Russo-Georgian War

Yeah, Baidu or Baidu.

Well, it's funny because during the 08 Georgian War between Russia and Georgia, the Russians determined that the Americans had shut off a certain access that they were using on the gps for their weapons and this was right prompted the russians to really start going hard with glonass their alternative because they didn't want to have that option that that option for the americans to use against them so yeah this this makes sense um What other kind of systems? Do you think possibly the Garin 5, this new jet-powered drone that Russia's been using to such great effect? Yeah,

no, I heard your discussion yesterday about that, and I don't think it's off-base at all.

Because remember, the original Garin, or the Shahid that went to Russia came from Iran.

You know, if the West wasn't supporting, uh, Ukraine to th-this fanatical level to the point where they don't have anything left, um, the war would've been over in, in a month.

You know, just like the Georgian War in two thousand and eight.

But given intelligence and the electronics of NATO and the US, the war's been dragged out.

Especially, you know, Russia always had very limited goals in mind.

And you already have chunks of Europe reverting to Third World status.

Uh, Belarus and Russia are, are exceptions to this, and it's all because of these, uh, centralizing policies.

Well, you already talked about the, the Chechen Wars, the, the Georgian Wars.

You start seeing the pushback against him.

So the CIA participated with Georgia here to invade southern Russia.

And that set off the Georgian War, which didn't go well for Georgia.

But in any event, you know, NATO moving east, that final decision to Ukraine was made at the Bucharest NATO conference in 2008.

And, you know, they outright declared NATO will be in Ukraine and in the Caucasus.

It didn't trigger it, but in August of that year, the declaration of independence was in February.

In August of that year, there was the Georgian War.

Georgia started to try to recover two territories it had lost back in the '90s.

Russia intervened, and Russia then formally recognized, not having done so up to that point, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Remember the Four Horsemen calling for nuclear disarmament and that sort of thing? That was in vogue prior to the Prague speech.

That was in vogue before the Georgia War, before Crimean invasion, before Chinese adventurism.

There is almost no one in this town that is thinking those things and saying it out loud.

The center has absolutely shifted, and I think it was John Kyle who almost single-handedly, and with no small amount of effort, single-handedly reinvigorated the nuclear modernization effort in the 2011 timeframe by tying it to the ratification of the New START treaty.

But, you know, to my wife's credit, this is a woman who was with me at every post in 45 years.

She was there during When we were in Jerusalem during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, she stayed with me through the Georgia War.

many of the other spouses and took their kids and went down to Armenia.

That's how we had as a kind of temporary evacuation.

It is very apparent that NATO expansion is one reason why US-Russian relations and Europe-Russia relations have got worse over the last 15 years.

Let's go, let's go back to, let's say, 2008 and the, uh, the summit where the Bush administration first pushed for the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, right? And you, you can see at that time that contributing to tensions, there's the Georgia War, et cetera.

But there are plenty of other factors that also play into this, right? The, the death of arms control, right? The Bush administration's decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty and to pursue missile defense, that contributed to it.

American involvement in the conflicts of the Arab Spring, right? We know from reporting how strongly Vladimir Putin felt about American action in Libya and the death of Gaddafi, and how that really impacted his psychology.