Are We In A Pre-War Era?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Free Press

News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 7.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2023

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Recently, Walter Russell Mead wrote an outstanding article in Tablet titled “You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times.” It’s about the paradox—and great dangers—of technological progress: “Human ingenuity has made us much safer from natural calamities. We can treat many diseases, predict storms, build dams both to prevent floods and to save water against drought, and many other fine things. Many fewer of us starve than in former times, and billions of us today enjoy better living conditions than our forebears dreamed possible. Yet if we are safer from most natural catastrophes, we are more vulnerable than ever to human-caused ones.” Today on Honestly, Walter talks about that significant vulnerability, and why human-caused catastrophes are the most serious threat to humanity today. Walter also explains why he believes we have definitively entered a pre-war era, and what he thinks needs to change in order to get us out of it. Walter Russell Mead is a fellow at Hudson Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College. He’s written numerous books on foreign policy, including last year’s excellent book on Israel titled The Arc of a Covenant, and he is the host of the brand-new podcast What Really Matters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Barry Weiss and this is honestly.
0:05.0	A few weeks ago I was in a dinner party and I found myself in conversation with two hyper-educated, super smart, gen zers.
0:14.6	These are kids who didn't know a world before the internet.
0:17.9	Didn't know American foreign policy
0:19.7	before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
0:22.7	We spent a lot of time talking about things like Lana Del Rey and succession,
0:26.6	but then somehow the conversation pivoted to the more contentious topic
0:30.9	of American foreign policy. Now these two guys had really different politics. One
0:35.9	was a centrist Democrat. The other was something of a Marxist. And yet when we came
0:41.3	to the subject of China and what America ought to do in a hypothetical scenario
0:46.2	in which China invades Taiwan, there was absolutely no daylight between them.
0:52.0	They both shrugged when I laid out the scenario and they said
0:54.8	something to the effect of we should probably do nothing at all. And then they
1:00.5	went back to eating their pasta while my jaw remained on the floor.
1:04.0	Their assumptions about America's role in the world,
1:10.0	and frankly about our civilization more broadly, we're just a world away from mine.
1:17.0	I still believe, despite all of our mistakes, that the world is better and safer where America is the uncontested world power,
1:27.0	that it is a very dangerous thing when that power is contested by countries like China.
1:34.0	But those Genziers I was chatting with think,
1:38.0	what are my talking about?
1:40.0	American hegemony?
1:42.0	We've already lost.
	...

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