Douglas Murray: belief

Transcript context

…There has to be a frustration. I don’t understand why Putin, Zelenskyy and Trump can’t just meet in a room together without signing anything, leaders meeting and discussing and the human connection, there’s so many layers of diplomats. It’s the problem I have with the managerial class, they schedule meetings really well, they don’t get shit done and I would love it if people got shit done. So, the soldiers get shit done, they’re fighting the reality of the war and then the leaders have the capacity to get shit done on the scale of nations and geopolitics. But these diplomatic meetings and this- No, I agree. I share your frustration about it, at the same time, I think … I share your frustration because I’ve seen it all, a lot of- I share your frustration because I’ve seen it, a lot of it in my own eyes. There was a [inaudible 01:04:09] the other week and they were hit just after I left the base. You wouldn’t believe what a thermobaric bomb can do to the human body. And I share your frustration with that. At the same time, one of the things that happens if you are rushing is that you do, and I’ve seen this elsewhere, you will put pressure on the people you can pressurize, and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can’t pressurize. That is one of the worrying things that could happen with this. Simply, America can put extraordinary diplomatic, financial, intelligence, military pressure on Ukraine, and it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it’s much easier to pressure Zelenskyy. That’s one of the many things that makes it harder is that the temptation to rush for peace, accepting that peace is the most desirable thing and accepting the horrors of war, which we can linger on, but accepting all that. If somebody says, “We’ve got to get peace today,” and the three of them around a table, the most likely thing is that it’ll be the person who you can pressure most easily, who will be the person that you pressure, and as a result, have an outcome, which, yes, might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim. That’s an extremely ugly and common thing to happen. Yeah, and that’s the other boring thing to say, the boring truth, that the easy shortcut here is to punish Ukraine, and you just have to not do it.…

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