World in Conflict: Israel, Russia, China, Iran | Walter Russell Mead | EP 326

Okay, what what what what in the world is the rationale for being soft on Iran? I don't see a rationale for that at all. I mean, Iran is a terrible repressive theocracy with nuclear ambitions. It's a dangerous regime. So how can you be soft on Iran? What is the biggest way, the easiest way to get into a war in the Middle East? It would be a confrontation with Iran. Therefore, you can't have a confrontation with Iran. That's the way I think a lot of people are thinking. But I think the logic of the position is we have to say we don't want an Iranian nuclear weapon, but actually if you're given a binary choice between a war with Iran, with the U.S. fighting Iran to keep it from being nuclear, and then just hoping that if they get a nuclear weapon, we can deter them, and Israel can deter them like everybody else with nuclear weapons has been deterred, they would say better let them have the bomb than have the war. I think that's the logic of the position, and that the Iranians, smelling that as the logic of the position, have taken a very tough line in negotiations. At this point, our continuing to press the Biden Administration, that's what I think has probably happened.

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Hello everyone, I met Mr. Walter Russell Mead at a dinner party in Washington. He's a prolific author and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, a very astute commentator on foreign affairs. I'm talking to him today about the international situation in the world, experienced by the United States and its Western allies. Let's say we're going to talk about Russia, China, Iran, Israel, and Palestine: all the predictable villains. Mr. Walter Russell Mead is a writer, professor, and academic focusing his efforts, as I said, on international policy and foreign affairs. He is the James Clark Chase professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and taught U.S. foreign policy at Yale. Mead has worked as a columnist for publications such as the Wall Street Journal and was editor-at-large for the American Interest. His books include Mortal Splendor, Special Providence, Power, Terror, Peace and War, God and Gold, and most recently, 2022's The Ark of the Covenant.

So, Mr. Mead, you've spent an awful lot of time thinking about foreign policy in very many different aspects, not concentrating necessarily on any particular part of the world, but taking, as much as it's possible, a relatively global view. Maybe we could start our discussion by having you summarize what you think are the most important issues that confronted the United States and the Western world, more generally, on the foreign relations front in 2022. Maybe we can also talk about what you see happening in 2023 as we move forward. What's currently besetting us in the West on the foreign policy front?

Well, it's a really difficult time. It's important, maybe, to help people get what's happening in the world is to realize sort of what the basic framework of world politics is, and that is that beginning about 300 years ago, the British began to build this sort of global commercial order where there's trade—there's commerce—and the British also were concerned for creating a balance of power in Europe and developing their power globally so that this commercial maritime system would develop. The Americans more or less inherited—or some would say took over—that system at the end of World War II. This liberal international maritime commercial system of trade, of power, of political relationships is the dominant reality in world politics. The world is more or less divided between countries that are fairly happy with this system and would like to see it continue; countries who have some grievances, would like the system adjusted but are basically willing to work within that system; and then countries who want to bring the whole thing down.

Today, the leading countries that are in that are, you know, China, Russia, and Iran, along with certain smaller hangers-on like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a few others. We've seen since, you know, at the end of the Cold War in 1990, it looked as if this Anglo-American system would last forever. People talked about the end of history, but partly because countries like China have developed and become more powerful, but maybe more fundamentally because the Americans and our close allies have not done a very good job of understanding how to build, nurture, and maintain this system, we've seen gradually a kind of a crisis of opposition approaching. In 2022, between the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China's continued sort of menacing of Taiwan, and Iran's progress, refusal to rejoin the JCPOA, it's deepening alliance with Russia, we've seen this alliance of revisionist powers assemble themselves for a real challenge to this international system.

Well, maybe we could walk through each of those countries in turn. I mean, the first reaction I have to what you said is that say what you might about the Anglo-American sphere of influence, it's by no means self-evident that either China, Russia, or Iran stand out as shining moral lights to emulate as an alternative. I mean, China is a desperately terrible totalitarian communist state; Iran is basically an Islamo-fascist regime. While Russia seems to be the outlier to some degree because at least nominally it could be allied with the West, it has certainly proved extremely problematic in new ways since the end of the Cold War.

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

Let's start with China.

Well, you know, China offers what China offers countries—or at least did offer, because its offering has gotten less attractive with between the mounting totalitarianism and the economic trouble that they're in and their reaction to COVID. They were saying, "Look, you don't have to buy the Western package in order to become rich and powerful." Furthermore, they were saying to somebody like the ruler of a country like Zimbabwe or other countries: "We'll give you money. We'll give you tech. We won't ask you any questions about how much money your brother-in-law is making out of the deal. No pesky auditors." We're not like the Anglo-Americans; we won't try to make you behave. We'll let you do whatever you like. Now, that is not a positive agenda for an alternative world order, but it is an offer that a lot of governments or a lot of powerful individuals might find attractive.

Powerful and corrupt individuals, I mean, it's for—okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. The first part of that is the proposition that you can actually be wealthy or, let's say, have abundant resources and a reasonable standard of living for your citizens—not for you—without adopting something like the underlying metaphysics of the Western moral code. That proposition strikes me as highly improbable, given that the only reason that China is rich at all is because it managed to integrate itself with the West and essentially adopt quasi-capitalist principles without actually adopting the underlying metaphysic. I don't think their system is stable. I don't think they're going to be able to propagate that well-being into the future. I mean, you said yourself that China has tilted very heavily under Xi towards an increasing totalitarianism, and that's pretty much self-evident. The fact that they can only peddle their wares with regard to, what would you say, their profitability on the dictator front to corrupt governments also indicates the moral bankruptcy of their offerings.

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

Right, so—and, well, I mean, China seems to be facing a whole host of problems now too, including demographic problems that are deadly serious.

Well, you know, Jordan, this Anglo-American order is 300 years old, and a lot of people have tried to shake it over the centuries. You know, you can go back to Louis XIV in France who said, "I'm going to have this centralized powerful planned economy. We're going to have all the economic and military power of the British but we're not going to have all that messy political liberalism," and it didn't work, but he put up a good fight that convulsed the world for many years. Napoleon, really exactly the same, challenging that Anglo-American—still at that time, British—world order and saying, "My dictatorship, my enlightened dictatorship can create a powerful economy that the stupid British cannot match, and an army that they can't defeat." He rampaged for a while; he did ultimately fall apart, and rightly so.

I think Kaiser Wilhelm II, I think, Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin—all in their different ways—had the same idea that the technocratic dictatorship, centralized power, and planning could challenge, create an economy and a society that could challenge this Anglo-American hegemony or called the liberal world system, and they've all failed. But, you know, no, they all thought, "Okay, I learned from the past; now I'll win." I think China is thinking along those lines too.

Well, I think there's a fallacy at the bottom of that presumption that basically is biological in nature. I mean, one of the things I've observed as a consequence of watching the United States as an outsider, let's say for 50 years, 50 conscious years, let's say, is that diversity of approach beats efficiency of monolithic view. What I always see happening in the United States is, while you guys are crazy about 80 percent of the time and going off the rails in five different directions, there’s always someone in the United States doing something crazily innovative, insane, always.

So what seems to happen is that the U.S. washes up against the shores of various forms of political idiocy, but there's so much diversity of approach in the U.S., especially given its massive population and its federated system and its genuine freedoms that someone somewhere is doing the next right thing. And then America is, what would you call it, open-minded enough and adaptive enough so that if someone is doing the right thing, then they spawn imitators extremely rapidly, and Americans just capitalize on that like mad.

You get this situation where you could imagine, and I think the Japanese managed this for a while, you could imagine that if you just happened to stumble on the right vision, if you were an efficient and benevolent totalitarian, you could be more effective over a five-year period. But you're going to have a hell of a time with power transitions—that's a deadly problem—and then if the world shifts on you, that's not in a way that isn't commensurate with your ideological vision, then you have no alternative approaches to rely on.

My observation has been that that just scuttles all these countries that try to compete with this distributed and creative free Anglo-American ethos, and I do think there's a biological reason for that. One of the ways that biological systems compute adaptation is by producing a very large variety of mutations, of variant offspring, and most of those offspring perish. But the only solution to that problem of excess mortality, let's say on the biological front, is the provision of multiple variants.

The Anglo-American system, because it's distributed and because it places a substantial amount of power in the hands of individuals and subsidiary organizations, its medium to long-term creativity simply can't be beat. It is inefficient in that, you know, a lot of the variants that the U.S. produces—a lot of businesses and so forth—fail. But those that succeed can succeed spectacularly, and that happens continually, and that seems like an unstoppable force.

You know, it's interesting. I think the circle is spreading of countries or cultures and individuals who do see this advantage. But as, again, a student of history rather than biology or psychology, what I see is that we keep having these wars. I can say I actually do believe the Chinese system, the Russian system in its own way, the Iranian system certainly cannot really continue as they wish and will fail in the competition.

I look at the devastation that we've seen in the Napoleonic Wars, the world wars, and so our problem on our side is not simply to wait for the time when our diversity and our innovation will clearly triumph, but we have to try to manage or work in foreign policy and security policy to try to prevent new catastrophic wars on a scale—even though the chances are pretty good that we will prevail in the end.

Right, right, right. Well, it looks to me right now on the Chinese front, I mean, they're experiencing a level of domestic unrest that, for China, appears to be somewhat unprecedented. It seems to me that it's perhaps clearly in the interest of the Chinese authorities to do something like saber-rattle extremely hard over Taiwan to divert their populace's attention from their domestic failures. That strikes me as a—I mean, maybe I'm being pessimistic about it, although obviously lots of people are concerned about China and Taiwan. I mean, Xi seems to be attempting to consolidate power in the same manner as people like Mao. He's turned out to be a real totalitarian dictator rather than someone who's, you know, moving China, maybe like Deng Xiaoping. He doesn't seem like another Deng Xiaoping; he seems to be more like another Mao, and that’s very worrisome on the Taiwan front.

So what do you think is in the on the horizon on the China front, and what do you think the West should do about it?

Right, no, it's really interesting because from the Chinese point of view, first of all, we have to understand that the people that people like I and you would talk to from China aren't representative of the mass of the Chinese in China. The average Chinese person has never left China, didn't study for years in an English-speaking world or at an American or Canadian university or what have you. For them, it looks very frustrating. They see China as this great nation with a growing economy, largest population in the world—at least until India catches up—and then they look and they see, "Look at Iran, a tiny country, backwards in many ways compared to China, which has been running the table in the Middle East. It's in Syria, it's in Lebanon, it's in Yemen; it's causing problems everywhere you look."

Even Russia has gotten Crimea and has achieved things—where has the Chinese government gotten? What has it done? The answer is it's done less than Iran, done less than China, sorry, than Russia in terms of expanding. So I think there’s pressure on the Chinese government from a lot of Chinese public opinion. "Why aren't you more effective? If we're as great as you're telling us, why don't the foreigners see that and give ground to us?"

There's a clash between what a lot of Chinese people think China's place in the world should be and what they actually see. The government, as you say, at this time of huge stress— their COVID policy—they locked them down for years, and now they're still having a massive epidemic. The housing market, which is where most Chinese have their savings and investment, house prices, have been going down for almost three years. There's a major crisis building financially in China. So the government is in a real pickle as to what does it do next, and that makes it obviously a little bit unpredictable internationally.

Well, so I was just curious as to your evaluation of the Biden Administration's response to the situation in Taiwan. What opinions do you have about the Biden formulation of foreign policy in relationship to China?

Look, I think the Biden Administration has done a reasonably good job so far in terms of its messaging on Taiwan and the U.S.-China relations. The CHIP Act, it's putting economic pressure, it's trying to stop the penetration—you know, so much of Chinese growth has really come from the theft of IP and from intellectual property, from Chinese state subsidies to corporations in key sectors that are able to use those subsidies to compete unfairly in the rest of the world.

We are beginning to see—and this started in the Trump years, and even President Obama talked about a pivot to Asia—so there's been a growing awareness in the U.S. of the need to focus more on China and not just sort of sit here and wait for capitalism to turn China democratic, which is what we were maybe doing 20 years ago. So we're definitely ahead on that front.

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So since I was a young person, what's happened in China? Well, first of all, when I started to become politically aware, let's say back in the 1970s, I remember going to a trade fair in Edmonton, Alberta. It was one of the first trade fairs that the Chinese participated in—probably about 1974, something like that. We went and looked at the Chinese had a display there of their industrial products, and it looked like stuff that had been manufactured in the West right after the Second World War. It looked like stuff that was built in the 1950s.

But that was the first time in my lifetime that we saw anything at all of China. And then, of course, when I was very young, the threat of famine was still something that we associated with China. What I've seen happen in my lifetime is that China has become an economic powerhouse. The threat of famine has receded substantially. The Chinese had been integrated, at least to some degree, into the world economy. The West had benefited, arguably, from an influx of unbelievably inexpensive consumer goods as Chinese manufacturing quality improved, as it did in Japan. For a good while, it looked like the Chinese were going to settle in beside us in lockstep—even though as competitors and cooperators—and move us all toward a relatively integrated capitalist future.

And of course, the presumption was that as that happened, the state would liberalize, not least because there would be all sorts of individuals in China who now had a certain degree of economic power. The Chinese would incrementally transform into essentially into allies playing under the same system, and I think that really was happening in a pretty damn optimistic way for a number of decades, till Xi decided to centralize control and turn himself into another Mao.

It isn't obvious to me at all that the optimism that the West had in relationship to China was exactly misplaced. I mean, I think the Western working class paid a big price for integrating China, but other than that, you know, the Chinese aren't starving anymore, which is certainly a big plus. There were a lot of positives to attempting to integrate the Chinese into the world economy. The downside was we seem to become more dependent on their largesse and goodwill than we needed to, and then of course, China as a totalitarian model is a destabilizing force in the international order.

Well, you're absolutely right, and I would agree with you completely that until a few years ago, I would travel pretty freely in China. A couple of my books have been translated into Chinese, and I would speak at Chinese universities and talk with professors and officials. The view that you just expressed was very common. This is what they felt China was doing and should do, was move toward this kind of integration to become what some Chinese used to tell me, a "normal country," is what they wanted China to become.

I think there are a lot of people there who still hope that; obviously, they're not going to say so right now. That would not be good for you or your family if you started talking that way. But I think what happened in some ways is we've tended to forget that the Chinese Communist Party is a real thing, and it wants to hold power. You know, and there are lots of people who see, you know, they look at Chinese history. Yes, the Communist Party has killed more Chinese than anything ever in the history of the world; have died as a result of Mao's famines and other things, far eclipsing the death toll say in their war against Japan even.

But that said, as you've pointed out, the economic growth of the last 30-35 years in China is one of the great miracles of human history. And you would have to have a heart of stone not to be glad that hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty, that new ways of life are opening up, new access to culture, to education. It's what life—what we should all be doing—it's progress, and it's good. But that very progress of the society, I think, terrified the Communist Party, because they could see themselves losing control.

They could see, you know, and there is in Chinese history and culture. You know, it's a country of a billion four people—that's like, what, four times the population of the European Union—and it's not so easy. Chinese history is a story of the balance between central and local governments. They've had periods of division and war and weakness when others have taken advantage when the central government was weak.

So instead of, in a way, relaxing and liberalizing more as their economic policy succeeded, many in the Chinese Communist Party became really worried that things were going to get out of control. For a number of years, even before we saw the international hostility, what we saw was gradually, in sector after sector, they were tightening up the control of this central communist elite, and more and more, under one man, Xi Jinping, they were tightening, using every lever they could to impose uniformity in China.

Reassert, even in companies, now every company has to have a Communist Party cell in it. So the part where we're back to the kind of Communist Party, yes, exactly. Obviously, as a Western investor, that’s a tough thing when you've got the Communist Party cell running your company. Do you really own the company, etc.?

So it's a—yeah, right, right. So they're moving, I think, from a good period into a much more difficult one, I think.

Well, I think also that people were optimistic and rightly so after 1989 because once the Soviets gave up the ghost, it looked for a pretty long period of time that you couldn’t beat the Communist drum very hard anymore, that the internal contradictions that were part and parcel of the ethos had made themselves manifest in a manner that was utterly unmistakable. Just as the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own internal idiocy, so was the Chinese Communist Party doomed to eventual failure.

But part of the problem is that even in the West, we don't seem to be of one mind when we look at the contradiction between Western productivity and generosity, let's say, and general well-being at the level of the citizen and the contradictions between that and a radical leftist view of the world. Our own society is rife with this culture war predicated, at least on the part that capitalism is inherently oppressive and, well, and so is Western culture in general—and, of course, the Chinese Communists believe that in spades.

If we can't get our own house in order with regards to the pathology of these ideas in the West, in some sense, it's not that surprising that the Chinese remain dominated by them. But the long-term consequences of that can't be good. I mean, what I see happening, I think in the West, in the U.S. in particular, is that people are losing faith in China as a trading partner and we're starting to pull back a tremendous amount of manufacturing capacity and decreasing investment and pulling away from China as a trading partner. Of course, that'll just make things more desperate in China, which is not a good thing.

Yeah, it's a tricky thing. We, in the West, we read 1989 and the events in the Soviet Union as a glorious victory, but in China—and Putin is on their wavelength here—they saw it very differently. What they saw is, look at the Soviet Union. Gorbachev tried to liberalize and to introduce some democratic elements into the Soviet Union, and look what happened: the Soviet Union fell apart, Russia was impoverished for a decade, it lost its great-power status in the world. The West, as they saw it in Russia and in China, just walked all over them and did whatever it wanted. The message for these leaders is: don't liberalize; liberalism is a poison.

Even a little bit of it can begin to corrode and destroy your society. If you let it in, it will wreck your power and devastate everything, so they actually became—they did not say, "Oh, how enchanting Western democracy is." They said, "How dangerous it is." We've heard Putin complain and talk about the color revolutions—different liberalizing revolutions in post-Soviet countries—and they see us—they see the West as leading this kind of subversion, and that Western ideas and Western freedoms are a fundamental threat to their own power, given the uses some of them have made of that power to their personal survival.

Right, well that seems like a reasonable concern for totalitarian, for ideologically motivated totalitarian dictators. It's definitely the case that Western liberal ideals will not provide an environment where their kind of psychopathic power playing is going to be successful, so they have every reason to be intimidated by that.

I think our mistake was not to realize that, you know, we were saying, "Hey, we're not, you know, we're going to wait patiently for China to evolve." But on the side of the Chinese Communist Party, they were saying, "Well, we're not just going to wait patiently until liberalism comes in and wrecks us. We're going to preemptively do what we need to do to maintain our power."

So I think, well, maybe we should have known that because they never wavered in their support for North Korea.

That's right, and they were also very careful always to say we want economic liberalization, not political liberalization.

Yeah, yeah, as if those—well, okay, so let's concentrate on that a little bit. So, it's not obvious to me at all that you get to have economic liberalization without political liberalization. In fact, I think the order of events in that causal link is reversed—is that the reason that we have abundance and material prosperity in the West is because of liberalism. Liberalism isn't the consequence of wealth; it's the precondition for wealth.

You can think about that particularly with regards to such things as the right to private property and the right to the fruits of your own labor. If your society isn't predicated on the idea that the individual is somehow intrinsically worthwhile and sovereign in that manner—that's not merely a gift of the state but something intrinsic to the person—as soon as you have that, you have, at least in principle, an inviolable right to something approximating private property unto the fruits of your own labor.

And without that fundamental presumption—which I think most particularly is a Judeo-Christian biblical presumption—the whole capitalist enterprise, because it's so reliant on trust and honesty as well for example, to really flourish and on the right of private property, it's just a non-starter. And this is a favorite shibboleth of the West is that, well, we can have all this economic prosperity or even more of it with a centralized top-down control system that's predicated on the idea of equality.

But in reality, that never seems to pan out. And so, and I don't—I mean, you could point to regimes, maybe like Singapore, as a potential exception. But Singapore isn't very old, and so we'll see how it does with regards to such things as power transitions. But the idea that you can have economic progress without that underlying ethos of individual sovereignty—I don't think there's any historical evidence for that at all.

And there's plenty of evidence to the contrary you describe that in terms of the constant failure of the dictator states. You know, it's interesting, I think you're right in that the, you know, sort of human nature exists in such a way that this kind of private property and the culture of individual rights together, honesty is a foundation for greater prosperity. But the foundations of different cultures around the world have a very different relationship to that set of ideas.

I remember the first time I started traveling in Russia; it was still the Soviet Union. One of the—I'm giving away how old I am, I suppose—but one of the things I noticed there was that Marxism was culturally attractive to a lot of people in Russia because there was a deep distrust of economic exchange, that the people kind of intuitively felt that if a merchant went into the countryside and bought a bushel of wheat for five rubles from the farmer and then took it into town and sold it for 10 rubles to the consumers in town, he was cheating somebody. You know, maybe he was cheating the farmer, maybe he was cheating his customers, but that this kind of exchange was fundamentally morally illegitimate.

And so there was—Marxism felt right in his, you know, that capitalism was by nature exploitative—a lot of people were induced to believe that.

Well, that—it’s easy for that belief to be induced because it can capitalize on envy, and envy is a deadly sin, let's say. It's easy to become envious of anyone who seems to have something that you don't have, especially if you don't look at the other person's life in totality. You see one feature in their life that in some manner exceeds what you've been able to manage, and then it's also extremely convenient for you to assume that if someone has exceeded you in a particular dimension of attainment, that the reason they did that is because they're corrupt and malevolent, not because they're useful and productive compared to you.

So one of the psychological advantages that envious Marxism has is that it plays to envy in an extremely powerful manner. The problem with that seems to be—and maybe this is another principle for economic advancement—if your society is predicated on the idea that all difference in attainment or socioeconomic status is a consequence of theft and exploitation, then basically you set up a situation where no one can ever have anything more than anyone else, in which case you have no basis for trade whatsoever.

And you certainly can't generate anything approximating wealth because there's just no way that everyone can become equally rich at the same instantaneous moment. There's always going to be a gradation of distribution. One of the weird things the West has managed—and this has something to do with that implicit trust—is that we've actually managed to develop a society where there's not only tolerance for inequality but there's a certain degree of admiration for it.

I mean, I think this is particularly true of the U.S., where it's less true of Canada and Europe. But one of the things that's always struck me so positively about the U.S. is that there is a general sense of admiration among the populace for people who've been able to achieve spectacularly and singularly in some domain.

Some of that's associated with the desire in the U.S. that parents have for their children to be able to perhaps accomplish the same thing, but it really is quite the miracle that any society has ever managed out at all.

You know, it’s interesting. In some dimensions— even in the Soviet Union you could see that because if you went to a concert in the Soviet Union, classical music was a big thing. The admiration that people felt for a great violinist or a great dancer was extraordinary. Because in every other channel of life, it was utterly corrupted by the party. If you had a good job, it was because the Communist Party gave it to you. You know, if you were a factory director, it was because your brother-in-law was the party commissar, something like that.

But in the arts, you know, that violinist is just up there playing. You hear it, and that gives you, you know, so there was this direct contact with excellence. So the human spirit I think does instinctively respond to excellence with admiration—they weren’t thinking, "Let’s go break his fingers," you know, he plays better than the others, so he should like lose a finger and then he won’t play any better than anybody else. But in this realm of economics, no, they, you know, they had a very different view much—whether you're selling footballs or fine art.

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Well, let's turn our attention to the Russians a little bit. So we know, or we've sketched out in a low-resolution sense, what's driving the reactionary Chinese, and that's a reversion to the communist model and to the totalitarian state that it enables. And that's being driven by the people who are benefiting from that enabling. That seems relatively clear. The Russian front is a lot more complicated because it's not obvious at all that Putin is a communist, for example.

I know that Dugin, who is Putin's favorite philosopher, has been trying to sketch out something approximating a different ethos for the Russians, and I know that some of that actually has its origins both in Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, who both proclaimed in various ways that the proper reign forward for Russia was a return to something like its incremental progression along the Orthodox Christian path.

I think the Russians are struggling with that to some degree, and Dugin has tried to outline an alternative ethos. But I don't see anything coherent coming out of that except antipathy to the progressive liberal excesses of the West. I don't see that the Russians have actually managed to elaborate anything approximating a vision. So what do you think's driving the Russians?

Yeah, I think, you know, there is a tragic sense of history, you know. Russian history has been a bitter thing. Putin is not a communist; he is, if anything, he's a tsarist. He’s a Russian nationalist. He actually hates the communists because Lenin and, you know, Lenin's nationality policy really destroyed the Russian Empire in some ways by creating this artificial Soviet Union rather than the empire. The transfer of Crimea to Ukraine under Khrushchev was the kind of, you know, communist BS that Putin really loved.

But there is something Putin deeply envies and misses in Russia today, which is that the Communist Party, for most of its history, had an ideological hold in Russia; it had a network of loyal informants and co-workers and members. So there would be somebody on every block watching what everyone else did and reporting the bad guys to this suspicious activity to the secret police. Through the network of Communist Party cells, youth organizations—this whole culture, the government had means to control, shape public opinion. Putin doesn't have that.

He's trying with Russian nationalism, with the Orthodox Church. He’s trying to find—and, of course, in places where most of the Russian citizens are Muslim, he tries to work through Islamic religious authorities. Remember that the Orthodox Church and the Muslim hierarchies were entirely controlled by the KGB under the Communists. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, all the KGB hacks and stooges were in place.

Now, of course, there were some sincere believers here and there, but, you know, and so the—and so there was blackmail material ways that you could control the Orthodox Church, ways you control—the power that Putin has tried to turn that into an instrument of state control now. You know, that’s not as illegitimate in some ways in Russian culture as it might seem to some of us because the Orthodox Church, in its theology, was always much more supportive of the Tsar, the emperor. You know, it comes out of the Byzantine tradition where, so there's a kind of—some people use the phrase Caesaro-papism, you know, that the Caesar, the emperor, is a holy figure as well. So it comports in some ways with traditional Russian ideas.

But Russian society changed a lot in the last hundred years. You know, Russia was a peasant society in 1920, and today it's mostly an urban society, etc. It’s changed in many, many different ways. It's changed, and so Putin does not have the ideological elements of control.

The other problem for Putin is that Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism don't export the way Marxism-Leninism did. At the height of Communism, Stalin could count on the fanatical loyalty of even highly placed spies like Alger Hiss in America and Kim Philby in England, who, out of loyalty to communism, would be willing agents and stooges for Stalin. Putin doesn't have that. He's hoping, with his opposition to some of the crazy things that are definitely going on here.

He and Orban and some others are sort of trying to create a sort of conservative traditionalist international that can do for them what the international communists used to do for Stalin. But it's not going to work that way; it's a much weaker position. But Putin is doing what he can with the tools he can find to make Russia a great power.

I think partly it's weaker because if you try to ally Christian theology with the idea of a centralized quasi-fascist state, it actually doesn't work out very well, because there's such a strong emphasis on individual sovereignty and individual worth in the Judeo-Christian tradition that you're fighting a pretty vicious rear-guard action.

I mean, it was definitely the case that when the Bible was printed and distributed so that everyone could read it in the original, what happened was people recognized their own intrinsic worth and were much more likely to, what would you say, take on both the rights and the responsibilities of informed citizenry as soon as they became literate and could understand the implications of that tradition.

So it isn't obvious to me at all that Putin is going to be able to manage to Shanghai the Christian tradition into alliance with the idea that he should be something approximating a czar, even if the progressive West has, you know, erred in its excesses, which it certainly has. The story just doesn't seem to have a lot of power.

I mean, it's definitely the case the Eastern Europeans are quite appalled by the Western turn towards this radical progressivism, but that hasn't driven them into the arms of people like Putin.

No, exactly. There’s a very Russian tradition of the Tsar as almost leader of the Church as well as the leader of the state, but it doesn't—and the concept of rights, as we understand them to be implanted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, was much more minimized in the old Russian Orthodox vision. It was a much more collectivist kind of faith.

The gap between Orthodox Europe and both Protestant and Catholic Europe is a very deep historical one that’s over a thousand years old. So Putin put something that works in Russia, at least for a time, is not exportable in the way Putin would like it to be.

Now, he has another option which he works with—which is this free-floating—so, Putin will try on the one hand to be the champion of, you know, the people who are in revolt against the progressive excesses of the West, but at the same time he wants to pick up the other source of Soviet support: anti-capitalism, anti-Western individualism, you know, the far left.

As those are the two things that Putin is working with, and in U.S. politics, it's interesting that you get people—you know, the squad tends to be very skeptical of U.S. policy in Ukraine, as do people on the very far right. Now, there are a lot of legitimate questions you can ask about what we are and aren't doing in Ukraine, but this kind of sympathy, quasi-Putin sympathy, you will find it among anti-Americans on the left as well as among some traditionalists on the right.

That's Putin. Putin doesn't care. For him, he'll use any tool he can find, and that's how he sees these people, not as allies and partners but as tools to be used to achieve his end, which is first, last, and always Russian state power.

What do you think his goal was in Ukraine? When I looked at what was happening, I thought two things: I thought, well, three things, I suppose. Putin wasn't very happy with western expansionism into Ukraine. He also was more than willing to extend Russian dominion, especially in the eastern parts of Ukraine. And then I also thought it's possible that he didn't really care, in some fundamental sense, whether Ukraine emerged from this conflict devastated, as long as it didn't fall into the hands of the West.

But I'm still relatively unclear about what his motivations and vision were for the invasion. I mean, do you think he thought it would be a cakewalk like so many military leaders tend to presume when they march into a foreign country?

U.S. intelligence also thought he was going to win. You know, the Americans were saying to Zelensky, "We'll give you a plane so you can escape," and we were telling the ambassadors of all the countries, "Leave! Leave! The Russians are coming!" There was a panic, all right?

So our message to Putin, by the way, was not a message of deterrence. It was a message of encouragement: we think our intelligence is terrific, and it tells us you're going to win if you do this.

So, you know, that’s interesting. I think he did think he would get a lot of success very quickly. But as to the threat of Ukraine to Putin, it's not like Western—it's not that like there might be Western troops in Kiev. It's clear we don't want to invade Russia. No one in the West wants to invade Russia. No one—there's no support in the United States for sending an army into Russia, right? That's not on the table.

But what is on the table is: suppose Ukraine democratizes and becomes a successful country. Putin’s whole argument to the Russian people is that, “Oh, you know, democracy may work fine for the English, the French, and the Americans, but we Russians— we’re different. We Orthodox Slavs! We have our own tradition in our own world!”

Kiev really is where Russian civilization—the birthplace of Russian civilization—and if Ukrainian Slavs, Orthodox Ukrainian Slavs, are happy and prosperous in a democracy and achieving things that a corrupt, stagnant, sterile, putinist regime is unable to achieve in Russia, a happy, democratic Ukraine without lifting a finger, without sending a single shot across the frontier, is a mortal threat to Putin’s power and vision at home. That's the problem.

Okay, so does that make a devastated Ukraine and a Russian withdrawal a Putin victory?

I think, yes, Putin wants Ukraine to fail. He wants—and he wants to be seen to be dominant in Ukraine. Those are the two things he needs. And the minimal grounds for victory for him—yeah, and Crimea.

Okay, so now what do you see? We don't know how the Russia-Ukraine war is going to continue. I mean, the Russians have been being pushed back, but they're unbelievably heavily armed in the final analysis, and it isn't obvious exactly what a Ukrainian victory would look like in the face of that ultimately overwhelming, let's say, nuclear threat.

I've heard intimations that Putin might be willing to sit at the bargaining table now. What do you think? Are we in for a long war? Are we in for a long-deteriorating war that's moving to a nuclear exchange? Is Putin feeling pressure to get to the negotiating table? What’s your sense of where things—how things are going to unfold over the next year?

Well, I think we're back. The war has gone through several phases already and it's important to remember it's been so long since we were all thinking about a big war in this way that we've all forgotten some of the things that are normal in warfare. One of them is that war changes, like in World War II; you start with 10 months of zitskrieg—no one is doing anything. Then Hitler conquers everything and, oh my gosh, he's going to win. But then another stalemate, etc.

In this war, there was the initial phase of Russian attacks and people, for a while, thought those might succeed. Then the Ukrainian defeat. Then we went into that long period of like slow grinding Russian advances. Then there were the heartening Ukrainian pushback, and everybody said, "Ah, their whole Russian army could disintegrate," etc. They seem, at least for now, to have stabilized their front.

We don't really know—and with the missile attacks and Russia, you know, fighting on the boundaries—are we back to grinding war of attrition? Because, you know, the morale in the Russian army is quite low in some places. Could we see more military collapses like we saw on the Russian side, etc.? So there's a lot going on.

Both the Ukrainians and the Russians still think they have some cards to play, and neither one is willing to give up until they don’t think they could gain something extra by trying something else.

So both now, you know, the West is saying to Zelensky, "Come on, at least look like you want to talk peace." So he says, "You know, I'm ready to sit down, you know, and discuss peace on the following terms: basically complete Russian withdrawal and reparations."

Putin also feeling some internal pressure to sound at least look like he's interested in peace—he says, "Yes, I'm interested. I want peace talks on the surrender of Ukraine to me and on exactly what pieces of Ukraine I’ll take."

But neither side at this point is ready to stop fighting, so I don’t see immediately much change. And the future will be determined by how the armies do on the ground. The God of battles will determine where we are, and then, you know, as the reality changes, the two sides' appreciation of what they can reasonably hope to achieve changes.

At some point, maybe there will be—we'll see, you know, a negotiated peace.

Right, but you think there's a fair bit of war to come before?

Right, there because it isn't obvious that either side is losing in some fundamental sense, right? It's still very ambivalent. Each side has reasons to believe that it can gain from where it is now, and as long as that's the case, the tendency is for the war to continue.

Yes.

Okay, let's turn our attention momentarily to the situation in Iran. I'd like to talk about two different streams there: the first would be the protests, and then also we could talk about Iran in relation to Israel and also the Iranian nuclear program.

When I was in Jerusalem, I met with some senior people who'd worked in various ways for the Israeli government over the years, and some of them were very concerned about Iran's capacity to move very rapidly towards the development of a nuclear bomb. My understanding is that they're still experimenting quite heavily with sophisticated centrifuges that are designed to push them to the point where developing a nuclear weapon could take place, if necessary, within a few months.

And it seems to me to be the case that Iran is Israel's most fundamental enemy and is devoted in some real sense to the eradication of Israel. And so that's all extremely worrisome in some sense counterbalanced against that is the fact that the Iranians themselves seem to be pretty damn sick and tired of their state. And God only knows what's going to happen as a consequence of the protests.

I mean, we could get lucky possibly and see the Iranian regime collapse, although a collapsed regime is often replaced by a worse regime unfortunately rather than a better one. So, anyway, tell me your views about Iran in relation to the U.S., in relation to Israel, in relation to the ongoing protests. What's happening there as far as you can tell, and what do you see happening in the future?

Well, in the first place, I think that hostility to the United States and Israel and, more broadly, to the West is baked into the nature of the current Iranian regime. They need a bad relationship with the United States; they need a bad relationship with Israel. Why else do you justify a clerical dictatorship if you don't have terrible enemies out there who are going to destroy you?

And they also remember that Iran is a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multicultural country. It has a large Azeri minority in the north, it has a lot of Kurds, and the Kurds in Iran are restless like Kurds in other countries—they want independence. For Kurds, you've got Baluchis down in the south, you've got a large group of Arabs in Iran, and most of the oil in Iran—or a lot of it—is in the part that's inhabited by Arabs. The central government wants to keep pumping the oil but spending the revenue not on the Arab provinces where it's come from, but to maintain its power regionally. So Iran is filled with these ethnic tensions, and you need something to hold a country like that together.

And Iran, for example, looks at what happens when the Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union lost its faith in communism, so to speak—the cement that held it together—the Soviet Union fell apart. The fear in—there's a tremendous fear in the government of Iran that without an ideology that legitimizes and empowers central authority, who knows what could happen? Especially with other countries—whether it's Turkey, Russia, the United States, anybody trying to pull away at its territories.

So that's one reason they're not—I think this whole fantasy that we can reach an agreement with the Iranians and everything could be nice was never very likely. But more than that, because they need an enemy.

Well, I also think it's been very convenient for the Iranians to have Israel as an enemy as well and to funnel support to the Palestinians and keep that conflict boiling away madly because, as you said, there's nothing that helps legitimize an authoritarian state than the presence of obvious malevolent enemies, right?

So, you know, one of the preconditions for peace agreements is that both sides actually want peace, and that doesn't seem to me at all obvious, as you pointed out, in the case of Iran, quite the contrary.

Exactly. And when it comes to Israel, they've got something else going. You know, Iran entertains the fan—we’ve talked about Iran's fears; what are its hopes? The hopes are if a single country could control the Persian Gulf and all the oil there, even in this time of oil in other places and alternative energy—that's huge power globally. You'd sort of blackmail the world, and the Iranians look at these small Arab Gulf states—many, you know, 90 percent of the population in some is foreign workers.

Bahrain has a, you know, is a country ruled by Sunni Muslims but has a large Shia majority. There’s a rest of Shia minority in Saudi Arabia. So Iran really sees opportunities. And look at what it’s been able to do, thanks, I think, to American stupidity in Syria, but also in Lebanon. Iran is really moving—has been moving across the Middle East. It's in Yemen, so—but here's the thing: Shia Islam is not popular among Sunni Muslims. It's considered a heresy, and the Persians are not really—the Arab-Persian problem is real.

So to be the most anti-Israel is a way of advertising your credentials: "I hate Israel; we're such good Muslims that we hate Israel and unlike all these nasty Gulf rulers who are willing to compromise and all this—we're in this to the death!" If you hate Israel, you know, right? You love Islam; we're your leader.

They are not going to give that up; they are not going to give that up. And if the other Arabs are walking away from violence among the Palestinians, well, the Iranians would be more than happy to fill that gap, so this is right, you know. This idea that somehow they’re these moderates and you know they’re just ready to make a deal—I’m sure there are moderates in Iran, but the hardcore of the power structure, I think, sees the logic both in terms of the fears and the hopes, and they don't see an advantage in changing.

We'll be back in one moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new documentary, Logos and Literacy. I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm; the pastor's home was the first school. Every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80 percent of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung.

This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all history, and hopefully, people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

So, let's discuss a little bit. One of the things that struck me was reading your book—the latest book, Ark of a Covenant published in 2022—and it's an analysis, at least in large part, of the situation in relationship to Israel and the Zionist state and Palestine. I thought that your book was remarkably even-handed. I've been fascinated by the developments on the Abraham Accord front. I've interviewed a number of people who are associated with the Abraham Accords, and from what I've been able to understand, what essentially happened was that a group of people who were outsiders in relationship to the foreign policy establishment decided to buck conventional wisdom, which was that there was no possibility for peace between the Israelis and the Arab world without including the Palestinians, just to do an end-run around that to start to talk to Arab countries who were actually interested in keeping Iran under control but also in making peace with the Israelis for strategic reasons, partly because they're a major military power but also for economic reasons because so many Arab states are now looking to differentiate their economies away from reliance on the petrodollar.

What seemed to have happened with the Abraham Accords was a very large group of Arab countries decided that peace with Israel was definitely in their best interests and that did circumvent the Palestinians. Now, I've been pretty sympathetic, let's say, to the operations of the Israelis in the Middle East, and I've been criticized to a large degree for failing to take into account the oppression of the Palestinians. Your work seems to be remarkably even-handed in that regard.

You commented just before we started this interview that you wrote a book on a very contentious topic, and so that would be the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But you didn't really contribute to an exacerbation of the culture war, and you really didn't get pilloried for it. So what that seems to indicate is that you struck kind of a nice balance between advocating on the Jewish side in relationship to Israel and also pointing out that by no means a majority of Jews around the world even support the Zionist project and also extending a certain degree of sympathy for the displaced Palestinians. So maybe you could walk us through your view of the Abraham Accord and your view of the situation in Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians.

Sure, sure. Let me start with the root—the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Americans were actually, you know, pro-Israel before the Jews were. Non-Jewish Americans in the 1890s, before Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, had written his book on the Jewish State, President United States got a petition asking him to use his influence to promote a Jewish state in Palestine, and this petition was signed by John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and the entire sort of American establishment was on board with this idea.

I myself, you know, thousands of years of persecution, the horrors of the 20th century, if any people on Earth need a state and, for that matter, deserve a state, surely it's the Jews. At the same time, you know, the Palestinians are a people. They became a people in part because of the struggle with Israel and with the Zionists, and they're human beings.

Human beings have rights, and as an American, I believe in rights, and rights like self-determination. So my hope is still, although it's difficult and complicated, that there would be, you know, that someday, I'll be able to travel from the Jewish state freely to the Palestinian state and have friends in both places—that's what I would like to see.

Now, in the book, I don't make recommendations. You know, I think right now it's very hard to get there, but that's what I think most Americans would like to see and is what I would like to see.

Okay, so you cite Mark Twain in your book, and let me just see if I can find that here. Yes, here's a citation from Mark Twain. Now, see, when I talked to Netanyahu, one of the claims that was put forward on his part was that before the Zionist movement, the Palestinian territory that is now Israel was pretty damn desolate and abandoned, and the Palestinian observers of that conversation are very upset about that characterization, feeling that it's in the best interests of the Zionists to portray pre-Jewish Palestine as a desolate and abandoned wasteland.

Now, but you cite—let me read this—"Yet to Americanize the land that the Bible famously described as flowing with milk and honey appeared bone dry and deserted in the 19th century, and its handful of inhabitants—Arabs and Jews—seemed deeply wretched and prey to disease and poverty." Mark Twain, in one of his popular travel columns, wrote, "From Abraham's time till now, Palestine has been peopled only with ignorant, degraded, lazy, unwashed loafers and savages." For Twain and for many Americans, the holy land was wasted on its current inhabitants whose poor stewardship had turned the land of King Solomon and King David into, as Twain quipped, "the most hopeless, dreary, heartbroken piece of territory outside of Arizona."

Now, it's certainly the case that one of the claims to Israeli legitimacy, in my understanding, is the idea that this was a particularly God-forsaken piece of territory. The Ottomans themselves weren't that interested in holding on to it; it hadn't been utilized particularly effectively. And one of the consequences of the Zionist enterprise is that what once was as an essentially barren desert wasteland has been turned into an extremely populous and productive and economically thriving and blooming country.

I have some sympathy for that viewpoint, but then that leaves—that brings into clear focus the problematic elements of that story in relationship to the Palestinians. So if you were going to make a case for the Palestinians vis-a-vis the Israelis, if you would, how would you characterize that in light of these sorts of descriptions of pre-Zionist Palestine?

Well, I don't want to pit them against each other, but I would say that my Palestinian friends would say—and I would have some sympathy with this perspective—that you have to remember that, you know, the Palestinians weren't self-governing in the 19th century. They were part—they'd been for 500 years or 400 years of that part of the Ottoman Empire, and so they were ruled from Istanbul by Turks who, you know, saw the Arabs more as a cow to be milked than as—so they were victims of Ottoman imperialism.

Then before the British came, and you know, I think that would be the kind of argument that people would make. I would go a little deeper and say a lot of the, you know, the redevelopment and the blooming of Palestine has come about because of modern techniques of agronomy and irrigation which no one knew in the 19th century, in a sense.

The Israelis have really brought—I mean people all over the world are using their dry farming techniques and their irrigation techniques and some of their desalinization and other stuff. So they really have brought something, but to compare a 21st-century Israel to a 19th-century Palestine—it's a little tricky as a historical comparison, I think.

Right, right, right, right. So, yeah, right. So you have multiple problems with that kind of comparison.

Yeah, the advancement of technology being one of them. So how many people—how many people are we talking about inhabiting the place that is now Israel in the late 19th century again, do you know?

It's—the estimates vary wildly because, of course, again, the Ottoman Empire was not a place where you had careful statistics. So you don't have every ten years the decennial census with an organized modern bureaucracy counting the numbers.

So, you know, how do you estimate that population? You know, what's your basis for it? And when you have such a politically contentious question as Israel-Palestine where everybody's got a point of view, everybody's got an agenda, without even cheating you can find all kinds of ways to get to different population estimates for 1890, if you see what I mean.

So, yeah, I honestly don't think—and you know, in all of these—one of the things I—in Ark of the Covenant, the book, I try to make clear is that in many ways this dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians is one of a hundred such disputes. You know, Croats and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, Hungarians versus Romanians in Transylvania. There are all these national disputes, and in all of them what you find is these scholars and historians and ideologues make all kinds of claims based on history.

I wrote—I was in Romania, and somebody said, "Yeah, the Magyars, they have no place in here. They're interlopers. They only got here in the 9th century A.D." Which, right, right, to an American, that's not a very convincing argument. But anyway, everybody comes armed with these battalions of facts that they just throw at each other. We're not going to get the solution by sifting ultimately through those facts.

You know, that is raking over—if you have a husband and a wife who've quarreled, raking over every quarrel in the marriage is not actually the way to get them moving forward.

No, no, no. Right, you need something like a uniting vision. No, I think that's a very good point. I mean, part of the reason that there is conflict everywhere when there is conflict is because the facts themselves are open to question. I mean, that’s almost like the definition of the precondition for a war.

We don't agree on what the realities are on the ground at all, and we disagree with them so vociferously that we can't even discuss them. We have to now kill each other, and we disagree with the rules. You know, like what should adjudicate something— is it, you know? So the Zionists will say—and they’re right to say so—the League of Nations recognized the British mandate over Palestine as a national home for the Jews.

So it's legal; the U.N. reaffirmed it in 1948. How much more legal could that be? And a Palestinian might say, "Well, you know, the British were colonial interlopers who stole the land from the Ottoman Empire. You know, the Palestinians never had a voice. What gave the League of Nations the right to say that the British had a right to the territory?" That's imperial right.

Right, you and—and they're both arguments, and people will have different reasons for supporting them. Well, and then there's ideological reasons too. I mean, there's two things that you do very masterfully, at least in this book, The Ark of the Covenant. First is, I would say, you make this remarkable case, which you touched on earlier, that a tremendous amount of impetus for the Zionist movement wasn't specifically Jewish. It happened to dovetail with a stream of Christian evangelism—that's probably the right way to think about it—that viewed the emergence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as part of the fulfillment of biblical prophetic tradition.

You point out, as you did with the Rockefellers, for example, and with J.P. Morgan, that there were Zionist movements on the Christian front that at least developed in parallel with the Zionist movement on the Jewish front and in many places preceded it.

One of the things I found quite compelling about your book was the detailing out of the remarkable and strange support that the Zionist project found in the Christian West. And so you also point out that if it was up to the Jews worldwide and they had a democratic vote, let's say, with regards to Israeli policies, it's by no means obvious that the hawks on the Israeli side would be the most popular, let's say, put forward the most popular viewpoint in relationship to what Jews themselves believe.

There's no evidence at all that—what do you call it? The Vulcan Planet Theory? It's something like that—that the whole Zionist project is the conspiratorial consequence of imperialist Jews. And then you also make a parallel case, which I really also appreciate.

So first of all, the Zionist story is much more complex than "The Jews are trying to steal the Middle East." That's for sure. But then there's an ideological issue too, which is that on the radical left in particular, there has developed this anti-colonial narrative that's predicated, in part, on the claim that every human relationship is predicated on power and exploitation.

Then what seemed to happen was that that narrative, which accounts, let's say, for the colonial activities of the Westerners—although it's curiously absent in claims about, let's say, the Ottoman Empire—is that Israel is just written into history as another example of the same thing, which is convenient for people who can only have one historical idea but doesn't seem to me to be very much in accordance with the historical process that actually gave rise to the Israeli state.

And if we look at—you know, again, people—people hear all of this. People talking about how it's sort of Israel is a European colonial venture in the Middle East; it's a white occupation of a brown country, so to speak. And, you know, certainly, the Zionists—Herzl and his Zionist movement were strong among European Jews, but the majority, the largest groups in Israel today are not European; they're Middle Eastern Jews. Many of them were actually driven out of their homes in the Arab world in retaliation for what happened to the Palestinians, although these Jews who'd lived in Iraq for thousands of years or their ancestors in Egypt and so on had nothing to do with either the Zionist movement or the war in Palestine.

They were driven from their homes as refugees and came to Israel. And these people sort of get overlooked in the discussion of, and there were about as many Jewish refugees from the Arab world, more or less—and people obviously argue about all these numbers, and I'm not the great arbiter of everything here—but comparable to the number of Palestinians who either fled or were driven out of Israel in the time of that war.

So it’s—and these Jews who were the supporters, by the way—that’s the core of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s support, not the European Jews but the Middle Eastern Jews and the Russian Jews who have a different story.

But these Jews feel no guilt about the Palestinians, right? A refugee—I’m a refugee, but where’s the global sympathy for me? Where the Jewish refugee would say, “Where is the United Nations with education for my child and free medical? What have I ever gotten? I’m called a colonizer, right? A European colonizer.”

Right, yeah, exactly. And then, on the other hand, I was visiting Auschwitz some years ago, and I saw a group of teenagers following a Star of David flag. So I went to see what was going on. They were Jewish teenagers visiting Poland because they were actually descended from Polish Jews, and they were coming back to see, you know, where their ancestors had been. I said, "Well, how’s the trip been going?" They said, "Well, it’s not been so good."

I said, "What do you mean?" They said, "Well, you know, we went to visit the memorial in the Warsaw Ghetto, you know, the Jewish resistance against the Nazis, and a crowd of people formed there, and they were yelling, 'Jews go home!' Oh my God!"

But you know, they go to Palestine and it’s ju—people will say, "Jews go home to Poland; Poland, Jews go home to Palestine! People have to have a home." It definitely seems, what would you call it, bordering on malevolent to regard the Jews who escaped from European persecution into Israel as European colonizers.

I mean, you can say what you want about the British and the hand they played in establishing Israel, and you can make the case for the Palestinians that the U.N. didn't have the right to do what it did, and there's some credibility to that argument.

But to regard European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, for example, or Poland as European colonizers—I mean, Jesus talk about pandering in both directions at the same time!

Well, you know, it's also true—and this is one of the things that in Ark of the Covenant just sort of that I learned the most about and surprised me the most—it turns out that Stalin had a lot more to do with the Jewish victory in the war of independence and the nakba—the exile of the Palestinians—than either the British or the Americans.

The British actually sided with the Arabs in the Israeli War of Independence, and they armed the Arabs, and the Arab forces that were the most successful were the British Legion of British-trained, British-led, British-equipped soldiers in the Jordanian Army.

You know, the reasons that the West Bank was held by the Arabs until the 1967 war. And on the other hand, the Americans—while we said all kinds of nice things about the Israelis, we put on an arms embargo that meant that the desperate Israelis—and for much of the war, they were losing the war, and they were being besieged in Jerusalem. They couldn’t buy weapons from the United States! Forget about American aid to Israel; they couldn’t even buy with cash money. We put an arms embargo on them.

Stalin ended up selling the—through Czechoslovakia—where the Czech arms factory, the Skoda arms factory, had been making weapons for the Germans, and when the Germans surrendered, they had all these surplus weapons in the factory to help the Communists take control of Czechoslovakia.

Stalin allowed the Czech government to sell these weapons, these Nazi surplus weapons, to the Jews and smuggled them into British-controlled Palestine. It was those weapons that allowed the Jews to turn the tide in the war.

So, you know, to call this an act of Western colonialism—it was, if any, you know, call it an act of Soviet colonialism. The reason that Stalin did it, okay, was that he believed correctly that the emergence of a Zionist state in Palestine would so disrupt the British relations with the Arabs that it would dramatically weaken the power of Britain and the power of the British Empire in the Middle East.

He also thought, rightly, that it would help drive a wedge between the U.S. and Britain. So the whole story of, you know, the story that in people's minds—this is the West imposing something of its grand imperialist capitalist colonial project. It just doesn't match the historical record.

And, of course, in those days, Israel was a left-wing cause, right?

Right, right.

The Democratic Socialists of America, who are now extremely anti-Israel— for them, in the 1950s, Israel was proof that socialism worked! Right?

Whereas Israel's policies were—you saw that with the glorification of the kibbutzim!

Yes, exactly. And Israel had a planned economy, and the labor unions were incredibly powerful. Israel was far more left-wing in its economic policy than any of the even Social Democratic countries in Europe.

So when people said, "Oh, under socialism there's no freedom," the Democratic Socialists of America said, “No, Israel shows you’re wrong!”

Do you think that part of the reason that the left has switched its position, let's say, in relationship to Israel is because Netanyahu went to war, so to speak, against a lot of these socialist predispositions and rekindled the Israeli economy towards something much more approximating a free-market capitalist state?

Yeah, it was a combination of several things, and this was a factor that, in the 70s, Israel goes from being a poster child of socialism to being a poster child of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Those were the, you know, they began to introduce those economic reforms which have helped create, in particular, the incredibly dynamic tech sector that now gives Israel allies all over the world.

And we’ll come to the Abraham Accords in a minute because this is obviously a major factor.

Yeah, well, Netanyahu's claim is that he worked very hard to make Israel a formidable military power, but also worked very hard to make Israel a formidable capitalist enterprise.

It was the combination of those two things that enticed or forced, let's say, the Arab states that did sign the Abraham Accords to go along. They wanted Israel as an ally against Iran, and so—and Israel was powerful militarily. It showed its prowess in that regard. But also, because the Israeli economy had been freed from the strictures of an idiotic centrally planned socialism, it had become an industrial and technological powerhouse rivaled perhaps now only by Silicon Valley.

That also made the Israelis very attractive as training partners to the Arab states that were interested in modernizing their economies. So that’s Netanyahu's pitch. What do you think of it?

Well, I think, look, I think claims—fundamentally this is correct—that Israel, thanks to its economic reforms but also thanks to some intelligent state, it isn't let's say fair, but, you know, the state has been very much involved in promoting its tech sector, but it has done essentially under capitalist principles, and it’s worked brilliantly.

And at this, and that then the tech investments helped reinforce the economy overall, but also increase military capability. And this, by the way, is a little bit worrying globally. In the old days, when you spent money on defense, it would weaken your civilian economy. Instead of building a school bus, you would build a tank.

But increasingly today, because so much defense capability is linked to I.T., advanced information processing, and all kinds of stuff, a lot of that technology is dual use. But also, firms that are excellent in military planning and military investment are extremely powerful economically.

So in fact, in large defense budgets tend to promote economic growth rather than restrict it, and that change, I think, is propelling the world in a dangerous direction towards more armed races.

That’s something to be genuine about.

Is it is it propelling the world to more, you know, pseudo-fascist collusion between large enterprises at the pinnacle of the state?

Well, you know, it's—hopefully, again, this is going to be one of the tests of the 21st century. It's clear that information and state power are very closely aligned.

In some ways, information is becoming the currency of power. You certainly—if you're the United States, you don't want TikTok or Huawei to have access to all the data about your population, and of course, vice versa, if you're China.

So, one of the kinds of fantasies maybe we had in the 1990s was that the tech revolution would make national borders obsolete and create a single global commons. It doesn't look to me right now as if that's how things are working.

The tech revolution may in fact be recreating blocks and strong national entities.

Yeah, well, I think the idea of a centralized global control elite and a massive citizenry at their beck and call is the Tower of Babel model. Yes! You see this in A.I. systems as well.

For an A.I. system to process information about the world properly, it has to have a very differentiated hierarchy of distributed computation. There can't just be a centralized—what would you say—algorithmic system operating on the basis of a few algorithmic principles and then an undifferentiated mass of activity.

The proper model for governance has to be something like, I think, something like the Catholic principle of subsidiarity where you have sovereignty inherent in various strata of the hierarchical system and that the hierarchy is quite deep and dense and differentiated.

So the problem with the globalist view is that there's this notion that you can have a centralized cabal that can make relatively simple centralized decisions, and all the power that should be distributed in all these subsidiary organizations can be accrued to the central authority.

That just can't work, and so there's going to be a place for something like sovereign nation-states because you want governance to operate as locally as you possibly can.

So you need countries, you need states, you need provinces, you need towns, you need municipalities, you need families. Every single one of those levels of organization has to be given their due in regard to political and economic