that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always appreciate peter in washington or the swamp as i like to refer to it let me go to you first here over the last few days and weeks we've heard some very troubling words come from members representing the great powers including a former u.s. commander in europe lieutenant general been hodge's he said the united states needs a very strong european pillar i think in fifteen years it's not inevitable but it is a very strong likely hood that we will be at war with china a president she of china said we have to set up a combat readiness exercises joint exercises and confrontational exercises to enhance service service and capabilities and preparation for war and we have the deputy director of the russian russian foreign ministry's department of nonproliferation arms grow he says at a recent meeting the u.s. stated that the u.s. russia is preparing for war yes russia is preparing for war i can confirm it. this is not getting a whole lot of coverage i'm afraid in the mainstream media these are very important

words peter go ahead. oliver stone and you mentioned the untold history the united states we just did an updated edition that covers the period from twenty twelve to twenty eight in a new chapter and if you look at that the world has become so much more dangerous now than it was in twenty twelve the situation earlier this year secretary of defense mattis said that the u.s. strategic threats now our main threats come from russia and china before that it had been global terrorism in january of this of this year the bullet an atomic scientist moved the hands of the doomsday clock to two minutes before midnight that's the they lasted that back in one nine hundred fifty four after the u.s. and soviet union tested their hydrogen bombs i think that the bullet the atomic scientists needs to meet again and move their hands closer to midnight we've got right now the u.s.

is involved in a major nato exercise peroration trident juncture which is the biggest operation of this sort in norway since one thousand nine hundred ninety one the end of the cold war last month the right russia and china participated in vos stock eighteen which was the biggest russian wargame since one nine hundred eighty one the world is gearing toward much more closely toward confrontation we've got the situation between the us and china the u.s. doing freedom of navigation operations in the south china sea china claiming almost the entirety of the south china sea with its nine dash line that's a confrontation on top of which you've got the trade wars between the u.s. and china to situations when the u.s. and russia you still got the dangerous confrontation potential in syria you've got a ukraine and crimea. you've got the baltics you've got a dangerous situation erupt evolving in the middle east situation in yemen maybe

we're taking a step back from that they were taking a step back from confrontation in korea but around the world now we've got a very very dangerous situation ok and i'm quite worried about the well of civility if something really developing that's why we're doing this program peter michael i mean i think it's kind of a truism that if you prepare for conflict in use this kind of rhetoric it does bring conflict makes it a reality here i'm very concerned about that and it seems to me that the the u.s. is is it has its new enemies list now and through these posture reports that were presented this year you know russia china and iran i mean is the u.s. preparing for some kind of complex with those three countries go ahead. hi peter wealth first of all kudos to both you and the other peter i thought the framing of the show and his first explanation of where we stand were both excellent and i agree with most of what has been said

a couple of mitigating concerns though even though i share your general point first let's let's take a moment to breathe a little bit more easily about korea a year ago we were much closer to war than i think we are right now there is no resolution of course on the crisis could get worse again but i'm quite encouraged to see that chairman kim and president trump and other key actors in that various parts of the diplomacy have actually pulled back a bit from the brink but let's go to your main point i agree with the concern i think that some of this is what professional militaries do to stay vigilant to maintain deterrence of each other but when you combine some of this with uncertainty about some key areas where we are interacting and the other peter already mentioned the south china sea in regard to russia we know that excuse me in regard to china we know that the nato countries and russia have disputes a lot of us. swath of territory centrally the neutral countries and the baltic

states of europe going down towards the middle east those zones are what worries me the most and i do think we have gotten beyond sort of just normal professional preparation into a realm of some sometimes political brinkmanship and we've got to keep finding ways to pull back ok well daniel i mean we can use the example peter i'll use the word that michael used the instability i mean decision to unilaterally walk away from the i.n.f. treaty i mean from a european perspective do you feel safer knowing that that treaty will not be in place could have been updated could have been made global no effort was ever made whatsoever but you know the way the the defense department and donald trump himself is talking is that well you guys are a target again wow for thirty one years that tree that treaty gave us a modicum of security now you don't go ahead daniel. well i'm removed from from the big politics show i'm in switzerland and we watch it from the sideline you know

switzerland has not been in a war for one hundred sixty years but totally share of the concern of peter and michael who have spoken before me that we should not you know go for the war in this confrontational mode i do think that as a human species we must look back to the twentieth century and realise that we had one hundred million death that's what we did in the twenty first in the twentieth century and we shouldn't repeat it in the twenty first because we are extremely armed and if you if you refer to nuclear arms obviously that's one challenge and then we have secret warfare that was very active in syria timber sycamore and others that we are aware of so i agree with the other two that this is this is a very dangerous moment and people here in switzerland are more removed from from the situation that has to be said. i mean it's not but in the street if you could feel it you know peter would we we've all talked on this program here about

potential conflict in the preparation for a conflict but there is so precious little talk of diplomacy and resolving these issues here again the i.n.f. treaty i can see how either side could see flaws in it fine fine it was made during the warsaw pact era all right but you know walking away from a.b.m. walking away from the eye and not even considering dating the new start i mean this is. where you would all of us were brought up that you know the unthinkable was a first strike the unthinkable was a new killer exchange but it is being conceived it's talked about in normal parlance now go ahead peter. walking away from the eye and have treaty makes no sense from the u.s. strategic standpoint and certainly makes no sense from a global standpoint the i.n.f. treaty is you know was put into place in the one nine hundred eighty s.

there was a standoff in europe at that point the russians had introduced the s.s. twenty's the u.s. was putting in the persian and the tom our cruise missiles it was a very dangerous situation they had between a six and ten minutes warning time if those missiles were launched or they got a report that the missiles were launched in order to respond. so they stepped back and we remember the i.n.f. treaty came sort of as the booby prize what gorbachev was pushing for at reykjavik in one nine hundred eighty six in the summit with reagan was completely eliminating nuclear weapons we came within a hair's breath of doing so then they agreed upon the i.n.f. treaty in one thousand nine hundred seven and they eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons it was still a huge step forward but then as you say in two thousand and two we abrogated the a.b.m. treaty. putin proposed that initial phone conversation to donald trump that we

think about renewing the new start treaty when it expires in two thousand and twenty one first trump how to put the phone down because he didn't know what the new start treaty was and then he asked his advisors around the table and he came back and said no we don't want to extend that so we are going to lord the possibility of nuclear anarchy you know what that means you know what every time i take my students out to study abroad class to hiroshima or nagasaki and i found myself repeatedly writing down the same caption at the atomic bomb museum in hiroshima and that was that by nine hundred eighty five the world had reached the destructive capability of one point four seven million hiroshima bombs. we have one and a half million hiroshima bombs in one nine hundred eighty five we had seventy thousand nuclear weapons we have a modicum of sanity has been restored since then we're down to fourteen thousand five hundred nuclear weapons ok seventy thousand i mean let me get this i go to

michael moore there let me go to michael before we go to the break here one of the critics forty seconds here one of the criticisms there is of the there is a growing perception that the united states is being grossly unilateralist in its foreign policy and not considering the impact of its policies around the world thirty seconds michael before we go to the break. get peter as you know the united states has concerns about russian compliance with the i.m.f. you know the but i think a better response on the american side would have been to say let's let's withdraw after a year or two if we can't resolve those disagreements there rather than just make the decision also we have concerns and we have concerns about china and we should try to bring china into some kind of restrictions as well and i know russia has concerns about various neighbors that have missile capability which perhaps explains part of its noncompliance so let's try to broaden the regime rather than just discard it ok i'm going to jump in here gentlemen we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on the words of war stay with our.

one else seemed wrong. why don't we just don't call. me. yet to see. this day comes after. and in detroit equals betrayal. when something find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground. most people think to stand out in this business you need to be the first one on top of the story or the person with the loudest voice of the biggest raid in truth to stand out in the news business you just need to ask the right questions and demand

the right answer. question. and this as. we are. warming is like yeah yeah. the rational. designer loved the fact. that the new doll caused. by people in the zimmer yeah i'm sure let me just give them.

fortune for the automobile out of both. more than. welcome back to crossfire we're all things are considered i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing words of war. ok i want to go back to michael and follow up on what i might my last question before we went to the break here about american unilateral is i mean this is really the hallmark of people like john bolton here you don't need any partners you don't want to have any kind of constraints on your behavior around the world and i would

say that it's inherently destabilizing you know the u.s. pulls out of the turan nucular deal ok that is that that's still shocking to a lot of peace. here pulling out of the aisle in an agreement that is quite shocking when you look at the arms control room architecture that was been put into place very carefully over decades i agree they need to be updated but there's not not even in the mix right now it's just unilateral behavior maybe that's good for the united states i doubt it i can't see how it's good for anyone else go ahead michael but peter one thing i would say one dimension of this is that i hope very much that secretary of defense jim maddest stays in his job and i realize there may be mixed views about him abroad because he's because he's a pretty tough guy but one of the things he often says and i think he's right and it goes to your question is that u.s. military force is in service of diplomacy and he considers himself subservient to

the secretary of state now technically he is and the constitution is very clear about the order in the cabinet but a lot of secretaries of defense act as if they are at least equally important if not more so to the secretary of state maddest sees american power in service of diplomacy he may or may not support every arms control regime i'm not suggesting that you know he would have a complete agreement with you but he doesn't see the military as being the first tool to go to and ideally it's the one to avoid using on issues like the south china sea that peter mentioned earlier ok let me go to daniel i mean from a european perspective here has the expansion of nato since the end of the cold war been in europe's interests. i don't think so i mean there was a promise obviously made by bush sr. secretary of state baker then to gorbachev that nato would not move one inch. the promise was broken and we've talked about

the the i.m.f. and the iran nuclear arms deal that was you know shred to pieces and i think that's a worrying development but i also think that if we look back to one thousand nine hundred five pete there was talk about hiroshima if we look back to nine hundred forty five we all need to recall that when the united nations were created we then for the first time in human history said that we should not wage war ok war was banned in forty five that is article two of the united nations charter and i'm here in switzerland then as you know we're a small country and many other small countries are actually saying we should not have this constant violation of article two which as all the nation should refrain from the use of force in their international relations and you mentioned the point about unilateralism when bush president bush attacked iraq in two thousand and three that was a clear breach of the u.n. charter it was a violation it was

a crime and kofi anon who is now dead at the time said you know this is an illegal war so we have a lot of illegal wars going on also. more so the cia operations in syria arming everybody against that is illegal and this i think has led us into the chaos that we are now in ok i perfectly agree peter i was going through the pages of zero hedge here i don't know how often you there are more on the conservative side of things but i came across a fascinating article and i suggested our viewers take a look at that title of the article is a rules based global order or rule is us global order and that it's getting to be unilateral isn't that i've been talking about here on this program i don't think you probably read the article but i think that title tells you a lot go ahead peter. unilateralists. well it was charles krauthammer who celebrated the lateralus of the leading neocon thinker

who in one nine hundred ninety said that wrote an article and gave a talk called the unilateral the unilateral moment and then by two thousand and two he expanded it to the unilateral era into the one nine hundred ninety he said it might last thirty or forty years by two thousand and two he was so triumphalist that he said this could last indefinitely unfortunately by two thousand and five he had woken up with the debacle in iraq and he said well what's going on now in iraq makes it look like the unilateral era is over and the unilateral moment might be not be lasting either the big change that's gone on is that we've gone from a unilateral world where the u.s. was the hedge amount of force and could dictate terms to the situation now which is a multi lateral world or multi unit polar and the multipolar was what i meant to say and so we're now in the multipolar world and russia and china have been

modernizing the danger is well let's go back in february of this year trump announced the u.s. nuclear posture review and the nuclear posture review called for increasing the role of nuclear weapons and building more usable nuclear weapons in march first putin gave his state of the nation address and that was also very alarming he says that he was very upset about the u.s. pulling out of the a.b.m. treaty in two thousand and two and now in response russia has developed five new nuclear weapons each of which is capable of averting us this is the reason that weapons arise so and so the russians have been modernizing china's modernizing but by two thousand and twenty china's descent spending is going to be two hundred thirty three billion dollars more than all of western europe combined. they've got the biggest navy in the world already so all of these situations nobody is tamping down and the problem is we've got no real leadership on the world scene we need

statesman we need russia china the united states germany and india and other nations to be sitting down like we did in one nine hundred forty five while roosevelt was still alive before truman. began to actually have exercised them peter interests are very literary but peter the problem is the foreign policy blob and i think it's appropriate term here they don't want they don't see anyone is worthy equal and that is the problem here you know michel it seems to me that we're going back to the wolf of it's doctrine here of full spectrum dominance ok that's exactly what these nucular pastor reports depends partially that's all that it says the it's read between the lines it is to be able to counter any of threat simultaneously i think that's very unrealistic and it's actually very dangerous because maybe some day we'll call the blobs bluff and then we'll have

a conflict go ahead michael. well peter if i can return to the nato question. a somewhat different view although i share some of the same concerns i don't think nato expansion has been an example of outright american unilateral ism we brought along a lot of our existing nato allies in the process and to some extent the countries that had been part of the warsaw pact deserve to make their own choices and most of them did want to join nato but i don't think we were very sensitive to right to russian psychology and how that would feel about the country or doing a television show under it and i get it that's an understatement and you think yeah right but i think that's so so that's a different kind of all i want to say is that's a different kind of perhaps error of judgment than unilateralism per se and what i think we need to figure out now is for the neutral parts of europe how to create a new security architecture that does not allow nato to expand but also doesn't allow russia to dominate creates a zone of neutrality where those countries determine their own i'm not yet sure

what about getting rid of and i developed what about getting rid of nato altogether and starting from scratch which would include going all the way to iceland have lot of us stuck what would you say to that i'm open to that i think it's a good conversation to have while we still keep nato in the meantime because we do need it for defense and deterrence given the state of nato russian relations but i like your idea of having a bigger conversation to see if we can find a new security architecture that yes goes even beyond the area that i just mentioned daniel you're you're in a neutral country but you still are a european which you like do you like what you see with ukraine being slowly but surely brought into the nato alliance not officially but in reality it is ok if that's destabilizing we heard michael say something and understatement you know about the expansion towards russia's borders well now nato is in ukraine ok is that good for european security and particularly some of the elements in the ukrainian

government that don't you know wouldn't even pass the smell test when it comes to civil society democracy and freedom of speech go ahead. well i clearly don't like the expansion of nato and i don't like the attempt to put to take ukraine and you know added as a maybe thirty nine member state to one thing i don't think that's any good for the stability of your of because nato if we if we look back always said we're not we know we're not going to attack any other country where our defensive alliance we will only react when somebody attacks of and then in ninety nine i was michael and peter and as you know as everybody knows here on the show nato attacked serbia in one thousand nine with that mandate from the u.n. security council with that out that serbia has attacked me before so clearly that was under clinton at that time clearly nato has transformed from a defensive into an office and said so and so for me today nato is an offensive

alliance and obviously that leads to a lot of instability and i would personally very much like to see a discourse where we talk about the dissolution of nato because you know looking at the bottom line what's the achievement of nato countries not nato alone but nato countries in kosovo what's the achievements of nato countries in afghanistan what's your cheeseman of nato countries in iraq what's the achievement of nato countries in libya what's the achievement of nato countries in syria you see a whole lot of devastation of think you we need to talk about the responsibility of nato of creating a lot of chaos well peter i know one thing it keeps five thousand nato bureaucrats gainfully employed and the arms producers also see their rotten line expand i mean i it's very simple from the point of view forty seconds goes to peter before we in the program. this situation then you just outlined it produce

a flame in terms that what's been going on in the world most recently as we started this show it's gotten a lot more dangerous than it was and i think what we need is to. to pull back now we need to be sitting down and talking we as michael said earlier we saw look what happened in korea we were on the brink of war in korea the head of the council of foreign relations richard haass said there was a fifty fifty chance in his opinion we were going to war in korea and we talked it was president and it took the initiative reached out to kim jong un in north korea and we made progress we can make progress in other situations also if we sit down and talk ok nato expansion ok rather than russia i wanted i want to put them on that i want to end on a good note progress that's what you said peter as all the time we have gentlemen many thanks to my guests in washington and in battle and thanks to our viewers for watching us here in our d.c. you next time and remember.

you know world big partners. and conspirators it's time. to dig deeper to hit the stories that mainstream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smart we need to stop slamming the door on the back and shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. for a chinese dominance going forward not only is a technology venture capital but they've been buying gold by hundreds and hundreds

of tons as is russia so they understand that only keep money and feel that you willing to lose the chinese government's message to the people is only keep money in fear that you willing to lose chinese people that's the chinese government tells our people. the chinese elite are buying gold by the ton hundreds of tons hundreds of hundred tons but they know that the money inflationary spiral is a part of. this has to be pursued as i live the good feel confident. we have many things in this world and this is an e-mail for everyone why some people's minds so take our things all the power just for themselves and to see

whether. given the way in which the last ten recent acts were programmed structured using european with a just as you can see there's a certain desire to change the way of life change the society in front. i am not terrorists i am at the other just. these days no matter where you are in the world the chances are you're being

watched. in the. strike anywhere and thousands probably won't have the slightest idea in the last. and if you won't see it coming. what you've seen in post nine eleven scenario that in case of focused on cia you had been given a license to kill. villages villages their houses the mud houses the bombing them sometimes they killed a terrorist and then you see he's alive so the killed. children for a country for profit. how can you smile.

i. some pedler mosco in the headlines in with the old and with the new washington announces with new measures on iraq and being called the toughest sanctions regime ever it will tell you all about.