EMERGENCY POD! Russia invades Ukraine: Reactions, Putin's ambition, Biden's response and more

Episode 70 opens with the usual scrambled intro music and banter before the hosts settle in. One host marks the milestone of reaching 70 episodes and notes they are recording earlier than usual because Chamath had to change his schedule. The mood is somber: the recording happens the morning after Putin launched what he called a "special military operation" to "demilitarize" Ukraine, late Wednesday into Thursday. The hosts say they had been watching the military buildup for weeks.

A host adds the detail that Putin framed the operation as both demilitarizing and "denazifying" Ukraine, treating the second word as transparent propaganda and reading it as more of Putin's trolling. The exchange is brief and sets up the serious discussion that follows.

The host moderating teases Sacks as a supposed "Putin fan" and asks, sarcastically, how glorious the invasion is for Republicans. Sacks pushes back on the framing itself: he argues that anyone urging de-escalation before the conflict spreads is reflexively branded a Putin apologist. He says he has no business dealings in Russia or Ukraine and no interest beyond the safety of the United States, taking a swipe at politicians and their families whom he accuses of profiting from Ukraine. The accusation is his own characterization and is not substantiated in the discussion.

Sacks grounds his position in what he calls the one clear point from Biden's recent speech: the US would not intervene militarily in Ukraine, and the troops being deployed were to defend NATO allies, which Ukraine is not. He stresses there is no treaty obligation to defend Ukraine. He calls Putin the aggressor and the situation a humanitarian tragedy, offering sympathy for Ukrainians, but says the US should not fight.

His core argument is a hierarchy of interests: who rules the Donbas is not a vital American interest in the way that avoiding war with Russia is. He names a second tragedy, that in his view the US did not exhaust diplomacy. He recalls saying on the show three weeks earlier that Ukraine was never going to join NATO, and asks why the US did not simply give up that card.

Sacks suggests that affirming Ukrainian sovereignty while confirming it would not join NATO might have defused the conflict, though he concedes no one can know for sure. Another host recalls that there was some agreement on this on a prior episode, floating the idea of a five-year moratorium on Ukraine joining, which Sacks endorses.

A host, identified in the transcript as the one pressing Sacks, raises the credibility problem. Regardless of NATO obligations, he argues, the US told Putin to back down, he did not, and a failure to respond militarily could reduce American influence and credibility in future standoffs on the global stage.

He develops the point: US primacy is being challenged because Washington "laid down the law," said the invasion was not allowed and promised repercussions, yet the only response is economic sanctions and perhaps other measures to be discussed. His worry is that non-action gives permission to other actors to move against US interests abroad. He also concedes the counterpoint that acting militarily would itself weaken the US position.

Sacks responds by quoting Barack Obama from an Atlantic interview, a line the hosts had cited before: that Ukraine, as a non-NATO country, is vulnerable to Russian military domination no matter what the US does. He uses this to argue the US must be clear about which core interests it will go to war over.

His claim is that none of the hosts would send their own children to fight and die over who rules the Donbas or even Ukraine. The US may sympathize, impose sanctions on Ukraine's behalf, and arm it, but it is not willing to fight. Therefore, he argues, trying to lay down the law to Putin was a bluff, and Putin called it.

Sacks reaches for a poker metaphor: the US bluffed at every street, got to the river, Putin invaded, and now both sides are in a showdown. He asks what escalating further would accomplish, warning that the only way to make things worse is to precipitate a world war. His stated absolute priority is keeping the war from spreading.

Another host predicts that, as of now, it would be very unpopular for the US to enter the war on the battlefield. He suggests a cyber war may be starting that day: the US has long touted its cyber capabilities, and his understanding is that a number of Russian state websites were down that morning and various Russian cyber interests were under attack. This is his account and is not independently confirmed in the discussion.

He then raises how public opinion might shift. He describes images already circulating on CNN and the BBC of downed Ukrainian aircraft, and asks whether footage of helpless children, bombed buildings and bodies in the streets would change American sentiment and pull the country toward a war that, today, many would say makes no strategic or economic sense. His point is that American opinion tends to turn when imagery of brutality appears.

He notes that even on the first day there are gruesome photos, and he can imagine people growing sympathetic and beating the war drum against the aggressor. Sacks responds that this is precisely why foreign policy should not be conducted by Twitter or "Twitterized," and why cooler heads need to prevail.

Sacks argues the situation is not unprecedented. He lists Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring, and Poland in 1981 against Solidarity, saying the US did nothing each time because avoiding war with the Soviet Union mattered more, even as it sympathized with those peoples.

He turns to 2008, when Putin invaded Georgia on behalf of breakaway Russian-aligned provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Sacks ties this to earlier talk of Georgia joining NATO and to Senator John McCain's "we are all Georgians now" declaration. In his telling, the russified provinces began rebelling, giving Putin his pretext to send tanks in; a year later he withdrew, but talk of Georgia joining NATO had ended. He notes George W. Bush was president and the US responded only with humanitarian assistance.

Sacks pushes against cable-news and Twitter claims that the moment is historically unprecedented and demands action. He points again to 2008 and to 2014, when Putin took Crimea, as prior instances of the same pattern.

A host asks Sacks directly whether, had the US actually conceded that Ukraine would not join NATO for a decade or more, that would have changed Putin's behavior. Sacks says honestly it is hard to know and that he cannot prove a counterfactual, but he calls it tragic that the attempt was not made, arguing that trying should be a diplomat's goal.