Iran vs Israel Fallout, Can America Become Great Again? w/ Daniel McCarthy
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There is a change in American attitudes towards Israel. Israel is becoming less popular among Americans. It's a slow change, but it is taking place and it's partly connected to demographics and some of the changes in population in America. And also Israel's approach, especially in Gaza, is really alienating a lot of the rest of the world, especially in Europe.

And the governments in Europe, you know, they have kind of a mixed feeling. A lot of them are very pro-Israel for historical reasons. They're still very ashamed of their own records during World War II. And yet populations within those countries are becoming very, very critical of Israel with respect to Gaza and Palestine as a whole. So Israel has to think carefully about what its relationship, not only with its immediate neighbors, but also with the whole world is going to be, you know, in the next decade or so.

A neighbor's choice.

Well, today we have a conversation in store about the implications, what's going on in D.C. with this battle between the neocons and the war hawks versus those who call for more restraint and non-intervention. And to do so, I have the editor of the Modern Age Journal,

as well as he's also the VP of ISI, which we can get into what that group is all about. That's the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Daniel McCarthy, how are you doing, Daniel? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on the show. It's great to see you again. And, you know, we've had such an interesting whirlwind of events in the last few weeks. I thought it'd be great to hear your thoughts on that. First of all, tell us a little bit about the legacy of

of the modern age journal and what it means and maybe kind of the context of this current

fight we're in. Yeah, so I mean, Modern Age goes all the way back to 1957. It's a magazine that was founded by Russell Kirk. Russell Kirk was one of the most important thinkers of the early post-World War II conservative movement. And Kirk wrote a book called The Conservative Mind, which really helped to popularize the very idea of conservatism in the post-war era. And right from the beginning, Modern Age was very skeptical of

the Cold War and the rather hegemonic or imperialistic foreign policy that characterized much of our Cold War strategy. And so in the very first issue of Modern Age, there was an essay by Felix Morley, who was an interesting libertarian thinker,

of uh you know the 1950s and earlier where morley uh you know titled this essay american republic or american empire he was already asking the question you know that early as to where our foreign policy was going so modern age since then has always been involved in uh examining these questions of whether america's foreign policy is too grandiose too ambitious

whether we have departed from the wisdom of our founding fathers or whether things may be perhaps more encouraging than we think. So I've been very critical of a lot of what we've seen happening in foreign policy in the last several weeks here.

What's your general sense of things? You know, everything's a little bit opaque. We can't really know what the swerve is. Everybody's got layers of swerves upon swerves that they're interpreting from this event and that event with Trump and the strikes and this strike and that strike and this bluff. I mean, we just went a few days ago, Trump was saying, total surrender, total surrender. We've got you. We're going to kill you too. Oh, we're going to make a great deal with him. So it's a whirlwind tour. That's how he likes to...

He likes to flood the zone with maximal chaos with his opponents and then kind of retreat, and he does that move a lot in different ways. How do you interpret, from the best that you understand, I know you're in the D.C. area, so you get to see people who are chattering, and the conversations online, of course, are informative. Where do you see things?

Yeah, so I mean, I think you have to be skeptical about a lot of the reporting on the decision making process. And even within government itself, there are folks who, you know, may have an interpretation of events that is entirely wrong. I think a lot of, you know, this comes down to simply what Trump himself is thinking in his own head, to which, you know, nobody else has access. I think, you know, on the one hand, you know, I didn't have any more confident a prediction than anyone else about where Trump was going with all of this.

But in the end, it seems like Trump has wound up sort of following a pattern that he's exhibited in the past. He has he's willing to use force. He's used force even against Iran back during his first term with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani.

So that's not something that's a totally new development with him. But he seems to want to use force when he does employ it in a very limited way and not in a very prolonged period. So in that sense, too, the fact that he had these airstrikes and now seems to be done with them, that seems to be in keeping with Trump's general tendency as a president to

And as someone who looks at foreign policy and doesn't want to get sucked into the kinds of prolonged conflicts that so many predecessors of his have been mired in.

So do you see this as a victory? You know, neocons are calling this a victory for their cause and saying Tucker Carlson has been totally, you know, exposed as a turncoat and he's been diminished by this and so has Candace Owens or anybody else who's been critical of the hawkish neocons. And then the other side, you know, folks who are wanting us to stay out of

conflict with Iran are saying, no, this is a total big victory narratively for the cause of restraint.

Well, I think you can decide which side is winning based on how they sound. And right now it sounds like the hawks are a lot less happy than the doves. You know, non-interventionists are saying, you know what, we would have preferred not to have the U.S. involved in this war at all. But if we were going to get involved, it was good that this was very brief and that, in fact, the war seems to be at least at a ceasefire and hopefully it's over.

Whereas the hawks, they're really disappointed right now. They wanted something to be much more prolonged, much more expansive, and it would ultimately end in regime change. And Trump seems not to be going in that direction at all. I wrote before the latest conflict in the American conservative, an article that Vietnam provides an example for how much more success we could have with

de-escalating problems with Iran with the trade deal, you know, with Vietnam, so many lives lost, you know, and

what we were able to do with peace through trade, it's very stark contrast. The people that just a few decades ago, how many of their people were killed by our country, and now ever since then, through trade and that kind of thing, travel, dialogue, cultural exchange, Vietnam is now a peaceful ally in a lot of ways to the American people.

and it's become a fixture of cultural interest and intrigue by Americans and vice versa. And it's interesting to see that they were the first to come to the table when all the tariffs were slapped on. Hey, we'll be the first to negotiate. And that is a model I see for how we could do things differently.

With a country like Iran, where you can have a lot more involvement with trade and eventually that de-escalates and that provides a lot of incentives to not continue popping off strikes every few years.

Yeah. You know, if Trump had carte blanche and were able to set whatever policy he wants, he might very well go for some grand bargain with Iran, something that might even include a trade deal. Trump likes to have these, you know, sort of great settlements to conflicts and to negotiations. He likes to have, you know, to be able to announce the biggest deal ever.

But unfortunately, I mean, Trump doesn't have that degree of freedom. And it seems like Congress, for example, is going to be very intractable for a very long time. So I don't know that you're actually going to see that much change when it comes to sanctions and economic policy towards Iran. I think, in fact, you know, Congress is probably going to have the determinative say in that much more so than the president does. Wow.

So, you know, he could probably just do a few ceremonial things. Maybe a meeting like Kim Jong-un is the best we can expect in terms of the peace overtures Trump could get away with. It does seem like, yeah, Steve Witkoff and perhaps even Vice President Vance are involved in negotiations directly or, you know, by force.

very close indirect proxy with Iran. So there are definitely talks going on. But, you know, I will say that this is still a very, very dangerous time, that the underlying concerns here that, you know, Israel and Iran are both, you know, their positions are very well defined. Iran wants to have a nuclear weapon. It sees that as being necessary to deter precisely these kinds of interventions against itself.

Israel says, you know, if Iran has a nuclear device, a nuclear weapon, that's something that could pose an existential threat to Israel's own population. Think about the geographic disparity here, by the way. So, I mean, you know, you saw all this discussion online where Ted Cruz's defenders claimed that he didn't have to know what the population of Iran is. What could be the relevance of that?

Well, the relevance is precisely that Iran is a country of, you know, 85 to 90 million people that is spread out over a huge territory. I mean, the country of Iran is twice the size geographically of Afghanistan. First of all, you can't try, you know, a regime change operation in that kind of a landmass without being really invested for many, many, many years and, you know, probably failing in the long run, almost certainly.

So that's one thing that Ted Cruz needs to consider. But the other thing to consider is if you did have, God forbid, a nuclear conflict between Israel and Iran, the

The geography actually favors Iran quite extensively because it is such a large country. It has a very large population. Israel, by contrast, is a population of about 10 million people, actually somewhat fewer than that. And most of it is concentrated in a very small slice of land. So as a result, if you were to start exchanging nuclear weapons, exchanging attacks, Israel would be in a much worse position to survive that than Iran would be.

And people talk about moral hazard in economic terms, but there's a tremendous amount of moral hazard here in Israel's behavior because of that very factor there. I mean, would you say, who do you think has acted with more restraint in this latest skirmish, Israel or Iran?

Well, I have to say, you know, this is a matter where both nations are following their own national interests as they understand it. So I don't think there's, you know, much use in saying, hey, if I were you, I wouldn't be doing what you're doing. Because in fact, you know, if I were an Israeli citizen, I'd probably be very, very worried about Iran having nuclear

weapon. If I were the Iranians, I would be determined to have a nuclear weapon in order to deter the United States and Israel. And I just don't see anything that's going to change the logic of either side. As a result, that's why I think that this conflict, the issues animating it are still very real. And although I'm very hopeful that Trump will have success in not only calling it to a close right now, but also resolving in the long run through diplomacy this conflict,

It's very, very shaky, and we should be very cautious about thinking that the ceasefire and the peace are going to last. You say it's in Israel's interest to start to keep this kind of posture towards Iran, but I don't see them freaking out about other nations like Pakistan having nukes and they're not trying to go after them all the time. I mean, why can't Israel find a way to make a deal with Iran? What's the problem there?

Well, you know, Iran not only has a very violent anti-Israel rhetoric that they resort to, but they also are the primary supporters of Hezbollah and a number of other terrorist organizations which actually, you know, attack Israel on a regular basis. So the Israelis have reason to believe that when the Iranians have, you know, very harsh things to say, calling Israel

you know, Israel, the little Satan and saying that, you know, they want to see Israel wiped off the map, that they actually mean the things that they're saying. Now, maybe they, maybe the Iranians don't mean it. Maybe it all is a bluff. Maybe it is simply tough talk, but Israel certainly feels like it's not in a position of sufficient security that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, that the Israelis would be able to sleep easily at night. Mm-hmm.

I don't think they're going to be sleeping easy anytime soon because of the, especially, you know, again, I don't see what the actions of the government of Israel have been in the best interest of the Israelis for some time, you know, even from their own perspective. But I guess I can see it from the perspective of trying to stay out of prison. Like it seems like that Yahoo has been doing, but from other, other than that, you know, just daily carpet bombing children is not really a good look when you're surrounded by people who, uh,

look and may have similar views as those folks that you're killing every day. Yeah, Israel has, you know, taken a very, you know, tough stance, obviously, both towards Gaza and now Iran. And at the moment, it seems like the Arab world is tolerant of what Israel is doing. And, you know, in a way, the, you know,

The success of Donald Trump's Abraham Accords in his first term, creating a greater environment of peace between the Arab world and Israel, is actually what's created the conditions that have allowed some of the wars that are happening now, because Israel doesn't have quite as much worry that you're going to have a multi-front war with neighbors that are also getting involved. And Syria is also a factor in this as well. The fact that the new Syrian government, even though it's an Islamist government, seems to be much more tolerant of Israel than previous Syrian regimes have been.

So all of this is, you know, this is a reason why America, you know, tends to, why many Americans think we should not be deeply involved in the Middle East, simply because all of this is going to be extremely difficult to sort out. And you've got a lot of different factions here, all of whom have their own interests and agendas and what they, the policy they're pursuing right now may be something that leads to, you know, enormous complications in the future. Now, why is it that the Syrian government

regime has you know comes comes from this islamist background of terrorism and yet is so pro seemingly pro uh whatever israel is interested in you know even giving them some of the golden heights and everything yeah it all comes down i think to who is financing these terrorist movements behind the scenes so uh for a very long time iran was involved in financing organizations like hezbollah um

The financing for the Islamists who've taken over Syria, it's kind of a question mark as to where that money is coming from. But if it's coming from the Gulf Arabs, if it's coming from the sources that tend to support Sunni radicalism, a lot of those states and a lot of those wealthy individuals

have moved to a position of thinking that it's actually better to have business with Israel and to make money than it is to continue having, you know, clandestine warfare against them, in part because Israel is very effective at assassinating people and very effective at cracking down on some of these terrorist organizations. So there is a sense in which, you know, the incentives, both financial and also in terms of life and death, have changed for some of the Islamists

such that they are now more willing to do business with Israel and also more afraid of Israel than they had been in the past. And the overall discourse about how we should handle this situation, do you think there's something that the general media conversation has missed so far that perhaps modern age or your own ideas, you feel like, I wish this angle or this perspective was more involved in this ongoing discourse?

Yeah, I think the big problem with the way this issue is covered is that there isn't enough thought given to the long term. And you've already alluded to one of the big questions here. So there is a change in American attitudes towards Israel. Israel's becoming less popular among Americans. It's a slow change, but it is taking place and it's partly connected to demographics and, you know, some of the changes in population in America.

And also Israel's approach, especially in Gaza, is really alienating a lot of the rest of the world, especially in Europe. And the governments in Europe, they have kind of a mixed feeling. A lot of them are very pro-Israel for historical reasons. They're still very ashamed of their own records during World War II. And yet populations within those countries are becoming very, very critical of Israel with respect to Gaza and Palestine as a whole.

So Israel has to think carefully about what its relationship, not only with its immediate neighbors, but also with the whole world is going to be, you know, in the next decade or so. And if it's a relationship of, you know, enmity or suspicion or, um, you know, um, hostility, that's going to be something which even if Israel seems very successful in the short term, in terms of using force to take out Iranian commanders or Hezbollah leaders or others, uh,

that force is not necessarily going to be the thing that Israel is able to rely on in the long run. I think actually you do need to have some degree of goodwill among your neighbors and among the rest of the world. Now, that said, the Israelis also are resolved that they want to maintain their country as a Jewish state. Obviously, it's surrounded by much larger Islamic governments and Islamic populations.

And therefore, the Israelis are always going to have to have a somewhat, you know, clearly defined line between themselves and their neighbors. And that's always going to cause a certain amount of conflict. So there are definitely some very long range questions here which need to be talked about. Similarly with, you know, nuclear proliferation. You know, one of the fears with the idea of,

Iran getting a nuclear weapon is that perhaps this will create a race for other states in the region like Saudi Arabia and others to go after nuclear weapons as well, thinking that, you know, perhaps everyone should have one. And then there are questions of just, you know, loose nukes and things that may, you know, involve terrorist groups or others getting their hands on a nuke.

As far as states are concerned, nuclear weapons tend to be self-neutralizing. It tends to be that nobody wants to have a nuclear exchange with another nuclear state because that would be mutual destruction for them both. But there are risks that nuclear weapons will get into the hands of non-state actors who may not have the same logic of deterrence that applies to states. Yeah, pretty clear that they continue to pop up. The countries that seem to be target for invasions are the ones that don't have nukes, if you

are the ones that are not protected by a major nuclear power you know and so and that seems like a pretty law of the jungle kind of environment there you know if you're not strong enough to survive you're not going to survive uh the the bigger dogs coming by and you know doing what they will with your with your country and it seems like the foreign policy of america and israel has been one of sowing chaos deliberately not not necessarily you know first they tried to do the whole yeah we're here to teach jeffersonian democracy but

it's become pretty clear that most of the record of what they've left behind has been one of sowing chaos and, you know, destroying Syria, destroying Libya, destroying a lot of the cohesion of Iraq and create, you know, kind of pushing them back a few, you know, I don't know, years or so in terms of where they could have been. And it seems like that is the design. That's not the bug. That's the feature of the foreign policy strategy.

operations of the Pentagon and Israel? Well, part of the complexity here is that the Pentagon and Israel, even though they're often aligned, they often operate in very different ways. The Israelis do have an understanding of their own neighborhood, and they do think they have a very clear understanding of their own interests. You can kind of see this in Syria. So you're right that the Israelis were very happy to see Syria weakened by civil war for many, many years. And in that sense, the chaos was serving Israel's interests.

But they actually, the Israelis seem quite happy to have the end to the chaos now, which is a, you know, the civil war has resolved into, you know, a now Islamist controlled Syria. But because the Israelis have a relatively good relationship with these Islamists, that may be a, you know, a new order within Syria that the Israelis are actually quite happy with, as opposed to, you know, the chaos before. So there is that. And then with respect to America, I mean, you know, we...

You would think that because it is so predictable that we cause chaos every time we get involved in these situations, that, you know, there comes a point where you have to, you know, just ask yourselves, how can this continue to be an accident when you know exactly what's going to happen and you keep doing the same thing over and over again?

But, uh, I don't think you can totally discount the unreality and the, the sheer ideological utopianism of America's, you know, supposed foreign policy elite here in Washington, DC. They really are people who have, you know, a tremendous, um, uh,

overestimation of their own ability to manage the world and who really think that, you know, if only they have enough bombs and enough, you know, freedom to use force, that they will be able to remake the world in, you know, the image that they want to see created, not of chaos, but of, you know, liberal democracy and happiness and so forth. And as, you know, obvious as the facts are in refuting them and showing that that is not true,

The fact is, you know, these Washington, D.C. elites, they never lose their jobs. They're never penalized for being wrong. And therefore, they can continue to entertain these illusions and these delusions for, you know, throughout their careers. And in a way, it becomes a self-sustaining, you know, community of illusion. Right.

If you are someone in Washington, D.C., and you're in foreign policy, and you say, hey, look at our track record. It's really dismal. Maybe we shouldn't keep doing these kinds of things. You're seen as being kind of a party pooper and someone who should not be part of the club. Whereas all the idiots who are saying, oh, this is, you know, maybe it didn't work out this time, but we'll just use more bombs next time. Or we'll have, you know, we'll have psychiatrists as well as soldiers sent in. Any number of permutations. Those sorts of things are treated seriously and are seen as being...

good for the foreign policy community, precisely because those kinds of dreams help to sustain the illusion. What are some insights Russell Kirk can provide for us in this time when people are deciding, what does it mean to be America first? What does it mean to make America great? Does it mean continuing this alliance with Israel and intervention in the Middle East? Or does it mean saying, hey, you know, you're on your own now. It's time for you to spread your wings and fly.

You know, there certainly are some great conservative thinkers and libertarian thinkers as well from the early part of the 20th century and the middle part of the 20th century who are well worth revisiting right now in order not only to think about the current situation in the Middle East, but also to think about, in general, America's foreign policy principles and what they ought to be. And of course, most valuable...

of all, is to go back and look at things that George Washington and John Quincy Adams and other leaders of the early republic had to say about what America's foreign policy would have to be if we wanted to maintain a system of self-government here at home. One of the things I think that is overlooked usually in foreign policy arguments

is that you cannot police the world and you cannot have this kind of, you know, imperial attempt to manage the entire globe and still maintain Republican institutions at home. You cannot maintain a sense that the leaders in Washington actually represent the interests and the needs of the American populace, you know, in the 50 states. If you have leaders in Washington who are constantly focusing on other countries' borders, on other countries', you know, security situations,

and not on actually whether the good of the American people is advancing. So I recommend to listeners that they check out what George Washington and what John Quincy Adams have had to say about foreign policy. And as far as libertarians and conservatives go, certainly, you know, looking at some of the great...

libertarians who really kicked off the revival of the post-war right and who even before World War II were instrumental in creating a kind of libertarian and conservative resistance to the New Deal and to the warfare state at the same time. This would be figures like Albert J. Nock, for example, but also there's a writer by the name of Frank Chodorov who's very interesting. And Chodorov

was a, he was very libertarian. He defined himself as an individualist. He was someone who worked with Albert J. Nock. He was someone who, you know, very much admired this kind of anarchist tradition of, you know, minimizing government completely to the point of, you know, non-existence even.

But Frank Chodorov is actually the guy who winds up founding the organization that I'm now VP of, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which starts out as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. And I recommend Frank Chodorov's books. One of them is called One is a Crowd. There are a couple of others that are collections of essays of his.

where he talks about foreign policy, but he also talks about his ideas as someone who believes that if you don't have the correct philosophy or you don't have an understanding of the West's traditions, then it's not enough to be opposed to, you know,

a force you don't like in foreign policy or, you know, uh, you know, or communist subversives during the cold war or whomever the case may be, that if you don't have positive ideas that are actually good and that you can embrace and teach to the next generation, then opposing bad ideas is not going to be enough and is not going to succeed. So I recommend Chodorov and I certainly do recommend, uh, you know, um, Russell Kirk, uh,

Other early conservative thinkers like Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet were also quite critical of America's foreign policy. Nisbet has two very important books called The Twilight of Authority and The Present Age, which I particularly recommend. But you seem to be kind of one of those conservatives that you're kind of okay with, I would say, the fusionism concept of bringing libertarianism and conservatism and finding some coalition ideas.

power there, but yet there's a growing disinterest, you know, you've seen probably online of this newer right that wants to go back beyond, you know, well, it depends on how you look at the time, you know, how you look at the time there, but they want to go back to an authoritarian, more right-wing, that's more kind of doing away with a lot of the liberalism that was still

I guess, you know, intrinsic to a lot of those thinkers you just mentioned, right? And so there's this desire for kind of a total repudiation of what they consider to be not truly right-wing in this allegiance with liberalism and fidelity to individualism and other things that they believe have kind of, you know, elevated the market and elevated, you know, these other considerations that

that are not dealing with reality, the reality of power and how it works. And a lot of this, I'm sure you're very familiar with it as well, this elite theory and all this. So people take elite theory and they go one way or another with it. But there is an emerging trend you're seeing of people, and who knows how long it'll last, but one can assume it might have some legs to it,

if there isn't some serious change, you know, that's able to happen, you know, in terms of meeting the needs and expectations of people who believe that America is in serious decline. Yeah, I mean...

Most of the thinkers I mentioned earlier, people like Russell Kirk, they would not have accepted the label fusionists, and actually many of them were quite critical of libertarians. Kirk certainly was. Kirk called libertarians chirping sectaries, and he had various other unkind words with libertarians, in part because many of the libertarians...

actually attacked Russell Kirk very early on when he publishes The Conservative Mind in 1953, for example. A number of libertarians like Frank Meyer wind up writing very critical essays saying, oh, this new conservatism is a very bad idea and that we should just focus on a kind of liberalism inherited from John Stuart Mill and others.

And conservatives have always been critical of John Stuart Mill and that particular, you know, notion of liberalism. That said, I mean, you know, you have to take these labels that, you know, are thrown around and that people, you know, have a very casual or caricatured understanding of, and

And you have to put those to the side and you actually have to actually read the important thinkers of these different schools of thought, whether they are conservatives who reject liberalism, whether they are fusionist conservatives who want to bring together libertarians and traditionalists, or whether they are libertarians who reject conservatism.

All of these thinkers, you know, there are thinkers within each of these schools who have apprehended something very important and true about the world in which we live, which is not to say that any of them necessarily has a philosophy that is entirely correct and that is comprehensively correct.

right for America either in their own time or right now. So, you know, I very much encourage, you know, people who are interested in these questions to take them seriously and to read, you know, the classic works of each of these schools of thought, because they really do give you a three-dimensional picture that is much more interesting and rich than the sort of dumb caricatures that one finds coming from both sides, actually, on social media and in very sort of casual discussions of these ideas.

Yeah, very good. And I think even on a bigger time scale, Rene Girard is very helpful with looking at this too. I mean, I can't help but be amused by, you know, what, you know, Rene Girard's, you know, examination of this kind of

continual breakdown of sacrificial violence and our appetite for it. And I can't help but think about how, you know, it seems that this, you know, these exchanges where, you know, Iran calls ahead to the United States is, you know, we're going to hit your base. Please leave everybody, get the women and children, get the cats, get everything out, get the goldfish, you know, this kind of, uh, what we would call kayfabe war, uh,

You know, this is kind of, if you look at the big picture, kind of fits nicely with the trajectory of what Rene Girard was seeing with the impact of Christianity in the West and the globe as well, where Iran is playing by these same rules where there's this aversion to, you know, unfold real carnage.

haphazardly and this desire to say, okay, you struck us and we struck you. Nobody's hurt. Let's call it a day. We've had our little problem. So there's this need for catharsis that's obviously seen in this. I have to save face. I have to show honor. I have to keep my honor. I have to keep my reputation. So I have to strike, but I don't want to kill anybody in my enemy. You just wonder where that trajectory could continue. Now, the one big thorn in that trajectory is

The Gaza thing where you see seemingly it seems like kids and children are being mowed down just kind of wantonly and brazenly against the tradition. And I think it explains, you can see that in a Girardian sense of how the whole world is very, very much turning against...

a nation that they once, you know, may have been in allegiance with or, and sympathetic to because of how brazen the kind of disregard for, uh, you know, citizens and civilians and the least of these, that kind of Christian aesthetic continues to haunt, uh, ever more. So it seems like the more we continue to, um, to go on here with this, uh, with this, uh, um,

I use the word Christ haunted because it kind of helps explain that it has nothing to do with we have the religion of Christianity, but there's this cultural aversion to violence that I think you see playing out here even amongst our enemies who are not even Christian in that sense.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm less, um, you know, um, sure of that than, uh, you might be. And it does seem to me that, um, you know, you're quite right that non-Christians can still be influenced by, uh, you know, the shadow of Christianity or by a larger sort of Christian influence on global culture. And yet I do think it's quite significant that, you know, Iran and Israel, both of which are non-Christian countries, uh, both of which are, you know, explicitly countries that are devoted to other religions, um,

I don't know that the Christian dynamic is what's controlling what happens in either of those states. And not only that, but also, you know, there is something that Americans, especially Americans who want us to be involved in fewer wars, have to think very seriously about is.

Since World War II and since the end of the Cold War, America has had enough power in the world that we've been able to kind of set a lot of norms. It's not because our bombs bring values. That's certainly not correct. And in fact, our bombs usually negate values. But it is the case that because we have seemingly such a prime position in terms of the rest of the world depending on us or fearing us either way,

that, you know, the values that we have have been assumed to be global values. And these have been, in many cases, you know, liberal or progressive values that are a kind of watered down version of Christianity. And in that sense, America has kind of, you know, been a symbol of a global success of Christianity in terms of prestige, if not in terms of actually, you know, being a religion that has now taken root in places like Iran or Israel.

And yet, you know, as we pull back from the world and as American prestige declines, you may find that these, you know, Western norms, these liberal norms, these progressive norms, which are, again, a kind of watered down Christianity, that these start to decline as well. And that other states start to more aggressively assert what it may mean to have, you know, Turkish norms or Indian norms or Israeli norms or Iranian norms declining.

and that may be a process that we find quite shocking and uncomfortable. It's very interesting, and that's kind of my point, though, is that we set these global standards that countries like Iran have to appeal to in order to kind of maintain legitimacy of their behavior. Hey, we're part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Those are standards that are kind of Christ-haunted, set up, like you said, watered down,

you know, downstream from Christianity. And one has to wonder, you know, you're right, if America does rapidly decline in prestige in various ways, will there be a return of more older sacred forms of kind of handling one's affairs? But I do think that as long as America maintains its number one position of wealth and innovation and

cultural making that it has had that it will continue to be kind of mimetically imitated and therefore those Christ-taunted values will continue to kind of seep into the norms of these other nations even if we're not quite the big superpower we used to be. In fact, I could see a positive scenario where we actually become more emulated precisely the more we return to a more normal nation that's not policing the world in a crooked way like we seem to have done and

and instead kind of leads the way with a wealth model. Wow, they're the envy of the world again because they're actually producing and manufacturing and they're actually being good neighbors and they're not going off into never-ending skirmishes on behalf of these crusades. So we'll see what happens. But you know what I mean? I remember the reason why I think about that, I think about that interview that Tucker Carlson did. Was it in Qatar where he was on stage and he said, I just want America to represent America

itself in its best way. And he got such a great reception to that crowd of, you know, Muslim businessmen and, you know, whatever, politicians. And I thought, well, that's so interesting how there's this deep craving for this kind of America to return to

a kind of Christian role model in some sense. I don't know. Well, but you've also seen when Tucker Carlson has visited other countries, whether it's Russia and, you know, going on the subway in Russia, whether it's, you know, going to the Middle East and Qatar, that Tucker Carlson has actually been very impressed by

by the sense of order and beauty that he finds in these foreign countries and he finds is now absent in America. So, uh, you know, that there's clearly, you know, in terms of other countries wanting to emulate us, it's not just, you know, the, uh, you know, number of zeros in our bank account matter. It's actually the way of life that we have. And that right now is very problematic because we see, you know, declining life expectancy. We see a lot of despair in this country. We see a lot of insanity. Uh,

Thankfully, that is starting to get rolled back. I think the fact that the Supreme Court and the president have both taken on this sort of transgender extremism, those are all signs that America might be starting to recover a degree of sanity and normality. Nevertheless, I do worry that our culture is so degraded that it will not have, in fact, the ability to inspire other people around the world. And as far as economics goes, I mean,

You know, it is the case that and it's it's partly a partly a very good thing But it is the case that because other countries have become a lot wealthier over the last half century That America's you know lead over other countries in terms of its wealth and success is now less impressive than it was You know in the decades after World War two that other countries now have a greater sense that you know what? It's not only the Americans who can have wealth but

We Chinese can have wealth. Indians can have wealth. Anyone who works hard enough can have wealth. And again, that's a good thing to the extent that it shows previously impoverished populations are now able to have a degree of prosperity. But it also means that America's ability to impress other people by having so much wealth in our country is diminished over time. Right.

And I will leave it here, but I do think that to the extent that these other nations inspire, it's interesting how even if Russia is becoming a role model for some nations who admire their stand against the globalism or going against some of the European hubris, that also has a way of kind of...

influencing people in a Christ-taunted way because of Russia's roots and returning to that. So I appreciate your time, Daniel, for coming on. Where can people follow you on X or any other platform and your website again? Yeah, so you can follow me on X with the handle at Tory Anarchist. So that's a nice provocative, you know,

Screen name for Twitter, Tory Anarchist. And then you can follow Modern Age at modernagejournal.com. And there's also a Twitter account for that, which is at modernagejournal. Does Modern Age focus on foreign policy, economics, or culture, lifestyle, health, too? Modern Age tries to focus on the philosophical underpinnings and the deeper currents behind the headlines. So

We do, in fact, have quite a bit on foreign policy, especially recently, but it's not so much, you know, I mean, oftentimes it'll take a headline or something that's in the news as a point of departure. But then it'll look at the history and the philosophy behind that headline and the, you know, sort of, again, the deeper currents that are actually informing what's happening in our world. So that's true when it comes to.

foreign policy, and it's also our approach to economics and to culture and to any number of other controversies as well. We try not to be just about, you know, the immediate, you know, kind of shock and, you know, back and forth chit chat that you find, you know, online, but rather to have a more serious kind of deeper discussion and examination. Maybe I have to submit some stuff to you guys. I have found in recent years that it's become harder in some ways for me to

I like to take current events and inject some anthropology in there and do that kind of thing. And it's kind of a unique thing that I do. And I have found it harder to find outlets that want to go to that high-level view. They kind of want to stay in the he said, she said, what happened this week. And that's hard to fit my tendency to want to write in that way. It seems like there was a few years ago,

where a lot of those outlets were, I don't know what it was, a different attitude in the time of the culture where a lot of these news-oriented outlets still made space for some high-level philosophical frameworks, you know, deeper thoughts. And I think we need to have more of that philosophical injection. And I don't like to see them isolated, too. And I don't know, you know,

the particulars of your outlet but i hate to see you know uh this kind of uh over here we have the scuttlebutt of what's happening and he said and who's mad at this person and who was mad at trump and who was in the situation room when the strike happened and then high level stuff i wish that stuff could kind of play together a little bit more you know it's more fun that way all right take care daniel thank you for your time thanks

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Woo!