Francis Foster

so and half of germany being effectively controlled by the ussr so unless you're prepared to tolerate that you are always going to get into a standoff with russia and therefore if you don't expand nato

into Latvia, Lithuania, they just become, they get taken over by Russia in some form.

And if we say, well, Russia's got nuclear weapons, we always just, we've got to be careful, well, when does that end?

At some point, there is a tension that has to be addressed, even in a nuclear world.

Isn't that inevitable, Eric?

I mean, I guess... You're doing your whole, I'm just a comedian thing now.

We're free America.

Well, you're free American.

Well, Poland increasingly is us, but Russia isn't.

Yes, but neither of those places is in Russia, Eric.

Yeah, and we're also all thinking out loud.

This isn't something we came prepackaged to, right?

I don't agree with that, actually, but there's also a lot to unpack elsewhere.

I mean, the greatest objection, I think, to what you're saying is that Russia sees itself as being a separate civilization.

Russia sees itself as the descendant of the Eastern Christian civilization, and there's a continuation of it, in fact.

So the idea that an alliance is possible, but I think what you're talking about, which is absorption, I don't think there's ever been any appetite for that.

But even once you've done that, look, Russia has a brief experiment with democracy in the 90s.

It doesn't work out.

And people will say, oh, the evil Americans came and ruined.

That's not what happened.