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Foreign.
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Welcome back, everybody, to what really matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in New York this week. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton center at the University of Florida. It's a somber Thursday afternoon to be recording WALTER on the 24th anniversary of 911 here in New York and also the day after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which we'll discuss momentarily in the big conversation. But first, let's start with the other news from this week. Our first story of the week. NATO warplanes shot down four Russian drones that flew deep into Polish territory overnight. On Wednesday, Polish authorities said that at least 19 drones had entered Polish airspace, some of them flying nearly as far west as Lodz in central Poland, where they were intercepted by Dutch F35s and Polish F16s. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the incursion as a, quote, provocation on a large scale and added that this situation brings us the closest we've been to open conflict since World War II. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the drones were small reconnaissance or decoy drones, not one way attack drones, suggesting their purpose was to probe NATO's air defenses and reaction time. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied any intention of attacking Poland. Walter, is this news or faux news?
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Well, it's news and I don't think it's good news. This is another example of a Russian provocation to which the west fails to respond with sufficient seriousness to change the direction of events. When the NATO spokesman said, or the Polish spokesman says, well, this was testing NATO's defenses, air defenses against a drone attack. Well, yes, but it was also testing the, the, the strength of NATO's cohesion and the strength of its strategic consensus. As I understand it now, the polls are going to convene Article 4 talks. Article 4 is a step below Article 5, which is there's an invasion is concerned. But you know, and that's in turn, if you're thinking like a NATO bureaucrat and a traditional diplomat. Oh, well, we're certainly showing them now. We are escalating to extremely concern. That will certainly show those pesky Rutsky's. It won't show them anything at all. If the west announced a major program of rearmament, if there were large military exercises taking place in the Baltic Sea, there are all kinds of responses that one could make to a provocation of this kind that would say not only we don't like it, but also we don't want you to do this anymore. And if you keep doing stuff like this, you will be unhappy. We're not doing that. We are still going. Oh, Tisk, Tisk. I understand the Europeans are debating the 19th package of NATO sanctions. Well, that will certainly. The EU sanctions. That will certainly show Moscow something. And if that doesn't work, we have the 20th, the 21st, and the 22nd package on are all coming. They better watch out in the Kremlin. I think Putin's sense of contempt for the west continues to grow, and as long as that does, we can expect to see a somewhat more aggressive posture now. You know, another, maybe slightly more optimistic reading of what's happening is that he is feeling the wear and tear of the war on his economy and on his army and his society, and so he's stepping up his provocations in the hope of trying to move the war faster. And that would be a slightly better sign. Nevertheless, our failure to give him the kind of response that would actually make him think twice. Whatever his goals are in launching this simply means that we're telling him, go on, Vlad, you know, take another punch. We're fine.
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All right, our second story. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has assassinated leaders of the Palestinian terror group in Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza. But Qatar, where some of Hamas's top leaders have been living, was long seen as off limits. The wealthy Gulf nation hosts the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle east and has been mediating between Israel and Hamas to end the Gaza war. So it was startling when Israel set those considerations aside and sent warplanes on Tuesday to try to assassinate Hama leadership in the Qatari capital of Doha. Hamas said no senior leaders were killed in the attack. The son of Khalil Al Haya, a leading figure who helped plan the October 7th attack, was killed along with four other people associated with the group and a member of Qatar's internal security forces. Qatari officials have said they hosted Hamas officials at the request of the US Government so as to facilitate channels of communication with the group. Walter, is this attack news or phone news?
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Again, I'm afraid this is a week when we're having real news. This is news Israel. Well, let me first of all say, just make it absolutely clear in my mind, Israel had a perfect moral and legal right to attack the Hamas leadership whenever, wherever it can get them. In my view, it has the right to do so. And people say, well, you know, this is just the international leadership. They had nothing to do with the planning of October 7th, and they weren't even consulted. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe so but they are still acting as the willing accomplices and agents to mass murders, terrorists who are inflicting vast suffering on Palestinian civilians after having done terrible things to Jews. There is no moral case for what they do. And Israel, in my view, if 25 years from now, if drones appear out of a clear blue sky and knock one of these people off at a beach or something like that. But was it successful? Well, in the first instance, no, it was not. They didn't get them all or they didn't get the senior ones. And second, will the consequences of the strike make it easier for Israel to achieve its goals or more difficult? And I think probably the media is overplaying the degree to which Trump was annoyed. I think he was annoyed, but I'm not sure he was as annoyed as he's being portrayed. That is something I think it also reinforces in a lot of the minds of other Arab states that while maybe two years ago they were worried about Iran as a potential threat, Israel is now demonstrating both kind of capabilities and ambitions. That may make some Arab leaders ask themselves whether maybe a little, you know, maybe they need to be trying to balance against Israel a bit in the Middle east rather than balancing with Israel against Iran. It is also, it sort of forces governments like the one in the uae, whether they want to or not, to kind of take an anti Israel position here. It complicates any discussions about how do you move towards some sort of Arab authority to replace Hamas in Gaza. All kinds. It makes a lot of things more difficult that you would have had one sort of one equation if they'd actually gotten eliminated the senior leadership of Hamas. You have another if they paid these prices and didn't take out the leadership of Hamas. But, you know, is this the, you know, the last chapter in the book? Of course it isn't. There's still a lot to.
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What do you make of Israel's kind of regional position now? It seems like there's kind of few parallels anywhere in the world where, you know, a leading power in the region is able to kind of strike at will in its neighbor's capitals to take out senior government and military officials. I mean, what does this say to you, if anything kind of long term about Israel's strategic position in the Middle East?
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Well, remember, Israel has been, has demonstrated military and intelligence dominance in the Middle east repeatedly really, since 1956. The war of Independence was a war for survival. And the Jordanians actually held up pretty well on that one. From 56 on, in any kind of conventional contest, Israel sooner or later demonstrates a kind of an absolute mastery. So that is not in itself new, but I think, you know, what we have seen since then is the failure of any Arab power sphere to cohere. You know, the Nasser's Egypt tried to become a kind of center of pan Arabism. Saddam Hussein's Iraq, in his particularly pathetic way, Gaddafi's Libya, all sort of aspired to, you know, this sort of building some kind of grand nationalistic union among the Arab masses. And Al Qaeda, in its own way, not so much Arab, but Muslim, but really Arab, you know, was trying to do the same kinds of things, and none of it has worked. So. But that has not made Israel secure. This, again, is the. The fundamental lesson of Israeli history is that its power enables survival but doesn't achieve security. And so Israel is constantly facing new challenges, new tests. What is interesting here is that the sort of the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, all in their own way, were trying to build a, you know, trying to sort of bring oil wealth into the service of the creation of a real Arab power center that could kind of, you know, could hold its own, you know, not just against Israelis or even primarily against Israelis, but Iranians could tell the Americans, you know, could. Could limit American influence, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the Israelis by, you know, by daring to strike at the Gulf and also showing they can strike at the Gulf. The message here is that even the Gulf Arabs, with all of their money, are not able to get above the Israelis in terms of these military and intelligence capabilities. It's gotta be a bit sobering.
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All right, final story of the week. Donald Trump has signed an executive order paving the way for the renaming of the Department of Defense as the Department of War. The historical Department of War was founded in 1789. It was the government agency responsible for the US army and most land and air base military forces until its dissolution in 1947, when Harry Truman split the Department into the Department of the Air Force and the Department of the army and placed all the service branches under the control of the national military establishment, which was soon renamed the Department of Defense. Strictly speaking, Trump's Executive order doesn't rename the DoD, but approves the Department of War as an authorized, quote, secondary title, and directs the Secretary of War, I. E. Pete Hegseth, to submit recommendations within 60 days for a permanent name change. As the Executive Order explains, quote, this name sharpens the Department's focus on our own national interests and our adversary's focus on our willingness and availability to Wage war to secure what is ours. Walter, news or phone news?
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Probably more phone news than news here. There's no organizational rethink going on. They're not doing anything to make the extremely sclerotic and useless Pentagon bureaucracy actually more effective at war fighting. They're not, you know, by this name change, they're not doing anything to address any problem, any actual problem that American defense or war making, if you prefer the term, has. Now, you can argue that the attempt that we saw for many years to turn the Department of Defense into a sort of Department of social work and environmental transformation has done a lot of damage, as indeed it has to the fighting culture of the military and sort of added more labors of fat bureaucracy and stupid purposeless infighting to an institution that was already oversupplied with all of the above. And so this, you know, to the extent this has any meaning at all, it's sort of baring your teeth at all of that stuff and saying, no more trans admirals in this fighting force in a, in a slightly louder way that may actually, oddly, have a positive impact on recruiting. There may actually be, may be easier to sign people up, kind of people you want in a military to sign them up for a Department of War rather than a Department of Defense in general. I prefer, I don't love euphemism. I think we should call things what they are. And, you know, Department of War is not a, not a bad thing. Calling it the Department of Defense also sort of allowed people to say, well, you know, global warming, climate change, that's also, that's a national security threat. And so there should be an extremely large, expensive and dysfunctional bureaucracy in the, in the Pentagon fighting in some bizarre way against, you know, defending us against this threat. And I'm fine for cutting out the linguistic space that allows people to make stupid demagogic maneuvers of that kind. Nevertheless, I don't think people are going to look back on this as a terrific age of statesmanship, you know, moment of statesmanship that transformed the American military. But fine, go ahead, do it. It doesn't cost a lot of money.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. So, as all our listeners know by now, Walter, the conservative activist and founder of Turning Point usa, the largest and most effective youth organization on the political right, was assassinated yesterday at a college campus in Utah where Charlie Kirk was doing what made him famous, holding free open debates and discussions with college students of every political persuasion. He was 31 years old and leaves behind a wife and two young children. And I think whatever one thinks of Kirk's own views on policy in the era of YouTube influencers and podcasters on both sides of the aisle, which has included increasing numbers of cranks and hucksters and conspiracy theorists, Charlie really was, and I guess I'm speaking for myself here, one of the good guys who practiced politics more in the right way by being willing to talk civilly with anyone about anything, especially young people. And so I want to get your thoughts and emotional reaction to the killing of Kirk, but also to put it in some sort of historical context for us, which is what this show, our podcast, does. In recent years, it seems political violence has been increasing in America. Earlier this year, an assailant threw Molotov cocktails into the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. The former House speaker of Minnesota and her husband were murdered. Two young Israeli diplomats were murdered in D.C. last year, of course, Donald Trump was very nearly assassinated. There was the assassination of the United Health CEO and murder of Blackstone executives. In 2022, an intruder entered the home of Nancy Pelosi and severely injured her husband. There was the 2020 plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, the 2017 mass shooting at a congressional baseball game. I could go on. But as someone who lived through the 1960s and 70s when political assassinations were terrifyingly frequent, I'm hoping this week you can kind of situate us and tell us where we are in American history right now and what the gruesome and tragic murder of Charlie Kirk means. As many of us are feeling, I think, more kind of sad and frightened about the near future of our country and society than we've been in a long time.
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Yeah, this is really, obviously it's just an awful thing to be happening. And we're having this conversation on September 11, which is another date that kind of rings in American memory. You know, the violence in the 60s and now was, I think, different. It consistently hit more high value targets in the sense of, you know, jfk, his brother Robert, at the time, he was clear emerging as the leading Democratic candidate for the nomination in 68, Martin Luther King, even George Wallace, who was a major third party presidential candidate. So I don't know if Trump had been killed, if President Trump had been killed, if Nancy Pelosi had been killed. And by the way, I don't think that was a very political thing what happened there. It seems like a burglar. If we were talking about sort of that kind of sort of figures who were at the center of American history, being removed by violence in such a way that the country visibly then took a different course. And at the same time, of course, we had the civil rights movement turning into the black power movement that was kind of exploding across the country in various ways. And we had the Vietnam War, which, again, there's just no. I mean, I think the Vietnam War cost 10 times the number of American lives that the Iraq war did. You had a draft, so that it was not something that it was extremely personal, and it was hitting families at every level. And then for the first time, yes, we now have the fentanyl plague, we have these drug plagues, but America wasn't used to having those things before the 60s and 70s. And we were getting this sort of heroin, hallucinogenic drugs, things that the culture didn't really have experience with. So much of what's happening now is sort of continuation of things that started in those periods. And feminism at the same time was becoming. Was moving from a very sort of small, elite thing to being a kind of a mass movement, changing the dynamics of millions of families across America and beginning this process of giving young men and young women very different ideas about their place in society. So I think the 60s and 70s were probably at a higher intensity. And by the way, the inflation in the 70s was far worse than anything we saw under Biden. So the gap between the present and the 60s and the 70s is sadly decreasing. Our trend line is up. And I think ultimately, and as regular listeners to our podcast know, I think that the information revolution is going to be. Is going to end by driving something that's much bigger than anything that we've seen in the past, and that we're only in the early stages of the transformations that are coming that way. So I don't take, I think, as a point of reality and just trying to kind of be sane and balanced about what our actual situation is. I think we are. We are not at the level of social crisis and chaos and dysfunction that we reach in the 60s and 70s, but our outlook may be for something significantly more chaotic than past history would.
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Hold as time goes on, and our kind of margin between our current reality and the horrors of, you know, the 60s and 70s strengths. How do you look back at the 80s and 90s? Do you. Do you see it as kind of this aberration and this special point in history that we were lucky to go through, but we're now kind of reentering history, and what we're living through now is actually much more historically normal than what people of the who are who are alive today who have memories of the 80s and 90s, remember? Or is that something that people can still be hopeful about recapturing in some kind of political or cultural way in the future? Do you know what I mean?
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Well, I think on a generational basis, my generation, the boomers really did grow up thinking that we were the first post American generation, would be the first generation to fail to achieve our parents living standards for whom the American dream wasn't working. And again, boomers and zoomers are much more like grandparents and kids. There's an awful lot in common in the experience of those generations. And at least in the boomer case, it worked out so that now people look at the boomers and say, oh, you all rats, you're the ones that are still living the happy large American dream and it all worked for, for you. So you can just shut up with your Florida retirement and your this and your that, right? That's what we were thinking when we were that that age. And that's the way it looked. I mean, you know, when, when a home mortgage is 21%, when real wages are declining across the whole country, inflation is roaring out of control. But some of this, and I don't know that, you know, as I said, the information revolution is a different thing. But some of this is what happens when you have a really big generation that is hitting the labor market at the same time, hitting the housing market at the same time. It's like everything that young people want to do, establish careers, move to big cities, is really expensive because every, there's just a lot of other people. Justice. For many years it was really, really hard to get into any college because, you know, there were just so many. You had record numbers of people applying to these colleges and you've seen a wave of that, I think in law schools more recently. And this is so in a sense, in its early years, a big demographic bulge makes things tough both on people in the bulge and generally, you know, creates issues for the economy. But then as those people do find their way and start establishing careers and families and homes and all of these things, it begins to, you know, it. They turn from being a kind of economic liability and source of chaos to being an economic asset and a force for stability. So I think some of that is a generational dynamic and a demographic reality. That doesn't mean, I'm not trying to say to these kids, to my students and others, oh, you've got nothing to worry about. It's all going to work out just fine. There are things to worry about. But I think the gloom and doom about the prospects of the generation are overdone. I think they're also, you know, we're extend. One of the things that people don't think about enough in my view, is that we're extending the period of youth. That is the period between your sort of social independence of your parents. You know, you're not dependent on your parents for your, you know, to like make sure you tie your shoes before you go out into the world, but your sort of full economic and personal maturity that you go back a hundred years. And only a small elite of Americans had this kind of prolonged adolescence. Most Americans at 15 or 16 are doing what they're going to be doing because that's the way the economy works. And people got married younger, they started, they got their house situation earlier in life. Now if you have a couple where they're both getting Ph.D. or you know, post grad degrees, you should have 28 by the time you're out of school, or 30 by the time you're out of school, if you're going to medical school, maybe 32 by the time you're actually doing your real career, all right, and then you're amazingly, you don't have a down payment for a house the first year you're out of school and start working. So that people are, are going to be establishing their, you know, going to be buying a, their first house. I don't know. At 35 rather than 25. Well, that's, you know, that's, and that's 10 years of, you know, what am I going to do? Are things, work of anxiety of, you know, rootlessness, a lot of other things. And I think too biologically we're sort of, we're kind of wired to get married and have kids relatively early in life. And so you're sort of, you know, your, your social reality is growing further away from your biological reality. And a lot of people kind of think their best child, you know, your, the years when you really should, you know, only a 17 year old can really keep up with a 2 year old, I think in some ways. And certainly a 35 year old keeping up with a 3 year old can be a pretty tough operation. So there are a lot of ways in which the life cycle, the American contemporary life progression and the biological, natural life cycle of humanity are a bit out of whack. Which is not to say we should all go back and get married at 18 and stuff necessarily, but what it does mean is that you have a generation is spending A long time. An unprecedentedly high percentage of this generation is spending an unprecedentedly long period of years between childhood and true social adulthood. And that's actually a kind of an unhealthy place to be for a long time. So I think, again, we have to disentangle some of the kind of emotional gloom that comes in. And we all live in bubbles these days, too. So you can see your unhappiness mirrored on Instagram or whatever. And you can also see those annoying people who've gotten it all together and are showing you on Facebook the pictures of their, you know, I don't know, their Portuguese water dog by the swimming pool in their. In their second home in Nantucket or something, whatever they're doing. And it's enraging and undermining. So you have a lot of things working against the younger generation feeling good about where it is in the world and at this and. And that. Then also naturally, people bring that to their assessment of politics. My guess is that the current generation, this younger generation, is going to end up living significantly better than my generation has done. The health care that's coming with the combination of scientific advantage. People are talking about a cancer vaccination that could actually protect you against every form of cancer, you know, so they'll look back on. I think the future may look back on our time is a little bit the way we look back on the old days when like 50% of children died before five. They'll say, what, you know, people were old at 80. Really? Ugh. How did they do it? Right, so. And that's the other side of this, too, is that I think life, your economic peak years start later, but they will go on longer. People in there, most people don't yearn to retire if they're in good health. And so when they actually like working, they like staying engaged. The older you get, the better you are at controlling your work situation. You figured out what you like, what you don't like. You figured out how to kind of get the kind in whatever industry you're in. Even in my case, the sad, tragic, dying industries of journalism and book authoring and so on, you found some way to cling on to some sort of a rock. So I think the life cycle now for this generation has a different shape from past generations. And comparing where you are to where your parents were, your grandparents, it's likely to make you unhappy, but it's also likely to be a bad predictor of what's ahead for you.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. We're going to skip the tip of the week this episode and instead leave you with a short clip of Charlie Kirk at one of his recent campus events, answering a woman's questions about why he did what he did, traveling around the country, speaking to young college students and encouraging the free exchange of ideas as a substitute for violence.
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I go around universities and have challenging conversations. And I'm because that's what is so important to our country, is to find our disagreements respectfully. Because when people stop talking, that's when violence happens. Well, it's a growing trend because people like me are facing violence. Assault the left. Yes, the campus antifa. I've been stormed out of restaurants. I've been assaulted publicly, multiple death threats. There's more people that agree with me than some people would actually believe. And they come out of the woodwork when I do stuff like this. We record all of it so that we put on the Internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that's when you get violence. That's when civil war happens because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.
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Sa.