Modern Japan and Saudi Arabia

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Hey there to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Welcome to the weekend edition where we look at things in a little more depth, usually, and or the historical aspects of things.

This week, we're going to look at Japan and a discussion of the historic some of the historical things in modern Japan,

and then we'll turn to the Saudi Arabian Peninsula.

But before that, I'd like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He can be found at his website, victorhanson.com.

That's victorhanson s-o-n.com and you can join to be a reader of the ultra material for five dollars a month or fifty dollars an annual subscription victor will come right back after a quick break for some messages and talk to you about japan and saudi arabia we'll be right back

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Welcome back.

Victor, before we go into our topic today, I'd like to ask you what's at the top of your mind because you're always fun with a few things that might be pressing since you're always on top of the news.

Do you have anything right now?

I do.

And

I wrote an article about labor shortages.

I mentioned all the reasons why, and we've talked about that with Jack and you.

And I was interested.

Also because of long COVID.

I'm on week 12.

I'm wiped out, but I'm upbeat.

It's going to defeat it.

So the next time you talk to me, Sammy, it's going to say

Victor decided to say no moss, just like

Duran, the fighter.

No, I should take that back.

He said no mosque when he gave up.

I mean, no moss.

He's winning.

I was going to just detour, if I could, on the news, because I heard a really disturbing story today from in the New York Times.

There was an interview with Miss Ms.

Collins and Brett Stevens, and they talked about the Democratic conundrum with Joe Biden, which is self-explanatory, given he's down in the Civic Pole to 29 points

approval rating.

But then there's the Kamala Harris who's in the low 30s.

And one can plead cognitive disability that explains his inability to speak.

And Kamala Harris, I don't know what she can do.

I said, I think on the air once, that she had a vocabulary of 500 neat words, but she just repeats herself.

But the point is, she turns off, not that she turns off me or you or our audience, she turns off her Democratic supporters who'd find her lightweight and not able to defeat the nefarious

Emmanuel Goldstein Donald Trump.

So they're discussing people, they were discussing, and there was an article out there talking about Pete Buddig.

And I thought, how strange is that?

Because any fair

empirical analysis would say they're going to get wiped out in the midterms in November, and Biden is at 29% because of the agenda.

No one agrees with them on inflation.

Nobody agrees with them on gas prices.

Nobody agrees with them on the border.

Nobody.

agrees with them on crime.

Nobody agrees with them on foreign policy.

Those are the issues that everybody

overwhelmingly polled to be the most important.

And it's not that they just don't agree with them.

They're destroying the country.

People cannot drive.

They can't find things on the shelf.

They can't afford shingles on the roof.

They can't afford new tires.

It's just so exorbitant.

And they don't believe that the inflation rate is 8.6.

They believe it's 10 or 20.

Or it is when they buy things.

We've used that term, the stuff of life.

and they're furious and they're angry.

And Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are forced multipliers of their disastrous agendas with their personalities and their disabilities.

Okay, so what in a sane world would be the solution to that?

If you don't want them, if you were a Democratic kingmaker or you're Mark Zuckerberg and you want to infuse another $419 million in your dark money to weigh the election or you're Jeffrey Katzenberg and, you know, Hollywood and you've got all the Hollywood Hollywood grandees.

Who do you bet on?

And they're talking about Pete Budigig.

Other than the fact he's gay,

what has he ever done?

He was mayor and a bad mayor of South Ben, Indiana.

That's it.

But more importantly, he was Department of Transportation Secretary.

So what has happened on his tenure, his watch?

Well,

the airline industry is in shambles.

The cancellations are at record levels.

The prices are climbing to be unaffordable.

When you get in a plane and you miss a connection, I can attest for that, attest to that on numerous occasions.

You're not going to find another flight.

They're going to be booked up.

So did he address that?

No, he did not address that.

How about

driving a car?

If you're paying $6.70, $6.80 in California for gas and higher on the coast, or you're paying $7,

which is my little town of Salmon, California, It's about $7 for diesel fuel.

Did he address that?

Did it go down?

No.

No.

In fact, anything he squeaked out has been that this is a necessary transition.

How about the Port of LA?

Maybe we could get some tampons and baby formula.

And you fly over Los Angeles and you see that cargo ships are stacked.

like they're on a shelf all the way out to the horizon.

He's been there a year and a half.

Did he do anything there?

Nope.

And the trains that survive to supply and enter and leave the port of Los Angeles is like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid bank robbery.

They're just, the doors are open and the

stuff that was inside it is littered all over the tracks.

Did he go out there?

Even Gavin Newsom may put on his little working man's outfit and strolled around for about 20 minutes for a photo.

Did he do that?

No.

So what has he done?

Well, he's lectured everybody how illiberal they are and how their interstate freeway system that Ike,

you know, modernized the country and allowed us to drive from one coast to the other was racist.

That's a really good time to bring that up right now to demagogue that issue when you people can't even drive.

And there's major thoroughfares in California, I-5, 101, 99 that are impassable due to traffic.

They're dangerous, are killing people every day.

And he says, well, you know, they're racist.

So we're going to do mass transit.

We have old Stonehenge mass transit bridges about 10 miles from here.

Not one foot of track laid in 10 years.

$15 billion spent.

So what I'm getting at is this, that he is the least likely person

to carry the Democratic banner and

correct this freefall because he has the same agendas.

He doesn't disagree with Joe Biden.

In fact, he's more left.

This is what's so strange that the hard left of a party, after brainwashing non-compost Mentes Joe Biden and forcing him to be a functionary, a vessel of their radical agenda.

And then when the radical agenda destroyed the country nearly and has alienated 70% of the country, they put their finger at Joe Biden and they say, you did it.

Well, he didn't do it enough, according to them.

And then they look at Kamala Harris and they said, you're not an articulate spokesman of the progressive cause.

If we just had some, and so they look at Pete Budig,

but he has no record of accomplishment.

He wants the agenda to even be further left.

It's alienated people.

And what does he talk about?

He talks about issues that poll respectively 6%,

3%,

4%.

And that triad is abortion.

And you ask the American people, what's the most important issue in your life right now?

About 5%, say abortion.

Gun controls, about 3 or 4%,

three or four percent

and uh climate change or radically restructuring economies about two or three percent so he will not address inflation or gas prices or crime or uh the lack of lack of deterrence foreign policy critical all those things he won't talk about because he has no answer because his answer is only uh poor fuel on the fire.

This shows you it's if you're a conservative and you're listening to this, you should be happy because it shows you that the Democratic Party, like Tallyran, have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

And they are going to press the pedal down further and further.

I hope they nominate Pete Buddhig.

I hope that he comes in.

And I don't know how they're going to get, this will be one of the interesting political questions of our lifetime.

How do you get rid of, if you're a big Democratic donor or you're Nancy Flossy on the way out, or Chuck Schumer, or you're AOC and you think on your way out.

How do you get rid of them?

And how do you get rid of Kamala Harris at the same time?

Not without being called, yeah, not without being called a racist and whatever, homophobe.

You couldn't.

Yeah, I don't know.

And how do these people get in?

So, I mean,

it's a hard call between the incompetent, empty-headed Gavin Newsom and Pete Buddy, but my gosh.

And then we, you know, it may happen.

He's in the Yosemite is burning up and Gavin is in Montana at a Tony ranch with his state paid security forces at a state that he had declared so homophobic that if any Californian went to a conference there on state business, they wouldn't be reimbursed.

Maybe they won't reimburse his security detail.

You know, maybe he can say, you know what?

I'm here, but this, I'm so unhappy and this is so homophobic that you people are not going to get paid for coming.

And so, I'll write you a check.

Or, yeah, I don't need you because I'm a He-Man Gavin Newsom in Montana.

But he sounds like the perfect candidate for Democratic presidential.

He's the Marie Antoinette.

He sure is.

Okay,

that was on my chest.

Yeah, great.

So, let's turn to Japan.

And I wanted to start with one of their writers, literary greats, Junichiro Tanazaki, and he wrote an essay called In Praise of Shadows.

And it's basically a challenge to Western enlightenment by the non-Western traditions in Japan and their general sense of beauty as well.

So it's a sort of intellectual argument.

It's very short.

It's just an essay.

So anybody who wants to read it, there's some beautiful translations.

Again, it's called In Praise of Shadows.

And it's interesting for even us Westerners because he is talking about

light and shadows as, you know, the light as how the West pursues truth through science and sort of overt methods.

And then shadows represent really sort of natural things that maybe are mysterious or require intuition and that sort of thing that are part of the Japanese tradition.

And at one point, he comes to tell us this.

He says, but what is the difference in this taste, right?

In my opinion, it is this.

We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are.

And so darkness causes us no discontent.

We resign ourselves to it as inevitable.

If light is scarce, then light is scarce.

We will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.

But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot.

From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light.

His quest for a brighter light never ceases.

He spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.

And with that quote, I was wondering, Victor, what are your reflections?

I didn't know you were were going to bring that up.

I ran across that

Tanni Zaka when I was writing my World War II book.

I think that was written

32, 33.

Yeah, it was right

in the turmoil and the period right after the destruction of democracy.

Yeah.

And this reassertion of sort of a bonsai

radical Zen Buddhist culture in Japan as its

nationalist religion, a nationalist

authoritarian.

And it was basically trying to square the circle of how you

preserve traditional Japanese culture at a time when you've sent a third of a million people over to Germany and France and Great Britain for 50 years by that time, started in 1880,

to learn everything from aeronautical to nautical engineering.

And you were modernizing rapidly the Japanese and industrializing and urbanizing the Japanese countryside.

How do you square that with haiku

and

traditional Japanese bonsai and painting and all of these traditional arts and sort of contrarian to modern progress culture?

And so it's pretty interesting, but

they

he has a family.

He squares a circle by 1938, 39.

To square that circle is a famous passage on the Japanese outhouse, which obviously is disconnected from the house and is out on its own and is a real outhouse as we used to know it.

And he talks about how wonderful it is to be out there without light in this outhouse.

So that's one of the famous passages.

I could disagree because I grew up on a farm whose last outhouse

was destroyed by me in 1985.

We had an outhouse on the north side, 120 acres on the north side of the road, and an outhouse on the

south side.

And I used to get bags of lime and throw it in there because it stunk so bad.

And then when you went in there, you never knew when our black widow or a wasp was going to come.

And in the summer, it was 110.

And, you know, it was just a bad deal.

It was unhealthy and there were flies.

So I was glad.

So we got so sick of it.

Finally, we built a modern bathroom.

Once we started packing our own fruit, we had workers here.

And I still have the modern bathroom.

I remodeled, I think, twice, but I don't like outhouses.

And

the problem when I looked at that book

is that they did reconcile it.

And you can see popular Hollywood World War II movies sort of picked it up: The Great Escape or Bridge on the River, excuse me, Bridge on the River Kawai, not the Great Escape, but Bridge on the River Kawai, when the commandant is somebody who's

militaristic militaristic and harsh and

has no problem with violence, but yet he's sensitive to poetry and art and things like that.

Almost every World War II movie about a prisoner of war camp, they try to, or letters from Ibo G.

McClines, with all of these movies now are trying to

go capture that disconnect: that how could a culture that was so refined culturally, artistically, literary, in literary fashion, poetical, also be so authoritarian and institutionalize the use of violence well before the Japanese military government.

Just as a sidelight, to remember that of the major six belligerents in World War II, in terms of the number of people lost, civilian and soldiers and the number of people killed, The Japanese military nation was the most lethal of any, more lethal than Germany.

They lost about three and a half million people, and they're responsible for probably killing over 15 million people.

Yeah.

Maybe 20 million people,

maybe more if you count China, that long occupation prior to World War II in China, and then the three to four million that were wiped out in Asia, Southeast Asia, and places like Hong Kong and the Pacific Island, and then probably somewhere between

400,000 and 500,000 Australians, British, Indian, and American soldiers.

Yeah.

Well, I think he's singing the praises of cultural forms that were extant way before

in the samurai culture,

the shogunates, and even before, because he does talk about no theater as well.

So

he's singing the praises of culture that's born in

authoritarian systems.

So that's kind of an interesting thing.

They were traumatized.

They lost 300 and I mean, 3 million people i think it was two and a half million soldiers and then but not nearly as much as germany germany probably lost five to seven germany probably killed 20 million people

what i'm getting at is that for all the talk about the fire raids which were horrific

on kobe and yokohama and tokyo this was a nation that went to war and killed for every Japanese soldier or civilian that was lost, they killed about

seven to eight innocents.

And the vast majority, 90% of the people they killed were not in uniform.

Yeah.

And so that, you know, and that is something to keep in mind.

I got introduced to Japanese culture very early.

My first cousin, Marn,

she was, my aunt and my mother were very prominent in this rural community in the 1930s and 40s when we had a lot of Japanese American farmers.

This was one place where people who migrated in the 19th, late 19th, early 20th century came here to farm.

And during the World War II with the relocation, I shouldn't say that, the deportation and places like Manzanar, the camps, there were efforts to make sure that those farms were not confiscated by opportunistic conglomerates.

And

my mother and her sister were very idealistic and my grandfather was.

And the Selma Enterprise was very active.

This guy named Lowell Pratt was kind of a hero.

And who were the villains?

Remember the villains.

They were all of our liberal icons.

They were Attorney General Earl Warren.

They were FDR that signed the order.

And they were C.K.

McClatchy the first, second, and the Fresno, Modesto, Sacramento Bees that were demagoguing the issue.

But my point is that when I came of age, we had all, I think, two of our neighbors were Japanese American, and then three or four people in the general area were Japanese American.

And my grandfather would lecture me about the way that they they farmed Thompson seedless grapes or orchards.

They had kind of a,

I guess it's the same spirit.

They had kind of a, and,

you know, in nearby communities, a lot of these successful packing houses were Japanese.

They were very, they were like the Armenian American community, very, very educated, very, very hardworking, very, very disciplined, very, very affluent, very, very successful.

But my point is, When you looked at a Japanese American vineyard, it was immaculate.

Immaculate.

When you went over to their homes, it was very stunning because they did not built the huge, big, ostentatious home, as you see sometimes now with a Sikh community or earlier with the Armenian community.

They had very modest homes with bansai prune trees and gardens.

Kind of, you know,

it was kind of like a Japanese tea garden.

And then they had

barns and sheds that were often bigger than their home.

In other words, their capital was put into

agriculture.

They had beautiful machines.

I'm saying they, I mean not everybody, but they were wonderful and very successful farmers from the cultivation side.

And they had all of these appurtences all around their homes and machines, and they were very mechanical.

And then their homes were very modest, but they were very tastefully

landscaped and tended to.

And then the vineyards, of course, were immaculate.

And my grandfather used to get me and pick up and say, Let's go take a look, Mr.

Victor, and let's go look at one of the Japanese farms.

And he'd drive and go, My God, look at that farm.

My God, you could take a vacuum cleaner down there and you wouldn't pick up any dirt.

And he'd go by the house and look at them.

Look at those trees.

They're just beautiful.

He was very impressed.

But that's how I, and I went to school, a lot of Japanese American kids and still keep in touch with them.

Yeah.

And that's sort of how it is.

Could we step back a little bit and look at japanese fascism and how it was different from the fascism in germany or in even in italy

yes

yeah well

and remember that uh the fascist party

in um

the fascist party in italy and was not, I mean, they gave lip service to the Pope and Roman Catholic, but fascism said it was modernistic.

It was into the 20th century modernism, even the architecture or the emphasis by Mussolini on engineering and industrialization.

And it was a nationalist religion, but in some ways, while he wasn't stupid enough to cross the Catholic Church, it was sort of a secularism.

Hitler, who didn't like Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, he hated Christianity as much as, not as much, but he hated as well as Judaism.

But

he created a, I guess you'd call it a pseudo-religion of this sort of crackpot idea of a pre-Western Germania right out of Tacitus's

Germania that was never polluted by the Riffraff and the Roman Empire that were south of the Danube and the Rhine, that they couldn't dare come on, you know.

domesticate, assimilate, integrate, intermarry these strapping six-foot blonde warriors.

This is the, I'm talking from the romantic point of view.

A lot of German eugenicists wrote about this.

And then the Norse gods came back into style.

I think Guring used to kind of run around with all kinds of contraptions, you know, deer horns on his head and stuff like this.

And Wagner opera, etc., etc., Valkyrie, all that was there now.

But Japan was sort of

similar, but they were Zen Buddhists, Shinto Buddhism.

It was a religious, it didn't deviate nearly as much from traditional Japanese religion.

And fascism was sort of an idea that

it was a combination in Japan of

a devotion to modernism.

And Japan was going to become entirely Western very quickly, but it was also infused with Bushido and radical Zen Shinto Buddhism.

And so there was a warrior cult that was religious in nature.

So the emperor was sort of a divine entity in a way that Hitler wasn't even.

And there was talk about, you know, reincarnate, all of the traditional elements of Buddhism were superimposed on fascism in a way that wasn't true in Italy and

Germany.

And, you know, it was,

it's one of, it's so similar to China.

I think people have missed that parallel because it's just about the same time period.

If you look at

Zhen Zhaoping, when he went and visited the United States after 1969 and the whole opening with Nixon, and that was 50 years ago, right?

The start of the Chinese modernization.

And you look at 1880 to 1940, 1890, and it's only 50 years, 50, 60 years, same thing.

And there was a

you know, by 1940, 41, they had formalized the greater

East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which is sort sort of a mercantile, superimposed,

forced,

subservient system on its neighbors in the way that Japan is doing with the Belt and Road.

I mean, China is doing with the Belt and Road.

Very similar.

And most similar and most, I think, scariest is that Japan was, like China, so confident, even arrogant, that it had no problem with emulation.

It had enough self-confidence.

So it would go, it started off with, we're going to copy

British naval architecture.

So they sent everybody to learn because they just found out who's the best Navy in the world.

The British have it.

And by 190, you know, 1905, 1906, 1904, 506, they blasted the Russian Navy that have a head start right out of the water in the Russo-Japanese War.

And by...

World War I, they were helping the Allies patrol the Mediterranean.

And by 1941, lo and behold, who had the best destroyers in the world?

The Japanese.

Who had the best torpedoes?

The Japanese.

Who had the best carriers, or at least the most numerous?

It was the Japanese.

And so

that's where we, that's, that was kind of scary.

And then who taught them to reorganize and reform their army?

It was the French.

And why the French?

Because the French had produced Napoleon and Napoleon and the Napoleonic tradition was still

in,

it was still in vogue until the Franco-Prussian War and World War I.

And then as they started to emulate the

French, then the rise of German militarism just said, you know what?

It's time to switch.

So we're not going to build the Japanese army upon French principles.

We're going to do it on Germanic.

They won the 1871 war.

They were pretty good in World War I.

They took on the world.

And that's whom we're going to emulate.

So they were very successful industrializing the country, innovating the country.

We had such an arrogant attitude that they, you know, that they produced pinwheels and,

you know, candy bar wrappers or just junk that when the war started out, we had no idea of their successful mortars they produced and

the quality of the Mishabishi Zero fighter or

the Kaga and the Akadi.

Recently, I was at a museum in Pasarobos Air Museum, and I noticed that often for the World War II, you know,

armor and ammunition, or at least at the beginning, the 1940s and 41, et cetera,

they kept saying this was, you know, either it was a Japanese

mortar or it was an American mortar and they were comparing it to the Japanese mortar.

And it sounded like that the Japanese in the early 39, 40, 41 had

better armaments in some cases than the United States, even.

And so that was quite kind of interesting.

They were strange.

They did and they didn't.

In terms of what they were really behind, and they found that out when they were fighting on the Mongolian border with Admiral Zuko, I mean, General Zhukov, that they were deficient in armor and

and heavy artillery and they were uh and

and close air support so they didn't do well against the russians and they never really but

in other areas and one of them you mentioned that infantry mortar that was a deadly

um i think it was called hold on type 97 infantry mortar type It was a 90 millimeter mortar and it had this little box on it.

I mean, a little square plate where you could, you know, you hold it.

And it was deadly.

It was a huge 90-millimeter.

This is a time when we were doing 40 or 60, and it was deadly.

And it was what

I think killed my namesake on Okinawa.

He died of shrapnel wounds, as well as bullet wounds, but it was from, I think, the lethal wounds, as I was told, was from a Japanese mortar on May 19th on Sugarloaf Mountain.

So they were very, I mean,

gosh, they got up to,

you know, 90 millimeters, 150 millimeters.

They made it really big and they were deadly.

And you can read

E.B.

Sledge on the old breed, and he talks about the terror of a Japanese very simple, very simple.

I can remember my father, when he landed in Japan, somebody came up to him with a radio and it was like a...

one transit, it wasn't there before transistor, one tube radio, and he thought it was a piece of junk.

And then they gave it to the crew and they thought, wow, this thing is simple.

It gets better

clarity and it's, you can fix it very easily.

And they were highly impressed.

So

in some areas,

the problem with Japan was that, you know, it

had about 75 million people and it took on the United States at that time with,

you know, 170 million.

It took on the Soviet Union with 220 million, took on Britain with 60 million.

And its GDP

was just a fraction of the Allies' GDP.

So it was doomed once it's it started.

Once it started.

So that brings me to my other question.

I haven't heard you ever give a general, not a general, but an assessment of the Japanese

strategy decisions or their commanders.

And I was wondering if you could talk to us about some of the best strategy decisions they made and their best commanders.

In World War II?

In World War II.

Yeah, well, the worst was Admiral Yamamoto's decision to attack Pearl Harbor.

Remember,

we have myth, and I've talked about that, I think, before.

I wrote about it in the Second World War.

We have created him into a mythical character because he was such a fine person, personally.

But Yamamoto was the one who insisted on the Pearl Harbor attack.

We think that he was, you know, he said, well, I can't guarantee victory.

I can run wild for six months and then after the sleeping dragon and all that crap.

But even if he did say that,

what he meant was, I want my way.

And if you don't get my way,

I'm going to quit.

And he offered to resign.

And my way is I want a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

He did that because the British had done it the year before very successfully against the Italians.

And he, in the Pacific,

We, when the war broke out, we only had the Hornet,

the Lexington and Saratoga and the Enterprise.

I mean, the WASP wasn't here.

So we had only four carriers in the Pacific Fleet.

They had about seven.

No, they had about eight, eight or nine, maybe 10.

So my point is that although we had a bigger navy, ours was dispersed all over the world.

We had another navy that was being built on the Carl Vinson Acts, but

in process, in progress.

But my point is that

he really pushed for World War II.

And there were a lot of people, believe it or not, in the Japanese cabinet and

government that didn't want to do it because they made some really good arguments against Yamamoto.

And one of them was:

well, wait a minute.

We have a non-aggression pact with Russia.

And

we're not at war with Britain, and we're not at war with the United States.

And guess what?

It looks to us like Britain's going to lose the war.

So there's Singapore that we can take because they thought, this is during the Battle of Britain, Singapore and Hong Kong, which they did take and Hong Kong.

But it looks like all we have to do is just sort of tiptoe around

the Pacific in 1940 to 41 because there is no such thing called France anymore.

It's Vichy France and they're weak.

And we'll just tell them we're going to take Southeast Asia.

And they did.

And then they thought, you know what?

We've taken Southeast Asia.

The Dutch East Indies are ours too.

We'll just take the shell oil fields because there's no longer an independent Netherlands.

It was conquered.

And so that was a pretty good strategy.

But they blew it because all they had to do was not attack Wake Island and not attack the Philippines.

And maybe not attack Singapore so quickly.

And it would have fallen.

Who knows?

But they were so greedy that they got themselves into a war with Britain and the United States.

And then they were wise enough because they had been double-crossed, remember, by the Germans.

They were fighting Zhukov in Mongolia.

At that moment, Hitler stabbed them in the back and signed a private deal, the

Molotov Ribbon Coffee, on August 23rd, 1939.

And then all of a sudden, Japan said, what did you do?

You've unleashed the Russians against us in full force.

They don't have a Western border to worry about.

So then the following year in 1941, the Japanese did the same thing to the Germans.

They didn't tell them.

They signed a non-aggression pact with the Russians.

And all of a sudden, Hitler discovered, he thought it wasn't matter at the beginning.

He was so greedy.

He thought he would go in, take Russia.

And the Japanese, he said, would be like vultures and they would take the carcasses.

But later,

and not much later, he needed them.

And the Japanese said, nope,

we're not going to invade

eastern Russia.

And Stalin had access to those communications and transferred a quarter million soldiers and saved Moscow in early December.

So

they had a very strange situation that gave them a lot of opportunities in World War II had they just played their cards right.

All they had to do was be a fascist member and remain neutral.

and expropriate French and Dutch properties that were very rich in minerals and oil.

And without sort of due to us, what they did to the Russians have a neutrality pact.

And I don't think the United States would have gone to war against Japan in World War II.

Had we gone to war without Pearl Harbor, had they not attacked, I think we would have concentrated mostly on Europe.

And you think Japan would have had an empire then?

Because obviously that's what they were playing for.

Yeah.

All they had to do was take, you know, they could have, after the war was over, they could have negotiated a deal deal with the the dutch and french and got something in return for giving something back and then almost by 1946

they were in the driver's seat because they were the only uh non-communist you know china was communist by 40 coming it was in the civil war by 49 and then north korea and we needed japan and so by 1950 i'm trying to be very blunt and not too specific but i could be offer more detail but in 1950 the u.s policy,

you could say by July, late July 1950, was, oh, no more

de

fascistic efforts, no more

cleansing of Japanese military criminals.

Japan, whether you like it or not, it has a new constitution and MacArthur is still there and he's co-consul.

And we need it.

We need it because we need a base to supply Korea and save South Korea.

So we stopped all pressures on Japan, which brings us probably to what you mentioned, the recent assassination of Abiy and why people

hated him both in Japan and also around the world.

Yeah,

can we take a break and then come right back to talk about Shinzo Abi?

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And yeah, Victor, so I was curious about your reflections on Shinzo Abe.

I mean, the papers seem to be a little bit torn, and the left not so admiring of him, and the right, of course, a little bit more so.

So, what is the reason for that?

Well, he was the first, first of all, he

was the longest prime minister in Japanese history.

I think nine years and multiple terms.

Nobody had ever done that before.

So whatever one thought of him, he had the ability to read the populace and he was very popular.

And

he had a weird ancestry.

His father, his grandfather, excuse me, had been a member of the, I think he was the Secretary of Japanese Munitions during World War II, was charged with war crimes, maybe unfairly or not, but then became sort of a left of center politician.

His father was very prominent, but my point is that he was a modern reformer, but he had a

familial, ancestral, family reputation for being a nationalist.

And so he very

cagely, I should say, examined the scene and said to himself in the 21st century:

the problem the West is going to have is not with us and reoccurring or

re-quidescent Japanese militarism.

It's with China.

And when you look around the world and in this part of the world, especially,

who is going to be the buttress against China, expansionism?

It's going to be Australia, but they only have, what, 30 million or so people.

And it's South Korea, but they've got a problem with North Korea.

It's the Philippines, well, they're kind of dysfunctional.

There's nobody else.

Taiwan, well, you know, Taiwan will be the first country to fall.

So he stepped forward during the Bush era and he said, you know, the time has come.

70 years after World War II, 60 to 5 to 70 years after,

we're going to be

more than just self-defensive.

We're going to have a military arm that is capable of projecting force in the region and checking Chinese power.

And this was sort of music to the ears of American diplomats who were bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And

we were having all sorts of economic problems.

And then he sort of gave a little bit of lift to the Japanese economy.

He sort of deregulated a little bit.

And he said to the world, he said some crazy things, I mean, about comfort women in Korea and some of the behaviors in Manchuria

and the puppet states that Japan had colonized in China in the early 1930s.

Stupid in the sense they were historically inaccurate, but he did say that the time has come where Japan has to resume its rightful role in the family of very powerful nations.

And we're pro-Western and we can help you check China and we can help you.

And so he started to

remilitarize the Japanese Navy.

And that was something that people, you know, because the Japanese, remember about World War II, you could argue that the Japanese army was substandard in comparison to Western Army.

There was nothing like the Third Army.

or Zhukov's army or Montgomery's, nothing in Japan like that.

And you could argue

that the Japanese Air Force as a strategic component didn't exist.

I know it could bomb areas in China, but there was nothing like the B-17 or B-29 or Lancaster campaigns or even the German ability to do the blitz.

But

when you look at the Japanese Navy, it was absolutely at a level that was comparable and early in the war superior to Western navies.

And so when he started to say we're going to emphasize the Navy, people kind of got shivers up their back, especially when he started to,

what's the word,

rename some of the.

So I think when you see, you know, these, I'm trying to recall this from memory, when you see maneuvers to send China a message, you see the Carl Vinson and the HMS, Queen Elizabeth, but you see the Kaga, you know, the new carrier.

It's very impressive, but it's the KAGA, K-A-G-A, one of the chief and most famous carriers in the 20s and 30s that spearheaded the attack at Pearl Harbor.

So naming that is pretty, you know what I mean?

It would be sort of like Germany says, well, we're going to have a Navy and help NATO out.

And the first carrier is going to be called the Bismarck

or the Prince Eugen or, you know, the Scheinhorn or something like that.

It would sort of, or they would call, you know, we're going to have a NATO division.

It's going to be called the Das Reich or the Herming, not the Hermenko, but the Das Reich division.

And, and that would send a message.

But the Kaga is a very modern,

impressive, impressive, and it sends a message.

And

the problem Japan is having that Abbey had was that we were trying to, we like this idea, but in Bush's later second term and then during during Obama, no comment.

And during Trump, the idea was, okay,

let's get Australia, let's get the Philippines, let's get Taiwan, let's get Japan, and let's get South Korea on the same page.

And the Australians, of course, liked this because

even though they had suffered from Japan and World War II, they didn't see a present threat, but they saw a lot of advantage in Japanese wealth and technology and population.

And so did Taiwan, believe it or not, but not South Korea for historical reasons, the Comfort Women and the colonization of South Korea and control of it by

Japan from the early 1900s.

And so there was such bitterness that it was, and we were trying to say, hey, you guys, stop fighting.

We're all on the same team.

And they'd say, no, we're not on the same team.

Abby won't admit what Japan did.

And we'd say, well, you know,

we lost a lot of people and we fought them too.

And we've forgiven them.

And they said, well, they haven't changed.

That was the big difference.

And so that really hurt that coalition.

It's less.

And Abi was, he kind of backed down on certain issues.

He apologized.

But he's so when the left looks at him, the worldwide global left looks at him, they have a negative assessment.

They were not reluctant to, I thought, no sooner was

he

killed than they went out and started trashing him, right-wing nationalists, semi-fascist.

He wasn't.

He was a,

he came to terms with reality.

And the reality is whether you like Japan or not, that it is a very large country.

It is one of the most sophisticated countries in the world.

It has, I think, after the United States and China, it's got the third largest economy in the world.

And it's the source of some of the best products that have improved life worldwide.

I mean,

when I was growing up, my father said to me, you're not going to buy a Japanese car.

And when he died, I went out and bought Hondas, and I've been buying Hondas ever since.

Yeah, but they're wonderful cars.

What I read about Abe was that he was, he felt that Japan had apologized enough for

their World War II crimes.

And so he was, in his mind, I think he was a new age in Japan.

His attitude was, how long are we going to apologize and pay psychological penance and financial?

They paid financial reparations.

It wasn't enough, probably, given the damage they've done.

But he said, how long is this going to go on while China is the beneficiary of this?

And can't we just settle and

make some kind of common front?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you were talking about the economy.

So I I thought my last

interest is

what are your reflections on the state corporate model of business that the Japanese have been so successful in?

Mitsubishi, Honda, Toyota?

Well, I mean, they were the model that China emulated.

They were the state-private consortia where they were given, I guess, concessions by the Japanese government, monopolies.

Sony, Toyota, Honda, you know, all of them, Mishubishi.

And then they were export powerhouses where they brought in all of this foreign exchange and helped the Japanese raise the standard living.

It was very successful.

But the problem was that

when you have an economy based on that marriage, and remember, this was what was scaring the United States.

in the 1980s and late 70s when we were in this period of decline before Reagan and our economy was not open enough.

And we didn't, we were running out of oil and oil was high priced.

We were coming out of Vietnam.

It was just a bad time.

And everybody looked at, you know, the Japanese came in and they were buying huge,

huge companies in Hollywood.

They were buying golf courses.

They were flush with money.

Hollywood was making these movies about you have to be scared of the Japanese.

They're going.

And then there was, I think there was a, I don't know if it was Harper's or Atlantic.

there was an article they're back.

And it was basically Paul Kennedy and others had made the argument because they thought we were spending too much on defense and subsidizing their

non-defense economies.

They had no military spending to speak of, and they were taking us to the cleaner.

So they were saying, who won World War II?

Britain is a mess.

The United States is a mess.

Russia is a mess.

We're all armed to the teeth.

And guess what?

Japan and Germany are going to take over.

So there was this paranoia

and uh i don't think it

what i'm trying to get at in a very clumsy way is that we go through these periods of paranoia where we think that a state

uh private concession marriage of fusion is a is a superior model and we we did it with the japanese oh my god the japanese are going to take over the world And then they didn't.

And they had 20 years of,

you know, negative growth or static growth and deflation that was paralyzing.

And it's in huge internal debt.

And then we said, oh my gosh, the EU,

look at the Euro.

And by 2006, it was up to $1.30, $1.40.

This is the way of the future.

They don't have a defense budget.

They have a social contract.

And the government helps guide industrial policy.

They don't have these mavericks.

They don't have

these buccaneers.

This is the model.

And then it faded.

And now the Euro is what, almost one to one.

And we have beat in annual growth and unemployment and almost every barometer of economic activity.

We have beat the EU.

And the average American is so much, the average American is more prosperous, and especially when you go beyond average income and you look at more relevant but less quoted statistics, square foot per family of living space, number of TVs, how many cars, size of car, disposable, that kind of stuff.

And so then we went into, after going from Japan's going to destroy us, and then EU is going to destroy us, now it's China is going to destroy us.

But the common denominator is that the left is always telling us

these alternate paradigms of state capitalism are more important and more effective and should be emulated by us because they're dominating us.

They're taking us to the cleaners.

But you take a deep breath when you look at the statistics from 2000 to the present doesn't bear that out.

When you let people

think

and act and prosper on their own, you have thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of minds.

And they're all busy, you know, sort of like a hive, but they're not being told what to do.

So I'm not a big fan of Jeff Bezos, but my God, whoever dreamed up the idea that you could be an Amazon Prime member out in the middle of nowhere and

you want some quercetin, and all of a sudden the thing shows up at your door the next day and he can make a profit when you were told that deliveries were a thing of the past in the 1950s.

Or you look at Bill Gates, I use Microsoft, I use it today.

And I don't do Twitter, but Twitter and all these things that are catching on worldwide.

Or the Hollywood is in decline, but still

its culture is all over the world.

And so there's a lot of American innovation and capital, and it's based on the idea that the left has not taken control and regimented everybody.

And when they do that, we're going to be in big trouble.

So don't listen to them when they tell you that Japan's model is Robert Reich was the big avatar of this.

Look at Japan.

Look at the EU.

Look at China.

And before, by the way, before Japan, you know what they told us?

We will bury you.

Nikita is the Russian economy is so much better than ours and their planes are better than ours.

And the Soviet Union is going to bury us.

So each time there's a status model, and they said it in the 30s.

Everybody said, we went through the depression and we suffered and they had a liquid monetary policy and they were expansionist currency, it's true, and public works and state-run industries.

And look at Nazi Germany and look at fascist Mussolini.

And when I say they, I'm talking about American liberals.

You can find all sorts of left-wing Americans,

not just the Azra Pound types, that were praising fascism because of this state control.

And there's no act of industry, and it's no accident that the National Socialist Party in Germany, it wasn't just the Nationalist Party or the National Fascist Party, it was a National Socialist Party.

And Hitler was a socialist as well.

And so I think we should all just take a deep breath and say, you know what?

As long as you allow somebody in the United States to have an idea and you have a merocratic system and you allow that person to profit

and you give people opportunity, whether they're authors or professors or scientists or doctors, you will always be more creative and productive than this status model.

But you copy that and you destroy merit, as we saw this week in the LA school system, or you put commissars like these diversity, equity, inclusion administrators who don't produce anything, but they restrict and retard and suppress the pursuit of knowledge with their credos,

or you

put someone like the Biden EPA and you give it legislative, judicial, and executive power, then you're going to destroy what we create.

And not going to, we're going to be like those systems.

But I don't know what it is about the left.

It's so strange.

I think everybody knows what I'm talking about.

You have these leftists

and they go to Davos, they go to Sun Valley,

they park these huge Gulf streams next to each other to show off.

Mark Zuckerberg's got this huge home in Hawaii.

The Obamas have a Wahoo mansion, a Colorama mansion, a Martha's Vineyard mansion.

They're all wealthy, and they've all done it because they've been allowed to prosper as individuals and to take, you know, business agendas and turn them into cash.

And yet, once they get up there in the attic, they just want to close the door on everybody else.

I don't understand it.

Or they want to brag on these systems that they never want to live under.

You know, what would Barack Obama do if he was in Japan or Europe right now?

You think an African-American would ever be chancellor of Germany or prime minister of Japan?

I'm not talking about our enemies.

I'm talking about our friends.

Do you think that a Japanese company would pay Barack Obama like Netflix or Spotify to come up with ideas?

I don't think so.

No.

No.

So, I mean, I don't think Bill Gates could have ever

emerged out of Switzerland.

I mean, they have some of these people in fashion in Italy and France and merchandising in Sweden, but they're very rare.

Yeah.

Well, just to finish up with Japan, I would like to just,

I guess you would call it, I don't want to

apologize for Tanazaki, but to

sort of defend him in the sense that while he was critiquing the Western tradition and praising the traditional Japanese lifestyle, he does at the very end say, I do appreciate everything that the modern way of life has brought to us, and it will probably continue.

But maybe there'll just be one little little corner where this traditional almost sounded like he was talking about a museum but yeah so that's that's where he ended he wasn't wholesale there's a balance there's a balance um i'll just end if i could for a minute i think i bored the listeners but since january i'm taking this 150 year old house and redoing it But what's fascinating is when you go up in the attic or you take out a portion of the wall or you go into the house, you can see see that

my mother, her father,

his father, his mother did that about every 40 years.

So you see no wiring and then you see like primitive like spool wire and then you see the great advance in knob and tube wiring and then you see 550 Romex.

And that's true of the plumbing and everything.

But the point I'm making is, especially in the agrarian tradition, there was this dichotomy that was not antithetical.

They wanted wanted to preserve something that didn't make economic sense because any one of those generations, as far as cost of benefit, they could have, my grandfather would have been the amount of money he spent to keep that 100-year-old, he should have just bulldozed it down and built a ranch-style 1800-square-foot, you know, 1950s stucco house.

But he didn't do it.

A lot of millions of farmers don't do that.

They keep it in the family and they keep doing it, but they do it with the modern technology and modern science and their modernists.

They're not, you know, we have a, we're not going to dare take away that outhouse.

No, they put in a huge sewer system or they, or, you know, what we're,

this was such antiquated, romantic wiring.

We're going to keep that.

No, or we're going to have this outhouse.

And, you know, my great-grandfather built that outhouse and we're going to preserve it just like they don't do that.

No.

So, and that's what I like about this country: that in certain nooks and crannies and aspects, people do things that are not entirely economically rational, but not to the point that they venture into the realm of nostalgia and quackery or, you know, anti-industrialism.

They're modern, but they use modernism, I think, for good purposes often.

I can see that, you know, when my grandfather, when he was farming, he once told me I should have bulldozed this entire home, I mean, a farm on the south side of the road and made it perfectly level because then it would have been much more economic.

But he he kept all these hills and ponds and he had it was uneconomical but it was beautiful and he had every uh alleyway you know lined with trees and and uh you they were four acres here three acres there and he had all these different varieties and you can see this pond that was an artesian pond it was beautiful with something out of hobbitville hobbiton

but you know when he died and then we tried to we kept it but it was very hard to do and uh the the person that bought it just leveled it.

I mean,

they just looked at this and they said, this is not going to work.

So

it's a fine line, but I think Americans do a pretty good job.

And you can see that with guys that restore cars or they drive them or, you know, you'll go somewhere and you'll see somebody with a 20-year-old car, but it's very well maintained.

And

I was driving the other day and I saw an old, old home and I thought, wow, that is beautiful.

And as I turned my neck as I went by, and they had a whole solar farm right behind it.

Yeah.

That sort of reminds me of Tanazaki's ending because he does sound sort of utilitarian, but at the same time with a sense of beauty about things.

And he kind of ends there.

So it's very sweet.

I think what you're trying to tell me, Sammy, is that we could air a little bit more on the Japanese reverence for ancestry and continuity and a little less

blow things up and start over each generation and forget the people we're here.

I think that's, I mean, they have the burdens of memories that we don't knew, but don't really share.

But the biggest thing that's driving me crazy right now is I feel like I'm a stranger in a strange land in the sense that when I

go to Home Depot or I go onto a university campus or I go to Walmart, anywhere where there's a lot of Americans, I just feel so bad because I feel that all the appurtances that they're taking for granted, they have no idea

who died on Iwo Jima, who was blown up in a B-17, who was killed at Bella Wood,

who died at Antietam for all of that.

And then when you, it's a force multiplier, when you see on a campus that it's not just they're ignorant, but they're arrogant and they hate their past that gave them all this.

They should all have to go to the Hoover Dam and camp out and just stare at it for two days and think, this is what made Las Vegas, this is what made Phoenix, this is what made LA possible.

And they don't, they never do that.

They only look at the negative.

And then the second half of that critique is, then you say, okay,

now you made the critique against your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents generation, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, nativist, etc.

We've heard it all a thousand times.

Now, what about you?

What did you produce?

Oh, you produced high-speed rail in California.

Not.

Oh, you built a big reservoir in 1990.

No.

You built those pinstocks that went over the grapevine?

No.

Oh, you enlarged I-5 three lanes each way so people wouldn't get killed.

No.

You solved the 99 problem.

Now it's six lanes for the whole link.

No.

What did they do?

Oh, you made the greatest school system in the world out of the LA

school system.

No.

So what did they do?

What did they do?

They didn't do a damn thing.

Nothing.

Gavin Newsom is the iconic of that whole attitude.

He's ignorant.

He hasn't done anything.

And yet he's so hypercritical.

He said the other day about DeSantis, you know,

California freedom.

It's like, I thought, this is like a guy who has a restaurant and the food is so terrible.

Everybody goes across the street to this less spectacular but really well-run restaurant that doesn't have the natural view of the bad restaurant and they're leaving it in droves.

And this guy

in the abandoned restaurant gets out in a megaphone and says, see, you don't want to go over there.

It's horrible.

Come here.

Look what I've done.

Well, he drove everybody out.

He's driving everybody out.

He ruined the school.

They ruined the transportation system.

They ruined the water storage system.

It's criminal.

There's homeless.

There's highest taxes and the less services.

And he's bragging about it.

I kind of admire him in a way.

He was like one of those Disney cartoon characters or maybe one of those, you know, that

is so arrogant and stupid.

But, you know, he kind of

Sam.

Yosemite Sam.

He reminds me of Wiley Coyote, too, who thinks he's so smart.

And DeSantis is kind of like Roadwinner.

Meet me to see see you.

This is the free state of Florida.

We make freeways.

We just have no taxes and everybody wants to come beat me.

And he's like, I'm going to get this guy.

I'm going to run a commercial.

And it's pathetic.

Let's take a break, Victor, and come back after these messages to talk about Saudi Arabia.

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We're back and Saudi Arabia is our last topic today.

And I know we don't have a whole lot of time, but I thought Saudi Arabia up

in addition to Japan because I felt like we've talked about the Middle East, we've talked about Israel, Iran, and we've mentioned Saudi Arabia.

We know, or most people know, that they have

exorbitant amount of oil reserves in Saudi Arabia.

But we've never really talked about them as their, you know, their own interests.

And I have a couple of questions on Saudi.

And we know that President Biden is going to Saudi Arabia to ask for oil.

At least that's what all the newspapers are saying.

So he'll perhaps already have been there by the time

this podcast is published.

But I was two things about the Saudis.

Their

unique relation with the Bush family.

I would like to hear what exactly was that?

Because I never have had really a clear explanation.

And also, what are the Saudis' political interests in the Middle East?

And that, knowing that we've talked about Israel's political interests and

Iran's political interests, where do the Saudis stand and all that?

So, whichever way you want to go, we'd like to hear.

Oh, you know, they were in the

1980s, there was that phrase, what was it?

House of Saud, House of Bush.

There was a book called that, House of Saud, House of Bush.

Yeah, I think it was.

It was about the relationship between the Saudi royal family.

And it was so character because the Bush, you know, George H.W.

Bush was not terribly successful, but he was an oil

man from Texas.

So the criticism was that the Bush family, the Texas Bush family cared about oil and they saw them and they were right-wing and they saw the Saudis as becoming wealthy and they had this commonality of interest.

And then there was a number of people in the Bush.

What's that?

The Bush satellite sphere that were in that so-called Carlisle Greek.

was that the name of it yeah that was a i think it was run by

oh frank remember this guy frank carlucci and darnum and i think even james baker i think still alive and anyway they would they would go in and out of government and then they would have these financial consortia and so when the very elite uh

left government even though they didn't know much about finance in comparison to the Wall Street Hawks, they were the point men that used their political ties in the Middle East and went over there and said, you know what, you're not getting enough investment return, put it in the United States, and we'll get you seven or eight or nine percent.

And they did, and they got big cuts and they became fabulously rich.

The Saudis did very well, and then they passed it off by saying

they're so invested in the United States, we and

we benefit from the investment true, we being the Americans, not just them.

And then, two, they're beholden to us.

So, next time they would kind of wink and not, next time they cut the oil off, we're going to, you know, they don't want to go too far because they'll end up like Iran with huge financial holdings that have been expropriated or put on ice by the United States.

So, the idea was, I don't want to call it grifting, but doing very well by translating political

experience while in office in the Middle East with a commonality of interest, passing it off as a win-win situation for the American people,

it was a way of saying, well, we just incidentally just sort of kind of got became multi-multi-millionaires in the process.

So that was Bush's critique against the Bush family.

But the second thing was

we never really got over the psychological trauma of the 1973 oil embargo.

Anybody lived through that?

The lines.

Remember, my poor father had got a no-good Oldsmobile diesel, and he had these diesel tanks, gas cans that he put

five per gallon.

He had them in the trunk,

and then he would kind of delegate us to go out and get in line with one of the cars.

I think each of us took a car to get in line.

And then that happened again with the Iranian 79-80 crisis.

So we weren't very vulnerable.

But that whole paradigm and Saudi Arabia sort of chuckled,

and then the no-blood for oil Middle East wars.

That was what the left called the First Iraq War.

Remember, in the Second Iraq War, we were only there.

And people would say, well, if they didn't have any oil, have we gone in to save Jordan or Yemen?

Why is it just Saudi Arabia and Kuwait?

And there was some more.

There was, you know, there was an

argument for that.

But what I don't get is this.

This is what I'm leading to.

We're not beholden to the Middle East anymore.

We pump 13 million barrels of oil a day.

We're the largest, I think we're,

well, we may not be after Biden got through with this, but we could be the largest natural gas producer as well.

I think we're second or third in the world after Russia and China in coal.

So, and we were the ones at one time the greatest innovator of nuclear technology.

But the point was we're an energy powerhouse.

So we don't need to go over now to Saudi Arabia and say,

Notice what I'm saying, we don't need to, but we are, because that your question's going, what in the hell is Joe Biden doing over there?

You know, begging for oil, yes.

Yeah, and doing

Solomon B.S., you know, the Saudi de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

So, why is he begging him to pump oil?

And why is he so dependent on Saudi Arabia when the whole purpose of the Trump economic plan was to have leverage with everybody by being

energy independent?

It was just a win-win-win-win-win-win situation.

We We pumped our own oil that we used

and we set the price.

To a certain extent, we weren't so beholden to world prices.

We weakened Russia, which was good.

We weakened Saudi Arabia by pouring oil on the market.

We could do it environmentally more

cleanly and more responsibly than these other countries could.

And we provided a dependable source of fuel for the American military and American people.

And we didn't have to go over the Middle East in optional ground wars.

It was a win.

And Biden comes along as a leftist and says, I don't like that.

So I'm going to cut back and I'm going to jawbone lenders and I'm going to cancel the health frackers and I'm going to cancel pipelines.

I'm going to cancel ANMAR.

And they said to him, well,

we were slated to go up another million barrels every year, and you're going to stop that.

We were down.

And he not only stopped the growth, he cut back by 2 million barrel in a very fragile market that was recovering from COVID.

So then we end up begging Venezuela.

We begged Iran.

We begged Russia before they went into Ukraine.

And now we're begging, you know, the Saudis.

We're begging SPS.

We're saying, you know, please, please help us.

And they have a big smile on their face and say, now, wait a minute, you're Joe Biden.

And when we got rid of that so-called journalist, that he was, you know, Khashoggi.

son of the great our nephew, the great arms merchant, we chopped him up.

You guys

played sanctimonious with us.

And, you know, we, every once in a while, we chop people up, but that was part of the deal.

And all of a sudden, you went public on us and said that we killed a quote-unquote journalist.

Okay, so we don't get along with each other.

And now we do get along with each other.

You're coming all the way over here to beg us.

And, you know, there's all these rumors that he doesn't pick up the phone when Biden calls.

Yeah.

So Biden better figure out what he wants from Saudi Arabia.

Does he want to criticize their human rights record and their use of systemic violence against their political opponents?

Does he want to say, as bad as they are, they're preferable to ISIS and the terrorist alternative?

Does he want to say you can hate them all you want, but under the Abrams Accords, they have made a de facto realistic alliance with Israel, as have other countries like Jordan and Egypt, and that is a very valuable foil against an expansionist, dangerous terrorist Iran.

And And to top it off,

whether they pump oil or not has a lot to do with the security of China and Russia, financial or fuel-wise.

Because if they can, they were in a fuel war with Russia during the COVID lockdown.

They almost broke Russia by not cutting back when the market didn't need the oil.

Yeah, so you've kind of explained Saudi Arabia's political position.

I mean, it's allied with Jordan and Israel, and Iran seems to be the enemy of just about everybody in the Middle East.

How does Iraq work into the Saudi relationship?

Are they friends now?

Or what's their

remember that they were ambiguous about, they were not ambiguous about the 91 war.

They had lost their friend Kuwait.

And remember that there was a fleeting moment when Saddam's forces were headed towards Saudi Arabia and they were stopped for a day.

And they could have gone into Saudi like nothing.

And they would have if that once they had consolidated her.

So they wanted, they wanted Saddam out,

out of, but not out, out of their countries.

And they didn't, he didn't make it into Saudi, but he wanted him out of Kuwait for the principle that, you know, an oil-rich, weak, weak, weakly protected kingdom shall not be expropriated.

as a colony of Iraq.

That said,

they're not stupid.

So they looked at the geostrategic situation and they said, you know,

what are you Americans doing?

This crazy Saddam Hussein is a Sunni and he's in a country of Shia majorities and he's fighting our arch enemy, the damn Persian Iranians, and they've killed each other off for 600,000 people and they've gone at it for years.

And why would you get rid of him?

What you want to do is emasculate him so that

he has just enough power to keep the Shia in his own country down and the Iranians out, but he doesn't have enough power to go after his Sunni oil-rich neighbors.

And that's why we don't want you to remove him.

So the Bushes, that was the critique against the Bushes, that they had

these

relationships that we just talked about.

So they, you know, George H.W.

Bush and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and all of them didn't go to Baghdad.

And they had the, you know, the highway of death and they stopped.

They could have removed him very easily.

And so George Bush did not go into Baghdad after the highway of death slaughter.

He could have.

And the complaint against that Bush, Cheney, Colin, Powell

decision was that they

had financial interest or they were too beholden or they were too obsequious to the Saudis.

And their argument was, as Kissinger said, it's too bad they both can't lose Iran and Iraq.

So they said in a geostrategic method that the method was that Saudis, Kuwaitis

wanted a Sunni dictatorship to direct its attention to keep this Shia in that country down so the Shia in their own country did not revolt.

And two, that he was secular, Saddam, so he wasn't an Islamicist, and they were the

custodians of Mecca and Medina, and they didn't want to stir up the hard-right fanatical terrorist bin Laden swords.

This is before 9-11.

And he would check Iran.

So we made that decision to bow to the Saudis.

And then we discovered in the ensuing decade

that You know, he gave bounties to the suicide bombers on the West Bank.

He was harbinging Abu Nadal.

He was harbinging

the bomber of the First World Trade Center.

He was exterminating the Kurds.

He was exterminating the Marsh Arabs.

He violated the no-fly zones.

He violated the 91 Accords.

There were 23 writs.

And I think that was the greatest error of the Bush administration.

I wrote very passionately about it, that if you want to take him out, then go by the U.S.

Congress's declarations.

And they gave you 23 reasons.

Only three or four of them were connected with WMD.

but they thought they were too theoretical, too murky, and they fixated on WMD.

We don't know what happened to it, whether it was there, where it was taken to Syria, but the point was that collapsed as a

Casas belly collapsed.

And they were left, once the war went south, they were left with an insufficient cause, even though

the

Congress, with a large number of Democrats in the Senate and the House had voted to authorize the use of force on 23 counts.

And I don't know why they did that, but by 2006, we were at, oh, George Bush went in there to save the Saudis and get oil.

And then this guy named Trump comes along, looks at that whole thing, and I thought a demagoguicic fashion said that George Bush should be impeached, doged up for going in the war.

It was the stupidest move, all that stuff.

Okay, but what was Trump's Trump's anecdote to all that?

Trump said three things: we're going to pump like you've never pumped before.

We're going to have federal leases, we're going to have pipelines, we're going to have anwar, we're going to tell those banks to give those fracks, we're going to just flood the world, we're going to crash the Russian price, we're going to crash the Middle East, but we don't need any.

Let the EU beg them for oil.

We're not going to beg anybody for oil.

We're going to get rich with our own oil.

Okay, number two, and we are not going to go into the Middle East.

We have an independent foreign policy.

We'll get along better with Saudis when they beg us and we don't beg them.

Same thing with Kuwaitis, because we have the power, we have the oil.

We're stronger than OPEC.

We've got more,

if we were in OPEC, we'd be the strongest member, and we've got this huge defense force.

So we're strong, and we're not going to ever go in there on the ground again and get a bunch of kids from red state rural America killed for a bicoastal

project.

And that was number two.

And then number three,

he had leverage over the Chinese and EU because he was saying to the world, the EU needs 40% of their oils got to come out of the Middle East.

Got it.

We are protecting the sea lanes, the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf.

So listen, you European countries.

You better start fracking or you better start doing something with nuclear or do something.

If you want to go electrical, whatever it is, but you are very, very vulnerable because you've got tankers strung out everywhere, all the way to

Saudi and Libya and the North Mediterranean.

And you don't have any navy.

You can't protect it.

And we're doing your protection work for you.

And he said to the Chinese, you've got about 25, 30% of your oil.

And we're protecting your lines.

And you know what?

You've got, you supply 50%, 60% of the goods of the material goods to the Middle East.

east you've got huge markets sir so you better be nice to us because you know what if we were to vacate maybe there would be it would be a little bit difficult for you to because you don't have a blue water navy and that was the point that trump was trying to do yeah that in our self-interest not to have an optional war to put the onus on the chinese and then to tell our allies you better start getting in the real world because you have no idea how vulnerable you are on the middle east and russia and we're going to be independent if you people people are going to be vulnerable in the Middle East, fine.

We might even take advantage of it, but we're never going to be vulnerable in the Middle East again.

And then

the left should have said, gosh, thank you, Donald Trump.

We hated those wars, and you've ensured they'll never happen.

And we don't have to deal with illiberal regimes anymore.

But they didn't.

They hated him.

No, and they seem to be going back into that unhealthy relationship with the southern.

Yeah, where are they talking yeah where are all the liberal voices that said that donald trump was a monster a monster and where are all the never trumpers who said that when uh s

uh kbs

whatever his name kbs i should i said s bs mbs mbs muhammad bin salmon yeah salmon muhammad bin salmon yeah so when mbs had the guy chopped up khashogi and they were so outraged well why aren't they criticizing Biden right now for going over and

begging Mohammed bin Salam to pump oil?

They're not.

They're not saying a word.

Because you know what?

They never had a principle about human rights.

It was just they hated Donald Trump.

They said it was over human rights, but if it was really over human rights, they would be outraged right now that what Biden's doing.

Because you could say that Trump powled around with him, but he wasn't dependent on him and he didn't beg him.

Biden's humiliating himself in the country by begging this guy for oil.

And he's begging it because he's adopted these stupid policies that he won't change.

So this is what people need to wake up about the left-wing green movement.

They are the most selfish SOBs and they care about nobody but their stupid little esoteric theoretical ideas that fall on other people other than themselves.

And they don't care about human rights.

And so they will do whatever is necessary to keep in power.

And right now, necessary is they've summed up the 2020 midterms along the following.

These stupid SOB Americans, these dummies, these crazies, these clingers, these deplorables, these dregs, these chumps.

these smelly people in Walmart, these toothless people, they care about oil prices and gassing up their car.

Why?

They don't have a Tesla.

You know, they're just fixated on their jet skis and Winnebagos and boats and cars and trucks.

Okay, we get it.

So we have to go get them oil or we're going to lose power.

So we'll say and do anything.

Drain the strategic petroleum reserve?

Fine.

Put it out in the world market, you know, and fungible and end up in China.

Fine.

Beg the Saudis, beg the Venezuelans, beg the Iranians, beg the Russians.

Fine.

Do anything to hold on for power.

That's what they care about, not principle.

Yeah.

Victor, we're at the end of our time.

Thank you so much.

I the discussion of a time limit.

It's okay.

I just wanted to say something about that Iraq-Saudi relationship.

It sounds to me like you're saying that they're probably a little leery of Iraq now that Saddam Hussein is gone because they don't really quite know what

position, what, yeah,

how they will be in position.

They're very,

I don't want to drone on because we're going to leave, but they're very suspicious, scared and rightfully so of the crackpot uh barack obama john kerry hillary clinton crazy ninkum poop disastrous foreign policy of creating deliberately and by intent a sunni crescent i mean a shia crescent from tehran down through lebanon including syria and Hezbollah and with help from Hamas to the Mediterranean as a weight, a lever, a counter force against the Sunnis in the Gulf.

So then they say to each side, your creative tensions will keep the peace.

And we sort of sympathize with the underdog poor Shia that have been manipulated as people of color and marginalized people have in the United States.

And they're more revolutionary.

So we have a nice little affinity with them, but we still respect you, other people, and we've created a tension that will be helpful.

That was their foreign policy.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Victor, thank you so much.

I'm sure me and your listeners are very happy with all of the wisdom of Japan and Saudi Arabia.

I know we went everywhere, so sorry about it.

That was quite a huge agenda.

So thank you.

Okay.

Thank you, everybody.

All right.

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