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July 9, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:49
THE GOOD IMAM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1121
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Coming up, I'll talk about Biden's doctor, Kevin O'Connor, taking the fifth.
I'll talk about an important recent decision from SCODIS and also the issue of Trump and the Epstein files.
Imam Tahidi, a Muslim theologian, a governing member of the Global Imams Council.
This is a guy, by the way, featured in my film, Trump Cardi, joins me.
We're going to talk about Islam, Islamic radicalism, and the future of Islam in the Middle East and the West.
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The issue of Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein list was raised with President Trump, and he gave a somewhat dismissive answer, like, why are we talking about this?
Who cares?
Jeffrey Epstein, are we talking about that guy still?
Now, there were a bunch of MAGA responders who took this very badly and said, in effect, Trump is not reading the room.
Trump is missing the point.
I do want to say that I do get Trump's point.
I think this is what Trump is saying.
We're trying to fix the country.
The country is like one of those minivans that was on the edge of the precipice.
And it could easily have gone off the precipice.
And some of us, me included, were worried that it would.
But we have averted that calamity.
And we are trying to do a lot of good things on the international front, widening the Abraham Accord, strengthening our alliances, drawing some money in on tariffs.
We just got the big, beautiful bill done, massive immigration enforcement.
So things are happening, tax cuts that have now been consolidated, going after sanctuary cities, going after left-wing universities.
So Trump's level of activity has been just dizzying to behold.
And I think in that sense, you can see that the Epstein issue is somewhat in the rearview mirror.
Now, not entirely, I think, because the Epstein issue for me has always been not even so much about who killed him, although I think it was not Jeffrey Epstein who did it, but where is the customer list?
Either you're going to say that there were no customers, that Epstein was, what, running this whole ring all by himself.
He was just having an absolute harem of women, of underage girls for just what, himself and Prince Andrew?
That's it.
I saw today that Pam Bondi addressing the issue made the point that she said, well, when I said on Fox News that I had it on my desk, I didn't mean, she says, the list.
She said, I meant the file.
And so this, I think, is Bondi's way of like backing away from the idea that there clearly must have been a list because she claimed to have to have had it.
I think that the issue is not going away, even though the DOJ seems to be proclaiming it closed.
It continues to rankle a lot of MA people for the simple reason that it raises the disturbing question, could it be that some foreign government or agency or maybe even our own intelligence agencies are involved here?
The fear is not that they were running a blackmail ring with Epstein.
The fear is that they are so powerful that not even the Trump administration is willing to out them.
The other issue, the other possibility is that there are a lot of prominent Republican and Democratic names.
And by that, I mean potentially elected officials, potentially donors who are on this list.
And that would explain why neither party wants to push the list out.
Because see, it doesn't make any sense to say it's a list of that just has Democrats.
Because if it had Democrats, why wouldn't our side want to push it out?
Oh, President Trump is on the list.
Nah, if that had been the case, you can be sure Biden and Harris would have pushed it out.
So what is the explanation for why We aren't getting the list from either side.
Well, I just gave you what I think are the other two possibilities, and both of them I think are quite disturbing.
Now, I'm happy to say that the Supreme Court, in an important decision, has allowed the Trump administration to downsize the federal government.
This is a case where a district court judge had put a temporary injunction, and by a vote of really eight to one, I say eight to one because there's an assigned opinion, a majority opinion, and only one dissenter, Katanji Jackson.
And this is a case where the Supreme Court is recognizing that Trump is operating inside of his own lane.
He's in charge of the executive branch.
He gets to say if agencies are upsized or downsized, using, of course, the resources allocated by Congress.
And Katanji Jackson basically says something to the effect of, well, if Congress is allocating the money, then Trump has to do what Congress says.
He has to operate within the sphere of the law.
He can't just go ahead and downsize a department or an agency just because he wants to.
And the Supreme Court basically says, yes, he can.
He actually can do that.
He has to do it consistent with law.
And this is the point that Soda Mayor points out to Katanji Jackson.
She basically says, I agree with Justice Jackson that the president cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner that sort of violates congressional mandates.
But she says here, quote, the relevant executive order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force, quote, consistent with applicable law.
Therefore, she says, essentially, Sodomayora from the left is telling her own buddy, Katanji Jackson, look, you're not really reading the law.
You're not really applying the law.
She's chastising her in a friendly way, but she's also doing it in a quite public way, essentially saying that Katanji Jackson has kind of gone off the reservation here.
And I also want to note that Joe Biden's physician, this is Dr. Kevin O'Connor, was called before Congress.
He was invited to come and testify about what he knew about Biden's mental state.
He refused to come.
He was subpoenaed.
He shows up.
What does he do?
He pleads the Fifth Amendment.
And what does that tell you?
What he's saying is that if I'm forced to answer questions, I could be incriminating myself.
Another way to put it is he seems to be implying I might have broken the law.
I'm afraid I might go to jail.
And so rather than do that, I want to protect my rights by pleading the fifth.
And so Congress, I think, here needs to take this as a sign that there's a lot more here.
There was, it seems, a conspiracy, a scheme, an attempt within the government, and perhaps Kevin O'Connor is at the heart of it.
Maybe he's just a part of it.
Maybe he was directed by somebody else to do what he did.
All of this is something that Congress needs to find out.
And they have the apparatus, they have the mechanisms, the investigative tools to do it.
I think Kevin O'Connor's pleading the fifth tells us that there is smoke.
And in this case, there is, I bet, not merely smoke, but also fire.
The administration has their sleeves rolled up and streamlining monumental moves right now.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast somebody that I interviewed in my film Trump Card.
This is going back to 2019, 2020, before COVID.
It's Imam Tahidi, a governing member of The Global Imams Council.
He is a Muslim theologian and scholar.
He's focused on issues of interfaith relations and tackling the spread of Islamic extremism.
There's a clip actually of the two of us talking that's gone viral on social media where he talks about the appeal of radical Islam, why the radical Muslims find it convenient to ally with the left.
You can follow him, by the way, on X at Imam of Peace.
And the website is just imams, I-M-A-M-S.org.
Imam, it's been a while.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let me start by asking you about the thesis of a book that I wrote.
This was right around 2006, 2007.
It was in the aftermath of 9-11.
It was at a time when many people were talking about a clash of civilizations between the West and the Islamic world.
And I argued in this book that that simple division of the world into two misses internal divisions in the West and also within Islam.
I argued that within the West, we have a left and we have a right, a party of the left and a party of the right.
And I argued that within Islam, we have radical Islam, but we also have what could be called loosely traditional Islam.
And I offered the idea that perhaps the left in the West would ally itself with radical Islam, creating the possibility that the right should ally more with traditional Islam to weaken the alliance between the left and radical Islam.
We're now, gosh, some almost 20 years away from that thesis, which at the time was quite controversial.
There were people screaming about it at the Hoover Institution, where I was a scholar at the time.
Could I have you comment on this general thesis as I've outlined it here?
Dinesh, thank you for having me on.
Islam comes with its own set of political principles.
And to try and understand it from a Western lens or even from a democratic lens, it's going to be a bit challenging.
Islam puts it might sound foreign to the listeners, but Islam really does put human interests first in its political ambitions and principles, whether we're discussing times of peace or times of conflict.
The interests of humanity are always put first.
However, the extremists will come and classify who is worthy of being treated as a human and who is not.
So then we have that problem later on.
But in principle, Islam has its own set of political principles.
And anyone trying to separate Islam from its politics is making a big mistake because the religion is part of a wider belief system that includes the behavior of Muslims in the political domain.
Now, this, what I'm saying now, is largely present in books, not on the ground.
On the ground, Muslims mostly submit to the state under a Quranic principle of walatul, those of authority upon you.
So if the ruler says we're signing the Abraham Accords, then we're signing the Abraham Accords.
There are no political parties to oppose.
There is no riots.
There's none of that.
Time for peace with Jews.
It's time for peace with Jews.
It's governed by a state leader.
But again, the Islamic religion itself, we do have the left and the right, just not in the political sense.
The far right can be considered the Wahhabis, for example.
And the far left, actually the far right today is Hamas, to give a better example.
ISIS, they would be considered on the right of the religious spectrum and therefore deviant.
So we don't consider our right wing, left wing to be within the mainstream of religion.
We see these as deviations.
And then absolute left is, again, with all due respect to everyone, but certain things Islam does not allow, whether it be abortion or other issues that we see being promoted in the West, these would be classified under the category of liberal Islam.
And it's not really practiced in a way that can be considered mainstream.
Very interesting.
So you are identifying here as the right in Islam, the people who are so strict and so fanatical that they interpret, for example, jihad largely in a kind of maybe violent way.
They are the people who believe that a global caliphate is something that is a kind of imperative for Islam to strive for today.
And I think by liberal Islam, you mean by and large the people who are Islam, who are Muslim in name only, but perhaps don't really follow Islamic codes and commandments, right?
So for example, there are a bunch of Iranians who live in LA.
They fled from the Khomeini revolution.
These people are very liberal in their politics.
My guess is that they are liberal in America and they are also liberal by the Islamic standard.
Would that be correct?
They would not be liberal by the Islamic standard.
The majority of Iranians in LA, and by the way, that is a wonderful community, I must say.
It's like a Mini Iran and all of its talent and everything it has to contribute to civilization, humanity, all in LA.
They're wonderful people, I know many of them.
But they don't consider themselves religious, they see themselves as Muslim-born.
They actually use that term, Musalmun Zadeh, born a Muslim.
But they don't apply Islam to any of their views and opinions or even decisions in life.
But going back to jihad, I remember around seven years ago, there was this debate online, on Twitter mainly in America, about what does jihad mean?
And this happens every five years.
There's this uproar as to what is jihad.
And then you have people who try to explain it and say, it's a struggle of the soul and against the worldly desires and struggle against sins.
And I'm going to make it very simple for you.
There's two types of jihad, correct?
The first is one's struggle against their own desires.
That is correct.
But that is not the one that is being spoken about in books of Islamic law.
The struggle against oneself is spoken about only in books of Islamic ethics.
When raising a family, when waiting to get married before you spend time with a woman, naming your children, even giving charity.
Sometimes when someone is not able to give charity, religion pushes you to give more.
That in itself is a form of struggle, to pray more, fast longer hours.
These things all fall under the category of struggle against one's desires and against sins.
Fine, but that's not the one we're talking about.
The one we're talking about is the violent jihad.
Now, Islam has the concept of war only in defense.
So a Muslim can never initiate a war.
He can only defend.
So yes, all of the battles of our Prophet were defensive.
They can never be offensive.
Otherwise, it's not considered religious in any way.
That is why we oppose Hamas.
Hamas attacked the Jewish nation on October the 7th, and they said it was self-defense for issues that took place 15 years ago and 70 years ago.
You see, there is a, even in law, there is a statue of limitations.
You can't say, well, you hit me 100 years ago.
I'm going to wage war against you now.
It doesn't work that way.
It needs to be logical.
And therefore, you see fatwas against ISIS and against Hamas, excommunicating them out of Islam, considering them to be deviant, cursing them, preventing joining them, donating to them, praying for them, and so on.
But this jihad, even the defensive jihad, is invalid.
It no longer applies.
I want to repeat myself.
Even the defensive jihad does not apply in our time.
Why?
Because it can only be initiated by the Prophet or his successors.
And we don't have those successors right now.
The Shia Muslims believe that the successor of the Prophet is the Savior who is yet to reappear.
And the Sunni Muslims believe that the successor of the Prophet, who is commonly known by all religions as the Savior, although you disagree in his lineage and name.
And so Christians would believe in the second coming.
But the point is that the Savior would reappear in the end of time.
He would be born in the end of time.
The Shia believe he's already born.
But the point is there is no infallible successor of the prophet appointed by God to initiate such a defensive war, not even offensive, which is why we say Khamenei is a corrupt, crook, charlatan dressed in the attire of religious men and waging war against all countries in the Middle East, whether it be military war or otherwise.
I mean, Imam, this stuff is so interesting.
I want to stay with this line of thought and respond to it in two ways.
I think one of the things that you're saying is that maybe going all the way back to the Umayyad dynasty in the very first centuries after Islam, you had the establishment of these Islamic states, which obviously had their own leaders who were generally, by the way, not clergy, they were emperors, the Abbasid dynasty, later the Mamluks and so many others, the Ottomans.
But this created a new phenomenon which was in a way following the state, following the state's mandate.
You know, Iraq is at war with Iran or Turkey is launching an expedition against the Arabs in the Middle East.
And I think what you're saying is that that is kind of outside the orbit of Islam.
There's no mandate here that you have to sort of, that the leader of a country necessarily gets to speak for Islam.
I'd like to ask you if that's correct.
And then I want to ask you a second point, which is, do you regard the Islamic expansion then, which occurred between the 7th century, you know, really all the way until the, I mean, the Muslims conquered most of the Syria, Jordan, those parts of the world.
They went south into Africa.
They conquered parts of India.
The Mughals were in charge of North India.
They were at the gates of Vienna.
They ruled Spain for hundreds of years.
I mean, were those, I don't think it's fair to call all those defensive battles.
How could you?
Are those illegitimate in terms of your understanding of Islamic history?
Yeah, anyone who wants to cheat you in an interview will tell you Islam according to me.
Islam according to my understanding.
I'm not here to talk about my understanding.
I'll tell you what exactly Islam is.
And I want to go back first before the conquest, speak about the Umayyads.
Dinesh, you see, before the Umayyads, we had caliphs.
The Umayyad period is when we went from caliphs to kings.
That's why it made sense for you to bring up the Issue of the state.
The Prophet Muhammad never had a state.
There was no Islamic government in the time of the Prophet.
Even by today's minimum standards, what makes a state?
If I were to ask you now, what makes a state?
A head of state, an economy, and a military.
These are the basic two wings for you to function.
Even today, some countries don't even have the military.
They say we don't need it.
We haven't had wars in so many years.
So you need a basic economy.
But at the time, military was a fundamental pillar of a state.
And even is now for many countries.
Look at America.
But all the other ministries of sport, of health, media, these are not vital.
So without them, a government can still exist.
Now, at the time of the Prophet, we never had an economy.
We had the Baytul Maal, a treasury that the Prophet, from his piety and care for the poor, would empty it every single night and feed the poor with it.
So we never had a economy.
And we never had a military in Mecca.
It was the same Muslims who would train and train their children.
And whenever there was a need to defend themselves, they would gather and go out to defend themselves in battle.
So there was no separate military like we have now in Iran, for example, in the militias.
So there's the IRGC and then there's the army, right?
This never existed in the time of the Prophet.
So to say that today's Islamist dictatorships like the regime occupying Iran is in any way an inheritor of the Prophet, which by the way is what's written on the podium when Chamana speaks, is an absolute lie.
coming to conquests now i will um go back to the point that we went from caliphs to kings uh but again what makes anything legitimate in islam whether it be a teaching or or an act it is if it is sanctioned by the prophet and the quran nowhere do we have uh Mecca was not a conquest.
Before we get into Africa and Asia and Europe, Mecca was not a conquest.
The Prophet himself is from the tribe of Quraysh.
And Quraysh were rulers of Mecca.
Quraish was at war with the Prophet.
They tried to assassinate him in his bed while he slept.
And therefore, in an act of self-defense, he returned and the ruling tribe, Quraysh, submitted to the Prophet.
And therefore, not a single person was killed when he entered Mecca.
So to call it a conquest is very wrong because by tribal law, the tribe submitted to him as the head of the tribe, as the chief of the tribe, and he's indigenous to the land.
It belongs to him.
And he returned and he claimed it.
And then people adhered to his message.
So there was no conquest.
The prophet never had any conquests is the point, what I want to say.
Even the whole idea of the prophet sending Usama, a young boy, 16 year old, Osama bin Zayd, to go and fight the Romans in Jerusalem while he was in his deathbed.
The Prophet had promised that he was going to avenge Zayd, whom the Romans had killed.
So he sent Usama, the son of Zayd, to lead an army.
They went outside of the city, and then they heard that the Prophet had passed away.
They made the U-turn and returned.
So there was no conquest ever sanctioned by the Prophet.
What happened afterwards is now a divide between the Sunni theology doctrine and Shia doctrine.
And the Sunnis believe that the Caliph can do whatever he likes because he's the caliph and the successor of the Prophet.
The Shia, on the other hand, which is why this is important when it comes to Iran, the Shia believe only the infallible can issue rulings such as this and there is no infallible that and again we had many successors of the Prophet.
11 we had that well the 12th by the way is the savior who's alive.
But for 11 Imams, all of them believed to be infallible, none of them ordered any conquests.
And Imam Ali, for example, who's the unifying figure between Sunnis and Shias and the cousin of the Prophet, he already, when it was his time to be handed over the governance of the Muslim world, conquest had already occurred.
So he didn't expand in any way.
So I can tell you that the conquests were not Islamic.
And if we want to go back to your point where you spoke about the current Muslim leaders, whether they represent Islam or not, 100%.
So I'll give you a good example.
And I always speak about the UAE.
It's a perfect example.
If you were to ask me, where is Islam good today?
In good shape.
If I had the opportunity to show a Westerner or an American what Islam really looks like, I'll point to the UAE.
Maybe in the future I can point to Saudi Arabia, but not now.
But currently I can point to Bahrain, I can point to the UAE.
The rulers in the UAE, they're Muslim.
They represent not only the region and its geopolitics, they represent Islam as well.
Why is it, Dinesh, that we only say that the leader of the Palestinian authority and Khamenai in Tehran, they represent Islam.
They're heads of state.
But every time they speak, it's interpreted as this is what Islam says.
But when the rulers in the Gulf speak, no one says it's an Islamic opinion.
So yes, Sheikh Zayed, the founder, and the current president of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed definitely represent Islam.
What would you say about countries, Imam, like Indonesia, which are comprised largely of Muslims, are democratic countries?
What is the relationship between, or is there a relationship between Islam and democracy?
Islam can have a relationship with any political system.
Don't worry about Islam.
If the communists are in power, if the Democrats, if the Republicans, if it's democracy, If it's autocracy, theocracy, Islam fits.
That's what I mean.
Islam is not bound by any limitations whatsoever.
Islam is an applied system that comes and applies itself on whatever exists at the time.
So we don't have a problem from a Muslim theological perspective.
The issue is when there are bad apples, there are bad apples in the Muslim community who utilize several factors that have nothing to do with the religion.
Firstly, these bad people, like the Muslim Brotherhood, came to the West first.
They have more money than the rest of the people.
They don't have language barriers.
Their age demographic is better than the immigrants who come in with 70-year-old parents and people are struggling trying to feed their families while having two jobs and getting an education and learning the language, right?
These people know the system.
In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood employs Westerners in its offices and organizations, people who don't even know what is going on, what the bigger agenda is, right?
They come and they give these Islamists advice.
So they politicize the religion and then they come to parliament or to Congress and they want to sell you votes.
So first they dominate the scene.
Those who refuse get intimidated and attacked.
And then they come and they want to sell you votes.
That we have 250 million Muslims.
We have 2 million Muslims.
We have 100 million Muslims who support us, who back us.
They don't say we are 10 communities.
They say we are Islam.
They speak for 2 billion people.
And a poor politician who has eight months left or is hoping for another term, they think in four-year terms.
The Muslim Brotherhood thinks in 100-year terms, right?
And with a few gifts and good pictures and events and donations to the campaign.
And before you know it, the Muslim Brotherhood is sitting in Congress.
And this is a lived reality.
It's not something we're imagining.
Now, I want to shed light on the Muslim Brotherhood because they are the number one threat.
They gave us Osama bin Laden.
They gave us ISIS.
They gave us Hamas.
Every bad thing in our lives, giving us a headache, came from the Muslim Brotherhood.
And so you're saying this organization, which is really, as far as I know, the oldest of the organizations of extremist Islam, going back to the 1920s, if I'm correct, the school teacher in Egypt who started the organization, Hassan Albana, if I'm right.
And then what you're saying is that this organization metastasized into a lot of the other groups that we see now, and it has the deepest penetration into the West.
I say this because the kind of Islam, and not the kind of Islam, what you're saying is I'm talking about Islam itself, seems to me not to be a threat to the world, not to be a threat by itself to the West.
But the type of Islam that is often pushed forward is an extremist Islam that is in fact a threat.
And you're confirming that that type of Islam has the most power, the most influence, maybe has the most power.
Islamism.
Islamism, right.
Correct.
Islamism is very different from Islam.
Islam has a book called the Quran.
And we can have our opinions on the Quran.
Dinesh, I can, 100% you don't agree with what the Quran says.
That is fine.
But Islamists don't have the Quran.
You know what they have?
They have political manifestos and charters and interpretations and cherry-picking the verses and applying verses that are not meant to be applied in 2025.
So it's very important that we speak very clearly, Dinesh.
I'm a Muslim.
How come you and I can coexist?
Why?
Because firstly, I know you're a Christian and you know I'm a Muslim.
I'm not here to change you and you're not here to change me.
I respect you the way you are and you respect me the way I am.
I believe in a God, you believe in a God.
You believe in Jesus as a son of God.
I believe in Jesus as a messenger of God.
You believe in Jesus also coming with a message, right?
So whether I believe he's a prophet or you believe he's a son, we believe that his message came from God.
You call him the father, I call him God.
And I'm telling you, when it comes to prayer, we pray very similarly in our intentions, in our desired outcomes of the effects of prayer onto us.
Many mosques today were former churches that would have otherwise been demolished and abandoned.
The Muslims revived them and renovate them and pray.
And I don't think a Christian would object to Muslims praying in a house of God.
Now, you sell churches.
Christians sell churches.
Muslims never sell mosques.
That's the difference.
So it's not like we're going out there offering.
And again, I don't lead the prayers.
I'm not a congregational imam.
And therefore, these are realities on the ground that you would respect me more if I were to speak about them than hide them or omit them from my answers to you.
There's a reality on the ground.
The Muslims believe in a prophet called the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
The Prophet Muhammad, we don't see him as a prophet who came to bring in a new religion.
No, in fact, he came to continue exactly what Moses brought and Jesus continued it.
And now the prophet did for the Arabs.
So we had the biblical revelations and the Torah in Sinai and in Jerusalem.
And the Arabs also needed guidance.
And the Prophet came in his language, Arabic.
That's what the Quran says, that the Quran was made into Arabic so that the Arabs could understand.
Its original language is not Arabic.
And we don't want to debate that.
It's for another debate.
But it was made Arabic.
So point is, Prophet Muhammad wanted to guide the Arabs away from burying their daughters alive out of shame of being given a daughter instead of a boy, Wanted to come and end stoning.
The prophet wanted to end people worshiping idols and wood and dates.
And when they get hungry, they eat their gods.
That's what Islam came.
That is the essence of Islam.
There are tribal wars.
They need to be seen in a tribal context.
They cannot be seen in a religious context.
Islam is not anti-Christianity and it's not anti-Judaism.
Muslims can be anti-Jews for political reasons.
Look, before 1979, I'm a Shia Muslim.
Before 1979, Shia Muslims were businessmen and farmers.
Khomeini came with the revolution of 1979, turned 90 million people.
I mean, at that time, it wasn't 90 million people.
But today we have a state of 90 million people being channeled against the West.
Now, I know and you know that Khomeini doesn't have 90 million followers, at best 30 million due to state allegiance and hatred of Israel.
But again, when he speaks and when you take him into consideration, what does America look at?
A country of 90 million people.
Bottom line is this, that's the end result.
I want to educate and raise awareness about the Islam that is free from Islamist politicization and pollution.
There is no room for politics in such a manner.
Politics needs to be, okay, for example, this water runs through my land.
How much water do I keep for me?
How much do I allow to flow into other regions?
This type of politics is welcome.
But to try and conquer and use terrorism of immigration, right?
So the regime opening the gates and facilitating and pushing for the gates to be opened from Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries so that they could flood the West in people who would be in prison, really, in any normal state such as the UAE.
This is what we oppose.
Bottom line is if we want peace, there needs to be a clear, truthful way forward where you and I can be different and coexist at the same time.
Imam, always a great pleasure to talk to you.
Fascinating.
I always feel like I'm learning a lot and I always feel like you're putting out stuff that's really going to get people to reflect and to think.
So thank you so much for joining me.
Guys, I've been talking to Imam Tahidi, the website imams.org.
Follow him on X, Imam of Peace.
Imam, always a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Pleasure is mine.
Thank you, Dinesh.
Goodbye.
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I'm in a section of the book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, called Confronting the Evil Empire.
And I mentioned how Reagan's approach to this could not be fully squared either with the doves or the left or with the Hawks or the right.
And this is the uniquely Reaganite approach that I'm trying to delineate.
Reagan had the operating premise, different from the Hawks and the Doves, that the Soviet Union could be defeated, that it was fragile, that the system had built into it a contradiction.
What's the contradiction?
Well, it's a contradiction between the Soviet regime's internal economic problems and its expansionist foreign policy.
So the Soviets were pushing hard on defense, and they were using increasingly scarce resources on defense.
But that requires extracting those resources from an already burdened economy.
And a country can continue to do this, by the way, for a while.
But Reagan understood that there was a strategy that hadn't really been tried before to put pressure on this contradiction, to force it to, in some ways, break.
And this is the theory of the sick bear.
The bear is sick.
It might lash out.
It does make the bear quite dangerous, but there might be a way to capture the bear or corral the bear or roll back the territory of the bear.
And Reagan didn't just think this.
He said it.
In a 1982 speech to the British Parliament, Reagan said this.
The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us.
The constant shrinkage of economic growth, combined with the growth of military production, is putting a heavy strain on the Soviet people.
What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base.
Very original idea from Reagan, and very different, by the way, from what the Hawks were saying, which is that, listen, don't think that because the Soviet Union is an economic doldrums, that they can't continue to expand on the foreign front.
They don't care about their people, and so if there's more strain on the Russian people, so what?
But Reagan's view was not so what.
Reagan's view was that the Russian people themselves, at some point, have to provide, well, certainly they have to provide the makeup of the Soviet army.
They have to make up the Soviet regime.
You cannot completely divorce a regime from its people.
If the people are under strain, the regime is going to feel it.
Reagan said something of the same thing in a commencement speech, also 1982, at his alma mater, which is Eureka College.
Now, like I mentioned, Reagan understood that the sick bear could very well increase its adventurism, its marauding in the short term.
And in fact, it's likely to do this because in some way, if the people domestically are suffering, the Soviet regime can say, well, look, that's all right.
We look at our spectacular accomplishments abroad.
And the regime can divert people's attention from their own problems by talking about their foreign conquests.
By the way, this is a strategy that went back all the way to the Roman Empire when some of the corrupt and vicious Roman emperors would starve the people, abuse the people, mistreat them in all kinds of ways, but then provide what was called bread and circuses.
Bread is the basic, we're going to give you crumbs to keep you alive.
Circuses refer to entertainment, but included in the entertainment was foreign conquests.
Let's bring in all these captives from Africa.
Look at all these black guys being paraded on the streets of Italy.
And the mob, the Roman crowds would cheer, yeah, we're doing great.
So this was to some degree also the Soviet strategy.
And Reagan understood it.
He understood that this was not a time to relax.
It was a time, in fact, to up the pressure and up the pressure in a way that the bear would understand that this aggression, which was expected, anticipated, would be firmly resisted.
Now, between 1974 when Vietnam fell, and that's a whole other story which we won't get into in this exercise, the Soviet Union began to gobble up countries one after the other.
In fact, between 1974 and 1980, no less than 10 countries fell into the Soviet orbit.
Let's count them.
South Vietnam.
This was the case, of course, of the North, then overrunning the South at the end of the war.
Two, Cambodia.
Three, Laos.
So this was all, these three countries are all part of Indochina.
Then we have South Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique.
This is the Africa gains on the part of the Soviets.
Then Grenada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan.
So that's a lot.
Some of the countries here may seem relatively small, but they represented a kind of one-way tide.
Put it this way, the Soviet Empire in this period did not lose a single country.
It gained 10, it lost none, and so 10-0 was the score for the Soviets in this period.
Not only that, the Soviets had built the most formidable nuclear arsenal in the world with thousands of multiple warhead missiles aimed at the U.S. and the Allies.
The Warsaw Pact had a superiority over NATO in conventional forces.
Not only that, they had a geographical advantage because their forces were poised really at the top, at the northern part of Europe, ready to come through the Falda Gap and swarm into Germany, France, and ultimately, of course, take also Great Britain.
The Soviets had just deployed a new generation of intermediate-range missiles called the SS-20s.
These were targeted specifically on Western Europe.
And so Reagan began on his own side a massive counter buildup.
The buildup was the largest ever undertaken in U.S. peacetime history.
And yet Reagan's view was this is absolutely necessary.
It's going to cost a lot of money, but Reagan predicts will save money in the long run because if we can get our adversary to give up, to retreat, then we won't have to spend so much money in the future.
And as it turned out, this prediction turned out to be quite right.
So the Defense Department under Reagan developed the B-1 bomber that President Carter had canceled, the stealth bomber, Trident submarines furnished with D-5 missiles.
Now, the reason for the importance of the submarines is this.
Let me back up for a little bit and talk about mutually assured destruction, which is the doctrine that you've got a kind of Mexican standoff.
You've got two cowboys standing facing each other and they both have guns in their holster.
And the idea is that each can take kill shots at the other.
And you create a kind of mutual terror among them, where each of them thinks that I don't want to shoot because the other guy can also shoot.
And I don't want to go into a pact of mutual extinction.
But of course, this reasoning, this notion that they can't strike us because we've got missiles and can strike them back, had a kind of flaw to it.
And the flaw to it can be imagined sort of this way.
Let's say that the Soviet Union has, and I'm simplifying just for the purposes of kind of theoretical discussion.
Let's say the Soviet Union has 20 warheads on land.
And the United States has 15 warheads on land.
And that's all that the two countries have.
I'm simplifying really for the purposes of illustration.
Now, it might seem like neither country can strike the other for the simple reason that if the Soviets fired their 20 missiles, yeah, they can take out 20 American cities and maybe blow up most of the United States.
But guess what?
Our 15 warheads are more than enough to blow up 15 major cities in the Soviet Union, and they're going to be pretty much wiped out also.
The flaw, however, is this.
What if the Soviet Union is able to identify the location of the silos, silos or holes in the ground, where these land-based ICBMs or intercontinental ballistic missiles are stored?
What if the Soviet Union, with only about 45 minutes of notice, could fire a missile from Soviet airspace that would then take out the U.S. missiles in a first strike?
So look at it this way.
They've got 20, we got 15.
They use 15 of their warheads to take out all our warheads.
So we don't have any.
They still have five.
Now they can engage in complete nuclear blackmail because not only have they subdued us, we got no missiles left, but they've got a reserve arsenal in which they can now take out our cities and we can't do anything in retaliation.
So all of this is the logic of the submarine.
Why?
Because the submarines move deep under the sea.
They are constantly in motion.
Their precise location can be detected from time to time, but a lot of times it cannot be detected.
And even if you do detect it, by the time you go to look for it, it's gone.
It's actually someplace else.
So the submarines compensate for the vulnerability of the land-based ICBM.
So anyway, I was just mentioning that Reagan authorized the Trident submarines.
I just did a little bit of a strategic lesson to illustrate the importance of these submarines.
Reagan also put a lot of money in MX missiles.
Now, the MX missiles are indeed land-based missiles.
And of course, you can build land-based missiles that are a lot bigger, more destructive than submarine-based missiles.
The submarines have to carry those missiles.
And so those D-5 missiles are a lot smaller and do less damage.
They're pretty lethal, but they're not as lethal as land-based missiles.
So the MX missile was a monster.
It carried 10 warheads.
It was more accurate and lethal than any submarine-based missile.
And the Carter administration had this extremely wacky idea, which was if we build the MX missile, let's put the MX missiles on a, quote, racetrack system around the country.
Now, this seems so lunatic that when we look at it in retrospect, we can hardly believe it.
But Carter literally wanted to put the MX missile on giant trucks and railroad systems and move these missiles around so that they could not be, in the manner I just described a few minutes ago, incinerated in a first strike.
The Reagan administration said, this is nonsense.
This is also politically impossible.
You think the American people are going to stand for giant ICBMs traveling around the country on railways?
And that's just not going to happen.
So Reagan realized with a little bit of common sense that that was kind of dumb.
And Reagan said, what if we can harden our silos in such a way they're deep under the ground and they won't be wiped out in a Soviet first strike?
But even so, it's not clear that that could be done.
There was research going on into it.
So the MX missiles program was always somewhat vulnerable.
Why?
Because the location of U.S. missile sites is known.
In other words, it's possible to find out where these missiles are.
In fact, to this day, we know that there are missile sites, for example, in Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, and there are, of course, other nuclear sites.
So the vulnerability of our land-based system was something that the Reagan Defense Department and Reagan himself were very much aware of.
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