Matt Welch
speaker
460 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Matt Welch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We're the only ones who are acknowledging the reality that Ukraine can't win. So now what? And I get that. That's an argument. What's not an argument is to single out Zelensky as the dictator in the exchange between these two countries. So we'll see how popular that is among Americans. I think it's an open question.
I think quickly, Zelensky screwed up for his people. He's eaten his words. And I wouldn't be surprised if Donald Trump announces a signing of a minerals deal at the State of the Union address tonight. Zelensky screwed up, but I don't think Trump took the high road in the run-up to the meeting. There's a lot of diplomatic activity in the week, 10 days beforehand.
And I don't think Zelensky was treated particularly nicely in that process.
But nor did Biden nor Obama.
Honestly, I think what Ukraine wants is to be part of the negotiations in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. They don't want to be where the Czechs were in the Munich Agreement and where all of Eastern Europe was in 19- It's shuttle diplomacy.
That's like what they want. I think this is that's what they're seeking. And they want a security guarantee. There's this sort of kabuki theater that goes like this. Emmanuel Macron in France wants to be wants to lead a European only like a semi NATO. They want to sort of detach. This has been French goals and foreign policy since forever. Cool, right? I like it. You like it. Everyone likes it.
And then look at the fine print of what he says when he's out and saying, my dear Donald, at the White House last week, saying, we just want we want to do that. And we're ready to even have our troops and boots on the ground, except, of course, not in combat areas. So that's exactly right. Some pretty French boots on the ground and now British boots, too. But we just want the U.S. solidarity.
We want a U.S. backstop. This is a French way of saying we want the U.S. to be the one doing the guarantees. Europeans. Germany, too. Germany is the worst. Frederick Merz, I mean, he's also talking about one of some of the strongest game right now. We need to declare independence for the United States. We need to create our own European security.
We need to spend five percent of GDP or whatever the number is. This is an acceleration towards that. Well, it might. The Germans have not done it. Of course not. No, no. You've never you've never gotten.
That's the problem. 80% or so of all of NATO actual warfighting capability is American. The munitions, certainly the leadership. And this is a really important part. Like NATO has been able, the Western European countries have been able to underfund NATO and benefit from their security without the burden of responsibility for NATO's decisions. Forever.
And so what Ukraine needs in order to survive, to make a ceasefire something different than just like a five years to wait before Russia pulverizes you again, is for someone to secure their their future, that someone should be Western Europe. Western Europe says they want that to happen, but they actually so far lack the balls to actually do that.
So everyone's dancing around each other in these negotiations trying to get over that fact. I think Donald Trump and I disagree with how he's done it and sort of the approach. I think he's accelerated towards that future, a future that needs to happen, which is that Western Europe has to put on its big boy pants.
Oh, yeah.
Unbelievable.
Didn't all four of us talk about this exact thing in similar, maybe not quite as harsh as Chuck Todd's words on this for several years? Like your family's falling apart and you're running as family man. What the hell are you doing? It's it's crazy to see this.
I'm reminded earlier you mentioned how it was in March or April of 20 of last year when there was the fundraiser that Joe Biden went to Radio City Music Hall instead of the funeral of the cop. We were on your show that morning and we talked about that. I remember that that happened in March or April of last year.
And when did George Clooney come out and say, wow, Biden's Biden's memory sure was going. Yeah. Four months later, July. Four months later. So Chuck Todd, dude, welcome to the whatever this is. But like that stuff about Joe Biden being a family man guy for 50 years and it being a bunch of horse pucky and people knowing that it's horse pucky and that his family is an absolute catastrophe.
What part of that is new? I don't know. I just don't know.
Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us, Megan.
Oh, that was bizarre. She was looking, Congressman Krakow was looking right at me the entire time, talking about how we want to lie on the world and all this other stuff. And she was really animated. I could not, I made the mistake of trying to follow what she was saying. Uh, which is confusing. Uh, so yeah, it was very strange. The whole hearing was bizarre.
Showing 241–260 of 460 · page 13 of 23
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