The Pete Quiñones Show - Bonus Episode: Iran and 'Just War Theory' w/ Ron Dodson

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

81 MinutesPG-13Ron Dodson is Principal Owner & Portfolio Manager of a Texas hedge fund.Ron and Pete talk about Augustinian Just War Theory and the American government's action in Iran.Ron at the American ReformerRon's SubstackRon on TwitterPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

Royal London Ireland, award winning, year after year, after year, after year. For the fourth consecutive year, Royal London, Ireland has won the overall financial services excellence award by Brokers Ireland. Because real excellence isn't a one-off. It's something you deliver again and again. When it comes to life insurance and pension products, choose a provider you can trust. talk to a financial broker or visit royal london.com forward slash fine broker. Royal London Insurance Act Trading is Royal London, Ireland is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. If you want to get the show early and ad free, head on over to thepec Kenyoneyshow.com.

I'm going to say this slow because I know a lot of you are doing this at one and a half speed or two times speed. If you want an RSS feed, it is only available if you, subscribe through Substack or Patreon. You will get the audio file if you subscribe through my website, Subscribe Star, or Gumroad, and the links are all there at the Piquinones Show.com. I just want to give thanks, continued thanks, to all of you who support me and allow me to do this

and be able to put out the amount of content I can do and hopefully the kind of quality that keeps you coming back. So I'm only able to do this because of you. So head on over to the Piquanayana Show.com, and you will get the episodes early and ad free. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekina show. Ron Dodson's back.

Hey, Ron, how are you doing? Oh, I mean, you know, there's nothing going on in the world, Pete. We just figured, I figured we'd talk hockey today. We can do that. We can do that. I can do that for hours. I think people have, people have, people have found out recently that I can do that for hours.

I want to say that your episode that isn't public yet, what Jay Burden talking about exactly how you would make a nuke almost, almost, but what it takes to get to a nuke is very good. And I hope people, when that drops on Jay Burden's feed, people listen to that because I think there's a lot of really good information there. Thank you. I actually studied that in undergrad under the great late Herb Simon, who was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and was with Rand and DARPA,

was some of the game theory intellect behind mad theory, mutually sure destruction theory, and anti-ballistic missile treaty that was signed with the Russians. And so I actually studied personally under Herb Simon. And that's kind of my background in that. So it's been a long, long-term passion of mine. And I really appreciate the kind words. It was Jay helped move what was a very technical topic.

He helped move it along. And hopefully it's not too boring for folks. Oh, Pylos and showed in the car yesterday. It was fantastic. Oh, thanks, man. Really appreciate that. All right, man. We, it's been, I think, a month since we talked to Iran.

And, yeah, well, here we go. Well, yeah. I think the, I've written a couple of, I've got a piece coming out for Claremont on probably Tuesday that I wrote about a week and a half ago. And then I got a piece coming out on Easter Sunday for responsible state craft. and and on on I've been you know skeptical from last spring about any attack on because it because of their for a host of reasons but but mainly because they they have all the advantages in this and that's just been born out and that's I take no pleasure

in being right about that I'm an American I'm a I'm a proud American I want us to succeed. I'll admit, even when we're wrong, you know, I think we're wrong in this case. I think there's, we've almost ventured into the realm of being the bad guys in this case. But we can talk about the metaphysical issues in a bit. I think to come up to speed, I think the cleanest way to frame where we are right this moment is, is this. The tactical picture is getting worse. for Washington and those whom we, for better or worse, have our saddles hitched to, even though we retain overwhelming destructive capacity. The biggest development today is we have an F-15E, so that's a strike eagle or in the biz,

nicknamed the Mud Hen. It was shot down over Iran and search and rescue operations launched. at least one crew member's been picked up. I think they're continuing to look for the second. I haven't checked the news feed in the last 45 minutes or so. But this makes the first confirmed total loss over Iranian territory of the war. We had the friendly fire. I say friendly fire in quotes in Kuwait.

But this matters because it punctures any of this easy air supremat. air supremacy has solved all problems. It punctures that storyline. It reminds everyone that Iran still retains meaningful denial capacity beyond just their ability to drone and missile their neighbors to death. And so Reuters reported also that 13 U.S. service members killed and more than 300 wounded so far. And so that's a mess right there.

And we can move on. on from there, but that in and of itself shows that this is not a special military operation where we are going and with unfettered access exercising our will or imposing our will. It's very much the contrary. And then, of course, the big issue is this choke, this strategic choke point of the Strait of Hormuz at the outlet of the Persian Gulf, it's worse than being closed. It's being sporadically opened for whomever the Iranians want to keep it open for. So that's the worst of all possible worlds because what we want in theory, I say in theory,

we can pick that up in a minute. We want this to have, for our Gulf protection partners, we want free and open navigation through that choke point, and it's the exact opposite right now. It's a complete and total Iranian control. I saw earlier that it looks like, I don't want to speak out of turn here. A French freighter?

Yeah, a French freighter was trying to transition through the straight to the north. And that was about 10 hours ago. I don't have, maybe you do, I don't have an update on the status of that ship. I don't have, but how that goes will be very interesting. Do the Iranians, are the Iranians going to allow for the French? you know, it'd be fun. I'll give them this. They've got all the cards. They could allow basically all traffic except that which we want through. So the, you know, the Emirates, the Bahrain passage, the Qataris, the Saudis, you know, all those who are partnered with us, and I say partnered,

they rely on us for military protection. They could allow, everyone else to pass through. And that would be, I say humiliating. I don't know if the president has the capacity to be humiliated anymore. And I say that as one who has happily voted three times for Donald Trump. And in certain areas, I think he has been a godsend. But this is a disaster for the status of the United States on the world stage, at least in the short, to midterm. We can speak about long term in a minute and get kind of four or five D chess, but keeping it in the realm of the real. This is a mess and it's not good. And his dog and pony show the other night. And I've got many friends. I do some work with the administration.

Look, again, I want the administration to have success, but it's not. And that speech the other night that that was that the market had had this huge run up and the oil had come down in light of this big speech and it was it was it was nothing it was I'm afraid that the president is exposing himself to being impeached in the spring on pump and dump you know if trust me his enemies are looking at every trading record on oil on equity futures on certain defensive stocks. And if they're playing both, if they're trading actively in this, I would not be shocked if impeachment proceedings were brought up. And he could get, he could get convicted. It would only take a few swing senators, regardless of how the elections go,

to, to convict. And again, I don't relish that, but that's a real, that's a real possibility. and that should frighten everyone. I hope it's frightening those who have the president's ear. Unfortunately, that seems like an ever smaller circle. Royal London, Ireland, award winning, year after year, after year, after year. For the fourth consecutive year, Royal London, Ireland has won the overall financial services excellence award by Brokers Ireland. Because real excellence isn't a one-off.

it's something you deliver again and again. When it comes to life insurance and pension products, choose a provider you can trust. Talk to a financial broker or visit royal london.combe, forward slash, find broker. Royal London Insurance Act Trading is Royal London, Ireland is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. I think we can agree that when Trump is abusing journalists and abusing leftists and calling, you know,

calling politicians, Pocahontas and things like that. It's funny. It's entertaining. This is war. This is the worst thing that humans do. And for him to get up there and talk the way he did, I was, I mean, it's fucking hard to call yourself, be proud of being an American.

When someone's saying, oh, we're going to bomb them back to the Stone Age. And then PC Principal Hegset gets on Twitter and all caps, bomb them back to the Stone Age. Look, these guys, when the left get, they're not destroying their enemies. The left is going to get back in power. And they're going to seek to put people in, put people like Hegset and Trump in prison. And at this point, I don't feel bad for him. I don't, after that speech, people are like, oh, that speech was nothing. If you, he didn't say anything.

If you listen to that speech and think he didn't say anything, you're out of your mind. He exposed himself as, I mean, he may as well have been Benjamin Netanyahu. He may as well have called the Iranian people Amalek. That's right. No, that's right. there is a real, you know, even Schmidt and who I really appreciate the thought of, Carl Schmidt, who was part of the, you know, national socialist regime, so he's, you're not supposed to speak of him. But, but as appreciated on both the left and the right and thinkers, since he did his

writing in the 20s and 30s, and then later on into the 40s and 50s of the, the last century, but even Schmidt in the no masts of the earth, wrote that the greatest danger is the dehumanization of the other, because it will take you to a place that you can't, you can't get civilization back, basically. I'm, I'm butchering the argument for Schmidt fans, but that's the, that's the basis of it. And we in the West, and, and we in the West, and, And not just, you know, Jesuits or Catholics, but we of the Western tradition of coming from Christendom and the Catholic states have always believed in just war,

which comes from the principles that St. Augustine laid out back in the fifth century, you know, in a period about 400, 450 years after Christ, 400 years after Christ, and these are incredibly important principles. You know, a just war is a war that can only be waged as a last resort. All nonviolent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified. Did we, and again, we threw some of this out of the window, or out the window in World War II. Curtis LeMay, and we used it to justify total war.

against the Germans and against the Japanese, which I personally think was a mistake. Beyond the philosophical issues that I think you and many of your listeners would have, just from a way to wage war, when you go to total war and expect unconditional surrender, you are forcing your enemy, you are dehumanizing your enemy.

You are looking for your enemy's extinction. and I just think that that is philosophically bankrupt and tactically and strategically inept. So anyway, did we exhaust all methods before doing this? Well, here's the way you know we did not. When we were negotiating last summer and a friend of mine, an acquaintance of mine was on that negotiating team last summer with the Iranians. before we moved, the Israelis assassinated the entire negotiating team using our special health, special form of the hellfire missile. And now we've seen a string of

negotiating partners in Iran suffer the same fate by the hand of the Israeli strikes. This is an issue because you always want an off-ramp. You always want the ability. You may choose not to take it, but you always want that ability to negotiate with the one you're fighting with. You want to exhaust all options because war kills innocent people. And that's always bad. It doesn't mean it's not justified,

but if you haven't exhausted all those options, at least St. Augustine thought it was bad. And then a war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. That's up for, you know, our friends, some of our more constitutionalist or libertarian friends really go on about the, it is the Congress's job to declare war. And I go back and forth on whether or not the president has the legal capacity to strike against, you know, I don't, I didn't have a problem with. the strike against Venezuela. That's near and dear, that's, you know, a closer neighbor. That's part of our

sphere of influence. That's part of our near abroad. And he saw the opportunity to do something. It seems like it had a minimal loss of life on both sides. So I didn't have a problem with that. Some would suggest that even that would require congressional authority. I think that's difficult in this day and age. I think it would have leaked. But good people disagree with that. And then we can talk about the other principles of just war, but the point is right then and there in point one, and then questionably in point two, we have left what the West has always considered a mark of civilization

in how we've waged this. And I just think that's a real problem. Because if we're on the right, we're supposed to be about order and peace and civilizational goals so that people can, pursue, you know, a virtuous life freely. And that's a real, I think we've crossed some, to quote, Tropic Thunder, you're crossing some lines.

The great Robert Downey Jr., his character, Captain Osiris there. The, you talk about the West. and the West is Christendom. Yeah. Israel has nothing to do with that. Israel is not the West. Israel is not Christendom. There is no Judeo Christianity.

That's a propaganda term. It's something that's been sold to people. Israel does not fight like we do. Israel seeks to kill. They don't care if they take out civilian populations. And one thing that you see, and it seems that Trump is helping to push this through and to encourage people, is to have more of an Israeli attitude when it comes to civilians. Oh, they're brown.

It doesn't matter if we kill brown people. Oh, they're Muslim. It doesn't matter if we kill Muslim people. Mm-hmm. I mean, this is not, if you're a Christian and you're like promoting. total war because, oh, those people don't look like me and they don't sound like me and they worship a different God than me. I don't take you seriously as a Christian. I'm sorry. You have to show me your, you can tell me you have faith. Show me your works. Your works look

evil to me. Yeah. And okay, so without getting, you know, on a tangent about Curtis LeMay, and the history of total war in this country, especially regarding, you know, World War II and all that. Well, it's also Vietnam. Vietnam, the victory metric in Vietnam was debt, was the number of debt. Yeah, body count.

And so, but, but this has been, this is one of the, and, and don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not trying to appune. I was baptized Southern Baptist. So I can, what I'm about to say, I think I have a little bit of moral authority to say. And I'm not trying to throw a huge portion of our populace under the bus.

But I do want them to think. The Baptist, and by Baptist, dispensational, Southern Baptist, all the baptistic, you know, the believer baptism, sex of Christianity in, in America. America have a church evangelicals. And these are our denomination. Non-denominational is just Baptist. It's just Baptist. That's right.

That's a Baptist view of how one enters into the kingdom, so to speak. Has how they gain citizenship, they would call church membership. But how Christendom is always viewed covenantal kingdom church membership. there, this, this, this, what, you know, this baptistic view of that tends to undercut, tends to, not always. You have a lot of reform Baptists out there, and this wouldn't apply to them necessarily, but, but, but it tends to undercut the universal claims of Christ. So without getting too deep in the theological weeds, just think of the Great Commission. The Great Commission, and we all know, you know, go therefore make disciples,

you know, baptizing them, teaching them to obey all that I've commanded, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Everybody remembers that part. But what they don't remember is the preamble that Jesus said. He says, all authority in heaven and on the earth has been granted unto me. And that includes, by simple logic, all the people, whether they believe in him, whether they bow the knee or not. And therefore, there is a gravity to killing a subject of Christ. This is beyond the whole Amago dei question that sometimes creates Catholic, Protestant.

I tend to be pretty Catholic on that question. the I tend to follow the more, I'm pretty Catholic in my ecclesiology, but regardless of the Amago Dei, the dignity of man and all that argument, put that aside, humanity is universally subject to Christ. So it is a grave thing when you go and kill one of his subjects. It may be justified. we are just the the the the the the the magistrate is just when he bears the sword against the evildoer but there is gravity there you don't do that lightly you don't treat somebody as again going back to Schmidt Schmidt really understood this and in no moss of the earth where he talks about this he begins the book saying talking about this lordship of Christ everybody

he says, oh, I don't know if Schmidt was a Christian or not. Well, no months of the earth sure sure seems to claim that he was. He seems to claim that he was. And he talks about this. And so if you're going to go and wage war indiscriminately, just know that you are killing, you are killing not only someone made in God's image, but you are killing one of his subjects. And that's not just someone who has been brought into the kingdom via covenant membership. And so this American baptistic ideal, the mega church, the second great awakening, fundamentalist idea, tends to undercut that. Again, not everyone, not all, but we tend to just treat, well, you know, they're just other. And it's ugly and it's gross.

And again, doesn't mean you can't fight war. Some have taken this idea and become pacifist. And I think, you know, the whole Bonhofer idea and then some of the more radical Christian sex, I don't believe that's the case. I believe there is a place for war. I'm just Augustinian on this, as is the Catholic Church. As, you know, I'm Presbyterian, reformed. Lutherans, they're Augustinian.

So I think we need a return to this idea of what makes a just, war and I don't think this I don't think it was justified I also think it was just dumb So I've talked about that until I blew in the face and we you know we can discuss that but but it's going badly and it was Easily to see that it was going badly and the problem there is it calls to the competency of this administration and it was competency that we were all looking for the the that That's what can we please just get some, we're tired of the Victoria Newlands. We're tired of the Robert, of the Kagan view, of the neocon deal where, you know, which falls into this too, where we're just going to create chaos everywhere.

So we're, at least we're the king of the chaos hill. No, no, absolutely not. We wanted to get away from that. And we're doing the exact same thing, except. worse, not just worse morally, but worse from a competency standpoint. And that is devastating for those who thought, man, are we setting up for some rightward influence on this country for years to come? And if I was an independent right now, I'd be like, I want nothing to, I'll take all the bad

that the other side has to get away from this. And again, I'm not an independent. I would never vote for the other side, no matter what. Give me stupidity over evil. But right now, we've got one toe dipped in the evil pool, as you so rightly put, a minute ago. Roy London, Ireland, award winning, year after year, year after year. For the fourth consecutive year, Royal London Ireland has won the

overall financial services excellence award by Brokers Ireland. Because real excellence isn't a one-off. It's something you deliver again and again. When it comes to life insurance and pension products, choose a provider you can trust. Talk to a financial broker or visit royal london. i.e. forward slash find broker. Royal London Insurance Stock Trading is Royal London, Ireland is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Well, I think you know I'm not a pacifist considering the conversation we had before we went live. Yes. But you have to fight a war for a reason.

And you have to seek to punish the guilty. And taking out the starvation campaigns in Iraq in the 90s, the, you know, the, you know, Oh, if we just impose enough torture and pain on a population of innocent people, they'll rise up and they'll take out their leadership. Well, that's what they thought about in Iran. And from what I've heard today, 7 million, this includes active military and military that have retired from the Iranian military within the last 5 to 10 years, have pledged to fight.

that's seven million people that's seven million people who are trained to fight look this is a very this I don't think we have a very good understanding of what you know we don't like no one would the whole death to America chance and and all that what we forget is is that

Saddam Hussein and the old Ayatollah Khomeini were at war, the Iraq-Iran war throughout the 80s, well before we went to war with Iraq, we actually helped Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran. The Iranians remember this. Okay, so have we, look, we had a good thing going from our perspective. when we had the CIA install in 53 a secular dictatorship. And for the secularists in Iran, Iran was pretty neat under, you know, the Shah. But they did lose their, there was a portion of the population

that very much was treated poorly. by the Shah, who they lost a, they saw themselves losing their culture to a materialist worldview. Some of the same things that we Christians mourn here in the United States. And imagine it being at the hands of a foreign place dictatorship that was brutal that would, you know, had death squads and all that. Do you want to have that? Do you want to have that conversation?

right now? Now, let's not have that conversation. No. So, and then, so the Iranians and Hussein went to war with the Iranians and used chemical weapons that we helped them procure. And they remember that. So this whole idea of death to America just didn't spontaneously generate

out of the miasma of Persia. No, this, there was reason for it. And we easily could have said, you know, that was a, those were, uh, uh, that was wrong and we are sorry and so on and so forth. And, uh, we've put you, we placed you for decades under this, uh, under this, uh, sanction regime. Um, I understand that they were ready to come under IAEA inspection regime just for the removal of sanctions. The problem is that makes one of our most trusted and our most trusted and important ally in the region very nervous because they want an Iran that is balkanized, that is turned into Syria,

that has turned into Libya. But think about the result of that. Iran, Iran, is not universally Persian Persian Persia the Persians are the ruling class of Iran the same way the Han are the ruling class over all the tribes of East Asia so if we were to Balkanize that region you'd have five six maybe more groups with with control over that strategic choke point instead of one So it's in our best interest, again, in theory, it's in our best interest for there to be a cohesive and rational leadership in Iran. And we're not going to, you're not going to regime change them. You're going to keep going down this road.

Anyway, the point is, this has been a mistake tactically. I don't understand. I don't see any way for the military, a military solution to this. if we take Carg Island, we're going to have maybe many hundreds dead. You know, we can talk about tactically, but strategically, it makes no sense. At least in the short and midterm, in the long term sense, now, I don't think Trump or the administration is thinking this. But there is the argument you could say that they're saying all these reasons to go to war,

Iran or just a cover to take this strategic chokehold completely off the map to make it unreliable to increase the strategic importance of a Monroe Doctrine North America that has all the food, all the oil, all the fresh water. And the issue with that is, is that also increases the strategic significance of Russia. And I think our most trusted ally isn't on board with that either. So there's some real cognitive dissonance going on. I don't know. What's your read on that, Pete? Well, I think that Israel likes chaos.

As you said before, whereas Christianity likes order, Judaism seems to like chaos. It's throughout, I've read the Old Testament. I've read the Old Testament. Every 40 years, they say, start sacrificing humans again. Oh, yeah. Yeah, judges, judges wasn't just a, wasn't just a case study.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so they, they like chaos. They, they seek to breed chaos where what you just described, where if the Strait of Hormuz is really that important to world energy, you would want one group in charge. That's right. Even if it's a, even if it's a, even if it's a group that you don't. really like. At least you can deal with them. You know, people say, oh, you know, Iran is the

biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. I don't think that's true, but well, they're a pain in the ass. But it has nothing to do with us. That's right. They hate Israel. Their enemy is Israel. And the only time Americans have ever been, you know, oh, the Marine barracks in Beirut and everything. Why were you, why were they there? And even Ronald Reagan said after that, his biggest mistake was sending those troops there. That's right. He knew he was doing it on behalf of Israel. Yeah, the history of that decision, it was made very quick.

If that's worth, I'm trying to remember there's a great, maybe it's a YouTube. I'll try to look it up for the show notes, but there's a great story of how that came to be. It was a quick meeting that Reagan had. He didn't think it through. It was absolutely a The Israeli leadership Wanted there to be a U.S. troop presence in Lebanon And we did not.

Our generals were completely against it And he authorized it Basically on a whim To please this one You know meeting that he had And then look what happened It's a fascinating story It's a very sad story.

I mean, you're not, I'm not excusing it. It's horrible what happened to them. But the point is it doesn't have to happen. That's right. George Washington in his, I mean, people are, I know people like hate George Washington at this point, especially the plan trusters, the people who think Trump can do no wrong. They must hate that George Washington said no entangling alliances. You do not have alliances that put your people at risk. If Iran is sponsoring, if Iran is financing Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, what does that have to do with us? It has nothing to do with us. It has everything to do with Israel. And the only reason it has anything to do with us is because we are joined at the hip with Israel. And until that stops, as Joe Kent has been saying ever since he stepped down, decouple, tell Israel you are on your own until you start acting like human beings. Yeah, let's talk about the history of this for a little bit because I think it's, you know, I realize I'm, you know, I just turned 59 week and a half ago. Scary thought. So I realize I'm older than than probably 99% of your listeners. Let's let's talk about why, why, how did we get where we are? And why did the Middle East, you know, there was a point in time where the Middle East wasn't important at all except as a the the U.S. sponsored believe it or not missions, Christian missions to the to the to the to the area. But they basically let the the UK and the French have dominion over that whole part of the world. You know the the this is before you know North Africa and and

basically it was a hedge under hegemonic control of the British Empire and the French. Algeria was a major French colony and so on and so forth. And they let, you know, there was British Palestine and the Ottomans had control. And oil was discovered and suddenly as basically the leaders, the U.S. led, even more so than the U.K. the industrial revolution because of the, it was the time after the U.S. Civil War was a business paradise, almost to, to a greater degree probably than it needed to be to wear the point where Teddy Roosevelt had to come in and break up, you know, some abusive companies and

everything, but we had incredible an incredible industrial expansion and the standard of living actually skyrocketed. And we saw the Middle East as a way to fuel that. And so it became important. Now, go on through World War I, World War I happens and the Russian Revolution happens. and now suddenly it becomes not just strategically important for fuel, but now it starts becoming geopolitically important. And the UK is trying to deal with it with this Balfour Declaration, and there's chaos. And then you get World War II,

and we're partners with the Soviets, but World War II ends, and now under Truman, that relationship, flips and I won't go on, you know, why we were partners with the Russians, you know, and all that. That's another topic for another day. I'm happy to talk about that. That deserves its own two-hour screed from me, but not today. So now we have the issue where we have the Middle East oil, which is hugely important. We've got Texan oil and Pennsylvania oil and California oil, but and California oil, but nothing like at the time, we didn't realize what was coming.

At the time, the Middle East was hugely important because it could continue to fuel our industrial capacity. But now we have this issue with we got to keep an eye on Russia. And what does that make important? Well, that makes Anatolia. That makes Asia Minor, Turkey, incredibly important. because Turkey controls the entrance to the Black Sea, which is the year-round Russian Blue Water Port, and the entrance and exit to the Black Sea is controlled by the Bosporus Dardanelles Complex. That's right there where Istanbul looks where Alexander crossed over into Asia when he was

conquering the known world. This is one of those hugely important choke points. So we put intermediate, you know, we allied with Turkey so that we could put intermediate range missiles there that could reach southern Russia, that we could have acts ingress and egress into the Black Sea. And so Turkey is now important. The Middle East is important. And Israel, we're still kind of fighting a little bit with Israel.

JFK comes along and Israel's wanting nukes and JFK says no we don't you don't get nukes you're you're you're you're you're and he ends up losing his head over it and is that connected I absolutely think well I won't say absolutely I believe that was connected I think if I think the argument that JFK was just murdered by this Russian sympathizer is kind of crazy. But again, that's another two hours we can spend. Oswald, I'm in Dallas. You know, Oswald's wife, Marina, lived, I kid you not, less than a mile from where I grew up. And continued as I was a kid. Oh, yeah, there's Marina Oswald lives right down the street in Irving. Irving Texas.

And everybody, anyway, everybody knew that, not everybody, but folks who were into it, knew that Oswald went down to Mexico City to try to meet with the, he met with the Russians and everything. It's come out now with some of these documents releases that the Russians let us know that he met with them and said, we want no part of this because they realized them being tagged for a, he wanted to kill the president. He was willing to do it. Could he get the Russians help?

And they wanted no part of that. And if they wanted no part of it, who did? I ask you, Pete, who did? Anyway, put a pen in that. Then you get LBJ. And LBJ was absolutely phylo-Semitic. Before he was ever president. But once he was president, he was running, he was running weapons.

He absolutely was running weapons. Yes. Illegal. Calling them, was it orange shipment? Yeah. Shipments, I believe. Yeah, there were like banana shipments, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then you get to, you know, Nixon. And Nixon, I think, handled it the way you should have handled it, which is, look, we have some strategic. We have strategic interests there. But we want to be friends with everybody. We don't want to be too closely allied with anyone. because that removes our ability to be. And he saw Iran as a wonderful, that Iran, Turkey, this is before, you know, we bought,

he saw Iran, Turkey, the Saudis, and Israel is kind of a four-legged stool, is a balance of power. And they could all be minor regional powers. And everybody was fine. And no one got a really privilege. Turkey to a certain extent because they were officially allies, but that's always been a strained ally, so to speak. But I thought Nixon handled it very, very well. And in his second term, was set up to do some interesting things with that.

He also was doing wonderful things we've seen. This has come out with Pakistan, again, trying to have regional powers balance each other out so that we wouldn't have to be over there all the time. Reagan comes along and I mean Carter comes along and it's an absolute S show. And I lived through Carter. I was politically aware through Carter. When Carter took office, I was 10 years old. And it was a mess. And it just got worse.

He gives away the Panama Canal. The reputation of the, we're coming out of Vietnam. The reputation of the armed services is in. the tank. People are treating not good Americans, but a lot of leftists are treating veterans like trash. It's a real mess. And Carter tries to say, you know, he tries to, he puts Sadat and and, oh good, Monachan Bagan, he helps broker a peace. Here's what really happened. We agreed to give Israel and Egypt, a crap ton of money every year is what happened. The two greatest recipients over the last 50 years of U.S. foreign aid is it's not just Israel, it's Egypt as well. So he does that,

but our reputate, and then he tried, there's an Iranian revolution. They take a bunch of American, it's very anti-American, again, due to this conflict. with the Iraqis that we helped. The CIA helped. It was a mess. And death to America and all this, they take a bunch of hostages. Carter authorizes a rescue mission to,

this is how Delta Force comes into being. It's an absolute disaster. Tons of people killed. C-130. destroyed, all this kind of stuff. And our reputation is in the tank and Reagan gets elected. Now, Reagan gets elected in 1980 and our operational, again, reputation is in the tank. And Reagan gets elected on this idea of pro-America, we're going to bring all this back.

We had sold a bunch of American equipment, F-16s and F-15s, to the, the Israelis and they use U.S. equipment to go and do this raid on the reactor, gosh, what was that? Osirac, is that right? I don't want to, I don't want to, the Israeli, yeah, June 7th, 1981 the Israelis destroyed this Iraqi nuclear reactor and it is

you know operationally it is a master stroke it was denounced by the U.S. at the time but everybody was like, wait a minute they used F-16s and F-15s to go bomb this and took it out

and there was a sense in which we wanted, you know, again, one thing I left out, three-mile island. I mean, I'm telling you, the late 70s under Carter were just a disaster. You probably remember some of this, Pete. I'm older than you, but you probably remember a little bit of this. And there was a sense when, I mean, you remember when this Oster Reactor raid happened and everybody's like, it's kind of like the raid on in Tebby. There was a certain portion of the populace that was like, well, that's pretty, pardon me, but kind of badass. And, and, and, over time we ended up wanting to borrow from that reputational and operationally and and so we this is where

our greater partnership started under LBJ but really magnified under Reagan because of this operational excellence that we wanted to participate in to do whatever to bring the operational reputation of our our armed services and our intelligence services to bear. So that's how we got to where this is. And it just never stopped. It's only amplified. Now, no, that was 20 minutes of me monologing, but I want people to have this historical of understanding

where it wasn't just one day we decided that the Israelis were going to be joined at the hip. it was a result of this historical kind of mess that we got ourselves into and we saw partnering with them. I say we, the ruling elite saw as a way to reputationally borrow some of their excellence because we were in a mess at the time. Did we need to do that? I don't think so.

But it was kind of a shortcut. And it just never has ended. Well, and you know, and you can also make the argument that if it weren't for the Cold War, you wouldn't have had that reputation. We wouldn't have been looking for, you know, because, I mean, what did the Cold War give us? First of all, World War II guarantees Russia's existence because we fight on the side of Russia. Well, we have, Pete, Pete, real quick. I'm sorry, USSR, not Russia. We finance the Soviets.

The Soviets were done without FDR and Lindleese. They were done. The Germans would have absolutely destroy them, and they probably start starving to death in Moscow. We absolutely give them. I'm making it sound like we have boots on the ground with them. We didn't have boots on the ground with them, but we finance their whole war.

Absolutely. And again, I think without that, they cease to exist as a political reality. And I say that as one, man, I've got a Russian aunt. I've got Russian cousins. That's a long story. But I love Dostoevsky. I have no problem with the Russian people. Are they a little different?

Sure. Of course they're different. They're Eastern. But I don't have any problem. Soviets, I got no. no time for Soviets or Marxist sympathizers. I mean, I struggle with Carl Schmidt's encouragement not to dehumanize when it comes to Soviets.

Right. So the, so what we're looking at now is, is we're basically fighting a war for the country that you think may have assassinated one of our. presidents. Truman's daughter says that they tried to assassinate him. Yeah. Yeah, Truman was, Truman was, uh, uh, the, the level of, I don't want to speak historically out of line. And I want to be respectful because Truman made some very hard decisions. I think he did the best he could. but the attitude, I don't think we have any modern analog

to the attitude of, or maybe we do, and I'm just missing it, of the attitude that Truman and LeMay had for anything that wasn't just kind of baptistic American. You know. Well, yeah, I mean, he,

famously, and this is, this this happened Emmanuel seller who later opened up the gates of Toledo into the United States heart seller for those playing at home it went into

Truman's went into the Oval Office banged on the banged on the resolute desk and said if you don't recognize the state of Israel we're going to run you out of the city yeah so okay I mean

And the and the issue not the issue but I think people don't have enough of a respect for the the

the a vast majority of the fellow travelers of the Marxist fellow travelers were there was a sense in which you know Marx, was raised some kind of Lutheran, I guess, but was Jewish ethnically.

And there was a sense in which Marxism was viewed by many as this way to overcome waspy dominance in America. Is that fair? I don't want to overstate that. It's absolutely, it's absolutely fair. Yeah, it's absolutely fair. I mean, after World War II, when everything started falling apart, everybody's like, oh, the national socialists were socialist. Look, it's in their name. Everybody was calling themselves a socialist after World War I. Everyone was calling themselves a socialist. And it meant different things to different groups. I mean, Mussolini was literally a socialist before the war. And then, you know, fascism takes hold. He embraces more. of the genteelie kind of fascism. But yeah, I mean, it was obvious that it was used to displace was power. And I'm one of these people who is like, look, Christians rule over Christians, Jews rule over Jews. That's right. Muslims rule over Muslims. I don't want anyone other than a Christian being in the leadership of my country. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's just,

That's just the way I feel. And Jews should want, and look at what you, I mean, oh, well, we, we have, we have Arabs in the Knesset. Yeah, but they can't get a majority. They'll never get a majority. You won't allow it. You want to be ruled by Jews. Muslims want to be ruled by Muslims. Well, and that's the way.

And that's the, that's the, that's the, that's both the argument against empire, right? And where empire has actually succeeded. you allow for that local rule, right, that it's a light touch, so to speak, in theory. The Muslims, you know, the Muslims actually did that. If you study their... The Ottomans? Yeah, well, they, when they would go and conquer,

even in Spain, in Spain, the caliphate there, they didn't even interact. act, they actually put the, basically made the Jewish population policemen over the Christians. And if you go read a book by Bernard Bachrock, he talks about how horribly that went and how the Muslims had to step in and say, hey, stop abusing the Christians. Yeah. We need these people to grow our food. We need to collect taxes from them.

And you can't. And you can, so there's historical precedent for what we're going through right now. Interesting. That's an, the, the politics of that area and era, I only know not enough to speak cogently to. I've studied more the, the philosophical and theological impacts of converso and, and Islamic transmission of the classical texts. I've studied that more. But the actual boots on the ground, you know, what you're talking of, I can't speak it. You know, I'd sound like an idiot speaking to it. So that's interesting, though. I need to check out that work. Yeah, it's early medieval Jewish policy in Western Europe.

It's a really good book. Forteum University professor. Interesting. Well, let's get back because I think this bears a lot of fruit. and it goes beyond just this disaster that we're in. Let's kind of really quick summarize the rest of what Augustine said about just war, because I think whether you agree with whether, whether you agree that Augustine should still be the ruling rubric for us today or not,

I think you at least need to know this is the cultural theological, and political foundation of the West. And so it behooves us to just refamiliarize occasionally. Okay, how do we get here? Where were we and how do we get here? We already talked about last resort, legitimate authority, a just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. What is the wrong that we were suffering?

the United States at the hands of the Iranians. I am I'm asking honestly, Pete, maybe you can help me. But what's the wrong? For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause. Got no issue with that. Just war can only be fought with the right intentions.

Okay, so now, so we've got last resort, legitimate authority, redress of a wrong suffered. Okay, number four, a war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. In other words, lost causes are not okay. You don't send your own blood and treasure to a lost cause. That is evil. That is wrong.

And I'm sorry, but I love our fighting men. They're our best. But I don't see how we win this. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't want Americans to die or get hurt doing this, become maimed or anything like that. But when you look at just war theory, and this is what Christendom has used as its benchmark, you know, since it was written for 1,500 years now, there is no, it fails here. And the best thing, the best thing, if Trump wants to consider. continue with his bluster, his delusional proclamations like Iran can't even protect itself anymore,

and they go and shoot down an F-15 and allegedly the rescue helicopter as well that went looking for them. Then obviously, I'm just across the line that another combat plane crashed in the Persian Gulf, that was at 140 my time, so about a half hour ago, that came across the wire. Yeah. So if we're, I mean, I don't want this to be happening. Let him be, let him continue to be delusional and say, oh, we won and just bring everyone home. That's it. There's no reason. Israel can't fight this on their own. Iran gets to, you know, the Persians get to stay in power. They get to control the Straits of Hormuz. We try to figure out a way to, get that open again so that just French freighters aren't the only ones going through and Chinese and freighters aren't the only ones getting through. And I mean, just fix this. There's no, look, you can't win.

You can't win against Iran. Everyone knows this in history. Everyone knows. The only time the Persians ever lost is when they went and tried to stretch their empire. That's the old. But no one ever won on, no one ever defeated Persia. I mean, I'm sorry. It's just you're not, this makes absolutely no sense. And the, the only thing that is keeping this going at this point is jingoism. I mean, that's it. No, you're exactly right. Looks like the second plane was a wardhog, an A10,

went down in the golf. That's my favorite. That's my favorite plan. It's bad. Fairchild Republic. Anyway, the pilot was rescued out of the Gulf. Okay. Let's get through this before you get rid of me here. Okay, so last, last war, just war. Only is a last resort, only if it's waged by a legitimate authority and legitimate. What does legitimacy mean? Legitimacy in the classical understanding is one who represents his people.

That's what legitimacy really means. Okay. So legitimate authority, last resort, legitimate authority, redressing a wrong suffered has to have a reasonable chance of success. The ultimate, number five, the ultimate goal of a just war is to reestablish peace, not destroy the enemy, to reestablish peace. You only fight as long as it takes. to reestablish peace because civilization comes by order, and order comes by peace. And the only way that you can,

the only way that you can reestablish peace is through negotiation. That's right. And if you're killing the negotiators, if you're targeting the leadership, if you take out the, I mean, by, by, if any way you look at it,

It seems like the Ayatollah was sort of a wimpy guy, old wimpy guy, who was like, you know, had a fatwa against nuclear weapons, was like, would actually say some really cringy, had some really cringy posts on like almost liberal kind of posts on Twitter. And, you know, this, why would you, if you go and kill that guy and you kill, you know, his family, while the remaining family, I mean, I don't know. I get this idea that, you know, if you kill my family,

I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life trying to make, trying to repay you for that. Yes. And that's another thing about this war. This is why I used the term jingoism. They went and attacked Iran. And as soon as Iran started fighting back, that was a bad thing.

Like, oh, Iran's fighting back? Why are they doing that? You had people saying that. Like, you had, like, there were people on TV. They were supposed to just sit and take it. Yeah. And here's another thing that just war, that there should be added to just war,

should be amended. Yeah. If you're using the excuse of a country, 6,000 miles away that they did something to us 50 years ago, that's a way different excuse than Iran being upset in 1979 that you overthrew their duly elected president, you know, earlier. That's something that's affecting them. That's, that's something that's affecting them continually on their homeland. That's right. The Marines getting killed in those barracks as horrible as that

was. You don't get to come back 50 years and go, yeah, we're going to start. start a war and that's going to be one of these. We're going to wipe out Lebanon. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. No, it gets a great point. All right.

So your ultimate goal has to be to reestablish peace. The violence used number six. The violence in the war. The violence used in the war must be proportional to the, excuse me, to the injury suffered. I'm still wondering what the injury was. was that we suffered, but I don't think total alliteration. It wasn't total obliteration. Yeah.

Yeah, allegedly the Iranians were trying to assassinate Trump. Well, yeah. Well, then you know who would have known is Joe Kent? Because he's in charge of that intelligence, because he was head of the national counterterrorism unit or, you know, sinner. Anyway, don't get me started. I know the CIA and the FBI were playing a game with Trump. I do know that from personal, once removed testimony from a friend who visited with the president.

So, but I won't get into that. So, and number seven, the weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and not. non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war. And every effort, will civilians die? Will there be occasional collateral damage? Yes, but every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. We are, which one of these seven principles are we following? I mean, you can make the argument that Trump is a legitimate authority, at least for a short term. You can make that argument. Well, I mean,

away from our near abroad, I have, I have, I have, I have questions. Do you think Augustine, do you think Augustine would see legitimate authority as

Christian authority? You know what? That's a really, in the city and, in the city, you know, city of God. City of God.

I almost said city and man. That's Strauss. Very different. you know that's interesting his understanding of you know he had a prophetic something that I absolutely think we need to recover a prophetic understanding of the role of the church with regards to informing the state or the magistrate what good and evil is in other words without the church

can the is the state even could it can even conceive, have a conception of what good and evil is, could it act wisely? And so, um, so in that sense, I think that's kind of where Augustine's coming from on that. But that's a really, that's a really good question. There's probably experts in, in his thought that would, uh, that would have better, you know, understanding of that. Even if it doesn't have to be a Christian. Having Christian, you know, advisors would be nice. I think, I think a female pastor. Historically Christian. I think a female pastor doesn't live up to that. She's a heretic. So, I mean, I don't even want to. She's an insane person. Yeah, she's, we don't even have to get to

the propriety of a female pastorate. We don't even have to get to that for for her. No, that's insane. And if that's his Rasputin, we're in real trouble, right? But other than number two, I don't see how we are following any of this. It's not a lot. It wasn't a last resort. It's, what's the wrong suffered that we're redressing? There's no reasonable chance. It doesn't say there's not a chance of success. There's always a chance that, you know, it's the U.S. military. There's a chance. I don't think it's a reasonable chance of success. Our ultimate goal clearly, by the very words of the president and the secretary of war, the goal isn't to reestablish peace.

It's utter destruction. Bombing back into the Stonehenge. And the violence isn't proportional to any theoretical injury suffered. And the weapons that we're using, I mean, we were dropping, we've been dropping minds. in residential areas. Now, the primary target of those mines was in was to limit the ability for mobile launchers to be used. I get it, but it's not cool putting mines in neighborhoods

where you can turn mom and kid and pets into red mist. That's just, that's not okay. And ultimately, like you said, I mean, like we started with, our partner in this deal has been making a habit of assassinating our negotiating those across the table from us. So I'm at a real loss for this. And again, I'm someone who voted, has voted for our president three times.

If he was running against, you know, if he was running a fourth time and it was Newsom or Cortez, or whoever, you know, some leftist, I'd grip my teeth and vote for him again. But this is, but I can say that and also be fully against this. And, and be fully against this and hope that we don't have any of our boys die. And I know we got women over there too. That's another topic for another day. But you know what I mean.

But look at all the, look at the destruction we've had. All these airframes lost, all these plat defensive. platforms lost that the you know it's just it's showing the asymmetric nature of modern warfare that it's very very very easy to cheaply defend when your when your opponent is very extended you know so all the aircraft carriers in the world don't do you a ton of good if you can't get any more than 600 notical you know 700 nautical miles from your target anyway I go on and on I've beaten that dead horse, but I think it's important that the historical background that we've gone over to explain, how do we get here? What does our cultural foundations say about this?

How does it inform us? Can we get back to that? Are we just going to abandon it all and be functionally, you know, again, I've got friends who are Jewish, but are we going to be functionally modern Talmudic about this? this, which is Eastern, not Western. Just like you said, Pete, I've got a real problem with that. I am proudly, you know, Western Christian. I think it's the greatest civilization that has ever been on the face of the earth, greater than Rome, greater than Athens, greater than the dynasties in the east, greater than Alexander's great empire.

And we're throwing our cultural heritage away and not just by importing the world, but by waging war in this unsurious, unwise, immoral, and unchristian manner. The old thing about laying down with dog and getting fleas. We've gotten the fleas. Yeah. I mean, we, we've gotten the eastern, we've gotten the Talmudic fleas. Yeah. Oh, we killed civilians.

Oh, they shouldn't have been there. Yeah, we're going to mow the, hey, it's your job to mow the lawn. Yeah. Do you think you're, have you spoken about this whole idea of mowing the lawn on your show? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. The, the, the whole thing is, is that. And then it's like, well, you don't hold, if you're, if, if you're okay with having, targeting civilians, and I guess 9-11 was fine. Oh, no, but they can't do it to us. Oh, so it's not a universal principle. It's just a you principle, right? It's like, come on. Come on.

Yeah. Stop it. Be a human. Be an adult. You know, be, be, if you're claiming the West, if you're claiming to be Western, act like it. Just don't, stop it. Stop it already. This is a cluster. You know what. And we can't keep going. And it's Israel's only hope for a long-term safety is being Western because it jumps in, it continues down this path. Trust me, the next, let's say Cortez gets elected, your next president. Lord have

mercy on us, but you think she's going to go along with this? You think the modern Democrats are going to go along with all this nonsense? The Israel's only hope for for a long-term health in existence is to get its west on, which it doesn't seem like it's ready to do. And you know what? Yeah, I know we got to go. We can talk, you know, Netanyahu and that whole Lycud deal, They're not. Okay, I'm going to say something. I don't want to get myself in trouble. But let me just say this.

That's an atheist Polish guy. You know? Well, it's as Thomas. It says Thomas says, really, if you believe the Bible, Jews don't exist anymore because they don't have a temple to sacrifice sin. They have no way to propitiate their sins. That's right. Well, I mean, Thomas is a, is reform like I.

I am. So, I mean, he understands that that propitiation, expiation. But yeah, it's a, I have no problem. And I really don't have, I have no problem with the faithful, serious Jew who is a spiritual, truly trying to follow all those inconsistencies that you, me and Thomas would say exist. regardless, if it's a group of peaceful people trying to follow their faith in and amongst themselves in the 1967 borders or the 1948 borders or whatever, then I'm okay with that. I don't have, but that's not what's going on now. You have materialist socialists who are honestly in memetic, in a, in a, in a, a Girardian fervor following down this memetic path of those who they have rightly, you know, rightly demonized, but they're becoming like that which they've demonized forever.

And it's Gerard top to bottom. It's sad, but what they're doing is they're squeezing out the ability for the peaceful, spiritual, and I'm not talking about. about the khabad or any of that stuff i'm talking about just the faithful normal jewish guy to to have a homeland and follow out his faith they're making it impossible for that guy and that's sad that's sad i think is silly too but i understand that a lot of people believe in it and they want to have places where they can peacefully worship their understanding of allah i got no problem with that but but just like you know, the Wahhabis made it pretty difficult for those guys. This ruling class of Israelis is making it pretty hard for that peaceful Jew right now.

And that's sad. And so I just pray that some sanity can be brought to Israel. Or we just say wash our hands of them. But it doesn't look like that's going to happen under Trump for whatever reason. tell people where they can find your work. The American Mind, published by the Claremont Institute, and I love those guys. They do great work at Responsible Statecraft,

which is a publication of the Quincy Institute and American Reformer at My Substack, the Eyes of Appellees, Ron Dodson. dot substock.com? That was a really good substock this morning. No, thank you. I shared it around.

Well, I mean, it's a very important subject to think that even if you're preparing, even if you're doing everything that you possibly can to prepare for an eventual downfall or catastrophe or change, that you can do everything that you think you've done correctly and still not be the ones that come out on top. That's right. That's right. that volatility um

volatility has greater cost to those on the margin and and always declares the most adaptable the winner. And that neither one of those things looks very good for the U.S. right now. Um, so those are my big takeaways. Now you don't have to read my substack. Go read my substack anyway.

Uh, and then I'm on, it's shockingly short for, own. Thank you, Pete. Imagine, yeah, I've never been, I've never been, uh, I'm quite loquacious. I will, I will fully own that. All right, man. Thank you very much. You bet always a pleasure to be with you. Support Pete. Subscribe. Thanks, man. See you.