I'm losing your voice for some reason. Well, I've been trying to lose
his voice for a long time. Congratulations, Ask not what your country can
do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister Gerbuschov,
tear down this wall. Read my lips. It's the Ricochete podcast with
Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lolas and Day. We talked to
Paul Ray about Sparta. When was the last time you thought about Sparta?
Well you're going to know, because let's have ourselves a podcast. The border
is secured. Frankly, mister nor Roster, I don't care what you think,
sitting in your safe office and removed from everybody, playing with some numbers,
Go and talk to people. The answer is to have real borders.
The answer is to have the rule of law. And once you established that,
then you look into what needs to be done in our immigration system.
Well, come everybody, this is the Ricochet podcast number six hundred and fifty
nine. Boy, that's a lot of podcasts. Have you've been there from
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you into the family, a family that includes founder Rob Long Peter Robins.
It will be along in just a second time, James Lilacs in Minneapolis.
Rob, Hello, how's Gotham? James, how are you? No,
Gotham's actually quite lovely. It's it's got that. It's the perfect time,
you know. It's yep, it's still kind of sun it's not quite autumn,
so it's not cold, but it's not hot. It's kind of nice.
And yes, it's you know, everybody knows it's about to get really
good. That's when it said it's best as you walk along with a fragrant
smell of roasted chest nuts and crystal and apple breeze and weeds, smokes skunk
defying the air. Yes, indeed, it's the it's not yet chestnuts.
It's there still is a wafting odor. It's not chest nuts. I never
know on anybody who actually bought the chest nuts off of those. I don't
know what you're supposed to do with them, rather than it's just the scent
is perhaps like an air freshener for Gotham, like the equivalent of a tree
hanging off a rear view mirror or something like that. I don't know anybody's
weird because in New York it's we think of it as a New York thing
and nowhere else. But everywhere in Europe in the autumn and the winter,
there's they're roasting chestnuts on the street. I mean, they do it in
Paris, they do it in Budapest, they do it everywhere. It's actually
just kind of a thing. But we only do it here in New York.
I don't think they don't do in Chicago. Do they Chicago? No,
Because nobody wants to know who ever says, boy, if I got
a yen for some roasted chestnuts, because I really eaten chest nuts when I
was a little kid, it was a big, big deal. It only
happened a few times when I was in school from my father to take me
down to New York and when I must have been seven or eight, my
first visit to Manhattan wintertime, and he bought me a bag of roasting chestnuts.
They were disgusting, but he did buy them and I did eat them.
There are different spells, I mean, different things for other people.
I like buttane on charcoal Brickett's as a matter of fact, but that's not
something you're going to find anybody daubing behind the back of the rear. Well,
Peter, welcome here we are. I'm back after my sojourn in London
and Walber's away. Can suffolk with interesting tales to tell? Tell that at
the end of the story, and promise, I promise they're interesting because they
involved interesting people, not just myself. So in the news today, the
whole bunch of stuff, of course, the usual back and forth of politics
and war and the rest of it. The story that I think is the
most interesting has to do with a immigration crisis on the board. I don't
know if you guys have noticed, but we're having something of an immigration kurf
fluffle, are we. Yes? We are. Eagle Past Access declared a
state of emergency because they think that more about oh ten thousand migrants or so
are expected to enter the town, which itself has a population of under thirty
thousand. It brings to mind the video that we've seen of a small island
off of Italy which has a population of something like six thousand and has been
overwhelmed by twelve thousand migrants, and the reaction seems to be, well,
we have to find a way to disperse them all through Europe, to which
most people might say why the Hungarians certainly say that Hungarians certainly would, But
of course they're run by a you know, yah boord Mine Jory. They're
run by a complete fascist, don't you know. So the idea of having
sort of a country for yourself and border control is now verging on authoritarianism.
We seem to be told by our moral betters that we have an obligation to
take in absolutely anybody who shows up here and do everything for them. The
Biden administration is considering an ID for the illegals. I'm sorry, the undocumented.
Oh there's a new term. There's a new I can't remember what it
is that I heard it the other It was on a report from New York
Now that the mayor wants working permits for these people. There's yet another new
term, and I can't remember what it is. Of course, they're just
too many of them. I can't remember. Well, undocumented was it for
a while, as though that as though you know, a piece of pain.
I mean, undocumented is somebody who just doesn't have it on them.
That doesn't mean they're even titled to the document in the first place. But
you know, of course that after the ideas are done, the from the
idea comes to the driver's license, and eventually comes the voting. Because while
they're here, they're impact. They're impacted by all of these decisions, so
it's wrong not to let them have a say in that. You'll take on
this gentleman, which, well, what I love about the Internet is that
that someone, not me, but someone could actually do a little research and
find out when exact act when you pretty much within the day probably we started
saying migrant, what day was that? That was very recent, So there's
gotta be a day it's gonna be like, oh, you know what on
June third, migrants. Yeah, it just came to the new term unpapered
is somebody who's sitting in a bathroom stall and realizes that there are there are
no roles. I'm sorry, but Rob is making the question saying, every
time the time gets introduced, we can end the internet. We'll let you
know when that exactly when that time actually is. And I think I'd like
to know who and when and where it first appeared. And then I want
to find out who decided, because I I bet someone decided. It just
feels like a brainstorming session in the New York Times style book editorial meeting,
where we can't call them that, and we can't call them this, and
let's call them something that they are clearly not. I mean, they are
illegal. They are also undocumented. That is true. That's a euphemism.
They are also on paper that it's also true. It's a euphemism. But
they're not migrants. No refugees didn't work. And yeah, migrants come and
they go that's what they do, or they keep moving. So someone,
someone made a decision. And I was in a room and with a big
dry erase board, and they had all these names up there. No bad
someone said, no bad, there are no bad suggestions, no bad ideas,
And some sad little sap raised his hand and probably said something that was
a little bit you know, descriptive, and they all yelled at him and
said, well, there's that bad idea. How about migrants? And I
just want to know what date that was and where that was. You're right,
So my reaction is fatigue at this point. Anger. I can I
can summon up the anger all over again, and I'll tell you why I'm
angry and why we should all be angry. But I've noticed that I have
become inured to this and that is the not me, but that seems to
be the case with the country. Even on Fox News. What was I
watching last night? The special the Brett Bear Show. Brett Bear was in
Saudi Arabia doing but in any event, it was the Brett Bear Show,
and there was footage of people streaming across the border, and it was just
a three minute segment, even on Fox News, which is which sort of
lives to get us all outrage. So here's why I'm angry. In nineteen
eighty six, when Reagan signed his immigration bill, there were three million people
it was believed there were three million people in this country illegally, and that
was such an outrage that there had been a bipartisan Commission established under Jimmy Carter
almost a decade before. It was chaired by that good and holy man Theodore
Hesburg, Jesuit priest, president of Notre Dame University. Both sides got it
was uncontroversial that we had to do something. It was difficult to work out
exactly what had to be done, which is why it took year after year.
Finally legislation got enacted, and that was to address three million illegals in
this country. Eight million have entered the country during the presidency of Joe Biden
alone eight million. And now we're down to a three minute segment on Fox
News. I mean, what am I saying? I guess I'm angry that
I can no longer work up the angry. We're all the anger. We
are all just numb to this. I can recall this is years ago.
I had a conversation with a philosopher who, to my astonishment, was a
kind of conservative guy, and I said, how what about this argument that
the earth belongs to all of us and that no nation has the right to
at least orders that the poorer always have the And he said, well,
I can be very sophisticated about this or I can just ask you this.
Do you have the right to the use of your own home? Are you
permitted? Are you morally permitted to lock your front door, perhaps to put
a fence around your front yard? And everybody knows that that's true, And
he said, the argument from the individual homeowner to the nation is identical,
identical, And we have lost the will and the wits to make this argument
to get angry about an administration that has chosen at this point of course,
it's not administrative difficulty. It's not lack of money they've given. They've chosen.
All right, I'm trying hard to work myself up into anger again,
and I just can't do it. They haven't known, we haven't lost it.
We have been informed that certain attitudes are nationalistic, xenophobic and therefore are
outside of the pale. Where have been informed and instructed that the idea is
is that we are a nation of immigrants. Ergo, anything that involves immigrants
is just absolutely fantastic. Now I'm one of those wide you know, pro
immigration guys. I think it's great. We need give people, smart people,
we need workers demographically wise. Yes, let's vet everyone, let's get
good people in here. Let's provide a solace and an asylum for the people
who are truly, truly needed. But what we are seeing now is a
lot of single men, economic refugees, or people who just have made a
very sensible, rational decision to crash into this country and get more for themselves
than they could elsewhere. It's a rational, sensible thing to do. But
the interesting thing about this is that we're supposed to believe that it's all sort
of dispersed, that these are just little droplets into the great ocean of America.
When we see as in New York, as we see in in Chicago,
and as we see in this town in Texas, that you have instantaneous
shifting of the culture in these specific places where it happens. So in the
case of the Italian Island, I find it fascinating because they say that they're
going to want to disperse them throughout Europe. When two to one now the
people of this nation, of this little island are out numbered by the other.
Why why not just keep them on that island there and have them do
whatever they're going to do. And the reason is, of course, is
that it would completely destroy the culture of that island, which then leads to
the conversation as to whether or not the people of that island deserve to have
their culture unmolested, unshifted by exterior elements. I was listening to the BBC
Hard Talk the other day where this unbelievable interviewer was excoriating a Swedish politician who
was suggesting that the bombings, the crime waves, the difficulties they have in
Sweden require them to redouble their efforts to instill Swedish values into immigrants, and
perhaps consider whether or not they should be taking in as many migrants as they
should migrants. There. I just said it, and the interviewer was just
was yelling at him practically for saying that these are right wing talking points.
It is right wing now to say that Sweden country does not have the population.
The United States has the right to maintain its own culture, to believe
what their own culture is, and to keep it from being shifted and changed
by people who are antithetical to it. Now, the America's America is not
Sweden. We're not a mono culture. We were were the melting butt.
It's also the point they're not yeah, I mean they're not antithetical. Wait
wait, wait a minute, No, the migrants in Sweden, because the
Sweden obviously, but that's the we're even weasel wording that they are. They
are Muslims. They're from Muslim countries right, from Syria and places like that,
and they're refugees from a terrible war and they've come to Sweden and they
are different. They are very different from the sweets. Right, everyone's different
from the sweets, but these people are really different the sweets. I'm sorry
I interrupt you. Mid No my rant is this, yes, there's good
news about It's good news is that suddenly all those things that James says,
which rightly were attacked and thought it was right wing talking points in the United
States but we had to separate it and that's not Sweden, are now things
being said by the liberal mayor of New York. Hey, we gotta do
something about all this. Hey, what's going on? Right? So that
that is some small good news. The other thing that I just I know,
I shouldn't even get mad at it. It's just too it's like too
complicated to be mad at. But every time someone says their refugees from Venezuela,
I'm like, well, whose fault is that how many liberal Americans who
are down there in Venezuela or praising Hugo Chavez. He's saying he's a socialist
king, and he and Castor have the right answer instead of saying what everybody
knew, which was it was a despotic, chaotic and utterly incompetent regime that
was going to take an energy supplying nation, an oil rich nation, and
drop it down somewhere between you know, Burkina Fosso and Niger in its GDP.
Right, that that is what socialism did. And it's not my fault.
It's the fault of the political science department at Harvard and a bunch of
Hollywood actors who praised this guy. They created a problem. Now the problem
somehow we have to solve. And then then the other problem is this is
that a long thirty and fifty thousand foot view of this is that we have
had this bizarre sleepwalking attitude about this problem because there's always like in the you
know, it's like, I mean, I don't have trying to be you
know whatever. But there was always the you don't have the Wall Street Journal
editorial page argument that actually, this is not a problem. There were a
bunch of a California economists and business people said, look, this is not
a problem, it's gonna it's actually necessary for the growth. Then there was
you know, when it started really happening in the nineties, when when you
know, unemployment in America was sort of below what anyone ever thought it could
be institutional just just as a matter of the number was lower than anybody ever
thought would jo it's a giant magnet for labor. Came from the South,
and we all, you know, maybe I got to get it direct.
It was enormous growth in the nineties. Mean, the economy grew and grew
and grew and loose of great years for us. We all kind of slept
walk through it. And then we had you know, then you know,
I'm here. Tom Tancredo from Colorado. He ran on this and didn't get
anywhere in the Republican Party, and Republicans kind of rolled their eyes and said,
it's not really a problem. And then Trump made it his issue,
and I think that was a huge part of his appeal. And then even
when Trump got in, he did basically nothing. He built as fewer miles
of Obama. He said he was gonna build a wall that's correct. That's
correct, that's correct. So I have a secondary rant, and this one
I still can get pretty good and angry about Mexico. Mexico is a country
that was making enormous progress for about twenty years, and now they can't pull
themselves together. They claim to block wave after wave after wave of immigration that
begins at their southern border, crosses Mexico and then enters our southern border.
Right, Mexican immigration into this country has become relatively modest. It's people from
farther south, those Venezuelans you talked about, and now we know perfectly well
the people from all over the world are crossing Mexico to enter our southern border
illegally. The Mexican the Mexicans can't get their hands on that. The Mexicans
also are seem unwilling and this is I mean, of course, what I'm
saying, all of this is a matter of political will. They also seem
unwilling to get out of the fentanyl game. And among young Americans, drug
overdose has now become the leading cause of death. We lose a hundred thousand
kids, overwhelmingly kids a year. Now I'll tell you about I'd better not
quote them because they didn't know I was going to yea. It was confidential,
at least private conversations. But here's what one former member of a presidential
cabinet told me. What's going on is that the Chinese are supplying the Mexicans
with the raw materials for drugs. The Mexicans then do the final cooking,
the final assembly, so to speak, and of course transmit it to this
country. And the Chinese are doing this to accumulate cash outside China. We
know who the Mexican we're tracking. The Chinese is difficult, I was told
by this cabinet officer, but we know a great deal about the Mexican drug
dealers, all right. Next item, another former member of a presidential cabinet
took a tour of the southern border in Arizona and talked to some ranchers in
Arizona, and it turned out there was so much trouble with them so called
mules, these young Mexicans who entered the country illegally. They we're breaking down
fences. So the ranchers on the American side got in touch with the ranchers
on the Mexican side and said, listen, tell the drug dealers. We're
going to install fences. Don't have mules break down the fences. We're getting
cattle mixed up every single night. Just use the gates we're going to install.
I beg your pardner, mis spoke, We're going to install gates.
Just make sure they close the gates behind themselves. And so this is now
going on that there is an informal but perfectly straightforward arrangement for illegal entry of
drugs into this country. Final point here is that remittances from Mexicans back to
Mexico are now fifty billion dollars a year. Fifty billion dollars of our economy
gets transferred directly to Mexico each year. This is insane. It is just
insane that we and the Mexicans cannot pull ourselves together to help them if they
need the help, if they'll accept the help and to and to get rough
diplomatically rough at least, if they won't accept the help to stop this immigration
across their country and to stop this drug trade, all right, it is
just insane. It isn't. Now that may be difficult, they may be
on what we are making, no effort difficult, just difficult. Saying difficult
was it to sant As. You said, the occasional sidewinder or tomahawk into
a meth lab would concentrate the mind. Oh, but they move elsewhere.
Okay, then hit that one. I'm sorry. If you have somebody who's
shipping, imagine if these factories were producing plutonium and we're smuggling that into the
American cities and very small quantities, mind you, but it killed an awful
lot of people to be the same thing. To very good point, you
admittances, ban them, ban them? Sorry you would you would you like
to get this money back? Okay, here's what you need to do.
You need to stop people from coming up here, and you need to do
something about the fentanyl. Then we can talk about starting the remittances up again.
Three. The fences, the doors. That's interesting because when something like
that comes along, what I think is that probably health and safety. What's
the Oh, they're going to make sure that the doors that the mules get
through are our ADA compliant. That would be the only thing that the government
would be concerned about that. If indeed you are installing you need ramps.
Do they swing both ways? Are they power assistant? We're gonna build ramps
and Mexico's gonna pay for it, that's right, absolutely, So I know
the answer seems simple to those of us who don't have to do anything about
it. Of course, people, you know that the ones who are involved
in task with these things themselves barely get any sleep whatsoever, and toss fitfully
because they know that the answers are there, if only we could sum it
up, the wheel and the money to do it. But those people,
if they wanted to sleep a little better, well we know what they would
use, wouldn't of course they would use bold and branch sheets. So bold
and branch. You know we're talking sheets, right, and you know that
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this the Ricochet Podcast, and now we're welcome back to the podcast. Bricochet
Favorite Ricochet writer Paul Ray, professor of history at Hillsdale College. He holds
the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage.
Is the author of Republic's Ancient and Modern Soft Despotism and most recently, Sparta's
Billion Proxy War, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta. Welcome, how are
you? We're all grand and we have been just despairing over the course of
modern events. So it's always fun to cast our mind back to history when
things were probably worse than bloody ear and like give us the play. So
the last week on Twitter, and I know you're on Twitter like five six
hours a day, somebody somebody who posed the question, you know, I
wonder how often men think about ancient Rome And the answer was generally intended to
be almost every day or every day and myself, it's about every other day
because if you study art history, if you study politics, if you study
any I mean, Rome is from my Twitter feed. I got guys who
are showing me mosaics and marbles and stories and busts and the rest of it.
So Rome was always still part of my imagination on a daily basis,
and it's not surprising that people do. So this got to people thinking about
that. But you know, Rome gets all the pr Sparta Greece less.
So what will it take Paul to make us think about Sparta every day?
The Michigan State football team would have to would have to bounce back in a
serious way. And let me say, the great ambition of my life is
to give a lecture during halftime at a Michigan State Michigan game on the ancient
Spartans. But but let me say, there are more sports teams named after
the Spartans than there are named after the Romans. And it strikes me that
if one we're to pose the question how often do people think about Sparta,
it would be more often than you think, especially in wartime. But look,
the Sparta Sicilian Proxy Wars. My fifth book on Sparta, it'll be
released by encounter books on Tuesday or Wednesday. Paul, I have to stop
you there. You know too much. It cannot be good for your brain.
It just cannot be good for your brain. You know too much.
Continue. I'm beginning. I'm seventy four, so I'm beginning to forget A
lot may be helpful. Maybe twenty years will meet our our knowledge levels will
meet. A part of what has been, you know, driving my writing
these books is a conviction that the two camps in thinking about American foreign policy
in this country, the realists best represented by John Mersheimer University of Chicago,
and then the sort of Willsonians pretty well represented by the younger Bush are both
out of their minds. Both yes. I don't think that we have had
a good administration with regard to foreign policy since Ronald Reagan, and that both
the Republicans and the Democrats have ignored what is right in front of their eyes.
There has been a kind of utopian vision that if we could unite everyone
in a neoliberal international order, that commerce would cause the spread of democracy,
and Russia and China would become ordinary polities. I believe that was crazy from
the beginning, because you need to pay attention to cultural differences. And one
of the people who directs you to paying a difference attention to cultural differences is
Subsididies. In Book one, paragraph seventy, the Corinthians try to instruct the
Spartans about what the Athenians are really like and what they're up against. And
they juxtapose the two peoples and you realize that they're very, very different.
They will respond to the same situation in quite different ways. So to think
that the Russians wouldn't try to re establish a Russian empire in Eastern Europe is
simply crazy. And to think that the Chinese would not try to be the
central kingdom and dominate the world is equally crazy. And what we've done is
averted our Gays from the facts for thirty years under the influence of these two
schools of thought, which are equally committed to ignoring cultural difference. So Paul
could I way back during the Cold War days, so the Persian Wars versus
the Peloponnesian Wars. Back in the old days of the Cold War, we
used to talk quite a lot about the Persian Wars because there you had a
democracy. The Athenians led the Greeks in standing up to this vast autocratic empire,
and it fit very well our feeling of ourselves. Or you can see
the same, fundamentally the same storyline in Star Wars. It's the republic versus
the empire. And that was a source of great encouragement because Athens beat the
Persians and we were going to beat world communism. Okay, but we kept
our mouth shut about the Peloponnesian Wars because that didn't fit at all. That
wasn't encouraging at all. There you had a more or less democratic Athens that
lost to a centrally controlled autocratic Sparta. Well, I don't think that's true.
Go ahead, go ahead, go I want to hear it. I
want to hear you adjust these templates for us. What do these two wars
mean to us today? Well, look, let me step back. George
Marshall gave a talk at Princeton in nineteen forty eight, and in that talk
he said, you cannot understand the position of the United States in the world
today unless you study Thucydides. And I can tell you at the war colleges,
the Naval War College, the Army War College, the Air War College,
where I lecture and have lectured off and on since the eighties, and
the Marine Corps University, they're all focused on Thucydides. And so the view
was Sparta that's the Soviet Union, Athens that's the United States. And I
would say that there is a certain similarity in the struggles that have taken place
in the world from the sixteen nineties to the present day, because the main
struggles have involved maritime powers in the rim Land, Britain, the United States,
and so forth against continental powers the Napoleon Louis the fourteenth, the kaiser
Reich, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and I think it is still
pertinent. And of course there are big cultural differences between commercial powers and land
powers. Commercial powers are not so much interested in territory. So the Spartans,
the Spartans here are the land power. Is that correct? Yeah,
China's a land power trying to be a sea power, just the way the
Kaiser's Germany was a land power trying to be a sea power. And so
I'm trying to get to the parallel here is part it was a land power
and the Athenians were a sea power. Essentially. Yes, Okay, that's
right. But here's the other thing. Sea powers have a tendency to go
off on crazy adventures. The Athenians went to Sicily, which gave the Spartans
the opportunity to really stick it to them, and to do it on the
cheap through a proxy war. And whenever you have these land and sea powers
against one another, you tend to have a stalemate. And of course in
the nuclear age, you tend to have a stalemate. And so when you
get a stalemate, you often get proxy wars. So the Korean War was
for the Russians a proxy war they could bleed us on the cheap. Vietnam
was a proxy war for the Chinese initially and the Russians later so they could
bleed us. The first Afghan War that we were involved with was a proxy
war on our part against the Soviet Union, and it may have contributed mightily
to bringing down the Soviet regime our time in Afghanistan, we just opened ourselves
up for it, and the Pakistanis took carried out a proxy war against us.
And in Iraq, both the Iranians and the Syrians carried out a proxy
war against us. And what we're doing right now in Ukraine is carrying out
a proxy war against the Russians, and we are bleeding them. Oh my
god, we're bleeding them. And it put NATO back together, and it
added the Fins and the Swedes. I have to ask here because you brought
up Ukraine. It's always fascinating to go back to see the patterns repeating themselves
as we sing of arms and the men and the rest of it. In
human nature not changing, etc. But we are seeing when you talk about
air power, some new fundamental shifts. Are we not in our expectations of
what the battlefields of the future we're going to look like. This is the
first time that I can think of that we've had drone warfare like this,
swarms of it, overwhelming it, finding its way into the little chinks in
the little holes. It's fascinating to see what we're learning in this war.
And aren't we learning about that? A lot of a lot of the paradigms
that we've been comfortably settled with for a long time are actually out of date,
and we'd best keep up. Yeah, that's always the case. Look,
when the try reams invented and the Persians began sending out large pleats and
they managed to get horses onto try reams. Suddenly, amphibious warfare became a
possibility for the first time in human history. Uh. And it transformed things
so that the technology is always changing. And boy, are you right about
drones? And you know that that leads one to a kind of question.
I was on at a gathering of the M Kinder Forum yesterday and I can't
tell you who was there because I'm not allowed to, but I tell you
what I learned. Yeah, yeah, yeah, seventy six percent. You
know, all of the computer stuff depends on rare earths right down to your
cell phone. Seventy six percent of the rare earths are produced in China,
fifteen percent in the United States. You might ask was that always so?
And the answer is no. The environmentalists pushed the United States to shut it
down because the pollution that comes from it's pretty ugly. The fifteen percent we
produce is refined in China. So look, Sunsu argues, one of the
greatest victory you can achieve is one where you win the victory without having to
do any fighting at all, by putting the other side in a position where
they cannot resist. And I would suggest you that our dependence on China for
rare earths is such that we can't fight a long war against China, except
of course, what's one other country that's been in the news lately that has
a tremendous amount of rare earth Well, Ukraine. Okay I didn't know that.
Yes they do, but they haven't been producing it. They have,
they've been trying to wrap it up, but since the war it's been a
bit difficult. But a lot of people have said that Putin's grab on the
East part portion of Ukraine is it is a resource grab. I mean there's
lots of you know, the neon is one of the things that Ukraine produces
that it outstrets other capacity and that's very necessary, and semiconductors from what I
understand. So there's a lot of reasons. The nationalistic getting the old band
back together big brother or old brother thing for Ukraine might actually be over a
fight over resources and money in oldigarchy. And imagine that well, to some
degree, it surely is it. You know, they say that amateurs talk
strategy and professionals in warfare talk logistics, right, and if you look at
Sparta Sicilian expedition involvement in the Sicilian expedition. A lot of it has to
do with the fact that the Athenian logistics are a nightmare because you've got to
you've got to make supply people over eight hundred miles of sea with the technology
of the time, and you know, to the extent this rare Earth's thing
is significant. That's a matter of logistics and a very important one. And
we for thirty years we averted our gays from the possibility of war, and
we didn't think about logistics. Well, I mean, every military history I've
ever read, in every military history I've ever talked to, eventually you start
talking, you say the same phrase, which is cut off the supply right,
to break up the supply chain, get them so that you know,
every army of Napoleon's army travels on stomach. That's you know, you just
expand that definition to include everything, material, everything. The Ukrainian strategy right
now is so clearly to cut off the line supply lines to Russia from the
force, the Russian forces in Ukraine territory now. But part of it has
been done because we're so rich. The Americans were so incredibly affluent, and
we were looking at a nation sort of across the Pacific that was poor,
and we thought, well, you know, let them make these dirty things,
I mean making a semiconductor, which we now do. We think about
and designed them in the United States, some of them, but we're making
them as dirty. It's dirty business, so we're like, let them do
it. There's a certain kind of decadence that sets in to a country that
is no longer willing to sort of grasp what it needs. I always said
that with electric cars, electric cars run on electric car batteries. Electric car
batteries really run on cobalt, and that cobalt is dug by little children in
Africa with their little fingers, and they are literally are slaves. And we
never hear about that. We only hear about, well, it's better for
the environment. Well it's not better for their environment. Like I guarantee you
that. I mean, it's the great Thomas Soul always teaches us. There
are no solutions, there are only trade offs. So let me ask you
a historical question. First of all, I have two th one. I
just want to tell you this little story. We occasionally, when we're looking
to hire somebody for Ricochet or our new Ricochet productions, we're talking to young
Bright almost exclusively Hillsteal graduates. They're all really smart and everyone I say things
like, hey, do you ever take a class and Paul Ray, and
almost to the student they go, oh yeah, that guy hard, Yeah
Hard. So I guess that's a compliment. Uh. I remember in the
two thousand campaign, So that's al Gore versus George W. Bush. The
foreign policy platforms were very different. Al Gore was part of that nation building
interventionist we can build a new country here and there foreign policy, and George
W. Bush said that this is silly. We can't do these things.
We shouldn't do these things. We should pivot to China, that Middle East
should be we should be benign neglect I think was the actual term they used,
and it sounded so sensible. And then nine to eleven happened. And
it isn't as if they grafted a policy onto their existing policy. They just
changed the policy. Yep. So how how do you what advice would you
give people to remember that despite all of the things that happened, because you
know these things happened, it happened in history, that you don't change that
policy. I mean, it seems like it's human nature right. What I
would say is the question that should always be asked is what can go wrong?
Yeah, and how likely is it to go wrong? And in my
opinion, in Afghanistan it was inevitable that it go wrong. Right. In
Iraq there was a chance. But then you have to ask a second question,
can you do it at acceptable cost? In other words, to turn
Iraq around? What would it take? And I think the answer, which
I did not consider at the time, is it would take a long time.
The question is are we ready to make a long term commitment now.
In some measure we succeeded in Iraq. They still have free elections, which
is really quite remarkable. In other ways, we weakened ourselves and strengthened Iran
because Saddam Hussein stood in the way of Iran. You know, if you
go back to the Iran Iraq War, to some degree we used it as
a proxy war against Iran because we gave at least intelligence help to Iraq at
crucial moments, and of course we intervened at one point to keep the flow
of oil going from Iraq, which was very important for Kiss's famous line during
that conflict, if only they could both lose, it's a good line.
It's a good line because either one of us is neither one of them could
possibly have been a friend of ours. But it led us, I think,
to the wrong jump. But it led us to the wrong conclusion.
The argument that I heard from people making that Iraq was a nation and that
nation could be fortified by our presence was that Iraq, this multi sectarian Shia
Sunni state, Shia Suni Curred state, fought together under one flag against the
Shia hundred percent Shei a nation, and this multi multi sectarian nation that really
only exists in Iraq and the in that region managed to hold itself together.
Forgetting that they did that because to the rear was a bloodthirsty dictator who had
forced them to fight. So the country once we went in, exploded into
sectarian violence that we didn't predict. It wasn't It wasn't that we didn't pay
attention to the ancient rule, which is that people hate each other sometimes,
and they hate each other for a long long time. I mean, nobody
predicted that Yugoslabby and nobody predicted that in Iraq, right, I mean,
I still still go back to the ancients, and I'm thinking, well,
why don't you people just read the history. The other thing, wait forgot
is they have a tendency to unite when the unite against a foreigner, and
the longer we stay there, the more we look like the foreigner. Paul
could I on this theme. Yugoslavia is a country for what four decades?
Tito dies, the Cold War ends, and it breaks up into Serbia and
Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia. And it turns out that the Orthodox Serbs still
hate the Catholic Croatians and they both still hate the Muslims in Herzegovina. Okay,
that's number one, number two, and maybe even more dramatic. What
I'm getting at here is the question is going to be about historical continuity.
Here we have Vladimir Putin behaving in roughly the same way as Ivan the Terrible
for a thousand years Russian rulers, romanoffs communists, and now whatever Putin is,
there's no ideological through line at all from Putin to Ivan the Terrible?
What is the mechanism? What is the transmission mechanism? How is it that
we recognize in Vladimir Putin a Russian and that there's something underlying all that.
Even Communism was a kind of overlay. This is complicated, but it was
a kind of overlay under something permanent. Where does this permanence come from?
Is? How is it that we miss it? But what is the Why
should Vladimir Putin have failed to grasp the chance to become a liberal, rich
democracy. He prefers being a Russian the son of a bitch? How does
this happen? Well, the sense of historical mission, something that runs deep
within the people, the heritage of Pan Slavism, the heritage of Pan Orthodoxy.
And look, Jijin Ping is like a Chinese emperor with the same kind
of of aspirations. Now there's one sweet thing about all this Chinese aspirations,
which is to say, to control all of the territory that China ever controlled,
conflict with Russian aspirations, to control all of the territory that Russia ever
controlled, if only they both could lose. Well this, you know they
fought a war in nineteen sixty nine over Siberia. Yeah, right. And
one of the unequal treaties that the Chinese denounced and that they teach their school
children to resent, is the treaty that gave Siberia to Russia. Charles de
gaul Is supposed to have said that by the end of the twentieth or it
might be the twenty first century, the eastern border of Russia would be the
Ural Mountains. I believe that's true. I think you're right. I believe
that's true. There are only two countries in the world with a claim on
territory that is currently that is Russian territory, was Russian territory in nineteen ninety
five. One is Japan, and it has to do with some small islands
and it's kind of irrelevant. The other is China, which has claims on
all of Siberia, and I think they're going to get it. I don't
quite know when they'll take it. Maybe they won't have to. Yeah,
the more Russia becomes a vassal state of China, perhaps it'll be part of
the foreclosure agreement. Maybe at the end of this we learn I mean,
as Peter was saying, great point thousand years why not well, culture,
culture matters. Culture matters more than ideology and a lot of these things in
shaping the way that people develop. But at the same time, the culture
of Sparta doesn't seem to be evident in the Greeks today. So over time,
things a road, things are malleable. And maybe as Americans we have
this protean culture that's always shifting and changing because we have so many different influences
that come to bear on it. So you know how this all ends,
whether or not in two thousand years there'll be filmmakers making versions of the United
States at Iwajima like they make Sparta in the in the movie four hundred Who
Knows. Thank you for telling everybody in reminding everybody that yeah, Rome is
cool. Room's cool, but there's there's Sparta. And one of the reasons
that I think that that's particular cool is because North Dakota. Farther north Dakota,
my school was the Spartans as so, as a matter of fact,
when we went as a school group to Rome and had a one of those
big meetings with the Pope, every group got to stand up and say something
a little you know, school model or something like that. So I stood
up and just shouted, go Spartans, which may not have been the thing
to say at Vatican City at the time or like extra pating pagan crowd,
but you know, it's hometown pride. I have to go torture, I
mean, teach freshman in Western Heritage, and I've got to be up there
in about five minutes, so I leave it, depart. Thank you very
much for having me on. Thank God. I don't care. I don't
care how hard a greater you are. Your students are lucky. They are
lucky. And it's been too long. We need we need regular sessions with
Professor Ray. The world is too interesting and it resembles the ancient world too
much. That's why we need a little guidance. Thank you, Thank you,
professor, Thank you, take care. Thanks Paul true So, Peter
Rob, I know you have to go, but how often do you think
about ancient Rome? I do a lot. I felt like I felt,
I felt embarrassed, like, yeah, that's kind of meat. You do
me too. I felt exactly the same. I don't know that I think
about it every single day, but I think about it a lot. I
have the Aid on my bedside table, I have the Caesar's a pretty good
translation of Caesar's Gallic Wars on the bookshelf right here next to me. Yeah,
I think about it, you every like I said, just about every
day or so, given the cultural and the historical things that I study,
And of course Paul's right, we ought to think about the ancient Greeks as
well too. As a matter of fact, those people who are classic Greek
scholars are just sitting there and fuming that we're not giving the Greeks the do
they deserve. Speaking of fuming, you, how does that bring to mind?
Bring to mind? Maybe not fuming, you know, doing the cold
turkey thing. Hey, listen, cold turkey may be great on sandwiches,
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sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast. Well, whilst we are talking there about the
things you can do, Fume wise robbed decamped, but we knew that was
going to happen. He's got important meetings, he's got things to go to,
he's got deadlines to me. Do you know what life is like in
New York? It's all bustle, It's all hustle. Man it's tired of
New York. It is tired of life. Actually telling you the truth,
I'm kind of tired of New York myself, but I'm not tired of life.
And I know that because I'm not tired of London. Anyway, Peter,
you're gonna you're gonna ask me a question. No, well, I
was simply going to say, here, we have to sit through this whole
show, Paul Ray, the Rise and Fall of Empires. Who cares about
any of that? You said at the beginning you'd just come back from Britain
and you had stories to sell. And I've been sitting here through the whole
show wondering what stories the moment has ad Jane, Well, yes, I
suppose it has. And to tell you the truth, I wrote about them
at Ricochet. I did not put them on the main page. I put
them in the member feed for the people who are now. And we have
to tell you it's not expensive. And I know that getting people to do
any sort of subscription these days are tough, but if you can subscribe to
the member feed, that's where we have the conversations and that's where you can
comment. And I told a couple of tales there about the ferryman. One
of the ferryman was Patrick, the limo driver who took me from Walter's Wick
and Suffolk down to the Heathrow and for two and a half hour. For
an hour, we had this conversation with this fellow top gear Britain petrol station
manager formerly liked motor boats, and so here we are completely different sides of
the ocean, and we're talking about the perfume of a two stroke engine and
the beauty of a nice piece of well oil the firearm. It was great,
I mean, virtually had a little in common with this guy until we
start talking and find out that as members of Western civilization and men of a
particular age, we can talk for hours. The other fairyman happened to be
the gentleman that I interviewed in London who had ferried to the other side of
Styx the memory of an ancestor of his great uncle Harry. Have you heard
about this book, Peter, No, I have not coming out soon.
What the man did was he came from a family, a fairly prosperous family.
His great grandfather was an Oxford don who gave it all up to marry
a woman and became a vicar in a small town, had about five or
six kids. Everyone did stokingly great, except for the last born, who
was late and probably an accident, never found his way much in the world,
wasn't very good at school, and this is the height of empire.
So off he goes to India to work in the railways, and we hear
the tales of what he did there, what life was like. Because of
the bureaucratic machinery that was the British Empire, the author of this book was
able to find all sorts of information about this man, who literally was unremarkable
except for the fact that he was the author's great uncle and he felt some
sort of obligation to him, and also for the fact that as an unremarkable
exemplar of empire, he's a man of a lost world. So in telling
the story of his great uncle Harry, he told the story of the end
of the Empire, essentially, because Harry, after failing in India, goes
to New Zealand becomes a farm hand, but he signs up the moment World
War One starts and you turn the page after basic training and you see the
title of the next chapter is Gallipoli. And your heart sinks because you know
what the man's in for when he made it through all of that. He
died in World War One and left behind a series of very blunt journals which
didn't really say much. I mean, there would be a battle at the
Psalm or Gallipoli in which tens of thousands were cut down by mechanized modern warfare.
In the entry would be received two pairs socks from home today. So
he tells this story of this man and brings him to life as best as
he could, and he doesn't dress up the skeleton with him any modern clothes
or assumptions. He just gives us a good idea of the men. And
the only reason that we know about this guy is probably because the author had
the poll to get it published. The author is Michael Palin of Monty Python.
And if you only know Palin from Python, you would think that's strange.
But if you know Palin from his subsequent pipe post python work, you
know that he's a man of many talents. A travelog, he does art
history, he's a humanist, he's a just a lovely fellow. So I
got to sit down for dinner for two hours with Michael Palin and have a
conversation and ask him about his book and joke about and the rest of it.
And it was one of the highlights of my life. I never thought
I had have a bucket list they would have dinner with a python, but
this was about as good as it got. And so that's what I did
in London, London, and interviewed at the home. Get this now.
It was arranged by a couple of friends of mine who know everybody because they
were in theater and musical theater and television and the rest of it, so
they know everybody of a certain era. And the house where we had the
dinner wasn't a restaurant, was the house of an actor who himself had a
brilliant career less so lately. Because it's interesting and every one of this,
Peter, you probably have your variant of it. I know that I do
his his IMDb listening start with uncredited and then minor role starring role starring role
as himself in a documentary, and and then and then and then voiceovers for
animated children's shows until they diminished to something two or three years later like that.
But one of the movies that this guy did was one of the movies
that I that I hated with an intensity of unbelievable magnitude in my youth because
they made a movie about my favorite composer, Gustav Mahler at the time.
And I go to see the movie and it's a Ken Russell movie, which
means that you have Gustav Mahler tortured and and and pale and dying as he
has visions of Nazi clad freulines are writhing on crosses. I mean, it's
just it was just awful because it was Ken Russell. But this guy was
Mauler, so I'm in here. He's not there at the time. They
were off, so I'm in the house of the guy who played Mauler in
the movie I hated so much in nineteen seventy three. That's the weird kind
of life that I slipped into when I go there. We were having dinner
later in Walberswick with a couple of friends and I met these people before.
One of them is he's named Miles Richardson, and he is the son of
Ian Richardson the Shakespearean Act The State of the Great State, British stage actor,
and he's doing My Fair Lady right now with Alan Cox, who was
the son of Brian Cox, succession, etc. Etc. And they just
casually mentioned that O'Brien was in town. He stopped at the anchor for dinner
and drinks last week. You just missed him. You tear your hair out.
But that's what life is in this small town. It's just extraordinary,
the people who passed through, the people you meet, the conversations that you
have. And I know it's not real in the sense that every time I
go there, I have a great time and I meet all my old friends
and we have brilliant conversations. But man, I would go to live there
forever in a heartbeat, and it won't happen. So I just have to
go back now. And then, So London, with its museums, I
learned a new one Walberswick, with its small town charms and the sea and
the culture of all that, and the wonderful people there. It was a
grand week and I was happy to come home because I love it here,
But man, do I love it there too. Next week. We'll see
you next week. Thank you for listening and join why don't you at ricochet
dot com. See you in the convents at Ricochet is at five point oh
yet no but soon four point zero, but soon to be five point zero
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