Making Sense with Sam Harris - #357 — America & World Order

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Bret Stephens about America’s place in the world. They discuss the waning Pax Americana, American isolationism, Republican fondness for Putin, Tucker Carlson, why America should support Ukraine, the significance of Alexei Navalny, what it would mean to properly hold Putin responsible for his death, nuclear blackmail, valid criticisms of Israel, the war in Gaza, Palestinian public opinion, the need for total military defeat, a two-state solution, the isolation of Israel at the UN and the International Criminal Court of Justice, waning support for the war in the Biden Administration, Hezbollah and war with Iran, Israeli politics and the settlements in the West Bank, charges of “settler colonialism,” antisemitism as a series of double standards, the prospect of a Trump victory in 2024, Biden’s age problem, the crisis at the southern border, U.S. immigration policy, 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. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,

and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. I released my second conversation with Rory Stewart last week. Many of you found that frustrating. Um, I understand. Especially if you are listening to it after more recent events in the UK have unfolded, where even the Prime Minister had to give a speech about the pervasive problem of Islamism and Jihadism in the UK,

and how they could no longer tolerate it. Anyway, make of that conversation what you will. I won't further comment on it here, but I am confident that the topic will come up again and again and again. Today I'm speaking with Brett Stevens. Brett is an opinion columnist for the New York Times. He previously served as editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post and as foreign affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal, for which he won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Among his other distinctions, in 2022, he was banned for life by the government of Russia and can't visit that country ever again. And we talk about Russia, among other things. We discuss America's place in the world, the waning Pax Americana, American isolationism, Republican fondness for Putin, Tucker Carlson,

why America should support Ukraine, the significance of Alexei Navalny, what it would mean to properly hold Putin responsible for his death, nuclear blackmail, valid criticisms of Israel, the war in Gaza, Palestinian public opinion, the need for total military defeat of Hamas, the prospects of a two-state solution, the isolation of Israel at the UN and the International Criminal Court of Justice, waning support for the war in the Biden administration, Hezbollah and war with Iran, Israeli politics and the settlements in the West Bank, charges of settler colonialism, anti-Semitism as a series of double standards, the prospect of a Trump victory, Biden's age problem, the crisis at the southern border,

U.S. immigration policy, and other topics. We cover a lot of ground here. And now I bring you Brett Stevens. I am back with Brett Stevens. Brett, thanks for joining me. It's good to be on the show, Sam. So there's not much going on in the world. It's too bad we don't have anything to talk about. How's the weather in New York? Yeah, it's a quiet time of peace on Earth. So the weather is just fine. It's warming up. It really is. I don't know if this is an illusion, but it seems like history is being made at an increasing pace watching the news and writing down topics, and they sort of fall into five buckets, and we'll

see if we get through each of them, but I'll just preview them for you, and then I'll lead you into the first. The first is the waning Pax Americana, American isolationism, and the inclination among Republicans to abdicate U.S. leadership in the world. Tucker Carlson is a font of wisdom, etc. The second, which is kind of contiguous with that, is Russia and the war in Ukraine. The third is the Middle East, the war in Gaza and Iran and related matters. The fourth is the presidential election, the trouble with Joe Biden. At one point, you made a charitable case for Trump in your column for the New York Times.

Well, that was a thought experiment, just for the record. We'll be clear about that. Yes, this was a bending over backwards to take those who are still inclined to vote for Trump seriously insofar as that's possible. And then finally, I thought we could touch on the crisis at the southern border and our immigration policy, if you have anything to say on that topic. Topics I write about a lot. Great. So number one, this new feeling of American isolationism, I've said previously on the podcast, it would be one thing to argue for a different posture for America with respect to being the world's cop or maintaining the rules-based international order.

And I think we can readily argue against that. But the Republicans seem to have gone further, and they've actually become fans of autocracy in various forms, and certainly fans of Putin. And then you have someone like Tucker Carlson, who many people take seriously as a maverick journalist who's uncovering the real deal over there in Russia. How do you view what's happening here with respect to American leadership? And then we will turn that toward Russia and Ukraine afterwards. You know, someone once said to me that there's a smart version of wrong and a dumb version of wrong. And when it comes to Ukraine, the smart version of wrong is the argument that we can't possibly hope to bring Ukraine into a Western

sphere of influence when for the Russians, it's so core to the way they have seen themselves historically that our energies have to be husbanded to deal with our principal threats, and our principal threat is China, and we would be better served pushing Ukraine into some kind of negotiated settlement with Russia so that we can deal more forcefully with the threat that the Chinese pose to our position and our alliances in the Far East. That's the smart version of wrong. It's wrong because I think that if Ukraine is going to fall, then we will have to actually devote more resources to the defense of Europe, not fewer resources. It will be a NATO country that will next be in the crosshairs,

and we will have treaty obligations. And it's wrong because I think the collapse of Ukraine, or rather the collapse of Western and American will to support Ukraine is just going to serve as an advertisement to Xi Jinping and China to adopt an even more aggressive posture in Taiwan. But at least that position has the merit of an attempt to sort of think strategically about what our options are when we have limited resources. The Republican Party now is in the dumb version of wrong. Not even the dumb version of wrong, I would say the evil version of wrong, because what they are doing is abandoning an extraordinarily courageous democratic ally that has done us the service, the great strategic service of destroying about half the Russian military without the loss of a single

American or NATO soldier. And against a dictatorship that, as we just saw with the killing, really the murder of Navalny, whether he was murdered in this last instance or sort of just slowly put to death, embodies the most despicable, malevolent features of Soviet totalitarianism that the Republican Party used to stand against. So it's ignominious what the Republicans are proposing, but it's also ignominious and stupid because ultimately, an America that abandons its allies, an America that thinks that our oceans are moats, is going to come to the same painful discovery that our great-grandfathers had 80 years ago, more than 80 years ago, when they realized that our oceans are not moats and that we are vulnerable to attack and that we will be attacked because we are ultimately the great democratic power and a source of a target for dictatorships everywhere. So the Republican Party has really descended below just simply bad strategic thinking into something that looks like the head in the sand, know-nothing isolationism that brought us to the brink of disaster back in the late 30s and early 40s.

Well, I know I've asked you some version of this question more or less every time we've spoken, and I imagine there really isn't an answer for it, but I'm going to give it another go because it is the inscrutable object and moral horror at the center of this thing on the right politically in America now, which is just how did we get here? I mean, you know many of these Republicans. I mean, you speak privately with them, presumably. I don't know if you still do. I mean, many are former colleagues and many are very serious people or erstwhile serious people. Ex-friends. Yeah. But I mean, there are people who you know who have like real bona fides as many of them as intellectuals, some are like were or may yet aspire to be serious politicians who are,

for whatever reason, enthralled to the cult of Trump, presumably mostly for opportunistic reasons or reasons of political survival. But I mean But how is it that we have so many people acquiescing to what is just at best an amoral embrace of somebody like Putin? Just the list of indiscretions is so long and so obvious and so indisputable. I mean, he's someone who, at the very moment that Tucker Carlson is glad-handing him, there's a Wall Street Journal journalist imprisoned over there, right? He's somebody who kills his political opponents, not just in Russia, but he kills his critics in the capitals of Europe, poisoning them with polonium or nerve agents. He imprisons his own billionaires.

How is it that the Republican Party can, even for a day, tolerate an apparent fondness for this guy, given what it used to stand for? The Republicans used to mock left liberals who would go to the Soviet Union and say, you know, people seem pretty happy there. And yeah, maybe they're a little poorer than we are, but there's more equality. They would mock, you know, the nation likes to do tours of Cuba and talk about the great health service there. And it was a source of conservative derision, correctly so. The kind of naive, starry-eyed Westerner who would go to a despotic regime and take a look at the Potemkin villages that had been erected for them and say, look,

I've seen the future and it works, as Lincoln Stevens, a great progressive journalist from 100 years ago famously said. And now it's the Tucker Carlson's who are doing precisely that. I mean, precisely that, going to a grocery store in a country where the gross domestic product per capita hovers around, I think, $11,000 or $12,000 a year, and seeing a showcase supermarket for the nomenklatura, some of our listeners will understand what that term means, the upper crust, the upper elites of Moscow Moscow and saying, look how much better this is than your average stop and shop. By the way, I doubt very much that it is, but that was what Tucker was peddling. And to answer your question, when Trump was first

elected, Sam, I took some books off my shelf, which I had read in college. I got to college in 1991, which was the same year that the Soviet Union collapsed. And for some reason, I developed this kind of fascination with the anti-communist intelligentsia of the Cold War, really not just anti-communist, anti-totalitarian. So from Orwell and through Milosz, the great Polish intellectual, Václav Havel, dissidents like Sakharov, all these people thought deeply about the nature of totalitarian society. And what's fascinating about some of the best work there is it's not really a political analysis, it's a psychological analysis of what makes people succumb to ideologies that at some level they know are false and evil. And the really interesting

insight, you find this in Milos, for example, is that it's not really fear that is the motivating force. It's a kind of rationalization of the position that they're in. So it's a kind of view that, well, it's all bullshit, so why don't you just go along with the bullshit that happens to be in power? Or, yes, the system is evil, but this is the direction in which history is inexorably going, and so you want to be on the right side of history. Or there are even sort of darker psychological tropes. Jean-Francois Ravel once said that it's easy to understand why people want to tyrannize other people, but the really interesting mystery is why some people want to be tyrannized. I mean, this captures sides of the human psyche that those of us living in

free societies are loathe to acknowledge or see, even if we see it in some cultures and subcultures, see, even if we see it in some cultures and subcultures, but it's there. And that's how people succumbed to the lure of despots, cults of personality, preposterous ideologies, ideas that collapse in the face of a moment's thought. And yet, that's what you have now in the Republican Party. And I think it's a mixture of a few things. I was in a debate recently with someone on some foreign policy questions, and the guy's argument basically came down to, well, the American people don't see it that way. And to which you want to say, well, they're mistaken, and in a free society, we should raise our voices and argue with the American people and win them over, right? That's the task of democratic persuasion. So that's sort of the argument like, well, history's not on your side, and I want to be on the side of history. should we have a moral component to our foreign policy? It's a dog-eat-dog, Hobbesian world. Let's just accept that that's the way it is. Well, most of us actually understand that it's a better world and a smarter world when leadership contains a moral element,

which makes other people want to follow you and not oppose you. So that, I think you really understand something of Trumpian ideology. I'm not talking about sort of the ordinary Trump voter, but the Trump ideologues in reading these books that came out 60 or 70 years ago about why despotism seemed to be so effective for decades on end. be so effective for decades on end. Well, what to think about the war in Ukraine at this moment? I mean, we're now speaking just a handful of days after there was a recent setback there to say that we have been dilatory in providing aid to Ukraine at this point is a bit of an understatement. There's a lot of

controversy as to whether we should be aiding Ukraine as you move, certainly as you move right of center. And there's also, as you said, the recent death of Navalny, which really kind of sharpens up the moral difference between the two sides. You wrote an article recently about what it would mean to properly hold Putin responsible for Navalny's death. That might be an interesting way into this question. But tell me how you're viewing the war in Ukraine, our wavering support for it, and what you think we should do in light of who Putin is and what his intentions are and what it means to defend a struggling democracy. Well, we should help Ukraine as much as we can, not only because of the morality of supporting

an embattled democratic ally against a foe like Putin, but much more importantly, the self-interest. The self-interest, you know, the kind of argument that I hear on some quarters, many quarters of the right, sometimes on the left too, is, you know, morality is too expensive for foreign policy. Foreign policy is about our interests. But there is no question that the United States has an interest in seeing one of its two most aggressive and arguably its most dangerous geopolitical rival humbled, humiliated, and defeated on the battlefield, not by us, but by our proxy. And when it comes to the question of expense, someone says, well, $60 billion is a lot of money. It reminds me of a scene in one of those Austin Powers movies

where the evil guy says that his ransom is a million dollars. He's like, come back to life from the 50s or 60s and everyone's like, a million dollars? That's nothing. So $60 billion, as large a sum as that sounds, is 1% of the federal budget. Okay, we have a $6 trillion budget. Ask yourself, is it worth spending one out of every $100 that we spend on so many other things, right, on defeating one of our two principal strategic rivals through the sacrifice and courage of our friends and partners in Ukraine. I would argue that's an incredibly great investment for the United States. We even have a few American citizens who could single-handedly foot the bill and still have $60 billion left over after they pick up the tab? I can think of one or two of them off the top of my head. They would be fine for the rest of their lives. But I think this is a task really for the American government and even the American

taxpayer. We are more secure when Putin can no longer think that he can threaten his neighbors and ultimately our treaty allies with impunity. Now, the other aspect comes to life with nobility. When I was coming of age, I think maybe you're a few years older than I am, Sam. Basically, we're the same generation. So we remember that names like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Sharansky, Havel, Lech Walesa, the Solidarity Movement in Poland, these were household names in the West. And Navalny should be a household name, not only because of the extraordinary example of moral and political courage, but actually also the power of his thinking and his prose. It is a shame he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he was murdered. But Navalny matters because he symbolizes what all free society should stand for, which is the belief in the singular importance of individual conscience

in the face of the overwhelming power of the state. That we as members of democratic societies should always look at those exemplars of individual conscience and dissent as models for what we, in our societies, try to protect. And I fear even now that within a week, the conversation about Navalny is going to be a part of the remote past. And I think that's not only a failure on our part, it says something, I think, about the degraded state of democratic discourse, but it's also a foreign policy failure. Because in standing up for people like Navalny, in punishing the regime for what it did to him, we're actually helping to embolden some unseen number of future Navalny's who could at some point profoundly threaten the state. It's not for nothing that Putin took a singular interest in Navalny and was so threatened by him because he

understood that the power of Navalny's example, his courage and his conscience were a threat to his regime. The best thing we could do, this was suggested to me by Bill Browder, the financier and activist who was behind the Magnitsky sanctions, is what he called the Navalny Act. Russia has north of $300 billion in frozen assets in Western institutions. They were frozen after the war. We should seize them and give them to Ukraine. If the Republicans want to say it's too expensive for us to underwrite Ukraine's defense, we'll give them Russia's money and let a portion of that money go to the purchase of weapons from the West. It would be a real signal to Putin that this kind of action has devastating consequences and hits him right next to his most precious assets, right in his wallet. That would be one thing. The next thing is there's an election in Russia, a quote-unquote presidential election next month. Garry Kasparov, the great chess player and also a human rights activist, he said, just don't recognize Putin's legitimacy. That's another thing that Putin

craves in addition to money. He craves the trappings of political legitimacy. Stand up for other dissidents. And finally, let's just give the Ukrainians the weapons they've been asking for for two years so they can start to hold Russian targets at much greater risk. What about the concern that I haven't heard it voiced much of late, but it was certainly voiced early on in the war when we began to support Ukraine, that we're poking a nuclear tiger with a stick and perhaps more and more a tiger that has nothing left to lose. And so it's really the threat of nuclear blackmail here that we're being told we should acquiesce to. On some level, we can't afford to help, we meaning not just the US, but Europe, we can't afford to help Ukraine win, truly win here, because that would leave Putin with more or less nothing left to lose and a

kind of existential threat, you know, politically and even mortally on his own side. And he might, in fact, just decide to let the big bombs fly at that point. Well, look, Putin has been blackmailing us, is blackmailing us with nuclear threats. His sidekick Medvedev routinely issues these unsubtle threats. You can't ever discount the possibility that bad people with nuclear weapons might use them. On the other hand, we've lived now, what, since Soviet Union detonated its first bomb in 1949, so we've lived with 75 years of bad guys having nuclear weapons and they haven't used them yet. And the reasons for that turn out to be pretty good ones. Take just one side of this, Sam,

which is the question of tactical nuclear weapons. People were very worried that Putin might deploy these so-called small nukes, one kiloton, five kilotons. I mean, they're huge bombs, but by the standard of strategic nuclear weapons, they're relatively small. And seen from a military angle, they really don't make a lot of sense, not least because if Putin were to deploy them, A, we would know at least a week in advance because of our intelligence. I'm told this by people who know. B, the Russians would have to clear the battlefield. That is to say they would have to retreat from the front lines if they were going to deploy one of these weapons and not incinerate their own people. So that would give us further advance notice.

The third thing is they're destroying the very ground they seek to conquer, and not just destroying it but rendering it uninhabitable for decades. And D, the Russians would need thousands of nuclear suits, radioactive suits for their troops operating in the vicinity and they just don't have them. So those are just, they add up to a very good reason not to use these bombs. These bombs were first developed and deployed with the idea of massive concentrations of Russian armor coming across very narrow defined places in West Germany during the Cold War, where a one kiloton Western nuclear weapon would make sense in killing a lot of Russian troops. It doesn't work quite as well on the Ukrainian battlefield, which again, doesn't make it

impossible. It just makes it highly unlikely. And it's also important not to allow ourselves to be implicitly threatened by this kind of blackmail because it, of course, it just advances Russia's war aims. I mean, Putin wants very much to win in Ukraine, but what he really doesn't want is to be completely incinerated. And someone made the point, remember during COVID when Putin would sit on one end of some 40-foot table and Macron or whoever was visiting him would sit at the end. A guy who's this afraid of COVID probably doesn't want to start a thermonuclear exchange with the West, which would be considerably worse than COVID for his own personal health. Hmm. What about the idea that he really just wants Ukraine and would be happy to stop there for reasons of the historical

fictitiousness of Ukraine as a nation and its belonging to Mother Russia. And he really has no further designs on Europe. What makes the concern that there's no stopping point, no natural stopping point, if we just let him take Ukraine, a rational one. I would imagine the Tucker Carlson camp is highly skeptical that he is going to be rolling tanks into the rest of Europe. Look, Lithuanians who lived under the Soviet Union up until 1991, the Estonians, all the Baltic states, they have a different view and a better informed view, which is that the Soviet, Russia, I should say, Russia, almost by its nature, is an expansionary

power. And so the argument that he's satisfied with Ukraine alone defies the long course of Russian history. So whoever would come after Putin, if he were sort of a dictator in the same vein, would then look for, let's say, softer targets, Moldova, for example, or targets to the south in the Caucasus, seeking to reconstitute the Soviet empire. And it was observed by a historian in the 20th century that when Russia is internally weak, and it is, it tends to be more expansionary in its aim. So there's a long history here which argues against the case that Putin is satisfied with Ukraine or a portion of Ukraine alone. It just runs against everything we know about dictatorships. I mean, the expression drunk on power is a cliche, but it's a good expression because power

is like alcohol, and dictators are like alcoholics, and they're not satisfied with just one drink. People thought that Hitler would be satisfied with the Sudetenland, and that was the basis for the Munich Agreement in 1938, or with the Anschluss with Austria, because, well, Austria is, in a sense, a German-speaking country. Then it was Poland, then it was the Lebensraum, and so on. So I think it's just crazy to indulge this kind of thinking, particularly given that Putin's track record before Ukraine was the invasion of Georgia in 2008, various threats against European neighbors, cyber attacks on Estonia. One thing or another,

this is not something that he's shown no example of having a restricted appetite in other theaters. No evidence. Okay, well, let's move to the Middle East, where Russia has also had a malign influence in Syria and elsewhere. The war in Gaza and the perception of now much of the world that Israel has lost the moral high ground, if it ever retained it even for a second. I mean, as you know, much of the world felt that it wasn't on the high ground even on October 8th before it had done anything in response to the atrocities of October 7th, which is, that was fairly bewildering. What do you make of, you can take any piece of this ghastly puzzle you want first, but I'm thinking of things like the isolation of Israel at the UN and the International Criminal Court of Justice, the waning support in the Biden administration.

Perhaps we could give the most charitable construal of concern about the right-wing side of Israeli politics and settlements in the West Bank and how those things are unhelpful at best. But we've got charges of apartheid and just what seems to me a dangerous level of moral confusion on the part of many people and powers that should know better around what is happening in Israel and what Israel's strategic and really existential needs are at this point. How do you view it? Look, let's separate two forms of critique of Israel. One is a critique that Israel has deferred too long the question of Palestinian statehood, that its policies in the West Bank are wrongheaded, abusive, and ultimately self-defeating. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website.

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