The Ricochet Podcast - The Spartan Lifestyle

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

In a world gone mad, there's something comforting about turning attention to crazier days that somebody else had to suffer through. TikTok informs us that the boys are thinking an awful lot about Rome, we grownups are joined by Hillsdale College's Paul Rahe to learn about proxy war, ancient and modern. He helps Peter, James and Rob connect the dots between Sparta's success in bleeding the Athenians in Sicily to the machinations of the global superpowers in the 20th Century on to today. Listen in to understand how a foreign policy that fails to take Thucydides into account is doomed. (Be sure to preorder your copy of Dr. Rahe's Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta.)Also enjoy some good ole fashioned rants about the state of emergency on our border; and which Monty Python star James got to gab with in London.

I'm losing your voice for some reason. Well, I've been trying to lose his voice for a long time. Congratulations. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new answers. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long.

I'm James Lalex. Today we talk to Paul Ray about Sparta. When was the last time you thought about Sparta? Well, you're going to now because let's have ourselves a podcast. The border is secure. Frankly, Mr. Noraster, I don't care what you think sitting in your safe office removed from everybody playing with some numbers. Go and talk to people. The answer is to have real borders. The answer is to have the rule of law. And once you establish that, then you look into what needs to be done in our immigration system. Welcome, everybody.

This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 659. Boy, that's a lot of podcasts have you been there from the start good for you are you just joining us for the first time well have you got a backlist to go to you can go to ricochet.com join sign up and learn all the advantages of being a ricochet member does that mean like you know triple a where you get 10 off if you go to the outback steakhouse no it means you are part of the most interesting, civilized, center-right conversation on the web. Pricochet.com. Check it out and then get back to us with all of your details so we can invite you into the family, a family that includes founder

Rob Long. Peter Robinson will be along in just a second. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis. Rob, hello. How's Gotham? James, how are you? No, Gotham's actually quite lovely. It's got that, it's a perfect time. You know, it's still kind of sunny. It's not quite autumn, so it's not cold, but it's not hot. It's kind of nice. And it's, you know,

everybody knows it's about to get really good. That's when it's at its best. As you walk along with the fragrant smell of roasted chestnuts and crisp wind and apple breeze and weed smoke skunkifying the air. Yes, indeed. It's not yet chestnuts. There still is a wafting odor.

It's not chestnuts. I've never known anybody who actually bought the chestnuts. I don't know what you're supposed to do with them. It's just the scent is perhaps like an air freshener for gotham like the equivalent of a tree hanging off a rearview mirror or something like that i don't know anybody it's weird because in new york it's a we think of it as a new york thing and and nowhere else but everywhere in europe in in the autumn in the winter there's they're roasting chestnuts on the street i mean they do it in paris they do it in budapest they do it everywhere it's actually just kind of a thing but we only do it here in

new york i don't think they do they don't do it in chicago do they know chicago no because nobody wants to know whoever says boy if i got a yen for some roasted chestnuts could i really have eaten roasted my chestnuts they're roasting on open fire when i was a little kid it was a big big deal it only happened a few times when i was a in school for my father to take me down to New York. And when I must have been seven or eight, my first visit to Manhattan, wintertime, and he bought me a bag of roasting chestnuts. They of fact, but that's not something you're going to find. Anybody daubing behind the back of the rear? Well, Peter, welcome. Here we are. I'm back after my sojourn in London and Walburzwick and Suffolk with interesting tales to tell. We'll tell that at the end of the story.

And I promise they're interesting because they involve interesting people, not just myself. So in the news today, a whole bunch of stuff, of course, the usual back and forth of politics and war and the rest of it. The story that I think is the most interesting has to do with a immigration crisis on the border. I don't know if you guys have noticed, but we're having something of an immigration kerfluffle. Aren't we? Yes, we are. Eagle Pass, Texas declared a state of emergency because they think that more about, oh, 10,000 migrants or so are expected to enter the town, which itself has a population of under 30,000. It brings to mind the video that we've seen of a small island off of Italy, which has a population of something like 6,000 and has been overwhelmed by 12,000 migrants. And the reaction seems to be, well,

we have to find a way to disperse them all through Europe, to which most people might say, why? The Hungarians certainly say that. The Hungarians certainly would. But, of course, they're run by a, you know, they're run by a complete fascist, don't you know? So the idea of having sort of a country for yourself and border control is now verging on authoritarianism um we seem to be told by our moral betters that we have an obligation to take in absolutely anybody who shows up here and do everything for them the biden administration is considering a an id for the illegals i'm sorry the undocumented the on how oh there's a new term there new term. I can't remember what it is, but I heard it.

It was on a report from New York. Now that the mayor wants working permits for these people, there's yet another new term. And? And I can't remember what it is, of course. There's just too many of them. I can't remember. Well, undocumented was it for a while, as though a piece of paper...

I mean, undocumented is somebody who just doesn't have it on them. That doesn't mean they're entitled to the document in the first place. But you know, of course, that after the IDs are done, from the ID comes the driver's license, and eventually comes the voting. Because while they're here, they're impacted by all of these decisions, so it's wrong not to let them have a say in that. Your take on this gentleman which um well i i what i love about the internet is that um that someone not me but someone could actually do a little research and find out when exactly when pretty much by within the day probably we started saying migrant what day was that that was very recent so there's got to be a day it's gonna be like oh you know what on june 3rd there

were no migrants uh yeah right it just came to me on paper on paper papered is the new term on paper yeah that is somebody that knows on paper to somebody who's sitting in a bathroom stall and realizes that there are no rules. I'm sorry. But Rob is making the linguistics. Every time a new term gets introduced, we've lost ground. And the Internet will let you know when that time actually is. And I think I'd like to know who and when and where it first appeared and then i want to find out who decided because i i bet someone decided it just feels like a brainstorming session in the new york times

style book editorial meeting where we can't call them that and we can't call them this and let's call them something that they are clearly not i mean they are illegal they are also undocumented that is true that's a euphemism they are also on paper that is also true it's a euphemism but they're not migrants no correct refugees didn't work and migrants stay yeah migrants come and they go that's what they do or they keep moving um so uh someone someone made this decision and i was in a room and with a big dry erase board and they had all these names up there no bad someone said no bad there are no bad suggestions no bad ideas and some sad little sap raised his hand and probably said something that was a little bit you know descriptive

and they all yelled at him and said well there's that bad idea uh how about migrant and um i just want to know what date that was and where that was you're right uh so my reaction is fatigue at this point anger i can i can i can summon up the anger all over again and i'll tell you why i'm angry and why we should all be angry but i've noticed that i i have become inured to this and that is the not me but that seems to be the case with the country even on fox news what was i watching last night the the special report the brett bear show brett bear was in saudi arabia doing but in any event was the brett bear show and there in any event, it was the Bret Baier Show. And there was footage of people streaming across the border, and it was just a three-minute segment, even

on Fox News, which sort of lives to get us all outraged. So, here's why I'm angry. In 1986, when Reagan signed his immigration bill, there were 3 million people, it was believed, there were 3 million people in this country illegally. And that was such an outrage that there had been a bipartisan commission established under Jimmy Carter almost a decade before it was chaired by that good and holy man, Theodore Hesburgh, Jesuit priest, president of Notre Dame University, both sides got, it was uncontroversial that we had to do something. It was difficult to work out exactly what had to be done, which is why it took year after year. Finally, legislation got enacted, and that was to address 3 million illegals in this country. 8 million have entered the country during the

presidency of Joe Biden alone. 8 million. And now we're down to a three-minute segment on Fox News. I mean, what am I saying? I guess I'm angry that I can no longer work up the angry. We're all the anger. We are all just numb to this. I can recall, this is years ago, I had a conversation with a philosopher who to my astonishment was a kind of conservative guy. And I said, what about this argument that the earth belongs to all of us and that no nation has the right to these borders, that the poor always have the right? And he said, well, I can be very sophisticated about this, or I can just ask you this. Do you have the right to the use of your own home?

Are you permitted, are you morally permitted to lock your front door, perhaps to put a fence around your front yard? And everybody knows that that's true. And he said, the argument from the individual homeowner to the nation is identical. Identical. And we have lost the will and the wits to make this argument, to get angry about an administration that has chosen. At this point, of course, it's not administrative difficulty. It's not lack of money they've given. They've chosen. All right. I'm trying hard to work myself up into anger again, and I just can't do it. They haven't. No, we haven't lost it. We have been informed that certain attitudes are nationalistic, xenophobic, and therefore outside of the pale. We have been informed and instructed that the idea is, is that we are a nation of immigrants ergo anything that involves

immigrants is is is it's just absolutely fantastic now i i'm one of those white you know uh pro-immigration guys i think it's great we need good people smart people we need workers demographically wise yes let's vet everyone let's get good people in here, let's provide solace and an asylum for the people who are truly, truly needed. But what we are seeing now is a lot of single men and economic refugees, or people who just have made a very sensible, rational decision to crash into this country and get more for themselves than they could elsewhere. It's a rational, sensible thing to do. But the interesting thing about this is that we're supposed to believe that it's all sort of dispersed, that these are just little droplets into the great ocean of America

when we see, as in New York, as we see it in Chicago, and as we see in this town in Texas, that you have instantaneous shifting of the culture in these specific places where it happens. So in the case of the Italian island, I find it fascinating because they say that they're going to want to disperse them throughout Europe when two to one now the people of this nation of this little island are outnumbered by the other color. Why? Why not just keep them on that island there and have them do whatever they're going to do? And the reason is, of course, is that it would completely destroy the culture of that island, which then leads to the conversation as to whether or not the people of that island deserve to have their culture unmolested, unshifted by exterior elements. I was listening to the BBC hard talk the other day

where this unbelievable interviewer was excoriating a Swedish politician who was suggesting that the bombings, the crime waves, the difficulties they have in Sweden require them to redouble their efforts to instill Swedish values into immigrants and perhaps consider whether or not they should be taking in as many migrants as they should. Migrants, there, I just said it. And the interviewer was yelling at him practically for saying that these are right-wing talking points. It is right-wing now to say that Sweden, a country which does not have the population of the United States, has the right to maintain its own culture to believe what their own culture is and to keep it from being shifted and changed by people who are

antithetical to it now the america's america is not sweden we're not a monoculture we were we're the melting pot it's also the point they're not yeah i mean they're not antithetical wait a minute no the migrants in sweden no i guess it's sweden obviously but that's the we're even weasel wording that they are they are muslims they're from muslim countries right from syria and places like that and they're refugees from a terrible war and they've come to sweden and they are different they are very different from the swedes right everyone's different from the swedes but these people are really different from the swedes um the what i'm sorry i interrupt you no no no no no no my rant is this yes uh there's good news

about it's good news is that um suddenly all those things that james says which rightly were attacked and thought it was right wing talking points in the united states but we have to separate it it's not sweet um are now things being said by the liberal mayor of new york hey we got to do something about all this hey what's going on right so that that is some small good news um the other thing that i just i know i i shouldn't even get mad at it it's just too ah it's like too complicated to be mad at but every time someone says they're refugees from venezuela i'm like well whose fault is that how many liberal americans were down there in venezuela or praising hugo chavez and saying he's a socialist king and he

and castor have the right answer instead of saying what everybody knew which was it was a despotic uh chaotic and utterly incompetent regime that was going to take a an energy supplying nation an oil rich nation and drop it down but somewhere between you know burkina faso and niger in its gdp right that that is what socialism did and it's not my fault it's the fault of the political science department at harvard and a bunch of hollywood actors who praised this guy they created a problem now the problem somehow we have to solve and then then the other problem is this is that a long 30 000 50 000 foot view of this is that we have had this bizarre sleepwalking attitude about this problem because there's always like in the you know it's like i mean i'm not

trying to be you know whatever but there's always the you don't have to try rob the wall street journal editorial page argument that actually this is not a problem there were a bunch of california economists and business people said look this is not a problem it's gonna it's actually necessary for the growth then there was you know when it was started really happening in the 90s when you know unemployment in america was sort of below what anyone ever thought it could be institutionally just just as a matter of the number was lower than anybody ever thought would go it's a giant magnet for labor came from the south and we all thought you know maybe i kind of get it great it was enormous growth in the 90s when the economy grew and grew and grew those are

great years for us we all kind of slept walked through it and then we had you know then you know i remember tom tancredo from colorado he ran on this and didn't get anywhere in the republican party and republicans kind of rolled their eyes and said it's not really a problem and uh and then trump made it his issue and i think that was a huge part of his appeal. And then even when Trump got in, he did basically nothing. He built fewer miles of wall than Barack Obama. He said he was going to build a wall. That's correct. That's correct. That's correct.

So I have a secondary rant, and this one I still can get pretty good and angry about. Mexico. Mexico is a country that was making enormous progress for about 20 years, and now they can't pull themselves together, they claim, to block wave after wave after wave of immigration that begins at their southern border, crosses Mexico, and then enters our southern border, right? Mexican immigration into this country has become relatively modest. It's people from farther south, those Venezuelans you talked about, and now we know perfectly well that people from all over the world are crossing Mexico to enter our southern border illegally. The Mexicans can't get their hands on that. The Mexicans also seem unwilling, and this is, I mean, of course what I'm saying, all of this is a matter of political will.

They also seem unwilling to get out of the fentanyl game. And among young Americans, drug overdose has now become the leading cause of death. We lose 100,000 kids, overwhelmingly kids, a year. Now, I'll tell you about two, I'd better not quote them because they didn't know I was going to yak, it was confidential, at least private conversations. But here's what one former member of a presidential cabinet told me. What's going on is that the Chinese are supplying the Mexicans with the raw materials for drugs. The Mexicans then do the final cooking, the final assembly, so to speak, and of course, transmit it to this country. And the Chinese are doing this to accumulate cash outside China. We know who the Mexican, tracking the Chinese is difficult, I was told by this

cabinet officer, but we know a great deal about the Mexican drug dealers. All right, next item. Another former member of a presidential cabinet took a tour of the southern border in Arizona and talked to some ranchers in Arizona. And it turned out there was got in touch with the ranchers on the Mexican side and said, listen, tell the drug dealers we're going to install fences. Don't have mules break down the fences. We're getting cattle mixed up every single night. Just use the gates. We're going to install, I beg your pardon, I misspoke. We're going to install gates. Just make sure they close the gates behind themselves. And so this is now going on that there is an informal but perfectly straightforward arrangement for illegal entry of drugs into this country. Final point here is that remittances from Mexicans back to Mexico, are now $50 billion a year. $50 billion of our economy gets transferred

directly to Mexico each year. This is insane. It is just insane that we and the Mexicans cannot pull ourselves together to help them if they need the help, if they'll accept the help, and to get rough, diplomatically rough, at least, if they won't accept the help, to stop this immigration across their country and to stop this drug trade. All right. It is just insane. Now, that may be difficult. They may be, but we are making no effort difficult just difficult sane difficult was it to santas who said a the occasional sidewinder or tomahawk into a meth lab would concentrate the mind oh but they'd move elsewhere

okay then hit that one i'm sorry i'm if you have somebody who is shipping imagine if these factories were producing plutonium and were smuggling that into the american cities in very small quantities mind you but it killed an awful lot of people. It would be the same thing. That's a very good point. Remittances? Ban them. Ban them. Sorry, would you like to get this money back?

Okay, here's what you need to do. You need to stop people from coming up here, and you need to do something about the fentanyl. Then we can talk about starting the remittances up again. Three, the fences, the doors. That's interesting interesting because when something like that comes along, what I think is that probably health and safety, what's the, oh, they're going to make sure that the doors that the mules get through are ADA compliant. That would be the only thing that the government would be concerned about that. If indeed you are installing ramps on the border. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

You need ramps. Do they swing both ways? Are they power assisted? We're going to build ramps and Mexico's going to pay for it. That's right. Absolutely so. I know the answer seems simple to those of us who don't have to do anything about it. Of course, people, you know that the ones who are involved and tasked with these things themselves barely get any sleep whatsoever and toss fitfully because they know that the answers are there. If only we could sum that up, the will and the money

to do it. But those people, if they wanted to sleep a little better, well, we know what they would use, wouldn't we? Of course, they would use bowl and branch sheets. So bowl and branch, you know we're talking sheets, right? And you know that sheets are necessary for sleep, good sleep. How do you sleep better? I got to ask. You go to bed earlier, you silence your phone, you read in the evening so you can... Me, I just drop right off. I mean, those are all good ways to get you to sleep. But if you want the highest quality sleep, you have to get the highest quality sheets. And if that sounds ridiculous, okay, think you got sheets made out of burlap. You're going to sleep well? No. So scale that up to the finest sheets you've ever had, and that would be bowl and branch.

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we thank Bowlin Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Ricochet favorite, Ricochet writer, Paul Ray, professor of history at Hillsdale College. He holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage.

He's the author of Republics, Ancient and Modern, Soft Despotism, and most recently, Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta. Welcome. How are you? We're all grand, and we have been just despairing over the course of modern events, so it's always fun to cast our mind back to history when things were probably worse, and bloodier, and the like. So the last week on Twitter, and i know you're on twitter like five six hours a day somebody posed the question you know i wonder how often men think about ancient rome and the answer was generally tended to be almost every day or every day and myself it's about every other day because if you study art history if you study politics if you study any i mean rome is for my twitter feed i got guys who are showing me mosaics and marbles and stories and

busts and the rest of it so rome was always still part of my imagination on a daily basis and it's not surprising that people do so this got to people thinking about uh that but you know rome gets all the gets all the pr sp Sparta, Greece, less so. What will it take, Paul, to make us think about Sparta every day? The Michigan State football team would game on the ancient Spartans. But let me say there are more sports teams named after the Spartans than there are named after the Romans. It strikes me that if one were to pose the question, how often do people think about Sparta, it would be more often than you think, especially in wartime. But look, Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War is my fifth book on Sparta. It'll be released by Encounter Books on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Paul, I have to stop you there. You know too much. It cannot be good for your brain.. It cannot be good for your brain. It just cannot be good for your brain. You know too much. You may continue. I'm beginning, I'm 74, so I'm beginning to forget a lot. All right, as long as you're off-loading.

Which may be helpful. Maybe 20 years we'll meet. Our knowledge levels will meet. A part of what has been driving my writing these books is a conviction that the two camps in thinking about American foreign policy in this country, the realists, best represented by John Mearsheimer at University of Chicago, and then the sort of Wilsonians, pretty well represented by the younger Bush, are both out of their minds. Both? Both, yes. a good administration with regard to foreign policy since Ronald Reagan, and that both the Republicans and the Democrats have ignored what is right in front of their eyes.

There has been a kind of utopian vision that if we could unite everyone in a neoliberal international order, that commerce would cause the spread of democracy and Russia and China would become ordinary polities. I believe that was crazy from the beginning because you need to pay attention to cultural differences and one of the people who directs you to paying a difference attention to cultural differences is thucydides in book one paragraph 70 the corinthians try to instruct the spartans about what the athenians are really like and what they're up against, and they juxtapose the two peoples, and you realize that they're very, very different. They will respond to the same situation in quite different ways. So to think that the Russians wouldn't try to reestablish a Russian empire in Eastern Europe is simply crazy. And to think that the Chinese would not try to be the central kingdom and dominate the world is equally crazy. And what we've done is averted our gaze

from the facts for 30 years under the influence of these two schools of thought, which are we used to talk quite a lot about the Persian Wars, because there you had a democracy. The Athenians led the Greeks in standing up to this vast autocratic empire, and it fit very well our feeling of ourselves. Or you can see the same, fundamentally the same storyline in Star Wars. It's the Republic versus the Empire. And that was a source of great encouragement because Athens beat the Persians and we were going to beat world communism. Okay. But we kept our mouth shut about the Peloponnesian Wars because that didn't fit at all. That wasn encouraging at all there you had a more or less democratic athens that lost to a centrally controlled autocratic sparta well what so i don't think that's i don't think that's true go ahead go ahead go i want to hear i want to hear

you adjust these templates for us what do these two wars mean to us today? Well, look, let me step back. George Marshall gave a talk at Princeton in 1948. And in that talk, he said, you cannot understand the position of the United States in the world today unless you study Thucydides. And I can tell you at the war colleges, the Naval War College, the Army War College, the Air War College, where I lecture and have lectured off and on since the 80s, and the Marine Corps University, they're all focused on Thucydides. And so the view was Sparta, that's the Soviet Union Athens, that's the United States And I would say that there is a certain similarity

In the struggles that have taken place in the world From the 1690s to the present day Because the main struggles have involved maritime powers in the Rimland, Britain, the United States, and so forth, against continental powers. Napoleon, Louis XIV, the Kaiserreich, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. And I think it is still pertinent. And of course, there are big cultural differences between commercial powers and land powers. Commercial powers are not so much interested in territory. So the Spartans here are the land power, is that correct? Yeah, China's a land power trying to be a sea power, just the way the Kaiser's Germany was a land power trying to be a sea power. And so, I'm trying to get to the parallel here is Sparta was a land power and the Athenians were a sea power, essentially.

Yes. Yes. Okay. That's right. But here's the other thing. Sea powers have a tendency to go off on crazy adventures. The Athenians went to Sicily, which gave the Spartans the opportunity to really stick it to them and to do it on the cheap and through a proxy war uh and uh the the if whenever you have these land and sea powers against one another you tend to have a stalemate and of course in the nuclear age you tend to have a stalemate and so when you get a stalemate you often get proxy wars

so the korean war was for the r, a proxy war. They could bleed us on the cheap. Vietnam was a proxy war for the Chinese initially and the Russians later, so they could bleed us. The first Afghan war that we were involved with was a proxy war on our part against the Soviet Union, and it may have contributed mightily to bringing down the Soviet regime. Our time in Afghanistan, we just opened ourselves up for it, and the Pakistanis carried out a proxy war against us. And in Iraq, both the Iranians and the Syrians carried out a proxy war against us. And what we're doing right now in Ukraine is carrying out a proxy war against us and what we're doing right now in ukraine is carrying out a proxy war against the russians and we are bleeding them oh my god we're bleeding them uh uh and it put nato back together and it added the fins and the swedes i have to ask you because you brought up ukraine

it's always fascinating to go back see the patterns repeating themselves as we sing of arms and the men and the rest of it and human nature not changing, etc. But we are seeing, when you talk about air power, some new fundamental shifts, are we not, in our expectations of what the battlefields of the future are going to look like? This is the first time that I can think of that we've had drone warfare, like the swarms of it, overwhelming it, finding its way into the little chinks and the little holes. It's fascinating to see what we're learning in this war. And aren't we learning about that a lot of the paradigms that we've been comfortably

settled with for a long time are actually out of date and we'd best keep up? Yeah, that's always the case look when the trireme was invented and and the persians began sending out large fleets uh and they managed to get horses onto triremes suddenly amphibious warfare became a possibility for the first time in human history uh and it transformed things so that the technology is always changing and boy are you right about drones and you know that that leads one to um a kind of question uh i was on um at a gathering of the mckinder forum uh yesterday and i can't tell you who was there because i'm not allowed to but i can tell you what i learned oh now you got it now you have to tell us yeah yeah yeah right

76 you know all of the computer stuff depends on rare earths right down to your cell phone 76 of the rare earths are produced in china 15 in the united states now you might ask was that always so and the answer is no the environmentalists pushed the united states to shut it down because uh right the pollution that comes from it's pretty ugly the 15 we produce is refined in china so look sun tzu argues one of the the greatest victory you can achieve is one where you win the victory without having to do any fighting at all by putting the other side in a position where they cannot resist and i would suggest to you that our dependence on china for rare earths is such

that we can't fight a long war against china except of course what's one other country that's been in the news lately that has a tremendous amount of rare earth well india ukraine ah okay i didn't know that yes they do but they haven't been producing it uh they've been trying to ramp it up but since the war it's been a bit difficult but a lot of people have said that putin's grab on the east part portion of ukraine is a resource grab i mean there's lots of you know the neon is one of the things that ukraine produces that that it outstrips other capacity and that's very necessary in semiconductors from what i understand so there's a lot of reason the the nationalistic getting the old band back together, big brother, old brother thing for Ukraine might actually be a fight over resources and money and oligarchy. Imagine that.

Well, to some degree, it surely is. You know, they say that amateurs talk strategy and professionals in warfare talk logistics right um and if you look at a sparta sicilian expedition involvement in the sicilian expedition a lot of it has to do with the fact that the athenian logistics are a nightmare because you've got to you've got to make supply people over 800 miles of sea with the technology of the time uh and you know to the extent this rare earths thing is significant that's a matter of logistics yeah right and a very important one and we for 30 years we averted our gaze from the possibility of war and we didn't think about logistics well i mean i you know every um military history i've ever read and every military historian i've ever talked to eventually you start talking you say the same phrase which is cut off the supply

right the break up the supply chain. Get them so that, you know, every army, Napoleon's army travels on its stomach. That's, you know, you just expand that definition to include everything, material everything. The Ukrainian strategy right now is so clearly to cut off the line, supply lines to Russia from the Russian forces russian forces in ukraine territory now but part of it has been done because we're so rich the americans were so incredibly affluent and we were looking at a nation sort of you know across the pacific that was poor and we thought well you know let them make these dirty things i mean making a semiconductor which we now do we now think about

and design them in the united states some of them but we making them is dirty it's dirty business so we're like yeah let them do it there's a certain kind of decadence that sets in to a country that is no longer willing to sort of grasp what it needs uh i always say that with electric cars electric cars run on electric car batteries electric car batteries really run on cobalt and that cobalt is dug by little children in africa with their little fingers and they are literally are slaves and um we never hear about that you only hear about well it's better for the environment well it's not better for the environment. Well, it's not better for their environment. I guarantee you that. I mean, as the great Thomas Sowell always teaches us,

there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. So let me ask you a historical question. First of all, I have two things. One, I just want to tell you this little story. We occasionally, when we're looking to hire somebody for Ricochet or our new Ricochet productions, we're talking to young somebody for ricochet or our new ricochet productions we're talking to young bright almost exclusively hill still graduates they're all really smart and everyone i say things like hey did you ever take a class in paul ray and almost to the student they go oh yeah that guy was hard yes hard so i guess that's a compliment um uh i remember in in the 2000 campaign so that's

al gore versus george w bush the foreign policy platforms were very different al gore was part of that nation-building interventionist we can build a new country here and there uh foreign policy and george w bush said we that this is silly we can't do these things we shouldn't do these things we should pivot to china that middle east should be uh we should be benign neglect i think was the actual term they used. And it sounded so sensible. And then 9-11 happened. And it isn't as if they grafted a policy onto their existing policy. They just changed the policy.

So how do you, what advice would you give people to remember that, despite all of the things that happen because you know these things happen they happen in history that um you don't change that policy i mean it seems like it's human nature right it what i would say is the question that should always be asked is, what can go wrong, and how likely is it to go wrong? And in my opinion, in Afghanistan, it was inevitable that it go wrong. Right. In Iraq, there was a chance. But then you have to ask a second question.

Can you do it at acceptable cost? In other words, to turn Iraq around, what would it take? And I think the answer, which I did not consider at the time, is it would take a long time. The question is, are we ready to make a long-term commitment? Now, in some measure, we succeeded in Iraq. They still have free elections, which is really quite remarkable. In other ways, we weakened ourselves and strengthened Iran because Saddam Hussein stood in the way of Iran. You know, if you go back to the Iran-Iraq war, to some degree, we used it as a proxy war against Iran. Because we gave at least intelligence help to Iraq at crucial moments. And of course, we intervened at one point to keep the flow of oil going from Iraq, which was very important for Saddam Hussein.

Wasn't Kissinger's famous line during that conflict, if only they could both lose? Right. It's a good line. It's a good line because neither one of us is, neither one of them could possibly have been a friend of ours. But it led us, I think, to the wrong conclusion. I know Peter wants to jump in, but it led us to the wrong conclusion. The argument that I heard from people making that Iraq was a nation and that nation could be fortified by our presence was that Iraq, this multi-sectarian Shia Sunni state, Shia Sunni Kurd state, fought together under one flag against the Shia, 100% Shia nation. And this multi-sectarian nation that really only exists in Iraq, in that region, managed to hold itself together, forgetting that they did that because

to the rear was a bloodthirsty dictator who would force them to fight so the the country once we went in exploded into sectarian violence that we didn't predict wasn't right wasn't that we didn't pay attention to the ancient rule which is that people hate each other sometimes and they hate each other for a long, long time. I mean, nobody predicted that in Yugoslavia, nobody predicted that in Iraq. Right. I mean, I still go back to the ancients and think, well, why don't people just read the history? The other thing we forgot is they have a tendency to unite, when they unite, against a foreigner. And the longer we stay there, the more we look like the foreigner.

Paul, could I, on this theme, Yugoslavia is a country for, what, four decades. Tito dies, the Cold War ends, and it breaks up into Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. And it turns out that the Orthodox Serbs still hate the Catholic Croatians, and they both still hate the Muslims in Herzegovina. Okay, that's number one. Number two, and maybe even more dramatic, what I'm getting at here is the question is going to be about historical continuity. Here we have Vladimir Putin behaving in roughly the same way as Ivan the Terrible. For a thousand years, Russian rulers, Romanovs, communists, and now whatever Putin is. There's no ideological through line at all from Putin to Ivan the Terrible. What is the mechanism? What is the transmission mechanism? How is it that we recognize in Vladimir Putin a Russian and that there's something underlying all that

even communism was a kind of overlay. This is complicated, but it was a kind of overlay under something permanent. Where does this permanence come from? How is it that we miss it? But why should Vladimir Putin have failed to grasp the chance to become a liberal, rich democracy? He prefers being a Russian, the son of a bitch. How does this happen? Well, sense of historical mission, something that runs deep within a people, the heritage of Pan-Slavism, the heritage of Pan-Orthodoxy. And look, Xi Jinping is like a Chinese emperor. With the same kind of aspirations. Now, there's one sweet thing about all this.

Chinese aspirations, which is to say to control all of the territory that China ever controlled, conflict with Russian aspirations to control all of the territory that Russia ever controlled. If only they both could lose. Well, this, you know, they fought a war in 1969 over Siberia. Yeah, right. And one of the unequal and or it might be the 21st century the eastern border of russia would be the ural mountains i believe that's true i think you're right i believe that's true there's there there are only two countries in the world with a claim on territory that is currently uh that is russian territory it was russian territory in 1995 one is japan and it has to do with some

small islands and it's kind of irrelevant the other is china which has claims on all of siberia and i think they're going to get it i don't quite know when they'll take it maybe they won't have to no it'll just sort of yeah the more russia becomes a vassal state of china perhaps it'll be part of the foreclosure agreement maybe at the end of this we learn i mean as people were saying great point thousand years why not well culture culture matters culture matters more than ideology and a lot of these things and shaping the way that people develop but at the same time the culture of sparta doesn't seem to be evident to the greeks today so over time things erode things are malleable and maybe as americans we have this protean culture that's always shifting and changing because we have so many different

influences that come to bear on it. So how this all ends, whether or not in 2,000 years, there'll be filmmakers making versions of the United States at Iwo Jima like they made Sparta in the movie 400. Who knows? Thank you for telling everybody and reminding everybody that, yeah, Rome is cool. Rome's cool. But there's Sparta. And one of the reasons that I think that that's particularly cool is because North Dakota, Fargo, North Dakota, my school was the Spartans. So, as a matter of fact, when we went as a school group to Rome and had one of those big meetings with the Pope. Every group got to stand up and say something, a little school motto or something like that. So I stood up and just

shouted, go Spartans, which may not have been the thing to say at Vatican City at the time. More like extirpating pagan crowd, but you know, hometown pride. I have to go torture, I mean, teach freshmen in Western heritage, and I've got to be up there in about five minutes. So I had better depart. Thank you very much for having me on. I don't care how

hard a grader you are. Your students are lucky. They are lucky, and it's been too long. We need regular sessions with Professor Ray. The world is too interesting and it resembles the ancient world too much. That's why we need a little guidance. Thank you.

Thank you, Professor. Thank you. Take care. Thanks, Paul. True. So, Peter, Rob, I know you have to go, but how often do you think about ancient Rome? I do a lot. I felt like I felt embarrassed. Like, yeah, that's kind of me. Me too.

I felt exactly the same. I don't know that I think about it every single day, but I think about it a lot. I have the Aeneid on my bedside table. I have the Caesar's, a pretty good translation of Caesar's Gallic Wars on the bookshelf right here next to me. Yeah, I think about it. You?

Like I say, just about every day or so, given the cultural and the historical things that I study. And, of course, Paul's right. We ought to think about the ancient Greeks as well, too. As a matter of fact, those people who are classic Greek scholars are just sitting there and fuming that we're not giving the Greeks the due they deserve. Speaking of fuming, fuming, how does that bring to mind?

Bring to mind maybe of fuming, fuming, how does that bring to mind? Bring to mind maybe not fuming, you know, doing the cold turkey thing. Hey, listen, cold turkey may be great on sandwiches, but there's a better way to break your bad habits. Not everything in a bad habit is wrong, so instead of a drastic, uncomfortable change that you have to follow. Why not just remove the bad from your habit? That's where the sponsor we are happy to have is Fume. Fume, that's where they come in. They look at the problem in a different way. Maybe you're finding yourself taking intermittent breaks from work to step outside. You know it's bad for your health. You know it's a waste of time. Plus, it leaves you with bad haste in your mouth and an unpleasant odor on your collar, on your sweater, on your clothes.

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because I want to talk to you about it, I was delighted by two things. One, the shape, feel, and heft of the instrument itself. It's cool. It's really neat. I don't mean to get into things like packaging and unboxing and the rest of it, but it was a delight to see this object and find it and hold it and fashion it. It was like something I want to carry on my pocket all the time. The second thing was just the wonderful aroma that came when I opened up these packages. I mean, I thought, if these guys don't want to do that, they've got the room scent market cold if they want it. Being a cold turkey though. But you breathe in these scents and it's just, it's delightful. Now, stopping is something we all put off because it's hard, but switching to fume is easy

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He's got important meetings. He's got things to go to. He's got deadlines to meet. You know what life is like in New York. It's all bustle. It's all hustle. A man who's tired of New York is tired of life. Actually, to tell you the truth, I'm kind of tired of New York myself,

but I'm not tired of life. And I know that because I'm not tired of London. Anyway, Peter, you're going to ask me a question. No, no. Well, I was simply going to say, here we have to sit through this whole show. Paul Ray, The Rise and Fall of Empires. Who cares about any of that? You said at the beginning you'd just come back from Britain and you had stories to tell. And I've been sitting here through the whole show wondering what stories. The moment has arrived, James.

Well, yes, I suppose it has. And to tell you the truth, I wrote about them at Ricochet. I did not put them on the main page. I put them in the member feed for the people who are, and we have to tell you, it's not expensive. And I know that getting people to do any sort of subscription these days are tough, but if you subscribe to the member feed, that's where we have the conversations and that's where you can comment. And I told a couple of tales there about the ferryman. One of the ferrymen was Patrick, the limo driver, who took me from Walberswick in Suffolk down to Heathrow. And for two and a half hours, for an hour, we had this conversation with this fellow. Top gear, Britain, petrol station manager, formerly liked motorboats. And so here we are, completely different sides of the ocean,

and we're talking about the perfume of a two-stroke engine and the beauty of a nice piece of well-oiled firearm. It was great. I mean, I virtually had little in common with this guy until we start talking and find out the other side of Styx the memory of an ancestor of his, his great-uncle Harry. Have you heard about this book, Peter? No, I have not. Coming out soon. What the man did was he came from a family, a fairly prosperous family. His great-grandfather was an Oxford Don who gave it all up to marry a woman and became a vicar in a small town, had about five or six kids. Everyone did stonkingly great, except for the last born, who was late and probably an accident.

He never found his way much in the world, wasn't very good at school. And this is the height of empire. So off he goes to India to work on the railways, and we hear the tales of what he did there, what life was like. Because of the bureaucratic machinery that was the British empire, the author of this book was able to find all sorts of information about this man, who literally was unremarkable, except for the fact that he was the author's great-uncle, and he felt some sort of obligation to him, and also for the fact that as an unremarkable exemplar of empire, he's a man of a lost world. So in telling the story of his great-uncle Harry, he told the story of the end of the empire, essentially. Because Harry, after failing in India, goes to New Zealand, becomes a farmhand.

But he signs up the moment World War I starts. And you turn the page after basic training and you see the title of the next chapter is Gallipoli. And your heart sinks because you know what the man's in for. He made it through all of that. He died in World War I and left behind a series of very blunt journals, which didn't really say much. I mean, there would be a battle at the Somme or Gallipoli in which tens of thousands were cut down by mechanized modern warfare, and the entry would be received two pairs of socks from home today. So he tells this story of this man and brings him to life as best as he could.

And he doesn't dress up the skeleton with too many modern clothes or assumptions. He just gives us a good idea of the man. And the only reason that we know about this guy is probably because the author had the pull to get it published. The author is Michael Palin of Monty Python. And if you only know Palin from Python, you would think that's strange. But if you know Palin from his subsequent post-Python work, you know that he's a man of many talents, a travelogue. He does art history. He's a humanist.

He's just a lovely fellow. So I got to sit down for dinner for two hours with Michael Palin and have a conversation and ask him about his book and joke about and the rest of it. And it was one of the highlights of my life. I never thought I had a bucket list that would have dinner with a with a python. But this was about as good as it got. And so that's what I did in London. I went in and interviewed at the home.

Get this. Now, it was arranged by a couple of friends of mine who know everybody because they were in theater and musical theater and television and the rest of it. So they know everybody of a certain era. And the house where we had the dinner, it wasn't a restaurant, was the house of an actor who himself had a brilliant career, less so lately,

because it's interesting. And every one of this, Peter, you probably have your variant of it. I know that I do. His IMDb listings start with uncredited and then minor role, starring role, starring role as himself in a documentary, and then voiceovers for animated children's shows until they diminish to something two or three years later. Like that.

But one of the movies that this guy did was one of the movies that I hated with an intensity of unbelievable magnitude in my youth. Because they made a movie about my favorite composer, Gustav Mahler, at the time. And I go to see the movie. And it's a Ken Russell movie, which means that you have Gustav Mahler tortured and pale and dying as he has visions of Nazi-clad Freulines writhing on crosses. I mean, it was just awful because it was Ken Russell, but this guy was Mahler. He's not there at the time they were off so i'm in the house of the guy who played mauler in the movie i hated so much in 1973 that's the weird kind of life that i slip into when i go there we were having dinner later

in walberswick um with a couple of friends and i met these people before one of them is his name miles richardson and he is the son of Ian Richardson, the Shakespearean actor, the great British stage actor. And he's doing a My Fair Lady right now with Alan Cox, who was the son of Brian Cox, succession, etc., etc. And they just casually mentioned that O'Brien was in town. He stopped at the Anchor for dinner and drinks last week. He just missed him. You tear your hair out. But that's what life is in this small town. It's just extraordinary, the people who pass through,

the people you meet, the conversations that you have. And I know it's not real in the sense that every time I go there, I have a great time and I meet all my old friends and we have brilliant conversations. But man, I would go to live there forever in a heartbeat. And it won't happen. So I just have to go back now and then. So, London with its museums, I learned a new one. Walberswick with its small-town charms and the sea and the culture of all that, and the wonderful people there. It was a

grand week, and I was happy to come home because I love it here. But, man, do I love it there, too. Next week? We'll see you next week. you for listening and join why don't you at ricochet.com see you in the comments at ricochet is it 5.0 yet no but soon soon 4.0 but soon to be 5.0 where everything break no we're fixing we're making sure that nothing breaks so when it comes to you it'll be absolutely fantastic and you say where's this been all my life? And you'll sign up. You will sign up, right? Right.

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