Oh bum beast, he's me, sir. Ask not what your country can
do for you, ask what you can do for your country, mister Gorbachev.
Tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and rob
Blog. Yes they're back. I'm Jamis Lylax. Today we talked to Victor
Davis Hanson about Henry Kissinger, life, legend and all. Those are the
things that Victor's great at talking about. So let's have ourselves a podcast.
Have we been correct in pushing for the expansion of NATO. I was opposed
to taking in Ukraine and Georgia. I believe the position of Ukraine it's so
sensitive. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
I wasna foot him. Excuse music. We never get bored. Welcome everybody.
This is the Ricochet Podcast. It's number six hundred and sixty eight.
Wow, we get that far well. As they say in public radio,
things to people like you. If that is you are a member of ricoshet.
If not, go there check it out. You'll want to join.
That's ricochet dot com. You're home for the most stimulating conversations and community on
the center right web. Well, the heck on the whole web it was
founded. There should be patriotic music and a flag rippling, and should be
an eagle alighting on my shoulder by Rob Long and Peter Robinson, who are
with us back after a brief hiatus, and welcome Robin Peter. I think
we're with us. That's always like, oh, you know, Rob Peter,
they're still with us, you know, not doing good. How are
they doing? Not good? Yeah, exactly, not good, but they're
with us. They're kind of sentient, Peter, Peter. Peter seems to
know when we enter the room. Yes, exactly. You know. If
I ever have to go into hospice, I want to go into the one
that Jimmy Carter is going to, because apparently that is just a life preservation
center. He's been there for longer than anybody else. I mean, for
Heaven's sakes, and good for him, although sad for him. Interesting week
newswise of people perishing and shuffling off the mortal coil. We're gonna get to
that a little bit later with the victory Davis Hanson. But first I thought
you guys might want to warm over the leftovers from the debate between two people
who are not running for president or you know, you know what I mean,
who are not their party fabs. You know, at the moment,
Gavin Newsom went up against Ron DeSantis, and DeSantis had a few arrows in
his quiver, the poop map, I love that the father in law who
moved to Florida is kind of a nice line and other things, and people
looking back saying Gavin Newsom looks like the guy that you were like president because
he looks like president, or he looks like the devil take a choice,
and DeSantis is just not as natural a politician and hence probably won't make as
an impression on the American mind. I don't know. It depends what people
are looking for. It's a big country. Depends what do you guys think.
I thought you summed it up beautifully just then, yeah, well then
let's move along, right then, Kenery kissing Dred, I know, I'm
sorry, go on, well, I mean, it seemed to me that
DeSantis had so much more powerful an argument to make you just keep coming back
again and again and again to the notion that people are leaving California and moving
to Florida. That's really the whole debate, right there, it doesn't matter
what. And even at that Desantas seemed to be on the defensive. He's
just let's put it this way, if this debate had any immediate political importance,
it was Ron DeSantis's last chance to light a fire under his candidacy,
and he didn't do so. It was still a better debate than any debate
we've seen. I found Gavin Newsom so smarmy, but of course I live
in California. I'm in a permanent state of agitation against the man. Anyway
for two people, for two people who represent just who are the representatives of?
Too completely love the two opposed ways of governing. There was just too
much shouting and smarm and Hannity might not have been the best moderator, And
I don't know. I thought to myself, how could you possibly keep controlling
this debate with Gavin Newsom there determined not to answer questions to talk over.
The only way you could have done that is if both sides had agreed that
Hannady would have the results the right to turn off a microphone, and obviously
the Newsom people refused to do that. So it wasn't the debate that I
was hoping for it was good enough in the sense that it gave people a
fair view of these two different men, and they're two different governing philosophies.
But Gavin Newsom got away with much more than he should have and Ron DeSantis
accomplished much less than he ought than he needed to do. That's sort of
my view of it. Rob. Do you agree, and do you agree
that perhaps it doesn't matter if Desanta's takes Iowa because that would change the momentum
completely. Oh, I mean, I think he needs a win. I
mean, the political argument and the debate conversation are kind of two different things.
I mean, I don't know to what a extent anybody who is on
the I don't I don't know to the extent that anybody's actually on the fence.
You know, there's just a bunch of Trump voters, and they don't
seem to want to not vote for Trump. My my feeling, my feeling
is they should, they should vote for Trump, that Republican should nominate Trump
and let's just see how it goes. That's what they want to do.
They should, you know, I considered, I think it's a suicide pack.
But okay, that's that's up to them. You don't understand, Charlie
is the only guy who can drain the swamp that is so powerful that it
will keep him from winning the presidency. Yeah right, Well, as we
talked before the before the podcast, the swamp, I consider the swamp of
the federal bureaucracy, and I can't imagine any any president, living president and
living memory who who who gave up his presidency to more of the federal bureaucracy
than Donald Trump. Donald Trump basically handed over the keys to the country in
the economy, to the to the federal health bureaucrats before that, as has
been demands. Now, we don't to litigate this has been demonstrated. These
vaunted Trump economy pre COVID wasn't great either. By the way, the COVID
economy was his too. Twenty nineteen, the economy shranked because of his stupid
steel tariffs. That's now, you know that's that those are stats we don't
have, so you know, that's we don't need to litigate Trump. But
the debate. What was sort of cheering and depressing about the debate was was
depressing about it, which just how rusty everybody is at having an actual debate
about a actual thing. I mean, if there are two greater choices in
America, then Florida versus California, I can't think of them. They seem
to embody very different ways of thinking about what a government's supposed to do,
very different ways of think what economy is supposed to do, very different ways
of figuring out how to like revitalize your economy. Right, we should be
having those debates. That's what the country should be deciding in November twenty twenty
four and so. But the depressing part about it was that everybody seems really
rusty. He was not a very good debate, and we're not going to
hear that again. Actually, we're all going to go and vote in twenty
twenty four and we're not going to have this very very important, thoughtful I
don't know what airing out of two very different visions about what kind of America
and what kind of an American government we should have. It was, now
that I think about it, it was more revealing than I felt at the
time. And at least one regard Gavin Newsom, Gavin Newsom really did not
make an argument for his model. He was there to attack and smear and
obfuscate. He viewed it as an entirely political encounter. I don't know whether
he's studied up on this, but he used the same technique that then Vice
President Biden used against Paul Ryan, the interrupting him, talking over him.
So even Gavin Newsom, the governor of the state of California, demonstrated that
the people who champion that model champion it for reasons of power politics. The
teachers' unions are behind them, certain minorities are behind them. They're not going
to make an argument about it because even Gavin Newsom eloquent, may not be
the glib. Let's put it this way. The man is good with words,
intelligent, good with words. He made no care he lacks any conviction
in his own model. That was revealing. Yeah, Also, don't you
feel like that only twenty hours later, don't you feel like, deep down
Gavin Newsom kind of thinks there's a non trivial chance between now and I don't
know, Labor Day twenty twenty four that he is going to be the Democratic
nominee. Absolutely absolutely, he just you could just see it in his smug
little hey look, and this is this is his dress rehearsal all the Democrats
now can see him. Wow. He went into the Lion's Den with Kennedy
and and Ron De Santis and look at and he he was insulting and pugnacious.
And no, no, no, it just feels to me like beauty
pageant time for him. He reminded me, there was one the one time
I sat in the owner's box. I knew a rich guy who then owned
a share of the San Francisco Giants. And when Barry Bonds went to the
what was on deck warming up? Nobody looked at anybody else, including the
man who was at home who was batting. He said, he was saying
they were behind. He was saying effectively to the whole and his bat speed
was so much faster than the man who was hitting. At that moment.
The crowd looked at him, and it was as if he was saying,
don't worry, don't worry, I'm next. I'm up. That's that's Newsom's
attitude. Now, by the way, quick point on Iowa. The poles
are overwhelmingly in favor of Trump, and so I, like you, Rob
thought, oh, for goodness sake, let's just get this over with.
And then a couple of nights ago. I had a conversation with an Iowan
who has attended Iowa caucuses and he said, no, no, no,
be very very careful. Yeah, the old rule, the old joke in
Iowa is that the Democrats hold their caucuses in the gymnasium. They all come
with their minds made up and it's an athletic event. They try to shout
each other into submission. But the Republicans, of course, the idea here
is that they get together in school, local high schools, which they often
do, schools or churches. But the Republicans hold their caucuses in the library.
It's a much more neighborly event. They do try to persuade each other.
And he said, actually, people do come into the Republican caucus with
a sort of notional first and second choice, but they're willing to talk this
over with their neighbors. They're willing to be neighborly about it. Votes do
get shifted around. So in that kind of environment, which is essentially unpollable,
can't you can't pull It's going to come out of a conversation things could
still happen for DeSantis or Haley. Maybe anyway, I put that out there
yeah. I mean, look, I think Iowa because I was always interesting,
I think it's going to be interesting. I mean, full full disclosure,
I predicted that Mike Pence would take Iowa. So you know, I'm
not really the best political prognosticator, but I was. I was. I
was very not that he's way too conservative for me, but I was bullish
on Pants on Pants's chances. I think he dropped the ball, but that's
you know, I was very you know, evangelical state. They should like
a Pence, but I think Pen's kind of tried to have it both ways.
Interesting thing for DeSantis to do if he had another run at this or
if the general does indeed turn out to be the two of them, is
to compare the California of Gavin Newsom with the California of Ronald Reagan, because
I think there's a I think you can probably find a few key differences in
those places, is when it comes to economic diversity and energy and population and
cleanliness and the rest of it. And it would remind people that Reraken came
out of that milieu, and you know, taking California values at that time
to the rest of the country meant something different than it does now. I
think everybody kind of gets that that California, while it's always been the land
of fruits and nuts in a place of craziness and experimentation and new beginnings and
the rest of it, is now just more or less the poster state for
DEI and various forms of social engineering that are designed to enrich a Norman Cluttor
of bureaucrats and not solve any problems at all, which is so olbvious because
the problems aren't being solved that Newsome is more likely to be the sort of
guy to say, we don't want you to be in your car, we
want you to be in an electric vehicle if you must, and we're going
to build high speed rail everywhere, to which Decatus could point out exactly how
California has done with high speed for that matter, how California has done with
anything, with anything. I mean, the fact that both states have a
Disneyland is probably the only thing that you can draw between them as a parallel.
I don't know, but as somebody else was saying, no, you
don't go the rob route, nominate Trump, lose, and then quit Donald
Trump for good, because that would be done. The only question is whether
or not quitting Donald Trump for good would be sort of one of those things
you have to taper yourself off or you have to just go cold turkey.
Cold turkey, you know, I know, I know at this point sounds
like it's something nice, good for a sandwich perhaps, although if you get
any turkey left over from Thanksgiving, i'd probably check that and maybe I hope
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Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast with Pleasure VDH. The
Man Victor he's a senior Fellow in Classics of Military History at Couver Institution,
authored more than twenty books, including most recently The Dying Citizen, and he's
got another one in the Way, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend
into Annihilation. It's set to be released May of next year. If we
get there. We're going to talk to Nick about the book in a little
bit. And thanks for joining us. Obviously, the question we want to
ask somebody like you has followed these things and charted rise and falls history and
then like Henry the kay passed at one hundred and I hate to say,
but he's being excoriated on Twitter for some reason. People under thirty are really
angry at Henry. Reservoir of hatred there. I didn't know the existed.
Judge the Man give us an overview failings, successes, and perhaps why he's
so hated to this day. Buyser and Cohort, Well, you know,
it's very funny. He was probably the most influential American diplomat of the last
fifty years, but he actually only held power for eight as Secretary of State
and National Security Advisor under Richard Nixon and that brief Jerry Ford period, so
he didn't have ex official power. But almost every president consulted him, and
even the stranger thing is they all felt they needed to consult him, but
they didn't want to publicize the consult that they consulted him. So if you
were a democratic president, you thought that he had illegally he had engineered the
illegal bombing of Cambodia, or he had backed Pinochet, or he had sided
with the Turks, or he had sided with the Pakistanis against India, so
he was a war criminal. If you were on the right, you felt
that he had opened he triangulated against the Soviet Union by you know, legitimizing
mouths seventy million dead in communist China. And then he didn't want to defeat
as Reagan did the Soviet Union, but he wanted to manage, manage it,
manage maybe their decline. So the right didn't own him. But then
the people on both sides, whether you were Bill Clinton or George W.
Bush or George H. W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama or
Donald Trump talked to him, So there has to be why was that?
And he gave you a cold, realistic appraisal of power human nature. It
was a very Fucididian guy that believed that human nature was predictable across time and
space and what people said, and this is very Thucididian with their bosses,
the historian called, it was one thing and the idea, the real motivation
was another that's never expressed. And he was a person who understand the real
and that the real motivations that came into the Middle East when he kind of
taught us that what the Arab country said about the Palestinian authority or Hamas was
not what they felt. In other words, they would side with them publicly,
but privately they would tell us that, you know, Israel should destroy
them. And that was the kind of realistic appraisal that got a lot of
ideals, very angry cynicism, I guess, they would say. And did
you like him, Victor? I only met him twice. He had yes,
only twice. He came to a couple of lectures. I gave the
Vista lecture in the Manhattan Institute, and then I saw him at a person's
home once. And he had a habit of writing authors. So when I
wrote about thucidity, I wrote the introduction to the landmark These Cities. He
wrote me a long, handwritten letter. And then he wrote me when I
published a book on the Peloponnesian War, a handwritten letter. And he was
very interested in thu cidities and human nature. And I think that dovetail with
his tally rand and what we're going and what about the right wing, the
right wing critique with which I associate myself. Yes, you were an anti
Kissinger person. Well, I was a Reagan person. And it meant it
meant View and Kissinger this is a complicated figure, and that he and Nixon
felt we were playing a losing hand and that the decline that had to be
managed was our own. And then Reagan came along and said, well,
no, actually we ought to be We have all the cards in our hand.
Let's start playing them. Of course I'm oversimplifying. Then you've got Neil
Ferguson saying, well, the Kissinger detonte was useful. It bought us ten
years and we really needed that decade. How do you what do you make
of all he Let's put it this way. Kissinger never felt comfortable with Reagan,
as witness that in his last book, latest book, and do we
now know? Last book, which was titled Leadership, and he did profiles
of what was it, half a dozen leaders. The contemporary leader he profiled
was Margaret Thatcher. Yes, Ronald Dragan's I think Ronald Dragan's name may appear
twice in the entire entire text of four hundred words. I bought the book
and I read it, and I noticed that. But I think there were
two things about that. One was he had a prejudiced against people outside of
the bipartisan establishment. They didn't have the proper curses and norm of education and
building some state department, whether it was the left or the Reagan came from
outside well outside that statues. So in his way of thinking, these were
populous yahoos, and they didn't They weren't sober and judicious, and they didn't
understand the intricacies of diplomacy and backroom deals and all this. They were too
over maybe even too trumpion. But that being said, that was one thing
I think, and the other was, you know, he wrote so in
his early career so much about nuclear strategy and the use of nuclear weapons,
and then later on he was one of the people who wanted to ban them,
you remember, along with a number of them, and I think,
so, yeah, he was so wedded to the idea that and he was
right. Nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union had so many of them that they
when Reagan came in and said, I want to defeat you know, it's
very simple when they lose. He thought, oh my gosh, this guy
is a California populist. He's an actor. He comes in and he thinks
that the world of nuclear weapons is sort of like a cowboy movie, and
you can win and lose, and you can't. There are no winners,
there are no losers because of nuclear weapons, and that was kind of ironic.
Se he actually wrote a book about how you could use nuclear weapons in
a limited fashion if you had to. So there were certain prejudices there,
but when you look at his intellect. I mean, there's one other thing
I should say is that maybe you met him, Peter, but William Shawcross
that wrote that book Sideshow about the bombing of he had a spouse that would
go to Stanford Medical and he would come and talk to me. And he's
a wonderful guy. He will Crosswood. Yes, and he wrote the most
damning appraisal if you remember about Kissinger, called sideshow and basically worse than Christopher's
book, than the Hitchins book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, only because
it's not a dire tribe like Christopher's. It's But the point I'm making is
that he used to visit me at Hoover and he retracted that entire book once
he got older, and he looked at the Cambodian what the Cambodian what the
who did the actual slaughter in Cambodi and the genocide and the nature of the
North Vietnamese regime, and he kind of I think he even formally apologized to
Kissinger for that book. And I asked Christopher about that, because you know,
Christopher came to Hoover and I'd see him in Washington Christopher Hitchins. Now,
yeah, I'm not saying that Christopher was repentant, but yeah, I
think he would say that. You know how he got had that flirtation with
the Bush administration during the Iraq War, Yes, you know he was.
He was talking to Rumsfeld and all those guys in that in that context he
was he didn't have that animus for Kissinger as he used to that he respected
his own right. So the only the only Kissinger anecdote I can. I
mean, there's tons of witticisms that he attributed, but the only one thing
I think was relevant here was that. And I heard this first hand or
secondhand, or but first hand. Somebody was there. I said, uh,
somebody asked, Kissinger, you know you're you're blamed for all these things.
It's an enormous list of specific crimes and things that Kenry Kissinger is responsible.
What do you think about that? And Kissinger, I guess, was
in some expansive mood. He kind of laughed and he said, I'm paraphrasing.
Hears like, even I don't think that much of myself, which is
sort of true, right. I mean, there is a kind of a
childish I mean, it's probably too a childish attitude, but also if it's
from k Kissinger, but I mean the childish attitude from people thinking that this
one big bad man did all these big bad things. Now you're absolutely very
It was a reductionist, especially on the left, and I think you're absolutely
right about it. The other thing, I do think, though, I
think it did get to him because I know so many people had criticized them
and got a call from him, you know what I mean. They would
he would actually call them and argue with him. And these were pretty out
there people. And I know that William Shawcross and Christopher told me that that
he had actually talked to them and was angry at them for what they had
written. In a case of Shawcross, he formally apologized once he heard the
Kissinger argument. And I think what he was trying to tell everybody that the
United States was I guess he had a deep patriotic love, deserved a pre
eminent place, and he was frustrated sometimes that we didn't exercise our power or
we underestimated it, and we were not directing affairs global and they weren't in
our interests. So when he looked at the Iraq war, he was not
for it originally, but then once it got it went south, he was
not for losing it. He reminded me a lot of Matthew Ridgeway. Eisenhower
called a Ridgeway, and same thing as Kissinger and said, I want to
go into Vietnam and save the French. And Ridgway said, if you go
in there, it's a mess. And then LBJ came in and said I'm
going to go in there, and Ridgway said, did not do it.
Then four years later, after TET, he called up Ridgeway and said,
I want to get out. And he said, there's only one thing worse
than getting in. There's only one thing worse than a stupid war, and
that's losing it, right. And that was kind of Kissinger's attitude about right,
all of these awkule that was the second George Bush administration. Kind of
in a nutshell, yes, and he was horrified. Kissinger said things about
the I think he was horrified about the Afghanistan at the end of his life.
To see that uiliation. I don't expect all the time a Kissener,
but he does seem like he's a like it's amazing when you realize that a
guy is so powerfully engaged, you know, part of the American century that
when he I mean, obviously what he knew is going to die one hundred
years old. But the obituaries are incredibly, incredibly elaborate. I mean I
read. I mean, it took me about twenty minutes to read the New
York Times of Ittuary today that this thing had been on ice for a while,
right right. The what I find striking about Kissinger is that this is
incredibly strong guy, was very very well, you know, educated, thoughtful,
strategic character. In the Nixon tapes, the ones that you could go
and listen to, I've heard a lot of them, he's the worst kind
of obsequious round noser like it's it's kind of shocking. I mean, am
I just being naive? Just the why he was very young and insane person
is using human grandpa, you know, like there's a wonderful speech with the
president, all that stuff. It's crazy. I think part of it was
that he was a Rockefeller guy, and he was an academic, and the
Nixon people hated academics. So when Rockefeller was out of the picture and didn't
do well in the primary, then Nixon Nixon. He never thought Nixon was
going to call him up, and Nixon called him up, and he was
shocked and he went from Remember he said at the same time, the only
thing, what do you say about academic politics are so vicious because the states
are so small, right, and so he got out of that world and
he never really went back. And then I think you remember the first two
years I think of the Nixon appointment of him as National Security Advisor. Harvard
had a big debate on whether to, you know, not let him come
back, and it was kind of like he put his hands to his mouth,
kind of, oh my god, they're not going to let me come
back. I'm just going to be the only national security advisor and Secretary of
State the same. So I think he and I think he was afraid of
Nixon, and I think he had an enormous, enormous respect for Nixon's intellect,
and but I think he did not want to get on the wrong side
of Nixon. And he was an academic that was out of place. Some
of the weird things about I mean, we dated all those beautiful women.
Yeah, that doesn't jis Ozolboard, Jill Saint John and all of those women.
That was what he was. Yeah, we forget that he was in
the paper almost every day. He was in the in the seventies and he
was He's the one thing I did admire about among all the other things,
is when you read that three volume memoirs. He wrote. He wrote that
himself. It was not Guess Woe, and it's beautifully written. The prose.
It reminds me of General Grants memoir. I mean it's he had Harold
Harold Evans edited every word, did he? I didn't know. Kissinger told
me that himself. I asked about it. He wrote it on long hand,
and then it went to Harold got typed up and Harold Evans, the
late editor, the late great editor, Harold Evans. Oh, yes,
no, no, no, there's no doubt about that. All his books
have a certain ear. You can tell that the man had for language.
By the way, on the length of the obituary, yeah, reminding us
of what a presence he was. I once asked Kissinger, I can't remember
how on earth it came up, But to this day, in any event,
I've never been able to understand why Eisenhower, during the Suez Crisis of
nineteen fifty six cut the legs out from under the British and the French and
the Israelis to help Nasser. And so I asked Kissinger about that, and
he began his reply by saying, well, as I wrote at the time,
nineteen fifty six, and he was already a serious enough person so that
he was publishing on events in the news. By the way, he himself
had no explanation and also said it was a terrible error to undercut our most
important allies and the hope of Korean favor with the Arabs. The one on
the SD destroyed Anthony. Anthony Eden was a good guy, and Anthony Eden
was gone within what six or seven months after that he was forced to resign.
At a dinner at Bill Buckley's house, Kissinger this is nineteen ninety one
or nineteen ninety right after the fall of nineteen ninety two, right after the
fall of Soviet Union, Kissinger stood up and talked about a visit he had
just made to the former Soviet Union, and he had sought out high ranking
former officials in the former country, and he said, to a man,
they said that what broke them was Reagan's strategic defense initiative, so very interesting.
He never felt comfortable with Reagan and ignored him in this last book on
leadership. But he understood Reagan's achievements there. Don't you think he was?
You know, they make fun of in realist foreign policy, they make fun
of what they I guess they used the word they use that left wing word
intersectionality. But what happens in one place affects the other. And he was
a person who really said he would say, and he wrote, if you
get humiliated in Afghanistan, then the Putin will go into Ukraine. If you
let up Chinese balloon go across the United States, then they will start threatening
Taiwan. And the people had so discredited the Domino theory that when he started
talking like that in the seventies and eighties, and he said that about to
George W. Bush, I know that for a fact when he said you
should not leave Iraq without it being stabilized because da Iran right and all the
others. That's pretty accurate. But we've kind of gotten away from that now.
So Victor, what do you make of the Neil argument that the Nixon
Kissinger achievement was to biaus time and that we needed that time. One sub
element of this, but it's a really important one, of course, is
Vietnam. Yes, we lost in Vietnam, but they slowed down the law.
Kissinger and Nixon slowed down the loss and preserve Vietnam in such a way
that other, Thailand was able to rise while we were fighting. In other
words, the dominoes, the dominoes didn't fall. We lost one big domino
and then Cambodia went, but other dominoes that might have fallen. What do
you make of the argument that was taken from you? Remember the National Review
writer, he was right wing and he turned left wing. He wrote the
book The Necessary Vietnam, The Necessary War, Michael. That was taken right
out of that. Remember, he made that exact argument that Vietnam had given
us time and that we had stopped the onset of Southeast Asian Soviet dominance.
So I don't buy it. You buy that. I'd kind of buy it,
but only in the sense that I think what they meant was and I
don't think they meant I don't think they understood quite. But when Reagan took
on the Soviet Union, it was a multi faceted economic, cultural, social
revolution. He was saying, I can take on the Soviet Union now because
I'm going to have massive tax cuts, I'm going to unleash the economy,
I'm going to bring back a traditional love of America. And I think I
don't know if those people are explicit or avert. But in that period of
the sixties and seven, when we had a regulated economy and we had the
campuses and the civil rights and the whole thing, I'm not sure that we
were capable of doing what Reagan did. I think for Reagan to have the
confidence to marshal the country, because even when you were there, we were
doing it. Remember they had all those Hollywood movies the day after and about
yes, And I don't think that the country was able. It didn't have
the confidence after Vietnam. It didn't have the economic wherewithal. So Kissinger and
Nixon really did have a weekend and they really did plant as well as they
could have. They had a lot weaker well, they had a weaker hand,
but they were partly implicit because after all, Nixon gave us waging.
We won't mention the architect of that, but they gave us wage and price
control, and they did not on leash and Richard Nixon created a lot of
bureaucratic bloat. But when Reagan came in, it was sort of we're going
to re examine everything, and we're going to do it on the basis of
what makes America powerful again and wealthy and united and proud, and part of
that agenda was obviously standing up in the Soviet Union. And I don't think
I don't think Reagan could have done it if he had continued with the Nix
and Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter economic policies, and I just don't think he
would have been able to get the people behind him, or you wouldn't have.
I mean, when you get seven eighty four, the third half,
the last three quarters of eighty four was an aggregate seven or eight percent increase
in GDP, you can do a lot when that's happening, Yeah, you
can. And when he said crazy things like I'm going to have a six
hundred ship navy, I'm going to bring back the New Jersey and the Iowa
and the Missouri, all these crazy things, everybody thought he was nuts,
but he did, and I think the Soviet Union were freaked out by it.
I really do. There's a story that Reagan's at one point his erstwhile
political advisor, Stu Spencer, and then his hit The Return of Stu Spencer
in nineteen eighty says on his way flying to Detroit to the RNC, and
he had just been brought on. I mean, he had been in the
deep breeze, the Nancy Reagan you know, tundra for a while, and
he'd just been brought back on and he walked to the front of the plane.
You didn't meet the talk to the governor again, had talked to governor
in tenureds right close to that, and he said, of sat and said,
so help me out, governor. Governor Reagan. So, of those
of you under ninety on this podcast, that's Governor Reagan. He was governor
of California before Gavin Newson. He says, So I got to ask,
why do you want to be president? This is nineteen eighty. So there
were hostages in Iran, and there was stagflation, and there was a malaise
in the country, and there was a defeat in Vietnam, and there was
a general sense of a decline in the American century. Maybe it was over.
And Reagan didn't even hesitate. He just turned his stud and said time
to win the Cold War. STU, just like that. And so there
was a spencer says, there's nothing to say. So it got up and
said, okay, well I'll see you on the ground, Governor. And
then then there was a march to victory. But in the midst of decline,
when all the news was bad, all the lights were red or yellow,
there was one guy on that plane saying, no, no, no,
no, we're going to win and here's how, here's what we're doing
right. And you know, for somebody it was and it was as as
it was multifaceted. We're going to win on the economy, we're going to
win the culture wars, we're going to win. The Republican Party is going
to be back, and we're going to get a dominant Republican Party again.
And that was part of that whole package. But I think if you look
back, and I read some of the obituaries that were pretty cruel. But
these people, if you look at a guy who comes from a German jew
who leaves in thirty eight, right before the last possible moment, and then
they come with nothing, and then he goes to New York guy City College
for a while, or he's going to counting or something, and then he
goes into the army and then he comes back and somehow that guy comes out
of Harvard. It's Harvard that makes him, yes, and then he's a
brilliant guy. And then he goes to work as a left wing academic.
He's intellect is such that right wing people want him, and then he kind
of really guides, you know, the Nixon administration. And then it's pretty
amazing that a person had that spoken ability, written ability, analytical ability,
and energy. And I was just thinking, you know, when I fly
overseas, when that guy was in his sixties and seventies and eighties, and
he was still flying all over the world. And so the last time I
talked to him, I was at a private club in North other in California
whose name will not be mentioned. But he was in a wheelchair and he
was giving the keynotes and I was keeping away from him because people were swarming
him. And I was walking in maybe ten weeks, and he was all
crumpled up. He kind of shrunk, you know what. And he turned
his head to the right and said, and I loot that Thucididus book you
wrote. And he didn't say hello, he didn't say I don't know if
you knew who I was, but he said that, and so he had
a twinkle in his eye. And I think they get I think he were
better off. The country's better off for having him. But I also think
that in a weird way, I think he helped Reagan because Reagan used him
as a foil. You remember, you remember this is to me. This
is the lowest moment for Kissinger. For me. You can do with what
you will with it, Victor. But you remember that Gerald Ford refused to
receive at the White House a visiting Soviet dissident author and that author's name was
Soljan Needson, and that was on the advice of Henry Kissinger. That's appeasement.
Don't get me really, there's just no other word for it. When
we won't president won't. Yeah, yeah, don't get me started. Because
there's two low points for me. And one was the youm Kipper war when
he went golden in the ears, said they're going to attack us in twenty
four hours and we're not going to be fully mobilized, and if we preempt
like we did in sixty seven, we have a chance, and Kissinger said,
no, you have to have the guilt on them. And then when
they were trying to resupply them, remember they were playing cute games like Biden
kind of about resupplying this and Nixon FINII lost his temper and said get anything
that flies and send over there. That was one thing their thing is.
I was in Greece during the invasion. I had gone to Cyprus. It
was a beautiful Bela Pies, the Northern Cypress. I was a student in
Athens and seven give us the year seventy three, seventy four, and they
invaded. The Turkeys invade, Turks invaded Cypress. They killed twenty thousand,
eighteen thousand people were missing, maybe three or four thousand Greeks were slaughtered.
Two hundred thousand people were ethnically cleansed. This was our two NATO wild eyes.
Greece had just been liberated from the dictatorship Passock, Socialism and the Greek
people were saying to Kissinger, stop the Turks immediately, and we had the
power to do that, and we didn't do that. We knew they were
coming in, and the attitude of Kissinger and the Nixon administration was, if
you look at the assets of Turkey, and you look at the assets of
Greek and you look at the pass Passock angry because of our dictatorship support,
They're angry. The Turks have a dictatorship. Basically, that's friendly. There's
no it's a no brainer. All of the assets political military on the Turk
side. The Greeks don't write we don't want to we don't want to ostracize
or a and eight. The biggest army in NATO, and the Greeks were
just wild men that started it anyway with the n O system was crazy and
they just let them take it over. And it was very anti Semitic.
I was really upset because the Greek I think it was Taunay, I remember
were they had the headline jo Hebreos Kissinger, the Jew Kissinger, and it
was so the hatred in Athens was really venomous, antisomitic and angry. But
I remember trying to defend him to Greek friends in my age. I was
only twenty. But I think we really missed that. We should have been
on the side of the Greece for a lot of reason. And you can
see that today more than ever given their subsequent trajectory. So there's a lot
of things to criticize, but if you look at the Ledger at one hundred
years, I think there's more positive than negative, if I if I can
grind the Gears here for a second. There's a new Napoleon movie out apparently
While it's well shot, well shot and beautiful to look at, it completely
misses the character of Napoleon, misunderstands the age, gets a lot of things
wrong, and is very sort of incomprehensible. And I'm wondering if it's because
as of people now, we've just no concept of the nineteenth century. We
don't find it relevant at all, But it is it, especially the Crucible
out of which Napoleon came. A movie about the terror about It's seventeen eighty
nine, about the Jacobins, would be tremendously relevant to these days. And
at the time it must have seemed to everybody as if the old world was
completely falling apart into annihilation and chaos. Which brings us to your book.
We briefly, since I know that we have about forty seven seconds left,
if you could sum up, I know Peter is going to be doing an
interview with you later that is going to be absolute must listening to. But
your book is the end of everything. How wars descend into annihilation and it's
coming out next may just give me the odds on us not descending into annihilation
by then, And what might be if we did, what might it be
from Well, they're very rare that a war usually ends, could be in
a humiliating defeat like Nazi Germany. But the idea that an entire losing sight
as Carthage or classical Thebes or the Aztecs or Constantinople, loses their religion,
their culture, their people. They're either wiped out enslaved ethnically. It's very
rare, but it happens. And so in the epilogue, I look at
the traits that allow these to happen. Naivete over confidence, appeasement, stupid
resistant. I talk a lot about the Median Dialogue and the city the same
thing. They're annihilated. But my point is that I have a long epilogue,
maybe too long, about certain vulnerable peoples, the Armenians three million,
the Israelis ten million, the Kurds and the Greeks. They have fifty thousand
square miles and there's only ten million, and they've got this existential hatred of
the Turks who. So my point is that I try to give you a
paradigm how it could happen, especially in the age of bioweapons or nuclear weapons.
Well, naivite, cultural decline, appeasement, good good thing, we're
not suffering from any of those. Yeah, So I try to. After
I do the four case studies, I give you a paradigm how it happened,
it cost time and space, and then I apply it to some vulnerable
areas today that could happen. It could happen again. But it's otherwise,
it's pretty rare. It's hard to wipe out entire people. Hernan Cortes did,
and so did Memo the Second, and so did Alexander the Great,
and so did Skippio Emilianus. One thing I'll just finished with all of them
who did that said they were men of letters and philosophers, and they all
said later in age they regretted it. Alexander, I didn't mean to do
that. Skippy o, oh, maybe some day it could happen to us.
Cortez, I never really wanted to destroy to notes Itlan. So that's
Memet said, we could have used it. We didn't. I'm the new
Caesar, and so they all had. They were all men of letters.
So it's kind of a scary that people who consider themselves intellectuals are enlightened.
Military leaders are the most dangerous. Alexander in his ripe old age Victor,
thanks for joining us today. We may get you guys somewhere and run and
it's always been a pleasure and we hope to talk to you a sap about
things in the world in your next book. So it sounds great you guys.
Fictor used lots of sunscreen down there in Palm b Yeah, careful,
I'm called a black sweet Peter. That my family was that it was dark
sweetish, so I don't have that problem as you Anglo Saxon. There's so
many ways to unpack that, Ictor. Okay, okay, bye, And
just a reminder, Peter, you are going to be speaking to vh on
uncommon Knowledge about his book and going into depth fit for forty five minutes for
an hour or so. Again, we'll post a link to that when it's
up in Ricochet and ricochet dot com is where you ought to go. Well,
since Rob's back, that means he's going to do his usual accounting of
the places where Ricochet members meet in real life. Yeah, and the last
time I did this a few weeks ago, we were talking about maybe the
spring. But of course Ricochet members do not wait for There's one tomorrow a
meet up Ricochet members tomorrow in the Seattle area. Rush Bay forty nine is
putting on her annual chili party. Go to ricochet dot com into the member
of section and look that up. Flicker as fielding suggestions for places to meet
while he visits a Georgia the Peach Day. So if you live around there,
see if you can splay some Ricochet members to head your way. It'll
be late December early January. So those in the Georgia area let's get together.
And of course Chattanooga, Tennessee. This is January fourteenth. Meet Up
King. That's great. This is we have to call him meet up King
because he does I don't know how many. I don't know how many of
these he's arranged. Randy Wivoda in Chattanooga is trying to to start a meet
up on January fourteenth. If you have not been to Chattanooga, and I
of course have been to Chattanooga, you should go to Chattanooga. Chattanooga is
one of the most interesting, like it's like the it's not even it's like
the fourth biggest city in Tennessee. Tennessee first of all is enormous, but
there are four great cities in Tennessee well three in Memphis and Chattanooga. When
Memphis is a great city, but it's not you know it, it's got
issues. But Chattanooga is unbelievably beautiful. And then when you go there and
you realize just how vibrant and powerful and alive the Mid South was for hundreds
of years, and I mean even post Civil War. It's a great city,
really interesting and great architecture too. So chennumy fourteenth Chattanooga, Well,
it sounds like a fantastic idea. Anybody wants to come to Minneapolis. Of
course I've got some recommendations, and I might even show up now. Of
course I'll show up. That's what Ricochet is all about. I love the
fact that Rush Bay forty nine is having a chili party. However, many
podcasts you listen to from the large institutions that claim to be your friend,
how many of them actually invite you over that? What said that it is
the Bricochet difference. Well, there's a different wind blowing in various political cultures
around the world. Argentina and Dutch people comes to mind too. Javiier Millay,
Do I have that pronounce correctly? Is it mil mil Milay? Actually,
you've got have the first name I would be I'm sure I think it
is Melea, although it might also be Mila Mila, yes exactly. I
like the way he shouts. I like his anger. I like the way
he talks. And it's very it's very chunky, and it's very forthright,
and it's smart and it is angry, but it's not angry in a sort
of mad, puffed up Howard Rourke. I'm not going to take it anymore.
Oh, it's got a little bit of that too, but it's meat.
He's get what he says, there's truth to it, and all of
these pithy little eyes. So of course we all know that people like this
get elected and then are instantaneously stymied because there's so far outside of the bureaucratic
norm that nothing can get done. But we're rutting for him, aren't we,
aren't we? Guys? Oh? I think so? I think so?
Yeah, kidding me, Yeah, Archie, he wants the Falkland.
Well, if he can, if he can turn he can have. Yeah,
that's mandatory for an Argentine politician to say that. But I don't think
he's going to be in a position to do anything about it, nor well,
any he is, He reminds me, he is what Margaret Thatcher would
have sounded like if she were on some some sort of drug that suppressed all
inhibitions, right, because we know Thatcher writes in her memoir that she realized
when she became Conservative leader and had people briefing her on how to fix this
piece of the economy, do this with the educator, she said, she
realized that all the failures of Britain were now so interconnected that you couldn't reform
anything without reforming everything. That's a fairly close paraphrase. James made the point
that this is the kind of figure who gets elected and then immediately finds that
he's thwarted. Perhaps so, But what the election itself indicates is that the
country of Argentina, the people of Argentina, realize that something big needs to
be smashed. Whether this is the man to pull it off, I don't
know, although I do know I do have friend here at Stanford who's from
He's from Chile actually, and Malay is known within economists as a serious libertarian
and an informed man. And now we know that he's also a performer and
a very successful politician. We shall see but yes, the answer is we're
rooting for him. He also looks like he should be a member of the
British graphic design firm Hypnosis in about nineteen seventy two. Yeah, look,
I mean, what are their choices? You know, they've tried everything else,
so they mas will try you know, sound Ludwig van Mesian, you
know, Milton Friedman economics, what what what if that works? It's worked
before. Also, look a look, I think a lot of these countries
are at a cross roads. I think you know, I think Holland is
in the Netherlands with a cross road. I was there last week. You
could either have it. You were there. You were there when the election
results came. I was not there when the election came in because I had
already I left the day before. But I was talking to Dutch people and
they tell do tail do tell well, look you can. I mean,
it's it's it's a it's a it's a question that we have here, right.
You can either have a very generous social welfare system, which Holland has
had for years, that's been held together by a willingness to understand what Dutch
society and cohesive Dutch society should be something that we in the United States would
not accept by the way, we would find it too restrictive, but they
like it. You can either have that or you can have massive immigration from
non Northern European countries. You can't have both. You just can't. It's
the same thing that a more honest governor of California would say. Certainly it's
something that the mayor of New York City understands. You can either have a
very generous welfare state or you can have essentially open borders. You cannot have
both. You cannot afford both. You have to choose, and all Gered
Bilders is a good Villains is what we would consider to be a very liberal
democrat here. He's not talking about shrinking the state. He's just talking about
closing the door and recommitting the Netherlands to the Dutch identity, which sounds grim,
you know, it sounds scary, sounds like you know not you know,
national socialism. But what it really means is that they have a very
specific kind of society that that we we don't want to emulate in this country.
We're much more free, we believe in much much greater opportunity, individual
opportunity, and he wants to protect that, and you can't do that when
you have massive immigration from non Northern European countries. You couldn't. And people
have been focusing entirely on what he's saying about Turks and about Moroccans and the
people in North Africa and Muslims. But if you wanted to bust up Holland,
you could just import a lot of Italians. Italians don't want to Holland
either, Like so, it's not quite as dire as people mention it or
people are painting it, but that the the the response is sort of the
same. It's been the same about Trump. There's there are too many parallels
between builders and trust being made. They're not really that very similar. But
the idea is that this has been this has been an alarm bell for the
establishment, and you what most people think of in the New York Times and
in the al Chamane dac Blot or whatever it is there the Volkskron or whatever,
what most people think of that now we're alarmed at how large the right
wing is getting, whereas the alarm really should be we should be alarmed how
far away we are from people and their immediate concerns. So when you hear
liberals in the United States talk about this is alarming all these like the alt
right in America, this alarms that that's something that they feel like they need
to squash, whereas the alarm actually should be telling you, well, where
how far away are we from these people? Now? We're very far away.
And I think that's that's what they essentially Dutch establishment discovered last Wednesday was
that they are very far away from the Dutch voter, which is which must
be very disconcerting in a country where you know, there's a huge amount of
social cohesion, there's a huge amount of of intras inter class social class cohesion.
The Dutch people are Dutch people are Dutch people. They are very very
similar. And I mean that with all due respect. You know, I've
lived in Holland as a kid, so I'm not not you know, I'm
not no shade. But in the United States when politicians are out of touch,
like yeah, yeah, you're out of touch. It's a big country,
you're not you're going to miss stuff. In Holland when you're out of
touch, so what how far off are you? And you know, that's
just a different way of looking at the obverse. The other thing, The
other thing that strikes me is how small these countries are. Population of the
Netherlands a little under eighteen million, population of Hungary little under ten million,
Norway five million, Denmark seven million, Sweden ten million, And what do
we know. Population trajectories are very hard to predict, but all the predictions
are that by twenty fifty the population of Africa will have increased by a billion
people a billion people, and the population of all those European countries will have
shrunk. Well, there's going to be some empty villages in the Netherlands and
France and Italy that look very appealing to some of those billions in Africa.
And it's just astounding to me. At least you can tell me what I'm
missing, but it seems astounding to me that the people who run Europe have
few If you're Dutch and you look at these two, we're a very small
country. We could lose our we could be overwhelmed, we could lose our
identity extremely easily, and we can already feel it happening from the number of
immigrants we've already accepted. In the next twenty five years. We could simply
be what politician looks though he's at least grappling. It just seems to me,
it just seems to be an obvious question for any voter in any of
these countries to ask to look Victor Orbont, He's the only one addressing what
seems to me, as a Hungarian perhaps the major problem of the next generation.
He's the only one who's addressing it. That's just a political system working
the way it ought to, and that this elicits shocks of howls of outrage
is astonishing to me. It presumes that the leaders care about maintaining a Dutch
identity, it cares that they presume about any sort of you know, national
character at all. Why would they when they can be part of a transnational
apparatus that is well paid for and well taken care of and manages the decline.
They're not interested, particularly in national ideas, because if there's anything we've
learned from the Progressive Project, it's that the the the idea of ethno states
in Europe is prima facia, a bad concept, an evil concept. They're
the only ones who are not allowed to have their own little cultural on c
lives. Everybody else in the world can have it. Nobody's looking at Somalia
and saying, you know, the problem with you guys is that you're all
Somali. You should be seventeen percent Dutch. It was an absurdity on the
face of it. People's self segregate. They've they arranged themselves as they do,
but they've redifind they're so poisoned by the idea that that national identity within
language and culture and history and folk ways and the rest of it is somehow
about one half of a goose step away from the rise of of the Fourth
Right, that they've just decided to abandon the whole thing forever in the name
of Europe, which means a set of values and ideas that are completely to
them, divorced and uprooted from the cultures that produce them. So they were
handed down by the you know, the tablists, by Moses and God.
One thing before we got to go rob because we know you have a hard
out, as we like to say here, so finish up and then we'll
leave. Oh. I was going to say that the only issue here with
with the with the Northern Europe and the Europeans is that they they don't like
change. They never have like change, and so they but they convinced themselves
that if they just hunker down that things won't change. And the reality is
what they need is they need more in Italy. They need more Italians,
they need to have more kids. They're upside down on their population group in
how they need more Dutch people having children. And they probably need to create
a slightly bigger, broader opportunities society for themselves instead of the regulatory states that
they have because you can't you know, you can't pass the tax to or
pass a law to outlaw tomorrow it's going to happen. And had they what
they they're now, they're they're dark. Theory is well, you know will
be in charge and but we just import a bunch of people and they'll do
all the work. That doesn't really that you have to be willing to shrink.
If you can do that, you have to be Japanese to do that.
The Dutch can't do it and the Italians can't do it. What they
need is they need to they need to create a vibrant, growing economy that
encourages people to have children right and to move out of cities and to do
economic opportunity activities that you know, grow an economy rather than just sort of
hold it steady while you import people from the global South to I don't know,
make your bitter balling in your you know, Kaiserschmarn somewhere else. Right
then, when you wake up like Ireland and you find it's time to talk
about these things, they've made it illegal to do. So it's been fun
to talk about this again more next week and for the weeks to come.
Peter rob always a pleasure. You the listener can go to ricochet dot com
and sign up. You can go to Apple and give his five started reviews
in the podcast, and you can go to Fume Fum try fume for that
wonderful little product. Thanks to everybody who's been listening, and we'll see you
all in the comment, said Ricochet. F point Oho next week. Next
week Ricochet join the conversation