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Aug. 12, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ENDGAME Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1145
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Coming up, I want to comment on the federal takeover of the crime situation in Washington, D.C., and why the Democrats and the left seem so upset about it.
I'm going to consider Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's proposal for an Israeli supervision of Gaza.
I want to argue that it may be the only way to restore peace and prosperity to the region.
And I'll show how the Trump administration can and should bring some of these elite universities, Harvard, UCLA, even the University of Nebraska, to their knees.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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I intend to talk about a couple of topics in this opening segment.
I'm going to talk first about the end game in Gaza.
And then, shifting gears a little bit, I want to talk about the runaway Texas Democrats and redistricting in Texas.
So I'm going to go from the big landscape, the international stage, to a more national, well, local as well as national topic.
But the Netanyahu government has floated a proposal that is drawing a great deal of criticism, mainly from the left-wing governments of Australia and France, to some degree of Great Britain, also Canada.
Essentially, what Netanyahu is saying is that we cannot let things just fester in Gaza.
In other words, we have a war, but the war needs to have an end point and it needs to lead to something.
And what is that something?
It can't be that we just want to get our hostages back and then we're done.
It can't be that we are going to somehow destroy Hamas and then we're done because Hamas is, after all, an idea.
Hamas can come back.
Hamas can rebuild.
Hamas can retake the facilities of Gaza and become as big, if not a bigger menace than it Was before.
So Netanyahu's idea here is that we have to take over, or more accurately, take back Gaza.
And we need to change its entire administrative and leadership structure.
This is not to say, I emphasize, that the Israelis intend to permanently rule Gaza and lord it over the million or so Muslims, largely Muslim populations, some Christians there as well, who live in Gaza.
But the idea is for Israel to establish a regime of control until there can be a handover to an independent authority that will be committed to certain key principles.
Of course, most notably, we are not planning or intending or seeking to destroy the state of Israel.
In other words, a new leadership that is committed to a peaceful coexistence with Israel.
And the Israelis have to make sure that they have that kind of structure in place.
I think the idea is to draw in international help, not just from the United States, but also from some of the Arab governments and Muslim governments in the Middle East, in the region.
Now, you might think, that's crazy.
The Muslims won't help the Israelis to do that.
But you got to realize that Israel is, in fact, not only on peaceful terms, but on pretty good terms with most of the Muslims in the Middle East.
This may seem like a bit of a shocker, but let's look at it more closely.
What are Israel's relationships right now with the largest, one of the largest countries in the region, Egypt?
They're excellent.
What about Israel's relationship with Saudi Arabia, the home of the two holy sites of Mecca and Medina?
Israel has pretty good relations with Saudi Arabia.
In fact, Saudi Arabia was reputed to be ready to join the Abraham Accords.
How about Israel's relationship with Jordan?
Very good.
United Arab Emirates, very good.
And on and on it goes.
Syria is unstable right now, and so it's unclear who is really running the show in Syria.
Of course, Iran is now licking its wounds after the Israeli attacks as well as the U.S. bombing of the nuclear facilities.
But there are also a lot of Muslims who live in Israel.
We saw them, Muslim neighborhoods in Jerusalem.
There are Arabs and Muslims who are in the Israeli parliament.
So somehow this idea that Israel is a Jewish state, they can't get along with the Muslims.
Islam is the problem.
For Israel, it's not like that.
Iran is the problem.
Radical Islam is the problem.
Jihadism is the problem.
Trying to wipe Israel off the map, that's the problem.
Now, I saw our friend Brooke Goldstein, who is a lawyer, international lawyer.
She's been on the podcast before.
She was on CNN, and she says this very provocative thing.
The truth is, Israel should never have left Gaza.
When Israel dragged every Jew out of Gaza in 2005, we had a terrorist state.
That was a big mistake, and the world has yet to admit that.
So notice that Brooke is going in a very different direction than these European left-wing governments.
They're saying, if Israel doesn't create a ceasefire in Gaza, basically letting the problem with Hamas fester once again, we're going to recognize a Palestinian state.
In other words, going to give diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state inside of Israel.
And what Brooke is saying is that the reason this doesn't really work is this has already been tried.
And it's been tried by Israeli governments that were seen as being very tough.
It was Ariel Sharon, after all, in the early 2000s who basically, quote, dragged every Jew out of Gaza and said to the people in Gaza, Elect your own government.
And that's when they elected Hamas.
Similarly, there was an election in the so-called West Bank.
This is the area historically called Judea and Samaria.
And the Palestinian Authority, which traces its roots more to Yasser Arafat and the PLO, they were put in power in the West Bank, and they remain in power to this day.
So let's try out this experiment.
The experiment is: we let the Palestinians govern themselves.
We allow them autonomy in their own regions, namely the West Bank and Gaza.
And then we see if we can create two side-by-side flourishing societies.
But no, you have October 7th.
So October 7th shows it is, in fact, a kind of deadly and bloody signature proof that this two-state solution isn't going to work.
Why?
Because the people on one side regard the people on the other side of the fence as being deadly enemies.
They think for two separate reasons.
One reason having to do with the fact that they don't believe or they insist that it's not the Israeli land at all.
The Jews, despite being native to the region, somehow are colonizers.
They need to be kicked out.
And the Muslims, who, by the way, there was no Islam prior to the 7th century.
So it's not exactly like Muslims were there from the beginning.
No, by and large, the armies of Islam came storming across that region, converted people very often by the sword.
And so the argument, there is a colonial or anti-colonial argument against Israel.
And there's also a separate kind of jihadi argument, which has to do with the fact that Israel represents, well, the West.
It represents Athens and Jerusalem.
It represents Western civilization.
It is the little Satan, and America is the Great Satan.
So these are the objectives or the motives of the people who want to get rid of Israel.
So I think the Netanyahu plan is an attempt to say: listen, we're not going to have a state right next to us armed to the teeth that is resolved upon our destruction.
Why would we agree to that?
Why would we succumb to that?
We don't care what sort of pompous pundits say in Brussels or in Canberra, in Australia, or in Canada, in Toronto.
We are going to protect our own security.
And I think they are quite right in doing that.
All right.
Let me talk about what's happening in Texas.
Debbie said to me this morning, she goes, The Texas Democrats, have they returned?
No, they are still the runaway Democrats.
Now they are being fined.
I believe it's $500 a day by the Speaker of the House.
They have the FBI looking for them.
They have the Texas authorities empowered to arrest them and kind of arrest them, not in the sense of locking them up, but arrest them in the sense of forcibly bringing them to the legislature.
And Governor Abbott has filed a motion with the Supreme Court to vacate the seat of the leading Democrat, who seems to be the guy who's cooked all this up.
And that case is before the high court.
But the Texas redistricting, which, by the way, is going to happen, these five seats, is now become part of a larger battle.
Because in California, the governor, Newsom, Newscombe, as Trump calls him, he goes, if Texas redistricts for these five seats, I'm going to pass a referendum in California that turn five Republican areas into Democratic areas.
And this would, by the way, virtually eliminate Republican representation in the state of California.
So he's like, we will do extreme gerrymandering to counter the effect of Texas.
But here is Governor Abbott, I see, on CNN from yesterday, and he's upping the ante.
I quote him: If California tries to gerrymander five more districts, Texas has the ability to eliminate 10 Democrats in our state.
Now, you might go, wait a minute, this is kind of a bad game over here because what it means is that the blue states take away all the red districts and the red states take away all the blue districts.
That may be all regrettable, but the point to make here is that because the Democrats have already gerrymandered so much, there just aren't that many red districts left in California.
There are some.
They can try to gerrymander them away.
But here's Abbott's point.
We can play that game more than they can because they have fewer Republican districts in their states.
So if they want to play the game, Abbott's point is we can play to the same extreme here and wipe out basically the blue districts in this red state.
So this is hardball.
Abbott is not known to be a congenital, like hardball player in the manner of Trump.
He is usually more cautious, more gingerly in picking his battles.
But he's apparently chosen this battle to fight.
And it's very interesting that Dustin Burroughs, the allegedly rhino head of the House, is also behind this redistricting fight.
So it looks like the Republicans are unified on this one.
And they have substantial majorities both in the House and the Senate.
They also obviously have the governorship.
And so Texas is going to get its way.
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The Trump administration has deployed federal resources to the protection of the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. And the reaction of the Democrats and the media is kind of odd, right?
Because they're like, no, we don't want this.
We want to keep our criminals.
We like the level of crime.
It's down from before.
It doesn't need to go down further.
There's no need for this.
Here's Rachel Bitcofer on social media.
They're going to seize control of Washington, D.C. And in fact, Trump has seized control.
Now, why is this so alarming to Democrats?
I think the reason for it is because the Trump administration is about to demonstrate that these high crime levels in Democratic run cities are a choice.
They are what democratic cities want.
They are what democratic cities have gotten used to.
They are what democratic policies perpetuate.
And so this is not some inevitability.
It's just not that this is just the crooked timber of human nature.
This is just the way things are in cities because people are in close conditions to each other and therefore we are more likely to have crime.
It is that crime is something that depends on the people who are running the place.
And so the Democrats have made us believe or tried to make us believe that urban decay, disorder, feeling unsafe at night, these are all normal emotions.
And we're about to demonstrate it doesn't have to be that way.
You don't need to have this kind of terror when you are functioning in a city.
In these cities, by the way, there are lots of places you can't even go at all, any time of day.
And then there are many places, maybe even most, where you can't go at night.
Crime has been bad in D.C. for a long time.
And even when I lived there, it was kind of understood.
Most people who worked in D.C. didn't live in DC.
The idea is that DC turns into a zoo at night.
And we got to flee to, well, the Democrats would flee to Maryland, the Maryland suburbs, and the Republicans would flee to McLean and Springfield and the Republican, the suburbs of Northern Virginia.
But not a whole lot of people lived in DC.
Now, when people talk about crime rates, yes, you can talk about raw numbers and you can say, well, the numbers are up, the numbers are down.
Of course, it all depends on what your baseline is, right?
If you've got a horribly high level of crime and, you know, your gang shootings are down 25%.
So instead of 100 people being killed, it's now only 75.
You think you're making amazing progress.
No, you're not.
This is an abominable, intolerable level of violence.
And you just don't cover it because the perpetrators and the victims are the same color.
And so when most people talk about crime, they're not speaking legalistically.
They're talking about kind of social disorder, a kind of breakdown of the civilized life of the city.
They're talking about the fact that older people have to clutch at their umbrellas and their purses and look over their shoulder.
They're talking about the fact that young women can't walk confidently without fear of being attacked or raped.
That ordinary citizens, when you're driving and you come to a stop with the light, the red light, you don't have to worry about someone coming up to your car, yanking open the door, carjacking you.
Trump actually put this very well, where he changed the way we think about these things when he said this.
He said, my father used to tell me, son, when you walk into a restaurant and you see a dirty front door, don't go in.
Because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen is dirty also.
And then Trump goes, if our capital is dirty, the whole city is dirty.
So Trump is speaking here in a very general way, but kind of what he's getting at is that the appearance of the city, if the city is filthy, if it's run down, if it's dangerous, if it's got wards that are uninhabitable, basically, or certainly places that outsiders can't go to.
And if you accidentally turn into one of those streets, you feel that sense of fear, like panic, like you got to get out of there immediately.
Trump is like, this is not how it ought to be.
Now, the Democrats say crime Rates are down.
And overall, if you look at the statistics, they are.
But that's only because there was a massive surge in the COVID period of 2022, 2023.
And so there's been some decline in 24 and early 25, but only from the high levels of before.
If you look at the crimes that really matter, and I'm talking here about serious crimes, homicides, let's look to see if there's been any great decline.
I'm going to give you some numbers.
The number of people killed by homicide in Washington, D.C. in 2006, 169.
2007, 181.
2009, 144, slightly down.
2010, 132.
2011, 108.
There's a decline.
2012, 88.
That's the only time it's gone under 100, by the way.
2013, 104, 14, 105, 15, 162, 16, 135, 17, 116, 18, 160, 19, 166, 20, 198, 21, 226, 22, 203, 23, 274, 24, 187.
So right there, that's the big decline they're talking about.
It's down.
Well, you're talking about rates that are substantially higher than they were before.
And you're talking about an intolerable level in the first place.
This is, these are not the kind of numbers that should exist in an industrialized country.
They're certainly much higher than happens not only in European cities, but also other parts of the United States.
Let's compare Washington, D.C., for example, with the state of Texas.
Texas is, by the way, thought to be, it's, you know, it's a tough place where there's a lot of crime.
And, but the crime rate in Texas is much lower than in Washington, D.C. 2024.
D.C. has one homicide per 4,000 people.
Texas has one homicide for every 16,000 people.
So in other words, the murder rate for DC is many times higher than it is for the entire state of Texas.
Motor vehicle theft rates.
There were almost 7,000 in 2023.
And the government finally decided we got to do something about this.
And so they took some action.
And that number went down, but it's still extremely high.
Carjackings, the number remains extremely high.
So these, and in certain wards of Washington, D.C., the rates of crime are higher than even in New Orleans and Memphis and St. Louis.
In other words, the notoriously violent parts of the United States that have the highest crime rates in the country, there are certain parts of DC.
I'm thinking particularly of Ward 7 and Ward 8, which could give those places a run for their money.
Now, who's the current chief of DC police?
Pamela Smith.
What is her police training?
Well, for the last several years, she has been the chief equity officer.
What's her main job?
Diversity.
Her main job is to count the number of blacks and whites and Hispanics and make sure that no group is underrepresented or overrepresented.
So here you have this person who's not really fundamentally even in law enforcement at all.
Why?
Because if you look at the career of these diversity officers, they're a diversity officer at Apple, and then they become a diversity officer at Ford Motor Company, and then they become a diversity officer at some university.
They migrate within the whole diversity industry.
And this is the person running the police force in DC.
Now, there are all kinds of liberal whites who don't even live in D.C., but are actually very say that they're just not worried about the crime rate.
And of course, they aren't because they really aren't subject to it.
As I mentioned earlier, these are people who come to DC in the light of day.
They generally go to a well-lighted and well-protected building with guards out in front.
They work there, and then they board the subway or they get in their car and they flee to Maryland or Virginia.
And so they are not subject by and large to much of the dangers of living in D.C. Here's a guy named Ron Campius.
I live in Arlington.
I'm a reporter.
I travel to DC frequently.
I've never been carjacked.
I know what happens, but I don't know anyone who has been carjacked.
So here we have the attitude.
If it hasn't happened to me, it's kind of like if I were to say, well, you know, I've never been murdered.
Why should I be worried about the murder rate?
I don't know anyone who's been murdered either.
So, but murder is a problem.
And the crime rate in DC is a problem.
And it's a problem for the people who live there.
You know, I've seen segments on MSNBC, CNN.
I don't see black residents of DC who live there saying it's not a problem.
What I see is white journalists and suburbanites who work in DC who say, oh, no, we've got it under control.
We, the great we, have got it under control.
It's not under control.
And let's say that you thought you had it under control.
Let's say that you were really happy that the crime rate, let's just say in homicides, used to be 220, it's now 180.
Don't you agree?
It's 180 people too many.
Don't you agree that if you have federal troops that are patrolling DC and that number, let's say, goes down from 180 to 18, that would be good.
So, in other words, why would you be resistant to what Trump is proposing?
Now, one of the talking points of the left is: here's Dana Bash on CNN.
I should note that the most violent moment in DC history was January 6th.
Well, first of all, that's simply not true.
And it's certainly not true in terms of actual homicides or deaths.
And I recall, I bring to your recollection the fact that the only person killed on January 6th was Ashley Babbitt, a non-violent protester who went through a window and was shot by a lieutenant named Bird.
And that was the violence.
It was perpetrated by, in this case, a cop who shot this veteran, Ashley Babbitt.
So by what standard do you use that that is the most violent episode in Washington, D.C.?
Not only that, but Nancy Pelosi dutifully, Donald Trump delayed deploying the National Guard on January 6th when our Capitol was under violent attack.
And the chief of police, Stephen Sund, replies to her, Madam, it's long past time to be honest with the American people.
On January 3rd, I requested National Guard assistance, but your sergeant-at-arms denied it.
Under federal law, I was prohibited from calling them in without specific approval.
On January 6th, while the Capitol was under attack, despite my repeated calls, your sergeant-at-arms again denied my urgent request for over 70 agonizing minutes, quote, running it up the chain for your approval.
So here you have a chief of police responding point by point directly to Nancy Pelosi, essentially pointing the finger at her and saying that if there wasn't enough security on that day, it's not because of Trump.
It's because of you.
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Can the Fed take the right action at the right time?
Or are we going to be looking at some potential economic slowdown?
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I want to talk about the Trump administration's ongoing crusade against the elite universities.
An overdue and necessary and important action to bring these universities into submission, bring them into balance, bring them into conformity with federal law,
bring them into a recognition of the importance of core liberties like free speech, but also tame their willingness to encourage anti-Semitism.
All of this is being now pursued by the Trump people with great zeal.
And I'm particularly impressed at the Blitzkrieg attack on Harvard, because every time Harvard thinks that they're getting an upper hand or not even so much that, but rather they're, all right, we've taken the biggest blows that the Trump people have to inflict on us.
We're going to try to come out alive on this.
The Trump people come up with something new.
And the something new here is just downright ingenious.
The latest something new is to attack Harvard for its possession of multiple patents.
Now, Harvard does a lot of research and they have a lot of patents.
But these patents, as it turns out, are often obtained with research that's funded with federal money.
And there are laws governing the way in which federal money is to be spent.
And that federal money is tied to these patents being exercised in a certain way.
So the Department of Commerce has sent a letter to Harvard basically saying that you are in violation of our policies regarding the use of patents.
When you have patents, you have to make timely disclosure and election of title.
Harvard hasn't done that.
You are supposed to use those patents and give preferences to American industry as opposed to foreign industries, as required by a federal statute.
Harvard doesn't do that.
They just take advantage of the patent and not worry about it.
And you also have to make efforts that the patent is used to the benefit of the American people, who are, after all, through their tax dollars, paying for these patents.
Harvard has been indifferent to all that.
So now Harvard is not alone.
I'm quite sure that most of these universities that have these patents funded by federal research treat these patents as their own because they're done after all by Harvard scholars and Harvard researchers.
So Harvard thinks, great, we got the federal money, we made the patent, now we get to cash in and keep the money.
And so quite unexpectedly, I'm sure, they get this letter basically saying that you need to give us a comprehensive list of all your patents that have come from federally funded research, and you've got to demonstrate conformity with all these federal policies and statutes, or else you face substantial penalties.
So this is upping the ante on Harvard.
I think that a Harvard surrender is coming Soon, and Harvard is going to submit to the demands of the Trump administration because they are just getting clobbered on many different fronts.
And it's actually a great thing to watch.
One of the reasons I think that the ferocity of this Trump campaign is fully justified is that these universities have just gone out of control.
And they don't even think that they are obliged to follow any sort of federal laws.
The Supreme Court might rule you can't discriminate based on race.
And these colleges go, we don't care.
We're just going to keep doing it.
Here is the University of Nebraska.
And look, here we're talking about a state university in a fairly conservative state.
We're not talking about Columbia or Yale.
And yet, here is a memo from the University of Nebraska.
They're talking about hiring people.
And I'm going to read you the key line.
The weight of the diversity scores were equal to the other scored areas that contributed to the candidate's overall score.
So to translate, you are evaluated on a series of performances, like how good is your academic background, and how good is your publications, and how good are your teaching skills, and your past experience, and your evaluations.
All of that is added up into one score.
Let's call that score on a scale of 1 to 10.
Then you have a diversity score.
And what this memo is saying is the diversity score by itself equals the entire overall other score.
And then the two scores are combined.
So think about it.
If you're a white male and you apply, you could get a 10 out of 10 on the competence score, but you're never going to be selected.
Why?
Because some other guy just has to go over 10.
He could have a 6 out of 10 and then just get another 6 for his diversity score.
And he's got 12 and you've got 10.
And so this just gives you an idea of how pervasive and insidious this racial discrimination is, and this diversity DEI stuff is.
It just has to be beaten out of these people.
They're not going to see the light.
They're not going to change their mind.
You have to create a very ruthless regime of enforcement.
And by ruthless here, I just mean absolutely strict conformity with federal law.
By the way, notice that it was precisely this ruthlessness with which the civil rights laws were enforced in the 1960s and 70s.
All vestiges of segregation, discrimination were just extirpated, were just removed on the basis that none of this is going to be tolerated.
Well, reverse discrimination, discrimination in the opposite direction, discrimination in any direction is now intolerable.
It's not allowed according to the Constitution.
It's not allowed according to the Supreme Court.
It's not allowed according to the policies of the Trump administration.
And we need to see comprehensive enforcement.
I don't know if you saw the video of the valedictorian at UCLA where she takes time out of her speech to say the F-word with regard to ICE.
She says, Pardon my language, F you ICE.
And that, of course, is just nothing more than one of these brainwashed, indoctrinated students trying to be cool, trying to show her boldness and bravery, which is not really bravery at all, as you'll see in a moment, because the students applaud.
And not only that, I was really looking at the administrators and faculty sitting right behind her.
And they're applauding, which is to say that the administration approves of this kind of political agitation, even on a fairly solemn ceremony like graduation.
And again, I think what this tells us is that these universities are kind of in open revolt against the law.
They don't want immigration enforcement.
They don't like ICE because that's exactly what ICE is doing, enforcing the law.
And so you have this group of activism, this activist culture.
It's pro-Hamas, it's anti-ICE, It's defund the police.
It's anti-Trump.
And the question is: why should the Trump administration essentially fund all of this?
I agree, it's protected by free speech.
And so, to that degree, no one is calling for any attempt to outlaw people saying what they believe.
They have a right to do that, but the government has no obligation to fund them.
And I think here that the Trump administration has been cutting deals with some of these universities, you know, pay us $50 million, $100 million, $500 million.
But I hope that it's not simply a free pass to these colleges.
I don't think it is.
When I looked at the Columbia Agreement, it had a lot of other provisions in it.
It's not just pay us a ransom and keep doing what you're doing.
It is pay us a ransom, and here are the seven other things you need to do to make sure you are in full conformity with federal law.
So it's almost like the ransom is a fine.
And then we have to ensure that going forward, that you are now complying with the rules and regulations of the federal government whose money you are taking after all.
I'm discussing the latter part of my book, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And we are in the section in which I intend to describe the unwinding of the Cold War.
These are things that some of us, probably many of you, have lived through, but still may not know about in detail.
And I think now, with some perspective, we can see the magnitude of what was happening right in front of our eyes.
This is in the very late 1980s.
In fact, we're going to talk about events for the most part that happened after Reagan left office, but in the pretty much immediate aftermath.
And then we're going to follow them through 1992, which is when the final implosion of Soviet communism occurred.
Now, I mentioned last time, yesterday, that Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Treaty, but that eliminated one class of nuclear weapons.
The bigger treaty was called the START Treaty.
And that was finally signed in 1991.
Again, the work on it was done under Reagan.
The signing occurred.
Well, Reagan completed his presidency in January of 1989.
So the signing actually occurred under Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush.
But that treaty cut the size of the nuclear arsenals of both countries in almost exactly the amount that Reagan had advocated.
So it was a realization of the Reagan proposal.
And not only that, it effectively ended the Soviet nuclear threat, whose elimination Reagan had made a top priority.
Now, Reagan knew the Cold War was over much earlier.
In fact, I would say in 1987, Gorbachev came to Washington, and guess what?
It was Gorbachev, not Reagan, who was the media hero.
He was celebrated as this incredible wonder worker, and he was getting all the favorable publicity.
Reagan out of the limelight had dinner with a handful of conservative friends.
Ben Wattenberg, my colleague at AEI, was there, George Van Geyer, Bob Tyrrell of the American Spectator was there.
And I asked Wattenberg afterward, I'm like, Ben, how'd it go?
And he goes, well, he goes, a lot of us complain to Reagan.
We go, what the heck?
You know, Gorbachev's getting all the favorable publicity and the media credit for making an agreement that was essentially on Reagan's terms.
And Reagan didn't say anything.
He just kind of smiled.
And then Ben Wattenberg said, he said, I asked Reagan, I said, well, are you, have we won the Cold War?
And he goes, Reagan kind of hesitated.
And then Bob Tyrrell goes, well, well, have we?
And Reagan goes, yes.
And then they realize, these guys around Reagan, that he was just being Reagan, which is to say he was being magnanimous.
His point was that it doesn't matter if Gorbachev gets the media credit.
Everybody knows that the United States is winning and has won in some ways the Cold War.
Now, to understand Reagan's course here, we have to see that he understood what was happening both in the beginning and toward the end.
He supported Gorbachev when many in the right thought he was mistaken.
And Gorbachev came to trust Reagan in remarkable ways.
I wrote a letter to Gorbachev in the summer of 1997 just to ask him his assessment of Reagan's leadership.
And Gorbachev wrote me back a nice letter basically saying how much he had grown to admire Reagan.
He said that Reagan's great merit was that he was a man of his word and also that he was somebody that Gorbachev had come to trust.
Now, Gorbachev found this relationship with Reagan very important because when Gorbachev announced that he was pulling Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, he actually called Reagan and he asked Reagan basically to kind of what he should do.
And Reagan, in effect, urged him to continue, to persist.
And later, when Gorbachev saw that the Soviet empire was disintegrating and his own position in the Politburo was becoming more precarious, he once again kind of reached out to Reagan as if to say, now what?
And Reagan basically, you know, Gorbachev was saying, I'm at the edge of the abyss.
Now what should I do?
And Reagan basically said, take one step forward.
And to Gorbachev's supreme credit, he did that, which is to say, he jumped off the cliff politically.
He destroyed his own regime.
He unwound his own, the system that had elevated him to the top.
So Gorbachev does deserve a lot of credit.
Some of the hawks on the right would subsequently say, and I've said Gorbachev miscalculated, he didn't intend to destroy communism.
All of this is true.
But Gorbachev deserves credit, in my view, for two very important things.
Number one, when the Soviet empire erupted, he could have brought tanks and crushed it.
He didn't do that.
The Soviets had done that twice before.
Hungary, 1956, Czechoslovakia, 1968.
Gorbachev would surely have been advised by some people to do the same thing.
And he could easily have done it.
And these satellites of the Soviet Union could not have resisted him, but he did not do it.
He allowed the rebellions to grow.
And ultimately, he stepped aside, not only from them, but also from his own position.
Now, 1988, the Soviets pull out of Afghanistan, and the process now begins.
The Soviets leave Ethiopia and they go home.
Toward the end of Reagan's second term, Moscow tells Vietnam to withdraw 50,000 troops from Cambodia.
And now you begin to see the stirrings of revolt in Eastern Europe.
It begins in Poland, and President Jarzelsky turns to the Soviets to support him.
They won't do it.
And so he agrees to have free elections.
He has the elections.
He's completely routed.
And Lech Valencia, a dock worker dissident, becomes the president of Poland.
Hungary had a barbed wire fence separating itself from the West.
They take the fence down and declare themselves a free republic.
Demonstrators in East German cities stormed the Communist Party headquarters and they toppled a longtime dictator Erich Honecker.
They also pulled down the Berlin Wall.
East Germany is now free and can reunite with West Germany.
In Czechoslovakia, mobs storm the capital.
The Communist Party surrenders.
Free elections are held.
Vaclav Havel, the famous dissident, poet, writer, becomes the new president of the Czech Republic.
In Romania, Ceaușescu and his wife are captured and executed.
And so you begin to see this remarkable phenomenon.
In a sense, it's a toppling of dominoes, but in the opposite direction, the United States always feared the toppling of dominoes meant more and more countries falling into the Soviet orbit.
Now we see the toppling of dominoes in the opposite direction.
The degree to which Gorbachev becomes a Reaganite, this is part of my argument in this book, and I think it's original with me, that Gorbachev in the end became a Reaganite.
And we can see this not only in Gorbachev, but amazingly in the people around Gorbachev.
While Eastern Europe was revolting, Poland, the Czech Republic, Gorbachev and a delegation, including a guy named Gennady Gorasimov, who is kind of Gorbachev's chief spokesman, are confronted by the press.
And they're asked about the Brezhnev doctrine.
The Brezhnev doctrine, you might remember, once a country goes communist, it never stops going communist.
It remains communist forever.
And Gorasimov says, and he would never say this without Gorbachev's approval, the Brezhnev doctrine is dead.
And a reporter then asks him, they go, well, what's going to take its place if you don't have the Brezhnev doctrine?
Like, what do you believe now?
And he says this amazing thing.
He goes, well, he goes, you know, the Frank Sinatra song, my way?
He goes, Hungary and Poland are doing it their way.
We now have the Sinatra doctrine.
Wow.
No Soviet spokesman would ever have said something like this.
This is not even a Soviet way of talking.
This is a Reagan way of talking.
It's a Reaganite analogy.
Reagan would have loved it.
Reagan could have said it himself.
And here we have the Russians essentially now talking in a Reagan mode.
Finally, the revolution makes its way into the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev is out.
Boris Yeltsin, his rival, becomes the first legitimately elected president of Russia.
The Soviet Union gathers together the Politburo and votes to abolish itself.
They dissolve the Soviet Communist Party.
They change the names of cities that had been named after communist heroes, Leningrad, gone.
Back to St. Petersburg.
And republics like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine are now independent.
And so it's a completely different world.
Interestingly, some of the old Soviet officials writing about this later and talking about this later will start using Reaganite phrases like evil empire.
Here is Andrei Kozirev, a minister in the Yeltsin government.
He's asked, what happened to the old term, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?
He goes, that was never a good description of what we had in this country.
Here's what he says.
He goes, it was rather, as was once put, an evil empire.
So here is the Soviet government saying, quoting Reagan, and basically saying, what we had, starting with Lenin and continuing basically to now, is an evil empire.
Your guy, Reagan, was right.
And in America, finally, some of the great wise pundits, people like Henry Kissinger, who had been skeptical of Reagan's approach, were finally forced to admit that Reagan was right and they were wrong.
Reagan pulled it off.
Reagan did it.
And so Reagan won the Cold War and Gorbachev lost.
They did it together.
But if Gorbachev was the trigger, Reagan is the guy who pulled the trigger.
And I think now as we look back on the 20th century, we can see that the defeat of Nazism was the great achievement of the West in the first part of the 20th century, actually, the middle of the 20th century, and the collapse of the Soviet Union was the second great achievement of the West in the latter part, toward the end of the 20th century.
And it is worth noting that for the third time in the century, the United States had fought and won a world war.
But the key difference, of course, was this was a war in a way won by being avoided.
So the earlier wars, World War I, World War II, took massive casualties, changed the whole, not only the landscape, but the character, I would say, of Europe and of the West.
World War II resulted in the leveling of so many countries on both sides.
Britain was largely leveled after the war.
Germany, of course, was completely crushed, and the war stretched as far as Japan.
The great achievement of Reagan was to win the Cold War, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, without firing a single shot.
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