EP19 Asymmetrical Perspectives

What this episode is about

The conversation explores the concept of asymmetrical warfare, introduced by guest Max Brooks, who defines it as a form of conflict where traditional military strategies are replaced by unconventional tactics, emphasizing the importance of understanding this dynamic in modern contexts. The discussion also touches on Brooks' multifaceted background as an actor, author, and senior fellow at the Modern War Institute, interweaving his insights on warfare with his unique experiences in writing and storytelling.

Key takeaways

• Asymmetrical warfare: where creativity trumps convention; think guerrilla tactics over grand armies.
• Desert Storm taught rivals: avoid the battlefield. Now, unconventional strategies reign supreme and redefine conflict.
• Forget sanitized warfare; history thrives in the gray zone, where subtlety outsmarts firepower.
• America's military evolution risks stagnation; we've upgraded tech but forgotten the art of asymmetric conflict.
• Max Brooks: from zombies to war strategies, proving that storytelling shapes our understanding of modern combat.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 52 min speaking
• Max Brooks (Guest) · 35 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Desert Storm, Max Brooks, Afghanistan, Iraq
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Afghanistan, Max Brooks, Russia, Desert Storm
3. 30:00 – 40:00: Russia
4. 40:00 – 50:00: Max Brooks, Russia
5. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Russia, Soviet Union
6. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: European Union, United Nations, World Health Organization, Russia
7. 1:10:00 – 1:20:00: Ukraine, Russia, Afghanistan, Soviet Union
8. 1:20:00 – 1:27:19: Max Brooks, Soviet Union

Notable quotes from "EP19 Asymmetrical Perspectives"

• Did that we had with max brooks thank you so much for coming on the program why don't we start with your definition since you brought it up thought we should talk a little bit.

  about Max Brooks · at 1:32

• We fought this war specifically as a war of deterrence the world was changing the soviet union was crumbling america was sort of stepping onto the world stage as the only superpower left and we thought.

  about Soviet Union · at 5:00

• Just utterly pulverize this massive army and we thought that would deter aggression we thought that if we said listen if you mess with america on the battlefield we will smash you into atoms what we didn't realize was what we were.

  about Desert Storm · at 5:48

• Life when i was 20 because it was but you think about the time period let's go between like 1975 the year the vietnam war officially ended and 1985 when the new american military it really is going to be debuted against manuel.

  about Vietnam War · at 6:46

• Has been studied about exactly what they were going into you know a lot of the guys that i know who went into afghanistan they had no books about afghanistan they had the bear went over the mountain they weren't.

  about Iraq · at 9:47

• Cohesiveness are one of those kinds of things i mean you're not going to launch a war for example with putin's russia over that right it's not like invading latvia might have…

  about Russia · at 18:18

• A private little war this is exactly what i'm talking about when it comes to asymmetry does it mean that if putin rolls in the tanks to ukraine we respond with our own tanks…

  about Ukraine · at 1:11:32

• In order to exist that's not russia and that's not china the threat of violence is a card to be played in negotiation the same way information warfare economic warfare energy warfare the russians are the.

  about China · at 1:18:18

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Max Brooks — Person · Main guest · 7 mentions · first at 1:01
  Primary interview subject; frames and argues for understanding asymmetrical/"gray zone" warfare and links it to U.S. institutional, political, and information vulnerabilities.
• Colin Powell — Person · Referenced military leader / historical example · 1 mention · first at 7:16
  Mentioned as a Vietnam-era junior officer who later influenced U.S. military thinking and the post-Vietnam conventional-war doctrine mindset discussed in the episode.
  And the people who'd risen through the ranks schwarzkopf all those guys was to create sort of a different sort of mentality different kind of warfare certainly these guys…
• Mel Brooks — Person · Referenced family member (guest’s father) · 1 mention · first at 1:19
  Introduced to contextualize Max Brooks’ background and public profile; supports the host’s description of Brooks as a multi-domain figure (comedy + war studies + fiction).
  World war z he was a comedy writer at saturday night live his father and mother are both probably known to use dads mel brooks as mothers and bancroft it's a fantastically interesting individual i enjoyed my conversation with him.
• Klaus Witz — Person · Referenced expert (misattributed quote source) · 1 mention · first at 2:02
  Cited as the origin of the famous line about war and politics; used to set up Brooks' reframing of asymmetry as "war by other means." In context, the quote is commonly attributed to Carl von Clausewitz, suggesting the transcript name may be a mishearing/misattribution.
  Yes well my version of it is as klaus awaits once called war politics by other means i call asymmetry war by other means that doesn't that doesn't mean that it doesn't include violence but it's not.

Companies & orgs

• Russia — Company · Referenced entity · 13 mentions · first at 18:22
  Discussed in the context of asymmetrical warfare and geopolitical strategies.
• China — Company · Referenced entity · 1 mention · first at 1:18:32
  Mentioned in discussions about trade relationships and global competition.
• NATO — Company · Referenced entity · 1 mention · first at 1:11:13
  Discussed in the context of alliances and geopolitical strategies.
  You want to protect your borders we understand that ukraine cannot join nato however if you continue to fund this war then we will have that episode of star.
• Soviet Union — Company · Historical reference · 7 mentions · first at 5:05
  Mentioned in discussions about past conflicts and geopolitical strategies.
• CNN — Company · Referenced entity · 3 mentions
  Mentioned in the context of media coverage during conflicts.
• European Union — Company · Referenced entity · 2 mentions · first at 1:04:54
  Mentioned in the context of international organizations and alliances.
  And what affects one of us affects all of us and we understood that because after the second world war we did not establish an american empire you talk about military commands however these military commands are all partnerships.
• United Nations — Company · Referenced entity · 2 mentions · first at 1:04:54
  Mentioned in the context of international organizations and alliances.
  Have we spent the immediate post-war period setting up international organizations like the united nations and the world health organization nato.
• World Health Organization — Company · Referenced entity · 2 mentions · first at 1:04:54
  Mentioned in the context of global health and international organizations.
  Have we spent the immediate post-war period setting up international organizations like the united nations and the world health organization nato.

Places & events

• Ukraine — Place · Setting · 7 mentions · first at 1:08:16
  Discussed in the context of potential conflict and geopolitical strategies.
• Desert Storm — Event · Case study · 5 mentions · first at 4:22
  Used as an example of conventional warfare and its implications.
• Afghanistan — Place · Setting · 8 mentions · first at 6:22
  Mentioned in discussions about past conflicts and military strategies.
  Asymmetric means whereas we keep gearing up despite what happened in iraq and afghanistan we're still gearing up for the next desert storm so here's what so i think i take away a.
• Vietnam War — Event · Historical reference · 4 mentions · first at 6:50
  Mentioned as a past conflict with lessons for asymmetrical warfare.
• World War II — Event · Historical reference · 3 mentions · first at 7:16
  Mentioned as a past conflict with lessons for current strategies.
  Certainly these guys having been through vietnam on the ground would have understood the challenges of asymmetrical warfare do you tend to is there a bureaucracy involved where…
• Iraq — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 6:20
  Mentioned in discussions about past conflicts and military strategies.
• Taiwan — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 11:02
  Discussed in the context of potential conflict and geopolitical strategies.
  Sounds terrible because it sounds like you're leaving people in the lurch but if we were still basically pledging to defend taiwan from china we right now would be looking at i…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:02 it's hardcore history so the origin story for the conversation you're about to hear is that i was on a panel with the upcoming guest and as we were departing the panel he leans in and whispers in my ear we should talk about asymmetrical warfare sometime on your show and as many of you know i'm a sucker for romantic talk like that so we set it up and we had the conversation i should point out back on december 14th 2021 so i've held this for a little while which might mean if if somewhere in the timeline there's anything that seems a little strange to you that might be why although i didn't notice anything but i tend to miss stuff especially when i'm as deep into the hardcore history with weeds as i am right now there's a lot of mental issues for the host has at the moment i don't even know how to describe the guest that's upcoming because he's done so many things in so many different areas

1:01 actor author writer uh senior fellow at the modern war institute at west point and writes about zombies he is the author of um world war z he was a comedy writer at saturday night live his father and mother are both probably known to use dads mel brooks as mothers and bancroft it's a fantastically interesting individual i enjoyed my conversation with him immensely so for the next hour and a half i hope you enjoy the conversation as much as i did that we had with max brooks max brooks thank you so much for coming on the program um why don't we start with your definition since you brought it up thought we should talk a little bit about asymmetrical warfare tell me what your definition of asymmetrical warfare is and why you think people should know about it yes well my version of it is uh as as klaus awaits once called war politics by other means i call asymmetry war by other means uh that doesn't that doesn't mean that

2:11 it doesn't include violence but it's not exclusive state violence and what i mean is uh the the traditional definition of war is that you have army a on one side and army b on the other side and they go at it on a chosen battlefield and whoever wins wins the war and asymmetry is using every other means possible in order to achieve your goal which is could be anything and so i think the reason i i wanted to talk to you about it today is because i think america is kind of at a crossroads and we need to remember that fighting in what the military calls the gray zone is nothing new it's a very old way of fighting but we have sort of forgotten that because we've gotten really really really really good at sanitized conventional conflict and we need to get back to the gray zone so i was looking at the uh list of hardcore history shows that we've done in the and the the second one so show number two

3:21 was essentially about ace asymmetrical warfare uh the west and field battles and that mentality versus the east and guerilla warfare and wearing down and all that kind of stuff we couched it in terms of the west and the east more like a persia greece sort of thing but now everybody practices all these i mean these these are in everybody's playbooks right everybody knows about field battles everybody knows about um you know i had a teacher once who described asymmetrical warfares everything other than field battles um and so everybody knows about those kinds of things now if you're going to fight uh the the strongest military power in the world and i'm gonna say we still are the strongest military power in the world you don't want to fight somebody like that conventionally right wouldn't wouldn't the asymmetrical uh method be the smart way to do something like that yeah yeah and i think you know you're

4:13 the perfect guy to talk to about this because this this is recent history for all of us whether we realize it or not and it all goes back to a recent war we fought which i consider to be the worst war we ever fought which was desert storm now why do you consider desert storm to be the worst war we ever fought uh because it's not about as in life life is not about the experiences we have life is about what we take from them and and you know this this is this is just being a person we know people who have had incredible life experiences haven't learned a damn thing and are the exact same person they were 20 years ago and they keep wondering why uh things keep happening to them and they haven't learned and that's the problem with desert storm was we fought this war specifically as a war of deterrence the world was changing the soviet union was was crumbling uh america was sort of stepping onto the world stage as the

5:12 only superpower left and we thought the best way to deter future aggression you know up and coming challengers was to have a very public very conventional big mechanized expensive conflict uh and we did that we did that with the iraqi army which both sides hyped up the fact that it was one of the biggest armies in the world at least on paper and that's why we invited this brand new uh fledgling company cnn you know 24-hour cable news to cover the war because we wanted everyone to see us just utterly pulverize this massive army and we thought that would deter aggression we thought that if we said listen if you mess with america on the battlefield we will smash you into atoms what we didn't realize was what we were teaching all our future competitors was if you are going to mess with america don't go anywhere near the battlefield find alternative means and our enemies have been developing

6:18 asymmetric means whereas we keep gearing up despite what happened in iraq and afghanistan we're still gearing up for the next desert storm so here's what so i i think i take away a little bit differently the the recent history only only because i see it more as a as a continuum um i mean so so it's funny because as you get older 10 years starts seeming like not that much time when i was a kid it seemed like half my life when i was 20 because it was but you think about the the the time period let's go between like 1975 the year the vietnam war officially ended and 1985 when the new american military it really is going to be debuted against manuel noriega and panama right you're gonna see stealth technology debut there you're gonna see a bunch of other different elements debut there uh maybe call that a warm-up or a test case for for uh does okay so uh so so to me that 10-year period including things like the

7:16 impact of people who were junior officers in vietnam like colin powell and the people who'd risen through the ranks schwarzkopf all those guys was to create sort of a different sort of mentality different kind of warfare uh certainly these guys having been through vietnam on the ground would have understood the challenges of asymmetrical warfare do you tend to is there a bureaucracy involved where you tend to want to focus on the big things because that's where i mean i mean not to change subjects here but i mean i remember talking about submarines and the japanese military the navy in the second world war and the literal excuse for why they didn't care more about it was the guys who would have to study it the junior officers didn't want us they want to study big fleet battles and and decisive things uh is there some sort of um call it a bureaucratic uh um um uh bias towards towards those sorts of

8:07 things whereas things like asymmetrical warfare seems like small potatoes by comparison not very exciting i i think so and i think it's the combination of of culture and money and so you would think coming out of vietnam that we would have come out of that war with the absolute best guerrilla warfare school the world has ever seen because we used to be good at things like that we would come out of these wars and we would learn incredible lessons we came out of the civil war understanding that the us army had to be professionalized you couldn't just elect your officers anymore you couldn't just appoint an officer because his dad had made a campaign contribution the army had to be professional uh we came out of wars like world war one and world war ii understanding these new technologies like air power uh tank warfare even things like snipers these things had to be institutionalized but then you come out of vietnam

9:02 and you see this gravity back to our comfort zone back to the fulda gap uh back to the the idea that vietnam was a one-off we'll never have to fight that again and that's where you get into uh the psychological disaster of desert storm the idea that desert storm was a return to how wars will be fought and should be fought as opposed to what it really was which was a dying breed that it was a last gasp of the old ways of fighting and so that's why you get into this problem you know being a fellow at the modern war institute and meeting these mid-grade officers who fought in iraq and afghanistan i got this understanding of how little has been studied about exactly what they were going into you know a lot of the guys that i know who went into afghanistan they had no books about afghanistan they had the bear went over the mountain they they weren't indoctrinated to study even the afghan war uh the soviet war in afghanistan uh

10:06 guerilla warfare in iraq i mean i always said the day that we got out of saigon if i had been secretary of defense i would have given general the windjap a check for a million dollars to come and be a professor at west point and teach us everything because that's what we used to do when somebody would give us a run for our money after the war we'd invite them in we had a lot of ex-u-boat commanders uh helping us prepare for an underwater war against the soviets you know it's it's a funny thing though because i you feel to take some of the pressure off of our planners and military i think they're in a little bit of a bind here because they don't have the option of deciding as you know max i don't mean that i'm telling you anything you don't know but they have to plan for both eventualities don't they they don't know that you're not going to get into some weird sort of war in um in in asia

11:00 right now off the coast maybe in a in a taiwan defense situation in other words you don't know what the enemy is going to do or what the situation is going to develop into you have to sort of be prepared for everything and it's a sun tzu quality isn't it that that defense everywhere is like not having defense anywhere but but you kind of have to be ready for 9 11 or world war iii don't you you do and this this is why i said it's not just about culture it's also about money because there is there is a center of gravity which is the military-industrial complex right there's a tail wagging the dog thing we don't need more tanks for the military but the georgia district where they make them needs them that kind of dynamic right right and in which you actually have general rayo dierno speaking to congress saying we do not need any more tanks you know if you think about the amount of money we shoveled

11:46 into things like laser weaponry during the iraq war and trying to retrofit them on hummers so we could shoot ieds with a laser beam to blow it up uh that's big money at work compare that to the fact that in 20 years in afghanistan 20 years dan we never had a witness protection program for our afghan allies in which a massive amount of our casualties were guys being shot by their afghan opposite numbers because the taliban would threaten their families now there should have been a program where those guys the moment they get the call from the taliban we're gonna kill your family unless you kill an american he should have been able to go to his american opposite number tell him the americans should have said well we have a program in place you can come on base your family is safe don't worry about it not once did we ever have that program that's not where the big money was the big money was in putting a laser

12:39 on a 747 to knock off the one ballistic missile that kim jong-un might fire someday well that's the vulnerability then that opens the door to the asymmetrical warfare right because the more you the more you invest at that very high level the more things aren't being handled at the very low level leaving vulnerabilities and what's so weird though max is as you had said we fought enough of these things i mean since the second world war this has been the main kind of warfare we've actually engaged in you would think that by now this would be institutionalized and yet we still follow in the same sort of pattern that you can see i mean i love the roman legions because they would they would start off when they first formed them you know made up of the the conscripts and they would form and they wouldn't they would be totally green and and not very good then they would work themselves over over time into this in

13:29 this fantastic fighting machine and then they would disband at the end of the conflict and lose all the institutional memory that they had built up and i feel like that's our pattern too i mean when you fought korea vietnam innumerable small sorts of things um you would think we would have this figured out by now um is and you know what's also funny and you know this better than i do max but you've met enough of these officers to know that this has to be one of the most well-read um intellectually curious historically minded group of of commanders that i've ever encountered i mean they totally bucked the trend of the of the the sort of the stuck in the last war military mentality so if that's the case you would think that we would be specifically excelling at things like learning from past experience um why do you think that's not helping more than it is this is this is one of the issues i

14:24 think we're coming up against is like you said the officers that i have known at the modern war institute uh the mid-graders you know the the captains and the majors they've all been through it and they know the old system doesn't work they are insanely curious a friend a good friend of mine john spencer uh recently retired from the army he is the preeminent scholar in urban warfare and on his desk is a little disc copper disc and he said this is this is the primary mechanism inside the iranian ied that killed a lot of my friends and behind him on the walls in ak-47 he said that killed the rest of them and he said that's it that's what killed them nothing high-tech uh and that's an example of how these guys are very much aware of how wars are being fought but the problem is they are i think like we said we're arrayed against culture uh we're also a rate against like we said big money the military-industrial

15:19 complex i think there's also a third element in this triumvir which is geography because we are safe because the the wars we fight are not existential wars i don't think there's enough of a of uh an honest-to-god threat that burns through the fog i think because we think that our wars can be wars of choice then we might have the choice never to fight another iraq or afghanistan we can delude ourselves into thinking that uh the next war can be desert storm because we will choose the time and place that's the that's just the typical hubris that goes back forever but but but it's interesting because it in my you know if you if you think about yourself like a science fiction super villain right or the joker or somebody like that um you can see i would think that we're much more vulnerable um if you're talking about you had mentioned existential threats right a threat to your existence um but you know other than nuclear

16:15 weapons i think the the most logical threat to our existence is having some uh program uh and i'm sure the russians are doing this but i bet everybody's doing this where you've got paid uh people who are going on message boards in the united states and helping to rip the country apart from within um which i would i would argue we're much more vulnerable to something like that right now than anybody launching a serious ground war anywhere in the world and yet that's not very sexy if you're if you're in the the halls of of military academia studying you know potential war scenarios that's not the one you necessarily want to be working on but but i would argue that that except for the nuclear weapon threat which never goes away and the longer we don't talk about it the more we just become endured to it that would be the next level is simply being torn apart by what max brooks has labeled correctly

17:07 asymmetrical warfare well i'll go one even farther uh we knew we knew uh years ago that the russians were putting bots on medical websites to begin to debate vaccines and they would put them on both sides by the way you would you would have debates being waged by bots pretending to be regular americans debating about vaccines and that was to so doubt that was way before covid and i'm sure years from now you and i will be doing a podcast about some historian who will do a deep dive into how much that attack on our trust in vaccines contributed to the deaths suffered by covet you know max though here's here's an interesting thing that reminds me of some of the nuclear brinksmanship type debates they used to have it places like rand where they would ask about um about countries exploiting the fact that you didn't want to launch world war iii so we'll just take a little bit of territory and see if you're willing to

18:11 use nukes for something as minor as that i feel like things like bots in cyberspace tearing apart your national cohesiveness are one of those kinds of things i mean you're not going to launch a war for example with putin's russia over that right it's not like invading latvia might have been um but at the same time certainly you can't just let that stuff fester if it's as dangerous as we just said it is it almost seems to me like the kind of thing that you would that in the old days during the cold war you would have addressed in some sort of summit agreement or something like that no you're exactly right and and i'm glad you used nukes because the thing about human psychologies you you and i both know the human mind has a problem with imagination we are not for all our imagination we we still have difficulty thinking about things until they're right in front of our face and the reason that we had

19:07 such incredible uh diplomacy and legality when it came to the use of nukes right who keeps them who gets them how do they use what's the oversight uh what are the treaty stipulations surrounding them i mean the legislation would fill a library about nuclear weapons because we saw them used and you couldn't argue with them and it didn't take much for the human mind to look at hiroshima nagasaki and picture the rest of the world and you can't tell me that kennedy and khrushchev didn't have those images in the front of their brains when they were negotiating over cuba but the new threats that we have we haven't seen something like hiroshima and nagasaki take for example cyber warfare i i did an article i wrote an article on this a little while ago speaking to a friend of mine in cyber command who said that we have all the tools to stop cyber warfare what we don't have is doctrine we never got to that phase like we did

20:05 with nukes where you get in generals and lawyers and diplomats and really sit down and order pizza and beer and stay up all night and hammer out agreements about this new power which is cyber warfare we don't have that uh i always use the example what if let's say russian hackers uh hijack data in a hospital right and all they want is money they're not working for the russian government they're just they're just taking the money but while they're while they're holding that data for ransom people are not getting their prescriptions and they're dying well that's murder or manslaughter how would you judge is that murder is it manslaughter and then if the russians don't turn over these killers is that any different than the taliban harboring osama bin laden and if that attack on the hospital is a nato ally isn't that article 5 isn't that an attack on the citizens lives of a nato ally so this is what i mean we don't have a

21:04 cohesive doctrine to tell us what is a cyber crime versus a cyber act of war reminds one of sort of like letters of mark or something allowing plausible deniability you know that's the other thing when you compare it to nukes too with nukes you're talking about physical things the possession of which can be seen photographed uh studied assessed uh movements of which can be followed when we're talking about somebody who can just quickly sign on uh uh into cyberspace anywhere in the world push a button that that begins a process then sign off throw the phone away and run i mean i feel like the plausible deniability reaches new levels of deniability if that makes sense well well you know eisenhower made a wonderful speech uh during the nuclear age about how our power was exceeding our wisdom and how we had to catch up i love that one by the way yeah wasn't that a great one oh my god it's a future

21:56 shock type statement by eisenhower isn't it yeah he got it he understood that wait a minute we've unleashed all this power we need to now get in front of it we need to build a fireplace around this fire before the fire burns down our house but we haven't done that with anything else and that's the problem because these new sources of power like cyber or like the internet they're so insidious you don't see the immediate threat until it's too late now we're starting to see it and we need to catch up so this is where free societies are at a bit of a disadvantage perhaps so you look at these states who see you know we always make it sound like that the reason that states like iran for example are or china are threatened by the internet is because they're threatened by openness but we're threatened by it too and we're not threatened by the openness we're threatened simply by the fact that you know we used to be scared about the

22:55 anarchist cookbook information getting online and something like that's ridiculous now right it's like we used to be scared or the soviets used to be scared about one radio signal radio free europe coming over the iron curtain and what that one radio signal of propaganda might do can you imagine trying to have the cold war with the internet i mean so so i feel like there's this this ability that that regimes that are more authoritarian and can cloak um the the the curtailing of civil liberties and the freedom to go online and read what you want in in terms that sound like patriotic self-defense uh protect yourself from the invasive enemy outside i mean i feel like they have um more of an ability to close that loophole or that hole in their defenses than we do because in our society it's not just a bug but it's also a feature does that make sense yes and you know but what's funny is that that in the short term they have an

23:52 advantage but only in the short term because in the long term our advantage is our openness and our ability to have these messy debates and the ability to inoculate ourselves from these kinds of viruses see the the idea is that in a free and open society you have more chaos but in the chaos you self-correct right you elect different people you change the laws you try a law out the law doesn't work you change it or the law goes too far you pull it back i mean that is that is the story of western democracies is we're always sort of shifting that line and in the short term yes it's much more chaotic but it builds a more durable society as opposed to say the people's republic of china where in the short term it's peace but it's peace built on a fragile absolutism where the moment a problem leaks in you have no mechanism to self-correct it's either perfection or it's the end and that's why they have

24:54 to shut things off i mean any society that is afraid of debate is a society that is doomed eventually to failure uh and we saw that we saw that with the cold war that they had to wall themselves off because the moment uh free you know of ideas freedom and expression and arguments came in they had no mechanism for controlling it and for inoculating themselves and the system collapsed so i'll take a little bit of short-term chaos any day for a little bit of long-term durability you know uh you and i are i'm a little older than you but we're almost the same age that to me is the argument we always grew up with right that that that's the old uh um free society versus closed society uh pros and cons argument i feel like some of the variables some of the things we've already discussed here um may impact though that that that received conventional wisdom that we both grew up with for example um it's almost like a

25:53 jujitsu kind of thing where you were just talking about the arguments that that keep us healthy and allow us to self-correct in our society but it's almost like when we talk about these bots or these uh the ability to undermine our society from within acting as though you're american citizens having political debates on message boards or out in the comments after news stories i mean that's that you would say is a feature 35 years ago of our strength and the debates and all this kind of thing now it seems to me almost something that's turned against us i feel like the debates that we've been having in this country is what's ripped us apart and if those debates have actually been prompted by our adversaries or international competitors then they've taken that advantage that you and i grew up with calling a feature and turned it into a bug does that make sense it does but i would i would argue that

26:43 it means that we need to have better debates we need to have all the facts at our disposal like for example uh you know when i go on twitter as i'm sure when you go on twitter right we need to have a check next to our name to make sure we are who we are yeah i i i don't have that max i i'm preaching to the wrong guy here but i had to do that uh you know the same way i had to do that on facebook but the average person doesn't have to do that well why is that well it i am lucky enough to live in a society where if i had the will i could elect someone who could run for office who could drum up support and make the case and then make the law and say listen anybody who wants to be on social media can be on social media but they must prove who they are so therefore if i am hearing a debate about vaccines i know that it's actually not a working-class single lawn from hammond indiana i know it's sergey and igor in

27:43 kaliningrad okay um you know this this goes back to how i grew up no i was just saying it's analogous to the letters to the editor and those kinds of things where there was a person uh uh checking the validity of those kind yeah absolutely so so you're you're going back to sort of a brick and mortar model for for the cyber age and things like um how we how we attach accountability to those kinds of things well you know what i'm going back to i'm going back to my mom my mom was a health nut and i grew up as you do you and i we grew up in a time when it was probably the least healthy time to be an american you know because the generations that came before us had healthy good food it probably didn't last as long it was probably a little more expensive but it was good for your body the generation coming up now is better off because of what happened to us where we were just shoveled in crap now my mother

28:41 was one of the first consumer advocates who lobbied and made sure that everything that was in the supermarket had ingredients on it and so that way she at the very least nothing was banned but she as a consumer had the choice of what she put in her child's body and you can argue that's all we need from social media you can say what you want but i need to know who it is and that's a first step is is having actual ingredient labels for information the same way you have it for nutrition well what it makes me think about max is if you and i are talking about national security concerns uh it strikes me and you know didn't strike me five minutes ago it just struck me now based on what we're saying but it strikes me that one could make a case that true accurate um confirmable trustworthy information might be more wrapped up in our national security than we had otherwise thought i mean the old idea of the importance of

29:48 the fourth estate to the running of the rest of the constitutional part of the the country um maybe there's something to the idea that those are all support systems and if any one of them becomes rotten or ceases to function as a support beam our stability is perhaps uh endangered what would you say to this idea about maybe something like truth and factual information being important enough for our national debates to be a core component of maybe our national security concerns well we used to have that and i think as a historian you will appreciate the term by francis fukiyama the end of history yeah and are we allowed to swear on the show or not i don't generally but uh you know well say what you want we'll figure out how to handle it well i think i you know i will say that the the notion that i'd say that in many ways our institutions are still stuck in the 90s and by that i mean this notion

30:43 that it is the end of history that all the great challenges are over uh and i think that notion in the 1990s that the great challenges of the human race are over that it is the end of history has to quote dr samuel johnson has [ __ ] us and so we need to get back to the idea that we had we used to have that everything is connected dan that you cannot separate the sheep and the sheepdogs when it comes to our national security that we used to understand that everything eventually flowed back to keeping us safe from our children getting good nutrition to our environment keeping us healthy to our infrastructure to our school teachers knowing what they talked about everything everything meant having a healthy well-informed society that was able to govern itself and therefore able to withstand outward threats and we gave all that up in the nineties because we saw the threats as going away so we could all

31:42 just do our own thing we didn't need these institutions we didn't need oversight no more you know no more grown-ups uh because it was it was happy time well the happy time is over and we need to get back to the notion that we can still be free we can still make good choices but we need to keep our eye on the ball i'm i'm meditating on this we thing uh that you keep using because it sounds um utopian to me at this point because i don't feel like we um are a collective unified um i i see a lot more division not just not just in the united states but i mean i think you can see um as you've been able to see for 50 years echoes of what goes on in the united states you see elsewhere i think you see it in europe too i think one could make a case that there's uh some of this in asia also um the these trends of um and you know it reminds me and you're gonna know about this max it's almost it's almost become

32:48 sort of an internet trope the project for a new america century a new american century uh uh uh um uh paper that came out before 9 11 saying that there should be you know that the natural uh tendency in our country is to pull apart and then it's only big events like pearl harbor and whatnot that that contradict that that momentum um i don't know if that's true or not but i would suggest that i think certainly that's where we are now and to me so many of these things that you say we should do break down when we're not really we right because if i say oh yes we should do this we may be uh one group of people who want to do a and we may be another group of people that want to do b and they disagree and they elect different people to congress who fight in the congress and then you have the military-industrial complex and foreign countries buying access on k street i mean the way this actually

33:41 all interacts when it gets into the soup of actual reality um sounds a little bit more complicated to me than this idea that we need to do this and we need to do that well i didn't say that we need to do what's easy that's the thing and this is this is always what i what i come up against whether i'm talking to a strategic studies group uh or a biodefense panel uh the the pushback i always get really can be boiled down to what you're saying we need to do is hard to which i say yes yes it is you know running running a self-governing democratic system is very difficult which is why you see the appeal of dictatorship because i think there is something in all of us really deep down that wants to be children remember that that horrible moment when we were kids and bit by bit we had our innocence ripped away from us and we realized oh my god i have to do work i have to to help take care of myself

34:40 and i think that that's painfully traumatic for all human beings you know we start off completely helpless someone else is running everything some of us are very likely to ha lucky to have the people who are running everything know what they're doing or we think they know what they're doing then we get to go out and play and then spit by bit we go ah boy i gotta i gotta pitch in and that's hard and it sucks well we live in a in a society that where we have chosen to be grown-ups and being grown-ups is hard and it's messy and it's painful and it's uncomfortable or you can choose to live in a country like russia or china or iran in which you can be a child and you are not responsible for how things go somebody else is in charge and you get to blame them uh and so we have a lot of freedoms in this country but what we don't have is freedom from responsibility and you know i think i'm very blessed in that i had

35:36 two greatest generation parents who told me about what it was like to grow up like that where you had to do your part and serve and sacrifice and it sucked but that's what you got to do if you want to live this way see i am i think see here's the thing see you know you bring back so many echoes of the way we were all raised i mean this these these are sort of things that in our generation we were infused with and this is cold war stuff to me i mean this is why we fight like the old line about why we fight these these are these are the things that they would put in a in a um in a movie that you would see between the the double feature in the movie theater explaining what this war in europe is all about and american values and western democracy and all this kind of stuff but i mean we've had a civil war in this country before uh that and and that's not so much about you know people not wanting to do the

36:26 hard work and and wanting someone you know what i'm saying in other words some of what you're saying sounds to me like on a different level from hey we've had a civil war before we could have a civil war again and if we have a civil war well that's not helping any of this democratic stuff we were just talking about and i mean i i would put the odds and this is a stupid thing to do but i mean you know i would put the odds of the united states having a civil war in the next 25 years as better that as better than they've ever been since the 1850s and that says something now i'm not sure what it says but if you're in the halls of power and your job is to defend the united states from threats both foreign and domestic i'm more scared of that because i think that's more of a realistic threat than than coming to blows for example with russia even though coming to blows with russia ain't as far away as it used to

37:13 be either no no and and as far as i mean a civil war everyone is always that seems to be what everybody's talking about i mean as we both know it's not going to be 18 60. no no because we're all mixed together there's no easy divide we'll have it precinct by precinct yeah but there is there is a real fear there is a real honest to god fear and i know this from my friends in the national security world of a right-wing white supremacist insurgency in this country and it's very real and it's bubbling but it's not inevitable none of this is inevitable that's the wonderful thing about a free and democratic society is self-correction but we get back to the truth we're in a loop here because it gets back to the truth thing right because these people one would make the case and i have that that the great ballast of the american electorate would self-correct if given uh reliable information that they could

38:10 trust now i would make the case that that i don't think there's a society in the world that has ever been given reliable information that they could trust but i would say that the democracies maybe in the 1970s and 1980s gave it a good stab um but without that and with the disinformation and with all of the you know choose your own truth sort of post uh 20th century society we live in now i feel like the self-correction mechanisms are broken so if you don't have that truth and reliability factor does it impede our ability to self-correct and if we can't self-correct what does that mean well i feel that it is all it might be broken but it is all fixable if we do our part and that is something that we used to understand and like i said this goes back to what i was saying before is that that means having to see yourself as part of something bigger and having to do things you necessarily don't want to do i mean i'm buoyed by

39:07 the fact that i live in la which is the most selfish narcissistic lazy sodom and gomorrah ever ever i mean if you if you want to point to possibly the worst of america welcome to my hometown and yet for the first time in my life i'm seeing my neighbors starting to take an interest in local politics and the details of local politics well why is this happening uh you know nobody i've ever known my whole life knew who our city councilman was nobody cared we lived our lives and now because the homeless crisis is out of control and people are asking why is this happening and they don't believe the propaganda they're hearing we're starting to have community meetings and for the first time in my life i went to a meeting in the cold sitting out freezing my buns off for a candidate who's going to run for city council uh a municipal attorney talking to me about court cases and why things are the way

40:05 they are and the big money that's at work and if she is elected what she will do to unseat the man who has allowed homelessness to run rampant and by the way not helping the homeless people either she she rattled off ev statistics of every homeless person who died in and out of shelters in la that night now she is just one person but if i do my part and show up and sit in the cold and maybe give a little money and maybe canvas for her and maybe do some phone calls i can help make a little bit of difference and maybe if my neighbors do that they can make a little bit of difference i don't get to do that in china or north korea or russia i get to do that here i'm trying to i feel like we're circling around the same points again which is i'm thinking about about the and you know remember there's a star trek episode i feel like i i'm contractually obligated to bring that up every uh but but there where where there's a mere

41:02 universe right and it's the absolute opposite of everything and in my mind there is a max brooks in los angeles or maybe he's in georgia i don't know what the opposite of los angeles is uh and he's got he's got a goatee and he's going and doing just what max brooks is doing he's going to see he's going to support this candidate who's going to unseat the but he's on the exact opposite of all the issues in other words i feel like your activism is canceled out by the other max brooks and that describes the country as a whole you know you keep saying we and we but we is something that to get back to that project for a new american century um thesis was that we're naturally pulling apart i don't feel like that we is here and if you say okay if it's not here now what can foster the conditions to recreate that sense of unity so that we comes back well then are we talking about a specific kind of leadership i

41:55 mean do you need an almost jfk call to some sort of higher calling i mean if if you decide if dan and max have have identified the problem right here as a sort of a we unity lack of focus lack of whatever that might be a need for a reinvigoration of our democratic system how does one accomplish that um beyond the child level if we're all children and would rather just be led how does how does one do this well i think we all need to be more aware of the forces at work that are pulling us apart we can't just say it's just happening we can't just say they're russians right yeah we can't we could just say oh wow oh we're just being pulled apart no there are actual forces at work that are pulling us apart and if we identify those forces then we can actually combat it as opposed to some sort of nebulous darkness that we all see as inevitable okay i like this though and i like this though because i think i don't mean to

42:54 interrupt you but i think you've hit the nail on the head here so what happens when our freedom right the fact that we get to debate we get to have the what happens when our very freedom is part of what undermines what you're just talking about in other words we can have multiple media companies all giving a very different narrative playing that narrative to a very different audience interested not in truth but in clicks viewers audience size uh impact that kind of thing um but that's a that's a facet of our freedom right putin doesn't have to deal with an opposition network that he you know what i'm saying in other words right it's it's our very freedom that has opened the door to these things that are the impediments to us becoming we again right right so we need to identify what exactly are the forces at work and that's what makes me so optimistic because finally after years and years of banging

43:44 my head against the wall i am starting to see the national debates start to center around these forces you know for the first time in decades i'm starting to hear people on tv on social media talk about voter suppression well what is exactly does it mean redis redistricting gerrymandering i'm also starting to hear the attack on social media about these algorithms that specifically are devoted to extremism you know this was this has been happening for decades but we were much more concerned with what lindsay lohan was up to and it is so wonderful to hear the top stories now about these forces at work because we have to identify them first in order to do something about them uh it's like in my neighborhood going back to local politics for years i was just seeing the homelessness getting out of control and homeless people dying on the streets and their encampments bursting into flames but always hearing oh

44:44 it's inevitable or oh god this is so terrible we need to do something uh or they they're the victims and they have rights and if you want to do something to mess with their rights you're a fascist well for the first time i heard a candidate say no no no you have to look at it in terms of addiction mental illness uh the housing plans long-term housing i mean really breaking it down and that's what i'm starting to see on a national level why do my neighbors fly opposite flags why do they watch opposite tv shows uh if we can identify them we can also solve them you know when i look at um when i look at the current climate and and this is all simplistic stuff and this is this is why i'm not a historian because i can i can play with all these simplistic uh non-representative scenarios and not worry about it but i mean to me there's a there's a weimar germany vibe and and the weimar germany vibe is

45:43 that there's extremists on both sides and and both of those groups are growing in size pulling people from the the ballast the societal ballast in the center because there is no center to hold so the in the weimar situation it was a it was a a a level of of distrust and disenchantment with the ability of that government to do what the people there wanted done and that that helps peel the the ballast population off to the extremes um if you want so so i guess what i'm saying is it is in the 21st century so there was something i i remember in the early 1990s when al gore and bill clinton were running for office against george bush senior and one of the planks that they were pushing was this idea of reinventing government uh and what i liked about the idea of reinventing government forget the specifics was this idea that that because of new technology and new things being learned all the time we should not

46:42 assume that that is not something that can be continually done because during that time period there was this attitude that government is government it was the same in ancient greece it is the same now the pluses and minuses are all what i liked about the gore clinton id at the time was this concept that no we can improve these things we don't have to sit and stand pat and pretend like none of this stuff can be improved if this is the weimar germany situation then improving the credibility and the functioning and the the the belief and trust in the in the government itself would be a way i would think to reverse the peeling off of the ballast population to the extremes how can something like that be done because to me again everything you know you said it yourself everything we're talking about here which seems like a bunch of different issues not connected to military things at all are all

47:32 wrapped up in our national security more than most people might think including this is the government functioning is it not functioning can it be fixed can it be improved and if it can't what does that mean yes well this is this is what i mean about about reintroducing ourselves to the connections where we used to my my parents generation used to understand how everything was connected but like i said the 90s [ __ ] us because the 90s believed that it was the end of history and we could all take our eye off the ball and do our own thing and we understand that we can't we understand a lot a big portion of our friends and neighbors became radicalized in the 90s because of globalization the jobs moved away that's economics but that economics flowed into politics at the same time we deregulated the media so that's politics and economics those two were connected at the same time you then had the rising

48:33 the opioid addiction which goes into public health at the very same time you are outsourcing things like the biotech industry which meant that when covet hit we didn't have enough supplies because it was all overseas we used to understand how everything flowed together and in the 90s we completely outsourced everything and we need to understand that everything is connected and once again going back to being i'm bullied by the fact that we are starting to understand this now you know our policy on china is starting to change and that's bipartisan i'm so buoyed by the fact that that trump was a china hawk but so is biden he didn't just come in and say well everything trump said is wrong he said no we have been financing a whole alternative method of government which is based on capitalism without democracy and that is wrong and i think that if we support that notion we can get back to the idea that our values

49:37 shouldn't be taken for granted nation-states do exist there are different ways of living our lives and we can't rest back control which will bring us together hmm so that takes us back so so we've added now um the dimension of something like this so the china hawk question is interesting to me um i don't know what we gain from all this um whether it's i don't know what the united st so if we assume and this is a little off the path of what we were talking about but since this national security umbrella pretty much covers anything we want to shove into this space um it seems to me that that that the country's policy should be dictated towards what's best for the people who pay the bills that the country racks up um how does confrontation with other large nation states benefit the average american on the ground well there's different types of confrontation you know if you have our carrier battle group facing off with the

50:41 chinese carrier battle group in the south china sea and everybody's got their finger on the button that's probably not going to turn out well however it is time to reach back into history specifically the 1990s and the early 2000s and reset our trade relationship with china because we believed in the goodness of our hearts you know going on the death of the soviet union that if we were to just engage with china you know bring them into the world trade organization and put factories nike and apple over there and they would liberalize we believed that liberalization would come from economic engagement okay nothing wrong with that it's i personally think that's a better foot to start out with but now we know that it's wrong now we know that instead of them becoming more like us they're using our money to make us more like them they are now using our greed to influence us here at home whether it's the nba not

51:43 being able to say anything about hong kong or whether they're censoring hollywood movies now we understand now that it has backfired fair enough yay for a society that's able to self-correct we can reset those trade agreements and say i am very very sorry corporate america and i'm very very sorry xi jinping we can no longer finance a system that is dedicated to ending ours if you want to do business with us then you have to compromise and you have to be a fair player in the game that's it and if you don't then you can be like south africa and go your own way good luck so this is interesting because um i would argue that and i think you set it up well by saying that they they've gotten us addicted uh and you know we have to we fused our societies together in ways that have made it difficult for either one of us to pull apart without hurting ourselves um but but what i would argue is that

52:47 we don't have the control over so let me back up i have these wonderful um history books and they will show um ads from american companies during the second world war so there was one for an american cigarette manufacturer lucky strikes and and the ad was how lucky strike had changed its color to green for the war effort the poster said right in other words to support the united states in the war against the axis that's an american company back in the day when companies had a more had a more tied to their nation states of origin now these are global international concerns with as much stuff on the ground in china as they have here if you were to get into a a third world war with china i'm not so sure all these companies are going to pick us like lucky strikes did rather than stand aside and just say hey we just do business with people we're not going to get involved in this dispute i guess what i'm saying is you

53:40 can still have these you can have bilateral trade agreements with with china you can have these giant nafta or gat type deals with uh with with that china has to then adhere to the rules the rest of the world's playing by but i don't know how you're going to necessarily get the very companies on board here by telling them that they're going to have to penalize themselves their stockholders their bottom line by somehow punishing the largest one of the largest because it you know depends on whether you're going numbers or people or the amount of spending money available per person but one of the largest markets available on the planet well this is what i mean this goes right back to how we started the conversation this goes back to asymmetric means of fighting when i look at the the global competition between american western democratic freedoms and china chinese authoritarianism i think which is the best way to spend

54:33 our money right we have a limited amount do we spend it on trying to match their hypersonic missiles with our hypersonic missiles or do we take that money and use it as tax incentives for our companies to move back to ohio and the rust belt rather than making money overseas then putting those money that all that money into sweatshops overseas which one gives us more leverage over the prc well again i think i think then you're getting into uh long term i mean if you're gonna say that you know what's great about this max is we could do six hours on this because everything we talk about leads to the next step in the conversation the conversation and they are all are completely interactive with with each other right they're pinging off all the other societal uh questions that we're dealing with for example if you talk about things like um the rust belt and tax incentives to get to pay people

55:31 there enough to do what the chinese sweatshops are doing um well then you're talking about maybe 20 or 30 or i mean when does that stop right then then in the next generation you're gonna have people saying oh my gosh now you just have these these uh these lazy people in the rust belt who don't have to work cause they're getting these you know i mean i think you're gonna i think that's a yin and yang uh you talked about self-correction that'll be i can hear the the milton friedmanites out there saying no no no that's not how you run economics um but to get back to what you were saying about national security and asymmetrical warfare um this is going to be a problem whether or not we're dealing with china per se or russia per se and this is the problem i've always had with u.s foreign policy is we sort of say okay this is the great adversary and you had talked about the the francis fukuyama end of

56:16 history moment well that only happened because we'd had a 50-year cold war that seemed over and then you then then you think okay that ding-dong the witch is dead now we can just have a nice peaceful world and we forgot that there were global interactions between nations that existed before there was a soviet union that would come back into play well they're going to come back into play whether there's a china down the road that we're worried about or i mean they could become our best friends tomorrow and there will be some other thing behind them that necessitates our need to keep building tanks in the key districts in georgia whether we need them or not you see what i'm saying yes and this is why i think it is critical for america to learn from its own history because while we started this conversation talking about how we don't learn from our defeats we also don't learn from our victories one of the conversations that

57:07 i've been listening to within the halls of national security is the re-engagement with what's called soft power yeah yeah yeah totally and we used to be masters of that and i guarantee you have this picture in your library of an american marine on okinawa uh giving a canteen to an old okinawan woman on a stretcher yeah we all know that picture because that's who we used to be we used to have two armies at the same time the army would go in and beat the enemy with guns and bombs the second army would come in with quinine and sea rations and i was part of living history in 1994 when i went to russia and i watched them all standing there with their hands out waiting for another marshall plan and why shouldn't there have been that's what america does when we conquer an enemy we rebuild them and make them see the advantage of our way instead of leaving them to rot and we didn't do that once again the 90s okay russia you're

58:09 free we have better things to do there's naked people on our computers and that kind of on we and rot gave way to putin well and then also it's expanding nato to the russian borders might not have been the best balance of power move either and once again so as so as you are as you're leaving the russians to decay and fall and i literally was spoke to when i was a college kid talking to a member of the state department in moscow telling me that these people these very proud people are watching their country go from being an industrial powerhouse to an exporter of raw materials to which then i spoke to a dutch businessman who said don't kid yourself their biggest export is women now how is that going to play on the soul of a nation if that's not going to come back to haunt us and it did and here we are so we need to also remember our history like you said there's going to be other threats well we also have to

59:06 look back and say well what did we do wrong but also what did we do right because america's done a lot of things really really right and we need to remember that whenever we engage uh with other countries this has not happened for the first time it has happened before so you mentioned the soft power so this is a a problem that i've had talking to people um and they're generally not the military people they're people that that um that enjoy uh the ability to use force and they who seem to think that things like diplomacy is a sign of weakness for countries that don't have large militaries and i keep trying to point out historical examples of diplomacy which is used not as a shield although there's nothing to be scoffed at when it is that's very valuable but as a sword i mean you look at how the chinese and the byzantines use diplomacy for example i mean they would destroy whole nations without using their military at all

1:00:05 and that's what we've really forgotten is that this stuff and this is something by the way that our adversaries have not forgotten at all they don't scoff i mean that is what this this undermining us if it's if it's happening through our own social media is is very similar to right this idea that there are ways to defeat your enemy without putting on the armor uh uh saying your lineage to your adversary across the giant mode and then and then getting into you know victor davis hanson style western hoplite combat i mean uh you're just as dead if somebody shoots you from behind and i feel like some of these things we're talking about here um our own people would think was sort of wimpy but listen if the byzantines can destroy you without using their military why use it and that's that's soft power used like a like a weapon oh yes well this i think this comes from the fact that america has changed

1:00:55 from my dad's generation when my dad was in world war ii everybody served and everyone understood soft power because everybody who had fought in world war ii was also part of the armies of occupation uh my dad's last job in the second world war in occupied germany was counter insurgency because that as as we both know the werewolves the idea that these nazi kids these hitler youth they were going to go into the mountains they were going to go into the forest there were caches of weapons buried and they were going to fight the allies for the next hundred years well the reason my dad survived to make me is because those insurgencies died out because those kids had jobs they didn't have to fight because the moment they came out of the forest somebody said hey you kid we got some milk that needs delivering you want a job and they did that and the rebuilding of germany and japan is what made them not just passive but

1:01:48 some of our best allies now that's changed because now we have a sheep in sheepdog military and most of the people in the military i talk to understand that they understand what soft power really means i met a special forces officer who'd been to the ebola task force in west africa and he said we have an open door now thanks to what we did in west africa with ebola they will welcome us there for any reason if we need to get into west africa in any of those countries we will be welcomed with open arms the people you're talking about the hawks are tend to be chicken hawks who've never actually served who are very macho and don't know actually what the facts are overseas on the ground and that's another problem of the sheep and the sheepdogs because when you get when you tend to see these people pushing for armed conflict they tend not to be the people who have actually been in the profession of arms

1:02:46 i i i agree with that um i also want to point out that you know because we've referenced it multiple times this idea about like uh in your dad's era and my grandfather was in the aef army of occupation in the first world war but but we should recall that those people that that that may have been unity but it wasn't unity of a sort that had existed forever this was conscription right this was a this was a temporary unity because of the war effort i mean the the the idea that this was how it was in 1900 or something is a real is a real departure from u.s history and that that to me is what the second you know you had talked about how the gulf war kind of screwed us um my own view is that the second world war screwed us is because it put us on this path that we're still on now and that there's no getting off um where like you mentioned if we needed to get into west africa well the american um

1:03:41 in me says why on earth would we need to get into west africa right what what does west africa have to do with us but in the 21st century american mindset any place in the world is potential interest zone and that's why we have to have bases all over the planet that's why we have what is it we have i think we have a military command for every continent except one and now space um i think most countries would say i mean if you're if you're let's pick i'm trying to think of it if you're denmark that's not a concern for you but it is a concern for us and has been since the second world war max what would happen if we found out to to dovetail this whole conversation into one sort of into one sort of bucket what if the biggest threat to our national security as a nation is the path that we have set ourselves on which would put us in confrontation with any other great power on the planet that seeks to be a great power on the

1:04:34 planet if we don't like them i think that the second world war set us on the best path because it made us understand that we are all trapped on this very tiny little planet and what affects one of us affects all of us and we understood that because after the second world war we did not establish an american empire you talk about military commands however these military commands are all partnerships these are not armies of occupation these are armies of alliances that we have we spent the immediate post-war period setting up international organizations like the united nations and the world health organization nato uh the european union all these different organizations that are very very messy and and go against the the polar opposite of some of us who are isolationist but there was a forward enlightened part of that generation who led america through the second world war that understood the only way to avoid a third

1:05:42 world war is if we all work together because like you said it doesn't affect denmark yes it does what affects a tiny little country across the world will eventually if left unchecked come to denmark now that before anybody jumps in there you know starts making comments that does not mean the bush doctrine which means that we must intervene militarily at the first sight of trouble and go it alone and get on the american skill that's not what i mean at all what i mean is we must identify how these problems no matter how far away they are will eventually come to all of our shores how do we identify them how do we all work together and share the burden of responsibility and we used to be really really good at that and as you and i both know his history buffs the very first test of that was the korean war and it was not an american war as faux historians would want us to believe that was a u.n

1:06:40 conflict yeah fought under the u.n flag yeah fought under the u.n flag because that was a threat to all of us same thing right now we talked about vaccine diplomacy i think covid should be a wake-up call because it is a threat to all of us so even though it did start in china it did come to denmark i'm thinking about um see it's funny because and this is i'm a natural contrary and i think and a natural devil's advocate so i hope i hope you'll take this all in the spirit that it's meant um so i'm thinking about like the very things that you were talking about in terms of enhancing global stability enhancing global peace and and i i see it in in just the opposite sense so take the alliance system before the first world war which was seen as as a stability producing sort of thing and then of course after the first world war it was blamed as one of the main potential stressors that might have led um to not

1:07:38 allowing the the countries involved in the war much leeway once things got rolling um for example if we ended up i mean we mentioned earlier the nato pushing the the borders um towards towards russia now i have no problem with all the people in in in europe who want to get involved in an alliance to protect themselves to do that um but i do think that alliance systems have a way of prompting counter-alliance systems and then history shows um spheres of interest and influence get get breached and you end up with problems i mean that's what belgium becomes in the first world war kind of and what one might make the case that the baltic nations or who knows dom bass and in the in in ukraine or or georgia when they were talking about uh um uh the nato's i mean i feel like these all become if you want to look at them in a negative light as opposed to the positive we're creating more global stability these are also potential flash

1:08:31 points um uh areas of disagreement area i mean look at look at what we we would be facing today max potentially if we hadn't sort of backed off um and this sounds terrible because it sounds like you're leaving people in the lurch but if we were still basically pledging to defend taiwan from china we right now would be looking at i mean taiwan could be belgium in the first world war so i mean in my mind these things are all potentially double-edged swords i'm not arguing that we don't get stability in some of these cases but let's not ignore the fact that they also become potential flash points the trap that trap decision makers and policy makers well i i would argue though that the only way you're trapped is if you're overly rigid either way because wait wait but in a negotiation you're only one side the other side has to tango also right yes but at some point you always are deciding where you're going to draw the

1:09:27 line you know at our height the korean war could have gone into world war three but that was a decision to keep it limited likewise in 56 when the hungarians rose up eisenhower made a very specific decision that defending the hungarian people and i remember i was at the atlantic council this other think tank that i'm on speaking to a hungarian diplomat it's 1956 right yeah okay in in 56 and i said listen we screwed you i'm sorry we did but eisenhower made a calculated decision that the temporary freedom of the hungarian people was not worth the nuclear annihilation of the entire world and he was right and as a result you and i are right here so alliances work but alliances are not biblical texts that must be followed fundamentally they are fluid and we must decide when and where the same way nixon decided to flip china if we were ideologues then the entire communist world would have always been against us

1:10:28 likewise tito was our communist and fidel castro could have been our communist if we hadn't been so stupid likewise ho chi minh could have been our communists because he wanted to be he wanted to be our ally he liked george washington i know um yes so what i'm saying is alliances work so max would you would you would you uh would you offer nato membership to ukraine no if alliances work absolutely not i would say that we need to understand where the alliances end we unders we have to understand russian culture we have to understand russian history we have to say to putin listen uh you want to protect your borders we understand that ukraine cannot join nato however if you continue to fund this war then we will have that episode of star trek where the hill people and the village people are both get getting flintlocks because it's a proxy war yeah a a private little war this is exactly what i'm talking about when it comes to

1:11:36 asymmetry does it mean that if putin rolls in the tanks to ukraine we respond with our own tanks and start world war three absolutely not does it also mean when he rolls in the tanks we wash our hands of ukraine absolutely not if putin does roll in the tanks and hoist the russian flag over kiev there must be a price and he needs to understand that in the words of sting the russians love their children too and russian mothers will not tolerate putin any longer if those zinc coffins start coming home from kiev hmm i wonder about that because i also think that that this gets back to what you and i were saying earlier about the differences authoritarian or more authoritarian regimes have uh in controlling i mean for example once upon a time during the vietnam war we saw the coffins coming back to the united states uh flag draped and they were on the media they were on the news we don't do that anymore ourselves but the but the

1:12:37 the russians and the chinese can completely control that i mean they could lie about the numbers and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it funny you should say that a little piece of history that's actually false know now through unclassified historical documents that in the height of the soviet afghan conflict when we fought right we thought that soviets could do whatever they want they're the soviet union they could throw as many lives into that furnace as they wanted we know now that the war was deeply unpopular to the point that the the casualty trains the trains coming back into moscow bringing in those zinc coffins came in at night because they didn't want the soviet people to see the casualties stacking us even authoritarian regimes are vulnerable and are casualty averse because sometimes it doesn't come down to the form of government sometimes it comes down to the culture

1:13:34 we know russian culture they want the spoils of war as churchill said without having to fight the war it's very different when nazi armies are slicing through the motherland that's when they'll give up anything but would russian mothers now want to risk their darling sons for a piece of the ukraine i think that's going to be the key is that it's going to be the goal is the goal seen as worth the cost right and so i think with afghanistan you'd already what did they sink into that a decade before before it ended um and and and one of those things where uh i think like like we did too eventually you look at it in the end and the the various uh lines on the on the paper are not intersecting at the right place and you just go okay what's like the vietnam war when you decide what did the pentagon papers say that the government knows that we can't win but you can't get out either and then there's going to

1:14:24 be this moment where okay we're five years away from getting out we have to stabilize things on the ground before we can get out and then you lose half your people after you already figured out it was over um okay but that's good stuff about the soviets and i actually i agree with that um but i also would point out that that was a country that by 79 80 81 and that's right when they went in was already in trouble and by the time they got out what was it four five years uh uh that they lasted after the uh withdrawal from afghanistan before we had boris yeltsin and a brand new russian federation right right well this is what i mean about asymmetry when i'm talking about stopping putin what's the best way to stop putin from invading ukraine is it javelin missiles and is it tanks and planes or is it a negotiated settlement with western europe to stop the gas from pipeline so therefore the united states

1:15:15 or north america becomes the number one natural gas supplier for western europe and not russia which one gives us more leverage but okay so this is where i'm going to take you to test that because this to me is the same thing which one gives us more leverage which i mean this is all part of the competition instead of going to the to the russians and maybe saying were we in your shoes we would not want russian assets in mexico right we just wouldn't we wouldn't allow it right so so we understand what's involved here and of course we also understand russia's uh history how often it's been invaded if you were to say that that country had the equivalent of a of a national ptsd complex i wouldn't argue with you right they have every reason to be afraid of invasion is what i'm saying oh god i mean look at look at their national eagle it's got two faces pointing east i mean the trauma of that place is is

1:16:08 palpable and understandable so knowing all these things my um my grandfather was a salesman and at his funeral somebody said he was a great salesman because he could always see things from the other side of the fence right with the other side if you went to putin and you said listen i understand what you're saying what if we talked about a band of demilitarized states on your border right you couldn't i mean this is the romney we're gonna play star trek the whole this is the romulan neutral zone right right um in other words uh you can't do it and we can't do it but this is a way to tell you that we have no bad intentions i know what would happen it would start to be the commercial in roads and and that would all be the things that caused trouble but i think right there you would be showing that you know because i feel like this is a terrible thing to say because world but i feel like the the

1:16:52 west really pushed their advantage after the fall of the soviet union and this would be a way you know to do what you were saying where you would essentially say diplomacy and you would say we understand your problem how about this is a solution that works for everybody and then you could also put the safeguards in place which would say for the people in ukraine for example that have every right to not want to be invaded this neutral zone if violated and of course now i'm setting up belgium in the first world war again but but i mean if this area were invaded then we would consider that to be a a terrible violation of a neutral country that the rest of the world has acknowledged is neutral like i said i'm just setting up world war iii by setting up world war one again but but that's i mean maybe something like that is is how you defuse situations rather than trying to gain leverage in an ongoing eternal struggle

1:17:36 against russia and china well that's that's what i mean is is where does the power of your enemy come from you know where like what i said like when dealing with russia which is casualty averse and we know this we know the russians do not want uh they don't want to be bathed in blood they want the spoils of war without the war that's very different than dealing with some place like hamas which only has outrage and revenge as their power base the worst thing that you could do for hamas would be to declare peace because then they would be exposed instead of glorious freedom fighters they would be a bunch of screw-ups who can't pave a road so they live on violence they require violence in order to exist that's not russia and that's not china the threat of violence is a card to be played in negotiation the same way uh information warfare economic warfare energy warfare the russians are the masters of energy warfare

1:18:37 uh and we need to step that up and we need to understand this our enemies like i said going back to the beginning they understand how to play every key on this piano called international relations and we just keep banging on that deep one have i not asked you is there something i haven't brought up in this conversation something you'd like to get into we're at about 122 now and i'm happy to go wherever you want to go um and and listen i hope you don't take this the wrong way it is a devil's i feel like it's just a better conversation when you and i go back and forth rather than me asking questions and you answering i hope that's okay no i mean listen i know you don't you don't want to admit this to the people listening but you and i have both been on bill maher and and bill's whole thing is you can disagree and we disagree and that's good that's the great thing i would i'd much rather be if you and i were both chinese

1:19:28 and we were on the history podcast hardcore history in china it would be called the glorious history of the perfection that is the chinese people the celestial heavenly kingdom yes and then we would we would just be complimenting xi jinping and all of chinese and that would be it so no the the debate is good through the debate we get to the answers so i mean i think one one other thing that we haven't hit on because i always wanted to talk to you about this your history your roman history right some of it yeah right you know roman history this is the example uh when we talk about the ability to self-correct and the roman republic how many consoles did they go through before they got to scipio africanus well a lot right right imagine if they had just had one emperor well i like i'm i'm seeing the value in the console the two console system more and more these days i have to tell you i'm starting to wonder if we wouldn't

1:20:23 benefit from something like that a little bit um as i as i look at the downsides of our own system right now because max i truly believe this is i think it's an existential test for our system what we're going through right now and i think the social media is sort of the tip of the iceberg and i mean we know we we sort of referenced either directly or indirectly the alvin toffler future shock type type conversation earlier i think that's what we're in right now and i think i think this is uh trying to figure out how we're going to wrestle like we said once upon a time radio free europe was seen as a dangerous destabilizing thing if not from the people behind it than the people on the other end of it right the the soviet union well now you've got zillions of radio free europe's and everybody's got them and they're pointed in every direction to every i mean we're like i mean it's a great giant experiment with all

1:21:14 these nation states as guinea pigs i had a conversation with uh james burke from connections and the day the universe changed and he said that he thought it was very possible that the very forces that made nation-states a good idea once upon a time right where size mattered and and all that sort of stuff that it's going in the opposite direction and that maybe the idea that you know the 1648 treaty of westphalia type nation state thing has run its course and that people would be able to form virtual type nations through uh um communities and whatnot in multiple countries so that you know i mean obviously there's some long-term development that would need be needed to make that possible but i think the idea is interesting when we start thinking about where does all this lead either you know the the max brooks self-correction towards uh uh the nation-states solidifying and repurposing again or maybe a

1:22:09 de-evolution to something different that we can't even imagine yet made possible by all this technology interconnectivity and yes the stresses and strains that that are heaping up in our country to the point where we're ready to kill each other well you know i i think that that's very possible what the hell do i know about what the future same here baby same here i'll know when we get there but what i will say is is what i and i'm like you i'm not a professional historian we're i'm a history major i'm guessing you were too totally um and what i have taken from american history is all is a constant series of addiction and self-correction something is starting you know something is working for us we love it it's great and then eventually there is a heavy build to pay and sometimes it's huge like slavery there's a very heavy bill we're still paying for that one and sometimes it's something like oil

1:23:10 you know made a lot of people rich made us very powerful very fast uh and we're now paying for that one but i do always see the ability of america to be better because i believe and i see it our whole national identity is built on fighting the good fight we understood this even in our constitution right the idea that it doesn't say a perfect union it says a more perfect union even our founders understood that humans are imperfect and that the american experiment is not about being great it's about fighting to be better than we already are and i see that no matter what you say about where we are and all the trials even in my short little life of almost half a century i have seen so much incredible progress in this country the america that i grew up in the the social freedoms and the tolerances the people who were not even allowed to exist when i was a kid are now free and equal to me the fact

1:24:16 and and you know more than me so i'm going to challenge you i've always challenged people on this maybe you can prove me wrong find me another civilization where our recent president could have been a slave of our first president has any civilization made this much social progress this fast without a gun to its head because germany and japan did that but they had a gun to its head has any other civilization made this much progress in this short time on its own by its own force of will the uh the the historian that neither of us really are officially would say that progress is a culturally specific sort of of an attitude and what we would consider to be progress we would be measuring other countries by a standard that that they wouldn't think of as progress at all which is exactly why i'm proud to be an american because i've traveled all around this world and i've seen other countries and i've

1:25:16 seen other so-called great powers and they look around and they go we're done this is it this is us this is who we want to be and we're totally okay with it and then i come back to america and i see this constant growing pain of always reaching towards the light and sometimes we fall back and sometimes we go forward but that fight for the light makes me proud to be an american i've always said max i want an america that lives up to the marketing materials uh my friend thank you so much for coming on the program these are the kind of conversations i have for fun so thank you for providing a really entertaining afternoon for me thank you dan and i look forward to your next 11 hour hardcore history podcast god okay thanks man listen hopefully you and i will be in the same room before too long again you bet buddy

1:26:14 my thanks to max brooks for coming on the program i really enjoyed the conversation i wouldn't mind doing that one again that's a lot of fun and you know i know there's 9 000 things i'm supposed to tell you but with the hardcore history temporary brain fog that develops at this stage of the process i can't remember any of them except to say that you know we sell the old shows online and itunes and some other places if uh if you're jonesing for one of the long podcast as we work on the current one also we have some relatively new merch available if you're interested in a hat or a shirt or something like that head on over to the website at dan carlin.com and check that out and thanks for all the support and patience folks we are working on the big show i promise uh and as usual i don't know if it's any good or not i hope you like it whenever the heck we finish it stay safe everyone if you think the show you just heard is

1:27:06 worth a dollar dan and ben would love to have it a buck a show it's all we ask go to dancarland.com for information on how to donate to the show

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP19 Asymmetrical Perspectives"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Max Brooks (Guest).

What is "EP19 Asymmetrical Perspectives" about?

The conversation explores the concept of asymmetrical warfare, introduced by guest Max Brooks, who defines it as a form of conflict where traditional military strategies are replaced by unconventional tactics, emphasizing the importance of understanding this dynamic in modern contexts. The discussion also touches on Brooks' multifaceted background as an actor, author, and senior fellow at the…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

19 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Max Brooks, Russia, China, Ukraine, Desert Storm, NATO. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP19 Asymmetrical Perspectives"?

The episode runs 1 h 27 min; the transcript is about 16,182 words in 93 timestamped sections.

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