In this episode, I sit down with my good friend and colleague, Dr. David Rothkopf, to talk about American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era. We talk about 9/11, the end of the Cold War, the rise of the neo-conservative right, and the fall of the empire.
00:01:44.520And 9-11 came in a way out of a dream for the American empire because it gave us the ability to create a new dynamic and long-lasting paradigm
00:02:01.180for existing institutions and the U.S. military, that we're fighting these anti-civilizational forces that are taking over,
00:02:12.800that are even coming here into the country.
00:02:15.480And, you know, everything that was stated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the like, was we're in this for the long haul.
00:02:24.500This is going to be, yeah, mission accomplished, sure, but this is actually going to be a very long war.
00:02:33.740These are the last holdouts to Americanism.
00:02:37.960And they are willing to do things that we aren't, that are sort of unimaginably evil and attack civilians and so on.
00:02:46.660But it did come out of a dream in the sense that it was like the American empire could be motivated again.
00:02:54.700We could start, we had a purpose and we were able to unify the country behind something for the first time since the Cold War as well.
00:03:06.780So anyway, those are just some thoughts to maybe hopefully some of those ideas sort of get your mind started in terms of thinking about the broader trajectory of what we've lived through.
00:03:17.360Yeah, yeah, I'll start with this entry point into that.
00:03:24.340So I had initially done my, formulated my master's thesis around economic sanctions and the weaponization of sanctions, specifically looking at Syria as a case study.
00:03:36.060And so through my research, I was trying to, then I was, got me into, I need to prove that the U.S. foreign policy or find evidence that the U.S. foreign policy has been to overthrow the Syrian government.
00:03:50.040And this has been a consistent policy.
00:03:52.460And, of course, I found that evidence from the 1950s forward.
00:03:57.740I think there's something like 14 successful and unsuccessful coup attempts.
00:04:02.380And then looking at their relationship with Israel as well.
00:04:06.420And then through that, discovering, having to reread the Clean Break document and to restudy Project for the New American Century.
00:04:14.700And I just got pulled into it, and I had kind of halfway through my master's thesis three weeks in, and I just had to basically throw it away and start from scratch with a couple weeks left.
00:04:27.340And I just realized something, it just kind of hit me, that if you don't understand the power, where the center of power is, and how power is executed, and how it's leveraged, who holds it, how it reacts to other powers in the world, and who is the biggest hegemon is, of course, is the United States.
00:04:48.780And I had to go back and study and understand what is the ideological motivation for U.S. hegemony.
00:04:57.320What is the story? What is the narrative?
00:04:59.800And I didn't want to, because it's like I had an adverse reaction to neocons during the whole Bush year.
00:05:28.660And it's ideological, and it's drawing on aspects of U.S. history, and it's cherry-picking.
00:05:37.720And this is what, when you read Krauthammer and some of his early essays, he absolutely predicted, in 1990, he predicted the unipolar moment.
00:05:47.320He said how long it would last, and lots of things.
00:05:50.540He was bang-on accurate when you look and read his old essays.
00:05:53.420And so they had something going into the 90s there, as they were preparing to take power and to flip, you know, where the United States was heading after the Clinton administration.
00:06:06.200But to be honest, Bill Clinton, as a staunch neoliberal, neoliberal foreign policy, the Warm-Up Act was the breakup of Yugoslavia.
00:06:16.200Well, the first Gulf War was the onset.
00:06:19.720That was the moment, the timing of that with the Iron Curtain falling.
00:06:24.440But Yugoslavia was a big project, and that kind of broke the door down and broke down the kind of adherence to, strict adherence to international law.
00:06:34.560That was the beginning of the rules-based international order, was NATO's operation on Yugoslavia.
00:06:41.540But as I got in there and started reading more, and then all of a sudden, the other questions just became academic.
00:06:50.600And then, but you had to find out, where does this come from?
00:06:55.100Where does this neoconservative Pax Americana come from?
00:07:01.420And it's not just American exceptionalism.
00:07:06.100And I started with that term, Manifest Destiny.
00:07:09.760And we read about that when we were in junior high history class in America as a normal part of your curriculum, just to understand Manifest Destiny.
00:07:17.960And Manifest Destiny really wasn't about, that term wasn't born out of the foreign policy conquest.
00:07:26.480This was about annexing the Western territories, New Mexico, Oregon, California, and Texas.
00:07:47.120It was a critique because while the U.S. was trying to expand, they were constantly being thwarted by the British and the French.
00:07:53.100So his argument was, their argument was, they are trying to get in the way of our Manifest Destiny to settle this continent.
00:08:02.100And from that point, then came American exceptionalism after that, because there was a, after the Civil War, there was a gestation period where America was developing its identity as a continental country, as a continental power.
00:08:19.860It's that settler, Puritan-driven, American settler, idealism, English-Protestant, you know, mentality, that attitude that had been established.
00:08:33.300Then you're getting into the Industrial Revolution, and then you're getting into, when American exceptionalism kind of went international, was President McKinley.
00:08:44.180And this is when the real, and it's funny, you look at that foreign policy, and below all of this talk about politics is economics, is hard economics.
00:08:55.240And the U.S. started becoming a manufacturing powerhouse in the 19th century, but it started producing a surplus of goods.
00:09:03.300So you had, what do you call it, deflation issues.
00:09:07.660So it became clear to the leadership, we need to find new markets overseas.
00:09:13.580And that's when coincided with the Spanish-American War, and they did establish these markets overseas.
00:09:20.260And that helped to power a new phase in American economic expansion and political expansion.
00:09:28.340And just the country became extremely wealthy during that period, and so wealthy that they were able to finance the First World War.
00:09:38.060Because America didn't get into the First World War immediately.
00:09:41.660But what they did, and this is what people don't realize, is that the dollar is a reserve currency.
00:09:50.300If you look at the total amount of trade globally around the First World War, the dollar was already beginning to eclipse the British sterling.
00:10:02.200What they did, they basically used, in part by the Federal Reserve Act and turning it into a fiat empire, they were able to lend money to European powers who were fighting each other and taking payment in gold.
00:10:17.980So America emptied out the gold reserves of Europe in the First World War, and that's how America accumulated massive gold reserves.
00:10:25.120That's what filled up Fort Knox was World War I, and then by the time the Americans came in, everyone was in hock to the United States at that point.
00:10:33.540Then they came in and basically, you know, very late in the game and managed to have a sort of key position, Woodrow Wilson, in kind of managing what the post-war system was going to be like, which didn't work out that well, unfortunately.
00:10:50.720But America became a superpower before, during, and after the First World War, not the Second World War.
00:10:59.640And that's really important that people understand that because there's a financial component there.
00:11:03.960And how I learned and understood and appreciated a lot of this was during my international relations master's, I was reading Edward Hallett Carr, E.H. Carr, was a great British historian who's a great diplomat, very much a stalwart text for international relations, 20 years crisis.
00:11:24.920And so he was in the interwar period, and so he was in the interwar period, and it just so happens this is very relevant to where we're at right now.
00:11:31.720There's a lot of similarities between the interwar period, post-industrial revolution, a lot of changes going on.
00:11:39.000The old systems of the old order is no longer functional and is begging to be replaced with something new, but nobody knows how that's going to take shape.
00:11:48.940And a lot of monarchies quickly becoming democracies, the nation state, nationalism is a new thing as well.
00:11:59.780So there's really a lot of things are in flux at that time.
00:12:02.680And so like now, a lot of things are in flux now as well.
00:12:07.200So that was, so American exceptionalism, understanding that.
00:12:11.460And then, so where does neoconservativism come from?
00:12:14.620It comes from not American exceptionalism, but American vindicationism.
00:12:20.580And vindicationism is a type of American exceptionalism where you, it's almost like evangelical, evangelizing, that we have been successful, we have broken off from our colonial masters, we have built a powerful world power here, a pluralistic society where we have, everybody's free.
00:12:41.860We freed the slaves, we freed the slaves, all of these things, we're leading in maritime power now.
00:12:48.400We're now going to proselytize to the world our success and our system is the best system.
00:12:55.880And that kind of became the basis of the Truman Doctrine as well, you know, to be able to make democracies happen and be, and that, that was the basis of that kind of liberal idea of spreading democracy.
00:13:14.960And that became the kind of raison d'etre or the raison d'etre of the United States on the surface in the foreign policy arena.
00:13:22.800And then studying, you learn to become, if you're fluent in left liberal internationalism and you're fluent in right and realist politics and discourse, you then begin to see the foreign policy has been almost identical between John Bolton and Samantha Power.
00:13:48.920And that was one of the basis of the, the neoconservativism, which is really just a rehash.
00:13:53.900So along the way, they all cherry pick various aspects of things that work for them, whatever the movement is, and then put it together in the kind of a new omelet, which kind of gets reified over time.
00:14:07.160And that's what neoconservativism was.
00:14:09.640It's really, you know, a lot of, we, we spoke about this on the spaces, how out of the University of Chicago, your alma mater, and all the great IR thinkers are coming out of there, but also the, the, the Trotskyites of the fifties and sixties rebranded themselves in the eighties and in the nineties as neocons.
00:14:30.020And so also the Straussians who weren't exactly Marxist, I would say, and, and it, you know, what exactly Strauss believes is, is up for debate.
00:14:46.060But yeah, there's unquestionable, I mean, I felt marinating, I felt like I was marinating in that world when I was there.
00:14:53.940And, and I've actually taken a lot from Strauss and so on, but let, let me jump in with a couple of things.
00:15:00.980So, um, one event that I've always found quite fascinating is the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
00:15:11.440And so that came after the Balfour, or was it, yeah, that was, Balfour was 1917, Paris Peace Conference was 1919.
00:15:20.480Balfour Declaration was a sort of mission statement for Israel.
00:15:25.160The Paris Peace Conference issued a mandate for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
00:15:30.400It was immensely influential in the Middle East.
00:15:33.800It wasn't just, it wasn't just the Versailles conference, which is what's most remembered about, you know, dragging Germany over the coals and creating, uh, uh, revenge and, and putting revenge in their minds and so on.
00:15:46.100Uh, but also it was, it was much bigger than that in the sense that it was the use of nationalism within an American hegemonic umbrella.
00:15:57.300In the sense that, you know, in 1917, there was a Bolshevik revolution in Russia, it's going to smash the, the patriarchy and the monarchy and, and capitalism and everything.
00:16:09.140But America had its own sort of Bolshevism, you could say that, that is a, and what I mean by that is a, is a global ideology that is politically disruptive, uh, but ultimately stable and ultimately serving Washington as opposed to Moscow.
00:16:26.820And so in the Paris Peace Conference, uh, they recreated Poland, uh, they, they created Czechoslovakia, they created, um, the, what is it, kingdom of Croats and Serbs that would, you know, eventually, uh, you know, go into crisis as well.
00:16:44.300And it was a sort of like, we're going, and they engaged in ethnic, um, redistribution, you could say ethnic cleansing, although it was, you know, largely peaceful and done with good and good intentions.
00:16:56.560It was not, it was not, it was not done maliciously, but that's what it was.
00:17:00.720Um, and so, and, and, and even in the, in the post 45 era, when you have Germans being expelled from the East and, and what, what is becoming the, the Soviet sphere, you have this remarkable thing that Tony Judd spoke about where these countries, after they defeated Hitler, they became ironically more ethno-nationalist.
00:17:24.500Um, Jews had been, um, uh, oppressed, expelled, in many cases killed, um, Germans were returning to Germany.
00:17:33.300It was almost in some sort of ironic way, the hyper-ethno-nationalist won, like Hitler won in some ironic way.
00:17:41.860I, you know, don't, don't, don't, don't read, don't take that too far.
00:17:45.540Of course, I'm, I'm just making a statement to, um, you know, illustrate a point.
00:17:50.640Um, and so, but that also existed under the umbrella of American hegemony.
00:17:58.420It also existed as a way of giving people a kind of Goldilocks amount of power, you know, just enough, but not too much.
00:18:08.000You're no longer going to be oppressed, you're no longer going to be stateless, you're going to have a voice in your parliament, you can have a military, et cetera, but you're not the big kahuna.
00:18:19.380And, and so that, that, you know, I think you're right to point this out, like the American century didn't begin in 1945.
00:18:25.860Um, there's been a much longer attempt to open up markets, subjugate competing nation states and, um, open up that space on, you know, that benefits Washington directly as you, as you were, uh, you were pointing out.
00:18:45.340But also carries with it a kind of hope or ideological oomph that actually is very compelling.
00:18:58.780You know, I, I remember in the Bush era when I was rolling my eyes or, or, you know, making fun of all this freedom and democracy stuff.
00:19:08.980The fact is that is a motivating thing.
00:19:13.900That is something that when you're presenting yourself as operating with the best of intentions, it might cover up some war crimes, sure, but it also is a motivating force.
00:19:26.080It's a kind of ideological, even religious like paradigm that you actually can rule the world this way.
00:19:34.420Like there, there's, you know, there's, there's a reason why the Catholic church, it wasn't just an institution.
00:19:40.540It had Christianity that it, you need an ideological kind of, um, political theology undergirding what you're doing.
00:19:49.080If I were living in Poland after the first world war, I would be pro-American and I would love the idea of bringing back Poland as a nation state where, um, we can have a voice.
00:20:03.060And there can be, uh, rules, uh, and so on.
00:20:07.780I mean, likely if I were living in the middle East, I might be compelled to support America and regime change.
00:20:15.980I mean, not certainly not everyone, but I can understand how people could take the side of that.
00:20:22.540So it, it needs to have that religious like veneer or religious like animus at the heart of it.
00:20:30.180And I guess maybe to bring us up to date, to bring us to 2025, do you think there's this danger with Trump where on the one hand, he's talking big and saying, you know, golden age, we're bringing back American exceptionalism, more exceptional than ever.
00:20:53.400But if you look at other aspects of his rhetoric rhetoric and definitely his actions, it's this transactional, self-serving, kind of selfish, maybe even malicious attitude.
00:21:08.220And I think that that's almost bringing this whole thing to a close.
00:21:14.080You know, it's, in, in Trump's mind, we're all getting ripped off.
00:21:19.100You know, the, the world is ripping us off.
00:21:20.860And he's been saying that since the 1980s, like NATO is ripping us off.
00:21:25.340You know, the UN, they, they're ripping us off.
00:21:28.080You know, like we created that damn thing and we still run it.
00:21:32.140The rules are, uh, completely on our favor.
00:21:35.040It's like you're playing a baseball game and you have like 12 strikes and the other team has one strike and they're out or something.
00:21:41.380It's, it's, it's a, an American institution.
00:21:45.700But the fact that he's so transactional and so sort of malicious, um, might this undermine all of the world order in the sense that American power is now not presented as something wonderful, something that's bringing democracy to you, something that's bringing hope or, or riches or Hollywood or whatever.
00:22:31.240I'm saying that you can't have a realistic military strategy without political theology.
00:22:38.760There, everything you do with, with bullets needs to be undergirded with Bibles to coin a phrase.
00:22:48.780Like there, there has to be some compelling motive to it.
00:22:53.420And the Soviet Union, when it started to lose that compelling motive, when being a Marxist was sort of uncool with the new left, or when the promise of socialism started to be a little too gray and boring and, uh, and so on.
00:23:11.140What happened, boom, it, it, it, it vanishes.
00:23:13.960And I think the American empire is in a similar danger.
00:23:18.620If we don't have a compelling story, a bold, neoconservative vision of democratizing the planet, or some sense that we're special, some, some sense that this is a new Jerusalem given to us by God, where we can fully understand the meaning of the Protestant Reformation, which, you know, is something that motivating to, um, 18th century Americans.
00:23:42.760Then it's going to collapse and all of this Trump realist stuff is, is actually bad policy precisely because it, it avoids the religiosity and, and heady quality of, of American foreign policy that just some thoughts.
00:24:01.460Yeah. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll start off saying on the last point, I'll start from there and work back. Pete, Pete Hegseth, the new, uh, defense secretary, Fox weekend host turned defense secretary.
00:24:14.040I mean, what a career jump. Um, and so he says, we're going to rebuild the U S military. We're going to rebuild it, make it more effective, more responsive. And my question is responsive to what effective for what you've got to have.
00:24:27.740So we, you have to establish the political purpose of, you know, and you have to establish what you're talking about there, Richard is what is that national narrative? What is that story? What are people believing in? Because if you don't establish that you, you could, what are you building there? You know, you could be, you could have a revolution in military affairs and, you know, pink elephants here and there. Um, and it's not really going to suit anything that you're wanting to do anyway as a society and as a state going forward.
00:24:56.140So that, that, that, that's typical. The problem, I think that neoconservativism fell down hard on was the, the, the real motivating factor was fear. It was fear. It was the clash of civilization. It was the hunt. They, they, they took Samuel Huntington and, uh, melded that with nine 11 and radical Islam. And that became the driving force of, of, of everything.