Second Cold War

And I don't believe that the world will get along again.

So we are in the process of in a, however you want to call it, a Cold War, Cold War 2.0, World War III, a quiet world war.

You could see what's happening.

You have a war in the Middle East.

I said, guys, I've seen this movie before.

You know, Democrats love to campaign in Cold War 2.0, but they govern in resets, right? And I'm not saying they're going to try to do a reset with Russia.

They don't have the executive branch to do that.

But I can see how they would... once elected and, you know, not having to worry about this for another couple of years, try to negotiate with the administration to kind of roll back some things that they had said that they would never abide by on the campaign trail.

All told, we view anthropics and open AIs, the world's two largest closed-source LLM providers, as the most likely poster children of the eventual AI burst.

Per our Cold War 2.0 theme, China's lower-cost, more abundant compute open-source LLMs are highly likely to win the AI race absent government intervention.

And then number three, France's dependence on foreign bondholders has contributed to recent volatility.

Non-residents own roughly 60% of French debt, near a decade high.

OK, now that I'm hearing that again, I realize his statement is not just ridiculous because of the lack of reference about colonialism and Europe and the United States, but also, no, they are angry with Putin because he reclaimed Russia for the Russian people.

And They thought they had won the so-called New Cold War and that it was the end of history.

But no, he reclaimed the country's resources for Russia and would not become a vassal to Western hegemony.

I mean, Tucker Carlson is Mr. Capitalism, right? So he should know this and he shouldn't be fooling himself.

So they're determined to push Russia away from Europe and basically push the whole world into once again a binary situation as we had during the 40 years of the Cold War I.

Now in Cold War II, They're recreating this binary situation.

And this is really, really bad, really, really dangerous, because it means that because Europe is under the control of the Americans, Europe is not independent.

And Europe cannot possibly, therefore, be any kind of bridge culture between America in the West and Russia or Asia or China in the East.

During the Cold War, we believed, you know, that that would be the Russian access into Europe if they were to, uh, to attack, and so we geared our, our exercises toward that.

But, you know, in the past, the past week, we had, um, Matt Kroenig, uh, from Heritage, um, who, uh, who spoke at our, uh, Huse event, and one of the questions I asked him, 'cause he, he said, you know, "This is the se- or that was the First Cold War," in, in insinuating there's a Second Cold War.

Yeah.

And I even asked him on it.

I said, "You know what? D- is this the Second Cold War? Is this the wording that's being used?" And his thoughts were, yeah, we're probably getting into a Second Cold War.

And so now we're, we're looking at Kaliningrad as probably one of those, you know, strategic places unlike, un- unlike the Fulda Gap, which not only had access into Europe, but also has access to the capabilities in the Baltic Sea and, uh, and it does sorta, you know, split up Poland and Lithuania, right? 'Cause it's sorta located there.

And what I hadn't noticed until now, and, you know, maybe my eyes were just closed, you know, we've basically...

And then as you know...

You know this debate about China better than I do, but I, I know the debate about Russia as well, and there was this big debate, are we in a new Cold War or not? And, uh, you know, here at Stanford, we have people that said we firmly are, and Niall Ferguson will tell you exactly when he wrote his first article saying it's Cold War 2.0.

Um, McMaster, you know, that was a, that was a ferment.

But what I said about both US-Russia and US-China is both camps are wrong.

And here's how.

This is a critical difference between Cold War I and Cold War II.

During Cold War I, the USSR was mighty and threatened all of Europe, so the threat unified the continent and its American security guarantor, fearful of seeing the other coastline being dominated by a communist augur that was quite adept at capturing left-wing elites on the continent, at least until the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Today's Russia is weaker than the USSR and it threatens only the eastern flank, so the threat divides the alliance.

What happened in the 20th century doesn't inform where we are in the 21st.

This isn't Cold War II.

This is an entirely different problem set.

And right now, if I follow Peter's reporting carefully, we do not have the tools to battle at this level yet.