"The makings of another world war”–Buckley Students Sound Off on Foreign Policy; Hillsdale's Paul Rahe on Repeating the Mistakes of WW1

Pod and Man at Yale

In this week’s episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Arav Dalwani ’26 and John Matthews-Ederington ’27 talk about the state of world politics, covering the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.

• Matthews-Ederington: “A lot of the failure of October 7th was an intelligence failure on Israel’s part.”
• Dalwani: “The world is on fire in my opinion… The world is in a much more precarious position than it was four or five years ago.”
• Matthews-Ederington: “Whenever you’re talking about nuclear weapons, you should always say yes, there’s a possibility that that’s going to happen.”
• Dalwani: “I think [the two-state solution] is much more unrealistic and I think that’s because of two reasons. One, obviously is the conflict that’s happened with Hamas. But the second thing I think that the Palestinian National Authority… is much more unlikely to accept a peace deal.”

For the expert interview, 2024 Donald Kagan Memorial Lecturer and Hilldale College Professor Paul Rahe looks at American foreign policy since the Cold War and how repeating the mistakes of post-World War I international relations is putting America on the path to another world war:

• Rahe: “And for 30 years, we acted, and we still continue to act to some extent, as if a utopia had been created that made war impossible.”
• Rahe: “What you’ve got is the makings of another world war.”
• Rahe: “Richard Nixon has been sort of demonized and he certainly did some foolish things but if you look at his conduct of foreign policy, it was brilliant. He laid the foundation for the end of the Cold War by driving a wedge between China and Russia.”
• Rahe: “What the Russians did in 2014 was breach is breach that agreement. Why did they do it? They did it because they could. And they did it as a way of humiliating us and humiliating NATO.”

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