DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - Interview: "Savior and Seducer" by Thaddeus Russell | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas

Episode Date: October 22, 2026

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!Join Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas on "DeProgram" as they interview historian Thaddeus Russell about his new book "Savior and Seducer."Thaddeus Russell discusses his book “Savior and Seducer,” arguing that U.S. foreign policy has long been driven by a sincere “savior complex”—a Christian-evangelical mission to uplift and Americanize the world—rather than primarily by greed or capitalism.He contrasts this hard-power imperialism with the more effective soft-power “seducer” of American popular culture, which foreign governments have repeatedly tried to suppress. The conversation covers historical examples from the founders through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Philippines, and into the Trump era, which Russell sees as a non-moralistic reorganization of empire focused on the Western Hemisphere.Tune in for unfiltered discussion that cuts through mainstream myths and prepares listeners for the full conversation. Live weekdays at 9 AM ET, streaming anytime.00:00 Introducing Thaddeus Russell and Savior and Seducer01:41 The Savior and Seducer Thesis of American Power03:57 Why U.S. Leaders Truly Believe in Saving the World09:04 How American Pop Culture Seduced the World14:38 Debating Motives: Ideology or Resources?25:21 Founders, Abolitionists, and the Civil War as Empire44:08 The Christian Roots of American Imperial Psychology55:17 Trump’s Reorganization of the American EmpireMERCHANDISE: DeProgram.MySpreadShop.comLIVE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@DeProgramShowLIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShowhttps://x.com/tedrallhttps://x.com/JamarlThomas#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

Hey there, you're watching Deep Program with Ted Rall and Jamarlem Thomas. We're very pleased to be joined today by Thaddeus Russell. He's a historian, the host of the Unregistered Podcast and the founder of Unregistered Academy, born and raised in Berkeley, California. Russell graduated from Antioch College. That's from my old stomping grounds. I grew up in Dayton. And received a PhD in history from Columbia University, where I got my bachelor's degree.

He's the author of Out of the Jungle and a Renegade History of the United States. He's been a professor of history at Columbia University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College, the New School for Social Research, Occidental College, and Willamette University, and he lives in California. Thanks. He is also the author, most notably here, of Xavier and Seducer, how a renegade history of the United States in the world. This is a sequel to a pre-reneged history of the United States in the world. This is a sequel to a prior volume, just a renegade history of the United States. And this one, obviously, from the title, the focus is on America's relationship, going back all the way to the colonial era in terms of its foreign policy. And so we're going to sort of, the way Jamarland and I like to do it is we kind of switch back and forth to ask questions.

And Thaddeus, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. This is great. So we, so I love the book. I was wondering, you know, the first thing that left out at me in terms of as a big surprise was sort of the colonial settlement of Marymount. So, you know, basically we have this, the, well, maybe the central thesis of the book, correct me if I'm mistaken or getting any of this is wrong, is that the United States basically has a good cop, bad cop approach to the world. And it kind of basically breaks down like this. Going even to the British colonial era, we have an aggressive, often militaristic, thuggish foreign policy and that involves neocolonialism and so on. And that, but it's aggressive. And it's very, you know,

sort of our way or the highway. And that that's the savior, you know, kind of like, We are here. We're the exceptional nation, shining city on a hill. We're trying to show the rest of the world how it's done. We're the great light that the world should follow. And then, on the other hand, you have the seducer side, the side that exports so many great movies and so much pop culture, so much great music.

And also, basically, that's the fun side, the seductive side, the sensual side. part seems to be generally generically more effective in terms of spreading American influence the soft power is better than the hard power come if that's correct and please again correct me if I'm I saw you shaking your head a little bit but tell us about sort of the you know the the how far back this goes because sort of the mainstream view of American history is that we didn't become a seriously outward looking power until the Spanish American War and Theodore Roosevelt.

And before that is all prequel. And even the prequel is kind of like, you have to go to the Barbary States. But we were not an aggressively external exporting power kind of society until at least American independence. Yeah. So that's a great introduction. And thank you for that.

And the only thing I quibble with, or I just want to make it more nuanced, is the use of the term thugish. So I'm sure you notice that I take great pains to be very, very clear about exactly how much death and destruction the United States has visited upon the world. Because it's very important to me for people to actually know and if possible feel the effects of empire, American imperialism. However, I don't call it thuggish and I wouldn't call it thuggish, believe it or not, in its intent. the intent comes from the first word in the title. It's the savior.

You could call it a complex. The savior complex of, and this is not an exaggeration, every single American foreign policymaker until Donald Trump. Trump is different, and we can talk about him. That's the epilogue is devoted largely to him. But until Donald Trump, and I mean beginning with the founding fathers, and all the way through Abraham Lincoln, not just during the Spanish-American War, the United States political leadership has been uniquely committed to the idea that our nation was determined by God

to uplift reform and essentially Christianize the world, Americanized the world. we, meaning speaking for the American political leaders, have always believed it in our souls. And I mean, presidents and senators, the foreign policy makers, state department officials, etc., believed in our souls that we are obligated to be the world's savior, policeman, father. If we find out any, I'm sure, and I'm speaking of the American policy elite, right? if we as the elite find out that there's some oppressed, as we see it, impoverished people. Somewhere in the world, the national religion has been, it is our duty to go save them. Now, the problem is, of course, that in virtually every single case, maybe every single case, there has been some opposition to another country coming in and reforming the place.

And so that has meant that to save these people in these other countries who are benighted, oppressed under the thumb of some dictator, we've had to kill a lot of people to do it. And in fact, we've had to kill a lot of the people we are purportedly trying to save. This is not news to either of you, I'm sure, nor to your audience, right? But I think that the anti-war movement, and I think the left in particular, has been a bit off on that. They tend to, and I devote a section that we can talk about this, think about American wars as somehow the product of capitalism or some kind of greed. There have been, of course, American politicians who have been driven by greed. They often end up in prison on corruption charges.

But I am here to tell you, and this is what the book, I think the book has more than enough evidence to show that in every single case, and this is from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, to Woodrow Wilson and the rest, nah, they really believe this stuff. They really, in their heart, believe that it was their duty given to them by God. This is the way they spoke incessantly. To go raise up the Philippines, to make the Filipinos into Americans, to make the Germans to make the Japanese into Americans, to make Iraqis and Vietnamese into Afghans into Americans. right? In almost no case did the presidents and senators gain any economic advantage, by the way,

from these foreign policies. Dick Cheney is the most famous example that's used and trotted out. He actually divested all of his holdings in Halliburton before they went to war in Iraq. George W. Bush could have made many, many, many millions of dollars just resting on his parents' businesses and fortunes, but instead he chose to become president with a salary of, what is it, half a million dollars a year or whatever it was? So no. These guys, there are greedy rapacious capitalists, of course, but they tend not to run for president or senator. These guys uniformly have believed in their hearts. It has been their duty to be imperialists.

So that's the savior part. And then the seducer part, so that's why I don't call it thuggish, right? The intent is not thuggishness. We all here see them as being, I mean, to me, I don't care what your intent is. if you come and bomb my house, I still think you're a thug. I completely understand that. But I think it's to analyze why the bombing of the houses across the world has happened. We have to understand what was in the heads and hearts, really, of the men,

and it's almost always been men, who have determined these policies. So that's the savior part. And then the seduzer part, yeah, you've nailed it. I mean, it's, and this is where the book is almost totally original. The book has two arguments. One is this critique of imperialism, which has sort of the blowback thing. thesis, which your audience will be will vibe with, I'm sure, with no problem. The popular culture piece is largely untold and half the book is devoted to this.

Yes, since really the blackface minstrels in the 1830 started doing their thing, American popular culture has been wildly popular around the world. Again, this is not news, I'm sure, either. Although the extent of it might be news, because as I said, it started, deep in the 19th century, it's not a recent phenomenon in Michael Jackson and Madonna. It goes all the way back. So that has been not the intention of American foreign policymakers. They have all been puritanical, by the way, and have disliked almost uniformly American popular culture, especially American popular culture that emanates from black culture, which has been the center, I argue, of the,

what I call the renegade culture that has liberated much of the world. they hate that stuff there have been Senate hearings devoted to the evils of rock and roll led by John F. Kennedy and Barry Goldwater notice that

John F. Kennedy the hero of liberals and Barry Goldwater the arch conservative whatever you want to call him were united in their hatred of rock and roll. This was in 1957

the Senate under them held hearings about as I said the evils of rock and roll and how it should be banned So, but all the while the United States is invading countries, shooting up villages, bombing towns. This stuff completely voluntarily, right, purely consensually, other people in the world have been bringing it in, consuming it, largely loving it. And that music, those movies, those styles, the fashions have represented to the rulers in their countries also an existential threat. Because if you want it, it doesn't matter what your ideology is.

You need your people, if you're a dictator or even a Democratic president, you need the citizenry to be disciplined, orderly, follow the law, follow your authority. Rock and roll, jazz, blues, dancing, disco, Marilyn Monroe, all militate against that, right? We don't, we're not interested in following people's orders or necessarily following the law if we're dancing, if we're listening to music. So for 200 plus years, this dual thing's been going on where the government, the national government, has been going abroad, waging war to uplift the peoples. Meanwhile, the peoples in those other countries have been consuming JZ. And the rulers in their countries have been cracking down on JZ, cracking down on Louis Armstrong, cracking down on Hollywood and all the rest of it.

And then I have examples, as you know in the book, from nationalist China, communist China, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Egypt, Islamic Algeria, every single case, in every single case, those governments have sought to eradicate what they called the virus of American popular culture. So what I am, the political sort of, I guess, what I'm, the implicit political statement, I guess I'm making with this book is, let's not send our troops abroad. Let's keep our defense as a defense. It's never been a defense, by the way, the American military has not for one second in its history been a defensive military, never once fought a defensive war in any way, shape, or form. Let's keep it actually at home inside the borders as a truly

defensive military. And it's not about changing policy vis-a-vis the popular culture. It's simply about letting it flow, getting out of the way of artists, musicians, all the rest, to do their thing. And including capitalists, I mean, yes, and that's part of the deal, is that to get these things exported and distributed, you need a certain, of a capitalist structure to do that. Just let the people make their freedom. Let the people make their freedom felt. Let their freedom be distributed across the world.

And I think we'll be living in a better world in which people don't hate America and don't want to fly airplanes into our buildings. Great break. And we will no longer be at war. So that's the political message of the book. Thank you so much. No, that's a great breakdown. Great thesis in regards to the breakdown.

I agree with you on the second point. this idea that American culture is infectious, it's insidious. And you can see it in a foreign policy thing, right? When Putin comes out and is like, you know, talking about Christian values. Okay, he's aiming that. Like, that's not like homosexuality of these things. Immigration and the change that immigration brings to the countries. When they're having this conversation,

having this conversation in many cases about this cultural issue that they see as being somewhat insidious into their countries. not, I agree with you on this. First part of it, I'm slightly more dubious. And let me explain why. I'm surprised. I am. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Love the argument. The argument makes sense. The issue is, I think, more than anything else, I don't believe that these people believe this stuff. If you want to go back to the, just let me make my point. In the very beginning, revolutionary spirit is usually infectious. And people believe that stuff in the very beginning. But at a certain point, there's a turn. I mean, the Department of War was first name honestly.

At some point it became the Department of Defense. And as you point out, that's not because they were using it for defense. They were using it in the same way of this kind of aggressive foreign policy, but they coded it with language. They didn't do it openly. So it's the Department of Defense. Everything is now defense. We're defending this stuff. I agree with you that Trump comes back as more honest.

And it's like, it's the Department of War. We're killing people. Let's call it what it is. We're going to call this the Department of War. My point of view is like, yes, it's more honest. Let's go with that. I don't like the dishonesty of it. When, when I think there is a differential between politicians with a geopolitical expansionary interests, meaning I'm not in this necessarily to get rich. I'm in this because I want to expand America's borders. Expand America's what?

I didn't, I missed the word. I mean, I want to expand America's influence across the world, meaning they have it in their mind. Joe Biden, whether he was out of his mind or not, fully understood. We need to go at Russia. He didn't know anything else he knew that. That's not because he was necessarily getting rich. That was because in his mind, he had this idea of American expansion. This is what I'm here to do.

This is my job. But the people who are giving Joe Biden money certainly know full well that they want to get their hands on Russian resources. Oh, okay. I guess I'm quibbling with us. Maybe this is semantics. There are people who are putting money in politicians park it to do exactly what they're doing from the expansionary standpoint. They're not in that with this idea of we're doing this for the betterment of people. They're in this. We're in it because we want to get Russian resources. And if we can split Russia up in a particular way, we can get our hands on those resources.

Same thing with Venezuela. Same thing with any other random country where the U.S. had initiated either attempts at overthrowing their governments like in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez. All of the wars that took place that the U.S. was involved in, either under Reagan from this idea of the Iran-Contrafare or even overthrow of the governments in South America. they were taking place where we're knocking over Chile, knocking over Honduras, knocking over these countries like this. They weren't doing that because they were helping the natives. They full well understood that this was about resources. I don't believe that in a full moment that in their minds they were thinking, we're doing this to help. They may have used the language of that where liberals are more inclined to be like we're dropping bombs in order to save people, whereas right wingers are less inclined to use that language. But both were going in the same direction in regards to policy, regardless of how they talked about it.

You really believe that in their minds, they thought we're here to help the people as we fleece those people. The money we stole from Iran. I'm sorry, from Iraq and oil, the money we sold from Venezuela. This was before. Yeah, so fantastic point. And it requires at least a two-part response. So, number one, the accumulation of resources from other countries has always been, just on its own sake, for its own sake, just the economic power the United States has gained from its imperialism. I think we need to use that word, by the way.

I mean, nope, that's okay. To me, that's just the only word that really explains American foreign policy. So they have always understood that to be the savior nation, to send our troops here, there and everywhere, to occupy foreign countries, essentially colonize them, to remake them, to save them, we've needed to be a rich nation. We can't be a rich nation and we cannot be a rich nation and do that. We can't accomplish that without being the wealthiest nation. So that's always been at the forefront of foreign policy makers' minds. We got to accumulate, too, as we're raging across the world. But that has always been in the service, as I said, of the greater goal.

And this is in the minds of the presidents I'm talking about. Serve the greater goal of uplifting the world. That's number one. Number two, actually, it's a three-part response. Number two is that there is a section in chapter, five, I believe, where I talk about capitalism and its relationship to imperialism. And I believe that Lenin was wrong about this, the famous, his famous theory published in 1916, that imperialism is the highest product, essentially, of capitalism. The capitalism produces

imperialism because capitalism chronically overproduces for domestic markets, forcing the nation-states to then go outward, to find new markets, to offload their surplus. There's a handful of statements by presidents. I actually can only think of one. McKinley did say that in 1898, but he said a lot of other things, too. That was one statement he did make that seizing the Philippines was a route to the China market. Sure. But he mostly talked about the benevolent, he called the benevolent assimilation of the Filipinos.

And they spent 40 years after 1898 colonizing the Philippines. And it wasn't just a resource extraction project. In fact, they got very little in terms of resources from the Philippines. What they did was they spent untold millions of dollars over several decades establishing schools across the Philippines, bringing in teachers from the United States to teach Filipinos how to be Americans in various ways, how to dress properly, how to speak properly, how to have the Puritan work ethic. Girls should be learned to be mothers and wives,

and boys should learn to be workers and soldiers, serve the United States. So capitalism, capitalists in this country at least, have, and there's lots of evidence I present in the book of this, have overwhelmingly, not totally, but overwhelmingly opposed every single American military conflict. since 1898. Bankers, the banking class, Wall Street, was uniformly opposed to the Spanish-American War,

to the conquest of the Philippines, to the colonization of the Philippines. Andrew Carnegie founded, actually a bunch of bankers founded the Anti-Imperialist League of 1898. The first anti-war organization in our country was the Anti-Imperialist League, and it was founded by a bunch of bankers in New York City and Boston. The banks, the oil companies, the oil companies in 1853 and 1954, outrightly opposed the coup against Mossadegh in Iran. They told the British government and the American government don't do it because all it's going to do is produce more blowback against us.

There will be more attempts to nationalize our oil if you do this, if you wage a coup in the middle of the Middle East. And they were right, of course, about that. But the MI6 overruled them and convinced Eisenhower to do it anyway. Even the Iraq War were many, many large businessmen who came out in 2002, three, and even four opposing the Iraq War for the same exact reasons. Not because they're great humanitarian, because it's bad for business to have war. You can't trade across borders when there's a war going on.

So it's not, it's rational, there's rational reasons. Now, there have been a handful of very important business sectors that have supported the wars. The sugar industry in 1898 was fine with invading Cuba and saving the sugar plantations owned by Americans. But that was about it. And shipbuilding. Shipbuilders, too, were for the war. But that was arms manufacturers have uniformly been in favor of every single American war, of course, for obvious economic reasons. But they're basically alone.

They're basically alone. So that's, yeah. So we need, and that's never taken seriously. It's always just assumed that business, all the wars are for businesses' interests. It's a war for oil. That's just simply not true. I will leave, I'll make those two points and send it back to you. No, I accept that.

Okay. Look, I don't think all businessmen are the same, right? Like, business interests will diverge depending upon whether they can get some advantage off of it or not. Well, there is, I mean, they all want profit. I mean, that's what it makes the most percent. Exactly. That's kind of, I guess that's my point. Whether they take advantage of it or whether they can't be, whether they're going to be disadvantaged,

it's going to make a large decision or whether or not they're going to be for or war or against the war. I guess I'm trying to point out that there are two strains of American foreign policy. You have this capitalist element that wants profit and you have this geopolitical expansionist element, both dovetail in U.S. policy. Like, meaning I don't think it's one or the other. it's both. And maybe you can call it the savior complex. But I think I don't get the sense that these, at 3 a.m. between them and they are God, they know this is about American expansion. Playing this imperialist game of sorts, right? Where how many bases can we get? Yeah, we want the

Philippines. The capitalists may not have cared about the Philippines, but would the U.S. care about making more Americans in the Philippines? Of course they would. It allows our geopolitical expansion. And I would argue that something is true for the way we colonize Europe. Okay. Not specifically. So as I said, number one, though, war has always been bad for business, for most businesses. So that's why the Chamber of Commerce has usually opposed wars and on and on. Even the oil companies, right, as I said, opposed coups in the Middle East, you know, and were overruled by their imperialist governments. The imperialist governments, no, we're going to do the coups, even though you don't want it, even though it's bad for business. Even though it will create more

blowback by these crazy Arabs who were going to seize more of your oil, which is exactly what happened. Because what did Nasser do, like right after that, right? In Egypt, he's seized about, you know, so, but let me, so the, so this is the third part of, the third answer to your amazing, very important question, which is, I spent a lot of time in the book on biographies of the great American imperialists. Yeah. So just run through that, man. Like, and again, this has largely been hidden because there's this myth on the right in particular that, as I think Ted mentioned this earlier, that the founding fathers were isolationists, man. Washington didn't want to, he didn't want to be entangled with other countries. Yes. Yeah. So John Adams,

arguably the most important of the founding fathers, but certainly obviously one of the top five or whatever. He graduates from Harvard in 1850s, gets a job as a school teacher in Worcester. Yeah, Worcester. Just a little job teaching 10-year-old kids. He's writing diaries. And by the way, John Adams's diaries, I recommend to everyone the man was a psychotic. If he were put on a couch today, no. And this goes for most imperialists in my view, Churchill was one of the great psychotics in modern history. Just read their words. I mean, if you, if you didn't know it was John Adams and I had you read his diary, you would be this guy should be locked up. He's fantasizing in his diary in tremendous detail. And I have excerpts in the book about what he will do when he is the ruler of the world, how he will assign people to particular positions in life. He would look at little Johnny in the corner scribbling and say, I'm going to make him the town writer and the and the little the dunce kid.

well, he's going to be the dog catcher, and it goes on and on. He has this whole taxonomy of what he's going to assign to every one of his little pupils. These are children, by the way. Thomas Jefferson in Monticello had busts in the, I actually think it was throughout the mansion, but certainly in the entryway to Monticello, he had busts of Caesar and Alexander, the Great, who at that point, as of the 1770s and 80s,

were, of course, the greatest imperialists in world history. They kind of invented imperialism that we know of, right? And George Washington carried a copy of Caesar's chronicles in his satchel on his horse as he was riding through the Pennsylvania wilderness, fighting the French and Indians to conquer that land and make it into America. That's just the founders.

then you get into the abolitionists who again this is where the left is screwed up the left has really radically misunderstood the abolitionists and my renegade history book the book prior to this I have a whole extensive critique about the abolitionists being essentially a different form of racist but we can talk about that but the abolitionists were most of them not all but most were arch imperialists and in fact the civil war and reconstruction and this is going to be you know hard for a lot of probably your audience to hear, was simply a colonial conquest. I mean, that was the purpose. It wasn't, we all know, there wasn't to free the slaves.

Abraham Lincoln was an outright racist, talked about, you know, exporting them back to Africa, etc. No, they talked about this. Real quick, I need to bow out just because I have another prior commitment. They're going to continue this interview. Okay. I want to say, this is great meeting you. And I hope to be able to talk to you again further.

Thank you so much. It's been wonderful talking to you. Great questions. Thank you. Thanks, tomorrow. I'm going to pipe in. Yeah. Robbie West is our producer.

And I know he's very interested in what you're just starting to talk about right now. So please continue. Yeah. So if you simply look at the words, and I mean the words that they were expressing throughout their lives, the abolitionists, the radical Republicans, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, all those guys who basically led the words. the Civil War and then Reconstruction, it was all about for them remaking the South into the Yankee North. And that's why, what did they do?

They put thousands of schools across the South staffed by mostly women from New England, who were all abolitionist Puritans, who went down to the South and taught the ex-slaves, guess what, how to be good Americans, the same way they taught the Filipinos 20 years later, which was, you know, the Puritan work ethic. ethic, basically sexual repression, conventional gender norms. The girls were trained to be moms and wives and the boys were trained to be soldiers and workers. Proper etiquette, proper language, don't use slang.

Eradicate every vestige of black culture. That's what the purpose of reconstruction was. And they wanted to do the same thing to whites in the South as well. And they remade the South in terms of infrastructure, sort of physically. remade it, but then made it illegal to be an opponent of the United States government, right? And that's why we often think, oh, well, the Confederates were all racist and bad in anything they had coming to them when they deserved. Fine. But the purpose of that, again, was to remake that region, the South, to look like and be like the North. I agree. I'm a Southerner. I reckon you can tell that from the

whether I talk. Which state? Where are you from? Florida. Okay. Well, that's debatable, friend. Well, I'm from Florida. Are you from the Panhandle?

I am. Oh, okay. Then you're from the south. Yes. Then you're from the south. Yes. Florida, the further north you go, the more southern you get. Right.

Exactly. It's not from Miami. Right. Got it. No, absolutely not. I don't speak enough Spanish to speak from Miami. Exactly. I'm reading a book about the major restoration, the Meiji Revolution.

in Japan. And what you're talking about, it, you can see where the Meiji government really picked up, and also their successors, what Abraham Lincoln did with the South. No, when the first sign of war, they took over Formosa. They banned Chinese, they started trying to make the Formosans Japanese. When they annexed Korea in 1910, it was actually a death penalty offense to speak Korean. Like they were, it's just what you're talking about doing. They were trying to make these people. Japanese. And is that because Japan was industrialized in such a scale that it was becoming a true, a true fascist state where it's a merger between capitalism and government? Or was it just greed?

It was defense, actually. I think so? Because of Admiral Perry? Yeah. Well, beginning with Perry and the European powers in general, just almost literally walking in and. and forcing the Japanese to submit to their very favorable trade terms for the United States and the West. Oh, no, that was top of mind for Japanese political leaders through the 19th and early 20th centuries, for sure.

And so this is why I believe, and this is borne out by a lot of the research scholarship. I'm not a Japan expert, but I have to do significant research for the book on it. But also it has no, and this is the thing people don't realize about Japan, it has basically zero natural resources in Japan. It's a volcanic rock in the middle of the ocean. There is not enough arable land to produce food for a modern industrial population and to defend themselves from further imperialist depredations from the West. They needed a modern industrial population and a modern industrial economy. And this is why they moved outward. And they did it in phenomenally vicious ways.

Every empire, right, as I've said, you know, they find out once they start conquering other lands, they got to kill a bunch of people in disgusting ways. You know, Manchuria, you know, that's why they went into Manchuria because of the agriculture and the cheap labor in Manchuria, basically slave labor in Manchuria. And then once Roosevelt starts cutting off the supplies of oil and other resources, is from the U.S. in the early night in 3940, 41, they have to move south into Southeast Asia. They take over pieces of Southeast Asia for the rubber, for the oil, and then into the East Indies. But no, it was, I mean, this is how they talked. I mean, they didn't, I don't think they wanted

to mix their pure race. And, I mean, Japan has been formally a racist country for, at least in the modern era. you know quite explicitly formally racist you can't be I think other than Israel I think Israel is the only other country where an ethnic identity is required for citizenship so yeah

they simply could not protect themselves from the rapidly advancing West unless they became rapidly advancing themselves so they adopted so they adopted the Roman Barrel an aggressive defense. Bingo. I think so. Again, I'm not an expert on Rome either, but yeah, that's what it looks like to me. That's what it looks like to me. Yeah. So, I mean, Baxter, I wanted to finish that sort of point about all the American foreign policymakers through history and how they were committed to this idea of saving and uplifting the world primarily and never interested in making money from politics because you just don't. I mean, these guys were all from, almost all from, of course, upper class families. They were born. and wealthy. They didn't need to do a damn thing to be wealthy. And to make more wealthy, they would have just continued to work in their family's businesses, right? But no, they chose to be

senators and presidents because Franklin Roosevelt was 16 years old in high school, writing to his mother about how we need to invade Japan. It's in 1899. He's writing, he's reading Admiral Mahan's books. Admiral Mahan was the great sort of foreign policy imperialist theorist of the 19th and early 20th centuries and wrote he was Mahan was obsessed with Japan because he was obsessed with the idea of the United States controlling the Pacific and Japan stood in the way of that. Young Franklin Roosevelt, 16 years old, read his books and was totally turned on by this idea and committed for the rest of his life to going to war with Japan. This is in 1890. This is 42 years before Pearl Harbor.

He gets the job as Assistant Secretary of Navy in the Wilson administration in 1914. What does he do? He's so crazy. This is Wilson. This is the Wilson administration, one of the sort of most famous imperialist administration. FDR is so crazy that Wilson and the Secretary of Defense have to reprimand him repeatedly because he keeps calling for new wars. When they're busy, they're busy talking about Europe and what to do about Europe. This is 1914.

World War I has just begun. Nothing's happening in Asia. but FDR keeps saying we need to launch a preemptive war against Japan right now. He gets reprimanded. It's amazing. He kept his job. He had in his office, there's photographs of it's amazing, just walls full of maps and then ships, battleships, like models of battleships.

And he would just sit and stare at these maps and fantasize about these other countries and what he would do to them, what he would want to do to them. So 1914, he's calling for the U.S. to go to war with Japan. And his very first meeting when he's elected president cabinet meeting, first day in the Oval Office with his cabinet, he lays out these maps and battle plans to launch a war against Japan. He has a whole strategy. We're going to have naval bases and air bases in the Aleutian Islands and Hawaii. We're going to launch this attack from there. And his cabinet members, and by the way, if you know my last book, I argue that they were.

dominated by basically fascist thinking, the new dealers, the first new dealers. So I'm not a fan of these guys. They were horrified. Rexford Tugwell, all these days that they wrote in their diaries. What the hell is he talking about? The first day we have a depression to deal with. A little bit. Yeah, a little bit in 1933. So, no, the first thing you not want to do was not close the banks and not launch the first new deal. The first thing he wanted to do was go to war with Japan in the Pacific in the middle of the Depression. So these are psychos. They really are. I mean, who I've never, I've been in politics my whole life. I've been in academia, my whole life. I've been around people like this. Roosevelt's entire cabinet came from Columbia University.

I spent a decade at Columbia. I have never met anybody that I'm aware of who has had any fantasy about conquering another country. It just doesn't, it's a very rare subset of the population. that always tends to become presidents and senators. I'm really glad that you brought up what you did about the war of northern aggression. That's what we like to call it back home. People always, they try and paint it, like you said, is the crusade against slavery. While they can merely forget that the union had four slave states, the menstruation proclamation did not address northern slavery at all,

nor did it address the conditions that the child workers had to go with in the northern factories. It was all about how southern states nullified tariffs that only impacted southern ports because there was no income tax at the time. And I still have my grandfather's grandfather, his diary, where he was trading tobacco for some coffee for a Yankee soldier in the Ravahannock. And this Yank asked him, so, well, Johnny, why are you fighting us? It's come Johnny Rebs. And he's like, well, Bill is because you're down here.

I mean, it's a pretty straightforward thing. Yeah, so a couple, but I want to say two things of that. So I love the South for many reasons. This is one of them. So I would say, I would, I would urge you to look at culture and psychology more to prove your thesis. And this is why I spend much of the book, as I said, on the biographies, and they actual words of these men who led American foreign policy. Around the Civil War, the radical Republicans, the abolitionists, the people who made

the Civil War happen and reconstruction happen, they were very upset that the South was different than the North, and they were upset that it was different in particular ways. They hated that the slave masters didn't have to work, and therefore were lazy. They hated that the slaves were lazy because they only worked because they were forced to work. They had no incentive to work, and therefore the Puritan work ethic fell on deaf ears among the slaves. And so they worked only so much that they wouldn't get whipped, which is not good for Yankee Puritans who want you to believe that work in itself is a good thing always. Because of this, they said the South is underdeveloped. Because of this, they said the South is not modern, the way the North is.

because of this, they said, and this is in the new book, we can't launch imperial wars. They wanted to conquer Cuba. Many of a lot of senators, including a lot of the radical Republicans, wanted to conquer Cuba in the 1850s and 60s. We can't do this if we have a divided nation and half the nation is made up of a slaveholding class that's lazy and unproductive. So it got in the way of empire as well, right? And so that's why they went to war with the South, and that's why they spent so many resources over 12 years during Reconstruction. Although you could say Reconstruction starts in 1861s, I do. So it's really a 16-year project because every time they would conquer a part of the South, they would send in the schools, the contraband camps, where they would instruct the slaves how to be Americans now.

They spent so many resources and the army itself to enforce this whole thing to remake the culture and the psychology. of the South. This is the heart of imperialism. This is what real imperialism is. Trump's imperialism is just for the grabs, for the power, for the money. It's very naked. It's very stripped down. It's completely amoral. I mean, Trump has been very clear. He doesn't care about saving anybody, uplifting anybody being the world's policeman. He's there for power and money. But everybody up until him was not. They were true believers in this. So the South, I've said the South was the original Afghanistan. It was the first. And by the way, I was, I loved one passage in the book. And I want to talk about the cultural stuff. I spent, I've been to Afghanistan five times and,

including during the U.S. occupation. Wow. And it was kind of one funny thing is I did a whole comics here, a couple of books about my trips. And one, like, for example, you talk about the, the influence, this, the dichotomy that's described. your book was really just so clear on the ground. I mean, the U.S. troops were sort of universally reviled. They drove around, scared to death, in, you know, overly armed, running around, sometimes shooting and robbing people randomly just for fun because they were bored or whatever. But nevertheless, less American culture was spreading. I mean, even as early as does, December 2001, I found American porn in a bazaar. There was, there was, and then by 2010,

there was pizza in Harat and in Missouri Sharif and all over Kabul, not good pizza, but pizza. Afghan Star, Ted. Were you there for Afghan Star, the TV show? Based on American Idol, based on American Idol. They had their own American Idol called Afghan Star, yeah. That's amazing. So, yeah, I mean, and you know, they'd always had an influence. from Iran and, you know, historically and from India pop culture. But like, you know, Bollywood is all over Afghanistan. But it was just, it was so interesting you see. I really wanted to get into the psychology here, right? Like you, you know, you described these psychos who, basically I always call the Puritans, people too uptight to get along with the English.

Yeah, true. They were like, the English are too foot loose and fancy. free for us, we're out. And so this country is founded by those people. They come here, I mean, what is the psychology and culture that A, makes you think that you have all the answers that you

and, you know, because you don't see you know, a lot of, like when King Leopold took over Congo, and he didn't think of it. I know there's yeah, some Christianizing missions and stuff like that, but for the most part, this is a cash grab.

Right. I'm here to loot the place. I mean, what is it? What makes people think that they are the ultimate embodiments of culture and power and that they have the right and the desire to do this to other people? And then, I mean, and yeah, it's like sort of like, why doesn't everyone else just sort of tell them to fuck off? Well, why is Christianity popular? To me, it is essentially a Christian impulse. It's an evangelical missionary impulse, which I see only in Christianity.

Certainly, certainly that's global version of it, right? The idea that we are responsible for the entire world, Caesar had no designs on the globe. He had designs on Gaul and then the rest of Europe and maybe that was, and he didn't really, it just didn't speak in these terms. Yeah, the Belgians less so, less the Savior, more the the looter. The British, though, right? The British, one could say, I suppose, invented the idea, although the Spanish did too, but there was something in Cecil Rhodes. I mean, Cecil Rhodes, if you look at his language, I mean, he is the ultimate savior imperialist, right? I mean, to him, all the conquests of the British Empire were in service of the people they conquered.

We are helping. This is good for them. And by the way, he wasn't entirely wrong. I mean, if you look you know, the infrastructure in India now and the infrastructure in South Africa and much of Africa, et cetera, it's greatly improved. Just like in Iraq, there is now a working electrical grid where there wasn't in 2003. Afghanistan now has paved roads. Yeah, exactly. And they didn't have that in 2000. Yeah, it's a Christian evangelical missionary psychology that, again, I can't relate to and no one I've ever known.

can relate to, and it's just a strange thing that's only emerged in the West, and really Anglo-America, Western Europe, I guess. I mean, I think that the rapid accumulation of Western countries, which outpaced the rest of the world, sort of in the early modern era, that kind of when you have all the guns, when you have most of the guns, I think it becomes easier to have that impulse, right? If I were, you know, if I were the president of Botswana, it's a little more difficult to sort of fantasize endlessly about assigning people their jobs in the rest of the world. But when you know that you're, and this John Adams and Jefferson and the founders all spoke about this all the time, they knew that they were a rising power because the American economy,

even during the revolution, was rapidly increasing in power and size. And so they saw that they were eventually going to overtake Britain. So they knew that. And I think that's sort of facilitated their fantasizing. So Robbie, I just want to say really one quick. I meant to say this earlier, which is not even, it's not even in the book, but one of the reasons I love the South is they, until 1945, were, as a population, were absolutely anti-imperialist, like from the Civil War through the Reconstruction, and then, I don't know if you know this,

there's an amazing book called Rich Man's War. It's about Southern resistance to the draft during World War I. And when we talk about, when we're talking about resistance, this is 16, 17, 18, 19. We're talking about, um, holding up in a holler with a bunch of shotguns when the draft agent comes to town and shooting them. It was, it was, it was a war. They were shooting at draft agents. There was such violent opposition to serving.

in this ridiculous rich man's war in the south among and again this is working class in poor southerners right entirely that the draft board gave up they gave up i think by 1918 they just stopped sending draft agents into uh conscription agents into the south so what happened though of course as you know and most people should be able to glean this is that after world war two they started the united states started there it is rich man's war phenomenal book absolutely high If you have any interest in anti-imperialism, look to the American South before 1945. Unfortunately, and this is just one of the most cruelest disgusting things that I think the national government has ever done, and almost no one talks about this. After World War II, they move all these military bases where, into the South?

So much of the South has been since then completely dependent on these military bases for employment, for local economies, et cetera. they basically made the South into a ward of the state, but a particular state, they made the South into the ward of the imperial state. And this is why the red, white, and blue flag has flown most aggressively in the South, but that wasn't usually the case in the past. It wasn't the case before 1945.

So I just wanted to interject that. No, very much. My grandpa, God bless stuff. He lied about his age. I'll have to go after this, have another show I've got to do. Yeah. But he lied about his age. He went to France, 12 or 13 years.

years old to go fight for the uh he uh went and fought with the french volunteers and the men that he was fighting with they're pretty much all southerners i don't know what the name of the village was but they would fly confederate battle flags over their trenches and the germans had no idea what the hell this even was so they came across if you go up shooting squirrels of the rifles shooting a person's not that big of a not that big of a not that big of a problem and uh we've got this old wax cylinder it's about a quarter of an inch stick, you can barely hear it anymore. It's called, you'll find Dixieland in France. And their commandant officers, this dude is in his 70s who is a Confederate veteran.

And he said, we're here to fight the damn Yankees. That's how he's called him the Germans. Oh, right. They got a little confused by then, is my point. Is my point. Yeah. Yeah, definitely read Jeanette Keith's book. It is awesome. And you will see that the South has never been this, wasn't always the South, as we know it now. So anyway, Ted, sorry. But I'm going to get out now, y'all. Thank you very much. It's pleasure to meet you. Thank you. Thank you, Robbie. Appreciate it.

So, yeah, I mean, this is why this book and my last book are primarily cultural and psychological analyses because I think that's where it's at. I'm kind of a, if you want to get philosophical, I'm not a materialist. I used to be, I used to be a Marxist materialist and now I'm a Hegelian idealist. So, I mean, I think that history is driven by ideas. So, and this is why. I think it's important to understand what's in the heads of these people who actually make these wars who make these policies. No, I mean, yeah, I mean, for sure, there's a old punk song where it called Missiles by a group called The Sound. And like the lyrics are, who the hell makes those missiles when they know what they can do, right?

And it's like, obviously, who the hell, right? Yeah. In the time that we have left, in the few minutes we have left, I'm wondering if you could sort of, you know, talk about the seductive side of. the book, you know, sort of the, how is it that American foreign policy makers have, I don't know, have they failed to see? You know, soft power gets mentioned in the opinion pages of the Washington Post every now and then, but the truth is it's not really something that people focus on. I mean, I don't think Donald Trump spending any time thinking like, oh, we've got to get some more money to the to the u s o we got to have you know we got to have we have to have lady gaga go to uh

go to ukraine or whatever i mean it's whatever taylor swift although he hates her um what you know why is this such an unappreciated um a form of uh you know power um projection because they're puritans until trump i mean trump is the first non puritan i mean when i say puritans i mean officially formally outwardly Puritans. I don't know what goes on in their bedrooms, but what they say, how they behave publicly, every president until Trump has been a Puritan. Trump is, you know, of course, violated that rule like completely, just a little bit. But so yeah, and so this, as I said earlier, John F. Kennedy and Barry Goldwater held hearings, you know, about the dangers of rock and roll in the 1950s. Every single president and major senator has been on that side of the war against sensual

pleasure. So jazz is a great example. jazz of course becomes extremely popular in the 1910s, blows up totally in the 20s becomes the world's music in the 1930s with swing and then World War II as well. So yeah, Yonner, and it's huge, as I show on the book, it's enormously popular all across the world, not just in Europe. Yeah, so why didn't they like send Louis Armstrong? Well, they did send Louis Armstrong, but they sent him in the 1960s. By that point, after World War II, jazz became, and anybody who knows the history of jazz knows this, jazz became respectable. It became known as America's classical music. Louis Armstrong and his cohort sort of became heroes all of a sudden. They became the good Negro. They became the example

for the civil rights movement. Look, we can be just as talented and musically adept as white people. And our music is just as good as classical European music, et cetera. So then they started to send the CIA and the State Department used to start to send jazz bands into Europe. But Dave Brubeck was one, the Dave Brubeck trio, quartet, whatever, which was, you know, not dance music, by the way. They would not be, they were never interested in dance music because that is dangerous, essential, liberatory in all sorts of ways, always has been. Yeah, so, no, it's because they're Puritans. They never sent rock and roll. They never sent Elvis, they could have sent Elvis Presley in the 1950s.

What would that have done to the Soviet Union, right? But no, they did because Elvis in the 1950s was dangerous. Rock and roll was dangerous in the 50s. jazz was dangerous in the 20s. So that's why they just, yeah, they were opposed to central freedom. So what does Trump represent in the grand theory of your book here? Yeah, so that's the epilogue. And I've written about Trump on my substack as well.

I mean, it's so, you know, people have thought, I thought this previously about Trump, that he's incoherent essentially. You know, he's clearly not an intellectual, not, he doesn't read books. So therefore, his ideas are not going to make coherent. His policies don't emerge from some ideology that is identifiable. Well, I don't, I think that's not true anymore with his foreign policy. So he issued in December of 2025, just a little less than a year ago, his National Security Strategy document, which is, I think it's annual.

It's released by the White House. I believe it's annually. So his comes out, and everybody needs to read that. if you want to know what's going on because he has been following the script of that thing almost perfectly ever since, which is, it's an amazing document. It is not overthrowing the American Empire, but it is refashioning it and reorganizing it. So what he wants to do and what he has been doing is to gradually withdraw from Eurasia. Eurasia historically has been identified by by imperialist foreign policy advisors to be crucial if you're going to have a global empire,

you have to control Eurasia, sort of for obvious reasons. It's the biggest landmass for the biggest population, the most resources. And the United States has spent most the bulk of its resources on Eurasia for the last hundred or so years, right? Latin America secondarily, but really Eurasia is where we've spent most of our money and our troops and all that, blood and treasure. Trump doesn't like that. It's too far away. I think he just doesn't, I think honestly, he just doesn't relate to those countries. He's not interested. You think he's been to Europe once in his life on vacation?

I looked this up. I think once with Ivanka, he went skiing in Switzerland. That's it. He's just not a cosmopolitan. He goes to Scotland. Okay. Oh, that's right, because of his mom, right? And his golf.

No, but that's for business, too. It's always for business. So all the imperialists, by the way, have been cosmopolitans. Another thing to remember. They've all been really interested in European culture. some of them have been interested in Arab and Asian cultures too. But what about except for George W. Bush, right? No, I looked this up to, no, he's spent a considerable amount of time in Europe on vacation.

You know, maybe that's because of his wife. But no, any events, some interest, Trump is just events none, but the great imperialists were all worldly. You have to be, you have to know about these other countries to want to invade them, right? So he wants to withdraw the bulk of U.S. forces from Eurasia. This is why he's been talking about NATO the way he has for the last 10 years. He wants to basically get out of NATO. This is known. He wants Israel to be the more active proxy to control the Middle East on our behalf. And he wants to leave and let them, and the UAE and Saudi, but that's falling apart. But the idea at least is to arm them, arm the proxies, the kingdoms, the Gulf kingdoms, and Israel so that they police that region to keep it stable for us. Great,

Britain, he wants to be basically the proxy controlling Europe. He probably is not saying this. He probably wants Putin in that deal as well. I mean, he's fine with Putin controlling Russia so long as they basically preserve order and trade routes and all that. And he wants to withdraw to the Western hemisphere, which that explains Venezuela. That explains Greenland. Who thought, about Greenland. I mean, I've been studying foreign policy my entire life. I'm 61 years old. I never even once thought an American president would go after Greenland, but actually, if you look at his national security strategy document, or you listen to what Trump. Yeah, and if you look, yeah, right, and if you look at his words, it makes perfect sense. It does. I mean, sort of, there is a logical coherence to this.

He wants the entire Western Hemisphere in red, white, and blue, and gold, I guess, gold plating with red, white, and blue flag, something like that. Um, so yeah, it's a reorganizing. It's a reorganizing, of the American Empire, not the elimination of it. And also, of course, he's eliminated the morality of it, right? It's no longer, as I said earlier, it's no longer evangelical, moralistic, missionary. It's just for power and wealth accumulation for Trump. Is that last question, is that like refact, is that like sort of a refreshing form of honesty in a way? Oh, yeah.

I mean, don't you prefer it? I prefer it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'd rather know what's actually going on. I mean, although in a sense, I'm not, I am saying the foreign policy makers in the U.S. before Trump were honest, largely.

I mean, they did largely say, yeah, we're doing it. We're invading, you know, we're funding the contras so that Nicaraguan's can be free, right? And Nicaraguan's can be democratic and be self-determining. And, you know, it's always for the other people that were invading or conquering. So, yeah, I prefer it. But a lot of people will be killed along the way. Trump, by the way, has killed far fewer people than the great imperialist presidents. His body count, which I call it, is still not even close to the top 10.

If you look at Nixon, LBJ, Eisenhower, maybe, certainly Truman and FDR, the two greatest mass murderers in American history. Like, it's not even Wilson, Lincoln, who I also didn't talk about, but a great imperialist. these guys killed orders of magnitude more people than Trump has. True. That's all true. And he hasn't even deported as many people as Obama. As Obama. That's right.

That's right. So Thaddeus Russell, thank you so much for joining us. Thadius is the author of Savior and Seducer of Renegade History of the United States in the world. It was a pleasure. Hope you come back. Tremendous pleasure I'd love to. Thank you, Ted. All right.

Take care. Bye.