Making Sense with Sam Harris - #215 — A Conversation with David Miliband

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with David Miliband about his work with the International Rescue Committee. They discuss the crisis of internally displaced peoples and refugees, the problem with open borders, the vetting of refugees, the limits of nation-building and diplomacy, the realities of globalization, global risks, defending human rights, a “post-values and post-competence” America, the breakdown of trust in institutions, the prospects of a second Trump term, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher along with other subscriber-only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason

why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. I am here with David Miliband. David, thanks for joining me. Thank you, Sam. Thanks for having me.

So, there's so much to talk about, and I'm really happy to have you on the podcast. Let's just start with your background. How is it that you come to know many of the things you will obviously know as we get rolling here. What have you been up to? Well, you know that British people don't like talking about themselves, but here goes. I'm proud to be the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee. It's an extraordinary American organization founded by Albert Einstein, a refugee in New York in the 1930s. He founded the International Rescue Committee to Rescue Jews from Europe. in the 1930s. He founded the International Rescue Committee to Rescue Jews from Europe.

Our first employee, Varian Fry, deployed to Marseille in 1940 and helped issue 2,000 fake passports that helped Jews predominantly, but also intellectuals, escape from occupied France. People like Marc Chagall made it to the US because of the extraordinary heroism and ingenuity of Varian Fry. And today, the organization is an international humanitarian agency, working in war zones and for internally displaced and refugees around the world, and also the largest refugee resettlement agency in the United States, albeit there are very few refugees coming into the United States at the moment. No doubt we'll talk about that. I suppose one question that your listeners might be thinking is, well, how did a guy with an accent that's more British than Brooklyn get to be the president, CEO of the International Rescue Committee? And I think that the backdrop is that I'd been in

British politics and government for 25 years. In the 1990s, I was part of the project led by people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who became prime minister. I was part of the project to turn the British Labour Party from an election-losing machine. We'd lost four elections on the trot, 79, 83, 87, 92. People ask, must Labour lose? Question mark, after the 1992 election. We were determined to rebuild a progressive party, a party of the centre-left that could win elections. And I'd then been fortunate enough to be involved both on the policy side in the run-up to 2001. And then in 2001, I was elected as a Member of Parliament for South Shields, which is an ex-shipbuilding, ex-mining constituency in the northeast of England. I was proud to be the

Member of Parliament for 12 years until 2013. And in the 2000s, I was in government. I was Minister for Schools for three years. I was Secretary of State for the Environment, a time when we legislated for the world's first emissions reduction requirements for 40, 50 years. Hence, we bound the hands of future British Parliament. And between 2007 and 2010, I had the extraordinary honour of being the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the 74th Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the UK, representing the country around the world. And I'd spent my time in diplomacy looking at global geopolitics, obviously. But we were in opposition in 2010. I'd lost the leadership race for the Labour Party in 2010. And

so I felt a frustration that while I was proud to serve my constituents, I felt that I had more to give and more to do. And the International Rescue Committee offered me the chance to try and address some really tough issues in global policy. How do you get aid into Syria? How do you get education into Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan? How do you get education into Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan? How do you tackle sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo? And I felt that the IRC was a bit of a sleeping giant, and it had a chance to become a great organization. And I suppose one other point that's relevant and that I've learned, I think, as I get older, is more important. Both of my parents were refugees.

My dad was a refugee from Belgium to the UK in 1940. My mom spent the war in Poland, came as a 12-year-old in 1946 on her own. She was put on a boat by her mother. Her father had been killed in a concentration camp. And they're both Jewish, my mom and dad. And my mom came to the UK in 1946. And if Britain had not admitted refugees in the 1940s and 50s, then I sure as nightfall as day, I wouldn't be here today. And so in some way, working for an organization that was committed to helping people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster was a way of closing a circle, if you like, and putting back something that related to my own history, albeit in very different circumstances in the 21st century. Well, so you're obviously well-placed to speak about many of the things that interest me here. I want to talk about the pandemic and our inept response to it,

the especially inept response of the United States, and what I certainly perceive to be America's loss of stature in the world. And we can talk about the reasons for that. And you seem to be in a great position to triangulate on our circumstance and view us both from inside and outside the U.S. I want to talk about that, but let's speak about the IRC for a bit here because I want people to understand what it does. And I want to talk a little bit about the politics and ethics around just philanthropy and the way we think about refugees and humanitarian aid generally. First, how would you differentiate if, in fact, there is daylight between what the IRC does and some other groups? I know that the UN has its own refugee efforts, which I've supported in the past. There's obviously Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, that does medical work in similar conditions,

the Red Cross, Save the Children. People know about many of these organizations. Where does IRC fit in that pantheon of people doing good in the world at considerable risk and expense and, frankly, without the kind of plaudits, certainly in mainstream conversation, that you would expect all these groups to have. Yes, it's interesting, but it's a confusing picture. We're a non-governmental organization, so the first point is we're different from the UN because we are independent. We are adhering to the humanitarian principles of independence and neutrality and impartiality, but we're not a government agency. I think there are three or four ways that they make the IRC, the International Rescue Committee, unique, distinctive. One is that

we're not a generalized anti-poverty agency. We're focused on people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster. We're focused on people who are in war zones, people who are internally displaced in their own countries, people who are refugees. And I'll come back and explain a bit about the differences. And we're focused on people who start new lives in countries like the United States or Germany. We work across the arc of crisis. We work in about 35 to 40 countries, not the 120 countries that the anti-poverty agencies would work in. We're defined by our origins in that way. And when I arrived, we defined ourselves as helping refugees and others. I thought that wasn't, I wouldn't have wanted to be an other.

I thought we had to do a better job of defining who we were and who we served. And we settled on this phrase that we help people whose lives are shattered by conflict, or is asked to survive, recover, and gain control of their lives. And so the first point is that we have a focus. We're not trying to do everything. The second thing that I think makes the organization unusual is that it's both an international humanitarian aid agency in 200 field sites around the world, 35 to 40 countries, 13,000 employees now, and 17,000 auxiliary workers, many of whom are refugees and displaced people themselves. But we're also a refugee resettlement agency in 25 US cities. We're the largest refugee resettlement agency

in the US. The US has historically been a leader in helping the most vulnerable refugees restart their lives in a new country. Interestingly, Ronald Reagan was the president who admitted the most refugees in the early 1980s, many from South Vietnam, 200,000, 210,000 a year. And under the Trump administration, the bipartisan support for refugee entry into the US has been slashed by about three quarters. But we are unusual, we're distinctive as an organization, because we're both an international humanitarian aid agency, we're a global agency in that sense, but we're also US focused through our 25 cities. The third thing that I think makes us different is the focus on research and evidence. We talk a lot about impact. We spend

a lot of time trying to document best practice. We say all of our programs must be evidence-based or evidence-generating. And we're now the largest research agency in the humanitarian sector. If you want to study crisis, the plurality of impact evaluations are done by the International Rescue Committee and its partners. I suppose that the fourth element of this is, and that people often ask about, is how does the organization recruit and work? And about 95% of our staff are hired locally in the places that we work. So inside Syria, we've got 800 staff across the country

in two main areas, Northeastern and Northwestern. And that pattern of local recruitment adds to our credibility. It adds to our local expertise, frankly, adds to our security. And so maybe just to put some flesh on the bones of this, just to give you a sense, at the moment we know that there are wars and conflicts taking place in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo. The most likely

consequence of a civil war is another civil war. That's why I talk about the crisis of diplomacy. Internal displacement, that's people who've been who have had to flee their own homes, but stay within their own country. And in Syria, to take that as an example, there are about seven to eight million internally displaced. Globally, there are 45 million internally displaced. Then a refugee is someone who is forced from their home, not for economic reasons, but for political or conflict reasons, and lands in the next door or other country. And at the moment, there are about 29 and a half, 30 million refugees. If you're a refugee who's crossed a border into a neighboring state or another state, and you are claiming refugee status but haven't yet received it, you're an asylum seeker. So there

are about three and a half, four million of those. If you tally those numbers up, it's 80 million people. So for the first time since records began in the 1940s with the foundation of the UN, more's the kind of picture of who we are and where we work. The final part of the jigsaw is we are one of the implementing agencies. We're funded in the main, three quarters of our funding comes from governments. Our budget is about $850 million this year. Three quarters of our funding comes from government, 25% from the private individuals, foundations and corporations. And that's changed over the last five or six years that I've been at the IRC. In that period, our budget has more or less doubled. And the amount of private funding has also doubled in percentage of the total. But we're still partnering with US government, EU governments, et cetera,

predominantly Western governments, although some governments in the Middle East. But we're also increasingly reliant on our private supporters. And we fit into the framework of humanitarian aid by working with UN agencies, working with host governments where they allow that, but always saying that it's the needs of the clients who drive us. Let's talk about the ethics and the politics around this, because frankly, we don't speak or think about refugees very much of the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis, so-called refugee crisis in Europe in particular. And Trump's messaging around this issue captured a lot of attention in our local U.S. politics. There's so much here that's confusing and becomes fodder for cynicism in the end that I think it would be good to just try to, however patiently, try to unpick some of these variables here. So for instance, from my point of view, it just seems to me that we have a responsibility in the developed world to recognize that it's through no genius of our own that we weren't born in Syria in the middle of a civil war.

That no one can take responsibility for the good luck for not having been born in Syria 10 years ago, say. And therefore, it is surely a matter of luck that you and I or anyone listening to this hasn't found himself or herself and their children to be in dire need of rescue from some hellscape of a failed state. So once you admit that, we can leave aside whether or not a person's agency should factor into this moral calculus, but there really is just no agency in play here. It's just a sheer disparity in luck. And those of us who find ourselves to be among the luckiest people who have ever lived, living in reasonably stable societies with a level of abundance that would be unimaginable in at least a quarter of the world, we have a responsibility to help people who are objectively among the least lucky people on Earth at the moment.

These are people living in poor, disease-ridden, and now conflict-driven spots on the Earth where life has become completely unlivable. And yet, what happened, certainly in the case of the Syrian diaspora, is political controversies around just what Angela Merkel did, you know, kind of opening the doors in a fairly sudden and unmitigated way to a flood of people, some of whom were clearly refugees, but some, you know, upon even minimal analysis, revealed themselves to be economic migrants. And so that was the first failure of distinction that made many people very alarmed and closed the door to what would otherwise have been a humanitarian response in many of them. And it amplified right-wing populism, which, you know, obviously if you go

far enough to the right, you have people who just don't care about refugees at all, but there were certainly people in the middle who want to help but recognize that you can't just have an open borders policy, right? There has to be some criteria by which you admit people into your society, because if you have a great social safety net, it simply cannot absorb all the needy people on earth in any given state. So there has to be some filter. And a failure to distinguish between refugees and economic migrants seemed pretty important, and seems like it will always be important, at least to know who you're admitting. But in response to that right-wing response, both the extreme version and the reasonable version,

one then encountered a left-wing response which seemed to grade fairly directly into a kind of open borders ethical argument, which is you have no right to maintain anything about your society in the face of this need. It's rarely put that starkly, but you find yourself in arguing for anything like a sane policy, you find yourself on a slippery slope where there is no handhold, and we just have to allow, you know, all of humanity to equilibrate by osmosis such that in the limit there'd be no reason to come to New York or LA or San Francisco or London because the quality of life there would be reduced to whatever the common denominator would be for the entire planet. And no taxpayer in any of those cities is going to sign on to that. So let's just start with react to this initial concern.

Yeah, there's a good deal to unpack there, and I think it's worth unpacking. And if I may, I think we should unpack three things, because I think they do play into the debate. One is exactly the point you make, which is, are these people real refugees or are they not? There's a second and third, which I'd just like to touch on, which I think does speak to the popular and political reaction around this. Second is around security. And are they properly vetted, which was a big issue in the US? Yeah. And the third is, is there control of our borders, which speaks to your point. And if I may,

I'll just address all three, because I think it's really important if you want to defend the rights of refugees that you take head on the points that are made when they are a reasonable point. So the first point is how can you tell? What's the definition and how can you tell? The 1951 Refugee Convention, transposed into US law in 1980 in the Refugee Act, talks about a well-founded fear of persecution. And what that means is, is it safe for the person to go home? And sometimes that can be told by where they're from. So it's not safe to send a Yazidi back to northwestern Iraq, for obvious reasons. They've been chased out. It's not safe to send a Muslim back to Burma, Myanmar, because they've been ethnically cleansed out of there. It's not safe to send

a Sunni young man back to Syria, because he's going to be persecuted by the Assad regime. And my point to people is to say, we have now over 70 years since the passage of the Refugee Convention, a well-founded, organized ways of treating each case and assessing them. And there's a good example in Germany. You mentioned Germany. Angela Merkel said she would assess the claims that turned out to be one and a half, one and three quarter million asylum seekers tried to claim asylum in Germany. And every case was addressed.

And at the beginning, it was more or less 50-50. Then it became 70-30 who were being admitted. Now it's more like 40% who are admitted, 60% who are not. And so the system can work. It then becomes difficult, just in all transparency, there are then difficulties, and the Germans have faced this, difficulties in then saying, well, if you failed your asylum application, and you're from Niger, or you're from Mali, it may be hard to get them back. But nonetheless, I think the philosophical point, and you're from Niger or you're from Mali, it may be hard to get them back. But nonetheless, I think the philosophical point, and I run an agency that is the largest refugee resettlement agency in America, we say very clearly, there should be a test. And if you pass, you should be effectively integrated into the society that you've come to. And if you don't,

then you can't stay. And what we can point to is parts of the world that do this well. In America, it's not being done well at the moment. If you come and claim asylum in America in February before the COVID pandemic started, it would be three or four years before your case was actually seen in the immigration court. So the first thing is, it's a reasonable thing for you to say, it can there be a system that works? And my answer to that is yes, and it can evolve.

So for example, 70 years ago, if you were a woman suffering domestic violence in El Salvador, and you fled and claimed asylum, it wouldn't have recognized your claim. Today, it can recognize your claim, and your case law has built that up. If it's okay with you, can I just deal with the other two points? Yeah, that'd be great. Because I think they're relevant. Look, there's a security point as well, which is to say, well, how do you know these people are safe? Who chooses them? And we went through this in inordinate detail because the granting of resettlement or refugee

status is important. We support, I support, effective security vetting. The truth is, it's tougher to get into America as a refugee than under any other route, a tourist, a student, or anything else. The vetting process takes 18 to 24 months. The UN defines the most vulnerable, but then it's US agencies, US officials who do the vetting. And I mean, some of the most tragic stories I've had are people who worked with the US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan who were promised that by working for the US military or diplomats, putting themselves at risk

of reprisals, we employ some of these people, they would then be given haven. Now, there are 100,000 Iraqis who are still waiting to be able to exercise that right to come and resettle in the US. And they've been literally standing, sitting next to senior American military diplomats, et cetera. And yet they're still caught up in the system. So I would say on the security front, there can be proper vetting. The third element, which was perhaps bigger in the European debate than in the US debate, but it's part of the US debate, is, well, hang on, what kind of controls are there at

the border? And in Europe in 2015-16, there wasn't an entry-exit system where everyone arriving was properly documented, properly noted, and properly registered. Now there is. Everyone entering and exiting the European Union, the 27, does get properly registered and vetted. And I think that if the politics of the refugee issue goes wrong, it goes wrong on one of those three grounds. And it's very important that those people who are willing to have a fact-based argument on those three grounds have that fact-based argument, because I think it's a winnable argument. And interestingly enough,

actually, if you look at the latest polling in America, it does wax and wane. But it's popped up again, the number of Americans, 60%, 70% now, who are saying they recognize that if you're a victim of war in, for example, Syria, you should be allowed to take refuge here. It's a historic American tradition. Yeah. So now how do you decide whether it's wise to resettle people in a country like America versus in a country bordering a conflict? You take Turkey or Lebanon. Well, that's a good question. Yeah, it's not our choice.

We're a refugee resettlement agency. In the end, it's the US government who decides. But here's something that I think is really important and where people like me and our organization, we need to do a bigger and better job. There are a lot of myths associated with the refugee issue. One myth is that most refugees are in rich countries. And in fact, it's completely untrue. 86% of the world's refugees are in poor and lower middle income

countries. They are in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey. If they're from South Sudan, they're in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia. If they're from Somalia, they're in Kenya. If they're from Burma, Myanmar, they are in Bangladesh. And the number of refugees in America or Europe is actually pretty low by comparison. It's a myth. And it's also a myth, by the way, that they're mainly in camps. 60% of refugees are in urban areas now, not in camps. And the biggest myth, in a way, the most damaging one is that, well, look, all they need to do is survive for a few months or a few years and they go home. The truth is less than 3% of the world's refugees went home last year because the wars keep burning. And you just say the list, Afghanistan, Somalia,

Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria now in its 10th year. And the figures are disputed and the figures are not great, but we're talking about multi-generational displacement of a kind that we've never known. Because while the world has a history of wars between states, what we're suffering from at the moment is wars within states, civil wars. I mean, depending on how you classify the India-China standoff at the moment, there are no hot wars between states at the moment. But there are 15, 20 countries who are spilling out significant numbers of refugees because of implosion at home. And that is a

new phenomenon for which the tools of diplomacy that I used to be involved with for the British government are not well suited because the record of helping peace building and peacemaking in countries of civil war is not a good one. Yeah, it really is a circumstance where we've drawn lessons that just can't be integrated into any political or behavioral plan. So you take Syria and Afghanistan by turns. We intervened in Afghanistan, and that's we being the United States, and that is now our longest war in history. And I'm reasonably sure that once the last American soldier leaves, we will feel that that was a pointless and ultimately masochistic exercise in nation building. But we're also chastised for having done nothing about Syria. Although had we gone into Syria, many would have been outraged that we hadn't learned the lesson of Afghanistan. You really are damned if you do, damned if you don't.

And mere diplomacy, not sending troops of any kind, seems in many cases totally ineffectual. What has diplomacy done for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has simmered now for at least 50 years? And many of these things, as you know, just rage out of sight and out of mind. So you take something like Yemen. I know in the abstract that Yemen is a terrible place to be right now. I was there last year and we've got 800 people working there. It's the world's largest, 24 million people in humanitarian need. And so you're right to raise it as a terrible failure of diplomacy, as well as a misbegotten military strategy. So what could we do? And so given our experience in Afghanistan

and elsewhere, given our experience of avoiding conflict in Syria, and we had Obama's red line, which Assad quickly crossed, revealing us to be some kind of paper tiger, or at least an exhausted superpower, what to do? I mean, if you were in control right now, if you could just pull the levers of diplomacy or military intervention or strong arming our allies and adversaries, you take the Saudis' involvement in Yemen, what do you think the US should do or the U.S. should attempt to get its allies to collaborate on? Well, look, it's an important and a good question. And the first thing to recognize is that there are different cases. From Afghanistan, America faced a threat to its own homeland. Syria doesn't represent that. And Yemen represents a, the meltdown of Yemen represents a threat to an American ally,

although there is now a debate in America about the extent to which Saudi Arabia should be seen as an ally. So I want to say that I recognize the differences, but I want to also try and say that there are some common elements. I don't want to sound glib because these are very, very difficult issues, but I think there are some common elements of learning that we can say. The first is that without a clear view of the political settlement in a country, the political compromises between different religious or ethnic or geographic groups, without a vision of the political settlement, no military strategy, no development strategy, no diplomatic strategy will work. That's a common lesson from all of the conflicts that you have mentioned, and you can add Iraq to that.

That essentially civil war is the failure of politics by other means. It's not the continuation of politics, as Clausewitz said. It's the failure of politics. It's the failure to build political institutions that can forge compromise and share spoils. So that's, I think, the first warning. The second point is that unless you are willing to put assets in play, and they don't have to be military assets, they could be economic assets, unless you're willing to exercise

leverage, then diplomacy on its own is not going to work. I think Frederick the Great said that diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments. And this applies not just to military, but to economic and other political pressure. If you're not willing, if you don't want to put pressure on Saudi Arabia in respect of Yemen, then they're not going to take any notice of you. And so I think there's a question of priority and interest, frankly. President Trump has inaugurated what Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations calls the withdrawal doctrine, which is essentially that you get out of everything. And you don't accept the argument that the world is inter of everything. And you don't accept the argument that the world is interdependent. And you assert that America can prosper through its own means,

and it doesn't need to get its hand in the mangle. So the second, I think, common element is that unless you're willing to put skin in the game of different kinds, then it won't work. The third element of this from the conflicts that you mentioned, is that these civil wars, and one could add civil conflicts, one can add others, is that unless you think about the region, as well as about the country concerned, you're not going to be able to forge a conclusion. I came to this studying the Afghan issue very closely. I went to Afghanistan for the first time in 2007. As it happened, I was there for the funeral of the last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, July 2007. Afghans from all across the country and frankly, all across the world gathered, but so did the region. And it came home to me so strongly

that there could be no Afghan settlement without a regional settlement. And frankly, that applies in other parts of the world as well. So the diplomacy is not just bilateral, nation to nation, it's also got to include the rest of the region. Now, if you just take those first three principles and start applying them, actually, American power works. I mean, if you listen, if you think about Yemen, the world's largest humanitarian crisis, them. Actually, American power works. I mean, if you listen, if you think about Yemen, the world's largest humanitarian crisis, Bruce Riddell, Brookings Institution, formerly an American government, outstanding scholar of the Yemen catastrophe. He says, look, if America put down its foot and said to Saudi Arabia, you must stop this war tomorrow, because it's a misbegotten

military strategy that is actually strengthening Iran, not weakening it. It's creating space for al-Qaeda rather than reducing it. And America was willing to put its assets on the line to ensure that happened. Bruce Riddell will tell you it would happen tomorrow. And I don't want to oversimplify this because stopping the fighting is not just a matter of what the Saudis do in Yemen. It's also a matter of what the Houthis do, and the Houthis are backed by the Iranians. But the strategy of the Saudi-led coalition, which I'm sorry to say the US and the UK are signed up to, is a misbegotten military strategy. And there's a danger that America underestimates its power and mislearns the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, which I think are painful, incredibly painful. I wouldn't say pointless. You said that we'll look back on Afghanistan as pointless. If you're an Afghan, you wouldn't say it was pointless. But I know what you're saying. The price has been very, very high indeed.

Well, I guess I would add to the picture of pointlessness the prospect that in the end, wherever we recognize the end to be, we may just see a resurgence of the Taliban and a return to something like the status quo circa 2000? You may, and many Afghans would fear that, especially female Afghans. But the American national interest would say the big question is not ended by the question of the Taliban. The big question for America's strategic interest is whether Afghanistan is a source of threat to the wider world by providing a haven for Al-Qaeda or others. But I mean, I take your point about the progress, but it didn't start as a nation building, quote unquote, nation building process. But my point in answer to your question is that we need to create a new kind of diplomacy.

I was the Secretary of State in the UK. Diplomacy was in a transitional period because this question of the civil wars that were threats to regional peace and security was emerging because of the failings in Iraq and Afghanistan. And what we face now is a true crisis of diplomacy. It's not just that wars are continuing. We are living through what I call an age of impunity. And I get, I'm sorry, I apologize. I don't know if I need to apologize, but I get passionate about this because literally international rescue community staff running an ambulance in Northwest Afghanistan get bombed

by their own government and by the Russians. That is the age of impunity. The fact that 70% of people who die in war today are civilians in urban areas is the age of impunity. The fact that aid workers are killed in higher numbers is the age of impunity. The fact that military commanders in Yemen, where a coachload of children were bombed by the Saudi-led coalition in Syria, never mind what non-state organization, the fact that military commanders think they can get away with anything means they do everything. They do everything beyond the limits that we thought we'd established after the Second World War. Chemical weapons, they get used. Bombing of civilians, that gets used. Cluster munitions, that gets used. That is the age of

impunity. And my point is that the retreat of countries like the US for all of the failings, for all of the mistakes, for all of the dangers of thinking in an American-centric or Eurocentric way, when countries that formally are committed to human rights and to the accountability of power, when they retreat from the global stage, and remember my own country's in retreat as well, exemplified by Brexit, when those countries retreat, for all their failings, the bar for the legitimate exercise of power goes down, and the tendency for power to

be abused goes up. And that's what we're seeing in the war zones, the conflict zones around the world, both in ungoverned space and in governed space, ungoverned where non-state actors are in control, governed where state actors who are formally meant to be committed to international treaties are concerned. So I think that your question about what's the right lesson of the traumas of the last 20 years of foreign policy is incredibly important in a world where there are growing numbers of these unstable states, producing growing numbers of refugees who are in miserable conditions in too many circumstances themselves, and for whom the international aid system is at the moment a sticking plaster. Okay, so let's linger on this skepticism about the wisdom or pragmatism of worrying about the

rest of the world in the first place. So you have this retreat to nationalism, populism, and a kind of radical selfishness that is on one level understandable because, again, we rarely see the evidence of great success for all of our misadventures out in the world. And, you know, for all of our misadventures out in the world. And, you know, I mean, we have historical successes. We look back at the resolution of World War II, and we see that what we did in Germany and Japan in the aftermath, well, these are now allies, and, you know, we're not dealing with mortal enemies anymore.

These are some of our closest allies. So clearly it's possible to rectify even the worst schism diplomatically in the end, even in the aftermath of the worst possible war. But there's not much evidence of that, at least in popular consciousness of late. And just take the American case, and I'm sure it's somewhat similar under the shadow of Brexit in the UK. But in America, you look around at our own failing infrastructure. You look at the crisis of homelessness in major cities. And it's easy to draw the lesson, we can't even put our own house in order.

And we are hemorrhaging jobs and economic prospects. Again, we'll turn the conversation toward the pandemic and all of its knock-on effects soon. But I could see that somebody in a Trumpian frame of mind could say, well, all of those crises, as tragic as they are, are far away. And I know I'm being told a story that the world is interconnected, but what I find most galling is that the potholes in my own roads and the homeless people on my own doorstep, that those problems can't even be solved, apparently, by the exercise of government and by, you know, my paying my taxes year after year. There's just a general message of hopelessness and ineffectuality, the zero-sum marshalling of resources,

where there's just not enough money or attention to go around. So why pay attention to any of this? Why isn't the Trumpian retreat to the citadel, both politically, we understand it's politically pragmatic to anyone who's thinking along these lines, but why isn't it actually a plausible path toward at least American and first world prosperity? Well, let's not call it a Trumpian point. Let's call it a good point. It's a good point to say, if America come, America should be able to fix its potholes, and it should be able to fix its education system, and it should be able to fix its

immigration system. Now, those are good, perfectly sensible points. And I think the way to address them is as follows, or at least discuss them as follows, beyond saying that those are rightful frustrations, to put it mildly. The first is that tending to the international front does not preclude tending to the home front. The diplomacy doesn't take away from the home front. And frankly, the sums of money involved are also limited. The sums of money in respect of overseas aid are very small. 0.17% of U.S.

national income goes on overseas aid. Actually, I just want to just flag a fascinating poll result. I don't know if this is done year after year, but I know it's been done. You ask people whether we give too much money to foreign aid or not, and most people, I forget the actual numbers here, you might know them, but most people in the US think we give too much to foreign aid, but when asked how much we should give, they put the number at something like 4%, which is 10x what we actually give. Yes. And also, they think the current level is 25%, or very high. So look, the demand to fix the home front is a rightful one. But point one,

that doesn't preclude you from working internationally. Secondly, you use the phrase retreat to the citadel, which is a great phrase. The Israeli author Yuval Harari talks about a dystopian future of a quote unquote, network of fortresses. And it's dystopian because it doesn't work. The blessings of the global economy, global innovation, mean that a future of a network of fortresses is not going to deliver anything that people have come to expect or hope for. That's the reality of the global economy and society. And that's why the pandemic does provide an absolutely critical point of rupture. If the lesson of the pandemic is that a connected world is dangerous, then we're going to have de-globalization, retreat from connection,

and I'm afraid not actually tackle the problem. If the diagnosis of the pandemic is that globalisation has been mismanaged, that actually we need a stronger World Health Organisation, not a weaker one, that if you're worried about Chinese influence in the World Health Organisation, the worst possible thing to do is to pull out from the American point of view. So the second part of the answer, I think, is to make the case that the world is more interdependent than when John Kennedy proclaimed a declaration of interdependence on Independence Day 1962. He went to Philadelphia and he said, my fellow Americans, we're living in an interdependent world and we need a declaration of interdependence. And it's even more the case today, whether you think about the supply chains that allow the economy to proceed, and never mind the innovations,

for example, on the vaccine that need to be globally spread. There probably is a third part to this, though, which is important, which is to really recognize that the renewal of fragile and failing states around the world is primarily the responsibility of people who live there. the renewal of fragile and failing states around the world is primarily the responsibility of people who live there. And it's important not to have hubris about the role of international engagement. But it's equally or even in some ways more dangerous not to recognize that the retreat from global engagement doesn't mean that other people aren't there. I mean, if America retreats, that doesn't mean the Russians are going to retreat or the Chinese are going to retreat. In fact, the evidence of the last six months is that China thinks that American retreat

creates circumstances for it to expand its footprint. And so I think there is a global security aspect that doesn't have the short-term resolution of fixing a pothole, but does speak to the kind of strategic, patient, global engagement that is essential to the prosperity and security of a country like this. And that's a political argument that has run for 200 years in this country. I'm very conscious of that. And I wouldn't teach American politicians how to win it, not least because we lost it in my own country. But I think that it is striking to me that the European Union is defying the predictions that it was going to crumble under the weight of COVID.

And for medium-sized countries, the case for global engagement is overwhelmingly strong. I think that the case that has to be made here is obviously different because this is a superpower, and it's one of only two real superpowers in the world. And it's a harder argument. But I think that if you want to think about American prosperity and security, it's intimately linked, not just to its neighbors to the south and to the north, because by virtue of geography, you're a long way from some of the world's trouble spots. But if we've learned anything in the last six months, it's that the world is actually smaller, not more disconnected

than people say. Yeah. Well, you mentioned Harari and a point he makes a lot, which, you know, it's very simple. It's almost an aphorism, but it does seem like a very good heuristic for thinking about this. He says that there are global problems which only admit of global solutions. problems which only admit of global solutions. There's no single nation that can solve the problem of climate change or a truly adequate pandemic response. And there are many things in the end that will be added to that list of threats, some of which are existential threats. I mean, there are developments in technology which could spell the end of us, for which

I mean, there are developments in technology which could spell the end of us for which we're currently in an arms race condition. Whether it's AI or genetic engineering, nanotechnology, any one of these things could get away from us even under the best conditions of success. And if we merely have an arms race and are not collaborating globally around some understanding of the shared risks, the very future of the species seems to be in question. Look, I think that's a great point. And it obviously has a climate dimension. But here's an interesting thing. I was in Beijing last November, and quite a senior person said to me,

look, I'm really worried about cyber warfare directed at nuclear power plants. And do you think that this is something that China and the West could collaborate on? And the fact that they're thinking about it is a good thing. The fact that they're worried about whether or not the West would talk to them and collaborate on it is a bad thing, because it speaks to a kind of myopia that has gripped our countries that is dangerous. that has gripped our countries that is dangerous. So now, where do you come down on collaborating with governments whose human rights records are objectively worse than ours, perhaps not worse than ours have ever been in our history, but worse than ours are now? And I mean, we've mentioned the Saudis, we mentioned China, it's often seen as a moral failing not to

issue ultimatums where one can. But whatever the other topics of conversation, if you're talking to the Saudis and you're not admonishing them about their treatment of women or apostates or any other minority who fares terribly under that theocracy, if you're talking to China and you're not belaboring the point about their concentration camps now for the Uyghurs, and yet those are the very points which might cause conversation on any other topic to totally break down. How would you recommend governments and individual politicians navigate those? Well, to answer your question directly, should we be collaborating, which was the word you used, with governments that are repressing human rights? The answer is, we should certainly not be collaborating in the repression of human

rights. Collaboration means egging on, supporting. I mean, on other fronts, yeah. But I think it's important to start with that, that to collaborate in something is to help it happen. Secondly, I think that it's really important that if we don't, if we're not willing to defend our own values and speak to our own values, which is the most basic defense of them, then what use are they? And so if the first point is that you shouldn't be collaborating in the repression of human rights, the second point is, should you be speaking up about it? My answer to that would be yes. I mean, I spent three years as foreign minister. And I think that when you go to China, they don't respect you if you don't raise difficult issues, that they will not respect you. They know what's on your mind and maybe more ways

than one, but they- They've scanned your phone, yeah. they've scanned your phone. Yeah. But the, so, so if you don't have the self-respect to speak up for what you think that I think betokens weakness and you can guarantee you'll get nowhere. Thirdly, you use the word ultimatums and the truth about ultimatums is twofold.

One, you should never use an ultimatum unless you're willing to follow through. And secondly, you shouldn't overuse ultimatums because if you throw around too many ultimatums, you'll be shown to be not just a broken record, but actually a hollow shell. So you have to choose your ground. The fourth thing that I think is incredibly important is that in dealing with powerful autocrats, never mind, leave aside the less powerful ones because that makes it too easy. If you're dealing with powerful autocrats, powerful autocratic regimes,

then take it on your own. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.