From The Vault: Why American Can't Win Wars Anymore

Speaker 0 00:00:00 Yes, welcome finally to Morals and Markets. Now, the topic tonight is, well, this was my title and I confess to wanting to be a little provocative here. So it's why America can't win wars anymore. And I feel a little guilty about it. Cause I think I really mean the us meaning the actual leaders of the country. I'm not sure the citizens of the country that themselves aren't willing to win wars, but even that's changing. So here's what I thought I would do. And by the way, I have two great special guests to join me. Uh, one of which I think knows way more about foreign policy in US history than I do. So that's another reason I wanted him on. So I'll, I'll introduce them briefly, but I just wanted to say that specifically when I say what wars am I talking about, really the last five since World War ii. Speaker 0 00:00:54 So I'm including in here, Korea, Vietnam, even the Gulf War of 1991, and then the last two, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan. Now, why do I say not winning? Um, in Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, the instigators remained in power afterwards. So, I mean, we did go in there and we did fight them, but we basically pushed them back over the original line. They passed without exterminating them, without removing them. Um, the last two, you could say the same thing. I mean, Afghanistan, the Taliban is not only in power as they were pre nine 11, but probably more powerful, more ubiquitous, certainly better armed, cuz we left them 83 billion worth of US war material. Speaker 0 00:01:45 Iraq was turned into another Iran in effect. Iraq is now more sector has been for the last five years, more theocratic, uh, than it was pre nine 11. Iran and Iraq were moral enemies for about eight years. During the Reagan years, they were at war, and we were backing, pretty much backing Saddam against Iran. Um, but that whole US involvement in Iraq has led to them being happy allies. Now. So I I, you know, I just think it's fair enough for me to say these, these are not winning, uh, engagements. Now, the background of this, of course, is we won the Cold War. So I don't wanna say no wars were won. You could, I mean, it was quite an accomplishment to, uh, you get rid of the Soviet Union and all its satellites, but that could have been seen as a kind of joint effort of Reagan naming the moral enemy for once and not engaging in appeasement or Dayton like Nixon and Ford had done, uh, combined with Gorbachev's willingness not to roll tanks into places when there was uprisings again. Speaker 0 00:02:53 So I give Reagan Ann, to a lesser extent, Corbit off credit for that. So I just wanted to get that on the record for standpoint of what does Soloman mean by not winning wars? But I'm, I'm open to debate on that, uh, tonight. And my quick answer to why we can't, the answer is why, you know, after weather, I think America has lost its pride. It's not a proud country anymore, number one. Number two, it's lost itself confidence. It's not a confident country anymore. And again, I think this is largely the leadership, both political and military. And this is decades of philosophy. This is decades of philosophy, even permeating the foreign policy establishment and the military academies. Uh, they don't see America as a moral beacon anymore. They don't see America as the face of freedom anymore. Um, the view is, you know, you've heard it all before. Speaker 0 00:03:48 America is racist. America is xenophobic. America is sexist. America is lamo, fa uh, phobic, imperialistic, colonialistic, all that kind of thing. It, it disarms in a way morally country's leaders. And therefore you see them losing to really inferior, uh, rivals. And so you get this oddity of the first half of the last century Democrat, presidents beating really formidable opponents like Germany and Japan. And then fast forward to recently you've got Republican government, presumably more hawkish, presumably more American losing to cave dwellers. Shocking, kinda shocking. Uh, so, um, I thought, uh, before I do these introductions, it might structure the discussion tonight. Uh, you don't have to go by this anyone, but, uh, something like what's behind foreign policy and then what's behind military strategy. And so, uh, and and I I kind of think of foreign policy as the mind and the military strategy as the body. Speaker 0 00:05:04 And so the mind body integration's important. And maybe the problem is, is a mind body split in America, but it also could be the strategy is terrible because the, uh, foreign policy is terrible. It can go that route as well. I think another underlying theme might be just the morality of egoism versus altruism. Egoism is the self-interest approach. And we could say, well, the equivalent in foreign policy is America's national self-interest should be primary. But you still have to define what that is. Something like America First, which is the Trump approach, kind of reflects that. It's the idea that America, not America exclusively, not America at the expense of others, not a Nietzche forum policy, but also not a sacrificial one either. If it's America first, that does sound more egoistic. And maybe that's why he was hated so much, because that's a more egoistic stance, uh, in the world. Speaker 0 00:06:00 But it reflects a right to self-defense, right? If you have a right to self-defense, you also have a right to national defense. Uh, but not national offense, not, I don't think imperialism or colonialism, that's the false choice, right? We might also talk about the false choice you see in the libertarian arguments, passivism and isolationism versus imperialism and colonialism. So it's easy for those two to be counter posed and easily dismissed. Um, nation building, uh, a whole bunch of other things. Uh, let me turn now though to introducing the guests and, uh, Ron Kazinski. I've known Rob, when did we first meet? My gosh, I think it might have been at the University of Chicago in the late Yeah. When I was the student eighties late. Correct. We're dating ourselves, something like that. And Ron TKI is, um, a, a multi-decade objective, an enormously prolific author. Speaker 0 00:07:05 Um, for many years, I think the dates I found, Rob, I forgot these date, 1996, well into the mid 2000 was editor publisher, owner of the Intellectual activist, which had been started by Peter Schwartz back in 1979. And then since then, the Tre Zinsky letter. So all you have to do is go www t zinsky letter.com, you see great stuff. Been a columnist for the Federalist for Bull Work for Discourse. He's got a new program called Symposium. You'll find that as well author a couple years ago, author of a great book called, so Who is John Galt? Anyway, it's a guide too. A Guide to Reading. Atlas Shrugged. It's fabulous. Um, uh, more recently an essay. This'll be controversial. The Case Four Nation building. Four Nation Building, not Against Me. So, welcome Rob. It's gonna be great to hear from you. Uh, by the way, if you want more Tre Zinsky, he was on, uh, I think September one. Speaker 0 00:08:10 You can go on to the Atlas site and see him being interviewed by, uh, Atlas's, C E o, Jennifer Grossman. And then I think you're also gonna be on September 30, Rob, on the medium called Clubhouse, which is all audio, but it's, uh, uh, so it's audio, but it's like you're on a conference call. It's really fabulous. So look on the site and look to sign up for that. Now, also, Dr. David Kelly, who founded the Atlas Society. So, so glad you could be here with David. And I had a conversation the other night, and even though this is somewhat of a grim story, we were laughing our heads off actually at certain absurd aspects of this <laugh>. So I don't wanna be totally dark tonight. Maybe there's some positive aspects to this, but, um, David, I can't wait to hear from you. Da, David wrote a letter to, uh, TAs members recently identifying three basic aspects of this whole issue and problem, pragmatism, democracy. Speaker 0 00:09:09 I think the third one was culture and philosophy. So I would love for you to, um, elaborate on that. David. Um, so welcome, um, David, actually, I I also found just lit literally recently, uh, had done in 2000, was it 2004, David, a, a two, two and a half hour lecture on, uh, was a history of just the ideas of Islam and the rise and fall of that culture. And it was a fairly advanced culture at some point, um, relative to Christianity. And then it switched. So that's a deeper philosoph dive into the whole thing. Um, but I thought I would just start with, um, David, if you want to just start with your themes and then we'll go to Rob and I'm gonna kind of back off for now, and I'd love to hear from you guys. So, so David, go ahead if that's okay. And then Rob. Speaker 1 00:10:05 Oh, well, thank you. Um, I consider myself kind of a junior partner in this discussion. You and Rob have been writing about this, uh, lately. And, um, I sent a letter, uh, as you mentioned to our donors, referencing some, some of the lessons, main lessons from nine 11. And, uh, but the main point of it was to sent links including to that, um, that lecture on Islam that I gave, uh, lectures, uh, at our summer seminar in 2004. Yeah. And we, that we published on, um, uh, on our site, the audio and the slideshow. Um, and I, it, I'm very proud of that. Um, you know, and, and it confirmed a sense that Islam, like medieval Christianity was a great civilization in many ways, despite the religion, despite the, the faith element. Um, there were rational phosphors, uh, of great achievement. And it's sad that unlike the West where Aquinas brought Aristotle back, and that led to, um, our, our Western enlightenment, um, um, in Islam, the, the, my Mistakes, uh, the witch doctor and, uh, Atilla combination, which I locate with a guy named Al Gaza, uh, was, was the dominant voice. Speaker 1 00:11:43 And so it, it just declined. And there was no, um, there was no recovering un until they began worrying about their, um, vast inferiority to the West. They were assu, they were used to a cultural history of being the dominant civilization, the most advanced civilization in the world. And suddenly, you know, um, around in 18 hundreds, uh, they were, um, they were vastly inferior. So anyway, there's, I, I don't want to go on too much. There's, there's a, a rich long history here for those who are interested, and thank you, Rob, for, uh, Richard, sorry for mentioning that, but I'm, I want to, uh, I just wanna say, you know, I, in terms of current foreign policy and why we're losing wars, I think it has a lot to do with pragmatism and the failure to understand principles. So let me leave it there. And, um, you guys, I have thought a lot more about this and I'm happy to come back to it. But, um, uh, you know, the, the, uh, let, let me just say I've, I've, like everyone I've followed, the complete disaster in Afghanistan was sorrow and outrage. And, um, and that's a very concrete thing, uh, which you guys have been thinking about a lot more than I have recently. So let me, let me, let me turn it back to you guys. Speaker 2 00:13:30 Rob, what are you thinking? Okay, well, uh, by the way, thanks for, uh, uh, David, for mentioning that about the history of the Islamic world, because I think there's a fascinating thing. There're gonna have to check out what you've, what you've, uh, written or, or said about that because yeah, I've, I've heard the Al Gaza described as the Emanuel count of the Islamic world. He wrote on the incoherence, uh, I think his big work is the, the incoherence of the philosophers. So he was the philosopher who came along in the Islamic tradition and basically said, forget about philosophy. Uh, they actually had a term for it, pfa, which is the Arab revised version of P philosophy. They had, you know, conquered all this Greek tar, Greek and Roman territory. They had encountered, uh, classical philosophy. They absorbed a bunch of it. They called it falsa. Speaker 2 00:14:16 And then Gali was the one who basically said, get rid of all that. And they turned against it and became, you know, relentlessly obscures and, uh, then just as the west was taking off. Uh, and that's part of the, sort of the inferiority complex driving this. Uh, now as for our own inferiority in the current situation, yeah, I think you're right. We have lost the ability to fight wars. But I would say there's one, something very specific about it. I, I, I go even below the level of pragmatism. It's that if it's a failure of thinking at all. So what I saw, I think is especially true of Afghanistan, is it's not that we failed because we had the wrong strategy. It's bec is we failed because we had no strategy that throughout, I mean, I've been following Afghanistan throughout, and we really had, you know, after the initial thing of, okay, let's, let's team up with the, you know, the, the north, the northern alliance and, and sort of friendly Afghan tribes. Speaker 2 00:15:11 Let's team up with them, give them air support and overthrow the Taliban and drive them back out of the cities and, and into the, into the mountains to hide. After that, we didn't really ever have a coherent long-term strategy in Afghanistan. We sort of switched back and forth between different things. Um, now when we talk about strategy, I wanna say, you know, we talk about an ary strategy, we talk about foreign policy. I think the concept we need to start with here is the biggest concept, which is sometimes called grand strategy. So grand strategy is sort of a grand integration of your idea of, uh, uh, am I, are you losing my audio? Speaker 0 00:15:52 We're still hearing the audio, but don't see your handsome face, but we're still hearing you. Speaker 2 00:15:58 Okay. See, you are losing the video, but you still hear me? That's fine. I, I think my internet connection is not the greatest. Oh, that I'm back. Okay. Okay. All right. So I'll just keep talking, <laugh>, I'll just keep talking even if my picture doesn't show up. Oh. So grant strategy is like the lar highest is the highest level integration of military strategy, of non-military foreign policy. And your general view of what it is you want to do, or what it is you want to accomplish as a country, uh, in, in shaping the rest of the world. So, to take some historical examples, you talked about, we won the Cold War, so we had two, well, really, there were three competing grand strategies throughout the Cold War. So very early on, and people don't remember this very well, because we think, oh, cold War, the strategy was containment, right? Speaker 2 00:16:44 So the, the grand strategy was, yeah, that the big contest of our era is a contest between, uh, the Soviet Union, between communism and capitalism, or communism in a free and the free world. They didn't always say capitalism, but they said the free world. Uh, so it was communism in the free world, and there was a grand struggle between these two entities then. And the center of communism was the Soviet Union. And our strategy is the, the Truman sort of version of the strategy is we're going to contain the Soviet Union. They're trying to expand out, they just took part of Eastern Europe. They want to take all the rest of Europe, they want to take places in Asia. We're going to contain them within those, those, those borders. And that's how we're gonna do it. We're gonna contain them and keep them from expanding until they somehow, uh, George Kennons had a famous memo. We laid this out until they somehow, with this vague way mellow out in the future. And it was all a little vague. Right? Now, what people don't remember is originally the containment as a grand strategy had a arrival, which was rollback. Speaker 0 00:17:46 Yeah. Speaker 2 00:17:47 And so, uh, I think it was, it may have been Nixon or one of the other people in the fifties who talked about the, the Cowardly College of Containment or something like that. And probably is Spiro Anu with that, with that sense of alliteration? Speaker 0 00:18:00 Oh, yeah. It sounds like Agni Sounds like Agna. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:18:02 <laugh> nattering day. Bobs of negativism. Speaker 0 00:18:05 Negativism, Speaker 2 00:18:06 Yeah. Yeah. Um, so the, um, but the, uh, so the idea with the, the, the competitor to containment was rollback the idea that, no, we should be supporting uprisings in Hungary. We should be supporting uprisings in Czechoslovakia. We should be trying to take back that territory that has, that the Soviets have taken and shrink them back even further and make them less powerful. Now, this is all based in the context, of course, of we'd just gotten outta a giant world war. We didn't want to have another one. And especially once we had nuclear weapons. So the goal wasn't to fight the Soviets in a conventional war. The goal was to push them ba either to push them back or keep them within their borders. And that was the big debate. Now, what happened is the rollback side sort of lost the debate. Containment became the stand, the, the consensus, uh, grand strategy. And then that was re uh, challenged by Dayton. And Dayton was we shouldn't be confrontational with the Soviets. We should have, detant literally means like friendly relations between enemies. And so we should be cooperating, we should be selling them grain, we should have cultural exchanges. We should be going to each other's, you know, to the Olympics, et cetera. Right. We should have all this outreach with them. And if we're just nicer to them, the bull, Speaker 0 00:19:20 The bol ballet, the ballet, and all the cultural exchanges and things, things. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Right, Speaker 2 00:19:26 Right, right. So, and what happened with Reagan is now I think Reagan gets a little over glamorized, because I remember at the time, I remember, uh, conservatives doing editorial cartoons portraying him as a hippie piece, Nick, uh, in the mid eighties <laugh>. Yeah. Uh, because he had, you know, gone and done, uh, nuclear weapons reductions, treaties Yeah. And things like that Yeah. With the, with the Soviet. But he had, had been part of that rollback, uh, uh, strategy. And he had, you know, very famously in the seventies when he was asked, what's your a how, what's your idea of our strategy towards the Cold War? He says, well, it's very simple. We win. They lose, Speaker 0 00:20:03 We win. They lose. He told, he told Dick Allen that, yeah, amazing. Yeah, yeah. The national security advice. Yeah. So Speaker 2 00:20:10 It, it was a bit more of a throwback to the rollback era. And I think I've also heard stories about when, when you had the solidarity protests in Poland that he, you know, said, and they started to have a crackdown. This Soviet said, a crackdown against solidarity, uh, uh, this dissonant move, you know, widespread, uh, large nationwide dissonant movement against the Soviets that he was like, he was beside of himself, though. Why are we in this position that we can't do more to help them? Uh, and never wanted, and part of the Soviet nuclear, sorry, the American nu the Reagan nu uh, uh, military buildup in the eighties was basically to say, look, we've allowed ourselves to not be strong enough that we can actually, you know, take them on. Uh, I remember, I I, I'm down in Central Virginia, so, um, I went off a friend of, wanted to go to Norfolk, Virginia, to the naval station there and do a tour. Speaker 2 00:21:00 And we got to tour a nuclear submarine. It was great. Uh, but I'm walking along the docks there where they have, you know, the nuclear submarines and the cargo ships and all these things. They have 'em all docked there. And you see these plaques at each one that size the ship. And then it describes when it was commissioned and when it first went, you know, when it, when it was basically when it was, uh, launched and I'm watch walking along and these giant ships one after another, and the commission dates are like 1982. And then, you know, launched in 1987. And it, they're, all the dates are in that range. And I realize I'm, I'm walking through the Reagan military buildup right now. Yeah. Because there are all these enormous multi-billion dollar ships that were all built in the eighties as part of this. And so it was the idea that, you know, but, but more than that, it was the idea that we're going to have, you know, there was a realization, we have this huge advantage in high technology that we can advance our technology way faster than the Soviets can. Speaker 2 00:21:55 And, you know, all the computer chips and all that, that was advancing very rapidly. And so, you know, the Star Wars and missile defense, all of that was based around the idea and the stealth bomber, uh, that was developed during that time. So I remember very careful, uh, very clearly, I think something had a real role in the collapse of, of the Soviet Union. That in the Gulf War in 91, there were a bunch of Soviet military observers who were on the ground in Iraq, because Iraq was one of their client states. So they, you know, the, the weapons and the equipment and the, uh, technology and the doctrines that the Soviets used, they had exported all of that to Iraq. So this is what you call a classic proxy war, right. Where, you know, you have, you, you have Iraq as a proxy for the Russians using their weapons, using their technology, using their, their tactics, and going against America. Speaker 2 00:22:45 And it was a test. And the report that came back from the Russian observers was, we are the, the Iraq was totally helpless. There was nothing they could do. The Americans are so far above us, beyond us that mil in conventional military terms that we can't even remotely challenge them. And that had a role, you know, along with the loss of Eastern Europe the year, a couple years before that had a role in this sense of, you know, we have to give up, uh, on, on this dream of Soviet domination. Uh, so that was to the idea of like, you know, a a quasi rollback strategy. Yeah. Or at least even an element of that rollback strategy combined with just simply that time was on our side. And any, you know, the, the reason why containment ultimately worked is that time was on our side, that over time we would become fabulously more wealthy and productive and high tech and go so far, you know, we, we'd be sci at the science fiction level beyond them with, you know, invisible airplanes basically, that they can't see coming. Speaker 2 00:23:45 Um, that, that they would not be, that we would, we would be so much more powerful than, than them that we would be able to exert pressure on them. Uh, I don't think that need to be even, you know, the most optimistic of us ever thought that they would just, you know, collapse and, and break apart the way they did. Uh, but it, the idea that you could become so much more advanced and so much stronger and more powerful that they would be, you know, put on the defensive. Uh, I think that was the, that was the predictable part of the strategy. So that gives you an idea of how a grand strategy works. Yeah. And the most important part that I wanna stress though Yeah. Is the ability to pursue a grand strategy over a long period of time. Yeah. Yeah. And that was part of the, you know, we, it was 40 years that we had the Cold War, uh, really started really in, in 1949, you know, the Berlin Airlift and all of that. Speaker 2 00:24:37 The, the formation of nato. Yeah. You know, 49 to 89 for 40 years. And a little tiny bit at the end. Uh, we had to pursue this continuous strategy. And that's why I think examples like World War II could be a little deceptive, especially when you're talking about places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially Afghanistan. It says World War II is this idea that okay, we will go in a, uh, a all out effort. Yeah. A total war effort for four years. Yeah. And if you think it's like, really it's like March, 1942. Cause we don't really, we take a couple months just getting our act together. Yeah. It's like March, 1942 to August, 1945. It's, you know, three years and maybe three and a half years of actual de you know, total effort towards the war. I think the American people have demonstrated they can sustain that, but if you go beyond four years, they start to lose interest. Speaker 2 00:25:28 They get impatient. I really noticed that like in Iraq, uh, when, you know, you had the insurgency rose up in Iraq by, basically by the end of 2005, the American people were done with the war on terror. Yeah. Yeah. And it became, cuz I, you know, I was writing about it at the time and it became, it became a sort of thing where there was a certain deadening of the audience. Like you were still talking about, well here's what we need to do and here's how Ku you who win. And people just weren't listening like they were done. They wanted to move on. And I think that the weakness we have right now is simply our inability to think about foreign policy and think about grand strategy and come up with these wide abstractions that will integrate all of our actions. The inability to think about that and maintain it over a period of time. Speaker 2 00:26:10 And I think the signal thing I would say about the, uh, that, that combines, I think Bush, George Bush, you can argue with the details of how he did it. He was capable of thinking of it and coming up with a strategy. Um, but by the time you got Obama, Obama, the thing that I think is continuous through Obama and Trump is that neither of them really wanted to focus on this. Neither of them wanted this to be important. Neither of them wanted it to be a central issue of their presidency. They didn't want to give it that time and attention. And so we could have just tugged along and muddled through, muddling through a little less each time. Because their strand brand strategy essentially was, we went out, we don't wanna do this anymore. Uh, now, uh, with Obama, I'll just finish up a little bit with Obama and Trump talking about both of them with Obama, he gave a speech very early on in his presidency in Cairo, I think, which is very ironic when you consider what happens in Egypt right after that. Speaker 2 00:27:07 Yeah. He gave a speech basically saying, talking about how no, no one country should be so dominant anymore. Yeah. And so this is basically, he was announcing his leading from behind policy. Yeah. Which is, you know, this is a guy who, who grew up with anti-Americanism, literally at his mother's knee. His mom was a Yeah. A leftist. All of her friends were radicals. Uh, and he grew up with this sort of idea. America's an evil imperialist power when we get involved in the world would just make things worse. Yeah. He grew up with that as just, you know, uh, uh, something, he, literally something that he imbibed from childhood. And that was his background and his approach. Now Obama, Obama turned out to be less radical than I feared he would be, cuz he was also a very pragmatic politician. So his policy ended up being sort of a compromise between blame America first, you know, leftism and, well, the Republicans will yell at me if I closed gun down Guantanamo or withdraw from Iraq, or, yeah, well he, well he did withdraw from Iraq, but if I withdraw Afghanistan, they'll yell at me. Speaker 2 00:28:07 So he would occasionally, you know, do make gestures. So there was like a mini surge that he did in Afghanistan in 2009, 2010. But he announced it and the same time he announced we're searching troops. And he says, but we're gonna withdraw them at this certain date in the future. So it was very, you know, he was, he was going down the middle of the road and everything. He's like, we're gonna, we're gonna fight really hard, but not for very long. So don't worry about it. And <laugh>, they sent the message to, to the Taliban of just outlast us. You know, we're, we're, we're, we're on our way out as soon as we possibly can. And, uh, so I think he was, you know, he recently, his strategy was, I don't want to have America leading. I don't want to have America doing these grand things on the world stage. Speaker 2 00:28:47 I'd really rather all that disappeared. Uh, and you could see that in his response. So for example, to the Arab Spring, which is basically, I'm, I'm here observing, tell me who wins. Uh, we're not gonna get a, we're not gonna do anything about it. Um, and then you get Trump, and Trump has a grand had a implicit grand strategy, I think. But I think his, his implicit form policy was basically mercantilist. Cuz he also gave a speech very early on, a big foreign policy speech he gave when he was a candidate. And basically it was that his foreign policy was the trade war. His foreign policy is China's taking advantage of us. We have trade. Uh, he, he, he came from a very anti-free trade background. Uh, uh, I published a piece by a young fellow named Stuart Hiyashi, who dug into this about how he went to Wharton, uh, school of Business and the Wharton School of Business, basically going back to its foundation, was anti-capitalist. Speaker 2 00:29:41 I was an anti-capitalist school of business, and specifically was based, was founded on anti-free trade ideas. So he, he had absorbed all this and he had this idea that, you know, Amer he had this very zero sum game view of the world. Yeah. Right. And if we're engaged in trade with other people, if they're not losing, then we must be losing. And, uh, you know, and if they're losing, then we're winning. And so, because, you know, we have trade going on with all these countries and they're taking away our jobs supposedly, therefore, that was the real focus of his, uh, foreign policy. You can see that really with his attitude towards China is he started a trade war and tried to make all these trade deals and, and couldn't push them on various concessions, but he wasn't really focused on things like crushing hon you know, the, the, the Chinese crushing, uh, the remaining liberty in Hong Kong or the, uh, and there's, there's some reports that he sort of gave a green light for them to, uh, put the uyghurs in concentration camps in Western China. Speaker 2 00:30:37 So the, the idea of of, of human rights or individual rights or freedom, political freedom being any part of his agenda just was not on the table. And it was really more of, I'm, I'll be against China, but only on the trade issue and not on anything else. And I'll be, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll put our relations with our NATO allies, make that dependent on the fact that while they need to be paying more money, and, uh, it, it was very mercantilist in its outlook in his foreign policy. And Yeah. Uh, so, you know, the question is that there was never a grand strategy that actually addressed for either of those two people that never addressed how is America going to deal with the threat from radical Islam and the threat from terrorism. And because of that, it all just went to the back burner and we would just sort of do one thing and another thing. And we never really had a sustained strategy in Afghanistan other than just let's muddle through where we are. Speaker 0 00:31:34 So I think a couple of things I'm hearing, Rob, what the, the grand strategy, whether it's, you know, a good strategy or not, the grandness part of it gets to Dr. Kelly's point about are we going by pragmatism or not? Are we going by range of the moment? You know, kind of, uh, enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of stuff, which has been a disastrous thing for the us But, but I, but I think what you're saying is, and I think it's true, the, the grand strategy part of it is a good part of it. It's better that we think that way. Maybe the, maybe the American system is vulnerable to the idea that presidents can, uh, turn every four years or so and the whole strategy changes. So we don't want an authoritarian system. I understand. But it does, it does. We do run the risk of changing the strategy as new parties come in. Speaker 0 00:32:23 Let, but let me ask you this, Rob, um, play around with this idea a little bit for perhaps the victory over the Soviet Union, uh, was made possible by a more vigorous Reagan policy. As you say. He, he was on record saying, uh, my strategy is we win, they lose none of this balance of power stuff. Uh, none of this, uh, let him off the hook with moral equivalent stuff. You know, his early years in office, he was explicit and got hell for it, for calling them the evil empire, for saying they will lie and cheat and do anything they can to get their way. I mean, Reagan was really going at it in a moral way. But let me ask you this, is it possible that the reason the US could succeed in the, in the Cold War where they could not in the, call it the Islamic War, is it was against godless communists. So a semi-religious US could more easily say we're we are fighting literally the infidels of the unbelievers with the unbelievers who were in Moscow. Now, if you go up against, however, the Middle East, you've got Christianity versus Islam, and you even have in Bush an an evangelical. I think he even described himself as a, a born again. So I remember right after, Speaker 2 00:33:44 Actually can I, can I, can I just hold on Richard, I wanna go into that because that one that I covered at the time, that was never true. He was never born again. He was never evangelical. He read like a Presbyterian to the end of his life. He's mainline Protestant. No, but the interesting, there's an interesting story on that because what happened is there was this sort of huckster, this evangelical huckster who said, no, I converted George Wilby bush. I met him and I, he had a born again experience with me, and the guy was promoting himself. And it, none of it was true. But here's the thing, Trump, this bush was running for office. He wanted to get the southern evangelical vote. So it was never true, but he did go his way to deny it. <laugh>. Yeah, Speaker 0 00:34:20 But still. Okay, I apologize. Okay, let's, okay, so set that aside. I won't, I won't classify him that way if that, if those are the fact. But still, I remember soon after nine 11, I mean, within days I saw, I re recall him being interviewed in the Oval, oval. And his line was something like, you know, they were asking, what are you gonna do? The line was something like, I'm a and he was saying this wistfully, I'm a Christian man, but I must respond and avenge this attack. So to me, the butt was very interesting cuz it's almost like he was saying, if I followed a truly Christian policy, new Testament type stuff, I would turn the other cheek and forgive. And so, um, so, so play with that a little bit, Rob. If you have Old Testament Judeo approach, I for an I, which we see in places like, you know, Netanyahu and Israel and the US approach is a bit more Christian, new Testament, turn the other cheek, not just turn the other cheek, especially turn the other cheek to an enemy. Is that a reason? Is there any plausibility to that causing us to have less, less success with a less militarily, uh, dangerous foe in the Middle East than we had with the Soviets? Speaker 2 00:35:41 Well, okay, so I think there is, there's something to it, but I don't, I think it's a much more complex than that because, you know, I actually was somewhat unique among objectives. I was somewhat controversial in defending some of the things George Abbu said. Yes. Specifically about how well specifically he, he went out of his way to say, this is not a religious war. Uhhuh <affirmative>. And I thought that was good because what we had, I wouldn't want it to be, is sort of the, an Ann Coulter famously got booted off of National Review because it, like a month after September 11th, she said, well, we should, we should go and we should kill all the leaders of Taliban and we should convert them to Christianity <laugh>. Yeah. The idea, I heard this, she wanted to have it be a religious war that we are going to force. Speaker 2 00:36:23 Our goal is to, our grand strategy is we're going to go in the Middle East and kill people until we can forcibly convert them to Christianity. Well, that's not, that's, that's a, an American theocratic, uh, uh, grand strategy. So I, I, I didn't want this idea. Now there was a whole little story there about how Bush came out and said some of these more conciliatory things about Islam. And then he met with Bernard Lewis, who was a very famous, uh, scholar of the Middle East, who basically said, you know, ixnay stopped doing that because the more you do that, the weaker you seem to them. And Bush actually changed his rhetoric a little, but he did. You know, and I, I appreciate the fact though that he didn't say, um, this is a, you know, this is a religious war. This is a war of Christianity versus Islam. Right. And Speaker 0 00:37:06 Rob, Rob, Speaker 2 00:37:06 Just lemme Speaker 0 00:37:07 Just lemme just interrupt briefly. So for the listener, for the listeners, especially the young ones who may not remember this, this was a, or this was Bush saying, you know, after nine 11, Islam is a good and peaceful religion. We're not against, uh, you know, the Iranian or Iraqi Afghanistan people we're against this, uh, how did he call it? He actually used the word hijack, which I always hated. The, the religion has been hijacked by a subset of a subset of an extreme version of a already extreme. Right. That's what Lewis was telling him. No, no. Back off from the end. He really shouldn't be saying that you're conceding not just too much, you're conceding something to the edit. Was that the context where Lewis came in and said, don't do that? Speaker 2 00:37:54 Yeah. Basically that was the context he was saying, you know, so don't go, don't go that far with talking about how, with talking about how much you love Islam. Yeah. Uh, that you also have to appear, you have to appear strong. Yeah. Uh, but the, uh, but you know, like I said, I appreciate the fact that it wasn't framed as a, purely as a religious war, because then, you know, that means, okay, it's Christianity versus Islam. What would that imply, would imply the Ann culture approach. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So he viewed it as, uh, uh, now the, the other aspect of this though is that you'd mentioned the eye for an eye tooth for tooth approach. Well, I think that has sort of been the Israeli approach, but I think we have to mention that that's been a, a long drawn out failure for the Israelis. Speaker 2 00:38:35 Uh, and I think that's actually, uh, you know, one of my complaints is that I think that's actually sort of what we ended up doing in Afghanistan by default. Because what we did is, uh, and by the way, if you wanna talk about Afghanistan, you know, that that approach of simply be as harsh as humanly possible, bomb as many people as possible. Well, the Soviets did that in Afghanistan. Yeah. And it didn't work for them. And I think you can look at, talk about Israel. Israel's approach has been, uh, you know, Hamas launches rockets against us and we bomb Hamas. Well wash, lather RINs and repeat. It just goes over and over again. And what you have is 20 years of Hamas launching rockets at your people every couple of weeks. I mean, it's literally at the point in Israel where by code all new buildings have to be built with all new residential buildings have to be built with like reinforced, uh, safe rooms. Yeah. Uh, especially, you know, con reinforced concrete safe rooms so that everyone in every apartment has a room you can retreat to that will be rocket proof. Speaker 0 00:39:33 So it's literally a Yes does rocket proof as as possible. It's, it's literally a bunker mentality, a bunker strategy, a defensive approach. Now what about the argument, Rob, that it really wasn't an Israeli failure. It was the US restraining Israel. I mean, that happen a lot where Israel could have gone in there and just rooted out these guys and the US restrained the US said, no, no, no, don't do that. So it, there there Speaker 2 00:39:58 Were incidents of that. Like, like there was, uh, I think one famous, famous one, I think it be Beirut and I think 1982 or something like that, where they, you know, they had p they had the P guys surrounded and we told 'em to back off and the artifact gets on a jet and goes to Tunisia. And, you know, he goes and lives another day. But I actually think that the, the worst thing with the thing about Israel though is that they did sort of what we did in Afghanistan just now. They did. I think my controversial thesis though, I think it's actually not that controversial starting to emerge as, uh, that people are realizing this is what we actually did, is we tried, we're trying to do with the Taliban what the Israelis did in 1993 with the P L O. So what happened is they decided, you know, we've done this 20 year long occupation. Speaker 2 00:40:43 Yeah. Roughly 20 years, you know, from 1967 war up to 19 87, 88, you know, we, we've done this 20 plus year long occupation in Israel of the Palestinian Territories. It's a quagmire. We're bogged down. We don't, we're tired of it. We don't wanna do this anymore. So they said, we're we're gonna do is we're going to, and this is, this is literally what they did. And it took me a while to figure out that, cuz it's so insane. They basically we're going to be the new sponsor for Yasser afa. So they took advantage of fact. Yeah. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The Soviet Union had been arafat's the PS sponsor. They provided security, they provided weapons, all that sort of thing. They, he has to have a sponsor now. He's in panic mode. So we will be his new sponsor, we'll set himself up, we'll set him up as the dictator basically, of this little strip of land, the Palestinian authority. Speaker 2 00:41:31 And because we're sponsoring him, he will be our friendly dictator. And it was literally a friendly dictator strategy that they had where we were gonna set up Yasser AFA of the, the p l o as our, as our guys, our our s o b, who will keep the Palestinians in line, Uhhuh <affirmative>. And that, that, that was the strategy they pursued. And of course, it, you know, it, it turned out exactly how you would expect it to turn out. Uh, I think I see a lot of evidence that's what we're doing in Afghanistan right now mm-hmm. <affirmative> that it's a, it started under Trump and was continued under, under, um, under Biden. That the idea was when we went out of Afghanistan, we're tired. We've been here 20 years, we don't wanna do this anymore. So what we're going to do is we're going to negotiate with the Taliban. Speaker 2 00:42:11 So the first thing we did, uh, is we started negotiating directly with the Taliban. We cut out the Afghan government. And that was a very big signal to say, you know, the af the, the Taliban we're recognizing as the new government of, uh, of Afghanistan. And we're basically abandoning the, the, the government that we were supporting before the Afghan, the, the, the African government we set up. And then we negotiated with them. We released their, their, their people. And uh, uh, like 5,000 prisoners. We, we've assisted that they'd be released. And we basically negotiated with them. I think the negotiations we were trying to make was, you know, we'll let you, we'll anoint you as the new leaders of Afghanistan. We'll, we'll let you take over, but do it slowly and uh, you know, allow us to basically, uh, make an orderly withdrawal. A as, as as as we do this. Speaker 2 00:43:03 And of course, this Taliban, you know, saw us coming a mile away and said, okay, great. We'll do everything you want. And then didn't do it slowly, they just took over and, and forced us into an embarrassing and disastrous withdrawal. Uh, but you saw, like in the final weeks, uh, of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, you saw things like, uh, uh, American General referring to, uh, at, at to, to Taliban leaders as our Afghan partners and as our security partners. Yeah, yeah. You know, that, that we were somehow, we were working with the Taliban. And I thought, you know, that, that blew my mind. Cause I thought, you know, if I could send this as a little telegram back to me, you know, in October of 2001 Yeah. He wouldn't believe it and tell me wouldn't believe Yeah. That 20 years from now, this is gonna happen. I I would not have believed it was, it could even be possible. Yeah. Or, Speaker 0 00:43:49 Or, or imagine, or imagine Rob 1944, uh, 45, 46, 47, this thing is going on and on. We're not winning. And then someone at some point says, why don't we just, uh, strike a deal with the Nazis? Well, why don't we just sit down and say this thing's interminable, you know, get Hitler and uh, Hitler in the room and, uh, strike a deal and try to, I mean, it's just a mind-boggling. Do even imagine that might've been tried. But let me, let me ask, uh, pivot back to David because Rob mentioned a guy who, you know, David Bernard Lewis and Bernard Lewis, if I recall correctly, you know, a British historian who began with a not, uh, specialty in the Ottoman Empire, but then, uh, in the nineties shifted to trying to understand Islam. And he, you could call him a hard liner, but he was the one who actually came up with the idea of clash of Civilizations, which was taken up later by Samuel Huntington. Speaker 0 00:44:47 And I know, David, I think you have a specific view of this. You've written on this where you've said, now, you know, it's not really the clash of civilizations, you know, between say, Islam and Christianity or the Arab world versus America. You, you think it goes much deeper. I think if I, if I read you right in, you know, that it's anti modernity. It's anti-modern. And so it's gonna encompass not just a hatred of the US but a hatred of the West and not just Western civilization. Anything that's close to being modern. You wanna elaborate that on, elaborate on that. And is it relevant to whether we win wars are anymore it, that, that take Speaker 1 00:45:28 Well, sure. I I'll try to be brief cuz I'm, uh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking and by profession, a philosopher from 30,000 feet above the level you guys are talking about. So, okay. Um, and I'm, I I really appreciate you're on the ground, uh, information. But yes, my view is that, um, there, ultimately there's a, a single cultural war going on in the West and in Islam and possibly in, in East Asia as well. And that is, um, and I define it in terms of there's the modernist view, which modernist approach, which is basically comes from the enlightenment of freedom, trade, capitalism, limited government. Yeah. And, um, but the underlying values of rationality, progress, prosperity. And it's opposed on the one hand by the pre-modern view, uh, uh, of, you know, which some conservatives embrace in part anyway, that we need more faith, we need more tradition. The kind of thing that I rand, um, really objected to in the conservative case for capitalism, that it, it's good because it's, I don't know, there's, it's traditional and because there's some foundation in the Bible. Yeah. And, uh, because, you know, there's even an altruist element. You succeed by serving others in, you know Yeah. Creating products. Speaker 0 00:47:10 Yeah. Speaker 1 00:47:10 And, but then there's the, um, post-modern, um, view, which is, uh, informed by an understanding of the enlightenment and hatred of it. And that emerged in the, what's called the counter revolution in the 19th century. And which my, our colleague Steven Hicks has written extensively about, uh, which said no individualism, uh, uh, rationality, secularism, that's all wrong. Um, they were still secular, but they were, um, hostile, uh, to the individualism, rationality, capitalism, and progress of the enlightenment. So that's what we're facing today. We face in the US with woke on the one side and some conservative faith-based, um, uh, attitudes on the other. And the same thing's happening in Islam. It's just that in Islam, the cultural predominance is with the pre-modern view. Um, and where, you know, the, the, but they, the idea that the Quran and Sharia will define not only our personal, you know, spiritual lives, but our politics. Speaker 1 00:48:28 Yeah. Um, but combined with, they have imported, and this is my view, and, and, and that of other, many other scholars, uh, many scholars who are specialists as I'm not, um, that they've imported the totalitarian ideas both from fascism and from communism, uh, as well as post-modern ideas so that they've imported those in because they see some connection between, um, their, uh, uh, the faith-based faith, the, the Koranic traditional Islamic, uh, totality, uh, totalitarianism, uh, it, it's in reinforced a kind of totalitarian view of Islamism governing religion. So anyway, it's, it's, it's a mishmash. But, um, and I think the, the one of my points is that I think that the uss just are leaders anyway, or foreign policy people have just not grasped us. Partly because they're, um, they are, uh, you know, like you you were saying Rob was saying Christianity versus Islam. Speaker 1 00:49:39 Okay. They're both religions. So we can't be too hard on Islam as faith. And, um, and also, you know, going back much further, I ran back in the fifties, it was a discussion where she's pointing out that in some discussion between Krushchev and Eisenhower, um, Krushchev said, were your systems based on greed? And Eisenhower had no answer and I ran was what the of our country. Yeah. So, um, I'll just leave you with one quip, uh, that I've mentioned. You, uh, Richard before that nine 11, this is from, uh, ed Crane, the founder, and, uh, longtime c o of the Cater Institute after nine 11. He said, you know, nine 11 was the ultimate faith-based initiative. Speaker 0 00:50:37 <laugh> Speaker 1 00:50:40 Devastating Speaker 0 00:50:41 For the younger ones in the, for the younger ones in the audience, faith-based initiatives. I think in the first year, <laugh> of the Bush administration was a phrase from the Bush administration. And there, Rob, there was the view that, uh, okay, the welfare state's not that effective at getting aid to the needy. So let's help faith-based groups, churches and other things, and finance them directly set up a little office in the White House. And yeah, so faith-based initiative was on the lips of almost everyone pre nine 11. So yeah, that goes by Ed Crane afterwards. Well, you know, Bush got his own taste of the faith-based initiative coming from, uh, Al-Qaeda. Yeah. That is, uh, fairly grim. So you, I wanted say also that the, um, and, and then Abby, um, if you wanna check out the chat room, I, I thought I would, we returned to questions for a moment and then we can come back to this. Speaker 0 00:51:34 But let's put out on the table also, cuz we haven't talked much about strategy in the field, but that a really dominant book from 1977 called Just War, uh, I think it was called Just Wars and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer, um, basically had the idea that you should not touch civilians, you should have restrictive rules of engagement that, uh, you should pull your punches, so to speak. So, so that has, I would argue infested, uh, the military academies foreign policy generally, but it has more to do with how you execute once you do decide to go to war. And I think that's been enormously damaging to, uh, United, well, the whole theory of all out war, complete war, total war, the, the kind of Curtis LeMay view from the forties where he said, no, you just bomb and str Japan and put an end to it. Speaker 0 00:52:31 Or going back to the Civil War, Sherman, uh, Lincoln had to fire, I don't know, four or five generals in a row. Cause they wouldn't execute the war in a, in an aggressive way. And until Sherman was hired and went down and burned Atlanta to the ground and tried to drive them into the Atlantic Ocean, I mean, it was, uh, not ended until then. So it sounds grim, it sounds harsh, but in, in many ways it's very much anti Walter. So we can talk about that. And, and the other thing is that on quotes that you, you have to remember this great quote from, uh, some of you may know it from Patton Patton said to the third army in 1944, famously. Now this is the complete opposite of altruism. Right. And altruism says, self-sacrifice is noble. And we often, we often hear that we love our soldiers because they, you know, paid the ultimate price. Speaker 0 00:53:25 They sacrificed it, you know, as if they really went there and they wanted to die. Now they did. They wanted to come home with liberty. But Patton's famous line was, uh, I'm reading here, no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. <laugh>. I mean, that is, so, it's kind of, again, kind of crude, but I mean, if you, if you even imagine someone like, uh, Millie saying that today, you just wouldn't believe it. But, uh, Abby are there, I can't see the chats, but you want to pick out some questions or comments that we might chew on? Speaker 3 00:54:05 Yeah. So there, um, I hope you guys can hear me. There have been like quite a few comments and, um, some questions. I'm kind of going back up to the top here. Okay. Um, so past all of my initial comments. Yeah. Um, I'll kind of go in order. The first person I see who commented here is Scott s did you have anything, I dunno if you had anything you wanted to say or any questions. Some of these were contemporary based on what we were saying in the moment, so I just wanna check with people. Okay. Um, you said Bob, is he here? Bob's 2010 defense? Is he still here? Scott? No, here. Speaker 0 00:54:43 Oh, was that the one about the defense of McCaskey McKowski? Speaker 3 00:54:48 Yeah. Um, Speaker 0 00:54:49 It's a little off topic, but Rob, you wanna take, you wanna take that one? Speaker 2 00:54:55 Oh, well this is, this is part of the, uh, our own little domestic wars that we have. The Speaker 0 00:54:59 Force <laugh>. Speaker 2 00:55:01 Right. Speaker 0 00:55:02 It's another, it's another civil, a civil war. A civil, hot, cold civil war or, yeah, Speaker 2 00:55:08 Yeah, yeah. And, and actually, well it relates to this in the sense that I think that it came out of my frustration that in writing about the war on terror, I felt like there was too much like a, a dogma from up above. But here's what you're supposed to say about the war on terror. And if you dissent from that, then you're the bad guy. Yeah. And it was, the dogma was being sent, sent by a philosopher who's commenting on that 30,000 foot level that David was talking about. Yeah. And um, you know, I I, and not sort of, you know, here I was immersed in covering the war on terror. Yeah. And um, you know, so part of that, by the way, is to bring it back to our topic here, that I actually do think that the just war theory argument, cuz that was sort of the thing that was coming down that you you, you have to sign up for this. Speaker 2 00:55:56 I thought, and I know, I think the source of that was John Lewis, the late John Lewis. I know it was a friend of yours and a friend of mine. Uh, but I disagreed with him on the, I thought he exaggerated the impact of that particular theory. Now my Okay. More technical equivalent is that the name just War Theory is actually a much broader category. There was this particular book by a guy named Walzer who had his own version of it. But just war theory in philosophy is sort of like ethics, right? It's, it's, it's a wide category and evolves all sorts of different views. Yeah. And I also think that it was inaccurately ascribed that the Bush administration was, uh, was basing its views on just war theory. And there was actually Walzer himself that said, no, uh, my, just, my version of just war theory is different from what the Bush administration is doing. Speaker 2 00:56:40 So he thought they were too aggressive and too, uh, too, uh, too, um, uh, um, to, you know, there were, there were his idea of using force preemptively against, uh, weapons of mass destruction, for example, was, uh, something that he disagreed with. And that was, that was a rationale that Bush was using. Um, but I will say this, that I, I, in, in terms of, so the McCaskey affair was a thing where there was another case where there was sort of the philosopher from 30,000 feet dictating views down to the person who's actually there in the trenches in this case, right? In John Mackey's case writing about political science. And so I was conveying against the general idea, which I think has been a problem in objectivism of having this top down view that philosophy dictates all the details. And, you know, so I think it's important to have this idea that yes, you could have bad philosophy up there, but you also have to understand how it is that it actually interacts with all the details of foreign policy, of the nature of the enemy, the nature of the mil, the, the, the na military tactics and the nature of military force. Speaker 2 00:57:46 The big thing that I sort of dissent from among the objectives crowd is the case I make for quote unquote nation building and also for counterinsurgency warfare. So I think one thing that everybody's wrestling with, and it really come out early on, is this weird paradox that, you know, the enemies we're fighting now are not anywhere near as tough as the Soviet Union, right? Or Communist China. I mean, we had this really fearsome giant armies, technologically advanced nuclear weapons. I mean, you know, the Soviets eventually fell behind, but they had engineers, they had, yeah. Uh, they had actually, they had a lot of skilled and talented engineers working for them. They got a lot of, uh, what was it, the in movie, the Right stuff. There's the, these guys debating about the US versus the Soviet Union is saying, look guys, our Germans are better than their Germans. Speaker 2 00:58:29 Yeah. Because we, we took all the German engine, we took all Vernon Vernon Bra Rocket guys and Von Bra and all those people. We divided them amongst ourselves, right? And, and so, um, you know, what made them really difficult enemies is that on the level of conventional warfare, they were actually formidable opponents. They had large armies. They had, you know, industrial capacity to build tanks and planes, and they had engineers to build technology and that they couldn't keep up with us. But it was a conventional, uh, war, uh, standoff. And so it seems like if we could beat these really powerful enemies, why can't we be beat, you know, these guys in Mud Huts, why can't we beat them? And I think the problem is that we're fighting unconventional war, and I think we have no choice but to fight unconventional war. So I think what happened after, really after the Gulf War was the, in 91 was the, was the dividing line where we demonstrated, without a doubt, we are, you know, way beyond anybody else. Speaker 2 00:59:27 Nobody can challenge us on conventional war. And then what always happens is, you know, you can decide what kind of war you wanna fight, but the enemy gets a vote. And our enemies looked at that and said, well, we better fight them using unconventional tactics. So, for example, Saddam Hussein was a great fan of the movie Blackhawk Down. Like it showed that we went into Somalia and we were fighting an insurgency. We were fighting a population. We, we were fighting an unconventional war, and we weren't prepared for it. And we, we lost. And he, he saw that as the pattern going forward. Now, it turned out to be a pattern going forward, but just not for him. Cuz he really couldn't employ that. And, but he, what happened in Iraq is that the, you know, the, the Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later Islamic state isis, uh, they took, and, and of course the Taliban, the ultimate practitioners of unconventional warfare. Speaker 2 01:00:16 And so one of the things that happened, this is a lot thing goes back a long time. We used counterinsurgency principles towards the end of the Vietnam War. We didn't use 'em at the beginning. We had this sole stupid war of attrition thing at the beginning. We just kill enough people and somehow the war will end. We started to use counterinsurgency techniques towards the end of Vietnam. But by then we were on our way out. We were, we were going out the door. Uh, we were had decided to abandon South Vietnam. So what happened is, and I talked to people in the military who said they went, they lived through this, that they were doing counterinsurgency training. And then one day, like 1975, uh, guy shows up and says, no, we're not, shut it all down. We're not doing this anymore. So we decided we're not, we're never gonna fight another encounter insurgency war, though. Speaker 2 01:01:00 We just get bogged down. They don't work. Vietnam was a disaster because Vietnam was such a terrible disaster. We're never gonna fight another encounter, counterinsurgency war. So let's stop learning how to do it. And one of the big lessons that some people drew from, from the war on terror is we came into Afghanistan having to fight an unconventional counterinsurgency war. And we had no training, no doctrine, no military preparation whatsoever. Now, the cycle I'm concerned about is what we do, this is a very American way to do things, is we decide we're never gonna fight a c counterinsurgency war. So we're not gonna train for it. We're gonna have no knowledge of how to do it. Then we're gonna get into a situation where the o counterinsurgency war is the only kind of war that, that we can fight. In this case, the Taliban don't have a conventional force that can be defeated. Speaker 2 01:01:47 And so we have to fight a counterinsurgency war. So we try to do it, but because we've never learned how to do it, we do it really badly and then we lose and we decide, well, therefore we should never fight this kind of war. And we stop train. Uh, it shuts out all the training and don't even attempt. Now in Afghanistan, we never actually tried a proper counters urgency strategy. We sort of temporized with what is Moore called? Counter-Terrorism. And this is actually, this is Biden's plan for what we're gonna do, uh, um, uh, after now that we've left is we're gonna do counter-terrorism and it's gonna be sort of over the horizon, counter-terrorism. So we're gonna strike from afar with cruise missiles and drones. And the problem with that, in Afghanistan, it was always just a matter of you identify some bad guy, you go in, you bomb him, and then you go and you leave. Speaker 2 01:02:33 And it doesn't really change anything on the ground, right? So what we needed was to actually establish some degree of authority for the Afghan government, a sustainable way for them to fight. And we achieved this sort of halfway, we actually, the Afghan National Army fought our war for us to a very large extent, especially in the last 10 years in Afghanistan. But we never really had a strategy to say, let's go in and do that fully and make that our strategy. Cuz that's a very efficient strategy, if you could do it. This is my case for nation building, is if you can build up an Afghan national force and build up an Afghan government that is functional, which we again, we didn't really do very good job of, then you can get somebody else to fight your war for you. You can have, you know, 10, 20, 50,000, uh, Afghan troops on the ground fighting the Taliban and, you know, a couple thousand Americans Special forces and advisors and CIA a guys, uh, to helping them and then giving them air support and that sort of thing. Speaker 2 01:03:32 That's a very efficient way to want to run a war. Um, that's I think what we, what could have been done in Afghanistan. And I think that's my case for why nation building is in our interests. But we never really tried to do it. And I think what we're gonna end up doing is the, the paradox here of why do we lose wars against guys in Mud Huts? And the answer is because you have to fight against guys in mud huts in a very different way. So you have to use counterinsurgency and unconventional war. You can't fight against them the way you fought against, you planned to fight against the Soviets, you know, when they invaded Western Europe. So because, Speaker 0 01:04:06 So Rob, I would say, Speaker 2 01:04:07 Adjust to the way we had to fight the war. Speaker 0 01:04:10 So I would say, when you say, well, we didn't really try. See, I would say it gets back to this issue of we're not confident enough to say we must, we, we should tell you how to restructure your politics. So even in the, the case which, which, uh, Dr. Kelly has, has made, well, nation building did seem to work post World War II in Japan and Germany. But he also has said, well, yes, because they had a more recent tradition of more civilized government, you know, only within the decade. And that's not true of Islam, that's not true of the Middle East. So we're, we're calling upon this possibility of nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and Egypt, but they don't have the pro-western, um, uh, base for us to do that. So we're not only unsure of our own Western values, they have no real source in it. Speaker 0 01:05:00 Now, Rob, back to the original controversy within Objectivism, just a reminder to people, if you wanna look this up, PEAC, right after the attack wrote a New York Times was published in the New York Times, I think as a full page ad, a very interesting essay. It's called End States That Sponsor Terrorism, that was the name of it. End interesting formulation, end states that sponsor terrorism. So his view was, there should not be a war on terror because terrorism tactic, terrorism is a tactic. It's like, uh, Kamikazi, you know, and if the US had gone into World War II saying, you know, the enemy is this tactic called kamikazi pilots, we're gonna, we're gonna have a war against Kamikazi <laugh>, people would've, people would've laughed and they would've said, wait a minute, that's not, no, it's, it's Japan <laugh>. It's Germany, it's Italy. And so that's been a distinction also. Speaker 0 01:05:55 And I think the Poff approach, the Ari approach at the time, if I recall, was, was Venge a vengeful kind of Old Testament approach. You attack us, we'll attack you and then leave. We're not, we're we'll, we'll punch you twice in the face if you punch us once, but we're not there to rehabilitate you afterwards. We're not there to, well turn you into a Jeffersonian democracy because it's futile Now, um, I I actually, um, I just so I'm on the record, I, I sympathize with that view more. I don't think the US should be 20 years in a country trying to turn them into a democracy. Not to mention the objective. His view is not that democracy is a primary, it's a technique. And if it happens to protect individual rights, fine. But we saw from the Arab Spring that they did hold elections, you know, and then they would vote for tyrants. I mean, it was just ridiculous. They'd say, even when you put in the structure, they'd just up vote, end up voting for, uh, imams and stuff like that. I think also, when we talk about five years, uh, five wars in a row, although you reminded me of Somalias, and maybe it's six in a row that we've lost. Speaker 2 01:07:01 Oh, there are a bunch of little tiny ones. There are a bunch of tiny ones. Speaker 0 01:07:03 It's kind of couple, yeah, a couple of tiny ones. Right. But, um, I'm also reminded that this might be interesting to people. There have been no formal declarations of war by the US since, if I recall this, right. So from Korea on through, they haven't not actually gone through the actual procedure required in the Constitution where Congress formally declares war. And the reason that's important is, um, it, one, it invites debate. Two, it makes it more definitive because you have to say who you're fighting. And three, it calls upon Speaker 2 01:07:36 No can I, can I, Speaker 0 01:07:36 It, it calls upon a definitive end, usually to the war, you know, it has to be renewed and things like that. It's debated. And so it, it holds out the possibility of having a definitive end of the thing as well. And the fact that that's just been thrown off, I, I think is institutionally, uh, interesting as well. Okay. Yeah. Quickly, Rob. Yeah, I, Speaker 2 01:07:55 I'm gonna disagree with you there because Okay. I think I actually, I used to make that argument and then I looked at it more closely. And if you look at what the Constitution requires, yeah. Basically it requires that Congress votes to authorize the use of military force. Well, Congress has voted repeatedly well, Speaker 0 01:08:10 With Speaker 2 01:08:11 Remf Yeah. Author. No, it is, it is literally, it's called an authorization for the use of military force. Yeah. Which is just a declaration of war by another name. Now they continue extending it and extending it and extending it because they're kicking the can down the road because they don't have a strategy. Right. But it is, it's basically an open-ended declaration of war. So I, I, I disagree with that argument. Cause I think we have complied with the, with the actual substance of the constitutional requirement. Congress has to vote to authorize military force. I e declare war. We just don't call it by the same name because that's the, you know, for the same reason that we have a department defense, a defense instead of a department of war. Speaker 0 01:08:50 Right. So, uh, Abby, any other chats, uh, that you wanna highlight? Yes. Speaker 3 01:08:55 Yeah, so I mean, I, I don't mean to be jumping over people, but I kind of on this topic, I think both Christopher and then John g, we have a few Johns here tonight, had some things to say about what you guys were just talking about. Um, if Christopher, if you wanna say something first, he was talking about, you know, as a veteran feeling that it is sort of futile, um, sort of along the lines of what David said in terms of, you know, the hearts and minds battle is not really there. You're not gonna convince these people to, you know, these nations to become, you know, democracy. So, I don't know, Christopher, if you wanna ask a question or elaborate on that yourself. Uh, don't, don't let me butcher your, if he's, if he's here, can he, I cannot see who's I scroll here. I think you're on mute. Oh, is he struggling with the audio? This is something we're going to have to get fixed. <laugh>. Yeah. Speaker 0 01:09:47 Okay. Speaker 3 01:09:47 Um, I can, I can read what Christopher has in the chat if you can't get, okay. Yeah. Um, so I'll I'll do that, Christopher, I'm sorry. We'll have to get, so those three little dots on the bottom, if you see that they should bring up your audio video settings. Okay. We'll have to get this, this glitch fixed. Um, but Christopher said, as a veteran, I have to say that nation building in the Middle East is futile. In a world where the un where the world where there is a un you can only build a nation in those Speaker 4 01:10:16 Nations. I've got, yeah, I've, I think I've got my audio now. Yeah, you Speaker 3 01:10:19 Got it. It's for you. Yeah, Speaker 4 01:10:20 We do. Yeah. Um, we hear you Chris. Yeah, I, you know, I'm a veteran. I didn't serve in Afghanistan. I had friends who did. I've served in other climbs. It doesn't, with the Islamic culture, they ha are extremely, um, patriarchal. And they only care about who is top dog. That's all they care about. That's why you act up with the dictators because they're the top dog. When we do the hearts and minds and all the pink and fluffy stuff, we are not acting as an alpha. We are acting as a beta. And they're not going to accept that <laugh>, the whole, our whole culture is anma to this. And therefore they don't, we can't, the web doctrine is completely pointless in those areas. It just doesn't work. You, you just can't go think, oh, we are gonna export democracy. It's never gonna happen. The only way we can deal with these countries, if we want to involve, get involved in those wars, you, we have to go do it in a way that the UN would never accept. Speaker 4 01:11:36 And that is, we go in, we basically say, our country, now, your your owls, you're gonna do, as we say, deal with it. Or we go in and we bash the people who attack us really hard and act like they would, we basically assault earth strategy. We basically destroy and get out. And that's the, because that's the only thing they'll ever respect. And it's not, it doesn't fit to our morals. It doesn't fit to what we want to do, which is why intervene in these areas. We just have to retaliate, retaliate hard, and then just leave them to it. And it's not, cuz otherwise we're not, we're never gonna build, um, a country like America in the Middle East. Hell, we couldn't even do it in Liberia, <laugh>, and actually in Liberia, the slaves that we put sent to, uh, we, that we freed and for from their own country, immediately enslaved the natives. Yeah. And just basically became slave slave masters themselves. So we couldn't even create Liberia as a, a, a model of America in Africa with people who'd actually grown up in, in America. We are not gonna create America in the Middle East. It's just not Christopher. Speaker 0 01:13:04 Uh, Christopher, you bring up a point also about the UN that reminds me this issue of getting permission, not only from the un but any member of the un, which are, many of them are anti-American. The whole idea of diluting your own sovereignty to me is a diluting of egoism. It's a diluting of the self-confidence, the self assertiveness of America first. Completely. So this is, it's not America first, it's America. If it gets enough votes. Speaker 4 01:13:30 Well, and it's, it's right. The cause it's just a continuation of the League of Nations. Yeah. Which was created to put us right under the, of the rest of the world. Yeah. Uh, by, so we, the best thing we we could do is just say, guess what? We're out. Bye. Speaker 0 01:13:50 The other thing is, okay, so Speaker 4 01:13:52 A Speaker 0 01:13:52 Couple, yeah. There is a, there is a plausibility to the forward strategy of freedom or this idea of, well, we need to make them democratic and free instead of just bomb the hell out of them. That there, there is something, David and I were talking about this the other night in ir in international relations literature for years, there's been something really kind of cool, actually identified as, and they actually use this phrase, if you look it up, called the capitalist piece. And the capitalist piece is just the empirical observation that free countries do not attack each other. Yeah. And the document come from the can documentation come Speaker 4 01:14:28 From cant, uh, from the cantan policy, but unfortunately they're never gonna be free. So you Speaker 0 01:14:35 Well, I know, I, Speaker 4 01:14:36 I work that with them. Speaker 0 01:14:37 My, my point is that that doc, that empiric is there, the, the, the mistake I think is people taking that obvious data and saying, good then the way to do this. And they actually think it's a longer term strategy. So they think they're avoiding the pragmatism of the day by day, you know, mo moment by moment by saying the fundamental long-term solution is to turn these regimes into, you know, Jeffersonian democracies. So I I I, I don't endorse that view because I think philosophically as you're saying, Christopher, as David has said, their philosophy just isn't going to be amenable to it. But I remember Bush used to say that you're insulting the Middle Eastern population by saying they have no interest in liberty. You know, their view, the bush view would be everyone wants Liberty Na naturally, innately, you know, inevitably. And it's just a matter of liberating them from the patriarchy. And I, I disagree with that, but I just wanted to mention this because it's not like it's a completely hair-brained idea. It does come from the underlying even empirics. I just think they drew, they draw the wrong conclusion from those, uh, empirics You Speaker 4 01:15:49 Did. Yeah. I, I think there was a thing where it worked in Germany, it worked in Japan, so it's gonna work everywhere. Yeah. And it's, it's accepting that there are limits to a theory to where where it'll actually work. Speaker 0 01:16:02 Yeah. Rob, Rob, do you want, did you wanna weigh in on that? I Speaker 2 01:16:05 Would probably disagree. Well, so, so yeah, I do disagree. Uh, so I'm, I'm probably the last remaining defender of the forward strategy of freedom. Right? Now, one of the things I wanna say is that, is that I, if you, I I took a very deep look at, there's a, the national security strategy of the United States as a document that's put out occasionally Yeah. As an official document summarizing basically the America's grand strategy and the one done in 2006 by the Bush administration. Yeah. I thought was very interesting and, and very worthwhile because one of the things I wanna notice about that is that the fourth strategy of freedom was not the military strategy, it was the wider diplomatic strategy. Yes. It was the idea that we should encourage and support, we should encourage and support free nations in the spread of liberty. Right now, he had, they had these things, they tried, this was after they had tried to get a, in, in Gaza, uh, on, you know, say, oh, forget the vote that they'd have a better system. Speaker 2 01:16:59 And they, they voted for Hamas and there was this revision of like, okay, so they had, they were trying to get this in-flight revision of saying, well, it's not democracy, it's liberal democracy and it's democracy with these certain characters, you know, and it was, it was a, it was a positive revision because they, they realized that this concept of democracy is inadequate to describe what we're trying to do. So, you know, the old version of this is McDonald's and Dicks, right. That no coup countries didn have a McDonald's have ever gone to war with each other. Right. I'm not sure if that's still true. It's Speaker 0 01:17:27 The same idea. Yeah. Speaker 2 01:17:29 Yeah. At the time that was coined McDonald's, having, McDonald's was sort of a proxy for being a liberal, you know, a western liberal democracy with a capitalist economy, roughly generally capital capitalist economy. So I don't, not sure it's as much of a, you know, McDonald's is spread out a lot more. I'm not sure if it's as good a proxy now, but here's the thing I wanna say. You, I don't think you can say these people are never capable of having, now Jeffersonian democracy is the sort of term people throw around when they win up a great, when, when they wanna make it sound like a, a crazy idea because they mean, oh, they, they, you know, people are Iraq are gonna be just like Thomas Jefferson. Well, maybe they're not gonna be just like Thomas Jefferson, but you could have something that's better than the dictatorships that have have, you know, better than a literally, I mean, Sadam Hus dictatorship, the bath party was cobbled together out of Leninist and, and, and, uh, fascist ideology. Speaker 2 01:18:20 You could have something better than that. Right. And, and wrong Afghanistan's a a much more primitive place. You have to have very modest ambitions. But the point of that is, I don't think you can say dismissively, this group of people out there will never, ever be capable of this. It's a matter of time and a matter of cultural influence. Like, you know, you probably would've said a hundred years ago that it, it used to be a common trope that the east, the far east was hopelessly, you know, that, that, that, uh, tyranny and despotism has been their system for all along. They're never gonna be capable of, of, of having a, a quote unquote liberal democracy or a Republican form of government. Well, there are, you know, many shining examples of that now. Right. So there's South Korea and Taiwan, uh, yeah. Hong Kong was the one that really amazed me that just simply living under British rule, even though they didn't get to vote, simply living under British rule. And the rule of wa has made them very cantankerous defenders of liberty. And there are some countries that with more or less success have large Muslim populations and a more, more liberal form of government. India has, I think, the largest number of Muslims living under a representative government, uh, is in India or Malaysia, which has its own problems. Of course, it's not a great democracy. But Rob, Speaker 0 01:19:36 But Rob, I re I recall even in cases where the US said, okay, you really have to have a constitution to Afghanistan, Iraq or whatever, even then, okay, that was like a better intention than just wild unlimited democracy. But the minute they cobbled together the Constitution and started putting Sharia in the Constitution, the US had nothing to say. The US didn't say no, no, it shouldn't Speaker 2 01:20:02 Be Sharia. So what, but why Speaker 0 01:20:04 They allowed the US allowed Sharia type constitutions to be put in place problem, which amounts to violating rights. So, right. So it's the same Speaker 2 01:20:12 Thing. Well, but no, but the idea is we're not trying to create a perfect democracy. Now, I want to go back to that the, the national security strategy under Bush democracy promotion was not actually the goal of the use of military force. Use of military force was described as being two for two reasons. Two things, two, uh, uh, to go to, to prevent state sponsorship of terrorism. So, you know, Leonard Poff got his wish. The idea of state sponsorship of terrorism is, you know, we're not going to allow states to sponsor terrorism. That was actually adopted as official policy now. But ultimately, I think with, with regard to Pakistan was the biggest problem with Afghanistan, that they said, okay, fine, we're not gonna support the the Taliban anymore. And then we're, well, actually what's gonna happen? And we're gonna wait till you get tired and then we're gonna start doing it. But it's not, no, but Speaker 0 01:20:58 It's a, it's a fact that as we stand here today, I, you can't name a single case where we ended a state that sponsored terrorism. They all still exist. Iraq. Speaker 2 01:21:09 Iraq. Iraq. Speaker 0 01:21:10 Does Iraq sponsor Iraq? Speaker 2 01:21:12 Iraq is, Iraq Speaker 0 01:21:13 Is an ally of Iran Speaker 2 01:21:14 Now. No, no. We, we ended the one regime. No, well, no, that's exactly what I'm getting at though, is that we ended the one regime that was a terror sponsor. Sam Hue. Yeah. Speaker 0 01:21:21 Cause we just replaced it. Speaker 2 01:21:23 But, but here's what I wanna say. Me get into this cuz this is important cuz this is an objective, all Speaker 0 01:21:28 Terrorism sponsors. Speaker 2 01:21:28 Now this is an, hold on. There's an objective trope that's been used for a long time, which is we should just go in with maximum force. We should hit them, we should destroy them. And then we, then we pull out, yeah, that was the Rumsfeld Casey strategy for Iraq. That was, we come in with overwhelming military force, we overthrow the retop of the regime and then we get out as soon as possible. Now what we found out is what happens when you get out as soon as possible, somebody else comes in, right? And you have to have a plan for what kind of regime you're going to impose and support, uh, afterwards. And that I think is the problem with this strategy and this complaint about how well that are gonna be democracies. So should we try, so Speaker 0 01:22:06 I don't agree Speaker 2 01:22:07 We should care what kind of regime comes when we overthrow one regime. We should care what kind of regime comes afterwards. Speaker 0 01:22:13 Okay. I don't, I don't agree on, and Speaker 2 01:22:15 We should, we should engage in an effort. We should engage in an effort to make sure it's a better regime than the alternatives. And the al you know, in Iraq, the worst alternative was it becomes, you know, uh, uh, ISIS or Al-Qaeda in Iraq takes over. We got the second worst alternative, although we mostly got that under Obama, which is, it becomes as sort of a semi puppet of Iran, it becomes heavily Iranian influence. Speaker 0 01:22:37 So I, I disagree on your interpretation of what we did in Iraq, but suppose your view is true. All you're all we're really saying is no matter what strategy the US used, you have to admit a pragmatist even would have to admit that the practical result has been an utter failure. Because there are just as many states, and I would say more and more formidable states in that region that sponsor terrorism than 20 years ago. And that it to, I mean to the extent that's true, that is shocking. A shockingly bad result. Uh, I'm not saying. Yeah. Okay. I'll just leave it at that Abby, and Speaker 2 01:23:14 Well, but, but I think I, I think that's the result of eight of eight year, well seven, six or seven years of muddled implementation of what I think was a generally sound strategy, but, but badly a Mudd that it's implementation by Bush. Okay. And then 12 years of comp of almost total neglect. Speaker 0 01:23:30 Yeah. Okay. Abby, any others? Oh, there's probably many. Speaker 3 01:23:36 Yeah, there's a lot. I know David has something to say. Okay. There's actually say, um, I don't know David, I wanted to give John a chance cuz he has quite a few questions in here as well. Speaker 0 01:23:45 Okay, good. Speaker 3 01:23:46 Did let John, do you wanna have your point first David, on topic here? Speaker 1 01:23:51 No, I'll pass. Thank you. Um, let's get to our questions. Speaker 3 01:23:54 Yeah. So John, if you're still here, um, I think he had a lot of really good questions. I was, um, intrigued about his, oh, he, I can't chat. He's in the library. Okay. <laugh>. Well, <laugh>. Um, well that, let's see. Um, what else do we got? Um, David, uh, jm do you have you have a lot of comments and questions in here. Is there one in particular you'd like to ask Speaker 1 01:24:23 Here? Uh, this, that's for, uh, for whom? Abby David Speaker 3 01:24:28 JM <laugh>. There's two Davids. Speaker 1 01:24:30 Oh, David Jam. Yes. I see. Yep. Speaker 5 01:24:35 It won't, Speaker 3 01:24:36 Oh, I can hear you. Can you hear? Mm-hmm. Speaker 5 01:24:39 <affirmative>. Okay. So, Speaker 5 01:24:42 So, you know, Eisenhower talked about the, um, industrial military complex many, many years ago. And what if all the wars are really just distractions? I mean, when you think about war, it, it's wars like a stable economy. If you had a stable economy, how many, how many talking heads would be outta work if you had peace? How many, uh, arms dealers and tank builders and ship builders and all those people would be outta work? I mean, what if all this is just simply, you know, I always have this vision of two people playing chess and you know, one side can be the left and one side can be the right, and you look at the ponds and they can have labels like B l m and all this other stuff. But then I have this image of two people in the shadows, behind the two chess players that are really the people that are calling the shots. Speaker 5 01:25:39 You know, when you talk about Obama or even Biden today, does anybody really believe that they're calling the shots? I mean, it's different from, uh, a lot of the people that we had that, like, even even Reagan, you know, Tripp tried to make himself like he was just so big actor, but he had a long history of anti-communist statements and, and, and things even Trump, when Trump, you can go back to the 1980 when he was talking about the, the trade issues and things like that to suddenly have, uh, Obama who, what ran, um, uncontested for the house and then ran uncontested in the Senate. And does somebody really believe that he was calling the shots for eight years? Um, Speaker 0 01:26:26 So, so David, let me ask you a question. Sure. You're su you're suggesting they're all puppets, but what is your theory of who's running them? I mean, is this the military industrial complex argument? You're saying defense contractors are just want war, just wanna sell material. They, the, the defense contractors maybe don't even mind that 83 billion worth of stuff was left in Afghanistan. Cuz that makes us more, no more of them more to sell in the future. Is that your view that the defense contractors are doing this? Speaker 5 01:26:56 I don't think, I think it's people even above that. I think, um, I think above that there are larger people that, that are living very, very well. And, uh, they, they really, they really just move. They, they just make their money moving stuff. What bother. Therefore, Richard, the thing that bothers me is that I don't even see us even questioning it. Yeah. Anybody looking, you know who it's, it's like the Wizard of Oz. Okay. Who is the main, who are the people behind the curtain? I I I I'm just fear, I'm just, it just bothers me that people don't even raise the question. That people just assume that the people playing the chess game are the people making the decisions. Speaker 0 01:27:42 Well, I think Rob was right when Rob said earlier, I think this is true, the American people generally, although I think it's a shrinking share, they're tired of these interminable wars. I think they're pissed off at the idea that they spent 83 billion on stuff that was not only left in Afghanistan, but is being p picked over by China, Russia, Pakistan. I mean, it's just outrageous. But the, I think you're right, David, that the, it's not like the generals at the Pentagon are all that bothered about it, Speaker 5 01:28:12 Richard. I mean, Speaker 2 01:28:14 I interject something which is, which is wait, wait. I'm way more of a pessimist. I'm way more of a pessimist than you are because I actually believe in the horrible, frightful, terrifying possibility that Joe Biden really is in charge and he really is causing the calling the shots. I mean, there's, he almost something comfortable with the idea, comforting with the idea that George Soros is, is behind the scenes <laugh>, you know, tried dip. But I also say that this whole military industrial complex theory does not co here with the facts because we're actually, now, as much as we talking about these, frustrated about losing these wars in Afghanistan and, and, and having a bad outcome in Iraq and all that, we didn't really lose the war in Iraq. We lost the piece, I would say. But, um, what happened is the, these are actually very small wars by historical standards that the, um, uh, there's actually, there's like a war recession that's happened that after World War ii, the number of major wars and casualties war keeps going down. Speaker 2 01:29:09 And then at the end of the Cold War goes down even further. And we're way, way down here in a tiny fraction of what you, of, of the military effort and mil and how would you explain Europe where they're hardly spending anything on their militaries? I mean, the military spending it is, or, um, when, when, uh, Eisenhower talked about the military and industrial complex, military spending goes about 80% of the national budget. Right now, it's like five to 10%. It's a, it's a tiny, it's a fraction of the federal budget. Um, the, you know, we're not, we, we have, we, I think we just passed the point where we're, we're about to pass the point where we have more debt compared to G D P than we did at the end of World War ii. But we don't have that debt because of the wars we're fighting. Speaker 2 01:29:48 We had that debt because we have a massive welfare state. And because we're, you know, giving out, um, uh, uh, pandemic handouts and, and trillion dollar spending bills. So the idea of that as the driver of the thing, and I also disagree with Richard on one thing, which is I don't think, I think, uh, American people getting tired with, uh, not wanting to pay attention to the wars is not a good thing. I think we should have a sustained effort. Um, and I don't think that the reason we withdrew from Afghanistan was because there was an uprising among the American people who were tired of all these sacrifices they're making for the war because the American people aren't making sacrifices for this war. Very few of them are serving in, in, you know, we volunteer military, very few people are serving the cost that it is very tiny compared to all the money we're spending and everything else. Speaker 2 01:30:33 I think people got tired epistemologically. That was the, and that's the problem I see is that people got tired, that it wasn't that they wanted to, they got tired materially or economically or militarily. It's that they just didn't want to think about it anymore. And I also think on the, at least for the Biden approach, I think there was a certain vindictiveness of, you know, we ought to lose this war, so therefore we're gonna make it happen that we lose this war. Uh, so, you know, it was the elites who sort of pushed us in there. There was not a ground swell. Joe Biden could have kept kings going at the cur at the, at the, uh, for kicked the can down a road for another four years with the status quo in, in Afghanistan. And probably nobody, hardly anybody except us political obsessives would've actually noticed that it was happening. Speaker 2 01:31:17 So I don't think as the American people were, were angry and, and upset, I think as the American people were disengaged. And then there was a faction of the elites that said, we, we want, we just want to get out and we would just un end this because we think it's a bad idea and that America should withdraw. Um, and uh, so I I I think though that the, the premise that somehow war is a driver of the economy. If, if there were the secret people behind want war to happen, they're doing a bad job of it. Because we have way less war now than we did 80 years ago. Speaker 5 01:31:50 Yeah. But I don't, Robert, I don't think they care about the economy. I just think they care about their economy. It's two different things. Speaker 2 01:31:57 Well, but no, but their economy is way smaller than it used to be. So, no, the idea of of of defense and, and military spending as a, as a driver of everything, I think is a is is literally, it fails a basic coherence with the facts of the fact that we, you mean we're spending a lot on middle military. We're not spending a lot compared to what we're spending and everything else. I would much more be inclined to believe in a welfare state industrial complex. Speaker 0 01:32:21 The, um, <laugh>, some ev some evidence in favor of David's point is, I saw a chart the other day. Us spending on NATO is something like 70% of all spending on nato and the US spending is something like 800 billion. And the second biggest is Britain at 80. Now, to me, to me, what to me, I, I understand, Rob, that US defense spending is shrinking as a, as a percent of total spending. But that's only because the welfare state is burgeoning beyond all control. But we might ask why and where in the US constitution does it say that the US government should providing national defense to non-Americans? I think the animus toward Trump for saying, to hell with that, I'm not really against nato, although I think he should have been. The Cold War is over. And the point of NATO was to oppose the Warsaw Act. So again, all these neocons who say the US should stay involved in nato, they're basically saying the US should have an empire that, that the US should provide national security for, you know, dozens of other countries. Why we're Speaker 2 01:33:29 Not an, we're not, okay, first of all, we're not an empire. Why Speaker 0 01:33:31 Should American, why should American taxpayers be providing national defense for Japan, Germany, Britain? I mean, I think that's outrageous. That should be zero in my view. I know you disagree, but Speaker 2 01:33:43 I I totally disagree. I, I think isn't that important? We have to start Speaker 0 01:33:47 Constitutional Speaker 2 01:33:47 The problem with America first, the problem with America first and the America. Yeah. The, the so-called America first is, I think it's actually America last, because America first basically is an isolation. Is what a quote unquote, I isolationist policy. It's a policy of saying we should be un disengaged with the rest of the world. And what it means is that we are then the last to have an influence on, Speaker 0 01:34:06 No, it's just saying no, Speaker 2 01:34:07 The purpose of intro right Now, hold on, the purpose of Rato right now. So I remember Peter Schwartz made these arguments back in the eighties. In the eighties, during the middle of the Cold War. He said, you know, we should ask NATO to, to line up more with us, or we should stop supporting them. Well, the obvious problem with that is if you stop supporting nato, you're basically giving Western Europe to the Soviets. And I know it's maddening sometimes that we have allies That's not true, man, who are not putting the same effort in that we are. Uh, yeah. But sometimes even supporting an inadequate, weak, vacillating ally is better than giving up to the enemy. And right now I see the purpose of NATO as being to keep the Russian, keep Russian authoritarianism out. And that's a serious problem that the Russian has, Russia has developed a new model of dictatorship under Putin, and they are actively working to export that first into Eastern Europe, even here. And we need to, Speaker 0 01:34:59 Even if, even if that were true, we have to tell Europe that you need to stand four square with yourselves and oppose the Russians. It's none of our business. I, in my view, none of our business to say, we'll provide, we'll provide, the American taxpayer will pay for the defense of non-Americans. To me, that's anti-American. Fundamentally in the Speaker 2 01:35:22 American, here's, I wanna get, I wanna get back to the, I wanna get back to the issue of grand strategy. Cuz grand strategy says you set and decide what are your strategic goals. And if your strategic goals require sometimes supporting an enemy, supporting an ally who's, who's whiny, and, and you know, some, some, you know, the French, you know, <laugh> an enemy who's whiny and recalcitrant and all that. Sometimes you still have to do that because you're focused on what are my foreign policy goals. And the fact that it's galling or that you don't like it is irrelevant. What's irrelevant is, am I achieving my strategic goals or not? And the com the, the complaint I have right now is I don't think we have a strategic goal. If you were to say, what is America's grand strategy? There is none. It's all purely reactive and it's purely piecemeal. Speaker 2 01:36:08 And well, we kind of wanna do something over here in mc and, and we are not really committed to anything anywhere. Even, you know, Biden says he's gonna pivot to opposing China. I don't see that he has a great, you know, strategy he's building up for opposing China. So I think we have no, it's, it's, it's the failure. It's not that we have a wrong policy, it's that we literally have no policy. And I think we need to go back to the beginning and say, what is, what are our, our, our broad strategic objectives in the world? What is, what kind of world does America want to be in? What kind of global environment would be the best environment for us? And then ask, you know, with the considerable tools we have military, diplomatic, economic, how do we use all those to try to achieve that? Speaker 2 01:36:50 And I, you know, in some cases it's gonna mean, you know, we don't want Russia to overrun the Baltic states. So we, we see what we could do to, to deter them from doing that. So if there's gonna be all sorts of things that, that we're gonna have to do that, some of which we're not gonna like, and we're gonna think the European, and we're always gonna think the Europeans are whiny because they are. But you have to decide what your, what your strategic goals are, and then do as much as you can to achieve those with the rep, with the considerable resources that we have. Speaker 0 01:37:17 All right. Good. So we are, Abby, I'm noticing we are a bit beyond the 90 minute mark and we usually, yeah, we're, we usually try, we usually try to end at 90 minutes, but if you have some juicy one in in front of you, you wanna pick? Well, I You wanna pick one? You wanna pick one more or, yeah, Speaker 3 01:37:34 I know that it's, it's late. I'm on the east coast for you, Richard, so I wanna be mindful of your time. I don't where I wrote Speaker 0 01:37:39 That's okay. That's okay. Speaker 3 01:37:40 But I, there's one topic that's come up a couple times. Yeah. Um, Graham, John, they keep bringing things back to, um, China in a sense. Like yeah. What do we, you know, the year I'm so like, you know, John just said, you know, we've gotta be, we've gotta get Europe to stand up to China. What, you know, um, uh, Graham had mentioned the security costs of, you know, we talked about trade wars, we've talked about, you know, Russia as like the old enemies. Yeah. And if China is the new enemy. Yeah. Um, to Robert's point then, are there, are there security goals in mind with supporting these allies as a way to be affront against China? Um, I don't know if that's rounding up all of these China questions very well, but if anyone wants to touch on China, Speaker 0 01:38:22 I think that's a good, that, that that's a good way to end. So I'll ask Rob to weigh in on this, but just to, uh, just a fyi, Millie who's very controversial now because, uh, the joint chiefs of staff was found to have in back, back, uh, channels have called his counterpart in China before, uh, Trump left office to forewarn them that the US would not attack them or something like that. So that, that could be, if that's true, it could be like a treasonous act. But you dig it a little deeper into Millie and a couple years ago he said something like, China is not our enemy, it's our competitor. It's a fierce competitor. It's developing a military capacity. But that's a debate within the foreign policy and military establishment that might interest people. Is it a mortal enemy of the Soviet's kind, or is it just eclipsing us like we eclipsed Britain a hundred years ago? I'm not saying the US was as totalitarian as China, but China kind of doesn't allow political liberty, but allows enormous economic liberty. So, but Rob, you wanna weigh in on that? Uh, us versus China. Are we doing the right thing on China? Speaker 2 01:39:33 I just wanna, I wanna throw a little cold water on the mille thing cuz you said if it's true and it's Woodward and Woodward has a tendency cost even more. So he has a tendency to embellish or to make Yeah. To make things seem more dramatic than they really are. Yeah. So I've heard some pushback just saying, look, there were, you know, a dozen people listening for the foreign policy establishment list, national security establishment listening in on the call that Millie had with this Chinese counterpart. It's a normal routine thing. It wasn't, uh, so just don't wait on that story because it may not be what it, what it seems to be. I think there's a, a certain political, uh, uh, effort to try to say, oh, Billy's the fall guy. Now we can make him the, you know, the bad guy. Um, and you know, he may not be a great guy, but he's, this may not be true anyway, but what I wanna say about China is what the problem we have with China is that we had a strategy towards China that we adopted for better or worse in the nineties, and it worked fairly well for a while, which is encourage their economic liberalization in the hope that that will lead to more as it had done, you know, in other, in Taiwan, you know, with Chinese people in Taiwan as it had done in South Korea. Speaker 2 01:40:43 And you could say, well, and, and, and the i the hope was that we just saw the Soviet Union collapse of its own accord. Marxism is, is, is discredited. And so maybe China will eventually, you know, uh, reform. And what happened is that worked really well up to about 2008. And that was when there was this reversal. And then the financial crisis came in the US it encouraged these, the Chinese to think, oh great, this shows the American model's not working. And they, what the big thing happened is you had a giant wave of freedom that spread over the world after the collapse of the, of the Berlin wall after the fall of communism. And what always happens after you have this wave of freedom spreading out is that dictatorship finds a way to mutate and find new forms and new ideologies and new excuses and new versions of it. Speaker 2 01:41:33 I just said, I did a, an interesting conversation, uh, uh, at symposium I did an interesting podcast with, with Sheika Dia, who's got a new thing studying authoritarianism in Eastern Europe especially. And that was one of the things we talked about is that I found new ways to adapt to like, well, you can't get rid of the media, but you can co-opt the media and, and, and exploit various weaknesses in the media. So they find new ways. And that's what Putin did in Russia find a new way, a new mutation of dictatorship. And that's what the Chinese did, a regime did, is they found the new mutation of dictatorship. It's gonna be less, you know, collectivist, dogmatically, collectivist on economics. Now what? And so we, what we've had to do is adjust to the idea that our first, our additional strategy of encourage 'em to liberalize and hope that that just keeps going, has come up against the reality that us didn't keep going. Speaker 2 01:42:22 And in fact, they're pulling it back now. And I think we're having a poor adjustment to that. And we need to start having more of a strategy of, uh, I won't say necessarily confrontation because we don't want a war with China. It would not be, you know, we wanna avoid a war, but we want us to do it to them what we did to the Soviet Union. We want a cold war. We want a situation where we are doing containment and rollback. So, uh, what I would say is we need to find ways to oppose them, which includes things like building up our military forces in the Pacific, working, building up allies, building up trading partners, which I think Trump, uh, unfortunately sort of cut us off on that when he stopped the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And so find ways to sort of try a, a containment slash rollback strategy against China. Speaker 2 01:43:10 But, um, uh, the, the big question is, uh, the, the big positive I see is I think the Chinese are doing their best to shoot themselves in the foot right now. Because what they did is they tried to say, we, we'll liberalize the economy, we'll produce all this wealth. And then that just since we produced all this wealth, that must mean that we, the bureaucrats in the central Communist Party are great geniuses who know how to do everything. So we're gonna reconstitute maoism. And that's basically what what Xi Jinping is now currently doing, is they're trying to recreate a maus system and they're cracking down on the free market. They're, uh, they're, um, creating more and more government control over what gets produced and what doesn't get produced. And I think, uh, I mean they, they, they had a, a crackdown on video games. You can't watch video games. I mean, it's becoming much more old-fashioned totalitarian Marxism. They're trying to get the Maoist band back together. And I think that's the best thing they could possibly happen for us because they're on a path that's going to really potentially just destroy all, you know, all this wealth that they're counting on to make them powerful. They're on a track to really undercut that. And I think that's, I mean, Speaker 0 01:44:18 My, was it Speaker 2 01:44:19 God protects fools drunkards in the United States of America and <laugh>, you know, we've benefited over the years from having weak and self-destructive enemies. Many times, Speaker 0 01:44:28 My interpretation of both Russia and China over the last, uh, couple decades would be China. If you look at its authoritarian moves since oh eight, they're mostly political, cultural and not economic. They're not really, Speaker 2 01:44:41 They're becoming economic, Speaker 0 01:44:42 Economic economy. But I think what's happening is that broad brush, like David said, 30,000 feet, the Russians, since the end of the Cold War, the Russians basically moved from communism toward the hybrid system called fascism. And so they're not really big on nationalization anymore. Same thing with China. They're interested in economic growth and they know it requires some semi capitalism. But, but then meanwhile the US is shifting the other way. The US is going from semi capitalist to fascist. And so all three countries are basically moving toward each other. And you know, if it goes this way for 10 more years, there'll be three fascist regimes, Russia, China, and America. And so I laugh actually when I hear conservatives say, oh, China is, you know, they're going back to Mao and communism and no, they're not. They're moving from communism to fascism. And in the US the conservators are helping the US move from capitalism to fascism in the, in the form of you get Trump with his nationalism, you get Obama with his socialism. And so that's what we have today. We have national socialism and they toggle back and forth. And anyone who knows the history knows that national socialism, uh, is nazim. So Rob, let's close this out and tell the audience, Rob, what is the best way to keep track of what you're doing, what you're saying, where should people go to, where's the best place for people to go to, uh, to follow you? The Speaker 2 01:46:18 One stop shop for all things, Tre Zinsky is the Tre Zinsky letter. So that's tre zinsky letter.com. All you have to do is know how to spell my last name, which is, you know, uh, all my, my prayers are are with you on that, uh, <laugh>, I'm sure it's written down here. So, uh, uh, trein letter.com, you can go there and anything I publish elsewhere, which will publish a lot of different places, uh, will eventually be flagged there or directed there. Uh, and the other main things I'm doing are symposium, which is symposium.subs.com. Yeah. Which is an attempt to try to get debate between various strands of liberals in the proper sense, classical liberals and yeah, people who believe in a free society. And, um, uh, then I'm, I'm, I'm being published elsewhere, but I think those are the two places to direct people Speaker 0 01:46:59 To and symposium I have seen, uh, two or three ver symposium is just fabulous. I mean, the first perfect your first interview was, uh, was it, uh, will and Pinker, Steve Pinker, George Speaker 2 01:47:09 Will and Stephen Pinker. Yeah. Speaker 0 01:47:11 That was fabulous. Just, just fabulous. And Rob and Rob, I think is doing the, in the right thing, uh, uh, pushing back on the, the theft of these words called liberalism, progressivism words, words that we should be, uh, proud to accept that have been twisted into the opposite, the illiberal regressives. And, uh, so that's a, that's a focus of symposium, isn't it, Rob? That let's, let's, yeah. I, Speaker 2 01:47:34 I actually, I stole, I stole a line from Reagan at his 1964 time for choosing speech because there's really no such thing as a left or right. There's just up or down, right up to freedom and down to, to, to totalitarianism. And I think, right, that's the perspective. I'm trying to get people to think that way more. And I think if you know that, that you don't think that there's a left versus right, but you think an up and down liberal versus a liberal. Speaker 0 01:47:57 Excellent. Dr. Kelly, any final thoughts from, what is it, 30 thou, 31,000 feet? What do you got? Speaker 1 01:48:05 Uh, it's a little more, um, a little lower altitude, uh, <laugh>. Just, Speaker 0 01:48:10 Ok. Speaker 1 01:48:11 There was reference, uh, from one of the questions to the Kki affair and the intra, uh, yeah. You know, uh, attention. And I just, I just want to appreciate what the fact that, that you, Richard and Rob, uh, both objectives are here debating and arguing openly about the question. Uh, and I don't think anyone's afraid. I'm certainly not afraid that I'm gonna be denounced, uh, certainly not by the Atlas Society or by Jennifer Grossman, our ceo. Right. So, um, I wanna thank you for that and, um, it was a thank everyone for participating in the discussion. It was great. Speaker 0 01:48:54 Well, and I'm not sure this discussion would've been possible, David, without what you built up here. What kind of, uh, collegiality you, uh, foster and have been fostering at t a s all these years? So I, I'm loving it directly more recently, so, uh, yeah. Isn't it nice to have respectful debates? And we definitely disagree a bit, don't we, rob? But, you know, in a broader context of objectives. I mean, that's the cool thing about it. We're both objectives, David is all of many of the listeners. And so it's also, it's actually a little bit more interesting to see, well, what about the subtle differences within Objectivism and since foreign policy and military strategy are applications of the philosophy? You know, there's not a, when you think about, there's not a lot of literature on this. She has the roots of war in the mid sixties. Speaker 0 01:49:39 Peter Schwartz wrote on foreign policy and self-interest. John Lewis has his book. You, you, I think are more prolific on foreign policy than anybody. But one way of looking at this would be to say, well, it ain't easy because it's, uh, an application of the philosophy and not a lot of work has been done on it. But you've done a lot of the great work spade work, Rob. So yeah. So we, we encourage people to follow Rob and subscribe to his stuff. It's fabulous. And so thank you Rob. Uh, we're gonna see you again. I know on some other Yes, yes. Atlas. Right, right Abby. So yes. Speaker 3 01:50:15 So Speaker 2 01:50:16 You'll be trying our clubhouse. Speaker 0 01:50:17 Yeah. So a Abby, you finishes, finish it off and tell us, uh, what's coming up. Speaker 3 01:50:22 Yeah, so September 30th, I believe, um, Rob's gonna be on Clubhouse. Yeah. Uh, which is sort of, um, audio conversation app. Uh, we do send out a link to join in our newsletter. So we'll have updates on that in our event page and newsletter. Right. And then, um, this month's book club, so on Monday is going to be Richard's book where have all the capitalists gone. Yeah. So we'll start with that. Uh, we encourage you guys to join us. I will send links and emails out about that this week. Um, it's also on our social media. And then next month, October we'll be doing Robert's book. So who is John Galt? Anyways, I believe I had links somewhere here in Juneau for that. Uh, so who is John Gall? Anyway, um, so I don't know if you wanna just give a quick, you know, I, we're gonna be doing that for our book club in, um, October 25th. I dunno if you wanna give a quick overview before we go or, Speaker 2 01:51:11 Uh, me. Yeah, sure. I'd love to do that. Um, is is a collection of essays covering a, a variety of things. I sort of decided that, you know, Atlas Shrug ne deserves intensive philosophical and literary and cultural analysis in historical context. And nobody else in the, certainly in the mainstream culture, nobody's doing that. So I said, well, I have some things to say. So I put together over a period of years and 20 essays that sort of go from the philosophical aspects of Ayn Rand's philosophy as presented in Atlas Drug. Talk about the literary aspects, talk about the historical context. I have one about, you know, uh, uh, Atlas Shrug as a work of science fiction as a futuristic work and how it compares to the science fiction as a, as a genre. And then going, you know, finally out to the, the sort of implications for today. Like what, what can the left and right learn? What can we learn from this, from the culture wars, from from Atlas Shrugged. Uh, which I think is very important to keep it, to show the relevance to the what's happening currently. So it's a whole variety of, of covering Atlas Shrug to many different angles. Speaker 3 01:52:15 Awesome. And we will have links coming out for that. Everything we're gonna try and stick with Juneau. We do like a lot of things about it. It has some glitches. We're gonna try to work out. They've been really good about answering our emails and just updating things. Um, so when we wanna hear from you guys, if you guys had any issues, please send me an email. We wanna make sure things get worked out. Um, other than that, what I've taken from this is that there are about six topics here that we could have talked about. You could, we could do a, a whole, um, course on just foreign policy in America's war. So maybe, we'll maybe we'll think about that for some future sessions and bring you guys both back. Um, and yeah, stay tuned. Atlas and Intellectuals, we'll be doing our starting our Capitalism course speaking on cor of courses. So that will be with Steven Hicks and that's kind of what we have coming up. So stay tuned for emails and social media links for those. Speaker 0 01:53:03 And let me just add, uh, let me just add Abby, for, in terms of, uh, live appearances, uh, professor Hicks and I will be at Nashville October 9th, right at the Students for Liberty Freer Fest. I think it's called that free. Speaker 3 01:53:22 Okay. Speaker 0 01:53:22 And, and, and, and isn't it unique because it's apparently held in the baseball stadium at First Speaker 1 01:53:27 Horizon Stadium? Speaker 3 01:53:29 Yep. First Horizon Stadium in Nashville, hopefully good weather <laugh>, and it'll be outdoors Speaker 0 01:53:35 <laugh>. So I'm wondering whether, I'm wondering whether Hicks and I who are gonna talk about the morality of capitalism that we're gonna, they're gonna set up a microphone, say on the pitcher's mound, and we will be speaking to, I don't, I don't know what we'll be. I'm looking forward to that <laugh>. So those of you, Speaker 2 01:53:51 You have to say, you have to say, today, today, today, I'm ous man of the world. Speaker 0 01:53:55 Yeah, right. Lou Gehrig. Very good reference. That's a really Speaker 2 01:53:58 Old reference. Speaker 0 01:53:59 So kids it up. I know, but I'm old enough. I'm old enough to know it. Wow. Very good, Rob. All right, so let's sign off. This has been another issue. This has been another session of Morals and Markets. We do it every month. Uh, Rob Kazinski, thank you so, so much. You were fabulous. You were just great today, Abby. Thanks for organizing all this. And you had such power to look through those chats and pick the ones you wanted to <laugh> Speaker 3 01:54:25 So much. Kinda nice. And I have my own questions. This is swirling. So you guys just my emails for me. Speaker 0 01:54:30 And finally, Dr. Kelly. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kelly. It's great to hear. Of Speaker 1 01:54:35 Course. And I, I just wanna say to, to Abby, I'm, as I'm astounded tonight, as before <laugh>, how, how fast you find links and post Speaker 0 01:54:45 <laugh>. Yeah, Speaker 1 01:54:46 You are, you're a genius at that. Yeah. Speaker 3 01:54:49 That was, I, I can't take credit for that. Lawrence was, he was teaching me well, about how to get the links up ahead of time. So <laugh> Speaker 1 01:54:56 Oh, okay. Well, we'll give him the credit. Speaker 0 01:54:59 <laugh>. Okay. Goodnight everybody. Stay healthy and stay happy. We'll see you again in a month.