Dave Smith: belief

Transcript context

…Well, so to push back a little bit throughout human history, there was also a thing, you look at the Roman Empire where just the culture of values were different where military conquest was seen as a good thing. So we just almost assume in the United States war has been framed in the defensive sense where offensive war we’re not doing that anymore. You make a fair point. It’s certainly true that throughout human history, there’s been overt empire building and wars of conquest and things like that. But I guess I’m just saying at least even there, you would have some type of sell of why we’re going to go take these resources and why that will be good for us. Whereas the idea that Kuwait just needed to be defended by the Americans seems so, it seems so hard to convince anybody, and yet they were able to do it. If you read Neocon writing in the ’90s, it was very interesting because they would tell the truth a lot more. Essentially, I think there was the Soviet Union had just collapsed. It was what Charles Krauthammer dubbed the unipolar moment. There was excitement, there was a feeling of invincibility. And also the Neocons weren’t in power after ’92 really. I mean, they were in the George H.W. Bush administration, but after ’92, they really weren’t. So they’re just writing at these think tanks, and it just didn’t seem as… they weren’t as guarded. There weren’t these accusations of Euro war criminal or something like that. But what he said, what Jonah Goldberg agreed with, I think the statement was every 10 years or so, America’s got to find a puny little country and put them up against the wall just to let the rest of the world know that we mean business. And that was actually their mentality. I’m sure there’s people that agree with that. I happen to disagree with that. But the drums of war are beating a little bit over Taiwan and China.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.