War, Men, and the Soul of the West

An interview with 'A Rage to Conquer' author Michael Walsh.

“War – what is it good for? Absolutely nothin’,” sang The Temptations. “War is not the answer,” declares the familiar bumper sticker.

But that depends on what the question is, doesn’t it? If the question is, how do you stop an imperialistic movement from bringing the whole continent of Europe under its totalitarian sway, then war is indeed a pretty valid answer. If your citizens are being relentlessly bombarded with rockets and terror attacks from an enemy with whom you have tried every conceivable diplomatic solution for literally decades, and their very raison d’etre, as explicitly noted in their charter, is to eradicate your people and erase your country from the map – I’m looking at you, Hamas – then war begins to sound like the best and only answer.

War is an ugly thing, but it’s not the ugliest of things, as John Stuart Mill said. Indeed, in his latest book A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History, Michael Walsh makes a compelling case for the centrality of war in shaping the cultural, political, and spiritual contours of the West. He goes beyond traditional military history to weave literary, cultural, and philosophical threads into a narrative marked by his signature erudition, storytelling passion, and deep reverence for the martial spirit (I reviewed it here).

Journalist, novelist, political pundit, and screenwriter Walsh is the author of, among his 17 or 18 books, two essential ones on cultural Marxism which I also have reviewed – The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and The Fiery Angel. The provocative Walsh has also appeared a couple of times on my podcast at the Horowitz Freedom Center, The Right Take with Mark Tapson (listen here and here).

I'm honored to say Michael Walsh has been a friend for many years. He is a brilliant writer with the most wide-ranging intellect and interests of probably anyone I know. I sat down with him recently to talk about A Rage to Conquer and about history, warfare, masculinity, and current events.

Mark Tapson: Thanks for making the time, Michael. Great to talk to you.

Michael Walsh: Thank you very much, Mark. Good to be with you again.

MT: Michael, when you write a book about battles that changed Western history, you know history buffs out there all have their own opinions about that. And they're going to look to see if you've included their favorite. So let me ask you a two-part question. One, why did you choose the battles that you did? And two, I'm curious why you left out the one I looked for right away – and which I'm sure you considered – and that is the Battle of Tours in 732, in which Charles Martel pretty much single-handedly prevented the early Islamization of Europe.

MW: Right. Good questions, both. The answer to the second one is that Tours is in this book. It doesn't have its own chapter, but it is part of the Crusades chapter. So I started with a fairly deep dive into the Battle of Tours and how that sets up the preservation of the Christian kingdoms, drives the Muslims out of Spain, triggers the Chanson de Roland indirectly and then we get to cut to 200 years later, the first Crusade. So Tours is in there for people who are Tours fans. That was a great battle.

You know, this is the second book in a series of what will be three about warfare and masculinity, about being a man disguised as a battles book. And the first book was Last Stands, which I think you and I talked about on your program. That was four years ago and that one sold very well, I'm happy to say. And that got me thinking and that got the publisher thinking, of course, what are we going to do next? So it took a while, but this book then came into my head, which was a book about battles that, whether immediately obvious or not, completely repositioned history. And I began to think along the lines of the commanders of those battles.

The first question you have to think about when you write a book is: Do I want to write this book? Do I want to spend this much time and effort? You know the movie business, Mark. It's very similar. Do I have literally years of my life to give to this project? It's not so much whether it will be remunerative; it’s whether it’ll be interesting. So if it's not interesting for me, it's not interesting for you. So I picked battles that were interesting for me and mostly battles that aren't that famous, because they've been covered before, certainly by more eminent historians than I.

And I think these other battles are equally as important and perhaps have just been missed. One particular strength I bring to this party is, I'm not a specialist. So I tend to see everything in terms of culture. And in this book, and my readers will know this, they know I'm going to drag music and opera and plays and poetry and the Bible and everything else into this. And I do, because so did the commanders. That's the point. I think military history is taught, when it's taught at all – that will soon change – when it's taught, it's taught strictly as a kind of football coach drawing diagrams on the wall about X's and O's.

I'm pleased to say I'll be going to West Point in the fall to have a little program about this particular book and the writing of history. For me, history is interesting only insofar as it explains the arc of history and the unity of history. Now we hear a lot about the arc of history from the Left, who believe it's some kind of living zeitgeist force that drives everybody eventually to become Barack Obama; it's actually not. And what it is, is a series of ricochets and rebounds and black swan events so that certain men – not women, men – arrive and arise in a cultural context that they either fulfill or in many of the cases in this book, completely grabbed by the horns and changed the direction of it solely by their own willpower.

So I disagree with Tolstoy, for example. I recently read for the first time War and Peace, in part for preparation for this book and the chapter on Napoleon. And Tolstoy at the end of that book has a long, long, long series of postludes about the Great Man Theory of history, and Tolstoy's contempt for Napoleon is so obvious. He basically says that Napoleon willed none of this and it all kind of happened by accident. Tolstoy, being an atheist, kind of believed that there was just kind of random chance ruled the world, but I don't agree with that at all.

And so this book is devoted to famous battles, yes, but famous commanders and what they had in common and how they approached oftentimes very similar militarily tactical situations and solved them each in his own way. But they knew what the other guy had done before. There are very few commanders who exist in a vacuum.

Our commanders since World War II all exist in a vacuum because their score is zero-to-I-don't-know-how-many-losses they’ve put up on the board. Four, five, six, ten, I don't know. They're complete incompetents. Hopefully that will change too. But for example, I start with the Iliad and then right away my readers will go, “My God, here comes poetry.” But it's true because that poem, A) is the foundation of Western literature, and B) describes the military mindset so well. Homer really is a genius and without that book, you don't have Alexander the Great. It was his Bible, there being no Bible at that time, and he slept with it under his pillow every night. He carried it with him on the field. He referred to it constantly.

So just from the very beginning of our recorded Western history, we have the poem exercising an incredible influence on a guy who retired undefeated, frankly; Alexander the Great never lost a battle. So that's the long answer to your first two questions, I think.

MT: As you mentioned, A Rage to Conquer, is sort of a follow-up or companion book to the previous one, Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost. As a guy who loves history and who has written a lot about masculinity over the years, I love that both these books celebrate masculine courage and aggression.

You argue in these books that war is an intrinsic and masculine facet of human culture. Can you explain why you see warfare as fundamentally tied to masculinity?

MW: Well, men fight and women don't. I mean, women fight, but they fight in a different way. I would say this, and I've been having this argument: a few years ago, I wrote a not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek – in fact, not tongue-in-cheek at all – essay about how the 19th Amendment should be repealed, that women should not vote. Now, without getting into the specifics of that, I would argue it's for this biological reason: if you take 12 men at random, in a situation that demands cooperation. It can be a crisis. It can be a water leak. It doesn't matter. They're strangers, 12 strangers. In five minutes, they will have organized themselves into a squad. They'll know who's the boss, who's the tech guy, who's the runner, who's the right fielder who doesn't get to do anything, just stands around. That's done. And it's done without a vote. It's done without consultation. It is absolutely instinctive.

And you get 12 women. Well, do I need to draw you a picture? You will have 12 competing queen bees backstabbing each other to decide which of them gets access to the alpha male. That's what happens. I know it's so politically incorrect, but someone reminded me of this the other day. And I used to tell my students this: when a male lion takes over a pride of lionesses, he's defeated the older, weaker male lion. And so the former boss skulks out into the desert or is killed in the fight, but usually just goes off to die. The first thing that happens is that the female lionesses kill all of their cubs and immediately go into estrus and are impregnated by the new male line. That's what happens.

And I think that feminism has destroyed American womanhood. It destroyed it. Because it's given women an impossible task on purpose to make them crazy – as if they needed any help with that – and told them that there is no satisfactory solution to your life other than being a male. And it's that simple.

[Iconoclastic feminist] Camille Paglia, I'm sure – I was a devotee of Paglia for a long time – would say, what do you expect? When men get to dress up now and play as women and win sports, what did you expect from your philosophy that the highest form of a woman is a man? You got it, ladies.

That's the problem. So what happens is, men organize things, men give commands, they take them. I'm thinking of this incident that the New York Times wrote a very good story about yesterday about the helicopter accident crash in the Potomac. And the bottom line of that story is, that woman did not want to take an order from a man and she drove a helicopter right into a plane and she killed 70 people. She had no business flying the helicopter. She had no business not listening to her chief petty officer, even though she outranked him. Anyone who spent one second in the military understands that officers listen to those noncoms that are there to tell them what to do and save their lives. And she didn't pay attention. You can't have women in the military. It's disastrous.

One of our ships – a plane fell overboard the other day. Until recently the CNO, the commander of naval operations, was a female. [SecDef Pete] Hegseth fired her in February. DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] jobs for women don't work.

So this book is about men. There are no female characters in it other than how women actually do work in the world which is behind the scenes and scheming; so for example, the chapter on a battle most people never heard of which is the Catalonian Plains – super important battle in which Attila the Hun, of all people, fights the last of the Roman generals leading the last Roman legion. And it's such an important battle in Western history and so dramatic it should be a movie, but of course, for some reason it isn't. That was occasioned in part by a woman who had gone outside the chain of command.

Women don't believe in the chain of command, by the way, not at all. Zero. And she had written a letter to Attila promising herself to him in marriage while he was busy invading the Roman Empire. And from all this came this clash of Flavius Aetius against Attila. To make it more fun is they had grown up together as boys, exactly as you do it in a movie. Aetius had been a hostage among the Huns. So he knew Attila and he knew how the Turks, or the Huns rather, rode, fought, slept, did everything. So he was the one man in position to be able to stop Attila the Hun and he did. But the battle is occasioned by a woman.

Now this is not misogynistic, I hasten to say. It's not. I love women. I love women as women and that's different. I don't want them to be men and I don't think they should be men and I think they make very bad men. And I don't think in general that they have any place in the military structure at all except as they have been traditionally over the years as nurses and helpers.

I'll give you another good example. I have a saying I put on Twitter every now and then, which is, when women feel that their men no longer desire them or will not protect them, they will instantaneously defect to the enemy. Instantaneously. They won't think about it twice. It's a biological imperative.

Here's an example. During the first battle of the Crusaders, fought once they got to Anatolia, was at a place called Dorylaeum, where they were surprise-attacked by the Turks, the Muslim Turks. And they were surrounded and cut off, and their front guard was isolated. And they weren't used to the Turkish tactics. The Turks rode great, and they were like American Indians. They'd run up, shoot arrows at you, and turn around before you could get them.

And so the Crusaders were bigger and stronger and had bigger horses and everything else and more armaments, but they couldn't catch up to them. So they were forced into a shield wall. And at one point the Turks broke through the shield wall and the women had been – because there were tons of female camp followers during the Crusades and in every other major battle up till modern period. So wives, children, prostitutes, you name it. And they had been helping by bringing water to the fighters on the front of the shield wall and by dragging away bodies of the dead and the wounded. The Turks broke through and instantly the women stopped helping the Crusaders, adorned themselves in their finest clothes and said, “Take us to the harems.”

And then [Norman prince] Bohemond [of Taranto], who is the hero of this very long chapter on the Crusades, came in with his mace and his axe and started lopping off heads of the Turks. And the women said, OK, and then they went back to work.

So I don't think we talk about this enough. I think that we've been browbeaten into accepting this odd egalitarianism on steroids that will not allow for any distinctions, that any distinctions are prejudicial. That's the thing, are somehow criminal, which is why the word discrimination is now, has changed its meaning from “I can separate good from bad or black from white or brown from apples and oranges. I can make distinctions among things.” It has become an invidious term attached to racism. It has nothing to do with it. But the left drives us to this mad egalitarianism in the hopes of destroying traditional Western society. So here we are.

MT: Exactly. Michael, we've all seen the bumper sticker that says that “War is not the answer.” Sting had a hit song in which he sings that “Nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could.” But one of the themes of your book is that war is a catalyst for social change and progress, both scientifically and culturally. Can you give an example or two from the battles in the book?

MW: Yeah, the Crusades is another one. Everyone thinks the Crusades, well, not everyone, but the Crusades have been demonized, to use the fashionable word, as some kind of unprovoked attack by evil Christians on peaceful Muslims, which of course is complete crap. And the fact is that the Crusades were called into being by a letter from the Byzantine emperor, Alexios, to the Pope, who was at that point dealing with the fact that there were two popes. And this particular Pope, Urban II, wasn't even in Rome. He was in France at this point, where he was running his own version of Catholicism, and Alexios said, he listed a long series of offenses, mostly sexual, interestingly. The Turkish penchant for buggery was already quite well known in the West and the deflowering of nuns and the rape of boys, etc. A lot of the Crusades was motivated by that particular thing. So the Crusaders marched off to liberate Jerusalem from Islam. Simple as that. And to retake area that had been Christian from, you know, from the time of Christ. So that's a thousand years. And the Muslims had taken it over in in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.

So they went all the way, amazingly, they organized – this is again a principle, male principle. There are no kings in Europe at this point. And if there are, they have very limited suzerainty over certain isolated areas. So none of these guys that went was a king. They were all Dukes of this and Prince of that. They had their little principalities, but they organized themselves into a movement that marched thousands of miles or sailed in some cases, and they won, amazingly. And eventually the Muslims overwhelmed them, mostly because the Europeans lost interest in the Crusader kingdoms. Many of the Crusaders went home.

After they liberated Jerusalem, they said, “Okay, job done. I'm going back to France or wherever they were from, but what they brought with them was a whole new way of fighting, a whole new way of looking at other people. They learned a lot from the Turks and they learned a lot from Islam at that point, but the Muslims had saved a lot of the Greco-Roman civilization that they had conquered – mostly they destroyed it, but some of it they saved and there was a rebirth of learning, of classical learning in the West, thanks to the Crusades.

Also you get the troubadours and the minnesingers and these songs of love and chivalry and all that whole Middle-Aged creation of how a man should treat a woman comes from the returning Crusaders. And so the West changes completely because of this interaction, very violent, with this other culture. So that's one example of it.

MT: The commanders that you highlight, like Napoleon and Julius Caesar and George Patton – what common traits do you see in leaders like these that define effective wartime leadership, and are they timeless traits that are still relevant to today's military leadership, or are things different in the modern geopolitical landscape?

MW: Well, that list is good because the answer is yes. As I mentioned, Alexander took the Iliad with him, and Achilles was his role model. Caesar wept at seeing a statue of Alexander once. Remember Caesar didn't become Caesar until he was a middle-aged balding fat guy. He was not a fighter and a lover like Alexander. He was a lover, but he wasn't a fighter like Alexander. But he knew Alexander was his role model.

When you get to Napoleon – let's skip ahead a bit – Napoleon is an expert on Alexander and Caesar. Napoleon writes in his exile at the end, a book of commentary on Caesar's tactics and what he would have done if he had been there, and what Caesar did right, what Caesar did wrong. So there's this kind of patrimonial legacy that passes down this list of commanders. And so they all understood the lineage from which they came. And oftentimes they would find themselves – and I just discovered this writing both Last Stands and A Rage to Conquer – “Wait a minute, I'm in this particular physical situation here facing an enemy. Who else has done this before me?”

So when you get to Napoleon, for example, in the battle of Austerlitz, which is widely considered by everybody his tactical masterpiece, he understands at that moment he's in the exact same position that Alexander was at Gaugamela, which is the first major real battle in this book. It is a certain amount of geography. You've got a line, you've got a left, middle, and a center, and the other guy's got the same thing in reverse, and you're going to try to make him, you want to break his center. That's always the key. So it is like a football coach in this respect. How do you do that?

And Alexander leading a much smaller force of Macedonian Greeks against Darius's huge Persian army. ‘Cause he'd already beaten Darius twice and he knew his man, knew he was a coward. He knew he would run. So he had that advantage, but he manages to pull Darius's left flank way off by himself. Alexander is always on his own right flank. And so he feints to the right. And then as Darius pulls his troops out of the center, Alexander comes cutting across the middle diagonally right at the opposite commander. That's a move Alexander made in every single battle he fought, including when he was fighting under his father, Philip, in one of the battles of the Greek Civil War. Anyway, Napoleon does the same thing. And so does Aetius at the Battle of the Catalonian Plains.

Dangle a poisoned pawn on the right, you get your enemy to commit and then you let him take that poisoned pawn. That's in chess and then you come straight across at him. And so there's three battles in a row where the exact same situation was solved the exact same way by three vastly different commanders. So there, that's the way military history used to be taught and should be taught but do our commanders know this now? No, they don't and I'll tell you when I realized this, Mark.

When I was a boy, I grew up in the Marine Corps, so I had a military officer, war hero for a father. And I was in Hawaii when Vietnam took off. I was there from ‘62 to ‘65, and Dad left at one point to go over to do something, we don't know what. But I realized even as a boy that we didn't want to win that battle.

I should mention, the actual opening chapter of this book is about Carl von Clausewitz and his big mammoth encyclopedic analysis of warfare on war. It's called Vom Kriege (On War). Clausewitz was a Prussian officer who was captured by Napoleon. It makes this circle complete. He began thinking about these tactical things after he was defeated so badly by Napoleon at Jena und Auerstedt, twin battles in sometime during the first decade of the 19th century. But he makes the point that war is a continuation of policy not by other means – that's always mistranslated and it drives me crazy – but with other means. MIT. So war is not a failure of policy. It's another tool.

He makes another point: war is always determined by politicians. But within the military community – and this is an important point that we have lost track of – there is no logical limit to the application of force to win. None. You do whatever it takes to win. And the only reason you have limitations is because politicians impose them on you.

So the last chapter of this book is my reflection on 9/11 and how we lost that battle, in part because we refused to fight that battle seriously. But I saw we were doing that in Vietnam too. We didn't really want to win. We wanted just to not lose. And now you see it in, we saw it in Afghanistan and this idiotic war in Ukraine where we're fighting to just bleed the Russians – for no good reason by the way, zero, no good reason, no geopolitical or strategic or historical reason. And we're letting [Ukraine President] Zelensky fight not to lose and make a fortune for himself of course too. That's easier.

MT: I was going to ask you about that last chapter, the afterword, about what you call the Battle of 9/11. You condemn the West's shift toward this limited warfare since 1945, arguing that it's weakened our resolve and consequently we've won no major wars since then. Can you elaborate a little bit on how our response to 9/11, the so-called War on Terror, exemplifies that?

MW: Yeah. Well, there's a controversial part of that chapter in which I say, What would Caesar have done? How would any of the other commanders have handled this? And I was asked at an event last week in New York, one of those present read that aloud to me and he said, “Is that how we should handle it?” I said, yes. And that is Caesar – well, let's put it this way: Caesar is estimated to have killed 1 million Gauls, Celtic French Gauls during the Gallic Wars, which lasted almost a decade. At the Battle of Alesia, when he had – very complex battle and I won't go into it here, except to say that Bohemond in the siege of Antioch was in the exact same position as Caesar was at Alesia. And I think at some level, he understood that.

When the Celts, Gauls, who were trapped in the city, sent their women and children out into the no man's land between the walls of the city and the Romans who had also walled the city in again. They expected that the Romans would take the women and children in as hostages and slaves. They let them starve to death. Caesar's famous mercy was zero in evidence there, because he said, “We can't take the prisoners. We don't have time. We're outnumbered. There's a huge Gaelic reinforcement coming. And I'm sorry, but that's it.”

And the women begged and cried and screamed and offered themselves sexually. And it didn't do any good. They all died. Every one of them. Now I'm not endorsing that. That is certainly not a Christian way to fight a war. Of course, Caesar had the advantage of not being a Christian since there weren't any Christians in those days.

But what the Romans believed in is total victory. Total victory at whatever it took. And they would take a beating like they did at Cannae where they lost 50,000 men in an afternoon and come back and get you the next time. But what we have done is nothing. We didn't fight back against 9/11 in my opinion, and I believe this to be true, historical facts prove it.

We had war literally declared on us, literally, by Bin Laden acting in the name of Islam. Now Islam is a decentralized, bifurcated religion and any mufti can make a fatwa. And look what happened to poor what's-his-name, the writer who's been –

MT: Salman Rushdie.

MW: Salman Rushdie. That fatwa was on forever until the guy finally caught up with him. Any one of them can issue an order and any member of the ummah [the worldwide Muslim community] can follow it and carry it out. There are no Muslim countries. There's only the ummah. And they will tell you that. That's not me saying that. I'm sure our mutual friend [Jihad Watch Director] Bob Spencer would say the same thing.

So we didn't fight back. We didn't even take the declaration of war seriously, even though they'd already tried to bomb the World Trade Center some years before.

MT: ‘93.

MW: Yeah, in ‘93. And suddenly, the Trade Center comes down, the Pentagon is attacked. If that's not an act of war, I don't know what is. And we didn't react at all correctly. We attacked the wrong people, of course, because [President George W.] Bush was awful and his father was awful. And I think we'll come to see those two as two of the worst presidents in the history of the country. Worse than Obama and Biden in many ways because they were much more important.

But what we should have done was make Saudi Arabia pay for that. But we didn't have the guts to do it.

MT: Yeah, I'm reminded, in terms of total war, I'm reminded of General Sherman's quote, which I think you cite in the book, “War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it. And the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”

MW: That's it. Get it over with. I think any military man will tell you that except, you know, today's modern girl-boss military. That's being purged. I'm also giving a talk at the Army and Navy Club later this year. So I'll make some of these points again. I think I'll have a receptive audience. But look, as I said, Clausewitz is very important to the ethos of this book.

So, war is hell – that's basically the short version of what Sherman said. But it is a political instrument. [Clausewitz] says it's a wahres politisch instrument. It's a true political instrument. It's not a failure, it's not a separate thing. But with it, and something to go back to what you alluded to earlier, it brings this great technological change.

All that we have – The internet was kind of vetted by the military. The interstate highway system was vetted so we could get trucks and tanks from one end of the country to the other easily. That's why it's there. So the civilians – and I must say when I was growing up on various Marine Corps bases around the world, the dirtiest word in my father's vocabulary, because Marine officers never use four-letter words. Never. Never heard one. Never. The dirtiest word to his vocabulary was civilian.

And that's because they have not contempt, but they have a certain aversion to civilian thinking, which they know must be the last word. Another good example of it is many years later, I asked my mother, “Who did you vote for in the” – let's pick one: Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960. An election I remember very well. And she said, “We didn't vote.” I said, “What do mean?” She said, “Marine officers never vote.”

The reason for that is they have allegiance to the commander-in-chief and it doesn't matter who it is. And that's another principle that's gone out the window with this politicized military. [former Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [Mark] Milley should be brought up on court-martial for calling China. I mean, it doesn't matter whether you love Trump or hate Trump or don't care about Trump. What [Milley] did is a court-martial offense. And I hope he gets what's coming to him. Really do.

MT: Yes. I agree. Well, to move from history to current events, we have a new administration, obviously, and a radically different approach to the military than we saw in the Biden years when our military was focused on these “existential threats” of climate change and whiteness. How do you feel so far about Pete Hegseth and a return to a military focus on lethality instead of equity?

MW: Well, it's only been three months. So everybody's talking a good game. Great. I'm all for it. I'm all for it. As I say, I don't think you should have DEI in the military. The military is the least racist outfit on the planet. It doesn't need DEI. My brother, again, my brother spent 20 years as a naval officer.

So I've been around the military my entire life and I've heard it from both close relatives and friends in the military. It is the least racist thing. So whiteness doesn't enter into it. You don't care what color the guy next to you in the foxhole is. The end. And civilians and women will never ever understand that. But I think Hegseth is right in saying war fighting is our business. That's our only business. Meals on Wheels is not our business. We're not here to send naval ships to rescue some poor wretched, you know the Elon Musk phrase, “save the orphans of Sadville.” The orphans of Sadville will be like the kids at Alesia. They will starve. That's what's going to happen to the orphans of Sadville. And it is not our problem to deal with.

We've got to learn that lesson. We've got to. And to have this sort of perversion of Christian ethics forced on us by the modern left, which demands – this is a very [Saul] Alinsky thing –make the Christian church live up to its own principles, he says. That's how you break an enemy, by saying, “But it says right here that you're not doing that. Therefore, you're illegitimate.” We've got to leave all that behind. We've got to ignore critics. I think the best thing that the Trump people can do is ignore the media and the critics. Ignore them. Just – they've got two years. Don't listen to them. Turn a deaf ear toward them. That's the only way you can fix this.

MT: Speaking of Zelensky, where do you stand on war with Russia in Ukraine? Because a lot of conservatives want to put America first, of course, and stay out of it, while some establishment Republicans are more hawkish about it. Are there any lessons from the past that could help us clarify where to stand in the Ukraine conflict?

MW: Yeah, I would say this from my own experience. As you know, Mark, I was in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union right up to the end of the Cold War. So from 1985 to 1991, I was there. I was in Berlin when the wall came down, because I knew it was going to come down. That's why I was there when it happened. I was in Russia, by chance, when Chernobyl blew up. I left the Soviet Union two or three weeks before the coup against Gorbachev. And after that, I spent a year or two reporting from Eastern Europe. Once it was – travel was a little bit more liberalized.

So I went all over the place: Poland, Czechoslovakia when it was Czechoslovakia, Hungary, I've been to quite a bit. And I remember being ashamed of the United States of America in 1990. I was up on top of the Fisherman's Walk on the Buda side in Budapest with some Hungarian friends. And the Wall had just started to come down, it had come down. The Germans, as you may remember, fled out of Hungary into Austria. That was what brought the whole system to a collapse.

And my European friends were basically saying, “Where are the Americans?” And I said, “I don't know.” This is the end of that Wall and the fall of communism was the principle foreign policy objective of the post-war period. And George Bush is sitting on his ass in Washington with that gargoyle James A Baker perched over his shoulder, doing nothing, nothing.

Nothing is what they did. Nothing. And that we could have bought Russia and the rest of it for a penny on the dollar. we didn't. And you know who did? [Left-wing billionaire financier] George Soros. He was there. He understood what was happening. And he was – and this is hard to believe in retrospect – a hero because he came in with money and expertise and knowledge and Western capital and started working immediately right there in the ruins of the Warsaw Pact and we did nothing.

So our fight isn't with Russia and I, you know, I spent some time in the White House informally in the first Trump term. My advice has always been “Russia's not our enemy. We won that war. Why don't you take the win and shut up?” No, you can't because it's like the Republicans on abortion. They can't take the win. Shut up. They can't they have to keep fighting and relitigating and refighting a battle. It's already in the books.

And so I think Zelensky is a criminal. I think he's a grifter, I think the Ukraine has always been a province of Russia and a million people will write to complain, “But what about...” No, it's a province of Russia as far as Putin goes.

I first encountered the name of Putin when I was in East Germany in 1985. I was traveling all over the country. And I was told by one of my friends on the other team's intelligence service about the new boy in Dresden, where I was headed. And Putin is a man who's seen his country shot out from underneath him. That's what happened. How would you feel? Let's just ask it. How would you feel?

So I think the objective for Putin has always been to restore the heart of the old [Russian nationalist political party] Rodina, the old mother Russia, which is Belaya Rus, which is now called Belarus. It's the old “White Russia.” And that's pretty much it. Ukraine is the Kansas of Russia. That's where all the food comes from. And so without it, you have a country that's crippled.

The Romans knew they needed grain and corn and it came from Egypt which is why Egypt was such an important part of Caesar's – well, shall we say very intimate diplomacy with Cleopatra and later Augustus – that they needed those supplies to feed the Empire.

So Putin is just acting the way any potentate from the past 2000 years would act. And our fight isn't with Putin. And turning it into a proxy war against a nuclear power is the height of insanity. For what? As Bismark said, it's not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

MT: I totally agree with you about Ukraine. You had mentioned earlier that there's a third book in the trilogy that's in the works. Can you give us a little preview of that?

MW: Yes, it's about religious warfare. It's going to be battles in which the whole point of it was whose God or which version of God is stronger. And what I found in writing A Rage to Conquer was in all the cases where there is a religious element in it, Crusades being a very good example – when you win, God favored you. When you lost, it wasn't that there was no God, it's that you screwed up and you weren't – you had insufficient fidelity, you didn't pray hard enough.

You'll read in the accounts of the first Crusade, Crusaders would always walk around praying. And when times are good, they give thanks. When times are bad, they pray. And when they win a battle, it's because saints suddenly appear, literally appear. The whole – the story of the finding the tip of the spear that pierced Christ's side, conveniently located under an altar in Antioch, actually helped turn that battle. And you'll see from the Muslim side – and I quoted many of the Muslim writers – that, “We let Allah down.” It's not that there is no Allah. No, no, that's unthinkable. It's not that there is no God. And the same for the early Hebrews. “God told us, ‘Kill all the Canaanites.’ So we did.” It's when you stand back away from it, whatever your own particular religious or lack of religious faith happens to be. These are common tropes throughout the history of warfare. And it's just something I find very interesting.

For example, the famous line, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” That comes from the Albigensian crusade, which took place in France between Christians, between Cathars and Orthodox Catholics, we would say now. And the commander, when faced with a city in which they wouldn't be able to tell the Cathars from the Orthodox Christians, said, “Kill them all and God will know his own.” So, and that was as violent a war crime as you're going to get.

But it's always carried out in the name of God and whose God is stronger. I think it'll make a – well, it can't possibly be controversial, can it?

MT: Definitely not. It sounds really interesting. I'm really looking forward to it. Michael, how can people keep up with you and your work on the internet?

MW: Well, with difficulty, I would say. I have a site called The Pipeline, which we've run for the last four years. But that is now changing into really a kind of personal site for me. And it was created as a site about the energy business, but quickly turned into a COVID site. I'll be bringing out a book of our COVID material to show how we covered it from start to finish and called it for the hoax that it so obviously was and the fact that it was from a leak in a Chinese Wuhan laboratory right from the start.

Mark, you know, I did a book called, before The Pipeline called Against the Great Reset and that came out a few years ago and in the very first sentence of that book I wrote with utter confidence that it was caused by a lab leak from the Wuhan lab with the collusion of [Anthony] Fauci. And I didn't get sued for that and that now seems to be everybody's understanding of what really happened.

So I think, so that's it. Writing my books takes an awful lot of time and I've also gone back to my first love, which is being a concert pianist. So I will be playing concerts this year in London and in Budapest and elsewhere. So, when you get to be 75, you get to ease up on the day-to-day journalism. I would say, I'm glad you asked me this question. I've been doing day-to-day deadline journalism since I was 22 years old when I got my first job on a daily newspaper. Our hours were 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. But it was a morning newspaper, so of course you stayed later than that. Of course you did and every day, you know five days a week, you did this and so that ticking clock has been part of my life for 53 years and it's less so.

But I'm very active on Twitter, on X. So I tweet under the name The Amanuensis. Leave it to me to use names that were hard to remember. An amanuensis is someone who writes something for someone else. It started as a joke when I had the David Kahane character at National Review that I was, so @TheAmanuensis, that's me. That's about it.

MT: Good to know. MW, thanks for another great book and another great conversation.

MW: Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.