WAR UPDATE: Harvard Professor on Iran, Russia, China, and Trump’s Dangerous Moves in the Middle East

First of all, thanks so much for doing this.

>> Nice to be here. >> So let's start at the end. The anticipated end. When and if the United States resolves, it's role in these two wars against Russia and against Iran,

what does the world look like, do you think?

“>> I think it looks like a substantially more dangerous world,”

actually, then we've seen for, say, most of, after the wars. >> Yeah, after the wars. >> Well, it's going to leave the world in a, I think a more precarious condition. And for sort of a larger, more enduring reasons than just these conflicts. I mean, the relationship with Russia is not going to improve for a while,

even if the war formally comes to an end. There's lots of suspiciousness on both sides now. So that's going to be a problem. China is going to continue to improve its military power. It's going to continue to grow economically.

It's going to continue to challenge the United States. And others for influence around the world. So that's going to be a source of tension. We have, I think, in the world today, you're seeing other powers,

you know, lesser powers being more active and not always constructively.

Think of the role that the UAE has played in the civil war in Sudan. So they're involved in fuel and conflicts in a variety of other places. So you're going to see a tri-polar world in Russia, China, the United States, as the three main powers, with some unresolved tensions among them,

“continued, I think, concerns about what's going on in Asia,”

and what China's ambitions might be there. And in a situation where no one really trusts America's judgment anymore. And that's, I think, an artifact of the war, especially the war in Iran. And I point to one other thing that I think people sometimes forget about.

And that's what we've seen. I think a pretty dramatic erosion in the normative environment surrounding the use of force. And I'm a good realist. So I don't think norms international law are everything, but they're not irrelevant.

So one of the things we've seen is, essentially, a collapse of the norm against assassination. You know, for a long time in world history, governments didn't try to assassinate each other. Leaders of other countries didn't try and kill each other in conflicts.

This was a common practice 500 years ago. And it gradually fell from favor and a norm emerged against it. And you can understand why. It was in everybody's self-interest. If you were a king, if you were a prime minister,

not to be trying to kill each other. Moreover, great powers like this norm, because it meant that conflicts would be decided on the battlefield, where they had all the soldiers and all the wealth and could win. Assassination is a tool of weaker powers.

Right. It's asymmetrical, of course. Right. And beginning at the end of World War II, when the allies began to hold leaders accountable.

Nuremberg trials, the Tokyo War kind of trials. This idea that what you did as a statesman was sort of separate, began to erode. Once that began to erode, then going after a leader,

going after move markadoffy, going after Saddam Hussein, begins to look morally preferable. Why not just take out this trouble,

“some leader as opposed to sphere of the population?”

It's a sphere of the population. You could make this argument. Of course, this is a very dangerous road to go down because now it's becoming much more common practice. Look at what the United States and Israel do at the beginning of the Iran War.

They take out all of Iran's senior leaders. There's at least two problems here.

First of all, you don't know who's going to replace them.

Of course, we're now having trouble with a more hard-length faction in Iran. It also erodes any possibility of trust. How can you sit down negotiate a peace agreement with a regime that has killed your senior leaders? And might do something again, subsequently.

And then finally, as that norm begins to erode, others are going to use it too. Others will start using similar tactics. And leaders, including American presidents, are going to have to worry much more about this than they did,

unnecessarily in the past. You put all of those things together. It continued great power competition, eroding norms against the use of violence in a variety of different ways. I think you end up with a much more dangerous world.

I think, unfortunately, the world agrees with that. Because if you look at the last 20 years or so, in constant dollars, defense managers are basically doubled in the world of the last 20 years. Because not just in the US, not just in the United States. You see this happening in Asia, you see this happening in Europe now.

Belatedly, but finally happening.

people anticipate a much less secure environment than the one we've had.

Not what we are promised. We were promised by certain factions in American politics. Peace based on global trade. Globalizing the economy was supposed to guarantee stability because you don't go to war with your trading partners.

That's what they told us. And I should have mentioned that. I mean, the other thing that's happening is we're seeing the onset of not an end to global trade, not even a complete end to globalization, but certainly a retreat back from it. Raising trade barriers increased protectionism,

particularly in high technology, things like that. And I don't think that's going to go away any time. So that you're going to see a much more competitive economic environment. And what has been called weaponized interdependence.

People trying to gain political advantage by using others,

vulnerabilities, or other dependence. The way the United States has weaponized the role of the dollar in the international financial system, yet posing sanctions. The way Iran has weaponized everyone's dependence

on the straight-of-form moves. Yes, to advance political agendas. So all of that's going to contribute. But can we put those clichés to bed that, you know,

“democracies don't go to work in their neighbors that trading partners don't have wars?”

Like, that's just not, no, that's true. Well, do you want to be careful here? There is some evidence that democracies are less likely to fight each other. It's soft evidence. I wouldn't want to base my entire foreign policy around that,

because we don't want to completely throw it out. And secondly, the, again, big macro studies will show you that, in fact, high levels of economic interdependence do make international conflict between the partners less likely. That is to say, there's a statistical relationship there.

It is not however an absolute guarantee. The fact that you have an extensive economic relationship for someone doesn't mean you won't fight them. It just makes it somewhat less likely. Also, you can make the reverse argument arguably even more powerfully.

It's not so much that interdependence causes peace. It's rather that peace causes interdependence. Yes, exactly. When you have a stable political environment. Thank you for saying that.

No, we have a stable political environment. People don't think war is very likely. That's right. Then they're willing to trade with someone else much more readily. They're willing to invest in a foreign economy without worrying

that somehow that's going to get nationalized or seized because of conflict emerges. And once people begin to see that conflict is likely, and I'm talking to investors here. They quite naturally begin to pull back. And governments encourage them to pull back because they're worried about

what the balance of power is going to be, et cetera. So the optimism of the, say, early 1990s that we're going to head into this wonderful, you know, Fukiama and Friedmaness world of globalization, peace and harmony. It was a grain of truth in that. If the world had remained peaceful and tranquil, then interdependence looks more attractive.

But once the world starts to look more dangerous, people begin to worry more about security than they do about wealth.

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“Why have American policy makers been unwilling to be realistic about the rise of China?”

It seems like everything in the last 20 years the subtext of a lot of it is like total unwillingness to deal with the fact that we're not in charge of everything because China has this enormous economy. I think there's a lot of factors that went into this. First there was a certain degree of just general American hubris. Particularly post-chold war.

We've won the Cold War.

We have the model for how you organize a modern society. It's got to be a market-based economy. It's got to be based on the rule of law. It's got to be open to trading with others. That's the modern world.

And this is what you get when you read Frank Fukama, who is in my view of Fine Scholar. But it was wrong about that. And some others in the 1990s. That's what we generally believed. And it was bipartisan.

Republicans in Democrats largely all subscribed to this idea.

“And a key part of that was because we had found the magic formula.”

This was the answer.

China had finally embraced markets and would inevitably become democratic.

Because it's citizens would get wealthier. It would be a middle class. That middle class would want freedom and political rights. And it would insist upon being able to express itself. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You can tell yourself a pretty good story for how this is all going to work out. And then once China's a liberal democracy and all engaged with everyone. And a member of all these international institutions like the World Trade Organization. We're going to have not a perfect world, but the best world we've ever had. Again, nice story. And there was a coherent logic to it.

It turned out to be wrong. The Chinese Communist Party was not about to liberalize. They put a premium, unpolitical control and had lots of ways of doing it. And we were to eager and to hasty to bring them into all of these institutions, to engage them and help them grow.

So one factor was just humorous on our part. And overall confidence that we really had the answer. And they would inevitably adopt our system or something like our system. Second part was of course the short-term interest of American corporations. Who could make lots of money by shifting production to China.

And in my view, so eager to do that that they were willing to accept terms that they probably shouldn't have about technology sharing about letting the Chinese, you know, basically learn to do what we had learned to do. And I should be clear here. I don't think the United States should have tried to strangle Chinese economic development.

We shouldn't have tried to encourage it as much. But that would have had cost for us. We all benefited from embracing China the way we did. You and I got cheaper goods than we would have had otherwise. Some Americans, a minority of Americans, were really badly hurt by this.

This so-called China shock. So there were industries that were communities that were decimated. But the vast majority of Americans ultimately benefited economically. What those all those Americans, including you and me, forgot was that this was also going to ultimately begin to shifts the balance of economic power in ways that were more beneficial to China than they ultimately were to us.

And that was going to have consequences down the road. China was going to grow. Once China embraced markets, once China got rid of Maoism and got serious about real quick, they were going to catch up. But it would have been better for us.

“And I think probably better for everyone if it happened or at least for most of us,”

if this had happened more slowly and more gradually than it did. But once it happened, oh, yeah. And you know, you look up and China has a bigger, and by some measures a bigger economy than the United States, a vastly bigger population.

Like you're going to have to deal with China. You can't continue to tell yourself it's unipolar in any sense. This is why wouldn't they have a sphere of influence? Well, there's two points here. Let's get to the sphere of influence point in a second.

But to me, one of the great college tragedies is that beginning in the Bush administration, there's a real recognition that China is now emerging as a potential peer competitor. You see this in the national security strategies written in the Bush administration.

And I know inside the Pentagon, they were a real serious efforts made to start preparing for this.

The problem is that 9/11 came along and completely blew the Bush administration's agenda.

Instead of focusing on great power relations and on China, they focus on the global war on terror. And ever since then, you've had every single American president saying they were going to focus laser-like on China. We're going to pivot to Asia.

We're going to focus on China. We're going to crack down on Chinese practices.

“And every one of those presidents, I think this is true of Bush.”

This is true of Obama. This is true of Trump. One, this is true of Biden. They get blown off course by events elsewhere, usually in the Middle East.

In trouble in the Middle East, in America's inability to stay out of that trouble has been a great benefit.

Because it's never allowed the United States.

Benefits of China. Benefits of China. Sorry. Because it's never allowed the United States to do what serious people in the government wanted to do,

Second question is the sphere of influence issue. So if I were the Chinese, I would like to have a sphere of influence in Asia. I would like to have the United States out.

Who wants the world's most powerful country or arguably the world's most powerful country,

allied with all of your neighbors and with substantial military forces in your body. If I were China, I would prefer a situation where the United States is essentially out of Asia. And I don't want to conquer Japan. I don't want to conquer Korea. I don't want to conquer Vietnam.

That's not necessary too much work. I just want relations of efforts. I want those countries to not be a security threat to me. I want them to pay close attention to my wishes. In other words, I would like a relationship with most of my neighbors in Asia.

Similar to the relationship the United States has with most countries in the Western Hemisphere. Where they're very careful how they interact with the United States. Because we tend to be pretty heavy handed and dealing with them for all those reasons. That's what I would like if I were China.

“Now, if you're the United States, the question is, is that something you should be happy with?”

And my view is no that a China that was as secure in Asia has we are in the Western Hemisphere. We face no serious rivals in the Western Hemisphere. There's no enemy armies about to invade the United States from anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. We can run around the world getting into trouble in lots of places because we don't have to worry about defending our borders. That's right, et cetera. A China that was in a similar position would suddenly be much freer

to roam around the world getting into trouble in lots of places. Maybe the Chinese are smarter than we are. Maybe they wouldn't do that, but the possibility would become much more viable. And that might even include starting to form strategic partnerships with countries in the Western Hemisphere. Not just economic partnerships, but strategic partnerships. If China depends on economic resources,

maybe it would like to have a military role here. Maybe it would like to form a alliance with Brazil. This is not something the United States has ever really wanted.

“That's what the Monroe Doctrine was all about.”

It's been a great benefit to American security. I think the United States should do what it can to prevent China from dominating Asia the way we dominate. The Western Hemisphere. I think that's possible to do. But I worry that we're doing all of the things that you shouldn't do if that was your goal. Well, decisions made in Washington have done a lot to tank the Japanese economy.

I think that's my read. And the President's recent comments about the South Korean president, suggest in both countries, which are the key countries you're talking about, like a withdrawal of American support to some extent. Yeah, it's quite remarkable. I mean, the business with North Korea, North Korean South Korea, is truly baffling.

And we can get into that. If you don't mind, so I'm confused. Yeah, I don't get it at all.

I mean, South Korea is, first of all, been a very stalwart ally for the United States for a long time.

And moreover, South Korea is a great success story when you think about it from broader American interests. This is a country that when we allied with them initially, it was a military dictatorship under Singmenry, and not a very nice military dictatorship. But for strategic reasons, we backed them in the Korean War and subsequently. And then over time, South Korea becomes quite successful democracy.

And it does this, by the way, not because we send the 82nd Airborne to do a regime change, but because the South Koreans as they developed economically decided, they wanted to become democratic. They also, many of them had been to the United States. They studied here. They liked what they saw, et cetera.

And so South Korea, on its own initiative, becomes a democracy with some encouragement from the United States, but not with us telling them what to do or anything like that. So it's a great success story for the United States. And now, to suddenly say, well, I've got a great relationship with Kim Jong-un. You know, a truly odious dictator.

And that's the reason why I want to suspend military exercises with South Korea. This is nuts. What is it though? Well, what's driving this?

“Partly, I think it's a perennial Trump tendency to want to distract people from whatever the problem is that he's caused.”

And he's a genius at this.

It always changing the subject, getting us talking about something else instead of, you know, whatever's going wrong.

I think he still wants to go down in history being remembered as some kind of peacemaker. And he still believes maybe he can pull off some miracle with North Korea all to that relationship.

And third, and this, I think, has been a problem throughout Trump's presidency.

He has this exaggerated ability in his own personal qualities as an negotiator and dealmaker. That if he can just get in a room with people, somehow the force of personality will turn the tide. And this didn't work in his first term. Kim Jong-un picked his pocket in his first term. Kim Jong-un got something that's worth something in World Pause.

He got a state visit. He got several of us. He got a personal one-on-one visit with the US president. Right? Nothing he'd ever, no North Korean leader had ever gotten anything like that before. And what did he give up in order to get that?

“What concessions did he make in order to get that one-on-one meeting with the US president?”

Zero. Absolutely nothing. He didn't compromise on his nuclear program. Didn't compromise on his attitudes towards South Korea. Didn't do any of those things. He got the meeting and walked away.

Right? And so Trump having gotten his pocket picked by Kim the first time around. And now what's to go back and do this again? I can't put a rational explanation behind it.

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If you want out, call 800-685-5696-865-5696 or visit Americanfinancing.net/tucker. Why do you think we're at war with Iran? I mean, there are the reasons, you know, there are many layers and levels on which we could say true things. But what is the bait? What's the bedrock here? I'll just go through my laundry list.

I mean, there has been a bad relationship between the United States and Iran for 40-plus years. We all know that. In my view, Iran has on number of occasions in the past tried to improve that relationship. They made the initiative. They did so in the '90s. They did so in the early '90s after 9/11. And each time, ultimately, they get the back of our hand.

We sometimes have flirted with it, but never did anything substantial and eventually rejected their overtures.

“I think most of that is a function of the US commitment to Israel, the fact that Israel and the Iran are deeply at odds with each other for various reasons.”

And therefore, the political price in the United States has been pretty high. And not all, but some parts of what I have called the Israel lobby have been pushing for a military action against Iran for a long time. Again, it's important to say that not all parts, for example, J Street condemned the war when it began this time around. And that's terrific. Good for them. So that's part of it. There's been a sort of thumb on the scale pushing for it.

Now, why are we with Iran now? It's not because Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon. It's not because Iran was suddenly about to launch some military operation. It was a great danger. The approximate cause, I think, was first of all Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the White House, which he came and gave this elaborate briefing about how Iran was teetering on the edge. And sort of all of it would take would be a sharp wrap. The regime would collapse and we'd have a new day, new opportunities to have a different relationship with Iran, get rid of whatever's left of its nuclear program, et cetera.

And he was able to persuade Donald Trump that this was correct. First time, he said, Netanyahu's made similar pitches in the past to Biden, to Obama, to Trump, I think, in the first term, et cetera. And all private or American presidents had said, "No, this is a bad idea."

And the international forces just snatching somebody and removing them, et cetera, but he began to believe that, you know, he really had great judgment, and that the American military could accomplish wonderful purposes.

There was no, as near as I can tell, no strong dissense within the administration in part, because it is an administration made up mostly of yes men.

And what he wants to hear, may have been some mild, well, or you sure, kind of comments. And then finally, I think this is, you know, Trump at the end of his political career, we think, and near the end of his life, who's playing for the history books.

“And I think he saw this as possibly a way to kind of run the table. You know, I've gotten rid of Maduro in Venezuela, that was always a headache.”

I'm working on Cuba. I'll probably get that one. I'll get Greenland sooner or later, so that'll be terrific. And Ron's been a problem for 40 years, and I will be the president that has solved it, and bring, you know, wonderful new opportunities to the Middle East, and put all that together, and because he believed, again, this is where Netanyahu helped persuade him, that it was going to be cheap, quick, fast. A few days of bombing regime collapses, gets some new people in there, ever be fine. I don't think Trump, if Trump had any clear idea that he would be where he is today, when he started it, I don't think he would have done it.

But he persuaded himself or was persuaded that this would be just like other operations he has authorized, short, quick, discrete, cheap, and he turned out to be badly wrong.

Yeah, I don't know the answer. I think that Trump understood fully well with consequences, but whatever the cause, you think he understood, I know it. Yeah, I know he did. He understood the consequences. Yeah, of course. The potential consequences for Turkey did. Yeah, no, he was told, and he agreed that those were real risks.

And the risks so far await the potential upside that it does make you wonder, but I don't have the answer, but we do know it wasn't just Trump.

There have been no anti-war protests. So what does that tell you? It tells you that Trump's organized opponents aren't, you know, they don't like the way it's going, nobody does, but they were not against regime change in Iran.

“So why is everybody in the political establishment fundamental Chuck Schumer sport? He may have done it better than Trump or whatever, but conceptually they're on the same page. Why?”

Yeah, you want to be clear here, not everybody in the political establishment, and I think for Democrats, this is puts Democrats in an interesting position. And a number of them have been, of course, outspoken say, there's a crazy idea condemning the president, et cetera. Whether, again, I'm not inside their heads, whether they would love the war to be over, because that would be good. I think, you know, that's where Bernie Sanders is. If you gave Bernie Sanders a button and said you can press this button and the war would stop tomorrow, he would press it immediately.

“I think there are plenty of Democrats, and a few Republicans who would do that now.”

But there may be a few Democrats who also say, well, if this sort of drags on into the fall, that looks good for us. So there may be some ambivalence. And you want to criticize the president, but why there haven't been protests, I think this gets back at something. It's been true now for a long time. I think relying on the all volunteer force has made it easier for presidents to get us into military operations, because everyone is doing involuntary for service, no one's being drafted, no one's being hauled out of it.

But in the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you did start to get pushed back from military families, particularly people in the reserve, who really didn't expect to suddenly be doing repeated deployments overseas as well. It is also true that the casualty figures have been relatively low. We don't see people concerned about that. And most of the consequences have been economic, and I think we are going to see those play themselves out in elections. That's where people don't have to necessarily go protest the war. They're going to vote people out of office.

But very quickly after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, they were protests, and they were going to protest against that war. I think. Yeah, there were some. And there have been some protests. I don't think they've been in large scale, and I don't know. Again, I don't know if there's been a certain amount of battle fatigue almost.

Whether or not this is just one more thing, and maybe some of that energy has been sapped, or some of that energy is going into gearing up for the midterms.

“I just don't have a good sense of why that might be the case. I don't, I don't know either, but I think it's interesting.”

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Thanks. I also think it's interesting that the President ran on explicitly ran on a promise to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, which we were then saying was between Russia and Ukraine. It's not, but whatever, he said, "I'm going to fix this. I can fix this." Yeah. And he did.

So why? Why didn't he fix it?

Yeah. Well, first of all, it was laughable to think, you know, he was saying to the cabinet, "I can solve it in 24 hours."

Yeah. And this is just part of the Trump mystique that he's this magical person with these amazing deal-making qualities. And I fully concede that guy is an absolute genius at persuading people of things that are not true. There was no evidence of this from his business career, and there was no evidence of this from his political career. That he was this sort of master manipulator, master diplomat who could pull these things off.

So maybe you could get a piece deal in Ukraine, but it wasn't going to be 24 hours. Because there are really serious issues here and really difficult problems to resolve. And there's lots of stakeholders and lots of parties in there.

And getting them all to agree when there is far part as they are was never going to be easy.

It's possible if Trump had put a really good team together and put a sophisticated plan in place to pressure both sides. But the Ukrainians, the back off some of the things they wanted, get the Russians to back off some of what they were doing. You might have been able to pressure them to a deal. But you were never going to be able to do this by sending Steve Wittkov and Jared Kushner off to talk to Putin and think you could get a deal that way.

“You were never going to do this by getting Zelensky into the oval office and sort of putting a gun to his head saying you have to concede.”

It was never going to be that easy. Zelensky wasn't in a position to do that. He was going back to Kiev and said, we're going to have to run up the white flag and cut a deal. He would have been to pose. He would have been removed from power.

The Ukrainians would not have gone along with that. So it was completely unrealistic for Trump to promise any such deal. And if that's what he wanted to do, he was going to have to get serious. Put the right people in charge and be somewhat more patient than he's able to be. What would it take to resolve it now?

I don't know what I might take on where we are now is. And there are some parallels, by the way, with the Warren Iran, which may get to. Warren, what, you know, I would call a hurting stalemate. The Ukraine is suffering, both from missile strikes and continued losses along the front. And Russia is suffering from losses along the front.

“The Ukrainian retaliation, and both of them are, I think, paying a substantial price.”

My guess is that the prices worse for the Ukrainians. And Russia is continuing to make at very high costs and incremental advances in the Donbass. When you're in a hurting stalemate, both sides are basically betting that they can the last longer. That they're going to outweigh the other side.

It's a much greater population. Much bigger population, et cetera. But you don't know.

Nationalism is a very powerful force.

I think the Ukrainians care more about fighting for what they regard as their country than the Russians care about taking the next 50 kilometers of Donbass. Putin may care, but I'm not sure the Russian population does. So, if it were up to me, and I assure you it's not. I think the United States should be continuing to back Ukraine, while saying that there are real limits to what we're willing to support.

“You know, you have to explain to the Ukrainians.”

No, you're not going to get Crimea back. No, you're not going to get most of the Donbass back, at least not any time soon. Maybe in the fullness of time, maybe some point, but you don't have the military capabilities of pushing Russia out.

And we're not going to give them to you.

Even if we gave you more stuff, you wouldn't be able to do it for a variety of reasons. And the risks of doing that are too great for us. But I would keep Ukraine in the game, and then I would also go to the right, and that's the leverage you have with Russia. You can continue to help Ukraine. And the leverage you have with Ukraine is that they're going to have to lower their ambitions.

And the Russians have to get some of what they want to. And that's the part that sticks in the Western draw. And my terms would be roughly that Ukraine has to become a neutral country.

It's not going to join NATO.

It drops any insistence on that. The trickiest part, and that's, I think, again, was the precipitating cause, was the belief that Ukraine was drifting into NATO over time. And that's the core Russian demand from what I guess.

“So I think that's the most important thing.”

It's not the only thing there's some other issues about rights of minorities in Russia. And those can I think be addressed. The trickiest part, at least, as I look at this, is what's the security arrangement going forward for Ukraine? It's not acceptable to Ukraine, understandably, to be disarmed, or to be allowed only a minimal amount of defense forces. It's going to be a sovereign country. It should be able to defend itself as well.

So if NATO membership is off the table, that's gone. It's going to be a neutral country. It's going to have a military. Can it buy weapons from other countries? I would think so, as a sovereign nation. If it buys weapons, say, from Sweden, can the Swedes send some people to help train the Ukrainians and how to use those weapons?

“How many? How long can they stay? And what kind of weapons?”

And what kind of weapons, maybe? So, and of course, there's a point at which that starts to look like you're becoming a defacto member of NATO. And if you're not a formal member, if it gets too far, that's a very tricky negotiations. It's so zero. It's not acceptable to Ukraine, and too much wouldn't be acceptable to Russia, and you start the war again. That's a long and complicated negotiation. Another reason why Trump was blown smoke when he said he could end this thing. There's some serious security issues that have to be worked out there, and you'd need really good people taking some time and care to do that.

Do that kind of negotiation in order to make it work, and to have it be something where it might last. If you speak to European politicians or well-educated Europeans, a lot of them, you know, in Spain, Germany, you certainly UK, they seem convinced that Russia has plans to invade them. From my perspective, that's insane, but I want to run up by you. Yeah, and I think that's, I'm not sure I'd use the word insane, but I guess it's completely wrong. It's so implausible.

Yeah, they can take all of Dambas. Yeah, exactly. The idea that Russia this had so much trouble dealing just with Ukraine is going to launch some kind of major assault on Europe. There's no incentive for them to do so, and I think there's no possibility they could pull that off. Well, I do think there's a history that people still to some degree invoke. I think that they are legitimately concerned by what's called gray area, hybrid warfare, things that Russia has been doing for a variety of reasons for quite some time.

And our, you know, violation of all sorts of international legal rules and a worrisome indication of malign intent. Let's call it that way. So if I were Swedish, if I were in the Baltic states, and I'm seeing this kind of interference on a constant basis,

I would say, how can you expect us to trust you and not worry about what you might try to do if you keep doing this sort of stuff.

“We're not doing that back in Russia. We're not setting fire to things in, you know, the same Peter'sburg. So why are you doing that to us?”

Well, they are setting things on fire and saying Peter'sburg. Not the Ukrainians are setting fire on things, they say NATO drones. Yeah, the drones that just hit a school in Russia were made in Germany. But they were not fired by Germans. No, but I mean the whole, the whole war is targeted by the CIA, and that's it's run by other countries.

But again, if, yeah, if country A sells the country B and country B then shoots it. There is some responsibility there, but I would put the principal blame on country B that, you know, is actually firing it.

In any event, there are reasons for Europeans, I think, to be concerned about Russian intentions and the most people in the military business do a lot of worst case planning.

If, if you saw, for example, I didn't think Putin was going to invade. Because I thought it was going to be the kind of disaster he's ended up with for Russia, by the way. So I didn't think he would do it. So I think it'd be crazy for him to launch an assault on NATO countries.

“I think it would fail, but can I be totally confident that he wouldn't do something that stupid?”

I at least think about it. And if I were a European, I would start hedging against the possibility. Well, also, asking myself, with some frequency, over time, what can we do to try and improve this situation? Because it gets back to our first question, where's the world headed? It's not good to have this many points of friction, this many points of conflict between major power centers.

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BattalionMetals.com/tucker to learn more. If this, if the world shakes out as you have predicted, where it's like more volatile, there are more tensions and we're ever closer to the use of non-conventional weapons and it just gets continuously crazier. How can you sustain the global network of our economy? It becomes harder.

It's not impossible. I mean, states sometimes even trade with each other in wartime. When they're both dependent on the relationship as well. And I think the sinews of international trade are going to continue.

You may see a lot more regional concentration. You're certainly already seeing trends towards so-called friend-shoring. Trying to do more economic deals with the states that you think are friendly and more or less aligned with you as well. So the sort of wide open globalization of the 90s and early odds may be over. But I don't think we're going back to our world where states are not going to trade with each other substantially.

“The cost to that would be so great that I think people will try to stay away from it.”

I think that sounds right. How is the war with Iran resolved and when? Well, you know, I wish I knew.

I don't see a solution to that that doesn't ultimately involve a tacit admission of on the United States that this was a huge mistake.

We made a mistake. We shouldn't have done it. And you don't make mistakes without pay or price for it. And obviously, you know, the administration would spin whatever end to the war as a victory of some kind, but it's not. It's likely to be a defeat.

I believe they are still flailing around for some formula that will put sufficient pressure on Iran that Iran will then give them something so big and tangible they can claim. You know, this is our great victory and I don't think they're going to get that. And the central problem is political. The motivation of the two sides is totally different. This was a war of choice for the United States.

There was no imminent need to do this. This was not a vital interest we were defending. It's one of the reasons why Trump was willing to do a very short, quick, cheap war. Why nobody seriously contemplated sending ground troops to invade it. Anything that would be really, really expensive.

Because it wasn't a vital interest. Well, optional war. For the Iranian regime, right? This is a war of survival. This is absolutely existential.

Because our stated gold very beginning was to topple them. We're trying to get rid of them. That's though.

He demanded, quote, unconditional surrender right in the first week.

So they're resolved. They're willing this to suffer in order to win or at least come out of this intact is much greater than ours. Right?

“And I think you see that in the fact that they're willing to do all sorts of things, including things that involve real price for Iranian people and for themselves.”

Risk to the regime, risk to the leaders of the regime. Because for them, this is an absolutely existential, existential affair. And it's not for us. And that's the central problem that we face here. And secondly, compounding that is fact that it turned out they had real options.

They were much weaker than us. They have much less clueless influence than the United States. We've done enormous amounts of damage to them. We've significantly hurt their military capability, the way Secretary of Defense takes us like to boast all the time. But the fact is they could close the straight-of-war moves or effectively close it.

And they could cause significant damage to American military facilities in the region and to other American partners in the region, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia. Conceivable also even Israel as well. So suddenly they have escalatory potential. And when you're dealing with an adversary who cares more than you do is willing to bear greater cost, run greater risk than you are.

“You have to worry that they might start exercising some of those options.”

And so every time Trump has threatened them, the Iranians can basically say, you know, you do this does.

We'll do something back to your side and you won't like it. And each time so far Trump has backed off. I'm glad he did because the consequences of escalating this further would be quite severe. So, you know, we had a deal of sorts in June. The memorandum of understanding.

It was badly constructed, badly negotiated by some people who didn't know what they were doing. But it was basically a surrender. It was the United States saying, this was a mistake. We shouldn't have done it. And we're going to agree to a set of terms that are actually pretty favorable to you.

Trump is immediately pilloried by the supporters of the war and some others for negotiating a bad deal. And the United States pretty quickly begins to try and skirt around it in various ways over access in the straight-up form of this. And the Iranians see what he's doing and they go back to war, essentially. That he's trying to evade the terms as they understood them in the agreement. If one final point I need to make here though.

And therefore, a piece of range, but with someone you don't trust is really hard to pull off.

Because you have always assuming they're going to renegone it.

And that's especially true for the Iranians. What the Iranians have to worry about is what the Israelis would call the mowing the grass phenomenon. That we bombed around last summer. Then we started a war with them in 2026. So we get a deal of some kind.

And we agree to some negotiations on their nuclear stuff. What's the stop the United States from bringing its ship some, refitting them, rearming them,

“sending them back and starting this up again in a year?”

If you're the Iranians, you would think long and hard about it.

Yes, you would. How do we agree to end a war with the United States? And be confident that the United States won't start this again at some convenient point down the road? And my reasoning is if I were Iran, I'd be saying, "I need to make sure the United States pays a significantly large price for this." That they learn not to do it again.

I can't trust their promises, but I can hope that I can trust that they might be able to learn that this was a huge mistake. And that means an incentive to actually make sure that we all pay an sufficiently large price that the next president, Democratic or Republican or Trump in his last term, decides that starting something like this again is a bad idea. All of those things, I think, and extremely difficult to solve. And the Iranians, if you watch their media or saying that, I mean, they're saying that.

They don't trust that a piece of agreement won't become just a pause. Remember, we were negotiating with Iran. Oh, I know, it's nuclear program when the war started. And here we have some negotiations. I do remember that. This is not exactly the way you instill confidence in your adversary that maybe diplomacy is the way to go here. This is what you do when your goal is unconditional surrender.

“But what happens when you can't achieve unconditional surrender? What does that leave you?”

But my question to you is how does Iran provide those incentives? It's like, how does it extract? What kind of cost does it need to extract in order to get this not to happen again? I'm not sure. I mean, I think that I don't know how the Iranians are thinking about this. But certainly anything that imposes significant costs on the American economy, which, of course, we've already seen, I think the Iranians would be delighted if the midterm elections go south from Trump's point of view.

They may do that for multiple reasons, of course, not just the Iran war. But that would be a lesson to future American presidents. Don't do things like this. Obviously, the more pressure that is placed on the United States by others in the region. And we've seen that happen now on a number of occasions. That's again, all of this feeds back into the American political system and foreign policy machinery.

Don't do this kind of thing again. One final aspect to this, again, I've not thought long and hard about. But I mean, there is a danger on the Iranian side of overplaying their hand, too. Yes.

One could make the argument that we have a situation in the world today gets back to your first question, where lots of countries are overplaying their hands.

Trying for more than they're really going to be able to grab. But the circumstances that allowed Iran to do what it did in response are likely to fade over time. The rest of the world is going to diversify away from fossil fuels. We're going to build more pipelines so they can get oil and gas out of the Middle East without using the straight-of-war moves. We were already seeing people re-engineer energy markets in a variety of ways to try and deal with this.

So Iran's leverage here is, in my view, likely to be less five years from now, six years from now. That doesn't mean they don't have the leverage now.

“And I think they're using it. But if I were Iran, I would be careful not to sort of drag this out too long, in the sense that at some point, you know, we will begin to adapt.”

We will have an answer. There's also only so much humiliation the U.S. can withstand sustained. I mean, at some point, every embarrassment in the United States is by definition, like reduction in its power, right? Yeah. But you can sometimes make those, if you're so worried about, "Oh, I can't be humiliated. I've got to do something." You better make damn sure that that next thing you do actually works.

But I'm saying, if U.S. policy makers decide, like, we actually can't lose this or we're going to lose the dollar.

Yeah. And I don't think we're anywhere near there though. But I'm just saying if people start to think like that, you could see incentive to do something crazy. I still cling to the hope, I guess, that some of the crazier things you occasionally hear about, you know, that we might use a nuclear weapon or something like that.

“At that point, you know, sensible people will stand up and say, "Are you kidding over this?”

This is not worth crossing that particular threshold." You know, the only country in history to use nuclear weapons and we've done it twice against non-nuclear powers. This is not a good look for the United States at a moment where America's image around the world is tanking anyway. This seems to me would be a huge mistake and I would expect a lot of pushback if anybody, you know, seriously went beyond the sort of contemplating stage. I hope so.

But I would think even at the stage of contemplation someone would say, "What did you just say?" That's not, but that hasn't happened because this has been discussed at the time. Yeah. But yeah, you look at the history of both nuclear powers and other major powers. And if you get it, the number of things people have talked about at first, but without, you know, that serious considerations.

There's a lot of crazy shit that gets talked about as, you know, let's think this through for a second. And then some of that's undoubtedly useful. If you've thought about it, you know, "Okay, no, that's a crazy idea, here's why." And then you can dismiss it. So I don't want to sort of self-sensor the consideration of various options.

I just want smart enough people with good enough judgment when they hear something crazy to know that it's crazy. Yeah.

I've always had confidence there would be people like that. I have less confidence.

I am with you there. So it does seem like, no matter what happens, no matter how this is resolved, there will be a reduction in the US presence in the Gulf. Because I just think that's a bunch of reasons, but it seems inevitable that there will be fewer US forces in the Gulf. What effect will that? I mean, because there will be a lot of politicians who say, "Why are we there at all?"

Well, there are a variety of reasons why we've ended up there.

“And I think actually a historical perspective here is quite useful.”

So we didn't care very much about the Middle East until the end of World War II. And at the end of World War II, we began to take our more serious interest in the Middle East because people began to realize there was a lot of oil there. That there was energy resources. It was not yet a vital interest because we didn't need those resources at that point. We were still producing an enormous amounts of oil and gas here in the United States, but we began to take an interest. And for the rest of the Cold War, the Middle East was a battleground in the Cold War where we were competing with the Soviet Union for influence.

We had our friends, the Saudis, the Israelis, the Jordanians, others, the Soviets had Egypt, Syria, Iraq, eventually as well. And our allies turned out to be better than their allies, which was useful. But very interestingly, in that whole period, the United States didn't really have much military presence there. We had an air base or two. We had a flatilla, a small flatilla that went in and out. But we didn't think of it as an area where we were going to get actively involved militarily.

Yes. We were playing basically a balance of power. We didn't want anybody to control the region.

We didn't have to control it ourselves. We just wanted to make sure the Soviet Union didn't. And nobody else was able to dominate the region as well. Very much a balance of power again. This changes the first Gulf War in 1991. We had created the rapid deployment force back in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution. Created the rapid deployment force, but we didn't park it in the Middle East.

“We kept it here in the United States, so we had prepositioned equipment, I think, in Diego Garcia, such a.”

But we were not a big footprint in the Middle East. Then comes the first Gulf War. Suddenly, we've got several hundred thousand troops in there throwing Iraq out of Kuwait. And we brought most of them home, but we didn't bring all of them home. And in the Clinton administration, we adopted a policy known as dual containment, where we were going to contain Iraq and Iran simultaneously.

Even though Iraq and Iran were mortal enemies at that point. And to do that, we had to keep troops in Kuwait. We had to keep troops in Saudi Arabia. This is early to mid 1990s.

And it was partly intended, not entirely, but partly intended to reassure Israel.

“And make Israel more compliant in the Oslo process.”

The theory was that Israel's insecure always worried, always worried about security.

So if we say we're going to deal with Iran and Iraq, we'll keep track of them. You guys should make some concessions in the Oslo process towards the Palestinians. Didn't work, right, but that was the logic. But the problem was by keeping all those troops in Saudi Arabia. And it became one of the things that Osama bin Laden, famously, if it didn't like and justified his declaring Gihad against the United States.

So one of the reasons we end up with, in trouble with Al-Qaeda is the fact that we've adopted a policy of keeping a lot of troops now in the Middle East. That's where it starts. Then, of course, that eventually we get 9/11. And then we get the war in Iraq, 2003, war in Iraq. And now we have a very large presence in the Middle East, and it takes more than a decade to start bringing that back down.

And we basically have never gotten out of now either trying to provide order in the Middle East ourselves or more accurately.

Providing a lot of disorder in the Middle East, trying to reshape it to our liking by toppling governments of various kinds. And no president has ever been able to fully extract themselves from doing that. So, if, well, the further a mesh than it had been. That's right. And now, if the end result of this conflict is for the United States to be less physically present in the Middle East, less directly involved in trying to manage the local politics of the region, telling different governments how to behave, what to do.

“I think that'd be a good thing. Right. That might permit the United States to then start focusing its attention on bigger problems.”

Problems in Asia and elsewhere. Last point. The other thing that's characterized American policy from the mid-60s on, I'd say, is we've had special relations with some countries in the Middle East, Israel, to some degree Saudi Arabia, after 75, also Egypt. And no relationship whatsoever with one country in the Middle East. You're on. Yes. Right. You contrast that with Russia, China, everybody else in the world, who has relations with everybody in the region. Doesn't mean they like them necessarily. Doesn't mean they're not pushing back or objecting or doing various things.

But they talk all the time. They deal with them. They understand that they're there. We've had relations where we give some governments almost unconditional support, and we don't even deal on a direct basis with the others. And this is crazy. My dream. Why do we do that? Where unique among countries in doing that? We're more likely than others. There's approximate causes and permissive cause.

The permissive cause is the fact that the United States has been so secure and so wealthy and powerful for so long. Which gives us the luxury of pretending other governments don't exist and doesn't matter. We don't have to talk to them, et cetera. It's not a luxury. You can afford if your security is more precarious.

“So that's, I think, the permissive cause.”

And then the approximate causes have been, you know, in the case of Israel. Obviously, the special relationship there is mostly driven by American domestic politics.

Not the only example of that in the world, but it's the most obvious and most important.

And to some degree, I think the connections between Saudi world family, American elites, American oil interests, things like that. And then Egypt was partly because of the Egypt or Israeli peace treaty and sort of keeping Egypt on board and part of that relationship. Most of it don't, I think, ultimately stems on Israel. So if we were to do what you hope happens, which is withdraw substantially or completely from the region, what are the risks of that? Well, so there's several. The biggest one that people point to is, you know, a proliferation risk to the extent that the American security umbrella has discouraged or deterred countries like Saudi Arabia from pursuing nuclear weapons.

Then if you suddenly said, we're no longer doing that. We're not in that business any longer. It'd be more likely, not certain, but it'd be more likely that some of those countries, maybe not just Saudi Arabia would decide. Okay, well, in order to be secure, you know, dangerous neighborhood, Israel has nuclear weapons, maybe Turkey will get them who knows Iran might someday get them.

That's even that argument, which I don't reject out of hand, is you have to be qualified because American activities in the region have also given countries reasons to pursue nuclear weapons in the past.

Why does Iran want to have a nuclear program? Why is Iran wanted to be close to the nuclear threshold, but not over it?

Because it was worried about the United States. It was worried that we were going to try to do what we've just tried to do.

“And so some American activities and involvement in the region is a spur to proliferation, even though you have to be honest, disengagement might encourage it.”

So also, you know, possible that will happen anyway. We've just reached some kind of nuclear arrangement with Saudi Arabia as well, which is going to, it's not supposed to lead them to get a bomb, but it's not going to make it harder, you know, as well. So there's only one of the concerns we have. And I should be very clear. I mean, if, I mean, would it, is it impossible that if more nations in the region had nuclear weapons that you would have a more peaceful region? This, this is a longstanding argument that a number of people might dissertation advisor Kenneth Waltz made this argument in both a famous paper back in 1981, arguing that the gradual, gradual spread of nuclear weapons would actually be stabilizing and better than going to enormous lengths to try and prevent it from happening.

So, very controversial got lots of criticism, and then it is very last public starticle for a few months before he died. He published an article in Foreign Affairs. I think the title is "Why Iran should get the bomb?" And he made exactly this argument that, in fact, if Iran were to get nuclear weapons, it would be relatively secure, it would no longer have much incentive to metal around with other countries, and it would actually have stabilizing effects again.

Very controversial got lots of criticism. The logic behind that position is a powerful logic about using nuclear weapons is completely irrational.

For Iran to use a nuclear weapon against Israel or anybody else might invite its own destruction, they're useful only for deterring major attacks on your own soil, and therefore a nuclear Middle East might actually be more.

“Have there been more or fewer wars per decade between India and Pakistan?”

Before Pakistan, that's a famous illustration of exactly this argument. There are also cogent counter-arguments on this side, that you do have to, you know, the more hands have more people who have their fingers on the trigger, it only takes one. Fine, we might say great. We've had 30 years of relative, not complete, but relative peace between India and Pakistan. They have fought each other a few times, but it would only take one nuclear exchange. Yes, you really alter that equation, so I don't think one ought to be sanguine about this possibility, but one should not reject it out of hand, and one should also always ask the sort of opportunity cost or counter-factual question.

“What do you have to do to prevent it from happening? What are the costs of doing what you're doing to prevent it from happening?”

I wanted to go back to one other thing, which is that I'm not arguing for the United States to disengage from the Middle East, either economically or diplomatically or necessarily, militarily. I like the idea of a balance of power in the region. I don't want any country to try and dominate the place, trying to control it partly because they could manipulate energy supplies in kind of the way Iran is trying to do now. Therefore, I think the United States should be ready if you see something like the invasion of Kuwait in 1991 happening, a major potential shift in the balance of power.

The United States should be ready to weigh in and try to stop that as we did in 1991, but that's not going to happen very often. And it doesn't require the United States to be physically present and trying to dictate the local politics and topal regimes and things like that.

It's not like the Middle East is irrelevant and I want the United States never to have a military role there. I want to be very selective in when we go and for what purposes.

I think you're in the center of the mainstream on that question.

This is the kind of thing, because in a sense, the critical decision to rest with one person at this point, I get rest with Donald Trump.

And until he says, okay, it's over, no matter how he dresses it up, it will be in a state of state of war, whether they're actually shooting at each other or not. And I can't forecast at what point he will decide that he needs to end this and be done with it. I do think I wrote this a few weeks ago that, you know, of all the presidents I have observed, he's probably the one who's best able to sort of declare victory and get out. You know, pretend it was a victory and then move on, change the subject, do something else somewhere, build a second ballroom, you know, just get everybody talking about something else. He's brilliant at that.

And he should take advantage of that ability. It would be harder this time around.

“This is a little bit too obvious, a failure, but but that's what I would have tell you.”

You as an effort to do that, I think it was. And one of the reasons it didn't work is because the first line of that agreement or framework of an agreement promised that

I would have passed a reason Lebanon would stop and he's really totally ignored that and doubled down. So like we're not in this alone. No, that's true. And we've seen occasional, you know, signs of fishers or cracks. I think that I would be shocked if Trump had, it doesn't have his moments where he's enraged at Prime Minister Netanyahu for getting him in the days. Yeah, you would be amazed, but you haven't seen that turn into a genuine policy rift. You haven't seen that turn into deny it's saying, look, you're the junior partner here. We're the great power. And this issue, we're now fully engaged and you're going to do what we tell you.

Right. Why haven't you seen that?

“Um, I think at first of all, Trump is still, I mean, I think he has advisors around him.”

I'd Christian with golf others who are deeply engaged in this who are pushing him the other way. I think certainly some of his donor base have weighed in various ways of not just now, but previously so I think he's mindful of the political consequences of that even though public is pushed away. The donor base in which a lot of Republican politicians depend is still heavily, you know, you got a back Israel no matter what. I think that probably is influencing him as well. I think that's probably, you know, most of it. The rest of it though is is I think his own inability to admit even to himself that he made a mistake here and that whatever comes out of it is going to look to most observers like an American retreat and that's not that's not part of his brand.

“Yeah, it has massive consequences too, by the way. Does it not?”

I'm not sure. I mean, the, you know, Reagan didn't face any real consequences for pulling out a Lebanon. Yes, that was the smart thing to do. Next in in Kissinger thought that getting out of Vietnam and having Vietnam followed the communist would have catastrophic effects on America's position in the world. It actually improved our position both in Asia and especially in other parts of the world. So I think we are very good at exaggerating the negative consequences of cutting losses. You don't want to have to do it. You don't want to have to make mistakes. Of course you do these things. But in some cases, you also, I mean, you probably know this, you know, in your own life at times.

If you make a mistake and you admit it and you, you know, tell everybody you're sorry, you've learned from it. Sometimes you actually benefit. Sometimes people get credit for good judgment in having made a mistake being able to recognize it and own up to it. It's the biggest win. And so, you know, there would be some, I think, benefits. I'll be carping from, you know, critics, folks who supported the war and continued support the war will undoubtedly attack him.

I, it can blame it or whoever he wants something. I was misled by my advisors, fire, Pete Higgs-Seth, you know, he'd make him the fall guy or whoever, right, and move on. You'd be better off for doing that. But whether he will, I don't know.

“My own read is that he would have done that already if it weren't for the Israelis. That's, it's hard to do with them for many reasons. But, but I think he'd be happy to fire Higgs-Seth and blame Higgs-Seth for the whole thing.”

Well, it, the option is always there. Um, interesting. Do you think that there will be, because the public so profoundly opposes this war according to public opinion polling?

How can the next administration or the second half of this administration, like, how can we have more conflicts like this after 25 years, the public just saying resoundingly we're not for this kind of thing? But it's a great question. I, I have thought mistakenly that, you know, this time we've really learned and we won't do this again. The public has learned. Yeah. No, I think the public has learned and, you know, one of the, there's a telling little statistic or an observation goes way back here.

Virtually every president, since the end of the Cold War has run for president on a platform of, I'm going to do more at home and less abroad. Right. What was Bill Clinton's mantra? Well, it's not, it's a Cold War. I mean, would you Wilson ran on that? But, but Cold War, you know, being of responsible internationalists, you know, McGovern got hammered for being, yes, you know, so you wanted to be a responsible internationalist, you know, Eisenhower Kennedy, Johnson, etc. That was pretty pretty constant.

Jimmy Carter was not a dove, right? He's rated plenty of harkish things, but beginning, beginning. So what's Bill Clinton's mantra? It's the economy stupid. He has no foreign policy credential. He's not interested in it. He runs against a very successful foreign policy president, George H. W. Boys and beats him, right? Get to 2000, right? What's Bush's mantra? I'm going to give a humble foreign policy.

“Our foreign policy would be strong, but humble, and he criticizes the Clinton Gore administration of a too much nation building, right?”

Too much foreign policy is social work, etc. We're too activist at all, right? The box, et cetera. So he runs for office saying, I'm going to do more at home. I'm going to give you a strong but humble foreign policy. That's not the foreign policy he ended up giving us. So, the axis of evil and he making the world in our image that wasn't humility? No, exactly. Barack Obama, he becomes president because he's one of the few Democrats who had publicly opposed the Iraq war. And so he's going to do a nation building at home.

That was one of his lines, and that's not exactly what he does, either. He tries to move in that direction, but he does Libya. He does a lot of involvement, et cetera. Then we bring us to Donald Trump, right?

Ponent to the forever war is very critical of the foreign policy establishment in 2016. That's distinguishes him not only from the Democrats, but all of the Republicans that he's running against,

who are basically interventionist, neo-cons, whatever. Right? And he wins. And then, of course, in his first term, he doesn't do half of the things that he says he's going to do. We're still in Afghanistan when his term ends. He actually does a little search, just like Obama did in his first year. So he doesn't change either, and you get Biden, of course, and Biden is critical of Trump, et cetera, but Biden was part of the old order anyway.

“So all of these presidents intuited that the American people wanted to hear that there was going to be some more attention paid to them at home, right?”

And less of this craziness abroad. Why do we use a term democracy to describe our system? Well, because I think it is still fundamentally a democracy, but it's a democracy mediated through institutions, which is what a democracy is. And some of those institutions are committed to certain ways of doing business. Also, most Americans, most of the time, almost all the time, don't think of foreign policies very important.

It's always way down there about 10, 11, and the list of things you worry about, right, when you show polls, people worry about cost of living.

They worry about health care. They worry about education. They worry about it. And foreign policy, except in rare circumstances, like right after September 11, doesn't loom that large in the political calculations of most Americans most of the time. But if you're spending the overwhelming majority of the discretionary budget, 1.5 trillion just on the Pentagon, not including all kinds of other national security related expenses. I mean, the economy is directly linked to your foreign policy, in fact, it's driven by your foreign policy.

So yes, that money is coming out of all of our pockets, but it's also going to keep people employed, and that will keep local congressmen in district X in state Z,

voting for the budget because there's 6,000 jobs dependent upon that going through as well. So some of it is structural in the way our system works, but I wouldn't say it's not democratic for that reason.

But I'm just saying if the big things that government does, like, I don't know, writes the tax code sends the troops are inconsistent with what the public wants over generations.

It's not an democracy in any recognizable way. I mean, the system, you may have what we've got, you know, by camel chamber at all, but it's like so. But that's true, I mean, public opinion polls, what if if public opinion were driving, right, public policy in every schedule way, you'd probably have Medicare for all, you'd probably have a really significant changes in gun control.

All right, there's all sorts of issues where the public is at odds with what the political system produces, but I wouldn't say it's not democratic.

I mean, I thought the definition of democracy was ownership of the state by the people and the governance of the state is mediated by the people they elect, but ultimately it's the, what the state does reflects what the people want to do because they own it.

“And I think to a first approximation that it's still true, I think that, you know, we got Donald Trump because American people were unhappy with what the political system was going to get exactly what we do.”

I understand this, I understand this, and Lord knows, you know, there are reasons why people think American democracy is gone by the wayside in a variety of different ways. I'm still, I guess, reluctant to declare the United States is not a democracy because the decisions made by people in government are not a perfect reflection of what the voter preferences are at a particular point. But if on the biggest issues, and we measure that by how much we spend on those questions, right, that's just a one measure, but I think it's pretty good.

What percentage of the budget goes to, right, initiative x, if the biggest ones are in direct opposition with the public wants, then I don't really know how we're defining the term, I guess.

“Well, I think this is a complicated picture, so there's also a difference between, do you want a strong defense, do you support the troops, do you want us to be secure versus how do you want those resources to be used.”

So there's less support for, say, cutting the defense budget than there is for not invading other countries, those are two different things, right, so most Americans want a strong defense, but they want that to be used differently than we have been using it for defense example. Right, I mean, right, but yeah, I mean, I don't know, I've this my personal view, I'm not sure of the answers to most of these questions, including the one I just posed to you is a democracy, but I do think we would benefit from like a more open.

And persistent discussion about like what are these, what are the terms mean, like that would be helpful. Yeah, no, I think that's right, and and the questions that are being raised now, I should caveat this by saying, I've never considered myself really a student of American politics, right, the international relations, but but I think the questions that have a reason now across the board about certainly the role that money plays in American politics now, which it's all it's not like. It's never played a role in the past, it's always been influential in their periods of American history, it was, you know, waxed and weighing in its influence, but it really is extraordinary now the amount of money that gets poured into politics and how it's concentrated in various places and clearly shapes outcomes in a variety of ways and shapes the way members of Congress and others behave.

“That's important, I think we are still wrestling with the impact of social media and the explosion of the media environment, you know, it's no longer the three channels that you can listen to, it's no longer, you know, dealing like.”

Huntly in Brinkley or Walter Concrete, you've got as many different voices as you want to and what effect that ultimately has on politics, you know, I think we all kind of intuit that the effect has probably not been good, but that's even there, it's not entirely true, it's clear, I think it's shaping our politics in a variety of ways that it didn't before probably in some beneficial ways.

Responsible and accountable politicians, I would say, responsible knowledgeable and accountable politicians and have them be rewarded for that behavior as opposed to, you know, grandstanders, liars,

thrifters, people who have managed to achieve a following because they were good at basically attracting attention. And we have an awful lot of that in our politics and in our, in in our,

“I think it's a deeply unhealthy, what's obviously deeply unhealthy, but it's unhealthy in, I think the more imminent problem is it like it's instability producing, that's what worries me.”

So you wrote a book once and you were telling me a purpose in which you described the groundwork that allowed the French Revolution 179 to happen, what did France look like, like the week before the mob stormed the best deal.

The, yeah, there's some, I don't want to overstate these parallels, you know, historical analogies should always be used somewhat.

I mean, you just state what France was like, and then like, if you were draw his own content. No, so you have a highly unequal system, right, but all the political powers, you know, reserved in the aristocracy in the king, there is an estate general, but it's not, it doesn't have particular powers, et cetera, although it plays a role in the story, highly all the wealth held by the crown, all the wealth held by the aristocracy and the church.

“And moreover, the system is rigged in such a way that those institutions that have all the resources really don't pay very much in taxes, you have a very large peasantry that hasn't has relatively little lives hidden to mouth, et cetera.”

They don't have economic power, they don't have political power as well, highly unequal situation, and because the people with the money aren't willing to spend any money in taxes, the state is chronically broke. And every time they fight a foreign war, which, you know, they do helping the American Revolution, for example, they end up in more trouble financially, so they're constantly in financial trouble. Does this sound, begin to sound familiar? And what, among other things, oh, final thing, of course, is literacy is gradually spreading, you have the printing press, you're getting an explosion of the median environment.

Suddenly, pamphleteers can put out various political tracks, and the coffee houses in Paris, lots of ideas are being swapped around, you do have some intellectuals who are starting to write about democracy, famous things to get circulated people, we had to talk about this, maybe rights of man, stuff like this, and so you have a lot fermenting below the surface here.

And then finally, the fiscal crisis becomes so significant that Louis has to call these states general, this could cause a parliament to come in and authorize some new financial matters.

And that's the thing that begins to generate a genuine sort of call it grassroots movement within the political lead or whatever, for change, a debt crisis. And the change then spins completely out of control in a variety of different ways, and there's, of course, huge contingencies in all of this, you can imagine ways as bounces differently in people in the right place, wrong time, etc. But the end result here is the collapse of the French aristocracy, the rise of the polling, 20 tons, 25 years of war, all sorts of bad consequences, and to some degree, you can trace it to horrible wealth inequality, denial of political agency, the lower classes, spread of information in ways that are no longer mediated or controlled, etc.

And a debt crisis driven by pointless foreign wars, exacerbated, exacerbated, okay. So I'm not, I'm not drawing any parallels at all, but I just kind of said, as I said to you, before this is, if I were a really wealthy person, I would worry about this. One of the things that back in the age of rubber barons and not just here, but in other countries, great Britain, there was enormous income inequality in the end of 19th century.

“I think one of the things that saved capitalism in the 20th century, from Bolshevism and other things, was the development of the modern welfare state, the essentially income redistribution.”

You wealthy people are going to live really great lots, good for you. Congratulations, thank you for all your contributions, but you're going to have to give a bit larger share here.

And I think it was again a remarkable success overall and prevented the kind of lower class of peoples that you saw in some other societies as well.

So if I were a wealthy oligarch today, I would have that in mind. You know what I would do is say against your will, we're going to develop a new technology that you're going to subsidize through your tax dollars in the form of data centers, that is going to eliminate your jobs, and none of your kids are going to be employed.

And there's nothing you can do about it.

Yeah, but their kids don't need to be employed. No, but I'm just saying like, no, rather than respond in a sensible way that preserves the system, what's good about the system, it does seem like the people in charge of the system, like are making it worse almost on purpose, and then don't understand the thinking there.

“I think that we have, what's interesting, I think about, you know, previous wealthy elites in the United States is not all by any means, but many of them also had along with, you know, the usual drive and ambition and you could even argue greed.”

I also did have a certain public mindedness was called Christianity. Well, now it wasn't just Christianity. I think some of them were, you know, obviously devout and faithful in their own fashion that may have played a role in it, but even those that weren't where it didn't where they're religion on their sleeve, there was a general sense that they were part of a larger society and that they owed. They, you had to sort of give back in some respects. And that appears to be largely absent in the wealthiest people I could name right now. You don't get the impression that they care very much about the collectivity.

And that's not healthy. That's not a good good situation. Well, it's evil, but also dangerous as you just pointed out. Yeah, I'm, I'm more worried about the danger part of the evil process.

“Yeah, that's just me. No, I mean, I think one leads to the next.”

So last question, do you think, I mean, it's related to that, you wrote, you know, one of the most famous books about, in some sense, an autopsy of like the rock war, I don't think it was built as that, but that was my take on it. And so you followed, you know, the wars like the one we're in for a long time and you just said, I keep expecting a correction and it never comes. Yeah, this one, if you could make a prediction like do does this change or politics does it, is this kind of the last thing like this?

So I think it might be, but for reasons that are not really about the Iran war per se. I mean, I think that the sea change actually began a while back and it's maybe the one positive contribution I'd give credit to Donald Trump for.

“You know, I believe will eventually be remembered by Americans and by others as like the most disastrous president we have ever had and will be remembered by America's adversaries as the greatest thing that ever happened to them.”

That's just my view. Anyway, I think what Trump did in 2016 was he, he's so challenged the prevailing consensus on American foreign policy by partisan consensus. And he did it in a way that was very dismissive of the foreign policy leadership literally back to the end. To the extent that as you will probably remember, right, there were open letters signed by former Republican national security officials, you know, dozens of them published open letters denouncing Trump's presidency. And by doing that, what Trump did, he opened up in some respects, a broader discussion. He made it possible or easier to talk about that. Now, some others had already started to do that had written things that were starting to open that up.

You know, organizations like the Quincy Institute, or I'm on the board, we're not yet in existence, but getting formed in the process of being established. So you could, the cracks were beginning to form in the edifice after 25 or so years of failure. But having a presidential candidate and then a president who openly proclaim some of these ideas or at least ideas that were adjacent and certainly questioned the consensus, made it possible to start having a broader discussion.

Now, just because things are bad doesn't mean they can't get worse. And I think some of the other things that Trump has done did not either fulfill the promises that he made. And we're seeing that come to fruition now. But I do think that we are in the process of seeing not just a sea change in public attitudes, which you do see on a variety of different issues, but also a change in the, let's call it the intellectual landscape in Washington. I think it is a broader conversation.

“And now splits within the democratic party. A lot of these questions splits within the Republican party. One of a lot of these questions, some of the think tanks that you used to see is almost indistinguishable from each other.”

Yeah, yeah, and heritage on there on the right are now kind of that odds are moving in opposite directions, some internal splits within them. And on the one hand, that's, you could argue that that's sort of worrisome, okay, us, but on the other hand, if we've been suffering from an excessive consensus and an inability to ask questions, ability to criticize and very importantly, a steadfast refusal to hold anybody accountable for mistakes, this is probably a good thing.

You think people will be held to, I mean, that's the one thing it never happens in the American system.

It's, it's a fascinating question. It's, and it's a huge problem. I mean, the people who complain get held accountable, I notice, but not the people who made the bad decision. So, so this, I think this has been a big problem, and it's a, but it's a tricky one.

“So, one of the issues I, there's a chapter in my book Hell of Good Intensions on this, where I basically make this argument that if you look across the foreign policy elite hardly anybody pays a price for for screwing up.”

And in fact, the more common pattern is you go into government, you screw up, and you make go out of power for while you land a safe synagogue, a think tank or whatever, and then when stars line up properly, you go back in and make the same mistakes. You go to consulting firm and get rich. Oh, well, along the way, you may make a bunch of money to, and, and when people are really guilty of various forms of malfeasance and are exposed to that, you know, they sometimes pay a modest price for public embarrassment, etc.

In the case of crimes, maybe pay a fine, but notice that usually the system rallies around such people protects them and they're fine. You can all think of examples.

Or, similar thing, the same people keep getting re-appointed to the same jobs and keep doing the same bad job. This is the history of American people, negotiations and at least. The reason it's tricky is the following that everybody makes mistakes, doing public policy is hard, doing foreign policy is hard. No one's going to get everything right all the time. And you wouldn't want to rule someone completely out of public service because they made one screw up, or they got something badly wrong. When it was not clear what the right answer was, etc. You wouldn't want to end somebody's career at 33 because they made a mistake.

“So you have to exercise a certain amount of judgment here, and my criteria tend to be the following. First of all, if somebody keeps making the same argument over and over and over again, and it never works.”

At some point, you really should stop giving them jobs, or you should stop listening to the system, you know, they shouldn't necessarily be given a prime spot in the New York Times. And it's a radical demand, professor. No, it's at some point we ought to see that. And secondly, if people are utterly unrepentant, right, if they, so there are, I have good friends who, and some people I don't even know who say we're vocal supporters of the Iraq War. Some of them have never recanted. Some of them still think it was the right thing to do. Others have said, you know, my head was in the clouds. I wasn't taken clearly. I believed X, Y, or Z, I was wrong.

And when you make mistake, if you can admit it, you can acknowledge that, yeah, I got that one completely wrong. And here's why. Here's what I missed. Here's what I was misled by.

Here's what I should have thought harder about. I have a lot of respect for that. I'm much more inclined to say, okay, that's someone I'm willing to either maybe reappoint or someone I'm willing to listen to because they've shown a capacity for judgment capacity for learning. What I kept seeing throughout the foreign policy elite was a lot of people who really had trouble admitting they'd made mistakes were very good at defending every decision they'd ever made.

And as you indicated, it was also quite to me quite telling that the people whose careers got ended. We're often people who turned out to be right.

“You know, whistleblowers, or who just took an unpopular position and, you know, we're vindicated five years later, or six years later, but by then, you know, things had moved on and they'd already been moved out.”

Finding the right balance between respectful, discent, principled, discent, and the right balance between, you know, you're not going to get everything right, but we need accountability without a sort of grim trigger that penalizes people instantaneously.

Last point I'll make about this gets back to is I do also worry that that the way the, now the media environment operates and our discourse operates.

You know, people can get pilloried for things that are essentially irrelevant because it becomes a social media thing as well, and unless they're protected, unless they have a lot of internal resources to deal with that kind of fire storm.

“It can be really, really difficult, and I think that's unfortunate too.”

What discourages telling the truth, right, people are afraid I felt it and who hasn't.

Yeah, you haven't apparently, because you did it anyway, so thank you.

“You never, you, you do it, but it doesn't mean you're not nervous about it.”

Yeah. Professor, well, thank you very much for doing this. Okay, I start with you.