Sarah Paine

inter-Cold War period when all that stopped.

And that's when you get this tremendous growth across the Third World because there aren't these insurgencies just tearing up wealth.

And then you could see recently, look at North Africa.

It's a mess.

right now, right?

It's both ISIS or whatever it is in there is doing its stuff, and then you have Wagner Group or whatever they are in there, and then you have the Chinese further south, and everybody's feeling everything.

You've got civil war all over the place.

And then that means military age males want to get out because people will kill you, right?

Or they'll either dragoon you into fighting where you don't want to fight or they'll just kill you outright.

So they're all trying to get into boats to Europe, which is destabilizing.

It's a mess.

We're in the second Cold War and this is part of it.

What were they missing?

I need to think more about that because I think there are probably all sorts of things.

Also, it's impossible to know the right thing to do.

Then afterwards, when it pans, you go, well, that was a mess.

It's hard to know, but I think it was probably a terrible mistake when Eisenhower thought, here's the Supreme Command Allied Commander of World War II, who knows all about hot wars, doesn't want to do that.

When the United States deposes Mosaddegh in Iran in 1954...

I can see Eisenhower's view is, hey, we're just deposing one guy and we're going to avoid the Russians taking oil fields here, etc.

And he thinks that's a better tradeoff.