00:00:55.040So 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.
00:02:43.340You 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.
00:02:53.800So 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.
00:03:02.980And 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.
00:03:13.440And I did that, and that was really quite helpful for me
00:03:15.780to sort of understand the role of politics.
00:03:19.440I came a bit late to it, but to understand the role of politics in life
00:03:25.040and to understand what the big questions were.
00:03:28.240And I spent several years in a master's in a Ph.D. program,
00:03:35.720So you're a dropout. That means you must be very good.
00:03:38.760All the dropouts always do well, right?
00:03:40.300Yeah, 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.
00:03:54.440And 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.
00:04:04.200and i uh and i moved to washington both for a job and for a woman uh i eventually lost the woman but
00:04:15.320i uh unfortunately managed to keep the job not really sure frankly that that was the right choice
00:04:21.700but there it was and i i i ended up working at uh at i started at rand which is a big think tank
00:04:28.960which works mostly for the U.S. Defense Department in Washington, I sort of, I think I did something
00:04:35.340which is very helpful for anyone starting out, which is I showed up as an intern and I just
00:04:41.000refused to leave. And so eventually they gave me a job. And, you know, that was great. I mean,
00:04:48.600because you were really sort of wrestling with policy ideas, trying to help the government
00:04:53.600to understand what the broader political implications of what they were doing was,
00:04:58.440and really just, frankly, learning a lot.
00:05:00.180I mean, these are really great ways to learn.
00:05:03.300And I moved from there to Brookings, which is a big think tank in Washington.
00:05:11.000And at Brookings, where I mostly worked on U.S.-European relations,
00:05:17.200I was able also to get really involved in sort of democratic foreign policy circles
00:05:23.160and to work on campaigns, first for John Kerry and then for Barack Obama as a sort of foreign policy advisor.
00:05:32.860There are dozens or even hundreds of these in a U.S. presidential campaign,
00:05:37.540but they really give you some insight into the way that foreign policy plays out in the campaign,
00:05:43.520and they just give you access to the people and to the process of a political campaign.
00:05:51.240And 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.
00:06:04.060uh and i did that because not because i preferred him really to hillary clinton
00:06:11.020uh but because i found him to be interesting and because the hillary clinton campaign was
00:06:16.360extremely crowded uh as one as one of my friends put it i'm tired of being in the same room having
00:06:21.920the same arguments with everybody that i used to argue with in the clinton administration
00:06:25.660sounds like my facebook feed to be honest with you yeah i think the clinton campaign is a little
00:06:30.280bit about the Facebook feed. It's people who've been together for too long, kind of a problem
00:06:34.320that she's had for a long time. And the Obama campaign was just much more exciting. It really
00:06:39.980wasn't philosophically different, I would say, but it had a real different kind of energy to it,
00:06:46.260I thought. And when they asked me to be an advisor, I said, sure, why not? I didn't expect
00:06:52.500him to win. I'm not even sure I wanted him to win in terms of my career. Because I was
00:07:00.120pretty happy with the think tank, and the idea of going into government was quite scary
00:07:05.080to me. And when, contrary to my plans, he won, which really was a huge shock. I still
00:07:12.500haven't quite gotten over it. I went in and worked at the State Department, first as an
00:07:21.840advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, who had been a colleague
00:07:28.040of mine at Brookings and had been the guy that brought me into the campaign. And then on the
00:07:34.840policy planning staff, where I worked pretty closely with Hillary Clinton and with her big
00:07:40.180advisor, Jake Sullivan. And, you know, that was incredible. I mean, it was working in government,
00:07:47.980at least in the U.S. government, is really interesting, amazing even. It's horrible,
00:07:54.020I would have to say it's I always compare it to like a car wreck you know it's like horrible and
00:08:00.640tragic and unavoidable but you cannot take your eyes off of it you can't stop watching because
00:08:08.300it is really fascinating and you learn a tremendous amount some things that you really never wanted to
00:08:14.440know about how government works about how policy works and even about how human nature works and
00:08:23.220And it has really informed my subsequent work.
00:08:28.920I think it's had a greater sort of, I don't think I actually accomplished almost anything.
00:08:33.740And even the things that I accomplished, I'm not sure they were a good idea.
00:08:40.680But I think I learned more from that experience than any other experience I've had.
00:08:45.820Arguably it's made me a bit too cynical, but I do think that everybody should do that for
00:08:51.420at least a few years just to sort of test their assumptions and to understand what I
00:08:57.860call the policymaking dilemma is, the pressures that the policymakers are under.
00:09:03.060I feel as if people who've never been in government don't, and frankly, quite a few
00:09:08.660have, don't really have an appreciation for the variety of pressures and the types
00:09:14.980of constraints that policymakers typically operate under.
00:09:20.520The sort of view outside is, oh, these people have a lot of power.
00:15:33.680And 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.
00:15:54.820I 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.
00:16:10.200They'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.
00:16:18.540When 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,
00:16:32.580they were saying, well, you know, maybe you should get, maybe you should, you know, get more
00:16:39.240experience, get more into Washington, know people more. And he had the insight to understand that
00:16:45.120actually the only time he could run for president was in his first term as senator. And if you look
00:16:50.800at the 2016 Republican primary, what you see is that every new senator basically ran for president
00:16:58.140on the Republican side in 2016, because they realized that if they didn't, they would have
00:17:04.960too much of a record, too much experience to run for president. It only counts against you
00:17:11.120these days. And I think that future presidential candidates are going to understand that,
00:17:17.520already are understanding that. So, you know, I don't know if Oprah wants to be president.
00:17:23.580I know that she couldn't be worse than Donald Trump.
00:17:27.780I don't think she knows really anything about being president,
00:17:32.140but I don't think that it's really important to have a lot of sort of
00:17:37.440of the typical experience that we generally associate with presidents
00:26:35.040I feel as if that debate here is very often submerged in an imperial nostalgia, which doesn't really help anybody.
00:26:43.600So in a roundabout way, you're basically saying Brexit was a mistake.
00:26:48.260I hope that that wasn't a roundabout way of saying that.
00:26:50.820Yeah, I mean, Brexit is a spectacular mistake in my view.
00:26:55.020It is very much Turkey's voting for Christmas.
00:26:58.000And, 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.
00:27:16.000But there are really only downsides, and it could be terrible.
00:27:20.000And 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.
00:27:33.840And I think actually even the Remain side was really unwilling to do that.
00:27:38.540They were unwilling, and, you know, I understand why in political communication it's not good to tell people you have to do this.
00:27:45.940And that's, again, you know, why I'm not a good politician.
00:27:48.240I 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.
00:28:01.240It needs them even because the United States isn't a reliable enough partner.
00:28:06.240idea of you know the going back to the empire or going back to a special relationship which has
00:28:14.080never really existed uh or certainly not existed in the way that the british think of it um is is
00:28:20.360a fantasy well i wanted to ask you about trident britain's nuclear weapons before i do i just want
00:28:25.260to say this table is this microphone rather very sensitive so when you tap the table it sounds to
00:28:31.360the listeners like trident has been launched uh so sorry about that i'll try not to launch any
00:28:36.540nuclear weapons but i'm curious you talk about a cruel and harsh world i mean in the world where
00:28:39.840russia is running around doing the things that it's doing and with the backup of its nuclear
00:28:44.100weapons i mean russia is very clear about that they they the russian regime says we are powerful
00:28:49.020because we have nukes we have a lot of nukes right what do you make of the debate or the
00:28:54.320conversations around trident jeremy corbyn the labor leader in this country has said that he
00:28:58.040wants to get rid of it. Other people are saying this would be ridiculous. What do you think
00:29:02.300would be the impact for Britain of losing its nuclear deterrent?
00:29:07.320Well, I think it would be a bad idea for Britain to lose its nuclear deterrent overall. I think
00:29:13.940a nuclear deterrent, particularly for a mature country like Britain, is broadly speaking a good
00:29:19.580idea. And it does sort of prevent the worst possible catastrophes. I would say, however,
00:29:29.780that particularly when you look at Trident and when you look at the way that Britain is maintaining
00:29:33.760its nuclear deterrent, it is extraordinarily expensive. It is a massive drain on the British
00:29:41.040defense budget. On a certain level, the British defense budget and almost a lot of the British
00:29:48.120public purse is becoming just focused. Frankly, if you look at British public spending these days,
00:29:53.800it basically looks like the NHS and the nuclear deterrent. I mean, that's a slight exaggeration.
00:30:00.560Pensions as well. Pensions as well, of course, yes. And I think that what the British need to do
00:30:08.540is I certainly wouldn't advise getting rid of the nuclear deterrent. I would be thinking very hard
00:30:13.900about whether Trident is the right way to do that, and I would be thinking very hard
00:30:18.380about how they can better cooperate with their partners, right, I mean, with a nuclear deterrent.
00:30:26.640I mean, the French have a nuclear deterrent, which is also weighing them down.
00:30:30.880The Germans aren't participating in it at all, but, of course, are benefiting from it,
00:30:36.040and that's true of the rest of Europe.
00:30:37.600And the great insight about the European Union, particularly European Union foreign policy, is that basically you guys all want the same thing.
00:30:48.060You're not really competing with each other, which is a sort of historical miracle at this point.
00:30:53.440And so it makes sense to combine your efforts when you're a medium-sized country is in a harsh and cruel world.
00:31:02.120I 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.
00:31:18.380So 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.
00:31:38.040No, I wouldn't advocate – I would agree.
00:31:40.100I wouldn't advocate that Britain should get rid of its nuclear deterrent.
00:31:43.640I'm not sure about the trident aspect of it.
00:31:47.360A submarine-launched deterrent like they have is extremely expensive.
00:31:53.080So 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.
00:38:13.880Yeah. 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.
00:38:27.940And if you want to do something, anything, you have to – you will very often create at least short-term violence.
00:38:39.380I 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?
00:38:48.960And here, I think U.S. presidents have felt that if you want to bring Israel and Palestine together,
00:38:55.480you need to be able to coerce both of them, right?
00:38:59.160You need to be able to have carrots and sticks for both of them.
00:39:05.280And a critical carrot and or stick against the Israelis in creating a negotiation is the status of Jerusalem.
00:39:14.120So 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.
00:39:31.020And it's just a tenant of negotiations that you don't play your strongest card at the beginning.
00:39:40.060You know, Donald Trump, I don't think he does.
00:39:42.220It's not that he doesn't understand that exactly.
00:39:43.800it's that he doesn't seem to care he's interested in making a big splash he's interested in having
00:39:50.620an impact immediately long term for him is next tuesday and so he doesn't really seem to care
00:39:58.700as far as i can tell uh because i mean you could say he doesn't know but but at least 100 people
00:40:04.720have told him directly and he uh he either doesn't take it in or doesn't care um and so
00:40:13.120I don't think that this has really furthered the cause of peace and not just because of the
00:40:19.660immediate violence which is bad enough but also because it makes the structure of the negotiation
00:40:25.080a lot harder you know having said that and maybe that weighs on Donald Trump it wasn't going well
00:40:32.480anyway and it's not really clear that he spoiled anything because it's not clear that there was
00:40:39.380anything to spoil. But, you know, I think in a situation that appears hopeless, like the
00:40:48.800Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, it probably doesn't make sense to just make it all the more
00:40:54.360hopeless because you want to have a good photo opportunity. And I think that that's what he's
00:40:58.720done. So you're saying that the decision to move the embassy was based entirely on ego?
00:41:02.860Yeah, 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.
00:41:25.640He doesn't really have anything he wants to accomplish in the long term.
00:41:29.160He's not trying to create a specific role for the United States and the world.
00:41:33.640He's not really trying to reshape the world according to any sort of ideology or image.
00:41:40.400Donald Trump has one very, very clear ideology, and it's the greater magnificence of Donald Trump.
00:41:56.480Picking up on that, then, what do you make of Donald Trump-led withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal?
00:42:02.960Can you, first of all, just for anyone who doesn't know what it is, including me and Francis to a large extent,
00:42:08.340what was the Iran nuclear deal, what still is the Iran nuclear deal, and why did Donald Trump decide to pull out of it?
00:42:14.640So the Iran nuclear deal, which is the technical term for it, is the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
00:42:24.880Yeah, yeah. Anything with an acronym like that must be good.
00:42:27.980It 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.
00:42:46.680And then those six had a deal with Iran, essentially.
00:42:51.660And the essential deal was a very simple one, really.
00:42:55.800The Iranians agreed to freeze their nuclear program to dismantle their nuclear enrichment capacity
00:43:03.240and to submit to a very, very intrusive regime of inspections to verify that.
00:43:09.880And 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.
00:43:31.920This was a really, really controversial deal, particularly in the United States and Iran.
00:43:37.600And 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.
00:43:55.180Iran is involved in a lot of civil wars in the region in places like Syria and Yemen and Iraq.
00:44:02.600and it hadn't addressed Iran's ballistic missile capability
00:44:07.500and that Iran was still a very bad actor.
00:44:10.180You know, the response to this from the officials that created the deal was,
00:44:14.500yeah, that's true, you know, one thing at a time.
00:44:17.080What we did in this deal was address the nuclear program,
00:44:20.960and that's really important for all the reasons that we talked about
00:44:26.380and the ways that nuclear weapons affect negotiations.
00:44:28.320But didn't Donald Trump also say that there was cash involved,
00:44:31.700that the West was actually giving Iran cash?
00:45:00.420And 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.
00:45:12.220But, yeah, I mean, Iran – the intent of this deal, going beyond cash, was to give Iran economic benefits.
00:45:20.060So 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?
00:45:38.560You 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.
00:45:54.620Right. OK, well, I think what he's trying to do is this.
00:46:01.380I 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.
00:46:15.540I 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.
00:46:32.400But we'll have the essential distinction that it will not be concluded by Barack Obama.
00:46:40.340So really, this is the level at which American foreign policy is now operating?
00:46:44.420Yeah. 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.
00:46:57.920But 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.
00:47:08.380John Bolton has been very clear that he doesn't think that we can ever have an effective deal
00:47:14.240or ever have a responsible actor in Iran as long as this regime is in charge of Iran.
00:47:18.500And that means pretty clearly that if you want to solve this problem,
00:47:24.040you have to move toward some policy that's going to get you to regime change.
00:47:29.860And in that way, obviously, you would not want the nuclear deal.
00:47:34.140What you would want is an international coalition that was worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons to create enemies against Iran.
00:47:44.140You'd want to go back to the days of 2014 where everybody was allied against the Iranians.
00:47:52.000And so that makes a certain amount of sense.
00:47:54.880It's very clear that's not what Donald Trump was trying to do.
00:47:57.240He 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.
00:48:08.300So I don't think that's in his mind, but that is where his policy is pushing us.
00:48:16.420So, I mean, what would you see as, I mean, let's say that Trump has his way.
00:48:21.820What are going to be the long-term implications, do you think?
00:48:24.020um well trump will probably have his way when it comes to the iranian nuclear deal i don't
00:48:31.860think that it really holds together without uh without the united states um and i'm very nervous
00:48:38.720about uh the the implications i think um look i always say i i talked earlier about the
00:48:47.380policymaker's dilemma thinking and so i always try to get into the mind of the people so let's
00:48:51.540just imagine for a moment that you're the iranian national security advisor which is you know probably
00:48:56.920tough job yeah you don't get something wrong it's not you're not just fired right yeah you're
00:49:04.060literally fired yeah yeah yeah it has many many uh uh disadvantages i think the media is even
00:49:13.860tougher um so you're the iranian national security advisor and one day you have this you have this
00:49:19.920nuclear deal, and one day the most powerful country on earth, with a president who seems, you know,
00:49:25.660withdraws from it, tells the entire world that you're evil, and basically signals that they're
00:49:32.760coming to get you, which is what, you know, Donald Trump hasn't precisely done that, but many of his
00:49:37.780subordinates have done that in ways which you don't have to be paranoid to be afraid of.
00:49:43.920What would you do? Well, you know, I mean, we just discussed it in the case of the United Kingdom.
00:49:49.140you would develop nuclear weapons immediately. That's exactly what I would do, because basically
00:49:56.200you've been told that a country with the most powerful military in the world is out to get you.
00:50:00.860So my suspicion will be that over the next several months that the Iranians will turn back
00:50:07.420toward creating a nuclear program, just because that's what I would do.
00:50:14.060I could be wrong about that. I don't really understand what's going on in the Iranian
00:50:18.400regime. I know it's very contested. But there were a lot of people in Iran at the time the
00:50:24.600nuclear deal was concluded and since that have been saying exactly the opposite of what Donald
00:50:30.140Trump was saying. This is a bad deal for us. We need these nuclear weapons because if we don't
00:50:35.080have them, eventually the Americans will come for us. And so this will verify everything that they
00:50:41.920have been saying. So they'll create they'll they'll move toward that. And that will mean that
00:50:47.620The United States and Israel and Saudi Arabia will try to resurrect the international coalition against them.
00:50:55.200I'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,
00:51:03.240but they might or at least succeed in bringing back the Europeans, and they'll try to create a lot of economic pressure on Iran.
00:51:12.420The first phase in the typical sort of American regime change script is you create pressure on the regime.
00:51:19.120You assert that there is a democratic opposition, which is just yearning to be breathed free.
00:52:19.060And that ended with an American invasion.
00:52:21.400I think an American invasion of Iran is very, very unlikely.
00:52:25.260But 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.
00:52:44.580So 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.
00:52:55.260No, 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.
00:53:08.400Right. 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.
00:53:35.180If you didn't want to be the world's policeman, the nuclear deal was a great idea, right?
00:53:40.780Because 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.
00:53:48.020And the countries in the region can deal with them, or the Russians can deal with them.
00:58:50.660it makes sense for you to be really, really scared of bears.
00:58:54.680And if the neighboring village is harboring bears,
00:58:58.080it makes sense even for you to, you know,
00:59:00.860have a problem with that neighboring village.
00:59:02.380But 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.
00:59:21.200You should just go on with your life as if no one was ever eaten by a bear.