The Ricochet Podcast - The World Is Not Enough

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

It’s hard to win these days. Not only do we have worries about war, we’ve got worries over worries about war. Is the Biden administration’s foreign policy dangerously cautious? That’s what Peter and James discuss – and argue about – with our guest, AEI’s Kori Schake. The hosts (minus Rob, who was off podcasting elsewhere…) also chat about Italy’s Giorgia Meloni; James gets peeved, and it’a lots of... Source

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We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and usually Rob Long, but he's in the wind. I'm James Lileks and I'm full of the wind. And we're going to be talking to Corey Schake today about Ukraine. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. I can hear you! like? Well, yeah, there's a lot of fascinating conversations going on on the main page, but on the member page where, yeah, you got to cough up a shackle or two to get to, that's where the real conversation and community forms. Ricochet.com. Once you go there and take a look, you'll wonder, oh, where's this been all my life? Waiting for you at Ricochet.com. I'm James Lollix here in Minneapolis, 612 area code represent. Peter Robinson is in California. Rob Long was supposed to be here. We don't know. He may pop in. It'd be a surprise. But, you know, we can certainly soldier on without him. Peter, how are you? Oh, I'm extremely well, James. How are you? Jack Dandy. Thank you. It's a beautiful fall day here. The leaves are changing. Sun is brilliant and blue and all the rest of it. But still, you know, I wonder, okay, who blew up the pipeline? So, you know, it's one of those things where everybody pours their priors into it, right?

And so we have, what do we have? Hold on, you better just take two sentences to explain the bubbles in the Baltic. The bubbles in the baltic sounds actually like you know the name of a back to the future school dance i like that um yeah nordstream kaboom and we're trying to figure and and two explode two explosions 17 hours apart which made some people think oddly enough i was reading a great thread about this today from somebody who was in deal in the pipeline business who was saying, no, no, no, it wasn't us. It wasn't them. It wasn't Germany. Certainly wasn't Ukrainians. It was bad, bad maintenance. It was the fact that you had pressurized pipes

full of hydrocarbons under tremendous amounts of water. They were trying to start it up in case they had to and kaboom he said the fact that there's 17 hours apart from this no military planning he said this is just a speculation although he passed it off as certainty which we love about the internet nobody would blow up one and then give everybody 17 hours to get on the site and take a look and then blow up the other no you right you want to do it fast so we were arguing about this in ricochet last night and i thought to myself who's unlikely but possible i thought you know anybody looked at the israelis because when you think about it they've got that big leviathan oil field they're sitting on they want to get

pipelines to europe they want to sell the product what What's a great way to make the Leviathan strike? To get Turkey and Cyprus and everybody else on board to building pipelines than to knock out Nordstrom 1 or 2. And if it means that Germany has to have a cold, cold winter, well, France's revenge is a dish best served cold, as they say. So that's possible. What do you think, Peter? I hadn't heard the Russian incompetence theory before, but I'm willing to put down a lot to Russian bad maintenance and incompetence. So I think my judgment would be Occam's razor points in that direction. However, you are groping toward,

you are working toward the premise of the next James Bond movie, I think. You know, you'd like to think so. I would love to have a James Bond movie in which he is a stalwart, uncomplicated defender of Western civilization, who does not regret his old school ways and who's more than capable of dispatching our enemies for the sake of the West. But alas, I fear that that whole franchise is, well, from what I understand,

it's all going up on streaming soon, which I think is interesting. Was that true? All the movies? Yes, all of them. Which means it will be possible to sit down and have a lesson in the drift of Western civilization by starting with the first and going to the last. To watch how the cinema, how the sophistication of the movie increases, how it goes through its 70s trough. I know, James, everybody loves Roger Moore's Charming and the rest of it. How it goes through its 70s trough, how it staggers and struggles in the 80s and finds great, brilliant moments. You can learn a lot about who we are by seeing those and seeing what our enemies will i still just have to cringe

and how much of the public perception of afghanistan was warped at the by the james bond movie where he's with the mujahideen remember that was the timothy dalton one and at the end of it one of the mujahideens comes up to him, clasps James Bond's hand, James, because they went to Oxford together or something. And he's as westernized as they can possibly be. And they ride off in the sunset like cowboys in Silverado. And we're just supposed to think that these are the guys who aren't going to come back to bite us and took us for 10, 20, 15 years. Anyway, so what else is out there in the world that you've noticed, Peter? Well, I am cheered by recent events in Italy. By the victory, I don't know much about Italian politics because, of course, to know anything about Italian politics, you have to study it

12 hours a day. It's so complicated. But here's what I know. This remarkable person, Giorgia Maloney, has won. Here's the quotation on YouTube. She's giving a speech and why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening? There's a simple answer to all these questions because it defines us. It defines our identity. She's just out there as against woke politics. I love that. Question one, isn't she a danger to democracy? I don't understand how someone who just won an election, a free election, why the first response of the columnists on the pages of the New York Times is that she's a danger to democracy. So, I guess what that now has been, the meaning of danger to democracy is now

crystallizing. It's a threat to the woke ideology. Any threat to the woke ideology is now a danger to democracy, I guess. Here's what I see. Here's the big issue, the overriding issue facing Europe, that Europe has a declining, has a below replacement birth rate, and over the next 50 years, its population is certain to shrink. Excuse me, nothing is certain when it comes to population projections, but all the projections show the European population shrinking. At the same time, Africa's population is projected to increase by 1 billion people. So the sort of existential question facing Europe is, how do we handle this? How do we get a grip on what we want to preserve? What kind of immigration we're going to permit? And Georgia Maloney, it may be in a ham-fisted manner, but Georgia Maloney is taking

on the issue. And as far as I can tell, the Italian establishment, the European establishment is simply pretending that it doesn't exist. Georgia Maloney is not a danger to democracy. She is democracy responding to the great issue on everybody's mind that's the way democracy would be astounding if somebody like her didn't arise if the democracy were genuinely functioning she's proof that democracy is still ticking in europe so i'm i actually find that cheering right they've come up she could screw it up of course she could turn into a fascist she's no fascist now that's ridiculous well, Italian politics being what it is, we'll see,

but you're right. I mean, democracy, democracy has been strangely transmuted into this, this word that just means good. And anything that is against it is against our democracy because it's bad. And our democracy, good.

When of course it isn't democracy that anybody really wants in Europe, according to the EU and the rest of the Brussels betters. It's a certain concept, a transnational idea that, and it's not, boy, big subject. It's because they need to import people that they have to redefine Europe as a sort of place that has values. And those values are transnational. And they're not rooted really in anything except, you know, clear thinking and smart, you know, how any rational, reasonable person would be. But those values came out of the individual cultures.

They came out of centuries of experience. So in order to make this work, though, she's right. And she says, again, the quote I'm reading from the same thing you are, they attack national identity. And why is that? Well, the old saw is, of course, that's what got them into World War I and World War II. Nationalism is tribalism, it's xenophobia, and the rest of it. But national identity is important. It's key. It's the glue that holds people together in monocultural societies like they have there. United States, different story because we are protean, we are melting pot, we are come one, come all.

We have a civic identity, but their identity is rooted in so many things, culture, folkways, history, religion, painting, names, all that stuff. She says they attack national identity, they attack religious identity well yes and no they attacked a particular one they give a wave and a pass to another they attack gender identity okay why is that exactly well i can't quite figure out the why of that myself why is it what is it in for them to embark on this process of dissolving what everybody knows to be a basic human historical binary. I get the idea that we expand our concepts to be more inclusive. I get that. I get that. Tolerance, fine. But what they're doing is using this theory in order to dissolve basic concepts that people have held by. For what purpose precisely, I don't know. Because I don't think that Klaus Schmidt Davos is clever to say this is the way we will dissolve society. I think they believe that these are good things and that good things will come of it. But nobody wants, nobody believes what they're saying.

Everybody has to mouth what they're saying. And so, this gender identity thing becomes just… Pete Yeah, I agree. I agree. That really is a madness in the sense that you can't even, even if you and I sat here until nightfall, we couldn't really come up with a sensible reason, with a plausible ideological we can we can understand why they might want to expand the state we could understand why I might want to raise taxes we can understand all of that but why you suddenly support the mutilation of girls who are tomboys and say they want to become what why do you why you champion that it makes no sense to me because the wrong

people oppose it because it is a sign of virtue to have these ideas to not question them to go along with this new vogue to show that you are the intellectual vanguard that you are smart enough to understand i mean i've had conversations where people just well we know so much more about the brain now we know so much more about gender and the rest of this that naturally science is telling us all of these things. And scientism being a religion to replace the one that just turned out, you know, Baroque churches and, you know, what else? Scientism being good. If science is pointing us this way, if a study shows that gender affirmation surgery leads to 14% more happiness, That's a quantifiable point, the science says. So I think a lot of it is just performative,

and none of it really affects their lives. And they say, why do you care if somebody does? Well, I don't, really, as long as they don't frighten the horses, fine. What I do care is that certain kinds of language become mandatory and speech right right you have to say these things so i so so she says national identity religious identity gender identity family identity she says i can't define myself as an italian christian woman mother and to which they will say no of course of course you can. all these things is good. So that speech, I think, was memory hold by YouTube, was it not?

Or another speech that she made? I saw it on YouTube. I understand it was taken down for a while because it had the content that violated the rules against slanderous speech or hateful speech or something like that, you know, which is interesting. Defense of Western civilization at some point becomes de facto offensive because it contains ideas that, that what? That otherize other cultures? That, that argue against the notion of, let me ask you peter um as you're getting your dog do you think we're at the point yet where it is impossible it seems it seems difficult to discuss immigration today without immediately being accused of xenophobia and racism

do you think we're past that point that it is impossible in Western society now to make cases against unrestricted immigration from wherever without being called a fascist? You certainly have to be willing to put up with being called a fascist. But again, I find this generally encouraging. Italians have just elected someone who promises to do something about it. Do what? We don't know. But at least she's recognized that there's a problem, that there's uncontrolled immigration taking place in Italy. In this country, to me, we'll see how it unfolds or how it displays itself in the midterms, which are just a few weeks away now. But to me, one of the more encouraging developments of the last couple of years is that on the southern border of Texas, which is heavily populated by Hispanics, they're moving to the Republican Party. And it was for years and years and years, you can see

Mitt Romney agonizing whenever anybody talked to him, asked him a question about immigration, because for years, it was taken as an article almost of faith. I guess it was faith. There wasn't real data to back it up, that if you insisted on controlling immigration as a Republican, you'd lose the Hispanic vote. And if you lost the Hispanic vote, you just couldn't win. So Republicans were doomed. And now it turns out that there are plenty of Hispanics who consider themselves Americans first and say perfectly comfortably, perfectly unselfconsciously, we cannot have uncontrolled borders. We just can't have it. And they say that some of the time in Spanish. We're talking about people whose first language at home is often Spanish. So, I'm generally hopeful on that point. Being cowed by the editorial pages

of the Washington Post and the New York Times, that seems to be ending. Not just Donald Trump, but that seems to be ending in the Republican Party. And whatever is happening in Europe, which again, I repeat, I am no student of Italian politics, but apparently they're finding ways of talking about and then eventually, presumably, dealing with immigration that they're just going to do no matter what polite opinion might say. Going their own way without the blessings of Brussels. Why, that calls the whole thing into question, doesn't it? And we can't have that.

And again, I remember when the Common Market, when I was a small kid, they were talking about the Common Market and the U and the rest of it. We regarded the United States of Europe. Why, that sounds so Star Trek. Yes, of course, naturally so. But we thought it would be an agglomeration of individual nation states, each with their own characteristic. We did not think at the time, I remember, that there would be this supranational

bureaucratic nomenclature that would be like a lid of a kettle that would be placed on top of it that would seem to, I still believe that would seem to i still believe that the reason that brexit started was because the telegraph or the mail or somebody ran a story but that the eu was now going to regulate kettles tea kettles to make them boil slower because the energy requirements to make the kettle boil fast were unacceptable to the greens at which the point somebody in a small town, small village somewhere, said, that's it, they've come for my kettles, they've gone too far. And in every country, there's an aspect where they've come for the kettles. Nobody thought

they were going to come for the kettles. They just thought that they were going to get along and pass sensible regulations. We laugh at the idea of a European Parliament. It's like, yep, what are they going to do? But it turns out that the mentality of that is as injurious as it can be. And if you deviate from it and you're Poland, you're Hungary, you're Italy, well, you're fascists. Don't think so. By the way, the idea that anybody who is on the right in Italy is a fascist is wrong when you consider what Mussolini was all about, a proud socialist. But yet we perpetuate this myth on and on and on again. You know, there's other myths, too.

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National Security Council and has taught at West Point, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and Stanford. Welcome, Cori. Thank you. It's so nice to be with you guys. Well, you just recently returned from a trip to the Ukraine. The Ukraine, as people call it. No, Ukraine, where you met with Zelensky. Fascinating. Let me tell you what I think is going on. No, I'm kidding. So you were there on the ground. You met with a man, give us the lay of the land. So it was so incredibly impressive to see the

toughness of Ukrainians and the unity that Russia's invasion created in the country. You know, President Zelensky had a 27% approval rating before the Russian invasion. He has a 97% approval rating now. And nor is it just, you know, his excellence as a leader. The defense ministry has a 98% approval rating. The parliament has a 94% approval rating. Vladimir Putin has proved to be the father, not just of Ukrainian nationalism, but of Ukrainian affection for their own government.

Hey, Corey. All right, let me just go to the big one, shall I? Nukes. Vladimir Putin, we grant everything you said that, and I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit here, grant everything you said. Putin has been foolish enough to call into being the very sense of Ukrainian nationalism and pride and energy that he claimed to be worried about, right? He's done what he didn't want to do. Now he's cornered. He's turning 70. He is like all dictators or autocrats surrounded by some small shadowy unknown, unless our intelligence is wonderful. You'd know more about that than I would, but presumably he's trapped in a bubble of some kind and he's losing. And this man has nuclear weapons and lots and lots of them. Again, you know far more about this than I do, but apparently they have in their arsenal

a lot of tactical nuclear weapons, far more than we do. We concentrated on ballistic missiles. They actually have tactical nuclear weapons. The use of tactical nuclear weapons is part of Soviet war doctrine. They've at least thought about how to use them. So should we not be concerned? Yes, we absolutely should be concerned. But we shouldn't allow that concern to cause us to capitulate. You know, you're quite right. At the end of the Cold War, NATO reduced its tactical nuclear weapons holdings by 90 percent, 9-0, down to only 200 weapons,

in the hopes that then the Soviet Union and subsequently Russia would follow suit. They reduced theirs by zero. So they have a stockpile of several thousand battlefield nuclear weapons. And I agree with you that the fact that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is failing, I can see a scenario in which Vladimir Putin considers it a perfectly rational military choice, namely as Russia's army is forced to retreat out of Ukraine. I could see Russia using a nuclear weapon on Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, as a way to try and show he had succeeded even as his army is forced to retreat. The thing that was most surprising to me in Kiev when I was there talking to people in the government and civil society and business, every single Ukrainian I talked to gave the exact same answer, which is Russia using a nuclear weapon would raise the cost of Ukraine's victory, but it wouldn't change the outcome.

By the way, I talk about tactical nuclear weapons as if I had the slightest idea what I mean. Can you actually give us a very brief tutorial? The mental image we have of nuclear weapons are the huge firebombs, the Nagasaki, the H-bomb tests in the Pacific. I don't even really know how controlled or contained a so-called tactical weapon might be. I mean, would it be a kind of fireball visible for hundreds of miles or not? So, battlefield nuclear weapons tend to have lower yields, so they wouldn't be as, you know, hundreds of miles visible. But most of them are not, like, there's no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon, in part because of the enormity of damage it would create. But secondarily, because crossing the nuclear threshold for the first time since 1945 would be a momentous experience. You're quite right, though, that there were in the were uh in in the american inventory the honest

john and the davy crockett where remember the steam leak go ahead yeah the escape radius namely the ability of the troops that use them to get out of the range of the weapon, the escape radius was smaller than the destructive radius of the weapon. So they were, in essence, kamikaze weapons. Brilliant. All right. James? Well, I'm just thinking, you said that when Putin is forced to retreat from Ukraine, he would nuke Kiev on the way out. but he doesn't believe that the area that he would be forced to retreat from is ukraine he believes it is now russia since the annexation of the of the eastern portion that means that ukraine fighting to agree in its own territory

is now by their terms fighting to take russian territory and their own constitution says ah we're not going to cede an inch a hectare of this stuff it's just simply not to be done doesn't doesn't the annexation almost obligate them to do something that ratchets this way way up because it's no longer loss of ukraine it's loss of russian territory which simply can't have since annexation it's now great patriotic war number two nuclear boogaloo isn't it it? I don't think so. That's clearly what Vladimir Putin would like the West to worry about. But recall, he is losing a war against a middling military, right?

He would lose a war against Poland. He'd lose a war against Germany. He'd lose a war against France, he'd lose a war against Germany, he'd lose a war against France, much less the United States. And so we are in the deterrence game where Putin's trying to say, you better stop preventing me from losing. Otherwise, I'm going to do something suicidal for me and you. And we don't have to accept Putin on those terms, just as Ukraine is refusing to accept Putin on those terms. What I worry about is that the way that you framed the challenge is, you know, leads to us consenting to Russian aggression. And we're the strong ones in this equation, not the weak ones in this equation. And so, you know, this takes us back to Thomas

Schelling and the early theoreticians of nuclear deterrence. You know, he uses the metaphor of a game of chicken, two drivers driving towards each other, each threatening that they won't swerve. And for Tom Schelling, the right move is for one driver to visibly throw the steering wheel out the window so that they signal to the other one that they cannot change course. And that's what Vladimir Putin is trying to do. But we don't have to accept those terms, and it doesn't necessarily end in a car crash. Okay, so how... Sorry, I'm still playing devil's advocate here. I made a note of something Peggy Noonan wrote earlier this week. Peggy Noonan has devoted, I think, two or three columns now to, wait a moment,

everybody, take this man seriously when he says he might use nuclear weapons. And there was one, what was it, today's, Monday, I guess it was. I made a note of this. I hope, this is Peggy Noonan, I hope our leaders are groping towards something, some averting process, maybe along the lines of French President Emmanuel Macron's urging for a negotiated peace, close quote. Right, you're shaking your head. And as I understand it, Neil Ferguson, our friend Neil, was in Ukraine earlier this very month, and he came back and said much of what you're saying now. He said if you ask Zelensky to settle for a negotiated peace, he would say, I can't. I'm a democratically elected president of this country. The people would not settle for a negotiated peace. So on the, and my question is, well, okay, fine. In that case, that's your problem. We don't need to be associated with your brave struggle for freedom.

You run the risk of nukes. We're out. What's the American interest in backing the Ukrainians as they push and push and push for real victory? Our interest is, first of all, we should always stand on the side of people fighting for freedom. Second reason, American interest in it, is that if we allow Russia to chew off pieces of another state's sovereign territory, that will encourage aggressors everywhere. And so...

Including China, presumably. China's the real... China, a much stronger power than Russia. But not just Russia and China. And so you permit the corrosion of an international order that has made us safe and prosperous and allow things to grow more dangerous. You allow the jungle to grow back at a time in which it's actually not particularly dangerous to us to stand alongside Ukraine. And I'm an enormous fan of Peggy Noonan, but I wonder whether the president for whom she was such an able speechwriter would take the position she has taken. And I think we should all reflect on that because we have ways to affect Russia's calculation as well.

And what I think we should be doing instead of encouraging Ukrainian capitulation, is encouraging Russian capitulation. That is telling the Russians, if you cross the nuclear threshold to try and cover your failure in Ukraine, We will track the movement of any troops or nuclear weapons coming into the area of operations. We will publicize that information. Namely, we will allow everybody to watch what you are doing in real time, just as we did in the run-up to the invasion. We will interdict the Russian use if we can, and we will enable the Ukrainians to interdict Russian use of nuclear weapons. And if you nonetheless proceed, if we fail to prevent the use of Russian nuclear weapons in Ukraine, we will join the war on Ukraine's side. We will hunt down everybody who was a party to the decision or a party to the carrying out of the decision. And we will make sure that they are either dead or facing justice for a war crime. interest I would add, Peter, is that as a country with very strong conventional forces, it is in our interest to preserve the norm against nuclear weapons use. That taboo,

because we can win our conventional wars. And if nuclear use becomes the norm for any country that is losing a conventional war, it will stimulate nuclear proliferation and it will make conventional wars also nuclear wars. So it's not that, you know, the Ukrainians are dragging us into something that's not in our interests. The Ukrainians are giving us an opportunity to strengthen the international order that's manifestly in our interest as well as the interest of even the authoritarian states that are threatening it right now. So there's a lot in there, though, that you said, because there's a lot of lines that are crossed. It's a difference between assisting Ukrainians in interdicting and destroying the nuclear weapons and us doing it via nato that's a big red line um and that is what a lot of people are worried about because they're content with a proxy war they're content

with funding giving them incredible munitions that allow them to do incredible things because you know arsenal of democracy and all that but they don't want the U.S. or NATO to get directly involved. So what can, what is our... Who doesn't want the U.S. or NATO to get directly involved? I think the majority of people who do not want a, the United States troops on the ground in Ukraine. I think that that's, that's a line that, that a lot of people are not willing to cross. They're perfectly happy to, to fund to fund them and help them but actually getting our guys there and fighting russian troops is not on the plate at the moment for a lot of people now if you're saying that you that you disagree that you think the majority of american people will be behind that i support the ukrainians all down the line i do not support putting u.s

troops on the ground to fight russians at this But then you don't support Ukrainians all down the line. You support Ukrainians partway down the line. No, no, no, no, no. I think they can do it. I think that what they are doing now, they have done with our support, with our intelligence, with our materiel, with all of our assistance. They can do it. Putting Americans in Ukraine changes the whole flavor of it. It has to. You have to admit it changes the flavor of this incredibly. But you made a sweeping categorical statement, which is you support Ukraine all the way down the line.

And then you made a limited defense of them. Well, yes, in the sense that I don't. It's totally fair. I'm just objecting to the generalized categorization. But that's like me saying somebody. I mean, I know a lot of Ukrainians and the most militant of them would not support using American intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy Moscow at this point. So you could say to them, well, then you don't support Ukraine all the way down the line because you don't support an icbm strike on moscow i mean we can i strongly disagree with you that i that my my support for them is qualified by the fact that i don't want america i but that's for elsewhere the question

that i have for you is if they do do it and we don't interdict it in in time and the uke's down what is our response to Russian nuclear weapon use? So the first thing is the clearer and more specific we are about the consequences in advance, the less likely it is to happen. Which is why I think we should be extremely clear to the Russians that their breaking the nuclear taboo will create NATO's intervention on the side of the Ukrainians. Because I think what we want to do is prevent the Russians from doing it. And widening the war to one that they will lose even more demonstrably on conventional battlefields, I think has potential deterrent force. I do think that threatening not just Vladimir Putin, but everybody involved with the decision

and everybody involved with carrying out the order also has the potential to prevent it from happening and is something we should do if they actually do make the decision and do carry out that. A third thing is I think it would be important for NATO countries, including the United States, that have specialized units that can help assist and detoxify and clean up nuclear places where nuclear weapons have been used to send those to Ukraine and assist in Ukraine's recovery. I think that's consistent. It sounds to me like that may be consistent with your red lines, which is no American troops fighting Russian troops, but also widening the war in ways Russia would not want it to happen. Hey, Corey, Peter here. Last question.

I say last question. You take as much time as you'd like to answer, but last question from us, because I understand we promised to get you out in what is now two minutes from now. So the question is this, could I, my general reading of the temper of this country, which is a horribly pompous thing to say, but this is just my feel for it, is that Americans are delighted that the Ukrainians have discovered a sense of nationhood, that they're pushing Putin and the Russians back, but at the same time just very, very leery of putting American men and women in a position in which they might die for, hmm, what exactly?

A country that's been a country for, I know we can talk about a millennium of history, but that gets complicated. So here, can I just ask, let me sum up the question this way. Germany has, by itself, has an economy which is what, a dozen times bigger than that of the Soviet Union? Germany has failed for three decades now to spend the 2% of GDP that it has always promised that it would on NATO. And we just look at this and say, now, wait a minute. This is a European problem. Let the Germans pull themselves together. If Germany and France both behaved the way Britain has behaved, Ukraine would get the assistance that it needs.

This really and truly is not our problem. We just can't. It's a European problem. Let them handle it. That's psychologically at least plausible, I think, to lots of people. What's the answer? The answer is, do you really want to punish Ukraine for France and Germany's failures? Do you really want the independence of Ukraine, the freedom of the people of Ukraine, to be something we don't care about because it's in Europe,

because that would make the United States a regional power, not a global power. And that would corrode, first of all, Germany and Ukraine, excuse me, Germany and France aren't going to move fast enough to save Ukraine because the fight's on now. Second thing is 97% of the Green Party members in Germany favor arming Ukraine. 97% of the pacifist party in Germany favors sending weapons to Ukraine. Attitudes are changing in Germany. Allies are getting scared. And when countries get scared, they want to band together with their friends. So I'm not sure that castigating France and Germany for the fact that they haven't been faster and more helpful either helps Ukraine or assists the direction of travel that both

France and Germany are going in, which is where we want them to be. And the third thing I would say is that what Jim Mattis and I learned during doing the public surveys for our books, Warriors and Citizens, about American attitudes about the military, is that American public attitudes about the use of force are incredibly malleable. And what they depend on is the political leadership of the country doing two things. First, expending the political capital to explain to my mom why this matters for Americans. And second, demonstrating that they have a plan for achieving it that makes our interests and our resourcing aligned. So you're right that the freedom of Ukraine isn't the conquest of the continental United States. It matters less to us than that.

But there are lots more ways we can be helping Ukraine to freedom than, you know, the Normandy landing equivalent of our modern age. And we don't deter our adversaries by wringing our hands and being fearful that we, the strongest power in the international order, might have to pay some slight marginal cost. We deter our adversaries by squaring our shoulders, owning our values and our interests, and helping people to freedom instead of being fearful that something might happen to us when we're the strongest power in the order and the one most able to defend ourselves and our interests. Here ended my sermon, guys. I think a lot of people are worried that the small marginal cost would be the city of Boston. Again, you are taking counsel of your fears instead of taking counsel of our strengths. We are not the only ones who have something at risk here.

In fact, we are the ones most able to prevent, protect, deter any attacks on ourselves. I'm not afraid. I'm wary. And Corey, thank you for joining us. Thank you. We'll talk again, I hope, down the line in six months and see where this is all shaken out. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Well, there you have it. It would appear that I'm a coward and I am also insufficiently a warmonger, which is a surprise for me. A couple of things here, and I know it's unfair to talk about what the guest has said after they had left but one when it comes to deterring aggression around the world uh to in peter mentioned you know if we support this then it gives china pause i think that's true but it's also the only situation in which it applies nobody's particularly cared about uh aggression in africa nobody's really worried about aggression in south america no we're concerned about europe for a variety of reasons

we're concerned about russian revanchism about if they get this then they're going to go back for the baltics they're going to go back for the rest of their neighbors and rebuild what they wanted what they what they so clearly mourn the loss of that's what we're worried about because we're more worried about europe than we are these other places. So it is. But two, I think the idea somehow that we get involved, that that that NATO American tanks start rolling their way. And this does not end very, very bad. I don't understand this sort of... Cavalier isn't the word I'm looking for. Indifferent isn't the word I'm looking for. Remote isn't the word I'm looking for. But there's something about this that says this can't end in something horribly wrong.

When I said that the marginal cost might be Boston, that that's the reaction to us getting involved, the nuclear exchange, and that's waved away as fear fear i don't think it's fear i think it's prudence am i wrong peter or did i did i completely you're not wrong you're you're you're not wrong there is this is vexing i mean on the on the one hand if you permit if you well, here are two things that seem to me true, and this is why nuclear theory, let alone when we're facing the reality of it, why nuclear theory is so complicated and difficult. possession by the other side of nuclear weapons to paralyze you, you may as well just give up right now, item one. Item two, if you ignore the possession by the other side of weapons that could take

out Boston, or more likely in the short term, some big city in the Donbass or even Kiev, then you're just a fool. And maneuvering between those two is not easy. No. When she said that one thing that she and Mattis had learned was that the American attitudes toward military engagement were malleable, I got a little shiver up my spine, you know, because, okay, that's true, but it does make it sound as though we're going to pull all the instruments of propaganda in order to get people to be on board with this, but it's difficult now. People are on, the general

attitude in this country, I think, is to help Ukraine. And the general attitude is as such, because what people initially saw was a war in what they believed to be sort of the, they could identify with all of these moms and their kids and their pink backpacks going to the train to run to escape russians they got that they got the human tragedy element and the more they schooled up on it and learned about it the more that they thought the russians were big surprise being aggressive and bullies and meanies and so presented with that horrible human tragedy at the beginning if the russians had taken care of in three days we wouldn't be be talking about this, but they didn't. And so they're allowed to be,

to flower, to grow this American attitude that we ought to help them in their struggle. And we've been unstinting in that. Nobody's been, I mean, yes, people have been saying, oh my God, they just gave another 1.6 billion, another 10 billion, and yet, you know, we're not helping our own people. I get that whole argument. But we're committed, we're in, we're giving them the good stuff, and it's working. So now to turn around to people and to somehow make malleable their attitudes to get them to believe that the next necessary step

is American troops, after what we've been through in the last 10, 15 years, I think is delusional. What is the end stage exactly of this, of American engagement with Russian forces? Is it, are we going to do another nation building thing? Because we've got a nation there that's ready, practically a cold bar of Turkish taffy you could hit with a hammer and would break into a variety of constituent republics, 12 time zones worse. Are we going to nation-build Russia right now, exactly? No, we're not. There's just no appetite whatsoever for war with Russia. There is a great delight

at seeing Russian difficulty and considering, perhaps, that Putin may lose, because American animus right now is concentrated on Putin as though he is somehow the font of Russian culture, instead of being an expression of what has been created by him and by the culture in the last 10, 20 years. There's no way, I think, the American public is malleable at this point to say, yeah, send our boys over. And it stuns me that she was, and it infuriates me that the idea that i'm not willing to commit american troops for this somehow makes me less committed to the to the notion of ukrainian independence hey they're doing a good job help them out let them do it but no oh we're not sending our troops my own model here is the story end of end of my sermon no No, well, so the model in my mind is the Reagan Doctrine.

What was the Reagan Doctrine? The Reagan Doctrine was, we're right behind you. Contras, you want weapons, you want materiel, have at it. Mujahideen in Afghanistan, you want Stinger rockets? Fine. We will supply, we will support, we will provide materiel, intelligence. We're not going to do your fighting for you. And that strikes me as the right place to draw the line. So, on the, yeah, here's the other thing. I am, now we're ramping up, here's a related problem. Someone whom I admire a great deal, particularly on Twitter, is Elbridge Colby, who's making the point that we need to take China's threats against Taiwan very seriously.

Okay, that is true. Taiwan also needs to take China's threats against Taiwan very seriously. Okay, that is true. Taiwan also needs to take China's threats against Taiwan seriously. Here are the statistics. Here's the percentage of its GDP that Taiwan devotes to defense, 2.1%. We're at almost four. Here's Israel, 5.6%. Israel's a serious country. They're serious about defending their own nation taiwan still isn't this is a serious problem for us well i think taiwan despite everything that said knows that thinks that will come to their their assistance well that's probably right or just that i don't know but you know personally, it's not high on my list of things to worry about, except for the economic impact of having a lot of semiconductor industries fall into the hands of China. But I mean, China is the big geopolitical problem out there waiting to happen. And China is having its own difficulties. It's not like they are this absolutely rock solid colossus that is going to be bestriding the world.

I mean, Xi gets on the phone with Biden and tells him that autocracy is the future of the world, not democracies. Well, OK, let's see how that's going to play out. I don't think very well because the autocracies that we have on display right now from Maduro to Xi to Putin are not places that anybody wants to live. There's not a great clamoring for people to get into their countries, whereas we still remain the beacon of that for the world. For rational self-interest of the people who are streaming here, yes, but that's because this is still a more dynamic and free, open society,

despite the fact that we moan and bitch and cry about all the things that are wrong here, we are still that shining city on the hill, as Reagan said. And I'm not going to, you know, it may be a cliche by now. It may be over romantic and pathetic and nationalistic and jingoistic, but it's still true. Where else do you want to be? So, but, you know, that said, I'm still coming back to what she was saying about this idea that it is up to us to do everything that everybody else isn't. I mean, yes, the fact that they

haven't spent this money in defense of their own countries is indicative of them. And she said, do we want Ukraine to pay for the failures of france and germany no but do we want france and germany to feel some of the consequences for their unwillingness to shoulder the burdens that they had peter i mean yeah i don't listen i'm thinking this through i don't have argue i don't have ready arguments i'm still thinking all of this stuff through as well i do and i do and and here here's what it is they have for the longest time taken a free ride from us because they know that they can because we offer to do so and the french you know of course they're not going to be part of this because they're friends they can defend themselves but they know they know that

they're part of this as well we know also that we are not going to let them go down again and that we would come back and save their bacon again. And that the result of that down the line, one generation or two, would be indifference and outright animus from the people that we saved again and again. And frankly, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter. I don't care if they don't like us. We have this place called Europe, 2,000 years of history, civilization from which we came, a civilization that created science and ideas that have transformed the world and are worth preserving. And I'm not going to be one of those guys who just waves off Europe because they're Davos and EU-influenced and the rest of it, and they want everybody to live in the pod and eat the bugs and all the rest of it.

No, it's still worth saving. Where else in the world exactly do you want to find a place that is produced and that is Europe? So I'm deeply committed to the Western world. That includes Canada, includes Australia, includes all of this, the Anglosphere that has created a civilization that is worth preserving. So yes, if they don't spend the money and they get in trouble again, we are going to save their bacon because for some reason we've signed up or been anointed celestially or otherwise the role of this and i accept that i just don't accept sending u.s troops into ukraine to start a shooting war where putin ends up nuke in boston or new york because that is not on the cards so i know i'm all over the road here but fair i so are we all. Right. By the way, the other point, even if you agree, and Corey is highly intelligent, she makes a very good argument. Even if you agree that we should do, and she listed, what, three steps that we should take right now,

do you trust this administration and this commander-in-chief to act with prudence and energy in the executive, to use Hamilton's phrase, do we trust this administration to get it right? Well, that's the problem. I don't know who this administration is. If you're telling me that they present a series of options to Joe Biden and they have to give him a B-12 shot in the buttocks to wake him up and figure out what's going on, The guy who can't find his way off the stage and spends his time at memorial events calling out the dead person's name is not somebody who I think is really up to speed on the particular options available to him should they nuke. So does it fall to Kamala Harris? Well, I worry about that because she doesn't know if we're in the North Korea or South Korea. So who then does it fall to? Klain? Does

it fall to somebody in the Pentagon? Who? Who's calling the shot? Here we are, oddly enough, rationally, calmly, and somehow just interestingly almost discussing the possibility of nuclear exchanges with the Soviet, sorry, with Russia, and we don't know who the leader is. We don't know who's making the switch, who's got the button, who's got the football i that is the most absurd part about this that i never could have predicted down the line wasn't it the which presidential campaign was it when the the the i think it was the democratic candidate said who are you who who are we who are you going to call at three in the morning three o'clock three o'clock in

the morning and i'm sorry to, but my question about the current administration is, who are you going to call at three in the afternoon? It's nap time. Jay Nortelier had a little piece there on Twitter the other day where he was talking about that Reagan actually did not nap. He didn't. But he had this reputation. Now, you would know.

Did he nap? He did. Yes, he did. He took a little rest in the afternoon. We'll leave that. But even if so, Jay was saying that Reagan, even though people were saying that this was a sign of his advanced age and the rest of it, he wasn't up for the job. And that Reagan walked, just gathered it up and made it part of his personality. You know, when talking about a problem, he said he'd spent many a sleepless afternoon thinking about it. That's wonderful. And Jay was saying that Biden should endorse his senioritis and perhaps make reference to that, which is completely beyond Biden's ability. Yes, it is.

But nobody would be reassured if he started making jokes about his diminished mental capability because it's already factored and baked into what people believe. So here we are. We don't know who's in charge. We're happy with what we're doing in Ukraine, generally, because they seem to be winning, and we like, and the Americans love a winner, as Patton would say, or George C. Scott. But we don't know exactly who's behind it. We don't even know what happened to Rob Long.

I shouldn't say that in case... We can't run a podcast. How can we expect to run a war? Hey, I got to tell you this, though, here. If you've enjoyed this podcast or you hate it and you want to tell everybody about it, it'd be great to sit down in person with somebody in the podcast and say, you are so wrong. It's possible. Ricochet does not exist as this floating incorporeal cyberspace thing.

No, we have meetups. Meetups, that's where it's at. So where exactly is it at, you ask? Well, go to ricochet.com, join up, we have meetups. Meetups, that's where it's at. So where exactly is it at, you ask? Well, go to ricochet.com, join up, and you'll know. But I'm happy to give you some hints. Since Rob isn't here, I will give them to you crisply and briskly. We mentioned over the last few

weeks, events will be going on in Williamsburg, Virginia, and Huntsville, Alabama in October. And we got one set for New Orleans next year. I'm sorry, New Orleans, as we say here up in Minnesota, next year during French Quarterfest. Oh, that'll be fun. Bring your beads. Most recently, an event in Pittsburgh has been added.

Exact dates have always been worked out, but it'll be happening sometime late November, early December. And you might be thinking, oh, well, that sounds like a lot of fun, but I'm not going to go to there. I like to stay home. Great. I understand that.

I'm a homebody myself. And it's a big country. You can't get other places fast or cheaply sometimes. But if our meetup locations are out of reach for you, you are not doomed to a lonely existence. No, no, no. What you can do is you can join Ricochet and then give us a place in time and Ricochet in all of its glory will come to you. I've been to these things. They're a lot of fun. I think the last one I got COVID, I was out of New York. It was worth it. The people that I met, the conversations that I had, the great thing about it is we did not sit around and rehash the things that we talk about on Ricochet. It was not politics. Everybody opened

up in a direction that just hadn't come up on Ricochet before. And the fascinating things you learn about people, the movies they like, the movies they make, the music they make. It was great. I went to New York on my own dime for one of these. You should, too. Or start your own. In any case, for details, go to ricochet.com slash events. Or there's also a module on the sidebar. You can eyeball for that and figure out where to go next.

Peter, before we go, there was a kerfluffle, brouhaha, on Twitter. Imagine that. kerfluffle brouhaha um on twitter apparently somebody i know somebody was talking about the time on the podcast when rob long was quoting to you lyrics by lizzo the rapper singer and you were plussed or non-plus i can't remember which and i couldn't remember this happening rob couldn't remember this happening you couldn't remember this happening. Rob couldn't remember this happening. You couldn't remember this happening. It's the Mandela effect, isn't it? Somebody has fabricated in their mind something that Rob did with exquisite detail. And yet they forgot the time that you were dining with David Bowie and didn't know who he was.

Yes. Well, I can tell you, I don't remember the Lizzo incident. It is certainly plausible if Rob did quote lyrics to me by somebody called Lizzo. When this was scrolling on Twitter last night, I turned to my wife and said, who's Lizzo? I certainly would not have known who Lizzo was. I'm starting to feel slightly ashamed of it because so many people tell me I should be ashamed of myself. I spent two months in Switzerland with Bill Buckley in the winter of 19, well, it turned, so 1987, 88, two months in Gestad, Switzerland. And we worked all day. Well, we skied for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and then we would go out to big fancy dinners. It was Bill's life, not mine, but Bill was kind enough to tell everybody that he wanted me, his research assistant, invited. And at one of these dinners, I think there may have been eight people at a round table, and I was seated next to someone who seemed perhaps 10 years older than I was, who spoke with an English accent. He was dressed in a suit, and we chatted amiably away. And

then on the way back to where we were living, Bill said, oh, by the way, Peter, did you know that man? I'm told that man is famous. His name is Mr. Bowie, Mr. Bowie, Mr. Bowie. And I said, oh, I still don't know exactly who David Bowie was. And I've looked him up. I've tried to listen to his music. Listen, I'm just now coming around to the Beatles. That's just the way it, so I did, it's true. It happened.

I sat next to David Bowie at dinner, chatted away about politics, a little bit of politics, mostly about the skiing. I couldn't quite figure out what his conversational métier was, and I did not have any idea who he was. The beauty of that is, is that eventually, I'm not sure if it was quickly or later, Bowie realized you really didn't know who he was. Yes, yes, yes. And that must have freed him up in a way that he seldom experienced because for the first time in his life he was just a guy first time in 40 years he's just a guy talking to another fellow he's not david bowie you gave him the opportunity to be himself as opposed to this and i do remember it's coming back i do remember there was a woman seated across the table from us who kept eyeing our conversation

as if she was somehow on a five-alarm alert, almost as though he was an alcoholic and she was worried he was going to start drinking again. She just kept returning to eye, breaking from her conversation to look across the table. And I think it was either, was his wife his agent his public i can't remember well how would i know i didn't know who he was but i do think now that she kept looking across in total astonishment that i wasn't asking for an autograph or discussing nothing i didn't know who he was who was this guy who is not who maybe he doesn't even he doesn't even know who is this thin white mook exactly's sitting there not talking to you.

Exactly. This podcast was brought to you by Boll & Branch. Support them for supporting us and join Ricochet today. Why don't you give us that five-star review? And also send all the available David Bowie vinyl pressings to Peter Robinson, P.O. Box 173, New York, New York. And so he can bring himself up to speed on the glories that were Mr. Bowie's career. I'm kind of indifferent on the guy. I love some of his stuff.

I admire his public work and the rest of it. His public work? What public work did he do? I'm sorry. By that, I think I mean the way in which he crafted his persona over the years. He was a very smart man. He knew what he was doing and he seems to have been a decent fellow as well. So for all that, but in some of the music I like and some, I don't same with these podcasts. Some you're going to like,

some you're going to hate. Hope you like this one. I'm James Lylex for Ricochet. We'll see you next week James James I I wish I could swim like dolphins like dolphins can swim Though nothing, nothing will keep us together We can beat them, forever and ever I'll become the hero Just for one day I will be king

And you You will be queen Nothing will drive us away We can be heroes Just for one day We can be us Just for one day I

I can remember I remember Standing Alone I remember, I remember Standing by the wall And the colors Shone above our heads And we kissed There's still nothing left for Nothing to hold

And the same Was on the other side Oh we can be there Forever and ever And we could be heroes Just for one day Ricochet Join the conversation We could be heroes