Is there any sort of a realistic road out of this?

It's a real problem because once you have the spending, and I worked on the Hill, and when the Defense Department or the Army or the Navy or parts of the Defense Department would come for their annual budget, most important page, you would always see all the congressmen and senators looking to the back page of the briefing because that was the map of the United States where the contractors were.

were for this particular program.

If they were up there testifying on the F-22, they had all the subcontractors.

And usually it's 40 some out of 50 states.

So there's the votes right there.

They can never cancel.

What outside forces are necessary to perturb the equilibrium that these wars seem to settle into? I think the

What did you have in mind how that would work?

I think that we're approaching a multipolar world and our data is so huge that I think we're gonna have to cut spending eventually in the military and in domestic programs to get this under control.

It's 37 trillion now, and it's going to go up some more according to the projections.

So we're in a different world now than the end of World War II when we dominated the world, and even during the bipolar Cold War.

We've really gotta have a manageable security posture for the multipolar world, and we have rising centers of power like India that weren't there before, and of course, Germany and Japan are economic powers, and China is both an economic power and an- budding military power as well.

The Russians now, they're a bit debilitated by this war, but I think Roosevelt, before he went on his UN binge at the end of his presidency, his initial thinking of what would happen after World War II was it'd be sort of a concert of powers to manage things, but of course, he never really sold that to the American public, and Truman came in and had a different idea, but what my current vision is sort of a version of his four policemen, except I think there would probably have to be five or six policemen or- or more on the Security Council if you count the economic powers as well, but each power would sort of police its own area.And, you know, the US can't guarantee that the other powers are going to be benevolent, but I think we should have learned by Hoover and Roosevelt's good neighbor policy in the 1930s really paid off because those countries were much more receptive to anti-US, anti-Hitler, the need for measures that, you know, against Hitler's.

My mother used to say, "You get more with sugar than vinegar." Of course, no one told Putin that, but the question, uh, with Ukraine is which sphere of influence do they want to be in? And, of course, Ukrainians want to be in the EU.

Can you explain that?