The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 326. Israel, Russia, China, Iran： The World in Conflict

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I met Mr. Walter Russell Mead at a dinner party in Washington.

00:01:12.920 He's a prolific author and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, a very astute commentator on foreign affairs.

00:01:18.800 I'm talking to him today about, well, about the situation, the international situation in the world as experienced by the United States and its Western allies, let's say.

00:01:29.740 We're going to talk about Russia and China and Iran and Israel and Palestine, all the, what would you call it, predictable villains.

00:01:37.780 And so, Mr. Walter Russell Mead is a writer, professor, and academic focusing his efforts, as I said, on international policy and foreign affairs.

00:01:47.500 He is the James Clark Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught U.S. foreign policy at Yale.

00:01:55.260 Mead has worked as a columnist for publications such as the Wall Street Journal and was editor-at-large for the American Interest.

00:02:01.720 His books include Mortal Splendor, Special Providence, Power, Terror, Peace and War, God and Gold, and most recently, 2022, The Ark of a Covenant.

00:02:15.440 So, Mr. Mead, you've spent an awful lot of time thinking about foreign policy in very many different aspects,

00:02:23.880 not concentrating necessarily on any particular part of the world, but taking, as much as it's possible, a relatively global view.

00:02:30.860 And so, maybe we could start our discussion by having you summarize what you think are the most important,

00:02:37.520 what are the most important issues that confronted the United States and the Western world more generally on the foreign relations front in 2022?

00:02:47.200 And maybe we can also talk about what you see happening in 2023 as we move forward.

00:02:52.480 What's currently besetting us in the West on the foreign policy front?

00:02:56.760 Well, it's a, you know, this is a really difficult time.

00:03:02.040 The, it's important that maybe to help people get what's happening in the world is to realize sort of what the basic framework of world politics is.

00:03:11.480 And that is that beginning about 300 years ago, the British began to build this sort of global commercial order where there's trade, there's commerce,

00:03:24.760 and the British also were concerned for creating balance of power in Europe and developing their power globally so that this commercial maritime system would develop.

00:03:36.760 The Americans more or less inherited, or some would say took over that system at the end of World War II.

00:03:44.380 And this liberal international maritime commercial system of trade, of power, of political relationships is the dominant reality in world politics.

00:03:56.740 And the world is, and the world is more or less divided between countries that are fairly happy with this, with this system and would like to see it continue.

00:04:08.240 Countries who have some grievances, would like the system adjusted, but are basically willing to work within that system.

00:04:17.080 And then countries who want to bring the whole thing down.

00:04:20.880 And today, the leading countries that are in that are, you know, China, Russia, and Iran, along with certain smaller hangers on like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a few others.

00:04:35.920 And we've seen since, you know, at the end of the Cold War, 1990, it looked as if this Anglo-American system would last forever.

00:04:48.480 People talked about the end of history.

00:04:50.440 But partly because countries like China have developed and become more powerful, but maybe more fundamentally because the Americans and our close allies have not done a very good job of understanding how to build and nurture and maintain this system.

00:05:07.140 We've seen gradually a kind of a crisis of opposition approaching.

00:05:13.020 And 2022, between the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China's continued sort of menacing of Taiwan, and Iran's progress, refusal to rejoin the JCPOA, its deepening alliance with Russia, we've seen this alliance of revisionist powers assemble themselves for a real challenge to this international system.

00:05:43.020 Well, so let's, maybe we could walk through each of those countries in turn.

00:05:46.420 I mean, the first reaction I have to what you said is that, say what you might about the Anglo-American sphere of influence, it's by no means self-evident that either China, Russia, or Iran stand out as shining moral lights to emulate as an alternative.

00:06:06.740 I mean, China is a desperately terrible totalitarian communist state.

00:06:10.920 Iran is basically an Islamo-fascist regime.

00:06:14.760 And while Russia seems to be the outlier to some degree, but, you know, because at least nominally it could be allied with the West, but it certainly proved extremely problematic in new ways since the end of the Cold War.

00:06:28.560 So, I mean, on what grounds can countries like China and Iran, for example, offer anything even remotely like an alternative to the sphere of Anglo-American domination?

00:06:40.200 Let's start with China.

00:06:41.980 Right.

00:06:42.320 Well, you know, China offers, what China offers countries, or at least did offer because its offering has gotten less attractive between the mounting totalitarianism, the economic trouble that they're in, and the reaction to COVID.

00:06:58.580 They were saying, look, you don't have to buy the Western package in order to become rich and powerful.

00:07:07.260 And furthermore, they were saying to somebody like the ruler of a country like Zimbabwe or other countries, we'll give you money, we'll give you tech.

00:07:16.000 We won't ask you any questions about how much money your brother-in-law is making out of the deal.

00:07:21.940 No pesky auditors.

00:07:24.240 We will, you know, we're not like the Anglo-Americans.

00:07:26.620 We won't try to make you behave.

00:07:29.200 We'll let you do as, we'll empower you to do exactly as you like.

00:07:33.220 Now, that is not a positive agenda for an alternative world order, but it is an offer that a lot of governments or a lot of powerful individuals might find attractive.

00:07:44.140 Yeah, powerful and corrupt individuals.

00:07:47.900 I mean, okay, so let's take that apart a little bit.

00:07:50.700 So the first part of that is the proposition that you can actually be wealthy or, let's say, have abundant resources and a reasonable standard of living for your citizens, not for you, without adopting something like the underlying metaphysics of the Western moral code.

00:08:06.800 And that proposition strikes me as highly improbable, given that the only reason that China's rich at all is because it managed to integrate itself with the West and essentially adopt quasi-capitalist principles without actually adopting the underlying metaphysic.

00:08:21.300 And I don't think their system is stable.

00:08:23.200 I don't think they're going to be able to propagate that well-being into the future.

00:08:28.100 I mean, you said yourself that China has tilted very heavily under Xi towards an increasing totalitarianism, and that's pretty much self-evident.

00:08:35.720 And the fact that they can only peddle their wares with regards to, what would you say, their profitability on the dictator front to corrupt governments also indicates the moral bankruptcy of their offerings.

00:08:49.480 So if what China has to offer is the ability to bring together, you know, the corrupt dictators of the world, that doesn't seem like a very plausible or sustainable alternative to Anglo-American domination.

00:09:01.160 Right.

00:09:01.960 So, and I mean, China seems to be facing a whole host of problems now, too, including demographic problems that are deadly serious.

00:09:10.020 Right.

00:09:10.720 Well, you know, Jordan, this Anglo-American order is 300 years old, and a lot of people have tried to shake it over the centuries.

00:09:18.960 You know, you can go back to Louis XIV in France, who said, I'm going to have this centralized, powerful, planned economy.

00:09:27.260 We're going to be, we're going to have all the economic and military power of the British, but we're not going to have all that messy political liberalism.

00:09:35.040 And it didn't work, but he put up a good fight that convulsed the world for many years.

00:09:40.560 Napoleon really exactly the same, challenging that Anglo-American, still at that time, British world order, and saying, my dictatorship, my enlightened dictatorship can create a powerful economy that the stupid British cannot match, and an army that they can't defeat.

00:10:02.920 And he rampaged for quite a while.

00:10:05.180 He did ultimately fall apart, and rightly so.

00:10:08.240 I think Kaiser Wilhelm II, I think Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin, all in their different ways, had this same idea, that the sort of technocratic dictatorship, centralized power, and planning could create an economy and a society that could challenge this Anglo-American hegemony, this, or call it the liberal world system.

00:10:33.080 And they all failed, but that, you know, they all thought, okay, I'll learn from the past, now I'll win.

00:10:41.700 And I think China is thinking along those lines, too.

00:10:44.880 Yeah, well, I think there's a fallacy at the bottom of that presumption that basically is biological in nature.

00:10:53.840 I mean, one of the things I've observed, as a consequence of watching the United States as an outsider, let's say for 50 years, 50 conscious years, let's say, is that diversity of approach beats efficiency of monolithic view.

00:11:12.500 And so what I always see happening in the United States is, well, you guys are crazy about 80% of the time, and going off the rails in five different directions, but there's always someone in the United States doing something crazily innovative and sane.

00:11:26.660 Always.

00:11:27.060 And so what seems to happen is that the U.S. washes up against the shores of various forms of political idiocy, but there's so much diversity of approach in the U.S., especially given its massive population and its federated system and its genuine freedoms, that someone somewhere is doing the next right thing.

00:11:47.020 And then America is, what would you call it, open-minded enough and adaptive enough so that if someone is doing the right thing, then they spawn imitators extremely rapidly, and Americans just capitalize on that like mad.

00:12:01.780 And you get this situation where you could imagine, and I think the Japanese managed this for a while, you could imagine that if you just happened to stumble on the right vision, if you were an efficient and benevolent totalitarian, you could be more effective over like a five-year period.

00:12:19.140 But you're going to have a hell of a time with power transitions, that's a deadly problem.

00:12:24.600 And then if the world shifts on you that's not in a way that isn't commensurate with your ideological vision, then you have no alternative approaches to rely on.

00:12:34.920 And my observation has been that just scuttles all these countries that try to compete with this distributed and creative, free Anglo-American ethos.

00:12:45.080 And I do think there's a biological reason for that, is that, you know, one of the ways that biological systems compute adaptation is by producing a very large variety of mutations, right, of variant offspring.

00:13:00.020 And most of those offspring perish, but the only solution to that problem of excess mortality, let's say, on the biological front, is the provision of multiple variants.

00:13:11.220 And the Anglo-American system, because it's distributed and because it places a substantial amount of power in the hands of individuals and subsidiary organizations, its medium to long-term creativity simply can't be beat.

00:13:25.920 And it is inefficient in that it's, you know, a lot of the variants that the U.S. produces, a lot of businesses and so forth fail.

00:13:32.860 But those that succeed can succeed spectacularly, and that happens continually, and that seems like an unstoppable force.

00:13:41.100 And, you know, you just outlined 300 years of history showing that these monolithic centralists who believe that central planning and efficiency will defeat distributed creativity, they just...

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00:15:31.600 They're just wrong one after the other.

00:15:34.000 You'd think eventually we'd learn that that was just wrong, and maybe we have to some degree.

00:15:38.160 Yeah, well, I think the circle is spreading of countries or cultures and individuals who do see this advantage.

00:15:47.240 But, again, as a student of history rather than biology or psychology, what I see is that we keep having these wars.

00:15:56.920 And so, you know, I can say I actually do believe the Chinese system, the Russian system in its own way, the Iranian system certainly cannot really continue as they wish and will fail in the competition.

00:16:11.320 I look at the devastation that we've seen, the Napoleonic Wars, the World Wars.

00:16:15.960 And so our problem on our side is not simply to wait for the time when our diversity and our innovation will clearly triumph, but we have to try to manage or work in foreign policy and security policy to try to prevent new sort of new catastrophic wars on this scale, even though the chances are pretty good that we will prevail in the end.

00:16:43.820 Right, right, right.

00:16:45.300 Well, it looks to me right now on the Chinese front, I mean, they're experiencing a level of domestic unrest that for China appears to be somewhat unprecedented.

00:16:55.320 And it seems to me that it's perhaps clearly in the interest of the Chinese authorities to do something like saber rattle extremely hard over Taiwan to divert their populace's attention from their domestic failures.

00:17:08.520 And so that strikes me as a, I mean, maybe I'm being pessimistic about it, although obviously lots of people are concerned about China and Taiwan.

00:17:17.680 I mean, Xi seems to be attempting to consolidate power in the same manner as people like Mao.

00:17:24.460 He's turned out to be a real, he's turned out to be a real, a real totalitarian dictator rather than someone who's, you know, moving China, maybe like Mao, like the Chinese leader who modernized, was it Mao, what's his name?

00:17:40.380 Deng Xiaoping.

00:17:42.140 Deng Xiaoping, yes, exactly.

00:17:43.800 He doesn't seem like another Deng Xiaoping.

00:17:45.540 He seems to me more like another Mao.

00:17:47.140 And that's very worrisome on the Taiwan front.

00:17:50.760 So what do you think's on the horizon on the China front and what do you think the West should do about it?

00:17:56.920 Right.

00:17:57.520 No, it's really interesting because from the Chinese point of view, first of all, we have to understand that the people that people like I and you would talk to from China aren't representative of the mass of the Chinese in China.

00:18:13.360 The average Chinese person has never left China, didn't study for years in the English-speaking world at an American or Canadian university or what have you.

00:18:25.540 You know, and for them, it looks very frustrating.

00:18:29.460 They see China as this great nation with a growing economy, largest population in the world, at least until India catches up.

00:18:37.160 And then they look and they see, look at Iran, a tiny country backwards in many ways compared to China, which has been running the table in the Middle East.

00:18:46.840 You know, it's in Syria.

00:18:48.400 It's in Lebanon.

00:18:49.900 It's in Yemen.

00:18:50.960 It's causing problems everywhere you look.

00:18:53.300 Even Russia has gotten Crimea and has achieved things.

00:18:56.920 Where has the Chinese government gotten, you know, what has it done?

00:19:01.060 The answer is it's done less than Iran, done less than China, sorry, than Russia in terms of expanding.

00:19:07.620 So I think there's pressure on the Chinese government from a lot of Chinese public opinion.

00:19:15.060 Why aren't you more effective?

00:19:17.280 If we're as great as you're telling us, why don't the foreigners see that and give ground to us?

00:19:23.960 So there's a clash between what a lot of Chinese people think China's place in the world should be and what they actually see.

00:19:33.820 And the government, as you say, at this time of huge stress, their COVID policy, they locked them down for years.

00:19:40.380 And now they're still having a massive epidemic.

00:19:45.100 The housing market, which is where most Chinese have their savings and investment, house prices have been going down for almost three years.

00:19:53.960 There's a major crisis building financially in China.

00:19:57.940 And so the government is in a real pickle as to what does it do next.

00:20:03.240 And that makes it, obviously that makes it a little bit unpredictable internationally.

00:20:07.680 Well, I was just curious as to your evaluation of the Biden administration's response to the situation in Taiwan.

00:20:16.440 What opinions do you have about the Biden formulation of foreign policy in relationship to China?

00:20:22.880 Look, I think the Biden administration has done a reasonably good job so far in terms of its messaging on Taiwan and on the U.S.-China relations, the CHIP Act.

00:20:37.820 And it's putting economic pressure.

00:20:41.360 It is trying to stop the penetration.

00:20:44.700 You know, so much of Chinese growth has really come from the theft of IP and from intellectual property, from Chinese state subsidies to corporations, you know, in key sectors that are able to use those subsidies to compete unfairly in the rest of the world.

00:21:03.840 And I think we are beginning to see, you know, it started in the Trump years, and even President Obama talked about a pivot to Asia.

00:21:12.420 So there's been a growing awareness in the U.S. on a need to focus more on China and not just sort of sit here and wait for capitalism to turn China democratic, which is what we were maybe doing 20 years ago.

00:21:27.580 So we're definitely ahead on that front.

00:21:31.300 So since I was a young person, what's happened in China?

00:21:35.560 Well, first of all, when I started to become politically aware, let's say back in the 1970s, I remember going to a trade fair in Edmonton, Alberta.

00:21:44.720 It was one of the first trade fairs that the Chinese participated in.

00:21:48.080 That probably is about 1974 or something like that.

00:21:50.940 And we went and looked at, the Chinese had a display there of their industrial products, and it looked like stuff that had been manufactured in the West right after the Second World War.

00:22:01.420 Like it looked like stuff that was built in the 1950s.

00:22:03.660 But that was the first time in my lifetime that we saw anything at all of China.

00:22:08.420 And then, of course, when I was very young, the threat of famine was still something that we associated with China.

00:22:14.660 And what I've seen happen in my lifetime is that China has become an economic powerhouse, that the threat of famine has receded substantially, that the Chinese had been integrated, at least to some degree, into the world economy, that the West had benefited, arguably, from an influx of unbelievably inexpensive consumer goods as Chinese manufacturing quality improved, as it did in Japan.

00:22:38.040 And for a good while, it looked like the Chinese were going to settle in beside us in lockstep, even though as competitors and cooperators, and move us all towards a relatively integrated capitalist future.

00:22:51.980 And, of course, the presumption was that as that happened, that the state would liberalize, not least because there would be all sorts of individuals in China who now had a certain degree of economic power.

00:23:02.640 And, you know, that the Chinese would incrementally transform into, essentially, into allies playing under the same system.

00:23:11.580 And I think that really was happening in a pretty damn optimistic way for a number of decades, till Xi decided to centralize control and turn himself into another Mao.

00:23:22.500 And it isn't obvious that the optimism that the West had in relationship to China was exactly misplaced.

00:23:29.480 I mean, I think the Western working class paid a big price for integrating China.

00:23:35.220 But other than that, you know, the Chinese aren't starving anymore, which is certainly a big plus.

00:23:40.620 And, like, there were a lot of positives to attempting to integrate the Chinese into the world economy.

00:23:45.740 The downside was we seemed to become more dependent on their largesse and goodwill than we needed to.

00:23:52.100 And then, of course, China, as a totalitarian model, is a destabilizing force in the international order.

00:23:58.300 Well, you're absolutely right.

00:24:00.440 And I would agree with you completely that, well, look, you know, until a few years ago, I would travel pretty freely in China.

00:24:08.780 And a couple of my books have been translated into Chinese.

00:24:12.360 And I would speak at Chinese universities and talk with professors and officials.

00:24:18.760 And the view that you just expressed was very common.

00:24:24.560 This is what they felt China was doing and should do, was move toward this kind of integration to become what some Chinese used to tell me a normal country is what they wanted China to become.

00:24:38.620 And I think there are a lot of people there who still hope that.

00:24:43.840 Obviously, they're not going to say so right now.

00:24:46.580 That would not be good for you or your family if you started talking that way.

00:24:51.520 But there, I think that what happened in some ways is we tended to forget that the Chinese Communist Party is a real thing and it wants to hold power.

00:25:04.440 You know, and there are lots of people who see, you know, they look at Chinese history.

00:25:08.620 Yes, the Communist Party has killed more Chinese than anything ever in the history of the world, have died as a result of Mao's famines and other things, far eclipsing the death toll, say, in their war against Japan even.

00:25:24.820 But that said, as you pointed out, the economic growth of the last 30, 35 years in China is one of the great miracles of human history.

00:25:36.680 And you would have to have a heart of stone not to be glad that hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty, that new ways of life are opening up, new access to culture, to education.

00:25:54.600 It's what we should all be doing.

00:25:57.680 It's progress and it's good.

00:25:59.720 Right.

00:26:00.140 But that very progress of the society, I think, terrified the Communist Party because they could see themselves losing control.

00:26:11.920 They could see, you know, and there is in Chinese history and culture, you know, it's a country of a billion four people.

00:26:19.360 That's like, what, four times the population of the European Union.

00:26:23.280 And it's not so easy to, Chinese history is a story of the balance between central and local governments.

00:26:31.600 They've had periods of division and war and weakness when others have taken advantage when the central government was weak.

00:26:38.900 So, instead of, in a way, relaxing and liberalizing more as their economic policies succeeded, many in the Chinese Communist Party became, you know, really worried that things were going to get out of control.

00:26:54.980 And for a number of years, even before we saw the, you know, the international hostility, what we saw was gradually, in sector after sector, they were tightening up the control of the central communist elite.

00:27:12.820 And more and more under one man, Xi Jinping, they were tightening every, using every lever they could to impose uniformity in China, to reassert, even in companies now.

00:27:26.700 Every company has to have a Communist Party cell in it.

00:27:31.680 So, we're back to the kind of Communist Party dominance.

00:27:36.900 Yes, exactly.

00:27:37.760 And, obviously, as a Western investor, that's a tough thing when you've got the Communist Party cell running your company.

00:27:45.640 Do you really own the company, etc.?

00:27:48.520 So, it's a...

00:27:49.560 Right, right.

00:27:50.340 So, they're moving from a good period into a much more difficult one, I think.

00:27:56.280 Right.

00:27:56.520 Well, I think also that people were optimistic, and rightly so, after 1989, because once the Soviets gave up the ghost,

00:28:03.760 it looked for a pretty long period of time that you couldn't beat the communist drum very hard anymore.

00:28:10.100 That the internal contradictions that were part and parcel of the ethos had made themselves manifest in a manner that was utterly unmistakable.

00:28:18.360 And just as the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own internal idiocy, so was the Chinese Communist Party doomed to eventual failure.

00:28:29.220 And it's certainly...

00:28:31.940 Now, but I guess part of the problem is that even in the West, you know, we don't seem to be of one mind when we look at the contradiction between Western productivity and generosity, let's say,

00:28:45.780 and general well-being at the level of the citizen, and the contradictions between that and a radical leftist view of the world.

00:28:53.420 I mean, our own society is rife with this culture war, predicated at least on the part that capitalism is inherently oppressive, and so is Western culture in general.

00:29:05.720 And, of course, the Chinese communists believe that in spades, and if we can't get our own house in order with regards to the pathology of these ideas in the West,

00:29:14.740 in some sense, it's not that surprising that the Chinese remain dominated by them, but the long-term consequences of that can't be good.

00:29:22.880 I mean, what I see happening, I think, in the West, in the U.S. in particular, is that people are losing faith in China as a trading partner,

00:29:31.460 and we're starting to pull back a tremendous amount of manufacturing capacity and decreasing investment and pulling away from China as a trading partner.

00:29:40.620 And, of course, that'll just make things more desperate in China, which is not a good thing.

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00:30:51.280 Yeah, it's a tricky thing.

00:30:57.440 We, in the West, we read 1989 and the events in the Soviet Union as a, you know, a glorious victory.

00:31:05.300 But in China, and Putin is on their wavelength here, they saw it very differently.

00:31:12.040 What they saw is, look at the Soviet Union.

00:31:15.800 Gorbachev tried to liberalize and to introduce some democratic elements into the Soviet Union.

00:31:23.420 And look what happened.

00:31:24.580 The Soviet Union fell apart.

00:31:26.760 Russia was impoverished for a decade.

00:31:29.780 It lost its great power status in the world.

00:31:34.720 And, you know, and the West, as they saw it in Russia and in China, just, you know, sort of walked all over them and did whatever it wanted.

00:31:44.140 And so, and the Iranians saw this too.

00:31:46.140 So the message for these leaders is don't liberalize.

00:31:49.860 Liberalism is a poison, and even a little bit of it can begin to corrode and destroy your society.

00:31:59.300 And if you let it in, it will wreck your power and devastate everything.

00:32:05.740 So they actually became, they did not say, oh, how enchanting Western democracy is.

00:32:14.420 They said how dangerous it is.

00:32:16.360 And we've heard Putin complain and talk about the color revolutions, different liberalizing revolutions in post-Soviet countries.

00:32:25.920 And they see us, they see the West as leading this kind of subversion, and that Western ideas and Western freedoms are a fundamental threat to their own power.

00:32:38.620 And given the uses some of them have made of that power, made of their personal survival.

00:32:43.240 Right, right.

00:32:44.080 Well, that seems like a reasonable concern for totalitarian, for ideologically motivated totalitarian dictators.

00:32:50.780 It's definitely the case that Western liberal ideals will not provide an environment where their kind of psychopathic power playing is going to be successful.

00:33:00.280 Right.

00:33:00.380 So they have every reason to be intimidated by that.

00:33:03.220 Right.

00:33:03.900 And I think our mistake was not to realize that, you know, we were saying, hey, we're not, you know, we're going to wait patiently for China to evolve.

00:33:12.000 But on the side of the Chinese Communist Party, they were saying, well, we're not just going to wait patiently until liberalism comes in and wrecks us.

00:33:22.160 We're going to preemptively do what we need to do to maintain our power.

00:33:27.460 So I think...

00:33:28.560 Right, well, maybe we should have known that because they never wavered in their support for North Korea.

00:33:33.340 That's right.

00:33:34.060 And they were also very careful always to say, we want economic liberalization, not political liberalization.

00:33:42.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:43.280 As if those...

00:33:44.160 Well, okay, so let's concentrate on that a little bit.

00:33:46.480 So it's not obvious to me at all that you get to have economic liberalization without political liberalization.

00:33:54.340 In fact, I think the order of events in that causal link is reversed, is that the reason that we have abundance and material prosperity in the West is because of liberalism.

00:34:10.360 Liberalism isn't the consequence of wealth, it's the precondition for wealth.

00:34:13.920 And you can think about that particularly with regards to such things as the right to private property and the right to the fruits of your own labor.

00:34:21.500 If your society isn't predicated on the idea that the individual is somehow intrinsically worthwhile and sovereign in a manner that's not merely a gift of the state, but something intrinsic to the person,

00:34:34.860 as soon as you have that, you have, at least in principle, an inviolable right to something approximating private property and to the fruits of your own labor.

00:34:42.720 And without that fundamental presumption, which I think most particularly is a Judeo-Christian biblical presumption, the whole capitalist enterprise, and it's because it's so reliant on trust and honesty as well, for example, to really flourish and on the right of private property, it's just a non-starter.

00:35:02.220 And so this is a favorite shibboleth of the West, is that while we can have all this economic prosperity or even more of it with a centralized top-down control system that's predicated on the idea of equality, but in reality, that never seems to pan out.

00:35:18.460 And so, I mean, you could point to regimes maybe like Singapore as a potential exception, but Singapore isn't very old.

00:35:26.180 And so we'll see how it does with regards to such things as power transitions.

00:35:30.700 But the idea that you can have economic progress without that underlying ethos of individual sovereignty, I don't think there's any historical evidence for that at all.

00:35:39.920 And there's plenty of evidence to the contrary.

00:35:42.500 You described that in terms of the constant failure of the dictator states.

00:35:46.360 You know, what's interesting is that, I mean, I think you're right, and that, you know, sort of human nature exists in such a way that this kind of, that private property and those, the culture of individual rights together with honesty is foundation for greater prosperity.

00:36:06.880 But the foundations of different cultures around the world have a very different relationship to that set of ideas.

00:36:15.360 And, you know, I remember the first time I started traveling in Russia, it was still the Soviet Union.

00:36:22.120 One of the, I'm giving away how old I am, I suppose, but one of the things I noticed there was that Marxism was culturally attractive to a lot of people in Russia because there was a deep distrust of economic exchange.

00:36:40.460 That the people kind of intuitively felt that if you, at least this is the way it seemed to me, that if a merchant went into the countryside and bought a bushel of wheat for five rubles from the farmer and then took it into town and sold it for 10 rubles to the consumers in the town, he was cheating somebody.

00:37:03.280 You know, you know, you know, maybe he was cheating the farmer, you know, maybe he was cheating his customers, but that this kind of exchange was fundamentally morally illegitimate.

00:37:15.500 And so there was, so Marxism felt right, you know, that capitalism was by nature exploitative.

00:37:24.680 A lot of people were induced to believe that.

00:37:28.300 Yeah, well, it's easy for that belief to be induced because it can capitalize on envy.

00:37:35.880 And envy is a deadly sin, let's say.

00:37:38.460 And it's easy to become envious of anyone who seems to have something that you don't have, especially if you don't, like, look at the other person's life in totality.

00:37:48.100 You see one feature in their life that in some manner exceeds what you've been able to manage.

00:37:53.940 And then it's also extremely convenient for you to assume that if someone has exceeded you in a particular dimension of attainment,

00:38:00.560 that the reason they did that is because they're corrupt and malevolent, not because they're useful and productive compared to you.

00:38:06.980 And so one of the psychological advantages that envious Marxism has is that it plays to envy in an extremely powerful manner.

00:38:16.080 And the problem with that seems to be, and maybe this is another principle for economic advancement,

00:38:21.180 if your society is predicated on the idea that all difference in attainment or socioeconomic status is a consequence of theft and exploitation,

00:38:30.820 then basically you've set up a situation where no one can ever have anything more than anyone else,

00:38:37.520 in which case you have no basis for trade whatsoever and you certainly can't generate anything approximating wealth

00:38:42.820 because there's just no way that everyone can become equally rich at the same instantaneous moment.

00:38:49.400 There's always going to be a gradation of distribution.

00:38:51.820 And one of the weird things the West has managed, and this has something to do with that implicit trust,

00:38:57.440 is that we've actually managed to develop a society where there's not only tolerance for inequality,

00:39:04.020 but there's a certain degree of admiration for it, right?

00:39:06.540 And I think this is particularly true of the U.S., where it's less true of Canada and Europe.

00:39:11.420 But one of the things that's always struck me so positively about the U.S.

00:39:15.320 is that there is a general sense of admiration among the populace for people who've been able to achieve spectacularly and singularly in some domain.

00:39:25.880 And some of that's associated with the desire in the U.S. that parents have for their children to be able to perhaps accomplish the same thing.

00:39:33.440 But it really is quite the miracle that any society has ever managed that at all.

00:39:37.280 You know, it's interesting in some dimensions, even in the Soviet Union, you could see that.

00:39:42.580 Because if you went to a concert in the Soviet Union, you know, classical music was a big thing.

00:39:49.920 The admiration that people felt for a great violinist or a great dancer was extraordinary because in every other channel of life, it was utterly corrupted by the party.

00:40:02.340 If you had a good job, it was because the Communist Party gave it to you.

00:40:06.260 If you, you know, if you were a factory director, it was because your brother-in-law was the party commissar, something like that.

00:40:15.820 But in the arts, you know, that violinist is just up there playing it.

00:40:21.460 You hear it.

00:40:23.400 And that gives you, you know, so there was this direct contact with excellence.

00:40:28.060 So the human spirit, I think, does instinctively respond to, you know, excellence with admiration.

00:40:37.880 They weren't thinking, let's go break his fingers.

00:40:40.420 You know, he plays better than the others.

00:40:42.820 So he should, like, lose a finger and then he won't play any better than anybody else.

00:40:47.340 But in the realm of economics, no, they, you know, they had a very different view.

00:40:53.320 Well, let's turn our attention to the Russians a little bit.

00:40:58.380 So we know, or we've sketched out in a low-resolution sense, what's driving the reactionary Chinese.

00:41:07.140 And that's a reversion to the communist model and to the totalitarian state that it enables.

00:41:13.600 And that's being driven by the people who are benefiting from that enabling.

00:41:17.160 That seems relatively clear.

00:41:18.680 The Russian front is a lot more complicated because it's not obvious at all that Putin is a communist, for example.

00:41:25.220 And I know that Dugin, who is Putin's favorite philosopher, has been trying to sketch out something approximating a different ethos for the Russians.

00:41:34.400 And I know that some of that actually has its origins, both in Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, who both proclaimed in various ways that the proper way forward for Russia was a return to something like its incremental progression along the Orthodox Christian path.

00:41:50.640 And I think the Russians are struggling with that to some degree.

00:41:53.480 And Dugin has tried to outline an alternative ethos, but I don't see anything coherent coming out of that except antipathy to the progressive liberal excesses of the West.

00:42:04.880 I don't see that the Russians have actually managed to elaborate anything approximating a vision.

00:42:10.800 And so what do you think is driving the Russians?

00:42:12.900 Yeah, I think, you know, it's, there is a tragic sense of history.

00:42:21.720 You know, Russian history has been a bitter thing.

00:42:26.140 Putin is not a communist.

00:42:27.700 He is, he's, if anything, he's a czarist.

00:42:30.940 He's a Russian nationalist.

00:42:32.860 And, you know, he actually hates the communists because Lenin and, you know, Lenin's nationality policy really destroyed the Russian Empire in some ways by creating this artificial Soviet Union rather than the empire.

00:42:50.260 The transfer of Crimea to Ukraine under Khrushchev was the kind of, you know, communist BS that Putin really loathed.

00:43:00.200 But there is something Putin deeply envies and misses in Russia today, which is that the Communist Party had an, for most of its history, had an ideological hold in Russia.

00:43:13.920 It had a network of loyal informants and co-workers and members, so there would be somebody on every block watching what everyone else did and reporting the bad guys to this suspicious activity to the secret police.

00:43:30.200 And through the network of communist party cells, youth organizations, this whole culture, the government had means to control, shape, public opinion.

00:43:43.620 Putin doesn't have that, okay?

00:43:46.620 That he, he's trying with Russian nationalism, with the Orthodox Church.

00:43:52.640 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:52.940 He's trying to find, and of course, in places where most of the Russian citizens are Muslim, he tries to work through Islamic religious authorities.

00:44:04.440 Remember that the Orthodox Church and the Muslim hierarchies were entirely controlled by the KGB under the communists.

00:44:13.520 So when the Soviet Union collapsed, all the KGB hacks and stooges were in place.

00:44:21.400 Now, of course, there were some sincere believers here and there, but, you know, but, and so the, and so there was blackmail material, ways that you could control the Orthodox Church, ways that you control.

00:44:34.820 And Putin has tried to turn that into an instrument of state control.

00:44:41.380 Now, you know, that's not, that's not as illegitimate in some ways in Russian culture as it might seem to some of us,

00:44:49.980 because the Orthodox Church and its theology was always much more supportive of the czar, the emperor.

00:44:57.180 You know, it comes out of the Byzantine tradition, where, so there's a kind of, some people use the phrase caesaropapism, you know, that the Caesar, the emperor, is a holy figure as well.

00:45:11.920 So it, you know, they've got a, it comports in some ways with the tradition, with traditional Russian ideas.

00:45:20.100 But Russian society changed a lot in the last hundred years.

00:45:24.580 You know, the, Russia was a peasant society in 1920, and today it's mostly an urban society, et cetera.

00:45:33.440 It's in many, many different ways it's changed.

00:45:35.960 And so Putin does not have the ideological elements of control.

00:45:41.380 Well, the other problem for Putin is that Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism don't export the way Marxism-Leninism did.

00:45:51.180 At the height of communism, Stalin could count on the fanatical loyalty of even highly placed spies like Alger Hiss in America and Kim Philby in England,

00:46:03.180 who out of loyalty to communism would be willing agents and stooges for Stalin.

00:46:09.260 Putin doesn't have that.

00:46:13.340 He's hoping with his opposition to, you know, some of the crazy things that are definitely going on here.

00:46:19.980 He and Orban and some others are sort of trying to kind of create a sort of conservative traditionalist international

00:46:28.000 that can do for them what the international communists used to do for Stalin.

00:46:34.400 But it doesn't, it's not going to work that way.

00:46:38.400 It's a much weaker position.

00:46:40.380 But Putin is doing what he can with the tools he can find to make Russia a great power.

00:46:48.380 You know, I think partly it's weaker because if you try to ally Christian theology with the idea of a centralized quasi-fascist state,

00:46:56.860 it actually doesn't work out very well.

00:46:58.500 Because there's such a strong emphasis on individual sovereignty and individual worth in the Judeo-Christian tradition that you're fighting a pretty vicious rearguard action.

00:47:08.400 I mean, it was definitely the case that when the Bible was printed and distributed so that everyone could read it in the original,

00:47:15.260 that what happened was people recognized their own intrinsic worth and were much more likely to, what would you say,

00:47:22.460 take on both the rights and the responsibilities of informed citizenry as soon as they became literate and could understand the implications of that tradition.

00:47:31.680 And so it isn't obvious to me at all that Putin is going to be able to manage to Shanghai the Christian tradition into alliance with the idea that he should be something approximating a czar,

00:47:43.660 even if the progressive West has, you know, erred in its excesses, which it certainly has.

00:47:50.600 The story just doesn't seem to have a lot of power.

00:47:52.900 I mean, it's definitely the case, the Eastern Europeans are quite appalled by the Western turn towards this radical progressivism,

00:48:01.320 but that hasn't driven them into the arms of people like Putin.

00:48:04.740 No, exactly.

00:48:05.820 This is a very, you know, again, there was a very Russian tradition of the czar as almost the leader of the church as well as the leader of the state.

00:48:16.220 But it doesn't, and the concept of rights as we understand them to be implanted in the Judeo-Christian tradition was much more minimized in the old Russian Orthodox vision.

00:48:31.500 It was a much more collectivist kind of faith.

00:48:35.060 And so, and the gap between Orthodox Europe and both Protestant and Catholic Europe is a very deep historical one.

00:48:44.420 It's over a thousand years old.

00:48:47.200 But, so Putin, something that works in Russia, at least for a time, is not exportable in the way Putin would like it to be.

00:48:57.620 Now, he has another option which he works with, which is this free-floating, you know,

00:49:03.240 so Putin will try on the one hand to be the champion of the, you know, the people who are in revolt against the progressive excesses of the West.

00:49:12.840 But at the same time, he wants to pick up the other source of Soviet support, anti-capitalism, anti-Western individualism, you know, the far left.

00:49:25.540 And those are the two things that Putin is working with.

00:49:29.640 And in U.S. politics, it's interesting that you get people, you know, the squad tends to be very skeptical of U.S. policy in Ukraine,

00:49:40.800 as do people on the very far right.

00:49:43.680 Now, there are a lot of legitimate questions you can ask about what we are and aren't doing in Ukraine.

00:49:47.680 But this kind of sympathy, quasi-Putinist sympathy, you will find it among anti-Americans on the left,

00:49:59.140 as well as among sort of some traditionalists on the right.

00:50:04.520 And that's, that's Putin, Putin doesn't care, you know.

00:50:08.600 For him, he'll use, he'll use any tool he can find.

00:50:12.680 And that's, that's how he sees these people, not as allies and partners, but as tools to be used to achieve his end,

00:50:20.440 which is first, last, and always Russian state power.

00:50:25.340 What do you think his goal was in the Ukraine?

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00:51:48.940 Thank you.

00:51:52.480 Three things, I suppose.

00:51:54.020 Putin wasn't very happy with Western expansionism into Ukraine.

00:51:59.100 He also was more than willing to extend Russian dominion, especially in the eastern parts of Ukraine.

00:52:07.220 And then I also thought it's possible that he didn't really care in some fundamental sense whether Ukraine emerged from this conflict devastated,

00:52:15.680 as long as it didn't fall into the hands of the West.

00:52:18.260 But I'm still relatively unclear about what his motivations and vision were for the invasion.

00:52:25.000 I mean, do you think he thought it would be a cakewalk like so many military leaders tend to presume when they march into a foreign country?

00:52:31.960 Or what was Putin exactly imagining?

00:52:34.900 U.S. intelligence also thought he was going to win.

00:52:38.900 You know, the Americans were saying to Zelensky, we'll give you a plane so you can escape.

00:52:44.260 And we were telling the ambassadors of all the countries, leave, leave, the Russians are coming.

00:52:48.800 There was a panic.

00:52:49.780 So our message to Putin, by the way, was not a message of deterrence.

00:52:54.800 It was a message of encouragement.

00:52:57.180 We think our intelligence is terrific and it tells us you're going to win if you do this.

00:53:03.020 So, you know, that's interesting.

00:53:05.720 I think he did think he would get a lot of success very quickly.

00:53:09.600 But as to the threat of Ukraine to Putin, it's not like Western, it's not that like there might be Western troops in Kyiv.

00:53:21.300 It's clear we don't want to invade Russia.

00:53:24.000 No one in the West wants to invade Russia.

00:53:27.040 No one, there's no support in the United States for sending an army into Russia.

00:53:32.340 Right?

00:53:32.740 That is, that's not on the table.

00:53:35.220 But what is on the table is suppose Ukraine democratizes and becomes a successful country.

00:53:44.140 Putin's whole argument to the Russian people is that, oh, you know, democracy may work fine for the English and the French and the Americans.

00:53:53.160 But we Russians, we're different.

00:53:55.840 We Orthodox Slavs, we have our own tradition and our own world.

00:54:00.500 Kyiv really is where Russian civil, the birthplace of Russian civilization.

00:54:07.060 Ukraine for Russians is part of their heartland.

00:54:12.160 And if Ukrainian Slavs, Orthodox Ukrainian Slavs are happy and prosperous in a democracy

00:54:20.140 and achieving things that a corrupt, stagnant, sterile, Putinist regime is unable to achieve in Russia,

00:54:29.840 a happy democratic Ukraine without lifting a finger, without sending a single shot across the frontier,

00:54:36.840 is a mortal threat to Putin's power and vision at home.

00:54:42.080 That's the problem.

00:54:42.820 Okay, so does that make a devastated Ukraine and a Russian withdrawal a Putin victory?

00:54:49.240 I think, yeah, Putin wants Ukraine to fail.

00:54:53.720 And he wants to be seen to be dominant in Ukraine.

00:54:58.080 Those are the two things he needs.

00:54:59.840 Right, right.

00:55:00.600 And Crimea.

00:55:01.060 And that's a minimal grounds for victory for him.

00:55:03.660 Yeah, and Crimea.

00:55:04.700 Okay, so now what do you see?

00:55:09.200 We don't know how the Russia-Ukraine war is going to continue.

00:55:13.240 I mean, the Russians have been being pushed back,

00:55:15.060 but they're unbelievably heavily armed in the final analysis.

00:55:18.220 And it isn't obvious exactly what a Ukrainian victory would look like

00:55:23.420 in the face of that ultimately overwhelming, let's say, nuclear threat.

00:55:28.100 And so I've heard, read, let's say,

00:55:32.420 intimations that Putin might be willing to sit at the bargaining table now.

00:55:37.100 What do you think?

00:55:38.840 Are we in for a long war?

00:55:40.600 Are we in for a long, deteriorating war that's moving to a nuclear exchange?

00:55:44.500 Is Putin feeling pressure to get to the negotiating table?

00:55:49.880 What's your sense of where things, how things are going to unfold over the next year?

00:55:54.700 Well, I think we're in back.

00:55:57.080 The war has gone through several phases already.

00:56:00.060 And it's important to remember, it's been so long since we were all thinking about a big war in this way.

00:56:06.220 We've all forgotten some of the things that are normal in warfare.

00:56:10.380 And one of them is that war changes.

00:56:15.420 So like in World War II, you start with 10 months of Zitzkrieg.

00:56:19.380 No one is doing anything.

00:56:21.580 Then Hitler conquers everything.

00:56:23.540 And oh my gosh, he's going to win.

00:56:24.820 But then another stalemate, et cetera.

00:56:26.860 It changes.

00:56:28.320 And in this war, there was the initial phase of Russian attacks.

00:56:32.500 And people for a while thought those might succeed.

00:56:34.700 Then the Ukrainian defeat.

00:56:37.140 Then we went into that long period of like slow grinding Russian advances.

00:56:43.100 Then there were the heartening Ukrainian pushback.

00:56:48.200 And everybody said, oh, their whole Russian army could disintegrate, et cetera.

00:56:51.720 They seem at least for now to have stabilized their front.

00:56:55.120 We don't really know.

00:56:56.060 And with the missile attacks and Russia, you know, fighting on the boundaries, are we back to grinding war of attrition?

00:57:05.620 Or because, you know, the morale in the Russian army is quite low in some places.

00:57:10.660 You know, could we see more military collapses like we saw, you know, on the Russian side, et cetera?

00:57:17.880 So there's a lot going on.

00:57:20.240 Both the Ukrainians and the Russians still think they have some cards to play.

00:57:26.880 And neither one is willing to give up until they don't think they could gain something extra by trying something else.

00:57:36.520 So both now, you know, the West is saying to Zelensky, come on, at least look like you want to talk peace.

00:57:44.040 So he says, you know, I'm ready to sit down, you know, and discuss peace on the following terms, basically complete Russian withdrawal and reparations.

00:57:53.580 And Putin also feeling some internal pressure to and from some others to sound at least look like he's interested in pieces.

00:58:01.780 Yes, I'm interested.

00:58:03.140 I want peace talks on the surrender of Ukraine to me and on exactly what pieces of Ukraine I'll take.

00:58:09.640 But neither side at this point is ready to stop fighting.

00:58:15.920 So I don't see immediately much change.

00:58:20.240 And the future will be determined by how the armies do on the ground.

00:58:26.200 The god of battles will determine where we are.

00:58:29.820 And then, you know, as the reality changes, the two sides' appreciation of what they can reasonably hope to achieve change.

00:58:39.900 And at some point, maybe, there will be, we'll see, you know, a negotiated peace.

00:58:47.740 Right, but you think there's a fair bit of war to come before that.

00:58:51.140 I'm afraid there is.

00:58:51.400 Because it isn't obvious that either side is losing in some fundamental sense, right?

00:58:56.040 It's still very ambivalent.

00:58:57.220 Each side has reasons to believe that it can gain from where it is now.

00:59:02.820 And as long as that's the case, the tendency is for the war to continue, yes.

00:59:08.460 Okay, okay.

00:59:09.300 Let's turn our attention momentarily to the situation in Iran.

00:59:13.260 I'd like to talk about two different streams there.

00:59:16.900 The first would be the protests.

00:59:18.860 And then also we could talk about Iran in relationship to Israel and also the Iranians' nuclear program.

00:59:25.320 When I was in Jerusalem, I met with some senior people who'd worked in various ways for the Israeli government over the years.

00:59:33.300 And some of them were very concerned about Iran's capacity to move very rapidly towards the development of a nuclear bomb.

00:59:39.860 And my understanding is that they're still experimenting quite heavily with sophisticated centrifuges that are designed to push them to the point where developing a nuclear weapon could take place, if necessary, within a few months.

00:59:54.440 And so, and it seems to me to be the case that Iran is Israel's most fundamental enemy and is devoted in some real sense to the eradication of Israel.

01:00:05.280 And so that's all extremely worrisome in some sense.

01:00:12.260 Counterbalanced against that is the fact that the Iranians themselves seem to be pretty damn sick and tired of their state.

01:00:17.660 And God only knows what's going to happen as a consequence of the protests.

01:00:21.440 I mean, we could get lucky, possibly, and see the Iranian regime collapse.

01:00:26.960 Although a collapsed regime is often replaced by a worse regime, unfortunately, rather than a better one.

01:00:32.620 So, anyways, tell me your views about Iran in relationship to the U.S., in relationship to Israel, in relationship to the ongoing protests.

01:00:43.860 What's happening there, as far as you can tell, and what do you see happening in the future?

01:00:47.220 Well, in the first place, I think that hostility to the United States and Israel, and more broadly to the West, is baked into the nature of the current Iranian regime.

01:01:01.680 In a sense, they need a bad relationship with the United States.

01:01:05.460 They need a bad relationship with Israel.

01:01:08.100 Why else do you justify a clerical dictatorship if you don't have terrible enemies out there who are going to destroy you?

01:01:18.340 And they also remember that Iran is a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-cultural country.

01:01:26.860 It has a large Azeri minority in the north.

01:01:30.680 It has a lot of Kurds, and the Kurds in Iran are restless like Kurds in other countries.

01:01:37.200 They want independence for Kurds.

01:01:40.020 You've got the Baluks in the south.

01:01:44.860 You have a large group of Arabs in Iran, and most of the oil in Iran, or a lot of it, is in the part that's inhabited by Arabs.

01:01:54.660 And the central government wants to keep pumping the oil but spending the revenue not on the Arab provinces where it's come from,

01:02:03.180 but to maintain its power regionally.

01:02:05.700 So Iran is filled with these ethnic tensions, and you need something to hold a country like that together.

01:02:15.580 And Iran, for example, looks at what happens when the Soviet Union lost its faith in communism, so to speak.

01:02:23.520 The cement that held it together, the Soviet Union fell apart.

01:02:27.820 So there's a tremendous fear in Iran that without an ideology that legitimizes and empowers central authority,

01:02:40.600 who knows what could happen, and especially with other countries, whether it's Turkey, Russia, the United States,

01:02:48.360 anybody trying to pull away at its territories.

01:02:52.180 So that's one reason they're not, I think, this whole fantasy that we can reach an agreement with the Iranians

01:02:59.140 and everything could be nice was never very likely.

01:03:03.760 But more than that...

01:03:04.700 Right, because they need an enemy.

01:03:05.960 Well, I also think it's been very convenient for the Iranians to have Israel as an enemy as well,

01:03:11.260 and to funnel support to the Palestinians and keep that conflict boiling away madly.

01:03:16.040 Because as you said, there's nothing that helps legitimize an authoritarian state

01:03:21.160 than the presence of obvious malevolent enemies.

01:03:24.800 Right.

01:03:25.300 So, you know, one of the preconditions for peace agreements, obviously, is that both sides actually want peace.

01:03:31.540 And that doesn't seem to me at all obvious, as you pointed out in the case of Iran.

01:03:35.160 Quite the contrary.

01:03:36.000 Exactly.

01:03:37.200 And when it comes to Israel, they've got something else going.

01:03:40.680 You know, Iran entertains the...

01:03:42.940 We've talked about Iran's fears.

01:03:44.760 What are its hopes?

01:03:46.360 The hopes are if a single country could control the Persian Gulf and all the oil there,

01:03:54.640 even in this time of oil in other places and alternative energy, that's huge power globally.

01:04:02.040 You'd sort of blackmail the world.

01:04:03.980 And the Iranians look at the small Arab Gulf states, many, you know, 90% of the population

01:04:12.780 and some is foreign workers.

01:04:15.520 Bahrain has, you know, is a country ruled by Sunni Muslims, but has a large Shia majority.

01:04:23.880 There's a restive Shia minority in Saudi Arabia.

01:04:27.480 So Iran really sees opportunities and look at what it's been able to do, thanks, I think,

01:04:34.940 to American stupidity in Syria, but also in Lebanon.

01:04:39.160 Iran is really moving, has been moving across the Middle East.

01:04:43.240 It's in Yemen.

01:04:44.860 So, but here's the thing.

01:04:49.460 Shia Islam is not popular among Sunni Muslims.

01:04:52.820 It's considered a heresy, and the Persians are not really, you know, the Arab-Persian problem is real.

01:05:01.820 So to be the most anti-Israel is a way of advertising your credentials.

01:05:09.820 We're such good Muslims that we hate Israel, and unlike all these nasty Gulf rulers who are willing to compromise and all of this,

01:05:17.460 we're in this to the death, if you hate Israel, you know, you love Islam, we're your leader.

01:05:24.560 They are not going to give that up.

01:05:28.100 They are not going to give that up.

01:05:30.400 And if the other Arabs are walking away from violence among the Palestinians,

01:05:36.040 well, the Iranians would be more than happy to fill that gap.

01:05:40.320 So this is, you know, this idea that somehow there are these moderates and, you know, they're just ready to make a deal.

01:05:49.060 I'm sure there are moderates in Iran, but the hard core of the power structure, I think,

01:05:54.980 sees the logic both in terms of the fears and the hopes, and they don't see an advantage in changing.

01:06:00.800 So let's discuss a little bit, one of the things that struck me, I was reading your book, the latest book,

01:06:10.760 Ark of a Covenant, published in 2022, and it's an analysis, at least in large part of the situation

01:06:17.120 in relationship to Israel and the Zionist state and Palestine.

01:06:21.620 And I thought that your book was remarkably even-handed.

01:06:25.540 I've been fascinated by the developments on the Abraham Accord front.

01:06:31.020 I've interviewed a number of people who are associated with the Abrahamic Accords.

01:06:34.440 And from what I've been able to understand, what essentially happened was that a group of people

01:06:39.820 who were outsiders in relationship to the foreign policy establishment decided to buck conventional wisdom,

01:06:48.540 which was that there was no possibility for peace between the Israelites,

01:06:52.460 the Israelis, and the Arab world without including the Palestinians,

01:06:56.520 just to do an end run around that and to start to talk to Arab countries who are actually interested in,

01:07:02.360 well, keeping Iran under control, but also in making peace with the Israelis for strategic reasons,

01:07:09.100 partly because they're a major military power, but also for economic reasons,

01:07:12.400 because so many Arab states are now looking to differentiate their economies away from reliance on the petrodollar.

01:07:19.520 And so what seemed to have happened with the Abraham Accords was a very large group of Arab countries

01:07:25.420 decided that peace with Israel was definitely in their best interests,

01:07:29.400 and that did circumvent the Palestinians.

01:07:32.260 Now, I've been pretty sympathetic, let's say, to the operations of the Israelis in the Middle East,

01:07:40.380 and I've been criticized to a large degree for failing to take into account the oppression of the Palestinians.

01:07:47.180 And your work seems to be remarkably even-handed in that regard.

01:07:51.780 And you commented just before we started this interview that you wrote a book on a very contentious topic,

01:07:57.920 and so that would be the Israel-Palestinian situation.

01:08:00.860 But you didn't really contribute to an exacerbation of the culture war,

01:08:04.560 and you really didn't get pilloried for it.

01:08:06.400 And so what that seems to indicate is that you struck kind of a nice balance

01:08:10.460 between advocating on the Jewish side in relationship to Israel

01:08:14.900 and also pointing out that by no means a majority of Jews around the world even support the Zionist project

01:08:21.480 and also extending a certain degree of sympathy for the displaced Palestinians.

01:08:26.380 So maybe you could walk us through your view of the Abraham Accord

01:08:30.200 and your view of the situation in Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians?

01:08:34.220 Sure, sure.

01:08:35.520 Let me start with the root, the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

01:08:42.720 You know, Americans were actually, you know, pro-Israel before the Jews were,

01:08:50.920 non-Jewish Americans.

01:08:52.320 In the 1890s, before Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism,

01:08:59.700 had written his book on the Jewish state,

01:09:02.120 the president of the United States got a petition asking him to use his influence

01:09:07.420 to promote a Jewish state in Palestine.

01:09:10.500 And this petition was signed by John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan,

01:09:15.100 and the entire sort of American establishment was on board with this idea.

01:09:22.680 And I myself, you know, thousands of years of persecution,

01:09:27.940 the horrors of the 20th century,

01:09:30.040 if any people on earth need a state and, for that matter, deserve a state,

01:09:36.720 surely it's the Jews.

01:09:39.860 At the same time, you know, the Palestinians are a people.

01:09:44.980 They became a people in part because of the struggle with Israel and with the Zionists.

01:09:51.740 And they're human beings.

01:09:56.640 And human beings have rights.

01:09:59.440 And as an American, I believe in rights and rights like self-determination.

01:10:04.120 So my hope is still, although it's difficult and complicated,

01:10:08.540 that there would be, you know, that someday I'd be able to travel from the Jewish state

01:10:13.300 freely to the Palestinian state and have friends in both places.

01:10:17.700 That's what I would like to see.

01:10:20.300 Now, in the book, I don't make recommendations.

01:10:23.420 You know, I think right now it's very hard to get there.

01:10:26.520 But that's what I think most Americans would like to see.

01:10:30.720 And it's what I would like to see.

01:10:32.900 Okay.

01:10:33.240 So you cite Mark Twain in your book.

01:10:35.820 And let me just see if I can find that here.

01:10:38.000 Yes, here's a citation from Mark Twain.

01:10:42.580 Now, see, when I talked to Netanyahu, one of the claims that was put forward on his part

01:10:48.540 was that before the Zionist movement, the Palestinian territory, now Israel,

01:10:56.920 was pretty damn desolate and abandoned.

01:11:00.020 And the Palestinian observers of that conversation are very upset about that characterization.

01:11:06.400 Feeling that it's in the best interests of the Zionists to portray pre-Jewish Palestine

01:11:14.420 as a desolate and abandoned wasteland.

01:11:17.320 Now, but you cite, let me read this.

01:11:20.400 Yet, to American eyes, the land that the Bible famously described as flowing with milk and honey

01:11:25.900 appeared bone dry and deserted in the 19th century.

01:11:28.780 And its handful of inhabitants, Arabs and Jews, seemed deeply wretched and prey to disease and poverty.

01:11:36.400 Mark Twain, in one of his popular travel columns, wrote,

01:11:39.440 From Abraham's time till now, Palestine has been peopled only with ignorant, degraded,

01:11:44.860 lazy, unwashed loafers and savages.

01:11:47.900 For Twain, and for many Americans, the Holy Land was wasted on its current inhabitants,

01:11:52.820 whose poor stewardship had turned the land of King Solomon and King David into, as Twain quipped,

01:11:58.120 the most hopeless, dreary, heartbroken piece of territory outside of Arizona.

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01:13:23.840 One of the claims to Israeli legitimacy, in my understanding,

01:13:29.760 is the idea that this was a particularly God-forsaken piece of territory.

01:13:34.700 The Ottomans themselves weren't that interested in holding on to it.

01:13:37.660 It hadn't been utilized particularly effectively.

01:13:40.380 And one of the consequences of this Zionist enterprise is that once was an essentially barren desert wasteland

01:13:47.440 has been turned into an extremely populous and productive and economically thriving and blooming country.

01:13:54.880 And I have some sympathy for that viewpoint.

01:13:56.740 But then that brings into clear focus the problematic elements of that story in relationship to the Palestinians.

01:14:08.840 And so if you were going to make a case for the Palestinians vis-a-vis the Israelis,

01:14:13.620 if you would, how would you characterize that in light of these sorts of descriptions of pre-Zionist Palestine?

01:14:19.800 Well, I don't want to pit them against each other, but I would say that my Palestinian friends would say,

01:14:26.860 and I would have some sympathy with this perspective, that you have to remember that the Palestinians weren't self-governing in the 19th century.

01:14:36.220 They were part of, they'd been for 500 years or 400 years of that part, part of the Ottoman Empire.

01:14:42.040 And so they were ruled from Istanbul by, and Turks who, you know, saw the Arabs more as a cow to be milked than as,

01:14:52.000 so they were victims of Ottoman imperialism than before the British came.

01:14:58.920 And, you know, that I think would be the kind of argument that people would make.

01:15:02.980 I would go a little deeper and say a lot of the, you know, the redevelopment and the blooming of Palestine

01:15:13.300 has come about because of modern techniques of agronomy and irrigation,

01:15:19.080 which no one knew in the 19th century, in a sense.

01:15:23.120 And, you know, the Israelis have really brought, I mean, people all over the world are using their dry farming techniques

01:15:29.860 and their irrigation techniques and some of their desalinization and other stuff.

01:15:34.340 So they really have brought something.

01:15:36.040 But to compare a 21st century Israel to a 19th century Palestine, you know, it's a little tricky as a historical comparison.

01:15:47.600 I think we can just say that.

01:15:48.480 Right, right, right, right.

01:15:49.420 So you have multiple problems with that kind of comparison.

01:15:53.500 Yeah.

01:15:53.660 The advancement of technology being one of them.

01:15:56.300 So how many people are we talking about inhabiting the place that is now Israel in the, say, in the late 19th century?

01:16:08.060 Again.

01:16:08.460 Do you know?

01:16:09.400 It's, the estimates vary wildly because, of course, again,

01:16:14.400 the Ottoman Empire was not a place where you had careful statistics.

01:16:18.720 So you don't have every 10 years the decennial census with an organized modern bureaucracy counting the numbers.

01:16:28.700 So, you know, what do you, how do you estimate that population?

01:16:33.080 You know, what is your basis for it?

01:16:35.440 And when you have such a politically contentious question as Israel-Palestine,

01:16:40.980 where everybody's got a point of view, everybody's got an agenda,

01:16:43.760 without even cheating, you can find all kinds of ways to get to different population estimates for 1890,

01:16:52.820 if you see what I mean.

01:16:54.460 So I honestly don't think, and, you know, in all of these,

01:16:58.920 one of the things I, in Ark of the Covenant, the book I try to make clear,

01:17:03.060 is that in many ways, this dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians

01:17:08.120 is one of a hundred such disputes.

01:17:11.940 You know, Croats and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

01:17:16.580 Hungarians versus Romanians in Transylvania.

01:17:19.760 There are all these national disputes.

01:17:22.140 And in all of them, what you find is these scholars and historians and ideologues,

01:17:27.820 they make all kinds of claims based on history.

01:17:30.740 I was in Romania, and somebody said,

01:17:34.100 yeah, the Magyars, they have no place in here, they're interlopers.

01:17:37.080 They only got here in the ninth century A.D., which, to an American,

01:17:43.180 that's not a very convincing argument.

01:17:46.380 But anyway, everybody comes armed with these battalions of facts

01:17:51.880 that they just throw at each other.

01:17:54.280 We're not going to get the solution by sifting ultimately through those facts.

01:18:00.020 You know, that is raking over, if you have a husband and a wife who've quarreled,

01:18:05.720 raking over every quarrel in the marriage is not actually the way to get them moving forward.

01:18:13.660 No, no, no, right.

01:18:14.680 You need something like a uniting vision.

01:18:17.460 No, I think that's a very good point.

01:18:19.920 And I mean, part of the reason that there is conflict everywhere when there is conflict

01:18:25.620 is because the facts themselves are open to question.

01:18:28.820 I mean, that's almost like the definition of the precondition for a war.

01:18:33.800 We don't agree what the realities are on the ground at all.

01:18:37.180 And we disagree with them so vociferously that we can't even discuss them.

01:18:41.500 We have to now kill each other.

01:18:42.860 And we disagree with the rules.

01:18:45.840 You know, like what should adjudicate something?

01:18:49.200 Is it, you know, so the Zionists will say, and they're right to say so, the League of Nations

01:18:56.340 recognized the British mandate over Palestine as a national home for the Jews.

01:19:03.000 So it's legal.

01:19:04.340 The UN reaffirmed it in 1948.

01:19:07.540 How much more legal, 47, how much more legal could that be?

01:19:10.720 And a Palestinian might say, well, you know, the British were colonial interlopers who stole

01:19:16.220 the land from the Ottoman Empire, you know, and the Palestinians never had a voice.

01:19:21.960 What gave the League of Nations the right to say that the British had a right to the territory?

01:19:27.500 That's imperialism.

01:19:28.340 Right, right.

01:19:29.140 Right.

01:19:29.720 And they're both arguments.

01:19:33.820 And people will have different reasons for supporting them.

01:19:37.640 Well, and then there's ideological reasons, too.

01:19:40.520 I mean, there's two things that you do very masterfully, at least in this book, The Ark

01:19:47.060 of the Covenant.

01:19:48.160 The first is, I would say, you make this remarkable case, which you touched on earlier, that a tremendous

01:19:55.160 amount of impetus for the Zionist movement wasn't specifically Jewish.

01:20:00.120 It happened to dovetail with a stream of Christian evangelism.

01:20:04.400 That's probably the right way to think about it.

01:20:06.400 That viewed the emergence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as part of the fulfillment

01:20:13.140 of biblical prophetic tradition.

01:20:15.620 And you point out, as you did with the Rockefellers, for example, and with J.P.

01:20:19.340 Morgan, that there were Zionist movements on the Christian front that at least developed

01:20:24.700 in parallel with the Zionist movement on the Jewish front and in many places preceded it.

01:20:29.980 And so one of the things I found quite compelling about your book was the detailing out of the

01:20:36.260 remarkable and strange support that the Zionist project found in the Christian West.

01:20:42.820 And so you also point out that if it was up to the Jews worldwide and they had a democratic

01:20:49.300 vote, let's say, with regards to Israeli policies, it's by no means obvious that the hawks on the

01:20:55.200 Israeli side would be the most popular, let's say, put forward the most popular viewpoint in relationship

01:21:01.340 to what Jews themselves believe.

01:21:03.440 And that there's no evidence at all that, what do you call it, the Vulcan planet theory?

01:21:09.240 It's something like that.

01:21:10.200 That the whole Zionist project is the conspiratorial consequence of imperialist Jews.

01:21:18.440 And then you also make a parallel case, which I really also appreciate.

01:21:23.360 So first of all, the Zionist story is much more complex than the Jews are trying to steal

01:21:27.580 the Middle East, that's for sure.

01:21:29.660 But then there's an ideological issue too, which is that on the radical left in particular,

01:21:35.180 there has developed this anti-colonial narrative that's predicated in part on the claim that

01:21:39.800 every human relationship is predicated on power and exploitation.

01:21:43.000 And then what seemed to happen was that that narrative, which accounts, let's say, for

01:21:48.560 the colonial activities of the Westerners, although it's curiously absent in claims about,

01:21:54.180 let's say, the Ottoman Empire, is that Israel is just written into history as another example

01:21:59.360 of the same thing, which is convenient for people who can only have one historical idea,

01:22:04.140 but doesn't seem to me to be very much in accordance with the historical process that actually

01:22:09.500 gave rise to the Israeli state.

01:22:11.260 And if we look at, you know, again, people, you hear all of this, people talking about

01:22:17.760 how it's sort of Israel is a European colonial venture in the Middle East.

01:22:23.920 It's a white occupation of a brown country, so to speak.

01:22:29.500 And, you know, certainly the Zion, Herzl and his Zionist movement were strong among European

01:22:36.380 Jews, but the majority, the largest groups in Israel today are not European.

01:22:42.880 They are Middle Eastern Jews.

01:22:45.560 Many of them were actually driven out of their homes in the Arab world in retaliation for what

01:22:52.340 happened to the Palestinians, although these Jews who'd lived in Iraq for thousands of years,

01:22:57.640 or their ancestors in Egypt and so on, had had nothing to do with either the Zionist movement

01:23:03.980 or the war in Palestine.

01:23:06.020 They were driven from their homes as refugees and came to Israel.

01:23:10.220 And these people sort of get overlooked in the discussion of, and there were about as many Jewish refugees

01:23:20.000 from the Arab world, more or less, and people obviously argue about all these numbers,

01:23:24.780 and I'm not the great arbiter of everything here, but comparable to the number of Palestinians

01:23:31.400 who either fled or were driven out of Israel in the time of that war.

01:23:36.180 So it's, and these Jews who were the supporters, by the way, that's the core of Prime Minister Netanyahu's

01:23:46.200 support, not the European Jews, but the Middle Eastern Jews and the Russian Jews who have a

01:23:52.160 different story, but these Jews feel no guilt about the Palestinians.

01:23:57.500 Hey, he's a refugee, I'm a refugee.

01:23:59.860 But where's the global sympathy for me?

01:24:04.460 Where, the Jewish refugee would say, where is the United Nations with education for my child

01:24:10.880 and free medical?

01:24:11.900 What have I ever gotten?

01:24:13.560 I'm called a colonizer.

01:24:15.420 Right, a European colonizer.

01:24:17.080 Yeah, exactly.

01:24:18.280 And then on the other hand, I was, I visited Auschwitz some years ago,

01:24:23.660 and I saw a group of teenagers following a Star of David flag, so I went to see what was going on.

01:24:32.220 They were Jewish teenagers visiting Poland because they were actually descended from Polish Jews,

01:24:40.740 and they were coming back to see, you know, where their ancestors had been.

01:24:46.600 And I said, well, how's the trip been going?

01:24:48.760 And they said, well, it's not been so good.

01:24:50.660 I said, what do you mean?

01:24:51.460 And they said, well, you know, we went to visit the memorial in the Warsaw Ghetto,

01:24:56.400 you know, the Jewish resistance against the Nazis,

01:24:59.980 and a crowd of people formed there, and they were yelling, Jews, go home.

01:25:06.280 Oh, my God.

01:25:07.180 But, you know, they go to Palestine, and it's, you know, they go back to Israel,

01:25:11.360 and people will say, Jews, go home to Poland.

01:25:14.220 Poland, Jews, go home to Palestine.

01:25:16.120 People have to have a home.

01:25:18.000 It definitely seems, what would you call it, bordering on malevolent to regard the Jews

01:25:25.820 who escaped from European persecution into Israel as European colonizers.

01:25:32.280 I mean, you can say what you want about the British and the hand they played in establishing Israel,

01:25:36.540 and you can make the case for the Palestinians that the UN didn't have the right to do what it did.

01:25:42.900 And there's some credibility to that argument.

01:25:46.860 But to regard European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, for example, or Poland as European colonizers is,

01:25:54.780 I mean, Jesus, talk about pan in both directions at the same time.

01:25:58.280 Well, you know, it's also true, and this is one of the things that in Ark of the Covenant just sort of I learned the most about

01:26:06.200 and surprised me the most.

01:26:07.740 It turns out that Stalin had a lot more to do with the Jewish victory in the War of Independence

01:26:14.000 and the Nakba, the exile of the Palestinians, than either the British or the Americans.

01:26:20.240 The British actually sided with the Arabs in the Israeli War of Independence, and they armed the Arabs.

01:26:29.800 And the Arab forces that were the most successful were the British Legion of British-trained, British-led, British-equipped soldiers in the Jordanian army.

01:26:41.880 And, you know, they're the reasons that the West Bank was held by the Arabs until the 1967 war.

01:26:50.240 And on the other hand, the Americans, while we said all kinds of nice things about the Israelis,

01:26:57.540 we put on an arms embargo that meant that the desperate Israelis, and for much of the war, they were losing the war,

01:27:06.220 and they were being besieged in Jerusalem.

01:27:09.180 They couldn't buy weapons from the United States.

01:27:12.280 Forget about American aid to Israel.

01:27:15.080 They couldn't even buy with cash money.

01:27:17.600 We put an arms embargo.

01:27:19.140 Stalin ended up selling through Czechoslovakia, where the Czech arms factory,

01:27:27.620 the Skoda arms factory in Czechoslovakia, had been making weapons for the Wehrmacht.

01:27:33.680 And when the Germans surrendered, they had all these surplus weapons in the factory.

01:27:38.980 To help the communists take control of Czechoslovakia, Stalin allowed the Czech government to sell these weapons,

01:27:49.660 these Nazi war surplus weapons to the Jews and smuggled them into British-controlled Palestine.

01:27:59.780 And it was those weapons that allowed the Jews to turn the tide in the war.

01:28:06.760 So, you know, to call this an act of Western colonialism, you know, this was, if any, you know, call it an act of Soviet colonialism.

01:28:18.340 And the reason that Stalin did it, okay, was because he believed correctly that the emergence of a Zionist state in Palestine would so disrupt the British relations with the Arabs

01:28:35.080 that it would dramatically, that it would dramatically weaken the power of Britain and the power of the British Empire in the Middle East.

01:28:44.160 He also thought, rightly, that it would help drive a wedge between the U.S. and Britain.

01:28:48.960 So the whole story of, you know, the story that in people's minds, this is the West imposing something of its grand imperialist capitalist colonial project,

01:29:01.760 it just doesn't match the historical record.

01:29:06.100 And, of course, in those days, Israel was a left-wing cause.

01:29:11.120 Right, right.

01:29:11.820 And the democratic socialists of America, who are now extremely anti-Israel, for them in the 1950s, Israel was proof that socialism worked.

01:29:24.340 Right, right.

01:29:25.040 Because Israel's policies were far more left.

01:29:26.720 You saw that with the glorification of the kibbutzes.

01:29:29.100 Yes, exactly.

01:29:30.260 And Israel had a planned economy.

01:29:32.620 And the labor unions were incredibly powerful.

01:29:35.360 Israel was far more left-wing in its economic policy than any even of the social democratic countries in Europe.

01:29:43.580 So when people said, oh, under socialism, there's no freedom, the democratic socialists of America say, no, Israel shows you're wrong.

01:29:52.320 Do you think that part of the reason that the left has switched its position, let's say, in relationship to Israel,

01:29:59.240 is because Netanyahu went to war, so to speak, against a lot of these socialist predispositions

01:30:06.360 and rekindled the Israeli economy towards something much more approximating a free market capitalist state?

01:30:12.960 Yeah, it was a combination of several things.

01:30:15.540 And this was a factor that in the 70s, Israel goes from being a poster child of socialism

01:30:22.240 to being a poster child of Thatcherism and Reaganism.

01:30:25.840 That those were the, you know, they began to introduce those economic reforms,

01:30:30.340 which have helped create, in particular, the incredibly dynamic tech sector

01:30:35.460 that now gives Israel allies all over the world.

01:30:38.980 And we'll come to the Abraham Accords in a minute, because this is obviously a major factor.

01:30:44.140 Yeah, well, Netanyahu's claim is that, okay, so he made two claims when I talked to him,

01:30:50.760 and not only, obviously, when I talked to him,

01:30:52.780 but one is that he worked very hard to make Israel a formidable military power,

01:30:58.440 but also worked very hard to make Israel a formidable capitalist enterprise.

01:31:03.440 And that it was the combination of those two things that enticed or forced,

01:31:09.140 let's say, the Arab states that did sign the Abraham Accords to go along.

01:31:12.980 They wanted Israel as an ally against Iran,

01:31:15.560 and Israel was powerful militarily, and it showed its prowess in that regard.

01:31:20.600 But also, because the Israeli economy had been freed from the strictures of an idiot centrally planned socialism,

01:31:26.820 it had become an industrial and technological powerhouse,

01:31:30.000 rivaled perhaps now only by Silicon Valley.

01:31:32.880 And that also made the Israelis very attractive as trading partners to the Arab states

01:31:37.160 that were interested in modernizing their economies.

01:31:39.740 So that's Netanyahu's pitch.

01:31:42.120 What do you think of it?

01:31:42.860 No, I think, look, I think fundamentally this is correct,

01:31:46.820 that Israel, thanks to its economic reforms,

01:31:50.580 but also thanks to some intelligent state,

01:31:53.940 it isn't laissez-faire,

01:31:56.080 but, you know, the state has been very much involved in promoting its tech sector,

01:32:01.020 but it has done essentially under capitalist principles,

01:32:04.420 and it's worked brilliantly.

01:32:05.820 And that then, the tech investments help reinforce the economy overall,

01:32:12.400 but also increase military capability.

01:32:16.080 And this, by the way, is a little bit worrying globally.

01:32:20.340 In the old days, when you spent money on defense,

01:32:23.720 it would weaken your civilian economy.

01:32:26.200 Instead of building a school bus, you would build a tank.

01:32:29.400 But increasingly today, because so much defense capability is linked to IT,

01:32:35.860 advanced information processing, and all kinds of stuff,

01:32:39.620 a lot of that technology is dual use,

01:32:42.880 but also firms that are excellent in military planning,

01:32:47.320 in military investment, are extremely powerful economically.

01:32:50.420 So, in fact, large defense budgets tend to promote economic growth

01:32:57.740 rather than restrict it.

01:33:00.760 And that change, I think, is propelling the world in a dangerous direction

01:33:04.840 towards more armed races,

01:33:06.580 and that's something to be genuinely to be concerned about.

01:33:09.940 And is it propelling the world to more, you know,

01:33:14.380 pseudo-fascist collusion between large enterprises at the pinnacle of the state?

01:33:19.060 Well, you know, it's, well, hopefully, again,

01:33:22.740 this is going to be one of the tests of the 21st century.

01:33:25.540 It's clear that information and state power are very closely aligned.

01:33:31.800 And in some ways, information is becoming the currency of power.

01:33:38.500 And so you certainly, if you're the United States,

01:33:41.880 you don't want TikTok or Huawei to have access

01:33:46.380 to all the data about your population,

01:33:49.960 and it could vice versa if you're China.

01:33:52.540 So one of the kinds of fantasies maybe we had in the 1990s

01:33:57.360 was that the tech revolution would make national borders obsolete

01:34:02.740 and create a single global commons.

01:34:06.200 It doesn't look to me right now as if that's the way things are working,

01:34:09.780 that the tech revolution may, in fact,

01:34:13.360 be recreating blocks and strong national entities.

01:34:18.960 Yeah, well, I think the idea of a centralized global control elite

01:34:27.360 and a mass of citizens at their beck and call

01:34:33.240 is a Tower of Babel model.

01:34:35.880 Yes, I think you're right.

01:34:37.360 You see this in AI systems as well.

01:34:40.620 For an AI system to process information about the world properly,

01:34:45.580 it has to have a very differentiated hierarchy of distributed computation.

01:34:51.000 There can't just be a centralized, what would you say, algorithmic system

01:34:55.500 operating on the basis of a few algorithmic principles

01:34:59.960 and then an undifferentiated mass of activity.

01:35:02.420 And the proper model for governance has to be something like,

01:35:06.680 I think, something like the Catholic principle of subsidiarity,

01:35:10.380 where you have sovereignty inherent in various strata of the hierarchical system

01:35:17.780 and that the hierarchy is quite deep and dense and differentiated.

01:35:21.320 And so the problem with the globalist view is that

01:35:24.220 there's this notion that you can have a centralized cabal

01:35:27.680 that can make relatively simple centralized decisions

01:35:30.660 and all the power that should be distributed

01:35:33.460 in all these subsidiary organizations can be accrued to the central authority.

01:35:37.120 That just can't work.

01:35:39.020 And so there's going to be a place for something like sovereign nation states

01:35:42.440 because you want governance to operate as locally as you possibly can.

01:35:47.820 So you need countries, you need states, you need provinces, you need towns,

01:35:52.220 you need municipalities, you need families.

01:35:55.320 And every single one of those levels of organization

01:35:58.100 have to be given their due with regard to political and economic power.

01:36:04.340 Yes, I think that's right.

01:36:05.420 An overwhelming amount of information isn't going to eliminate that.

01:36:08.180 Yeah, so that's the problem with the globalist vision as far as I can tell.

01:36:11.540 What do you think of the Abraham Accords, broadly speaking?

01:36:15.160 I think basically, in some ways, the story that you told, I think, is the right story.

01:36:22.660 The thing I would add, which is to say that the Arabs and the Israelis are both looking at Iran.

01:36:30.700 And by the way, down the road, they might be looking at Turkey.

01:36:33.360 Because remember, the Ottoman Empire ruled both Palestine and the Arab world for hundreds of years.

01:36:40.040 And as Erdogan has tried to revive this idea of an Islamic Turkey,

01:36:46.740 he's made a lot of his neighbors quite nervous.

01:36:49.980 So the sense is, well, Iran might be the threat today, Turkey tomorrow.

01:36:54.480 But yes, the Arabs and the Israelis now understand that they have a core strategic interest in common.

01:37:01.920 Neither one of them wants any country to be able to dominate the Middle East.

01:37:06.800 Because if any country did, it would directly threaten the independence of both the Arab states and Israel.

01:37:15.840 Now, they didn't recognize this in the past because many Arabs had this dream that there could be an Arab state that would dominate the Middle East.

01:37:24.060 That was Saddam Hussein's vision.

01:37:26.180 It was Nasser's vision.

01:37:28.000 In his kooky way, it was Gaddafi's vision.

01:37:30.500 But this pan-Arabic or, in some cases, pan-Islamist vision of the Middle East.

01:37:36.820 That is sort of the Arabs have lost faith in that, by and large.

01:37:41.120 And so there is an understanding that their interests and Israel's interests are connected in this very geopolitical way.

01:37:51.140 But at the same time, you've got the problem of energy transition.

01:37:56.660 The Gulf Arabs, in particular, used to think, hey, we've got all this oil.

01:38:01.300 It's going to be around forever.

01:38:03.300 Now they're not so sure.

01:38:05.540 You know, will we still be using an oil-driven economy in 100 years, etc.?

01:38:10.340 And with all of these talks about carbon neutrality and so on by 2030, 2040, whatever year,

01:38:17.700 I mean, I'm a little skeptical that all of these things are going to happen in the ways that...

01:38:23.260 Yeah, they're not going to happen.

01:38:24.120 They're definitely not going to happen.

01:38:25.800 I mean, the Biden administration itself has projected that it'll take till 2240

01:38:30.700 to produce something like 100% reliance on renewable energy.

01:38:34.800 Right.

01:38:35.060 So these ideas that we're going to get there by 2050, they're not only preposterous, they are outright lies.

01:38:41.180 Right.

01:38:41.500 But even so, the Arabs have to figure, because on the other hand, they've got fracking,

01:38:46.260 and they've got, you know, greater competition from other sources.

01:38:50.080 The Arabs have to figure the price of oil, their income from oil over the long term is going to be

01:38:56.300 trillions of dollars less than they once thought it would.

01:39:00.580 That there's a long-term downgrade for income streams from oil.

01:39:05.480 And so that means in a country like Saudi Arabia, where the population is growing,

01:39:10.380 and the government, in order to stay in power, needs to keep the people happy in some way,

01:39:16.640 you've got to be thinking about economic growth.

01:39:19.420 Well, that means you need technology.

01:39:21.300 It means you need investment.

01:39:23.240 It means you need to have good relations with the people who are good at this.

01:39:27.600 So there's an economic dimension to that as well, that's new, and that is added now to the strategic.

01:39:36.120 The third thing, though, and I think some of the Americans involved in the Abraham Accords

01:39:40.420 have not talked about this as much, but it's real,

01:39:43.700 is that neither the Arabs nor the Israelis trust the Americans as much as they used to.

01:39:50.360 And it's, you know, it's partly because of things like the Iran nuclear deal

01:39:56.340 that they thought was sacrificing their interests to America's interests.

01:40:00.580 But it's also, you know, we elect Bush in 2001.

01:40:04.620 Then we turn around 180 degrees, we elect Obama.

01:40:08.480 Then eight years later, we turn around and we elect Trump.

01:40:11.440 And then four years later, we elect Biden.

01:40:13.680 So people in countries where America plays a large role in their security,

01:40:19.580 they have to think harder than before about,

01:40:23.580 well, we don't know who the Americans are going to elect in 2024.

01:40:27.140 Will it be Elizabeth Warren?

01:40:28.680 Will it be Donald Trump again?

01:40:30.900 You know, they have no idea what we'll do.

01:40:33.300 And frankly, we don't either.

01:40:35.480 So that means that they have to work together more.

01:40:41.720 So American weakness actually helped push the Abraham Accords.

01:40:48.460 So one of the disappointments that I've experienced in relationship to the Biden administration

01:40:57.820 was what I saw as their ideologically motivated rejection of the advances made on the Abraham Accord front.

01:41:06.300 From what I've been able to understand,

01:41:08.620 the Saudis were playing a large role behind the scenes in pushing the Abraham Accords forward.

01:41:13.740 And it seems to me that had the Biden administration gone to the Saudis with an attitude

01:41:20.420 that would have unfortunately also allowed Trump to claim some credit for the Abraham Accords,

01:41:26.640 if this Biden administration had gone to the Saudis with open arms in some sense,

01:41:32.960 that they might have been the next signatories for the Abraham Accords.

01:41:37.180 And it looked to me like the Biden administration let an extremely narrow-minded, parochial, ideological view

01:41:45.180 of both Trump and the situation in the Middle East scuttle an unbelievably promising opportunity,

01:41:52.260 not only on the peace front, but I mean, the Americans were also very much interested

01:41:56.400 in getting their hands on some additional Saudi oil, which they seem to have failed at dismally

01:42:00.800 and then had to turn to, you know, lovely, lovely regimes like Venezuela.

01:42:05.660 So what do you think's going on with regards to the Biden administration

01:42:11.160 and the Saudis in relationship to the Abraham Accords?

01:42:16.120 Well, you know, this is a really interesting story, and it's a complicated one,

01:42:20.280 but I'll tell it as simply as I can, which is that the Democratic Party

01:42:25.000 has been basically hating Saudi Arabia for 70 years.

01:42:29.360 The last Democrat who really sort of liked the Saudis was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who visited in 1944.

01:42:39.120 But during the 1950s, Democrats actually hated the Saudis in general

01:42:44.820 because they were very pro-Israel at the time, and they saw the Eisenhower administration,

01:42:49.920 which tilted toward Nasser and in general toward the Arabs.

01:42:52.660 Well, this is, you're preferring a bunch of evil, feudal monarchs over democratic Israel

01:42:59.220 because you want the oil, and the oil monopolies are your friends.

01:43:04.540 So to be a good liberal Democrat was to hate the Saudis and hate Eisenhower for liking them.

01:43:11.060 Then you come to OPEC, you know, the 1970s, and now you have the oil cartel.

01:43:16.500 I think we've been protecting you from the Soviet Union and your enemies,

01:43:19.940 and you turn on us, and you're jacking up the price.

01:43:23.540 And at that time, sort of working-class America was basically democratic,

01:43:27.820 and the price of oil tripled at a time when people were getting like 10 miles a gallon in a car,

01:43:33.660 and it was wrecking people's lives, and it was the Saudis who were doing it.

01:43:39.000 Then you add sort of, you know, then 9-1-1 comes along, and there were the Saudis.

01:43:45.540 But plus, the Saudis were friends of the Bushes.

01:43:48.880 The Bush family had a long connection with the Saudi royal family.

01:43:53.880 Obviously, hanky-panky is at work.

01:43:56.480 It's the evil.

01:43:57.480 It's the evil.

01:43:59.700 Then now on top of all of that comes oil and the greenhouse gases.

01:44:04.220 The Saudis are destroying the world because they're pumping all that oil into the atmosphere,

01:44:09.420 and any good relationship with the Saudis is sort of bowing the knee to big oil

01:44:15.920 and to the destruction of human life through climate change.

01:44:19.660 I'm exaggerating, but you can see what I mean.

01:44:21.760 Right, right.

01:44:22.780 Well, you also saw widespread Saudi support for the Wahhabis as well,

01:44:27.440 and their drug-beating on behalf of a pretty damn restrictive form of fundamentalist Islam.

01:44:34.460 Exactly.

01:44:35.240 But it looked to me like, okay, so that's a perfect storm,

01:44:38.880 but it still looked to me like the American choice in the last five years

01:44:43.080 was something like, well, is it Iran or is it the Saudis and the Israelis?

01:44:49.860 Right.

01:44:50.020 And it seems to me that despite the sins of the Saudis, which are manifold,

01:44:54.620 the idea that they're not preferable to the Iranians is a form of political insanity.

01:44:59.180 Well, I think we also need to throw in a factor here, which is there's been a huge scandal recently

01:45:04.700 about Qatari influence in the European Parliament, where they've actually arrested the former vice

01:45:13.620 president of the European Parliament and so on and so forth.

01:45:17.700 The Qataris are very anti-Saudi.

01:45:20.600 They've had a huge fight with the Saudis in recent years.

01:45:23.540 They also have a kind of a softer relationship with Iran.

01:45:27.440 And they are heavily and, you know, heavily involved in the Washington policy network.

01:45:33.540 The head of a major think tank sort of got into big trouble because of a relationship.

01:45:38.760 So there's a sense in which, you know, all sides in the Gulf with a lot of money

01:45:45.460 are put themselves into Washington politics and acquire networks of allies, let's just say.

01:45:53.980 So there's, and the democratic side of the spectrum is more aligned with soft on Iran.

01:46:04.380 Pro-democracy is a little bit tilting toward the Muslim Brotherhood.

01:46:08.840 Again, I'm not saying everybody does this, but if you watch Washington politics, you can

01:46:13.580 see some threads moving forward.

01:46:15.620 Okay.

01:46:16.080 What, but what, what in the world is the rationale for being soft on Iran?

01:46:20.100 Iran, I don't see a rationale for that at all.

01:46:23.600 I mean, Iran is a terrible, repressive theocracy with nuclear ambitions.

01:46:29.440 It's a dangerous regime.

01:46:30.900 So how can you be soft on Iran?

01:46:33.440 Well, okay.

01:46:33.920 May I call you Jordan, by the way, or Mr. Peterson?

01:46:36.940 You certainly may.

01:46:38.180 All right.

01:46:38.480 Well, and I'm Walter, by the way.

01:46:40.320 It's after two hours, I think we should.

01:46:43.020 But it's...

01:46:43.660 I think we could do that.

01:46:44.760 But I think that, look, if you believe, and a whole generation has come to believe in the

01:46:54.680 U.S., and not entirely for bad reasons, like the Iraq war was the worst mistake America

01:47:00.040 has made in the 21st century.

01:47:02.240 People would say that.

01:47:03.800 And a war with Iran would be even worse than the war in Iraq.

01:47:07.820 And it's very easy to start a war with Iran, but once it's going on, you know, it'll suck

01:47:14.100 us dry, it'll divert us from China, the Middle East will be aflame, et cetera, et cetera.

01:47:20.140 So you're numb...

01:47:21.600 And furthermore, we got to get out of the Middle East and think about China, okay?

01:47:26.920 So what's the biggest danger...

01:47:29.740 What is the biggest way, easiest way to get into a war in the Middle East?

01:47:33.180 It would be a confrontation with Iran.

01:47:34.900 And therefore, you can't have a confrontation with Iran.

01:47:39.960 That's the way I think a lot of people are thinking.

01:47:43.340 And I think, you know, and they're saying...

01:47:44.840 And they will say, and now I'm, you know, I can't tell you this is what they think, because

01:47:49.380 I can't read their minds.

01:47:51.040 But I think the logic of the position is, we have to say we don't want an Iranian nuclear

01:47:55.980 weapon.

01:47:56.720 But actually, if you're given a binary choice between a war with Iran, with the U.S.

01:48:03.880 fighting Iran, to keep it from being not nuclear, or just hoping that if they get a nuclear weapon,

01:48:10.040 we can deter them, and Israel can deter them, like everybody else with nuclear weapons has

01:48:15.560 been deterred, they would say, better let them have the bomb than have the war.

01:48:20.740 I think that's the logic of the position, and that the Iranians, smelling that as the logic

01:48:28.680 of the position, have taken a very tough line in negotiations, and at this point, are continuing

01:48:35.960 to press the Biden administration.

01:48:38.960 That's what I think is probably happening.

01:48:40.960 Okay, okay.

01:48:41.840 We've wandered over a lot of territory.

01:48:43.880 We talked about China.

01:48:45.200 We talked about Russia.

01:48:46.440 We talked about Iran.

01:48:48.160 We talked about the Abraham Accords.

01:48:50.340 We talked about the complexities of the Israel-Palestinian situation.

01:48:54.100 So we've covered a lot of the territory I was hoping we would cover.

01:48:57.340 Is there anything that is remaining that you'd like to bring people's attention to?

01:49:02.740 Well, you know, there's been such a, this has been a great conversation.

01:49:06.700 I really enjoyed it.

01:49:08.960 And we've touched on so many things.

01:49:11.020 I guess I would like to close by giving a bit of a reason for optimism for folks, because,

01:49:18.000 you know, the world situation is grim, and there is real danger of war.

01:49:23.480 But this Anglo-American 300-year-old system of a kind of a commercial capitalist global liberal

01:49:32.720 framework, it doesn't just stay there by accident.

01:49:38.040 There are solid reasons why the world order that we've known, you know, it's possible that

01:49:46.180 it can continue lasting.

01:49:47.780 Who knows how long?

01:49:49.160 But there are forces that prop it up.

01:49:52.120 One of them, and we've talked about this some, is that a diversified society with capitalist

01:49:58.260 principles actually is incredibly creative and vital and keeps coming up with new technologies,

01:50:04.100 new economic productivity, new ideas, new institutions that enable it to continually adjust to changing

01:50:13.040 conditions.

01:50:14.320 And that gives it tremendous advantages over people who try to follow other systems or other

01:50:20.440 approaches.

01:50:21.440 The other advantage is geopolitical.

01:50:24.860 See, America is a sea power.

01:50:26.620 You know, we're not trying, we don't have any interest in conquering France, much as there's

01:50:34.760 some really nice places in France.

01:50:37.320 We, you know, we don't, you know, we occupied Japan after World War II, but we got out.

01:50:43.220 We did not want to stay.

01:50:45.760 And, you know, so that, but on the contrary, land powers like the Soviet Union keeps, they keep

01:50:52.720 expanding and they want to dominate their neighbors in a way that a sea power just isn't going

01:50:59.040 to do.

01:50:59.800 So when a country like Russia or Iran or China begins to threaten its neighbors, they all

01:51:06.940 want to be allies of ours.

01:51:09.780 So as China has become more threatening, we can see how Japan is suddenly, they're doubling

01:51:15.740 their defense budget.

01:51:17.180 They are deepening their relations with Australia, with India.

01:51:22.020 You know, they're really working very hard to build the alliance.

01:51:25.080 The Indians are waking up and getting very geopolitically active.

01:51:30.100 So the Abraham Accords pop up in the Middle East.

01:51:34.340 The Poles and the Baltics are committed.

01:51:37.260 You know, the Swedes and the Finns want to join NATO.

01:51:40.180 So when this system is threatened by ambitious big powers, the other powers organize into alliances.

01:51:49.060 And this is not new.

01:51:50.220 This is how Britain defeated Louis XIV in the 16th and early 17th century.

01:51:57.180 It's how the British were able to defeat Napoleon.

01:52:00.420 It's what brought down Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I.

01:52:04.400 It's what brought down Hitler and Tojo in World War II.

01:52:08.160 And it's what defeated the Soviet Union.

01:52:10.140 So there are things on our side and we need the courage and the vision and maybe even a little bit of the knowledge of history that can help us understand and assess these incredibly threatening and dramatic trends in world history that we're living through.

01:52:29.520 Well, I think that's an excellent way of ending this on that optimistic note.

01:52:35.900 Yes, I do think that the principles upon which this lengthy Anglo-American productive piece have been predicated are rock solid, particularly compared to all known alternatives.

01:52:48.340 And it is useful for us in the West to observe that and to take heart in it and also to understand that to the degree that those fundamental principles have spread across the world, what they've primarily produced in their aftermath is unparalleled productivity and abundance and peace.

01:53:09.000 And so we could we could have more of that.

01:53:11.640 And I also think that that's within our grasp.

01:53:14.060 So that's a nice optimistic projection for 2023 and hopefully calm and stable and wise heads will prevail.

01:53:21.880 Thank you very much for talking to me today and to all of you who are watching on YouTube or listening on the associated podcast platforms.

01:53:30.080 Thank you for your time and attention.

01:53:31.800 I'm going to turn now for an additional half an hour to the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:53:36.620 I'm going to talk to Mr. Walter Russell Mead about his biographical progress.

01:53:43.140 I'm very interested in delineating out the particulars of successful people's lives.

01:53:48.900 It's always it always makes an interesting story.

01:53:50.880 And I think it's useful for people to understand how a productive destiny makes itself manifest across a life course.

01:53:57.300 And so that's what we're going to do.

01:53:58.700 Thank you to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this conversation.

01:54:02.400 And Happy New Year to all of you who are watching and listening.

01:54:06.900 Thanks again, Walter, for the conversation today.

01:54:11.340 Hello, everyone.

01:54:12.880 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on DailyWirePlus.com.

01:54:19.400 Thank you.

01:54:19.700 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 26, 2023

326. Israel, Russia, China, Iran： The World in Conflict ｜ Walter Russell Mead

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