Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature

It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. And if you talk to anybody in Eastern Europe especially, it's very real to all of them.

And so what this tells me is that the atmosphere is very, very much like 1983.

Very heightened tension.

Very, very much, war is very much present on the minds of everybody who lives near the battlefield.

I mean you don't have to talk to people from Eastern Europe to get that, you talk to people from Europe in general,

and they'll tell you that, yeah, the Russian war is right there,

you know, I mean, for me, the equivalent when I was in Germany last year,

I had to think about the equivalent would be like if Montana was being

invaded by the Russians and I'm in Oregon.

Like that's how close it is, right?

So it's very present to them.

And then you factor in other developments we've seen recently.

So we've got, so a steadfast defender underway,

we're seeing kind of a mirroring of Abel Archer 83 with large NATO exercise taking place at a time of heightened tension, but what we don't have is a Gorbachev.

And honestly, we don't even have a Reagan. I mean, I don't think Joe Biden wants war, but I also don't think

Joe Biden is that talented of an orator and capable of wooing public opinion both here and abroad in the ways that he needs.

And we certainly don't have a Gorbachev character in Vladimir Putin.

We have the opposite, right? We have what would have... have a

gourbachev character in Vladimir Putin. We have what would have happened if the hardliners had

taken over in 1984 and that's very scary and dangerous because Russia is launching a major offensive right now against the Ukrainian city of

Harquive.

...