“But if they want to go ahead and undertake efforts against Hezbollah, they're going to be meeting a force ten times as strong in Hezbollah because they've got more personnel, they've got more rockets, more high precision missiles,” Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense told Sputnik’s The Final Countdown.

“...also if they want to deal with Iran, that's going to be yet another layer of contention. I think the fact that there has been restraint basically shown by Hezbollah and Iran is really a shrewd tactical effort on their part to, basically, bring about a death by a thousand cuts, if you will, on Israel itself as an entity,” he added.

“This attempt to break down communications and free speech around the world… is a dangerous trend,” warned host Steve Gill on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program. “We just saw the CEO of Rumble… fled to avoid prosecution on whatever trumped up charges they may come after him. So this is a big issue. It is a big story.”

“It's notable that, of course, Durov was arrested on allegations and is still being held, though he hasn't been convicted for any crimes,” noted independent journalist John Jackman.

“Is Elon in trouble?” asked journalist John Jackman on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program. “If he stays on the right side of US foreign policy then he should be fine and continues to advocate for things like overthrowing the government of Venezuela, staying on the right side of the conflict in Ukraine, not cozying up to Russia too much, and so on.”

“What [censorship] means is that you're weak, basically,” he claimed. “When you have to censor speech, when you have to be able to have the power to limit what people can say, then that means that you're operating in a world where you're scared of the facts, where you're scared of truth.”

“When great governments, empires, or nations start to lose their ability to actually govern effectively… you see these crackdowns on speech to start to try to limit the fact that the people can point out that the emperor has no clothes.”

“My co-author and I argue that containment doesn't match the challenges that the United States is facing in the future,” said Petro on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program. “It's just an old way of thinking about the world's problems based on strengths that the United States no longer has in the world.”

“And the old containment had its problems, but it held together because it was limited in scope,” he continued. “It didn't actually seek to confront the Soviet Union everywhere at the same time. And, very importantly, it also sought to separate China from the Soviet Union and it would never have worked – Henry Kissinger spoke about this – it would never have been implementable had China and Russia been united against the United States. And, of course, that's the situation we're facing today.”

“Any new containment policy involves an arms race,” said Petro. “Can we afford an arms race now? I mean, we are a country that has a $35 trillion deficit and no prospect of reducing that significantly in the future.”