Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…as region, and they voted to be independent, he didn’t take them then. I mean, he could have used that as a pretense for, hey, they voted to be with us, and he didn’t. I think he wants to end the war. Zelenskyy, from everything he’s said publicly, seems like he still feels like… I’m just taking him at his word here, that it’s like, no, we could end the war, but we got to end the war… It seems like he’s moved from his position being like, no, we have to reclaim all of our territory, to now his position is like, all right, maybe we don’t reclaim all of it, but we got to be given some type of security guarantee in the future. I think the problem with that is just, again… I don’t mean to be cruel about this, because it sucks that there’s little countries that are next to big countries that get bullied around about them, but there also is a bit of an entitlement to demanding a security guarantee. What exactly do you mean? From America? What? That we’ll go to war if you’re invaded? Why do we owe that to anybody? That’s crazy. I’m sorry. You can’t just sign up to say that we’ll go to war if anybody invades anybody. I hope nobody invades anybody, but I don’t want us to get dragged into… That’s a recipe for always being at war, and I don’t think that’s right for our country. So essentially, I think Trump and Putin want peace. And if that’s the case, I think we’ll ultimately get to an end of this war. There’s a lot of stuff to say here. Let’s actually start at the beginning, at the foundation of this. I think the thing that we left unsaid that’s important to say is that Putin invaded Ukraine in February 24th, 2022. And I think he is, at least from my perspective, the person who started the war. You could talk about NATO expansion. You could talk about any other thing that led to it. You could start at the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can go all the way back, as he did, 1,000 years. The reality is, and this goes to our deep discussion about the morality of war, no matter the reasons, the guy that pulls the trigger first non-accidentally and keeps pulling the trigger, that’s the guy who’s at fault. Oh, I agree. I’ll say one standard, one standard for everybody. The standard that I laid out before is the same one I… Did you absolutely have to do that? Once you start killing people by the hundreds of thousands, was there any other option? Are you telling me you absolutely had to do this? And I don’t think that’s right. My friend, Scott Horton, who I was talking to you about, just a totally brilliant guy, even in his book, there’s a whole chapter of all the other options of what Vladimir Putin could do. So, you’re absolutely right. And there’s a weird thing where people say, “If you say that the West provoked this conflict, that is a very different thing than saying that this invasion was justified.”. In the same way that if you were at a bar and someone goes and spits in another guy’s face and then he pulls out a gun and murders them right there, he’s not justified in doing that. That is not okay. You don’t get to murder someone because they spit in your face. Also, if you were talking about why did he murder that guy, I’d be like, oh, because he walked up and spit in his face. That’s why it happened. And that is essentially my contention about this war. I think it’s just crystal clear that that’s why it happened. Listen, it may be right or it may be wrong, but if China or Russia ever backed a street putsch to overthrow the democratically-elected government in Mexico, and then install a pro-Chinese or a pro-Russian government, and then started pumping arms into that conflict, and then kept floating out the idea that they were going to bring them into their military alliance, DC would simply not allow that. You cannot do that, any more than the Soviet Union could put nukes in Cuba. Sorry.…

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