The Ricochet Podcast - Kissinger's Legacy

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

Henry Kissinger is gone after a century on Planet Earth. The most influential diplomat of the last fifty years, he's never been short of fierce criticisms from both the left and right. The great war historian Victor Davis Hanson returns to the Ricochet Podcast to give a careful review of the controversial emissary. Plus Lileks, Robinson and Long are reunited after a couple weeks to evaluate Thursdays much-touted DeSantis/Newsom faceoff and they give their early impressions of Argentina's triumphant Milei and the seemingly vindicated Geert Wilders.

Oh, Palm Beach! Excuse me, sir. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Yes, they're back. I'm James Lilacs, and today we talk to Victor Davis Hanson about Henry Kissinger.

Life, legend, and all those are the things that Victor's great at talking about. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Have we been correct in pushing for the expansion of NATO? I was opposed to taking in Ukraine and Georgia. I believe the position of Ukraine is so sensitive. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him, excuse me. We never get bored. Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet podcast. It's number 668. Wow. How we get that far? Well, as they say in public radio, thanks

to people like you. If that is, you are a member of Ricochet. If not, go there, check it out. You'll want to join. That's ricochet.com, your home for the most stimulating conversations and community on the center right web. Well, on the heck on the whole web. It was founded, there should be patriotic music

and a flag rippling. There should be. An eagle alighting on my shoulder by Rob Long and Peter Robinson, who are with us back after a brief hiatus. Welcome, Rob and Peter. I think we're with us back after a brief hiatus. Welcome, Rob and Peter. I think we're with us. Oh, you know, Rob, Peter, they're still with us.

You know, not doing good. How are they doing? Not good. Yeah, exactly. Not good. But they're with us. They're kind of sentient. Peter seems to know when we enter the room.

Yes, exactly. You know, if I ever have to go into hospice, I want to go into the one that Jimmy Carter is going to, because apparently that is just a life preservation center. He's been there for longer than anybody else, I mean, for heaven's sakes, and good for him, although sad for him. Interesting week, news-wise, of people perishing and shuffling off the mortal coil. We're going to get to that a little bit later with the victory of Davis Hanson, but first, I thought you guys might want to warm over the leftovers

from the debate between two people who are not running for president. Or, you know, you know what I mean. Who are not their party faves, you know, at the moment. Gavin Newsom went up against Ron DeSantis and DeSantis had a few arrows in his quiver, the poop map.

Gotta love that. The father-in-law who moved to Florida. It quiver, the poop map. Gotta love that. The father-in-law who moved to Florida. It's kind of a nice line. And other things. And people looking back saying, Gavin Newsom looks like the guy that you would like president because he looks like president. Or he looks like the devil. Take your choice.

And DeSantis is just not as natural a politician and hence probably won't make his impression on the American mind I don't know depends what people are looking for it's a big country depends what do you guys think I thought you summed it up beautifully just then yeah well then let's move along right then okay I'm sorry go on well I mean it seemed to me that DeSantis had so much more powerful an argument to make you just keep coming back again and again and again to the notion that people are leaving California and moving to Florida.

That's really the whole debate right there. It doesn't matter what... And even at that, DeSantis seemed to be on the defensive. He's just... Let's put it this way. If this debate had any immediate political importance, it was Ron DeSantis' last chance to light a fire under his candidacy, and he didn't do so. It was still a better debate than any debate we've seen. I found Gavin Newsom so smarmy. But of course, I live in California. I'm in a permanent state of agitation against the man anyway.

For two people who represent, just who are the representatives of the two opposed ways of governing, there was just too much shouting and smarm and Hannity might not have been the best moderator. and I don't know, I thought to myself, how could you possibly keep control in this debate with Gavin Newsom there determined not to answer questions, to talk over this? The only way you could have done that is if both sides had agreed that Hannity would have the right to turn off a microphone, and obviously the Newsom people refused to do that. So it wasn't the debate that I was hoping for. It was good enough in the sense that it gave people a fair view of these two different men and their two different governing philosophies, but

Gavin Newsom got away with much more than he should have, and Ron DeSantis accomplished much less than he needed to do. that's sort of my view of it rob do you agree and do you agree that perhaps it doesn't matter if desantis takes iowa because that would change the momentum completely well i mean i think i think he needs a win i mean the political argument and the debate conversation are kind of two different things i mean i don't know to what extent anybody um who is on the i don't i don't know to the extent that anybody's actually on the fence um you know there's just a bunch of trump voters and they don't seem to want to not vote for trump my my feeling my feeling is they should they should vote for trump but

republicans should nominate trump and let's just see how it goes um that's what they want to do they should you know i consider i think it's a suicide pact but okay that's that they want to do. They should, you know, I consider I think it's a suicide pact. But, OK, that's that's up to them. You don't understand. Trump is the only guy who can drain the swamp that is so powerful that it will keep him from winning the presidency. Yeah, right. As we talked before the before the podcast, the swamp, I consider the swamp the federal bureaucracy and i can't imagine any any president if living president and living memory who who who gave up his presidency to more of the federal bureaucracy than donald trump donald trump basically handed over the keys to the country in the economy to in the last year at least in the light yeah to the federal health bureaucrats before that as has been demand as now we don't have to litigate this has been demonstrated the vaunted trump economy pre-COVID wasn't great either.

By the way, the COVID economy was his too. 2019, the economy shrank because of his stupid steel tariffs. That's now, you know, those are stats we now have. So, you know, we don't need to litigate Trump. But what was sort of cheering and depressing about the debate was, what was depressing about it was just how rusty everybody is at having an actual debate about an actual thing. I mean, if there are two greater choices in America than Florida versus California, I can't think of them they seem to embody very different ways of of thinking about what a government's supposed to do very different ways i think about what economy is supposed to do very different ways of figuring out how to like revitalize your economy right um we should be

having those debates that's what the country should be deciding in november 2024 and so but the depressing part about it was that everybody seems really rusty it was not a very good debate um and we're not going to hear that again we're actually we're all going to go and vote in 2024 and we're not going to have this very very important right thoughtful um uh i don't know what airing out of two very different visions about what kind of an america and what kind of an american government we should have it was it now that i think about it it was more revealing than i felt at the time in at least one regard gavin newsom gavin newsom really did not make an argument for his model he was there to attack and smear and obfuscate.

He viewed it as an entirely political encounter. I don't know whether he studied up on this, but he used the same technique that then Vice President Biden used against Paul Ryan, interrupting him, talking over him. So even Gavin Newsom, the governor of the state of California, demonstrated that the people who champion that model, champion it for reasons of power politics. The teachers' unions are behind them. Certain minorities are behind them. They're not going to make an argument about it because even Gavin Newsom, eloquent may not be the glib, let's put it this way. The man is good with words. Intelligent, good with words.

He made no... He lacks any conviction in his own model. That was revealing. Yeah, also, don't you feel like... But only 20 hours later. Don't you feel like deep down, Gavin Newsom kind of thinks there's a non-trivial chance

between now and, I don't know, Labor Day 2024 that he is going to be the Democratic nominee for president. Oh, absolutely. Yes, of course. Absolutely. You could just see it in his smug little, hey, and look, and this is like, this is his dress rehearsal. All the Democrats now can see him. Wow, he went into the lion's den canady and and and ron dos santos and look at he and he he was insulting and and uh pugnacious and

i don't know it just feels to me like beauty pageant time for him he reminded me there was one the one time i sat in the owner's box i knew a rich guy who then owned a share of the San Francisco Giants. And when Barry Bonds was on deck warming up, nobody looked at anybody else, including the man who was batting. They were behind, he was saying effectively to the whole crowd. His bat speed was so much faster than the man who was hitting at that moment. The crowd looked at him and it was as if he was saying, don't worry, don't worry, I'm next, I'm up. That's Newsom's attitude. Now, by the way, quick point on Iowa. The polls are overwhelmingly in favor of Trump.

And so I, like you, Rob, thought, oh, for goodness sake, let's just get this over with. And then a couple of nights ago, I had a conversation with an Iowan who has attended Iowa caucuses. And he said, no, no, no, be very, very careful. The old rule, the old joke in Iowa is that the Democrats hold their caucuses in the gymnasium. They all come with their minds made up and it's an athletic event. They try to shout each other into submission. But the Republicans, of course, the idea here is that they get together in schools, local high schools, which they often do, schools or churches, but the Republicans hold their caucuses in the library. It's a much more neighborly event. They do try to persuade each other. And he said, actually, people do come into the Republican caucus with a sort of notional first and second choice, but they're willing to talk this over

with their neighbors. They're willing to be neighborly about it. Votes do get shifted around. So, in that kind of environment, which is essentially unpollable, you can't poll what's going to come out of a conversation. Things could still happen desantis or haley maybe anyway i put that out there yeah i mean look i think iowa because i was always interesting i think it's going to be interesting um i mean full full disclosure i predicted that uh mike pence would take iowa so you know i, I'm not really the best political prognosticator, but I was very not that he's way too

conservative for me, but I was bullish on Pence, on Pence's chances. I think he dropped the ball, but that's, you know, I was very, you know, evangelical state. They should like a Pence, but I think Pence kind of tried to have it both ways interesting thing for desantis to do if he had another run at this or if the general does

indeed turn out to be the two of them is to compare the california of gavin newsom with the california of ronald reagan um because i think there's a i think you can probably find a few key differences in those places when it comes to economic diversity and energy and population and cleanliness and the rest of it. And it would remind people that Reagan came out of that milieu, and taking California values at that time to the rest of the country meant something different than it does now. I think everybody kind of gets that, that California, while it's always been a land of fruits and nuts and a place of craziness and experimentation and new beginnings and the rest of it, is now just more or less the poster state for DEI and various forms of social engineering that are designed to enrich a nomenclature of bureaucrats and not solve any problems at all,

which is obvious because the problems aren't being solved. That Newsom is more likely to be the sort of guy to say, we don't want you to be in your car. We want you to be in an electric vehicle if you must. And we're going to build high speed rail everywhere. To which DeSantis could point out exactly how California has done with high speed. For that matter, how California has done with anything, with anything. I mean, the fact that both states have a Disneyland is probably the only thing that you can draw between them as a parallel. I don't know.

But as somebody else was saying, no, you know, go the Rob route, nominate Trump, lose, and then quit Donald Trump for good, because that would be done. The only question is whether or not quitting Donald Trump for good would be sort of one of those things you have to taper yourself off or you have to just go cold turkey. Cold turkey, you know. I know. I know at this point. Nice. Sounds like it's something. Nice.

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You're going to love these things. And we thank Fume for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast with pleasure, VDH, the man, Victor. He's a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, authored more than 20 books, including most recently, The Dying Citizen. And he's got another one on the way, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation. It's set to be released May of next year, if we get there. We're going to talk to Victor about the book in a little bit, and thanks for joining us. Obviously, the question

we want to ask somebody like you who's followed these things and charted rise and falls of history and the like. Henry the K passed at 100, and I hate to say it, but he's being excoriated on Twitter. For some reason, people under 30 are really angry at Henry.

Reservoir of hatred there. I didn't know it existed. Judge the man. Give us an overview, failings, successes, and perhaps why he's so hated to this day by a certain cohort. Well, you know, it's very funny. He was probably the most influential American diplomat of the last 50 years, but he actually only held power for eight as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under Richard Nixon in that brief Jerry Ford period. So he didn't have ex-official power, but almost every president consulted him.

And even the stranger thing is they all felt they needed to consult him, but they didn't want to publicize that they consulted him. So if you were a democratic president, you thought that he had illegally, he had engineered the illegal bombing of Cambodia, or he had backed Pinochet, or he had sided with the Turks, or he had sided with the Pakistanis against India. So he was a war criminal. If you were on the right, you felt that he had opened, he triangulated against the Soviet Union by, you know, legitimizing Mao's 70 million dead in communist China.

And then he didn't want to defeat, as Reagan did, the Soviet Union, but he wanted to manage it, manage maybe their decline. So the right didn't own him, but then the people on both sides, whether you were Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama or Donald Trump, talked to him. So there has to be, why was that? And he gave you a cold, realistic appraisal of power, human nature. He was a very Thucydidean guy that believed that human nature was predictable across time and space. And what people said, and this is very Thucydidean, what the prophocets, as the historian called it, was one thing and the idea, the real motivation was another that's never expressed and he was the person who understands the real motivations.

That came into the Middle East when he kind of taught us that what the Arab countries said about the Palestinian Authority or Hamas was not what they felt. In other words, they would side with them publicly, but then privately they would tell us that, you know, Israel should destroy them. And that was the kind of realistic appraisal that got a lot of idealists very angry. Cynicism, I guess they would say. And did you like him, Victor? I only met him twice.

Really? Yes met him twice. Really? Yes, only twice. He came to a couple of lectures I gave, the Viston Lecture in the Manhattan Institute. And then I saw him at a person's home once. And he had a habit of writing authors. So when I wrote about Thucydides, I wrote the introduction to the landmark Thucydides. He wrote me a long handwritten letter. And then he wrote me, when I published a book on the Peloponnesian War, a handwritten letter.

And he was very interested in Thucydides and human nature. And I think that dovetailed with his Talleyrand and Bismarck and all. And what about the right-wing critique with which I associate myself? Yes, yes. You were an anti-Kissinger person. Well, I was a Reagan person, and it meant viewing Kissinger, saying this is a complicated figure, and that he and Nixon felt we were playing a losing hand, and that the decline that had to be managed was our own. And then Reagan came along and said, well, no, actually, we have all the cards in our hand. Let's start playing them. Of course, I'm oversimplifying. Then you've got Neil Ferguson saying, well, the Kissinger detente was useful. It bought us 10 years and we really needed that decade. What do you make of all that? Let's put it this way. Kissinger never felt comfortable with Reagan as witness that in his last book, latest book, and we now know last book,

which was titled Leadership, and he did profiles of what was it, half a dozen leaders. The contemporary leader he profiled was Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan, I think Ronald Reagan's name may appear twice in the entire text of 400 words. I bought the book and I read it and I noticed that. But I think there were two things about that. One was he had a prejudice against people outside of the bipartisan establishment. They didn't have the proper cursus and norm of education and billets in the state department whether it was the left or the right. Reagan came from

well outside that establishment. So in his way of thinking these were populist yahoos and they weren't sober and judicious and they didn't understand the intricacies of diplomacy and backroom deals and all this they They were too over, maybe even too Trumpian. But that being said, that was one thing, I think. And the other was, you know, he wrote so, in his early career, so much about nuclear strategy and the use of nuclear weapons. And then later on, he was one of the people who wanted to ban them, you remember, along with a number of them.

And I think he was so wedded to the idea that, and he was right, nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union had so many of them, that when Reagan came in and said, I want to defeat, it's very simple, when they lose,

he thought, oh my gosh, this guy is a California populist, he's an actor, he comes in, and he thinks that the world of nuclear weapons is sort of like a cowboy movie, and you can win and lose, and you can't. There are no winners or are no losers because of nuclear weapons. And that was kind of ironic because he actually wrote a book about how you could use

nuclear weapons in a limited fashion if you had to. So there were certain prejudices there. But when you look at his intellect, I mean, there's one other thing I should say is that maybe you met him, Peter, but William Shawcross that wrote that book, Sideshow, about the bombing of, he had a spouse that would go to Stanford Medical and he would come and talk to me, and he's a wonderful guy. Shawcross would. Yes. And he wrote the most damning appraisal, if you remember, about Kissinger called Sideshow. And basically...

Worse than Christopher's book? Than the Hitchens book? The Trial of Henry Kissinger? Only because it's not a diatribe like Christopher's. All right. But the point I'm making is that he used to visit me at Hoover, and he retracted that entire book once he got older, and he looked at Cambodia and what the Cambodian, who did the actual slaughter in Cambodia and the genocide and the nature of the North Vietnamese regime, and he kind of,

and I think he even formally apologized to Kissinger for that book. And I asked Christopher about that, because, you know, Christopher came to Hoover, and I'd see him in Washington. Christopher Hitchens now. Yeah. I'm not saying that Christopher was repentant, but he... Yeah. I think he would say that you know how he had that flirtation

with the Bush administration during the Iraq War? Yes. He was talking to Rumsfeld and all those guys. Right. In that context he didn't have that animus for kissinger as he used to that he respected his right so the only um the only kissinger anecdote i can i mean there's tons of witticisms that he attributed but the only one thing i think was relevant here was that um and i heard this firsthand or secondhand or but firsthand somebody was there i said uh

somebody asked kissinger you know you're you're blamed for all these things it's an enormous list of specific crimes and things that henry kissinger is responsible for um what do you think about that and kissinger i guess was in some expansive mood he kind of laughed and he said i'm paraphrasing here it's like even i don't think that much of myself which is sort of true right i mean there is a kind of a childish i mean it's probably too short this is kind of a childish attitude. But also an image from Kissinger. But I mean, the childish attitude from people thinking that this one big bad man did all these big bad things. No, you're absolutely right.

It was reductionist, especially on the left. And I think you're absolutely right about it. The other thing I do think, though, I think it did get to him because I know so many people who had criticized them and got a call from him. You know what I mean? He would actually call them and argue with them and these were pretty out there people. And I know that William Shawcross and Christopher told me that, that he had actually talked to them and was angry at them for what they had written. In the case of Shawcross, he formally apologized once he heard the Kissinger argument. And I think what he, he was trying to tell everybody that the United States was, I guess he had a deep patriotic love, deserved a preeminent place,

and he was frustrated sometimes that we didn't exercise our power, or we underestimated it, and we were not directing affairs globally, and they weren't exercise our power or we underestimated it and we were not directing affairs globally and that and they weren't in our interest so he when he looked at the iraq war he was not for it originally but then once it got it went south he was not for losing it he reminded me a lot of matthew ridgeway eisenhower called ridgeway, same thing as Kissinger, and said, I want to go into Vietnam and save the French. And Ridgway said, if you go in there, it's a mess. And then LBJ came in and said, I'm going

to go in there. And Ridgway said, do not do it. Then four years later, after Tet, he called up Ridgway and said, I want to get out. And he said, there's only one thing worse than getting in. There's only one thing worse than a stupid war and that's losing it.

And that was kind of Kissinger's attitude about all of these debacle. That was the second George Bush administration kind of in a nutshell. Yes, and he was horrified. Kissinger said things about the, I think he was horrified about the Afghanistan at the end of his life to see

that humiliation. I don't want to spend all the time on kiss your but he does seem like he's a like it's it's amazing when you realize that a guy is so um powerfully engaged but you know part of the american century that when he i mean obviously everybody who's going to die is 100 years old but the obituaries are incredibly incredibly elaborate i mean i read i mean it took me about 20 minutes to read the new york times of it for you today but this thing had been on ice for a while right right um the the what i find striking about kissinger is that this is incredibly strong guy this very very well you know educated thoughtful strategic character. In the Nixon tapes, the ones that you can go and listen to,

I've heard a lot of them, he's the worst kind of obsequious brown-noser. Like, it's kind of shocking. Am I just being naive? Just the... Well, he was very young then. He's just a humoring and insane person. Is that a humoring grandpa? You know, like,

this is a wonderful speech, Mr. President, all that stuff. It's crazy. I think part of it was that he was a Rockefeller guy, and he was an academic, and the Nixon people hated academics. So when Rockefeller was out of the picture and didn't do well in the primary, then Nixon, he never thought Nixon was going to call him up. And Nixon called him up, and he was shocked, and he went from, remember he said at the same time, the only thing, what did he say about, academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. And so he got out of that world, and he never really went back. And then I think you remember the first two years, I of the nixon appointment of him as national security advisor harvard had a big debate on whether to you know not let him come back and it was kind of like he put his hands to his mouth

kind of oh my god they're not going to let me come back oh heavens i'm just going to be the only national security advisor and secretary of state at the same time. Yes. So I think he, and I think he was afraid of Nixon. And I think he had an enormous respect for Nixon's intellect. But I think he did not want to get on the wrong side of Nixon. And he was an academic that was out of place. Some of the weird things about him, he dated all those beautiful women. Yeah. Zaza Obor, Jill St. John

and all of those women. We forget that he was in the paper almost every day. He was a huge celebrity. In the 70s. The one thing I did admire about him among all the other things is when you read that three volume memoirs

he wrote, he wrote that himself. It was not guest written. And it's beautifully written, the prose. It reminds me of General Grant's memoir. I mean, it's... Darrell Bock He had Harold Evans edited every word. Peter Robinson Did he? I did not know that. Darrell Bock Kissinger told me that himself. I asked about it. He wrote it on longhand, and then it went to Harold, got typed up, and Harold Evans, the late editor, the late great editor, Harold Evans. Peter Robinson But it's well written, whoever did it went to Harold, got typed up, and Harold Evans, the late editor, the late great editor, Harold Evans.

Yeah, but it's right in whoever did it. Oh, yes, it is. No, no, no. There's no doubt about that. All his books have a certain ear. You can tell that the man had a problem for language. By the way, on the length of the obituary, reminding us of what a presence he was, I once asked Kissinger, I can't remember how on earth it came up, but to this day, in any event, I've never been able to understand why Eisenhower, during the Suez Crisis of 1956, cut the legs out from under the British and the French and the Israelis to help Nasser.

And so, I asked Kissinger about that, and he began his reply by saying, well, as I wrote at the time, 1956, and he was already a serious enough person so that he was publishing on events in the news. By the way, he himself had no explanation and also said it was a terrible error to undercut our most important allies and the hope of currying favor with the Arabs. The one on the SDI- He destroyed Anthony. Anthony Eden was a good guy. Yes, and Anthony Eden was gone within, what, six or seven months after that.

He was forced to resign. At a dinner at Bill Buckley's house, Kissinger, this is 1991 or 1992, right after the fall of the Soviet Union, Kissinger stood up and talked about a visit he had just made to the former Soviet Union, and he had sought out high-ranking former officials in the former country. And he said to a man, they said that what broke them was reagan's strategic defense initiative so it's very interesting he never felt comfortable with reagan and ignored him in his last book on leadership but he understood reagan's achievement there don't you think he was you know they make fun of in realist um policy, they make fun of what they, I guess they use that word,

they use that left-wing word, intersectionality, but what happens in one place affects the other. He was a person who really said, he would say, and he wrote, if you get humiliated in Afghanistan, then Putin will go into Ukraine. If you let a Chinese balloon go across the United States, then they will go into Ukraine. If you let a Chinese balloon go across the United States then they will start threatening Taiwan. And the people had so discredited the domino theory that when he started talking like that in the 70s and 80s and he said that about to George W. Bush I know that for a fact when he said, you should not leave Iraq without it being

stabilized because da-da-da, Iran, all the others. That's pretty accurate, but we've kind of gotten away from that now. So, Victor, what do you make of the Neil argument that the Nixon-Kissinger achievement was to buy us time and that we needed that time. One sub-element of this, but it's a really important one, of course, is Vietnam. Yes, we lost in Vietnam, but they slowed down the loss, Kissinger and Nixon slowed down the loss and preserved Vietnam in such a way that other Thailand was able to rise while we were fighting in other words the dominoes the dominoes didn't fall we lost one big domino and then Cambodia went but other dominoes that might have fallen yeah what do you make of the argument that was taken from you remember the national review writer he was right wing and he turned left wing

he wrote the book the necessary, the Necessary War. Michael Lindgren. Right. That was taken right out of that. Remember, he made that exact argument that Vietnam had given us time and that we had stopped the onset of Southeast Asian Soviet dominance. And you buy it? You buy that i kind of buy it but only in the sense that uh i think what they meant was and i don't think they meant i i don't think they understood quite but

when reagan took on the soviet union it was a multi-faceted economic cultural social revolution he was he was saying i can take on the Soviet Union now because I'm going to have massive tax cuts. I'm going to unleash the economy. I'm going to bring back a traditional love of America. And I think, I don't know if those people are explicit or overt, but in that period of the 60s and 70s, when we had a regulated economy and we had the campuses

and the civil rights and the whole thing i'm not sure that we were capable of doing what reagan did i think for reagan to have the confidence to marshal the country because even when you were there when we were doing it remember they had all those hollywood movies the day after and about yes right and i don't think that the country was able it didn't have the confidence after Vietnam. It didn't have the economic wherewithal. So Kissinger and Nixon really did have a weak hand, and they really did play it as well as they could have. They had a lot weaker. Well, they had a weaker hand, but they were partly implicit.

Because, after all, Nixon gave us wage and, we won't mention the architect of that but they gave us uh wage and price controls and they they did not unleash and richard nixon created a lot of bureaucratic bloat but when reagan came in it was sort of we're going to re-examine everything and we're going to do it on the basis of what makes america powerful again and wealthy and united and proud and part of that agenda was obviously standing up the soviet union and i don't think he i don't think reagan could have done it if he had continued with the uh nixon jerry ford jimmy carter economic policies and i just don't think he would have been able to get the people behind him or he wouldn't have i mean when you get 784 the third half that last three quarters of 84 was an aggregate seven or eight percent increase in gdp you can do a lot when

that's happening yeah you can and when he said crazy things like i'm gonna have a 600 ship navy i'm gonna bring back the new jersey and the iowa and the missouri all these crazy things everybody thought he was nuts but he did and i think the soviet union were were freaked out by it i really do there's a story that um um reagan's at one point his erstwhile political advisor stew spencer and then his uh the return of stew spencer in 1980 says on his way flying to Detroit, to the RNC. And he had just been brought on. I mean, he had been in the deep breeze, the Nancy Reagan, you know, tundra for a while. And he'd just been brought back on.

And he walked to the front of the plane, and he talked to the governor again. He hadn't talked to the governor in 10 years, or close to that. And he sort of sat and said, so help me out, Governor. Governor Reagan. So for those of you under 90 on this podcast that's governor reagan he was governor of california before gavin newsom uh he says um so um i gotta ask why do you want to be president this is 1980 so there were hostages in iran and

there was a stagflation and there was a malaise in the country, and there was a defeat in Vietnam, and there was a general sense of a decline in the American century. Maybe it was over. And Reagan didn't even hesitate. He just turned to Stu and said, time to win the Cold War, Stu. Just like that. And so Spencer says there's nothing to say. So they got up and said, okay, well, I'll see you on the ground, Governor. And then there was a march to victory.

But in the midst of decline, when all the news was bad and all the lights were red or yellow, there was one guy on that plane saying, no, no, no, we're going to win. And here's how we're going to do it. And, you know, for somebody

and it was as you as it was multifaceted we're going to win on the economy we're going to win the culture wars we're going to win the republican party is going to be backed and we're going to get a dominant republican party again and that was part of that whole package but i i think if you look back and i read some of the obituaries that were pretty cruel but these people if you look at a guy who comes from a german jew who leaves in 38 right before the the last possible moment and then they come with nothing and then he goes to new york city college for a while or he's gonna count counting or something and then he goes into the army and then he comes back and somehow that guy

comes out of harvard it's harvard that makes him yes and then he and then he comes back and somehow that guy comes out of Harvard. It's Harvard that makes him. Yes. And then he's a brilliant guy and then he goes to work as a left-wing academic. His intellect is such that right-wing people want him and then he kind of really guides the Nixon administration. It's pretty amazing that a person had that spoken ability written ability analytical ability and energy and i was just thinking you know when

i fly overseas when that guy that guy was in his 60s and 70s and 80s and he was still flying all over the world and uh so the last time i talked to him i was at a private club in north california whose name will not be mentioned but he was in a wheelchair and he was giving this keynote and i was keeping away from him because people were swarming him and i was walking in maybe 10 weeks and he was all crumpled up he kind of shrunk you know right and he turned his head to the right and said and i liked that lucidity's book you wrote and he didn't say hello he didn't say i don't know if you knew who i was but he said that and so he had a twinkle in his eye and i i i think they i think we're better off the country's better off for having him. But I also think that in a weird way,

I think he helped Reagan because Reagan used him as a foil. You remember, this is to me, this is the lowest moment for Kissinger, for me. You can do with what you will with it, Victor. But you remember that Gerald Ford refused to receive at the White House a visiting Soviet dissident author, and that author's name was Solzhenitsyn, and that was on the advice of Henry Kissinger. That's appeasement. Don't get me started. There's just no other word for it. When we won't, President won't. Yeah, don't get me started, because there's two low points for me, one was the yom kippur war when he went

golda midi air said they're going to attack us in 24 hours and we're not going to be fully mobilized and if we preempt like we did in 67 we have a chance and kissinger said no you have to have the guilt on them and then when they were trying to resupply them remember they were playing cute games like biden kind of about resupplying israel and nixon finally lost his temper and said get anything that flies and send over there that was one thing the other thing is i was in greece during the invasion i had gone to cyprus it was a beautiful bella pais the northern cyprus i was a student in Athens in 73- Give us the year. 73, 74. And they invaded. The Turks invaded Cyprus.

They killed 20,000. 18,000 people were missing. Maybe 3,000 or 4,000 Greeks were slaughtered. 200,000 people were ethnically cleansed. This was our two NATO out eyes. Greece had just been liberated from the dictatorship, PASOK socialism. And the Greek people were saying to Kissinger, stop the Turks immediately. And we had the power to do that.

And we didn't do that. We knew they were coming in. And the attitude of Kissinger and the Nixon administration was, if you look at the assets of Turkey and you look at the assets of Greeks and you look at the PASOK angry because of our dictatorship support they're angry the Turks have a dictatorship basically that's friendly there's no it's a no-brainer all of the assets political military on the Turk side the Greeks don don't rate. We don't want to ostracize or alienate the biggest army in NATO. And the Greeks were just wild men that

started it anyway with the NOS system. It was crazy. And they just let them take it over. And it was very anti-Semitic. I was really upset because the Greek I think it was Taunea. I remember they had the headline Ho Hebraos Kissinger. The Jew Kissinger.

And it was so, the hatred in Athens was really venomous, anti-Semitic and angry, but I remember trying to defend him to Greek friends at my age. I was only 20, but I think we really missed that.

We should have been on the side of the Greeks for a lot of reasons. And you can see that today more than ever, given their subsequent trajectory. So there's a lot of things to criticize. But if you look at the ledger at 100 years, I think there's more positive than negative. If I can grind the gears here for a second, there's a new Napoleon movie out. Apparently, while it's well shot and beautiful to look at, it completely misses the character of Napoleon, misunderstands the age, gets a lot of things wrong, and is very sort of incomprehensible.

And I'm wondering if it's because, as a people now, we've just no concept of the 19th century. We don't find it relevant at all. But it is relevant, especially the crucible out of which Napoleon came. A movie about the terror, about 1789, about the Jacobins, would be tremendously relevant to these days. And at the time, it must have seemed to everybody as if the old world was completely falling apart into annihilation and chaos. Which brings us to your book.

Briefly, since I know that we have about 47 seconds left, if you could sum up. I know Peter's going to be doing an interview with you later that is going to be absolute must-listening to. But your book is The End of Everything, How Wars Descend Into Annihilation. And it's coming out next May. Just give me the odds on us not descending into annihilation by then. And if we did, what might it be from?

Well, they're very rare that a war usually ends, could be in a humiliating defeat like Nazi Germany, but the idea that an entire losing side as Carthage or classical Thebes or the Aztecs or Constantinople loses their religion, their culture, their people. They're either wiped out, enslaved, ethnically it's very rare, but it happens. And so in the epilogueogue i look at the traits that allow these to happen naivete overconfidence uh appeasement uh stupid resistant i talk a lot about the melian dialogue and thucydides same thing they're annihilated but my point is that i have a long epilogue maybe too long about certain vulnerable peoples the armenians three million the israelis 10 million the kurds and the greeks they have 50 000 square miles and there's only 10 million and they every

they've got this existential hatred of the turks who so my point is that i i try to give you a paradigm how it could happen especially in the age of bioweapons or nuclear weapons. Well, naivete, cultural decline, appeasement. Good thing we're not suffering from any of those. Yeah, so I try to, after I do the four case studies, I give you a paradigm how it happened across time and space, and then I apply it to some vulnerable areas today that could happen again. But otherwise it's pretty rare. It's hard to wipe out entire people. Hernan Cortes did and so did Mehmet II and so did Alexander the Great and so did

Scipio Aemilianus. One thing I'll just finish with, all of them who did that said they were men of letters and philosophers and they all said later in age they regretted it. I didn't mean to do that. Scipio, oh, maybe someday it could happen to us. Cortes, I never really wanted to destroy Tenochtitlan. Mehmet said, we could have used it. I'm the new Caesar. And so, they were all men of letters. So so it's kind of a scary that people who consider themselves intellectuals or enlightened military leaders are the most dangerous alexander in his ripe old age victor thanks for joining us today we got to go

somewhere and run and it's always been a pleasure and we hope to talk to you asap um about uh things in the world in your next book. It sounds great, you guys. Victor, use lots of sunscreen down there in Palm Beach. Yeah, careful. I'm called a black Swede, Peter. My family was dark Swedish, so I don't have that problem as you Anglo-Saxon. There's so many ways to unpack that, Victor.

Okay. Bye. And just a reminder, Peter, you are going to be speaking to VDH on uncommon knowledge about his book and going into depth for 45 minutes, for an hour or so. Again, we'll post the link to that when it's up in Ricochet, and Ricochet.com is where you ought to go. Well, since Rob's back, that means he's going to do his usual accounting of the places where Ricochet members meet in real life. Yeah, and last time I did this a few weeks ago, we were talking about maybe the spring, but of course, Ricochet members do not wait for spring.

There's one tomorrow, a meetup of Ricochet members tomorrow in the seattle area um rush babe 49 is putting on her annual chili party go to ricochet.com uh to the member section and look that up um flicker is fielding suggestions for places to meet while he visits georgia the peach state so if you live around there see if you can sway some ricochet members to head your way it'll be late december early january so those in the georgia area let's get together uh and of course chattanooga tennessee So if you live around there, see if you can sway some Ricochet members to head your way. It'll be late December, early January. So those in the Georgia area, let's get together. And, of course, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

This is January 14th. Meet Up King. That's great. We have to call him Meet Up King because he does. I don't know how many of these he's arranged. Randy Waivoda in Chattanooga is trying to start a meetup on January 14th. If you have not been to Chattanooga, and I, of course, have been to Chattanooga, you should go to Chattanooga. Chattanooga is one of the most interesting.

It's like the fourth biggest city in tennessee tennessee first of all is enormous but there are four great cities in tennessee well three in memphis um and chattanooga when memphis is a great city but it's not you know it's got it's got issues um but chattanooga is unbelievably beautiful and then when you go there and you realize just how vibrant and powerful and alive the Mid-South was for hundreds of years, and I mean even post-Civil War, it's a great city,

really interesting, and great architecture too. So, January 14th, Chattanooga. That sounds like a fantastic idea. Anybody who wants to come to Minneapolisneapolis of course i've got some recommendations and i might even show up no of course i'll show up that's what ricochet is all about i love the fact that uh rush babe 49 is having a chili party however many podcasts you listen to from the large institutions that claim to be your friend how many of them actually invite

you over for chili i would said that it is the the ricochet difference well there's a different wind blowing in various political cultures around the world. Argentina and Dutch people comes to mind, too. Javier Millet. Do I have that pronounced correctly? Is it Millet? Millet. Millet.

Actually, the first name would be Javier. Javier. Javier. That I'm sure of. The Millet. I think it is Millet, although it might also be Millet. Millet. Millet.

Millet. Yes, exactly. I like the way he shouts. I like his anger. I like the way he talks. And it's very chunky, and it's very forthright, and it's smart, and it is angry. But it's not angry in a sort of mad, puffed howard rourke i'm not going to take it anymore oh it's got a little bit of that too but it's meaty he's got what he says there's truth to it

and all of these pithy little lies now of course we all know that uh people like this get elected and then are instantaneously stymied because they're so far outside of the uh the bureaucratic norm that nothing can get done um but we're rooting for him aren't we aren't we guys oh i think so i think so yeah kidding me yeah argentina's at the stage he wants the falklands back so there's that well he's never listen if he can if he can turn argentina around he can have us yeah yeah that's mandatory for an argentine politician to say that, but I don't think he's going to be in a position to do anything about it nor, well, he is, he reminds me, he is what Margaret Thatcher would have sounded like if she were on some sort of drug that suppressed all inhibitions, right? Because we know Thatcher writes in her memoir that

she realized when she became conservative leader and had people briefing her on how to fix this piece of the economy, do this with the education, she realized that all the failures of Britain were now so interconnected that you couldn't reform anything without reforming everything. Yeah. that you couldn't reform anything without reforming everything. That's a fairly close paraphrase. James made the point that this is the kind of figure who gets elected and then immediately finds that he's thwarted, perhaps so.

But what the election itself indicates is that the country of Argentina, the people of Argentina, realize that something big needs to be smashed. Whether this is the man to pull it off, I don't know. Although I do know, I do have a friend here at Stanford who's from Chile, actually. And Millet is known within economists as a serious libertarian and an informed man and now we know that he's also a performer and a and a very successful politician we shall see but yes the answer is we're rooting for him he also looks like he should be a member of the british graphic design firm hypnosis in about 1972 rob what do you think yeah look i mean um what are their choices you know they've tried everything else so they may as well try you know sound um ludwig van mesean you know milton friedman

economics what what what if that works it's worked before um also look look i think a lot of these countries are at a crossroads i think you know i think holland is in the netherlands at the crossroad i was there last week um you could either have it you were there you were there when the election results i was not there when the election came in because i had already i left the day before but i was talking to dutch people and they were shocked do tell do tell well look you can i mean it's it's it's a it's a question that we have here, right? You can either have a very generous social welfare system, which Holland has had for years, that's been held together by a willingness to understand what Dutch society and cohesive Dutch society should be and is. Something that we in the United States would not accept, by the way.

We would find it too restrictive. um but they like it you can either have that or you can have um massive immigration from non-northern european countries you can't have both you just can't um you it's the same thing that a more honest governor of california would say certainly it's something that the that the mayor of new york city understands you can either have a very generous welfare state or you can have essentially open borders you cannot have both you cannot afford both you have to choose um and all gert wilders is a good village this is what we would consider to be a very liberal democrat here right um he's not talking about shrinking the state he's just talking about

closing the door um and and recommitting the netherlands to the dutch identity which um sounds grim you know it sounds scary sounds like like, you know, national socialism. But what it really means is that they have a very specific kind of society that we don't want to emulate in this country. We're much more free. We believe in much greater

opportunity, individual opportunity. And he wants to protect that. And you can't do that when you have massive immigration from non-Nthern european countries you couldn't and people but focusing entirely on what he's saying about turks and moroccans and people from north africa and muslims but if you wanted to bust up holland you could just import a lot of italians italians don't want to be in holland either either so it's not quite as dire as people

mention it or people are painting it but the the response is sort of the same about Trump there are too many parallels between builders and Trump being made they're not really that very similar

but the idea is that this has been an alarm bell for the establishment being made they're not really that very similar but um the idea is that this has been an this has been an alarm bell for the establishment and you what most people think of in the new york times and in the alchemy doc blot or whatever it is there the volkskrantz or whatever what most people think of that now we're alarmed at how large the right wing is getting. Whereas the alarm really should be, we should be alarmed at how far away we are from people and their immediate concerns. So when you hear liberals in the United States talk about, this is alarming, all these like,

the alt-right in America, that alarms, that's something that they feel like they need to squash. Whereas the alarm actually should be telling you, well, how far away are we from these people now? We're very far away. And I think that's what essentially the Dutch establishment discovered last Wednesday, was that they are very far away from the Dutch voter, which must be very disconcerting in a country where you know there's a huge amount of social cohesion there's a huge amount of of of of intra-class inter-class social class cohesion that the dutch people are dutch people are dutch people they are very very similar um and i mean that with all due respect you know i lived I lived in Holland as a kid, so I'm not, you know, no shade. But in the United States, when politicians are out of touch, like, yeah, you're out of touch.

It's a big country. You're going to miss stuff. In Holland, when you're out of touch, it's like, how far off are you? And, you know, that's just a different way of looking at it. The obverse, I guess. The other thing that strikes me is how small these countries are. Population of the Netherlands, a little under 18 million. Population of Hungary, a little under 10 million.

Norway, 5 million. Denmark, 7 million. Sweden, 10 million. And what do we know? Population trajectories are very hard to predict, but all the predictions are that by 2050, the population of Africa will have increased by a billion people. A billion people! And the population of all those European countries will have shrunk. Well, there are going to be some empty villages in the Netherlands and France and Italy that look very appealing

to some of those billions in Africa. And it's just astounding, to me at least, you can tell me what I'm missing, but it seems astounding to me that the people who run Europe have refused... If you're Dutch and you look at at these two we're a very small country we could lose our we could be overwhelmed we could lose our identity extremely easily and we can already feel it happening from the number of immigrants we've already accepted in the next 25 years we could simply be who's who what politician looks as though he's at least grab yeah he's saying have more kids and he's the only one seems it just seems to me it just seems to be an obvious question for any voter and one in any of these countries to ask to look victor orban he's the only one addressing what what seems to me as a

hungarian perhaps the major problem of the next generation he's the only one who's addressing it that that's just a political system working the way it ought to, and that this elicits shocks of howls of outrage is astonishing to me. It presumes that the leaders care about maintaining a Dutch identity. It cares that they presume about any sort of national character at all. Why would they when they can be part of a transnational apparatus that is well paid for and well taken care of and manages the decline? They're not interested particularly in national identity. If there's anything we've learned from the Progressive Project, it's that the idea of ethnostates in Europe is prima facie a bad concept, an evil concept. They are the only ones who are

not allowed to have their own little cultural enclaves. Everybody else in the world can have it. Nobody's looking at Somalia and saying, you know, the problem with you guys is that you're all Somali. You should be 17% Dutch. It was absurdity on the face of it. People self-segregate. They arrange themselves as they do. But they've redefined, they're so poisoned by the idea that national identity within language and culture and history and folkways and the rest of it is somehow about one half of a goose step away from the rise of the of the fourth reich that just decided to abandon the whole thing forever in the name of europe which means a set of values and ideas

that are completely to them divorced and and and uprooted from the cultures that produce them. They were handed down by the tablas by Moses and God. One thing before we got to go, Rob, because we know you have a hard out, as we like to say here, so finish up and then we'll leave. Oh, no, I was going to say the only issue here with Northern Europe and the Europeans is that they they don't like change they never have like change and so they but they convinced themselves that they just hunkered down but things won't change and the reality is what they need is they need more in Italy they need more Italians they need to have more kids are upside down on their population growth in Holland anymore Dutch people having children um they they probably

need to create a slightly bigger broader opportunity society for themselves um instead of the regulatory state that they have because you can't you know you can't pass a tax to or pass a law to outlaw tomorrow it's going to happen um and had they what they're now their their dark theory is well you know we'll be in charge and but we just import a bunch of people and they'll do all the work um that doesn't really that you have to be willing to shrink if you can do that you have to be japanese to do that the dutch can't do it and the italians can't do it um what they need is they need to they need to create a vibrant growing economy that encourages people to have children.

Right. And to move out of cities and to do economic opportunity activities that, you know, grow an economy rather than just sort of hold it steady while you import people from the global south to, I don't know, make your bitter ball and then your, you know, Kaiser Schmar and somewhere else. Right. Then when you wake up like Ireland and you find it's time to talk about these things, they've made it illegal to do so. It's been fun. We'll talk about this again more next week

and for the weeks to come. Peter, Rob, always a pleasure. You, the listener, can go to Ricochet.com and sign up. You can go to Apple and give us five-star reviews on the podcast. And you can go to Fume, F-U-M. Try Fume for that wonderful little product. Thanks to everybody who's been listening, and we'll see you all in the comments

at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. See you, fellas. Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.