Human Rights and American Foreign Policy with Andrew Preston

If the puzzle that you want to solve is explaining why the US went to board me and how much

“is still a puzzle that historians grab with, if you want to explain that, then the answer”

that you're not going to find the answer is anywhere except for the way it is.

[music] Foreign policy discourse is often characterized by the relationship between national security, on the one hand, and ethical considerations, on the other, of these ethical considerations. Human rights are essential component alongside humanitarian intervention and broader peacekeeping narratives. However, in great powers, particularly the United States, these ideas are far from untested.

Human rights as a notion has been used throughout American history by different actors, both state and non-state, through entailed different things and advocate for different causes.

“In this episode of the Declaration of Podcast, I'm joined by Professor Andrew Preston from Claire College Cambridge.”

Preston Andrew is a historian of American foreign policy and American disorder role in the world.

He's written particularly about the idea of national security and how it relates with more abstract concepts like religion and ethics. In this episode, we discuss the ideas of international history and its challenges. We discuss the relationship between national security and more ideal and normative considerations. And we talk about Andrew's particular idea of the American experience of free security and how this is influenced its role in the world. From the Cambridge Centre for Governance and Human Rights, my name is Ed, and you are listening to the Declaration of Podcast.

[music] So hello, and welcome to declarations the podcast out of the Cambridge Centre for Governance and Human Rights. This is the start then of season nine of the podcast, where we're going to be looking particularly at the idea of human rights in a period of omni crisis constructed as a narrative of kind of constant recession and constant crisis in relation perhaps to a more historically optimistic perspective. My name is Ed Parker, I'm going to be one of your hosts for this season.

I'm a third year studying history of politics and a black college so I'm particularly going to take through some of the earlier episodes.

And we're going to try and historicise and look at a more historical perspective on the current position of human rights in political discourse. Later on we'll then try and apply that some more varied modern context and take a board analytical approach, the topic. But it's a great place to start then today to be with Professor Andrew Preston. Thank you very much for joining us, Andrew. So my pleasure is for having me. So Andrew is a professor here at Cambridge in American Foreign Relations. Andrew's published work on the Vietnam War, National Security and the idea of religion in foreign affairs particularly.

So we're going to have a conversation starting off with the ideas of domestic pressure in America on foreign affairs. Andrew is written for the love review of books, the new statesman, Washington Post, among other publications and appeared on other podcasts. Andrew also on top of the crowning academic achievements interviewed me as a prospective undergraduate three years ago and was right here in this room. It would have been online, actually. Of course it was.

Yeah, that's right. You were kind enough not to correct my pronunciation of these cities at 19, which I really appreciate. How did you say? I gave it a few kind of ideas I think. Oh, I see, okay. Yeah, I wouldn't have corrected you.

And then obviously didn't cost you.

“I'll also, I think you got an A for reference.”

I think I also had a retainer at the time, so I think if I tried to pronounce it, translate correctly, then it would have come back in the list of years ago. But yeah, thanks very much for joining us, Andrew. There's a general structure for the episode that I quite let to start in a broader understanding of how you're defining foreign relations and how you're understanding the relationship between the domestic and the international and your work. Because particularly looking at something like human rights, we're maybe looking more domestic pressure than we are of geopolitical considerations.

And then I'd like to go into kind of discussion about how that pressure is applied in practice, so potentially a bit not more protests and how our protest articulates and requests for changes in foreign policy and how maybe historians can try and study that. But as a kind of starting point, would you like to tell me a little bit about your work and what you're kind of approaching? And maybe what you're trying to do when you're looking at foreign affairs and foreign relations. Yeah, well you covered it pretty well in your introduction of telling people what I specialize in, but I am an historian of American foreign relations.

So that's where most of my research occurs and I'm writing a book right now on the United States and the origins of the Pacific War.

“So the war that breaks out with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.”

And I'm looking at the 1930s and they're amazingly hasn't been a book on the US and the 30s and Asia for about 40 years. So I'm kind of plugging a gap there, but I'm also as I'm doing my research finding loads of stuff fantastic evidence that is helping me frame this narrative history. I just want to tell the story. But it's also going to, I hope it's going to allow me to make some bigger arguments about situating America's role in the world. So that's kind of my bread and butter.

As you said, my first book was on the origins of the Vietnam war and the bureaucratic politics.

I'm going to have bureaucratic politics created within Washington. I created the conditions and led to a lot of the policies that ended up leading the US to war and Vietnam. And my second book was on how it was a very, very different book, but it was on how American religion is shaped. American attitudes to war and diplomacy. And as you said, my work is very domestic as well as foreign.

And I like to find that nexus between domestic politics and domestic political culture, especially. So not just high politics, but the things that people talk about that they argue about. The things that we're going to be talking about in your podcast. So I look at the domestic political scene, the cultural scene, and merge it with America abroad and how America. Especially how America inserts its power in the world.

So for your listeners who are students, just sort of sort of slight nerdy, historiographical. Yeah. But my field used to be known as diplomatic history as American and diplomatic history. It was sort of underwent a name change in the 1980s, 1990s. And into this century, away from diplomatic history, which is just really about purely defined.

It's about what diplomats say to each other. It's about top down diplomacy. It's president's prime minister's secretaries of state. And then the people who work for them in foreign ministries and embassies.

“And that of course is important, but if that's all you're looking at, it gets a little bit boring.”

Yeah. And my field underwent a complete revolution in the '80s, '90s, into the 21st century by bringing a bottom up perspective. Yeah, to complement, not to replace, but to complement the top down perspective of politicians and diplomats. So you know, people started looking at, I mean, not for the first time other historians had looked at these actors before, but more attention was paid to business people and missionaries and NGOs and human rights workers.

And people like that bankers tourists. There's some really good literature on American foreign policy.

You've seen through the eyes of travel-ish tourists. It's amazing stuff.

And not just in that period of the 1980s, '90s and onwards, but earlier before going back to the 19th century. And so my route into that was through missionaries and about in religious actors. But so as a result, the field then, even though the flagship journal is still called diplomatic history, because it's such a label that's such a famous, in my world, it's just such a known brand. And being like changing the name of Coca-Cola, I mean, you just don't do that.

“But the field is now nobody really calls it diplomatic history anymore.”

The first themselves is a diplomatic story. And it's more American-form relations. Yeah, all that, that's my preferred term because you can bring in the bottom up and the top down. So it's a foreign relations as opposed to foreign policy. Exactly. That's precisely the way of putting it. And so immigrants is a huge part of American-form relations now.

Whereas in the old diplomatic history, immigrants only popped up here and there, which doesn't make any sense. Yeah, okay. The term of art now is the U.S. and the world. Yeah, that's the history of the U.S. and the world.

I'm not a big fan and I'm not the first to make this point, but I'm not a big fan of that term,

because if we're going to use something like that, I would prefer the U.S. in the world. Because the U.S. and the world kind of accepts... All I call it, it's exactly, it's a dichotomy where the U.S. is equivalent to the world. United States and you have the world, and as if the two were kind of equal, they kind of acceptionalizes the United States. So I like the U.S. in the world.

And what that does is, and I'll shut up here in the United States question. But one of the other big turns in my field was the transnational term. So international history is kind of like the diplomatic history where it's relations between states. And therefore, you're looking at state actors and usually very high-level state actors. And the transnational term brought in a kind of social history about on a global scale,

where you're looking at the interactions between bankers and tourists. And missionaries and immigrants. And the flow of people around the world across borders. And my route into the cultural term, the social term, but also the transnational term, the missionaries.

And a lot of my work then is kind of embraced that duality,

between the foreign and the domestic, between the international and transnational.

“So that's why I'm not a political scientist.”

Because I just couldn't be parsimonious. I couldn't have a tight model. I'm like most historians, I'm just too messy. Well, that was the day's question I suppose. Because international relations theorists kind of took a pretty similar turn

in the period you were talking about with Jerberlitz, but the diplomat's history moving more towards the history of foreign relations. And that's also a similar sort of period where... Like, instructive international relations. Yeah, so that's what we're constructed, isn't right.

Where, instead of kind of separating the sphere of international politics from politics, in other areas, I out there is still looking at domestic contestation and they're looking at pressure from below, instead of dealing with kind of rational agents on international stage. And naturally that sort of...

Well, I think that's a very compelling way to interpret the international relations and it's not very compelling to look at it without that. It sort of blows the distinction between the international and the domestic and the sense that international relations, that is a category of analysis. It's been seems because it's not such a separate discipline anymore.

It seems quite unnecessary sometimes to have that. Oh, actually. Do you still think there's a... I'm not not saying that there isn't.

“But what is the place then for specifically foreign relations?”

As a motive? You mean specifically foreign relations or specifically...

It's basically diplomatic history.

It's basically the study of foreign relations. From what perspective, from like a top-down perspective, or like is there still... Is it still a kind of useful category, I suppose? Oh, it's just, I think so. I don't think I'd have a job if it wasn't.

So, I'm not at Turkey going to vote for Thanksgiving. No, of course we need the term. And we need the study of foreign relations. And actually, we still need... So, of course, that doesn't exist.

It came for Jenny Moore because of how we had some curriculum reform. A few years ago, but it was called historical argument in practice. And I used to teach the glass to all history students on international history and transnational history and leading students through the difference between international transnational, which I did in the previous answer in a nutshell.

And one of the points that I would make is that they both need each other. You can study one in isolation of the other. And you still need as unfashionable, because it's not... I mean, just in academics or it goes, it's not as fashionable as it certainly used to be. Just to study the kind of power brokers, you know, the top-down policy makers,

the one diplomat said to another. methodologically, it's pretty boring because you're just looking at one type of archival source. And you're really just tracing you're connecting the dots and what one diplomat said to another. That's a kind of caricature of it, but it's not at its heart.

That's what you do. But I kind of say what one diplomat said to another diplomat matters a lot. Yeah. Sometimes the fate of nations turns on the decisions of individuals at the top. And so, to go back to my original specialty, the Vietnam War,

there's been the study of the Vietnam War now is so much more interesting than it was.

But it's always been interesting and it's always been interesting.

And that's why I got into it. But it's more interesting now, but it's more complex now because it does bring in a much wider range of actors from either just the anti-war radicals or just the top-down policy makers in the United States. I mean, I'm not talking about people in Southeast Asia at this point, but I'm just thinking of the US. And so now we look at, you know, it's huge range of historical figures who influenced American policy or took part in the Vietnam War or protested against the Vietnam War, whatever.

But if the puzzle that you want to solve is explaining why the US went to war and Vietnam, which is still a puzzle that historians grapple with.

“If you want to explain that, then the answer, you're not going to find the answers anywhere except for the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department and National Security Council.”

Maybe CIA. But you need to understand those in relation to the pressure that they're under. You have absolute right, because the pressures they're under are actually a lot of those pressures are reacted. And a lot of the cultural factors are certainly creating the conditions in which policy makers make decisions. But those same cultural factors, that same wider social and political context.

It's the same context that is leading them not to intervene in laughs in 1962. Right. Not to intervene in China in 1949 or again in 1963 when the US was thinking about intervening to stop China's nuclear program. Just like the speculation over whether the US and Israel are going to strike Iran today to stop a nuclear program. It's exactly the same thing with China in '60 to '63.

So the US does not intervene in East Asia in those particular circumstances, but it does intervene in Vietnam. That's all variables. There are very, exactly. This is the political scientist. I was at double major in history and policy side. So I do have that, and within policy side, it had been concentration of Iran. So I definitely appreciate the need where messy historians sometimes need a bit of tidying up and we need to have that clarity.

Well, you have to look at the individual decision makers, and you have to look at not just the wider context, which you have to look at the pressures they were under. And also their ideals and their aspirations and their hopes. And a lot of that leads you to strategy, high-level politics. I mean domestic politics is not in the cultural sense, but relations between Congress and that sort of thing. That is still hugely, hugely important. We still need to look at that.

But to go back to your question about whether the concept of American form relations as a discipline is still valid.

“I think it absolutely is because we need to understand why the US does what it does in the world.”

Whether you love the US or hate the US, it's extremely powerful.

And it's something you can't avoid. We also have to understand China, we have to understand India. We have to understand lots of countries, but the US is still, and I think it will be for in my children's children's children's lifetime. The US is still the most powerful actor in the world. I don't think that's going to change any time soon. And so we absolutely need to understand whatever you want to call a US diplomatic history, American form relations in the US in the world. Great.

Well that's really something we can continue with. We have to say that this is a podcast is not over.

So I've got to do it in the rest of the day.

I know, I know. I'm just saying you're right. Get it out of the office. It's an empty vessel. That's just retire it, and at the end of the show. So if we're continuing there, the Vietnam War sounds like quite a good place to start as a kind of case study for domestic pressure and for protest.

“And I think we're thinking about this in relation to human rights.”

Often when the state is, the American state is using the language of human rights.

And it's generally, I suppose, to legitimate it's foreign policy objectives in the eyes of the people or to try and apply it.

The moral vernacular to its foreign policy. Do you see the Vietnam protests, particularly the last late 60s, early 70s protest as kind of trying to assert a moral standard as to trying to ask for a moral standard from the state? Is that what what processes about and what what domestic pressure is doing in that context? There's certainly what the protests against the Vietnam War. Yeah, I don't know if it's about what protest is in general, you can have different kinds of protests, but there was absolutely a moral aspect to the anti-war movement.

The anti- Vietnam War movement, not just in the United States, but in Latin America and Europe and other parts of the world as well. It had a very strong moral component, whether it was powered by concerns about human rights depends on how you define human rights. And of course, there's a huge historiography around what human rights means, at least in the American context, when it sort of caught on in American foreign policy or a wider American political culture. That big debate is something that you know more about than I've probably had as beyond the scope of this podcast.

But it depends on how you define human rights, but however you define human rights, certainly there's a very strong moral component to the anti-war movement. Again, it depends on how you define human rights, but if you define self-determination as a human right, which not all is going on. Yeah, but if you do then the administration, Johnson administration, couched the Vietnam War in very strongly moral terms, because that was its whole claim. It was about the self-determination of self-determination to, yes, as a separate sovereign nation state.

So the whole war was about what to do with self-determination. And if you're the United States, and the Americans didn't care that North Vietnam is communist. This isn't a war where you want to reunify Vietnam under non-communist rule. It's all about self-determination. So does self-determination have an legitimacy and the viability to exist as a separate state, a separate nation state? And the U.S. undertook a multi-billion dollar program of nation building in the 1950s and 60s, to sort of allow self-determination to have this independence and this legitimacy in the international sphere.

Or, is that an artificial-created, self-determination, an artificial creation of an 1950-Porty Native Conference, and it would not have existed without U.S. military power. And actually, as one country, it should be re-unified, and the legitimate claimants to a Vietnamese nation state are actually the nationalist and communist. There was a broad coalition that comes to be dominated by the communist, quite early on in the certainly dominated by the communist and the 60s. That's the strongest, initially, the strongest moral claim is over self-determination.

“And then once the war begins, it becomes about, again, it depends on how you need to find human rights, but the scale of American power that is applied to Vietnam.”

And we're seeing this in a similar way today. This isn't political claim as to the legitimacy of what the U.S. did or didn't do or what's happening today. But in terms of the disparity of power, it was very similar to what's happening in Israel, and power and Gaza today. Just, again, that's not to say that one side is right or wrong or morally correct or incorrect.

And it's the application of that divergent power that leads a lot of people to question the application of that power.

“So they just think that, so in the case of Vietnam, the U.S. was bombing North Vietnam.”

Yeah, and actually bombing South Vietnam, so the U.S. bomb, this is one of them. There are so many, I love when I teach this, I love telling students this thing because it's a kind of logical absurdity, where the United States bombed its ally. Yeah, South Vietnam, much more than a bomb, it's enemy North Vietnam. Like on several registries at the end close, because that's where the insurgency was, but in doing a lot of this bombing, especially in North Vietnam, or the use of things like that, it just seemed to a lot of people that it was in the immoral application of overwhelming force.

Yeah, against the people who couldn't defend themselves, even though the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese certainly were more like defending themselves and shot down a lot of American pilots. But still the appearance was of a kind of David and Goliath type struggle. And it was what, that's precisely what led people like Martin Luther King, to strongly turn against the war. He turned against the president who was the biggest champion of civil rights. So there are all sorts of moral quandaries like that that may be in the home so interesting.

You said there's a kind of argument early on that is grounded in some kind of understanding of rights and morality of armed self-determination. But then that later is better understood in terms of this ethical understanding of the application of power.

Well, for the anti-war protest, now that there's a choice administration, it's always about self-determination.

But those are kind of two very different levels to be having the absolute discussion of power on of ethics on. So the protest in 1969 and '70, this is as opposed to kind of on the, the event of the '70s that often seems to kind of break through period for human rights. Right, the language of modern ethical. If we compare that to an abstract idea of a kind of modern, only crisis, is this a period where ethics and morality is being demanded of the American state. And that's an optimistic way.

“Is there argument for what American can be human that can do in a positive sense?”

Or is it a rejection of what America is doing in a similar sort of sense as you might refer to kind of negative protested to that? Yeah, the comparison today is an interesting one. At the time, in so you're referring in 1969, '70, to a lot of the sort of break of some of the most widespread anti-war protests. The mode and the moratorium and the protestor with the invasion of Cambodia, the end of April 1970, and then the protest that erupted across campuses. But shut down a lot of universities in early, uh, lady-proilerly May and Kent State is where four students were shot by national guard troops.

It's a very febral moment. It's a very delicate moment. It's a very combustible moment. And out of it comes a whole bunch of forces, and you alluded to some of them as they relate to human rights.

Now, if you're like, say at morning, you see the 1970s as a breakthrough moment for human rights, which I think I'm convinced.

And it's an argument that he made, um, you know, what 15 years ago, and the argument is then continued in super interesting ways. Yeah, but I think that basic notion that however you define human rights, and if you define human rights as kind of in an anti-state as personal liberty sense, as mind does. And I think he's right in saying that that's the turn of the U.S. foreign policy takes in the wake of Vietnam. But interestingly, if I remember my reading of Sam Wayne correctly, he says it doesn't come out of Vietnam, but it's it's conditioned by different by different forces.

“Yeah, that's why it's a really, really important moment.”

And if you define human rights in that sense, and that kind of personal liberty sense, and that individual rights sense against, uh, against the state, then the 1970s is clearly with that question, especially the late 1970s and the 1980s are really, really important moment. The relationship with the Vietnam War to that anti-war movement is more complex, and there's some really good literature coming out now that that sort of links the anti-war movement to the emergence of a kind of individual rights ethos.

Yeah, 70s or 80s, and where the debate, it still is focused on America's application of overwhelming firepower on people who can't really, I mean, they can fight back in some ways, but the disparity of power is just so, so overwhelming. Then it does seem to be in egregious use, um, a force. But then the debate also turns on the self-eatenies government, and here's a really interesting kind of twist, because a lot of the anti-war movement, the anti-war movement argued that self-enhanced was not a legitimate state, um, it didn't deserve the protection of the United States,

and that the North Vietnamese, and the national liberation front in the south, were the more legitimate claimants to, yeah, Vietnamese nation, and that too should that too should that, but that's an important distinction, though, especially if you're looking at the 70s as a period of individual liberty human rights, compared to a debate that's about whether an individual nation or a collective has a right to be identified as a nation, and therefore treated differently.

And if you're right to point that out, because the debate then turns from the word doesn't turn from, but it adds to, it's already that the obligation of our own force,

then it turns to how self-enhanced treatings on citizens, and, yeah, there, it's in authoritarian state, it's not totalitarian, it's actually more democratic than the government in Hanoi, there's more descent, there's more, there's a really bustling civil society in South Vietnam, and there are protests, as well, but it is in authoritarian state, there's no question.

“And that authoritarian state that's based in Saigon treats a lot of its people who are dissenting, some of them are allowed to protest, but if they're considered as threat, then they're tortured, they're thrown into tiger cages.”

I mean, the treatment of these people is, is abysmal, and that in your moment, 69, 70 from that point, leading into the early 70s, that gets a lot more attention.

And then necessarily America's use of violence, in the war. Yeah, that's an interesting point, because what I find sort of quite difficult about these sort of historical questions, particularly, as we're trying to kind of historicize the cut-the-car in the moment in human rights, by looking at moments of protest and how moral claims historically been articulated in relation to the state, it's kind of very difficult to draw, as you say,

“kind of causal connections between the protests in 69 and how America goes back to the 70s and how the movement develops from that.”

Is it difficult, and how well sort of ways can we, as historians or people looking at the background of human rights and modern era, draw connections and kind of causal relationships between discourse and ethical arguments and domestic pressure, and then what we're looking at in terms of how human rights are enacted on an international stage. That kind of causality seems quite a difficult argument to make concretely. For example, I am very interested in kind of cost of 1999, as an example of an intervention that at least was legitimated in the language of human rights in the American state.

You definitely talked about human rights a lot in any instance, but it's really hard to separate whether they're using that language to legitimate their intervention to the people, or whether they're genuinely influenced by the claims made by the people for human rights.

“As a historian, how can we kind of go about separating causality there?”

Well, that's where I think historians really come into their own, because we're messy, because we're not parsimonious necessarily, because we have sort of multi causal factors, and we we're happy with all sorts of dependent independent variables sort of mixing together because we're not writing a tight theory or a model. We're basically following the trail wherever it leads us, and then making sense of that trail. And so that's where I think historian and historical scholarship is really helpful in looking at exactly those sorts of relationships, cause of relationships that you're talking about, because there's very rarely a straight line.

It's often much more complex than that, and it's a zigzag, it goes back and forth, it's two steps forward. Once that back sometimes there is no connection, as he said, sometimes there's maybe an echo, it's not necessarily repeating or rhyming, but it's some sort of distant echo. I mean, we can talk about the cost about that's something that would be an interesting case to talk about as well. In terms of its relationship to the Vietnam War, this isn't research that I've done, but there is absolutely a relationship, because they sit in this same kind of larger diplomatic political and cultural context about America and the world and how the US uses its power.

I don't think you can understand how the Cold War ends, how the 1990s unfold the emergence of the 1970s, as you said it, before it was a big breakthrough moment for human rights, but the 1990s is the next big breakthrough. It really then settles in and becomes policy and informs policy in a really big way. I don't think you can understand anything without understanding Vietnam. Just like going up to the present, I don't think you can understand Trumpism or right wing populism or what's happened in American domestic politics, without considering the effects of the Vietnam War, that's not to say that Vietnam is the sole cause or even the main cause of the life of our world today, but it's a pretty important part of the mix.

Finally, you know, the question is you put it was, you didn't put it like this, but basically you know, policy makers, are they really, well, no, you put it much better than I'm about to put it now, but I'm just trying to recall it, but it's basically, you know, to policy makers believe this stuff, like, the kind of, and my answer to that, and I, so I faced this a lot in my work on religion and foreign relations, because a lot of that is rhetorical or, it's not necessarily, you know, you're never going to find the joint chief sitting in a meeting room and talking to the nation.

Security adviser in the Secretary of State and saying, yeah, we should bomb this country because of what the Bible says about this, or because of how missionaries are behaving over here.

So how do we tease out this, you know, wider context to a specific decision, and again, that's where historians come into their own, because we look at this huge range of sources,

“trying to make sense, and then bring it all together, without necessarily imposing an artificial order on the past, we can kind of create a narrative, and that's why history is based around a narrative,”

you create a narrative, explaining why things happen the way they did. Once you can do that, you can then have a clearer sense of how things are later on either in our current era, or, if you're going from, say, late 1960 to the '99, '99, '99 in the world, cost about, and you can definitely do that. And maybe there is scholarship here, the traces and direct line from Vietnam to cost about with the enormous, the kind of main factor in creating ideas for cost about. But it's certainly part of the matrix.

So I'm just a moment, you say there's another kind of big change in the '90s, but it becomes more central to policy.

Yeah, so what Mark Bradley has a really good book on that. Well, I think it's called reimagining the world, maybe published about 10 years, where he looks at the three sort of threshold moments of human rights of '40s, '70s and '90s.

“And that's where he got a ground up, isn't it? That's like social history, isn't he?”

Yeah, he looks a lot. I mean, it's both, it's not just grandma, it is grandma, but it's not just grandma, but it's also he believes he spends his fair time, you know, fair amount of time in presidential archives. It's a really good book, but yeah, he looks a lot at protest groups, it contentures politics, and he looks here as a lot of photography, which I find fascinating. And images and how this reshapes a context in the way people think about empathy and sympathy and rights across borders. Good book, really good book.

And so the change in the '90s and '90s and '90s is that that's just kind of becoming much more relevant to how people are seeing the state in relation to human rights.

“Or people have ethical plans, what's everybody? What's going to fit fit fit?”

I don't think it's, so this is not, this is a separate question from mine and Bradley. Yeah, there's no choice. Human rights, but no, I think there's a strong moral claim in American foreign policy, I mean, in perpetuity. I think it's, and I think it's been, now, I'm going to get in trouble for saying this because I'm not a specialist in other countries. But I think this strong, normative moral center of American foreign policy has been, not necessarily stronger than other countries than that of other countries.

But I think it's been more consistently strongly enduring in American foreign policy has been more moralistic over a much longer period of time and more consistently than other countries. I think I'm on safeguard against saying, and I've argued elsewhere. So one of the ways in which I explain why religion matters so much to the conduct of American foreign relations in the 19th and 20th centuries is that for a long time, the United States had what scholars have called free security, where the US did not have to worry about being attacked, physically attacked, invaded, occupied,

it's system of government change, maybe it's way of life changed from an external power, so the US could take for granted that it might have enemies in the world and it's certainly had interest, but it did not have to worry about its basic security. But every country needs a foreign policy, every country has a foreign policy because every country has ambitions in the world.

And so if you have free security, that gives the, that gave Americans a huge degree of latitude to basically have moral factors, cultural factors, political factors shape their foreign policy.

Because it was this, if you're living in basically any European state until war or two, your foreign policy is being determined by what other states are doing. You're always in constant fear that you're going to be invaded, and the US didn't have that, so its condition of free security was as the French ambassador described it to Teddy Roosevelt in the early 20th century. She was, I mean, the United States is blessed among nations, because to the north, you have Canada, to the south, you have Mexico, to the east, you have fish, to the west, you have fish.

You don't ever have to, you live in a safe neighborhood, and everyone else, Japan, China, Germany, Britain, France, India, they all live in dangerous neighborhoods, they all, and all of those countries I mentioned, unlike the United States, were attacked, all of them except for Britain were invaded. They had their whole way of life was changed to the imposition of an outside power. Sometimes temporarily, like in the case of France, but sometimes permanently, at least for now, like Germany and Japan, the US did not have to deal with that, and so it created this kind of permanent condition where moral and normative considerations were always at the very heart of American foreign policy, because all of American foreign policy was a matter of choice.

You're worried that your country is going to get carved up by your threats and all the other directions. You're worried about your basic security in that way in Americans, and I think that there's not a whole lot of scholarship on this, I've got a book coming out in May that deals a lot with this, and the book is called Total Defense, play around a lot with free security and how that shaped American attitudes to the world, it's not just on religion, it's on all sorts of, yeah, all sorts of things.

“And I think that's something that historians and political scientists just haven't paid a whole lot of attention to.”

That's really interesting, that's it.

That idea of free security that is, I've seen that that's very important for America's general historical progression of the 19th, 20th century, isn't necessarily something that is still true. I mean, it's just suppose if the all your threats being your immediate order states, it's probably something that is less the case now than it was in the early 20th century. I mean, America isn't under threat from its immediate neighbors, but the idea of a threat being exerted from the other side of the globe is actually a lot more prevalent now and has been responsible for us.

“How many years? So that's something that America has to be increasingly worried about now because of how power distribution, how threat is changing.”

My book Total Defense is about the invention of national security. The term national security was almost never used before Franklin Roosevelt to apply to foreign policy and then he devises this new concept of self defense away from the defense of territorial sovereignty to protecting an American way of life and globalizing world.

He didn't use the word globalizing, but that's basically it. And that's kind of what you mean, the threats.

The threats not just your neighbor. It's not just your neighbor, and it's also not just about repelling a physical attack against your borders or your sovereign territory. It's about how the international system or regions parts of the international system, but in the American case, the whole thing about how it's going to interact. And Franklin Roosevelt's in 1940, he famously says, "So before the U.S. is ending the war, when most Americans did not want to enter the war, and he tells them, we cannot remain alone, island of democracy in a world ruled by a philosophy of force."

“He says, "Well, protect ourselves for a time, maybe for a long time, but we're going to be completely alone in the world, completely isolated in the world."”

And so we have to change even if Germany and Japan aren't about to invade us, although he did also warn that they were about to invade the U.S., but nobody really believed because it was so far fetched. But he did make that case. But he also said, "Even if we're not about to be invaded in the near turn, we have to worry about the rest of the world that if we allow them to recreate the world, we have to worry about that, because we have to operate in this world." So, and he loosened me that case in his famous American-centric article in February 1941, makes basically the same case Roosevelt was making a lot of people were making that case in changing the concepts of American defense.

So, after our changes for his security, that's the basis of American foreign policy, right up to Donald Trump.

Whether you love him or hate him, Donald Trump is undoing that national security revolution. And if you're here, whatever Trump wants to pull back from certain internationalist commitments. And again, maybe he's right to do so, maybe he's not that's not the point that I'm making. But he always says something like, "Why should we protect fill in the blank Ukraine, or why should we care about or get involved in fill in the blank Ukraine, Syria, Korea, wherever, when it's fill in the blank so many thousand miles away?"

Yeah, it says it all the time. And so he has reintroduced this concept of geography in a way that I find really, really interesting. J.D. Vance has also done the same thing. And he talks about the big beautiful oceans that separate the United States and keep America safe. We don't have to worry about what does Ukraine matter to us. It's so far away, he keeps saying that sort of thing. And so there is, again, whether you love him or hate him, there is something Trump is recovering a kind of tradition from the 19th century, not just in terms of tariffs, which everyone knows about, not just in terms of manifest destiny with Greenland and Panama.

And that's sort of thing, but also in terms of free security. Now, as far as I know Trump is not used to turn free scenario, I'd love it if he did. Anyway, sales through the roof. He should, exactly, book sales through the roof, but he should, because that's kind of the essence of what his foreign policy is. So it is making this return even though we live in a more globalized world that we have in a long, long time. And it's interesting then with, we're looking at a connection between free security as a reason that, or part of an explanation for why America has often been able to take a more humanitarian or normative approach to its foreign policy.

The free security has historically allowed America to be more humanitarian, and now it's return is making the sort of less concern with humanitarian and normative concerns.

“Well, that's a really good question. So when I talked about free security, it goes up to World War II.”

After World War II, you could still argue, do some people did the US still have free security after World War II, despite the add undinuclear weapons, because the US was still so predominant, because there was mutual issue of destruction. The US was still not going to be invaded, and it was completely implausible that the Soviets were going to launch a nuclear, so preemptive nuclear strike against the US, given that the US could strike back. So some people have said free security continued, but to me that's irrelevant, whether you agree or disagree that the US still have free security after World War II, Americans believed that they did not.

So when I say that America had free security before World War II, I'm not just saying, oh, that's because I'm looking at the globe, and I'm thinking they had free security, although that is part of my argument, I'm saying they had free security, because that sort of Americans themselves believed, and they talked about it constantly, although they didn't use that phrase, free security. I had the return of free security, yeah, that's a great question, so my book ends in 1947, I don't know if that's okay, I don't have to deal with that, I'm really glad to have a good question.

I don't, because obviously Trump is not saying he's valueless, but his values are not the same as the values that underpinned liberal internationalism after 1941. So when free security disappears, the normative moralistic basis of American board policy does not go away. Yeah, and I think that still has a lot to do with the fact that the US, there's such a disparity in power between US, but I think it's also because the US is a very extremely dynamic place that's full of ideas and full of morals, the separation of powers and federalism provide endless opportunities for citizens to make their voices heard in politics and democratic politics.

And it's got a very, very, very, very, very vibrant civil society and very vibrant contentious politics, sociologist called contentious politics.

And so this moral pressure is always born to bear in a way that you're not going to get in say China or for cultural reasons, Japan, or historical reasons for Japan as well.

The US is, it's this sort of perfect laboratory for this kind of moral impulse to effect policy, so it continues even after free security disappears, it underpins foreign policy. I mean anti-communism is really before the 1970s. It's really the big human rights concern for the US. And the phrase anti-communism is a human rights. It absolutely was a human rights crusade and people don't say it like that, but they should because now it committed a lot of human rights abuses other times.

“But in the United States anti-communism and its heart was about freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, that's what a lot of Americans hated about communism is that the sort of dominant view of communists in the 40s and 50s.”

And into the early 60s was of thumb, you know, there's a obsession with brainwashing.

Well, that's about freedom of conscience, that's about freedom of thought, that's about freedom of religion, communism was atheistic.

And there was an idea that Franklin Roosevelt, he didn't, sorry, he didn't pioneer it because others talked about it before, but he put it at the heart of his foreign policy. And he said that, see if I can remember this because it's from my religion book, but in the 1939 state of the Union address, he says that without religion, you can't have democracy without democracy, you can't have peace. Right, that's because the freedom of religion protects the freedom of conscience, it protects the freedom of thought.

You can't, you know, if the once the state can start meddling with what you believe in your own, it's a very Protestant view in the world by the world. But if the state messes with your individual belief that only you know, truly know. And it's, you know, it's something that's within you. If the state can start meddling with that, there's no stopping the power of the state.

“Right, the Roosevelt said, it's a democratic, it's a faith-based democratic piece there. Yeah, that's what it is, obviously.”

So yeah, anti-communism was, now, after you are doesn't apply that to the Soviet Union, he applies it to Nazi Germany in 1939. But the exact same idea, same logic and supply to the Soviet Union and the Cold War. So anti-communism was absolutely one of America's biggest human rights causes, human rights crusades. But we just, I don't, we don't see it like that because you don't like to think of John McCarthy and Roy Cohen and J. Edgar Hoover. And it's true.

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It's true. I mean there is also a strong security dimension in the war and communism and a lot of absolute treatment.3, for example it's very much a simple I suppose to what you're saying about the

“Roosevelt and the world of democracy you need to take your hypothesis in that position exactly.”

Is that often a kind of direct trade off in American foreign policy between the language of security and the language of rights or do they more often go kind of a hand in hand? I think they go hand in hand. And I think it's a matter of rights to find security. So if you rightly said that the German doctrine in Germany's foreign policy is sort of picks up from where FDR left off in World War II. And it's true men who really, it's FDR who invented national security, but it's true men who

really embeds it at the heart of American foreign policy. The National Security Act

is passed by Congress in July 1947 at single piece of Congress. I think it's one of the most important

pieces of legislation in the American history. It doesn't get nearly the attention it should. This one single act creates the CIA, the JCS, the DOD. So the Central Intelligence Agency, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense, and the National Security Council. And then five years later the National Security Agency is added on. So Truman definitely picks up from where FDR left off and sees communism in studies translating that

security threat from Nazi Germany and to the Soviet Union. But what informs that, what shapes that

“because the US is not about to be attacked itself is this emphasis on rights. It's this emphasis on”

what kind of external world do we want to create? We want a liberal world order. And that's true in economics. And so things like the General Agreement on Terrorist and Traitor setup, the WTO. Sorry, that's the format of the WTO. It sets up the General Agreement on Terrorist and Traitor,

the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the whole Bretton Wood system. So you've got

it in a kind of economic sense. You've got it in the Marshall Plan. We can add that in there too. But it's also created in this kind of liberal international order. It's based on a kind of sense of liberalism which is hard to to a large extent. He's based on certain liberal individual rights. And then we're saying that as we have an administration is quite a long way away from the liberal international moment. Is there still that connection between rights and security? Do you

think in the way that the Trump administration sees its place in the world? Is it still connecting security with rights and with maintaining democracy worldwide? Was it this kind of more closed off moment in American foreign policy? Kind of breaking that connection, maybe. Trump, I mean, and bans and others have been very open about wanting to break with a previous tradition of liberal internationalism. And again, Trump himself has said many times that it's because

the U.S. was being taken advantage over as he says ripped off. Yeah. He's got a point on like a lot of

things. He's got a point in terms of what America's allies were doing to pay for their own security. And the U.S. really was paying for a lot of other countries, was underwriting a lot of other countries' security. In a way that American presidents thought was beneficial to the United States. It wasn't purely an act of charity, but Donald Trump doesn't see that connection. And so he's right to think that the U.S. has paid a disproportionate share of the defense of, say, Canada,

or Germany, or Japan. Whether that was to America's benefit, and it was a wise thing for presidents since Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to do, or whether that was the U.S. just getting ripped off, is that's a, you know, that's up to people to make up their own mind.

“Okay, that's really interesting. So yeah, we've been going for a while, I think we've drawn some”

yeah, pretty interesting connections that across the world, historical time. The final question then I suppose we're relating a lot of this season to this idea of their procession and kind of crisis in relation to historical periods where human rights, such as, you know, tearing them seen in rather more kind of optimistic terms. Are you optimistic about America's placing the weather, are you optimistic about America as a force for goods in foreign policy? You say it's going

to be the biggest power in the fall for the foreseeable future. Do you kind of find that any, any course for the hope for optimism in the role that it can play? Well, as a story, I kind of don't normally try and answer those questions. I like the history to speak for itself, and whether I think things were right or wrong, it's not really my place to, I do have one, you know, of course I have my own opinions, but so for instance, when I say the Franklin Roosevelt

invented national security and he did so by exact as I said before, he exaggerated the threat from Germany to Japan. I mean, deliberately, and after he engaged in a lot of deception to Tusa,

I'm glad you did a lot of things that he wouldn't get away with doing now. I think that it was

important to the future, and also especially Nazi Germany, but also Japan, but that's not really, I don't say that in my book. Yeah, that's not true. That's not for me to say. Readers can probably guess where I stand on that. But what I wouldn't say is just thinking of American power today as an analyst is just to say what I already said, but she just, you know, referred back to me and said,

“and a lot of people, I think the notion of American decline is grossly overdrawn. I think that the”

United States, American power has undergone profound, and what would be for other countries,

existential moments of shock, and has come through, as I just survived, but actually come through even stronger. So the crisis in the 1960s and early 70s was as great, domestically, and in terms of foreign policy is what the U.S. has gone through recently. In fact, I would say it was more serious in a lot of ways. The U.S. then had a crisis in the Lake Boachurli Obama period, both in foreign policy, and it entered domestic sense. If you, if you sort of foisted on almost any other great power

“over the last century, domestic crises involving race and urban violence and drug crisis and”

lowering life expectancy, as we've seen in the United States in the last 10 to 15 years or so.

So you have that, and then you then overlay the economic crisis, and we found economic crisis over top of that social crisis at home, and then you also overlay that foreign policy crisis on top of those economic and social crises. And then because of all that, you also have deep cultural divisions and a sense of despair. You put that on almost any other country in the last 100 years, that country that has a revolution, there's a change of government, there might be, it might crack

up, it might break up. And the U.S. has come through that, it came through that in the 30s, it came through that in the 60s and 70s, it came through that in the 21st century, and each time it's emerged

“even stronger. So I think that tells you something about American resilience. I mean, for some people,”

that's an optimistic view of the world because the Lake American power. For some people, that's a pessimistic view of the world because they despair of American power. I think the United States is not about to go away, and I think America is going to remain the top dog in the world. Yeah, for the next 50, 100 years, maybe longer. Obviously something like, you could throw, I mean, you know, what about climate change? What about a pandemic? Okay. Yeah.

Absence, some sort of external shock like that, that we can't predict, you can't account for, some sort of Black Swan event. Then Absent that, then just normal crises, economic, social, yeah, cultural and political. Yeah, wars and that kind of thing, you know, the run of the mill crisis of America is going to be pretty strong. That's great. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks to all this deficit. Yeah, I get to tease out then the place of America in the long term

Cuban rights regime. That's great. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you very much. Yeah. That's great. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of declarations. We hope you found this and engaging discussion. Thanks again to Professor Andrew Preston for his insights. Join us next week where the declarations team will be exploring another aspect of the poly crisis of human rights within other fascinating guests. We'll see you there.