Lee Smith.
5:10 But the way a lot of people are looking at multipolarity is they presume that Russia should be dominating Europe, not Europe dominating Europe.
5:24 What problem would that cause for us, I mean Europe is an enormous trade partner for the United States, and so what would it mean for Russia to dominate Europe? What would it mean for the Europeans, then what would it mean for the United States?
5:38 Well, it's the whole reason we had NATO was to prevent Moscow from dominating Europe. Russia never de-Sovietized the way that Germany de-Nazified. There was never any national retrospection, never any screening of people who would be unfit to serve in the new post-totalitarian government. So they still have a big Soviet mentality and they have a pretense of a great power to dominate what they say from Dublin to Vladivostok.
So that's all the way from the Atlantic across the Eurasian landmass to the Pacific, and that's their concept of multipolarity, which is part of a doctrine that Alexander Duggin, a Russian political theorist, geopolitician who is credited with refining the term but that means you had different poles of power around the world. But within that Russian construct is what they call Eurasianism. Russia is a Eurasia power. That's a fact from Europe all the way to Vladivostok. So you can't argue that. Its the logical power for a lot of that part of the world. But Eurasianism is an ideology that goes with multipolarity where it will sort of where it will dominate Asia in concert with China, with India, with what until recently was the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Europe. Well that means it would dominate a whole lot of our own strategic interests and that's just not in our national interests to allow Russia to do that. They have no constructive role to play.
7:25. A lot of people, including inside the government, look at NATO . . . for instance, they say NATO is outdated and also . . . so, what is the purpose? The United States has very important interests in Europe, and I always contend with people who say, well, we're just there to protect Europe. Well, no we're there to protect our own interests and we expect the Europeans help us to protect their interests as well as our own. So what's your argument against people who say, "Well, NATO is outdated. We don't need NATO anymore." Either we can't do it on our own anymore, or you know well actually this is Russia sphere of influence. Let's step off of Europe a little bit.
8:18. First of all, NATO is outdated. It was developed to contain Soviet communism. It accomplished that mission. But it's a mutual defense pact among all member nations, and it was designed to defend Europe but the only time that that Article 5 Mutual defense pact was put in motion was after 9/11 in defense of the United States. Our NATO allies played big roles in Iraq, Afghanistan, with terrorism around the world, even countries that we like to bash. I mean France provided us with important help. The Brits did of course. A lot of the Continental Europeans did. The Danes did. The Lithuanians did. The Polish. I was in Afghanistan when the Polish and the Lithuanian forces back in 2007 they were really gung-ho. You had the military from Finland, which wasn't even part of NATO at the time doing guard duty so that our forces wouldn't have to do that, and all the way across the board.
