Konstantin Kisin

i i kind of it's strange for us because we're not immersed in american culture nearly as much when we look at conflicts that are happening now ukraine israel uh and you know the left and right split in different ways on those issues both within and against each other etc but you hear a lot of people say this thing like i'm not dying for ukraine or we're not sending american boys which is kind of like

weird in the current context, because that really isn't remotely what's happening in either of those conflicts, nor is it the direction of travel, nor does the United States have a draft.

So even if America did put boots on the ground, which it has no intention of doing, they would be people who volunteered for that.

But the cultural dominance of this thing of like, we're not dying for a foreign country, does that come from Vietnam?

Well, again, as an outsider, that does seem like the smart position because those two other extremes, you know, the neocon wars of the 2000s don't seem to me to have been beneficial to anybody, especially America.

say nothing of the people that were killed, et cetera.

And the neo-isolationist position or the isolationist position seems to me a little bit naive.

We had a big debate about this with a guy called Dave Smith, who's very popular representing that point of view.

Because if you are going to be the most powerful country in the world, you are gonna have to control territory beyond your own borders.

And sometimes that means getting physical.

I'm not hearing much strategic interest for the United States in that explanation, though.

well the weird position of the biden administration was is like ukraine is going to win but we're not going to give them the weapons to do it so so it's like well they could have won maybe or look it depends on you know the ukrainian flag is not going to be flying over the kremlin anytime soon but they could have pushed russia back to the 1991 borders now unlikely but if you've given them proper support they might have done that but you can't but it's sort of it was like it was all pom-poms and no no actual support

yeah it wasn't zero but it wasn't the support that they needed so this kind this is kind of how i i certainly think and i'm from russia and i have a lot of ukrainian family how we've ended up where we are what about israel and the the war against hamas how do you talk to your students about that

But does America have a national interest in being allied with Israel?

By the time this episode goes out, everyone will have forgotten about Kevin Roberts, who we've had on the show, by the way.

But what I'm asking is, what is the strategic interest for the United States in being allied with Israel?

Forget about Gaza.

That's where the conversation on the right in America really is.

And by the way, on the left, too, I think.

Why is America allied with Israel?