#202 - Barry S. Strauss - "We Are In The Final Stages Of Western Collapse"

**Barry Strauss** (0:00)
Europe in general, including the UK, is one step ahead of us when it comes to the decline of the West.

**Peter McCormack** (0:08)
There's a time when I felt really fortunate to live in the period we lived in. I was like, all the big wars are behind us. Here in the UK or Western liberal democracies, we have a pretty stable existence. And now we transplant ourselves to now and we're essentially clipping the coins. We have high inflation. We have political instability. We have war on the edge of Europe.

**Barry Strauss** (0:28)
Their children, their children become softer. And their children become softer. And they start not making war anymore and not having martial values and not having common sense. And they adopt luxury beliefs.
And they start hating themselves and criticizing their own society. And oops, the next Raiders come in from the desert and take them over. There are always people out there on the horizon who have more asabia and who are going to ride in and want to take it away from you. And I don't think most people in the west really believe that anyone could take this away from us. But they can.

**Peter McCormack** (1:08)
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Do you know the meme, how many times a man thinks about the fall of Rome a day? Yeah, and it feels pertinent for what is happening in the world today. And one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you is that, do you or are you able to look at the world through the lens of the 10 books you've written, what you've been teaching, your history and classics?

**Barry Strauss** (1:54)
Pretty much all the time. All the time, yeah. Yeah, always looking at the world through my own books. Maybe that's a little too self-referential. But certainly I try to look at it through the lessons of history, especially from the ancient world and its modern resonances. I was always an ancient and modern guy. When I was in graduate school, I was undecided as to whether I was going to do ancient history or whether I was going to do modern European diplomatic and military history.
Then I spent one summer in Greece, and the next summer in Germany, and I decided no offense to Germany, but Greece wins. I decided I'd rather spend the rest of my career going back and forth to Greece and to Italy, and to other places in the Mediterranean, but still have this fascination in German history, in particular in modern European history.

**Peter McCormack** (2:43)
What do you think is going on right now? How do you take it all in? Because we seem to be, one way I look at it is that there's a time where I felt really fortunate to live in the period we lived in. I was like, all the big wars are behind us, all the big revolutions are behind us in the UK or Western liberal democracies. We have a pretty stable existence. We have a stable democracy. We have a stable currency. I don't feel like we're going to be in war. Now we transplant ourselves to now and we're essentially clipping the coins. We have high inflation. We have political instability. We have war on the edge of Europe.
I don't want to over worry. I have, as a conservative, you can do, you can catastrophize, but I also have two kids. I do sometimes wonder, are we at the end of an empire search?

**Barry Strauss** (3:35)
I don't think so. I mean, I think we're in a time of transition. I think we're facing huge challenges.
I'm optimistic that we can rise to the occasion, but we haven't done so yet. I mean, we still have a long way to go.

**Peter McCormack** (3:52)
What do you think are the biggest challenges? Is it a challenge of democracy?

**Barry Strauss** (3:56)
Certainly, it's a challenge to democracy. I mean, the digital revolution is in some ways the biggest revolution since the invention of the printing press. The printing press led to an explosion. It's called the Reformation. That led to a long, long period of war and change. Ultimately, led to modern republics and democracies, which is great, but it wasn't an easy process. The digital revolution, social media, the impact on the way people think, the way people talk, the way people communicate, we were educated. It's absolutely enormous. So that's one huge change that we're all facing. The other is the rise of China and the rise of a new axis, a new challenge to the West, such as we haven't seen certainly since the Cold War and maybe even before then, but China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, big, big challenges to Western liberal democracies.