The Ricochet Podcast - Root Causes and Summit Highs

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Noah Rothman returns ahead of Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin to give a foreign policy progress report of the president's second term. He gets into the fraught history of US-Russia negotiations, applauds the latest maneuvers in the Middle East, and applies a big-picture framing of the geopolitical status quo in response to the charge that collapse is imminent. Plus, Charlie, Steve, and James discuss the federalization of law enforcement in D.C. and the administration's announcement of potential weed reform. Sound from this week's open: President Trump and House Minority Leader Jefferies on DC police “scheme.”Please visit our fantastic sponsors:Cozy Earth: Upgrade your summer. Go to cozyearth.com/RICOCHET for up to 40% off best-selling temperature-regulating sheets, apparel, and more.Qualia Senolytic: Take control of your cellular health today. Go to qualialife.com/ricochet and save 15% to experience the science of feeling younger.

I can't believe that Trump hasn't thought of doing Trump-branded Social Security bracelets. That would be the obvious extent, right? So you've fallen, you can't get up. So, okay, are we ready? 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 Rickishay podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward.

I'm James Lylex. today we talked to Doa Rothman about, well, basically, the world. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I'm officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act. You know what that is? I stand with the people of Washington, D.C. I stand with Mayor Bowser, and we are strongly supporting their efforts to stop this scheme.

This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital. capital back. We're taking it back. Welcome, everybody, to the R ricochet podcast, and which one is it? Why, you're right. It is episode 753. You can join us at Rookoshae.com. You really can, and you can be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web, the place you've been looking for all these years. Forget Twitter, forget X, forget Facebook. You'll find your friends at ricochet.com. I'm James Lylex. I am joined as ever by Stephen Hayward in California, I presume, and Charles C.W. Cook in Florida, I presume. And gentlemen,

All eyes in the nation are turned to D.C., where the continuing authoritarian fascist takeover continues to this day with people being arrested. So the interesting thing about this to me is that there's a, as we keep saying, there's a big middle lane there for somebody to drive through when it comes to all of these social issues. And the Democrats can insist on going to the narrowest part on the left, like the gutter in a bowling alley, and staking out their claim there. It appears now that you've got to be, in order to be anti-Trump, you have to be pro the crime in D.C., which isn't that bad, mind you. It's not that bad. It's really not that bad. We've got the figures to show it. Well, you juke the figures, but it's not that bad. So, Stephen, you want to take this first, and then Charles respond to what our friend says. Well, it is, Trump has a genius for this of making Democrats overreact and try and persuade us of what our own eyes tell us is not the case. forget the official statistics, which, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job figures, which are now very contentious, the statistics being reported are very iffy these days. I mean, D.C. actually put on leave someone credibly accused of faking some of the statistics, but I say forget those statistics.

Everyone who walks into a CVS for a Walgreens in an urban area, and everything is behind a locked case, or people who see all the videos of shoplifting going on. erupted and unpunished. That may be in decline, but it's still happening. I think it's hard to persuade the general public that there isn't a general problem of disorder and crime. So what did I hear, James? I think you had something like, was it, 124 car break-ins or carjacking's last weekend or a few nights ago? Something crazy. No, what's been happening all over the city, 120 here, 120 another night, is that they go through the neighborhoods and they just break the window of every single car in the street. and then they rifle through it looking for rifles or cards or door openers or anything and then they move along the police are under orders not to pursue them so even if they see them doing

this the guys get in their cars and race off and the police say well what are we going to do hands are tied and it hit our neighborhood uh two three nights ago or so we had about 10 windows on the street shattered and everybody the next morning with the tape up and the plastic and the rest of it's just just grand absolutely grand so yeah um and Does that thing, does that qualify as murder and assault and the rest of it? No, but it's quality of life that makes everybody look over their shoulder and grind their teeth and be angry at the officials who do nothing. Charles?

Oh, I have many thoughts. Where to even start? As always. Where did I begin? Yeah, I was going to start with a song. I usually start with structure, how the Constitution works. And this is a slam dunk. D.C. is a federal district.

D.C. is no more able to resist the authority of the federal government than was the Northwest Territory. It can, if it wants to have a council or a mayor, but Congress can take those away. That is a delegation of choice. So the idea that this is somehow an imposition for the federal government to run the federal district, it's completely ridiculous. That's not authoritarianism. If this were happening in Louisiana, then those who were griping would have a case

if President Trump woke up tomorrow and said, I'm so worried about crime in New Orleans or Baton Rouge that I will send in federal troops and we now have martial law. Well, yeah, okay, that's a state. It has sovereign claims. We have a federal system. The federal government has enumerated powers, et cetera, et cetera.

But that's just not the case here. And on the material point, I just don't think the good question is, is crime coming down? Even if you believe the statistics, and I agree that a lot of them are juked, but even if you think that that's true, the question is, yes, but is crime tolerable? Now, sure, people will say no crime is tolerable, but we live in a free country, you're never going to have no crime. I don't know anyone on the left or the right, and I know both, in Washington, D.C., who thinks that crime is tolerable, especially women. It just seems to be a

terrible place for women to exist. And if that is the case, then the federal government is totally within its rights to look at the existing mechanisms for dealing with crime and to say, you're not doing your job, we're ultimately responsible. Especially when the last two or three weeks have brought crimes that are connected intrinsically to the functioning of the federal government. We had an intern, in Congress, the Article 1 branch, murdered while going to McDonald's. And then we had this Doge employee, known as Big Balls, who got himself into a fight through no fault of his own

because he was trying to help someone who had been assaulted. So you don't even need to fall back on the can. That's an aught sort of question. If Congress's interns and federal bureaucrats are being routinely assaulted in the federal district, then I think it is not only reasonable, but imperative for the federal government to do something about it. So I'm very much in favor of this. What I'm not in favor of, just as a caveat, is what James Comer said on cable news yesterday, which is, well, this is a great recipe for the rest of the country. Maybe we'll start doing some

other cities. No, you won't. Those other cities are not federal districts. They have a different responsibility. But this, fine with me. So I'll put you out down as a qualified okay then. When you talk about it being a horrible place for women, I mean, you have anchors on television talking about how they have been assaulted outside their studio, how there are weedy waggers in the stairwells of the metro. I mean, yes, when I moved to D.C. in the early 90s, it was bad. It was very bad.

And I'd come from a place that was not characterized at all by the, kind of disorder by the murders so many murders and so many potholes and so many vagrants and so me and i looked at this place with with with horror and that was my initial impression of dc i didn't like it i didn't like it at all and i got out after three years but i went back in the teens when i was doing some books for encounter books and i would stay up late and walk back from the tabern into my hotel at two o'clock in the morning uh with the totter in my step and it was absolutely fine i mean it really got good it got good for a while because it's they were doing something and the something was working.

Now, the interesting thing about it, though, is that while they were doing something and achieving results and getting a safer street by many metrics, they weren't addressing any of the root causes. But now, of course, what we're always told is that it's pointless to do enforcement and all the rest of these things because what really matters is our old friend root causes

and unless you adjusts the socioeconomic problems, socioeconomic problems that causes in the first place, you're doing a bad thing. I mean, you can't do anything unless you address these things, which, of course, we've been addressing for 50, 60 years. And that's why one of the reasons that the left seems paralyzed about this is that even though they would kind of like to walk into a CVS or people's drug, as we used to call them,

and get some tied without having to call somebody over and run the tumblers, what it would take to do that? They really are kind of squeamish about that. And besides, the people who are stealing these things are John Valjeans, who just need to wash their drawers. I think root causes are generally nonsense in crime. I just think this is such guff. I mean, A, it's incredibly patronizing.

My family historically was very poor. They didn't commit crimes. They were not looked upon favorably in the social class system of Great Britain. They didn't commit crimes. I don't know what that's supposed to imply. But second, it doesn't work. Even if you feel bad for the people who commit crimes, that's your prerogative.

It doesn't work to go after the root causes. You have to do something about it. You have to put cops on the street. You have to arrest them. And you have to give them sentences. I must squish on this question when it comes to procedure. I am very much a small L liberal when it comes to the due process part of the equation. But that doesn't mean that you.

can't have rigorous policing. And it certainly doesn't mean that once you have satisfied all the due process steps, you can't punish people harshly. You just have to make sure they did it. You have to make sure that the accusations are correct, that the jury is convened that the promises that we make constitutionally and half the Bill of Rights is about this are satisfied. But once you've done that, there's no obligation just because you have a liberal, small, or liberal attitude towards due process to say, oh, we'll let him off then, or let him out after a week, or it doesn't really matter. Nonsense. But none of this works.

We know how to fix this. It's so annoying. We know how to fix this, and we don't do it. That's exactly it. Yeah, I'm reminded of one of Reagan's great lines when he was governor of California in the 60s. He says, a liberal's idea of being tough on crime is giving a longer suspended sentence. That was right. That's a great line.

Isn't that typical, right? I'm sure it's one of his originals. Yes, and I grew up in those years, as you did two, James, and root causes was the great manner of reform, liberalism, and the great society, and so forth. And I don't know if it was Giuliani or who, back in the 90s, when we were getting a handle on and said, we finally figured out that the root cause of crime is criminals.

And, you know, while the left has sort of learned nothing and forgotten everything, I mean, I go back to 2019, when presidential candidate Kamala Harris was talking about, one, how great busing was. and the need to get back to fighting the root causes of illegal immigration and so forth. So the left still says that the root cause of crime is poverty, except most poor people, the overwhelming majority, are not criminals. And on the other hand, and no one's ever been able to do even one of those fancy regression models to demonstrate that,

you know, what level of poverty or where or how or so forth. On the other hand, we do know the data now goes back decades that these are rough numbers, but something like, you know, 80% of crimes are committed. by about 20% of the criminal population. And one of the things that did work, Charles mentions we know it works, was identifying and giving sentences to those people. And we stopped doing that. And partly, again, this is the academic left pushing Democrats.

If you are an in higher education, as I unfortunately have been for a while now, one of the big phrases, and maybe Charles, you've heard this, is the carceral state. Carceral, yes, Carson. America is the carceral state. and the decarceral movement, which I think never makes the sort of mainstream press very much, but boy, it's huge in the academic journals and classes and so forth has been very big and influential. And so, you know, the Democrats have gone with that and here we are.

The decarceral movement, which is very, very noisy online, eventually devolves down to this, is that while we shouldn't put anybody in prison, if somebody does commit a horrible rape or murder they will be dealt with in other ways by society. And basically comes down to vigilanteism in the end with all of these things. Instead of having somebody go to a place where they're sheltered and fed and clothed for the rest of their life, we'll just beat them to death with sticks on the outskirts of town. Great. Charles, you're going to say? Well, I've always thought that the decarceral people miss the follow-up question.

So one thing that they like to say is the United States has a greater percentage of its population in jail than. And then they insert, whatever. Italy, Europe, the West. And my follow-up question that never gets asked is always, okay, what do they do? Because if the answer is they jaywalked, then I have a problem with it. If the answer is, which it's not, by the way, they smoked marijuana, then I have a problem with it.

But the answer actually is that they did bad things because America is a more violent and lawless place than Europe, especially Western Europe. I don't think that is a good thing. I do think it's a fact of our history that has obtained since the colonial period. Americans were more lawless, and I think it's related to our being more freedom-loving and perverse-s than Europeans. And if you're going to have a more lawless society,

you're going to end up with more people in jail. You can't just focus on the consequence of it as if it's bad. So, you know, yes, in that sense, like you need to look at the root call. which are that we are more lawless but once you've established that you just got to lock people up it becomes circular right i know my favorite thing to be said the end of the argument about root causes comes from west side story which i believe came out in 1961 which the jets are sitting around and singing off as a kruppky songs and they're no it's not that one is they're explaining exactly their their their progress of the social welfare system and when they learn of course that they do

what they do because of their origins they say you know sarcastically i'm depraved on on a count I'm deprived. They knew it as a punchline and a joke the criminals then. No, I'm not confusing, of course, the Jets with actual criminals, but the line was there. And I have no doubt whatsoever that it reflected a true reality. I'm not deprived, though, when it comes to sleep. And I'll tell you why. Because I believe in sleeping comfortably, and I'm going to tell you exactly how you can do.

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And we thank Cozy Earth for sponsoring this. the Rikoschet podcast. And now we're welcome back to the podcast, Noah Rothman, senior writer at the National Review, author of Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against Progressives War on Fun is a must-fall of foreign policy columnist, and we, well, today there might be some developments because the president is meeting Putin in formerly Russian territory, which I'm glad we have and bought, all the rest of it. All right, Noah, press conference coming up. What do you expect? I have no idea. I really have to.

Thank you, Noah. We'll talk to Noah later. Now we're going to go to our next guest. I mean, these are very bad pundit answers, but they're also honest pundit answers. And anybody who says otherwise, I think this is either has access to a crystal ball or is leaning too hard into their own priors and assumptions. I don't know what to expect from this. The president has been very mercurial when it comes to his understanding of this conflict, his navigation of this conflict. And I don't know where his head is at at any given moment. The Russians, on the other hand, are telegraphing to the extent we can understand what their strategy is, and their strategy may be to pull a crazy eye event at the negotiating table.

But what we understand their strategy is is really transparent. It is to provide the president with every opportunity to talk about everything other than the Ukraine conflict. They're going to offer him deals. They're going to offer him the prospect of economic integration and joint infrastructure projects in the Arctic. They're going to talk about future security arrangements and security cooperation in Europe. And all this is going to prove very enticing, I suspect. To the president, to his credit, he has said, it's great. All that's great.

But none of that's going to happen unless we get this war stopped, concluded. But my fear is that there's a real imbalance when it comes to objectives here. The president and his subordinates seem to want peace. And that's noble, but peace and peace. what terms. And there's a big internal argument within the administration over this conflict. I'm frequently asked, why are you a little down on this summit? What do you think is not going to happen? Or it's not going to go very well. First of all, the history of summitry with the Russians is a fraught study. And the second is that these people will say, well, the president's negotiated

conflict settlements or at least ceasefires in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, in the caucuses. what makes this one different. And what I would say is that the administration doesn't seem to be of two minds on those conflicts. Indeed, they seem to understand those conflicts within the parameters of the conflict itself. When it comes to Ukraine, Russia, there is a big internal war over the very nature of that conflict, who the parties are, the belligerents are, and what their motives are, and how deserving they are of American support. And it has much more to do with domestic politics than it has to do with the actual conflict on the situation on the ground, Russia's grand strategic interests in the region, NATO, all that seems to be secondary and

subordinate to the domestic interests that are on one side of this conflict or the other. And that's why it's been a very confused process. And then they're going into Anchorage with this confusion as opposed to Russia's, which is singularly focused on its objectives, which is taking Ukraine, either today, tomorrow, 10 years from now. But that is their grand strategic goal. and they're pursuing it with monomania in a way that I don't think this administration quite is when it comes to its approach to securing peace. Yeah, they want it to end because war bad, etc. I get that. But the thing of it is, is you give Putin a slice of the Ukraine that he already occupies, then he just resets his clock and waits until the next time that he can invalidate or Renegon, whatever he said before, and give it another shot. and Ukraine is reeling

after years and years of this what do you think what are you going to happen is it is it is it unrealistic to think as so many did a while ago that the Ukraine was going to actually was going to win this was going to push Russia out

was going to get Crimea I mean there are a lot of talk about that they're going to blow up the Kursk bridge and they're going to get it back and they're going to crippling I mean Ukraine has done some absolutely fantastic things in this war and I've always been a supporter of them always but are we getting to the point where the reality of Russian occupation is just simply going to have to be

what is accepted going forward because the alternative is just bleeding the country white and endless war? I don't know. Well, I certainly reject the premise that acceptance is something the United States or the West must acquiesce to. We didn't recognize formally the Soviet occupation of the Baltics at no point. We recognized governments in exile. That was an illegitimate occupation from 1941, I believe, 1940, rather, to 1991. It would be a shift in American foreign policy to acknowledge, as Stephen Wyckhoff was playing with earlier this year, the notion that the illegally annexed to territories, Crimea or the other four oblasts, would be functionally Russian territory.

At no point should we acknowledge the legitimacy of those gains. Occupation may be a de facto premise, but it is not one way. we should cert, we should accept. And there's also those who are, who are frankly, woefully ignorant of diplomacy to the degree to which they say, what's the big deal here? They're just talking. They're just sitting down. What are the material consequences from that, you warmongering lunatic?

The material consequences of it are that the Russian government now sitting on American soil, enjoying the legitimacy conveyed to the Russian government by the American presidency, says and will say that it's diplomatic isolation. as a result of the second invasion of Ukraine is over. And when they say stuff like that, it indicates to the Russian markets that their long period in the cold is going to be over pretty soon,

and we're going to be reintegrated. Our economic segregation is over. When that happens, the Russian markets explode. They generate a lot of capital, capital that the Russian government can borrow against and undermine the sanctions regime. So you're functionally contributing to the Russian coffers by doing stuff like this,

which has a material impact on the battlefield. We will see it. And that's the sort of thing that they just gloss over because they don't understand the subject on which they're opining. And I suspect that a lot of people are invested in that sort of ignorance, those who want to see peace come, whatever the cost. Great. But last question. I mean, I'm not sure. There are so many people who are just, what's the word I'm looking for? They don't care exactly about the nationhood of Ukraine. They don't care. Why are we even talking about this? Why is this conflict important? Yeah, right. And I think it's important because of Russian ambitions. I think it's important because of looking at what Russia is casting its eye elsewhere, and they hasn't been able to do so because they've been tied down. And I think it's also strange to grant them, as you say, the diplomatic legitimacy at a point where it becomes apparent that, yeah, we can do business again. Why would you want to integrate Russia back into the European economy? Why would you want to make Europe more dependent, dependent again on Russian fuel? What is the disadvantage to freezing them out at every possible opportunity? play of American soft power and economic power. Why cozy up now? And I'll stop them. I'm not a

question. I'm just ranting. So maybe I should give it to somebody else. Yeah. I don't I don't quite know. I mean, the scenario here that that makes me nervous is that the prelude to Ukraine War III consists of something like the Minsk agreements, these two agreements, the first of which wasn't worth the paper it was written on. The Russians never observed it and kept taking territory afterwards. The second of which was also never observed, but at least the line of contact held. It was never quiet. It was always hot all the way up into 2022, but that's the condition that we would see. And that resulted in more security guarantees to Europe, not less. I mean, that was preceded. The Crimean invasion in 2014 was preceded months earlier by Obama removing the very last armored

division from European soil since World War II, as well as many other divisions. We had just been withdrawing from Europe in our forever quest to pivot to Asia. The desire to, the desire to to pivot to Asia at the expense of the European theater, makes the European theater more hot and results in more commitments to Europe's security, not less. And that's what we would see. We would see a NATO alliance, particularly members on the frontier, get very, very nervous, very, very jumpy about their security. And keeping the 33 member states in line is the foremost job of prima inter-paris, the United

States, the first among equals in the NATO alliance. And so we would see a lot of disunion and perhaps a little bit of adventurism on the part of some of our allies on the NATO frontier, which would force. us to put more troops into the NATO frontier to satisfy our NATO allies. But the big scenario that really keeps me up at night is not a fold-a-gap-style invasion of Europe. I don't think Russia has that capacity. What they could do make an attempt is to destabilize Estonia, take a little chunk of

Estonia and say de facto situation on the ground, deal with it, or maybe even get more ambitious an attempt to establish a land bridge between Russia proper and Kaliningrad, East Prussia, as we all remember it. And that's the sort of thing that's really scary because they could very well do that. And then Berlin and Paris and Ottawa and Washington and London are all confronted with the Die for Danzig scenario. Do you really want to risk a conflict with a nuclear armed power over tiny talent? It folded like an origami lesson. Right.

So no, it's Steve Hayward out in Gavin Newsom Stan, as I call my miserable home state. Look, here's the difficulty is that most people who will be listening to this podcast after we know the results, or at least some of the results. It may be literally years before we know everything that passes behind closed doors today. So I want to use the Ukraine situation today to draw you out onto a broader scene of the world and about Trump, too. This caused a little bit of setup. When I heard that they were going to be meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, I go in maybe too much for historical analogies, but I immediately thought of the hastily arranged summit, which was not a summit,

between Reagan and Gorbachev in 1986 in Reykjavik. And, of course, you remember there, Reagan walked out against the intransentive demands of the Soviet leaders when they offered him a deal that he really wanted, you know, deep cuts in nuclear weapons. There are a couple of differences. One of them is this time, unlike Reagan, remember Reagan really blindsided our allies,

especially Margaret Thatcher. They were very upset that that deal nearly happened without consulting them. We know that Trump spent a lot of time on the phone with NATO leaders in the last few days, working out red lines and so forth. We know that very interesting Wall Street Journal story that I don't know if you saw about how Trump is very close to the president of Finland, who seems to be a pretty solid guy, a right of center person, which I didn't know Scandinavia had.

In any case, so I am hoping, and now again, people will know maybe by the time they're listening, to us that if Putin tries to play Trump the way Gorbachev did to Reagan, that Trump will do the same thing. He will walk out also angry like Reagan did. But who knows? There are some other aspects that encourage me a little bit. And that's what gets me to a broader question. You know, just watching Trump, he's still Trump, he's very mercurial, as you say. He's still fit to contradictory outbursts. You know, one day you're the worst person in the world, and the next day you're the second coming of Gandhi. But on the whole, he seems generally more comfortable in his own skin, a little more temperate, I guess I'd say, about our relations with our allies. It just seems

he has his act more together. So I'd want to comment on what your impressions are of Trump two generally. And then from there, I'd like to move on to the Middle East. Sure. So Trump two in his second term, when it comes to foreign policy, is hard to gauge because the first two months I was horrified, frankly, by his performance. And then the subsequent several months were very encouraging and diametrically opposed to the administration's approach to our adversaries and allies in those initial two months. So you have to take it all in total in sum. And sort of that prevents me from issuing grander verdicts because I just need more inputs.

I need more information before I return to render a verdict. And when we talk about the Middle East, I suspect they'll be far more complimentary to the administration's approach. When it comes to this conflict in particular, the Putin regime and the negotiators are going to put a variety of scenarios to the president. There could be a ceasefire with some modest land swaps that Russians don't want a modest land swap. They want a huge land swap. They want a part of Donbass, which is very heavily fortified, including some industrial towns that they couldn't take on the battlefield and would be very difficult to take back. but also something along the lines of an air ceasefire, which would also be beneficial to Moscow, because while it's raining rockets and drones down on Ukrainian population centers,

Ukraine is targeting infrastructure sites like Russia's petroleum processing facilities, which are very difficult to put back together. You can build an apartment building in a year. It's not that easy to rebuild a petroleum refining facility. So these are all things that sound really reasonable, but would also advantage the Russian position more than the Ukrainian position, And that's the sort of thing that I'm worried. The Reykjavik scenario, I mean, Ronald Reagan was just frankly frustrated and very mad when he had to walk away from the table.

It was one of his best moments. But I submit that he shouldn't been approaching the Russians with the kind of disarmament agreements that he was seeking. He was very wide-eyed and ideological about disarmament. And he was also attached to SDI and missile defense technologies. And when the Russians said, don't research that sort of thing, he got up and walked away. Good for him. But the very virtue of the fact that he had that summit in the first place was an embarrassment that, as you said, the Europeans. came down on him. The press came down on him. And summitry with the Russians is fraught in that

way. Joe Biden was burned in the same way. Russian troops were building up on Ukraine's borders in 2021. He said, let's have a summit. And then four months later, five, no, I'm sorry, eight months later, the Russians invaded, make Putin look like an idiot. Or Biden look like an idiot. 1960, both of them. 1961, Kennedy goes to Vienna and is lamb-baseded by Khrushchev gets into this high-minded ideological argument about the tenets of Marxism is on his back foot and then concedes that the Sino-Soviet alliance as functionally has military parity with the United States, and then three months later, the Berlin Wall goes up, and a year later, we have offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba.

These sort of things matter. If they go wrong, they matter, historically. And I wonder if this administration is as of single-minded when it goes to the negotiating table, as the Russians will be. I suspect not. Yeah, well, we'll just have to see what happened. And thank you for your attention to this matter, as Trump likes to say. Let's switch to the Middle East a bit because I, you know, I know you follow that closer than just about anybody.

I guess I'd say as a general proposition that Trump has been pretty robust and consistent in his support with Israel, with, of course, the occasional outburst at Netanyahu because that's just what Trump is like. What I worry about right now is two things. One is there's this massive propaganda campaign about starvation and, you know, genocide in Gaza. of which is nonsense, but which a lot of conservatives are buying into, or maybe not a lot, but too many. You know, the American conservative magazine, which I used to read because I thought had interesting stuff, has gone full anti-Israel on the last couple of months.

And then you have a couple of our key allies saying, we're going to recognize a Palestinian state. And I haven't followed whether Trump has said anything about that. I'm kind of disappointed if he hasn't that, and maybe I missed it, but it seems to me that that ought to call for some pretty direct and forceful condemnation by our government with some consequences, I think. I mean, we're threatening people in the UN who don't take anti-American positions. I think this merits at least equivalent treatment. So give us your grade or give us two or three, Noah Rothman, summary assessments of where that scene stands right now.

Well, just a quick note on the recognition of a Palestinian state. Which Palestinian state? Right. Are we recognizing these are non-contiguous territories with very distinct governments, which, by the way, are at one another's throat when they get the opportunity. They have different foreign policies, different economies, different relations with Israel. So which one are we recognizing? And if you're recognizing the whole of these territories as one single Palestinian entity, are we then immediately sanctioning that recognized Palestinian entity for being governed by a lawless terrorist group, which you acknowledge as a terrorist group with European and American blood on its hands? It's a very foolish proposition.

It's not a foreign policy. It's a temper tantrum. And it is one, I agree, Stephen, that should be met with condemnation from the U.S. government and probably a few disincentives to engage in this sort of thing. The president's conduct when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East has been generally laudatory. From my perspective, the attack on Iranian nuclear sites was we were told supposed to begett Gotherdamerun. And we have not seen that. perhaps because the conditions on the ground had changed so dramatically over the course of

Iran or Russia, rather Israel's war against the seven armies that ringed Israel, the ring of fire that was the Iranian military proxy network, decimated systematically over the course of the war that Hamas started on 10-7. And as such, we had a much more limited capacity for Iran to engage in retaliatory strikes. This was the window of opportunity and the president. took the absolute, made the most of it in ways that are very salutary, I think. And the very fact that it has not begat the kind of response that a lot of the hand ringers expected or perhaps even hoped for in a perverse way, if only to justify their opposition to this sort of thing, is an example of the kind of intuitively, I'm sorry, not intuitive,

the opposite of intuitive, not intuitive approach to foreign policy that has been discouraged by the foreign policy apparatus. Abraham Accords are also illustrative of that. Didn't exactly spring from Donald Trump's forehead, and there have been think tanks that have been working on this for a long time. But the notion that you could do one of two, you could do two things to unlock a new dynamic in the Middle East. The first is to push the Palestinian issue to the back burner.

Don't deal with that first, as the peace protesters insist you had to, deal with it last. And then refocus the entire region, especially the Sunni states, on the threat posed by Iran and its Shiite militias, which Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, all of which were engaged in a somewhat quiet, cold war, hot conflict. And all that sort of unlocked this diplomatic and military cooperation with Israel. It created a new dynamic in this region that would not have been realized in the absence of

American leadership. I think we're seeing some of that here with the dynamic between Israel and Iran and the United States. There's a lot of political pressure, as you say, on. the West in particular as a result of this propagandistic campaign, which alleges that Israel is engaged in the most cartoonishly evil campaign of immiseration and genocidal reprisals against civilians that you could imagine. The motives for this are alighted. Nobody ever really describes what Israel gets out of the deal. How does that end up with this, you know, placid condition

in which everybody's ethnically cleansed because they've starved and murdered them all. I mean, the population seems rather stable, so they're doing a terrible job as Genesis dares. But nevertheless, I mean, it's just assumed on the part of people who assume the worst of Israel that this is what's going on. It's taken at face value,

and it's an extraordinary claim that lacks the extraordinary evidence you should have to support it, and the president deserves a lot of credit for just bucking. And this is one of the things that he does very well because he's so on the outswomen. when it comes to the conventional wisdom, be it cultural or political or foreign policy, he's rather suspicious of and often contemptuous of it.

And sometimes it serves him well. And in particular, the Middle East, it has served him very well. Donald Trump will go down in history as someone who presided over a revolutionary change in the geopolitical situation in the Middle East. For good or for ill, and I think mostly for good. But it's all because he approached it in a way that was really contemptuous of the staid and unchallenged

assumptions that had calcified in the American foreign policy establishment over decades. Okay, I give up. Charles, you try to draw this guy out because we're coming up with nothing. Am I not performing to expectations here? No, you know who I am. I've heard of you. Because we worked together and in fact hung out together 45 minutes ago to do the other podcast, which you should listen to. I have a question that is broad.

We can zoom all the way out into space, as Tim Curry would say. That's such an obscure rep. I get it. How dangerous is the world? Because the prevailing view of younger people seems to be that everything is very dramatic at the moment. And America has never been like this and the world has never been like this. And I'm habitually and reflexively hostile to these claims because my great-grandfather fought in World War I and then lived through the Depression and my other grandfather's fought in World War II

and then they live through the people of the 50s and 60s. And I just am not persuaded. On the other hand, we have got wars going on and there is a situation in Israel and there's the prospect in the Pacific of an invasion of Taiwan and China really is a threat. So, and how dangerous are things relative to any point you want to pick in history? Well, let's start 125 years ago. Let's just start at the turn of the century. The, if you look on, you know, if everything's relative, but if you were to plot on a graph, casualties from warfare, you would find prior to October 7th, the wars on October 7th that began then, or let's say prior to the Ukrainian invasion in 2022, you've seen fewer casualties from warfare and battlefield conflict than in the whole of going back into the, you know, the treaty was failure to the extent that we have actual numbers and we do to a certain degree. about battlefield casualties, the condition that arose amid American hegemony, unquestioned superpower status across the planet Earth,

was one of an unparalleled peace, unparalleled safety and security. The human species had never known that kind of security. And there are basically three dynamics that typify the geopolitical landscape since that period. The first is the one that we're experiencing now, U.S. hegemony, the United States, for all of China's rising power capacity and what have you, it cannot yet, to the extent that we understand it, project power across its borders in a sustained way. We haven't seen that yet. It might, but it hasn't attempted that. It certainly can't project power across the other side of the planet Earth in a sustained way. No other power on Earth can but us. The second dynamic is bipolarity, which is roughly what defined the Cold War. period between roughly equal superpowers the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. And that was a very bloody time. It was a very dangerous time. That's not to say it was unstable. And I think that stability is largely a result of the existence of our respective nuclear arsenals. But to the degree to which the United States and Soviet Union fought proxy

battles across the planet Earth, many of which were very bloody, many of which had absolutely no concern for the individuals and the proxy forces that were fighting on our behalf and Cuba to a lesser extent, if you look at Angola. That was a far more unstable condition if you want to just measure geopolitical stability in terms of the number of people dying and the number of wars that were being fought. And the third dynamic is multipolarity. And that's when you have multiple geopolitical polls that have rough parity between each other militarily, economically, that is the least stable dynamic, but it is the least predictable

dynamic. And to the degree that we're entering into a multipolar world when it comes to nuclear power, that is one that is, that's a very disconcerting dynamic because there are just more variables at play and more powers that have the capacity to alter their geopolitical environments. But we've experienced nothing like, even during the Cold War period, well, we've experienced nothing like the kind of violence and the prospect for violence that we had during the multipolar period in which you had a variety of states that had inviolable spheres of influence that were policed and that you could not penetrate. For example, no, just say this.

The global economic marketplace that we have now is a pretty new invention. It actually coincided with another new invention, which is roughly Hayekian and Milton Friedman's conception, of what should be market economics. These are all pretty new things. We talk about these things, like they're ancient ideas that were just, you know, that the wisdom of Adam Smith and, you know, Montesquieu was this vision of the world that we're living in today.

It was not. It was basically built in the 1980s and 1990s. Within my lifetime, it's pretty new. The old condition is state control of economics, state intervention in cultural affairs and a variety of spheres of influence that locked powers out of their backyards, of the great powers backyard.

So we had something like a global economic system in 1914, close to it, and it was basically just European colonial possessions trading with one another, as well as the United States and Canada. And then we didn't have that until 1991. There was no global market. until for most of the 20th century so all this stuff is pretty new and very fragile um but it is

the case that the world that we're living in today is relative in relative terms the safest the most stable the most predictable and therefore what's something that you should just fall on your knees and and thank you the fates that delivered you into this time in history and in my view have some gratitude for it and work to preserve it and i see quite a lot of people who just look upon this as though it was this condition that our grandfathers and fathers fought and died for in order to bequeath it to us. There's just a lot of ingratitude for it, and the assumption that something better is available on the horizon. I just don't know what that is, and I fear that toying with the status quo, as revisionist powers are, and as some people who want to retreat

behind American shores would like to do themselves, we'll just begin a more unstable world and hasten our descent into a multipolar world in which spheres of influence are once again the dominant condition in the geopolitical landscape. A historical ingratitude is one of the things I hate the most and there's so much of it today. But on the other hand, I was watching Twitter today, I'm sorry, X. And there was an appalling video of somebody who traveled

a very long distance to go to a conference, an outdoor celebration. It was even LGBTQ plus two spirit friendly. But they've been denied entrance because the people at the gate had deemed her braid to be a cultural appropriation. She insisted that actually, no, it was Vikings. They said, no, it's a Rastafarian. And since we're all about having a welcoming and inclusive thing here,

we cannot allow you to enter with the braids that some people might regard as a cultural appropriation. Oddly enough, none of these people looked like they'd be any fun to be around ever, aside from the hair and the septum rings. But it reminded me that there's a man who wrote a book called The Rise of the New Puritans and fighting back in the Progressive's War on Fun.

And if I were to have him on the show, He might give a precese to this book. They would encourage people to go out and buy it in the very global marketplace of which he had spoken. Could that be you, No. It could be. I can neither confirm nor deny, but you do seem to have a lot of information to this effect. So I won't gain to you. Well, Noah, you wrote that book at the high tide of wholeness, I think.

Didn't it come out in 2021 or 2020? It came out in the summer of 2022, and I will tell you the fates conspired against it, because just about two weeks or a week and a half before release date, the Dobbs decision was leaked. And the entire media apparatus was on fire with the notion that the Republicans were trying to force you to not have sex, as though that had anything to do with the Dobbs decision. But this was the stat, this was what the media was saying on MSNBCs, which made my book tour rather difficult. So I'm hoping that my third is we'll encounter fewer headwinds. Well, my, my quick question, which I say quick question, it's not, we're running short of time, so it calls for a brief answer. But it does

seem to me that the tide has turned, not only generally, but because Trump is leading a ferocious counterattack against Wokery in general. What kind of grade do you give him on that or how things are going? Oh, I'll give him a very high grade on anti-Wilcary, in particular the attack on meritocracy and his efforts to restore meritocracy. And some of the heavy-handed interventions into the cultural spheres in which the executive branch has a statutory and cultural role or constitutional role. Those, I think, are salutary. They're a bad, backlash to a backlash and they deserve to have the effects that they're having on the opposition because the opposition is finally willing to acknowledge the degree to which they had been led

astray by the activist class. Not do much about it, mind you, but at least acknowledge it and sort of express quiet frustrations about it when they're in closed doors and among, you know, like-minded company. Yeah, I'll just say, you look more cheerful than I'm used to seeing you, Noah. I like your grumpiness, which seems to be largely absent today. So I was so grumpy earlier, Steve. I was grumpified by the Russian talk, and then you got me out of doing. Ungrumped Noah, we like, and you should buy his book The Rise of the New Puritans and just read it conspicuously in public places because the Puritans of the left hate to be called Puritans because they associate that with Godbrothers like Cotton, Mather, and Increase, for that matter.

So, yeah, great book, great conversation. Glad to have you back. And it's always interesting when we do and can't wait until the next time we have you on, Noah. My pleasure, guys. Thank you. Bye-bye. One of the things, though, that I got to mention, and I should, is that after this, I'm going to the gym. I used to do that when I was at the office.

I would have my Brought worse for lunch than head down to the gym. But I don't work in an office anymore. I'm retired. I'm retired. I just quit my job. So I have to go elsewhere for a gym. And the thing is, if I don't, I feel old, and I feel creaky. So you've got to limber up.

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day and it ends in the absolute cold seller of winter with disappointment and bitterness. $50, however, cash price, cash money to the league winners. Charles, tell us about this. Yeah, well, not only can you come play and have fun with other ricochet members, but you can earn some dollar, dollar bills if you win. And that's per league. There's a maximum number of people in each league, but we are willing to create as many leagues as necessary. We have 200

sign-ups. We will create 10 leagues, 20 people each, and each winner of those leagues will receive $50. No strings attached, except that you have to be a ricochet member for the duration. You can't join, then play vanity football, then rejoin and say, where's my 50 bucks? You have to be a part

of the community. That's the only rule, and we hope you will sign up. If you want to do that, you'll notice on the site, if you look to the right, there is a little link on the homepage. It has football leather backdrop and it says play fantasy football win some money or some such click the link follow the instructions and you're in you know your thing about joining and signing up and then

quitting and doing it it presupposes a level of craftiness that everything characterizes the average no no I don't think anyone would actually do it I just said no strings attached and then I realized there was one before we go um I've heard this that Trump is reconsidering um um um not reconsidering, considering reclassifying marijuana to a Schedule 3 controlled substance. And a lot of people sat up when they heard that. I didn't because I don't know what a Schedule 3 is. I'm not exactly sure what this means. Have either of you followed this story?

And I mean, AI overview from Google says Schedule 3 are substances that have a moderate potential for abuse and addiction, as well as they currently accepted medical use and treatment. So I don't know if this is an upgrade or a downgrade. Downgrade. It's a downgrade. It's a four now. Well, the classification system, I think, sets the most dangerous drugs at one. It's Schedule 1 now, yes, is Schedule 1.

And the WHO has recommended removing it. And so we are going to be, I don't know, it's like DefCon, which order does it go and the magnitude of stars. Point is, I think the entire country, well, not the entire country. I think a lot of people are rethinking the whole, oh, just decriminalize it, let people smoke it wherever they want to do because it leads to a stinky streets. Then people say, oh, what's the deal?

What do you care? Come on living in a city. I'm sorry, I was working on my outdoor lighting system at my house. Somebody walked past smoking something, and it was at the bottom of a hill and it wafted up all the way to me. And it was as potent when they got to my nostrils. I don't know when they changed the aroma of me.

marijuana, which my college days was not this odiferous, but it's just, I hate it. And I walked in New York and other streets, and it's just choking clouds of it. Can't stand it? Go on. Can I give a limited defense of this? Go ahead. Well, first off, I don't think the federal government is allowed to prohibit marijuana constitutionally. So I would like to see them out of it, irrespective of what the policy was to be. You could then have prohibition in the states if you wanted it. I just don't understand why we needed a constitutional amendment to allow the prohibition of alcohol, but then a few years later, the government said, drugs, let's do that. The enumerated powers doctrine is still there. It's still in there. You can read it. But in terms of the smell on the street, I 100% agree with

you, James. What I don't understand is how smoking it in public became an intrinsic part of decriminalization. Right. What happened to the city? What happened to the city? What happened to sitting around the dorm room and listening to Genesis and reading. But the thing is right, is you could have a situation in which a state says we are not going to criminalize marijuana, but also you are not allowed to smoke it on the street. And I don't think this is a weird view because, A, we already do this with drinking. Right. Most states have some restrictions or cities on whether you're allowed to drink in public.

For example, in Jacksonville, you are not allowed to drink on the street except on game day. certain hours within a certain part of the city, which makes total sense for tailgating. Second, we have now reached the point with progressives at which they think that if somebody smokes tobacco on the street, they should be instantly executed. Yes. But that smoking marijuana on the street is a normal part of a functioning civil society. And I don't understand why more people who are more libertarian-minded have not taken the view decriminalize marijuana and ban smoking it in public because that's the bit that everyone

hates, but we already do it for drinking. So just do it. Like, why are we, why has this become the hell that these people want to die on? It would probably lead to a disparate impact argument at some point when somebody said. I know rubbish. I know with you there, but I completely agree. Stephen, we know that you're the kind of guy who just gets out as Gandalf Bong and rips him off on the weekend while listening to some King Crimson. But what's you take on the whole thing? Well, first of all, you mentioned, one of you mentioned Prohibition, which brought me the frame of mind of Will Rogers' great remark that, well, at least Prohibition is better than no liquor at all. And I wish we could go back to something like that. Actually, I think the terms Charlie laid out a right, and I've joked for a long time, that the way the left operates is tobacco is illegal and carries a death sentence, but marijuana smoking will become mandatory. I do think, though, and I haven't followed the medical literature closely, but I do think we're going to end up having a lot of sex.

thoughts about our rush to legalize it. So one thing about decriminalizing, and I'm all for that. But I do think that commercializing it, legalizing it, giving it a social approval is a bad idea. And it was true that before prohibition, we really did have a serious problem with alcohol consumption and alcoholism. And it went way down under prohibition. It never came back to quite the level it was beforehand. But we still have a lot of problem with people who have alcohol problems and treatment programs and AA and all the rest of that. And my ideal world would be

finding that kind of stable equilibrium for marijuana as well. Yeah. Well, the thing is, is that a lot of the people who were voting for this were remembering back to their healthy on college days when they were buying ditch weed from somebody who was essentially getting it from the guy down out in the country who

would sell it in giant hefty bags and it would be like tumblers for $5.00. I think the stuff today is more powerful, right? I think the stuff today, right? And although James, I have to say, I do resemble that remark of sitting around a dorm room listening to Genesis with our, okay. Why did I say that? Why do you think I said that? Right. I know. Exactly. I resemble that I embodied it. I just know that there's something, it's just very odd to walk into my high class grocery store, ultra high class, and they've got a whole section for THC. And again, if you want to have, and they have a liquor section, of course, too, because you can drink some of these things and become sparklingly interesting people after half a glass. But you drink this and you become an insensate moron. who has absolutely nothing of note to merit to say.

But that's my old bias. He's coming there. I'm supposed I'm old. I'm a boomer, and I prefer the fine products of the Scottish Highlands when it comes to an amber liquid. As a matter of fact, I've got a space eye lined up for myself tonight, but that's hours away. Right now, I've got to say, thank you.

Podcast brought to you by Cozy Earth and by Qualia Sennuilite. Support us by becoming part of the best place for civil center-right conversation and joining up at Rurichet. And, of course, I would like you to leave a four-star review on Apple podcast. Not a five star. No, no, I've been asking for that for years and move the needle a bit. So I'm saying four star and maybe you will out of just sheer stubbornness give us a five because I didn't ask for it. But what we mostly ask for you to do is come back next week when Charlie and Stephen, and another guest I hope will entertain you with insight,

amusement, observations, and everything else you've come to expect from the Ricochet podcast over these 753 episodes. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Bye-bye.