The Ricochet Podcast - Scary and Confusing

Episode Date: August 21, 2021

What can we say? Frustration has a way of concentrating the mind, and this week we’ve got one word: Afghanistan. Victor Davis Hanson joins us to talk about our absurd administration and its pathetic priorities. Then national security correspondent Eli Lake joins us to speak on the Taliban, Biden’s “return to normal” on the world stage and his moral illiteracy. The fellas also have a chance to muse... Source

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If we had decided 15 years ago to leave Afghanistan, it would have been really difficult. I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex. Today we have Victor Davis Hanson and Eli Lake on Afghanistan. I can hear you. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet podcast. It's number episode 557. You got to join us at ricochet.com because there's lots of stuff to talk about and there's lots of good people there to talk about it with. Knowledgeable people, friendly people,

people who enjoy a good spoiling fight. Join us, won't you? And if you got something to get off your chest, that's a great place to do it. I'm James Lilex here in Minneapolis with a few things to get off my chest. Peter Robinson is in California. Rob Long is in New York. And I imagine that both of them, too, are like cans of soda that have spent 24 hours in a paint shaker in a hardware store. And when you open them up, there will be a detonation of effervescence because we're all kind of mad about this. You know, start with this. People are saying, oh, it's worse than Saigon in 75. What came to mind for me was not Saigon, but the failed attempt to rescue the hostages in the Carter administration.

Because if there's one thing that we always thought that we could count on, it would be the competence of the military. I'm not blaming the soldiers for this, but that sort of laid bare one of the last things that we kind of sort of believed could get the job done. And now we're seeing that the job isn't being done. And it's not necessarily because we can't. It seems as if there's any number of things that are preventing us from doing what needs to be done by rules of engagement, by specious decisions, by fatuous decisions, by lying politics. I politics i could go on peter rob what's your immediate take on the situation i i don't feel prepared to fizz i'm less angry i just finished watching the president's i press conference i don't know if the press conference

is even the word for it he called on two or three reporters from friendly organizations, friendly to him and to his administration. And even they asked questions that he couldn't, that were probing and that he couldn't really quite handle. So I feel more shaken. Imagine, so the press conference, what was it yesterday or the day before with General Milley and the Secretary of defense? And there were certain questions that they dodged. All the commentators said they dodged those questions because they're under orders either not to answer the questions or they have requests into the White House for the president to authorize. So the question was, will we go back and retake Bagram Air Force if we need to?

And they both dodged it. Okay, so you put yourself in the position of the military, of the foreign policy people, the Secretary of State. Joe Biden is the commander-in-chief, and in a crisis, the only way to get decisions made is to get the commander-in-chief at least to sign off on some large decisions. And in the press conference we just heard he said he was not aware of any allies questioning our actions in afghanistan quite the contrary the contrary is what i haven't oh excuse me if you had watched the house of commons yesterday yeah there haven't

you would have seen you would have seen members of both parties get up and lamb based the united states so my point is we have a chief executive here who's simply not in touch with the fundamental realities of the situation or so it seems to me rob yeah no i mean i mean i don't think there are any allies that we have that haven't oh i see i'm sorry that's the opposite like yes yes not that any i don't know what you have i i can't name one that hasn't i don't think i mean at least does he just assume then that people aren't going to know that? They're going to rely on him? Who knows? I mean, you know, it's dispiriting. I mean, there's so many ways to unpack this.

One is just the sheer unpreparedness for this, which seems so strange. Yes. I mean, even if, I mean, you know, the continuity of the military, the continuity of sort of below the layers in in diplomatic areas i mean it's pretty much the same as the people who were the architects and negotiated the capitulation agreement from 20 whatever it was 2018 2019 in which it was sort of assumed that the taliban would take control of the country that was the it was the blueprint for the taliban take over the country i mean, anybody who's surprised that Taliban took over the country is illiterate. That was the essence of the paper that we signed with the Taliban and not with the Afghan government.

And the assumption was, well, why sign it with a body that's not going to exist the minute we leave? For better or for worse, that this has unfolded in a way that could be predicted easily. And the fact that it wasn't, or that seems to have caught them off guard, seems so... I mean, I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around it. Like, where is the failure there? I mean, if not everywhere, then where specifically is the failure? Did somebody ask a question like, this is going to be easy, right? And then some toady said, oh, it'll be easy and it where i mean i'm sitting in

the west village of manhattan i know it wasn't gonna be easy um right so there's that operational failure which is catastrophic and very much like uh um desert one is that what it's called that was desert one the it's not operational conceptually i mean if they had failed to follow through on a on a good plan that would have got everybody out that'd be great but conceptually it seems as if they did absolutely everything backwards backwards i mean they're not doing it i mean even now he can't answer questions i saw this this press conference was terrifying even now he can't answer questions about things that really should have been part of the planning like this is this is not a new like what airstrips refugees translators uh uh uh friends of the american military loyal afghan friends the american military american personnel contract all that stuff that should

have been like yeah we thought yeah, we thought of that. We thought of that two months ago. That's what we did for two months. We planned this. Instead, it seems like we decided on Tuesday to start. We started, and it's like moving your house, and you didn't buy any boxes, and you didn't call the movers, and you didn't do anything, but you got to get out, and you got to get out by midnight.

I mean, it's very strange to me. It's really- And you haven't bought a house yet either. that too you're gonna stay with the neighbors for the mortgages and so there's that part of it and then there's the other part of it which is like the whether it's saigon and i don't think it's the fall of saigon i mean maybe it'll have as much impact i think it might but it's the fall of saigon 1975 that was at least you know 52 53 000 american deaths later that the country had been torn apart it was a different country 1975 than it was in 1962 or 1964 to tonkin gulf right completely different country completely different culture so i don't think

it's the same but i i do think it's it is one more sign of the ideal that Americans have for America and the purposes we think we have for our military are out of sync with the commitments we have made 20, 30, 50, 60, 80 years ago. And I don't know how to resolve that, but that's that. One of the strangest things is just Biden seeming indifference to all this is that, well, you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs and slaughtering some chickens and putting the hens back in burkas. Speaking of omelets, though, you know how to make a really good one. You need good tools. Question, how does your favorite restaurant consistently make such delicious food? Well, the short answer, they have access to the right kitchen tools. With Made In's professional quality cookware and kitchenware, anyone is capable of making restaurant quality food at home. Made In produces professional quality cookware and knives too. For those who love to cook, they source the finest material

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better cookware for better meals. And. Use promo code ricochet. Made in. Better cookware for better meals. And we thank Made In for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Victor Davis Hanson, Martin Milley Anderson, Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, National Syndicated Columnist and author over a dozen books. Listen to his podcast, The Classicist and The Traditionalist, wherever fine podcasts are distributed. And we welcome him back to the Ricochet podcast. Although we wish it was to talk about some great turn that American society, culture and politics have taken the leaders to a greater position of strength. But let's start with Afghanistan. What would you say

to those people who are saying, you know, like the president, hey, you know, I had a little chaos. It was inevitable. What are you going to do? Well, I listened to his press conference, and that's pretty much what he said. So it's absurd that any military in the world, even the Russians, when they left in 1980, the last man out was a military officer, not the first. So we pulled our military out first. It's absurd you don't consult with your NATO allies about what you're doing. We didn't do that. It's absurd you have no idea where 10,000 Americans are, much less 80,000 of their Afghan helpers that we need to get out it's absurd you leave 50 billion dollars of military equipment and which will turn afghanistan into a pre-911 terrorist haven and a weapons mart for every would-be jihadist in the world and so there's all these absurdities and it's absurd it's actually

derelict to tell americans there's no problem basically getting to the just traffic so if you want to go get out then just go to the airport. And if 10,000 people try to do that, a lot of them are going to get killed or shot or beaten up. And so, you know, for too long, people have said, well, he gets an exemption because he's 78 and he's non-complimentous. But the wages of that exemption are people are going to die. And that was the worst press conference. And I've heard, I think, all the way back to Dwight D. Eisenhower press conference as a little boy. And that was the worst one.

I thought the last one was the worst. I thought the one before that. But they keep getting geometrically worse. Worse why? Because the president of the United States seems out of touch with reality, because he's very much in touch with reality and he's misleading us intentionally. You're absolutely right, Peter. You're absolutely right. He doesn't connect with reality. He says things that are absolutely, he says that I had to inherit this, this plan. But then,

and then he tells you that the plan basically was working. But then he said, then I had to break it. I was bound by it. And you're saying, well, you're always bound by Trump plans. You know, the Iran deal, getting out of the Paris Accord, the Abrams Accord, or it was just just this one. And then you're saying everything went so well and you're bragging about it. But then you said, I had to do it this way. So you had to do it. You wanted to do it. way so you had to do it you wanted to do it you didn't do it and then he just he just admits large sections of the

problem and as i said what is he going to say about the weaponry we planned this and then he says well you know we would we got down to 2500 would you want troops there now and i thought well yeah we have 6 000 over two and a half times more than we used to have two weeks ago. And we're probably going to have to have 10,000. And we had 10,000 troops there, if you count the NATO contingent. And so America was split 50-50. 50% said, screw it, I'm sick of it, it's 20 years. Our military and our diplomatic people and our politicians didn't give a convincing argument why to keep staying there. And the other 50% said, well, you haven't lost a dead American in 18 months.

You can control the airspace with 2,500, 3,000 at Bagram. You can stop, you can orderly get our equipment, our allies and our Americans out over a year. And maybe you can even prop up the Afghan military and just see how it goes. We have 150 installations worldwide. What's so bad about having 2,500 when nobody's dying? Those are both legitimate arguments. But where both sides agree on whatever your argument is, A or B, you do not withdraw in shame, dishonor, and death and destruction and chaos the way he did. Here's what the press and the Democratic Party said in putting forward Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president.

Yes, look, of course, he'll be 78 when he takes office. He'll be a year older when he takes office than Ronald Reagan was when he left office. We understand that. We understand this isn't the dynamic, the man possessed of sheer animal spirits that Joe Biden was for much of his time in the Senate and most of his time as vice president. Well, we get all that too. But he's not Donald Trump. The exigency of the moment is to get rid of Donald Trump. And this is the important part, he'll be surrounded by professionals. He's going to go back to the people who know how Washington works, get rid of Mike Pompeo, this Trump upstart, and put in Antony Blinken, who's held one position after another. He's gone wealthy family in New York. He knows Wall Street. He knows the Council on Foreign Relations.

And in the military, he's not going to push knows the Council on Foreign Relations, and in the military, he's not going to push the generals around and humiliate people the way Trump did to the general. He's going to work with them. Okay. How could this have happened? The president, let's say the president is 78, but he's supposed to be surrounded by people who know what they're doing

what about them well let's look at all of these people that he brought in wendy sherman the deputy secretary who said the other day this is personal for me and i'm sure that uh the taliban thought oh my god wendy's going to get an f-16 pilot a bomb it's in a minute or two she said it's personal or we we had the UN ambassador who has been in every administration. And she said, you know, you're going to be ostracized from the rules based international order. That really scared the Taliban. And then we had this guy, the spokesman Ned Chance for the State Department. And he made a lot of other threats to the Taliban that if they really, really, really, really keep it up, they're really, really, really going to be not part of the

international community. And we have a lot of leverage over them. We have so much leverage, and why don't just clear the road to the airport? So these people, I think that's what the election of 2016 was about. There were a lot of people who came desperate, warned it or not, wise or stupid, that the traditional CV that you're referencing was not an argument for competence, but it was an argument that these people have never been out in the private workplace. They don't live outside of the coastal corridors. And what they think are impressive and credentials that ensure success from the last 20 years of his crude tweets, his callousness. That might be true. And that Joe Biden, who had no record of not being crass, let's get that straight.

I mean, this is a guy who had a whole history of racialist insults, whether clean black or junkie or you put your wall in chains or the corn pop sagas. But nevertheless, we were told that he was good old joel biden from scratton but when you looked at the actual record the abrams accord versus the iran deal a secure border versus chaos no inflation versus inflation uh deterrence on policing versus critical race and legal theory that led to crime i could go down but all of them did not poll in Joe Biden's favor before what he hinted about before. So it was basically people did not vote for Joe Biden. They voted because he didn't tweet and he didn't say that Anthony Fauci threw like a girl and all of that other gratuitous, unnecessary insults that Trump did. But they did vote

unknowingly or maybe knowingly for a very destructive therapeutic progressive agenda and i have a feeling that there was an understood pack that elizabeth warren and bernie sanders and camilla harris and the squad said you know what nobody in their right mind would ever vote for us and good old joel biden from scranton is going to carry us across the finishing line and then after six or or seven months, he's going to implode. And we're going to hear, we're already hearing the whisperings that Joe may not be. The press is woken up saying, oh, my God, what those nutty people on the right said about him being in the basement might be true. This is kind of weird.

And they're whispering and the anonymous sources are back. And we're going to see a transition in the next six months from the hard left to ease him out. I really do believe that. You know, one of the things that the hard left has done in this country is change the debate so that we have to say equity instead of equality, so that we have to infuse everything with race, etc., etc. We were expected that this was going to infect the universities. You know, we expected that. And maybe some corporate boardrooms.

But the big surprise to a lot of people is the way that the institutions we expected to be rather clear-minded and hard-nosed about the world turned out to have succumbed to it as well. We got that when we had the lectures on, you know, from our own military about race and critical race theory adjunct matters. But now we have something today from a British chief of defense staff, Nick Carter, who said, and quote, I think you have to be very careful using the word enemy to describe the Taliban,

which echoes something that we've heard from officials here, too, as well. He says we have to be patient and that the Taliban, quote, want an Afghanistan that is inclusive for all, which, of course, they don't. Joe Biden has spoken of the Taliban's note about existential crisis they're having at the moment as they try to figure out exactly who they are. We continue to be reminded that our leaders see these people through the blinkered prism of the most modest, fattish, fatuous intellectual concerns of today, of this culture. This can't end well.

They are unable to grasp what they're even looking at or fighting, and not even being able to say that they're fighting them. I agree. I say that that cadre and who they represent and where they come from hates half of America more than they do the Taliban. They find non-Americans, internationalists, exotic, non-white male Christians in the Middle West better people. So that's part of it. And the part of it is this therapeutic culture is one of narcissism. So when all of this is going down, these people really believe that if you fly the pride flag at the embassy, or you brag that you have gender studies at the University of Kabul, or that you're soldiers or, you know, woke, or they've had the proper, that people are going to be impressed by that.

This is who we are. And this is not who we are, that kind of talk. Austin says he's going through the entire roster to spot out white extremism. And Miley and the other Joint Chiefs vie with one another to virtue signal their wokeness about Kendi and critical race theory. And we're going to go down the road to proportionality and disparate impact. Only we're not, are we? Because 33% of this country are white males. And if you look at the fatality records in Iraq and Afghanistan,

there are about 73% to 76% white males. So suddenly Joe Biden and Austin and Miley say, uh-oh, we're way over a quota of dead, and these white males have been overrepresented, so let's pull them back from the airport and let people of color come in and die in proportion because that's the the logical trajectory of absurdity where these people are from they should have all resigned all the joint chiefs should resign austin should have resigned because it's a corrupt culture to get to be this wasn't true of arnold bradley or eisenhower matthew ridgeway or curtis or george patton they had their problems but now to be a top ranking officer in the pentagon

the cursus enorm is you virtue signal how woke you are to elizabeth warren and that crowd then they don't say you revolved in from general dynamics and you're going to revolve out or from the wayathon and you're going to go out or Lockheed or Northrop. They give you a pass on that and then you can go in there and you can make a lot of money when you get out. And you're never going to be judged on your military record. You're never going to be judged on the bombing campaign in Libya or Afghanistan or Syria, any of that. And so when I saw all those ribbons on Milley's chest, I thought, wow, what is that? For the brilliant strategy in Libya?

For, I don't know, saving Afghanistan? What was it all for? I don't know. Setting aside the failure of elected and appointed leaders, and just talking about the American culture, there has been a certain consensus in that famous horseshoe shape of the left and the right of the, what are we doing? What are we doing there? Why are we in Afghanistan? Fiasco leaving, obviously, but the big question is, why are we there? Now, my answer to that, you, you, you, you, you, you propose to, you know, solution A,

solution B. I think I generally tend to solution B, which is Taliban's living in caves better than Taliban running a country. Taliban living in caves was cheaper, you know, I mean, cheap compared to a 700 billion plus billion dollar defense budget. Seemed like a good price. No 9-11s. 20 years after World War II, we didn't say, let's bring the troops home from Hamburg. Let's bring the troops home from Japan.

They were there to hold a defensive line against and to deter. Right. defensive line against and to deter right but if we don't have the struts uh the stomach for that which i guess we don't as a country um why are we spending 700 billion dollars i mean aren't the aren't the liberals right if we're if we're if we're not gonna if we're not gonna if afghanistan was too hot too heavy a load to carry which was sort of a tiny fraction of our overall defense budget, why not just cut the defense budget in half tomorrow? By the way, it's almost 4% of the GDP. Bring everybody home from overseas and say, you know what, America, we're going to defend our borders. That's what we're doing.

Well, the left doesn't believe that quite you're i think you're 75 percent representing what they believe but when you said defend their borders when they they don't want to spend well okay yeah that's right okay point taken i use the wrong phrase with the wrong guy i hear yeah but i get your point when you bring all the money yeah you don't spend the money you bring everybody home then what you do't spend the money, you bring everybody home, then what? Is the left saying we're going to balance the budget? No, what they're saying is let's use this for even more massive woke redistribution. Fine, but that's a secondary consideration.

I think the left and the right are a huge part of the right. It seems to me I could be wrong. Agreed generally with the idea that we shouldn't be Afghanistan. Yes, I think soghanistan um and if that's the case then what are we doing with any of that money why don't we why don't we stop spending all of it on this on the largest federal program i mean an enormous i mean what is it like 10 10 of the discretionary budget is is is the defense i mean it's a huge part of the federal budget why not just take it well i think i think that there was a consensus growing because the right was was really the drivers that drove the neoconservatives crazy were the right base that said they don't want to be in afghanistan and they made the further

argument that their children were all dying there and they did disproportionately and they didn't think it was a cost benefit analysis worth it so i have no problem with that but the problem and you know why do we ever go in the middle east at all and the it started out we needed oil because we imported 60 percent then we became energy and before biden we were energy sufficient and then it was well we still have to be there because the russians and the chinese are using the oil they're going to cut it off for our allies and they they're going to stroll but so it got more and more tenuous so i think you're right and now with sophisticated drones and satellite weaponry we can intervene as we showed with isis and we we bombed the shit out of is ISIS without putting puts on the ground.

And people said, if you don't get in between the Kurds and the Turks, you're isolationist and it's all going to blow up. That didn't happen. So I tend to agree with you that most Americans feel that whether it's technology or whether it's changing conditions, the Middle East and the greater Middle East is not strategically significant to us, except in the idea that we don't really need it, but we really don't want to make it a force multiplier of our rival's economy and military and geographic strategic locations. So that's what I think we are. I think we all agree on that. Last question, if I may. This is Peter again. Follow Saigon.

Tremendous humiliation, it felt. But it didn't endanger West Berlin. It didn't move our position elsewhere in the world. It didn't weaken NATO. Iranian hostage crisis, in some ways, an even worse humiliation because it was so protracted. It finally ends when Ronald Reagan takes office. And a decade later, the Berlin Wall falls. And two years after that, the Soviet Union collapses. You see what I'm asking here.

To what extent is this an event that permanently damages our standing in the world? And to what extent is it an event from which we can recover that indeed may lead in some ways the american people to say no not that that may lead to may clear the political system for a kind of renewal i maybe i'm asking too much maybe that's no no you're right that's a very good question and uh i think you're right because you're talking essentially about the resiliency of America. And we do have the largest economy still in the world where one American produces twice the goods and services, or almost twice the goods and services, of three Chinese counterparts.

We have the largest military in the world. We have the second largest number of nuclear weapons. We have the best universities in science, medicine by far. We control popular culture global-wise. We're the head of tech in Silicon Valley. I could go on. And so, yeah, are we going to be invaded? I don't know. But there's two or three differences, I think, now from 1975 in Saigon or 1984 when we withdrew the troops after the Reagan

bombing the year before or the 1980 and the first is this is not an isolated incident it's more like the perceptions of Jimmy Carter when he seemed inept on the economy, on social policy, on foreign policy. And then finally, in extremists, he issued the Carter Doctrine. Remember that? And then he bit his lip and he actually increased the defense budget. And he said that under the Carter Doctrine, if the Soviet Union tries to alter the geopolitical balance in the Middle East, we're going to stop them. That was a pretty radical thing to say right so but what i'm getting now is this is a force multiplying effect or it's a logical result of paying people to stay home and not work uh borrowing not trump's $1 trillion, but $2 trillion deficits,

reaching $30 trillion in debt, turning the country into basically two racial camps and saying that the civil rights legacy of Martin Luther King, that our race is incidental, not essential to who we are, is out the window. And we're now to go back to pre-civilization tribalism or we don't have a border anymore borders a construct two million people are scheduled to cross illegal in time of a pandemic and in this fiscal year so this is part of that and it creates to our enemies a new idea that this generation of americans that rioted for 120 days or if you're on the left storm the capital whatever image you want and the country is torn apart and it's gone from two controversial presidents

and now maybe there's an opportunity that there hadn't been in the before because this is not a one-off what you're what you and i were talking about is every five or ten years we screw up right but otherwise pretty solid. But now the images, we're screwing up all the time, not because... All the time and in every way. Yes, because it's symptomatic of a toxic disease that we are suffering. And I think there's some argument that the wages of affluence and leisure have kind of innervated this country.

And we're more fighting for these scraps among each other mostly the bi-coastal elite is fighting to see who gets this world prize and who gets that world prize but there are so many estranged people in this country for a variety of reasons that we don't have a unity anymore and then when they look at joe biden we've never had a president you pointed it out peter that is that old and was obviously during the campaign, cognitively unable to handle the job. And he is cognitively unable to handle the job. And so, and then when you add another force multiplier of an obscene, whatever people think of Trump, 93% of all media coverage was negative. And what that told Trump is they hated his guts. And if he sneezed the wrong way, it was going to be, you know, another Russian collusion

or Hunter laptop is Russian disinformation, or you abuse Congress, we're going to impeach you, or we're going to impeach you when you're not. He knew that Biden has the opposite idea of deterrence. He knows that if he picks a piece of egg off his chin and puts it in his mouth or he walks into a press conference, I just got my butt wiped, they're going to tell everybody he's Cicero or Pericles. And so that empowers him. It really does. There's no check on him. And there's no check on the absurdities that Wendy Sherman said the other day, or Jake Steltz, or Anthony Blinken, all these people.

Because they feel that they're the chosen, and they're so much morally and ethically superior. And they've got all these Rhodes scholarships, and this Ivy League degree, and this Stanford degree, and they're just so better than everybody. And the media, they intermarry, and they have this idea of themselves. And they have not a of themselves and they have not a clue that half the country thinks they're absolutely absurd and wants nothing to do with them right and so that's what people are looking at so i was looking at the chinese newspapers yesterday they're all the one ones in english are all as everything is communist affiliated they're they're funny i mean they're just outright blatant.

Message to our Taiwanese brothers, you would be crushed in any, if you provoke us, you would be crushed in 24 hours. And of course, the Americans would be as effective as they were in Afghanistan. And the Russians are saying the same thing. And the Iranians are saying the same thing. Joe Biden was in an office more than three months. And we had a saying the same thing. And the Iranians are saying the same thing. Joe Biden was in office more than three months. And we had a Mideast war. And that was because Iran and its surrogates said, you know what?

He restored aid to the radical Palestinians, $700 million. And he wants to open up dialogue with us, even though we're on our way pretty close to getting a bomb. And he doesn't like Netanyahu. And now is a good time to just strike some blows. And they were wrong that Netanyahu responded and inflicted a bad defeat on them. But they did that because of a perception. And wars start not from accidents. It starts when people are not aware of the relative strength of all the parties

concerned. By any measure, we still in our decadence and decline are the most powerful country in the world. But when a weak power looks at a powerful country, as Hitler did to the United States or the Soviet Union or to Great Britain, All three had more resources than Hitler. But when they did not want to fight or they did not want to detour, then they suffer additional waves of decadence. And they think, you know what, if I had that power, I would be killing people left and right. But it doesn't really matter they have it. In fact, it's better they have it because they don't want to use it,

and so I'm going to try to test them. When everybody is clear about your relative's, like, you know, I went to a pretty bad high school, and everybody knew that if you went up to Geronimo Rodriguez, he's going to knock your block off. And if you went over to Henry Gonzalez, who was 5'2", he might not do it, but he was going to fight and try to scratch your eyes out. And then there was big, pudgy Ben Lopez, overweight and big and strong,

but you could go up and hit him in the head and he wouldn't do a damn thing. He could. So everybody knew the relative strength of everybody else. And so there was an unspoken peace. But when the United States conveys the idea that for all that $50 billion there, we're not going to do any equipment abandon or what Biden said. We have assets over the horizon. Have you heard that term before? Over the horizon?

Behind a hill? I'm still stuck, Victor, on your idea of him as our Cicero. I await his first Philippic. Although if you asked him what a Philippic was, he might say it's one of those princes in England. Victor Davis Hanson, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. It's been great.

We could go on forever, and we hope to have you back again. Thank you, Victor. Thanks, Victor. The thing I mentioned before about cooking, right? Well, I got something else to tell you. It's that, you know, tools. You got the great tools? Fine.

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But the best part of that is seeing that ButcherBox box and knowing that when I defrost that, I'm going to have the best steak, the best chicken, the best bacon, the best hamburger. And yeah, I've been sort of hitting the ButcherBox stuff a little bit harder than the others because it's my fave. ButcherBox wants you to enjoy the rest of the summer with this special deal. ButcherBox is giving our listeners, you, a special offer of three pounds of chicken breast, two pounds of burgers, and one pack of hot dogs for free, for nothing. Right now, new members get the special deal when they sign up at butcherbox.com slash ricochet.

So go there. Three pounds of chicken breast, two pounds of burgers, one pack of hot dogs for free at butcherbox.com slash ricochet. That's your first box. It won't be your last. We thank ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Now we welcome to the podcast, Eli Lake, Bloomberg Opinion Column, discovering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun, and UPI. Follow him at Twitter

at the Eli Lake. I don't know why you're on Twitter when there's so many Afghan experts telling us it was bad to do this during fighting season. I want it animated for Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd doing the Wabbit season, except it's hunting season. I want an animated Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd doing the Wabbit season, except it's hunting season. Poppy season,

fighting season. Poppy season, fighting season. Okay, we'll get to Afghanistan in a second. I want to get you this from Rasmussen, which just appeared. Apparently, according to this latest poll that Rasmussen just had, most voters believe that Joe Biden will not serve out his term, and they don't think that Kamala Harris is ready

to step up. They say only 43% people say that she's qualified to assume the duties of the presidency. A, do you think that's going to happen? And B, what do you think about her ability to perform that job? You know, I can't predict the future. I think his, you know, Joe Biden's, if you want to call it a performance, his public appearances in the last week have just been pathetic. I obviously, you know, I covered the Afghanistan war since the beginning, so I'm probably more informed than the average voter. But anybody who believes when Joe Biden says something like, you know, I haven't seen any evidence that people are questioning our leadership around the world, as he just did today. It's absurd. I think the UK parliament just voted to denounce him. And he's saying this in a press conference, not even like, what, 24 hours later.

So and on and on and on. I mean, he's insisting that there's no Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Nobody who's an expert on this, even the U.N., which is pretty squishy most of the time, is saying that there is an Al Qaeda presence. The Taliban never severed ties as they were supposed to under Trump's agreement. And even the justification for this as he's come under criticism that this is like, you know, his hands were tied. Trump made this agreement. I'm sorry. What is the other Trump policies or agreements that you've continued? And I thought you ran as the anti-Trump. And, you know, I have no problem as someone who's center-right saying that Trump's agreement with the Taliban was a disgrace. Biden's implementation of that surrender is even more of

a disgrace. And in some ways, it's worse because there was a very bad and unenforceable agreement and a political solution that the Trump administration was pursuing with the Taliban, which is bad enough. But Biden made the calculation that he didn't care whether or not there would be some sort of political agreement before he would withdraw all American forces, thus, you know, being the catalyst for this particular moment. And if I could, there's this one other thing that Biden said this week at one of his appearances, and I think it was actually the ABC interview on Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos. He repeated this line that he had said during the campaign when he's asked to meet the press, which is, do you, you know, basically, what do you have to say to all the

Afghans that we're abandoning that will now go into darkness because the Taliban is taking over the country? And he goes into this whole thing about how, well, you know, there's a problem with women's rights in Western China and the Uyghurs and all these human. We can't just respond to all these human rights problems everywhere else. You know, we're only one country now in the abstract. If this this is an argument that I know that you could be somewhat defensible if we were talking about, I don't know, the genocide in Rwanda. But this is a situation where Biden's actions are causing the horrors that we are now seeing in Afghanistan. For him not to be able to distinguish between America not being able to rescue every vulnerable person all

around the world when something terrible happens with understanding that this is all resulting as a result, you know, because of what he has decided to do with drawing the final 2,500 American forces. It's just a profound act of moral illiteracy. And it really raises a question as to who the president is. Does he have the values that we hoped that he would? If Trump had said something like that, we wouldn't really be surprised because he was open about these sorts of things. But this is supposed to be an American president who has empathy, who, you know, is restoring America's standing in the world, who's going to renew alliances and democracy and all this lather that doesn't mean anything now that he has done this one heinous

act as i see it and uh you know i mean the stain is on him and the stain is on his cabinet i mean this is terrible eli could you are a professional watcher writer about observer of the United States military and diplomacy. And so if I may, you've just told us about the president. Yeah. Absent him from the equation, how could this have happened? Meaning the Pentagon, those people are supposed to be professionals. Likewise, at the state department, Antony Blinken has been back and forth between wall street and diplomatic circles.

He and the people around him are supposed to be professionals. Even if you have a president who I think we were chatting earlier with Victor and Victor just stipulates now that Joe Biden is mentally incapable of grasping all that you need to grasp to do the job. But the military, they just went through four years of Donald Trump. We now know that General Milley and others were, in effect, trying to protect the country against what they saw as Trump's worst tendencies. So 10,000 to 15,000 Americans left behind. Bagram Air Force Base, which is just outside Kabul and has two runways instead of the one Air Force Base that we still control, surrendered immediately. I saw a graphic on Twitter, not always a reliable source, needless to say but the numbers of small arms and missiles and tanks the weaponry we've left behind is staggering just vast so my question is from the point of view of a professional

analyst of professional figures how did this happen well um there's a lot of CYA going on right now. So you're hearing now the intelligence community is leaking. Pentagon's leaking. We just saw this story about the descent cable from the embassy in Kabul, all of which were saying we were warning something like this was going to happen. But again, they went ahead with it. And I cannot help but think if this was Trump in a second term, we would have seen these leaks when they would have made a difference before the decision was made. They would have done everything they could to sort of slow roll him. And indeed, he was slow rolled because he wanted to bring everybody home before the end of his first term, and he wasn't able to do that. So that's the first point,

which is that Biden was supposed to be the return to normal, and the government did not work in a normal way under Trump. You had the professional national security bureaucracy in opposition to Trump, even though he is the commander in chief. And I believe that that was a real strain on our republic. And that was itself a very bad thing. But it did produce, at least in some cases, good results, such as we didn't fully abandon Afghanistan under Trump. And even though he tweeted that we were getting out of Syria, he was talked back into like allowing some folks in. So there was this, you could say, silver lining. With Biden, the return of the civilian full control of the military and all

of these things also returned. So they didn't stop him. They sort of went along with it, even though we now know and i believe that the advice that he got from his secretary of defense austin from general milley and others was let us leave a small contingency here we don't want to repeat of the nightmare of what happened in 2011 with iraq which played out actually over three years as opposed to three weeks and so there was an effort to try to persuade him but once he made that decision then the pentagon did something that is inexplicable to me which is that it just focused on protecting their own 2500 forces and got out as quickly as

possible so as to avoid any potential flare-ups with the Taliban, almost forgetting as a side note that there were American citizens, there were our diplomats, there were allied diplomats, there were Afghan translators and Afghans who helped us, and all of these other people that we're now trying to save. I mean, that's what the military, that's one of the main jobs the military is supposed to do there in a situation like that. And they just went ahead with a strategy that only sought to protect themselves and get out of harm's way as quickly as possible. And if you remember in that infamous, I believe it's the July 8th or July 9th press conference that Joe Biden gave, in which he said a number of things that have come back to haunt him, he boasted of the speed of that military withdrawal,

with not a thought given to the fact that he was stranding all these other folks. Now, we can argue, I mean, I'm sure that there were, covering the intelligence community for a long time, there's always going to be, they always hedge. So they never say, if you do this, Kabul will fall in two months. It's always, you know, there's this amount of chances and they give a range. Analysts can sort of say anything, you know, they're not oracles. So it's important to understand that it's probably true that nobody predicted that it

would collapse this quickly. But nonetheless, he was warned that Kabul would collapse by the year's end. And he was okay with that. And even if this disaster that we're seeing now in terms of trying to get Americans and our allies out didn't occur, it would still mean the Taliban would take over the country. It would still mean that he was basically thrown away 20 years of blood and treasure to build an admittedly imperfect, corrupt, and at times awful kind of alternative, but still far better than the Taliban taking over Afghanistan. I think that there's a lot of people who maybe don't know how bad it is. But certainly Joe Biden should know. Certainly Anthony Blinken should know. Certainly Lloyd Austin should know that in foreign policy, there's often a choice between bad and terrible. And they chose terrible. They basically chose a catastrophe to end a stalemate.

And so even if in the best case scenario that it's true that Biden's device that he was getting is that they didn't think it was going to fall this quickly. Even if that's true, it's still an terrible indictment. He was willing to basically risk and he was willing to live with the likelihood that this government would fall. There would be no political settlement. There would be no power sharing agreement, which is what the official policy was. He was willing to pull the pull the court. And, you know, I mean, I could go on about all the sort of disgraces of Biden in the last week, but that's where we're at. Hey, Eli, so I got a couple of questions. One, it seemed like the premise of the capitulation agreement was that the Taliban are going to take over. That there's no, if there was power sharing, we would have, if we expected power sharing, we would have had the Afghan government at the table and they weren't.

So it seems like, you know, to take who the president is out of it, just the consensus in national security and Afghanistan, all the Afghan brain trust, believe that eventually the Taliban's going to take over, so why don't we make a deal with them and have a deal with them? And then taking aside for a minute just the catastrophic incompetence

of the way this was executed, it seemed to me like we had told ourselves the story that we were in afghanistan so the little girls could study calculus when in fact i thought we were in afghanistan i'm 56 so i really remember 9-11 um i thought we're in afghanistan so that the taliban had to live in caves and my calculation is really simple taliban in caves equals good taliban in this administrative state of afghanistan bad yeah taliban in the presidential palace bad taliban caves good that's that's a great way to sum it up yes so taliban and caves

is good uh at a fairly low cost. I mean, $700 billion is our defense budget. I just said this to Victor Hanson, who was on before you. That's about, what is it, like 3%, 3.5% of GDP? I mean, it's a huge amount of money, right? If we're not going to spend it on Taliban and CAVES, what are we spending it on taliban and caves what are we spending it on it's i think that what happened was that the at first the the base of the democratic party began to rethink um and to turn on democratic leaders and this is sort of explains the rise of obama um because they began to sort of

kind of re-oppress re-apprise after 9-11 the arguments that got us into iraq and afghanistan and the idea that we would have this long-term military commitment but these were arguments that were potent you know in the moment of like you know when, when you had U.S. forces in Iraq and later Afghanistan, basically like manning traffic stops and checking under the hoods of cars for car bombs, which I think is a pretty fair argument. I say this as a neocon, you know, warmonger hawk or whatever you want to say, right? So that's, you know, so I understand why you wouldn't want that and why it's, you know, tough to ask everyday volunteers in our military to kind of, you know, sign up for this for tour after tour after tour.

But that's not what was the, that's not what was happening, you know, in the last five years in Afghanistan. What's happening in the last five years, we had a very small force. They were almost all special operators. They were there to train, advise, and assist the Afghan military. They were there to basically provide through contractors the maintenance for the close air support, which is how the Afghan military trained. And they, in some cases, were there to be these sort of intelligent spotters to paint targets for airstrikes. That's a totally different mission. And that's very

sustainable in my view. And they can play at the two. Then I think that I was going to say, I think Biden's going to get justifiable historical scorn and political rejection, I hope, for this, and he deserves it but he may he's making a calculation politically that the american people want it out and they want it out and this is awful and they're going to get over it because people the american people tend to go over that that's his calculation whether it happens or not i don't know but he is correct in looking at the genuine general general feeling of american voters both left and right let's get out here. Let's get out of here. Are the Americans just no longer no longer have the stomach to be the world superpower? I mean, in night, I said 20 years after for 1965, where there was there this broad consensus in America that we should get out of Japan, that what are we doing?

The Chinese are fine. What are we doing? The Russians are fine. Like, what do we care? And I don't think there was. I mean, in fact, we were at the beginning, really, of a major proxy war in Vietnam. 30 years, 1975, perhaps, at least the Democratic Party. But certainly not 1965. But isn't that where we are now? I mean, if you cannot muster an argument to keep taliban in caves so that

equals no more 9-11 which is basically the equation we went in there for i'm setting iraq aside because i thought that was foolish but just talking about afghanistan now then what argument could you make to defend taiwan what is what does it matter to us taiwan china is a better trade dealer than taiwan they already speak mandarin and taiwan china's it once was china why bother to just why bother to have a blue water navy well i think um that the on foreign policy national security issues i think most american voters are really looking for a level of competence. And it's a little bit like, you know, I don't need to know all the details, but I want to know that it works.

And these scenes are scenes of utter incompetence and failure. But also, there's going to be these ripple effects. Can I just push back on that? Because I don't think they do. Because what we've just described, and I agree with you you the past few years of afghanistan have of our involvement afghanistan have been incredibly efficient they have done the job 20 years in that in afghanistan we destroy the taliban we put them in caves we no more 9-11s success and americans i think a lot of americans maybe even a majority of americans like okay yeah but you know what forget that let's come home why are we spending any money or time there so i'm not sure it's confidence because i'm not entirely sure though that that's like really

how because this is not let's be honest afghanistan wasn't a burning issue for anybody until this disaster there wasn't this wasn't motivating the democrats it wasn't motivating republicans it wasn't motivating anyone it was like eli to pile on may i just elaborate on i think rob is asking a question that's in my mind as well but i have a slightly different take on it and it runs as follows okay in my own mind i was before this catastrophe i was of two minds about i honestly i felt the force of the argument never-ending war what are we doing there let Let's bring them home. I believe I felt that I was divided in my own mind, I believe, because in recent, not just in recent years, but beginning in the W administration, our presence in Afghanistan was explained to the American people in terms of building a new kind of nation.

Women's rights, sending little girls to school, and on and on and on. And indeed, two or three weeks ago, when President Biden announced that we were going to be out by date certain, George W. Bush broke his dignified silence in this matter. And what did he say? He said, Laura and I spent a lot of time with Afghan women. We're concerned about the plight of Afghan. And I have to say, crude though this may be, the first thought in my mind was Afghan men have had 20 years to learn how to defend Afghan women. Why does George W. Bush think it's the job of American soldiers to defend Afghan women? Instead, and throughout all of this time, there was an our presence in Afghanistan could have been explained to the American people, and in my mind justified justified in terms of the defense of our own republic, not creating a new world for Afghans,

defending our country. Am I onto something that from George W. Bush straight through, honestly, even if Donald Trump had come into office and he hadn't heard, spent 15 years hearing that we were there to create a new society but instead we were there to defend this country and there were good specific military reasons to be there even trump would have had a different approach to it i think you don't buy a word of that i can see from your face um i would i well i i would i would challenge the idea that the Afghans didn't, I mean, Afghans died, I think, you know, maybe a hundred times more Afghans died in the Afghan war than Americans. They were dying in great numbers during the peace agreement or Zalmay Khalilzad's peace negotiations. And only the one thing that we were providing them was this kind of ability to kind of have

the close air support, which was a great advantage against the Taliban. Um, so, so that's the first thing I would say is that, you know, we, we trained an army that was going to be reliant on us. And if I was a Marxist, perhaps I would try to explain that by saying, well, of course, because defense contractors want to, you know, continually get all this money to, uh, that's why they want these endless wars. But that is what we ended up doing. And that was the situation. But I would turn it around. I would sort of say, you know, by leaving the way that we're doing as precipitously as we're doing with all of these sort of self-delusions, and then we're kind of hit in the face with all this reality,

that kind of betrayal has enormous consequences in lots of other things that we want to do in the world. And again, I don't know that you need to explain that to the average American voter, but when there is another catastrophe, when we start feeling the repercussions, when we see more repercussions of this, whether it is a Chinese move on Taiwan or another massive terrorist attack like 9-11, there will be a sense of why did you incompetence allow this to happen? And that should have been the motivation for both Trump and Biden to turn around and not go down this road. Because there wasn't this. I mean, listen, I think there was in 2007 a real anti-war sentiment, in the same way that in 1969 there was a true anti-war sentiment in the same way that in 1969 there was a true anti-war sentiment

in the country against vietnam and that there was a real popular issue there but i don't think in 2020 anyone really cared much about this i just don't think it was a major issue people were worried about covid people were worried about you know race there were all kinds of other things there were much higher political priorities that were dividing the country. It wasn't like people were in the streets about the Afghanistan war and everything like that. It was Biden who chose to make it because he, somewhere along the line, internalized two things. One, it was an unwinnable war. It was a foul war we should get out. And two, I don't trust the generals. I don't trust the military. They trapped Obama when I was

vice president and I don't want, I'm not going to let them trap me. So he wasn't willing to hear what the implications were. And now he's dealing with it and trying to tell us, well, this was inevitable because of Trump's peace plan and I don't buy it. And I think that it's not just a judgment of history. There will be a political problem for him, depending on when the implications, the repercussions of this decision, you know, when that debt comes due, people are going to ask, what the hell were we doing? And the Taliban in caves versus Taliban in the palace argument is going to look like an obvious point that we elected our competent leaders to understand that so we could go on with the rest of our lives. And that's kind of where I think that there is political peril here.

So I kind of, I think it's short-sighted to say that Americans, you know, generally kind of agree it's an endless war, who cares about the girls' schools, what are we doing there? That might be, there were 70% of the Americans, Iicans i guess you know a few weeks ago who supported this now it's down to 49 i mean i wonder why but that number is going to drop right well i hope you're right i hope you're right yeah eli last question and no matter how many interviews you have today you are not going to get this question from anywhere else other than the ricochet podcast i've been listening to all this it's been great my beloved co-hosts great questions your answers have been fascinating.

But while I've been doing it, because I can't multitask, I've been engaged in something that I like to call forensic typography, which is show me half of a word and I will try to figure out what it is. I can see half of the word on your t-shirt. And I've teased out that it's smitten, perhaps smitten with the mitten, perhaps? No, smitten ice cream. I see. Smitten with the mitten is what they say about Michigan. And I was thinking, how possibly could that be at work here? But smitten ice cream.

Okay. All right. Great. I've got that solved. The Republic is saved. It's a very good ice cream place in San Francisco. The ice cream is so good, I had to buy it. Well, listen, we understand you're a new new father so we're going to let you go because right now as i said before

thank you you should open up a college account for your daughter and also go to sleep just go to sleep even if you're not just you that's good trust me congratulations again eli oh there won't be any colleges around you can teach her all she needs to know about critical rights theory by the way rob i have to tell you this just before i go that i am a huge fan of yours from cheers to glop i like the whole what a trajectory that is that is the saddest trajectory ever oh no no you did eli no no no but really you didn't have to say that yes on behalf of peter robinson the other plate of chopped liver. Thank you very much.

Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye, Eli. Thank you. That's right. Ah, yes. Well, of course, Rob. So my question is this. Yes.

Like, somebody like that who says, I've been covering the intelligence community for a long time. Like, how much does he know? You know what I mean? Like, what does that mean? Like does that mean like does that mean like people are giving him info like so who's calling you who do you call for info i don't know just was i didn't didn't have time to ask him but i would ask him next time like what is i'm not named the sources but be honest you know you're not really curious about this you just think there may be a premise for a show in there i think there might be a premise for something yeah it was but i want to know what the actual mechanic i'm always interested in mechanics that you call is it a is it a tech situation do you

have lunch somewhere where you have lunch nothing with a trail i imagine you wouldn't want to text you wouldn't want to email you would want to meet somewhere you know a parking garage behind a pillar and say a few things i don't know yeah or it is just simply something as meeting somebody for drinks in georgetown somewhere and uh look around your shoulder and say yeah you need to say i don't know well um i told him to sleep right uh because as a new father he is going to need to do that sleeping is so difficult well no not really the thing is when you're an exhausted terrible what excuse me yes When you're an exhausted first parent, a parent of a child, you can sleep anywhere. You can sleep on a bed of Legos because you're so tired. But, you know, as life goes on, you want to make your sleep the most comfortable thing

because how much time do you spend in bed? Well, a lot. Okay. You know, here's the thing. Even, you know, easygoing types like Rob who are, you just float through life without a care, have your moments of demanding only the best. And I know it's hard to think of Rob as somebody who would say, send this back. It's not good. No, but we all have those moments. For example, I do not compromise on certain things.

I'm not going to tell you exactly what those are because the minute you do, people say, no, you're wrong about that. What you should really do is to have that. Rob, do you compromise in your cocktails for example or are you one of those ecumenical folks who say it'll do i mean it'll do yeah okay all right honestly but everybody knows the place they can go to get the perfect you know latte or the best eggs benedict or an unbeatable old-fashioned you know because sometimes you're just not going to settle for anything unless you got to get the best well we all have uncompromising standards in particular places in our lives. So why would you skip out on quality in the place where you spent a third of your life? And that's the bar.

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What's on your mind? Is there any space for anything else on your mind? I know that I doom scrolled about this over and over and over again. I mean, we're at a point now where we're actually getting we get tweets from Afghanistan. The New York Times has a story today about how the Taliban is going to use social media to help rule Afghanistan. Wow. That's your father's Taliban after all. Well, yeah, that's not going to work, but I don't know. I guess the question is, are we watching the spectacular incompetence of a bunch of know-it-alls who blew it? Yes.

And or, you know, a big change in America's commitment to a position in the world as a whole, not a nonpartisan movement, which these things happen. I mean, my theory in life is generally that the screaming is always loudest after the change has occurred. So after something has occurred already is when the disasters happen, like the disasters in the fire, the disasters, the fact that you just you weren't maintaining your electrical system or something like that. Is this the, I don't, is this the beginning of something or this is the confirmation of a, of a, of a trend? And my, my fear is, or my, I guess my conclusion temporarily is that it's the confirmation

of a trend that, um, that we just don't want to be engaged in the world the way we have been for a century, almost. Well, Peter, might you say that the reason that we shouldn't be engaged in the world is that we've been told by all of our betters that we have no moral standing whatsoever? In fact, this is a uniquely depraved country founded on the worst possible sins. We have no moral standard, and we'd best retreat. But that's not the belief of people who think that we— there's a huge portion of the Americas that retreat for firsters, and I don't mean that in a bad way. It's being a legitimate position who don't buy into that.

No, but all these things come together. Buying into that doesn't mean that. But it all comes together. I mean, when that's the general theme that you're getting in the popular discourse, yes, it's going to affect the way people think. The swaggering American is a bad thing. The American who wants to transplant his values elsewhere. So we learned, I mean, Victor Davis Hanson remarked about the pride flag outside the

Kabul embassy. And I wrote about that this week, too, elsewhere. I can't remember where. We hung out the pride flag and had the Kabul embassy tweet, yay, LBGTQ, et cetera, which seems to me like cultural imperialism of the worst sort. Is it not? Isn't that the very definition of what we were told the West was wrong in doing? Does that not sound like white supremacy man's burden to go to other countries and tell them you've got to fly the flag?

Regardless of whether or not you think the ideas behind it are a good idea. It's not their culture, and we're trying to change it to make it so. That's the only value, it seems, and we're trying to change it to make it so. That's the only value, it seems, that we will go to other places and talk. The only thing good about America is that we can go to a country that believes in throwing gay people off the top of the building and hoisting the pride flag. That's good. But everything else is rooted eternally in the fundamental inherent sins of America, and we have no right to tell anybody that we have a moral standing. We have no right to proclaim American exceptionalism, because

unless we're saying we're exceptionally bad. Or is that nonsense, Peter? Entirely possible. No, no. I'm just thinking, well, I have two thoughts, I guess, and one of them is just an image. I ran into H.R. McMaster yesterday. He's a colleague here at the Hoover Institution, Donald Trump's first, I beg your pardon, second national security advisor, retired from the army with three stars on his shoulder. And H.R. was strolling around with his little grandson, and he showed me his phone. And as he's strolling around in the August sunshine here in California with his grandson, the former national security advisor to the president of the United States, is tapping away at his iPhone, trying to get people who helped this country, Afghans,

translators, into the airport so they can get out of there. And I thought, this is really bad. This is really unnerving. When a senior official is just reduced to trying to call in favors by iPhone, to help this country's tell people who risk their lives to help this country. Item one, item two. I tried asking this of eli and eli didn't i think eli more or less just batted away the question but it's been a long time since we had a president who could explain why we had so many bases why we were doing what we were doing. George W. Bush says we're going into Iraq because they have weapons of mass destruction, and then they didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

We go into Afghanistan to punish the Taliban. We wipe them out in three weeks, but we have to stay there. Well, it turns out they're good military reasons to stay there, but that's not what George W. Bush told us. We're going to create a democracy like our own we're going to that it was we we we need a president who can relate what we're doing to the defense of our country in a sense can't you say that that was the you know the good luck for america to have one polar enemy russia and one articulate leader reagan at the right time right right um and one american leader reagan who really saw uh as his primary job to end the cold war that was what he's supposed to do uh and he did it um now we have

a series of positions and a shifting uh cast of characters of strategic competitors maybe more military competitors i mean what is we know china is an economic competitor that may be good for us or bad for us. Who knows? We don't know what their military designs are. Historically, they haven't had them so much as to encircle the Chinese-speaking world, right? That's one thing they've done. But other than that, it's really actually a hard thing to do, a hard thing to figure out. We are, in fact, without a blueprint. argument i've heard american politician give against nation building was given by george w bush in the 2000 campaign where he ran as a uh we were not going to build nations abroad as a repudiation of the clinton um or the clinton era uh trend of nation building nation building

used to be something that we said as a good thing in the 90s. And then George W. Bush came around and said, we're not doing that. That's a giant failure. That's what leads to Somalia, etc., etc. Six months later, nine months later, actually literally nine months later, we are building a nation and then building a second nation. Doing a thing that uh clear heads knew was impossible to do and then one calamity happens and we kind of freak out and so i i'm i'm just more interested to me i'm more interested in um

whether we're whether that's natural whether it's natural in a country a rich country though but like now facing true competition around the globe, is redirecting its attention and its resources. And one of the things we forgot to do, I think, is to connect, which I think is legitimate, is to connect our presence overseas in all of our places, deployments um you know europe with the west and the east and the near east and connect them directly to american interests and security and it seemed to me that if you can't make that argument to yourself about afghanistan then i really don't know how you make it about taiwan how you make it about west germany i don't know how you make it about guam really i don't know how you make it about almost any the afghanistan seems like that's the freshest wound in american um history i mean in 20 years a 9-11 is only 20 years and if 20 years now is

something we say to ourselves like well that was 20 years ago. We're not, we shouldn't be leading the world. That's not a culture that should be leading the world. And I suspect that there is a culture on the horizon that thinks in larger terms and is able to construct long-term plans. And unfortunately for us, that culture is the Chinese. So we either got to like step up or step down but this ripping the band-aid off the way we've done in afghanistan is probably the worst choice the um the debacle in freeing the iranian hostages that i talked about at the top of the hour capped off an entire decade where americans were increasingly innovative because we didn't feel as if we could do anything we didn't have the

competence we just we just lacked the confidence in our own competence for a variety of reasons. This feels different because if you look around at the problems of the devil of this country, it's not that we lack the ability to solve them. We lack the nerve, the will to go and do what everybody knows needs to be done. If you have the guys at the Kabul airport who are not able to help people get into the airport because the rules of engagement say they can't go outside and fight the Taliban, that's not because we're weak. It's because we have chosen not to do so. We have chosen not to make the streets safe in American cities by abandoning a host of police

policies. We have chosen to let drug addicts fill the streets of San Francisco and the parks of other countries because we have chosen not to deal with them by sweeping them out or putting them into institutions which you'll humanely deal with them. There's a whole series of things that this country has chosen not to do by a managerial class that does not seem interested in the least in solving these things, either because they're hamstrung by particular political ideologies that keep them from doing what needs to be done, or they don't care because there's more money and power to be made by perpetuating the system. So that's what I think is different about this. We know what to do. We're the soldier in the middle of Afghanistan with rules of engagement that have been set by

a guy way back in a desk somewhere else that tells him that he's got more problems if he loses a bullet and more paperwork to fill out than if he does something that if he, you know, shoots somebody under the proper set of engagement rules in those terms. Does that sound sort of kind of like what you guys feel? Or is this going to be one of those things where you say no not really and then agree with everything that i just said a rob long specialty wait a minute wait a minute um i don't know i think it is a quite i i'm not sure i'm not sure i think i had lunch with a friend of mine on saturday walter kern who i hope is going to be doing a podcast for us tell him i follow him and i think he's absolutely fantastic i will do that yeah uh and we were joking around darkly about stuff and he said is there is there anything is there any any reckoning america won't just kind of

kick down the road is there any can that we don't as a culture at the very beginning the foundations of our nation have just kicked down the road like waited like uh you know later on we'll deal with this and part of it is that's a funny cynical thing about america and americans are you know dynamic and we all have add and all that stuff part of it is our dna you know obviously that's that's the constitution is many many things but it is also uh so the kind of a software engineering they call agile where you're like we're gonna keep doing things at that we're gonna start and we're gonna keep fixing it and we hope that like you know down the line someone comes up with a solution to slavery but we're not gonna wait and solve it now we're gonna start a country and just kind of fix it

later and that's optimistic and that's what americans do best is like they think that the future is going to be better than the past that's like in our dna whether we like it or not and so that is part of what drives our desire to kick the can down the road but i think another part is our desire to turn everything into a story and and we want a happy ending because that's what we get and we watch too much tv and too much news on TV. And so it just feels like we're scrolling through real life and we're kind of looking for the big finish. And when the big finish isn't on, we got to change the channel. And culturally, I feel like that we just lost the thread of the story for Afghanistan because it was not that satisfying. And what's satisfying about what's not happening?

Security isn't satisfying. It is like young people at the end of the year, they look at their bills and they say, why am I spending so much money on health insurance? I didn't even get sick. What a rip. I don't need health insurance. I didn't get sick because you don't want to pay for something that you didn't notice. And that's what my concern is that not I look, I understand that we have our politicians and our leaders are incompetent. I accept that. I accept that this is a fiasco. All that's true.

But I'm wondering whether we as a should have the stomach i'm not arguing that we should but just i wonder where they have the stomach for maintaining our long-term global security interests even when that's been a theme for you this whole show yeah and i still i don't know yeah that's my question it's the it's the it's the question it's the question i i mean trump was on to something excuse me there i've got about 10 different thoughts buzzing around in my mind and it turns out you can't talk 10 different thoughts at one time so i'll just choose one well we have to wrap in 90 seconds peter so if you give nine seconds to each one of the 10 thoughts we'll be good wait a minute you guys get to hold forth at reams and reams of prose and I have 90 seconds?

No, you get to go. I don't know the answer. I was thinking about this because I was doing a little bit of writing about it. Communism holds that history is predetermined. We don't believe that. That's the whole point of democracy. It's open-ended. And I was tremendously impressed by the way Victor put the question, which is really

Rob's question. We are in all kinds of ways still by far the most powerful, most talented, richest, most dynamic nation on earth. And we can choose to embrace those strengths and build on them. And from this economy, this economy with its technical dynamism, of course, we can throw off a military that pursues our interests and protects this republic. But at the same time, look at all this rot that has set in. The American people get to choose in a series of elections. It would strike me that if a decade from now we haven't got this sort of cleaned out of our system and moved along, then it's over. But it's always been almost over. The 70s were a catastrophically bad decade in all kinds of ways. So the short answer is,

I just don't know. None of us knows. And that's sort of what we, not to whack, I mean, I'm not going to be eloquent, but the danger is that I might be grand eloquent. But that's sort of what we're trying to do here. All we can do is fight the fight and ask the questions and do our best in the underlying confidence that the country is worth fighting for. Will all things come to an end? Maybe this is the moment for this country. But it won't come. I intend to fight and so do the two of you.

But the answer, who knows? Who knows? It's scary, but it's exhilarating at the same time. And there is a great place to end. This podcast, worth every minute you just gave listening to it, we thank you for that, is brought to you by Made In, by Butcher Box, by Bowling Branch. Support them for supporting us, and of course, join Ricochet today. Don't make me make Rob

give you another member pitch. It's been a while, so we're keeping that one in our holster just in case. Listen to the best of Ricochet, which is a radio show on the Radio America Network, hosted by moi. And you can check your local listings to see if it pops up near you. And take a minute to give us a five-star review at Apple Podcasts.

Would it kill you? Apparently not. Thank you for listening. Thanks to our guests and our sponsors. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, fellas. Next week.

I took 120 seconds, James. I'm sorry. I went 30 seconds over there. No, that was a great way to end. Seconds are free. I will sleep in my sleep I will leave it in my dreams I'm making bad decisions I'm making bad decisions

I'm making bad decisions for you I'm making bad decisions for you. I'm making bad decisions. I'm making bad decisions. I'm making bad decisions for you. Pick up your mind Burn up your good Save us from all Save for our Lord Baby, I on everything we say

I'm not right down in the room But do me a favor Ricochet! Join the conversation. I'm making bad decisions. I'm making bad decisions. I'm making bad decisions. I'm making bad decisions. I'm making bad decisions. I'm making bad decisions.

Why did we have to move because no Americans are being attacked? Am I done? Thank you. Thank you. See ya.