TRIGGERnometry - Jeremy Shapiro on Trump, Trident, Israel & Iran

00:00:00.000 Jeremy Shapiro, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:02.120 Thanks for having me.

00:00:09.120 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:12.240 I'm Constantine Kissing.

00:00:13.160 And this is the show for you.

00:00:14.620 If you're bored of watching people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about,

00:00:19.500 at Trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:24.580 Here at the world-famous Angel Comedy Club,

00:00:27.180 Our amazing expert guest this week is Jeremy Shapiro, who is the Research Director for the

00:00:32.080 European Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior official in the State Department

00:00:36.060 under President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

00:00:39.440 Jeremy Shapiro, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:41.320 Thanks for having me.

00:00:51.600 Jeremy Shapiro, thank you for coming on.

00:00:53.300 Thanks for having me.

00:00:54.040 It's great to have you here.

00:00:55.040 So before we get started with our interview, which I'm sure will be lots about foreign affairs, which is something you're an expert in, just tell us a little bit about how you got to be where you are today.

00:01:05.020 What's been your journey?

00:01:06.020 Yeah, it's a long and winding road.

00:01:08.980 You know, I grew up in Boston and Massachusetts in the U.S. in a very sort of normal suburb.

00:01:14.980 And I had a sort of staggeringly boring, you know, by the standards of such things, childhood.

00:01:20.260 I've always wanted to have a sort of childhood trauma to overcome, but I never managed to find one.

00:01:26.900 My parents were great.

00:01:28.380 They were always encouraging me.

00:01:29.940 We were neither too wealthy nor too poor, which is frustrating to create a story, but probably very good for one's childhood.

00:01:38.520 And the only real problem I had, I think, as I was growing up was that I was very technical.

00:01:44.940 I was a sort of computer nerd even before it was popular.

00:01:50.260 to be a computer nerd, and I spent most of my teenage years and college experience in

00:01:57.460 the computer lab.

00:01:59.960 And after university, I got a job in Silicon Valley working for a big computer company,

00:02:07.880 which was pretty good, I suppose, but I think over time I became really very, very bored

00:02:13.320 with it.

00:02:14.320 had the problem that it was extremely detailed-oriented, more than about concepts.

00:02:20.800 And you got very, very good at smaller and smaller parts of the computer project

00:02:28.020 that you were working on, which was in the interest of the company

00:02:30.720 to make you a real expert at something very small.

00:02:33.000 And as you got better and better at less and less,

00:02:36.020 eventually you were the sort of world's expert at nothing.

00:02:41.680 And it was very isolating.

00:02:43.340 You could only really talk to the five or six people that you worked with who were the last people that you wanted to talk with because you saw them all day and they were, frankly, very boring.

00:02:53.800 So at that point in my mid-20s, I sort of wrote to a professor that I had in university and said, you know, I think I want to do something else.

00:03:02.980 And he recommended that I come to the school that he was at and get a master's degree in international relations, which was at Johns Hopkins SICE in Washington, D.C.

00:03:13.440 And I did that, and that was really quite helpful for me

00:03:15.780 to sort of understand the role of politics.

00:03:19.440 I came a bit late to it, but to understand the role of politics in life

00:03:25.040 and to understand what the big questions were.

00:03:28.240 And I spent several years in a master's in a Ph.D. program,

00:03:32.480 which I never completed, wrestling.

00:03:35.720 So you're a dropout. That means you must be very good.

00:03:38.760 All the dropouts always do well, right? 0.85

00:03:40.300 Yeah, I think dropping out of a Ph.D. program is a sort of badge of honor because because it shows that you lack the patience to wrestle with an idea for five or seven years until you've beaten it to death.

00:03:54.440 And no, I mean, I think I should have graduated, but I was I was afflicted by the sort of twin enemies of knowledge, which are love and money.

00:04:04.200 and i uh and i moved to washington both for a job and for a woman uh i eventually lost the woman but

00:04:15.320 i uh unfortunately managed to keep the job not really sure frankly that that was the right choice

00:04:21.700 but there it was and i i i ended up working at uh at i started at rand which is a big think tank

00:04:28.960 which works mostly for the U.S. Defense Department in Washington, I sort of, I think I did something

00:04:35.340 which is very helpful for anyone starting out, which is I showed up as an intern and I just

00:04:41.000 refused to leave. And so eventually they gave me a job. And, you know, that was great. I mean,

00:04:48.600 because you were really sort of wrestling with policy ideas, trying to help the government

00:04:53.600 to understand what the broader political implications of what they were doing was,

00:04:58.440 and really just, frankly, learning a lot.

00:05:00.180 I mean, these are really great ways to learn.

00:05:03.300 And I moved from there to Brookings, which is a big think tank in Washington.

00:05:09.220 And I spent several years there.

00:05:11.000 And at Brookings, where I mostly worked on U.S.-European relations,

00:05:17.200 I was able also to get really involved in sort of democratic foreign policy circles

00:05:23.160 and to work on campaigns, first for John Kerry and then for Barack Obama as a sort of foreign policy advisor.

00:05:32.860 There are dozens or even hundreds of these in a U.S. presidential campaign,

00:05:37.540 but they really give you some insight into the way that foreign policy plays out in the campaign,

00:05:43.520 and they just give you access to the people and to the process of a political campaign.

00:05:51.240 And so that was quite helpful. And after I had I'd signed up to work for Barack Obama early in his 2008 campaign, early in 2007, because U.S. presidential campaigns are essentially endless.

00:06:04.060 uh and i did that because not because i preferred him really to hillary clinton

00:06:11.020 uh but because i found him to be interesting and because the hillary clinton campaign was

00:06:16.360 extremely crowded uh as one as one of my friends put it i'm tired of being in the same room having

00:06:21.920 the same arguments with everybody that i used to argue with in the clinton administration

00:06:25.660 sounds like my facebook feed to be honest with you yeah i think the clinton campaign is a little

00:06:30.280 bit about the Facebook feed. It's people who've been together for too long, kind of a problem

00:06:34.320 that she's had for a long time. And the Obama campaign was just much more exciting. It really

00:06:39.980 wasn't philosophically different, I would say, but it had a real different kind of energy to it,

00:06:46.260 I thought. And when they asked me to be an advisor, I said, sure, why not? I didn't expect

00:06:52.500 him to win. I'm not even sure I wanted him to win in terms of my career. Because I was

00:07:00.120 pretty happy with the think tank, and the idea of going into government was quite scary

00:07:05.080 to me. And when, contrary to my plans, he won, which really was a huge shock. I still

00:07:12.500 haven't quite gotten over it. I went in and worked at the State Department, first as an

00:07:21.840 advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, who had been a colleague

00:07:28.040 of mine at Brookings and had been the guy that brought me into the campaign. And then on the

00:07:34.840 policy planning staff, where I worked pretty closely with Hillary Clinton and with her big

00:07:40.180 advisor, Jake Sullivan. And, you know, that was incredible. I mean, it was working in government,

00:07:47.980 at least in the U.S. government, is really interesting, amazing even. It's horrible,

00:07:54.020 I would have to say it's I always compare it to like a car wreck you know it's like horrible and

00:08:00.640 tragic and unavoidable but you cannot take your eyes off of it you can't stop watching because

00:08:08.300 it is really fascinating and you learn a tremendous amount some things that you really never wanted to

00:08:14.440 know about how government works about how policy works and even about how human nature works and

00:08:23.220 And it has really informed my subsequent work.

00:08:28.920 I think it's had a greater sort of, I don't think I actually accomplished almost anything.

00:08:33.740 And even the things that I accomplished, I'm not sure they were a good idea.

00:08:40.680 But I think I learned more from that experience than any other experience I've had.

00:08:45.820 Arguably it's made me a bit too cynical, but I do think that everybody should do that for

00:08:51.420 at least a few years just to sort of test their assumptions and to understand what I

00:08:57.860 call the policymaking dilemma is, the pressures that the policymakers are under.

00:09:03.060 I feel as if people who've never been in government don't, and frankly, quite a few

00:09:08.660 have, don't really have an appreciation for the variety of pressures and the types

00:09:14.980 of constraints that policymakers typically operate under.

00:09:20.520 The sort of view outside is, oh, these people have a lot of power.

00:09:23.500 They can do anything they want.

00:09:24.760 The view from the inside is that you're barraged from 100 different directions

00:09:28.920 and you have incredibly little freedom of action

00:09:31.300 and that people are telling you things, making recommendations to you

00:09:38.000 that you already know and have already rejected or are already trying to do,

00:09:43.000 but you can't and you can't do anything about it and that's incredibly frustrating and I think as

00:09:49.920 what I've tried to do particularly since I left is to try to understand the pressures that those

00:09:55.220 people are under and to talk to them in a way that they can you know that they certainly that

00:10:00.220 challenges them you need to challenge them but also that understands the constraints that they

00:10:05.420 face. Do you think looking back at the Trump campaign with phrases like drain the swamp

00:10:11.780 Do you think that actually public trust in politicians, and especially in Washington, has actually decreased significantly?

00:10:23.020 No, I always find that to be a strange question because I can't remember a time when people had trust in politicians.

00:10:31.500 So it hasn't really decreased. It's always been terrible.

00:10:36.960 But do you think it's got even worse, where someone openly refers to Washington as a swamp and everyone goes, yeah, okay.

00:10:43.520 Well, not everyone, but there's certainly the people who voted for him.

00:10:47.340 No, people have been doing that my entire adult life.

00:10:51.720 You know, it is classic, certainly among American politicians, to run against Washington.

00:10:59.400 People have been doing that at least since Ronald Reagan, probably before.

00:11:02.700 and to run as an outsider, to run as an anti-establishment figure.

00:11:08.400 Think about this.

00:11:09.920 George W. Bush, when he ran for president in 2000, ran against Washington,

00:11:15.380 ran as an anti-establishment figure.

00:11:17.260 He was the son of a president.

00:11:21.160 And yet he positioned himself that way, and people bought it.

00:11:27.020 Hillary Clinton tried to run as an outsider. 0.92

00:11:29.720 She was the wife of a president.

00:11:31.880 Al Gore ran as an outsider.

00:11:33.540 He was the vice president.

00:11:36.060 Everybody does this to – they don't succeed – sometimes they don't succeed.

00:11:41.960 Very often they don't succeed.

00:11:43.760 George W. Bush did succeed as positioning himself as an outsider.

00:11:46.540 So almost anything is possible.

00:11:50.580 You know, Donald Trump – I don't know what makes Donald Trump an outsider.

00:11:54.620 He's a billionaire.

00:11:55.740 He's been hobnobbing with all of these establishment figures for 20 years. 1.00

00:12:01.660 He's certainly an asshole, so I don't know if that's what makes him an outsider. 1.00

00:12:04.620 But he took the same rhetoric. 1.00

00:12:10.260 I think that the distinction to be made in the 2016 election is that there is a certain, let's say, oligarchy in both parties,

00:12:20.440 uh which you know i mean the united states i think like any country is is a sort of combination

00:12:26.320 between democracy and oligarchy and i think this is actually kind of necessary um because you can't

00:12:32.160 run a country without an elite um you know you all people are always running against the elite but

00:12:36.980 you never but you don't actually ever run a country without an elite you just replace the

00:12:40.640 current one that you have and the united states has had for a long time a system of competitive

00:12:46.320 elites who run the country in alternation, which is a reasonably good way of keeping them honest, 0.94

00:12:53.660 but certainly can be frustrating to people who aren't in either of those elites.

00:12:58.680 Donald Trump did something in the 2016 campaign, which was very new. It wasn't running against

00:13:04.700 Washington. That's the oldest trope in the book. It was avoiding having any sort of debt or homage

00:13:11.960 to the oligarchy of his party he ran against not just the democratic party not just against

00:13:18.760 washington he ran against the republican party he ran against their control of the system and

00:13:26.000 that was never possible before not because you couldn't make the the political message but

00:13:32.300 because you couldn't uh get the money and get the backing and the endorsement of key institutions

00:13:38.860 like the media and the expert community like I am part of.

00:13:45.020 And he was able to evade that system in the first instance by being incredibly wealthy,

00:13:51.300 but maybe more importantly by, in the second instance, being already a celebrity

00:13:55.640 and not really needing their endorsement.

00:13:59.700 He had his own brand. He didn't need the Republican brand.

00:14:02.160 Yeah, his own brand. I mean, typically if you start off as a new presidential candidate,

00:14:07.580 you need to convince the public that you're not a lunatic. 0.53

00:14:12.540 And the way that you convince the public that you're not a lunatic

00:14:16.100 is people that they already know not to be lunatics come out and say,

00:14:19.720 oh, this guy's got a pretty interesting campaign.

00:14:21.560 Oh, he's good. 0.79

00:14:23.700 Donald Trump didn't need to do that, not because he's not a lunatic,

00:14:27.660 but because people already knew who he was.

00:14:31.260 This is very, very rare in American politics

00:14:34.080 that someone comes from nowhere.

00:14:36.220 I think it's perhaps the future of American politics.

00:14:39.880 That's what I was about to ask you.

00:14:41.060 Do you think it's Donald Trump's all the way in from here?

00:14:43.360 Like, is it going to be Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West?

00:14:46.400 Is that what's going to happen from now on?

00:14:47.980 I think that Donald Trump has demonstrated, if we really needed any demonstration, the incredible power of celebrity.

00:14:55.200 And social media has only accentuated this.

00:14:59.040 And that I think we should expect – people are always asking me, who is the Democratic candidate for 2020?

00:15:05.080 and you can come up with 30 or 40 different possibilities.

00:15:09.820 I think that there's also a very good chance

00:15:11.600 that the Democratic candidate is someone

00:15:13.660 that we have never heard of

00:15:15.020 or at least never considered as a Democratic candidate.

00:15:17.440 We probably have heard of them

00:15:18.820 but in a musical or some other context.

00:15:20.880 We've got their album, basically.

00:15:22.960 Yeah, yeah, they probably have headlined in this club.

00:15:28.680 And, you know, I think that that kind of celebrity,

00:15:31.880 that kind of non-politician,

00:15:33.680 And that kind of person who has a rapport with the public, that the public knows who they are, that they don't need to go through the party oligarchy or through the expert community, that they have no problem either raising money or just already having money, and that they don't need any of the sort of existing groups to say, well, this guy's okay, this guy's not a lunatic, this guy's plans make sense.

00:15:54.820 I think that could be the future of American politics. It's fascinating to note that when you look at almost all of the last several presidents, sort of including George W. Bush, they've really basically come from nowhere.

00:16:10.200 They've been people who not only haven't had much of a political record but have succeeded because they haven't had a political record.

00:16:18.540 When people were advising Barack Obama on whether he should run for president in 2006, 2007, when he'd only just been in politics as a senator for a couple of years,

00:16:32.580 they were saying, well, you know, maybe you should get, maybe you should, you know, get more

00:16:39.240 experience, get more into Washington, know people more. And he had the insight to understand that

00:16:45.120 actually the only time he could run for president was in his first term as senator. And if you look

00:16:50.800 at the 2016 Republican primary, what you see is that every new senator basically ran for president

00:16:58.140 on the Republican side in 2016, because they realized that if they didn't, they would have

00:17:04.960 too much of a record, too much experience to run for president. It only counts against you

00:17:11.120 these days. And I think that future presidential candidates are going to understand that,

00:17:17.520 already are understanding that. So, you know, I don't know if Oprah wants to be president.

00:17:23.580 I know that she couldn't be worse than Donald Trump.

00:17:27.780 I don't think she knows really anything about being president,

00:17:32.140 but I don't think that it's really important to have a lot of sort of

00:17:37.440 of the typical experience that we generally associate with presidents

00:17:42.840 to be a good president.

00:17:44.340 I do think that you need to have a few qualities that Donald Trump really lacks,

00:17:49.700 which is, you know, listening to people, the capacity to learn, a basis of good judgment and a moral center.

00:17:59.500 Those things would be nice.

00:18:02.100 You know, Oprah Winfrey may have those. 0.73

00:18:04.360 Maybe some other celebrities will. 0.99

00:18:07.120 I'm not inalterably opposed.

00:18:09.540 I mean, obviously, as an expert and as someone who spent my life trying to educate myself about this stuff,

00:18:14.340 it's very sad for me to say, well, you know, you don't really need to be an expert to be president.

00:18:18.660 but I think that's fine

00:18:20.960 what I'm hoping for

00:18:22.980 is that we can find someone

00:18:25.160 even if they're a celebrity

00:18:27.260 who is willing to learn

00:18:29.660 who has judgment

00:18:30.520 who has a moral core

00:18:31.920 who has something that they want to achieve

00:18:33.920 what I don't know is how to assess those things

00:18:37.160 buy someone's music album

00:18:39.560 or the headline set

00:18:41.140 the angel comedy club

00:18:42.200 I ask does Oprah Winfrey have those things

00:18:44.680 she might, I don't know 0.99

00:18:46.520 But the thing that terrifies me is, okay, you are particularly successful whether you're a musician or an actor.

00:18:53.460 How does that qualify you to go and negotiate with North Korea about the disarmament of their nuclear weapons?

00:19:00.760 Yeah, look, I shouldn't tell you this as an expert, as someone who does international relations.

00:19:05.780 It doesn't qualify you to do that, but it's not important to be able to do that as president.

00:19:09.760 uh it the president has a lot of people that can do that for him that can help him do that

00:19:16.880 that can instruct him on how to do that the government washington is full of people like

00:19:23.540 this they're all over the place honestly i could i could assemble six for you uh and in a in a in

00:19:29.500 an hour we could have a pickup basketball game about north korea well make you sound like the

00:19:34.080 avengers it's not anywhere near that interesting nobody has a hammer which is unfortunate uh but

00:19:44.540 um what what a president needs is not uh an ability to negotiate uh not information knowledge

00:19:52.880 about north korea uh we could teach him that in an afternoon he needs um uh enough self-confidence

00:20:01.100 to reach out to the experts. No, Donald Trump doesn't have that. I mean, I think that this is

00:20:07.440 a fundamental problem. One of the ways that you can tell that Donald Trump is deeply insecure

00:20:13.700 and lacks the necessary self-confidence to be a good president is the way he keeps telling you

00:20:19.120 how great he is. I'm sure that you guys probably went to high school and are familiar with this

00:20:24.440 type, right? No, I mean, someone who's truly self-confident is someone who is able to listen

00:20:31.920 and take advice and not feel like it diminishes them. You were saying earlier that Hillary Clinton

00:20:40.220 has become very toxic, and I think there's definitely some truth to that in American

00:20:44.360 politics. But one of the things that gave me great comfort in working with her and in voting for her

00:20:49.800 later as president even though I often disagreed with her on key issues was that she was someone

00:20:56.240 who was confident enough in her intellect and in her capacity to listen to people that she

00:21:01.920 disagreed with to take arguments seriously to wrestle with ideas in a way that was that was

00:21:08.900 open to to change you didn't usually change your mind because generally speaking she was smarter

00:21:15.160 than you were. And she generally felt like she was right. But she listened and she occasionally

00:21:20.140 changed her mind. And she had a basic good judgment and a basic moral core.

00:21:29.300 And I think that that's what presidents need. And I don't rule out a celebrity having those

00:21:37.840 kinds of things. If you think about Ronald Reagan, he, because I should add something else that a

00:21:43.200 president needs is really the ability to communicate with the public and you know

00:21:48.480 I can't do that I think as this interview is probably already proven and

00:21:53.600 you know I think that that's a real political skill which a lot of very

00:22:00.300 very smart very very expert people simply don't have it has frankly nothing

00:22:05.580 to do with knowing what the right thing to do in North Korea is and you know I

00:22:10.620 I think people like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are very good at that, and I think maybe celebrities in general could be good at that.

00:22:19.600 That's probably how they became celebrities.

00:22:23.360 But what we're going to need to do, if we're going to have people like that, communicators as president,

00:22:29.340 people whose communication skills allow them to get elected,

00:22:34.180 we're going to need to be able to forge an alliance, if you will, with an expert governing

00:22:41.720 class that can help the communicators govern. Reagan did that pretty well. Donald Trump isn't

00:22:48.300 doing that at all. He's not even trying. He doesn't recognize that he needs to. And I think

00:22:54.040 that's the real struggle that we'll have, is if we're going to have government by celebrity or

00:23:00.280 government by a famous person, how are we going to create a system where they can access expertise

00:23:06.940 and not feel diminished?

00:23:17.840 So here you are in the UK talking about and advising people about foreign and researching

00:23:22.520 foreign relations. I saw an interview that you did with Channel 4, I think it was Newsnight,

00:23:26.820 and one of the things you said, I think you mentioned you got a lot of pushback on, was

00:23:30.240 that britain is a medium level power um where what is your view of britain's role in the world

00:23:37.520 today yeah uh look i should say uh in starting off that i live in the united kingdom and i

00:23:44.020 do that for a reason i really like it it's a great country uh it's a wonderful place to live

00:23:47.920 and it's got a great future uh so uh i don't mean to be disparaging of it when i say you know

00:23:53.820 get real um you know i mean the the donald tusk is famous for saying there are two kinds of

00:24:02.560 countries in europe uh those countries that uh realize that they're small countries and those

00:24:07.740 countries that don't and uh the united kingdom is clearly one that doesn't realize that it is

00:24:14.100 uh that it is a medium-sized power it's odd there is this very strange schizophrenia about this if

00:24:21.100 If you look at government policy, if you look at the way that the United Kingdom has been

00:24:26.060 reducing its military budget, the way that the United Kingdom has been withdrawing a

00:24:31.420 lot of its influence in the world, you see a very strong recognition that the United

00:24:37.320 Kingdom needs to redefine its relationship with the world and think of itself as a medium

00:24:41.900 power, which can certainly punch above its weight, but needs to relate very well with

00:24:46.780 its neighbors and with some of its key partners in order to function in the world. But yet if you

00:24:53.380 look at the sort of politics in Britain, if you look at the way people speak about the United

00:24:58.580 Kingdom, it sounds like it's 1890. I mean, there's this sort of idea of, you know, what do they call

00:25:05.660 it? Empire 2.0. Every third movie seems to be about Dunkirk or about 1940. You know, these were

00:25:13.220 great times i understand that uh and some amazing things were accomplished but we did win the war

00:25:18.700 yeah yeah that was great and i'm really glad that you did i yeah we won the war we've got a russian

00:25:25.580 and american and english and the englishman is like yeah we won the war i think we can all take

00:25:30.100 some credit let's just say that yeah um but uh you know it it was it was good that the that the

00:25:37.340 war was won. I think we can all agree on that. But it was kind of a while ago. The world has

00:25:44.320 moved on, even if the movies have not. And I think there is a new reality. And in this new reality,

00:25:51.780 the United Kingdom still has enormous strengths, but it cannot be the United Kingdom of old.

00:25:57.780 It needs to understand that it has, that it is a medium power in a difficult and cruel world.

00:26:06.280 Uh, and that means it needs to seek, uh, very, think very carefully about its alliances,

00:26:12.940 about its international positioning.

00:26:14.980 That means there is, there can be no spirit of Dunkirk for 2018, uh, because, because

00:26:21.100 the United Kingdom cannot function alone.

00:26:23.400 Uh, and that means it needs to think very hard about the role that its European partners

00:26:28.980 play in its security and prosperity and the role that the United States plays in its security

00:26:34.040 and prosperity.

00:26:35.040 I feel as if that debate here is very often submerged in an imperial nostalgia, which doesn't really help anybody.

00:26:43.600 So in a roundabout way, you're basically saying Brexit was a mistake.

00:26:48.260 I hope that that wasn't a roundabout way of saying that.

00:26:50.820 Yeah, I mean, Brexit is a spectacular mistake in my view.

00:26:55.020 It is very much Turkey's voting for Christmas. 0.55

00:26:58.000 And, you know, I think there is a good possibility that with a lot of clever statesmanship on both the European and the British side that it can be only not much worse than it was before.

00:27:14.000 That's a good possibility.

00:27:16.000 But there are really only downsides, and it could be terrible. 0.95

00:27:20.000 And it's all completely unnecessary and stupid because I think, you know, a proper debate in the pre-referendum period would have told some people some harsh realities about the world today. 0.90

00:27:33.840 And I think actually even the Remain side was really unwilling to do that. 0.96

00:27:38.540 They were unwilling, and, you know, I understand why in political communication it's not good to tell people you have to do this.

00:27:45.940 And that's, again, you know, why I'm not a good politician.

00:27:48.240 I think this interview really demonstrates that, but the fact of the matter is, and I'm a fact of the matter is guy, Britain needs its European partners.

00:28:01.240 It needs them even because the United States isn't a reliable enough partner.

00:28:06.240 idea of you know the going back to the empire or going back to a special relationship which has

00:28:14.080 never really existed uh or certainly not existed in the way that the british think of it um is is

00:28:20.360 a fantasy well i wanted to ask you about trident britain's nuclear weapons before i do i just want

00:28:25.260 to say this table is this microphone rather very sensitive so when you tap the table it sounds to

00:28:31.360 the listeners like trident has been launched uh so sorry about that i'll try not to launch any

00:28:36.540 nuclear weapons but i'm curious you talk about a cruel and harsh world i mean in the world where

00:28:39.840 russia is running around doing the things that it's doing and with the backup of its nuclear

00:28:44.100 weapons i mean russia is very clear about that they they the russian regime says we are powerful

00:28:49.020 because we have nukes we have a lot of nukes right what do you make of the debate or the

00:28:54.320 conversations around trident jeremy corbyn the labor leader in this country has said that he

00:28:58.040 wants to get rid of it. Other people are saying this would be ridiculous. What do you think 0.52

00:29:02.300 would be the impact for Britain of losing its nuclear deterrent?

00:29:07.320 Well, I think it would be a bad idea for Britain to lose its nuclear deterrent overall. I think

00:29:13.940 a nuclear deterrent, particularly for a mature country like Britain, is broadly speaking a good 0.94

00:29:19.580 idea. And it does sort of prevent the worst possible catastrophes. I would say, however,

00:29:29.780 that particularly when you look at Trident and when you look at the way that Britain is maintaining

00:29:33.760 its nuclear deterrent, it is extraordinarily expensive. It is a massive drain on the British

00:29:41.040 defense budget. On a certain level, the British defense budget and almost a lot of the British

00:29:48.120 public purse is becoming just focused. Frankly, if you look at British public spending these days,

00:29:53.800 it basically looks like the NHS and the nuclear deterrent. I mean, that's a slight exaggeration.

00:30:00.560 Pensions as well. Pensions as well, of course, yes. And I think that what the British need to do

00:30:08.540 is I certainly wouldn't advise getting rid of the nuclear deterrent. I would be thinking very hard

00:30:13.900 about whether Trident is the right way to do that, and I would be thinking very hard

00:30:18.380 about how they can better cooperate with their partners, right, I mean, with a nuclear deterrent.

00:30:26.640 I mean, the French have a nuclear deterrent, which is also weighing them down.

00:30:30.880 The Germans aren't participating in it at all, but, of course, are benefiting from it, 1.00

00:30:36.040 and that's true of the rest of Europe.

00:30:37.600 And the great insight about the European Union, particularly European Union foreign policy, is that basically you guys all want the same thing.

00:30:48.060 You're not really competing with each other, which is a sort of historical miracle at this point.

00:30:53.440 And so it makes sense to combine your efforts when you're a medium-sized country is in a harsh and cruel world.

00:31:00.860 But Europe isn't doing that.

00:31:02.120 I mean, one of the points you made in an article that you wrote recently, you were talking about Iran, and we'll get to that in a second, but one of the points you made is actually Europe is divided quite often against itself, and countries will seek the help of America against other European countries within Europe. 0.50

00:31:18.380 So while we're not cooperating, is it not wise for Britain to hold on to its ability to deter others, particularly because one of the other thing that would happen if Britain was to give away Trident would essentially, to put it very crudely, you become America's bitch even more because you don't have your own ability to, you know, to control.

00:31:38.040 No, I wouldn't advocate – I would agree.

00:31:40.100 I wouldn't advocate that Britain should get rid of its nuclear deterrent.

00:31:43.640 I'm not sure about the trident aspect of it.

00:31:47.360 A submarine-launched deterrent like they have is extremely expensive. 0.98

00:31:53.080 So I think my only point is that in maintaining a nuclear deterrent, which I think it should do in part not to be America's bitch but really not to be anybody's bitch. 0.98

00:32:03.240 Well, yeah, exactly. 1.00

00:32:04.400 Because being a bitch sucks. 1.00

00:32:07.940 I'm glad I brought that up. 1.00

00:32:09.300 You really run with it.

00:32:10.600 Yeah, well, this is a sort of rule of international politics.

00:32:15.140 I think that they do need to look very carefully at ways of doing that more cheaply.

00:32:20.620 One way might be thinking about other mechanisms besides Trident.

00:32:26.140 Another way might be cooperating with European partners.

00:32:29.720 So like a land-based thing if it was?

00:32:31.500 land-based or air-based yeah yeah i mean you know the thing about a nuclear weapon i think people

00:32:37.540 get very involved in the sort of intricacies well you know a sea launch weapon is very hard to find

00:32:43.120 and it's very survivable second strike blah blah blah you know in a luxurious world it would be

00:32:48.580 good to think about all of these things but actually if you look at the history of nuclear

00:32:51.800 weapons it doesn't matter that much the important thing is that you have them and that people think

00:32:57.220 you might be able to use them uh and people don't take a lot of risks when it comes to nuclear

00:33:02.400 weapons there was a sort of it's kind of understandable yeah so you know there's a

00:33:07.920 lot of focus in the united states about stewardship does the nuclear weapon work you know if i was an

00:33:12.480 opponent of the united states and i was like well you know it's not clear that america's nuclear

00:33:16.380 weapons really work 100 of the time we can trade they're only 60 70 reliable let's invade and see

00:33:23.420 how that works. People don't think that way. So yeah, I think a deterrent is important. I think

00:33:32.080 we underestimate how easy it is to create a deterrent with nuclear weapons. That's both

00:33:38.480 the great and the horrible thing about them. And so Trident is a very, very sophisticated

00:33:45.200 system. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are a very sophisticated system. They do provide

00:33:50.960 an extraordinarily survivable deterrent, and that's impressive.

00:33:57.820 And during the Cold War, it was the sort of jewel in the crown

00:34:00.640 of the American nuclear trident, triad, excuse me.

00:34:05.080 But I'm not really sure it's necessary for the kind of nuclear deterrent

00:34:11.120 that the United Kingdom both needs and can afford.

00:34:20.960 moving quickly on towards what's happening in israel with trump and the embassy can you just

00:34:28.320 give us a little bit of a background as to why that is so inflammatory sure um i mean it's a

00:34:35.460 big question i accept that yeah you want me to go back to uh 90 moses on sinai

00:34:40.620 tell us about yeah i mean everything in israel starts with the bible but um but i won't go back

00:34:48.940 that far. I think the issue is the central question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

00:34:55.900 is the city of Jerusalem. I mean, and it is biblical. It is for all of the three monotheistic

00:35:03.340 religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a sort of central and holy city. And to go there

00:35:10.140 is to sort of wallow in the incredible history of those religions in that city and in their

00:35:16.980 conflict over centuries and millennia. It's quite incredible. And so it is, particularly for the

00:35:25.400 Israelis and the Palestinians, a city which is sort of deep in their emotional heart, deep in

00:35:31.480 their historical heart. They both have historical claims to that city, which go back millennia.

00:35:38.000 and the when the when Israel was created in 1948 the the city was divided not

00:35:48.080 between the Israelis and the Palestinians interestingly between the

00:35:50.660 Israelis and the Jordanians and Israel had West Jerusalem and Jordan had East 0.94

00:35:57.020 Jerusalem and East Jerusalem is where the Temple Mount is which is the holiest

00:36:03.200 site both for in Jerusalem for both for the Jews and for Muslims because it's

00:36:09.680 where the Al-Aqsa Mosque is and the in the 1967 war the six-day war the

00:36:19.060 Israelis seized all of Jerusalem and the Jordanians relinquished their claim to

00:36:27.360 the Palestinians. And so since the Israeli occupation in 1967, there has been an effort

00:36:35.500 by the Israelis to establish in the mind of the entire international community that Jerusalem is

00:36:42.940 the undivided capital of Israel. They have not annexed the West Bank. They did not annex Gaza,

00:36:53.540 which they also took in the 1967 war, but they have annexed East Jerusalem.

00:36:59.940 They have claimed that they will always rule over this.

00:37:02.180 And the question of how Jerusalem will play in what's called the two-state solution,

00:37:08.720 the idea that there will be a Palestinian state next to Israel at a certain point,

00:37:16.200 has been one of the central questions in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations

00:37:20.540 negotiations going back to at least Camp David in the 1970s. And so when Trump decides to move,

00:37:32.580 I mean, I guess I should add that the U.S. Congress, which has always been even more

00:37:36.240 pro-Israeli than U.S. presidents, passed a bill in the 1990s and 1995 saying that the United States

00:37:45.220 recognizes Jerusalem as the capital, and we'll move the embassy there.

00:37:49.640 And presidents have always, since that time, waived that requirement in the bill,

00:37:55.140 saying that it wasn't in the interest of the United States

00:37:58.500 and the interest of peace in the Middle East to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

00:38:08.340 So previous presidents, in other words, knew how inflammatory this would be

00:38:12.100 and have avoided doing it?

00:38:13.880 Yeah. Well, it's not just that it would be inflammatory. I think obviously there's been a lot of violence in the last few days, but that's not the central question because there's always violence in the Middle East. 0.98

00:38:27.940 And if you want to do something, anything, you have to – you will very often create at least short-term violence.

00:38:36.280 It's the nature of the region.

00:38:39.380 I think it's very important that it will be inflammatory, but the more central question is does it in the longer term push toward peace?

00:38:48.960 And here, I think U.S. presidents have felt that if you want to bring Israel and Palestine together,

00:38:55.480 you need to be able to coerce both of them, right?

00:38:59.160 You need to be able to have carrots and sticks for both of them.

00:39:05.280 And a critical carrot and or stick against the Israelis in creating a negotiation is the status of Jerusalem.

00:39:14.120 So typically American officials would say, well, we're going to hold the status of Jerusalem till the end to seal the deal because that's what the Israelis most want.

00:39:31.020 And it's just a tenant of negotiations that you don't play your strongest card at the beginning.

00:39:38.060 You play them at the end.

00:39:40.060 You know, Donald Trump, I don't think he does.

00:39:42.220 It's not that he doesn't understand that exactly.

00:39:43.800 it's that he doesn't seem to care he's interested in making a big splash he's interested in having

00:39:50.620 an impact immediately long term for him is next tuesday and so he doesn't really seem to care

00:39:58.700 as far as i can tell uh because i mean you could say he doesn't know but but at least 100 people

00:40:04.720 have told him directly and he uh he either doesn't take it in or doesn't care um and so

00:40:13.120 I don't think that this has really furthered the cause of peace and not just because of the

00:40:19.660 immediate violence which is bad enough but also because it makes the structure of the negotiation

00:40:25.080 a lot harder you know having said that and maybe that weighs on Donald Trump it wasn't going well

00:40:32.480 anyway and it's not really clear that he spoiled anything because it's not clear that there was

00:40:39.380 anything to spoil. But, you know, I think in a situation that appears hopeless, like the

00:40:48.800 Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, it probably doesn't make sense to just make it all the more

00:40:54.360 hopeless because you want to have a good photo opportunity. And I think that that's what he's

00:40:58.720 done. So you're saying that the decision to move the embassy was based entirely on ego?

00:41:02.860 Yeah, on ego and on domestic politics. I think, frankly, you can trace every Donald Trump foreign policy decision thus far to some combination of ego and domestic politics because he isn't really interested in foreign policy per se beyond immigration questions and maybe international trade questions.

00:41:25.640 He doesn't really have anything he wants to accomplish in the long term.

00:41:29.160 He's not trying to create a specific role for the United States and the world.

00:41:33.640 He's not really trying to reshape the world according to any sort of ideology or image.

00:41:40.400 Donald Trump has one very, very clear ideology, and it's the greater magnificence of Donald Trump.

00:41:56.480 Picking up on that, then, what do you make of Donald Trump-led withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal?

00:42:02.960 Can you, first of all, just for anyone who doesn't know what it is, including me and Francis to a large extent,

00:42:08.340 what was the Iran nuclear deal, what still is the Iran nuclear deal, and why did Donald Trump decide to pull out of it?

00:42:14.640 So the Iran nuclear deal, which is the technical term for it, is the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

00:42:24.040 Sounds good.

00:42:24.880 Yeah, yeah. Anything with an acronym like that must be good.

00:42:27.980 It was a deal between actually seven countries, what they called the P5 plus one, which is all of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, which is the U.S., Russia, China, France and Britain plus Germany.

00:42:46.680 And then those six had a deal with Iran, essentially.

00:42:51.660 And the essential deal was a very simple one, really.

00:42:55.800 The Iranians agreed to freeze their nuclear program to dismantle their nuclear enrichment capacity 0.80

00:43:03.240 and to submit to a very, very intrusive regime of inspections to verify that.

00:43:09.880 And the international community, those seven countries, six countries, excuse me, agreed to give them – to relieve the economic sanctions that had been placed against Iran and to give them some economic benefits so that their economy could get back on track.

00:43:31.920 This was a really, really controversial deal, particularly in the United States and Iran.

00:43:37.600 And the substance of the complaint, at least on the U.S. side, was that this had not addressed Iran's other nefarious activities in the region.

00:43:55.180 Iran is involved in a lot of civil wars in the region in places like Syria and Yemen and Iraq.

00:44:02.600 and it hadn't addressed Iran's ballistic missile capability

00:44:07.500 and that Iran was still a very bad actor.

00:44:10.180 You know, the response to this from the officials that created the deal was,

00:44:14.500 yeah, that's true, you know, one thing at a time.

00:44:17.080 What we did in this deal was address the nuclear program,

00:44:20.960 and that's really important for all the reasons that we talked about

00:44:26.380 and the ways that nuclear weapons affect negotiations.

00:44:28.320 But didn't Donald Trump also say that there was cash involved,

00:44:31.700 that the West was actually giving Iran cash?

00:44:34.260 Yeah, that's not true,

00:44:36.740 which is a sort of frequent theme

00:44:39.800 in responding to Donald Trump.

00:44:42.740 But what was happening was that a lot of Iran's money

00:44:47.640 had been frozen in Western bank accounts

00:44:51.480 as a result and part of the revolution

00:44:53.520 and part of the sanctions.

00:44:55.340 And some of Iran's own money was released back to them.

00:44:59.860 Makes sense.

00:45:00.420 And so I would assert that there's a big difference between giving Iran cash and giving them back their own money, which had never belonged to anybody else.

00:45:12.220 But, yeah, I mean, Iran – the intent of this deal, going beyond cash, was to give Iran economic benefits.

00:45:20.060 So if we assume that there is a rational element to Donald Trump, what is the rationale – and I know it's an assumption – what is the rationale for withdrawing from this deal which prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

00:45:35.860 I can't come up with a rationale.

00:45:37.720 I tried.

00:45:38.560 You know, I think that there is there is a real effort by a lot of people to construct a strategic narrative around what Donald Trump does, I guess, because it just makes us feel better about the world.

00:45:54.620 Right. OK, well, I think what he's trying to do is this.

00:45:57.040 And he's got this plan.

00:45:58.120 And let's ignore the word rationale.

00:46:00.160 Why does he think it's bad?

00:46:01.380 I think he thinks that the deal is bad because it allows Iran to engage in all of these other activities because Obama made it and he wants to undo the legacy.

00:46:15.540 I mean, frankly, if you look at what the president is apparently going to do, seems to be about to do in North Korea, he's probably not going to conclude a deal as favorable as the Iranian nuclear deal with the North Koreans.

00:46:32.400 But we'll have the essential distinction that it will not be concluded by Barack Obama.

00:46:40.340 So really, this is the level at which American foreign policy is now operating?

00:46:44.420 Yeah. I mean, look, that's the level at which Donald Trump is operating. You can certainly, if you are, let's say, John Bolton, Donald Trump's national security advisor, you can have a more strategic rationale.

00:46:57.920 But the only way that you can understand that rationale is if you are moving in one way or another toward a policy of regime change in Iran.

00:47:08.380 John Bolton has been very clear that he doesn't think that we can ever have an effective deal

00:47:14.240 or ever have a responsible actor in Iran as long as this regime is in charge of Iran.

00:47:18.500 And that means pretty clearly that if you want to solve this problem,

00:47:24.040 you have to move toward some policy that's going to get you to regime change.

00:47:29.860 And in that way, obviously, you would not want the nuclear deal.

00:47:34.140 What you would want is an international coalition that was worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons to create enemies against Iran.

00:47:44.140 You'd want to go back to the days of 2014 where everybody was allied against the Iranians.

00:47:52.000 And so that makes a certain amount of sense.

00:47:54.880 It's very clear that's not what Donald Trump was trying to do.

00:47:57.240 He ran on getting the United States out of the Middle East, not on fighting another regime change war with a yet stronger regime in the Middle East.

00:48:08.300 So I don't think that's in his mind, but that is where his policy is pushing us.

00:48:16.420 So, I mean, what would you see as, I mean, let's say that Trump has his way.

00:48:21.820 What are going to be the long-term implications, do you think?

00:48:24.020 um well trump will probably have his way when it comes to the iranian nuclear deal i don't

00:48:31.860 think that it really holds together without uh without the united states um and i'm very nervous

00:48:38.720 about uh the the implications i think um look i always say i i talked earlier about the

00:48:47.380 policymaker's dilemma thinking and so i always try to get into the mind of the people so let's

00:48:51.540 just imagine for a moment that you're the iranian national security advisor which is you know probably

00:48:56.920 tough job yeah you don't get something wrong it's not you're not just fired right yeah you're

00:49:04.060 literally fired yeah yeah yeah it has many many uh uh disadvantages i think the media is even

00:49:13.860 tougher um so you're the iranian national security advisor and one day you have this you have this

00:49:19.920 nuclear deal, and one day the most powerful country on earth, with a president who seems, you know,

00:49:25.660 withdraws from it, tells the entire world that you're evil, and basically signals that they're

00:49:32.760 coming to get you, which is what, you know, Donald Trump hasn't precisely done that, but many of his

00:49:37.780 subordinates have done that in ways which you don't have to be paranoid to be afraid of.

00:49:43.920 What would you do? Well, you know, I mean, we just discussed it in the case of the United Kingdom.

00:49:49.140 you would develop nuclear weapons immediately. That's exactly what I would do, because basically

00:49:56.200 you've been told that a country with the most powerful military in the world is out to get you.

00:50:00.860 So my suspicion will be that over the next several months that the Iranians will turn back 0.99

00:50:07.420 toward creating a nuclear program, just because that's what I would do.

00:50:14.060 I could be wrong about that. I don't really understand what's going on in the Iranian

00:50:18.400 regime. I know it's very contested. But there were a lot of people in Iran at the time the

00:50:24.600 nuclear deal was concluded and since that have been saying exactly the opposite of what Donald

00:50:30.140 Trump was saying. This is a bad deal for us. We need these nuclear weapons because if we don't

00:50:35.080 have them, eventually the Americans will come for us. And so this will verify everything that they 0.90

00:50:41.920 have been saying. So they'll create they'll they'll move toward that. And that will mean that

00:50:47.620 The United States and Israel and Saudi Arabia will try to resurrect the international coalition against them.

00:50:55.200 I'm not sure if they'll succeed in bringing back the Europeans and the Russians and the Chinese who might feel pretty burnt by this, 0.99

00:51:03.240 but they might or at least succeed in bringing back the Europeans, and they'll try to create a lot of economic pressure on Iran.

00:51:12.420 The first phase in the typical sort of American regime change script is you create pressure on the regime.

00:51:19.120 You assert that there is a democratic opposition, which is just yearning to be breathed free.

00:51:24.880 We've seen how that works.

00:51:26.340 But it is oppressed by the regime.

00:51:28.260 There's always a degree of truth to that, but usually exaggerated.

00:51:31.280 and you try to stimulate regime change from within,

00:51:37.280 sometimes by also having a program on the side to support the people who want to do that within the country.

00:51:45.760 When that doesn't work, you start to up the level of enmity between both sides

00:51:55.260 and to create a reason to have a greater conflict

00:52:00.540 so that you can devote more American resources

00:52:03.380 and more allied resources to the struggle.

00:52:07.000 And in the Iraq case, that ended.

00:52:08.720 That was a long period.

00:52:11.060 That was 12 years, basically, from the first Gulf War to the second Gulf War

00:52:15.300 where these dynamics were going on.

00:52:19.060 And that ended with an American invasion.

00:52:21.400 I think an American invasion of Iran is very, very unlikely.

00:52:25.260 But a sort of long-term conflict in which there's even force used between the two of them is definitely possible because I think there will be people in the United States who will believe that regime change is both necessary and possible if we keep up the pressure for long enough.

00:52:44.580 So it sounds to me like what you're saying with Donald Trump is that essentially the world's policeman is withdrawing from the world to some extent, and you think there's going to be more crime because of it.

00:52:55.260 No, I wouldn't say that's exactly what I'm saying. Certainly not in the Iran case, actually. And again, this gets to the confusion of Donald Trump. Donald Trump definitely ran on, we don't want to be the policeman.

00:53:08.400 Right. He definitely said, I'm not interested in Middle Eastern wars. But his policy and the policy of a lot of his, the avowed policy of a lot of his subordinates, including people like John Bolton, is specifically to be the policeman in places like the Middle East and specifically to police the Iranian regime.

00:53:32.400 So there's a huge contradiction here.

00:53:35.180 If you didn't want to be the world's policeman, the nuclear deal was a great idea, right? 0.99

00:53:40.780 Because it allows you to say, well, we've dealt with the nuclear problem, and there are other problems with Iran, but those are easier to deal with. 0.89

00:53:48.020 And the countries in the region can deal with them, or the Russians can deal with them. 0.87

00:53:51.800 Who cares?

00:53:52.420 We only care about nuclear weapons.

00:53:53.760 but once the nuclear weapons are back on the table that is really something which engages

00:54:00.280 the American public which engages American security interests because we're especially

00:54:05.600 scared of nuclear weapons and that brings you back in to the Middle East you know does Donald

00:54:12.400 Trump understand this contradiction I have no idea he doesn't really seem that interested in it

00:54:16.840 Donald Trump bless him I wish I had this capacity he doesn't seem to care about consistency

00:54:23.020 um it's probably what's made him a great politician uh and so he is you know they say that uh that

00:54:33.880 the mark of genius is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same

00:54:38.440 time and not go crazy Donald Trump can hold dozens so in that sense he is a very stable genius

00:54:46.640 he's the best genius in the world yeah he's the greatest genius there's something to that I mean

00:54:52.240 I have to say that that would keep me awake at night, the idea that I was both trying to get the United States out of the Middle East 0.99

00:54:59.280 and taking measures that seemed to be getting the United States into greater conflict with Iran.

00:55:06.420 His subordinates, and he has both types of subordinates, are struggling against these two issues.

00:55:12.780 And so the result basically is confusion, and you can read a lot of different policies into what the United States is doing.

00:55:20.300 If you're focused on Iran, you're thinking he's trying to get in.

00:55:24.480 If you're focused on Syria, you're thinking he's trying to get out.

00:55:27.880 And these things don't really work well together.

00:55:30.380 But that's Donald Trump.

00:55:32.340 I think that's a fantastic place to leave him.

00:55:36.120 Yeah, we can do that.

00:55:38.800 We always ask the final question, Jeremy.

00:55:42.020 So the final question is always in this podcast.

00:55:44.460 What is the number one issue that you think is incredibly important

00:55:47.520 that people simply aren't talking about at the moment?

00:55:50.300 But, yeah, I was struggling with that issue, with that question, because from my perspective...

00:55:57.840 Jeremy, you've just given away a secret that we ask the question in advance and you get a chance to prepare it.

00:56:03.480 This show is ruined forever now.

00:56:05.880 Thank you.

00:56:06.580 Sorry to give away your secret.

00:56:09.860 Yeah, no, I actually had all of the questions in advance.

00:56:13.840 Even we don't know all the questions in advance.

00:56:15.720 It's definitely not true.

00:56:17.500 Yeah.

00:56:17.700 Yeah. No, I think it is helpful to be able to think about that. And it's hard from my perspective

00:56:23.560 because I feel like I talk about everything all the time. And people are always saying to me,

00:56:30.360 yeah, we're not paying enough attention to Chinese banks or something. And then I go out

00:56:37.080 and find 1,100 different articles on Chinese banks. We have a massive media environment. We

00:56:43.520 You have a massive expert community.

00:56:45.940 We're paying attention to virtually everything.

00:56:49.480 Some things don't have political salience,

00:56:51.360 but that's really about how the public receives them.

00:56:55.680 Your friend Gideon actually made this point on this very show

00:56:58.440 that he wrote an article about something that he thought was really important

00:57:01.840 and then no one read it.

00:57:03.400 So quite often, even if you are talking about something that you think is essential,

00:57:07.520 no one really cares.

00:57:09.180 Yeah, what can you do about that?

00:57:11.400 You can't really make people...

00:57:12.980 And frankly, a lot of times it's rational.

00:57:14.640 I mean, people shouldn't care about things that don't affect them immediately,

00:57:17.960 given that they have a lot of things that do affect them immediately and a limited bandwidth.

00:57:24.000 I have to say that, so to my mind, I'm always focused on what makes people care about things.

00:57:31.240 And I say my number one frustration with the reasons that people care about things

00:57:36.400 is the lack of statistical and probabilistic reasoning in the public.

00:57:42.980 and if there were if you know if i were emperor of the world

00:57:46.740 that's a great way to start a statement yeah yeah no i think this is a good idea

00:57:52.440 and that's trump's ultimate ambition isn't it emperor of the world it's mine too he's somewhat

00:57:57.440 closer but if i were emperor of the world i would make everybody go to a statistics and

00:58:03.640 probability class i would then be overthrown immediately yes but really one of the things

00:58:09.600 that's fascinating about the inability of people like me to convince anyone, including, I have to

00:58:17.960 hasten to add, my mother, about my policy beliefs, is that they don't reason according to large

00:58:26.260 numbers. I find this to be both fascinating and frustrating. I guess if you think about it,

00:58:34.380 and there's a lot of sort of evolutionary study on this,

00:58:37.320 that people, that we evolved in communities of about 150 people.

00:58:43.440 And so if you live in a community of 150 people

00:58:47.240 and somebody gets eaten by a bear,

00:58:50.660 it makes sense for you to be really, really scared of bears.

00:58:54.680 And if the neighboring village is harboring bears,

00:58:58.080 it makes sense even for you to, you know,

00:59:00.860 have a problem with that neighboring village.

00:59:02.380 But if you live in a community of 65 million, which is the UK, or 7 billion, which is the world, and somebody gets eaten by a bear, even if that person gets eaten by the bear on live television, it doesn't make any sense for you to be worried about bears.

00:59:21.200 You should just go on with your life as if no one was ever eaten by a bear.

00:59:25.900 But that is not what we do.

00:59:28.520 When someone gets eaten by a bear on live television, we create a war on bears.

00:59:34.800 And we invade countries.

00:59:38.420 And so I'm obviously talking about terrorism or anything else, but I think it exists on a whole bunch of different issues.

00:59:47.540 If you're trying to tell people what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of,

00:59:53.840 they don't understand what you're saying because they don't understand what large numbers mean.

01:00:00.300 They don't understand that it probably doesn't make sense to go out and fight a war in Iraq or Syria

01:00:09.080 to prevent terrorism back here when you have much bigger problems.

01:00:13.560 and, in fact, terrorism isn't much of a threat because it looks so good on television.

01:00:19.080 And I think that this sort of lack of statistical and probabilistic reasoning

01:00:24.600 is one of the main problems that we have in our public policy.

01:00:29.060 I have no idea what to do about it because we're not going to improve it,

01:00:34.180 but I do think that it is the issue which people are paying.

01:00:37.880 It is the problem with our public discourse that people are paying very little attention to.

01:00:42.760 That's a really great point.

01:00:44.260 I'm just to end the show.

01:00:46.480 John, before we let you go, you are on Twitter at?

01:00:49.540 J.Y. Shapiro.

01:00:50.760 J.Y. Shapiro, perfect.

01:00:52.380 I'm Constantine Kissin at Constantine Kissin.

01:00:54.540 And I'm Francis Foster at Failing Human.

01:00:56.580 If you enjoyed the show this week, please subscribe to us on YouTube.

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01:01:10.160 and we'll see you in about a week's time.

01:01:11.700 Thanks for watching.

01:01:12.540 Thank you.

01:01:13.420 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - June 25, 2018

Jeremy Shapiro on Trump, Trident, Israel & Iran

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