Chapo Trap House - American Prestige: E1 - Ghosting Afghanistan w/ Stephen Wertheim

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

This is the first episode of Chapo all-stars Derek Davison & Daniel Bessner’s new foreign policy podcast “American Prestige”. To get more, go here: http://patreon.com/americanprestige In the premiere episode of American Prestige, Danny and Derek get into the US's withdrawal from Afghanistan. Did the military intentionally botch the withdrawal? Has the imperial frontier contracted in any meaningful way? Will the Taliban gain legitimacy with the Afghan people? Plus, an in-depth interview with Stephen Wertheim, discussing his new book “Tomorrow, the World”, which explores how and why during World War II U.S. elites decided that their nation should, indeed must, dominate the world.

Hello everyone and welcome to the first of many episodes of American Prestige. Thank you so much for tuning in. Derek and I really appreciate it. So before we get going, we just like to give everyone a little sense of what the pod is going to be about. My name is Danny Bester. I'm a historian. I'm a historian of U.S. foreign policy and I'm really an expert on macro affairs and

things like that. The history, theory and practice of U.S. foreign policy and I'm joined by my good friend and co-host Derek Davis and Derek, why don't you introduce yourself? Yeah, so I mean, you know, I assume most of you already know who I am, but no, I'm just kidding. Oh, yeah. No, I, my background is in of all things medieval Iranian history. So I'm well versed to be talking about U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century.

No, I studied Middle East history and policy for several years too long at the University of Chicago and I've been writing about U.S. foreign policy and international affairs generally for men also a long time now, I guess, six or seven years now and I've had my newsletter for exchanges at Substack for a little bit over two years now. So yeah, I kind of, you know, deal with the nitty gritty of what's happening in the world. And so what we're going to do is we're going to provide you all with a sense of what's going on in the world with international affairs, how the United States is responding to it, and then also give you some interviews with experts who understand what's going on

in the world and why the United States is doing what it does. And hopefully we'll answer that age old question. How many countries is the United States bombing this week? And so we really appreciate you joining us on this journey on this, on this, on this path through the world that we're going to be taking. So we're also, we also want to have beef. I want to have beef. Oh, we'll definitely have beef.

It's almost natural. People think I'm like an affable guy. I have a dark side. I'm planning to exercise on this show. That'd be nice. That's still it. Italy. Italy.

Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy.

Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy. Italy.

Italy. And so San Marino is a very small country that I think gets off. It's got three for its, its various things. We don't want to hit too much above our weight, you know, we got to pick those smaller countries. Yeah, Michael Ladeen, the famous, Neo, conservative writer, used to say that the United States should pick a small country every 10 years and bash it against the wall just to show the rest of the world that we need mean business. That's good stuff.

And that's the stuff we'll be exploring on this. That should be an operating principle for us. Yeah, that's in the Constitution of American Prestige. I don't know if you saw this, Derek, but HR McMaster has released a wonderful op-ed today in which he blames the media for the United States' failure to, I don't know, democratize Afghanistan to take it over, to make it our 51st state. I don't precisely know exactly what he wanted, but what's going on in Afghanistan now, and why is HR fellow history PhD, I might add, HR UNC history PhD?

They should ask for that back, actually, the university should. We only do our best, but what's going on in Afghanistan, and is it actually, are we actually coming to an end? Do you think of this 20-year extravaganza? Yeah, I'm skeptical about that. I think we're coming to a change. It is an end in some ways. I think legitimately there will not be an offensively capable American ground force in Afghanistan.

There will not be a major air presence in Afghanistan now. There will be, as the withdrawal is either already complete, and we're not acknowledging it, or 90 to 95% completely, you get different answers from different media outlets. I think it's probably done, and we're just pretending there's this lingering 10%, because it gives the Taliban a little pause, and it helps buoy the Afghan government a bit. This is something that the United States has been doing for decades, famously the decent interval strategy in Vietnam, which is the idea. By the early 1970s, everyone knows South Vietnam is not going to be this vibrant state that

is going to challenge communism. What happens is the United States, and this is something that we see throughout history, will repeatedly essentially say we're leaving, but just give us a little bit of time. Don't embarrass us so much. It was called the decent interval between US withdrawal and the total collapse of what essentially could, in many regards, be understood as a US puppet regime. I think we're seeing something similar now, because Derek, it relates to American prestige. Americans are constantly worried about their international prestige and what's going on.

That seems to be what's going on in Afghanistan right now. There's this muddled area, and everyone knows the Taliban is going to retake everything. Former Afghani president Karzai has essentially said this. We're now waiting for a decent interval before things go totally in the direction that we promised they wouldn't go. Is that correct? Do you think I'm right there? I certainly think the Taliban, if they're prepared to do what needs to be done, that's

a question, because the Taliban wants to be the legitimate government of Afghanistan when this is all over. They're not nihilists. They're not there to just sort of plow Afghanistan into dust and call it a day. The question is, how far are they going to be willing to go? How violent are they going to be willing to get to, say, take Kabul eventually? Saying that the more violent they get, the less legitimacy they're likely to have with the Afghan people.

This is already a group that, to the extent that you can do any polling in Afghanistan, they're not popular. People are not like, hey, let's have the Taliban take over again. That was a good time. They do need to be cognizant of that to some degree. That leads to all sorts of questions about how much factionalization is there inside the Taliban, because we tend to treat them as a monolith in a sense, and they are a very coherent group, relatively speaking, for that type of organization.

But they're also riding a wave of success. They've captured almost half the country at this point. If you go on a district by district basis, they've swept through the northern part of Afghanistan, which was the seat of the resistance to them in the 1990s when they previously ruled Afghanistan. And a lot of heroin, what goes through the north, right? Is that correct? Yeah.

Well, some goes through the north. Some goes through the Iranian border, but they've also made moves on the Iranian border as well. They're right now trying to take over an entire province, or at least the provincial capital in Bagus province in the west, and if they do that, that would be probably their most impressive victory to date. So there's no pressure at this point on the Taliban that would expose weaknesses or kind of disagreements between, let's say, like a moderate faction and a more hardline faction.

But as they get closer to the goal, I mean, I've seen some people write about this, there's a possibility that you will start to see some divergence of viewpoints about what do we want? Do we want a negotiated settlement with us in the ascendance, you know, kind of leveraging our military strength to achieve a favorable peace deal, or do we want to just conquer the whole thing? And I don't know. I mean, there may be some disagreement about that at some point.

Right. And of course, this is coming after what is it now, 42 years of almost total and complete chaos from the Soviet invasion of 79. Yeah. I mean, it's never been, the country's never not been at war pretty much since then. Yeah. From the like the gigantic imperial powers on earth. So and again, I just think like it's important to underline the absolute absurdity of the

United States being in this country for 20 years and having absolutely almost nothing to do. Nothing to show for, I mean, to be left at this point. I mean, there's now the, I see, I feel like there's a new trend kind of countering people like H.R. McMaster to say, you know, that the U.S. military is kind of screwing around with this withdrawal in a way that's, you know, it meant to sort of maximize the chaos and maximize the dysfunction and embarrass the Biden administration because they're mad. They're mad that they're being pulled out and, you know, they're not going to be policing

what I guess we're supposed to regard as the frontier of the empire anymore. And I, you know, that that's not out of the question. And certainly this has been managed in a way that from the outside doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, you had Donald Trump announced last year that he was going to have all U.S. forces out by May 1st. I mean, it was in a deal that that Zalme Khalilzad signed along with the Taliban, Taliban, to have a full withdrawal by May 1st, 2021.

So that they had from, and that deal was signed at the end of February. So they had all that time to prepare for a withdrawal on May 1st and to do it in a way that was not just like as haphazard as is looked, Biden came into office and kind of repudiated a little bit that agreement, but still said, you know, we're going to be out by September 11th. That's the new deadline. There are a few more months to kind of manage this process, and yet you still have like the story this week was the U.S. withdrew from Bagram Air Base, which has been the main

U.S. platform in Afghanistan for almost the entire time that the U.S. military has been there. And the story was that they just like left in the middle of the night and didn't tell anybody. They didn't tell anything to Afghan. And I think that's a little bit hard to believe because there's like a prison at Bagram that houses hundreds of Taliban fighters. So I don't think they would have just, I don't think it's reasonable to think that they just

left the key. Right. Just left like the key under the mat and like, you know, we don't know if these guys are going to look under the mat. Yeah. We don't know if they're going to try to escape whatever it's not our problem. I think that's a bit unrealistic. I'm sure they there was some notice given to somebody in the Afghan government, but clearly

the military unit that was meant to come in and occupy the base was not informed. And despite that, despite the fact that there was no managed handover, the U.S. military just bugged out and that kind of thing speaks to a level of disorganization. It's almost hard to believe given how long these guys have known this was coming. And this to me is I think a shift that we haven't fully grappled with. I do believe that one of the consequences of the Trump administration and just basically not having a commander in chief who has to wear with all will or interest in sort of governing this far-flung military empire could have begun to basically instantiate a culture

in which the military becomes more and more independent. And I think this is one of the big stories of the last 75 years is the essential emergence of the military as an independent foreign policy actor in terms of politics, which of course, it's not supposed to be at all in relation to the Constitution or in relation to the, you know, fabled American norms. But I wouldn't be surprised if that the Trump administration initiated this, particularly given the fact that it's an all volunteer force. There's so many private contractors.

There's such a diffusion of authority and responsibility that will begin to see more and more of these basically unexplainable and bizarre or seemingly bizarre military resistance in a sense. Tantrum. Yeah. Tantrum. Political. Political to political choices.

And that's pretty frightening actually. Because one of the reasons, one of the reasons that I wasn't like particularly worried about January 6 is that there's no charismatic military general to take advantage of the discontent. But if you know, if you begin replacing some of these faceless military people like Mike Mullen or even Petraeus with someone who actually has some sort of charisma, that could be a recipe. Right. Right.

Someone who's like appealing in any way, you know, in Eisenhower or even a grant, you know, I think that could be, that could be a real recipe for something pretty dangerous and something pretty scary. Yeah. I agree with that. But you know, with respect to Afghanistan, the issue to me is like, yeah, okay, I can buy the argument that the military is intentionally screwing up this withdrawal. But it feels like that's where we're going to land in terms of like what went wrong.

And the fact of the matter is like, it's been 20 years and you haven't built anything durable in this country. It's so crazy. It's not the last six months that did us in here. Like when the Taliban rolls through or whatever happens, if they wind up in power, whether it's through a negotiation or military conquest, it's not because of the last six months. It's because of the entire 20 years in which you completely failed to inculcate any kind of institution that could survive the U.S. withdrawal.

And that's the question about people who are complaining about this, like McMaster, complaining about the withdrawal. Like what is the alternative after 20 years? It's just permanent. You just say, that's it. We're going to put a little sideways eight and call it an infinite deployment. And that's it. Essentially.

We're never leaving. And I think what you said about the frontier is something really important here because a year or two ago, Max Boote wrote an op-ed where he said something along the lines. He openly said it. Right. He said, over an argument was this is the frontier of empire and we need to police it and it needs to be permanent. Right.

And he made the explicit reference to the so-called Indian wars. And what that refers to is essentially the hundreds of years of genocide and displacement that made the United States expand west. And I think that literally people like McMaster and Max Boote, that is what they are arguing for. They want a permanent garrison in the frontier of an empire that would take hundreds of years to essentially make Afghanistan probably not a state for racialized reasons, but effectively a part of the U.S.

Empire. That's what they want. And I think that Max Boote essay obviously was morally disgusting, but it was useful in sort of revealing what the actual project was. The problem though is that I think unlike an after Vietnam, which essentially lasted the same amount of time, if you think since the U.S. took over from the French in 1954 and then lasted until 75 with the final, that's when Saigon fell, I believe in 75, that Afghanistan roughly 20, maybe it'll be 21 years, but by the time it's all done, it's the same exact

thing. But unlike in Vietnam, the establishment of an all volunteer force essentially led Afghanistan to be fought primarily not with the bourgeoisie. So I think whereas in Vietnam we had the reaction of the church hearings and sort of the war powers resolution in 73, et cetera, et cetera, I don't think we're going to see any of that. I think this will be swept under the rug and I think people will just remember it as a bad dream and the United States is just as likely to get into another Afghanistan as it is to not.

Well, and it hasn't, I mean, it's not, it hasn't even been fought by a wide swath of the volunteer force for years. I mean, it's been several years since this was a major war from the perspective of how many active duty US soldiers are in combat at any given time. It's been mostly the Afghan military with US air support. And that's even more kind of out of sight out of mind for people in the United States. Like, okay, well, there was an airstrike and, you know, 20 people were killed, maybe some of them were Taliban fighters, maybe some of them were, you know, Islamic state operatives,

maybe, you know, 12 of them were farmers who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because it's sort of a bedrock principle of the US, of US foreign policy and politics is we don't care really when it's not an American dying. It's not as a nation, it's not high on our list of things to worry about. I think that's right. And I think as we wrap up here, it's important to emphasize this last point about air support. I think this is going to be a shift to manage togemony.

I think we're going to see fewer and fewer, quote, unquote, boots on the ground, certainly the volunteer force. I think you'll you'll see special forces and you'll see private contractors. I think that's a whole nother world we're going to have to get into at some point. But I think we're going to see a big turn to basically air policing and air surveillance in the frontiers of the empire. And of course, this has a long history going back to the first drone or drone drone-esque flying aircraft were used in Iraq, were used in the Middle East by essentially the European

powers. And I think we're going to still be in that sort of air surveillance, air support world going forward. So that's a pretty happy place to end on. I think that we'll be talking more about what's going on in Afghanistan in the future. And I think now would be a good time to turn to our interview with Stephen Wartime, who recently left the Quincy Institute for the Carnegie Endowment. And we look forward to seeing you all next week.

Welcome to the first of what will no doubt be many interviews coming over the next few years, decades, centuries and millennia. I'm very happy and proud to be here with my good friend and colleague, Stephen Wartime, who left the historical profession, who betrayed his colleagues that he spent years getting to know to join the Treesonist Benedict Arnold of the historical profession. Sully and the Academy like this. Oh, I didn't get tenure. Yeah, what a betrayal it was.

Yes. What a betrayal. To join the ranks of the foreign policy world. And Stephen, before we get to the conversation, is currently the senior fellow at the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Tomorrow, the World, which was released by Harvard University Press. So Stephen, thank you very much for being here and for taking the time. Really appreciate it, man.

My pleasure. And so before we get into the interview, I wanted to ask you a bit of a biographical question because one of the things that I've noticed that you and I have also talked about a bunch is how so many of the public intellectuals today seem to be historians. Why is there this big entrance into history graduate programs in 2008 and 2009 of the people who would then come to be some of the major critics of the American Empire amongst the millennial generation in 2015, 2016, 2017? That to me seems an interesting historical phenomenon.

Well, start from the fact that historians were basically written out of the public sphere. I mean, it used to be that a major public intellectual like the middle of the 20th century could as well be a historian as anything else. So the Charles Beards of the world are basically done with very few exceptions. So in the 1990s, I think you have a lot of confidence in elites and a kind of technocratic expertise is valued in the public sphere as well as part of that. And so our politics have changed. We've come into a moment where no matter who you are, basically you were surprised that

Donald Trump could be the Republican nominee in 2016 and then was elected president. And then you were probably surprised by a lot of things that happened over the course of the Trump era. And so we've come to a point where our space for politics and for imagination is open. And I think that creates in an environment where people actually want some orientation. They don't feel oriented and historians are well suited to give that orientation and to say that actually it's not so odd and not so bad that we're having to deal with issues that we thought weren't on the agenda before.

And so what would you say that major issue is? And I think this brings us to your book. So what is your book about? And really, what do you think is the major, you know, super macro question about American foreign policy that people listening should be asking themselves? Well, for me, the issue is should the United States continue to pursue global military dominance? This is what I grew up with. This is just what we did.

It was basically beyond question. You could not be a serious person with a real voice in public life or politics and think that the United States shouldn't have military alliances across the globe, outspend the next many, many countries combined on its military, hold itself responsible for enforcing so-called world order. And I wanted to know when I was in grad school, not expecting this agenda to have much purchase right in our day to day. But maybe sometime in the future, it would become relevant.

You know, I wanted to know, well, why do we pursue this world role axiomatically? It's the foundation of our thinking on foreign policy to secure military primacy. People in Washington say, what do we need to do? Not starting with the question of what do the American people need and want in the world? And is that the same thing as pursuing American military dominance? So my book looks at what I take to be the actual decision for military dominance, which happened actually in a short period of time, 1940 and 41, in about 18 months between the fall of France to Nazi Germany and the attack on Pearl Harbor that got the United States

into the war. And it was at that time that a set of officials and intellectuals came to think that the United States should cast off its traditional aversion to what were then called military entanglements in Europe and Asia, and instead be the premier power trying to enforce world order in principle on a global scale. And what I show is that they were not just responding to the immediate issues of the war and thinking about whether the United States should enter the war and in what fashion, but they were looking far ahead to ask what kind of post-war world role should America

play. We must meet the threat with our valor, our blood, indeed with our very lives, to ensure that human civilization, not insect, dominates this galaxy now and always. I think essentially we've been living within those parameters ever since, but it's become more apparent and more troubling over the course of our lifetimes because totalitarian conquerors, the Axis powers, and then the Soviet Union and Soviet-backed communism fell away. I mean, the Soviet Union completely collapsed, and yet the United States pursued in some ways a greater military dominance than ever before.

And I think that is fundamentally what has produced endless wars, what produced the kind of reaction to 9-11 that we've been talking about, and that is bound to set us up, I fear, for more trouble now in a world where you have significant powers like China rising to a degree that wasn't the case back in the 1990s when American foreign policy makers thought that there would be very few costs and risks to all these actions that they wanted the United States to take. So why did we make that choice? This is the big hinge point of history.

There was talks of a peace dividend in the early 1990s. There's even talks of, I don't even want to mention it, it's so frightening, of NATO being disbanded, of the United States not having access to hundreds of military bases, and things along those lines. So this is the big question, why did we pursue global military dominance, particularly I might add, in an era where you see, I would say, real stagnation in the American economy, the explosion of credit in the late 1970s, you have deindustrialization, you have offshoring. So what is basically the choice for empire, and how do you see that related to the choice

for neoliberalism, which Clinton really puts the pedal to the metal on? So I'm still thinking this through. The relationship between empire and neoliberalism I think isn't simple at all, because I think it's actually rather hard to see why you need the empire in order for a neoliberal global economy to do its thing. So let me just say, I think that's an open question that I'm not done thinking about. I think with respect to the attachment to military dominance, you might look at this on two different levels.

On a material level, the United States had built up what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex that created concentrated interests that had a strong stake in the United States being extremely militarily powerful, not necessarily in doing specifically X or Y toward this country, but you need some countries to be doing something to, in order to keep that thing going. And there were a lot of jobs, including in a deindustrializing context, that remained attached to defense production as they do today. So let's start with that condition.

And then on an... So that's a... I just want to highlight, that's a domestic condition that has nothing to do with US security, that has nothing to do with US safety, and I think this is a theme we're going to be returning to in the show, which is the domestic origins of a lot of US foreign policy that I would say, I don't know Derek, if you agree, that are then smuggled through a security logic effectively, where you have the creation, I would say, I would say, Stephen, I don't know if you agree, I don't think the Soviet Union was ever an existential threat, particularly

after the mid-1950s. I think the United States was always more dominant, but you have these domestic interests basically being smuggled through a language of security, and I just want to emphasize because I think that's a really important point, but sorry to interrupt. So you have the first of the domestic interests. Right, so already very little incentive for political elites to be serious in dismantling what had been built up, even though the US did actually cut its defense spending across the 1990s as a percentage of GDP.

So it kind of looked like there was a little peace dividend, even as the US actually proliferated security commitments and began to intervene more frequently since 1991 than it actually did during the Cold War itself. But I digress. So the second thing is on an ideological level or an intellectual level, for people in positions of power, their reading of things was, well, the US was isolationist after 1919, like 1919 was another pivotal moment for the world. That was a disaster.

What happened in 1919? So World War I ends, what actually happens is that President Wilson proposes this League of Nations, which he wanted the United States to join. The Senate did not join the League of Nations for lots of reasons. But what didn't happen was that isolationists wanted the US to play no part in World Affairs. That's the myth. People didn't even talk really about isolationism at the time. Far less are there like any people who were just saying, United States should do nothing

abroad. There was a vibrant interest in American cultural exchange, capitalist exchange. And the US resumed its traditional role with respect to the military policing the Western Hemisphere as well as governing the Philippines as a colony. This is what's so crazy. Whenever people make the isolationists claim, it's like the United States controlled half of the fucking world and also had a colony in the Philippines. So it's just so bizarre.

And this, again, this is something you're going to be returning to again, the Eurocentrism of so much American foreign policy analysis is really insane, where you could just write off the entire continent of Latin America, of South America, rather, and Latin Central and South America as being still isolationists. And I think that's an important point that we want to emphasize. So yeah, so that happens. So then people again, they have this bugaboo, this fear of isolationism that is constantly referred to in the 1990s, I imagine, that people are constantly worried about that.

Right, and it's rooted that fear, as I show in the book, is rooted in the 30s and 40s when the people who actually come to favor U.S. global military dominance call their opponents isolationists. And so if anyone's an isolationist, it would be surely the America firsters in 1940 and 41 who didn't want the United States to join World War II. Those are the quintessential people, they wanted the United States to defend the entire western hemisphere. So ask Central Americans whether that sounds like isolationism to them.

So this conceptualization is formed, and what American policymakers tell themselves, and many Americans tell themselves in 1945 is that the country has cast off its isolationism, learned its lesson, and embraced internationalism, right, now equated with global military dominance. And so in 1991, or in the years when the Soviet Union was coming apart, what policymakers said was, well, okay, basically, we don't want the 1919 route, that's isolationism, we want the 1945. And so let's complete the project that we set out to achieve before the Cold War happened as of 1945, where we have one world united under American supervision.

And so I think that basic conceptualization of the world and America's place in it helps to explain why the United States didn't reap the peace dividend after 1991. And remember, when you have to explain isn't just that action, it's why there was almost no thought given to taking that course of action, too. That course of action would have been beyond the pale. I think, you know, well, first of all, I'm surprised you didn't say job security was the reason why everybody was becoming historians, because, you know, obviously, there's a lot of that.

But secondly, it might be helpful to remind people that our third president, Thomas Jefferson, went to war with North Africa at the start of the 19th century, before the war of 1812, which I realize is cast as this sort of defense of America, even though it involved an invasion of Canada, but we were at war with the Barbary states, which, you know, you know, all the way over there. But it's, you know, it still casts as this sort of the United States was isolationist. Again, I think you were right. It's a Eurocentric way of looking at the world.

When you talk about military entanglements, that phrase as it gets used for, you know, the first, you know, 150 years or so of American history is it means stay out of Europe. It doesn't mean don't get involved in Latin America. It doesn't mean don't, you know, go to war with the Barbary states. It means stay out of European affairs, basically. And that even becomes an American culture like the Marine Corps song from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of. Sure.

It's right there. Yeah. It's right there. But this is what just annoys me so much about like the I can bury doidney doidney piece. I'm sorry. I'm getting the pronunciation of that name incorrect. But it's just like so focused on where the empire was good. I have to say, if you're in France, if you're in the UK, if you're in the FRG, West Germany,

it's a pretty good thing to be under, you know, in the US imperial sphere. And I think, you know, if you're looking back on this history in 1500 years, you might even effectively say from Germany to the West, it's like there's a North Atlantic polity that is developing over time and you could view the world wars as a type of civil war in some sense. But that's for another time. But it totally writes out the other things that are happening, particularly in the Philippines where the United States fought a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that was defined by horrible racism,

you know, the water cure, i.e. waterboarding and things that would, you know, become foundational to the American experience. But Stephen, Jacques Hughes, how dare you? Don't you know that Trump has destroyed the liberal international order and that everything that we have done for the world has been taken apart? So what do you think? How do you think Trump fits into this larger story that you're telling? Because when he was elected, this was the big fear, right?

The United, the abandonment of the liberal international order. Foreign affairs, foreign policy, all of these places were publishing these pieces about how Trump was his big shift. So what do you think? I want to ask first, what do you think that reaction, which I know to both of, to all three of us seemed overblown at the time, what do you think that was a reflection of? Fear. So I still don't know what the liberal international order is.

In fact, that phrase came in. It's the rules-based international order now. So it's even more. Rules-based. US-led. It's the rules-based liberal international order. Just keep on adding adjectives to distract people. US-led, post-war, rules-based, liberal international order.

That's all the adjectives. Yeah, that's all the adjectives. So you can pick and choose from those. Very few people were actually talking about that thing before Trump, right? So this tradition is brought into being, at least in those terms, right, suddenly in reaction to Trump. My reading of it is that, well, first in the campaign, a lot of people wanted to exclude Trump, just knock him out by saying he's an isolationist.

And then when he used the phrase America First, and he made noises about wars in the Middle East, and he questioned alliances, it all seemed to be falling into place. Can't question alliances. That's number one rule. To question an alliance is to be beyond the pale. It is the most annoying to even question it, and then we could talk about your NATO piece, but it's so ridiculous. Sorry, Stephen.

They're sacred. No, I mean, I think we just need to rebrand NATO, and if you just call it by OTAN, like, that will get people off their attachment to NATO. They love it. They love it, folks. So first there was this attempt to just say, look, Trump is beyond the pale, but it didn't work. If anything, it seemed to confirm to certain voters that Trump was indeed as different

from the status quo as he claimed to be, which he wasn't. And then it became a line of attack used to basically equate U.S.-led multilateralism with U.S. military primacy, as if those two things go together naturally. Could you expand on that a bit? What's U.S.-led multilateralism? What are you referring to there? So when Trump does things like pull out of the WHO, one of his earlier ones was to pull out of UNESCO, et cetera.

Which the U.S. has done before, I might add. The U.S. has pulled out of UNESCO before. For the same reason, by the way. Correct. Look, many of the things Trump did in foreign policy have precedents that are not even far in the past. Even his rhetoric about alliances, like Obama was saying similar things, much more politely, to ask Europeans to spend more on their defense.

So was his Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. And then it was, how dare Trump say these things in a nasty way, and then wind up in exactly the same place on policy. The NATO alliance continues and expands under his watch. U.S. alliances expanded under the Trump administration, and not a single war was ended. Let's just be clear about that fact. But the argument was made, specifically, he's out to destroy this U.S.-led, rules-based post-war liberal international order, and therefore is the antithesis of everything America's

been trying to do since, well, the date kind of varied, but 1945 or 1948 or whenever you said this order came into being. And I see this as another attempt to try to rehabilitate U.S. military dominance and make it seem like it's one of the same essential to other forms of international cooperation. And that's what the concept of isolationism, that's what its usage does, because against isolationism, you can seem to want to dominate the world and cooperate with everyone else at the same time. So a question that I have, and I guess this is for both of you guys, is what is sort of

the, I'm trying to think of the right word, like there's almost, it's like a Dowager Countess is offended when you even, it's like, how dare you? Is it really true? There's sort of, there's a cultural element to people's responses when you make this argument about U.S. foreign policy, which is almost very fragile and very unbelieving. And I was wondering as you two much more than me have been in the sort of the blob world is what is the relationship between these people's identities and U.S. foreign policy that they get so offended?

How dare you? You know, how dare you suggest that France pay for its security? It's such a strange cultural element to me. I was wondering what you guys thought about that, either of you. It's fun, they didn't, I mean, they didn't complain about asking France to pay for its security when the Obama administration asked. You know, it's really about, I think, this investment in America's image, American prestige, as the leader of this rules-based international, whatever international order.

And Trump, you know, was too much of a buffoon to kind of play the role, the image of an American president as the kind of, you know, grandee of this system. And you know, he was just a lot cruder about it. And that's, I think, embarrassing on some level to people in the foreign policy standards, because these aren't necessarily things that they don't believe themselves, a lot of the things that Trump would talk about. These aren't things that, you know, these are things, you know, you talk about sort of in, you know, over a glass of whiskey or something at the bar, but they're not things

that you're supposed to say in public, out loud. And it just, you know, it's sort of like, you know, get that back behind the curtain here. Yeah. I think that's right. Because a lot of the American foreign policy debate is really about American identity. America's leadership role in the world is part of how the country understands what it is.

So when, you know, Hillary Clinton could talk about, America's already great in the 2016 campaign. And so, you know, we're all together with the idea that we stand tall in the world. We're the indispensable nation. You see farther. Yes. Right. This is a Madeleine Albright quote.

It's really wacky. She, we stand, she basically says in a 1998 interview with, I believe, Matt Lauer, that America stands taller and sees farther. So if people die, it was worth it. Essentially. It's all among those lines. It goes back to Reagan's shining sitting on the hill rhetoric. I mean, it's the same.

It's just different versions of the same thing. It is the, you know, example par excellence of what humanity should try to be. And we have to uphold that image at all times. And Trump was, you know, doesn't clearly, I mean, to the extent that the United States actually upholds that image, which I would question, you know, Donald Trump is clearly not it. Yeah. He, he openly disavowed American exceptionalism.

I'll pull out people noticed actually on the campaign trail, but he said he didn't like the term and he consistently presented the United States as in a competitive environment in the world where the United States had no special moral claim to stand over the world. Now he continued to want the United States to dominate others. So I don't think his rejection of exceptionalism led to a better place at all. But nevertheless, he did not go for this traditional view of the indispensable nation. And I think that drove people wild. And that's the big quote related to that.

I'm going to mangle it a little bit, but, you know, the, the we're killers too. Putin's a killer. A lot of killers. We got a lot of killers while you think our country's so innocent. The liberal media establishment, they went apoplectic over that because basically I think the Trump administration in general is just, he literally in every element of his policy made subtext text in his, in his, in his speeches and in his literal, you know, justifications for policy.

It's just what the actual effects of these things were just used to justify them in a way that no one had ever done before. But you know, thank God Biden was elected. We could all breathe a sigh of relief. We could, we could return to brunch as the famous saying goes. So why don't we actually turn to our reading series and I'll turn it over to my co-host Derek Davidson to expound upon this wonderful essay that appeared in a foreign policy magazine last week.

This is a good one. Yeah. No, it's a classic. And just to give some brief context, this essay was written by Daniel Dudney and or Doidney and John Eikenberry, who are basically, and Stephen, you correct me if I'm wrong, sort of the dons of the, of what might be termed a liberal approach to international relations that essentially argues that, you know, multilateral capitalism, multilateral exchange through essentially Western dominated, really North Atlantic dominated international institutions

are the key to pieces. Is there anything to add to that? I can bury that Princeton and Doidney is somewhere also really good. I forget where I'll look it up. But Stephen, is that an accurate portrayal of what they're, he's at Hopkins Doidney. Is that an accurate portrayal? Yeah. Eikenberry also wrote a book that came out recently, and you can see that he's tried

to fit the history and the Biden administration into the framework of that book as a lot of scholars do. But that's part of the problem with this piece. So okay, this piece is the intellectual foundations of the Biden revolution. That's ridiculous. Sure. I mean, it's been six months, but and he hasn't really done anything revolutionary. Let's go with it.

1917-1945-2021. I don't necessarily want you guys to comment on this first paragraph, but I do want to read it because I think for people who haven't seen the article, it will, you know, draw a picture. The unexpected four years of the Donald Trump presidency took U.S. foreign and domestic policies in troubling directions, frontally rejecting all the pillars of what he took to be the bipartisan establishment foreign policy. Trump set the United States on a boldly different path.

He rejected longstanding alliance commitments, calling into question NATO and the security packs with Japan and South Korea. He attacked international institutions and withdrew the United States from numerous arms control and free trade agreements, even going so far as pulling out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic. He embraced climate denialism and withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. He was hostile to the promotion of democracy and human rights. He aggressively alienated allies while cozying up to a rogue's gallery of despots, autocrats,

and populists. God, imagine. And I just want to underline just very quickly the sort of democracy promotion stuff. Like obviously we all know it's bullshit with regards to Iraq, but in terms of history, this political scientist, Lindsay O'Rourke, in her book has revealed that the U.S. tried to covertly overthrow regimes 66 times, and I believe in 44 of those cases explicitly supported authoritarian or anti-democratic forces. So that's a type of democracy promotion that we're referring to here.

So this paragraph kind of makes it clear what we're talking about is Donald Trump is a fundamentally different kind of president who broke American foreign policy, although here we are six months into the Biden administration, seems like we've pretty much either continued deliberately or fixed all of the things that Trump did or kind of reversed them. But they go on to sort of lament the fact that there's no Rooseveltian school of foreign policy. There's schools named after Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Wilson.

Even John Quincy Adams, they say. Even John Quincy Adams. And then there's a bunch of isms, of course. You have neoconservatism, realism, isolationism, and liberal internationalism, et cetera, which seems indistinguishable from what these guys are talking about, but okay. But there's no Rooseveltianism, and this is bad. And I guess so. My first question to the two of you is, what is Rooseveltianism?

And I think we should start with what they kind of lay out here. We go into the piece and they write at one point that Roosevelt is a colossus in US history, is a truism. Over the course of his unprecedented 12 years in office, he accomplished a revolutionary recasting of the United States domestic order and place in the world. And then, you know, because sort of goes through his record and internationally, the United States went from being a regional power to a global military superpower leader of a multi-continental wartime alliance.

More than anyone else, Roosevelt laid the foundations for Pax Americana and inaugurated what became known as the American Century. Here's the key part. The Rooseveltian revolution was decisive in the development of modern liberalism, but it built on its, and internationalism, but it built on its predecessors, such as Theodore Roosevelt's new nationalism and Wilson's new freedom, and was in turn built upon by successors, including Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society.

It was this political project to which Biden has returned that brought the United States to its peak of greatness. So as I'm trying to figure out what FDR Rooseveltianism is, this is, you know, the first statement of it. And it sounded, the first thing I thought of was, you know, when they asked the now dearly departed Donald Rumsfeld where the WMD were, and he said, well, they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and also to the east, west, north, and south. Like, we're all over the map here.

Like, what is Rooseveltianism? Well, it's all these things that came before, and then all these things that came after, but it's somehow distinct. What do you guys make of this? Well, Stephen, this is your specialty. So is that an accurate description of U.S. history, my friend? Oh, my God. So, first of all, so FDR was president for a long time and underwent a lot of change.

So they want to lump together, you know, FDR, save to the capitalism or the country with the New Deal, and then FDR set the foundations for American military primacy. Well, that's true, except that FDR changed his mind fundamentally in the 1930s when he was focused on the New Deal. He was focused on the New Deal and even proclaimed a good neighbor policy toward Latin America ago, which is quite a significant thing for us to reflect on in which the United States renounced interventionism even in its own sphere of influence in a way that it didn't do before and really hasn't since.

And I just want to add just an interesting historical footnote. That's where a lot of Latin American culture, I think, came to the U.S., where it wasn't Carmen Miranda from around that time and the Disney characters that were, I believe, of Latin American origin. So this is like this big shift in Latin American U.S. cultural exchange, and a lot of these things that entered essentially what became hegemonic white culture were during this sort of 30s period. So it was, I would say, a high point of cultural exchange in the 20th century.

Yeah, it was a high point of American identification as American, as part of the Americas. And that seemed like it would continue for the 30s and even into 1940, given how much the country did not want to be part of the looming war in Europe and Asia. And FDR was part of that until FDR changed his mind, as did many others, but FDR made an explicit turn from being Mr. New Deal to being Mr. Win the War and then pursued U.S. military primacy. So just as a, and I'm not saying anything that's controversial. I mean, my book is new and controversial, and that's part, that's the point.

This is, yeah, this is not, this is just like any historian will tell you this. So it's all lumped together as one teleological Roosevelt in their account. And then it turns out that Roosevelt doesn't even matter, because Roosevelt was only building on Teddy Roosevelt, who was only, and then there was Woodrow Wilson, and then FDR, and then all the others, until something happens, and this is, I think, the interesting part of the article, that is not part of the article, which is that they say that the tradition was breached after the 1970s by Reagan and Reagan's successors, and there is no account of what that was.

What was that breach? Somehow they were isolationist, I guess, because it culminates in Trump. And yet, that's an incoherent account of Trump. The key line in the whole thing is when they write, and I'm quoting them, building on Trump and Obama administration policies, Biden has further elevated the challenge of China to the top of the policy agenda. So Trump is an isolationist, totally out of step with anything good and decent and American, except that Trump laid a foundation that Biden is building on with respect to China, which

is like the number one issue today. It's totally incoherent, and I think it offends my sensibilities in two ways. One, there's so much of this, basically, there's, for lack of a better phrase, historical bullshit that is constantly just reframed, like totally anti-historical, historian, this is, like Stephen said, this is a basic point that is just totally used for ideological purposes, which, you know, fine, we all do that. But it's just so against what every historian thinks, I would add, regardless of political persuasion.

These are not controversial points, but it's just totally anti-historical. So that's offensive. And then it's also, and I don't actually mean offensive, obviously, but then it's also anti-empirical, because as Stephen gestured toward earlier, the military interventions project, which I believe is out of tufts, has essentially demonstrated that 25% of interventions in U.S. history since 1776 have occurred since the end of the Cold War. So I don't understand how anyone could reasonably put that in one, in any way, censor or form as isolationist, and then two, distinguish Trump from these larger traditions.

It's just absolutely incoherent. And then why is foreign policy publishing this? I mean, these are basic things that editors should be aware of, and it just shows a type of group think that allows one to thrive in this sort of establishment, I think. I wouldn't get back into the piece a little bit, but I think we'll culminate with China, because I think that's where the, what the real parallel between Biden and Roosevelt is, but I'll get to that in a minute. I just want to throw out some phrases, it's a very long piece.

So if people want to read it, we're not going to go through the entire thing here. Godspeed. But yeah, really, good luck, good luck with that. But I want to throw out some, a couple of phrases here from various parts of the piece. The Rooseveltian tradition is more relevant than ever, because many of the central problems in world politics ranging from nuclear proliferation and climate change to transnational migration and pandemic management are problems of interdependence that spill across borders. Okay, fair enough.

To address these problems, both domestically and internationally, liberal internationalists argue that cooperation and institutions are required, which invariably restrains the freedom of everyone to some degree. I'm pointing out in the context of where this piece is being written as the Biden revolution. Like the Biden administration has been slammed rightly so for several months now for practicing vaccine nationalism and deliberately kind of not addressing the international ramifications of pandemic management. But we talk about the pursuit of public interest in the successful functioning of modern industrial

societies and the need for interdependence and somehow liberal internationalism is the way to do this. There's later, they write about the need, well, left to their own devices, capitalist societies stratify and modern liberal Democrats view extreme inequality as a problem. I don't know where this is coming from. But Roosevelt talked about economic royalism and supposedly, I guess, we were doing something about extreme inequality at a global level. There's a paragraph on the wake of World War II, modern liberals designed and implemented

the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the last of which ultimately became the World Trade Organization. These international institutions provided a framework for reopening the world economy, aving the way for a golden era of sustained global economic growth in the spread of capitalism and its intended prosperity to previously very poor societies all over the world. So I think as you guys were saying, there's a certain just, you know, a historical nature to all of this, I thought maybe you could comment on that. It's a fantasy, it's a fantasia.

And Stephen, as someone who's lived there the last few years in the blob, what do you think that fantasia is and just everything that Tarik said? You know, I think this piece is even beyond, look, a lot of people in the foreign policymaking at least understand dynamics of power. This piece is totally mystifying on that score. You know, if what they want is to manage the problems of interdependence and coordinate things, then why did they just say, oh, it's great that Biden has built on Trump's legacy to elevate the challenge of China to the top?

Why this focus on, they just kind of take it all as a given. It's not important. It's there. It's all part of the project and see it all has a nice pedigree from a comforting past. So I find this to be actually like, it's not coming from the US foreign policy community specifically. It's coming from some professors who are not engaged in recognizable questions of power. And I actually find that to be almost the scariest of all options.

So what do you think that indicates as someone who's been both in and outside the academy? Because I think that's really interesting because I think it's an important question because so much of our public discourse on foreign policy is really driven by academics, is really driven by professors. So what do you think that says about the academy? Why did you leave the academy, Stephen? Why did you abandon us? So I don't know about this, the particular case of these two authors.

I do think that the academy has become introverted in part because it's just a cutthroat environment to be part of it, to like climb your way up to getting tenure and so forth. There's very little incentive to engage the wider world, including even the policy world, which I think a lot of people actually want to do if they could figure out how to do that. And then, of course, you have to say it's not as though the policy world is like super eager to hear from academics who are pontificating in the way that we've pointed to from this article. And you can spot very quickly, okay, this is an academic who's in their own head that

is saying things of no relevance to the actual choices that we face. So it is a two-way street, but I think it's lamentable that these two realms have grown so far apart, and I do not know the way to bridge that gap, except to try to create spaces that literally do that kind of thing and can bring the two realms together. There are a couple more, just a couple more things I wanted to sort of throw at you guys to make you pull more of your hair out. But along the lines of this historical fantasia about the greatness of Roosevelt in America, there are in a couple of places very obvious mischaracterizations, I guess, or strawmen

of the kinds of arguments I guess these guys are anticipating they might get in opposition to their piece. For one, in one case, they write, the America that brought unprecedented peace, prosperity and security to the international system was the America brought into existence by Roosevelt's New Deal. Had the laissez-faire and isolationist opposition to the New Deal, the United Nations, NATO and other domestic and international projects been successful, the United States might well not have sought or been able to play its pivotal role in the great struggles of the 20th century.

So I think there we have the kind of false, the sort of throwing around of isolationism in a way that's sloppy and presents a kind of false choice between, it was either this maximal international presence or just retreating behind the oceans and doing nothing, which I think is fundamentally presented in a bad faith kind of way. Here they write that overall liberal democracies and their movements have over two centuries of often difficult struggle, expanded freedom, human rights and mass prosperity in ways that are cumulatively revolutionary. During the 20th century, the United States played pivotal roles in thwarting and subverting

empires, including the global empire building of Germany, Japan, Italy and the Soviet Union. This is so insane. Left-leaning critics who characterize the US system as yet another empire fail to recognize that it is won by invitation and that the number of independent countries in the world rose explosively during the period of greatest US influence. Leftist critics and historians, and I'm pointing at the finger at you too now, have shown that the glass of freedom has never been full, but they fail to acknowledge that it has become steadily fuller, that the United States has played a key role in filling it.

Now, by the way, there's no mention of Iraq or Afghanistan in this piece. Or Iran or Guatemala or the Congo or Chile or Lebanon or what have you. That was all by invitation. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome world for inviting us in. So Steven, what's your take on that? Is that good stuff?

Would you teach that to your undergrads? No, look, I think that finally makes sense of who this piece is aimed at because otherwise it's so unclear. And I also notice that they pepper the word restraint about in the piece. I think that's an attempt to try to say that our approach is the real way to get restraint as opposed to those who are calling for US military restraint. And you know, they ought to be forced to actually cite somebody. I mean, I like that they called out like left leaning whatever and included historians

in that. That's awesome. But like it seems like they ought to have to actually name some people, provide some evidence and that goes for the entire essay. And I just say like, you know, I am very liberal minded when it comes to like what I think should be out in the public sphere. But if I were to write some correspondingly loose piece from my perspective, like what would it pop?

No, it would not get published anywhere. What would it have to be? It'd be like Charles Lindbergh is a hero and then, you know, he wasn't listened to. I mean, it would just be so insane. Yeah, it would have to be like the caricature of isolationism and then it wouldn't get published. So I think this also indicates sort of the the discursive world of the foreign policy establishment that as you as to put it generously, a loose piece like this. What is it?

6,000, 7,000 words. Easy. Right. It published in one of the major foreign policy journals in the country. And I think that indicates indicates something. We get, I think in the last couple of paragraphs to the real message here and it's illustrative. You know, Steven, one of the things you mentioned, you know, as we were like talking about this piece before the interview was the application of FDR's vision of American kind of or liberal

internationalism, which rested on American military primacy to a time when you're trying to try to sort of impose that or superimpose that on the Biden administration at a time when the challenges that we face don't really have military solutions. There are pandemics and climate change and things that can't be bombed into submission. But we get to the last couple of paragraphs and I think it becomes clear the ways in which these guys want Biden or the way in which they want Biden to mirror Roosevelt. They write the problems that the Biden administration has elevated to grand strategic importance are a mixture of familiar and novel building on efforts begun by the previous two administrations

here again, sort of the incoherence of this, it has made the problem of the rise of China's central focus in responding to the Chinese challenge, Biden's liberal emphasis on rebuilding alliances, championing democracy and human rights and promoting a national industrial policy is clearly superior to the realist libertarian and Trumpian emphasis on pulling back internationally and dismantling the modern US state. The Biden strategy rests on the assumption that China with its strong central government booming capitalist economy modernized autocratic model and revisionist foreign policy poses a full spectrum threat that will require a full spectrum response.

In the same way, the aspiration of many to reduce US power and impact is out of date and out of place at a moment when the global balance of power between liberal democracy and autocracy is unfavorably shifting in the face of the novel and powerful Chinese autocratic challenge. The task for the United States as Biden has succinctly captured is to show the world that democracy works in solving problems. So I think effectively we want Joe to give us our cold war back. That's the familiar structure, the one that makes it easier to talk about how wonderful

America is. And it's sort of comforting, I think, in a way to a part of the foreign policy establishment. At the same time, you know, we are in a time when, again, the challenges that we really face not only, you know, does does a cold war with China raise additional risks of World War Three of some kind of a nuclear exchange, but it it manifestly stands in the way of addressing climate change or any kind of any issue that requires a global approach, pandemics, any of these things, it manifestly kind of prevents that. I wonder, you know, where you guys, you know, kind of land here as we, you know, kind of

get to the point, I think, which is we want a cold war with China. I wish they had argued that. I mean, that is what they're saying, but they provide no actual reasons for it. And I think that's what's maddening, and I also don't think it's going to work anymore. I mean, maybe there was a time in the past couple decades where you could just put an ideological gloss on what the United States was doing. People would go, OK, fine, that sounds good. I'm reassured.

And actually what they're doing with Roosevelt is very similar to what a lot of people did with Woodrow Wilson a couple decades ago, you know, Woodrow Wilson was the template for the Bush administration. Now it's just shifted up in time to FDR, who, by the way, was also carrying on the legacy of Woodrow Wilson. So what's the difference? But you know, let's go ahead and have that argument about what to do about China, right? It's a multifaceted issue.

It's not so simple of all the challenges there are. It's one of the more, the more weighty ones. But they just kind of plop down a position and say, time to go back to the Cold War, time to lead the free world, and say that China poses a full spectrum kind of threat. So we don't have to differentiate between the economic challenges that it poses, the human rights issues, and the military issues. So again, give us give us some analysis of power, please. But I think if they think that they can just do the ideological magic wand shaking that

seems to have worked for a couple of decades now, if they think that's going to work in the future, I think they're wrong. And I think just to build on that is that it really displays an intellectual exhaustion with this entire way of looking at the world, which is I think what the Roosevelt gambit that they're doing is trying to essentially replace. Is that they really don't have a program for what is going on. So they just want to return to the Cold War. And I imagine that this is something we'll be seeing in the coming years.

But Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time. Derek and I, well, I'll speak for Derek. Derek and I really appreciate your being on the podcast, particularly our inaugural episode. And just to remind everyone, check out Tomorrow the World, Stephen's new book, which really provides a new understanding of the U.S. rise to armed primacy and hegemony. So Stephen, thank you. And the American Statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment. Check those.

Keep an eye on that. Thank you both. One, two, three, four.