Gregory Aldrete: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And it’s a terrifying experiment to find out if nuclear weapons… When a lot of nations have nuclear weapons, is that going to enforce civility and peace, or is it actually going to be a destabilizing and ultimately civilization destroying? Right. I mean, it was weirdly stable when it was a bipolar world where you had just sort of those two blocks. Now with a multipolar world with access to these weapons, I don’t know. I mean, we’re kind of jumping out of the ancient world, but I’ll tell you one thing that’s always fascinated me in this sort of comparison of ancient/ modern is how people don’t learn the lessons of the past in military history. And the very specific example, that in my lifetime I’ve seen play out twice, is just certain places people make the same mistakes over and over again. So a nice example is Afghanistan or roughly that sort of northern Pakistan-slash-into-what-is-Afghanistan. I mean, that is a geographic region that over and over again, the best most sophisticated armies in the world have invaded and have met horrible failure. And that goes all the way back to Alexander the Great tried to conquer that area. The Mongols tried to do it. The Huns tried to do it. The Mughals tried to do it. Victorian Britain tried to do it. The Russians tried to do it. The Americans tried to do it. And they made the very same mistakes over and over and over again. And the two mistakes are not understanding the terrain, that it’s a rocky mountainous area that people can always hide in caves. And it’s not understanding the fundamentally tribal nature of that area that that’s where the real allegiance is in these tribes. It’s not in a centralized government. And that’s the same era Alexander made, as the British made in the 19th century, as the Russians, as the Americans. And it’s so depressing as a historian who studies history to see these things being repeated over and over again and you know exactly what’s going to happen. For leaders not to be learning lessons of history. You co-wrote a book precisely on this topic, The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What have the Greeks and Romans Done For Us? What are the some key elements of antiquity that are reflected in the modern world?…

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