00:03:33.060Yeah, spare the population. You could make this argument. Of course, this is a very dangerous
00:03:37.080road to go down because now it's becoming a much more common practice. Look at what the United
00:03:43.460States and Israel do at the beginning of the Iran war. They take out all of Iran's senior leaders.
00:03:50.160There's at least two problems here. First of all, you don't know who's going to replace them.
00:03:53.660Of course, we're now having trouble with a more hardline faction in Iran. It also erodes any
00:04:00.320possibility of trust. I mean, how can you sit down and negotiate a peace agreement with a regime
00:04:06.240that has killed your senior leaders and might do something again subsequently.
00:04:12.240And then finally, as that norm begins to erode, others are going to use it too.
00:04:17.380Others will start using similar tactics and leaders, including American presidents,
00:04:22.360are going to have to worry much more about this than they did necessarily in the past.
00:04:28.040All right, you put all of those things together.
00:04:30.640Continued great power competition, eroding norms against the use of violence in a variety of different ways.
00:04:38.140I think you end up with a much more dangerous world.
00:04:40.900I think, unfortunately, the world agrees with that.
00:04:43.320Because if you look at the last 20 years or so, in constant dollars, defense expenditures have basically doubled in the world over the last 20 years.
00:04:59.660now, belatedly, but finally happening. And I think that's all evidence that around the world,
00:05:06.580people anticipate a much less secure environment than the one we've had.
00:05:11.020Not what we were promised. We were promised by certain factions in American politics,
00:05:16.880peace based on global trade. Globalizing the economy was supposed to guarantee stability
00:05:22.860because you don't go to war with your trading partners. That's what they told us.
00:05:25.720Right. And I should have mentioned that. I mean, the other thing that's happening is we're seeing the onset of not an end to global trade, not even a complete end to globalization, but certainly a retreat back from it.
00:05:36.900Raising of trade barriers, increased protectionism, particularly in high technology, things like that.
00:05:43.320And I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon.
00:05:46.480You're going to see a much more competitive economic environment and what has been called weaponized interdependence, people trying to gain political advantage by using others' vulnerabilities or others' dependents.
00:06:02.520the way the United States has weaponized the role of the dollar in the international financial system,0.66
00:06:07.460imposing sanctions, the way Iran has weaponized everyone's dependence on the Strait of Hormuz
00:06:40.000I wouldn't want to base my entire foreign policy around that assumption.
00:06:44.200You don't want to completely throw it out.
00:06:47.000And secondly, again, big macro studies will show you that, in fact, high levels of economic interdependence do make international conflict between the partners less likely.
00:06:58.620That is, there's a statistical relationship there.
00:07:02.100It is not, however, an absolute guarantee.
00:07:04.700The fact that you have an extensive economic relationship with someone doesn't mean you won't fight them.
00:07:09.560It just makes it somewhat less likely.
00:07:12.800Also, you can make the reverse argument arguably even more powerfully.
00:07:18.040It's not so much that interdependence causes peace.
00:07:21.200It's rather that peace causes interdependence.
00:07:31.920Then they're willing to trade with someone else much more readily.
00:07:34.520They're willing to invest in a foreign economy without worrying that somehow that's going to get nationalized or seized because a conflict emerges.
00:07:42.940And once people begin to see that conflict is likely, and I'm talking of investors here, they quite naturally begin to pull back.
00:07:51.300And governments encourage them to pull back because they're worried about what the balance of power is going to be, etc.
00:07:56.220So the optimism of the, say, early 1990s that we're going to head into this wonderful, you know, Fukuyama and Friedman-esque world of globalization, peace and harmony, there was a grain of truth in that.
00:08:11.200If the world had remained peaceful and tranquil, then interdependence looks more attractive.
00:08:17.900But once the world starts to look more dangerous, people begin to worry more about security than they do about wealth.
00:08:24.280You know one thing that might make you feel a little better about your life is buying life insurance.
00:08:29.840Because life ends and the last thing you want is to leave the ones you love hanging.
00:11:16.600The Chinese Communist Party was not about to liberalize.
00:11:19.280They put a premium on political control and had lots of ways of doing it.0.92
00:11:24.860And we were too eager and too hasty to bring them into all of these institutions, to engage them and help them grow.
00:11:34.300So one factor was just hubris on our part and overconfidence that we really had the answer and they would inevitably adopt our system or something like our system.
00:11:45.580Second part was, of course, the short term interests of American corporations.
00:11:49.280who could make lots of money by shifting production to China
00:11:53.840and were, in my view, so eager to do that
00:11:56.600that they were willing to accept terms that they probably shouldn't have
00:12:00.780about technology sharing, about letting the Chinese
00:12:03.820basically learn to do what we had learned to do.0.87
00:12:08.460And I should be clear here, I don't think the United States
00:12:10.840should have tried to strangle Chinese economic development.0.99
00:12:14.440We shouldn't have tried to encourage it as much,1.00
00:12:17.540but that would have had costs for us. We all benefited from embracing China the way we did.0.53
00:12:24.020You and I got cheaper goods than we would have had otherwise. Some Americans, a minority of0.86
00:12:29.800Americans, were really badly hurt by this, the so-called China shock. So there were industries,
00:12:34.520there were communities that were decimated. But the vast majority of Americans ultimately
00:12:38.480benefited economically. What all those Americans, including you and me, forgot was that this was
00:12:45.480also going to ultimately begin to shift the balance of economic power in ways that were
00:12:50.460more beneficial to China than they ultimately were to us, and that was going to have consequences
00:12:56.520down the road. China was going to grow. Once China embraced markets, once China got rid of Maoism
00:13:02.480and got serious about Rio Grande, they were going to catch up, but it would have been better for
00:13:07.660us, and I think probably better for everyone if it had happened, or at least for most of us,
00:13:40.320But to me, one of the great, call it tragedies, is that beginning in the Bush administration, there's a real recognition that China is now emerging as a potential peer competitor.
00:13:56.720You see this in the national security strategies written in the Bush administration.
00:14:02.220And I know inside the Pentagon, there were real serious efforts made to start preparing for this.
00:14:08.380The problem is that 9-11 came along and completely blew the Bush administration's agenda.
00:14:15.700Instead of focusing on great power relations and on China, they focus on the global war on terror, right?
00:14:23.180And ever since then, you've had every single American president saying they were going to focus laser-like on China.
00:14:33.040We're going to crack down on Chinese practices.0.96
00:14:34.940And every one of those presidents, I think this is true of Bush, this is true of Obama, this is true of Trump One, this is true of Biden, they get blown off course by events elsewhere, usually in the Middle East.0.98
00:14:48.820And trouble in the Middle East and America's inability to stay out of that trouble has been a great benefit because it's never allowed the United States.0.79
00:14:58.140Benefit to China, because it's never allowed the United States to do what serious people in the government wanted to do, which was to focus a lot more attention on that problem.
00:15:11.180Second question is the sphere of influence issue.
00:15:14.840So if I were the Chinese, I would like to have a sphere of influence in Asia.0.93
00:15:18.760I would like to have the United States out.
00:15:21.660Who wants the world's most powerful country or arguably the world's most powerful country allied with all of your neighbors and with substantial military forces nearby?0.90
00:15:30.140If I were China, I would prefer a situation where the United States is essentially out of Asia.0.69
00:15:35.540And I don't want to conquer Japan.0.73
00:15:44.980I want those countries to not be a security threat to me.
00:15:48.560I want them to pay close attention to my wishes.
00:15:53.060In other words, I would like a relationship with most of my neighbors in Asia similar to the relationship the United States has with most countries in the Western Hemisphere, where they're very careful how they interact with the United States because we tend to be pretty heavy-handed in dealing with them for all those reasons.0.64
00:16:09.960That's what I would like if I were China.0.73
00:16:12.120Now, if you're the United States, the question is, is that something you should be happy with?
00:16:16.740And my view is no, that a China that was as secure in Asia as we are in the Western Hemisphere, we face no serious rivals in the Western Hemisphere.
00:16:28.120There's no enemy armies about to invade the United States from anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
00:16:33.120We can run around the world getting into trouble in lots of places because we don't have to worry about defending our borders, et cetera.0.74
00:16:39.500A China that was in a similar position would suddenly be much freer to roam around the world, getting into trouble in lots of places.0.99
00:16:49.520Maybe the Chinese are smarter than we are.0.99
00:17:49.340And the president's recent comments about the South Korean president suggest in both countries, which are the key countries that you're talking about, like a withdrawal of American support to some extent.0.94
00:18:25.260And moreover, South Korea is a great success story, when you think about it, from broader American interests.
00:18:32.160This is a country that when we allied with them initially, it was a military dictatorship under Syngman Rhee and not a very nice military dictatorship.
00:18:40.300But for strategic reasons, we backed them in the Korean War and subsequently.
00:18:45.300And then over time, South Korea becomes a quite successful democracy.
00:18:50.600And it does this, by the way, not because we send the 82nd Airborne to do a regime change, but because the South Koreans, as they developed economically, decided they wanted to become democratic.
00:19:00.340Like they were also, many of them had been to the United States.
00:19:06.640And so South Korea on its own initiative becomes a democracy with some encouragement from the United States, but not with us telling them what to do or anything like that.
00:19:15.800So it's a great success story for the United States.
00:19:19.200And now to suddenly say, well, I've got a great relationship with Kim Jong-un, you know, a truly odious dictator.0.68
00:19:26.760and that's the reason why i want to suspend military exercises with south korea this is nuts
00:19:34.100this is what is it though what's driving this um partly i think it's a perennial trump tendency to
00:19:43.420want to distract people from whatever the problem is that he's caused and he's a genius at this
00:19:49.200always changing the subject getting us talking about something else instead of some you know
00:19:53.620whatever's going wrong. I think he still wants to go down in history, being remembered as some
00:20:00.480kind of peacemaker, and he still believes maybe he can pull off some miracle with North Korea,0.73
00:20:05.800alter that relationship. I think that's fanciful. And third, and this I think has been a problem0.92
00:20:13.000throughout Trump's presidency, is he has this exaggerated ability in his own personal qualities
00:25:48.360A very different operation, of course, special forces just snatching someone and removing them, etc.
00:25:55.320But he began to believe that, you know, he really had great judgment and that the American military could accomplish wonderful purposes.
00:26:04.600There was no, as near as I can tell, no strong dissents within the administration, in part because it is an administration made up mostly of yes men.
00:26:14.960We'll tell the president what he wants to hear.
00:26:17.820It may have been some mild, well, are you sure, kind of comments.
00:26:22.520And then finally, I think this is, you know, Trump at the end of his political career, we think, and near the end of his life, who's playing for the history books.
00:26:33.400And I think he saw this as possibly a way to kind of run the table.
00:26:37.520You know, I've gotten rid of Maduro in Venezuela.
00:27:01.600again, this is where Netanyahu helped persuade him,
00:27:04.380that it was gonna be cheap, quick, fast,
00:27:07.700few days of bombing, regime collapses,
00:27:10.180get some new people in there, everybody fine.
00:27:12.580I don't think Trump, if Trump had had any clear idea that he would be where he is today when he started it, I don't think he would have done it.
00:27:21.020But he persuaded himself or was persuaded that this would be just like other operations he has authorized.
00:29:12.160And you want to criticize the president, but why there haven't been protests, I think this gets back at something that's been true now for a long time.
00:29:23.560I think relying on the all-volunteer force has made it easier for presidents to get us into military operations because everyone is doing it volunteered for service.
00:29:38.660And you got in the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you did start to get pushback from military families, particularly people in the reserves who really didn't expect to suddenly be doing repeated deployments overseas as well.
00:29:53.560It is also true that the casualty figures have been relatively low, so you don't see people concerned about that.
00:30:02.920And most of the consequences have been economic, and I think we are going to see those play themselves out in elections.
00:30:09.880That's where people don't have to necessarily go protest the war.
00:30:13.000They're going to vote people out of office.
00:30:14.600But very quickly after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were protests and there were organized protests against that war, I think.
00:30:25.560Yeah, there were some. And there have been some protests. I don't think they've been in large scale. And I don't know, again, I don't know if there's been a certain amount of, you know, battle fatigue almost.
00:30:36.540That we've had a series of the so-called No Kings rallies, which were quite substantial, quite large, and are sort of across the horizon protests against where the administration is going.
00:30:48.900Whether or not this is just one more thing, and maybe some of that energy has been sapped, or some of that energy is going into gearing up for the midterms.
00:30:58.060I just don't have a good sense of why that might be the case.
00:31:00.820I don't either, but I think it's interesting.
00:31:04.140We're often assured that Christians are safe in the Holy Land.1.00
00:32:28.180Thanks. I also think it's interesting that the president ran on, explicitly ran on a promise
00:32:34.780to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, which we were then saying was between Russia and Ukraine.
00:32:41.540It's not, but whatever. He said, I'm going to fix this. I can fix this. Yeah. And he didn't. So why?
00:32:48.080Why didn't he fix it? Yeah. Well, first of all, it was laughable to think, you know,
00:32:54.280He was saying, I can solve it in 24 hours.
00:32:56.680And this is just part of the Trump mystique, that he's this magical person with these amazing deal-making qualities.
00:33:05.440And I fully concede the guy is an absolute genius at persuading people of things that are not true.
00:33:12.380There was no evidence of this from his business career, and there was no evidence of this from his political career,
00:33:17.000that he was this sort of master manipulator, master diplomat who could pull these things off.
00:33:23.400So maybe you could get a peace deal in Ukraine, but it wasn't going to be 24 hours because there are really serious issues here and really difficult problems to resolve.
00:33:35.440And there's lots of stakeholders and lots of parties in there.
00:33:38.300And getting them all to agree when they're as far apart as they are was never going to be easy.
00:33:45.740It's possible if Trump had put a really good team together and put a sophisticated plan in place to pressure both sides, get the Ukrainians to back off some of the things they wanted, get the Russians to back off some of what they were doing.
00:33:59.680You might have been able to pressure them to a deal, but you were never going to be able to do this by sending Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner off to talk to Putin and think you could get a deal that way.
00:34:09.740you were never going to do this by getting Zelensky into the Oval Office and sort of
00:34:14.480putting a gun to his head and saying, you have to concede. It was never going to be that easy.
00:34:18.860Zelensky wasn't in a position to do that. If he'd gone back to Kiev and said,
00:34:23.140we're going to have to run up the white flag and cut a deal, he would have been deposed. He would
00:34:28.340have been removed from power. The Ukrainians would not have gone along with that. So it was0.99
00:34:33.480completely unrealistic for Trump to promise any such deal. And if that's what he wanted to do,
00:34:39.420he was going to have to get serious, put the right people in charge, and be somewhat more
00:34:43.780patient than he's able to be. What would it take to resolve it now?
00:34:48.820I don't know. My take on where we are now is, and there are some parallels, by the way, with the
00:34:57.120war in Iran, which we may get to. We're in what I would call a hurting stalemate.
00:35:04.080The Ukraine is suffering both from missile strikes and continued losses along the front.
00:35:09.420And Russia is suffering from losses along the front and the Ukrainian retaliation.
00:35:14.020And both of them are, I think, paying a substantial price.
00:35:17.720My guess is that the price is worse for the Ukrainians.
00:35:21.040And Russia is continuing to make, at very high cost, some incremental advances in the Donbass.
00:35:30.520When you're in a hurting stalemate, both sides are basically betting that they can last longer,
00:35:35.600that they are going to outweigh the other side.
00:35:37.920And I think from a macro point of view, you'd say, well, Russia's probably got the advantage there because its resources are still substantial.0.82
00:35:51.360Nationalism's a very powerful force.0.67
00:35:53.140I think the Ukrainians care more about fighting for what they regard as their country than the Russians care about taking the next 50 kilometers of Donbass.
00:36:03.420Putin may care, but I'm not sure the Russian population does.0.75
00:36:07.080So, if it were up to me, and I assure you it's not, I think the United States should be continuing to back Ukraine while saying that there are real limits to what we're willing to support.0.56
00:36:19.760You know, you have to explain to the Ukrainians, no, you're not going to get Crimea back.0.91
00:36:25.800No, you're not going to get most of the Donbass back, at least not anytime soon, maybe in the fullness of time, maybe some point.0.88
00:36:33.900But you don't have the military capabilities of pushing Russia out, and we're not going to give them to you.0.86
00:36:41.120Even if we gave you more stuff, you wouldn't be able to do it for a variety of reasons.0.73
00:36:45.480And the risks of doing that are too great for us.0.95
00:36:50.500But I would keep Ukraine in the game, and then I would also go to the right.0.78
00:36:55.920And that's the leverage you have with Russia, that you can continue to help Ukraine.0.61
00:37:00.440And the leverage you have with Ukraine is that they're going to have to lower their ambitions and the Russians have to get some of what they want to.
00:37:10.640And that's the part that sticks in the Western craw.
00:37:13.900And my terms would be roughly that Ukraine has to become a neutral country.
00:37:24.140So the trickiest part, and that's, I think, again, was the precipitating cause, was the belief that Ukraine was drifting into NATO over time.
00:37:34.680And that's the core Russian demand, from what I can tell.0.94
00:37:37.560Yeah, I think that's the most important thing.
00:40:08.160that people still to some degree invoke.
00:40:11.580I think that they are legitimately concerned by, let's call it gray area, hybrid warfare things that Russia has been doing for a variety of reasons for quite some time.
00:40:23.020And are, you know, a violation of all sorts of international legal rules and a worrisome indication of malign intent, let's call it that way.
00:40:35.420So if I were Swedish, if I were in the Baltic states, and I'm seeing this kind of interference on a constant basis, if I am observing some of the sabotage, I think credibly linked to Russian intelligence that have taken place in other parts of Europe, I would say, how can you expect us to trust you and not worry about what you might try to do if you keep doing this sort of stuff?
00:49:46.500They have much less global influence than the United States.
00:49:49.460We've done enormous amounts of damage to them.
00:49:52.260We've significantly hurt their military capability the way Secretary of Defense Hagseth likes to boast all the time.
00:49:59.640But the fact is they could close the Strait of Hormuz or effectively close it.
00:50:04.240And they could cause significant damage to American military facilities in the region and to other American partners in the region, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, conceivably also even Israel as well.
00:50:17.000So suddenly they have escalatory potential.
00:50:20.640And when you're dealing with an adversary who cares more than you do, is willing to bear greater costs, run greater risks than you are, you have to worry that they might start exercising some of those options.0.81
00:50:32.920And so every time Trump has threatened them, the Iranians can basically say, you know, you do this to us, we'll do something back to your side and you won't like it.0.53
00:50:41.860And each time so far, Trump has backed off.
00:50:44.840I'm glad he did because the consequences of escalating this further would be quite severe.
00:50:51.860So, you know, we had a deal of sorts in June, the Memorandum of Understanding.
00:50:58.740It was badly constructed, badly negotiated by some people who didn't know what they were doing.
00:51:10.020And we're going to agree to a set of terms that are actually pretty favorable to you.
00:51:16.000Trump is immediately pilloried by the supporters of the war and some others for negotiating a bad deal.
00:51:24.080And the United States pretty quickly begins to try and skirt around it in various ways over access in the Strait of Hormuz.
00:51:32.240And the Iranians see what he's doing, and they go back to war, essentially, that he's trying to evade the terms as they understood them in the agreement.
00:51:43.080There's one final point I need to make here, though.
00:51:45.860I said a while back that there's zero trust between the United States and Iran at this point.
00:51:51.100And therefore, a peace arrangement with someone you don't trust is really hard to pull off because you're always assuming they're going to renege on it.0.99
00:52:01.060And that's especially true for the Iranians.0.54
00:52:03.580What the Iranians have to worry about is what the Israelis would call the mowing the grass phenomenon.0.99
00:52:09.220That, all right, we bombed Iran last summer.0.99
00:52:12.760Then we started a war with them in 2026.0.98
00:52:16.160So we get a deal of some kind, and we agree to some negotiations on their nuclear stuff.0.77
00:52:23.980What's to stop the United States from bringing its ships home, refitting them, rearming them, sending them back, and starting this up again in a year?0.62
00:52:31.540If you're the Iranians, you would think long and hard about this.0.99
00:52:35.320How do we agree to end a war with the United States and be confident that the United States won't start this again at some convenient point down the road?0.81
00:52:47.400And my reasoning is if I were Iran, I'd be saying I need to make sure the United States pays a significantly large price for this, that they learn not to do it again.0.85
00:52:58.740I can't trust their promises, but I can hope that I can trust that they might be able to learn that this was a huge mistake.0.94
00:53:05.320And that means an incentive to actually make sure that we all pay a sufficiently large price that the next president, Democratic or Republican, or Trump in his last term, decides that starting something like this again is a bad idea.
00:53:21.900All of those things I think make this extremely difficult to solve.0.84
00:53:24.940And the Iranians, if you watch their media, are saying that.1.00
00:54:44.360Obviously, the more pressure that is placed on the United States by others in the region, and we've seen that happen now on a number of occasions.
00:54:51.500Yes, that's, again, all of this feeds back into the American political system and foreign policy machinery.
00:54:59.900They don't do this kind of thing again.
00:55:04.780One final aspect to this, again, I've not thought long and hard about, but I mean, there is a danger on the Iranian side of overplaying their hand, too.0.97
00:55:14.460And one could make the argument that we have a situation in the world today, gets back to your first question, where lots of countries are overplaying their hands, trying for more than they're really going to be able to grab.0.62
00:55:27.740But the circumstances that allowed Iran to do what it did in response are likely to fade over time.
00:55:38.620The rest of the world is going to diversify away from fossil fuels.
00:55:43.940People are going to build more pipelines
00:55:45.700so that they can get oil and gas out of the Middle East
00:56:36.480in other words, if you're so worried about,
00:56:38.440oh, I can't be humiliated, I've got to do something.
00:56:40.620You better make damn sure that that next thing you do actually works or then your humiliation is compounded and it gets worse and worse and worse and worse.
00:56:48.780But I'm saying if U.S. policymakers decide like we actually can't lose this or we're going to lose the dollar.
00:56:54.180Yeah, I don't think we're anywhere near there, though.
00:56:56.520But I'm just saying if people start to think like that, you could see incentives to do something crazy.
00:59:56.060And for the rest of the Cold War, the Middle East was a battleground in the Cold War where we were competing with the Soviet Union for influence.
01:00:04.720We had our friends, the Saudis, the Israelis, the Jordanians, others.
01:00:10.140The Soviets had Egypt, Syria, Iraq, eventually as well.
01:00:15.880And our allies turned out to be better than their allies, which was useful.
01:00:21.400But very interestingly, in that whole period, the United States didn't really have much military presence there.
01:00:29.240We had a flotilla, a small flotilla that went in and out.
01:00:33.960But we didn't think of it as an area where we were going to get actively involved militarily.
01:00:38.120We were playing basically a balance of power game.
01:00:41.600We didn't want anybody to control the region.0.73
01:00:43.680We didn't have to control it ourselves, but we just wanted to make sure the Soviet Union didn't, and nobody else was able to dominate the region as well.0.71
01:00:52.580Very much a balance of power game.0.84
01:00:55.380This changes, right, the first Gulf War in 1991.
01:01:00.400We had created the Rapid Deployment Force back in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution.
01:01:06.580Created the Rapid Deployment Force, but we didn't park it in the Middle East.
01:02:26.120But the problem was by keeping all those troops
01:02:28.140in Saudi Arabia, it became one of the things
01:02:31.300that Osama bin Laden, famously, didn't like and justified his declaring, you know, jihad against
01:02:39.440the United States. So one of the reasons we end up in trouble with al-Qaeda is the fact that we've
01:02:46.240adopted a policy of keeping a lot of troops now in the Middle East. That's where it starts.
01:02:51.880And then, of course, that eventually we get 9-11 and then we get the war in Iraq, 2003 war in Iraq.0.54
01:02:59.260And now we have a very large presence in the Middle East, and it takes more than a decade to start bringing that back down.
01:03:05.120And we basically have never gotten out of now either trying to provide order in the Middle East ourselves or, more accurately, providing a lot of disorder in the Middle East, trying to reshape it to our liking by toppling governments of various kinds.
01:03:22.540And no president has ever been able to fully extract themselves from doing that.
01:03:27.300Well, we're further enmeshed than we have been.
01:03:31.680And now, if the end result of this conflict is for the United States to be less physically present in the Middle East, less directly involved in trying to manage the local politics of the region, telling different governments how to behave and what to do, I think that'd be a good thing.
01:03:49.520That might permit the United States to then start focusing its attention on bigger problems, problems in Asia and elsewhere.
01:03:59.080Last point, the other thing that's characterized American policy from the mid-60s on, I'd say, is we've had special relations with some countries in the Middle East, Israel, to some degree Saudi Arabia, after 75, also Egypt.
01:04:17.340and no relationship whatsoever with one country in the Middle East, Iran.
01:05:02.260There's proximate causes and permissive cause.
01:05:04.980The permissive cause is the fact that the United States has been so secure and so wealthy and powerful for so long.
01:05:11.380Which gives us the luxury of pretending other governments don't exist and doesn't matter.
01:05:16.660We don't have to talk to them, et cetera.
01:05:20.460It's not a luxury you can afford if your security is more precarious.
01:05:25.380So that's, I think, the permissive cause.
01:05:27.720And then the proximate causes have been, in the case of Israel, obviously the special relationship there is mostly driven by American domestic politics.
01:05:39.420Not the only example of that in the world, but it's the most obvious, most important.
01:05:43.960And to some degree, I think the connections between Saudi royal family, American elites, American oil interests, things like that.
01:05:53.200And then Egypt was partly because of the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty and sort of keeping Egypt on board and a part of that relationship.
01:06:02.600Most of it, though, I think ultimately stems on Israel.
01:06:04.560so if we were to do what you hope happens which is withdraw substantially or completely from the0.75
01:06:13.900region like what are the risks of that well so there are several the the biggest one that people
01:06:19.880point to is uh you know a proliferation risk to the extent that uh the american security umbrella
01:06:26.660has discouraged or deterred um countries like saudi arabia from pursuing nuclear weapons
01:06:33.960Then if you suddenly said, we're no longer doing that, we're not in that business any longer, it'd be more likely, not certain, but it'd be more likely that some of those countries, maybe not just Saudi Arabia, would decide, okay, well, in order to be secure, you know, dangerous neighborhood, Israel has nuclear weapons, maybe Turkey will get them, who knows, Iran might someday get them, I need them too.
01:06:56.040And so you could imagine a sort of gradual spread of nuclear weapons in the region.0.56
01:07:04.220That's even that argument, which I don't reject out of hand, has to be qualified.
01:07:10.440Because American activities in the region have also given countries reasons to pursue nuclear weapons in the past.
01:07:18.200Why does Iran want to have a nuclear program?
01:07:20.840Why has Iran wanted to be close to the nuclear threshold but not over it?
01:07:25.120because it was worried about the United States, right?
01:07:28.480It was worried that we were going to try to do
01:08:07.960I mean, is it not possible that if more nations in the region
01:08:14.660had nuclear weapons that you would have a more peaceful region?
01:08:20.160This is a longstanding argument that a number of people, my dissertation advisor Kenneth Waltz made this argument in both a famous paper back in 1981, arguing that the gradual, gradual spread of nuclear weapons would actually be stabilizing and better than going to enormous lengths to try and prevent it from happening.
01:08:45.380Very controversial, got lots of criticism.
01:08:48.020And then in his very last published article, a few months before he died, he published an article in Foreign Affairs.
01:08:54.780I think the title is Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.
01:08:57.680And he made exactly this argument that, in fact, if Iran were to get nuclear weapons, it would be relatively secure.
01:09:07.000It would no longer have much incentive to meddle around with other countries.
01:09:11.240And it would actually have stabilizing effects.
01:09:14.060Again, very controversial, got lots of criticism.
01:09:18.020The logic behind that position is a powerful logic about that, you know, using nuclear weapons is completely irrational.
01:09:27.700For Iran to use a nuclear weapon against Israel or anybody else might invite its own destruction.0.53
01:09:33.560They're useful only for deterring major attacks on your own soil.0.96
01:09:39.360And therefore, a nuclear Middle East might actually be more.0.98
01:09:43.380Have there been more or fewer wars per decade between India and Pakistan?0.99
01:09:48.020Before Pakistan got the bomber after.0.91
01:09:50.620That's a famous illustration of exactly this argument.
01:09:55.440There are also cogent counter-arguments on the other side.
01:10:00.760That you do have to, you know, the more hands have,
01:10:05.320the more people who have their fingers on the trigger, you know, it only takes one.
01:10:09.540And fine, we might say, great, we've had 30 years of relative, not complete,
01:10:16.840relative peace between India and Pakistan.
01:10:19.820They have fought each other a few times,
01:10:21.420but it would only take one nuclear exchange
01:10:45.560I want to go back to one other thing, though, which is that I'm not arguing for the United States to disengage from the Middle East, either economically or diplomatically or necessarily militarily.
01:10:59.520I like the idea of a balance of power in the region.0.81
01:11:02.820I don't want any country to try and dominate the place, try and control it, partly because they could manipulate energy supplies in kind of the way Iran is trying to do now.0.88
01:11:12.980And therefore, I think the United States should be ready if you see something like the invasion of Kuwait in 1991 happening, a major potential shift in the balance of power.0.96
01:11:24.320The United States should be ready to weigh in and try to stop that, as we did in 1991.
01:11:31.440But that's not going to happen very often.
01:11:34.420right and it doesn't require the united states to be physically present and trying to dictate
01:11:39.540the local politics and topple regimes and things like that so it's not like the middle east is
01:11:44.720irrelevant and i want the united states never to have a military role there i just want to be very
01:11:49.820selective and when we go and for what purposes i think you're in the center of the mainstream on
01:11:55.300that question but back to the original uh question problem how do you get this war resolved and when
01:12:04.300will that happen i mean what's your best guess um i this is the kind of thing because in a sense
01:12:12.460the the critical decision rests with one person is at this point i think it rests with donald trump
01:12:18.260um and until he says okay it's over right no matter how he dresses it up it will be in a
01:12:28.840state of war, whether they're actually shooting at each other or not. And I can't forecast at
01:12:36.260what point he will decide. It's just he needs to end this and be done with it. I do think,
01:12:43.240I wrote this a few weeks ago, that of all the presidents I have observed, he's probably the
01:12:50.880one who's best able to sort of declare victory and get out, pretend it was a victory and then
01:12:58.120Move on, change the subject, do something else somewhere,
01:14:20.240Um, I think, uh, that first of all, uh, Trump, uh, is still, I mean, I, I think he has advisors around him, uh, Kushner, Witkoff, others who are deeply engaged in this, who are, uh, pushing him the other way.
01:14:43.680I think certainly some of his donor base have weighed in in various ways, not just now, but previously.
01:14:53.040So I think he's mindful of the political consequences of that, even though the public is pushed away.0.54
01:15:01.340The donor base on which a lot of Republican politicians depend is still heavily, you know, you got to back Israel no matter what.
01:15:09.580I think that probably is influencing him as well.
01:15:13.680The, I think that's probably, you know, most of it.
01:15:20.180The rest of it, though, is I think his own inability to, you know, admit even to himself that he made a mistake here.
01:15:31.540And that whatever comes out of it is going to look to most observers like an American retreat.
01:15:39.780And that's not part of his brand, if you will.
01:15:43.400Yeah, it has massive consequences too, by the way.
01:17:39.720Do you think that there will be, because the public so profoundly opposes this war, according to public opinion polling, how can the next administration or the second half of this administration, like how can we have more conflicts like this after 25 years of the public just saying resoundingly, we're not for this kind of thing?
01:18:10.380Yeah, no, I think the public has learned.
01:18:11.820And, you know, one of the, there's a telling little statistic or observation that goes way back here.
01:18:22.580Virtually every president since the end of the Cold War has run for president on a platform of, I'm going to do more at home and less abroad.
01:18:38.560Yeah, but Cold War, you know, being a responsible internationalist, you know, McGovern got hammered for being seen as, so you wanted to be a responsible internationalist, you know, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, etc.
01:20:45.400Then you get Biden, of course, and Biden is critical of Trump, et cetera.
01:20:49.820But Biden was part of the old order anyway.
01:20:53.000So all of these presidents intuited that the American people wanted to hear that there was going to be some more attention paid to them at home, right?
01:21:04.700Why do we use the term democracy to describe our system?
01:21:07.320Well, because I think it is still fundamentally a democracy, but it's a democracy mediated through institutions, which is what a democracy is.
01:21:16.000And some of those institutions are committed to certain ways of doing business.
01:21:20.260Also, most Americans, most of the time, almost all the time, don't think of foreign policy as very important.
01:21:27.440It's always way down there about 10, 11 in the list of things you worry about when you show polls.
01:21:38.060And foreign policy, except in rare circumstances, like right after September 11,
01:21:44.080It doesn't loom that large in the political calculations of most Americans most of the time.
01:21:50.020But if you're spending the overwhelming majority of the discretionary budget, $1.5 trillion just on the Pentagon, not including all kinds of other national security-related expenses, I mean, the economy is directly linked to your foreign policy.
01:22:03.420In fact, it's driven by your foreign policy.
01:22:05.120And, you know, there's a reason why there's Pentagon spending in every congressional district in the country.
01:22:14.960Right. And why weapons manufacturing gets distributed very broadly as well.
01:22:19.460So, yes, that money is coming out of all of our pockets, but it's also going to keep people employed.
01:22:25.960And that will keep local congressmen in District X in State Z voting for the budget because there's 6,000 jobs dependent upon that going through as well.
01:22:41.600Some of it is structural in the way our system works, but I wouldn't say it's not democratic for that reason.
01:22:48.700Well, I'm just saying if the big things that government does, like, I don't know, writes the tax code, sends the troops, are inconsistent with what the public wants over generations, it's not a democracy in any recognizable way.
01:23:03.340I mean, the system, you may have, well, we've got, you know, bicameral chamber and all this, but it's like, so?
01:23:07.440No, but that's true. I mean, public opinion polls would have, if public opinion were driving public policy in every way, you'd probably have Medicare for all. You'd probably have really significant changes in gun control. There's all sorts of issues where the public is at odds with what the political system produces, but I wouldn't say it's not democratic.
01:23:34.180I mean, I thought the definition of democracy was ownership of the state by the people and the governance of the state is mediated by the people they elect.
01:23:44.340But ultimately, what the state does reflects what the people want it to do because they own it.
01:23:50.320And I think to a first approximation, that is still true.
01:23:53.520I think that we got Donald Trump because the American people were unhappy with what the political system was throwing up.
01:23:59.860Then Trump did exactly what we've been doing.
01:24:01.560I understand this. I understand this. And Lord knows there are reasons why people think American democracy has gone by the wayside in a variety of different ways.
01:24:17.000I'm still, I guess, reluctant to declare the United States is not a democracy because the decisions made by people in government are not a perfect reflection of what the voter preferences are at a particular point in time.
01:24:30.940But if on the biggest issues, and we measure that by how much we spend on those questions.
01:24:35.860Like, that's just one measure, but I think it's a pretty good one.
01:24:37.860Like, what percentage of the budget goes to Initiative X?
01:24:41.160If the biggest ones are in direct opposition to what the public wants, then I don't really know how we're defining the term, I guess.
01:24:47.860Well, I think this is a complicated picture.
01:24:50.280So, there's also a difference between do you want a strong defense?
01:26:29.660I think we are still wrestling with the impact of social media
01:26:34.980and the explosion of the media environment.
01:26:40.620You know, it's no longer the three channels that you can listen to.
01:26:43.840It's no longer, you know, do you like Huntley and Brinkley or Walter Conkroy?
01:26:49.240You've got as many different voices as you want to.
01:26:52.300And what effect that ultimately has on politics, you know, I think we all kind of intuit that the effect has probably not been good, but that's even there. It's not entirely true. It's clear. I think it's shaping our politics in a variety of ways that it didn't before, probably in some beneficial ways and probably in some ways that are quite pernicious.
01:27:14.140So there's a lot going on with American democracy and I think democracies in other parts of the world.
01:27:20.240And one of our major challenges is figuring out ways where we're more likely to get responsible and accountable politicians, responsible, knowledgeable, and accountable politicians, and have them be rewarded for that behavior, as opposed to, you know, grandstanders, liars, grifters, people who have managed to achieve a following
01:27:48.860because they were good at basically attracting attention.
01:27:53.340And we have an awful lot of that in our politics
01:27:55.680and in our punditry, if you will, or our commentariat.
01:29:26.020And because the people with the money aren't willing to spend any money in taxes, the state is chronically broke.
01:29:32.580And every time they fight a foreign war, which they do helping the American Revolution, for example, they end up in more trouble financially.
01:29:39.400So they're constantly in financial trouble.
01:32:23.480And this happened across many, many countries,
01:32:27.000especially here in the United States with the New Deal.
01:32:29.380And I think it was, again, a remarkable success overall and prevented the kind of lower class upheavals that you saw in some other societies as well.0.57
01:32:41.220So if I were a wealthy oligarch today, I would have that in mind.
01:32:45.580You know what I would do is say, against your will, we're going to develop a new technology that you're going to subsidize through your tax dollars in the form of, I don't know, data centers.
01:33:22.980um what's interesting i think about you know previous wealthy elites in the united states
01:33:30.280is not all by any means uh but many of them also had along with you know the usual drive and
01:33:38.160ambition and you could even argue greed um also did have a certain public mindedness
01:33:43.560um it was called christianity yeah well no it wasn't just christianity uh i think some of them
01:33:49.740were, you know, obviously devout and faithful in their own fashion. That may have played a role in
01:33:55.840it. But even those that weren't or didn't wear their religion on their sleeve, there was a
01:34:01.160general sense that they were part of a larger society and that they owed. You had to sort of
01:34:07.800give back in some respects. And that appears to be largely absent in the wealthiest people I could
01:34:18.520name right now you don't get the impression that they care very much about the collectivity
01:34:23.520um and uh that's not healthy that's not a good good situation well it's evil but also dangerous
01:34:32.020as you just pointed out i'm i'm i'm more worried about the danger part than the evil part that's
01:34:38.540just me no i think one leads to the next so last question do you think i mean and it's related to
01:34:45.840that you wrote you know one of the most famous books about it was in some sense an autopsy of
01:34:53.860like the iraq war i don't think it was billed as that but that was my take on it and so you followed
01:34:59.000you know the wars like the one we're in for a long time and you just said i keep expecting a
01:35:05.620correction and it never comes yeah this one if you could make a prediction like do does this
01:35:11.800change our politics does it is this kind of the last thing like this um so i i think it might be
01:35:19.400uh but for reasons that are not really um about the iran war per se i mean i think that the sea
01:35:27.280change actually began a while back and uh it's maybe the one positive contribution i'd give
01:35:34.100credit to Donald Trump for, who I believe will eventually be remembered by Americans and by
01:35:42.140others as like the most disastrous president we have ever had and will be remembered by America's
01:35:47.980adversaries as the greatest thing that ever happened to them. That's just my view. Anyway,
01:35:53.200Anyway, I think what Trump did in 2016 was he so challenged the prevailing consensus on American foreign policy, bipartisan consensus, and he did it in a way that was very dismissive of the foreign policy leadership.
01:36:15.480Literally back of the hand dismissive.
01:36:17.280To the extent that, as you will probably remember, there were open letters signed by former Republican national security officials.
01:36:26.220Dozens of them published open letters denouncing Trump's presidency.
01:36:32.960And by doing that, what Trump did, he opened up, in some respects, a broader discussion.
01:36:41.520He made it possible or easier to talk about that.
01:36:44.360Now, some others had already started to do that, had written things that were starting to open that up.
01:36:52.900You know, organizations like the Quincy Institute, where I'm on the board, were not yet in existence, but getting formed in the process of being established.
01:37:04.060So the cracks were beginning to form in the edifice after 25 or so years of failure.
01:37:11.600But having a presidential candidate and then a president who openly proclaimed some of these ideas, or at least ideas that were adjacent and certainly questioned the consensus, made it possible to start having a broader discussion.
01:37:30.320Now, just because things are bad doesn't mean they can't get worse.
01:37:33.580And I think some of the other things that Trump has done did not either fulfill the promises that he made, and we're seeing that come to fruition now.
01:37:42.920But I do think that we are in the process of seeing not just a sea change in public attitudes, which you do see on a variety of different issues, but also a change in the, let's call it the intellectual landscape in Washington.
01:38:00.180And I think it is a broader conversation now splits within the Democratic Party on a lot of these questions, splits within the Republican Party on a lot of these questions.
01:38:11.600Some of the think tanks that you used to see as almost indistinguishable from each other, AEI and Heritage on the right, are now kind of at odds or moving in opposite directions, some internal splits within them.
01:38:25.560And on the one hand, you could argue that that's sort of worrisome, uh-oh, chaos.
01:38:32.240But on the other hand, if we've been suffering from an excessive consensus and an inability to ask questions, ability to criticize, and very importantly, a steadfast refusal to hold anybody accountable for mistakes, this is probably a good thing.
01:38:55.560You think people will be held accountable?
01:38:57.080I mean, that's the one thing that never happens in the American system.
01:38:59.720Yeah, it's a fascinating question, and it's a huge problem.
01:39:05.700The people who complain get held accountable, I notice, but not the people who made the bad decisions.
01:39:10.040So I think this has been a big problem, but it's a tricky one.
01:39:15.940So one of the issues, there's a chapter in my book, Hell of Good Intentions, on this,
01:39:36.420and you may go out of power for a while.
01:39:39.480You land a safe sinecure at a think tank or whatever.
01:39:41.880And then when the stars line up properly,
01:39:44.520you go back in and make the same mistakes.
01:39:47.160You join a consulting firm and get rich?
01:39:48.880Well, along the way, you may make a bunch of money too.
01:39:51.820And when people are really guilty of various forms of malfeasance and are exposed to that, you know, they sometimes pay a modest price for public embarrassment, etc.
01:40:04.960In the case of crimes, maybe pay a fine.
01:40:07.820But notice that usually the system rallies around such people, protects them, and they're fine.
01:42:46.980And as you indicated, it was also quite, to me, quite telling that the people whose careers got ended were often people who turned out to be right.
01:42:58.480You know, whistleblowers or who just took an unpopular position and, you know, were vindicated five years later or six years later.
01:43:08.120But by then, you know, things had moved on.
01:43:12.060And, you know, finding the right balance between respectful dissent, principled dissent, and the right balance between, you know, you're not going to get everything right, but we need accountability without a sort of grim trigger that penalizes people instantaneously.
01:43:35.760Last point I'll make about this gets back to is I do also worry that that the way the now the media environment operates and our discourse operates, you know, people can get pilloried for things that are essentially irrelevant because it becomes a social media thing as well.
01:43:57.940And unless they're protected, unless they have a lot of internal resources to deal with that kind of firestorm, it can be really, really difficult.