Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Well, I would like for America to have an extremely minimal nuclear deterrent and work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. And I know that that sounds utopian. However, I would remind your audience that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came within a hair of achieving a deal just like that at Reykjavik Iceland in 1986, and they were both of them dead serious about it, complete and total nuclear disarmament. Then Reagan was essentially bullied by Richard Pearl and others on his staff saying, “You promised the American people that you would build them a defensive anti-missile system, the Star Wars system,” which was total pie in the sky, technological fantasy of the 1980s. And if you’re getting rid of all the ICBMs, then why the hell do you need a missile shield anyway? Is the world’s probably greatest tragedy that ever took place that Ronald Reagan walked away from those negotiations. They literally were within a hair and it wasn’t magic and there was no trust in evil, bad guys. This is, by the way, two years before the wall came down, this is when everybody still thought the USSR was going to last. And Reagan, the plan was that America and the Soviet Union would dismantle our nuclear weapons until we were right around parity with the other nuclear weapon states who all have right around two or 300 nukes, France, Britain at that time, Israel and China, India and Pakistan came later. South Africa only had a few of them, but gave up whatever they had. And the idea was we would get down to two or 300 and then America and the Soviet Union both together would lean hard on Britain, France, and China, let’s all get down to 100. Let’s all see if we can get down to 50, etc. Like that in stages. Again, Ronald Reagan we’re talking about here, trust but verify means do not trust at all. It means be polite while you verify. And in fact, America did help dismantle upwards of 60 something thousand Soviet nuclear missiles after the end of the Cold War. And so it is possible to live in a world where at the very least we have a situation where the major powers have a few nukes and potentially can even come to an arrangement to get rid of the rest. We should also just say one more thing, not to be ageist, but most of the major leaders with nukes and those with power in the world are in their 70s and 80s. I don’t know if that contributes to it, but they kind of are grounded in a different time. I have a hope for the fresher, younger leaders to have a more optimistic view towards peace and to be able to reach towards peace. And underlying so much of what we’re talking about here is all this enmity, but if America could just work, remember when China cut that pseudo sort of peace deal between Saudi and Iran a couple of years ago or last year was it? We could try to double up on that. We could try to come up with ways for Saudi and Iran to exchange as much as possible. I know you don’t like all the going back too far in history, but it’s important. It’s in my book that in 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who the revolution had happened on his watch Operation Eagle Claw, the disaster of the rescue mission in ’79 after the hostage crisis and everything, all that egg was on ZB’s face. But in ’93 he said, “We should normalize relations. We should build an oil pipeline across Iran so they can make money. We can make money and we can start to normalize.” And Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger’s right-hand man, agreed. They both were trying to push that. But the Clinton administration went ahead with Martin Indick who had been Yitzhak Shamir’s man and inaugurated the dual containment policy instead, because the Israelis were concerned that America had just beaten up on Iraq so bad in Iraq War one that now Iraq wasn’t powerful enough to balance against Iran, so America had to stay in Saudi to balance against them both. And that was the origin of the dual containment policy. It was Martin Indick who had been Yitzhak Shamir’s man who pushed it on Clinton. And this was not the Israelis, it was the Kuwaitis who lied that there was a truck bomb attempt assassination against HW Bush, which was a total hoax. It was debunked by Seymour Hersh by the end of the year. It was just a whiskey smuggling ring, and it was the same guy whose daughter had claimed to have seen the Iraqi soldiers throw the babies out of the incubators. He was the guy who two years later made up this hoax about Saddam Hussein trying to murder Bush Senior. But when he did, that was when Bill Clinton finally gave in and adopted the dual-containment policy, because he had been interested in potentially reaching out to Saddam and the Ayatollah both at that time, but instead of having normalization with both, we had to have permanent Cold War through the end of the century with both. And my argument is simply, it just didn’t have to be that way. It’s the same thing with Russia. Look at how determined the Democrats especially are to have this conflict with Russia where to Donald Trump? Nah, not at all. We could get along with them. And so it’s perfectly within reason. If Zbigniew Brzezinski says, we can talk with Iran and get along with Iran, and Donald Trump says we can get along with Russia, then the same thing for North Korea, the same thing for China. And then who do we have left to fight? Hezbollah? Hezbollah’s, nothing without Iran.…

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