In talking about all this, I often quote an axiom coin by a great friend of mine,

the late Pierre Spray, who was a great Pentagon analyst, actually. He used to say, he said,

the US government exists, has two main functions to buy arms at home and sell arms abroad.

And that's how I think we should look at NATO expansion.

It seems so clear on some level, which makes it so,

dispiriting and almost a kind of gaslighting to turn on the news, or to have a conversation

with anybody in the mainstream, and be told that to mention any of this, to question the extent to

which this is a conflict being fueled by energy interests, or the military industrial complex,

or any of the obvious red flags that are going off. It's a bizarre situation to be in,

to have to feel like you still tiptoe around these sorts of issues. I wonder what you make

of a current media climate, and as you reflect on the extent to which the military industrial

complex is a driver, what do you make of living in a world where Lloyd Austin is a former

Raytheon executive? You know what I mean? And now the Secretary of Defense, I mean, it feels like

the more things change, the more they stay the same, and yet there's no public outcry about it.

There's no public outcry about what it means for someone like Victoria Nuland to have such

successful career under so many administrations that are perceived from the outside of being so

radically different, you know, from Clinton to being Chinese national security advisor to

Hillary spokesperson under Obama to the Assistant Secretary of State for your, like, it all seems

so incredible. It almost feels weird to be talking about it in the kind of these muted matter

of fact terms right now with you. Well, I agree. I mean, I was thinking the other day,

I was thinking, you know, President, President Eisenhardt talked about his famous speech about

the military industrial complex. If Twitter, if he'd made it today, wouldn't he get banned from

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