The Ricochet Podcast - The Fight For France

Episode Date: November 20, 2015

Last week’s podcast concluded just before the attacks in Paris began, so this week, we’ve assembled a couple of guests who can help us make sense of it all and divine what response the U.S. should make both the terrorists and the refugees soon to be arriving en masse. Herb Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman... Source

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Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Hello, everyone. They have not gained ground in Iraq. I'm not going to get... I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't have any information on that.

They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to prove to be disastrous. And what it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs and our guests today are Herb Meyer and Walter Russell Mead. Let's have ourselves a podcast.

There you go again. Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast number 283. Brought to you by a wide virtuous panoply of sponsors. SaneBox. Is your email box out of control? Of course it is. You can get it back in control with SaneBox. And we're brought to you by The Great Courses. They're

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for your limited introductory price, and we'll tell you a little bit more about that later and of course i am well rested having slept on a casper and for the best night's sleep you too can sleep on a casper and have that thing delivered right to your door get a casper mattress and rest easy and we're also brought to you obviously by the thing that is ricochet and here's the thing that is Ricochet. And here's the thing that is Rob to tell you about that other thing before we go to thing number three. James, welcome. How are you? Everything good over there in Minnesota? 29 degrees. That's all I live for. I just live for that, for the weather report. I'm actually in autumnal and kind of warm Indian summer New York, although it rained like hell.

If you are listening to this podcast and you are anywhere experiencing weather, which is everywhere, you know what people say. They walk around. They say, oh, it's climate change. And sometimes if you're on the center right, you despair of what's happening and how silly the culture and the arguments of the culture have become. Go to Ricochet.com. We're the sponsors of this podcast.

Peter Robinson and I founded that organization to combat basically incivility and loudishness and disgusting language on the web to foster smart, thoughtful, civil conversation and debate, and to give everybody on the center right who's frankly normal and sane, and to give everybody on the center right who's frankly normal and sane a place to gather. So go to Ricochet.com, sign up for the Daily Shot. It gives you sort of a great crib sheet for the events of the day so that you can win and make jokes and make fun of any liberal in your wake.

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that in order for a conversation or a community to work, everybody has to have skin in the game. It only works if you know your fellow members are also part of the club and they've also paid dues. They also believe in our code of conduct and conversation. It only works that way.

I don't know why no one else has figured this out on the web, but no one else seems to have figured it out. We're free market conservatives. We believe that only ownership and skin in the game makes for a better world. End of rant. Please go to RickShader.com and join. It's free for a month. There's absolutely zero, zero risk. Peter, did I miss anything in that giant pitch? You said people should spend their money for the good of all, which is true. They should also spend their money because we have expenses. It costs something to keep

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There. I just used my big word for the day in self-defense against James Lilacs who I know is going to be coining one unforgettable image after another, polysyllabic, on he goes. By the way, James, I have one other thing to prod you, to incite you. It is 54 degrees headed toward a high of 71, cloudless, spectacularly beautiful. The taxes are too high. The infrastructure is crumbling. But California is still just gorgeous. Nice to hear it, of course.

It's that monotone weather that just leads the brain eventually to assume the lively characteristic of a dial tone. Here, fighting with the elements, grappling with them like Ahab, staring at the spout of the whale in the distance and grabbing his harpoon, that's how we feel about winter coming. And it makes us better, heartier, sharper people for it. That's what we have to tell ourselves every single bloody year. Gentlemen, after last week's podcast, which we did on Friday thinking,

hey, what's going to happen this weekend? Paris occurred. And, of course, everyone's been spending the week wondering what the response should be. You know it's going to be nothing pretty much. Pinpricks, penny ante pinpricks. I'm of the mind that seven days and seven nights of fuel or explosives over Iraq would tend to concentrate the mind. But America is in no way ready for a dresden-esque response to this so it's going to be more of the same until we get oh look there molly hotel radisson um so on it

goes are we all molly now are we uh is that do we have to find what the colors of their flag are so we can change our twitter avatars to moali today? What should our response be? I have actually been to that Marriott in Bamako. But here's what's interesting about that, about Mali, about actually, I think most of the crackpot terrorists, I don't even, you know, I'm actually going to try to coin a new phrase, not the Islamic radicals, but the Islamic literalists, I think is what they really are, who are taking over. In Africa, they're al-Qaeda. They're al-Qaeda. I'm not ISIS.

It's al-Qaeda. So people always say, oh, well, al-Qaeda, we whipped al-Qaeda. We should do exactly what we did with al-Qaeda. We should whip them. That's what we should do with ISIS. The truth is that al-Qaeda didn't go – al-Qaeda didn't get smaller. It just moved. It went to Africa.

And eventually these groups are all going to hook up unless we do something pretty drastic. Who is sending – who's making a stand for France, which I think is probably – the lack of any other European leadership or American leadership certainly is probably his best option at this point. And letting in 30,000 more refugees. Peter, your response. Is he letting in 30,000 more refugees? Did they say that? I can't hardly believe that. At the very minimum. The character of France depends upon it, don't you know?

That's actually true, unfortunately. Has he said that since the Paris attacks? I thought they were going to – oh, well. That's just astonishing. Well, so there is this to be said about France, right? That although they have this – their overall domestic policy is touchy-feely, heavily socialist. They never stop puffing themselves up about their place in the world of culture, saving the economy, on and on and on it goes. When it comes to their police and their military, which is small, but still, they are pretty tough. And I have to say Francois Hollande has been – well, what was it? The Wall Street Journal said the other day that while President Obama is behaving the way he behaves, that is to say until we have a new president in the Oval Office, Francois Hollande – this is the pass we've reached.

Francois Hollande is the best leader in the war on terror that the West has. All that said, we've been reading and seeing clips on YouTube and so forth of the French attacks, the French massive attacks on ISIS in Syria and Iraq, stepping up there. And I read one of these stories to the third or fourth or fifth paragraph where they actually started giving some facts and details. The number of French aircraft involved in these attacks, at least this was I think the day before yesterday, the massive attack, 12. 12 aircraft. Using targets that we provided, which apparently we just had in our back pocket in case we needed to send an additional message a day after we'd sent a message. So what it comes down to again and again,. I suppose eventually if France survives, if it started to

ramp up its military right now, five years from now, it might have regained status as a medium sized military power. But France, France, 12 aircraft, that's the best they can do. Britain doesn't even have an aircraft carrier any longer. In fairness to them, they're slated to build one over the next X number of years. But what it comes down to, as it seems to over and over again, either we act or nothing happens. And

I don't actually know what we should do. I don't actually know what we should do. Here are my two responses to that, Peter. One is the worst thing about this president, I think, in terms of foreign policy, the worst thing about this president is he's so classically arrogant. He's such a product of his upbringing and milieu and the people who shaped him that he really doesn't think that anyone was president before him. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush on a very unified line that American military power should be preeminent in the world, that we don't want to encourage other countries to increase their defense spending, even though it's irritating to us that they don't because we don't trust the countries of Europe after World War I, World Wars I and II, and we don't trust other countries to have large military. We trust ourselves. That's the bargain we made to people.

We'll protect you, but we're not going to let you have a standing army. We're not going to encourage you to do that because we don't want you to get in a lot of little fights with each other. That was – since 1946, that's been the deal. Since he took office though, he seems to think that wasn't the deal and that other countries should just step right in and take – and act. But we've – that hasn't been the American policy for 80 years. So I find him incredibly, incredibly irritating, starting to report more of their discomfort with his lack of any initiatives at all to deal with this. And in terms – and then just to answer what should we do, I have no idea what we should do. But I think we should start by banning the use of hysteria or panic to describe people who simply are disquieted by the number of Syrian refugees we are supposed to take in. The idea that you're disquiet with that is panic or hysteria

is so perverted and distorted. The truth is, if you do a thing, if you do something or take an action without reflecting on it, without thinking about it, without analyzing the consequences and without protecting yourself from the consequences, and without protecting yourself from the downside. That is what is hysterical. That is what is panicked and insane. It's perfectly rational to say, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, slow down.

But Rob, Rob, I think actually you are being a little bit panicky and hysterical. Look, we only have four to five million people in this country illegally, only four to five million in this country illegally because they overstayed their visas and we can't find them. Surely, surely any immigration service that can limit the number to four or five million who are here illegally because they can't find them, surely they can let in 100,000 Syrian refugees and know exactly the inner beliefs of every single one of them, know exactly that every single one of them is coming here as a genuine refugee and intends and wants nothing more than to assimilate into this great country. Surely they can handle that. So please calm down.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And how quickly we turned on people voicing legitimate caution as somehow bigoted and crazy. I mean that to me is a – and I think there was – I forget his name. James, maybe you remember this because it was all over Twitter. A columnist from Mother Jones of all places was the one who pointed out – I think it was Kevin Drum who said – Kevin Drum. Exactly. Kevin Drum. This is unwise people. Yeah. It is unwise. Yeah who pointed out. I think it was Kevin Drum. Kevin Drum, exactly, Kevin Drum. This is unwise people. Yeah, it is unwise.

Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry. Well, it's just that most people out there would like a pause. Most people are a little bit disquieted by it and don't want to rush pell-mell into something that they see as completely needless. There is no obligation of the United States to take in everybody or half of everybody or a quarter of everybody. It's not how it works.

The first objective is to defend the United States and its interests. The second is to be charitable where you can, but that doesn't automatically mean that anybody who wants to come here gets to come here. A lot of this would have been more easy for the administration to sell, I think, if they had been keen to bring in Yazidi and the persecuted Christians when they were having their heads lopped off by ISIS. But all of a sudden, to be told that we have to do this seems to be another part of that wonderful European version of the multicultural project wherein the national character is changed intentionally by the elites in Brussels in order to create this ideal society, which really, at the end, is nothing more than a herd of people being shuffled around the continent with little pieces of money in their hands that have pictures of imaginary buildings.

They want to dissolve the European national identity in favor of this great transnational project, and I say it's spinach into hell with it. Before we go, the remarkable thing is that the sort of bureaucrats in Brussels haven't even managed to do that with Europe. Europeans all over are starting to chafe and trying to break free of Brussels. So the idea of like enlarging the EU is sort of classic progressivism. You haven't even accomplished your first mission. Now you want to go – now you're in the sort of second level mission, which is insane. The national identity of America is protean, is procrustean. It changes, it shifts, it adapts, it adopts.

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Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie It improves. That's what we are. That's what our country is. It's tremendous.

It's a civic identity. And if if the European leaders were saying that we would like to be more like America in that sense, I would I suppose I applaud them. I'd also say good luck, because what they're dealing with can't deny if you know a Frenchman that what he wants to remain is French and that what he wants France to remain is France. And so the idea that there's some sort of cultural dissolution that has to take place in order for the great future to – no. Can I – I know you have to go. I just want to say one thing because you made me think of something, which maybe someone else has said more eloquently before. But this is what I just – struck me, what you just said. If you ask a Frenchman or you ask a Dutchman or an Englishman what he wants to be, he'll say a Frenchman or an Englishman, a Dutchman. If you ask an American what he wants to be, he'll say free. Yeah.

That's very good and that's almost bumper sticker quality. That's true, actually. It's got a few more words to it. It's a very rational thing for you to say, Rob. And as you said before, you want to think rationally about these things. I deliver you the segues, James. it over like actually like a stack of chips that you're tipping the uh the guy who's uh dealing the hand uh yes rationally is the key word there and if you want to be the most rational person in any room like rob long who i think we can all agree is eminently rational um how do you do it well two ways one you can kidnap rob long um uh you know the king of comedy style and hold him in your room tied up until he imparts his wisdom or we don't recommend that you can go to the great courses well it depends if you get sandra bernhardt there she's she had her she had her moment

i just got that safe word yeah there you go what is your safe word by any chance just so we all know for general i don't even know probably it can't be it can't be squished because that sounds like something you'd request i'm asking you to do yeah right precisely all right well the greatcourses.com which probably regrets the fact that we moved into bondage safe words en route to telling you what they're all about, would like us to restart. So we are. If you listen to our podcast, you're probably a naturally curious sort of person. And so that's why we're telling you about The Great Courses. We're big fans of these things, including the Philosopher's Toolkit, How to Be the Most Rational Person in Every Room. It's taught by Patrick Grimm, who's an award-winning professor who provides you with great tools to sharpen your critical thinking skills,

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For this offer, go to thegreatcourses.com slash ricochet. That's thegreatcourses.com slash ricochet. That's thegreatcourses.com slash ricochet. We now bring into our podcast guest segment, our guest, Herb Meyer. He served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of central intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. In these positions, he managed production of the U.S. national intelligence estimates and other top secret projections for the president and his national security advisors. Mr. Meyer is widely credited with being the first U.S. government official to forecast the Soviet Union's collapse, a forecast for which he was later awarded the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished

Service Medal, which is the intelligence community's highest honor. He's the author of How to Analyze Information and The Cure for Poverty. He's also the dad of Ricochet editor Tom Meyer. We welcome him to the podcast. Hello, Herb. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I just said hello, and now you can pretend that you're saying hello to that. And then Peter O'Rob, this is James.

Peter O'Rob will jump right in. Herb, Peter Robinson, I've only met you a couple of times, but we served together in a certain sense during the 80s. I was in the Reagan White House when you were across the river in Langley. The question I would like to ask, and I'll bet a lot of people would like to ask it, runs as follows. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, they seem to be everywhere. The news – we had attacks in Paris last week. This morning, there's news that they've taken hostages in Mali, Africa, Europe, the Middle East. Can intelligence – can Western intelligence possibly hope to keep up with the terrorists, let alone to give us the chance to stay a step or two ahead of them. Let me give you a short answer and a longer answer. And by the way, it's nice to be back in touch with you after all this time. Those were good years back then. Last time it worked out pretty well, Herb. We took down the Soviet Union. Let's just get,

if we can knock off the Islamists during this podcast today. We did that. Yeah, okay. Go ahead. Anyway, look, the short answer is that when you play defense, you cannot win. All you can do is try and hold them off. And since no one's perfect, you're going to have attacks. You're going to have terrible events like we've seen in Paris, like we're seeing in Mali. So the short answer is, no, you cannot win playing defense. And by the way, if we go back to the Reagan years, what actually happened is that in 1979, 1980, the three most unlikely individuals stepped onto the world stage simultaneously. Polish Pope,

a woman prime minister, and an actor. Talk about a year of the outsiders. The three of them agreed that they did not want to keep not losing the Cold War. They wanted to win. In other words, they threw the switch from playing defense to playing offense. That was the great shift that changed the course of world history. Now let's look at what's happening here. We in the West have basically been playing defense for the last several years. And so sure, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, all their affiliate groups, they're running amok. Let me give you, if I may, one way to look at this right now that might make a difference. When you study the history of

war, one of the things you very often see is that the creeps always go too far. They're doing great, everything's terrific, and then they take one last step. They just couldn't resist doing it, and everything crashes down on them. If you look at Japan, the late 1930s, 1940s, they were running all over Asia. They were doing great. And then they had the bright idea to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor. Well, it was a disaster for us, but it was a bigger disaster for Japan. They lost the war. In fact, they got nuked twice. And in other sense, creeps attack creeps. If Hitler hadn't attacked Russia, Germany would control Western Europe, probably even Great Britain. But he couldn't help himself. He had to do it.

Well, one way to look at it is this. ISIS was doing very well because we were all up at the switch and playing defense. Look at how much they've accomplished in the Mideast. Look at the territory they've taken, the Mideast. Look at the territory they've taken, the caliphate they've set up. And then within 10 days, they brought down a Russian jetliner and they attacked Paris. And now they've got the French and the Russians coming after them. You know, we're mourning our dead. We're criticizing our intelligence services. And rightly so, I'm not so sure the leaders of ISIS think they're doing very well right now.

They're getting bombed. You know, the smarter leaders of ISIS, not the idiots, but the smart ones may think, oh, maybe attacking Paris and bringing down the Russian jetliner wasn't such a good idea after all. So, you know, we always tend to think in wars that our enemies are geniuses. Sometimes they do really stupid things. That's too soon to tell. But it wouldn't surprise me if these guys are thinking, uh-oh, maybe everything just changed. One more question.

I know Rob Long and James wanted to get in and ask a couple of questions. I have one more that I just have to ask, Herb. One of the things that was so impressive about your former boss, Bill Casey, was that he seemed to have in his mind all of world history. He steeped himself in history. And every time he looked at a contemporary problem, it was informed by a deep knowledge of history. So the question runs as follows. Many of us on the right become frustrated and then some that Hillary Clinton will not talk about Islamic terrorism, that President Obama will not permit himself to be drawn into in the history of the conflict between Islam and the West, and it's more or less permanent. Islam comes out of nowhere in the 8th century and within a few decades has swept across northern Africa, wiping out what were already quite ancient Christian communities. It takes over all of Spain by what's the Battle of Tours, which is deep inside France is 732 as recently as 1683 there at Vienna. So if you look at history,

you see that whenever the West is in any way weak, Islam presses it and holds to this day the Middle East, Turkey, North Africa, all of which used to be Christian, all of which used to get into a civilizational struggle. As recently as I think it was 30 or 40 years ago, just two or three generations ago, the Western population was I believe 20 percent of the world's population and Islam was below 15 percent. Now they're equal to us within another generation or two. At current birth rates, they'll outnumber us. How do we fight this war without starting a civilizational conflict? It's a good question. Look, it is a civilization conflict, but not necessarily in the way that everyone's talking about it. What's actually happening when you stand back from it all is this. Peter, when we were back in Washington 30 years ago, the prism through which we saw the world was the Cold War, that titanic struggle between the free world and the Soviet Union.

Cold War ended. The prism went away. President George H.W. Bush talked about a new world order, but he couldn't quite explain what he meant, and it wasn't his fault. It hasn't formed yet. He just had an intuitive sense that something new was shaping up. Well, now there's a new prism, and that prism is modernization, modernity. That's what's going on. What we're looking at is the entire Islamic world beginning to do what we in Western civilization began to do centuries ago, which is to become modern. May I show you what I mean by that?

Please, please. If you go back before we became modern, say the end of the 17th century, 1690, 1695, life was terrible. Lifespan was very short, mid 40s in most places most people were half starved when they prayed, they prayed that when the next famine came at least some of their children might survive that's how bad it was

people were illiterate, uneducated women weren't allowed to be educated travel was rare most people spent their entire lives within 20 miles of where they'd been born. You had no say in how you were governed. You were a peasant. You were a serf.

You had to shut up. You did what you were told. Nothing changed. Tomorrow was the same as yesterday. The modern world is completely different. Lifespan is nearly 80, and there's no starvation in the modern world. Do you realize what an extraordinary accomplishment this is? The first lady tells us accurately the biggest health problem

faced by the poor among us is obesity. Isn't that incredible? What a human achievement. People are educated, literate. Women are educated. They own businesses. They run for office. We travel all the time.

We have a huge say in how we're governed. And the driving force of our lives is change. Our transition to modernity wasn't smooth and seamless. The 18th and 19th centuries were violent. In 1861, the United States broke apart into a civil war over slavery. And before that war ended, we killed more than 700,000 of each other and a president was assassinated. Peter, that's much worse than anything that's ever happened in Iraq or Afghanistan. It happened here. It happened to us. The 20th century was ghastly. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, fascism, communism. Look what it took to get us here. When we look at the war, all the turmoil, all the violence, what we're actually looking at is the entire Islamic

world beginning to make the journey we began more than 300 years ago. And what we keep saying to these people is, can't you guys do this by next Thursday? No. Look how long it took us. Look at the mistakes we made. That's what we're seeing. Okay.

Can't you do it by next Thursday? I recognize that, but if the whole project goes off the rails, ours as well as theirs, if there's a dirty bomb in Manhattan, right? Understood. Yes, but what I'm saying is it's a mess. Again, if you go back to, say, 1861 when the Civil War started, I can see half the members of Ricochet, half the commentators on Fox News saying, See? Told you these Americans couldn't hold it together, should have cut a deal with the Brits, those damn Tea Party

patriots in Boston, look at the mess they made of everything. Well, you know, they had a point. But we got through it. We got it together. These things are horrible. But that's what it looks like when you're on the road to modernity. In a way, Peter, the entire Islamic world, a billion and a half people, are beginning to write the code for version 2.0. That's what we're seeing.

This is Rob. Herb, thank you for joining the podcast. I'm in New York. So what I would say to those code writers, write it faster. I do want it by Thursday. Here's the problem really. In olden times, in olden days, everyone was separated, nicely separated. Now we sort of – we are virally attached to each other, not just virally by a computer but virally by an actual medical virus.

These diseases transfer back and forth really quickly. So a 13th or 14th century civilization with very literal views of its religion isn't some – sort of isolated in some desert backwater or free to impose its own peculiar backwards and frankly primitive views on its own citizenry as in the case of Saudi Arabia. But instead, they're in Paris and they in London, and they're in New York. And the Ebola virus goes from Africa to Los Angeles in 11 hours. That's exactly right. That's why the 21st century is different. And when that happens, when the Ebola virus was right here in downtown Manhattan, where I am, there were swarms of police, swarms of guys in hazmat crews scrubbing turnstiles on the subway. And there was police tape outside the meatball shop on Greenwich Avenue where the one Ebola victim was reported to have gone. We actually took major action to keep that. Now, it was silly in retrospect, all that stuff, but we didn't really need it because nobody else got Ebola. But the truth is that while they were doing that, they thought they were doing the right thing, and they were doing something called quarantine.

That seems to be the solution now, although if you mention the word quarantine, you get 1,000 pounds of progressive politically correct response to that. As they make their way into modernity, shouldn't that be something they are required to do back home? Well, yes. You put your finger precisely on it, which is this. The 21st century is different than the 18th and 19th centuries simply because everything's so close and we're interconnected. You know, if your neighbors are having a marital dispute, do not go next door, knock on the door and ask if you can help. But if a bullet comes through your window, suddenly it's your business.

But that's what's happened. Their dispute, their fight for modernity has now landed on us in Paris, in New York, Mali, and so forth. So you're absolutely right. We have to respond differently, and I'm with you. We have to respond hard, which is, hey, guys, if you want a debate coming into the modern world, that's nice, but you can't kill us while you do it. And that's where we have to play offense. Can I ask one sort of procedural question? Because you've had a long history

in the intelligence community. The Defense Intelligence Agency is now being investigated, I believe, by the Inspector General for massaging intelligence it delivered up to the President. Whether it was done sort of ham-fistedly or done sort of with a whisper, apparently it seems that the word went all the way down to the collectors of intelligence and the preparation of sort of raw intelligence to be presented to the president that it's better not to say that ISIS is getting stronger.

It's better to tell him what he wants to hear. How easy is that to do? Have other presidents done that? Is that a danger of intelligence gathering in general, or is that something you think is more worrisome for this president? Well, it's all of the above is the short answer to the question. Everybody wants to keep their job. Everybody wants to make the customer happy. So there's a huge tendency to tell a president,

a secretary of state, whatever they want to hear. Can I tell you an interesting story about Bill Casey that sort of answers your question? Sure. Please, please. We wound up doing a national intelligence estimate. It was something about the Mideast. I actually forget what the details were. But the key judgment was that the conflict between the intelligence and the policy was irreconcilable and the chances of the policy succeeding were bleak. That was the actual word. Bill Casey's two guys were me and Bob Gates Bob went on to become our defense secretary

Bill called us and he said look I just played a round of golf with George Schultz the secretary of state and he's really upset by this could we take another look and Bob and I got all hot and bothered and we said no we won't change the intelligence. We won't do this. And Bill said, look, hang on, guys. It's possible we made a mistake. Why don't we take a second look at it? And come on, we owe it to George. He's a good guy. He's trying to do the right thing. So Bob and I went back to the staff and we said, hey, look, Bill's got a problem. Just played golf with George and George was upset. And can we take a look? And they said, no, we're not taking another look. Said, oh, come on. Bill needs a hand on this. The upshot is we took another look. And when the new draft came up, instead of saying the chances for the policy working were bleak,

they said the chances for the policy working were nil. So Bob and I looked at each other and we figured, uh-oh. And we said, well, Bill's not going to fire both of us. Let's just go into his office and show him. So we walked in and we just handed it to Bill. And he said, okay, thanks. And he just put his hat and coat on. He went right over to the State Department and he threw it on George Shultz's desk. Now, if that's not what you want for an intelligence chief,

you got a big problem. That's the difference. What made Reagan special, among other things, is he wanted someone like Bill, the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, who would tell him what he needed to hear, not what he wanted to hear. If you haven't got that, – he got the intelligence. He got what he wanted to hear, which wasn't real. Do you think what's happening in Paris, what's happening in Mali even, although that's al-Qaeda, what's happening in ISIS in general, do you believe that that's a direct or indirect response of bad intelligence for a year, of being told what you want to hear?

Probably. But there's also a thing. Sometimes you can tell a policymaker the right thing, give them good intelligence, but they just don't want to deal with it. There's sort of nothing you can do. I mean, it's their job. You know, if your doctor says, hey, listen, stop drinking beer and eating pizza and get more exercise, he can't make you. He can only tell you that's what you can.

Thank God for that. Yeah. No, but I mean there's a serious problem of what do you do if the policymaker simply won't act on the intelligence. There's one short answer that you won't get from anyone in Washington, which is you resign loudly. Right. And you say, hey, we've been sending intelligence to the White House, and they're ignoring it. They're changing it. They're lying about it.

The president just gave a speech that's in complete conflict with the intelligence. And you slam the door loudly. By the way, someone like a Bill Casey would have done that in two seconds, and everybody knew it. I'm not sure who in Washington right now has the guts to do something like that. And if you don't have people with the guts to resign and slam the door, you got a problem. And one of my problems is not one four-star general has thrown his stars on the table and said, this is baloney. I'm out of here. I'm not sending guys into battle with these rules of engagement. Not one.

Alas, if it had been done under a Democratic administration, the press would have given it a day on Friday and then forgotten about it. If it had been a Republican administration, they would have trumpeted that as a sign of the times for weeks to come. But right now, getting outside of that little protective bubble around D.C. is one of the hardest jobs we face. Mr. Meyer, thank you so much for joining us today. And we hope to talk to you again soon about your other areas of expertise or just whatever current news has had the misfortune of happening. We'll talk to you later.

Thank you. Herb, thanks so much for your service to the country. But if I may, even more so for your son and his service to Ricochet. You're welcome. For that, you're welcome. Well, we had in the news this week, yes, as Rob was noting, there's been these long stories about intelligence not reaching the president. And Cheryl Atkinson reported that the president really simply doesn't read some stuff if it doesn't conform with a particular worldview that he has. And I think it will be in a year from now when they go back and look at the ruins of this city or that building and find out that actually things were said, they'll wonder, why didn't anybody know? That's because the president, in his infinite wisdom, had taken

all of the information that they'd send to him, warning about what was to come and black hold it, which is a mistake. But it's a great argument for the power and force of Sane's black hole feature to keep you from ever seeing troublesome emails that you never want to see again. And that's why we like SaneBox here at Ricochet. Not just because they're a sponsor, but because they're so damned useful. You got too much email? Of course you have too much email. Train your box to do what you want it to do once you join Sane and start to play around with the settings a little bit. And it's easy, mind you. It's practically automagically behind your back. You will find that some stuff that doesn't need to get looked at right away

goes to your Sane Later folder. The things that you've sent to people that never got a reply, they have a folder, and there's the beauty of the Sane Black Hole when you drag that stupid credit card offer from a Mexican bank into it. You never see anything from those people again. So it diverts the stuff you don't need into separate folders and concentrates for you on what you need to look at. Now,

features like one click on subscribe, the ability to snooze non-urgent emails, you'll save hours, countless hours, and increase your email productivity, they say, by 25%. I think for me, it's about 25.3 to 24.7, so I fall within the range. That's more time you can spend on your email and engaging your audience. well. Again, S-A-N-E-B-O-X slash Ricochet. We now welcome to the podcast, Walter Russell Mead. You've read his work at the, well, the American Interest, which is the publication that he's editor of large at. He's the distinguished scholar in American strategy and statesmanship at the Hudson Institute, the James Clark Chase professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard

College. From 97 to 2010, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. You can follow him at Twitter at at W Mead. And we welcome him to the podcast.

I believe it's your first time with us, isn't it, sir? I think so. Well, welcome. You wrote recently about President Obama's rather cynical refugee ploy. We heard the other day a speech in the Philippines where he got mad at the one target that really enthuses him, the Republicans, calling them names essentially. It's a contemptible display of contemptuousness. But you wrote, quote, to see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama's least

favorite question, why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place? If you could elaborate on that. Sure. Well, you know, back when the whole Syria thing started, there were nonviolent protests against the Assad government. And this is, there was no ISIS, there was no radicalism. And a lot of people at the time argued that the U.S. should work with them, not boots on the ground or anything like that, but work to push Assad out. The regime was rapidly in retreat. Had we done this, Syria would certainly not be a paradise today, but you'd probably have

no ISIS in Syria and no 10 million refugees and displaced people. Even beyond that, after things had deteriorated, a lot of people, including people in the Obama administration, called for safe havens where refugees could come in Syria and not be sent on the road. Again, President Obama overruled his own advisors, and so his choices are a major reason why we are where we are. And so to turn the man who failed to take the kind of precautionary, prudential measures that could have prevented this catastrophe, for this man to now turn around and talk about why other people are at fault here, I think is a little rich.

Walter, Peter Robinson here. Here's a question I've been, you've been tweeting up a storm, by the way, and it is perfectly amazing how in 140 characters and one link, you're able to deliver to people who follow you effectively a slow-moving doctoral dissertation in world affairs. It's just amazing. You're one of the best tweeters on the planet. In any event, so here's a question I've been meaning – I've been hoping for the chance to ask you and now I have it. And it falls in the category of how bad is it? Is it possible to deal with the Islamic radicals, let's call them that, without starting a war of civilizations between the West and all of Islam. And let's just take the case of France, where I've seen different estimates, but the Muslim population of France now seems to run,

the lowest estimate I've seen is 7%. It goes up to 10%. Whatever the number, it's some millions of Muslims who live in France. They tend to live in concentrated areas. We hear a lot these days about the banlieue, the neighborhoods and large neighborhoods. Again, we're dealing with millions of people. Is the French problem identifying and tracking some small-ish number of radicals, a couple of thousand? Or is the French problem that they have an enormous population of millions in their midst who in one way or another are against them and will represent a permanent danger? You know, it's hard to say. A lot of that depends on the future. But let's them or any way for them to get out of what becomes essentially a ghetto, that's not a good recipe for success. And so I think the Europeans

can do a better job about dealing with the legal immigrants they have who were there. I think the polls seem to show that most of the Muslim population in countries like France does not sympathize. In fact, it's actively opposed to these nut jobs. But, you know, if things don't get better economically, if they continue to feel socially excluded, it could be a really difficult situation. And I think the French are aware of it. Again, I think the American model of getting your immigrants

from many different sources so that no single immigrant group is, you know, is kind of big enough to set itself up as an alternative to the mainline society, mainstream society, has worked a lot better than what's been happening in some European countries. Additionally, obviously, you do have the whole question of Islam and the ways in which people who are aggrieved or unhappy or angry can find networks of jihadi thought ideology. That becomes an additional problem.

Hey, Walter, it's Rob Long in New York. Can I just talk about politics for a minute or at least American politics? You're a scholar and you look at the American political scene. You wrote a very tough column about Obama. Traditionally, in most presidential administrations, there's somebody there that we say, I wish he'd listen to this guy more or this person seems to know what he's talking about. I wish the president could listen more to this person. Is there anybody like that in the Obama administration that you think you wish could march into the Oval Office and set their president straight? Are there any quiet heroes there?

I think many people have. I think many people have. I think at various points, you know, whatever you think of Secretary Clinton, on some of these cases she had a very different point of view. She said it. Rob Ford, former ambassador, Robert Ford, the former ambassador to Syria, has said it inside the administration and outside. I think you find somebody like Joe Lieberman, who obviously doesn't have a job in the administration, has said many of these things. So there are a lot of Democrats, a lot of seasoned national security professionals who are worried by what they see happening.

And I think that one of the differences, one of the things that's happened between the president's first and second term is in his second term, he seems to have surrounded himself more tightly with people who agree with him. And there is less access to the inner workings of the White House from people who disagree. It does seem, just in my memory, that usually around this time in the president's second term, any president's second term, there are lots of books and sniping and books out and sniping and little gossipy stories, and we all – we complain about that. Everybody sort of rolls their eyes like, oh, this is typical of an administration falling apart. But it does show that there's a lively discord in a group.

I mean under Reagan and even under George W. Bush, there were people who disagreed politically at that policy. How dangerous is this situation right now with the Obama administration? It's a complete bubble. They don't seem even to be listening to their own side. For a president to have a foreign policy – for instance, a refugee position and to lose almost 50 key Democrats seems like a – would be a warning sign for any other administration. But for this one, it just keeps chugging along. What do you attribute that to? Well, again, look, I don't think they're as worried about the Syria vote.

He'll be able to override, and the override will be sustained. If I were a Democratic political manager, I would say to all my people, listen, if this is a problem for you back in your districts, vote against the president. No harm, no foul here. Which they seem to have done in the House. There were 47 Democrats voted with the Republicans in the House, so they seem to have done just that. Yeah. I don't think that means a collapse of authority or anything like that. I have one last question, though.

I want to just continue on this. After 9-11, there was a fairly large group of people who simply kind of shrugged and said this is terrible. But America and the West is just going to have to get used to regular incidents of low-level – they call it low-level terrorism. I don't think 9-11 counted as low-level because of the sheer death count, but I think that for those people, 150 dead in Paris counts as low-level terrorism. Do you think – first of all, do you think it's low-level terrorism? Do you think we have to get used to it? And isn't that sort of the Obama position that, hey, you know, stuff happens?

Well, I think, yeah, he would be more likely to compare this to crime than war. And, you know, you might say you have a war against crime, but you don't expect – you're not going to get to Appomattox where crime surrenders to you once and for all. So yeah, I think there is a sense in which for Obama, this is part of the human condition, and it may be a new normal. I think, though, he is aware that if there were sort of another 911-type incident on American soil, it would be disastrous for him and the politics he represents. And that's one reason why we have such an active drone program, such an active surveillance program. Obama is talking as if there were, you know, the war on terror is over and everything is calm. But in fact, behind the scenes, they're trying pretty frantically to keep any of this stuff from coming up again because it would be such a disaster for them. Walter Peter here.

One more to follow on that. Surveying the Republican field, do you feel comfortable is the wrong word. Let's just put it this way. Who has, of the Republican candidates, who strikes you as the most wide awake? I'm not even reaching the question of whether he has good policies to propose, but who seems most wide awake to the international facts? Who understands the world we now live in best? You know, I have to admit that three months before the Iowa caucuses, I haven't made a profound inspection of the entrails of the various candidates. So my colonoscopies are not complete here.

You know, and at this stage in any presidential race, I'm sort of more interested in ruling people out than ruling them in. Okay, rule out a few. Well, I don't think Donald Trump has. I mean, you know, he talks about the threat, but I look at what he has to say. I don't see much sign of a sort of an intelligent, you know, it's more like chicken little squawking than somebody coming in with a plan. So I would definitely say that. Would he strike you as incapable of – I mean on Republican politics, I think people are getting used to the idea that he may very well win a primary or two. So we have to ask a few serious questions about Donald Trump. Does he strike you as incapable of hiring, finding, recognizing and bringing in good advisors to make up for his various obvious gaps in knowledge?

I've seen nothing, nothing that gives me confidence that he would be even a minimally competent president of the United States. Okay. Next? I'd love to be found wrong. I think that's about as far as I'm ready to go at this point. Oh, so you are unwilling at this stage to rule out Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul? I haven't been playing close enough. I thought Rand Paul had ruled himself out, but I guess technically he's still in the race. Right. But I think Rand Paul's sort of brand of withdrawal is not going to set many voters on fire this cycle. Yes, well, the voters, as we know, are dousing themselves in gasoline and walking around looking for a match. And so far, there's been Trump with a flamethrower, and we'll see if that carries through into next year.

And if you want to read about this and other great insights, you can go to the American Interest, where daily you will find something of consequence to read. Thank you for being on the podcast today, sir. Thanks so much. All right. Thank you. Thanks. Bye. You have to like – wasn't mead – wasn't that a honeyed alcoholic beverage? It was. Yes, exactly right.

It's one of those things they used to raise tankards. And how much honey do you have to get to make booze? I mean it just – I suppose in the olden times you just had lots of time to do something like that. And if you were king, you would have everyone go out and get your mead for you, I suppose. Sounds so good, doesn't it? I don't know. You can go down now to the store and get a honeyad for you, I suppose. Sounds so good, doesn't it? I don't know. You can go down now to the store and get a honey shandy or something like that. There's all these shandies, these seasonal things, and the end result is always the same.

Drowsiness and you fall asleep and wake up with your back cricking because you got a lousy mattress. If you're the sort of person – Oh, there it came. There it came. All right. I'm not saying we have a product designed for those people who lose unconsciousness in an alcoholic stupor. I'm just saying that everybody sleeps.

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said, risk-free trial and return policy. Try sleeping on a Casper for 100 days with free delivery and painless returns, and you'll also know that it's made in America. That's a good thing to know. Not $500 for a twin, did I mention that? $950 for a king? Now, you compare those to the industry averages, and that's an outstanding price point. So, for $50 off that already low price, go to casper.com slash ricochet and use the coupon code ricochet at checkout. We will all sleep better knowing that you did, and we thank Casper, of course, for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Gentlemen, from the member feed this week, we had something that's been delighting people on the right with the schadenfreude all week. And that is watching the people on the left in the academies who taught and schooled all these young Robespierre's.

They now find themselves on the tumble going for a ride at the end of which is the guillotine. They bred a generation of radicals and found that they are not held in esteem or respect. Rather, they themselves are now to be tossed on the ash heap of history. The latest is the attempt to dethrone Woodrow Wilson, of whom I am no fan whatsoever. But I do have a problem with chiseling off the names of people off buildings because history in retrospect has decided that they're not worthy of the honor. It's like going back and finding those Egyptian carvings where they had to blast off the name of the female pharaoh. History is best preserved, so we remember it and make not the same mistakes again. What do you guys think?

Is it time for Woodrow Wilson to be scoured from the landscape for the sins of racism? Well, I think he was a terrible president, and I can't say – I can't really think right now of anything he did that I really agree with 100 percent. So for that reason, I don't want his name removed. I want him to be there. I want to be able to know that he – how terrible he was. But I just note that they did have a – they had a symposium about this a year ago i think or not quite a year ago yeah because you know this is not the first time this has come up um and and it came usually it's the wilson stuff is usually in response to some crackpot left wing left wing move to have

like calhoun college at yale renamed right or some other thing and then there's always a bunch of academics saying well yeah you know that is. And there's almost always an academic who has some kind of tenured position at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. And so the natural response is, well, why don't you change that? So they did. They had a symposium about it, and there was – someone printed the transcript. It's great to read. It's fantastic, exquisite yoga-like pretzel twisting that these people go into to make a distinction about why Woodrow Wilson should not be removed from the name of the school. No, I think in the best possible world, he should not be. However, universities in the United States right now are insane.

And rather than trying to put lipstick on the pig, maybe we should just let the pig go crazy and lose all the pig's customers. That metaphor doesn't work anymore, but you know what I mean. I can't help noting that it is such a relief, such a relief for Rob, Yale man, and Peter, Dartmouth man, to be able to attack Princeton. Just what a relief after what's been going on at Yale and Dartmouth. I have to limit myself since I have two sons at Dartmouth College right now. People have sent me emails. What's happening? Do I have opinions about what's happening at Dartmouth? I do, but I decided to keep them to myself because I embarrass my children enough as it is. So I wish to limit myself to saying simply this, when they play football in Hanover, New Hampshire, tomorrow at noon Eastern time,

it is my rich hope that Dartmouth crushes Princeton. How's that? Going out on a limb there, Peter. Woodrow Wilson. So, enough of that. I'm not going to say anything about Dartmouth because I embarrass my children enough. But it is exquisite because Woodrow Wilson is at once the founder of the progressive movement and richly on record, richly on record as a totally unrepentant, unreconstructed racist. It's not even slightly ambiguous.

He believed the white race was superior and African-Americans were inferior and that it was genetic and permanent. And so all I can say – I don't know what they're going to end up doing. But all I can say is I really am enjoying watching the progressives who must trace their intellectual lineage back to Woodrow Wilson himself, twist and turn and squirm on this one. Schadenfreude is the word for it. But yet Margaret Sanger will never be kicked out of the pantheon because her name and her works are attached to the holy act. And she's a woman, so that would be exclusionary and patriarchal. But Woodrow, yeah, sure, throw him on the pyre. I don't agree, but like I say, watching their auto-consumption, their self-cannibalism is a delightful thing to see.

We leave with this. Rob reminded everybody that Ricochet is not just a place for center-right politics. It's also about the culture. I think the last post I had was an argument over whether 2001 is a great movie and should be seen. There's lots of stuff like that bubbling. But you hit a nerve, a perennial nerve if there is such a thing. Did I? You did when you said don't leave a tip because apparently a couple of restauranteurs in New York have decided not to – decided to ban tipping and raise their prices accordingly.

And as we all know, if a couple of restauranteurs in New York do something, we should have a national conversation about it, shouldn't we? Well, I mean, it's Tom Colicchio and it's Danny Meyer. Danny Meyer runs probably one of the most successful restaurant groups in the country. Shake Shacks are everywhere and he's opening different restaurants all over the place. And he's a very, very, very, very good restaurateur. Runs great restaurants that really do him proud. His argument was that it's weird. It's barbaric with an international clientele. Half those people don't even know they have to tip. The waiters and waitresses get taxed on it anyway.

Why not just simplify everything and put it all – just put it all – fold it all into the price of the meal? And there's something about that I don't know. I mean Pascal Emmanuel Gobry, a French writer, wrote a wonderful piece that I used to quote it from about why he loves tipping. He loves going – he thinks that's a sign of American greatness. The service is so good, and if you get due way with tipping, it ends up being just like France where the service is terrible. Great French restaurateurs like Eric Riper and Daniel Boulud and I think Jean-Georges Van Gerichten have all said they're not going to – they will not abolish tipping because they don't want it to go turn into France. So we're about to have a market test, which is good, A-B testing. That's what made America great.

Perhaps so, and perhaps as the fast, casual restaurants continue to cannibalize some of the mid-range sit-down stuff, and those places have no tipping whatsoever. But I don't know. Anybody who's ever spent time as a waiter, and I was a waiter for many, many years, knows the job and knows the pleasure of being able to reward somebody for above and beyond and also to punish somebody for slovenly, sloppy, indifferent service. So, yeah, ban it and we'll go the way of France. And by that, we mean the people who actually seemed serious about attacking ISIS. Nothing's clear anymore. You know, that whole Freedom Prize thing, as I wrote in my, after they attacked ISIS, I thought, well, so much for the cheesy-seeing surrender monkeys. And about that whole Freedom Prize thing, let's just say that's ketchup under the plant. Well, folks, that is it for us. We have to thank TheGreatCourses.com, and we have to thank SaneBox.com.

And if you go to the Ricochet store, you will be able to pick up many pieces of Ricochet swag to display that logo conspicuously in public. Also thank casper.com. And in all these cases, Ricochet is your code coupon word. And on the web, it's your guarantee of civil

center-right discussion amongst friends like we've had here. See you in the comments, everybody, at Ricochet 2.0. Rob, next week wait a minute hold on wait are we next week because it is after all the great day of feasting oh good point i don't think we've just i don't think we have a policy on that i'm sorry next week we're just going to have a live broadcast that's consist of auditory mastication by rob peter and myself who are just going to be slopping down the gravy and the bird and the rest of it so So come in, listen to us crunch celery. Or not.

All right, thanks, guys. We'll see you later. Next week, fellas, probably. Next week. And do remember, A-B testing, it's what made America great. I knew I was going to get away with that.

But it is. In a way, it is. We don't have to discuss this now, Peter, but in a way, it is. And the script says, cross-chatter, fade down. We'll let Scott Emmerget fade anytime he wants to,

but we're about to have some A-B testing in this house next week. My wife, don't ask me why. Rob knows her. He knows she's Cuban, and you don't ask why. She has announced that although we're having a turkey on Thursday, we're having a goose on Friday. So we'll have a little A-B testing. I've never eaten goose before in my life. Really?

Delicious. Oh, okay. You're in favor of that. All right. Enough. Next week, boys. you saw me standing by the old corner of main street and the lights are flashing on your windowsill all alone ain't much fun so you're looking for the thrill.

And you know just what it takes and where to go. Don't say a prayer for me now. Save it till the morning after. No, don't say a prayer for me now Save it till the morning after Ricochet. Join the conversation. Take a chance. Don't say a prayer for me now. Save it till the morning after. No, don't say a prayer for me now. Save it till the morning after.