Making Sense - Sam Harris - #355

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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00:00:45.440 Okay, well, a little housekeeping. We see the full lunacy of the Republican Party on display.

00:00:51.960 Isolationist, willing to abdicate U.S. leadership globally, unconcerned that they now have a

00:00:59.100 candidate who openly supports dictators in wars of aggression, who said that he would encourage

00:01:06.100 Putin to do whatever the hell he wants to our NATO allies if they don't spend enough on their own

00:01:09.840 defense, because they're, quote, delinquent in their payments, as though the defense of Western

00:01:15.080 civilization has all the significance of a rental dispute over a condominium in Florida. It would

00:01:21.560 be one thing to argue for American isolationism and to reconsider our involvement in foreign

00:01:27.180 conflicts. I do think it would be easy to take the other side of that argument and to make the case

00:01:31.880 that pulling back from the world, that is, failing to defend democracies against aggressive autocracies,

00:01:38.140 failing to defend our traditional allies, losing NATO, etc., I think it would be easy to argue that all of

00:01:44.340 that would be very bad, not just for the world, but for American security, eventually. But what we see

00:01:51.040 on the right is not merely an America-first agenda. We see a totally amoral, and in many cases immoral,

00:02:00.480 fondness for dictators, and for Putin in particular, and for the total eclipse of liberal values,

00:02:07.660 for the outright destruction of liberal institutions. We see fellow travelers and useful idiots

00:02:14.460 propagandizing for autocracy. And speaking of idiots, useful or otherwise, we have Tucker Carlson,

00:02:23.780 this well-established liar and fabulist and crackpot, broadcasting his smug ignorance from Mother Russia,

00:02:33.740 to the delight of Putin, obviously, and of the populist right in America, but insanely also to

00:02:41.740 the delight of some of the most prominent podcasters and tech bros who are not themselves right-wing

00:02:48.960 idiots at all. I won't name names, but Jesus Christ. These people are acting as though just sticking a

00:02:57.820 microphone in front of Putin for two hours and looking servile was a heroic act of

00:03:03.560 investigative journalism. Now, of course, many people have savaged Tucker, and in particular

00:03:09.320 responded to his delusional comments about how much better life is in Moscow than in any American

00:03:14.200 city. Fareed Zakaria had a great response on his show, and in the Washington Post, John Stewart

00:03:19.960 did his bit. And this would all be hilarious because it's so ludicrous if so many people weren't

00:03:27.500 taken in by it. Needless to say, Trump's and Tucker's and the right-wing's embrace of Putin

00:03:33.960 looks even more vile in light of the recent death of Alexei Navalny. In Putin, we're talking about a

00:03:41.900 leader who imprisons and murders his political opponents. He even murders his critics in foreign

00:03:49.140 capitals like London. He imprisons and murders journalists. He even imprisons American journalists

00:03:55.720 and even Russian billionaires. I mean, how did we get to the point that something like half of America

00:04:02.440 can't see what's wrong with this? Anyway, I'm going to do a podcast on the war in Ukraine soon

00:04:08.880 with someone who actually knows something about it. And no doubt there will be more to say about

00:04:13.760 Russia and Putin at that point. I have a book recommendation to make. A book just came out in

00:04:20.300 the U.S. I think it came out in the U.K. maybe a year earlier. The title is The Holocaust,

00:04:26.420 An Unfinished History by Dan Stone. A very readable book, and the audio is actually quite good.

00:04:34.100 No matter how much you imagine you know about the Holocaust, revisiting it is always astonishing.

00:04:40.400 And this is a particularly good window onto it.

00:04:43.760 We actually invited Dan on the podcast, and he declined. I think he said he had done enough

00:04:49.920 podcasts. I don't see the evidence of him having done enough podcasts, frankly. Perhaps I'm missing

00:04:55.340 something. But it almost never happens that someone declines. I think I can still count on

00:05:00.940 one hand the number of times someone has said no to appearing on the podcast. So it doesn't happen

00:05:06.820 much. If any of you are friends of Dan's or colleagues, and you think we would have a good

00:05:12.480 conversation, you might ask him to reconsider. I think we'd have a great conversation, and I love

00:05:18.020 his book. Whether he ever comes on the podcast or not, I recommend you all go out and buy it and read

00:05:23.520 it at this moment, because I'm really enjoying it, if enjoying is the right word. It's quite good.

00:05:30.580 In today's podcast, the question and perhaps inevitability of American isolationism does come up,

00:05:37.260 because today I'm speaking with Peter Zion. Peter is a geopolitical strategist and a global energy

00:05:44.900 demographic and security expert. He is the author of several books, but he has re-released his first,

00:05:52.900 The Accidental Superpower, and updated it, which is the focus of today's conversation.

00:05:59.220 Last time he was on the podcast, I brought Ian Bremmer on with me to essentially backstop my ignorance

00:06:06.720 of a lot of these issues and to help me get the most out of Peter. This time I flew the plane

00:06:12.880 myself, and you can be the judge of whether or not I landed the thing safely, or whether there should

00:06:18.140 now be crosses and bouquets of flowers strewn along the tarmac. I must say, Peter is so confident

00:06:25.060 in his prognostications that I find it a little disconcerting, both because so much of what he predicts

00:06:32.920 is scary, but also his confidence worries me a little too. You know, I push back in certain

00:06:40.500 places or at least ask him to consider counterfactuals. So make of my contributions to this

00:06:46.200 conversation what you will. I think Peter is fascinating to listen to. Some of his predictions

00:06:51.700 are relatively near term, which is fun. For instance, he thinks there is no way that Trump will win in

00:06:59.040 November. We'll see the results of that soon enough. And many of his most dire predictions for

00:07:05.360 the fate of Europe and China and elsewhere, these are not many, many decades out. He's thinking in

00:07:13.680 terms of 10 and 15 years for a lot of this stuff. So anyway, very interesting, extraordinarily bleak,

00:07:21.260 and yet the picture for America is pretty rosy. That is, if we survive the nuclear war that he

00:07:28.540 thinks is probably coming. But more of that soon. Anyway, we speak about the unraveling world order.

00:07:35.720 We discuss the Bretton Woods system, America's role in securing the global supply chain,

00:07:41.400 the coming end of these security guarantees, the shrinking of the U.S. Navy, Houthi terrorism

00:07:48.280 in the Red Sea, deterring Iran, conflict in the Middle East, the future of Israel, the limits of

00:07:55.980 immigration, the demographic pyramid, the coming demise of Europe, the war in Ukraine, the prospect of

00:08:03.800 nuclear war, demographic collapse in China, the threat of loose nukes in Russia, America's relative

00:08:11.380 immunity to the world's chaos, U.S. debt, the southern border and immigration policy,

00:08:18.260 why Trump will not win the 2024 election, and other topics. And now I bring you the fascinating

00:08:25.640 Peter Zion.

00:08:26.600 I am here with Peter Zion. Peter, thanks for joining me again.

00:08:35.580 Great to be back.

00:08:36.720 So, since we last spoke, we spoke in our first conversation about your book, The End of the

00:08:44.180 World is Just the Beginning. And since then, you have reissued your first book, or at least

00:08:51.340 it was your first book that I'm aware of, The Accidental Superpower. And you reissued it

00:08:57.280 10 years on, updating your predictions and analysis. So, we'll focus on that. And I just,

00:09:04.600 to remind people, you seem to argue, at least in the two books I've read and in much of the

00:09:12.080 other material I've seen from you, that some combination of geography and demography is destiny,

00:09:19.160 right? Which is, I must say, very counterintuitive to those of us who tend to think in terms of the

00:09:24.620 power of ideas, right? So, your analysis tends to suggest that you can have the, whatever ideas

00:09:30.140 you want, but if you live in a malarial swamp without navigable waterways, you're basically

00:09:35.540 screwed.

00:09:36.840 There's only so much you can do with an idea in that situation.

00:09:39.200 Yeah. So, yeah, feel free to correct any misapprehension you, I might have with your

00:09:45.580 general take on things, but that's the general lesson I tend to draw. And I just want to get into

00:09:50.820 all the details. I think the, where I want to land with you is in a discussion about this new spirit

00:09:58.400 of American isolationism, which is, you know, kind of a waning of the Pax Americana that we've all

00:10:03.400 taken for granted, you know, modulo a few hiccups, like a few wars that we think better of now. But

00:10:10.960 there's this new populist desire for isolationism, and this is emerging at a time where there's this

00:10:18.900 seemingly new authoritarian axis that's emerging with China and Russia and Iran and North Korea.

00:10:25.880 Perhaps there are others that should be put in there. And many people in America seem to want

00:10:30.780 our country to become some version of a nuclear-armed Switzerland, where we just stay out of the world's

00:10:37.200 conflicts. And you seem to be arguing that that's going to happen whether people want it or not.

00:10:42.340 And populism and Trumpism might be pushing it, but there are geopolitical changes that are just going

00:10:46.860 to make it happen anyway. And you also have a very optimistic take for how America lands in all of

00:10:53.240 this. So I want to save America for the end, but obviously it's going to come up again and again as

00:10:57.860 you analyze the rest of the world. But I thought we could probably start, as you do in your book,

00:11:02.580 with the Bretton Woods Agreement. And you can remind people what that was and what its consequences

00:11:06.820 were. And then we could just track through various regions landing with the U.S. and North America.

00:11:12.220 That works for me.

00:11:13.780 Nice. So Bretton Woods, what was it and what were its consequences?

00:11:18.140 When most people think of Bretton Woods, they're thinking of the International Monetary Fund or the

00:11:21.760 World Bank and the idea of a new financial architecture in the aftermath of World War II.

00:11:26.960 And it was all of that and more. But the core issue was this concept that the United States

00:11:33.040 military would go out and make the global oceans safe for anyone's commerce, no matter who you were,

00:11:39.020 no matter what you did, no matter where you were selling, no matter who you were partnering with,

00:11:42.380 anyone could go anywhere. And that was a fundamental change in the international environment

00:11:46.920 because it allowed countries that honestly had lost the war and lost badly to emerge from the

00:11:52.980 wreckage with trade access as if they were the world's most powerful empire and could get anywhere

00:11:59.520 at any time. Now, there was a catch there. For the Americans to do this for you, you had to sign up

00:12:05.680 to be on our side during the Cold War. And that provided us with the alliance network that we

00:12:09.980 needed to contain and ultimately beat back the Soviet Union. Another characteristic of this

00:12:14.980 structure was that the United States would not invest its economy in this new international

00:12:19.820 network because if it had done that, it would have just been another conquering empire.

00:12:25.000 So we got this global structure where the United States did the heavy lifting on a security front

00:12:30.060 and allowed this parallel economic structure to happen on a global basis of which the Americans

00:12:35.960 were at most side participants in. It's not that we didn't play at all, but as a percentage of GDP,

00:12:43.860 we remain the least involved economy in the world, especially if you factor out the NAFTA countries

00:12:49.360 modern day in terms of total import export, where you're looking at something that's less than 5% of

00:12:55.460 GDP, which is, you know, a drop in the bucket compared to what it is for most other countries.

00:12:59.560 I don't think that's widely appreciated. I think that's, in fact, I was fairly surprised to hear

00:13:05.060 that we don't export all that much.

00:13:08.620 Well, the numbers are going to be different based on who's doing the data because different people

00:13:12.620 weight different things differently and don't even count certain things. And when you're talking

00:13:16.180 about money and manufacturing, which is where there's thousands of supply chain steps,

00:13:19.340 getting good data is difficult at best. But pretty much everybody's data says that somewhere

00:13:24.260 between 10 and 20% of U.S. GDP is involved in imports and exports in some way. But roughly

00:13:30.040 half of that is the NAFTA network. And roughly a third of what's left is U.S. energy and energy

00:13:37.100 product exports. And so if you pull those out, you're talking 5% of GDP is all that's left.

00:13:44.160 All right. Well, we'll get to Island America eventually. So you're saying that we basically

00:13:51.260 have policed world trade without being ourselves nearly as dependent upon it as the countries we've

00:13:59.180 been helping police.

00:14:01.040 Right. So if you go up until 1992, because that's where we have a bit of a split in policy and

00:14:06.600 decision-making. Up until that point, pretty much all of our involvement in the Middle East

00:14:10.400 wasn't about getting crude out of the region for us. It was about getting crude out of the region for

00:14:15.760 our allies because the North American market for energy has largely been self-contained since the

00:14:21.400 beginning. Remember that we were one of the major exporters during World War II that allowed the

00:14:25.520 Europeans and even the Russians to fight. And that generated a very different economic model

00:14:31.740 because we experienced things like the oil shocks in the 70s because oil prices are internationally

00:14:36.840 linked. It is a broadly fungible and liquid commodity financially. But we were never in danger of an

00:14:43.780 actual shortage. It was a price issue here. The shortage was an Eastern hemispheric problem. It was a

00:14:49.500 problem for Japan. It was a problem for Germany. And that's why we were involved because the idea was if

00:14:55.140 the United States does not rise to the occasion and contain instability in the Middle East, then the

00:15:02.680 allies would no longer have an economic interest in partnering with the United States on security

00:15:07.620 affairs. And for us, that was the only thing that mattered. And that's the reason why Iran, once it

00:15:13.220 turned fundamentalist in 1979, was always an issue because Iran always had that threat over the

00:15:19.760 Persian Gulf energy exports. And if that went away, the alliance could theoretically go away.

00:15:25.620 And so even now, 40 years later, when the United States is more and more populist and is less

00:15:31.860 interested in maintaining all of us for any number of reasons, mostly domestic politics, we still get

00:15:38.760 this knee-jerk reaction to anything that happens against Iran because we have been so exposed.

00:15:44.840 That has always been the raw nerve. In many ways, Iran has always been the country on the planet that

00:15:50.880 had the greatest capacity to disrupt our overall security plans. Now, I would argue that's no longer

00:15:55.060 the case. We've moved on. But the emotional inertia there is immense. And we're certainly seeing that in

00:16:02.600 political decisions today. So how and why is Bretton Woods coming to an end?

00:16:07.980 Oh, you have to go back to the fact that we won the Cold War. And after 1992, we started to have a

00:16:15.080 conversation with ourselves about what's Bretton Woods to? How do we take this alliance, the greatest

00:16:20.140 alliance in human history, and play it forward for another generation or two of American premits? How do we

00:16:25.140 remake the human condition? How do we spread free market capitalism? How do we improve the rates

00:16:30.600 of human rights? How do we push women's rights? How do we make the world a better place that we

00:16:35.400 can then leave to our descendants? And the person who tried to get us to have that conversation was

00:16:40.280 George Herbert Walker Bush. And Americans decided that they didn't want to have that conversation.

00:16:45.960 And instead, we went with Bill Clinton, who was much more focused on North America, much more

00:16:53.240 populist and narcissistic. And from there, we went to W. Bush. And from there to Obama and Obama to Trump

00:16:58.940 and Trump to Biden, and we've just kind of taken steps down that road. Despite the variety of

00:17:03.880 policies and personalities that we have seen since 1992, what they all have in common is each one is

00:17:10.780 a little bit more economically nationalist than the one that came before. So from an economic and

00:17:16.220 political point of view, we've moved away from this structure. And while that's happened, we've also

00:17:23.100 changed our military, specifically the Navy, into a form that I would argue is no longer even capable

00:17:29.100 of maintaining the globalized network. We used to have a 600 ship Navy dominated by small vessels that

00:17:37.880 could be almost everywhere at once. And so the idea of keeping the sea lanes open against threats was a

00:17:44.580 viable policy. But since 1992, we've steadily reduced the size of the fleet while steadily increasing

00:17:51.720 its tonnage. And so instead of having 600 ships that are mostly small, we now have about 250 ships

00:17:58.840 that are centered around the aircraft carrier battle groups, of which we now have 12 supercarriers and 10

00:18:04.220 jump carriers. And it's really hard for us to function independently of that anymore. Now, if you

00:18:09.560 want to carry out a military operation and knock over a country, you have the right tools for the job.

00:18:14.040 But if you want to throw a wide net and provide naval security everywhere, we no longer have the

00:18:18.860 numbers or the types of ships that are necessary. So look at what's going on in the Red Sea right now

00:18:24.180 with the Houthis taking potshots at shipping. It is stressing us to the brink of keeping the Red Sea

00:18:32.080 open because we no longer have enough vessels of the type that could do this. And this is arguably,

00:18:38.080 the Houthis are arguably the worst terrorists in the world operating from the most worthless chunk of

00:18:43.740 land. And if we had a second event like this anywhere in the world, I doubt the US Navy could

00:18:49.420 rise to the occasion. So this is pushing us to the very brink of what is possible with our current

00:18:55.260 military posture. And if it fails, the United States is not the country that's going to feel

00:19:00.920 the pain. The country that's going to feel the most pain by far is going to be China because they're

00:19:05.480 the most dependent on open seas. Which they don't police despite the fact that the South China Sea is a mess.

00:19:10.740 You know, even if they wanted to police, they don't have the ships with the range to get there.

00:19:15.140 Right, right. Just maybe a little detour here. What do you think we should do about the Houthis?

00:19:20.560 Well, like I said, they're the most incompetent terrorists in the world operating from the most

00:19:23.820 worthless land. The only reason at all, in my opinion, that the Houthis matter is because everyone

00:19:28.880 wants to take shots at the Saudi oil complex. But over the last 10 years, the Saudis have put up nets

00:19:35.620 and jammers, which have pretty much reduced the damage to zero. So I am going to go with a big fat,

00:19:40.880 don't really care.

00:19:41.960 But how do you operationalize, don't really care when ships can't navigate those waters and they're

00:19:48.980 crucial for oil and much else?

00:19:51.640 Yeah. I mean, here's the problem. It's not just politics that is driving the United States away

00:19:57.520 from the system. I'd argue between demographic changes, economic reality, the Chinese rise,

00:20:04.460 and the shift in the American naval posture that we can't do it anymore. We're going to have to do

00:20:10.140 something Americans really hate doing. We're going to have to make some choices about what we want

00:20:15.420 to protect and what we want to further. And it's really hard for me to see Yemen being part of that

00:20:22.620 conversation.

00:20:24.180 Well, I guess now that I've wandered off course here, let's bring Iran into this conversation.

00:20:29.260 Sure.

00:20:29.620 Isn't it really Iran that needs to be successfully deterred here? I mean, the Houthis are widely

00:20:35.640 understood to be one of their proxies. And what do you make of the fact that the massive asymmetry

00:20:42.000 and power between the US and Iran doesn't seem to offer much effective deterrence? I mean, Iran seems to

00:20:50.260 do what it wants more or less with impunity, at least up until this point. What should we do?

00:20:56.120 We can get into all kinds of trouble with this conversation. Okay. Let's start with the situation

00:21:01.060 on the ground and then we can look at American policy. So in the aftermath of the Iraq war,

00:21:05.840 the biggest thing the United States did was remove the single largest regional check on Iran's power

00:21:11.580 and expansion. And that was the government of Saddam Hussein of Iraq. And just by destroying that,

00:21:16.740 and then the way we chose to attempt rebuilding and restructuring in a post-Ba'ath environment,

00:21:22.420 which we did not manage very well, we fully shattered what had been the Mesopotamian check

00:21:29.920 on Persian expansion that had existed for most of the last millennia. In doing so, Iran was able to

00:21:37.300 shove power into Southern Iraq, into its Shia zones, and then beyond into places like Jordan and

00:21:42.840 especially Syria and Lebanon. And in doing that, what they usually did is they worked with whatever

00:21:48.720 sectarian group did not hold the whip, the ones that were not in charge and empowered them to fight

00:21:54.660 back against the ruling order of their zone. And in doing so, basically half burned the entire region

00:22:02.620 down. Now, I don't mean to suggest this was just them. The Saudis got in on it too. And the Saudis did it

00:22:08.560 from the majority position, usually working with Sunni Arab fundamentalists and militants

00:22:13.380 to attack things. So, you had elements on both extremes that weren't so much attacking the center,

00:22:19.540 but attacking what passed for the rule of law and what passed for stability of the region.

00:22:24.360 And so, all of these states faced a massive degradation in their capacity to function as

00:22:29.760 states. Now, the United States has largely disengaged itself from the region,

00:22:35.920 but where we still have forces that's in play, it's to fight one specific group,

00:22:41.740 the Islamic State or ISIS or whatever you want to call it, which is to be perfectly blunt,

00:22:46.820 the child of our ally, Saudi Arabia, as opposed to the Iranians. But the decision has been made

00:22:53.900 by the Trump administration and then doubled down on by the Biden administration that we should keep

00:22:59.140 combat to a minimum and just focus on training and intelligence cooperation with other forces in the

00:23:05.520 region to carry out most of the work. And what that means effectively is that American forces that

00:23:11.240 are in the region don't leave their bases very often. And so, if you're an Iranian and you're

00:23:17.080 looking for a very, very, very easy propaganda win, you launch a mortar, you send off a rocket or a

00:23:23.440 drone, you take a pot shot. And even if you hit nothing, it makes a nice little splash of PR that you can

00:23:30.440 use for recruiting wherever you want to operate. You put that against the backdrop of the Gaza war.

00:23:36.160 And of course, hundreds of attacks are going to go against American positions because we're not

00:23:41.240 shooting back because that is not the order. The Iranian militants, despite how much we don't much

00:23:46.720 care for them, we have decided in Washington that ISIS is the bigger threat. And so, we didn't shoot back

00:23:53.080 until one of the drones actually got through. And it's forcing the Biden administration to

00:23:58.860 reevaluate the entire policy set of this entire region, not just vis-a-vis the Iranian-backed

00:24:04.740 militias, but why we have a footprint there at all. And if the decision comes down, which I think

00:24:10.780 it will in the next year, that there's not really much that we're doing that is useful in this region

00:24:16.760 at all on the ground, then you have to, when you pull those forces out, then you have to take another

00:24:21.840 look at what you're going to do on the seas. So, there is a long overdue policy reckoning that has

00:24:28.640 now started in Washington. And it's unclear to me at this moment just how far back we're going to

00:24:34.980 pull out, but everything is on the table. And we probably should have had these conversations 15

00:24:41.240 years ago, but you know, better late than never. I still am kind of mystified by the failure of

00:24:48.500 deterrence because wouldn't it be trivially easy for us to just destroy Iran's ports, right? And just

00:24:55.340 there's kind of three ways that the United States could fight back. Number one is just go for a bit

00:25:01.760 of a tit for tat against the militias themselves, whether they're the Houthis or one of these various

00:25:07.140 Hezbollah outcrops anywhere in Jordan or Lebanon, Iraq or Lebanon, or sorry, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria,

00:25:14.480 or Iraq. Number two would be to go after Iranian shipping because most of the weapon systems that

00:25:22.560 are going to places like the Houthis have to go by the water. It's not like they're smuggling these

00:25:25.720 things on land through Saudi Arabia. So, you do a kind of a de facto embargo on vessels that are

00:25:31.760 coming out of Iranian ports, especially once they leave the port of Hormuz. And then step three would

00:25:36.300 be to go after their physical assets in the Persian Gulf. Going after their quote, naval bases

00:25:41.700 won't really do much because most of the Iranian Navy is literally speedboats. So, I'm not suggesting

00:25:47.260 that would be hard to take off. I'm just saying that doesn't really move the needle in any meaningful

00:25:50.580 way. You're certainly not going to do an assassination program on the mainland because

00:25:54.400 there's just too many people. This isn't China where it's a one-man show or Russia where the

00:25:59.280 entire elite's under 140 people. This is a full-on theocracy with literally over 10,000 people in

00:26:07.460 the political elite. There's no assassination program that would make any sense there or have

00:26:11.900 an end. But you could destroy their oil industry very easily because it's pretty much all shipped out

00:26:18.300 via one port on Karg Island. And Karg Island doesn't even have a bridge connecting it to the

00:26:23.680 mainland. So, if you destroy the facilities on either side of the strait that separates Karg

00:26:29.160 from the mainland, Iranian oil would basically go down, exports would effectively go down to zero

00:26:35.240 and not come back for years. So, two questions. Why haven't we done that?

00:26:40.260 Because we have still not carried out our full assessment of what we want to do in the

00:26:44.620 post-Bretton Woods system. If the United States, who at least officially today, is the guarantor

00:26:50.440 of global naval security, even if it's failing at that role and edging away from it, if we actually

00:26:55.980 go out and attack maritime shipping and energy supplies, that closes off a lot of options in

00:27:03.120 a lot of places. Now, I think in time we're going to get there anyway. But like I said, we probably

00:27:09.860 should have had a policy reassessment in this region 15 years ago. This is part of that.

00:27:14.900 Yeah. Well, so accepting that rationale, why is it that you think Iran is not deterred by the

00:27:21.160 prospect of our doing that? Why are they being as provocative as they are given how vulnerable they

00:27:26.500 are?

00:27:26.680 There's a general belief in Iran that the United States has no interest in giving up its global

00:27:33.180 cop role. And as long as that is the case, the more you needle the United States, the more likely

00:27:38.360 they are to come to the table. Now, I personally think that is a miscalculation on their part,

00:27:44.220 but that is the dominant view of most of the folks who think strategically within the country.

00:27:48.860 There's this misunderstanding. It's kind of funny. Iranian foreign policy now for 30 years has been

00:27:55.280 about basically backing the little guy to oppose the Arab and the secular and the American-backed

00:28:00.780 governments throughout the region. And in many cases, the Iranians have gotten exactly what they

00:28:05.520 wanted. But now that the dog has caught the car, they're discovering that this region can't be

00:28:10.060 governed because they've destroyed most of the poles of power and stability throughout the region.

00:28:14.820 There's no one to co-opt. And they've really, really, really pissed off most of the Sunnis and

00:28:21.160 most of the Arabs. And so they've indirectly in their victories and their successes and in their

00:28:26.280 exploitation of the Iraq war, created exactly the sort of environment that is encouraging all the

00:28:31.560 other regional governments to man together against them. And the Abraham Accords is part of that.

00:28:35.500 So this is what happens in the Middle East when you get what you want. And it's a pretty ugly

00:28:42.000 picture. And they're honestly not sure what they can get next. The reason that they are still in play in

00:28:50.960 such a big way is because they've discovered that their population is actually sufficiently okay with

00:28:57.620 the level of economic isolation, recession, that it doesn't inhibit the theocracy's ability to rule.

00:29:03.820 And as long as they believe that, they will keep pushing.

00:29:09.560 Okay. So let's widen the picture to the rest of the Middle East. Generally speaking, once again,

00:29:15.100 you seem to blame economic geography for most, if not all, of the dysfunction in the region.

00:29:21.580 I'm wondering how you interpret the success, notwithstanding the security concerns of Israel

00:29:28.200 in that context. Well, you know, the region overall, whenever you've got an area that's

00:29:33.900 dry to desert, it's hard to have basic agriculture. And if you don't have agriculture, you never get

00:29:38.040 small businesses and you never move up into, say, manufacturing and industry. And so this region

00:29:43.160 has always been left behind. The places where that is least true are the places where it rains.

00:29:48.220 And that is Turkey. And that is Tunisia and to a lesser degree, Morocco, which are the three most

00:29:53.780 economically advanced states in the region by any measure. The Israelis are unique in many, many,

00:30:00.460 many ways, mostly because when the Jews were brought back in the post-World War II environment,

00:30:06.520 they brought a lot of skill sets that they had developed elsewhere over centuries with them and

00:30:10.680 a lot of capital in addition to the strategic sponsorship of the West in general, the United States

00:30:15.160 in particular. And that gave the Israelis access to trade options that no one else in the region had,

00:30:20.560 but they also started working with skill sets that no one else in the region had. And that's allowed

00:30:26.260 them to build up a bit of a technocracy in a region that is known for anything, but you've got this weird

00:30:33.060 little pocket of service economy and high-tech manufacturing in a sea of something else. And it

00:30:38.280 is because of the people, not because of their ethnicity, but because you've had, you know,

00:30:42.780 a few million people who now call themselves Israelis who for generations lived somewhere

00:30:49.060 else. It's a full-on graft and it's part of the reason why North America and Australia are just

00:30:54.700 so different from Europe. They took the skill sets that they originated in another place and applied

00:30:59.360 them to Indian geography and made something new for better or for worse. Now, maintaining the security

00:31:05.640 of a little statelet like that under normal circumstances is impossible because this region,

00:31:11.220 the Levant specifically, has never been powerful enough to look after itself. It's never had the

00:31:16.900 population density to generate a military force that can keep things at bay. And so it's always

00:31:23.160 been at the whim of greater powers, whether those powers be the Turks or the Persians or once even the

00:31:29.940 Mongols. That, countering that, the forces of history and just the sheer demographic overbalance of the

00:31:38.040 tiny size of Israel versus the huge heft of these other players requires a lot of really creative

00:31:43.920 thinking. And what the Israelis have done, sometimes in league with outside powers, sometimes not,

00:31:49.020 is one after another turn the countries that border them either into allies like Egypt,

00:31:56.260 into security proxies like Jordan, basically has become a dependency, or break them. In the case of

00:32:04.840 Lebanon basically becoming a failed state, and I'd argue Syria is pretty close to that as well.

00:32:08.860 It doesn't solve the broader problem of a partnership with those larger outside powers to

00:32:14.160 prevent invasion, but it does give whoever is going to cross in from elsewhere the fact that they have

00:32:20.760 to cross through these other areas first. So let's assume, for example, that the last country

00:32:25.540 that occupied what is today Israel, Turkey, decided it wanted to come back. Well, first it would have to

00:32:31.780 absorb Lebanon and Syria, and there's no one in Turkey who thinks that would be a lot of fun.

00:32:37.080 So it's kind of a firebreak strategy. I don't want to suggest that it's going to work forever,

00:32:41.060 but it's working for now.

00:32:43.220 Well, what are your expectations for the future of Israel, given the durability of the hatred of

00:32:50.220 the surrounding Islamic cultures to varying degrees? What are their prospects from a security

00:32:56.700 point of view? There's the partnership angle, and then there's the internal angle. The partnership

00:33:03.120 angle is well underway, and if it hadn't been for the Gaza war, we would probably already have a formal

00:33:09.480 peace deal between the Israelis and the Saudis. Now, they have been cooperating fairly tightly for 15

00:33:15.260 years now. There's a lot of Israeli forces that basically train the Saudis on their own equipment.

00:33:21.080 There's a lot of intelligence cooperation on both sides, especially vis-a-vis Iran. I'm not suggesting

00:33:26.100 that they agree on everything, but whenever the Americans have put official or unofficial sanctions

00:33:32.040 on either country for human rights abuses, they turn to one another in order to play the United

00:33:36.940 States off of whatever the issue happens to be, and then provide direct assistance to the other one

00:33:43.640 in order to get what they want anyway. It's been a fairly successful model so far because the

00:33:48.220 Americans have not called them on it. They've had a de facto alliance, I would argue, for at least a

00:33:54.560 decade. The question that has been up in recent months is whether just to make that formal.

00:34:01.460 There's a generational split within Saudi Arabia about whether they should go formal and get

00:34:06.560 something for the Palestinians as part of it or just throw the Palestinians under the bus

00:34:10.240 and make it official. That is a conversation that is very much in play. In terms of a security

00:34:16.180 guarantor, Saudi Arabia can't play that role. If the Israelis can flip Saudi Arabia to formally being on

00:34:24.140 the same side as Egypt and Jordan and Morocco and at least neutral like Turkey is, then you really

00:34:32.880 don't have to worry about the Arab side of the external security threats. That would be a significant

00:34:39.660 victory. I think that is now within reach and I think we're definitely going to see that this decade.

00:34:44.680 The Iranian problem isn't going away, but it's distant and no one is thinking that there's about to be

00:34:53.600 another Persian empire that's going to expand out and occupy the entire region. The Iranians are too

00:34:58.440 technologically inept at the moment to pull anything like that off. So, you know, that's a problem for a different

00:35:03.480 century. The internal problem, I think, is going to be more of an issue. The success of Israel owes more to

00:35:12.680 itself than it does to American sponsorship. It is because you've got this highly educated population

00:35:20.840 that has carved a little green out of the desert, that's made them high value add, that's made their

00:35:26.920 intelligence systems great, that's made their weapon systems among the world's best. But at the same

00:35:31.640 time, they've created this space within their own political and economic system for a class of people

00:35:36.620 who reject everything about modern life and basically study religious texts all day and have a bunch of

00:35:44.880 kids and live on state subsidies. And that's like 30 to 40% of the population now. And so you've got

00:35:51.700 this, this is going to sound incredibly jaded, but a near deadbeat population who is sucking at the

00:35:59.000 teat of the government and sucking the government dry. And yet all voting together in a relatively

00:36:04.660 anti-economic, anti-Arab, anti-peace, anti-cooperation, anti-military block. And they're just the leaders

00:36:13.940 that get put in from this population are absolutely incompetent. Yet they claim that they represent the

00:36:20.820 true soul of the people and they claim that they're the security hawks and they claim they know more about

00:36:25.600 how to run the military than the generals. And their incompetence is in many ways, what led to

00:36:30.520 the surprise of last October and November when Hamas made their move. These were the people who

00:36:36.800 were in charge of those institutions and they ignored all the warnings that were coming up from

00:36:41.140 their professionals who had been in their jobs for decades. And they did so for political reasons.

00:36:45.940 Well, you'll get no defense of the ultra-Orthodox from me, as you might imagine. Let's move to Europe.

00:36:51.980 Europe. You're extraordinarily bearish on Europe. What's the landscape look like there?

00:36:58.900 So three big problems. Number one, this is a region that has gotten most of its energy from

00:37:02.620 the Russian space. So that's a problem, especially since that's obviously their number one security

00:37:06.900 threat. They're in the process of trying to wrestle with that right now from a late start.

00:37:12.520 Number two, this is part of the world that industrialized and urbanized very intensely after

00:37:17.320 World War II. And after 70 years, their birth rates have now been so low for so long that Germany

00:37:23.600 and Italy and, well, those two, those are the big ones, will cease to function as modern economic

00:37:30.480 entities within 10 or 15 years. Because it's not that they ran out of children. That happened 30 years

00:37:35.860 ago. They're running out of working age adults this decade. And there is no economic model that works

00:37:41.480 there. Immigration isn't the solution to that? The problem there is scale. So like take Germany,

00:37:47.920 a country with a little over 80 million people. For them just to hold the line where they are right

00:37:51.880 now, they would need to import 2 million people under age 25 every year for the next 20 years,

00:37:59.100 just to hold the line of where they are now. And that would mean in 20 years, the Germans would be

00:38:03.520 a small minority within their own country. It's just, it's not viable. If you want immigration to be

00:38:08.700 part of the solution, you start early, you make it a trickle, you never let up and you have to

00:38:16.640 consign yourself to a degree of cultural change. If the longer you wait, the more you need to bring

00:38:23.300 in, the sharper the change will be. And for the European nation states, I just don't think it's a

00:38:27.340 viable option or at least not at scale. There may be some individual exceptions here and there.

00:38:31.880 And there now are a lot of Ukrainians that are looking to settle in a new place. But if

00:38:36.360 all of the Ukrainians who have left, that's like a quarter of the population of Ukraine is left for

00:38:42.720 Europe. If they all settled in Germany, that's still not enough. Immigration as a lever requires

00:38:51.080 a lot of early action. And what that means is you've got an entire continent that is aging towards

00:38:56.280 obsolescence. They no longer have enough people who are young to perpetuate the populations, but

00:39:01.520 that also means they don't have enough people who are young to do the consuming of the economic

00:39:05.460 outputs, which means the third problem that Germany, Europe in general is an export led economic system

00:39:14.300 and not only works as long as someone is willing to absorb those exports. The United States is turning

00:39:20.900 more nationalist and populist and it's shrinking what's available. And the Chinese system, even if

00:39:28.440 it survives, which I'm sure we can talk about that next, no longer has a lot of young people either.

00:39:33.840 So most of the exports to China have been in the form of industrial plant to help the Chinese export to

00:39:41.340 yet more countries. It's a bit of a daisy chain that even if you remove issues of ethics and morals

00:39:48.080 and solidarity in Ukraine and Russia from, still is a bit of a starvation diet because there just

00:39:54.660 aren't enough countries with young populations to absorb this volume of advanced age economies,

00:40:01.820 exports beyond the end of this decade. So it's a model that is very clearly dying by any number of

00:40:09.520 means, even if the United States decides it still wants to partnership with Europe. And it's not clear

00:40:14.360 that that is the case for the longterm. If you look at what's happening with the Biden administration

00:40:18.020 vis-a-vis the Europeans on the topic of Ukraine, every single deal has been about security.

00:40:24.640 Their trade hasn't been brought up once. There is no stomach in the Biden White House to push towards

00:40:30.920 any sort of trade arrangement with the Europeans that will buy them more time.

00:40:35.140 Is there any scenario where technology comes to the rescue or is this just science fiction? I mean,

00:40:40.040 just imagine perfect robots that fill in for any shortage of human labor in the relevant cohort.

00:40:47.940 Sure. So there's two big problems. If you want to look to say automation to solve these problems,

00:40:53.160 number one is that automation is very expensive and it's more expensive to maintain it than it is to

00:40:58.700 install it. So it's a cost that builds as you go. And as people move into mass retirement,

00:41:03.920 their ability to generate capital to fund this sort of thing declines. So if you can't front load it,

00:41:09.500 it's probably not going to happen. And then second, let's say you can figure it out. You can automate

00:41:14.680 everything. Okay. Well, that may address the production side of the equation, but Europe's

00:41:19.620 problem hasn't been production. It's been consumption and robots, at least yet, don't consume.

00:41:25.420 Don't buy things. We can fix that. Actually, take a moment to review the demographic pyramid and

00:41:35.340 sketch as you just began to the responsibilities of the different age brackets in terms of how they

00:41:42.360 contribute to the economy, to production, consumption, investment, et cetera.

00:41:46.580 Sure. So in a, quote, normal, unquote system, especially before World War II, you had a pyramid

00:41:52.760 structure. You had very few retirees and then slightly more mature workers, people in their 40s,

00:41:58.620 50s, and early 60s. And below that, even more young workers in their 20, 30s, and early 40s.

00:42:03.940 And below that, lots and lots and lots of children. It's a traditional pre-industrial

00:42:09.520 demographic structure because it's all about having lots of free kids because they're free labor on the

00:42:14.200 farm. But as globalization kicked in, we all started to specialize because all of a sudden we were all

00:42:20.480 part of one extended network. And specialization meant services and manufacturing jobs. And all of those

00:42:26.980 were in town. So we started moving into the cities and in cities, kids are no longer free labor.

00:42:32.400 They're an expense. And you fast forward 70 years and adults just had fewer and fewer and fewer and

00:42:37.600 fewer of them. And after 70 years, the pyramid has shifted. At first, it was just you had fewer

00:42:43.880 children and then fewer young adults and it kind of became a chimney. And that gave us this absolutely

00:42:49.920 magical growth structure, especially in the West, especially in East Asia, from the 60s and the 70s up

00:42:56.240 until almost now. Because you had a lot of people who were aged 20 to 65, but very few retirees and

00:43:05.360 very few children. So all of the investment, all of the tax base, which was huge, could be spent on

00:43:12.760 infrastructure and technology and education. And we got the fastest economic growth that we have ever

00:43:17.740 seen as a species. And it moved around, but more or less lasted for 70 years. Well, you can only do that

00:43:23.860 once. You can only urbanize once. And you can only benefit from that perfect demographic moment

00:43:28.600 once. And what's happening now is there have been so few kids born for so long that most of the

00:43:35.420 advanced economies, and this includes Germany and Italy and Japan and China, it's not that they've

00:43:41.740 run out of kids or teenagers or 20-somethings or 30-somethings. They're not running out of 40-somethings

00:43:46.560 and 50-somethings. And we have this massive inversion. It looks kind of like a top with the

00:43:52.960 wide spot now approaching mass retirement. And what happens this decade is that wide spot moves past

00:43:59.960 retirement. And we get to a situation where it's not where we have more retirees than children. We

00:44:04.420 passed that a while ago. It's we have more retirees than we have children and young adults put

00:44:08.700 together. And we have no idea what that will mean for our normal economic models of fascism and

00:44:14.820 socialism and capitalism, because those are all based on growth based on population. And that is

00:44:20.420 now impossible for most of the largest economies of the world. In the case of the United States,

00:44:25.960 it's a bit of an exception. We're still in that chimney stage, and our birth rate hasn't dropped

00:44:30.080 enough to condemn us to that future. If we keep aging at the rate we're doing now, we won't be in a

00:44:36.140 German-style situation until about 2070. Hopefully, that's a lot of time to figure out a new path.

00:44:40.840 Or at least, worst case scenario, we get to see how the Germans and the Chinese and the Japanese

00:44:45.520 and the Koreans and everyone else deals with this devolution. And hopefully, we'll learn a few

00:44:50.740 things about what to do or even just what not to do. What happens or what do you expect to happen

00:44:56.720 when the largest cohort of retirees dies off, like I guess the baby boomers, when they age out of

00:45:05.600 existence, what does that do to the economy? You have to look – I mean, if that's a cultural

00:45:12.880 question as much as anything. So, you've got your American boomers and then your global boomers.

00:45:17.240 They were formed at roughly the same time by roughly the same reason. The post-World War II euphoria,

00:45:22.840 when the GIs came home, they had a bunch of kids. Those are the boomers. And that happened even in the

00:45:28.800 Soviet Union. The difference between the United States and most of the rest of the world is that

00:45:35.280 our boomers had a lot of kids. And we know those as the millennials. And so, we do have an echo

00:45:40.960 boomer generation. And that's a big part of why our demographic decline has been so much slower.

00:45:46.080 But that didn't happen almost anywhere else. So, when the boomers die everywhere else,

00:45:52.520 they probably will have already absorbed all of the accrued capital from their lifetimes and

00:45:57.140 pensions and healthcare because they won't be paying taxes in the same volume anymore.

00:46:01.500 And that'll bankrupt the states. And there's no longer replacement generation down below

00:46:05.520 to replenish the population. So, you're looking at aging populations, denigrating populations,

00:46:11.900 less investment capacity because there's never the capital generation to exist in the first place now.

00:46:18.060 In the United States, that's not necessarily true. I mean, I firmly believe that America's boomers

00:46:22.260 aren't going to pass a lot of money on to their kids because they're going to spend it on themselves.

00:46:25.500 But we still have that younger generation coming up. The older boomers turn 45 years old this year.

00:46:33.880 And that means in about 10 years, they're going to be entering their capital rich stage of their life.

00:46:39.120 Wait a minute. The older boomers-

00:46:40.540 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I said that wrong. The older millennials turn 45 this year.

00:46:45.360 And as a rule from age 55 to 65 is when you're the most capital rich in your life. That's what

00:46:52.220 everyone else in the world is losing. We just have a hiccup. As the boomers pass on,

00:46:57.160 Gen X is small, but then the millennials will eventually catch up. So, all- I'm using air quotes

00:47:02.920 here. All we have to do in the United States to get back to a better capital generation moment is wait

00:47:07.640 12 years until the millennials will be doing it. But there aren't a lot of other countries in the

00:47:12.580 world that will ever reach that point. France, New Zealand, Sweden, that's about it.

00:47:18.000 So, what exactly are you picturing when you say something like Germany is going to de-industrialize

00:47:25.200 and basically unravel or not exist as a state? I forget the language you use, but it was

00:47:31.120 starkly dystopian. What are you actually picturing? If we jumped in a time machine and went to

00:47:37.380 the Germany of 2070, what are you expecting to see? I wouldn't expect to see a Germany in 2070.

00:47:43.980 I mean, that's part of the problem here. Everything that we're studying demographically,

00:47:47.420 this has never happened before, never in human history. We've never seen this sort of decay,

00:47:52.000 even in times of war and genocide, even in times of the Black Death.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 21, 2024

#355 — A Falling World

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