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- [00:00]
A
Ed Luttwak, legendary strategist, the Machiavelli of Maryland. He's consulted for President's Prime Minister, Secretary of Defense, authored magnificent books on Roman and Byzantine history. A guy, a guide for aspiring coup attemptors, and a sort of, I guess, opus of sorts on the logic of strategy, and then also applied that to the context of the rise of China. He. And he raises cows too. But we're going to get back to your approach to history because in reading it, in ingesting a lot of you over the past month or so, you do have this very unique approach, which is almost like a everything everywhere, all at once view, both when you're doing your. Your Byzantine stuff, as well as the more contemporary work looking at the modern world, which is not something you see very often. I guess there aren't a lot of historians who are, you know, fluent in as many eras and, and regions as you are, or even, you know, try to synthesize as much and draw from as many different examples in trying to pull out threads and theses. So maybe, like, how did you come to this approach? What inspired it? How did you develop this style?
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B
Well, if I were to answer honestly, you would realize that I invented Nunevik. And I can't claim credit for having initiated Nivec, because accidents of life brought me successfully into contact with people of all kinds. And it started the fact that I was born in Transylvania, in Banat, actually northwest Romania, which is an area that was within Romania but was not Romanian. The population were Serbs, there were Hungarians, there were Germans Catholics, German Protestants, there were Hungarian Calvinists, Hungarian Catholics, Jews of different kinds, and of course, Romanians as well. But it was the only truly multinational part of Europe, the only multinational place in the whole of Europe, where down the main boulevard, where my house, the house where I was born was, there was the Serbian Cathedral, the Orthodox Cathedral, the Romanians, the Hungarian Catholic Church, the Calvinist Church, the German Lutheran, and so on. And there were the schools for all these languages. The Romanian government had a very light hand because it was by far the most prosperous part of Romania, generated high tax revenues, and they didn't want to mess with it, so they didn't try to Romanize. There was no brutal imposition of Romanian uniformity of anything of the sort, of. So I was born in that environment, and my parents were very enterprising people. The honeymoon in 1938, they went to Bali because the KLM had just started flying boat service to Surabaya, which is across from Bali, and the Americans had made a film Called Bali High. And there were no hotels in Bali, but it was a fantastic place. All the women went around topless in those days because it was a traditional Hindu way to do it. And my father's business was import, export, not of anything modern. But he imported dried fruits from Turkey and black olives from Greece, oranges and anchovies from Catania, oranges from Palermo, all the traditional things. But he was traveling all the time, times. It was very international. So because of that, he took us out to Romania a week before the Communists slammed down.
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A
What was their experience of the war?
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B
Well, the experience of the war was that I don't want to go into details, but the fact is that the only two Jewish communities in the whole of Europe where nobody was deported. Among Jews, nobody was deported, nobody was killed. Arad and Timisoara Banat community population increased during the war from the Atlantic to the Urals. All other communities either disappeared or went down drastically, and there they increased. But you'll note that if you look for it in the vast historiography of the Holocaust, you will not find the history. Because even when the Holocaust museum archivists, whatever they are, historians, did a big thing on Romanian Jewry. It was all about martyrology. They died here, they died there. The place where they survived, they didn't write anything about, and they were not interested in writing about the leadership of the Jews in these two areas acted as if the leaders of a nation under attack instead of and deployed resources, did everything and used every method. And in other words, it was a survival that was not accidental. And it's interesting that these stereographers are not interested in it anyway. So from leaving everything behind, and there was a lot he left behind, my father, my mother, a lot. They went to Italy with nothing. And my father immediately went to Palermo, Sicily, where his few thousand dollars became millions in three years, simply because he read the. Every day he would read the Swiss newspaper, Neue Zurich. Zurich is the headquarters of the reinsurance industry. So there are people sitting in Zurich who are very interested in oil wells off the coast of Mexico. Reinsurance. They insure everything or reinsure everything, I should say. And he read. There were detailed articles and anoints about everything, including the British National Health Service, which he read and which promised to give orange juice to every British child would get oranges. So my father had been to England, knew there was not a single orange tree, so went to Palermo with the highest concentration of orange trees and started sending oranges to England. So arriving with three children and virtually no money within three Years he starts building a factory in Italy because they had a perverse fashion passion for plastics, which were new at the time, very new, they're very beginning. But anyway, I went to school in Palermo and my history starts there because really starts there because the local school teacher refused to teach Italian. So I didn't know Italian. He said, everybody speaks Sicilian, what's the point of me teaching you Italian? So he taught Latin and nobody stopped him, he just told us Latin. And I was there only four years. But then I went to British boarding school. And in those days Latin and Greek was still very important in British education. And the other thing, they had a cadet core. Britain still had an empire and it would happen under 20 years or so. In the bony school you have a cadet corps. So at the age of 13 you have a, you know, a kid's uniform and you have what you call a.22, you know, a light rifle to practice with. And then, you know, a couple of years later you get a real rifle. And the body school was a Jewish school. And so we also had. Interesting. Yes, but there was a Jewish school that derived directly from the Yeshiva of Lithuania. And the Yeshiva in Lithuania uniquely were big on sports. In Lithuania alone, the Orthodox Jews that you see running around and so on, they were, they had sports, they had men's sauna in corporate Sana, you know, healthy minded. So our rabbi was athletic guy and we were on a trans river and used to swim up and down. We all did. We had boxing, we had cricket of course and football, but we also had boxing and fencing as a big deal. So all cadet corps, boxing, fencing, swimming, non fretting and fussing and cold showers and all that stuff of a British boarding school of the 1950s. That was a very profound thing and all. Also our teachers were basically German Jewish refugees who had been university professors. So our history teacher, his name was Friedman, he had used to was a professor at the University of Bonn, you know, later federal capital and so on. And they, they brought that level of teaching, you know, they were not all Jews. The chemistry professor was an Englishman who was in a physics. There were a couple of non Jewish teachers there who were very vigorous representatives, enthusiastic and so on. And of course they were living an upper middle class life. You know, each of them in the boarding school had a substantial house to live in and so on. And there was the local farmers. Daughters would come in to help with the cleaning and so on. So they were the kind of people who would teach things that would uphold the society which had rewarded them with this Upper middle class lifestyle in a beautiful place along the Thames. It's called Mandywell Park.
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A
Let's stay there for a second. With this, with this world you were living in, what was everyone's relationship to the Holocaust and Judaism at the time?
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B
My parents were invited to participate in the Holocaust. They never did and continued to have absolutely no interest in it.
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A
What does participate in the Holocaust mean?
- [10:00]
B
Well, they were, you were invited to go and be deported in a sense. And people like my parents, they persuaded the entire community to be refused. Oh, during the war, right. They did not participate in the Holocaust, had no interest in it afterwards. They considered the Holocaust as a defeat of the Jewish leadership, secular and religious. All these self important people who were the leaders of the Jewish community around Europe, from the Atlantic to Russia, they all failed. They failed to understand that there was a threat. They failed to organize, they failed to use the resources, they failed to do a lot of things. Our local rich guy, I mean really rich guy, was a man called Neumann, actually Baron Neumann, no less a Baron. And he called the young people, including my father, I mean young strivers at the time and said, I'm very rich and none of my money will serve me if I'm deported. So you young fellows, if you have any way of doing anything useful and it's got a high probability, I'll fund it. If it has a low probability, I will also fund it. If it is just a possibility that it might be of new use, I will fund it. Okay, so he did. That was one thing using money like that and the other was the understanding that when there's a war you have to be ruthless. And there were ruthless actions taken that were effective. And so afterwards my parents never ever mentioned it. I never heard a word about it. Nor did they talk ever about what they left behind. Oh, we had such a beautiful house. You know, when they meet people, they would never ever ever say to them, you know, we lived on the main and our house on stairs, where I actually visited the house when I got an honorary degree in my hometown Arad. And if I, if I'd owned that house, I would have boasted about it because it was made of marble from Italy and all kinds of things. They never ever mentioned the Holocaust, never mentioned everything they left behind. They were strictly forward looking and they were not unique in this because actually a lot of even Holocaust survivors went through concentration camps, were very dynamic people. Actually after the war, very dynamic. Some of them became car dealers in California and things like that. And others went to Israel and created a state of Course. But my good luck were schools, my elementary school in Palermo, because all the rich kids sent their children to Tuscany. All the rich families sent their children to Tuscany so they would not speak Sicilian, they would not be contaminated by speaking the local Sicilian. But my parents were enthusiastic about Sicily. And so I went to the local school where I did not learn Italian, but I learned Sicilian and Latin. And then I go to boarding school where my teachers are refugee professors from German universities and alongside the Thames river with a rabbi running it, a six foot rabbi who believes in physical athletics. You know, it was a, it was a, you know, it was a really sort of dynamic, athletic guy and he believed, really believed in men's sauna, corpora, sauna, you know that. And we did all the sports and very seriously and the cadet corps, which was wonderful because who was teaching? The teachers were sergeants. And all of the sergeants had been through World War II because we're now in a. In the early 1950s. And they're also actually, in our case, it was the Oxfordshire Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. They had all been in the 8th army, so they went from North Africa and Italy and so on. So when they were teaching us how to use weapons, they had real knowledge. And also Britain still had an empire and everybody in that school were looking forward, you know, to having a career in imperial policing and so on along the way that you would do your years in, in uniform and then you would do whatever you wanted to do. And that applied even to Jewish kids or the sons of dentists who wanted to be dentists, they didn't want to be dentists without doing, not just a national service, but you know, four or five years, that kind of stuff. So these were all things that I had nothing I can claim no credit for at all. It was accidental. It was my parents, my parents who brought me to Sicily. And therefore I learned Sicilian, therefore I learned many, many things, including the art of violence, controlled violence. From we, even as very young children in Sicily, you could never escalate fights because if you won the fight over the other 8 year old, the 10 year old would come, the brother and then another brother, and then the parents would come out, then guns would come out. So you learned actually the use, the coherent use of force and is very typical of the culture, which is the Mafia culture, really, is that you don't waste force. And if you go around punching people for no reason, this is really terrible and poor purposes, force, all these other stuff were all given to me without any credit on my own, any merit of my own it was what you might call an extraordinarily fortunate childhood for somebody whose final destination was not to paint or make films or build houses, but to do what I have done, which is to study war and all these other things. And I was given all this right at the start.
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A
Why? Why should people study war?
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B
Well, the reason I studied war is because coming from a family that came From World War II, family, let's call it that. Arriving in Sicily, where the controlled use of violence was the essence of society, the Italian state pretended to rule Sicily. As a matter of fact, they still pretend to rule Sicily today. Sicily was actually ruled by the Mafia. And the Mafia is not the Mafia of the films and so on. The heads of the Mafia were notaries, lawyers, notaries, dentists, surgeons and people like that. And so, yes, so it was something. And then I was very determined to take part in any war I could take part in because I did not want to miss the experience of war. I read Churchill's book, the River War, which he wrote. You know, he was very poorly educated. He never really studied the university or anything of the sort. But he was a young subaltern, a young officer in the war against the Mahdi in Sudan.
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A
Yeah, he wrote the biography, right, where he brags about one guy and.
- [17:20]
B
No, he was a cavalry officer and he writes the River War, which was a book about his experiences. And he took part in the charge of the Battle of Onderman, which is really the most, the last charge, just about, of cavalry with the sword drawn and so on. And he published his book in London and do remember, very soon after it, very quickly, very, very quickly published his book. And he would publish a book which was immediately reviewed by people. The first people reviewed there were the people who had taken part in the Sudan War, the war against the Mahdi Anglo Egyptian Sudan. The people who read the book, reviewed the book, were all people who had taken, not reviewed it. But he didn't lie. In other words, he had to tell the truth, because the book that appeared was read immediately by the other officers. And he told the truth in that book. And he, in that book already revealed an understanding of the basic dynamics of war which. Enabled him to be a gigantic pioneer. For example, in war, he was the tank. The first tank was the product not of the British army, but of the Royal Navy, because Churchill understood that to advance against machine gun fire, you should carry a plate of steel. And it's not convenient to carry it in your hands. It's sort of heavy. And so you need to have a vehicle and he's the one who understood that. That the machine gun, you cannot outpace the rate of fire of machine gun, which is what the French army and also British army really believe for two years that you have to actually stomp those bullets with a piece of plate, armor plate, and then you have to move it. And so an agricultural tractor had been built by an American company called Halt with tracked vehicles and all that concern. He understood that when radar came along, he understood that radar should be used to have a defense perimeter. The Germans never understood that the Germans used the radars for individual dual engagements. He understood the most important thing is to have a perimeter so that you know where they're coming so you can make a rational use of your own fighters and send them north when it's north or south, and north enough to spread them around or something. And then when a nuclear weapon, and this is important nuclear weapon comes along. Because some refugee mathematicians contradict the prevailing opinion that fission bombs are impossible, which was uniformly held by the leader of the profession in the United States, Enrico Fermi, who believed the bomb was impossible. Joliette Curie in France, son of Marie Curie there, believed it was impossible. And Eisenberg in Germany believed it was impossible. Why all three of them thought it would take 300kg of 235, you know, and they already knew then mathematically, that it would take more energy to separate that much from regular uranium, which is the same except the atomic weight is 238 instead of 235, that it was impossible. The dissenting people were a bunch of refugee scientists. Three Hungarians who were in the United States, Teller, Wigner and Srirachi, all products of the same school, school room, the silk class in Budapest. And two went to German, Jews went to England. And the legend is that these three guys went to Einstein. Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt and hey presto, Manhattan Project answer. The letter was put in a safe. The actual way it started was in England, because Churchill was the chairman of the radar committee, so to speak. And every nuclear physicist, sorry, every physicist had access to him, every professor. And the two guys who did the same calculations as Wigner did, and Teller and Schiller, they went reached Professor Oldfield, who was an Australian at Birmingham University. He went to Churchill. Churchill is the one who actually initiated. So the same guy who never finished school, never went to secondary school is the charge at on the man with the sword in his hand is the guy who made the tank and then made radar and then made nuclear weapons. And why? Because he understood something he really had this sense for, for the realities of these things. And so it's as I say, I got there myself at a fairly young age because I was. You mean the interest, the deep interest in war. And also always actually a technology interest. My last book is all about technology, but always an interest in technology of war. Now, Churchill did it all by innate talent of some mysterious kind. Okay? It was not well educated. I, on the hand, I didn't have to do that. I was well educated. I had wonderful schools. And when I had to leave boarding school because I turned 16 and I discovered girls and so I abandoned boarding school, went to London by myself, my parents disapproved. They said either go back to Milano, Italy or stay in boarding school. A 15 year old kid can't run around London kind of thing. Well, I rebelled and I earned my own living. And when I went to the local public school, state school, not public school, it was a grammar school. They no longer exist in England. They've been abolished in the name of equality, in the name of diversity. You call it equity. Grammar school meant that you were doing advanced level exams such as you start, you have two years, two years, let's say. And during those two years you get A levels, 16 to 18. My school there were six, seven boys in a class. Our history teacher was LCB seaman who wrote a book From Vienna to Versailles that was used in every university to teach starting students at university. It was Vienna to Versailles, 1820-1920, more or less. He was a teacher for me and four other boys or five other boys, et cetera, et cetera. So again, blind luck to be in a school not in Milano but in Palermo, where the teacher is undisciplined. Teacher gets away with teaching the language. He's not. Instead of not teaching Italian, teaching Latin, then blind like to land in the boarding school in England where you have these refugee professors from Germany who were great men basically, great men teaching kids. Several of them deserve a biography actually. And so all good luck and everything else and. And then he went on. Because I never actually started a career of any sort. I was an oil consultant in, in London. Very well paid actually, because I got the job. I was flying to Paris, I had a girlfriend in Paris. So I used to fly from London to Paris and the only way I could afford it was the overnight mail flight. The flight. You paid £10. £10 for the flight, okay, which was money, but not huge amount. And one day, instead of other scruffy people like myself next to me there was a guy wearing A three piece suit. He was running this very expensive oil consulting. And the flight was long, two hours or something because the planes were not that fast. And he hired me, he hired me right on the flight. Come to London, come to see me, you're going to work for me. And so what was the work? Middle east political advice for oil companies like Shell British Petroleum and others. And so what was the problem? Turmoil and coups. And so I, you know, I, I started, I went to Beirut and I interviewed the people who were being overthrown from Syria. You know, the chief of intelligence wondering, going to the cafe with everybody else. And I read my first coup book on that basis. And I wrote it by interviewing these people on how they made coups. My book was called Coup d' Etat, A Practical Handbook, a kind of provocative title. The current edition is Harvard University Press. It was published by Penguin originally. And so I asked these people how you make the coup. And all of them had failed at some point because that's where they exiled. And therefore they had learned a lot.
- [26:53]
A
If only I did this, if only I did that.
- [26:56]
B
And that's how I. And so my book is a practical handbook on coup d'. Etat. And it starts by the phrase overthrowing governments is not easy. First we have to do this, then we have to do that. In other words, it's written from the perspective of somebody who's planning a coup, not the description of how this coup was planned, that planned. How do we plan a coup? That's how I wrote the book. That's what's called the Handbook. And then, and the publisher of that book was my editor. The book was born because I met a man called Oliver Caldecott in a pub and he was an editor, Penguin Books. And he says, well, what about writing a book? I said, what do you mean, a book? I had no intention or idea or conce conception of writing a book. But he more or less said, well, you have to write a book. So I was thinking of, yeah, I could write the handbook, could it? Great. Gave me a contract and I. He gave me the money, I spent the money. So now I was obliged to write the book. And I had very little time. And I had the letter, the typewriter letter at 22, a mechanical typewriter, tick, tick, tick. And I wrote the book very fast. And after work, because I had this oil consulting job which was a fantastic piece of luck, I mean, I'm flying to Paris, the guy hires me, pay me like, I don't know, seven times the going rate or something like that. And now About I started writing and then the book captured me. I started writing as a lark really. But then by starting that particular way, overthrowing governments is not easy. The first thing, I got carried away with it and that's how I wrote the book. Now Penguin itself, the editor, Oliver Caldicott, was also an extraordinary fellow. He was very enthusiastic and he successfully sold it to something like 15 different foreign languages right away, including Germany and France. And so of course the German publisher invited me, Rovald to Germany and all kinds of things. And then in France. And so I went, I was in Paris when the book was published in 1968, there was a revolution in Paris and I was so enthusiastic about Paris and particular lady I met that I, I stayed in France and you know, I, I, I basically left London, lived really in Paris, except in between There was the 67 War, June 67 War. So there was a buildup before that war. It wasn't a Southern war like 1973. That was out of the blue. There was a buildup. So I went to Israel, I went to the upper Galilee. I was put in a local defense. I claimed my British credentials with these old weapons I'd used. And the local defense used those old weapons. The Israeli regular army had the Belgian FN rifle, which was a new type of 7.62 millimeter rifle. But there they had Lee Enfields, all British, and the lie Enfield rifles, the very one that I've been trained on from age 13. And they had brain guns, the light machine gun with the recurve magazine, which was our machine gun. And so the weapons were totally familiar to me. So I, I greatly enjoyed that war, I have to say, because it ended rather gloriously, you know, went up to Golan Heights and so on. I was not in the first echelon, the second, third or the fourth. I was with the tag along looters or whatever you call it. The first echelon suffered casualties. It was a heroic fight. I saw it all because the glad heights are so steep that standing at the bottom you see everything. But I certainly was not fighting heroically. But that was the war, you know that. So I left my job in London to go there. They didn't fire me or anything. The war didn't last long. And so that was a first time that I was in combat. And I discovered that a lot of things that I had thought about combat were wrong. Such as, for example, that you have to be brave. The answer is you don't have to be brave. You don't, you really don't. Because you know, well first, you know, mathematically certainly that no, you will never be wounded, right. So you didn't take that into account. I don't know the whole, there's no need to overcome fear because there isn't any fear on it. And the dangers in the battlefield are not avoidable anyway, you know, because I was never in a cavalry charge like church. It was that get on a horse and charge against the enemy who was shooting at you? I was just, you know, I, I didn't go up to Golan Heights. I wasn't first echelon, I was this rear guard. So the only thing I had to do was to repel attacks. There were a couple of Syrian attacks, nothing very elaborate, a few tanks with some infantry men working alongside them. Very old fashioned, minimal. So you shoot at them and then, you know, and I, I didn't see anybody being afraid. I wasn't afraid. So that was my first introduction to it. And then I actually I had the six day war was. Everything was wonderful about it except it ended very quickly. You know, just when you were really enjoying was as. And the 73 war was better. I was a volunteer for that one as well. I didn't go there before as I did the 67. There was a crisis buildup that I got there before this one. I arrived on the second day, even the third day possibly, but I arrived in between in the 74 from the first shock of the Egyptian attack to the counterattack. And so I was milling around with somebody, somebody former armor general who had been actually attached in Washington or became army general, organized a whole new armored division by pairing odds and ends of people with captured Soviet armored cars, eight wheelers, troop carriers and tanks. And he created the vision out of nothing, the equivalent of a division. It was all missing pieces and so on, but. And we crossed the Suez Canal, so I got across the Swiss canal and ranging in the rear battlefield and so on. So as I say, I don't think I was ever in serious combat, not at all. But I was simply moving around. I was present in the battlefield where things could have happened. But I've never actually experienced neither then or later when I was a contractor in Latin America and so on. I never actually experienced the situation where oh, I must be brave, you know. In other words, I was never like in the first World War. I never experienced that. I was sitting being in a trench in the first World War and people blow the whistle and you're supposed to abandoned protection of the earth in front of you, to jump up, face enemy fire Machine guns, trade bullets and so on. I never experienced that. I was in combat in many different places. I was actually in the British Army. They deployed us at one point to Borneo, no less. But I never actually experienced. I was never in a situation where in order to be a soldier, to be there, you had to expose yourself to murderous, lethal, intense fire. You know, that kind of stuff. You just never experienced it. I have no idea how it would react. In Borneo, we were very few and the enemy was even fewer. There was a jungle and so on, and the British army at its best, because the British army was at the time, as I learned much later, was operating a whole jungle school in Johor, Malaya, where even American officers went later on when the Vietnam War starts. So only the British army had the jungle school. When we ended up in North Bordeaux, there was not. I asked the lieutenant, the lieutenant colonel in charge of the battalion. I said, where the jungle specialist who tells us what to eat and what to wear and how to do this? Oh, he said, naturally, they're all in Germany in the British army of the Rhine, naturally, that's where they. I don't have a single one. The whole command doesn't have a single one. And I said, are you bringing them back? And he says, well, the warhorse, that's how they call the War Office, the Ministry of War, in effect, the warhouse. Keep promising. And so we have to improvise everything. So the British army always goes to war completely unprepared, but in the end it wins because it doesn't break apart in the end. And we were sent there with woolen uniforms suitable for Germany. Where the British army was focused on Germany, it was the British army of the Rhine, the Cold War, defending Russia against Russia. So we had woolen uniforms that you couldn't wear. So we had to basically strip, go around with underwear. You couldn't. In the jungle, you would just die. Our rations were heavily on corned beef, and as I'm sure you know, in tropical conditions, if you eat corned beef for a month, you will never recover from the gastric complications that this causes in tropical conditions and so on, so forth. So our rations were wrong and our weapons were completely wrong because in the. The Borneo jungle is very thick, very dense, and our rifles were very long. Our rifles was called the slme, the short Lee Enfield. And they called it short because it was so damn long, you know, and you couldn't swing it around in junk. So in other words, real war, studying war, being in real war, experiencing real war. And I would say normal War, not abnormal war, like the first war of the trenches, was a combination of multiple. The arrival of the machine gun that stops the infantry charge that sweeps the cavalry. I was not in, I never experienced that kind of war where you are standing in a trench and they're going to tell you to go over the top of the trench and attack, knowing that it's a flat battlefield with a machine gun, maybe a British machine gun somewhere, sending the bullets that will kill you because the place is saturated. I never experienced any of that.
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A
So let's. So many places we could go. You mentioned your interest in sort of the. The interaction between technological change and warfare. Maybe if you want to pick a few examples from history and how they sort of illustrate the dynamics where. How technology ends up changing the way war happens.
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B
So small arms, as you know, arrive as arquebuses, very low rate of fire, and then they get better rate of fire. And then right through, as Europe evolves and modernizes, you have regimental soldiers, soldiers are regimented, they advance in files and lines, and they have to advance against artillery, they have to advance against muskets and so on, so forth. And then a whole culture of uniforms, of martial music, you know, band music, a whole culture of bravery against fire is what enables war to continue once firearms arrive.
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A
Okay, because if not, who would do this?
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B
What a criticism, right? In Japan, when the firearms arrived in Japan and they were arrived and very quickly copied very well and used very well, the response of the society was to stop war and to have the shogunate that suppressed all war. The samurai culture continued, but it was devoid of actual consummation, so to speak, because the shogun stopped all war. Why? Because Japanese social structure could not survive the firearms in Europe, they didn't stop war. And indeed social structure continued to be smashed by firearms. Finally, we reached the First World War. We reached actually the invention of Hiram Maxim, the very important American Hiram Maxim. And suddenly, by being able to fire 550 rounds per minute of belts of 50 rounds and so on, suddenly the entire culture of Europe, or war culture of infantrymen drilled and disciplined to advance against fire, that is, against the peppering of muskets, that becomes irrelevant. And of course, they tried. At the beginning of First World War, their massacres take place. The Battle of the Marne, 10,000 dead here, 20,000 dead there. To achieve no advance, advance of 10 yards. And so technology intervenes in war, incrementally and invisibly changing nothing. Then suddenly technology intervenes and changes everything. It ended the possibility of the cavalry charge. And cavalry gets Swept off the battlefield. The beginning of the First World War there was cavalry. Everywhere goes away. The infantry itself can't do it. And finally there is technology. The tank, if the machine gun fired small arms ammunition and a piece of steel stops it. And now you find a way of bringing the steel forward because somebody else, unrelatedly before the war had invented agricultural tractor with tracks and you know, an engine to be able to pull plows in thick terrain. So technology arrives abruptly to take you out of a bind. In effect, the war reaches a non is a. The First World War would have been a complete stalemate were it not for the tank. The tank broke the stalemate. A single invention. And so technology intervenes abruptly when it does it. The ability to change everything, to make the strong weak and the weak strong.
- [42:33]
A
Do you have favorite. What books come to mind that illustrate the interaction between technology and warfare?
- [42:43]
B
I mean, none of these books are aimed to that. For example, the poet Robert Graves wrote his memoirs about Goodbye to all that where he gives a detailed description of fighting in the First World War. And I learned enormously. The poet Robert Graves had the poetical education from the youngest age. He was then drafted into the. He was conscripted for the First World War and he all his friends like Siegfried Sassoon the role anti war people. But quite a few of them were heroic fighters. Graves who came in as I think a first, a second lieutenant because it was upper class. And he ended the war while having no particular ambition. He ended the war as de facto brigade commander. And he writes about the First World War and Goodbye to all that in great detail with the perspicacity of a literary man, of a poet, great poet, I think. And I learned a lot from that book about the essence of a lot of war. He writes in detail. He writes about tactical things and how command works and so on. There are two. Two books that are dominatingly important for my understanding of war. One is the Iliad and I have like 10 different edition because people asked me to review it, I did. And the other is also in this room and it is the British Official history of the Strategic Bombing offensive. And there, you see, there are some other of these official histories. The British Strategic History of the Bombing offensive is worth all the others put together. And in fact it's worth the whole shelf. It's worth three quarters of this room full of books about war. Because in the official history of the British bombing, what you get is the fact that war is action and reaction. The British bombers were going through and then the Germans would find A new tactic and they would be able to circumvent it and so on. And at the very beginning of the book, well, not the beginning, but the important part is when the Royal Air Force finally finds a way to actually fly to Germany and not to get shot down totally and to be able to find the targets. Because originally they didn't even think about how to find targets to locate even a city they would miss once they learned how to do it. Finally, the Royal Air Force was able to actually generate as many as a thousand bombers. It wasn't really a thousand, like 800, 900 bombers to actually fly to a German city and destroy a German city, or at least the core of it, if the German city was built of wood. So the traditional cities were built of wood. And through incendiaries, they learned how to get there. They learned how to produce aircraft rationally, as the Germans really never did, by focusing on one model and resisting the temptation to interrupt to go to a slightly better model to maintain rhythm of production. They learned how to train people to fly bombers. And each bomb took 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 crewmen. And so they come around to Churchill and say, look, we can destroy a German city every night that we bomb. We can bomb once every three or four days. If the British industry produces a thousand bombers a month, we will be able to be able to bomb that. And when we bomb all the German cities, Germany surrenders. So basically stand down the Royal Navy, forget about the army, which is doing nothing except in North Africa and who cares about North Africa? Give us all the resources and we can win the war by bombing. And Churchill replies, immoral. Everything is moving at the same time. You're successful in bombing Germany. That's why what the Germans are going to do, they're going to pull more resources into anti aircraft guns, they're going to put more resources into radar. Right now you're winning the radar war. British countermeasures are defeating German radar. But if you defeat German radar and you're able to destroy German cities, the Germans will switch efforts and everything moves at the same time, back and forth. So there's a whole basic dynamics of what becomes the logic of war action, reaction, the paradoxical outcomes. The very successful missile. You have three missiles, anti aircraft missiles. One is super successful. The enemy focuses countermeasuring the super successful so that the less successful missile can still shoot down airplanes, but not the best missile, because that's countermeasured. All of this comes in this book on the strategic bombing offensive against Germany. And also there Is there also, you know, the whole. In a broad sense it was bombers. And so also that how Germany responds to bombing through dispersal, you know, removing the targets and so on. So that the power of bombing is so great that it changes the world as the world reacts to this power and out outmaneuvers it by evading it and so on. And that brought me reading that book and thoroughly brought periodically I dipped back into Clausewitz, because Clausewitz had it all, really did have it all in his book on war. But you really have to go back to it. You can't even read it through because to discover that. And so. And as soon as I read the British bombing offensive into Germany, I rushed back to my Clausewitz, who was sitting up there looking at me, in order to read Clausewitz on mount of warfare. Clausewitz is very famous and many people read the first few pages or a chapter or two, and then they drop it. Actually, the reason to it it's very hard to do. And it gets really uninteresting very fast. So what they really should do is to ignore all of Clausewitz except for his section of mountain warfare.
- [49:45]
A
Okay, why is that?
- [49:46]
B
Because he says to you, well, in mountain warfare, if you can really put your troops on a peak, on a mountain peak, they will tactically be able to repel any attack. And they're so terribly strong. But that is only true tactically. On that mountain peak, nobody can dislodge them. But the enemy is not making war. To capture mountain peak is to capture your country. So if you put troops on the mountain peak, they dominate tactically because nobody can dislodge them. But if the army happens to not go past the peak and goes two valleys down, they are unable to do anything about it because they can't get off the mountain peak and quickly go and do a flank attack. So tactically strong, operationally weakness, okay? And operation is how you win the battle. Now, let's assume that your operation is strong and you have. You concentrate your forces and you achieve surprise. You're very dynamic and all that kind of stuff. You still are not able to overcome what you meet. Not at the operational level, tanks, artillery, fighting each other, but at the theater level, where geography comes into action. And you can have the experience of the Germans who won every battle in World War II almost and lost the war because they could not transcend operational victory to achieve theater victory, albeit for different reasons. For example, Rommel outmaneuvered the British and all that, but actually you could not conquer Egypt from the start. Starting point, which is Libya. Because you cannot bring supplies from Libya to an army fighting in Egypt because it's 1200km of road and you don't have enough trucks to do it. If you had enough trucks, you wouldn't have petroleum for them. And by the way, they're so exiguous. Then British air power could opportunistically attack those long, long columns or wherever there was less anti aircraft very effectively. So tactical victory is overcome by operational victory and operational victory is overcome by things like theater, strategy, the depth and so on, so forth. And of course in Ukraine war we see a simple fact. Ukrainian forces can be very heroic, but they can't get to Moscow and force an end to the war by putting, you know, the sword, pointing the sword, Putin's neck. No, they can't get to Moscow. Theater strategy. The Russians themselves were undone by their mistake in attacking Ukraine was that their concept of war was much too modern for their circumstances. General Gerasimov, who is still there to my great surprise, I would have fired him the next day, so to speak. Gerasimov is a very modern guy. He believes in really. How do you win war politically? Politically cyber, you know, cyber war, the Internet manipulation of images and so on and so forth. And he gives a long list of things and in the end he mentions he forgot about the infantry, the artillery and armor. And so they did a fantastic ultra modern coup de man. You know, by helicopters arrive and drop a handful of paratroopers who seize the airstrip. Then you fly in the airborne infantry, I mean delivered by illusion transports. And then you match up with some vehicles that have sneaked in the descended from Belarus. They rush into Kiev, you take over the defense ministry and you do a coup de main. It's called military, but it's actually a coup d'. Etat. You do but a coup d' etat on this thing. And now you've taken Kiev and now you have thousands of tanks waiting in a long, long, long lines to go through Kiev in order to generate images of overwhelming strength. This is Gerasimov, how you would win the war psychologically, politically, historically. He forgot about the infantry and all that. And the tanks parade through. When the coup de men failed and the tanks were strang out in the long column, it was very embarrassing that to turn around. There were some weapons that arrived in Ukraine. Some of the most useful were The Norwegians had 5000 LAVs like anti tank weapon. The simplest, lightest thing. It's a plastic tube which has an anti tank rocket in it. You pull out the tube, you aim Roughly, and you put the trigger and it goes off. And these Russian tanks finally were hit. In other words, just the opening of the war tells you all the different ways in which it can go wrong at war. The Russian plan was ultra modern and the head of the General Staff was ultra modern person. He wasn't an old fashioned stupid idiot who believes in infantry, artillery and armor. No, it's all this psychology and shock and trauma and surprise. Okay, very, very clever. So that is one way you can fail in war. But the newest way you fell in war is that you don't understand the levels of war, which are very contradictory. We just had an example. Hamas did a brilliant assault and naturally caught the Israelis by surprise. Israelis are very easily to be caught by surprise. In October 1973, when 20,000 Egyptian troops of the very first echelon, there were 200,000 behind them, arrived at the Suez Canal in the October 1973 surprise war, right, there were four hundred and eleven Israelis. So they are self confident, they're overconfident. And the other thing is this, that the Egyptian army was deployed in front of the Swiss Canal. If you allow the enemy to deploy on your front door, he will always catch you by surprise because all he has to do is to, is to make noises like he attacks and immediately you reinforce. When you reinforce, he doesn't attack. Then waits for a few more weeks and then he makes noise and you reinforce and he doesn't attack. The third time you don't reinforce and that's when he attacks. So. The alternations of war, I mean, the Egyptians did very well at the beginning in taking the Swiss Canal and everything else. By the way, they had 22 positions, the Israelis did, along Swiss Canal. Only one of them was fully manned. With how many soldiers? 30. 30. They never took it. So they had built this very clever fortress. All you needed was 30 men. But then in the course of the years, nothing happens. They didn't have 30. The ones who did have 30, the Egyptians couldn't take. So the dynamic flow of war. You read the official history of bombing in World War II, how the British win. Then the Germans say, oh, they're serious, they're bombing us. So they shift resources and then the Germans win. And it goes back and forth, back and forth. Hamburg. Everybody knows that in August 1943, Hamburg, mostly built of wood, is attacked by, by the Royal Air Force and the US Air Force for the first time. That was the time, the first time when the British Bomber Command could send a thousand bombers and the US Air Force ended Its bit in daylight. The British were flying at night, the Americans, Hamburg burns, burns and the asphalt melts and the place becomes hell. And hamburgers walk out of their city in all directions. And the Nazi party begins a kind of transformation into a social welfare organization quite effectively. And that is when the royal efforts goes to church and we can win this war. We just stand down the useless army navy. We'll bomb Hamburg. Hamburg, Hamburg. And Churchill was smart enough to say no, because your very success of last night condemns you to failure. In fact, after Hamburg there wasn't a triumphal march for German cities, but greater and greater and greater losses and so on. Flying in bomber command in World War II was more dangerous than being an infantryman in the First World War.
- [59:01]
A
The chapters you did about the air war in Europe were the ones that unlocked it for me because you really do see, see every level of war and the interaction between them from the tactical stuff.
- [59:13]
B
Where did you read that? In the logical War and Peace. Yeah, yeah, I did pick that up.
- [59:18]
A
Yeah. And it was this very clean, okay, something works here, it might work here. You get something tactically, right. Maybe that's because of a technological innovation that might unlock some operational thing and then you get to strategic or grand strategic. But the, this sort of incredible fact at the end of this is they had this very linear model, right of okay, if we find the four factories that make the ball bearings and blow them up then all of a sudden you know they're going to go back to donkeys. And and you know you just alluded to it right there, right Is like the, the success of it led to them, you know, adapting from an anti aircraft perspective. They spread out the factories and, and you know you end up changing the psychology of the whole regime. And you go from, you know, I've watched these like really weird like movies made in Nazi Germany in 1942 and they're like walking around on the street and like going to the plays or whatever and then you're in total war mode because the city get bombed. It's much easier to get people to make the sacrifices they have to really.
- [60:28]
B
Long time to get to that point. Then it finally evolved but so the British official history of the strategic bombing offensive Get Germany written by a guy called Noble Frankland, which is up there. That is what got me going. And it contains some fantastic documents in it. One of them is the report of the, of the police, the police minister, the police president of Hamburg of the bombing and which is the first description of the, of the effect of the you know, the meltdown effect is from the fire starts, that attracts, sucks in air. With this tornado with high hurricane speed of the, the flame going up hurricane speed, people get blown off their feet into the molten asphalt of the roads. And so he wrote the description and unknowingly he was, he wrote it like immediately afterwards and infused with this fantastic thing that this firestorm, the first, the first firestorm, his text in English translation is in that book is like a literary masterpiece. So I went back to the German original and the German is a masterpiece of writing. And the guy wrote it quickly as his report on the bombing. And it was not his intention to produce a literary product, but he was describing how the oxygen being pulled, the air being pulled into the flame. So you saw people were swimming, they were picked up and they were flying horizontally into the flames. And so, and others tried to cross the road, the asphalt melted, they got stuck there and burned to death there. Yet others jumped into a canal, but the canal was rather narrow and it was boiling by that time it could boil an egg and boil down. And so tragic descriptions by a Nazi, I mean a policeman. He was probably a normal policeman, police officer. Police officer, inspector, you know, graduate, university graduate, writing a report about what happened in the firestorm, knowing it was a first such thing in human history and unconsciously writing a great masterwork, literary masterwork on its own. And there's a lot of good literature. A war generates a lot of good literature because people are forced to think about things. War makes you think. And, and so I consider the Iliad as the foundation document of Western civilization, whose impact on life and society was only mildly moderated by the advent of, of Christianity and so on. An Iliad is about the essence of war. I, as I say, I've read, I don't know the Iliad 12 times only for the purposes of writing reviews of new translations, which it was duty bound to read the new translation. Some of them are awful. And my most important article ever is called Homer Inc. And it's, I think, available free online, London Review of Books. And it's a description of how the Iliad was written, how it was edited, and why it has the power it has, why all the Western countries are still very interested in it. There are multiple translations. The new one comes out every two or three years and why it has no. In India, where the British set up classics departments in all the different universities like Madras, Mumbai and so on, nobody knows Greek. Nobody's interested. You couldn't sell a copy of the Iliad for nothing. The Arab world absolutely rejects it. The only Iliad available is a very late and very bad translation. And so where is their enthusiasm for the Iliad? Beautiful knowledge of the Iliad and studying it in Japan definitely from an early point when they modernized, you know. But when they decided to go Western, they were sensible enough to understand where it starts from. They didn't try to jump into petroleum engineering without starting with Homer. But the big price is China know Chinese are enthusiastic about it. When I wrote my. This article, Homer Inc. Which is already five years ago, something six years ago, maybe more, there were four different translations of the Iliad in China already. And then since then appeared several more. And they're not produced by some beautiful academy of ancient history or something. They are produced by commercial publishers. How to make money and Chinese line up and buy them. No, it's.
- [65:49]
A
It's really remarkable how Western classics has a, has a foothold.
- [65:53]
B
And you experience that in China yourself, right? It's a foothold and it's a serious one. And my Byzantine book which has been published in different languages, Greek, Turkish, Italian, French and some the most. And Harvard Press itself did a beautiful edition, I have to say, a gorgeous edition with the raven and mosaic covers and all that. But the most beautiful edition is the one published by the Communist Party of China, the so called Academy of Social Sciences, which is actually the research bureau of the Communist Party Central Committee and Politburo in Beijing. It's called the Academy of Social Sciences. Their publication is magnificent and has boards. You know, boards is where you have a highly covered fly called the outer thing, but you remove that instead of seeing brown or gray, it's reproduced in the cardboard. So the most beautiful addition. And I give them great credit because it came out years after my book called the Rise of China versus the Logical Strategy, which is the book that says that China will fail. Let's.
- [67:11]
A
We're going too far.
- [67:12]
B
I want to stay on that.
- [67:13]
A
Let's stay on the alien.
- [67:14]
B
Even though I publish a book saying that the Chinese are wrong, they will fail. They don't understand. They published the Byzantium book and it's magnificent.
- [67:22]
A
Yeah, I know you're. You're one of these foreigners who likes their gifts. That was a joke.
- [67:27]
B
No, no, no. I mean, yeah, yeah. Even before that they did not know I was anything against the system. I mean, you know, I did. I first visited Mao when. China, when Mao was still alive. I was there when he died. I was actually one of the honored guests at the funeral in, in 1976.
- [67:50]
A
I want. Let's we'll get back to China. So the come back to the pitch for reading Homer. What can you learn in there that you can't learn anywhere else?
- [68:00]
B
Okay, so if you read Homer with a translation, one of the many translations that are reasonably close to the truth, and then now and then, and you also buy for 20 bucks the LERB classics with the Greek one side and English on the other, the English tends to be a pretty literal translation. There's translations you can buy in bookshelves, are more fluent, some of them are very bad, should be avoided, written by all kinds of imposters who don't really know Greek and so on. But if you read the Iliad carefully, you realize that the Iliad presents a superman because remember who the hero of the Iliad is? Achilles. And Achilles is somebody who feels sorry for the gods, because the gods are immortal, therefore they can never be brave. Therefore they can never impose their personality onto the universe because they can do any foolery they want. In fact, there's a chapter in Iliad about when the gods start fighting. And it is, you know, boof. It's a comedy booth. I mean, it's ridiculous. They can't die, so what's the point? So first of all, it's a book. It's the only book that gives man his full dignity. Because man, man is not afraid of death. Being guaranteed against death means that you can never be brave. And if you can never be brave, you can never be fully achieved. So you are superior to the gods because you're not immortal. So the Iliad teaches you really what bravery is about and how life would be truly tragic if you were in the position of a Greek God. Because the Greek God cannot die, therefore he cannot be brave, therefore he cannot be fully achieved. And everything he does is foolery and pointless. I mean, Greek God, whenever a Greek God feels like having sex, it can just transform itself into an eagle and pick up a girl or a boy, as the case might be, as Zeus did with Ganymede, and so on. And you can have your way. You can seduce women, you can rape women. If you're that way inclined, you can do anything you want, and therefore none of it means anything. That's what you learn from the Iliad, which is a human being. Don't complain. Assert yourself. Make yourself realize yourself. That's what counts. And so on. That's the ideology of it. And then, of course, it has all these different characters in it. And for me personally, one of my great happy moments is I discovered from the translation of the correspondence The Hittite correspondence the Troy belonged to, vaguely belonged, was under the suzerainty of the Hittite empire. When they found the correspondence of the Hittite empire, they found a series of letters about Troy. When they were translated, they were found in the 1930s, and translated they made available belatedly in the 1950s. That's when the Trojan War went from literature to history. And you have there the figure of Alexander, also known as Paris, you know, the one who provoked it all. And you also have Achilles. That his Hittite translatory name is really bizarre. But the Hittite ruler is writing to Agamemnon and saying, I understand you have a war against Troy. Troy is really a protectorate of mine, but I know they caused the war. But as for this other guy, Ascus, whatever he was called, he raids my towns without any reason at all. This has nothing to do with your war. You're supposed to be besieging Troy and there he's going off raiding. That's Achilles, actually. He steals the. You know, he grabs the daughter of this priest and so on, and then rapes her. And then he falls in love with her. And then when they want to take her away, this is, you know, the daughters of the priest. And so I give her to Agamemnon, which starts the whole machinery of the story, which, because this is. He doesn't write in Iliad how the war began. It's the 10th year of the war, and there's this episode not between Greeks and Trojans, but Achilles as a Greek prince, let's call it that, against the great Agamemnon, who is obliged to give up the girl he captured because he, the daughter of a priest of Apollo, Nefer, was. Was attacking the camp with his arrows. And that's why they were dying of plague. And so he has to return his girl. And therefore he grabs Briseis. Briseis, the girl. And Achilles refuses to fight. He goes to his tent and says, even though I captured her with my spear, I won her with my spear. I'm truly in love with her. I really love her. He took away this woman I really love. And so we have. Suddenly we realized that war was not yet a collective thing. It was inherently. It was voluntary. And that opens the door to something very important. Most wars of history have been fought by volunteers. Volunteers, if not by actual, actual volunteers, there are people who were summoned. Regiments were called to war, and people rushed to war, rushed to war. On October 7th, Israel was caught by surprise. October 8th, they started issuing notices to reservists. And by October 10th a problem built up in Israeli army because they had sent recalled reservists to the units they belonged to, which were reserve formations with all their weapons, their kit and everything else. But whose commanders and son would arrive from active duty, full time jobs, you know, whatever they're. And then the soldiers arrive from their homes and they go to a depot. In the depot they pick up their uniforms, their weapons and everything else, their vehicles and roll out. So they discover within two days so of the recall that many more people had showed up, people that didn't call. People. See, let's say there was, in this battalion there were 400, and of the 400 reservists there were 520 reserves in the book. But they didn't call the others because they were older, because they was marked as having some medical issues at some point. At some point. And so these people who were not called up all went anyway, they showed up anyway. And this is a wonderful thing, you know, you call 100 soldiers and you get 120, isn't it wonderful? Except that if that happens at the company level, two levels up at the, you know, the brigade level, they think they've got 100 soldiers in that company, but it's not, it's 130. So they send trucks for 100 and the other gets stranded. So after a while they started issuing public narcissists. Don't, please don't come, don't come, don't come unless you're really being called. And then in some cases they had to call the military police to weed out people because they're all there with friends and they were covering up for each other. So that is a reservist being called and you call 100 and you get 120. What happened more often in war is they didn't have a system. Let's see, peculiar to the Israeli army is that wars were fought by volunteers. People went to the colorists, they volunteered to fight. The two world wars were great anomalies when giant state bureaucracies compelled a lot of people, including very reluctant people, to go to war. Historically, wars were fought by volunteers who wanted to go to war. And Enia tells you why you want to go to war. You know, heroic achievements, the fun of it, the excitement of it and all the rest of it. So if war was not so much fun, there wouldn't have been so many wars because most wars were fought by volunteers. In the civil War, there were draft riots in New York because people didn't want to fight. But that was because America was very early in conscription. Conscription, forcing people to fight is very new. It's a. In human history. It's a very recent development from which there's been a withdrawal. Now, this brings me to a very important thing that is a tragedy on a continental scale. The energy of Europe, the dynamism of Europe, the whole thing that came out in art and science and everything else, is such that when Europeans got to that historical stage, they spilled out on a whole planet. Small numbers of Europeans conquered Latin America, conquered Africa, conquered much of Asia. Why? Because they were forged by Europe. The intense competition between rival states that competed even more because they shared the common culture. To a large extent, every little state was competing with every other state that generated dynamic energy. Europe was like a veritable nuclear reactor of energy from the collision of all Florence fighting against Venice and Siena against Florence, Milano and then Italy against France. This war was the engine of European growth. That's why the Iliad was the actual constitution of Europe, not the New Testament. It was the Iliad. And Iliad is a constitution of Europe. All these European little states, statelets were competing against other. Each of them. There were perpetual wars. And every war destroyed buildings. After the war, they built twice as much. The warriors went to war and they loved war because they were all 99.9% were volunteers. Until you get really to the, you know, to the first 20, 19th century, really late 19th century, you get there. Volunteers. Men love war, women love warriors. So instead of the population going down, as soon as the war ended, the warriors would come back, women would, would jump on the warriors and vice versa, and make children. So from war to war, Europe's population increased. Europe was a land of children. And every time there was a war, there'd be more children. And then there's more reconstruction. Now somebody had this idea of removing war from Europe.
- [79:48]
A
What a horrible idea.
- [79:50]
B
I'm not saying it was horrible. There were problems with war by 1945. Not only the fact that the Second World War was really horrific, more than any other war, really, but also the advent of the nuclear weapon made it seem a bit pointless, because if you won, you would get rewarded. You know, there was definitely a problem. There was a exhaustion. The exhaustion in 1945 was a simple normal exhaustion that you had after every war for 2,000 years. But then there was the nuclear fact as a kind of intellectual fact somewhere out there. And then there was the fact that the war was particularly horrific. It was long. It was long. 39 to 45, long and horrific. And a lot of this Pointless. There was a lot of really huge destruction and sudden killing and many more people died and so on. So Europe gives up war and you say, oh, I want to fall. There's no war. And what they did was they removed the engine of the car. Because since you remove war from Europe, there are a number of other things happening. First, Europeans stop making children. The most pacifist societies. Spain and Italy makes the least children. There are more veterinarians than pediatricians in northern Italy. There are children actually. And there's no dynamic energy. And there's nothing. All of it is gone. War was a machine. It was the intense competition between all the different European states and statelets by putting them all in a union together where they can't fight each other. And the armies, navies and air forces remain as ritualistic things. They have no real combat capability. The raw air force recently flew to Cyprus and from Cyprus to Yemen and drop bombs. There are air forces in other countries and they have generals and airplanes. They can't do it. If the Italian air force were ordered to bomb Yemen the way the Royal Air Force would, they would have a big advantage because the Italian air bases are much closer to Yemen than the Ukraine. But the order would never be issued. Right now Italy has supposedly a right wing government, or at least center right. And what the Prime Minister Meloni puts on a tweet is a celebration because the big Italian warship, the volcano, very big ship, came back from El Arish carrying some Palestinian children who need medical care. Whereas the the Italian ports are in distress because traffic is interdicted in the Red Sea. Sorry, dissuaded, discouraged and good to go around the cape. Which means that Italy is bypassed. Okay? This affects Italian economy powerfully. The Italian navy is the largest one in the Mediterranean. She does not send it into the Red Sea to defend traffic, to save the Italian economy. Instead she sends a ship to El Arish to pick up some Palestinian kids. So why? Because even a center right government, in fact neo fascist or whatever she is, war is no longer admissible. And in fact they have sent one frigate to the Red Sea, but not as part of the US Anglo American Operation Prosperity Guardian, but separately as a European mission with Germans or whatever. And they are not only they're not attacking the Houthis, of course, but they're not even intercepting Houthi missiles unless they're aimed at themselves to be okay, so they're. So you can divide nations into two categories. Three actually. One is countries for which war is irrelevant. Like nauru for example, 12,000 people in the Pacific with no enemies who can reach them. So war for them does not exist. It would be absurd to bring a war philosophy to Nauru in the Pacific. But for everybody else, I use the very ancient Latin concept that every, only I use, which is capax peli capax, capable of war. Bellum, of course, is war. And genitive is. Genitive is belly capacity. Now this, if you research, if you go and research and try and look for the original quotation of it, you won't find it because I invented kappax belly. It's an ancient Roman concept which happens to have been invented in Chevy Chase, Maryland by myself. But it is a useful concept. Countries capable of war and those who are not. So the British spend a lot of money on the Royal Air Force, but the Royal Air Force is capable of war and it just flew to Cyprus and Yemen and dropped bombs. The other air forces in Europe also cost a lot of money. They're also expensive, but they're not capable of war because either the political level cannot issue such orders because they go against the spirit of the age, as they would put it. And all because, you know, the pilots didn't really sign up to really fight. You know what, I'm supposed to be flying over Yemen. What happens if I get shot down? I'll be taken by tribesmen who will tear me to pieces. You know, there's no enthusiasm. I don't see protesting airmen all over Europe saying how come we are not helping to fight the tuthis as well. I have a fighter bomber and why don't they let me fly on it? No such thing. And in some cases, like Spain, if the Spanish. Spanish have an air force, you know, they do, and they have combat aircraft and they're not cheap. If the Spanish government offered them to bomb, they would not do it. There'd be protests, the pilots would walk off. I didn't do it. I did it for. But not that. And so on. So once you're not Capac's belly, you have lost something that binds your country, makes the country effective as a country and makes military institutions valid. If you are not capable of war, but that doesn't mean logistics, like you don't have enough ammo or something, that's never a problem. Or your equipment isn't that great. That's not a problem.
- [86:26]
A
It's the psychology of the political leadership.
- [86:30]
B
The psychology, the culture, the political thing. And by the way, right into the military. When Italian soldiers were deployed in Afghanistan, it was essential that she's not going to combat. And so the Taliban were paid off. Basically, they paid off the Taliban so they could patrol unmolested. So once you are not Kupak's belly, your engine, you're switched off the engine. And you lack dynamism, you lack capability, you can't do anything else either.
- [87:04]
A
So let's. There's an interesting argument you make in the China book where you look at Germany in 1890 and you say they had it all. They had the chemical companies, they had the universities, they had the economic dynamism. And had they not wanted to taste the forbidden fruit of national greatness as expressed by hard power in the form of battleships and international colonies, then the 20th century probably would have turned out, or the first half at least would have turned out a lot better for, for Germany. And then you sort of.
- [87:44]
B
No, no, I would say that if Germany had not gone to War in 1914, given the fact that it was more advanced in the chemical industry, metallurgical industry, and only had competed with the United States only for the electrical industry, dominated the pharmaceutical industry. Deutsche bank was the largest bank in the world, the most powerful bank in the world in every possible way. Given the fact that German education had advanced so far beyond anybody else. It wasn't just the universities, you understand, it was the high school, the hochschule, the German Hochschule, which just means high school, was a formidable institution. So if they decided not to go to war in 1914, then Europe would have been compromised in other ways because Germany would be absolutely the dominant country. That would not be a problem. When I was born in Einhard, which were German, German was the dominant language even though it was ruled by Romania. All the books were in German. The feuertung, the magazines were in German. My parents library was. She had. My mother read English books. She knew English quite well and she read German, she read Russian and other things and she learned French as well. But the fact is German dominated from the pharmaceutical industry to education, to every dam of the industry, to the university. Also the domination was self reinforcing because the brightest, the best and brightest would go to German universities. The people of the Manhattan Project were all Hungarian Jews and Polish Jews, whatever they were.
- [89:33]
A
Yeah, Oppenheimer, famously, of course.
- [89:34]
B
Yeah. But Oppenheimer was born in America. All these people, most of them were not. They were born all over Europe.
- [89:41]
A
Yeah, but he went to study in Bonn, right?
- [89:43]
B
Of course he went to study in Germany and they had gone to Germany. They, they, the Hungarian bunch were beneficiaries of highly superior secondary education, mathematics teaching in high schools. In Germany, in Europe, Hungary was the world leader in every respect. Like the Russians today, by the way. The Russians, with all the decline of Russia and all the fuck ups and screw ups and all the problems they have, the Russians, even today, the Russian high school teaches mathematicians who are superior in their education. So Germany would have been the dominant power. All they had to do. But it wasn't not to go to war, as you put it. All they had to do was not to challenge the Royal Navy because German commerce worldwide was protected by the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy protected German commerce. As German commerce was becoming more and more and more dominant all over the place. And, you know, from coffee plantations in southern Mexico, Guatemala, to every damn thing you wanted and all the traveling, the world's oceans protected free of charge by the Royal Navy. That's when they decided to challenge the Royal Navy. So in case a comparison comes to mind, you know, the Chinese wanting to challenge the US Navy, which enables them to sell all over the world. Who would do that? Only that kind of insanity.
- [91:05]
A
Yeah, so. So this is kind of what I want to get to the Greek. Bring it back to the Greek tragedy, right? Because you have these two countries, Germany, who's kind of doing everything well, all the trend lines look really great. China in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, it's really firing on all cylinders. You have this incredible sort of like integration with the global economy. But is there something just like about humanity where when you see like power, you know, you have to kind of internalize what you see. You know, how the leading power of the day defines national power and take it on their own. I mean, there's nothing like, I think.
- [91:49]
B
One could go beyond that. One can go into a more logical sequence. So the wonders of free economies, commerce, the wonders of science and industry, it brings, all of it is just really wonderful. But it's all based on different kinds of freedom. And those freedoms are conceded by a state. You have a state that maintains law and order, protects the borders. But it's a state whose politics, whose methods, whose leaders and so on limit their accumulation of power. They allow you freedom to operate sufficiently so that the economy can flourish and academic universities can flourish. Flourish. Okay? And then what happens is that they, they still have the quest for power, they still have the craving for power. But they manifested not by imposing themselves on their own citizens, but they manifested, for example, in colonial competition or something at the turn of the century or something of the sort of. The problem was that the Germans dominated Europe militarily, but they could not expand militarily because. And as Bismarck had explained, because all in life is action and reaction. Bismarck had explained that with Germany, with its wonderful army and everything else had reached the culminating point of success in 1871, when they formed the German Empire. And Bismarck understood that if Germany expanded by another square meter, it would start the process of global coalition against Germany. And to stop it. He was blessed by the fact that von Molke, his chief of imperial staff, fully understood strategy. And therefore, when Bismarck. As soon as Bismarck formed the German Empire in 1871, he was greatly applauded. A week later, people started saying, well, the Italians are unifying Italy. All the Italians are coming under the Italian flag. But we have Germans in Silesia that are Germans. But then we have Germans there. We have Germans in. In Transylvania, as it happens. And mainly we have the Germans in the south of the Austrian Empire. Now the Italians have unified, the French are unified. Why the hell we can't unify? And Bismarck basically said words to the effect that we have reached the maximum culminating point of success in our lifetime, in the lifetime of our children. Germany cannot expand by one inch. Because if we expand by one inch, everybody else will gang up against us. Everybody will gang up against us, he might have said, even the Americans or something. He understood that is a culminating point of success. And that going beyond that doesn't make you more successful, but you descend the curve of success. And as I say, his luck was for Malka, the chief of general staff. So as soon as that it was intellectuals, naturally, professors and so on. We said, we have the most powerful army in Europe. We have unredeemed Germany because we have all these Germans who are not in Germany. Everybody else is unifying the Danes, the Italians, the damn Portuguese. Only we have Germans stranded outside Germany. So we have to use our power to unify Germany like everybody else. I mean, why are we racially inferior that we can't be unified? And these were very strong arguments. And they were not advanced by hotels in pubs. They were advanced by professors, university professors and so on. So Bismarck had his. So the first place they wanted him to expand was of course, south, Austrian and so on. And in the Balkans with the excuse of the Balkans. You know, the Balkans are in turmoil. And he comes up and says that all of the Balkans are now worth the bones of one of my grenadiers. And he had this very clever guy, Fon Malkin, the chief of the general staff, who not only understood tactics and operations, he was the one who understood really how to do operate the railways. He Also understood that tactical victories are worthless. You need operational victories. All these things. It was. He was not a man who wrote books, but he clearly understood all that from his single decisions that he was making like that. So he backed him firmly. The moment that Vomalt had done, Bismarck was weaker. He still held on until the young Kaiser comes. And who. And the young Kaiser says we have to use our power to unify Germany. It's our duty to unify. We got left our fellow citizens stranded. It's like we are sailing in a ship and we're leaving them on this shore, you know. And then the intellectuals weighed in. German tragedy would not have been possible if all the intellectuals had not lined up in supporting the idea of building a fleet to challenge Britain. Britain was assuring the commerce of Germany all over the world. But we never to challenge the Royal Navy. So what did happens when you challenge people who understand power? You know, Churchill was the first was already understand people who went to boarding school. In the same boarding school that I went to the boarding school with the cadet corps where you were not taught love, peace and so on. You were taught you have a rifle, you're going to rule people. And et cetera, et cetera. What happens is that the British reacted. And I wrote in the book, they made up all the quarrels with the French. They made 72 concessions and 72 colonial disputes. They satisfied everybody. Everybody. So that the next thing Germany turns around. They find themselves surrounded by two world empires against them and the Russian world empire. And in the case of China, I think Xi Jinping is particularly inexcusable and shows his intellectual nullity. For all his pretensions that he, you know, knows literature. I trust him that he really is very interested in literature. I'll give you a small proof of it. Goethe wrote three or four or five times more than Shakespeare Goethe did. Therefore, there's no complete Goethe in English. There's no complete Goethe in French. There isn't Chinese. Under Xi Jinping's order, the Shanghai Foreign Languages University had to mobilize all 85 Chinese. German is to bring all of Goethe in translation in 87 volumes, okay? It doesn't exist in English. So I believe he understands literature and he loves literature. Xi Jinping but clearly has no understanding of history because Chinese commerce is carried by the. By the. The US Navy protects Chinese commerce and they. For them to oppose the US Navy is the same level of high, high grade idiocy. Because I repeat, it wasn't the stupid Kaiser. Kaiser wouldn't be able to do anything if the so called fleet professors, the fleet professor professors, arguing that we have to challenge her, and the same rationale, by the way, that is the Royal Navy will allow us to go to a certain point and then they will come in and cut us off abruptly. That's exactly what the Xi Jinping crowd says in China. We have to challenge the US Navy because if we don't, one day they will suddenly shut down everything. So this is not ordinary error caused by I make mistakes and I make them because I'm stupid. At various times I made the mistake yesterday, I foolishly back into. I made a little accident because of some foolish calculations. You need intellectuals for this. To make that level of error that Germany made in challenging the Royal Navy, beginning the whole competition, causing the British to start organizing coalition against them. For that you need intellectuals. And I think I know who the intellectuals are.
- [100:45]
A
So you have this action and reaction which you saw in Germany and you're seeing now in China today, where the rising power gets ahead over their skis and all of a sudden the entire region recognizes the fact and reshapes itself to make sure that that power isn't able to manifest its vision. And so we have that. But we also have these, these moments in history where you get leaders who have this sense of temporal claustrophobia of whatever odds I have today, they're going to be worse tomorrow. And then you have horrible wars start. And I guess when you're thinking about how the US and its allies in the region should try to manage this.
- [101:35]
B
Yeah, but there's also protagonism. I mean, Hitler started the war in September 1939 because his health wasn't great and he was afraid that he might decline before Germany could fight its necessary war. So their war plans were to start in 1942. You know, he missed out three years of production. Xi Jinping undoubtedly has this belief that he must rejuvenate China because China is paradoxically, China is shrinking and getting older by the minute because they don't have babies. But he wants to rejuvenate and you rejuvenate by fighting in Sanskrit. Then intellectuals provide the rationale that we have to attack the US Navy because even though our commerce has gone global by the protection of the US Navy, undoubtedly the Americans will not let us really come out on top. So they will abruptly shut down Chinese commerce unless we have defeated, we are in a position to overcome their navy and all that. For that, you need intellectuals. You need intellectuals to concoct these elaborate explanations of why Germany has to attack the Royal Navy which was providing the security for its global commerce that was essential to German life and its growth and so on. Yeah, I mean, everything you. Whenever you see the Chinese navy's development and you hear what Xi Jinping says when he visited, the last speech I studied in detail was his visit to the Eastern theater command. Where is the commander that has Taiwan and says, most important thing, you have to be ready for war. Most important thing, you have to be ready for war and victory. You have to be ready for war. And I mean real war. You know, you have to be ready for real war and then win a victory. He is exhorting them, exhorting them. Historically, the Chinese never fought. The Chinese were conquered by foreigners. Foreigners were come in and Chinese generals would exchange clever quotations from Xi Jinping. In the meantime, the foreigners would defeat them, defeat their army and then rule China for 300 years. The last lot was the Ching. Before the Ching, there was the Ming interval because Ming was. Had not been educated in Chinese culture, therefore understood war or at least enough to be to have a dynasty. Quite a while before that it was Mongols, before that it was another Manchurian. It was a Yurchen dynasty. And then Chinese have been a people who were conquered and defeated. And the last foreign dynasty was the Japanese. If the Americans had not defeated Japan in 1945, the Japanese very likely would still be in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. And with the Nationalists and the Japanese and the communists finding it out or whatever, it is backed by one or the other. So to make these mistakes, you need intellectuals. Intellectuals mediate. And then you need the guy who's afraid that he will die because his success is an unworthy and only he can achieve this thing. So you have to. That sets up the timing. So let's turn to the Chinese are profoundly unmilitary nation, profoundly unmilitary. They are not really fighters at all. And therefore the 1895, a very big Chinese navy with modern German warships was defeated by a small Japanese navy. Japanese are fighters. The Japanese come from a culture of fighters, but the Chinese not.
- [105:42]
A
Okay, so let's come now then to the topic of. Sorry. So let's come now then to the right way to conceptualize deterrence.
- [105:53]
B
The nine ways to conceptualize deterrence is by realizing that everything about deterrence is taking place in the mind of the enemy. You don't deter by building a missile or by not building a missile, building four missiles or 17 missiles or buying this or buying that. You deter by understanding your enemy and to understand what deters him, for example, right now, the United States periodically attacks the Shia militias, both the fiverr, you know, five Rashi' a of Lebanon and Syria and Iraq. I mean, the 12, 12 Rashi, 12 Shia and the five Rashia of Yemen, the Houthis, to deter. To deter them. But actually they're just executive agents of the Iranians. Not only all their weapons come from Iran, but they're commanded by Iranians. You can't deter them by killing them because the Persians do not consider Arabs to be people whose life or death is very important. You cannot deter Persians by killing Arabs. They consider Arabs expendable. Arabs are not much use for anything. So give the weapon everything them shoot at other people. And they're not Persians. If you want to deter Persians, you have to kill Persians, okay? That simple proposition doesn't get through in the White House because it is. It cuts against the concept that all races are equal, of course, and we will consider Arabs equal. Therefore, the Iranians must consider them equal. The existence of whole Persian culture. The Shahnameh. The Shahnameh is the national book of Iran. The Ayatollahs wanted to abolish, forbid it because it's not Muslim. You know, the guy who wrote it was post Islamic. But his. The Shahnameh is a book about Persia, about us Persians, about our Persian kings and our Persian heroes, not about Islam at all, okay? And so they want. But then as soon as they got into war with Iraq, suddenly they started printing editions of Charlemagne. Pocket editions, big editions, ceremonial editions and so on. The White House hasn't read the Shahnameh. If you read the Shahnameh, you realize that you cannot deter Iranians by killing any number of Arabs. So deterrence starts with that. Deterrence starts in understanding the mind of the enemy. What will deter him. Because you don't do deterrence. You are. Deterrence happens in the mind of the enemy. Therefore, it's conditioned by what the enemy thinks is dangerous and not dangerous. You could not deter a Japanese suicide pilot, okay? Because he was serving the Emperor. He was achieving the maximum possible thing. Imagine I could sink an aircraft carrier, bringing so much joy to the Emperor and I will becoming famous. And there's no way you could deter. You have to deter by starting the mind of the enemy. Now, in the case of the Soviet Union, as an empire that was built on strategy, Russia was and still is today the largest country in the world. Nobody gave it to them. They got it because they won the wars. They won the wars and they won the wars because Russians understand strategy. They understand only two things. Poor Russians. Mathematics, the strategy, the teaching. When the Israelis think that, you know, Jews are very smart and all that. But when the Russian Jews arrived from the fall of the Soviet Union, which they did a lot to bring about as people don't recognize because they rebelled openly in Red Square, nobody else did. There were 18 nationalities. Only the Jews went to Red Square with the Israeli flag, starting the whole process. But when these Israelis were convinced they were so smart, when the Russian Jews arrived, and not all of them came from downtown Moscow, they came from everywhere, from all kinds of remote areas. Suddenly the Israelis realized that they'd never been teaching mathematics in Israel. They had no idea what mathematics was. And these refugees who arrived, who didn't have anything, the first thing they insisted on was to set up after school mat. It's called fismat, Fismat, Fismat classes. And first, only the Russians went there because they were taught by Russian teachers. And then everybody realized that mathematics was way ahead of Israel, way ahead of Europe, way ahead the United States. So you have to understand them. To deter the Soviet Union, what you had to do was to say to them, okay, World War II, remember World War II, we are going to destroy much more than the Germans destroyed much more. The doctrine came out, you know, a massive, massive retaliation. And that was a perfect doctrine for Russia to understand. You now it's much harder to, to deter Iran today because when the Iranians look at Washington, they see they. Until a few months ago, they saw Robert Mali, who was their agent basically. In fact, at least he was high. I don't say he was an agent in the sense of being a paid agent, but he was somebody who was highly sympathetic Iraq and who hated Saudi Arabia and hated Israel. Mali was brought up, is a second generation Zionist hater. His parents hated Zionism so much that they worked for the FLN in Paris. When I first run into them, they were working for the fln, which was in the Algerian FLN and so on. So Mali is. They saw Mali, who's the ally. They saw Sullivan, who is a very nice young man at the time, but he was a national security advisor to today. He was the one. He negotiated with an Oman and made all the concessions under the table to the Iranians along with Burns, who is now the head of CIA and a very, but also a very important advisor really. So he sees Burns and Sullivan in the window. That's America. People that they think are usually manipulated. So because they are in a window, it's much harder for the United States to be deter and certainly you cannot deter by killing Arabs. Not Iran, okay? Their national culture is the Shahnameh, the book of the Shah, okay? That's their poetry. The renaissance for. And the Arabs are the vandals who came in and attacked the Iranian civilization and put nothing in his place. They're nothing, these Arabs.
- [113:36]
A
So how about deterrence in China?
- [113:39]
B
Well, deterrence in China is. First of all, we have to recognize that in spite of everything that we could have expected, nations continue. The abundant autocracy is a very strong institution. Trotsky said that once you had the machine gun, you couldn't have an insurrection. Insurrection. You can't have an insurrection because you set up a Maxim machine gun and you can kill all the crowds. The only one who didn't do it was the Shah, because the American ambassador kept telling him, above all, don't shoot. Don't shoot. Don't shoot at these crowds. If the Imperial guards in Tehran had opened fire and killed the thousand people in front of the palace, we wouldn't have all these problems. But Tarksy did not point out that the prince could lose his nerve. If he loses his nerve. The maxi machine gun with 500 rounds per minute doesn't help you.
- [114:40]
A
Let's wait one second. She's just in the hallway now.
- [114:45]
B
Or.
- [114:48]
A
Okay, sorry. Shaw and. Shaw and the maxim in the Messenger. Sorry, sorry, We.
- [114:55]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [114:57]
A
Where we. You were.
- [114:59]
B
What do you want me to pursue of these different things?
- [115:02]
A
No, on deterring. How to conceptualize deterring China today?
- [115:08]
B
Okay. First you have to accept that it's an autocracy, that in spite of everything that's happened, single men will make a huge difference. Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein's mistake was now other Iranian Iraqi potentates who were living very well under Saddam, did not preserve their way of life by killing him at the last minute when he failed to surrender to the Americans, which is what he had to do. And then they could all keep their mansions and everything. We have to deal with Xincipe and himself. And they obey Xi Jinping. They obey Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping has a way of getting rid of people who disobey. I have no evidence whatsoever for what I'm about to tell you, which is I believe that the defense minister, newly appointed defense minister last year, one of the first things he did, he went to the Shangri La dialogue in Singapore, as I did, and I was sitting in the background. I didn't do much because actually I just made a visit. I was invited individually and I met all the top people there. They paid, did all that. Now I go to the dialogue and A journalist asks him, what about war with America? And he says, it will be a terrible, terrible, terrible disaster. It will be an awful, awful, awful disaster. It will be the catastrophic, catastrophic disaster. He got fired. There was stupid stories about corruption. I believe that the ambassador, Chinese ambassador, Chinese ambassador to Washington, who lived here in Washington as a Washingtonian, goes back to Beijing, he's briefed by Xi Jinping about his plans, and he manifests no enthusiasm, may even have said, don't do it, or something. And he then disappears, literally disappears. The story, despite that he was having an affair, is complete rubbish, not believable rubbish. And it remains that even one newspaperman repeated this accusation without saying so. Because the Chinese ambassador in Washington, everywhere he goes, is, of course, he has his own security follows him. Everywhere he goes, the Chinese spies follow him and the Federal Protective Service follows him. So for him to have an affair, he had to accommodate three people in his bed. They had found a photograph of him being interviewed by a beautiful woman. And that was the story that he was fired because of extramarital affair. Nonsense. He was fired because after living in Washington, he's brought back, and once he's elevated to foreign minister, he's briefed about Xi Jinping's intentions, which is to rejuvenate China by starting a war with Taiwan, for which purpose farmers all over China last year were under ordinance last year to stop cultivating spices, fruits, vegetables and all kinds of things, or even keeping ducks, because they have to grow grain. Because of that, of course, China imported 2022. They imported about 130 million metric tons of grains. That's the Chinese definition of grain. That is rice, of course, grain itself, wheat, not huge quantities. And soybeans. Soybeans they call grain. And 123 million tons were imported in 2022, that being the largest traffic in the world's auction oceans, except for iron ore and petroleum. And the moment he starts his war, to rejuvenate. Now, how you rejuvenate? Well, by seizing Taiwan. And of course, you run into an American warship or two, and then you have a skirmish, but it doesn't escalate because we all have nuclear weapons. And you establish the fact that the Chinese are great fighting nation. They fight the Americans, they fight the Taiwanese and all that kind of stuff. And then we win a victory. And that is. That is how we redeem Chinese history these centuries after centuries when foreigners walked into our country and ruled us and forced us to have a little hair, you know, the. What is called the tail, what is called the chin. Yeah. In Chinese, but in English is the little. Yeah, the little hair behind that. The Manchu made the hunt wear disobedience and so on. We redeem all of that. We redeem the 1979 war with Vietnam. The China attacked Vietnam. Vietnamese killed 30,000 Chinese. The Chinese walked off and gave up and so on. Incidentally, in the Korean War, they. They not only fought bravely, they threw themselves against fire because they were Kuomintang soldiers. And the Kuomintang soldiers, each of them had prejudiced their families. The families were black. Black family because their son was in Kuomintang. If all you got killed in Korea, your family became red. By becoming red, they would have access to land and be able to survive instead of being condemned to death. Because when they allocated land, you know, after the landlord reformed, black families didn't get any, and so on, etc. In other words, he has built a whole castle of things to do something highly illogical. For the Chinese, whose global commerce is the key to their prosperity, to attack, to challenge the US Navy is totally irrational. So in order to rationalize the rational, you have to fantasize that the Americans have a plan that at a certain moment they will intervene and stop all commerce. That's why we need a strong navy that will defeat the Navy. And then you connect it with the rejuvenation of the Chinese people and you bring in this fact that the Chinese were a defeated nation, that foreigners conquered, foreigners came, killed them, raped their women and ruled them. And now we're going to rise up. This is like Benito Mussolini, who is the only Italian who understood that Italy did not, in fact win the First World War, which was taught in the school books, and who put children, you know, schoolboys in uniform, got them little rifles. And all the walls in Italy when I was a child were still written with the slogan, better one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep. He was fighting to make the Italians a great warrior nation. And at the end, he was an honest man intellectually. He was a very honest man intellectually. But at the end he realized, and he said it's not true, that it's hard to rule Italy. It's useless. Meaning that he had wanted to turn Italians into warriors. Xin, Japan is doing the same.
- [122:20]
A
But why is that as an idea so seductive?
- [122:25]
B
Well, for obvious reasons, because before you had nowhere to live. Now you have at least decent apartments. In all over China, there are very few people still live in Hobbles. They exist, but they're few. I've been to all the peripheries of China, remote peripheries, although not, you know, last year, but over the years. And there are plenty of people living in hollows and caves. Caves and so on. Now you have a place to live. Food is not a problem, unless of course, you start a war with Taiwan. And so all the food in the world, so much food that. That the Shanghai people protested when under lockdown because of the food humpers they got from municipality were not good. Well, if they'd given them to Chinese throughout history, until a few years ago, there would have been blessing the municipality crying in their emotion of how much food they were getting. But now they said they were starving, starving because they didn't have things like yogurt, which did not exist in China at all. When I was in China on the Mao, there was. Milk was available on a limited basis only for children. Naturally, there was no yogurt exist as a product. Yogurt was known to the Chinese as something that the barbarians were drinking, you know, but smelly thing, a horrible smelly thing. Who wants that? And people ate rice and wheat and sorghum. And if a family on those days on the mound, they were still families, you know, they were grandfather sons and. And it could be in one small, very small place in a hutong in Beijing. You were in Beijing, you know, the hutongs, there are a few of them being preserved. It was all hungs, okay, Courtyard houses. And a family would have a room facing the courtyard. They might have two rooms or one and a half rooms. And in that family group where there might be grandfather, one chicken a week, that's meat. The rest is just cereals. And everybody must buy up cabbage when it gets distributed in late summer and summer. And you have to dry it on the balconies or dry it wherever you can, because otherwise, if you didn't have cabbage, you would not survive the winter because otherwise there's going to be rice and wheat, that's it. And the vegetables that were available in the summer would no longer be available from all the farms around Beijing that were fertilized with human soil, night soil, as they called it, and causing the whole city to smell like a toilet. All of Beijing smelled like a toilet because of that, because they were carrying night soil cards which were hand carts with nice soil. That was their economy and so on. So now all of this is gone. There's prosperity. So now the question is, okay, what else can we do? Well, you know, can build the fleet. We can challenge him. So now they're not building an Army. The army is under 1 million. The deployment of about 120,000 or so in Tibet to face the Indians is already a big strain for them. Most of the borders are unguarded, but they're building up the Navy. I personally believe that if this clash between the US Navy, which is much reduced, much reduced, and there's all kinds of problems, recruitment problems, all sorts of stuff. You know, it lost an important ship in San Diego that caught fire and the crew was unable to control the fire. The fire was apparently started by lovers quarrel. Homosexual lovers quarrel started the fire and then the crew was unable to control it. And the Admiral of course, was fired, was dismissed because there was not just an accident, but failure. So there are all kinds of problems. The US Naval Sea Systems Command makes it impossible to build the fleet because they elaborate and over elaborate and triple evaluate every damn ship. Naval Sea Systems Command is a cult dedicated to perfectionism in a single ship that costs so much that you can't have a flotilla and such. So we have all kinds of problems, but the Chinese can't fight.
- [127:00]
A
So you've talked a little bit about the edges that autocracies have in your book with being able to have operational surprise and so on.
- [127:10]
B
Yeah, they can surprise, they can launch a surprise attack.
- [127:13]
A
But what do democracies still have going for them?
- [127:16]
B
Well, democracies have historically done very well. And the fact that autocracies don't have a mechanism to correct mistakes. If Xi Jinping wants aircraft carriers, even though our aircraft carriers as a collective are becoming obsolete and China doesn't need them at all because they can dominate the space around China with missiles, if they didn't have the stupid navy there, they would be much more powerful, of course, but only around China. They would not be able to protect Chinese commerce that day when the secret American plot comes about and Chinese container ships get attacked as they're heading for the Panama Canal and other fantasies of that sort, but it could definitely do everything important. So what democracies are doing for themselves is much more initiative at every level and the ability to have true enthusiasm, true dedication. When you do things under orders you not only you don't manifest, you lose the capacity for the actual enthusiastic individual response which doesn't just want to look doing the right thing. The Chinese are constantly striving to appear to be doing the right thing. In a democracy, you actually care to do the right thing, you want to succeed in doing it, and so on, not to appear to be doing the right thing. There are no fierce parades in Israel. The Israeli army doesn't parade going up and down and all that stuff. Only when they're called to war. They come. They come, these reservists who come. Some of them came from mansions in Silicon Valley because they were called. And people came from mansions Silicon Valley who were not cold and who ended up were using their influence to elbow themselves into unity to be able to fight. And so you don't get in orthocracies.
- [129:29]
A
I want to do a rapid fire round. We started the conversation talking about civil servants and bureaucracies. If you had to spend a career working in a particular organization for a lifetime, I would.
- [129:44]
B
So I had a brief dip into the 67 war and a brief deep end in the 73 war. The one thing I would have liked because I after 67 I was working with intelligence, military intelligence, not spying around the world, but military intelligence, classical. I think I wish I had been remained in Israel 67 and being in military intelligence and then being able to avoid the October 73war surprise and as a personal achievement, even though, as it turns out, it was a key to the 73 war because it was an Israeli, a brilliant Israeli counteroffensive. But the Egyptians had achieved their victory before the counteroffensive, a period of victory before they were defeated, and that opened the door to peace. So if I stayed in Israel between 67 and 73, I would have had great, very exciting and important things to do and avoiding the surprise of 73, therefore avoiding the initial Egyptian victory and only have an Israeli victory and then we wouldn't have peace with Egypt, Israel wouldn't have peace with Egypt. So my entire activity would have been highly harmful. And it was the particular officer whom I happen to know who mistakenly believed that Egyptians would not attack in October 73 that allowed them to have that victory, which allowed diplomacy then in Kissinger and so on to reach peace through them having the satisfaction of having won a victory even if it only lasted for a week or so. So yes, so that's what I would like to do. Okay. However harmful, destructive. Yes.
- [131:39]
A
And then, you know, from the perspective of a historian of like if you could just be the fly on a wall for some, you know, piece of history that you would have liked to been able to live through and understand better.
- [131:51]
B
Oh, live for. And understand better. Yeah, well, it's. So that excludes anything like the Sako War. I was involved in the Cold War, as you know, it was I. My profession.
- [132:09]
A
Sorry, sorry, one more time. So the idea we're imagining a world where you can snap your Fingers. And you can be a ghost and you can literally, like, sit there and watch Constantine make decisions or watch.
- [132:24]
B
Oh, no, no. That would be no fun at all. Yeah, I think I was in Borneo, North Borneo, briefly, for the campaign there. British Army, North Borneo. I would have very much liked to have been in Southeast Asia during the period when the Dutch acquired their archipelago, Indonesian archipelago, and the British, they had Sarawak and Brunei, and, you know, they established. I love boats, you see, and that's another thing. I like cows. I love cows. I have a ranch. I still have cows, but I love boats. I spent. I did anti piracy in Indonesian waters on a sustained basis when I was 60 or so, 65. I would have liked to have been in that period when the Dutch and the British were fighting and exploring islands, because I did have the experience of going with a motor sailor hunting pirates and landing in a different island every other day. Some were Hindu, some were pagan, some were Muslim, some were piratical, others. Many of them didn't have an airport, an airfield. No airfield and no dock. So they could only be visited by, like we did with the mother sailor and a dinghy. So I would have liked those colonial wars, Dutch and British fighting it out in that environment because it's so beautiful and the war was so purposeful. It was to lay your hands on these specific islands that produce specific spices that were sold. They were very profitable. And it was a highly rational war. War to make money, fought in a beautiful environment and of course, with no headquarters above you to give you orders because of no communications. So, you know, that would have been it.
- [134:39]
A
Okay, I'm going to give you a contemporary leader, and I want to hear your, you know, play, like, Plutarch's lives, Like, who's the analogy? Analog, you know, who's the analogous person from history, either, like, ancient or modern. That first comes to mind. Trump.
- [134:58]
B
Oh, well, Trump is Cleon. Pericles had the rival in the Greek assembly, Cleon, who was a vulgar guy with a very, very powerful voice. He thundered. Pericles didn't have his volume. And he would always attack Pericles because of things like his mistress and things like that. And Pericles would try to explain to the assembly the politics of the war, the necessity of the war, the strategic context, how we must act and this and that. And Cleon would come with simple fraud. Let's go and kill all of those guys there. And so Trump is. Cleon is the populist with the loud voice, plausible arguments, As opposed to Pericles, who explains the reasons to the assembly and so on also Trump, I mean, sorry, Cleon increased greatly the number of Greeks who served on juries because they got the daily doll. A small amount, a small coin with which, you know, a couple of people could eat for a day and so on. So, yeah, Trump is Cleon. Definitely Cleon.
- [136:18]
A
Netanyahu.
- [136:19]
B
Well, Netanyahu is more in the nature of Netanyahu would be cincinnatus. Very much cincinnatus. Netanyahu was in in the Baines company with Mitt Romney, his pal Mitt Romney. And Romney begged him to stay to wait a couple of years and then you become a millionaire and then you can go back to Israel and plunge into Israeli politics trying to lose. So he Netanyahu actually consulted me, came to this house, said to my dad wants to be prime minister. I said, look, you're a great television celebrity because he had been defending Israel at the UN as the UN guy. So he was on television all the time. Go back to Israel. All the politicians will wait to eat you up and devour you. So you go back, ignore them in Tel Aviv and get a little car and go and visit all the branches of the Likud Party. And the branches are in the back of a gas station. There'll be a few old guys showing up. That's the branch. Patiently go from north in Bethula to a lot in the south and talk to them. And they will all have met the television celebrity, Netanyahu. And then after you visited all the branches in every little place, then wait for the party meeting, the annual meeting. And all those people who have met you, all of them told all the friends that you actually their friend and baby told me this and I said to him that and sons perf. And he won. And instead of being eaten alive by the other established politicians, he was there. So. But he had served by that point in time before going to the United States, going to mit, going to Baines and Company. He has served five years in the army, not three years. The military service at the time was actually two and a half years. He served five years because he signed up for a unit that was an elite unit. Because of that he was in combat even between wars. Every other month he got wounded. Then he goes to MIT to study business and so on. Then he jones b the company. Then he's about to start making big money. Then he leave it to plunge into politics. So he's cincinnatus. He has many other things because remaining in power, people degenerate. Obviously, he is not the neo. The first ventured courageously and cleverly, actually to. Because many other people had tried to do what he did. To go from international celebrity to becoming an important politician is. And they all fell. But he succeeded. Then, just by staying in power, you degenerate, you become, your mind becomes blunter and, and you, you outlive your talent, you know, by staying in power. So, so I, I, I, he is to me a cincinnatus. She. The easiest explanation is Stockholm syndrome. When Xi came to power, Mao had been sidelined. The portrait remained on the Great Wall. But Mao was out. Mao was out. Mao had killed 60 million Chinese with his harebrained schemes and his madness and his cruelty. He had killed all his colleagues in the Party. He had Li Shaoqi, who was president, whom I met when I was a very young person in Romania in 1964. I happened to be in Romania when he came. And I was invited to dinner because I was with the television team interviewing the president of Romania, the boss. And he had Mikolya and Liy Shalci, because Romania was independent as well. And I met Liu Xiaoqi, a long evening dinner. Mao. When Liu Xiaoqi complained about the Great Leap Forward and the murder of all these people, did the massacre and deaths of people who died of hunger because of Mao, he complained. He ended up in prison. The Red Guards put him in prison without insulin, and he died because of insulin there. And so, so I, you know, Mao was a, to me, it was a maniacal character. So Xi Jinping is a total victim of Mao because he was living in Shunai, in a mansion in the heart of Beijing with his father, was supposedly Zhou Enlai's deputy. But in reality he was the party's publisher, published books and journals for the Party. He had published a book about the character, long forgotten at the time, whom had quarreled with Mao. Long forgotten, quarrel. And when he published a biography of this great communist leader who Ma didn't like, Mao started, sent him away. He wasn't shocked, he wasn't killed. He was exiled. He was sent to prison, then to exile. And Xi Jinping gets with his two sisters, two half sisters. He gets tossed out of their beautiful mansion and him and his mother all crowded in one room in some horrible apartment house while the father is in prison. Periodically he's brought back to Beijing to walk through the streets with a placard saying he's a counter revolutionary, da da, da. So people could pummel him and beat him, and the mother had to go along with him these things. And one of his half sisters died of hunger or Committed suicide is not clear. The other half sister, who then bought a mansion in Hong Kong decades later for 50, maybe $150 million, she was set to work making bricks with her bare hands. Mud bricks to be baked for five years. And only survived because the Communist Party leader in Outer Mongolia, who was called the King of Mongolia kind of thing, he was very high handed. And he periodically would send somebody to bring the food. And he is sent to the countryside, as everybody knows, in a house with no windows, dug into a mountainside, in a horrible place in Shanzi, a really horrible treeless hills and ugly village, primitive, dirty, dirty, with very little to eat. And he, who had grown up in a house full of books, because his father was a party publisher, had only one book with him, Goethe. Translation of Goethe, of the Sorrows of Young Werther, which he quickly changed for Faust, which is very appropriate. So he read the Chinese translation of Faust, written, by the way, by Faust, translated by Faustian character, whom I actually met, whose name was. And Guamrua had survived the Cultural Revolution because when the Ray Guards came, he had already written a screed saying that everything in Britain was counter revolutionary. He was terrible, horrible and everything. So they couldn't force him to apologize for anything, because he apologized himself. And also because the Red Guards grabbed his two sons and he enthusiastically joined in accusing them of them being counter revolutionaries. Both of them were killed. And when I met him, because he had shown such loyalty to Mao, he was restored to his elegant mansion. But there was some servant lurking in the back and he had these vases. He was very proud of antiques. So he reads the Faust in the village, where there's only in daylight, there was no electricity to read at night. So he suffered because of Mao terribly, most terribly. And his father for 18 years, it was 18 years before. So he ought to hate. Hate to hate Mao. But it's Stockholm syndrome. He, instead of hating Mao, he adores Mao. And he keeps exhorting Chinese people to. To read this Ma thing about that he wrote in the Caves of Yanan about protracted war and this and that. And he elevates the cult of man. This is Stockholm syndrome. The man is sick, deeply sick. To celebrate the person who not only imprisoned his father, humiliated his father again, repeatedly. And his mother. His mother used to walk alongside the father with a placard. And people would call her names and everything else, push her, shove her, she would fall to the ground. She picked us up, she got up again, otherwise people would have walked over and killed her. So for him to Worship Mao is deeply sick, but it is the so called Stockholm syndrome. You want to propitiate this character. So it's a tragic thing that China is in the hands of somebody who has a kind of historical neurosis. Right.
- [145:41]
A
I'm sorry. Okay, let's do Biden briefly.
- [145:45]
B
Well, so Biden, I've known Biden. You're talking now about somebody I know quite well. If you go online and you put my name and his name, you'll see that he many times invited me to testify. So called before the Senate for instance, committee. I met him much earlier. I was introduced to Biden when I first arrived to Washington. Very early on I went to see the famous speaker of the House. Tip o' Neill was a wonderful man, a big huge Irishman, wonderful guy who told me one of the best jokes ever, which is. No, I, I heard the best joke. Somebody came when you went to see Tip o' Neill to lobby. You had to bring a joke. You did. And there was this lobbyist who comes in and I'm there and he says Norwegian, the Free Norwegian Air Force was flying around and officers, pilot officers who were taking leave, you know, were sent up and they were talking to ladies up in Scotland to get him to buy bonds, you know, war bonds. It was very important to soak up all this money in war bonds. And so the Norwegian pilot with his Norwegian accent was saying he was turning around, flying and suddenly there was this who tried to shoot him down and so on. So the escorting officer said, oh, he means the wolf 190. And the Norwegian said, no, this was a Messerschmitt. So that was a joke. So next thing happens, Biden arrives, he's a Tipanil, is a big old guy. And Biden was just elected. I met him when he was just elected, just before he lost his, his wife and child in a car accident. And he was incredibly young, incredibly friendly and everything else you want. And then we had some exchange, some words. And then much later when he was, I lost touch with him. I had no contact with him really until he becomes chairman of Senate for Analysis Committee. Then he calls me and he says, I remember you. Tip o' Neill introduced us. And so he had me testify various things. And some of this testimony is on C Span. You can see it on C Span, some of the testament. And then he would invite me all the time. So I know him well and I have lost a lot of my short term memory. I think he has lost a lot more than I have now. The one thing he has, he understands Foreign policy. He understands foreign policy really well. The problem is that there are no Bidenites. All the Bidenites are retired. Of that, the people staff him are Obama people who are deeply unsympathetic to Biden's fundamental ideas. And right now, as you know, the White House people, all these Obama staffers there are rowing back against him. They were. I visited Saudi Arabia just six days before his arrival in Jeddah to meet the various princes, including the prince by Mohammed bin Salman. And I asked the foreign minister, the foreign minister received me and we had a long talk. And I said to him, where is the agenda? Where is the agenda of the meeting, who does what and so on. No agenda. The White House staffers, these Obama people, disloyally, to the last minute, were trying to sabotage the visit because they wanted him to punch Mohammed bin Salman and not to greet him. So they held up the agenda, you know, the staff people. So Biden is the Biden you see, functioning in the world is a combination of Biden's own ideas and everything else, but as distorted and deformed by his people. He has this. He has some Arab, American, Palestinian, American actually, whom Biden brought to the White House, who's still there in the NSC with important responsibilities. He had Roger Mali. Mali, who was the fanatical opponent of kingdom of Saudi Arabia and of Israel, who was the Iranian guy. And finally only last, it was only last year, after years and years, because Obama sicked him on to Biden, forced him to have Mali to be his Iran coordinator, and the guy was in continuous touch with the Iranian regime under the table and got caught out, et cetera. So Biden with no Bidenites, a tragedy because whenever it's himself, he's always right. For example, I remember when he was vice president, he told everybody, ignored him, ridiculed them and ignored him for sure, but also ridiculed him early on. Vice president says the Afghan army is not the real army because the Afghan nation doesn't exist. You could have Uzbek regiments and Tajik regiments, whatever, but you can't have an Afghan army. And so you get all these briefings by people like Petraeus and so on. He says it's a puttam job, they're just doing it for the salary. They will never fight because you can't have an army without a nation and there's no nation. He was totally right. He was ignored. The people who sneered him and ignored him, sneered him, made fun of him. And Georgetown dinner parties are now serving in his administration because there's nobody else. The Democrats don't have other people.
- [151:15]
A
Let's close on a few more books. Are there any other titles that come to mind that particularly influenced you or you'd recommend other people, aspiring historians or strategists to read?
- [151:28]
B
Yeah, so the ones I mentioned is the British Official History of the Strategic bombing offensive against Germany. It's the only one that is really. Of all the official histories, I looked at quite a few. There was fantastic piece of work with all the other things on top. That will be a very important book. The. And then, of course, Clausewitz. You can't read Clausewitz. You have to go back to Clausewitz. When single issues arise and you look in Clausewitz, there's everything in Clausewitz. Clause had it all. But since he died and the book was put together after his death, you can't actually read it through. And people try to read it through and give up in frustration. I understand that. But when you have a single subject, go and look. Because he has many different sub subjects about different forms of warfare. And when it is a natural thing that you are focusing on and you see all around, then you'll see how much you get from him. And I got from him the levels of war, tactical air. I got for him the constant dynamic of action and reaction, the flow and the backflow, and how no action in war can happen from the conception to execution, because halfway through you meet the enemy and then he maneuvers against you, maneuver against him. So there's no linearity and so on. So I would say reading Clausewitz. Re reading Clausewitz, whenever specific issues call for deep reflection, I will be that. And then, of course, there is the greatest of all the Roman authors who should be read cover to cover. But beginning with the histories, he wrote the books, he wrote many things. And what survives is the annals and the histories, and that is Tacitus. And Tacitus. The prose of Tacitus is such that every single phrase was carefully composed by him as an epigrammatic, memorable phase. He's the one, for example, they made a solitude and called it peace. Some Scottish chieftains said the Romans arrived to kill everybody. And they call it Pax Roman, something like that. It's epigrammatic, but there's a deep, deep level. He wrote it after having been a civil servant and imperial functionary. And so. And the Annals of Tacitus, which are a history of Rome under Tiberius and so on. And the Histories, which is the year, the terrible year of the four emperors, when Nero was killed. And then they found this Worthy senator in Spain, who, who becomes the emperor. And then Vitellius, who is this Roman profligate, becomes emperor. And then eventually Vespasian is the one who wins because he just defeated the Jews in the Jewish war, comes back as the war winning general and becomes emperor. And he writes that there's the histories of Tacitus. And he says, I am about to enter a narrative of a terrible time, time of civil war, but also foreign wars, a time when faction turned against faction, son against father, and all that kind of stuff. Whole recitation of it. And so I would say it's Tacitus. Once you've done that now you can pick up and read the Peloponnesian War. And if you read these basic books thoroughly and seriously and put them down, if they don't grip you and pick them up again when they can grip you, then these books will get you there 95% otherwise. They really will. They're not, they maintain this, their celebrity. T is notoriously everywhere. But Tacitus, who is less quoted, is fantastic. The histories of Tacitus, such dramatic writing and such powerful things. I mean, one emperor, he describes that he was interrupted by iron. His rise, he did very well in his rise, but it was interrupted by iron. You know, they got his neck, you know, one phrase after another. Very memorable. So that's my authors. Awesome.
- [156:24]
A
Two last ones. Is that okay?
- [156:25]
B
Yeah. Okay.
- [156:28]
A
What are you excited to learn about next?
- [156:31]
B
About what?
- [156:32]
A
Anything. What personally are you excited to learn or study next?
- [156:38]
B
What, what I'm studying now. Well, I'm now actually I'm doing what everybody else is doing. I'm not being original at all because I'm work. I'm trying to understand how it, the next, the current wave of technology will play out, which is the fact of having sort of digital, the digital culture going on. Steroids with artificial intelligence and how this interacts and works. I had a practical thing about. I was talking to a company that offers a new satellite service and they're having trouble because their service is really far superior, but they can't sell it. And I said, look fellows, you produce images, but when a government buys images, it doesn't have to have a single image. When you buy a rifle, the soldier only has one rifle. But now you have proliferating companies offering images, of course, mostly radar, but still many optical of every different kinds of producing many other things. And also with artificial intelligence, you can instantaneously recompose every single photograph of any part of the world taken at any time by directing it to, to collect Selectively something or other. And so that, and I suddenly realized how, how the most elementary form of artificial intelligence, not the forms where you fake a whole personality and all that. No, it was elementary machine learning, simple machine learning, which is assembling together all the cats and all the dogs, really can transform things like the entire satellite business, which is connected with instant coverage, the impossibility of maneuver because there's no surprise, and all the rest of it and so on. So that's what I'm, that's what I'm thinking.
- [158:49]
A
So when you're so in your take, it's, you know, we talked earlier about there are some technological surprises. They wash out pretty fast. And, you know, there's some like, you know, you mentioned in the book that targeted, you know, targeted bombing and the tank, where all of a sudden we're in a new world.
- [159:08]
B
Yeah, right. Artificial intelligence is, could be a big one because of this recomposition factor, the fact that you can really throw data in a hopper and then in a very simple way, line up all the cats and all the dogs, intelligence wise, it's very important. And secondly, the fact that you can add artificial intelligence controllers to a handgun, to a cannon, to a tank, to airplanes. And you can do it. For example, as of now, as of today, there's no reason whatsoever why United Airlines flight from a specific hard spot at an airport to another hard stand at another airport needs pilots. Removing pilots would just remove opportunities for pilot error. And why can it be done? Because in addition to things like inertial navigation that we've always had, you can actually have an artificial intelligence overlay that continuously reevaluates. In other words, you don't just have a series of electronic gizmos functioning in series, but you can also have, in fact, electronic artificial intelligence that taps, checks, tams and questions and says, oh, is the altitude really. The altimeter says it's 800, but are we really at 800? And things like that. So the applications for civil aviation are obvious considering the fact that they want to sell autonomous cars that have to drive around the streets, irregular streets where there are children and bicycles and dogs running across all kinds of stuff. And you want to go from A to B in San Francisco without the driver. Well, if that is true, you can certainly go through the neutral space of air, and air only has objects that your radar can detect. You don't have children darting out of alleys with a bicycle. Then you can see how the potential of existing artificial intelligence and not speculative enhancements. Already we are in first dealing with this technology that we're applying 4% of, like, for example, civil aviation pilots add nothing to artificial intelligence. Because remember, you're starting from a hot spot, you land in the hot spot, and in between, it's only air. And even if air is occupied by birds, by other airplanes, you can definitely avert them, but you can't. If anybody's talking about having cars running around San Francisco for a theory, it must mean that we should have pilots.
- [162:15]
A
You should try to ride in one of them the next time you go. It's a cool experience.
- [162:19]
B
Did you do it?
- [162:20]
A
Yeah.
- [162:21]
B
You sat in the back street in.
- [162:22]
A
Phoenix and San Francisco. You can now. It's like a roller coaster. It was the most exciting thing.
- [162:28]
B
Why. Why is it the roller coaster if it's driving normally at the normal.
- [162:31]
A
It just feels thrilling.
- [162:32]
B
Oh, you mean it's thrilling because. No, the only thing was the. Your awareness that there wasn't a drive. Yeah, yeah.
- [162:38]
A
No, it was this. It was. I felt way more in danger as soon as I got a normal Uber right afterwards.
- [162:46]
B
No, wait a second. Oh, no, that's also not the immediate feeling. The immediate feeling, if the machine works properly, is that nothing much happens. Right? No, no, no. But it's only your awareness to the fact that there isn't a driver.
- [162:59]
A
Well, no, I think it's sitting in.
- [163:00]
B
The car and there's no driver.
- [163:02]
A
Well, but it's. They, they. They tune it to. It's never going to break the law. Right, but your normal driver, they break too hard or they run a red light.
- [163:11]
B
Oh, in other words, the optimization. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, I, I always run too fast and I break hard and I enjoy doing that. I hate smooth rides.
- [163:23]
A
All right, last one for you. Would you mind talking about your relationship to Judaism over these years?
- [163:29]
B
Yeah, well, so I was. I went to. In Palermo. There were no Jews. My father used to teach us. My father had a standard kind of, you know, basic Jewish education. Of course he knew Hebrew well, and so, bit of Talmud and so. And then I went to a Jewish boarding school where they were teaching formerly Hebrew and religion and so on. It was a. A what you would call a modern Orthodox thing. But they were big on. Of course, we had Judaism and Hebrew and all that stuff. Now, I am not the theist personally, but Dalia is. My wife is very much. She loves biblical literature. She has a large concordance of the Bible to connect, you know, where all the characters are and so. And she's also not. She's not a real believer. She just is very interested In Hebrew literature, the biblical Richard, Post biblical. And I'm still fascinated when I read the actual Bible, the real Bible, not the New Testament. From my point of view, it's not the real Bible at all. I'm fascinated by all the intricacies and the stories and so on and the fact that it's all very elemental. I mean, these were people who were fighting wars and, you know, all this other stuff and they were herding animals and there were disputes over water rights and things. Yeah. So I love that fact. And the other thing I love is that in Judaism, the trade made the Christian trade is if you are a good Christian, you'll go to heaven. Now the Jewish trade is if you're a good Jewish, you will have served God who made you already. There is no promise of going to heaven. There is in Judaism. In Christianity there are elaborate descriptions of heaven, but all the different comforts of pleasures. Islam adds fountains and many other things. As you know, their heaven is very, very specific. Don't think about your life now. If you die in jihad, you will go to this heaven. And they describe the heaven in great detail, you know, with all kinds of accoutrements. Jewish heaven is. Isn't a heaven really not mentioned. You have to follow the rules of Judaism because God, you're made by God, therefore you have to be grateful to God. You have to do it and so on. There's no heaven involved. But there is a promise in Judaism, and that's not personal, not to you as an individual. There is a promise that other nations will come and go and you will not. Other nations were right. By the time these texts were written, the Jews were aware of the Egyptian civilization and the Pharaonic civilization. And then of course came the Assyrians, the Babylonians. And then everybody thought they'd be on top. The Persians who were friendly. Then came the. Of course they dealt with the Hellenistic rulers. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah celebrates the revolt against the Hellenistic ruler of Jerusalem, Antiochus Epiphanes IV and so on. And the Jewish province is to given to Jacob when he changes his name to Israel is other nations will come, other nations will go, you will continue. So it is a collective promise because it's selective promise. One of God's commandments in Hebrew is purvu multiplied. I feel that very much. And that's why Abisha had 10 grandchildren. 12, you know, but purvu. So Judaism is actually a religion that makes no individual promises at all, only collective one. And I believe in the fact that historical, given the history to date, the correct attitude of Jews is the attitude that Natal Sharansky had in Russia. Sharansky was brought up as completely knew nothing about judaism whatsoever. And 1967, the other 80 nationalities in the Soviet Union remained quiet. And the Jews went on Red Square and waved a homemade Israeli flag saying, we want to go to Israel. 67 the Russians couldn't believe it. The K initially, anybody who wanted to leave, they gave them immediately a visa because they were sure there was only a small number of crazy troublemakers and all the other Jews love it in the Soviet Union. That was phase one. When they all left him free. Sharansky was late in the game when in the middle, they started firing them so they wouldn't have any money. And that failed because the Jewish gangsters who were abundant in Georgia, but also in other places Jewish gangsters has lots of money and they develop even though culturally and intellectually they didn't know these people. They would go and find them and thrust ruble notes in their pockets. So that's why the families didn't die of hunger, actually, because of that. So in that whole period, Sharansky gets arrested late in the game anyway. When he gets arrested, Sharansky says, listen, you're arresting me, except you're going to put me in the cell and all that, but you have to realize that the Soviet Union will not last. I might die of pneumonia or something, but if not, you are serving a system that is going to die and disappear. He was convinced of that. And I, working for that assessment, became convinced that I will outlive the Soviet Union at a certain specific moment. And in fact, my book. I wrote a book which came under this far, the foolish, misleading title Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union. And that book came out at the time when nobody had any consciousness of the existence of the Kazakhs and the Uzbek and the Tantiks and, you know, the Karupalaks and all these nationalities. And my book's the first one that wrote about them and said that they are instead of becoming so task, they're becoming more and more Cathars. I can tell that from the census, because in the census answers what you speak at home. The percentage that said I speak my language at home rises from census to census. So said it's going to be the end.