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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is one of the shows that we're doing a discussion of Victor's new book that's selling like hot cakes, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

So

very provocative title.

It's, as I said, selling well.

And we're going to look at the last episode,

the last episode, the last

chapter, which is the epilogue

and the conclusion to his book.

So stay with us, and we'll be back after these messages.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in

Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Amar Shabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.

It is called The Blade of Perseus, and it's got lots of good things on it.

His podcasts are archived there, his

American Greatness articles, and other interviews that he has either on podcasts or on

some of them are newscasts.

And he has a VDH ultra material for which you must subscribe $5 a month or $50 a year, and we'd love to have you join.

Well, Victor,

the book ends with the lessons that we've learned from the defeats and the annihilations of those cities.

And I was wondering if you could go ahead and talk to us about the lessons that were learned from that.

Well, one of the first ones is not just exclusive to these doomed civilizations that were erased, but to all powers that find themselves in a war, all players.

And that is,

if you feel that your survival hinges on allies, then the allies have made that same calculation.

And if they feel that you're going to lose,

in a cost-to-benefit analysis,

they're not likely to help you.

There's very few Winston Churchills.

In other words, Britain was the only one of six major belligerents in World War II that went to war on the principle of Poland's territorial integrity.

Every other combatant either attacked somebody to start a war or was attacked.

The Soviet Union went to war when it was attacked by Germany.

We went to war when we were attacked by Japan.

Italy went to war to attack France, and so did Germany in going into Poland.

So you don't find a Briton very often.

And so that was one thing in the case of Carthage and Thebes and Constantinople.

The Spartans are coming, the Spartans are coming, They're marching up from the Peloponnese and the Spartans.

Just how many men does Alexander the Great have outside Thebes?

30,000, huh?

Didn't he win the Battle of Chaeronea just

two and a half years earlier?

Sia wouldn't want to be.

We're going back home.

And isn't the Macedonians coming?

Aren't they going to have a third, first, second, third, fourth

Macedonian war?

Carthage doesn't seem like it's going to make it.

I don't think we want to take on the Romans by ourselves.

And the Genovese, the Venetians,

they're going to come up the Dordanelles and come to the rear of Metnet, and then they'll be lead the siege.

No, they see how many men he has, 200,000, and you have 50,000.

And they were much more likely to cut a deal with them once they take the city, which they did.

There's not very many people like Giustiani, the brave Genovese mercenary who did help.

And of course the Aztecs said, well, we have the four million person empire, and we're all going to gang up on the Tlaxcalans.

Well, not when the Tlaxcalans start to win with Cortez.

So that's one thing.

And everybody, I think, understands that.

The other thing is you have no,

there's no margin of error for any interior dispute, interior dispute.

The Thebes were fighting.

There were radicals that came from Athens, and they were the ones that attacked the Macedonian garrison.

People were angry.

They didn't know whether to give them up or not.

The case of Carthage,

my gosh,

they rounded up the Senate and tried to stone them when they made the initial negotiations.

And then Hasdrabal,

not related to Hannibal's father, but he was hated, loved, hated, and

he killed, he murdered murdered his opponents.

In fact, he was the only one really to survive the city.

He sold them out.

In the case of

the megadukes, there was always this rumor that the megadukes and Constantine were feuding and fighting all the time.

And of course,

Montezuma was replaced by his brother, and then, etc., etc.

And there was always a question of whether the Spanish or the Aztecs killed them.

Don't look, number three, don't look at your past as an indicator of your current efficacy.

So Thebes said, We're the seven-gated Thebes of Myth, Oedipus, Antigone.

We're the Thebes of Epaminonis, the Liberator.

Scipio,

when Scipio was outside the walls, the Carthaginians said, We fought them in the First and Second Punic War.

They no one has ever in history breached

the broad walls of Carthage except for the later Theodocin walls.

They were the biggest walls in antiquity.

And of course, the Theodocin walls had never been breached.

So people in

Constantinople said, well, yes, we're not like we were under Justinian.

Of course, we're not the city of Constantine.

It's been 1,100 years.

What do you expect?

But nobody can go over this tripartite wall.

It's just impossible.

And they don't take a realistic, and same thing with Lake Texkako.

Nobody's ever attacked Tenochtitlan itself.

There's too many natural barriers on the lake, locks, causeways that we can prevent you.

They don't take a realistic appraisal where they are.

They only look at themselves in the past.

Sort of like Americans say, we can win Vietnam, we can win Afghanistan.

After all, we stormed the beach at Normandy.

Well, no, we didn't storm the beach at Normandy.

Our grandfather stormed the beach.

That's a big difference.

And the people who were arming the United States, like Henry Ford and Henry Kaiser, and

Mr.

Knudson, Robert Knudson, I guess his first name, the GEM,

they were a little different caliber than the CEOs of today's arms companies.

So

that's a depressing lesson that

people tend to, in a reactionary fashion, think they are as strong as they always were when they're not.

Yeah, can I interrupt you just for one second?

On the Aztecs,

it seems to me they wouldn't have been able to have a fair appraisal of their enemy.

When they saw Cortez and his, you know, 1,500 or whatever he had, somewhere around that, with their 100,000 military, they probably thought, you know, we've got some leeway here because, but they wouldn't have been able to appraise the technological skill, the military prowess, et cetera, of Cortez.

I think they could have very easily found out that they had let somebody into their city that had

no one had ever done that before.

They had never invited, I know that they would thought they maybe, I don't think they were gods, they don't think they thought they were gods, but letting them in the city was a colossal error.

And then when they discovered, they just thought they were Aztecs, we're Aztecs, we can slaughter them.

So they didn't, you know, they didn't really, they didn't change their tactics.

They didn't say, well, we can take captives, but you can't take captives with these people.

They're covered with steel.

So we better kill them.

And they never evolved.

Another thing that they all seem to do is they've all had some negotiations with their eventual destroyers, and they don't seem to understand that the rules of the game have changed.

The Thebans had dealt with the Macedonians, and they thought, well, we dealt with Philip.

We fought Philip at Chaeronea.

He didn't wipe us out.

And this guy, Alexander, he might not even be king.

We just hear rumors that he's got all these half-brothers and siblings and claimants.

And even if he is going to come down here, we can deal with him.

We can negotiate with him.

And people in Carthage said, well, in the first and second Punic War, they didn't destroy the city.

We dealt with the adopted grandfather of Scipio Aemilianus, Scipio Africanus.

So we know what the parameters are.

And Constantine said, we dealt with Mehmet's father.

In fact, he beseeched us.

He failed.

We understand that we're very valuable because we're a window on the Western for their technology and imports.

And the Aztecs said, Well, we've been, we routed them, we got them up at the Nochatriste, we got rid of them.

We won.

So there's this idea that because you have been able to deal with them in a non-existential way, that that's going to continue.

In fact, the enemy evolves in a change and response cycle.

You know what's weird, though?

Once they destroy the city,

the so-called leaders or intellectuals, they always cry

crocodile tears.

Oh, I'm Cortez.

I really didn't want to do it, Charles V.

When I write to you, I just express my

lamentations.

And Scipio, oh, I don't want to do this.

We talked about that before.

This is like Troy.

Why did we do this?

And Alexander, of course, saying, there was no reason to destroy Thebes.

I wish I hadn't have done it.

And of course,

Mehmet saying, oh, what a beautiful city we destroyed.

Don't believe them.

They have pretenses of morality or intellectual acumen or something.

One thing, finally, all of these things,

what happens is once these targeted

cities or states realize finally, too late, 11th hour, that they're going to be annihilated, they go into a furious response and they don't realize that

the more brutal they become, the more they ensure there's going to be no mercy.

So the Thebans begin to kill Macedonian garrisons.

And

the Carthaginians take Roman soldiers up on the walls and they torture them, they cut their limbs off and they throw them down at the Romans.

And

when Mehmet attacks or kills Italians outside the walls, they line up the same number of Turks and slit their throats and throw their bodies down onto the Turks.

And

when the Aztecs realize they're in real trouble, they make a big spectacle out of sacrificing 300, 400 or 500 Spanish.

They make sure that everybody can see it.

It's at the top of the city.

And it's a huge crowd.

And this only incites the Spanish and the

Romans and the Macedonians and the Ottomans even more to wipe them out.

It becomes a tit-for-tat, and there's no going back.

And

so

it's pretty clear.

I mentioned other

extinctions in passing,

the extinction of the island of Milos or Scione, the city of Skione, and I talk about gradations.

You know, Prussia, there's no Prussia, but there are Prussians today, or there's Prussian culture maybe,

and it's incorporated and embedded deeply within Germany.

Still, it didn't just die out,

to take one example.

So, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more.

I think there's a couple more things that you've identified as lessons that should be learned.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, and we are looking at the epilogue to his book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

And so, you had a few more things, Victor, and

we'll just go with that.

And then I have some questions on the epilogue.

Well, you know, a lot of people have asked me what qualifies as erasure or extinction or utter destruction, because it's like atoms.

You destroy something, but there's always the atoms.

You can atomatize, and then they keep getting smaller and smaller.

And so is Japan destroyed because

we bombed it?

No.

But what's different about this is

that once their territory is overrun and their capital city is leveled to the ground, and every single person in it is either killed or enslaved or flees,

then the language, the culture, the religion starts to disappear.

So yes, there's Hellenic culture, but the Botian, Theban version of it is gone.

They're going to found another.

These sites are very strategically located, so the victors usually resurrect a city near or on top of it, but it's not the same city.

Macedonian Thebes has no connection with classical Thebes of a millennium.

And the same thing is true of Constantinople.

But there is no more Byzantine entity in Asia Minor after the fall of Constantinople.

There are Greeks who flee to the hills and they're dispersed, they intermarry.

I think I mentioned in the book that Erdogan wanted to prove that Asia Minor, Turkey, had been there forever and it was Turkey, so he hired

23andMe or whatever these genetic testing are, and they tested tested and they found out there was a lot more Greek blood among Turks than there were Turks in many places.

Wow.

But that doesn't mean that the people that they tested speak Greek and

worship as an Orthodox Christian.

That's gone in Asia Minor for all practical purposes.

There is no idea anymore that Europe is in Asia Minor.

It's gone.

And that was one of the bastions

of

Western civilization.

Western civilization started in Asia Minor, along the coast of Ionia, the pre-Socratic philosophers, etc., Greek city-states of Miletus, etc.

So

they're gone.

The Nahutu language, as I said when we talked about Tenochtitlan, is spoken sporadically, or remnants of it are, but there is no Aztec religion left.

There is no language.

Mexico is a very different culture.

It's a

slow process of osmosis between various indigenous peoples, well beyond the Aztecs and the Spanish.

And

you look in,

it's just very rare in history to be able to wipe out an entire civilization or to want to do that.

I look at other places like the Volga German culture, Stalin pretty much destroyed

during World War II.

He moved them out of the Volga River basin and they're gone.

And

there is no more Armenian culture in Nagorno today.

They were ethnically.

But there is an Armenian culture.

So

you have to be.

There are variations of this definition of erasure, but it's very rare.

Yeah.

Why don't we see annihilation like this in the modern era?

Well,

I think there's three or four reasons.

I think we will see it, but there's three or four reasons that have prevented it from happening very frequently one is the moral sensibility that in the modern 20th century I don't think human nature has changed one bit as we saw on October 7th in Gaza and Israel but

at least there's public opinion and there's all these liberal democracies and what goes on in

Darfur

or what happened in Biafra.

These efforts are what we saw in Rwanda.

And those were genocides.

But there were foreign efforts to stop it or to feed or to help.

That's one thing.

And then with nuclear weapons, it makes it very difficult for one side just to wipe out the other.

If we're going to see a nuclear exchange, I have a feeling that it's going to be in two places, Pakistan and India, and it will probably be Pakistan pre-empting.

India has, I don't know, 700 or 800 nuclear weapons.

Pakistan has like 180.

Israel probably has 200, and Iran has probably, if it does have them yet, three to five.

But there's where we're going to see something.

And this Rothson Johnny said, and I mentioned him in the epilogue, that he likes the idea that half the world's Jews are in Israel.

He said that 20 years ago as president of Iran because of that, it's what he reportedly said is a one-bomb state.

And Iran periodically issues these videos where it shows all of Israel blowing up.

Yeah, so he sounds like I would, what I was thinking is that if you got nuclear weapons, then you could more likely see an annihilation of the machine.

Let me put it this way.

What we saw from October 7th to now, on July 2nd,

when we're recording this, on the campuses, and students from the Middle East shouting, go back to Poland or go back to Germany, mean go back to the ovens.

Does anybody really think that if Iran sent five,

I don't know,

200 kiloton bombs and destroyed Israel off the map,

that there would be a moral outrage in the world, given what we've seen?

I don't.

There's only one reason Israel is not destroyed, and that's Israel's got nuclear weapons, and it has deterrence.

That's why it's absolutely critical.

that Israel destroys, utterly annihilates.

When I see an Israeli political figure or an opponent, Netanyahu or general say,

you're just pulling wool over your eyes.

You can't destroy Hamas.

Well, there's no such thing as national socialism right now.

And you can destroy radical Islamic Hamas in the confines of Gaza if you hunt them down and kill them.

And then you go after their headquarters or their apparatus in gutter and continue with these targeted assassinations.

You can stop it.

And they're going to have to do that, or people are going to do it again and again, and they're going to escalate.

And then you have to deal with Hezbollah, and don't count on the United States, at least not this administration.

And so those are reasons why we don't see it too often.

And

so there's world public opinion.

Everybody, you get on a cell phone, call somebody, and text anywhere in the world.

There's nuclear weapons.

But that should not

fool us.

And then this epilogue, I go through a lot of very scary things.

Mr.

Erdeon threatening to wipe out Athens, Greece, threatening threatening to wipe out Cyprus, threatening to wipe out the Kurds, threatening, he said, we'll use a 19th century solution as our grandfathers did with the Armenians.

Seven or eight years ago during the tensions over Isilik Air Force Base during the Turkish coup, he made it kind of, he hinted that those

large, dirty Cold War bombs, there's about 50 nuclear weapons that we have there, don't really belong to us.

They have now been there so long they're Turkish.

He's a very dangerous character.

So is Kim Jong-un,

who has been launching missiles again toward Japan and South Korea.

So is the Iranian theocracy that now is empowered with $100 billion of oil revenue that it didn't have three years ago.

They've got a drone factory.

So is Russia.

Everybody just seems to think that

they're going to send missiles into Russia against all the proxy rules of World War II, that you say you don't attack the homeland of your rival in a proxy war.

And then all of a sudden, as I said earlier, we have Russian ships in the Caribbean reminding the United States that, hey, this is what Khrushchev did.

He came into the Caribbean and he was going to put missiles and point at you, and we're here right now.

Maybe we can do that because you're doing that to us.

And this can escalate.

It's very dangerous.

I don't know what we would do if they went into Taiwan, what we could do.

But the only thing that would prevent them to back down is that the United States has 6,500 nuclear weapons.

China's probably got about 1,500.

But within six to seven years, we'll have as many as we do.

They're billing them like a fantastic rate.

And that's why Donald Trump should be listened to when he says he wants a serious missile defense over the United States and secure war.

So are you suggesting then to us, the listeners and me,

that

we should be careful in assuming that there is some global consensus, that one would never do that because there are powers out there that are very capable of changing the military calculus very quickly?

Yes, I think that we think human nature improves with education and money, and it doesn't.

And I've seen enough in my 70 years to know that nobody lifted a finger for Rwanda or Darfur.

And if Iran gets into an existential fight with Israel, no one will help Israel.

No one will help Israel.

It's just a fact.

And if Russia threatens Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon, I don't think Europe, France, and Britain and the NATO deterrent will

say that Ukraine is under our nuclear umbrella.

I just don't think it will.

Maybe Australia, maybe Japan, maybe South Korea, but not.

Maybe even Taiwan.

I don't know, but not Ukraine.

Yeah.

Well, back to your

epilogue.

One more question is,

were these defeats that we looked at in the book fated,

or could things have turned out differently for the

defeated?

It's very rare because usually it's very hard to erase a society and a civilization.

So let's take them one by one.

When the Thebans rebelled against the Macedonians, all Alexander said was, release the garrison, our Macedonian overseers, and give up the revolutionaries that were spreading and forming

revolt.

They came from Athens, but they were Theban exiles.

Just give them over to us, and that's it.

We'll leave.

Just And they said, no, we want to be free, free city-states.

They had a chance.

Then they fought ferociously, but of course

they only had 10,000 soldiers against 30,000 professional killers.

In the case of Carthage,

they fought, that siege lasted three years, and the first four commanders, the consular and three cases, were completely,

completely incompetent.

And it just happened that this late legate, Scipio,

who was not by, he was the adopted grandson.

He was from the

very different

Aemilianus Paulus, a very different Roman family, but he wanted the name Scipio.

He was a legate and he was kind of a fireman the first two years for the incompetence people.

He goes back to Rome and he says, I've been there two years.

I want to run.

for office.

They said, you're too young to be consul, but you're going to be consul.

And we're going to make you consul, and you're going to go back there and use all your skill and brilliance and win the war.

So he's got a great speech when he comes back and says, You guys are a bunch of losers.

You're lazy.

All of the women, all of the traffickers, all of the middlemen, get out of our camp.

People are going to get up early with the sun.

They're going to go to bed at sunrise, and we are going to take this city.

And I don't know if they could have done it without him.

So it was possible.

The Theodician Walls, this was what's sad about Constantinople.

It was the saddest to write about, about, as I've noted.

They held out.

They arrived on April 1st of 1453, the Ottomans, and the Sultan came there on April 6th.

That's when they started the bombardment of the walls.

They did not take this until May 29th, Tuesday.

Okay, so for two months they held out.

On the night of the final assault, the Grand Vizier said to Mehmet, you're only 21, and you have lost somewhere between 50 and 70,000 men.

And they only have 7,000 or 8,000 actual combatants, and they're still there.

These are the toughest people in the world, the Genovese and the Imperial Guard around Constantine and the Venetians.

And we can't even blockade them.

They have come in and broken through our blockade.

And the longer we're here, it's getting warm.

And we're going to get disease, and we've got to import food, and we're in a plain, it's kind of marshy, and

one day three or four hundred galleys are going to come up from Venice, and we're going to be in big trouble.

So let's just pull out.

And there was no need to take the city in the first place, because we've taken most of their land, and they're dealing with us, and they gave us, and

then

the head of the sanissaries and the militants said, no, no.

This is what we're going to do.

We'll give us one last chance.

We'll take all the Turkish peasants that are cannon-fired.

We'll just swarm them against the wall.

They'll all get killed.

They won't even get over the outer wall.

They'll fill up the moat.

And then we're going to get all the Christian subjects,

mostly from the Balkans, Serbians, etc., that are impressed into the Turkish army, Ottoman army.

And then they're going to come.

And they're not going to be able to take the walls either.

But what they are going to do after six or seven hours, these people are going to be out of shot, crossbows,

creek fire, oil, etc., and they're going to be exhausted.

And then we're going to send in the Janissaries, 10,000 crack troops, 6 to 10,000.

And they did.

And even that didn't work.

It was not until the

Genovese

contingent that was spearheading under Giostiani, who was spearheading the whole defense, he got shot.

And he panicked.

He said, take me out to the ships.

I'm dying.

He did die

within about a week.

And they panicked.

And they left a big gap in the wall.

And the Janissaries went in and people panicked.

Even then, they could have stopped it because the way that the theodes and walls were structured, the larger, higher, thicker wall was the inner wall.

And there were protocols that when you lost the outer wall, you rushed in formation through the gates into the inner wall and closed them.

But what happened is people were so scared they wanted to go protect their kids or something, they thought all was lost.

They just opened the gates to the inner wall and then they fled and they went right behind them.

If they had closed the walls and gone back up on the inner walls, they could have probably held out.

So, yes.

And Tenochtitlan, after the Nochatriste,

there was an attempt to kill Cortez by his own men.

They said, what are you doing?

We're all wounded.

We're sick.

They've killed 500 of us.

And we're down to about 1,000 men.

And you're wanted by the Spanish government in Cuba, and there's no hope.

And all of our allies except the Tlax Calins are left.

And it was one man,

indomitable.

And by sheer force of character, I don't want to say character, but strength and rhetoric and courage, he just said,

we can win.

We know how to beat these people.

And he did.

Yeah.

So do you think that a lot of it hinged on the particular individual?

So in other words, if Cortez hadn't been who he was or Metme II hadn't been who he was or Alexander the Great or Scipio, that

it maybe they would have lasted longer at least or

things wouldn't have taken, turned as they did.

Well look at the Incas.

The Incas in some ways were not as impressive as the Aztecs.

They lasted 30, 40 years against, and they only fell because of Pizarro, who was Cortez-like.

Ultimately, all of what is now Latin America was going to have a Spanish overlord control it because of technology and population.

Got to remember, Europe at this time was vastly overpopulated.

and just and was starving in places.

Places like Ireland and Scotland and Iberia, and these people just

they had nothing to lose.

And so

they had this population wave and they had the technology and they had the sea craft to get there and the enemy didn't.

And so it was and they were a more dynamic civilization in the sense that Everybody says, well, yes, the Aztecs were very sophisticated and they did things the the Spanish yes, that's true in some areas, but they didn't have the wheel.

They didn't even know what the wheel was.

The only time they had wheels was little toys.

And people said, well, they didn't have the wheel because they didn't have mammals to pull it.

Maybe so, but the Chinese didn't, in some provinces, they had rickshaw.

But

anyway.

Well, look, Victor, let's go to a break and then come back.

And I have a couple, or at least one question to ask you on that.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

We're talking about Victor's new book that's been selling very well, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

And this is the last episode on this.

So

let me just ask you then about Constantinople.

Do you think that it was inevitable as the Byzantine Empire was slowly being taken over by

Islamic armies and that there wasn't really much land left that was Byzantine,

part of the Byzantine so-called empire at that point.

So there wasn't really, there was just this Constantinople, and it was inevitable that it was going to eventually fall, but it didn't have to fall at that time.

That's not quite true.

There was something called the Morea, and that was pretty much all of the Peloponnese of modern Greece, and that was

run by, Constantine had been the Duke of Morea, and his two brothers controlled it.

So they controlled a Greek-speaking southern half of Greece as part of the Byzantine Empire, with its capital at the beautiful city of Mistras, which is down in the lower Peloponnese.

And then there were protectorates, small enclaves along the shores of the Black Sea.

And

there were some villages along the Dardanelle of the Hellas Point, all the way out to the Aegean.

And the question is,

why

had they lost?

They were very vibrant from the founding in 335.

They came to fruition, and their greatest apex was under Justinian in the 520s, 30s, and 40s.

And yet, they had Renaissance after renaissance after setback.

What made them decline?

There were three things.

One was the Fourth Crusade, where the Franks and the Venetians detoured.

They were going to the Holy Land, and they were

got into a

dynastic fight over the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire.

And they sacked...

They didn't go through the Theodesian walls, but they went into the sea wall and they slaughtered everybody they got their hands on.

The Franks did, and then they took it over for 60 years.

And when they quit, places like Crete,

Rhodes,

Noplion,

Cyprus were Venetian for the next 200 years.

Cyprus until they fell until the Turks.

in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries.

So that really weakened them.

And then they had two terrible bubonic plagues.

The first was under Justinian, they recovered.

The second was in the 13th century, and they didn't recover.

It wiped out 500,000 people.

And that was because they were situated

on the north side.

They had the Bosphorus coming, and that meant all of the Asian trade came through the Black Sea

through the Bosphorus into Constantinople.

And then on the

southwestern side, they had the Hellespont, that long strait.

And in that case, and then they had

all of the main Roman highways built all the way through the Holy all the way down through Turkey, what's modern day Turkey, into Gaza and Antioch, into the Holy Land.

So this was the nexus.

That's why it was so wealthy.

But it also meant that if there was a plague in Egypt, it came by land very quickly.

If there was a plague in Asia or southern Russia, it came very quickly.

If there was a plague in Europe, it came right up to the,

and that hurt them.

And so, but still,

they did something right that the Western Empire.

Remember, the Western Empire officially fell in 476.

They lasted a thousand years longer.

And that has baffled Roman historians.

How did that happen?

And it had to do something with the natural defenses of Constantinople compared to Rome.

It had something to do with the fiercest of the barbarian tribes were on the Danube and the Rhine and not way over in Eastern Europe.

It had something to do that Islam really didn't get going until the 7th, 8th century.

It also had something to do with the Hellenism and Orthodox Christianity, and the lack, and there was not a schism, there were not these

divisions.

And it was a monolithic state.

And it was very well organized.

The Justinian Law Code, for example.

And it brought in all of the great

technology and science of the Roman Empire.

When it started to fall, it fled to Constantinople.

So,

I mean, Hagia Sophia was built in the 430s.

It's still there.

It was the largest cathedral in Christendom until the 17th century in Seville.

And so

it had some ingredients at the Western Empire.

Then the quirk of history is that as it started to ossify

between,

and Rome was gone, in Italy, in Spain, in Gaul, in Belgium, etc.

What happened was in the Dark Ages and then the Middle Ages, it started to be dynamically incorporating barbarians.

Huns, Viscoths, Osgoths, Vandals,

etc.

And by the time of the 15th century,

it had reversed course.

The Western

half of Christianity was more dynamic than the East.

It had ossified.

And

the Renaissance did not really take place in Constantinople to the same degree that it did in Florence or Venice, for example.

So

the East rescued parts of the West

from 470 to almost 600, and then the East called on the West a thousand years later to help it, even though the East had been uninterrupted and the West had gone through a whole variety of iterations.

All right.

So last, I'm wondering

what,

well, let me read something from your book toward the end.

You write, in our unstable, contemporary, globalized world, we should keep in mind all these considerations of what on rare occasions allows the unthinkable to become reality, meaning the unthinkable to the states that are defeated finally becomes a reality that they are the defeated.

And I was wondering if you had some observations on what

these case studies tell the modern globalized world.

What can we learn from that?

Anything is possible.

If all you listeners just take a deep breath, and I say, I am, just say that Joe Biden has just been elected,

and everybody's relieved.

It's old Joe Biden from Scranton.

He's the great uniter.

The Trump January 6th coup, quote unquote, is over with.

And Victor, Mr.

Nostradama, says, I want to warn you you about this man.

I want to warn you about

your military.

Nine months from now,

Joe Biden is going to collapse the entire

command and presence in Afghanistan.

He is going to pull out in a matter of hours, days and hours.

He is going to leave all of his NATO allies.

He's going to leave from 50 to 70 billion dollars of sophisticated weapons in the hands of terrorists.

He is going to leave a billion-dollar embassy, a $350 million retrofitted

Air Force base at Bagram, one of the most opportune bases in Central Asia.

And he's going to leave thousands of loyal Afghans to be killed.

And he's going to leave hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S.

contractors there.

Do you believe anybody would believe that?

No.

They say that's impossible.

No, he wouldn't do it.

You couldn't do that.

No American president victor would leave $50 to $70 billion in the hands of terrorists.

So

anything can happen at any time.

And people have to be aware of that.

The message again and again is Vegetas' famous, if you want peace, prepare for war.

If you want war, prepare for peace.

And we are not deterring our enemies.

Our defense budget is only 3%.

And so much of our defense budget is devoted to retirement and health and DEI and indoctrination and very expensive carriers and $200 million jets.

We should be, our military should be 100,000 soldiers bigger.

It should have no ideology at all.

It should be ecumenical.

And we should be buying a million cheap drones.

We should have every infantry battalion adept at launching 100,000 drones self-contained, like kind of like a Napoleon, a Napoleon battalion.

And we should have a whole fleet of drains.

If you're going to keep a carrier, it should just be equipped with 5,000 maritime drones.

And they should just be circling all around the carrier.

And at any moment, they can attack anybody who gets near it.

We're not doing that.

And so I'm very worried about it.

I think the United States is weaker and more exposed and more vulnerable militarily than it has been since right after the Vietnam War.

Yeah,

left administrations seem to assume that they can appeal to the better natures of people that are their potential enemies.

But those people don't tend to reveal or show that their better natures are going to come out if they could get the upper hand.

That's what seems to strive.

That's the general rule of human nature in general, but particularly of totalitarian and dictatorial

nations, that any magnanimity is always considered weakness to be exploited and not to be reciprocated in kind.

That's how Putin thinks, that's how Qi thinks, that's how the theocracy thinks, that's how the Venezuelans think, that's how Erdogan thinks.

And we've got somebody in the White House and people like Blinken and Jake Sullivan who don't believe that.

They believe that when they go abroad, people say, wow, these guys were trained at the Ivy League.

Oh, wow, they're aristocrats.

Wow, this guy even speaks French.

And they're so, that's what they think they think.

And they don't think that.

I think, who are these guys?

What are they going to do?

When they talk to the Saudis, they say to them things like, okay, what do you want?

Well, we'd like you to pump more oil before the midterms.

And what are you going to do about Iran?

You just gave them $100 billion in oil relief, and they're flooding the world with drones, and they're allied with the Chinese now.

What are you going to do about them?

Well, this is something we're working on.

And we feel that Iran has legitimate aspir they don't have any legitimate aspiration.

You can't, the only thing they understand is force.

They sent missiles in here.

What are you going to do?

That's what they get.

That's what they hear all over the world.

And, you know, it's just the opposite with Trump.

goes in there and says, what do you want?

This is what we can do.

This is what we can't do.

And if you're our friend, there's no better friend.

If you're our enemy, there's no worse enemy.

And then everybody said, but he's so blunt.

He's so crude.

Does he support NATO?

I support NATO.

If you pay your own way,

and I'll force you to pay your own way.

I'll get out.

Oh, my God.

Trump said he's going to destroy NATO.

That's how they think.

And then they look back and they say,

well, who gave offensive weapons to Ukraine?

It wasn't Biden or Obama.

They froze them.

And who, when he came into office, froze all help to Ukraine?

That was Biden.

And who put sanctions on the Russians and got out of the missile deal?

That was Trump.

And who killed mercenary, Russian mercenaries?

Never happened.

Probably of the Wagner group in Syria, that was Trump.

But we don't think that way.

No, and then the people that are, you know, the left tends to think think that, or doesn't observe that under Trump there wasn't a lot of warring, and under Biden there is.

And

why is that, right?

There was not.

Russia did not leave its borders.

No.

They did under George W.

Bush when he was weak after the Iraq war.

They did under Obama.

They did under Biden.

He tried to make that point in the debate, not skillfully, because, as I said earlier about the debate,

after 10 minutes, Trump just looked at the audience.

I think he even said, why am I here?

Why is it this thing is, don't you see who I'm debating?

And he didn't, he kind of just kind of jogged through it at the end.

But he did say something to that effect that nobody invaded.

Russia did not invade anyone.

He's kept saying, my only request to get off topic of him would have been when he said this.

Gaza would have never happened if I were president.

Then tell us how.

What do you mean?

If If he had said they would have never, ever gone into Israel and butchered 1,200 if I was president.

And then he should have said, because there was no daylight between Israel and I, I was going to give them all the weapons.

I had emasculated Iran.

Iran had no money to give Hamas.

Iran had no money to give Hezbollah.

That's why they didn't go into Israel.

He just said that.

Yeah.

And I hope he does in the next debate.

So let's let you finish this

episode with your own words here at the end of the book about the defeated.

You write, in these rare cases, the targeted will also continue to quarrel and deny reality.

They will believe that doomed resistance may not be so impossible.

that the attackers will not consider extermination a necessary part of their victory, that allies and sukur

must be right over the horizon, that their defenses are

underestimated while their enemies' powers are exaggerated,

and that reason rules war.

And so they will hope that even their own defeat cannot possibly entail the end of everything.

And thank you for that wonderful book, Victor, and all of these discussions on it.

I'm sure the listeners are happy as well.

I think they'll like the book.

It's a little dense because it's a history book, but it has a very relevant epilogue.

And

I think one of the reasons that

it's been, of all the books I've written, it's been the longest on the New York Times is kind of a fluke that it came out right during the worry over the Gaza-Israeli war, the Ukraine war, and the threats to Taiwan.

Yeah.

And Kim Jong-un's reappearance, or resurgence, I should say.

Yeah.

Well, thanks everybody for this joining us.

Thank you, Victor.

Okay, thanks everybody for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.