RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - How Russia Plays Geopolitics
Aired: 2026-03-30
Duration: 05:36


=== Game Theory and Nihilism (05:23) ===

[00:00:00]  I once described, by the way, I once described it that if you think about like the way that different countries play geopolitics, that the Americans, we play football, the Chinese play Go, the Russians play chess, and the Israelis play poker in a mob house, basically.
[00:00:21]  It's how it works.
[00:00:23]  And game theory can be used for both closed and open games.
[00:00:27]  Because obviously geopolitics, everyone can see, for example, if the United States is actually moving thousands and thousands of troops to the Middle East, for example.
[00:00:39]  That will be an open part.
[00:00:41]  But then trying to suss out Trump's statements, is this, what is the deal in Pakistan, that's sort of closed.
[00:00:49]  But game theory would basically approach it of, okay, what is everyone's different kind of move here?
[00:00:56]  Now, reflexive theory would be more about playing the person.
[00:01:01]  It would be more psychological.
[00:01:04]  And the idea is that you want to have your opponent make a decision within a very closed parameters of possibilities that will, it doesn't matter actually which way they choose, that their choice is now been dictated by you to some extent.
[00:01:23]  So you're like putting, instead of playing the board and playing the pieces, you're playing the person more and you're trying to get them to actually do what you want them to do to some extent.
[00:01:35]  Now, there's parts of game theory that will go similarly to some extent.
[00:01:39]  But this is really, I think, what we really see in terms of these kinds of very Russian deep penetration kinds of operations.
[00:01:49]  It's basically here, take up our poor Jewish Soviet refugee Ayn Rand, let her come in and give the right an entire cult around rebellion and being the new man who doesn't need the old world to some extent.
[00:02:05]  Interesting.
[00:02:06]  So let's go back to what you were talking about before of the sort of left and right nihilism of so we stipulate the right-wing nihilism is pure individualism.
[00:02:20]  I'm not going to even pay my parking tickets.
[00:02:23]  I am so liberated from the community to something like that.
[00:02:28]  I've been liberated in that sense for many years, in fact.
[00:02:31]  But there's that aspect of right-wing nihilism.
[00:02:34]  And then there's the left-wing nihilism of Kojev, which is a, which is an end of history concept in the sense that there's, in a way, nothing more to do.
[00:02:50]  There's no point in conquest at this point because it makes so much more sense not to go in and take anything, but to simply trade with that person and establish division of labor.
[00:03:04]  And there's nothing more that you could conceivably want.
[00:03:09]  And everyone will soon be recognized in the sense that everyone will be a citizen of some country that might be in a larger block, but there's really no point in striving an effort.
[00:03:22]  Francis Fukuyama, the subtitle of or the forgotten other half of the title, The End of History, is The End of History and The Last Man, which is a Nietzschean concept.
[00:03:31]  And it's this is, again, why I think Fukuyama is maybe deeper than he's given credit for in the sense that he's at least recognizing the possibility that we could enter a state of like that Disney film WALL-I, where everyone's like in chairs watching television and they're like horribly fat and they don't engage in any sort of effort.
[00:03:53]  I haven't seen it in years, but I think the final statement or the climax is they like push themselves out of their chair and they're like, I'm going to do something and not just be fed and entertained.
[00:04:04]  So that is a grotesque, cartoonish version of Nietzsche's last man.
[00:04:09]  Nietzsche's last man knows that God is dead.
[00:04:12]  He's wise in a way, but he doesn't care.
[00:04:15]  It doesn't mean anything.
[00:04:16]  So what if God is dead?
[00:04:19]  So long as I have a good rate of return.
[00:04:21]  Yeah, every God is dead.
[00:04:22]  It never had any meaning whatsoever.
[00:04:25]  But I have this new timeshare I'd like to talk to you about.
[00:04:27]  It's that type of attitude that Nietzsche was getting at.
[00:04:30]  And Nietzsche hated, obviously.
[00:04:32]  But let me back up.
[00:04:33]  So you have the sort of left-wing collectivism that in some ways has no real opposition to neoliberal capitalism.
[00:04:43]  This is something even Paul Godfrey talked about this a while ago when I was speaking with him.
[00:04:51]  There's some point where a Hegelian Soviet spy in Khozhev, who's deeply versed in all of this stuff, one of the few people who can even read Hegel, not to mention explain him.
[00:05:04]  And he's sympathetic towards communism and all this kind of stuff.
[00:05:08]  But on some level, there's no real opposition between him and a neoliberal corporate guy or a neoliberal bureaucrat in the sense that we're all going in the same, we're all moving in the same place, actually.

=== Hidden Hand of History (00:13) ===

[00:05:23]  There's a hidden hand of history, a cunning of reason that's bringing the GE corporation close to what Khozhev might have imagined with the European Union.
[00:05:35]  And it's this remarkable thing.