ironically, Nixon has no reason to cheat. McGovern is far too left-wing to stand a serious shot at winning an American Presidential election, and Nixon wins in a 520- to-17 electoral vote blowout. But cheat he does, so instead of going down as one of the most popular presidents in American history, he’ll be forever remembered as the first American President to resign from office.

        -During his abbreviated second term in office, Nixon does oversee the American withdrawal from Vietnam. The cost for the United States alone is over 58,000 dead, plus more than 300,000 wounded, not to mention hundreds of thousands more with mental and emotional scars that would leave them in lifelong pain. Not to mention the more than one million combined North and South Vietnamese military dead and the between 200- and 600,000 civilian dead, or all of their wounded, or the dead and wounded in Laos and Cambodia, or the Australian and New Zealand and South Korean troops who fought and died in the war. Vietnam remains a Soviet ally until the end of the Cold War, but has since not only normalized relations with the United States but become a major US trading partner. As an opponent of Chinese expansionism, there’s even talk of Vietnam becoming a US ally in the near future. So it seems as if the only beneficiaries of the war are the folks in the Military-Industrial Complex, who have made bank out of it.

        -Regardless, Sino-US relations are finally normalized in 1979. Opening the US to China doesn’t place the Chinese under the US security umbrella. But it does welcome them into the system of global trade that’s guaranteed by the US umbrella, which is a win-win. China gains access to the lucrative US export market, which helps them to develop their economy at warp speed. The US, meanwhile, further drives home the wedge between China and the Soviet Union, the world’s two most powerful Communist countries. And so it continues through a series of Presidents – Ford, Carter, Reagan, all White House residents who try to beat the Soviets by out-growing them economically. Reagan will add to this by expanding the American military budget by leaps and bounds, growing from $143 billion in 1980 to over $300 billion in 1985. In inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars, that’s a change of $529 billion to $850 billion, or an increase of more than 40%, which includes a doubling of procurement spending. The defense contractors rake in the windfall, while the Soviet command economy is unable to keep up.

        -With Reagan’s presidency comes a series of radical reforms in the private sector. Major tax cuts, union-busting measures and deregulation pave the way for soaring corporate profits, while increased globalization ensures an ever-growing supply of cheap labor for American corporations. Once again, there’s no way the Soviets can compete. As we’ll see, both globalization and Reagan’s economic reforms will also have downsides, but those downsides are slower to propagate. As it stands, the mood in the West is optimistic, and on November 9th 1989, the Berlin Wall falls. Barely two years later, on December 21st 1991, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev steps down and the Soviet Union is dissolved.

Communism is dead, following Fascism into the dustbin of 20th Century ideologies and leaving Capitalism supreme. There’s a new man in the White House – former CIA Director and Vice President under Ronald Reagan, George Bush. Under his watch, in late 1990 and early 1991, a coalition army made up of forces from 39 countries liberates Kuwait from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain’s armies in what will become known as the Gulf War. The army stops at the Iraqi border, and Bush declares a New World Order, one where trade, not war, will be the field of competition between nations. The Baby Boomers are in the prime of their lives, the largest generation in American history dominating the most powerful economy in history. Generation Xers are young adults, and Kurt Cobain, the voice of a generation, has just released Nevermind with his band Nirvana, an album and a band that will change music forever. The Boomers’ children, the Millennials, are just starting to grow up, and Paula Abdul, Marky Mark, Madonna and R.E.M. are all on the radio, although the top charting song of the year is Byran Adams’ single (Everything I Do) I Do It for You from the soundtrack for Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which my parents are taking me to see at a drive-in movie theatre in Illinois when I’m five years old. And while Little Dan is enjoying his drive-in movie, Big Things are happening in Europe. The Soviet Empire doesn’t collapse due to an invasion or a civil war or any of what you might call the “normal” causes of imperial collapse. Instead, it undergoes a sort of negotiated unraveling, and we should talk a little bit about that unraveling before moving forward.

        -First, there’s the issue of German unification. Ever since the end of World War II, Germany has been divided into East and West, with West Germany a fully-fledged member of NATO and East Germany a member of the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact alliance. As a matter of fact, the victorious World War II Allied powers still rule the city of Berlin under a pair of military governments, with the Soviet Union running East Berlin and the United States, Britain, and France running West Berlin, which is itself an enclave within East Germany. At the beginning of 1989, no-one is seriously talking about dismantling any of this. But 1989 is a year of revolutions in Eastern Europe. That year, Poland holds its first free elections in half a century, while Hungary opens its border with neutral Austria, effectively tearing a hole in the Iron Curtain.

        -Now, East Germany has basically been an open-air prison since 1945, with citizens banned from visiting the Capitalist West much as today’s North Koreans are banned from visiting their families in South Korea. However, East Germans have always been allowed to travel within the Communist Bloc, and a stream of emigrants starts flowing from East Germany to Hungary to Austria to West Germany. The East German government bans travel to Hungary, but then people just start traveling to Hungary via still-Communist Czechoslovakia instead, and the government realizes that unless they want to literally lock down the entire country people are going to travel to West Germany, and in the face of mass demonstrations, the regime forgoes banning travel to Czechoslovakia. The resulting surge of migrants overwhelms Czech border authorities, which threatens to cause a diplomatic incident. So, East German authorities announce that they will start allowing passes directly to the West. When the announcement is made, on November 9th 1989, a mass of humanity arrives at the wall dividing East Berlin from West Berlin, and what begins as a trickle of people turns into a flood, and they overwhelm the gates and people start climbing over the wall, and you have the famous fall of the Berlin Wall. This is a big step for human freedom, but it doesn’t represent the reunification of Germany – it’s just a case of a closed, militarized border being opened. Reunification would happen in 1990, first with the victory of the center-right Christian Democrat party in East Germany’s March elections, the first free elections in that country since 1932. This is followed by the merging of the East and West German economies in July, then the full merger and the creation of modern Germany on October 3rd 1990. You may have noticed a small problem; this is still a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and when the Soviet Union is around, nothing happens in East Germany without their say-so. So why is Big Daddy Russia letting East Germany not only hold free elections, not only leave the Eastern Bloc, not only cease to exist, but actually merge with West Germany and strengthen NATO?

        -We can thank another great man; Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, or “Transparency” and “Restructuring”. Gorbachev is trying to save the Soviet Union by opening it to the West economically and culturally, and he’s open to changes in Europe under the right conditions – conditions which are hammered out in what becomes known as the Two Plus Four Agreement. Two meaning East and West Germany, and four meaning the four occupying powers of the Soviet Union, United States, Britain, and France. These countries are meeting throughout 1990, and they sign an agreement called the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany on September 12th, exactly three weeks before unification goes into effect. The treaty provides for the withdrawal of occupying troops from Berlin and its return to civilian government. It affirms Germany’s current borders and requires Germany to renounce any claims to land they had lost to Poland at the end of World War II. Critically, it provides for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany, and allows a united Germany to make its own foreign policy decisions without foreign oversight, which all but guarantees that the newly-united Germany will be a member of NATO as West Germany had been.

        -This is a huge concession for the Soviets, but it’s predicated on an American concession. In February of 1990, as negotiations on the Two Plus Four Agreement are just getting started, US Secretary of State James Baker meets with Mikhail Gorbachev and personally guarantees to him that NATO will not expand “one inch” to the east. What this means is open to interpretation. To hear US diplomats tell it, Baker is referring only to the situation in Germany, and in fact, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany does forbid non-German NATO troops from being stationed in the lands of former East Germany. But Russia has interpreted James Baker’s promise more broadly, taking it to mean that NATO will not add any more members in the East at all. American officials have argued that this makes little sense. Again, Baker and Gorbachev are meeting in February, 1990. When Baker makes his promise the Soviet Union is intact and so is the Warsaw Pact, so the idea of Poland or any other country joining NATO isn’t even on the table, and we should take his words in that context. Except that the idea of further NATO expansion is on the table during the Two Plus Four Talks, to the extent that some diplomats even float the idea of the USSR joining the alliance and everybody being one big happy family. At any rate, we have a promise from the American Secretary of State not to expand NATO, and the Russians interpret that promise broadly and the Americans interpret it narrowly.

-The other thing I want to talk about as regards the unraveling of the Soviet Empire is the status of Ukraine in the early 90s. As I said, from late 1989 through early 1991 the various Communist governments of Eastern Europe are toppled one by one in free elections. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania all become democratic. Yugoslavia, which was Communist but never part of the Soviet Bloc to begin with, falls apart along ethnic lines. And those are just the Soviet satellite states. In the Soviet Union itself, the year 1990 alone sees the loss of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Armenia, and Georgia, all of which elect non-communist governments and declare independence. In 1991, the Soviet military tries to reassert control, but ultimately fails in the face of pro-democratic fervor and the election of a Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, who has declared independence from the Soviet Union and rendered it all but impotent. In December of 1991, the Soviet flag is lowered for the last time, and the Supreme Soviet votes to end the empire’s existence.

-In the midst of all this, Ukraine has also declared independence from the USSR in August of 1991. Like Belarus, Ukraine is a founding member of the United Nations, and in that capacity at least has been quasi-sovereign since the end of World War II, although in practice it’s been a part of the USSR. Unlike Belarus, Ukraine has nukes. See, nobody really plans the breakup of the Soviet Union. It just kind of happens, and when it does, about a third of the nuclear weapons are left in Ukrainian territory, which makes Ukraine the third biggest nuclear power on Earth after the United States and Russia. However, Russian officers have the actual nuclear launch codes, so the missiles aren’t much good to the Ukrainians and they decide to give them up, and in 1994 Ukraine, the United States, Great Britain, and Russia sign an agreement called the Budapest Memorandum to facilitate the transfer of the weapons to Russia. The memorandum reads as follows:

“The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, welcoming the accession of Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as non-nuclear-weapon state, taking into account the commitment of Ukraine to eliminate all nuclear weapons from its territory within a specified period of time, noting the changes in the world-wide security situation, including the end of the Cold War, which have brought about conditions for deep reductions in nuclear forces. Confirm the following:

“1. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.

“2. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

“3. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.

“4. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.

“5. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm, in the case of Ukraine, their commitment not to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a State in association or alliance with a nuclear-weapon State.

“6. Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America will consult in the event a situation arises that raises a question concerning these commitments.”

-That’s where things stand in 1994. NATO has expanded to include Germany, Eastern Europe’s new democracies are all neutral, and Ukraine has security guarantees not just from Russia but also from the United States and United Kingdom.

But the 90s are a strange decade. In Russia, President Boris Yeltsin proves to be the wrong man for the job. A chronic alcoholic, he mismanages the transition to a private economy, and the Russian people’s standard of living stagnates while oligarchs pillage the old Soviet state-run industries. In the US, President Bush loses power after only one term. Instead of Bush getting a full eight year stint in, the Presidency goes to a man named Bill Clinton. Clinton is a man of his time, and that time is the 90s, baby! He has the good fortune to take over just as the internet is starting to become widely available, which means all he has to do is let the economy do its thing and he gets credit for the growth and cruises to a comfortable victory in the 1996 elections, and leads the United States for the rest of the decade.

        -Clinton’s hands-off policy towards the digital economy is part of his appeal to the country’s business class. He’s a fiscal centrist who works with Republicans to pass welfare reform, reducing the number of people on the public dole. Most of all, he’s a big supporter of continued globalization and building a truly international economy. The end of the Cold War has opened new markets not just for products and services but also for labor, and in 1993 Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, an agreement to eliminate trade barriers between the US, Canada, and Mexico. This creates a single North American market for goods and services, with a total GDP greater than that of the European Union. However, NAFTA is also controversial, and many of Clinton’s Democratic Party allies vote against its passage in Congress. They’re concerned that with the elimination of tariffs, industries will move from the US to Mexico to take advantage of Mexico’s lower wages, scant worker protections, and weak or nonexistent unions. These fears prove well-founded, and an American middle class that has already suffered from Chinese competition now takes another shot to the gut. But the empty factories and foreclosed houses and suicides don’t show up in the financial press. The despair creeps across the country like a dark, silent cloud, and it’s a cloud that you can almost feel in places I don’t want to mention because I’m not here to criticize anybody’s home town, but if you live in the US then you’ve probably been somewhere where all the jobs have left and you’re in a city but there’s an eerie quiet, as if all the life has been sucked out and the city has been turned into a kind of zombie, and the people, if there are any, sit on their front porches and stare at you with hollow eyes. And how many of them are dying deaths of despair? People who look into a bottle of alcohol or a jar of pills or pick up a syringe and a spoon and shoot for one more high, even though they know it could be their last. Those are suicides, too, whether or not they show up that way in statistics. The other shoe drops in the year 2000, when, in a parting insult to the American working class, Clinton paves the way for China to receive Most Favored Nation trading status with the US and join the World Trade Organization, a move that will destroy another 2 million American jobs.

-None of this registers with the financial press or indeed with the mainstream culture. The GDP is up, the cost of living is down, and the professional and managerial classes are enjoying an era of prosperity akin to the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. Efficiency is everything in business, and the new global economy is more efficient than anything that’s come before.

-Clinton struggles with foreign policy, and while I’ve been critical of his economic policies I think it’s fair to say that most leaders would struggle to deal with the US geostrategic position as it stands in the 1990s. The problem with being the world’s sole superpower is that your huge military forces now have no raison d’etre. In the 1980s, it’s easy for Reagan to explain to the American people that you simply must raise the military budget to defeat the Evil Soviet Empire. In the 1990s, it’s tougher for Clinton to explain that the US Navy, by default, now plays a crucial role in preventing piracy and policing the world’s seas, and that a reduction in naval spending would damage US interests as much as anyone else’s. It’s toughest of all to explain why there are army bases all over the world, with American ground troops stationed in countries that have no further need of such protection. But the National Security State and the Military-Industrial Complex have taken on a momentum of their own, and in 1996 Bill Clinton calls for former Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO.

-This is the beginning of a fundamental break between Russia and the West, and it’s based on a failure in the West, particularly in the US, to understand Russia’s national security concerns. People will often point out that Russia is the world’s largest country by land area, but being the biggest country comes with a downside – it means you have a lot of borders. People in Europe kind of get this because they have a longer history than we do and they have more countries and complex international relations in general. Americans are familiar with a simple security environment: to the north, we have Canada, a friendly country with whom we have deep economic and military ties. No threat there. To the east and west, we have the Atlantic and Pacific oceans respectively, which make damn good borders. Think of the World Wars, where much of Europe and Asia get bombed and shelled, while the US suffers almost no damage whatsoever to civilian infrastructure. To the south, we have Mexico, where we’ve had some friction in the past, but there too we’re now bound up with social and economic ties. Now look at Russia, with almost all of its population in the European west and almost all of its land and natural resources in the vast stretches of northern Asia. The border with China is relatively safe if only because it’s in the hinterland of both countries, and the borders with Mongolia and Kazakhstan are relatively safe because those powers are much smaller and weaker than Russia. So far so good, but now we come to the west. In Eastern Europe, when the Soviet Union collapses, there’s no border between Russia and NATO. From north to south, Russia borders the neutral countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine, and Belarus isn’t so much neutral as a close Russian ally.

-Then, in the southwest of Russia, in far southeastern Europe, there’s the Caucasus. The Caucasus Mountains stretch roughly from northwest to southeast between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and Russia’s border more or less follows the mountains. To the south, from west to east, are the former Soviet Republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, which form an additional buffer zone between Russia and its old regional rivals Turkey and Iran. This cozy arrangement falls apart when an independence movement breaks out into violence in the majority-Muslim Russian state of Chechnya in the eastern Caucasus. The rebellion lasts until August of 1996, and results in a humiliating defeat for the Russian Army, which is forced to withdraw and re-tool as Boris Yeltsin’s government signs a peace agreement temporarily accepting Chechnya’s de facto independence.

-Rather than view this as an internal Russian affair, the desperate efforts of a once-great country to hold its territory together, NATO misreads the First Chechen War as an act of aggression, and in April of 1999, at a summit in Washington, D.C., NATO accepts three new members in Eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Slovakia was also to have been admitted, but has failed to meet NATO requirements for democratization and anti-corruption. Now, none of these countries directly borders Russia, but this expansion zone is eating into the buffer zone of neutral states that lies between Russia and NATO, and it violates James Baker’s promise to Gorbachev not to expand, and Boris Yeltsin protests, but nobody in the West is listening because to them NATO is just a defensive alliance of free, democratic states. They don’t see what the Russians see, which is the vast, flat stretch of the Eastern European Steppe that merges into the Great Eurasian Steppe, a steppe across which Russia has been invaded many times, including by Napoleon and Nazi Germany, and which the Russians have traditionally defended by maintaining a sphere of influence over a set of buffer states between it and other major powers. Think of Catherine the Great in the Seven Years War, trying to defeat Frederick the Great’s Prussia and maintain a weak and divided Germany between it and Austria. So between the Chechen War and NATO expansion, both sides have inadvertently signaled aggression to the other side while ostensibly trying to do the opposite.

-At the same time, NATO humiliates Russia in the Yugoslav Wars, which is a whole sideshow of its own. Yugoslavia is a multi-ethnic country that takes up most of the Balkans. For most of its post-World War II history, it’s been ruled by a Communist strongman named Josip Broz Tito. Tito was a staunch nationalist who had fought both the Nazis and the Soviets, and whose magnetic personality and pan-Slavic policies appealed to most of Yugoslavia’s ethnic groups. Following his death in 1980, the country had seen a rise in separatist movements, and in 1990 separate republics are breaking off. Slovenia wins independence in 1991 with Croatia and Bosnia following in 1995. All of these nations have to fight for independence, but when Kosovo declares independence, Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic’s armies engage in war crimes against civilians and NATO warplanes bomb Yugoslavia in retaliation. Kosovo eventually wins its independence, as does Macedonia, which due to an outcry from Greek nationalists will ultimately be renamed as North Macedonia. All of this happens not so much over Russia’s objections as without Russian participation. While Russian troops make up part of the UN protection force that keeps the peace in Bosnia and Croatia, the Russians are unable to participate in the air campaign against Milosevic because their military is busy with the Second Chechen War. This war will begin as a Russian invasion of Chechnya under Boris Yeltsin, which continues through the year 2000 under Russia’s new President Vladimir Putin, and after years of running Chechnya under martial law, the territory will finally be handed over to a local warlord named Ramzan Kadyrov in 2009. He will be free to do more or less as he pleases in Chechnya, so long as his troops stand ready to fight for Russia, not against it.

US foreign policy at the end of the Clinton administration is on autopilot, which is never a good thing for something as big and important as an entire country. Both major parties are sleepwalking in Europe, and the shell game continues, and if you’re a big-time Military-Industrial Complex executive, it wouldn’t trouble you when the 2000 elections go to a guy we call W. George W Bush is the son of the older President Bush, and he basically represents the same policies with a bit of “Aw shucks” swagger and a Texas drawl. It’s 2001 now. The Y2K bug has come, come to nothing, and gone again. Friends, CSI, and ER are the top shows on television. The Dot Com bubble is bursting, but all in all things are still looking good for America in the first year of the new millennium. At least until September 11th, when a group of Islamist terrorists hijacks four passenger airliners, crashing them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. At the end of the day, just under 3,000 victims lie dead at the hands of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group led by the son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family named Osama Bin Laden.

        -Bin Laden himself is partially a creation of the US National Security State. During the 1980s and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US had funded several anti-Russian insurgent groups, including some led by Bin Laden. These mujaheddin or “holy warriors” had fought to expel the Russian occupiers from what they viewed as Islamic lands. And now in the aftermath of the Gulf War, some extremists, including Al Qaeda, are objecting to the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia. Never mind that those troops are there at the request of the Saudi government to deter future Iraqi aggression. In the eyes of these fundamentalists, Saudi Arabia is some of the holiest land in the world since it includes Mecca and Medina, the top two cities in Islam. The presence of American troops is at best insulting and at worst an outright desecration of sacred land. Anyway, George Bush asks the government of Afghanistan, the Taliban, to hand over Osama Bin Laden to American authorities. But the Taliban doesn’t want to hand him over and if we’re being honest it’s doubtful they could if they wanted to. At any rate, the US can’t very well let a terrorist kill 3,000 people and go free, so Bush orders an invasion of Afghanistan. This invasion is actually a joint effort by several NATO countries, carried out under Article 5 of the NATO charter, which states that an attack on one member of the alliance is an attack on all.

        -Outside of a handful of pacifists, few people in the West object to the war in Afghanistan. Regardless of what you think of US foreign policy in general, this particular military operation seems well justified. The Afghan regime is sheltering a dangerous mass murderer whose organization is ready and willing to kill again. The US is working within the international framework and with local rebel groups. This is all being done by the book.

        -Unfortunately, the Bush administration makes some moves that look like serious mistakes if you’re in favor of world peace and a sane US foreign policy, but which make perfect sense once you understand that the President is getting all of his advice from a National Security State and Military-Industrial Complex that no longer have any reason to exist other than to support their own interests.

        -To begin with, there’s the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US does this ostensibly because Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain is working with Al Qaeda and developing chemical and biological weapons. As it turns out, the links between Hussain’s government and Al Qaeda are invented out of whole cloth by US intelligence analysts looking for a reason to invade, and the chemical and germ war programs are based on some of the shoddiest intelligence the British government has ever produced. The whole invasion has no purpose, and toppling the minority Sunni Muslim government provokes a revolt by majority Shia Muslim militias, many of them backed by the Iranian government, which sees an Iraqi insurgency as a cheap way to inflict damage on the United States. The total cost for the US over the next eight years comes to between $758 billion and $3 trillion, depending on how exactly you account for various military expenses and what your criteria are for something being “war-related”.  This of course does not include the thousands of dead and injured soldiers, nor the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured civilians, nor the loss of American moral authority.

        -As for the 9-11 attacks themselves, many of the government’s investigative documents are kept secret. In 2021, on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, over 80,000 previously-classified pages are released, most of which are unremarkable, but some of which show that individual Saudi Arabian intelligence assets in the US knew about the attacks in advance, which is pretty embarrassing since Saudi Arabia is a major US ally. It’s important to note that these pages don’t implicate the Saudi government itself, just some individuals connected to Saudi intelligence, but there are many pages still classified, all of them filed away in the briefcase in the basement of the White House.

The events of 9-11, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War are well-known, and at the time they dominate news coverage of American foreign policy. This is unfortunate, because the world still hasn’t really dealt with the fallout of the end of the Soviet Empire, China is on the rise, and the US is getting distracted in the Middle East. When historians look back 100 or 1,000 years from now, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will barely warrant a footnote. They’ll be like any of the many small wars we gloss over all the time when we talk about history. When historians look back on the Bush Presidency, I think they’ll instead look at what happens between the US, NATO, and Russia, because so much of this is relevant to what’s going on today.

        -To begin with, on December 13th 2001, just weeks after the US invasion of Afghanistan, the US withdraws from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an arms-reduction treaty with Russia. This is because the ABM treaty forbids the development of missile defense systems, and W’s intelligence people are telling him the Iranians want to develop a ballistic missile, and the US needs to defend itself. To be fair, there’s a touch of logic to this. Mutually Assured Destruction has worked for the US and the Soviet Union/Russia because the US and the Russians are rational actors who don’t want to die, but the Iranian mullahs are theocrats who believe they’re paving the way for Armageddon. Suppose they decide to say “The hell with it” and kick off the apocalypse themselves? Never mind that Iran is years from developing a bomb and the idea that they’d use one for anything other than deterrence is purely speculative.

        -Regardless, the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty is threatening to Russia because it messes with the entire balance of the nuclear equation. If the US can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, it makes Mutually Assured Destruction obsolete and the risk of nuclear conflict goes up, not down – at least from the Russian perspective. Russia doesn’t withdraw from other arms treaties. Bush and Putin sign the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT, in 2002, cutting down the number of both countries nuclear weapons. This will be followed by the New START treaty in 2010, which reduces numbers even further. Instead, in response to the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Vladimir Putin orders the development of new nuclear weapons delivery systems such as hypersonic missiles and heavy, liquid-fueled ICBM rockets that can arc over the South Pole and circumvent American missile defenses. All of this raises tensions and contributes to increased military budgets.

        -The slight increase in nuclear tensions would be a mere bump in the road if it weren’t for continued NATO expansion. In March of 2004, NATO welcomes seven new members. The former Yugoslav state of Slovenia sits near Austria and Italy and is of little concern to the Russians. Bulgaria, while formerly a Warsaw Pact ally, is also far enough from Russia’s borders not to be a threat. But Romania and Slovakia both border Ukraine, which starts to make Russia’s defensive neutral buffer zone seem a little thin. Then there are the Baltic states. Latvia and Estonia sit directly on the Russian border, removing the buffer zone altogether. Lithuania, meanwhile, meets Poland in an area called the Suwałki Corridor, a swath of land that separates the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea from Russian-allied Belarus. From the US perspective, these are three small, democratic, mercantile countries. NATO is a defensive alliance and the Baltic States are joining to preserve their own neutrality. But from the Russian perspective, NATO is now preventing it from maintaining any sphere of influence or buffer zone between it and historically hostile foreign powers.

        -At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, George W Bush floats the idea of putting Ukraine on what’s called a Membership Access Plan, or MAP, to eventually gain membership.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel shoots down the idea, arguing that it would be a needless provocation of the Russians. Albania and Croatia do join the alliance in 2009, but that’s not very controversial for Moscow because both of those countries are far from Russia’s borders.

        -Now, people on different sides will say that Russia is overly aggressive and shouldn’t worry about any of this expansion, or that NATO is reckless and the US National Security State is running amok, and there’s some truth to both of those things, but once again I want to highlight the complete disconnect between how both sides see the world. For the US and NATO, there is no threat. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are just free countries joining an alliance of other free countries. They’ve suffered decades of Soviet domination and so with good reason they view Russia as their primary national security threat, and NATO as their shield. The US National Security State seems to equate membership in this defensive alliance with neutrality, but that’s only accurate if you’re a sincere player. If you’re an insincere player, a defensive alliance can be used as a pretext to pre-deploy troops for an invasion. Witness Russia’s abortive thunder run to Kiev in 2022, launched after routine military exercises in Belarus.

        -On the flip side, Russia has a long history of being attacked in a similar way. Remember, this whole area in Eastern Europe is flat land that’s very difficult to defend, and you can say what you want about the horrors of Stalinism but what happened to the Russian people in World War II was on another level. If anyone on Earth has ever witnessed the Platonic ideal of Hell – horrific suffering on a massive scale – they witnessed it on the Eastern Front. We Americans have Sherman’s March to the Sea and the subsequent Carolinas Campaign. That devastated huge chunks of the American southeast and they took a generation to recover. Well the war on the Eastern Front was Sherman’s March times ten thousand, the kind of horror you think of when you think of the Mongol invasions, and those happened to Russia too. Remember how John F Kennedy put a blockade on Cuba because the Soviets had missiles there. Well, it’s understandable that Russia, even a post-Cold War Russia, would see the expansion of NATO to its borders as a national security threat.

In 2008, the last year of Bush’s Presidency, the housing market crashes. Now, this is a long episode and you could make an entire show this long just about the 2008 housing crisis, so forgive me for glossing over some details, but suffice it to say that un-checked capitalism’s chickens are starting to come home to roost. Big banks have been bundling questionable mortgages into securities along with good mortgages – basically mixing in rotten eggs with good ones and calling the whole package “Grade A”. But when housing values enter a small decline, it turns into a big problem because you have all these homeowners who can’t afford their mortgages and have been counting on being able to refinance on better terms when their houses gain value, and when prices go down the homeowners can’t refinance and they can’t pay and they go into foreclosure and they become non-homeowners. This isn’t just a problem for the people who lose their homes. Because the mortgages have been bundled into securities, and because junk mortgages have been mixed in willy-nilly with loans to creditworthy homeowners, all kinds of investors are losing their shirts, and the government has to bail out the banks. If you really want to understand it, just read The Big Short or watch the movie.

-Anyhow, the Republicans are now unpopular because Bush is in charge when the housing market crashes, so without a lot of fuss or drama, we get a Democrat named Obama. Not that the party matters; we’re playing a shell game, remember? I’m not making a moral judgement here. I’m not saying it’s wrong for NATO to expand or that NATO shouldn’t allow new members to join. What I am saying is that this is a major decision, and we in the public never seem to have had a conversation about it because we’ve all been watching the shell game. The citizens of our democracy stand around gawking as the carnival barker moves the shells around, and those of use who are politically engaged wonder which one it will be. Will we get the Democrats or the Republicans? Will taxes go up or down? What are they going to do about the housing crisis or Iraq? Who’s shagging who in the Oval Office, and is there a cigar involved? I’m not saying these aren’t also important questions. But I am saying that in our democracy our elected leaders have a certain amount of bandwidth, and when they’re focused on all of these things – and, let’s be real, they’re spending most of their time fundraising anyway – but even when they are focused on policy they have limited bandwidth, and so a lot of important decisions get made by unelected bureaucrats and then rubber-stamped. This works just fine for the National Security State, which includes many such bureaucrats, and so European policy under Obama looks much like it had under Bush and Clinton, and hardly anybody of influence seems to notice because even the people who care about foreign policy are mostly focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, so the shell game continues. There’s a meme I’ve seen that sums it up nicely, and on one side there’s a picture of a bomber dropping bombs on people and it says “Republicans.” And on the other side there’s a picture of the same bomber except it has a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker and a gay pride sticker and it says “Democrats,” but it’s still bombing people.

-Now, I do want to stay focused on the US and US policy here, but my story doesn’t make sense if we don’t talk a little bit about what happens in Ukraine in 2013-2014. In the early 2010s, the Ukrainians and the EU have been negotiating the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement. This is an economic and political treaty that pledges Ukraine to slowly adopt EU economic policies and commit to democratic reforms, while pledging the EU to provide financial support and preferential access to European markets. Basically, it’s an on ramp to Ukraine joining the European Union, at some point down the line, provided certain conditions are met. The Ukrainian Parliament agrees to the treaty, but in August of 2013 Russia closes its borders to all Ukrainian trade. Since Russia is Ukraine’s number one trade partner at the time, this severely disrupts the Ukrainian economy, and Russia signals that they will only reverse this policy when Ukraine revokes any steps towards EU membership.

-In response, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich puts the brakes on the EU treaty, causing pro-EU protests to break out throughout the country. But much like the Patriots and Tories in the American Revolution, the pro-EU and pro-Russian citizens in Ukraine are not evenly distributed. The EU’s support is primarily in the west, which makes sense if you look at a map, but this also means that the capital, Kiev, is a hotbed of EU support, and the EU supporters call themselves EuroMaidan, meaning literally “Euro Square,” which refers not just to their goals but also to the fact that some of the first protests are held in Kyiv’s European Square district. On November 29th, the EuroMaidan protestors make an official list of demands, and I’ll read them here from the English language newspaper the Kyiv Post:

“EuroMaidan organizers issued a resolution that outlines their demands and plans for further action.

It begins, ‘We, citizens of Ukraine, who united to support the idea of Euro-integration, declare: we continue the fight for a European Ukraine and will act so that our main demand of signing an association agreement with the European Union is fulfilled.’

It says that President Viktor Yanukovych ‘ignored’ the will of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who called on him to take Ukraine into a European future that ‘millions of Ukrainians want…he is taking the nation into the past.’ The resolution proposed the following:

1. Form a coordinating committee to communicate with the European community.

2. To state that the president, parliament and the Cabinet of Ministers aren’t capable of carrying out a geopolitically strategic course of development for the state and calls on Yanukovych’s resignation.

3. Demand the cessation of political repressions against EuroMaidan activists, students, civic activists and opposition leaders.

The resolution stated that on Dec. 1, on the anniversary of Ukraine’s independence day referendum, that the group will gather at noon on Independence Square to announce their further course of action.”

-Protestors remain throughout Kyiv on November 30th, and that night riot police attack and beat people at several locations. On December 1st, somewhere between a quarter million and three quarters of a million Ukrainians turn out for protests in Kyiv alone. After the previous night’s violence, these protests quickly turn to riots, and some activists steal a bulldozer and break down security fencing around the Presidential Palace. Others occupy City Hall. The opposition party in the government declares a national strike in solidarity with the protestors.

-Things continue to escalate throughout January and February, and on the night of February 21st 2014, President Victor Yanukovich flees Kyiv for the city of Kharkiv. This is a strategic move, since Kharkiv is in Ukraine’s east, where Yanukovich has his base of support. He wants to make it look like he’s just touring some industrial plants, but in his absence from the capital the opposition party is able to convene a meeting of Parliament with a quorum and remove him from power.

-New elections are called, but at this point pro-Russian demonstrations break out in eastern Ukraine where there are a lot of Russian speakers and where the people had supported Yanukovich. But this isn’t just a civil war.

-See, on February 20th 2014, two days before the Ukrainian Parliament votes to remove Yanukovich from power, the Russians have already started sending special operations forces into Crimea. This is all very hush hush and none of it is made public at the time, but in retrospect it makes sense why Yanukovich would suddenly take off to Kharkiv the next day to get away from Kyiv, and why the Parliament would remove him so quickly.

-Anyway, Crimea is incredibly important to Russia because they lease the naval base at Sevastopol from the Ukrainians, and this naval base is their only true warm water port, meaning it’s the only place in the world the Russians can base ships where they won’t get frozen in for part of the year. So with the unrest in Ukraine Russia is just going to grab Crimea rather than risk losing their naval base to a Ukrainian revolution. To be clear, the invading Russians don’t come storming in with tanks under cover of artillery and cruise missiles. They come in the form of so-called Little Green Men – guys with modern gear and elite training but no insignias on their uniforms to indicate their nationality. Publicly, the Russian government claims these are just local militias who purchased their gear on the private market, but on April 17th, Vladimir Putin finally admits that at least some Russian military units are involved. As we now know, these include special forces, paratroopers from the Russian Airborne Force’s elite 45th Guards Spetsnaz Brigade, as well as Wagner Group mercenaries.

-In April, the Little Green Men also start appearing in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, collectively known as the Donbas, where they square off against right-wing Ukrainian citizen militias as the central government stands paralyzed. In June, the Ukrainians elect pro-EU President Petro Poroshenko. He signs the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement, declares Ukrainian as the official language, establishes a Ukrainian Orthodox Church that’s separate from the Russian Orthodox Church, ensuring that not just Ukraine’s government but also its cultural institutions will be distinctly Ukrainian. There’s even a new quota on radio stations to ensure that a certain percentage of content is in the Ukrainian language. But Poroshenko is unable to work out a solution to the Donbas crisis, and Putin’s Little Green Men continue low-level skirmishes with Ukrainian troops that are now starting to get support from Western allies. More unfortunately, Poroshenko is an old-school politician in the Soviet mold, which means he’s incredibly corrupt and ends up losing the 2019 election to a guy named Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Jewish comedian who grew up speaking Russian, runs on a peace platform, and promises to end corruption in the Ukrainian government. He tries to get the Russians to withdraw from the Donbas and agree to a local referendum on the region’s status, but the Russians won’t withdraw until there’s a cease fire, and the Ukrainian nationalist militias won’t agree to a cease fire unless the Russians withdraw first. There’s a complicated history here. Remember, Ukraine has a history of being invaded and starved not just by the Communist Soviets but also by the right-wing German nationalist Nazis. This is a mostly flat country that lies in a geographic buffer zone between larger powers, and you see a similar history in places like Poland that have a similar geography.

-Anyway, Zelenskyy doesn’t want to risk civil war by putting down the nationalist militias by force, so he continues moving the country towards NATO in the hopes that a more robust Ukrainian military can allow him to negotiate a Russian withdrawal. Putin draws a red line in the sand in late 2021 and demands that Ukraine revoke all plans for NATO membership and that NATO withdraw multinational forces from all countries east of Germany. NATO says that it has an open door policy and that Russia doesn’t get to claim a sphere of influence and dictate what other countries get to do, and Putin invades Ukraine outright, and we get to where we are today.

That’s my short version of the story in Ukraine, at least from a birds-eye view, but the 2010s also see important developments in the United States. This is a decade where we learn a lot about the shell game, the National Security State, the briefcase, and where a lot of chickens come home to roost.

It begins in 2010 with the release of a set of documents now known as the Iraq War Logs. On October 22nd of that year, Wikileaks releases 391,832 classified documents from the US military related to the occupation. There’s a lot of stuff in these documents, most of it low-level secrets that don’t really interest most people. But there’s also a lot of damning information, including Pentagon estimates of civilian casualties that far exceed any numbers that have been released to the public. And then there are the many incidents kept secret not because revealing them would endanger US spies or expose confidential military technology. Many so-called “national security secrets” are nothing more than accurate records of events that could be embarrassing to the US military. One of these records is a video taken on July 12th 2007 from an American Apache helicopter that engages and accidentally kills two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Both men are wearing press badges which cannot be seen from the air, and Noor-Eldeen’s camera case is misidentified as a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, while the case for a secondary lens is misidentified as a second rocket. The two journalists are also near a combat zone and have what appear to be armed guards to protect them, so from the air this looks like some insurgents, and the American helicopter opens fire, killing the journalists and bodyguards. It’s an honest mistake, but the video is embarrassing, so it’s buried in the briefcase in the basement of the White House, at least until Wikileaks releases it under the title Collateral Murder. Here’s some of the audio. [BEGIN RECORDING]

        “02:50        Light 'em all up.

02:52        Come on, fire!

02:57        Keep shoot, keep shoot. [keep shooting]

02:59        keep shoot.

03:02        keep shoot.

03:05        Hotel.. Bushmaster Two-Six, Bushmaster Two-Six, we need to move, time now!

03:10        All right, we just engaged all eight individuals.

03:12        Yeah, we see two birds [helicopters] and we're still fire [not firing].

03:14        Roger.

03:15        I got 'em.

03:16        Two-six, this is Two-Six, we're mobile.

03:19        Oops, I'm sorry what was going on?

03:20        God damn it, Kyle.

03:23        All right, hahaha, I hit [shot] 'em...

03:28        Uh, you're clear.

03:30        All right, I'm just trying to find targets again.

03:38        Bushmaster Six, this is Bushmaster Two-Six.

03:40        Got a bunch of bodies layin' there.

03:42        All right, we got about, uh, eight individuals.

03:46        Yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there, but, uh, you know, we got, definitely got something.

03:51        We're shooting some more.

03:52        Roger.

03:56        Hey, you shoot, I'll talk.

03:57        Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.

04:01        Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six. Over.

04:03        Roger. Currently engaging [fighting/shooting at] approximately eight individuals, uh KIA [Killed In Action], uh RPGs, and AK-47s.

04:12        Hotel Two-Six, you need to move to that location once Crazyhorse is done and get pictures. Over.

04:20        Six beacon gaia.

04:24        Sergeant Twenty is the location.

04:28        Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.

04:31        Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.

04:36        Nice.

04:37        Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.

04:44        Nice.

04:47        Good shoot.

04:48        Thank you.

04:53        Hotel Two-Six.

04:55        Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.

05:03        Crazyhorse One-Eight; Bushmaster Seven. Go ahead.

05:06        Bushmaster Seven; Crazyhorse One-Eight. Uh, location of bodies, Mike Bravo five-four-five-eight eight-six-one-seven [military map grid reference].

05:15        Hey, good on the uh...

05:17        Five-four-five-eight eight-six-one-seven [map grid reference]. Over.

05:21        This is Crazyhorse One-Eight, that's a good copy. They're on a street in front of an open, uh, courtyard with a bunch of blue uh trucks, bunch of vehicles in the courtyard.

05:30        There's one guy moving down there but he's uh, he's wounded.

05:35        All right, we'll let 'em know so they can hurry up and get over here.

05:40        One-Eight, we also have one individual, uh, appears to be wounded trying to crawl away.

05:49        Roger, we're gonna move down there.

05:51        Roger, we'll cease fire.

05:54        Yeah, we won't shoot anymore.

06:01        He's getting up.

06:02        Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand?

06:04        No, I haven't seen one yet.

06:07        I see you guys got that guy crawling right now on that curb.

06:08        Yeah, I got him. I put two rounds [30mm cannon shells] near him, and you guys were shooting over there too, so uh we'll see.

06:14        Yeah, roger that.

06:16        Bushmaster Thirty-Six Element; this is uh Hotel Two-Seven over.

06:21        Hotel Two-Seven; Bushmaster Seven go ahead.

06:24        Roger I'm just trying to make sure you guys have my turf [area], over.

06:31        Roger we got your turf.

06:33        Come on, buddy.

06:38        All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.” [END RECORDING]

        -You can’t see what’s going on here, but there’s a wounded man crawling along the ground trying to drag himself to safety, and the helicopter gunner is wishing for the guy to pick up a weapon so the rules of engagement will allow him to shoot the guy again. Not illegal, but not a great look for the US military either.

        -As the video continues, some locals show up in a van and start collecting the bodies. The van is unmarked, so the helicopter gets permission to engage and once again opens fire. They do, and as it turns out the van is just full of civilians who are trying to help the wounded. Shortly after the helicopter fires, US ground troops show up in Humvees and start attending to the wounded themselves. In the process, they find a four-year-old girl shot through the belly, and we hear the following exchange: [BEGIN RECORDING]

        “16:49        Roger, I've got uh eleven Iraqi KIAs [Killed In Action]. One small child wounded. Over.

16:57        Roger. Ah damn. Oh well.

17:04        Roger, we need, we need a uh to evac [evacuate] this child. Ah, she's got a uh, she's got a wound to the belly.

17:10        I can't do anything here. She needs to get evaced. Over.

17:18        Bushmaster Seven, Bushmaster Seven; this is Bushmaster Six Romeo.

17:20        We need your location over.

17:25        Roger, we're at the location where Crazyhorse engaged the RPG fire break.

17:37        Grid five-four-five-eight.

17:46        Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” [END RECORDING]

        -“It’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” And in that smarmy tone of voice. This man is talking about a four-year-old girl. Later on in the recording a medic tries to get her taken to a US military hospital that’s nearby, but he’s told no, that she has to be taken to the Iraqi civilian hospital that’s further away. I’m not here to carry water for anybody, least of all any Iraqi insurgents, most of whom it seems to me are scumbags who would sell their own mothers out for the right price. But there are plenty of wars in history that are just evil against evil, or where there seems to be no morality at all, just a bunch of people dying and killing each other for no reason. And when you hear men talking this way about wounded children, you have to at least question whether or not they’re the good guys. I lost a friend, a soldier, when I shared this video on social media back in the day. He said I didn’t understand, and I’m not saying I do because I wasn’t there. But videos like this shouldn’t be kept secret. They should be brought out into the light so we can have a conversation about them and figure out how to do better. At least, that’s what a republic should do, if America is a republic and not just another empire.

        -For revealing the Iraq War files, a US Army soldier named Bradley Manning is arrested and sentenced to 35 years in prison. While in prison, Manning undergoes a gender transition and changes her name to Chelsea before being released in 2017, when her sentence is commuted by President Obama. Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange is not so lucky. To this day, he remains in Britain fighting extradition to the United States on espionage charges.

Then in 2013, there are even more leaks, this time from an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden. But before we dig into those, let’s take a quick listen to a Senate hearing on global national security threats. This exchange, broadcast by C-SPAN 3, occurs at 11:49 in the morning on March 12th of 2013 between Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and James Clapper, who serves as President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. For those of you who don’t know, Senator Wyden is a longtime civil rights advocate and staunch civil libertarian, while James Clapper is a pathetic worm of a man who long ago sold his soul to the National Security State in exchange for getting to be its head goon. Let’s listen: [BEGIN RECORDING]

        “Senator Wyden: LAST SUMMER THE NSA DIRECTOR WAS AT A CONFERENCE. HE WAS ASKED A QUESTION ABOUT THE NSA SURVEILLANCE OF AMERICANS. HE REPLIED, "THE STORY WE HAVE MILLIONS OR HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOSSIERS ON PEOPLE IS COMPLETELY FALSE." THE REASON I'M ASKING THE QUESTION, HAVING SERVED ON THE COMMITTEE NOW FOR A DOZEN OF YEARS, I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT A DOSSIER IS IN THIS CONTEXT. WHAT I WANTED TO SEE IS IF YOU COULD GIVE ME A YES OR NO ANSWER TO THE QUESTION. DOES THE NSA COLLECT ANY TYPE OF DATA AT ALL ON MILLIONS OR HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF AMERICANS?

DNI Clapper: NO, SIR.

Senator Wyden: IT DOES NOT?

DNI Clapper: NOT WITTINGLY. THERE ARE CASES WHERE THEY COULD INADVERTENTLY PERHAPS COLLECT BUT NOT WITTINGLY.

Senator Wyden: ALL RIGHT. THANK YOU. I'LL HAVE ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS TO GIVE YOU IN WRITING ON THAT POINT.” [END RECORDING]

        -Of course, Clapper is lying like the spy and the rat that he is, never mind that he’s under oath, speaking to the representatives of the people he purportedly serves. As a matter of fact the federal government is at that very moment collecting extensive data on every man, woman and child in the United States. This brings us back to Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor who sees Clapper lie under oath and abruptly quits his job with Dell and obtains a new contract via Booz Allen Hamilton, which gives him enough access to steal loads of files from government systems. In late May, Snowden takes a leave of absence and travels to Hong Kong, and in early June he releases a trove of classified US intelligence documents to journalists, including most notably Glenn Greenwald, who at that time works for the Manchester Guardian.

        -The Edward Snowden leaks are explosive, and there’s far too much to go into here. Much of the revelations involve the so-called Five Eyes countries: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who have all promised not to spy on each-other and instead to freely share their intelligence. Snowden reveals how these countries partner with telecom companies to hack into secure communications networks and spy on politicians and other influential people from around the world, even going so far as to record phone calls and blackmail people. But that’s just ordinary spy stuff, and it shouldn’t be all that surprising.

        -Of far more concern are the existence of two spy programs called DISHFIRE and PRISM. DISHFIRE is a database run by the US National Security Agency and the British Government Communications Headquarters, and it captures an astonishing amount of information: over 200 million text messages per day, and it can do all kinds of things with that data. Using advanced software, it automatically extracts financial transaction information, contact data such as email and physical addresses, geolocation data, missed call alerts, and can even track border crossings by registering roaming alerts. PRISM is a program that allows the NSA to intercept virtually any kind of digital communications, from email to direct messages to video chats. Edward Snowden provides evidence of the NSA gathering mass surveillance data from companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Skype, and YouTube. While the NSA is technically banned from collecting such data on Americans without a warrant, it nonetheless captures data on many Americans through bulk surveillance of foreign institutions like hospitals, universities, and businesses. Basically, if you’re an American chatting with anyone outside the US and your communications aren’t end-to-end encrypted, the US government is almost certainly listening in. For his role in revealing these government programs, Snowden is forced into exile. While en route from Hong Kong to Ecuador, he’s stopping over in Moscow when the United States government cancels his passport. Unable to legally board a plane, he seeks political asylum in Russia, where Putin sees an opportunity to stick his thumb in Uncle Sam’s eye and gives Snowden asylum in Moscow, where he remains to this day. The US media and intelligence establishment use this to try and smear him, with the most well-known version of the story being that Snowden is a Russian pawn or even a willing spy. He’s not. He’s just a guy who sees government abuse and blows the whistle.

        -Even after all this, DISHFIRE and PRISM are going concerns. And as millions of Americans go about their daily lives, their most personal secrets are scooped up and saved in digital files, which are, at least metaphorically, filed away in the briefcase in the basement of the White House.

The Obama years also see the rise of a new populist wave in the US. Some people like to see this as a right wing wave, others as a left wing wave, and in truth I think it’s a little of both. Certainly when it comes to Trump it takes a right wing form, but Bernie Sanders is a left wing populist who shares a lot of the same basic ideas about the economy and working-class Americans getting shafted by globalization and capitalism run amok. Obama has trouble dealing with this, since beneath his progressive exterior is an anodyne establishment politician in the vein of Bill Clinton or indeed either of the Bushes. He sees globalization as good because it’s worked so well in the past, not realizing that in the post-Cold War era it’s often more costly to the working class than it’s worth to the nation. This is borne out in the economic numbers. From 1979 to 2020, US worker productivity rises by 61.8% when adjusted for inflation, but inflation-adjusted wages increase by just 17.5%. When you factor out wage increases for the professional and managerial classes, wages for front line workers are all but stagnant.

        -Now throw in the 2008 housing crisis, which wipes out people’s savings, leaves many people homeless and forces many millennials to continue living with their parents. People in my age bracket are just getting out of college, entering an economy where even a good degree doesn’t guarantee a good job, and suddenly realizing that they’ll be paying off their college loans until they’re 50.

        -In 2011, the economic anger boils over into rage in what become known as the Occupy Wall Street protests. From September 17th through November 15th 2011, as many as a quarter of a million protesters occupy New York City’s Zuccotti Park and the surrounding areas. With the slogan “We are the 99%,” they protest against corporate greed and income inequality. But the ad hoc left-wing movement has no central leadership or goal, and the protests quickly devolve into chaos. Without any clear demands to present to authorities, most of the serious activists leave and are replaced by transients who come to take advantage of the food and other supplies sent to the protesters by supporters from around the country. Eventually, the camps are cleared out and the protests have no immediate policy outcome. But ideas are born in Zuccotti Park – ideas like the 99% and the 1%, and the campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

        -I should mention that the Occupy movement itself comes on the heels of a right-wing populist movement called the Tea Party movement, which had helped the Republican Party regain control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections. Now, these respective left- and right-wing movements are proposing different sets of policies, but they have something in common. Both are addressing real economic problems that the mainstream political class is ignoring.

-In 2016, this populist wave manifests in two Presidential campaigns. The first is Bernie Sanders, who almost manages to snag the Democratic nomination from Hilary Clinton. But love him or hate him, Bernie never sits in the Oval Office, and for that matter neither does Hilary. Instead, the Presidency goes to a strange man with an orange tan you get from a $5 spray can. I know what you’re thinking. Nobody likes to talk about Trump. Some people think he’s a hateful man and everyone who votes for him is hateful because he’s mean and evil and bad. Other people seem to think he can do no wrong, and will excuse any kind of behavior because he’s on their team. Just mentioning the man’s name activates people’s amygdalas and makes them want to write me angry emails. This is what we call tribalism, and it’s something monkeys do and it’s poisoning our society, so I’m going to try and turn off my monkey brain and apply some actual analysis to what happens during the Trump Presidency, which lasts from January 2017 to January 2021. And ladies and gentlemen I have faith. I have faith in you because you’re my audience and you’ve stuck with me for almost four hours at this point, and I – believe! – I truly believe, that you too are a beautiful and brilliant human being who can turn off your monkey brain. And together, we can get through this without anyone losing an eye. It’ll be easiest if we start by acknowledging that Trump wins in large part because a lot of would-be Bernie supporters vote for him in the general election. They may not like the man, but at least he’s acknowledging their pain, which is something they haven’t seen from any serious Presidential candidate since Ross Perot.

-Trump is inaugurated in January 2017; let’s set the stage, because the late 2010s represent a changing of the guard of sorts. The Baby Boomers are starting to retire, Gen Xers are finally starting to find themselves in senior leadership roles, and Millennials are slowly recovering from the housing crash. The oldest Millennials are even having kids of their own, and the oldest Zoomers are making the awkward transition from adolescence to young adulthood. Ed Sheeran is at the top of the music charts, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi is Number One at the box office. It’s only six years ago as I speak these words, but it might as well be twenty because we all know what happens.

-No, the Orange Man doesn’t impose a ban on Mexican food or invade Greenland. I’m not even going to talk about him threatening to withhold funds from the Ukrainian government if they don’t investigate his political opposition. Nor am I going to talk about how Biden’s crack-addicted son is somehow holding down a lucrative job with a Ukrainian oil firm at this same time. Those things are what we call sideshows because I’m going to tell you a secret: politics are dirty. They’re a dirty game for people who like to get down in the mud and grab their opponent by the balls, and today’s political families aren’t the enlightened leadership we used to have – they’re basically Mafia families. And whatever nepotism is going on with Papa Joe or whatever blackmail is going on with Daddy Trump is the kind of garbage you get when you have a system that incentivizes the worst kind of people to run for office.

-First, think of the narcissism it takes to think you can be President of the United States. I don’t care who you are or what your qualifications are; that takes some cojones! Now, think of the political parties. It doesn’t matter which one, because they’re both corrupt and you have to choose one or the other because our first-past-the-post system inevitably produces a binary choice. So now you’re a narcissist who’s willing to work in a corrupt system to get the job done, but as the late, great Billy Mays said, “That’s not all!” You also have to be willing to spend scads of time not even engaging with policy or talking to your constituents but glad-handing with the rich donors who keep the lights on in your campaign office. Most of the real, interesting work you can sink your teeth into is being done by unpaid interns, underpaid staffers, or unelected bureaucrats in what the Orange Man calls the “Deep State.” So on top of everything else, the ideal candidate is an incredibly shallow person who values the illusion of holding power while doing nothing of importance. This isn’t to say that there are no good politicians, but it does explain why there are so few decent people in Washington. Whatever shady dealings Trump or Biden or both may be up to, I can’t tell you, although future historians might. But you can bet that their secrets are locked up tight in the briefcase in the basement of the White House.

-But I digress. The reason the six years since 2017 feels like 20 years is because 2017 is the Before Time. Before the COVID pandemic and the societal reaction that’s sent much of the world into a tailspin. Again, I’m trying my best to do history here and I’m not a doctor and I’m not here to tell you whether or not lockdowns are right or wrong, or start pontificating about masks. There are plenty of other people doing all of those things. But there’s a huge wealth transfer from 2020 through 2021, probably the greatest wealth transfer in history. In the face of ubiquitous lockdowns, small- and medium-sized businesses find it hard to get by, even when government aid is available. Bigger companies are able to adapt and thrive, and the share of the world’s wealth held by billionaires increases from 2% to 3.5%, with a total wealth of $13.1 trillion in late 2021, up from $8 trillion at the beginning of 2020. This should surprise nobody who understands how government works. The elite hire lobbyists who write rules to favor their interests, and everybody else suffers. It’s called “class warfare,” the elite have been doing it ever since Nixon sold the working class out to China, and if you think the Orange Man isn’t in on the game, just remember who locked us down in the first place. Combine this hyper-concentration of wealth with the already-existing issues we’ve talked about with globalization, and it’s easy to understand how the past few years have seen a resurgence of populism not just in the West, but throughout the world. This was happening even before COVID. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalists took power in India in 2014 and have yet to look back. Erdoğan took power in Turkey that same year, and Viktor Orbán has been Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010. COVID has just added fuel to a fire that’s already burning.

At the height of COVID, we in the United States have an election, and it’s a rough one. The Orange Man says the media and the tech companies are unfairly censoring his supporters and tilting the playing field in favor of the opposition, and he’s telling the truth. Then the Orange Man says the opposition cheated when they win the election, and he’s lying. And then there’s a riot, and the National Security State panics, and I’m not even sure what’s going on with the prosecutions and the simultaneous investigations that are going on with the Biden family, but I can make an educated guess that there’s a lot of material getting typed up and filed away in the briefcase in the basement of the White House. And now we come to today. It’s 2023, we’re ridin’ with Biden, Russia has invaded Ukraine, the world is full of populists, China is about ready to invade Taiwan, Wagner Group mercenaries are in Africa kicking off military coups, and the war in Europe is starting to give off World War I vibes. There’s trench warfare, and it’s incredibly brutal on both sides. There’s also a shortage of artillery shells, which is something that pops up often in World War I, particularly early in the war.

        -Let’s not kid ourselves, though. There’s a specter looming over the battlefield in Europe, and its name is Nuclear War. I’m not trying to sound like some crazy alarmist, but consider what we know. The Russians are on their back foot, and while the Ukrainian summer offensive seems to have stalled, it seems like the Russian offensive will also achieve very little. So we’re looking at another campaign season, and the longer this drags on, the greater the odds that Vladimir Putin could decide to use a nuclear weapon. I’m not talking about the Russians launching all of their ICBMs and intentionally kicking off the apocalypse, but western planners believe that the current Russian nuclear strategy is something called “escalate to de-escalate.” Basically, the Russians will drop one or two bombs on the Ukrainian battlefield as a warning to the West to back off. Only if the West escalates will Russia consider a broader attack. No matter how you cut it, we’re looking at the potential for a nuclear battlefield and a truly dangerous path for humanity.

        -This takes us to nuclear policy, which is how a country is willing to use their nukes. Most nuclear powers make their nuclear policy clear, because that’s the best way to avoid miscommunication and blunder into a nuclear war. China’s policy is probably the clearest: no first use. In other words, China will only ever use nuclear weapons if somebody else uses nukes on them first. Their weapons are purely a deterrent. The UK nuclear policy reads: “We would consider using our nuclear weapons only in extreme circumstances of self-defence, including the defence of our NATO allies.” In other words, the UK won’t necessarily wait to get nuked. If enemy troops are at the gates of Buckingham Palace, they might use the bomb. They might also do the same for NATO allies. US policy is similar, although it emphasizes that the primary purpose of the US nuclear arsenal is deterrence, but that’s just semantics.

        -At this point I want to read the exact phrasing of the Russian policy on the use of nuclear weapons, as stated in a June 2020 decree by Vladimir Putin:

        “The Russian Federation retains the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

        -Now, listen to the words Putin uses in a February 2022 speech justifying the invasion of Ukraine:

        “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty.”

        -That phrasing, “very existence of our state,” is basically identical, and it speaks to how the Russian leader sees the current war. Now maybe this is bluster. But maybe it’s a serious warning to the West that should Russia start losing this war, they will consider using nukes to force a favorable conclusion.

        -Don’t believe me? Here’s what retired US Brigadier General Kevin Ryan has to say in a June 21st 2023 interview with Boston’s NPR station, and Ryan is talking about the Russian deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Belarus. He says:

        “Why would you need to deploy tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus? That's the big question. Putin hasn't really given a satisfactory answer why he would do that. He may be just trying to set up a situation which he can use later as leverage and negotiations with the West. ‘Well, I might be willing to remove these, if you did some other things yourself.’

        “But Russia in general doesn't waste money. They're not a rich country. And they wouldn't go through all of this hubbub with their nuclear weapons, moving them to Belarus, if there wasn't a strategic reason for it. I don't know the exact reason, but it certainly puts a greater threat for their use on the table. In January, President Putin assigned three new military leaders to run his what he calls ‘special military operation.’ He also calls it a war now.

        “And they are the chief of the general staff. That's like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley's counterpart, Gerasimov. There's the head of the ground forces, Salyukov. And the head of the aerospace forces, the Air Force, Surovikin. What's important about these guys is that they are the three officers who control the use of tactical nuclear weapons once they are authorized. And they're on the ground there.

        “So he has the three most loyal officers in position to use tactical nuclear weapons. There's really no other reason for these three people to have been selected to run this special military operation. In fact, it's kind of counterproductive. And against military, I'll say doctrine or tradition, to have your chief of the general staff out there running field operations in war.”

        -If Putin isn’t at least seriously considering nukes, he’s sure putting on a good show. This is something we should seriously think about. What is the Western response if, for example, the Ukrainian Army manages to punch a hole in Russian lines and rather than allow a Ukrainian breakthrough and lose a bunch of ground, the Russians decide to plug that hole in their lines with a nuclear bomb? We can have this conversation now, or we can have it later when everybody is panicking and nobody is thinking rationally.

        -Most of all, we have to recognize how lucky we’ve been in the West, and especially in the US. Baby Boomers grew up in an age when the United States was supreme. Most of the world was still rebuilding from World War II, which left American industry with many markets and few competitors. With the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve enjoyed unchecked growth and expansion. And by “we” I also mean Millennials. We had a bumpy start, with many of us getting started in the Great Recession. But we’ve grown up in a world where America was king. Well, now it’s time to grow up.

        -We live in the real world, and whether we like it or not, spheres of influence exist. We cannot wish Russian nukes out of existence, nor can we change Russian nuclear policy to suit our wishes. If Russia wants to control part of Ukraine, they’re going to control it. That’s not defeatism. That’s certainly not any love for Vladimir Putin. There was an earlier generation of Americans we call the Greatest Generation, and they won World War II, and when the war ended there was a line of American and British troops and a line of Soviet troops, and most of the Americans and Brits didn’t have anything nice to say about Joseph Stalin, other than that he’d helped the Allies win the war. But this generation, the Greatest Generation, also didn’t make war on Joseph Stalin and fight the Red Army back to Moscow where they belonged and liberate Eastern Europe from the Communists. General Patton wanted to, and he got relieved of command in part for talking a little too loudly about it. My point is that they’d beaten the Nazis and they decided that enough was enough. There didn’t need to be another war with millions of more dead.

        -So maybe we should take a lesson from them, and remember that a negotiated settlement is historically the most common outcome of a war. It’s almost certain that Russia will keep Crimea. It’s likely they keep part of the Donbas. It’s just a question of how many people die before that happens. And again, this doesn’t mean we have to like it. I’m no more a fan of Vladimir Putin than I am of Joseph Stalin, but I’m also not a fan of nuclear war, and that’s where we could be headed if this thing escalates much more.

Of course, thinking rationally would require getting out of our own tribal bubbles, shutting down our monkey brains, and pulling together as Americans. This in turn would require us to overcome our greatest obstacle, which is fear of the other tribe. I know that can be hard in America because our politics are just so damn wacky, which is exactly why I try not to have any tribe, even though that can also be hard sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of the Orange Man. He’s a sexual creep-o with the linguistic IQ of a fourth grader. But that doesn’t mean I’m lining up to root for someone as transparently corrupt as Joe Biden. I’m sorry. They’re both awful people who should probably be in prison, and it’s depressing that our political system seems once again to be serving up a couple of terrible choices, but let’s talk about this. Let’s play out where this story could go.

        -We could see the story of a quick ending. This winter, with the war continuing to drag on and damaging both the Russian and Ukrainian economies, both sides agree to a negotiated settlement. Crimea becomes part of Russia, while the Donbas comes under UN occupation pending a plebiscite on the territory’s future, which is to be held under UN observation at some point in the near future. The upside of this ending is obvious: there’s a quick end to the war with fewer overall casualties. The downside is that we might see a sequel. With its military intact and already fully mobilized, Russia may decide to attack the Suwałki Corridor, that bit of land in Poland and Lithuania that separates the bulk of the country from its Kaliningrad exclave. This attack on two NATO countries would draw the US into a direct war with Russia, with the obvious extreme risk of things going nuclear. Then again, maybe Russia takes the small win and stands down, in which case everyone can take a deep breath.

        -We could see a different story with a longer war. Biden wins the election and does exactly what the National Security State tells him. The briefcase stays locked securely beneath the White House and we carry on. The war in Ukraine continues with US support, it’s competently run, and there’s a solution at some point in the future. The upside of this version of the story is that it’s more likely to have a happy ending for the Ukrainian people. They may break through the Russian lines, particularly once they’ve got F-16 fighters, and if they can manage that and pull off a strategic encirclement of a big chunk of the Russian Army, they could get their country back. Then again, maybe the Russians break through instead and gobble up even more of Ukraine. Or maybe Putin’s chiefs of staff decide to drop a nuke or two to knock the Ukrainians back. The longer things go on, the more likely things could get really ugly, and I mean like in a Cormac McCarthy kind of way, with survivors wandering a post-nuclear wasteland.

        -Maybe instead of Part Two of a Biden Presidency, we get President Trump: The Sequel. He can take the oath of office in his prison jumpsuit before immediately pardoning himself and getting to work smashing the Deep State. In all seriousness, I think it might be pretty cool to see President Trump clean house at the FBI and the CIA and abolish the National Security State, assuming they don’t arrange for him to have an accident first. He might even show us some or all of what they’ve been hiding in that briefcase under the White House. And if you’re a liberal like me and this upsets you, remember that we’re talking about the organizations that probably killed JFK, MLK, and RFK, and that that created the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and who knows how many other smaller wars. We’re talking about spies and snakes and narcs who hide in the shadows and listen in on people’s phone calls. People who entrap mentally-disabled Muslim kids into confessing to terrorism, just to boost their numbers. It’s about damn time somebody cleans house. Then again, we all know the Orange Man only cares about himself, which means he’s bound to mishandle the house cleaning. There are, after all, legitimate security concerns that need to be responsibly handled. That’s the problem with dismantling something as embedded in our society as the National Security State. The same FBI and CIA and other three-letter agencies that do so much damage also do things like catch bank robbers and child predators and actual terrorists who really do want to kill people. You can’t just take a sledgehammer to the security state. You have to dismantle it piece by piece and simultaneously build a new institution with more limited powers to take over important responsibilities. If you think the Orange Man is capable of doing that and doing it responsibly, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Worse, remember that a man like Trump is likely to be tempted to use whatever is in the briefcase for his own ends. He’s not going to open it up. Remember, he had a chance to tell the truth once and for all about the JFK assassination and kept the documents under wraps. Never mind the Ukraine situation. The Orange Man will immediately move to cut off funding without trying to negotiate any kind of settlement, and the Ukrainians will be left to suffer, and it will be another foreign policy embarrassment for the United States. That story ends better than nuclear war, but it’s still not a happy ending.

        -Those are the most likely endings to my story, and I don’t like any of them. There are other would-be great men who might step up. There’s Florida Man and the Entrepreneur and the Fat Man from Jersey. If we’re being honest, the odds of any of them beating the Orange Man and challenging Biden are slim, but it could happen. And in any ordinary year, any one of those guys would make a decent leader. But we are at an inflection point, and I don’t think a single one of them, or the Orange Man, or Grandpa Joe has both a full appreciation of what’s going on and the desire to do something about it.

        -Yes, the next great man has to make peace, but it has to be a credible, stable peace. It can’t be a peace that leaves Ukraine vulnerable to another attack in 10 years, or invites Russia to attack our NATO allies. That kind of peace will only get more people killed, especially if it ends with the US getting sucked into a direct showdown with Russia. At the same time, it would be nice if the next President opens up the briefcase in the basement of the White House and ends the National Security State, but like I said that also has to be handled delicately.

        -Most of all, I don’t think any of these men understand the times we’re living in. The 20th Century saw the collision of three great ideologies: Fascism, Communism, and Capitalism. Capitalism won; the West won. But ideologies are always at their worst when they’re allowed to run loose un-checked. Nazism didn’t need to be destroyed because Hitler wanted to build a better Germany for the German people. It had to be destroyed because Hitler wanted to make room for that Germany by killing millions of Poles and Jews. Communism isn’t repulsive because it aims to make all people equal. It’s repulsive because it destroys their freedom and their agency in the process. And un-checked capitalism isn’t corrosive because a bunch of people get rich. It’s corrosive because the entire system relies upon constant growth year upon year ad infinatum, so everything that’s small and local and wholesome and human gets swallowed up by the corporate. You can board an Acela train in Washington DC and order an Egg McMuffin at McDonald’s, then get off seven hours later in Boston and nab a Big Mac for dinner on your way to your hotel. Along the way, you’ll pass through Baltimore and Philly and New York, and if you’re listening to conversations, unless you’re listening to the older generation, the local accents are all but gone. Everything’s homogenizing into this bland monoculture, but it’s cheap and it’s efficient and the stock market keeps rising. We don’t have a free market. We have a capitalist market, which means it’s run by and for capital. Those who have the money write the rules. Big banks get bailouts and little old ladies get foreclosed and thrown out in the street. You know the drill. All of this to say that capitalism has gotten us a long way, but un-checked capitalism is a real danger. Marry that un-checked capitalism to a military-industrial complex that needs customers and a National Security State with the ability to create those customers, and you end up with all kinds of perverse incentives that fool good people into doing bad things.

I have one more ending up my sleeve. It’s not a particularly likely ending, but I set out to tell a story and I’m gonna finish it. Along comes another man, not a perfect man by any means, but the kind of man who can make a credible peace – he’s JFK’s nephew and RFK’s son, RFK Jr. He’s known for his – let’s just call them “controversial” – views on vaccines. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about RFK Jr.’s views on foreign policy and the National Security State. He wants to make peace with the Russians, and with his pedigree he actually has the credibility to get a deal done that works for Ukraine and ensures that the conflict won’t flare back up in five or ten years. And he’s promised to tell the truth about the National Security State, which by the way is the same thing as the so-called “Deep State,” it’s just a different name for the bureaucracy that controls our national security apparatus.

        -I admit, it’s gonna be a fight. Thanks to Reagan’s deregulation of the telecom industry, 90% of legacy media is owned by six companies: Disney, Comcast, AT&T, CBS, Viacom, and Newscorp. That’s a lot of power held by a handful of people in the billionaire class whose interests are deeply aligned with those of the Military-Industrial Complex. And thanks to the Twitter Files, we now know that our intelligence agencies are involved behind the scenes in social media companies, directly manipulating what we can and cannot say in our online conversations. Not only are these agencies directly involved, but former intelligence officers are all over the moderation teams of social media companies. There’s a link on that in the description, and it’s pretty wild how many ex spooks are deciding what we get to see online. As RFK Jr. himself puts it in an article in The Guardian: “What do you think is more dangerous? The attack on the Capitol building on January 6 or the revelations that the White House has been using the CIA and the FBI to censor its critics? What do you think is more dangerous for the republic? Both parties are doing things that are equally dangerous.” I’m inclined to agree, and I’m inclined to think we stand at a point of crisis, where we Americans could lose our Republic, and that’s a big part of what moved me to make this episode.

        -Crisis means risk, but it also means opportunity, and I do see some stars aligning. Elon Musk has bought Twitter and turned it into a free speech app, so there’s at least a temporary platform for open debate. How long the App Formerly Known as Twitter will last is anyone’s guess – my guess is until someone comes up with something better, which is easier said than done – but it should remain relevant at least for this election cycle. Just remember that “free speech” doesn’t always mean “honest speech”. A lot of people on social media are just out there to stir the pot, and controversy generates clicks like nothing else. Worse, and I don’t have any proof, but I’m fairly certain that a large number of accounts are being run by intelligence agencies and other bad actors, and are intentionally stoking division in our society. A lot of this takes the form of gatekeeping, public shaming, and dogpiling, and especially in the last case it can be hard to distinguish the bad guys from the idiots who are just trying to get clicks. Look… I consider myself a free speech absolutist, but it’s not a panacea. People are going to try to sow division, and we should all be alert for it. If we can do that, then maybe we can have an honest conversation. I have a poetic sense of history, and I like the idea of a Kennedy setting things right, but I’m just one guy. It’s up to you to decide.

        -The other fortuitous aligning of the heavens is a citizens group called No Labels. This organization is getting ballot access in all 50 states for something they call “Insurance Policy 2024.” Should they succeed, they intend to hold a convention in April 2024 and if they decide that the two major parties have both nominated unpopular candidates, they’ll nominate a Unity Ticket, meaning a President and a Vice President from opposite parties, so that’s something to watch out for. Would these people be able to avoid nuclear war? Would they open the briefcase? We don’t know yet.

One thing I do know, and that’s that most of us, wherever we are in America, wherever we are in the world, we share the same dreams. We want to live our lives in peace, spend time with our families, and if we can have a little fun along the way, so much the better, and if every now and then our lives brush against the numinous then we’re living them to the fullest. And yes, there are elites who love to keep us divided. One of the great men we talked about today, Lyndon Johnson, once said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” He was talking about racial politics in the American South during the Civil Rights Era, but the same principle applies in any context. We’re social animals, and nobody wants to be on the bottom of the totem pole so to speak. It’s easy to keep people divided, keep us kicking at each other, because we evolved to be tribal and cliquish and mob-like. The hardest thing to do is the thing we must do – turn off our monkey brains and engage with one another as people. Because what the elite fear most is average people coming together. If we can do that – if we can do it just once, just for a few minutes to fix our Republic – I think we’ll be in good shape.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of my story, and I’m sorry if the ending is a mystery. Then again, that’s life, isn’t it? We live in a prison called the Present, and every moment in the past is unchangeable and every moment in the future is unknowable. But what strikes me is that when it comes to who is going to be the next Great Man, most of the characters in this story aren’t talking about the National Security State, or if they are they touch on it briefly before going on to some other issue. Some are happy with the status quo. Others will tell you about their infrastructure plan, or what they want to do about healthcare, or how they think the top tax rate should go from 37% to 38%, but they’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If we stumble into nuclear war, then none of that matters, and that’s what we risk with most of these individuals in the driver’s seat. We in the US have an opportunity to get back to the Monroe Doctrine and a sane foreign policy and maybe, just maybe do what Eisenhower said and at long last beat our swords into plowshares and rebuild our society. This requires honesty, integrity, and above all an open government that has regained the trust of its citizens. Want to win my vote? Spare me your tax plans and culture war mantras. I want to know what’s in the briefcase.

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