David Sacks is one of the “Big Four” GOP technology funders/activists, along with Keith Krach, Elon Musk, and of course Peter Thiel. Sacks is a somewhat new and rapidly emerging influencer and funder, who is one of the co-host of the very popular All-In Podcast. I caught up with Sacks on Wednesday early evening on the East Coast with him on the West Coast. Here is that audio, transcript, and video:

Audio:

Video:

Transcript:

HH: Joined now by David Sacks of Craft Ventures and the co-host of the All In podcast, as well as a big presence on Twitter. Hello, David. Thank you for joining me. I’m very glad you did.

DS: Good to be here. Thanks, Hugh.

HH: Now I’ve spent a lot of time with some of your friends like Peter Thiel, and I just got off an hour-long interview with Tristan Harris of the Center For Humane Technology. Are you familiar with Tristan?

DS: I don’t think so. I’m not, not that I know of.

HH: Okay, well, I am only learning about the All In podcast, and I listened to the Vivek interview with great interest, because I interviewed him yesterday.

DS: Yeah.

HH: And then I listen to Bill Gurley interview with even more interest. But I have a problem. I don’t know your voice, yet. The only time I’d ever heard your voice was on the Twitter thing with Ron DeSantis. It was so choppy, I couldn’t get a good, I’ve been doing this for 33 years. But I still couldn’t get it in. When you were doing biographies, which was really the most interesting part of both podcasts, somebody said they like Shoe Dog, Man in the Arenas, and Hamilton. Was that you?

DS: I don’t know. Let’s see. No, I don’t think so. Wait, so a voice said that those were, oh, that those were books that they liked?

HH: Biographies. You guys were talking about biographies.

DS: Biographies. Yes, I think that was a friend of mine, Brad Gerstner, who was also on the pod. So yeah, no, unfortunately, that was not me.

HH: Okay, so tell me what biographies you read, because I actually think it’s one of the most interesting questions you can ask somebody.

DS: Yeah, I mean, there’s been a bunch. I don’t read as many as I used to. I guess probably the best biography I read, well, I really like Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, which is historical fiction.

HH: Sure. I like his Burr, even though it’s counterfactual. But I like Burr.

DS: I like, there’…(laughing) Yeah, I like the First Man in Rome series, actually.

HH: Oh…

DS: …about

HH: Oh, we are soulmates.

DS: …by Colleen McCullough.

HH: You know, why is that not on audiobook? You can only read them twice. You can’t, I could listen to them endlessly and get the pronunciations done, but that’s a seven-book series, which is fabulous, because it’s all Plutarch and Tacitus made real.

DS: Yeah.

HH: So that’s a very good and interesting thing.

DS: Yeah, I love that series. It kind goes from Marius to Caesar to Augustus, that whole sort of last century of the Roman Republic.

HH: It ends with Augustus, yeah.

DS: Yeah.

HH: And after that, if one goes off, you can read further. But historical fiction does a very good job. I’m curious, have you read any of Churchill like the three-volume Manchester book on Churchill?

DS: Yes, I was going to mention that. The Alone book, the one from, was it like 1933-1940, basically, talking about the wilderness years?

HH: Yes.

DS: Yeah, I’m a big fan of that, and I was going to mention that book, too.

HH: The reason I bring that up is because I’m very familiar with your stance on Ukraine, and I think if Winston Churchill could channel in right now, he would say you’re forgetting the Sudetenland, you’re forgetting the Anschluss, you’re forgetting Munich, David. You’re forgetting everything I tried to warn Neville about, and before him, Stanley Baldwin. How would you respond to that ghost?

DS: Well, I mean, this is always the neocon argument, is that it’s always Nineteen-Thirty…

HH: I’m not a neocon. I’m a Reagan conservative.

DS: Okay, well, let’s just say that this is always the argument that you hear, is that it’s always 1938, that our enemy is always Hitler, and engaging in any diplomacy whatsoever would be akin to appeasement, and you’re Neville Chamberlain. And so this is what I’ve been hearing throughout this war. And what I would just say is that every historical circumstance is different. I think, you know, I’m very familiar with what happened in World War II and what led up to it, and I just think that the situation we have today really bears no resemblance to that. I don’t think the idea that Putin is Hitler is a serious argument. I don’t think that this is primarily a war of conquest. I think the cause, the causes of this war have been known for decades, which mainly has to do with Russian security concerns which the West continuously ignored. We ignored the advice of George Kennan in the 1990s in bringing NATO right up to Russia’s door. He predicted that would be a tragic mistake that would end in hostilities. We ignored the advice of our own ambassador to Moscow in 2008, Bill Burns, who is now the CIA director, who told us that expanding NATO to Ukraine was a red line for the Russians, not just Putin, but the entire Russian elite. It was absolutely a red line for Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as well as various liberal reformers inside of Russia. We ignored the advice of Kissinger and Mearsheimer, Professor Mearsheimer in 2014 who warned us we were headed for this war unless we agree to make Ukraine a neutral country. And instead, we ignored all of this advice for many years, and we persisted in this crusade to bring Ukraine into NATO and basically turn it into a giant military base on Russia’s most vulnerable border. And not surprisingly, Russia reacted quite negatively to this, as was predicted many times over the years by all the experts I mentioned, including many others. And yet we, again, we persisted in this policy. And the results now have been disastrous. We’re in this war. It’s going very badly. I think the war is an absolute disaster for Ukraine. I think the administration was pinning its hopes on a successful counteroffensive. Remember the narrative we were told for the whole last year, or at least certainly since the fall of Kharkiv, was that we were going to arm the Ukrainians. We appropriated over $100 billion dollars to them. And the idea was that we would have this successful spring counteroffensive. The Ukrainians, with the help of American armor and weapons, would punch through the Russian lines. They would scatter. They would turn tail and run. They would be disorganized. They were demoralized and ineffective and corrupt, and that within a period of even three to four days, that you’d see significant progress. And within a couple of months, the Ukrainians would be at the Sea of Azov. They would cut off the land bridge to Crimea, and the Russians would have to sue for peace, and that was going to be the end of this whole matter. Well, obviously that hasn’t worked out. Where things stand today is that the counteroffensive has moved incredibly slowly. Even publications like CNN and the Washington Post, which are incredibly pro-Ukraine, are admitting that the reports from the battle lines are sobering, that the losses have been staggering, that the Ukrainians have made little progress. And there is no serious prospect for them making serious, for retaking territory in a serious way. So what you’re starting to hear now are words like quagmire. You’re starting to, you know, hear words like this is going to be a multiyear war. They’re already giving up on this year, that now they’re planning for next year. And once again, the United States has found itself in another quagmire. So, and not to mention that Ukraine has just become completely destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. Over 10 million of their population are now refugees, have had to flee the country. The infrastructure has been destroyed. The economy has been destroyed. And again, they’re not retaking this territory. So I think at some point, we’re going to have to recognize that we are going to have to do what we always needed to do, which was engage in serious diplomacy to solve this conflict. And sadly, we’re going to recognize that fact, I think, after this country is completely destroyed and the West has basically fought to the last Ukrainian. So I’ll stop there and give you a chance…

HH: Now David, I always like to tell, well, I like to tell my audience it’s not a debate.

DS: Yeah.

HH: It’s an interview. I want to know what you think and why you think.

DS: Yeah.

HH: I get three hours a day, five days a week to tell people why I think we ought to arm the Ukrainians, so I don’t need to debate you. I want to know what you think. Vivek was on [Monday], and he told me he wants to impose a peace in place and deal with Putin, disengage him from China. And we talked for 45 minutes. He had another engagement. And I didn’t really get into the specifics of how he would propose to do that. Now you’re close with Governor DeSantis. Governor DeSantis regrets, I know, the territorial dispute. I don’t hold that against him. I think he’s talking about diplomacy at a more higher range. But in your mind, you’ve taken companies from zero to great success. How do you get from where we are to where you think we want to get to? I mean, just in your mind, what do you think happens here? If someone adopted the David Sacks plan…

DS: Well, I think that we’re in a very tough position now, because the deal that we can get today is not the deal that we could have gotten back in March or April of 2022. And it’s certainly not the deal we could have gotten in mid-2021 when Biden had the summit with Putin. I think we could have resolved this matter very easily. What the Russians were looking for, again, throughout 2021, and they made this really clear in a draft treaty they proposed in December of 2021, is the most important thing is they wanted a written guarantee that we would not bring Ukraine into NATO. Secondarily, they were very concerned about our placement of dual-use missiles, missile launchers, in NATO countries like Poland and Romania. I think we could have negotiated on those points, too. I don’t know why we had to abrogate the ABM and INF treaties, but that’s sort of a separate matter. But the main thing they wanted, their primary concern, was about NATO expansion. And I do not think that it would have cost us much of anything to make that, to give them that assurance. But instead, the administration took the point of view that there can be no change, there will be no change, that we are committed to this idea of an open door policy for NATO. This is what Blinken said. And we categorically refused to negotiate on the question of whether NATO’s door would remain open. And yet today, after Vilnius, there is no prospect of bringing Ukraine into NATO. Jens Stoltenberg himself said that Ukraine would not be joining NATO unless and until they win this war. But there is no prospect for them winning this war. We are out of ideas, frankly, on how to help them. And so there is no…

HH: So David, if you got…

DS: Yeah.

HH: If Ron DeSantis became president, and he said David, I want you to be my Harry Hopkins. You don’t have to live at the White House, but you’re going to be my Harry Hopkins. Go wherever you need to go to make the world safer for America’s national security. Where would you go and what would you ask for?

DS: Well, let me just say, to be clear, because you mentioned DeSantis a couple of times, I have supported him, and I do support him, because I think he’s done an excellent job in Florida.

HH: Superb. I’m neutral.

DS: I don’t want, yeah, I don’t want to give the impression that somehow I’m like a foreign policy advisor to him or something like that, because he has his own views, and he needs to speak for himself on this issue. You know, what I would recommend is, and I think Vivek was on to something here, is that one of the really negative consequences, one of the many negative consequences of our handling of Ukraine and this war is that we have absolutely pushed Russia into the arms of the Chinese. And China really is, being the only real pure competitor to the U.S. in the world, it really should be the primary focus of U.S. security. And you know, the strategy we should have pursued, and I think Vivek made this point, is it should have been more akin to what Nixon did with China, which is we always try to divide the Soviet Union and China, not have them link arms. And notably, we tried to do that even though they were both Communist countries. And you know, whatever you think of Putina and Russia today, it’s, the authoritarian nature of Russia today, it pales in comparison to the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union or Mao’s China back then. And so this idea that we somehow couldn’t make a deal with Putin when we could make a deal with Mao, I don’t accept that. I think there was a deal to be made. And I think Vivek is right that we need to stop pushing Russia into China’s arms. Where I think maybe he’s being, maybe where he’s simplifying is this idea that this is something we can fix overnight. I think the best we can hope for…

HH: You know…Vivek is a very fast learner.

DS: Well, he’s simplifying.

HH: He’s a very fast learner, but he’s still got a lot to learn.

DS: Yeah.

HH: And he’s drawn a red line around Taiwan, but he’s going to erase it as soon as we are semiconductor independent. That didn’t go over too well when I talked with him on [Monday] among the national security crowd, which you call The Blob. And it can be sometimes the blob. You’re absolutely right. But vis-à-vis Xi, who makes Mao look like a piker, Xi is our 1938. Putin is our 1914. And there’s a book called The Sleepwalkers by Kenneth Clark, which I’ll recommend to you, David. But I’m going to go back. We are where we are. We can’t go back in a way back machine to two years ago. Tom Cotton said we could have deterred this completely by not leaving Kabul and giving it to the Taliban and inviting the Chinese in to take Bagram. I don’t know who’s right. We are where we are.

DS: No, that’s, that’s not correct.

HH: So you’re Harry Hopkins.

DS: That’s not correct.

HH: Okay.

DS: Listen, the, let me address that point. I mean, the rhetoric that you hear from neocons, and what I mean by that is hardline militarists, and I would include Tom Cotton in that, and look, I like Senator Cotton in other ways, okay? I don’t want to be disparaging.

HH: Would you define hardline militarist for me?

DS: It’s somebody who perceives the world in a very hawkish way, and wants America’s first response to any international crisis to be militaristic versus diplomatic. And I would further say, and this is a point I want to make about deterrence, is that they have a tendency to think that any bad thing that happens in the world occurs because the U.S. failed to project power. In other words, it failed to deter. And therefore, the only thing the U.S. needs to do is be strong, and you know, and again, that every bad things that happens is because somehow, we were weak. I think that is silly. I think that other nations, especially great powers, have their own interests. Some of those interests, they consider to be existential for themselves, and therefore they cannot be deterred in a simple way from pursuing those issues that they believe to be existential for themselves. Furthermore, I would just say that this type of thinking has a horrible track record. I mean, look at where the United States is after 20-some odd years of pursuing this hardline, kneejerk, militaristic, reactionary foreign policy. It’s got us into, it got us into Iraq. It kept us in Afghanistan for 20 years. It got us involved in Syria. It got us involved in Libya. It’s been one fiasco after another. Millions of people around the world have been killed. We have thousands of our own casualties and horribly wounded veterans suffering from PTSD to this day. We destabilized the entire Middle East, creating this huge refugee problem that persists in Europe. So this type of thinking has really done nothing but give us one disaster after another. And yet, it’s these same people, the same foreign policy establishment, and the same government bureaucrats who have administered and led us to this situation we have in Ukraine. This is, again, another neocon folly that, and maybe it’ll be the last neocon folly that’s been perpetrated by our…

HH: Now neocon is a loaded word, and I don’t like to use it, because there are Reagan conservatives, and there are neocons. The Reagan counterexample…

DS: Victoria Nuland is definitely a, Victoria Nuland is definitely a neocon. She started as Dick Cheney’s foreign policy advisor. She was arguing for Iraq, telling us lies like Saddam had WMD, he was in cahoots with al Qaeda.

HH: Not a lie. If you’re wrong, it’s not a lie, right? If you’re just wrong, because the entire foreign policy establishment, including Bill Burns, who you’ve spoken of well, they all believed he had WMD. We were wrong. It led to bad choices. But I want to go back to the end of the Cold War.

DS: Well, I…

HH: Why do you think the U.S…

DS: I think that when Donald Rumsfeld said things like, that he not only, Saddam, not only has WMD, but we know where they are.

HH: Yes.

DS: I think that has to be a lie.

HH: It’s not a lie.

DS: I think that was a lie.

HH: We disagree, but again, it’s not a debate. I want to know why you think the Soviet Union fell apart. Was it because of Reagan’s peace through strength? Because I think you said on the pod that you fear the military industrial complex. Was that you?

DS: Well, I’m certainly not the first to say it. Eisenhower said it, and he certainly knew what he was talking about.

HH: Yeah, but he said it when we were spending, When Ike said that, we were spending 11.3% of GDP on national defense. We’re spending 2.7% of GDP on national defense this year.

DS: Yeah, listen, I think if your point is that do I believe in peace through strength, am I a fan of Ronald Reagan, the answer is yes. But part of the reason why I am a fan of Reagan, and this is where I think his legacy has been misappropriated by some of the people we’re talking about, is that Reagan, at the end of the day, was a peacemaker, that when Gorbachev came along, and Margaret Thatcher told him this is a man we could do business with, Reagan sat down and made peace. And he ignored some of the hardliners in his own administration who basically didn’t, were too suspicious. And Reagan sat down and signed arms control treaties, and made peace with Gorbachev. He seized the opportunity. Moreover, when the foreign…
HH: That’s actually incorrect, David. David, that’s incorrect. Do you know Reyjavik at all?

DS: You don’t think…

HH: Reyjavik…

DS: Yeah, we…

HH: What do you think happened in Reyjavik?

DS: We signed arms control agreements with Gorbachev.

HH: No, no.

DS: That didn’t happen?

HH: It ended with Gorbachev leaving in anger and Reagan leaving in anger, and Richard Perle, who was the prince of darkness, was there leaving disappointed. They worked on the bathroom tub. I was in the administration. It was an utter and complete failure. And there was no peace agreement with the Soviet Union. What happened in 1989, managed by George H.W. Bush, is that Reagan’s SDI and the investment in American strength brought about competition that the USSR could not win, except for Glasnost, but then they could not control Glasnost once it began, and a totalitarian state fell apart. We didn’t have to go to war. We did go to war in Grenada. We did supply the Afghans with weaponry to fight the Soviet occupiers of the Afghanistan peninsula. He wasn’t a pacifist, and he didn’t do a deal with Gorbachev. So if you make that kind of a, if someone does a presentation to you at Craft, and they get a basic fact wrong, how do you respond?

DS: I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I’ve just Googled INF treaty. 1987 intermediate range nuclear force agreement.

HH: That’s not Reykjavik.

DS: Signed by the United States. I didn’t say it was Reyjavik.

HH: That’s not Reyjavik.

DS: Who cares about Reyjavik? We were discussing Reagan’s legacy.

HH: Well, Reyjavik is when Gorbachev, Gorbachev wanted Reagan to abandon SDI in exchange for significant cuts. The INF does achieve parody, but it did not do what Reyjavik proposed, and that was not making peace, the INF. I just, what do you do if someone gets something…

DS: We’re debating, we’re debating tactical issues here of how Reagan brought about these agreements with Gorbachev. I don’t, to me, I don’t really care about what happened at Reyjavik, what didn’t happen at Reyjavik. My point is that when Reagan had the opportunity to make peace, he did. He seized the opportunity.

HH: No, no. That…

DS: Reagan was a peacemaker. 1987 – INF treaty. What am I getting wrong here?

HH: That is fundamentally wrong. He would not give Gorbachev what he wanted. He did not mind the INF deal, because we had already…

DS: How do we, how did we sign that treaty?

HH: Because we had deployed the Pershing II’s and the cruise missiles to Europe, and then we were willing to agree on limits on the number and types of intermediate nuclear range. But he first acted with strength towards Europe. And how do you deal with a counterfactual that he put arms into…

DS: I never said, I never said, I told you I agree with peace through strength. I, you know, like Trump says, I want our military to be so powerful we never have to use it. Obviously, we want to be strong.

HH: But he gave all that weaponry to the Afghan Mujahideen. Now we left and we screwed it up after the Soviet Union fell apart, but was that a good move by Reagan to arm the Mujahideen?

DS: Maybe, but remember, we did this in a completely different way than we’re doing Ukraine right now. I think you’re referring to Operation Cyclone. It was a CIA covert operation. We gave them Stingers. We were not putting American flags on the boxes and the trucks that were delivering them. It was a covert CIA operation. We were very careful to not let that escalate into World War III. What we’re doing in Ukraine is very different. We’re giving them much more weaponry. We’re much more involved. The weapons that we’re giving the Ukrainians require them to be part of a tightly-knit web of information services. They’re using our satellites in space. They’re using our targeting. You’ve had Biden administration officials bragging about sinking the Moskva, bragging about killing Russian generals, taking credit for that. They took credit for the successful counteroffensive, the Kharkiv counteroffensive last year. These were all articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

HH: Well yeah, look. You’re not going to get me defending the Biden administration. They’ve completely screwed this up.

DS: You have Biden…

HH: Usually, by acting too little, too late. That’s where we disagree. But I want one more comparison for analogy’s sake, David. I assume you’re familiar with the Yom Kippur war, because you’re a student of history.

DS: Yeah.

HH: Okay? So Nixon said in order to save Israel, send everything that can fly. They were being overrun in the south by the Egyptians, on the east by the Jordanians, to the north by the Syrians, and Nixon sent everything that could fly, but not American troops. What is the difference between sending everything that can fly to Ukraine and sending everything that could fly to Israel 50 years ago?

DS: Well, as I recall, the Yom Kippur war was only 19 days. It lasted October 6th through October 25th, 1973. So if they were sending everything they got, they better need to get it there pretty quickly, because it was over in less than three weeks.

HH: They did. Golda Meir said Nixon saved Israel.

DS: Fine. It was over in less than…it was over in less than three weeks, and that’s very different than a war that’s already lasted a year and a half, and Biden is saying as long, as much as it takes for as long as it take, and we’re talking about a multiyear war with Russia that could spiral into World War III at any time. That’s difference number one. Difference number two, hold on a second, difference number two, did I get any facts wrong there?

HH: No, that’s correct.

DS: Okay. Difference number two is the role that Kissinger played. He brought that conflict to an end.

HH: Oh, no.

DS: He sought a ceasefire.

HH: No, no. Nixon won that. Kissinger in his book, Crisis, recounts how he had to be brought into it. Now I know Dr. Kissinger fairly well because of Nixon Library stuff. Kissinger likes to credit Nixon and go out of his way with crediting Nixon overcoming the Defense Department’s unwillingness to send what were the anti-tank missiles which were crucial to the win on the ground. But I don’t want to defend Biden. Biden screwed it up, David. I want to know what Harry Hopkins…

DS: Well, hold on. Hold on. Let me, I think I need to finish making this point. There’s no question that Kissinger and Nixon, the administration played a role in achieving a ceasefire that then became a peace deal.

HH: That’s true.

DS: And that was taken to the United Nations, and the U.S. played the lead role in bringing about that deal. And they did it in conjunction with the Soviet Union, because neither superpower wanted this regional war to escalate into a world war. So they shut it down, okay?

HH: I don’t want to hold it against you, because I ran the Nixon Library. You may not know this. The Egyptians were in full flight retreat, and the Israelis could have gone to Damascus, and we stopped them. That’s why we got peace, is that we stopped Sharon in the Sanai. We stopped their tank battalions advancing any further than the Golan Heights. And Kissinger then did shuttle diplomacy for three years to bring about the deal under Ford. So it’s not that easy.

DS: Right, but you’re not contradicting anything I’m saying. What I’m saying is we played the role of peacemaker. Now compare Antony Blinken’s role in the current crisis.

HH: He’s hapless.

DS: Compared to Kissinger…

HH: He’s hapless.

DS: Blinken just gave a speech, Blinken just gave a speech saying that diplomacy was appeasement. He was actually attacking the very idea of diplomacy, which is his job in this conflict. Moreover, the West…

HH: The appropriate…

DS: Hold on, the West sent Boris Johson to sabotage the peace process that we had at Istanbul, or I should way the parties had at Istanbul, that was on the verge of producing a peace agreement. So the Biden administration here has done everything possible to perpetuate this war, and I’d say not only avoid, but sabotage a ceasefire and a peace deal. It is completely different than the role that Kissinger and Nixon played.

HH: Okay, David, my suggestion is that you cannot get to the bargaining table about a lasting peace, whatever it would look like, unless and until Ukraine achieves strategic momentum. They might have been able to do it last year, and Biden blows everything, and you know what Robert Gates said. He’s been wrong about every major foreign policy decision for the 50 years he’s been in office, and Robert Gates is right. But you do need momentum on the side of the Ukrainians before you can do any kind of a deal. What I want to ask you, and what Vivek left unclear with me, is if Russia is winning, I mean really winning, what do you think would happen in Ukraine? And what do you think would follow a Russian win in Ukraine?

DS: Okay, well, there’s a couple of parts here. So first, I want to address the idea here that we have to be winning on the battlefield in order to make peace. I think that last year would have been the time to, when I think the West and Ukraine was on, had that successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv, and the Russians were a little bit on the back foot. That would have been the time to negotiate. And actually, General Milley suggested that, remember? He came out, was kind of, went contrarian compared to the rest of the administration and suggested that the Ukrainians had achieved as much as they could on the battlefield, and they should seriously consider negotiating? Well, we missed that opportunity. And the reason was that what the administration said is that we’re just going to win. You know, we’re winning the war, we’re on the front foot, and we’re going to basically arm the Ukrainians for this spring counteroffensive, and then we’re going to push the Russians out of Ukraine altogether. So when you’re winning, according to the administration, that’s not a good time to make peace, because you can keep winning. And then when you’re losing, that’s not a good time to make peace, because you have no leverage. So the fact of the matter is that in the eyes of these people who are conducting our policy, there is never a good time to make peace. And that has brought us to, I think, this disastrous point which is the Ukrainians are losing on the battlefield with no real prospect of reversing what appears to be, at best case, a slow-grinding war of attrition and a stalemate.

HH: A 1914 situation.

DS: And I think that’s…

HH: It’s a Nineteen…but I’m not willing to say they’re losing. I don’t think they’re winning right now, and I think the minor advances they’ve made in the Donbas are not significant, and they’ve got to show a lot more to get momentum back. But to go back to the Yom Kippur analogy, it was a rout, David. The Egyptians and the Syrians and the Jordanians were in full flight retreat, and the Soviets were threatening to send in Soviet arms unless we stopped them. So that’s when Kissinger stepped in after we had rearmed them.

DS: Right.

HH: We’re not there now, and I’m not going to defend the Biden administration, and Cotton doesn’t, either, and neither does Mike Gallagher. They’re hopeless. They’re completely bad. They do everything at the wrong time. They say the wrong thing, and the President is infirm and not in full, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. I don’t know if you want to comment on that or not, but I just don’t think he’s actually in charge. And I don’t think Tony Blinken can run an apple cart, much less the Department of State. And I do not believe Lloyd Austin has a clue. Have you read this new book, yet, by the way, Kabul by Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson? Had a chance to read this, yet?

DS: No, I haven’t. No, I haven’t read that.

HH: It is a catalog of error in the Afghanistan withdrawal which makes me, it’s the only book that’s made me actually angry and sad at the same time in decades, because the level of incompetence once Biden and team took over from Pompeo and Trump and Robert O’Brien is staggering in the level of its incompetence. And we will get hit out of Afghanistan within five years by the Haqqani network, al Qaeda, ISIS-K. Someone’s going to hit us again, 9/11. What are you doing to, if you’re Harry Hopkins, I’m going to take David Sacks to being Harry Hopkins. What do you do?

DS: About what? About which crisis here?

HH: About the world. Right now, we’re in a very perilous situation. Taiwan is, China’s poised to strike at Taiwan. That’s Vivek’s view. That’s my view. We’re in the Davidson window. We are in a quagmire in Ukraine. Our GDP is falling. We’re on the cusp of a recession. You think 2.7% military spending is too high, but as Vivek said, we’re down to 275 ships, and the Chinese have 450, and they’re building 8 every year, maybe sometimes 12. We’re not building anything. What do we do? We spent all the money on crap. The IFA is just crap. I don’t know if you believe me or not, but the semiconductor factories are fine. But 90% of it is crap. What would you do if Ron DeSantis called you up and he wins, and I’m not for anyone. I’m Switzerland. I might be doing the debates. It can be Trump, Vivek, they’re all welcome here. I will ask them the nasty question. What do we do with this world? And what does David Sacks advise them to say?

DS: Well, Hugh, we’ve set the world on fire. So the first thing I would do is act like a firefighter and put out some of these fires. I mean, you can’t go around the world destabilizing the world, being hyper-interventionist like we did in the Middle East. We destabilized the whole Middle East. We destabilized Ukraine.

HH: Time out. Time out.

DS: We basically sponsored, we backed a coup there in 2014.

HH: Were the Abraham Accords, were the Abraham Accords a significant achievement?

DS: Yeah, that was a, I think that was, I think that was a meaningful achievement. I think Jared Kushner did a good job, and I praised him on our podcast for that. I think that was good, yeah.

HH: And so I don’t think we destabilized the Middle East. I think we brought Israel and the Sunni Arab countries into the first entente that they’ve had in reality since the cold peace of the Camp David accord. And I believe that but for Biden incompetence, we would have Iran on the ropes right now, and they would be begging for a deal. So I think we brought Iran on the ropes, but we, again, this team is the worst team in national security history, in modern times, at least.

DS: But Hugh, you’re using this language like you know, we’ve got, we’re in fights with all these countries. You know, we’ve got Iran on the ropes, we need to keep challenging Russia. We can’t make peace with them unless we win decisively, which basically is a recipe for continuous escalation to World War III. Meanwhile, we really do have a peer competitor in China, but we don’t have the resources to basically, or we should be pivoting to Asia, and that’s been delayed indefinitely because of all these other problems.

HH: But David, Russia and Iran…

DS: But, so this attitude, this hardline militaristic attitude has got us into the problem.

HH: I’m not hardline. I’m just a realist. I want my grandkids to grow up in a world where they’re safe. I believe that China, Iran and Russia are locked in an entente that resembles nothing so much as Austria and Germany and Italy, or Austria and Germany, not Italy, in 1914, and that we’ve got to do something. Not to…

DS: We drove them into each other’s arms. Those three countries don’t have that much in common, okay?

HH: What? What?

DS: Russia and China were not allies during the Cold War. There is historical frictions there. Graham Allison wrote a great piece in Foreign Policy or Foreign Affairs talking about the potential border disputes that Russia and China historically have had, and should have had. But we have driven them into each other’s arms. They see us…

HH: And China wants their Siberia back. Yes, they’ve got, actually, Chinese maps now with Chinese names next to some of the Russian cities. But Russia is the junior partner. That’s basically a mafia state. That’s not a Leninist state. China is the big boy. Iran is dependent upon China for all of their foreign exchange currency because of the Trump administration’s hard sanctions. I’m just, you’re trying to, you think that it’s a Risk game, and I think there’s basically China, Russia, Iran, and everybody else, and everybody else better get their act together to contain, like George Kennan said, not to go to war with, but to contain. Do we agree on that?

DS: George Kennan told us we were making a tragic mistake in alienating Russia by bringing NATO right up to their border, which we didn’t need to do. He said nobody after the Cold War was threatening each other. We could have worked out a security architecture for Europe that basically diffused any tension between Russia and the United States. And instead, we did the opposite. We ignored all of their red lines. We basically staged color revolutions in their backyard. We basically, you know, again, expanded NATO over their many objections. We threatened to take Crimea away from them, which is the location of their major naval base, Sevastopol. It’s basically their Pearl Harbor. We have no regard for any of their security concerns. And then, when they react negatively at all of this, we invent this story that it’s because they’re somehow so belligerent, and we can’t engage in diplomacy with them. The main mistake the Biden administration…

HH: In 1994…

DS: The main mistake the Biden administration made was not taking one of the offramps to this war. We could have negotiated an offramp. Now, we are stuck in a quagmire over there, and we still have this problem of China, and we still have Iran. So what I would say is you know, maybe your worldview needs to allow for the possibility of diplomacy more. If you want to put out some of these fires, we have to start using diplomacy.

HH: Well, I don’t disagree with that. I’m a Nixonian guy. I’m a realist. But I do believe that Nixon assessed very carefully, and he set in motion a five-year plan beginning in 1967 and culminating in 1972, to do the flip the script with China. I think Hillary Clinton had that in mind with the reset button. I think Donald Trump had that in mind when it was undermined by the Steele dossier and by the Democratic Party. And I don’t think it’s now possible given who Putin is and the people he’s surrounded by. But it might come back around again. But Iran is a revolutionary regime that will never do a deal with us, and they are in with China, which will never do a deal with us. So let’s go to China, David. Can we agree at least that the American military expenditure on its Navy, which guarantees freedom of the seas and the rise of American capital and the rise of European capitalism, that we have to guarantee free passage of the South China Sea? Do we give them the South China Sea? Or is that part of your diplomacy?

DS: I think that these are very tough questions, because I do think that we have allies in the region. We do have interests in the region. Those interests are much more important than any interest we have in Ukraine. And I do think we have some real questions there. You know, I am basically a realist, and I think that we, I think it does make sense to put together a balancing alliance in Asia…

HH: Yes.

DS: …to basically contain China to some degree.

HH: AUKUS plus India and Vietnam.

DS: And that is basically…that is balance of power logic, okay?

HH: Yeah, that’s…UK…

DS: So I agree with that. But at the same time, I think we have to be extremely careful not to accidentally provoke a war with China, because that’s the last thing we need right now. And I’m not totally convinced we would win that war. So I think we have to be very…

HH: A) I don’t, I’m neither. I don’t, either. I think they’ve got 450 ships, and we’ve got maybe 120 that are deployable. What would you do about Taiwan? Vivek wants to say to them don’t mess with Taiwan until we’re semiconductor independent. Then, you can have it. That is controversial, very controversial. But he said it on [Monday] on my show, and it made the rounds. What does David Sacks think we ought to say and do about Taiwan right now?

DS: Well, I think we just want the status quo to continue.

HH: Yes.

DS: The status quo has been very good for the U.S, has been very good for Taiwan. And so we have this status quo of strategic ambiguity combined with the One China policy. It’s a little bit contradictory, but we have managed to kind of, you know, muddle through the contradictions. And I think that what we should do is to seek to continue that policy. I would not change it to strategic clarity. I know Vivek wants to do that just temporarily, but I think that that would be extremely provocative in the eyes of the Chinese. I do not think we want to escalate this situation. I do not think we want to blunder into a war. I think that if we can maintain status quo and kick this can down the road another 10 years like we’ve done the last 10 years, that’s sort of a best-case outcome for us. So I know that’s not…

HH: They have these giant roll on/roll off’s, David, where they have outfitted, basically, giant ferries with the ability to approach and amphibious landing in Taiwan. If that begins to happen, and an American president who was presented with the problem of shooting first, what would you advise them to do? Let them have Taiwan, or shoot first?

DS: It’s very hard for me to see an American president shooting on a Chinese ship. I mean, you’re talking about starting potentially World War III. And I think that as we’ve seen with Ukraine, the idea that you can fight a limited war as opposed to the inexorable logic of escalation taking over, I think that it would be incredibly dangerous. Now I’m not saying that we don’t maintain the optionality. That’s kind of the point of strategic ambiguity. I’m not saying that we have to definitely decide not to defend them, either. But it would be, I think, it’s very hard for me to see Americans shooting on a Chinese ship and starting World War III. So I think we don’t want to find ourselves in that situation, is the short answer.

HH: Yes. Strategic ambiguity…

DS: You know, look. We don’t want to…

HH: Strategic ambiguity was…

DS: I think we just want to keep our options open. I mean, yeah…

HH: If you go back to 1911 and 1914, whether you read Churchill or you read Kenneth Clark, strategic ambiguity was everywhere dominant. And when the German naval law passed in 1900 and they began to build their fleet, strategic ambiguity increased. But people began doing operations, and they began planning for war. But no one was clear. Strategic clarity might have prevented the Kaiser doing what the Kaiser did. And he didn’t really understand what was coming, and they ended up with their Ukrainian hardline situation. I think strategic clarity makes a lot of sense, and that Vivek just went a little bit too far and putting a time limit on it. We’ve got to deter the Chinese, because what happens, this is where I really wanted to ask you. If they invade Taiwan, what do you think happens to the world economy?

DS: Well, it’s not good, but it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as if the U.S. and China got in a war.

HH: Yeah, but what do you think? If they…

DS: I mean, that…

HH: If we don’t, I don’t want to get in a war with anybody. But to deter China, we have to say a lot more than strategic ambiguity, and we have to build a lot more, and especially, we have to build things under the sea that have the feasibility of striking and demonstrating cyber and satellite capability that do the same thing. That takes a lot more spending than we’re currently spending. And what I heard on the All In podcast is you think we’re militarist at 2.7% of GDP. And we’re not even close to Reagan levels, which was, I think, 5.3% at the height of the Cold War.

DS: Well, we’re spending, we’re spending almost a trillion dollars a year on Defense, and we don’t even have enough ammunition to give the Ukrainians. We’re out of 155mm artillery shells. So I don’t know what we’re getting for all this money. We’re getting royally ripped off by the military industrial complex. You know, people have been complaining since the 1970s or 80s about the Pentagon spending $500 dollars on hammers and $800 dollars on toilet seats and that kind of stuff. But now, it’s gotten much worse. Since the forever wars, we’ve been spending trillions on all these wars that actually, they’re not even part of the budget. We spent $8 trillion dollars on the forever wars in the Middle East. What did we get for that?

HH: All sunk costs. And you know as well as I do that sunk costs cannot determine going forward. $877 billion in Defense spending…

DS: Yeah, but you can’t, you can’t keep incurring all these trillions and trillions in debt for no good reason and then say oh, that was just a mistake, that was a sunk cost, don’t worry about it, we shouldn’t have any lessons going forward. We have squandered trillions.

HH: No, we’ve got to get lessons. The $877 billion requires changes to everything, including the triad. My first question to Vivek, the first time I interviewed him, if we have to cut one of the legs, are you familiar with the triad? I don’t want to trick you. It’s not an ambush. Are you familiar with it?

DS: No, not. No. What, is that…

HH: It’s the ability to, it’s our strategic deterrent that is under the water, in the air, and in missile silos. We have three legs to the triad. Vivek did not know what it was, and he went off to study what it was, because it’s crucial to American national defense. The triad has always been what prevents nuclear strikes on the United States. And we’ve always had that capability. It is increasingly clear to me we can’t afford all three legs. And I get the hawks mad at me, because we can’t afford all three legs. So I ask people what do we cut. They’re all $20-50-100 billion dollars programs, and I think the one we need is under the sea, but I can’t get anyone to focus on that. But 2.7% total is not too much. We’re just not spending it right. So forgetting about the stakes…

DS: I don’t necessarily think it’s 2.7%. So the U.S., well, I mean, just to do back of the envelope here, the U.S. economy is about $25 trillion, and we’re spending, yeah, like you said, $877 is the official number, but there’s all these other costs that you know, if you add it in, you’d probably add a trillion or more. Then, you’ve got all these wars that are done off balance sheet. The Ukraine war is not being taken out of the Pentagon budget. By the way, that would be a much better incentive structure for our military industrial complex. If you said to them your budget is $877, if you want to spend money on defending Ukraine because you think that’s the best use of American defense dollars, then take it out of that budget. But we don’t do that. We just put it on the credit card. And we just put it on the national debt.

HH: No, we don’t. But, and that is, at $33 trillion, that is a nightmare, and the interest rates are going to go up, and it’s going to bring a lot of chaos through the system. But if we had a national consensus…

DS: Yeah, look at our deficit. I mean, our deficits are, you know, well over a trillion dollars a year, okay?

HH: And so $33 is going to be $40.

DS: And 65% of that…

HH: $33 trillion is going to be $40.

DS: 65% of that, sorry. Say that again?

HH: $33 trillion is going to be $40 trillion in seven years, maybe five.

DS: Right. Exactly. And we already have this massive debt. That’s already starting to increase the interest rates, which is going to have a huge drag on our economy over the long term. But my point is we’re already, we have at least one trillion-dollar deficits, and maybe multitrillion dollar deficits already. And the majority of that goes to entitlements, which nobody wants to cut. And now, we’re looking at interest expense on the debt at about a trillion a year. And so when you say that we’re underfunded on Defense, and we’re spending a trillionish a year plus all these other, all these wars that we tend to get into as bonus spending, I don’t think it’s a small number. I think it’s a massive number.

HH: It’s a very small number.

DS: And by the way, and I think they’re ripping us off royally. I don’t, I mean, what are we getting for all that money? You know, again, we certainly, we don’t have enough 155mm artillery shells. We don’t, we’ve run out of Stingers. We’ve run out of Javelins, on and on and on. The reason we’ve given cluster bombs to Ukraine is we’re out. That’s the only thing we’ve got left.

HH: Your best examples, David, if you want your best examples, it’s at 40% of our attack submarines cannot get maintenance, and that the LCS, which was our most recent commissioned ship, is worthless, and we’re decommissioning it after four years. Those are your best examples. The Ford cost an enormous amount of money. We are terrible at this. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do it. We do need to do it. We need to do it better, and we need to upend the Pentagon spending and have better leadership. But I am worried about China.

DS: If the Pentagon were a company, Hugh, hold on. Hugh, I’m a businessman, okay? If the Pentagon were a company, what it would be doing is it would be going through its budget. It would be cutting costs. It would be figuring out what wasn’t needed anymore. It would be questioning the wisdom of investing billions in things like aircraft carriers, which are total sitting ducks. The Chinese can take out a multibillion-dollar aircraft carrier with some missiles that cost thousands. And we’re seeing this asymmetry…

HH: That’s incorrect, David.

DS: …in Ukraine, where you can take out…

HH: That’s incorrect.

DS: You can take out a $5 million dollar tank with a drone that costs a few thousand dollars.

HH: That’s correct.

DS: So we’re spending the money, we’re spending the money on the wrong things. I’m not an expert on military systems, but it seems to me that our thinking on military systems is outdated. I think the procurement process is a disaster. You have this revolving door of the generals who do the procurement in the Pentagon. They don’t go retire, and then join the boards of these Defense contractors, which is, and we’re single-sourced in many of these areas…

HH: Your best argument is that the aircraft carrier today is like the battleship in 1940. It has many great capabilities, but they’re not the capabilities that we will need in 30 years, and we’ve got to transition immediately, and we have sunk costs that are holding us from making radical choices. But all of that is true. But we still need to agree on a baseline Defense budget. And I believe historically, we’ve done at least 4%. And in doing that, you might be able to get reforms. But the Pentagon isn’t a business. It’s a bureaucracy run by the Constitutional authority that’s duly appointed. And you need Congress to do that. So you need politics to change. How do you, I don’t think you get politics to change with isolationist arguments. And I think you’re making an isolationist argument. Why am I wrong?

DS: Well, I’m not isolationist. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any involvement in the world. But the way I see it is that we should, don’t need to be the first responder in every situation. We don’t need to be the policeman of the world. I mean, I think that’s fundamentally the mistake.

HH: Oh, we do.

DS: And if you look at what we did in World War I or World War II, one of the reasons why we suffered a lot less than our allies is we were late to the conflict. We weren’t the first responder. We were the last responder. We were basically the balancer of last resort. The doctrine that I believe in is not, you know, either literal intervention, interventionist on the one extreme, or isolationist on the other. It’s called offshore balancing where basically you do engage in balance of power logic, but you try to look to your regional allies to provide the peace first. And you know, that may not be what we did in World War I or World War II. It may not be the most noble. We didn’t rush into battle the way that, you know, the British did. But we suffered a lot less. It’s just a lot smarter.

HH: Oh, FDR was a genius. Churchill wanted him in earlier, and he was a genius. He waited. But at the height of the Cold War, Reagan spent 5.3% GDP, and we had just under 600 ships on the ocean, because we are an everywhere police force on the oceans. That guarantees free trade, which allows us to prosper. And we cannot let the Chinese build a navy base in Djibouti. We cannot allow them to have Iran as a client state. We can’t allow them to threaten Taiwan. We’ve got to get India to the game. Vivek makes that point repeatedly. But let’s just go back to Ukraine and finish there.

DS: Reagan had a 30% debt to GDP. We have, what is it now, 120% debt to GDP?

HH: Correct.

DS: We have $32 trillion of debt against a $25 trillion dollar economy? So we are much more indebted than we were in Reagan’s day. Reagan had a lot more room on the credit card to increase, to engage in a Defense buildup. And what we need now, I think, is just a lot smarter thinking. You mentioned the number 4%. I mean, look, we’re at 4%.

HH: No, we’re not. 2.7%.

DS: If you do the accounting right.

HH: No, no, no. We’re at 2.7%, because within the Pentagon, there’s a lot of spending that is not on military needs. I know there’s off-balance stuff, but there’s also global warming and social engineering.

DS: Then, let’s rethink it.

HH: If you get it all together, we’re about 2.5%. And I would leave it to the Defense experts to do it, but we are not anywhere near where we need to be. And we’ve got to build…

DS: Well, how about, how about we put, how about we correctly budget for Ukraine. How about we correctly budget for all these other items that are downstream impacts of all these wars that we get into, as VA spending and so forth.

HH: Happy to do it if…

DS: Correctly do all that budgeting. If you correctly do the accounting, and by the way…

HH: If you take out all the…

DS: The Pentagon cannot even pass an audit. They can’t even pass an audit.

HH: I agree. But…

DS: So…

HH: But what do you do? I mean, it’s easy to bitch, but what do you do?

DS: Look, well…

HH: You can’t stop spending.

DS: I saying we start being a lot smarter. Restructure. You do what a business would do. Look, a business that has been failing for 20 years that has been recklessly spending for 20 years on the wrong things, and by the way, we haven’t won any of these wars that we’ve gotten into.

HH: Oh, disagree. David, where were you on 9/11?

DS: They’ve all been fiascos. So we’ve gotten nothing. We’ve got nothing for this $8 trillion that the forever wars cost us. We’ve got nothing for that.

HH: Where were you on…you’re wrong. You’re wrong.

DS: So we need some new thinking.

HH: That’s just not correct. That’s just not correct.

DS: But Hugh…

HH: We were hit on 9/11. We have not been hit in the homeland except for minor attacks with bad human consequence – 11, 15, 30 people. But we have not had a 9/11 since 9/11.

DS: Great. Great. Well, that…

HH: Bush did a good job.

DS: That was money well spent, and I think we should protect the homeland. What we didn’t need to do was stay in Afghanistan for 20 years. I think going in to basically get al Qaeda and get bin Laden, that was a righteous cause. I think we had justification for that. We were attacked. Iraq was based on a big, fat lie, or an untruth. You know, if you want, our entire reason for going in there was totally invalid. I don’t know what we were doing with Syria, Libya and so forth. Ukraine, we could have easily avoided this conflict, and yet we keep blundering into all these wars that then cost all of this money. And then, you know, people come along and say well, our big mistake is not spending enough. Come on. We need to start being a lot smarter. We need to start being smarter about avoiding these conflicts. There’s no reason to get into all of them. We, again, instead of being the first responder, we need to let our allies do some of the work and carry some of the burden. And then, we need to spend the money in the right ways. The last thing we need to do is really increase the budget. I’m not saying we have to cut it, but we need to spend that money in much smarter ways.

HH: Oh, I’m worried that Ron will listen to you. If he’s President DeSantis, I want him to…

DS: Don’t worry. I don’t think he will. I don’t, I’m not that important, so…

HH: I want to close by asking you about NATO, because you’ve taken a couple of shots at it. I’m very glad Poland’s in NATO, very, very glad. I’m very glad that Sweden and Finland are in NATO. Not too sure about Romania, not too sure about Hungary, certainly don’t know about the Balkan nations. But frontline nations, what would you do? We’ve signed a treaty with them. That’s a treaty, NATO treaty. If the Wagner group mercenaries invade Poland, will our people shoot them, and ought they to?

DS: Yeah, look, what’s done is done. It’s water under the bridge. They’re members of NATO. We’re not going back, so yes, we are going to defend NATO countries. I think we have that obligation to do it, and I think we would. One thing I would tell you, though, is we need to keep those countries, especially Poland, on a pretty tight leash, because they’ve been engaging in a lot of bellicosity towards Russia. They’ve been even, there’s been quite a bit of talk about them even going into Western Ukraine. And the last thing we need them to do is to start a direct war with Russia that would involve NATO.

HH: I don’t think there’s any danger of that, and I would agree with you if I thought there was a danger of that.

DS: …and thereby get us involved.

HH: We do not want any single NATO troop to be involved in direct combat with the Russians. But last question, if Putin were to win in Ukraine, what do you think he would do, and stopped, not engaged Poland, not crossed the border in Romania, stopped there. But if he were to win, topple Zelenskyy, what do you think the country would look like in three years?

DS: Well, I think some version of this is actually going to happen, because I think that we are going to fight to the last Ukrainian, and we’re not going to engage in diplomacy, and we’re not going to make peace. And I agree with, you know, Professor Mearsheimer’s analysis of what’s likely to happen, which is the Russians are going to win this war. It’s a war of attrition in which they have four or five times the manpower that the Ukrainians do. They have many times the artillery that the Ukrainians do, and there’s nothing that the U.S. can do to fix that within the next few years, because we’ve hollowed out our industrial production. And that’s been, I think, one of the shockers of this war, is just how depleted our stockpiles are. I think it’s insane.

HH: So what do you think…

DS: But in any event…

HH: …the Russians will do if they win and occupy the country, to the people of Ukraine?

DS: Well, I don’t think they’re going to, they don’t want to occupy the entire country, because you know, again, like Mearsheimer says, it would be like swallowing a porcupine. Western Ukraine is filled with Ukrainian nationalists who are incredibly hostile towards Russia. And the last thing they want to do is try and govern all of those people who are inimically, are hostile towards Russia. So I think that ultimately what Russia’s going to do is what Mearsheimer said, which is that they’re going to try to get to a defensible point, which is probably the Dnieper River. They might try to take Odessa. They might try to take Kharkiv if they can. And then, I think, you know, they’ll stop. And I think they will reduce Ukraine to…

HH: What will they do to the people under their control, because Mearsheimer is not an authority with me. I think he’s been absolutely wrong on almost everything, but I don’t want to argue that with you. I just want to know what you think Putin will do to the people of Ukraine? If you are right, and he is right, and they advance to some line that they consider sufficient, what will they do to the people behind that? And ought we to care?

DS: Well, I think the sad reality is that I think that where we’re likely to end up if we don’t use diplomacy is, and so this is not just Putin doing it. We have agency, too. We could engage diplomacy. We could work to resolve this conflict. But I think that where we’re going to end up is that this slow-grinding war of attrition will continue. The Russians fundamentally have the advantage in that. They have more men, more artillery, and the Ukrainian counteroffensive is not going anywhere. We don’t seem to have the weapons systems that can really make a difference in this. We can talk about that if you want. But fundamentally, I think the Russians are going to win this war. Again, it’ll be a slow-grinding victory. And it’s, they’re going to win ugly. It’s going to, you know, and what that will look like is I think that Ukraine will be reduced to a rump state. It’ll basically just be the western portion of the country. The eastern part of the country that has a lot of ethnic Russians in it, the Russian diaspora, I think that’s the part that Putin is interested in. I do not think they’re going to try and govern Ukrainians. I think they’re going to try and govern, again, this eastern portion of the country. And I think that…

HH: What do you extrapolate…

DS: I think the sad reality is that I think that Western Ukraine is going to become like the Palestine of Europe, or like the Palestinians. They’re going to be left in this limbo state of not having full statehood, basically.

HH: But the Israelis do not do a Bucha. The Israelis do not export 16,000 Palestinians and turn them into Jews. The war crimes that Russia have amassed that nobody argues, they’ve done war crimes, and they’re on the record. Do you think he’ll stop? Or do you think he’ll escalate that, and that the vengeance would be extreme and ongoing, and we would stand by and do nothing? Is that what you’re suggesting?

DS: I think that questions of war crimes are determinations that should be made by objective third parties after the war. It’s very hard, it’s hard to make those determinations in the heat of battle, because both sides have propagandists who want to basically inflame and inflate those claims. So things like Bucha need to be investigated by third parties after the war, and then we can make those determinations. But look, my take on it is that the Russians have defined objections, defined objectives, rather, in Ukraine. They want to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. They want to demilitarize it. They do not want it to be a military threat on their border. They said denazification, what you can treat as propaganda, or you could see it as removing that Azov element from the Ukrainian regime.

HH: David, you have kind of drunk the Kool-Aid there.

DS: But these, these are their objective, okay? And I do not think that they want to engage in genocide. I think that’s hyperbole.

HH: I didn’t say that.

DS: And when Zelenskyy went to the Knesset…

HH: They are systemically exporting children from Ukraine without their parents, 16,000 of them. Bucha is not up for grabs. That happened. We’ve got the evidence, and everyone knows it. And Putin is nuts. And he’s also a paranoid, and he’s also surrounded by yes men, and he’s got the Wagner group crazies, and he’s got nukes. I really don’t believe…

DS: This is all the more reason to engage in diplomacy. I don’t understand these people who say Putin is a madman, he’s nuts, let’s keep escalating this war against him.

HH: I don’t want to do any…

DS: Why wouldn’t we want to defuse it before we get into World War III?

HH: Escalating would be to go to Russia. Pushing him back beyond his invasion from 2014 would not be. But David, I think we’ve come to the conclusion where we’re not going to agree on this. But I’d like you to come back in six months and let’s see where we are. But on the Defense side, we really have to buy a lot of ships. We have to buy a lot more of the Navy triad, and we have to get smart about Taiwan. And I know that you talk to all these guys. They all come and speak to you on the air. Talk to them about Defense, and do it in a fairly serious, sustained way. I have a last question. What is China’s ambition in the world, do you think?

DS: Who’s?

HH: China’s? Xi Jinping and the party?

DS: Oh, China’s ambitions? I think that great powers behave in a certain way, Hugh. And I think that China basically will behave like a great power, which is that they will seek to translate their economy strength into military strength. They want to be safe. They want to be secure. Great powers tend to be paranoid about the intentions of other states. And I think that once they translate their economic strength into military strength, they’re going to try to, I mean, this is sort of the Mearsheimer realist views on the world.

HH: Mearsheimer’s not a realist, but go ahead.

DS: They’re going to try and translate, they’re going to try and translate that military strength into a type of regional hegemony. They’re going to try and be the dominant power in Asia. I do not think that necessarily means they want to conquer other countries and rule them, because I don’t think that’s consistent with Chinese culture and history. But I do think they want to be the dominant power in Asia. And I don’t think it’s because they’re like fundamentally evil. I just think that’s because great powers do tend to act that way. That’s what the U.S. did in creating a Monroe doctrine in the Western hemisphere. So you know, over time, they’re going to seek to assert their own Monroe doctrine, which by the way, is also in a way what this Ukraine war is about, is that Russia wants to be recognized as a great power, and they want to have some influence over threats on their own border. They do not want a hostile military alliance, the United States, setting up shop on their own border. I think China will, has that same objection as well, and over time, they will probably try and seek to push us out of Asia.

HH: Well, that’s true, but they are…

DS: So that’s probably something…

HH: You don’t think they’re a fundamentally evil regime? They’re a Leninist regime. They put a million Uyghurs into concentration camps.

DS: Well…

HH: They seized Tibet, destroyed the culture. They are an evil regime.

DS: Yeah, I’m not a fan of Communism, Hugh, or the Communist Party. I’m just saying that I think the behaviors that we’re talking about are fundamental to great powers. So I just think that as states become more powerful, they do seek to achieve a more secure situation in their neighborhood. I mean, I think that’s the final behavior.

HH: You mentioned earlier the Thucydides trap that we’re in…

DS: Yes.

HH: And on Blinken. And so do you think that’s inevitable, because that ends up in conflict? And only once, it didn’t when Great Britain was replaced by the United States did the rising power not get into a war with the falling power. But if we’re the falling power, and they’re the rising power, conflict will happen. Should we shy away from that? Or should we prepare for it?

DS: Well, probably both. I mean, it’s an excellent book. I think Graham Allison is right. I think it’s very consistent with the realist view of the world, and the Mearsheimer view of the world. I know you’re not a fan of his. But he correctly saw this, he correctly saw 20 years ago that China would not rise peacefully, that as it gained economic strength, that it would seek to translate that into military strength, and ultimately seek some sort of regional hegemony and push the United States out of Asia. That view that I think everybody now has, or many, many people have, he predicted 20 years ago. So I think maybe you need to give him a little bit more credit. But look, I think that, where were you, Hugh? I lost my train of thought here.

HH: Just that he’s evil and what should we prepare for an conflict in order to deter a conflict, and that means spending a lot more money.

DS: Right, Thucydides trap. Yeah, look, I think the reason why Graham Allison wrote that book is because of the historical pattern. I think that he does not want to see us get into a war, a war that the United States could lose, that could basically end the world. I mean, the U.S. and China getting into a war would be a disaster. I mean, we’re talking about the potential end of the United States. We could lose that war. It could turn into nuclear Armageddon. So we should be doing everything we can to avoid that war. And I think that if you read his recommendations in that book, you know, obviously the United States being strong and creating deterrence and creating, you know, a balancing alliance, a balancing coalition in the region is part of what we should do. But also, he clearly recommends giving more weight to Chinese interests over time as they get stronger. And so if we’re only bellicose, if we’re only belligerent, if we are never willing to see the Chinese point of view, if we do not have strategic empathy, we will blunder into a war with them that could be the end of the United States. So look, I believe in peace through strength, but I also believe that we have to be smart. We have to be strategic. And it’s not, and we have to have judgment. You know, my big problem with the neocons is whenever somebody wants to exercise judgment, they accuse them of being weak. It’s not weak to exercise judgment. It’s smart.

HH: I don’t think it is. I don’t think we ought to get in a conflict over whether or not they build a naval base in Namibia, or whether they’re there in Djibouti with us, I don’t want a shooting war. But the number one thing, and I don’t think it’s right to call Cotton or Gallagher a neocon, because neocons are associated with eager for war. Reagan was not. Reagan invaded Grenada. That was it. But he deployed Pershing II’s to Europe. He deployed cruise missiles to Europe, and he got a 600-ship Navy. That which has traditionally projected American strength has been naval power and a willingness to engage our allies and fortify them. If we did that, we’ll be fine, including drawing India maybe into our coalition like Vivek says, and well, let’s just leave it there, David, because we are in general…

DS: Well, two quick points if I could, Hugh. So first of all, I think technology constantly changes, and we’ve seen now from this Ukraine war the importance of drones, and the asymmetric nature of the warfare where a thousand-dollar drone can destroy a $5 million dollar tank. I think a lot of the boats that you’re talking about are floating ducks, and they’re sitting ducks. And I think we really have to think about that. I don’t know if we have a good way to protect them from Chinese missiles. So I think we really have to think through that, whether that strategy is still the best way.

HH: We do…

DS: …of projecting power.

HH: And I’ll tell you something off the air. I’ll talk with you off the air, but let’s cut off the recording.

DS: Okay, okay.

HH: And then thank you so much, David Sacks. We’ll talk about this off the air.

DS: Yeah, absolutely.

HH: All right.

DS: Good to be with you.

End of interview.