Transcript: ‘Rapidly Growing BLOODBATH!’ Can Trump Still Bring Peace? On Piers Morgan Uncensored

He can’t be seen at the moment before they’ve even got around the negotiating table to be just ceding Ukrainian territory. Right? I mean, no leader in that position.

[JEFFREY SACHS:] Remind everybody that there were already the negotiations that brought this war nearly to a close two years ago. They were real negotiations. I went to Turkey to speak with the negotiators. I’ve spoken in detail with the negotiators. There was a negotiated end to the war. The United States and UK stopped it. And that’s not controversial. That’s just how it is, how it’s been explained by everybody.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Well, Boris Johnson was actually on my show last week and emphatically denied that he was the instigator for Ukraine continuing to fight. He said they wanted to continue fighting.

[JEFFREY SACHS:] Instigator. Maybe he—I don’t think he was the instigator. I think the US was the instigator, but I think he was the messenger.

Seeking a Permanent Peace

[PIERS MORGAN:] And so the assumption would be then that they what? They freeze on the current lines. The 20% that Russia is now occupying Ukraine, they would keep, albeit, I assume with no chance for a sovereignty because Ukraine wouldn’t agree to that.

[JEFFREY SACHS:] No. No. No. I—first of all, we can’t negotiate. This is—

[PIERS MORGAN:] I’m asking you what you think is most likely.

[JEFFREY SACHS:] What I think should be done is a permanent peace, not a ceasefire or an armistice line. I don’t want to revisit this war and have irredentist sentiments, and lobbying for a renewed war and new military buildups and all the rest, I want peace. There should be peace.

Ukraine’s mistake—but by the way, it wasn’t Ukraine’s mistake. It was an American project that we’ve discussed that goes back to 1994 was to push NATO all the way to Ukraine, and that crossed Russia’s understandable national security red line. And I would have respected Russia’s national security red line because I felt that if you violated it, we would get to where we are today.

So I would aim for peace, not a settlement that is grudging, imposed. “We never will accept the sovereignty of Russia.” What kind of peace is that? All of that is just a prelude to the next war. We should have real peace.

By the way, there are three groups of people that are involved or should be involved. They’re the generals. They know something about fighting, sometimes well or sometimes badly. They’re the politicians. They know something about grandstanding. But then there are the diplomats. The diplomats should work out a real settlement.

And while it’s not very popular to say, I’m going to say it, the United Nations Security Council should be the ultimate place where that arrangement is settled, including China, including Russia, including Britain, France, the United States, all as co-guarantors of a true peace. Not an armistice line, not a frozen conflict, not something that Ukraine never accepts. No. An end to this war because we have more important things to do on the planet than have a future, in which the question of Lugansk and Donetsk play a central role in somebody’s politics.

[PIERS MORGAN:] There are people like Elon Musk calling for America to withdraw from NATO. What, just quickly, what is your response to that?

The Future of NATO and US-European Relations

[JEFFREY SACHS:] It will happen if there is no settlement of this war. If Europe says—well, I’m all in favor, by the way, of Europe getting its act together. And I was in the European Parliament saying this just very recently. But if Europe says we fight until 1991 borders are restored, the United States will wash its hands of all of this.

I can tell you, they will not play a losing hand. They started this, by the way. The US started this. The US said we could go wherever we want. Zbig Brzezinski laid it all out in 1997 as clearly and explicitly as one can do. So the United States started it, but the US drops countries like hot potatoes. That’s my whole life, whether it’s Vietnam or Afghanistan, now Ukraine.

So if the Europeans push so hard, if Zelenskyy because for whatever reason as an individual says what is not in the interest of his country, it could be pretty bad for the relations between Europe and the United States. I would not recommend that at all.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Professor Sachs, great to have you back. Thank you very much.

[JEFFREY SACHS:] Great to be with you. Thank you.

Francis Fukuyama’s Counterpoint

[PIERS MORGAN:] Well, the author and political scientist Francis Fukuyama is coming up and also be joined by the rest of my panel, but he’s joining me now. Mr. Fukuyama, you’ve just listened to what Jeffrey Sachs had to say. I have to say he’s been very consistent about his position on this from the very start. What is your response?

[FRANCIS FUKUYAMA:] Well, it’s hard to know where to begin. I think he’s been wrong about this from the very start. It begins with the fundamental assessment of what Putin wants. Jeffrey Sachs basically parrots a lot of Moscow talking points that somehow Russia was threatened by the expansion of NATO, that it’s really NATO that destabilized the situation, and all they’re doing is seeking peace.

I think that if you listen to what Putin has been saying from the beginning, he is not just interested in security. He regrets the collapse of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t just that one statement from the 1990s. He did—he said this in a very long article published before the war. He just celebrated the anniversary of the death of Anatoly Sobchak saying that he, like Sobchak, you know, this was the most traumatic moment when the Soviet Union fell apart.

And if you think that you’re going to get peace by any kind of agreement over the current lines in Ukraine, you are wrong because he wants to reabsorb the whole of Ukraine. He wants to get Moldova. He wants to get Georgia. He wants to get all of these pieces and then, ultimately, the Baltics. And so I think that, you know, Jeffrey Sachs is not being realistic about the kind of threat that we are facing.

[PIERS MORGAN:] What should Europe do given the attitude that Donald Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, seem to have adopted, which is Europe has to take the lion’s share of responsibility here for dealing with this war now.

[FRANCIS FUKUYAMA:] This is one area where I actually agree with Donald Trump. I think that Europeans ought to be spending closer to five percent of GDP on their own defense because America is proving that it is indeed a very unreliable ally even if the Democrats manage to come back in the next few years. As a European, I would not count on America pulling their chestnuts out of the fire, and therefore, they’ve got to be much more serious about defense cooperation.

The Future of Liberal Democracy

[FRANCIS FUKUYAMA:] Actually, I did not say either in the original article or the book that it was irrevocable. I said that there’s backwards and forwards.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Sorry. I may have mischaracterized you. I’m sorry.

[FRANCIS FUKUYAMA:] No. The real question is, is there a – you know, first of all, the history I was talking about is not events. It is the broad social evolution of societies. And the question is, is there a superior form of civilization that is going to supplant Western liberal democracy?

And frankly, for all of the backsliding that has occurred in existing democracies in recent years, I don’t see that higher alternative. I don’t think we’re all going to look like China in another fifty years because I do think that people want basic freedom. And I think that they need governments that are restrained by checks and balances, which is the essence of a liberal democracy.

So we’re going through a very tough period. There’s no question that democracy is threatened. I guess the one thing I really didn’t anticipate is that the threat to liberal democracy could be so prominent in the United States itself. That is something I really had not anticipated. But here we are.

I think that the international liberal order is being threatened. But I think the liberal order in the United States, and by liberal, I don’t mean liberal in the left-right sense as in the United States. Liberal meaning the fundamental rule of law, the constraint of checks and balances in a constitutional system. I did not expect that it would come under the kind of threat domestically that it is experiencing today.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Are we seeing a complete reframing geopolitically of the world order?

[FRANCIS FUKUYAMA:] Well, Donald Trump has a very different view of the world, in which basically democratic values are completely absent. You know, when Jeff Sachs talks about a multipolar world, this is a world in which the basic value of democracy as an organizing principle is absent. And the world then revolves simply around power and it revolves around great powers that can decide to do with the rest of the world what they please.

I think that for the last seventy years, we’ve been trying to build a different kind of world in which rules both domestically and internationally would try to limit the pure exercise of power. And I think that we’re going to suffer if we move into that world where it’s simply a contest of power.

I mean, there was no discussion of China. Is China then going to say, well, if the United States can take Greenland and Panama, we have every right to take back Taiwan? And I think that invites further use of force and further instability. It’s not going to lead to a more peaceful world.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Are we more or less likely to be heading to some kind of nuclear conflict?

[FRANCIS FUKUYAMA:] Well, that’s another red herring. I think that there were many red lines that Putin laid down that had been crossed. It’s insane to think that they would resort to nuclear weapons over anything going on in Ukraine because they are going to come out the losers if that happens, and they know that. Nuclear deterrence continues to hold. And I think that making preemptive concessions out of some kind of abstract fear of World War Three is simply wrong.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Francis Fukuyama, thank you very much indeed for coming on. I appreciate it.

[FRANCIS FUKUYAMA:] Thank you very much for having me.

America’s Role as Leader of the Free World

[PIERS MORGAN:] So is America no longer the leader of the free world, and if so, should Americans care? Joining me to debate this, Andrew Wilson, host of The Crucible, the host of the Part of the Problem podcast, Dave Smith, and the Air Force veteran and YouTuber, Jake Broe.

Welcome to all of you. Let me just start with you, Jake, if I may. We’re really at a very critical moment, it seems to me, for the world order in a sense. What happened in the Oval Office on Friday sent shockwaves around the world about whether America was going to continue being with Europe when it came to issues like the invasion of a sovereign democratic European country by a Russian dictator. How concerned are you that we might see a genuine fracturing here?

[JAKE BROE:] Last Friday was shocking, but unfortunately, I’m not surprised. Donald Trump and JD Vance just trashed the eighty-year transatlantic partnership that has kept all of us safe in the western world. And now all of our allies are asking, can we trust Donald Trump? Can we trust the United States? Are they a good faith partner?

Canada is already preparing for the worst. And now all of our partners in Europe as well as our partners in the Asia Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, the entire democratic world is wondering, will the United States honor their commitments?

If a treaty has been signed by the US Congress, Donald Trump can’t arbitrarily break it. That’s in violation of federal and international law. But right now, Donald Trump says I have the power to do whatever I want. I can make law. I can discern what the law is. Nobody can stop me. Nobody can check me.

And we’ve entered a new age. I don’t think anyone alive today really remembers what it was like back in the age of empires prior to World War One, prior to World War Two, and that’s what Donald Trump and the Putinists in our own governments want to do.

The United States wants to ally – our government wants to ally with Russia against our smaller, weaker, democratic, traditional allies. These alliances were built on shared values, respecting democracy, international law, human rights – three things that Donald Trump doesn’t care about, three things that Vladimir Putin doesn’t care about. And if the American people don’t rise up now and put a stop to this, then we’re going to have a lot more wars.

A lot more wars as Xi wants to redraw the maps, Putin wants to redraw the maps, and Trump wants to redraw the maps.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Okay. Andrew Wilson, your response to that?

[ANDREW WILSON:] Yeah. So, I mean, more panic mongering from the stupid leftist. So anything they can do to say, oh, Zelensky is a hero. This guy, by the way, in the paradox of freedom who’s pressing people into service in this country, don’t want to go, while he’s in a great battle for freedom. He went to the White House and completely embarrassed himself. He decided to have a massive argument in front of the American people, which should not have happened in the middle of trying to get some type of peace treaty together on behalf of his own nation. Has the left held him accountable? Of course not. Instead, somehow, it’s always Donald Trump’s fault.

By the way, this is our treasure, my treasure, my money that’s going over to Ukraine in order to fund this rapidly growing bloodbath that you so desperately want. Well, at the same time, you say, “Well, Andrew, don’t you think that we – you know, it’s all because Putin is so bad.”

It’s like, look. There’s no good guys here. Stop pretending that I need to follow this dialectic that there’s good guys who are involved in this. Ukraine was always a corrupt government. The Russian government’s a corrupt oligarchal government, and they’re at war with each other. And I don’t want my treasure to go over there, and I don’t want my kids to go over there and fight a war.

I’m sorry, but I think that we will refrain from entering into another European theater as you bring up. People don’t really understand what it was like in these pre-imperial dynasties. Yeah. The thing is, we do have grandparents or great grandparents left alive who were part of these European theaters, and they were bloodbaths, absolute bloodbaths. And what we need right now is a peace treaty, not any more of your cocksure posturing about all of the good guy Zelensky and the bad guy Putin. It’s a false dialectic, and I’m sick of it.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Dave Smith, it’s very interesting to me to see the difference between the way a lot of people in America are viewing all this, particularly the Oval Office showdown and the way countries like the UK here or other European countries are viewing it. But, ultimately, everybody would like to see peace. Do you think we’re more or less near to a peace settlement than we were before Friday?

[DAVE SMITH:] Oh, I think we’re closer to one, and I think that’s great. And Andrew is spot on. And, look, I know I’ve said this before on your show, Piers, but when you hear this fear mongering about the Putinists in our government, I mean, look, at least during Joseph McCarthy and the Senate and the House on Un-American Activities, during what is now known as McCarthyism, at least back then, there were some actual communists. The idea that there are Putinists within our government is just ridiculous.

And I love how everybody freaks out when Donald Trump is doing what is the scariest thing in DC, talking about potentially ending a war. And then we hear these lectures about the power of the president. Meanwhile, Barack Obama – forget that obviously the Constitution is very clear that Congress has to declare a war. We haven’t declared a war since World War Two, but at least George W. Bush got some authorizations from the Congress. Barack Obama went to war in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, not even anything from Congress, and we don’t hear a freak out about the power of the president until one is actually discussing the possibility of ending a war.

And look. I mean, what Zelensky did in the Oval Office has got to be the greatest strategic blunder that I’ve ever seen in my life. For him to think that the way – when he is in a desperate situation, completely reliant on Donald Trump – he thought the way to accomplish this was to go in there and try to out-alpha Donald Trump in a language he barely speaks. I mean, this was – he did the biggest disservice to his own country and this entire effort.

But you know what? I’m fine with that because the whole thing is that America was never supposed to be a global empire, and the American people don’t want to be a global empire. We’re supposed to be a constitutionally limited republic, and there is no such thing as a constitutionally limited world empire. We should get out of the empire business. It’s been nothing but a disaster for the American people.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Well, let me bring in Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, retired US commander in Europe. General, great to have you on Uncensored. You’ve heard there the conflicting views. From your perspective, with all your extensive military background, what did you make, first of all, of what you saw in the Oval Office on Friday?

[BEN HODGES:] Well, thanks for the privilege, and extensive military service is another way of saying I’m really old. So thanks for the euphemism.

[PIERS MORGAN:] My apologies for the ageist way I framed that.

[BEN HODGES:] Look. I have to say, Friday was one of the hardest days for me I’ve had in a long time. It was very difficult to watch how President Zelensky was treated in there. And look. You could criticize him as Dave just did, the fact that he pushed back there in the Oval Office. But you know what? He’s leading a country that’s fighting for its survival, and he was being bombarded with absolute false information.

And it also revealed to me or made it clear to me that the people around the president do not understand the nature of war or why people fight. This notion that, “Look, you gotta stop. You don’t have the cards.” George Washington sure didn’t have the cards. The Taliban didn’t have the cards. The Vietnamese did not have the cards, but yet all of them defeated much larger, technically superior forces.

And so I think that what’s missing from this is a clarity of what is our strategic objective. What are we trying to accomplish?

Russia’s Military Limitations in Ukraine

[BEN HODGES:] What do we want in Europe? Why does Ukraine matter? It’s not charity, obviously. It’s because the Chinese are watching to see, are we serious when we talk about respect for sovereignty, respect for international law, respect for freedom of navigation. And if the Chinese see that we’re not even willing to do this in Europe, then I don’t think they’ll be very impressed with what we say and do in the Indo-Pacific.

And, of course, our economy is tied to Europe. The biggest trading block in the world or the trading relationship is between Europe and the United States. And so if Ukraine fails, you’re going to see about another ten million Ukrainian refugees heading into Poland and Germany and Western Europe. That affects us. The Biden administration failed to do it. The Trump administration has not yet done it to say our strategic objective.

[PIERS MORGAN:] And, before I go to Andrew to respond to that, general, just from a pure military perspective, is there any way Ukraine can either win this war with enough support or chuck Russia out of the twenty percent of Ukraine it’s currently occupying? Are either of those two things remotely achievable?

[BEN HODGES:] Absolutely. Look. This war has been going on eleven years. Eleven years, and Russia still, with every advantage, only controls twenty percent of Ukraine. They have gone a total of sixty kilometers in the last year from Avdivka to the outskirts of Prokhorst. That’s it. Despite enormous advantages and huge casualties, the great Russian Black Sea fleet, nobody even talks about them anymore.

The Russian Air Force failed its two main tasks, achieve air superiority and interdict the lines of communication from Poland and Ukraine. They’re not able to do it. So it’s clear that the Russians do not have the ability to break through or overrun the Ukrainian defenders the way their grandfathers did in the Second World War. That just doesn’t exist.

And this is without the United States actually committing or European countries actually committing to helping Ukraine win. You know, the Biden administration never could say, we want Ukraine to win. And so you ended up with this sort of a drip drip drip support.

And, of course, I think the Europeans are finally waking up, they realize that they are going to pay an enormous price if Ukraine fails. About fifty percent of the ammunition that’s produced in Europe today goes to customers in the Middle East and in Africa. So it’s not like they don’t have industrial capacity. They have not yet shown the political will or the strategic backbone to do what needs to be done.

Debate Over Ukrainian Democracy

[PIERS MORGAN:] Okay. Andrew Wilson, some people on the conservative right in America want to see Zelensky resign and have somebody else to deal with here. What do you feel about that?

[ANDREW WILSON:] Well, I mean, there hasn’t been a… he suspended all elections in his nation and probably shouldn’t be the sitting president.

[PIERS MORGAN:] But he’s actually paying… oh, hang on. On that point, though, just to be clear, the country remains under martial law.

[ANDREW WILSON:] So it was supposed to have an election, I think, last April, May. If this happened here in the United States, these guys would be screaming bloody murder that Trump was a dictator, that he was a neo-Nazi, that he was a fascist authoritarian. If this happened under martial law in the United States, these guys would be screaming for blood right now.

For some reason, though, when it’s Zelensky, it’s fine because it’s under martial law. That makes it all better. They can press people into service. That’s okay. They don’t mind that.

[PIERS MORGAN:] But how could they… I’ll give them a brief recap. Could they? But, Andrew, how could they realistically have a free and fair election given that six and a half million Ukrainians have left the country as refugees?

[ANDREW WILSON:] Perhaps it could be…

[PIERS MORGAN:] Hang on. Hang on. Let me finish. Three and a half million more are living under Russian occupation, They clearly can’t vote freely or fairly, in the way they may wish to. Plus they’re still at war, so there’s a front line which has thousands and thousands more Ukrainians battling it out every day who wouldn’t be able to vote either. How does this election even happen?

Never mind the fact that under their constitution, which got parliamentary’s massive support, dictates they can’t have an election while they’re under martial law anyway. But how do you have a free fair election given those kind of circumstances?

[ANDREW WILSON:] Perhaps you couldn’t, though there are war-torn regions before which have had elections. But let’s just grant for a second that you couldn’t. So what? These guys would still be screaming bloody murder if the shoe was on the other foot here in the United States, and it was impossible for us to do a free…

[PIERS MORGAN:] Nobody did when the UK didn’t have an election for ten years before and during World War Two. Everybody understood. There was no criticism of that. There was a realization.

[ANDREW WILSON:] Era with people who weren’t lunatics. And now the left is a bunch of lunatics, and they apply a double standard, and they have what is called the paradox of freedom. And right now, they don’t care that people are being pressed into the front lines. He brings up Washington who was using a volunteer militia. Nobody was getting pressed into service in order to fight off the British.

These people are lunatics, and they’re bloodthirsty monsters. Ultimately, anytime we try to move towards peace, as Dave Smith rightly points out, these people want to do everything possible to not do that because, oh, Putin might get a win.

It’s like, look. Ultimately, I’m going to say this again, reiterate it again, neither one of these are the good guys. Ukraine has a corrupt government, has a history of corruption. Putin and Russia, history of corruption, very, very bad countries doing very bad things to each other. The Europeans didn’t… if they cared so much, how come they only recently started to actually fund this?

[PIERS MORGAN:] Well, I agree with you. I agree with you.

[ANDREW WILSON:] There was only four of them. Four countries including ours that even had three percent of its GDP going to this conflict until Trump demanded it. So it’s like, no. I don’t buy this narrative that, oh, we’ve always cared about our tree. You cared when it was when our treasure’s going over there and funding the entire thing. Right? Suddenly, there’s a blank check.

I’m sure that the corrupt Ukrainian government loves having our blank checks go over there where they pocket half of it, and only half of it goes to the war effort. I don’t trust any of these people.

European Defense Spending and American Responsibility

[PIERS MORGAN:] Alright. Jake, there’s no doubt. I said this from the moment Donald Trump first started talking about NATO being potentially obsolete if the member countries didn’t pay their basic financial dues, which they weren’t doing in the main. There’s no doubt given how many more are now paying their dues or more that that memo got loudly received.

But Europe is still… most countries, including this country, UK, have not been stepping up properly on their own defenses. And there comes a point, do they not, where I completely understand why a lot of Americans are simply done with being the global police officer. Why should they be? If the Europeans aren’t prepared to take their own defenses seriously enough, why should America constantly feel obliged to come in and spend American taxpayer money on bailing them out?

[JAKE BROE:] The honest answer is because America has been writing the security policy for these countries since World War Two. If America makes all the decisions, America calls the shots in this alliance, what incentive is there for our allies to spend increased amounts?

Should they have been meeting that two percent NATO guideline? Of course, they should. But they were lulled into a false sense of security both from the United States and from the Russians. This entire plan of making Europe dependent on Russian energy exports, nations that trade together don’t go to war with each other, we now know that’s a lie. This was a post-communist collapse experiment.

What if we economically intertwined ourselves with the Chinese, with the Russians? We make this globalization effort in order to connect them. That way, they won’t want to risk their trade partners in order to go to war with their neighbors. And what we’ve learned in the last three years is that we were wrong. We never should have made our economy, our energy needs dependent on either the Chinese or the Russians because they’re dictatorships and they’re authoritarians, and they want to be empires.

They want to invade their smaller, weaker neighbors or topple their governance, either create proxy states or redraw the maps. So now nobody can deny the reality. Nobody can deny the truth. Every democracy in the world has to reevaluate their trade partnerships and their food and energy supplies because you cannot be reliant on dictators.

You cannot be reliant on either China or Russia because they will use those trade relations as leverage to get what they want on the battlefield, to get concessions from democratic nations that do try to negotiate in good faith when the Russians and the Chinese will never negotiate in good faith. They will always make maximum demands. They will always lie. They will always cheat. They will always steal. You can’t trust them. You shouldn’t be working with them.

And right now, Donald Trump is trying to negotiate an aluminum deal with the Russians. Donald Trump is trying to resume direct flights between the United States and Moscow on stolen planes. All of these aircraft that the Russians stole three years ago, Donald Trump wants to pretend like it never happened. We’re trying to increase diplomatic staff when we know these people are all FSB agents and spies here just to subvert, undermine, and weaken the United States. Donald Trump is opening up the gates and making every American less safe and our country weaker. This has been a disaster the last three days, and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are the ones driving all of this right now.

Trump’s Foreign Policy Approach

[PIERS MORGAN:] Okay. I mean, Dave Smith, I would not share some of that categorization because I don’t think this is by any means done, this scenario. I think that Trump ultimately is desperate to bring peace. He prefers peace to war. He’s said he’d do this before he came into office. He wants to get it done as he does in Gaza as well. He wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are lots of incentives here for Donald Trump to deliver on what he said he would deliver on. So I don’t share that slightly apocalyptic view of where we are, but I also think Jake makes some very good points about, you know, when you dance with the devil, you get pricked by the horns. And a lot of people believe that the way Donald Trump interacts with people like Putin and Xi and Kim Jong Un and others is detrimental to America’s natural interest. What do you feel?

[DAVE SMITH:] I mean, this is global politics… always involves interacting with bad people, and it only seems like the propaganda about this arises when it’s somebody who we want to support a war against. How about the way we interact with the Saudis or the Israelis for that matter?

Look. The greatest thing that ever happened in the history of the world has happened over the last thirty years, and there’s a billion people have been pulled out of extreme poverty. And a big part of that was because Richard Nixon went and talked to Mao Zedong, the most evil man who ever lived by the numbers.

I just think there’s always this fear mongering that is associated with every single war. And, you know, you mentioned age before. I’m old enough to have lived through a lot of these wars right now. America’s been in a constant state of war since at least 9/11. And, of course, we know that with the war in Iraq, it was what? It was going to be a mushroom cloud over Kansas. Right? Saddam Hussein was going to give the weapons that he didn’t have to the terrorists he wasn’t friends with, and then they were going to nuke America. And they convinced everyone in America that this was the case, and we hear the same thing now.

Although, weirdly, there seems to be something so contradictory here between making the argument that Vladimir Putin is so weak that he can’t even take over Ukraine even though he’s been at war with them since 2014 or however you want to calculate when the war actually started. And yet also he’s some huge threat to reconstitute the Soviet Union, or we just hear it asserted that China will move on Taiwan if Vladimir Putin gets to keep his percentage of Ukraine, which I’m not even saying is impossible, but it’s certainly not an inevitability. By the way, I don’t think we could do anything if China wanted to move on Taiwan tomorrow.

And I think Americans have to get out of this empire mindset. Like, just for example, imagine let’s just say there was the political will and there was the desire. Let’s say that the US wanted to take Mexico City. We were just… we had decided we’re going to do that. What could Russia do to stop us? What could China do to stop us? Nothing. The idea is ridiculous. If we decided we wanted to do that, then we do that, period, because we are the bigger, stronger country, and that might… that’s not great, but it is the way of the world. Look.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Perspectives on Peace and Deterrence

[DAVE SMITH:] The bottom line here is that people—and I will say like me at this point, because I’ve been talking about this conflict on big platforms for years at this point now. The head of NATO, Stoltenberg, said that in late 2021, Vladimir Putin drafted a treaty between Russia and NATO. What he was asking for was a promise that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO. And he said for that, he would not invade. The people like Jeffrey Sachs, who you just interviewed before we started this panel—that’s the deal we could have had if we had listened to people like that.

And now, oh my god, wouldn’t you give anything for that deal? Imagine you could have all of Ukraine minus Crimea under Ukrainian control, and all you had to give was a promise of not bringing Ukraine into NATO. Now NATO’s not even on the table anymore, and there’s no way Ukraine’s going to keep 100 percent of its geographic integrity from the beginning of the war. This is the reality of the situation. Governments are not perfect and neither is ours, but peace is better than war.

This war did not need to happen, and it’s been an absolute disaster, worst of all, for the Ukrainian people.

[PIERS MORGAN:] On the issue of the election, I think it’s worth noting—and I’ll come to you, General, if I may, for a response to this—Ukraine’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to approve a resolution affirming the legitimacy of Zelensky’s stay in office, asserting the constitutionality of deferring the presidential election while the country is at war. The 268 parliament members present voted unanimously to approve the resolution, while twelve other MPs were not present during the session. So that seems to me to be a very clear democratic mandate by the elected officials of Ukraine to endorse not having an election until the war is over.

[BEN HODGES:] Well, you know, we may—some of us may not like the fact that Ukrainian martial law includes a suspension of elections, but that is the law. And so the fact that the Rada made the decision to vote and give that sort of public endorsement, to me, that’s compelling.

Now I do want to say, give Dave Smith credit. Finally heard him say something today that I agreed with. This war could have been avoided if we, the West, led by the United States, had responded appropriately after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, if we had responded appropriately after they invaded Ukraine in 2014—and that’s not a game. I mean, the whole world saw Russia invade Ukraine in 2014, and we did nothing when they jumped over the Obama red line in Syria.

So this war is a result of failed deterrence. And trying to explain deterrence and spend money for deterrence is always a tough sell because you have to convince taxpayers and voters and legislators of what the risk is and why you have to do it. That’s hard. But it is much, much cheaper, obviously, to do that, to have successful deterrents as we did for over seventy years after the Second World War versus dealing with the failed deterrents we’re dealing with right now.

U.S. Aid to Ukraine and Military Presence

[BEN HODGES:] I think for Andrew, I would just offer, as I’m pretty sure you know this, the amount of money—the $120 to $180 billion, depending on what you include in that amount, is clearly not $350 billion. But the amount of money that the United States has spent or contributed towards helping Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of that money was spent in the United States.

It’s not pallets of money that are loaded onto a C-17 and then delivered into Ukraine. It’s money that is spent replacing or buying ammunition, refurbishing old equipment that is then loaned or given to Ukraine. And, of course, there are no US troops in Ukraine except for those officers that are assigned to the embassy in the Office of Defense Cooperation whose task is to make sure accountability of every Javelin, every artillery round, every set of binoculars. Or you can shake your head if you want to. That’s a fact.

[ANDREW WILSON:] Why not just stop pretending that we don’t have United States special forces on the ground right this second? We don’t have CIA agents all over Ukraine right this second. I want you to stop pretending because it’s nonsense. And we all know it’s nonsense. This is the way it’s been going for a long time.

And when you talk about, “Well, Andrew, what we’re actually doing is we’re spending a whole bunch of money on refurbishing equipment here instead of buying new equipment to send over there.” So what? So are you still spending tons of my money on something I don’t care about to send over to a nation which is corrupt as hell?

So can we just stop BS-ing each other for a second? Yes, United States has boots on the ground there. Yes, we have special forces units there. We have CIA agents there, and we would be fools to pretend we don’t.

[BEN HODGES:] It’s an interesting argumentative style that you have. When people start calling me names or whatever, then I really—

[ANDREW WILSON:] I didn’t call you any names, sir.

[BEN HODGES:] Okay. What was the name that I called you?

[ANDREW WILSON:] I think the key is this idea of trying to—I’m usually just offended by tone.

[DAVE SMITH:] You just don’t like tone. Maybe a little tone policing getting worked in there. Maybe that southern drawl where you try to make yourself sound likable—it doesn’t work so well on me because you can’t gaslight me with this stuff. It’s nonsense.

Yes, there’s boots on the ground there. Yes, we’ve had boots on the ground there probably since the beginning. Yes, we’re spending $100 billion plus dollars on equipment that we then send over there. And by the way, there’s hidden money going over there too. This is such nonsense. Just stop gaslighting the American people. Stop it. We’re not stupid. We’ve seen this on repeat so many times now.

Ending the War and Security Guarantees

[BEN HODGES:] The idea of ending the war, of course, is exactly what we would like to do, but it needs to be an end that is sustainable. And I think President Zelensky understands that he can’t just sign or accept an end to the war where Russia will wait for us to lose interest because we always do lose interest, and then they pick right back up with a resumption of the conflict after we have left or turned our back.

And so I think it’s reasonable to expect Ukrainians to want some sort of guarantee, whether that’s continued aid, continued equipment, or presence. I don’t know exactly what that looks like. Obviously, I would prefer to see Ukraine in NATO. We get better the day they join NATO. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, especially if the United States is not willing to do it, and the Biden administration also is not willing to do it. But how do we end it when your negotiating partner on the other side of the table is Vladimir Putin? There’s no reason to have confidence that they will live up to any agreement because there’s nothing in their history.

[DAVE SMITH:] I never quite understand this argument that seems to just logically fall apart—that we can’t end a war because the war might pick up at some point in the future. I’ve heard the entire time through this war, including on your show, Piers, that if Putin was successful in Ukraine, then he was going to move on Poland. This is what Joe Biden kept saying. This was the official fear-mongering of this war.

And so if you’re telling me that even NATO membership isn’t a guarantee, then, yes, we never have a perfect guarantee. By the way, you also don’t have a guarantee from any government in the history of the world. That doesn’t mean that ending a war isn’t still a positive.

And I just want to go back to what was brought up initially. The idea that this was a case of failed deterrence, and that if only we had deterred Vladimir Putin sooner, then we could have avoided this whole thing. Let’s just quickly look at the last twenty years of US foreign policy in Europe. We’ve expanded NATO all the way to Vladimir Putin’s borders. We constantly floated out the idea for years that we would include Ukraine at some point, give them full membership. We said point blank in 2008 at the Bucharest Summit that we were bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO before Russia ended up going to war with Georgia there.

Just imagine, if you can, have a little bit of strategic empathy and put yourself in the Russian shoes. If the Soviet Union had never collapsed and had poured $100 million into a Mexican street protest that overthrew a democratically elected government, and they had been saying for years they were going to bring Mexico into their military alliance—and then when the new government came up, they recognized them immediately and started arming them as Donald Trump foolishly bragged about the other day with Zelensky in the Oval Office. Piers, do you think Americans would feel that was deterrence, or do you think we might view that as a provocation?

[JAKE BROE:] The first thing that he said, what is the concern if Russia takes Ukraine? If Russia can’t even go sixty kilometers deep and take the city of Pokrovsk, what is the threat to NATO? It’s absorbing a country of forty million people, absorbing a country that has ten trillion dollars of natural resources under the ground. It’s the strategic location on the Black Sea.

If Russia absorbs Ukraine, they will Russify the people. They will annihilate the Ukrainian identity, turn them into Russians, and then start press-ganging them into the military and send them into meat wave attacks against the Baltics, against Poland in this small key gap. The fear—we’re trying to prevent Ukraine—Russia could be forced into war, and what is the care about what Russia thinks or feels. Russia is not a great power. Russia has an economy the same size roughly as Spain. Do you think Spain is a great power that the United States should respect?

[ANDREW WILSON:] Listen. We are in the business of trying to be a world empire, and we are going broke. We’re $36 trillion in debt because we can’t afford to do it. We’ve blown $8 trillion dollars in the last twenty years in foreign wars.

[JAKE BROE:] The current estimate I’ve seen is that Russia’s GDP is about two trillion dollars a year. That is less than a third—is Spain a great power that we should respect?

The Nuclear Factor

[PIERS MORGAN:] Let me bring the elephant in the room into the debate. Nobody’s mentioning the nuclear arsenal that Russia has. That’s what makes it different to any of these other countries. Russia, on its own, has more nukes than any other country, including the United States. That is a fact.

There are, I think, nine countries in the world that have nukes. The UK has some. France has some. There are American nukes at a number of other European countries. But let’s be clear. When it comes to deterrent, there’s probably only one deterrent that Putin really cares about, and that is a nation that is nuclear armed.

When I interviewed President Zelensky two weeks ago, he did say as part of the security they wanted, “Maybe we could have our nuclear weapons back.” Because, of course, when Ukraine became an independent country, they had a lot of Russian nuclear missiles on their territory, a lot.

The Nuclear Question for Ukraine

[PIERS MORGAN:] And they agreed to give them all back to Russia, but only because Russia, America, and the UK gave undertakings that they would guarantee Ukraine’s defense, and that hasn’t materialized. And so you could argue, if you go right back to the start of all this from when Ukraine went out on its own, had they been allowed to keep some of those nuclear missiles that were Russian owned but were on Ukraine territory, had they been able to keep them and remain a nuclear power, that might have been the only thing that would have deterred Vladimir Putin. Now what would you say to that?

[BEN HODGES:] Well, of course, you have to take Russia’s nuclear capabilities seriously. They have a lot of them. They don’t and they don’t care how many innocent people might be killed. But I think that we—it was a mistake of the Biden administration to assume that if Ukraine was successful or we did too much, that Russia might retaliate with a nuclear weapon of some sort. I think there was never a chance they were going to do that because there was no benefit to the Russians to use.

[PIERS MORGAN:] Would Russia have invaded Ukraine if Ukraine had retained some of the nuclear weapons they had to give up back in the mid-nineties?

[BEN HODGES:] Well, that’s a fair question to ask, but I don’t know. I mean, having a nuclear force is incredibly expensive. Almost half of UK’s defense budget is tied up just in their nuclear force. So could Ukraine have managed to continue a nuclear deterrent that was modernized, ready, prepared, when in fact, you know, it’s not just about having those big silver bullets. It’s also the whole system to be able to deliver it. And I’m not sure that’s a—I can’t answer that with any sort of assurance.

But nuclear deterrence, you know, this has always been one of the most important contributions of the United States to NATO was the nuclear capability that we brought as well as what UK and France possess as well. So we do live in the nuclear world. I think it was unfortunate that we allowed ourselves to be deterred by Russian threats of nuclear weapons because now everybody else that wants a nuke or has one or is trying to get one sees that we could be deterred by just the threat of the use.

[ANDREW WILSON:] Totally agree. I was saying that actually throughout the entire time. Every time Putin was in a bit of a hot situation, he’d just rattle his nuclear saber in a threatening and aggressive manner rather than the deterrent defensive manner that you’re supposed to do with your nuclear deterrent. And everyone backed off, terrified. That’s not how a nuclear deterrent is supposed to work. You’re supposed to—if you’ve got as many as he’s got, which the Americans and the UK and France collectively would have, rattle them back. That’s the point.

Closing Remarks

[PIERS MORGAN:] Anyway, I’m going to leave it there. Thank you. Fascinating debate. I really appreciate it. Thank you all very much.

Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we offer only one simple thing: Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcast. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate, and entertain, and we’ll do it all for free. Independent uncensored media has never been more critical, and we couldn’t do it without you.

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