David

Well, I guess also, I mean, this is a point that John Cipher, former CIA officer and also friend of the show, we did a live stream with a while back on Epstein and the Russia connection.

He has made the case in writing for many years now that Russia...

is effectively an intelligence state and its foreign policy is conducted primarily by its intelligence services.

And those intelligence services, going back even to sort of Tsarist times, had embedded in them this concept of active measures, of not necessarily going out and just stealing plans and intentions, secrets around capabilities, but in actually shaping the environment around Russia politically.

to make it more amenable to Russian interests.

And so I think that is different from the way the Chinese have used their intelligence services.

I mean, to your point, Tom, it's the Chinese are engaged in a massive, you know, sort of generational wealth transfer program back to China of all kinds of IP and commercial secrets and all of that.

The Russians, I'm sure, do that.

But the Russian services bureaucratically just seem much more focused on kind of

trying to shape the environment around them.

Hence why it would make sense to be paying off British MPs to create division in the country and try to tilt British politics in a more pro-Russian manner.

Yeah, I would agree.

I think

I think there has been a revenge of geopolitics.

There has been a failure of whatever multilateral institutions and machinery we had designed to try to

control these impulses, that is clearly not helping to solve big transnational problems.

And I also think in the States, we've had a, you know, we've obviously, we've had a collapse of our own political consensus on the US role in the world.

I mean, there was always debate, but there was far more uniformity in opinion across both sides of the aisle, you know, 30 years ago about what the US should be doing in the world than we have today.

So I think all those things together,

for me, as an American who lives in Texas, are kind of, you know, that makes me a little gloomy.