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Foreign.
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Welcome back, everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. The US Military says it sharply increased its attacks on Iran this week as both countries extended a cycle of hostilities that has all but shattered a truce intended to pave the way to a long term peace deal. US military officials say they hit about 170 targets in Iran on Tuesday and Wednesday, 15 times the number struck during a previous round of attacks in late June. The goal, they said, is to degrade Iran's ability to threaten ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The attacks have left the region deeply unsettled and seemingly caught in an ongoing cycle of sporadic war. They have raised the prospect of a return to the full scale war that began in late February, a day after President Trump said he believed that the ceasefire he had signed with Iran three weeks ago, quote, over the Iranians threatened on Thursday to expand their attacks to more American military bases in the region. Walter news or FO News?
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Well, news, but folks who've been with us on the podcast, maybe not a huge surprise that we've been saying for a while that neither Trump nor the Iranians really believe in the MOU as some sort of final solution or even roadmap to the solution for both of them. They've decided it's more convenient to try to get at each other through the medium of the MOU and violations rather than trying to fight without it. But the core reality here is that the Iranian bid for control of the Gulf and the region, in spite of the sanctions, in spite of everything else, has reached a point largely through, I think, their ability to, to develop missiles and, and, and build drones where either we stop them or they cement their control. And given those stakes, Trump has not been willing to, fine, you can have it, I don't care. And they're not willing to say, okay, fine, we'll give it up. It wasn't really that important anyway. So it's hard to see what the compromise position here is. They control Bahrain, but they don't control Kuwait. I mean, you know, what's the deal that would satisfy Iranian aspirations for more control and satisfy the American long standing view that nobody should be able to control that space against us. So it looks to me as if both the Iranians and Trump are dealing with this reality sort of in the moment, as Each of them sees their tactical and political picture changing depending on
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what happens in the midterms. I think, you know, like a Democratic wave of victory seems less assured now than maybe some people thought it might earlier in this year if the Republicans managed to hang on. How do you think that would change the picture for Trump in, in Iran?
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Or would it not? I'm not sure how much it would change the picture in that he's pretty good at not paying attention to Congress when he is not interested in what they have to say. So, you know, does he find some mysterious precedent that allows him to divert money from who knows what into the war? And so Congress isn't appropriating and is passing things and he's just ignoring them and vetoing them and then, okay, fine, there's going to be a long litigation until the Supreme Court finally rules. I mean, who knows how, how that works? But I do think he does not want a high price of gas or a global economic crisis before the midterms. After the midterms, he may not care quite as much.
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All right, our second story. President Trump heaped praise on Ukraine's president and war effort Wednesday, speaking in unusually positive terms about Kyiv's deep strikes inside Russia and appearing to grant one of Ukraine's long held requests the ability to produce US Designed Patriot air defense missiles on Ukrainian soil. The interceptors which Trump said the US Will allow Ukraine to manufacture are used to knock Russian missiles and drones out of the sky before they can strike cities, power plants and other civilian infrastructure. The president also said he was willing to send, quote, some Patriot interceptor missiles from the US Stockpile, though the numbers the Pentagon possesses have been dwindling after years of aid to Ukraine and more recently their use during the U. S. Israeli war with Iran. Trump's words on Ukraine were a dramatic departure from his tone during his first year in office when he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ungrateful for US Help and accused him of, quote, gambling with World War iii. Walter News or FO News.
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Trump has in fact changed his view of the situation in Ukraine. He now thinks that Ukraine has a bigger chance of, if not prevailing ultimately in the war, of standing up and forcing Russia to make some concessions in exchange for peace. And Trump is a very energy focused president and he sees energy dominance and energy prices and the flow of energy as very much a kind of a marker for the global balance of power, one of the mediums in which he's trying to really project and build American power. So Ukraine's Ability to knock out 20, 25% of Russia's refining capacity is something that Trump notices. But remember too, he's also, he's probably feeling vindicated because his position early on has been, wait a minute, America is not going to pay for this. You Euro weenies are not going to make me bail you out in Ukraine. Now that he has a mechanism where the Europeans are buying weapons from the United States for Ukraine to use, he says, all you people thought that I was an idiot about Ukraine. All you people thought that I was going to hand it over to Putin. No, look, I took a tough line with the Europeans and guess what? I was right and you idiots were wrong. So that, that creates a kind of a positive psychological atmosphere for Trump as he looks at the whole thing. So I think he sees it as a win. We also should not forget that Trump is extremely competitive. I think this whole, to me ridiculous idea that Trump is in some kind of cahoots with Putin and that his fanboy enthusiasm for Putin sort of like, you know, what was it, Peter II and Frederick the Great or some idiocy that has obsessed so much of the American chattering class, really since what, 20, 15? 16. Trump is out for Trump. Trump is captain of Team America. He wants Team America to win, not because he's trying to spread glorious, glamorous Wilsonian ideals of democracy in the world. You know, none of this kind of, you know, sentimental, let's have some soft music now and Kate Smith's and God Bless America. But it's very hard nosed and competitive and he has been relentlessly taking advantage of Putin's being bogged down in this war to deepen American relations in Central Asia, in the Caucasus. He is, and his whole sort of energy policy is aimed at reducing global prices of energy in a way that hurts Russia more than it hurts any other major petroleum state. This all kind of makes sense. And again, Trump is a realist. And realists, at least in theory, respond to facts. Putin is getting weaker. Zelensky is getting stronger. Trump follows. Now, we should not rule out the possibility that there's going to be some kind of escalation or trick on the Russian side. Putin is giving out no signs that he's saying, oh, well, I guess maybe it just didn't work. I'm going to go home. My bad. Sorry, guys. That's, that's not Putin, that's not Russia. So we could be here a few months from now and the military position might have reversed. The Russians might find a way to block Ukrainian drones or their guidance systems. Who knows? Who knows? And in that case, we could see another shift. But right now, Trump is following the news, following the direction, and he is taking advantage of Putin being bogged down in a war which right now, he simply cannot win.
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All right, final story of the week. According to a hotly debated essay in the Atlantic this week, Americans today are reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read and how people are bombarded with emails, text messages X posts, Reddit threads and Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey richer and more complicated information. Marianne Wolfe, a cognitive neuroscientist at ucla, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn't mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn't illiterate, it's post literate. Things are about to get worse, the article argued, and fast. While the next generation perhaps reads more words than today's adults did when they were kids, they are reading and able to read far fewer books, articles, and other pre social media forms of writing. Walter News or Fonoos?
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I'm not persuaded by the article, although certainly I see and regret a number of the trends that, that she points to. You know, I part of me says, you know, boy, it'd be fun. I'd really love to go back and read a nice article about how terrible the printing press was and how, oh man, in the good old days we had to copy every manuscript by hand and you only had access to maybe 10 books in your whole life. You understood with a kind of D depth, you know, the importance of every word in those books. You engage with literature now with this print, you just skim it once and you're gone forever. You know, very superficial, you know, you have no really value and then they're producing so much crap that nobody could ever read it all. So this is not a plus. And oh, did I mention that we're having wars all over Europe that have been touched off by the consequences of this new technology. I'm not persuaded that change just because it's change must therefore be bad. I would also raise the the point. I think people are writing a lot of really bad books these days. Whenever I read a policy book or, you know, whether it's a, you know, foreign policy, it is so poorly written it makes me want to scream. I'm very interested in these subjects. I but I find the authors are punishing me by writing boring, flat, ridiculous prose that. That no sane person wants to spend more time with than they have to. Give me the tweet. And in terms of novels, one of the worst things that universities have done to our culture is their capture of both poetry and prosecution. And there's, I think there's this kind of vicious circle here, the sort of more academic and esoteric both poetry and prose become, the more the audience for serious fiction and poetry declines, and the more you have to survive. You have to get a teaching job in a university, which means your income is not based on, you know, like Jane Austen making your readers want to buy your books or Sir Walter Scott. It's making your colleagues think that your prose checks all the boxes in the latest, you know, literary apparatchic guidebook. And so the more you write that way, the fewer people read and the more you're trapped in this hermetic circle. So I think the crisis of literacy in our society is real, but it is not simply a crisis of all the plebs out there reading, you know, not reading the magnificent things that we write. I will say that all this crap makes it harder for those of us who write good books, because people do get out of that habit. But our society has really kind of turned its back on intellectual quality in a lot of different ways. And mediocrity, you know, sort of pumping out mediocrity when the president of Harvard is a plagiarist. And nobody thought that was a really big deal until, you know, until sort of. A lot of people work very hard to wake people up to this. The literary culture is so attenuated and so attuned to the mediocre production of theory. And, ah, So I would say, you know, it's. We've all got to get back to Scheherazade, you know, where it's like it's actually your job to be compelling to your reader. You know, if the sultan isn't enthralled by your storytelling, he's going to cut off your head. So it is not up to the Sultan to be more dutiful. I mean, in a perfect world, maybe it is, but in the actual world, it's Scheherazade's job to enchant the sultan. And so I would say write better stuff, then maybe people might start to read it. But fundamentally, the problem, I think, of an intellectual class not saying all of that. Obviously, the new media has downsides, but, Jeremy, it kind of has upsides too. I seem to Remember this old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words, I. E. Actually, the human mind does in fact acquire a lot of information visually in a fast and efficient manner. Faster and efficient than a verbal description. You know, you can. You can talk to me about, you know, the cave where Fafner is hiding, you know, and write me a three page description of the woods and so on and so forth. And you can also just like, show me a picture. And so it is not at all clear that people are processing less information or receiving less information. Different information with sort of, you know, different elements of, you know, relationship to change of logic and causality and so. Absolutely, absolutely. But even as we mourn some of the loss of, well, frankly, middlebrow culture, we should also be thinking a bit about what's gained and also how to increase those gains. Given that you have a lot of people who are more and more getting their information in non written, non printed ways, how do you pack real information into an Instagram? You know, again, I say it's the creators of knowledge and, you know, who have a responsibility to communicate to the public and to educate the public. Somebody once wrote that a genius has to create the taste by which that genius can be known. That is something for people to be thinking about.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, you wrote about the question of American identity this week, particularly about how America is not, as many people like to say, a creedal nation. But that doesn't mean it's a blood and soil nation either. So what is it? Tell us what you mean.
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Yeah, I think everybody has their own America. You know, we're all. We're all Americans in our own way, and it's kind of based on your own experience and your own thinking. So I think there are people who experience America as a creedal nation. And I'm not trying. I'm not here to say, well, you're less American than me is. I actually think one of the characteristics of America is that we can all be Americans in very different ways. So somebody who just got off the plane six years ago and is going through their citizenship ceremony has a very different experience of somebody like me who grew up in a place where there just weren't even many immigrants. But certainly when I think back to, you know, my. My own life, my own experience, and that's what we all really do when we think about questions like this, I don't know that I met a single human being who thought of America as a creedal nation. Maybe until I went to college, certainly until I went to the North. You know, back when I was a kid, you'd go into the football stadium at the University of North Carolina on a Saturday afternoon in the fall, and you'd stand at attention with your hand over your heart while they played Dixie. And then you would stand at attention with your hand over your heart while they played the national anthem. You know, where's the creed in that? Let me ask, what is the creed? As I wrote in the piece, the Civil War really was about the fact that even though the Confederacy rejected any concept of a national creed, Lincoln and the entire north said, no, no, no, you are still American. You disagree with us about these very important foundational truths. What kind of country we we have. You don't believe in human equality. We do sort of actually kind of when you really look into it. But okay, but you're still American and we're going to shoot you and keep shooting you until you admit it or at least stop resisting it. So again, there is a creed in New England, even the creed doesn't restrict the idea of America to people who believe in a set of propositions. But I find in some ways, to me, the most interesting thing about this is that both in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, kind of root idea in both is that there is something called the people, and this people is possessed of political rights. So the Declaration of Independence, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one for, for a people to declare their independence. Okay, well, what is the people is clearly pre existent of any propositional arguments in the Declaration of Independence. And the people is not composed entirely of those who believe in whatever the sort of notions of the Declaration of Independence are. And there were founders who didn't really believe in God and there are founders who really did, who both signed this document. And again, it's we the people of the United States is who establishes the Constitution. And we've talked on, on this podcast about one of the problems with the Europeans is if you tried to write a European constitution, it would be we the peoples of the European Union. So there is an American people. And okay, there are a lot of different kinds of Americans. Certainly when I was growing up, there were black people, there were white people, and they had their issues with each other, but nobody doubted that we're all Americans in the same way that the French are French and the Turks are Turks. So I think I understand why for a lot of people it's important to talk about America as a creedal Nation. And it's partly, I think, during. At various stages when we had heavy immigration, you know, and people felt a little bit alienated from a bunch of, you know, old guys in silk stockings and powdered wigs prancing around in Philadelphia, being able to say, no, I accept these founding ideas of America, and that makes me as American as anybody else. That becomes politically important and psychologically important for people, and it's real. And a lot of people who thought in that way would go out and fight and die for the United States because of their belief in this. So I'm not dishonoring this in any way, shape or form, or saying it's less than, but I'm saying it is in the kaleidoscope of American identity. It's just one of the prisms through which people see the country.
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And final question. To the extent that people are right in their sense or their feeling that the kind of American national identity you're describing is under threat or coming apart or coming unglued in some way, maybe not in an unprecedented way in American history, but to the extent that we kind of do this periodically, what is the thing that's kind of most responsible for that right now? Is it the tech revolution and how people consume information? Is it the economic changes from the tech revolution? Is it immigration? Is it political partisanship? What do you think?
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Well, I mean, we've always been kind of a tumultuous and rowdy lot, and we tend to feel more American when we're being threatened from without in a very obvious way. So a lot of it is just the plain old normal chaos of American life. You know, one of the things in 1914, the Germans really just didn't think the Americans could fight in World War I. And that was one of their calculations is, you know, these people, they're just all over the place. They hate each other, they're divided. Their civil war is only like 40 years in the past. They got all these immigrants. Many of them speak a German. They're not. There's no there there. And people have made that mistake about the United States at other times in our history. So that is part of it, is that our national identity becomes stronger when we're threatened. You know, there are other things going on. We formed a kind of particular national identity. You know, between about 1880 and 1923, there was a huge wave of immigration into the US and at its peak, it obviously dropped off during World War I because you couldn't take boats across the Atlantic. But during that time, the idea of American identity comes under a lot of stress because while we'd obviously had immigrants before, in general, the mix of the quantity of immigrants and the perceived cultural differences between the immigrant population and the, quote, native population, and I quote, native population does have. Does sort of force people to ask a lot more questions about, well, who's an American and am I an American? And is this new garlic eating, foreign looking person down the street, are they American? Right. And so I do think high levels of immigration do in fact, place a lot of stress on the concept of American identity. It was resolved in the early part of the 20th century, really by a couple of methods. One was they basically banned immigration from most of the world for like 50 years. That was part of it. And that had a big impact on American culture and history. They also really pushed the notion of a unified American identity. And the public schools were particularly focused on, you know, inculcating American. And there was a kind of huge negative value attached to being un American. So that the immigrants kids were almost bullied at times into assimilation. But at the same time, again, a very natural thing on the immigrant side, like, why would you move here and not assimilate? It's like, I want to make. I want to live like these rich people. I want to have a house, I want a good job. I guess I need to learn English. I guess I need to learn how people do things here. So there was both a push and a pull toward assimilation. But there was a time when people wondered if that would happen. I believe. I think at one point in Minnesota, There were like 11 daily Norwegian language newspapers. All right, and. And German immigrants. Even after 80 years, a lot of German churches, Lutheran churches, were still doing services in German until World War I, when the hammer really came down. German would be the language of instruction in Lutheran seminaries. So. So immigration and assimilation have always been, I think, a lot more complicated. And they do raise issues. You know, they force us all to think, both immigrants and non immigrants, more about what being an American is. What do you have to do think, say, to be an American, et cetera. And we are definitely in that period now that we're having it also at a time of economic stress. Well, you know, think about the end of World War I and the Depression that soon followed the war. There was a, you know, there were deportations of radicals, you know, left wing radicals from New York. There were socialist mayors elected in American cities and a lot of talk about how un American that was. Ironically, in those days, a lot of the very far left or anarchist immigrants Were Jews today? A lot of those far left immigrants really hate Jews. It's an interesting twist of fate there, but I think there are a lot of structural similarities between where we are today and where we were kind of toward the tail end of the great wave of immigration. Does this mean that we're going to slow immigration? I don't know. It's a political question. I don't know the answer to that.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week.
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Foreign.
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Morgan from Texas writes in to ask what is the most underrated city in America?
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Well, I mean, there are a lot of cities that I think get a sort of unfair treatment. You know, Dallas, for example, is a city that, that even in Texas you find like, oh, Dallas, I don't want to be there there.
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But actually my dad still, still hates it and blames it for Kennedy.
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It's actually, I really like it. And they have an amazing dynamic civic culture. They're, you know, there's so many people, they think, how do we make Dallas better? Dallas needs an X, Dallas needs a Y. Let's get together and do it. It's, it's terrific. But I, you know, in some ways I, I was just in Greenville, South Carolina about a month ago for a conference and I was, you know, in terms of a place that I'd never really thought, you know, was very interesting or had much. It's an old mill town in, in South Carolina. They've actually done a lot there. The, the river is beautiful. There's. They're good restaurants with Furman. They have very good college there. They're 45 minutes away from kind of the, you know, the mountains in, in, in the Carolinas. I mean, it's a, it's a place that I think if, if more people knew about it and knew how nice it was, I think a lot more people would want to live there. I, I'm not going to get a lot of thanks from Greenville residents because I think they're quite, they think there's enough people here already keep them away. But I was actually really amazed at, at what a nice place it is.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Vatanov at Hudson and my co host Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show. Sa.