Pod Save the World - A republican critique of Trump’s foreign policy

Episode Date: October 11, 2017

Tommy and Eliot Cohen, a counselor to Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, talks about his Atlantic piece “How Trump is Ending the American Era” and try to figure out what constitutes a Republican and Democratic foreign policy worldview in 2017. 

My guest today on Pod Save the World is Elliot Cohen. He's a contributing editor at the Atlantic and the director of the Strategic Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. In 2007 and 2009, he was a counselor at the State Department under Secretary Connoisseurice. He is the author of The Big Stick, The Limits of Saw Power, and the Necessity of Military Force. He is also a leader of the Never Trump movement. Thank you so much for doing the show, Elliot. Happy to be with you.

We got connected because you wrote a piece for the Atlantic this month titled, Is Trump Ending the American Era that I think everyone should read? Really, people should read the entire issue of the magazine. But your piece in particular is a, it's a brutal indictment of the Trump administration's foreign policy. And I'd like to talk to you about several of those specific critiques, but in some ways I thought the most interesting part was the conclusion when you write, Trump is accelerating the decomposition of the Republican foreign policy and national security establishment that began in the 2016 campaign. You go on to sort of lament the destruction of an elite consensus on foreign policy that spans both parties and keeps government from shifting to radical from president to president.

I thought that part was fascinating because it felt so contrarian. You don't hear a lot of impassioned defenses of the elite consensus these days. Steve Bannon on 60 Minutes telling you that the whole election was a rejection of all things. Elites, why do you think it's important to maintain that consensus? Like what is Trump killing off that's so risky in your opinion in the long term? Well, I think part of what he's killing is a, you know, when you get right down to it, it's an awareness that American foreign policy has to be a complex mix of our interests and our values. Every administration wrestles with it in different ways. Your administration wrestled with it in one way. The administration I was part of wrestled with it in a different way. But I think it's fair to say American administrations have wrestled with that going a lot further back in our history than that.

But certainly in the post-war period, all administrations one way or another have had to come to terms with that, whether they've liked it or not. Donald Trump clearly rejects that. There's no concept of the role that American values play in the world. He also, I think, rejects another tenet of American foreign policy, which is that the United States has a vital role to play in maintaining global order. And again, different administrations have understood that differently, and one can be critical of all of them, I suppose. But that just doesn't seem to be part of his picture of the world. And the third thing, and this is actually probably the most important part of the critique of simply denouncing and ripping up establishments, if you are going to execute foreign policy coherently, you need a lot of like-minded individuals scattered throughout the government and indeed outside government, sometimes to make the arguments that people on the inside can't make on their own.

He has blown most of that up. And to the extent that he, you know, obviously he does have people working for them, at best it's the B team and sometimes it's the C team. And they can't really do that. So you add all those things together. I think it's a pretty disastrous recipe. Yeah. So I agree with what you said.

And for all the areas where Obama and Bush disagreed, they both believed in an international order with America at the center of it. They believed in strengthening alliances to maintain that order. We've heard Trump attack NATO. We've heard him criticize the UN. We've heard him criticize traditional allies. Do you think that's posturing or ignorance? Or is this a full break from the Bush-Obama point of view?

Well, this is not a deep thinker about foreign policy or indeed much of anything else. But I think it is a set of genuine instincts insofar that as there is anything about Donald Trump that is genuine. These are his instincts. You know, his basic view of the world is very dark. everybody's out to get you. And what the business of politics is about is what he thinks business is about. It's deals. It's actually, it's a very simple-minded view of the world.

And so all this stuff about maintaining global order and, you know, freedom, democracy, I think he just thinks that's all codswallop. I mean, it's just nonsense. It doesn't mean anything. The issue is cutting deals, and there are bad guys out there. And some people are even worse than the bad guys. And so you crush him. And it's sort of a jungle view of international politics reflecting as much his own peculiar psyche as anything else.

Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that. It is weird the degree to which he is focused on just the cost of things. It seems like he hasn't figured out any way to understand or comprehend the value of the investments in things like diplomacy or in alliances. And I don't know if people around him are trying to educate him on that value, but he seems to only view things in dollar terms. I think they are trying to educate him that way. But he is a profoundly ignorant man. You know, he does not know what's in the Constitution of the United States. He clearly wasn't aware who Frederick Douglass was. He would fail, I'm quite convinced, sort of a junior high school test on the history of the United States of America. So we're dealing with an extraordinarily ignorant and worse and curious man. There's no doubt in my mind that this kind of benign junta that we've, you know, that all of us feel somewhat better, having around him, H.R. McMaster's, the National Security Advisor, Matt is a sec deaf, and Kelly as chief of staff are trying to educate him.

And in fact, there are been stories about taking him to the Pentagon and briefing him on things. And I think in the moment, because he doesn't have any real convictions, he can go along with that. But the problem is Donald Trump is always in the moment. And so it's not as if there's some sort of fundamental understanding of the world where you can say, all right, you know, I've changed. That sort of thing happened to say with some of the great legislators of the early Cold War period. People who had been essentially isolationists before World War II really came to see, no, the world is different. different than I understood it. And so I'm going to change my outlook. Donald Trump will go back and forth, depending on whether he thinks he's been disrespected by somebody or, you know, he's angry

about something. There will be no stability here. Yeah. One of the, I love the phrase benign Huta. I think one of the biggest disappointments of the Trump cabinet, in my mind, at least, has been Rex Tillerson. I hope that his management experience and his global relationships meant that he had the potential to effectively lead the State Department. Instead, I feel like he's largely been absent, except for slashing the State Department workforce, including at very senior levels. In the piece you write, it is virtually impossible to conduct an effective foreign policy without political appointees at the Assistant Secretary rank who share the President's conceptions and will to implement his agenda. I agree with that, but I feel like I've

done a poor job of explaining the listeners of this show why those assistant secretaries are so important and what they do. Can you help explain that and then offer maybe your take on Rex Tillerson? Sure. As you know, it actually goes even deeper than that. Deputy Assistant Secretaries, positions like the one I had of counselors. So there's actually a whole bunch of things. I think the main thing that people need to understand. And in some ways, you only really feel this keenly enough when you're actually in government that the ideas, the concepts behind foreign policy are kind of like the yeast when you're making bread. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's absolutely essential, otherwise the bread isn't going to rise, but it's actually an infinitesimal

amount of the total volume of what you're building. And the bulk of what you do is implementation, is making things happen, you know, adjusting to setbacks or changes. And so there's just a constant stream of work that has to be done, but it has to be done with some larger ideas in mind. And in the case of the State Department, what's so important about that is this is about building relationships. George Schultz, who was a great secretary of state, I believe, under Ronald Reagan said that diplomacy is like gardening. You know, you always have to be tilling the soil. You always have to be working at. You always have to be, you know, pruning shrubs and all that sort of stuff. And I think that's what's missing. So even, you know, the ideas here are kind of crazy and

not particularly good anyway. But the thing is, if you don't have people going to implement it, you just have chaos. And instead, what we've got with Tillerson is he's apparently trying to run the State Department with a deeply disliked chief of staff and a somewhat inflated policy planning staff, which is normally not operational at all. It's supposed to be the conceptualizers, the speechwriters, and what have you. And that's just bound to fail. And we will discover that if we actually try to do something, for example, over North Korea. On Tillerson, I think I'm on record as saying that I think he may very well go down as the worst Secretary of State ever.

I was asked why I thought that. And what I said is, well, there have been plenty of Secretaries of State who've had to implement stupid policies. There have been plenty of Secretaries of State who have had dumb ideas. There have been plenty of Secretaries of State who ended up at odds with the President

or the National Security Advisor. But I'm not aware of any who have been in that situation and at the same time have decided that the best thing they could do would be to take a pickaxe to their own department. Yeah. I don't understand why you would gut your own team for no reason.

That's what he's done. And it is just bizarre. I know you've wrestled with this over time, but do you think people should serve in this administration in foreign policy roles? I mean, I think the Sean Spicer's of the world are as craven as human beings get. Ryan's prebis I put in that camp. But, you know, I do feel a little better knowing H.R. McMaster

A couple doors down from the Oval Office. But where do you land at this point? Well, I had a piece about this in the Atlantic, which was mainly about Kelly, but I think it applies to all of them. So the first thing I would say is, and I certainly say this to my students, you know, the career foreign service, the career intelligence corps, the military, civil service, absolutely. I mean, those people outlast administrations, they're neutral servants of the state. They should definitely be there. Political appointees, yeah, I mean, there's some positions which are innocuous, you know, the Assistant Secretary for Greenland affairs, you know, there's probably nothing pernicious. I think when you get to the higher levels,

there is a dilemma here, which is, on the one hand, I agree with you. I'm very glad that McMaster and Kelly and Mattis are there. I am troubled by the fact that you've got three generals in those positions. We can discuss that if you want. But I also think, by doing it, they are imperiling their own integrity because, you know, you have to be able to stand up for the president. You know, there are times when I'd certainly disagreed with George W. Bush before I went into government and after. But if somebody at a dinner party and said, you know, I think George W. Bush is a lying, crooked, dishonest lous of a human being, I would have stepped up and said, no, he's not. And here's why I think that's completely unfair and inappropriate whether or not you agree with any of the policies.

I'm sure you would have said something similar about Barack Obama. Well, in the case of Trump, Actually, a lot of those things are true. And to have to defend him and to pretend that he is something other than what he is, actually, particularly for military people, is a kind of breach of your integrity. And there's a moral price that you pay for. There's a great essay, which I make all my students read, called The Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia books and so on. And it's about what the desire to be in the circle of power does to people.

and about the moral risks that you run doing that. So I have very mixed feelings. None of these people, trust me, none of these people are asking me for my advice. I don't know. But the fact of the matter is they've made that decision. I think many of them will be permanently damaged by it, if not financially, because I'm sure they'll be fine.

I think in terms of who they are. Yeah. Well, and this is also the first time Narnia books have been mentioned on this show, and I am here for it because I fully support reading those books as well. So back to the staffing question. You have this great anecdote about how in 1990, the American ambassador to Iraq met with Saddam Hussein in the meeting. The ambassador assured him President George H.W. Bush's friendship and said, you know, we have no opinion on the Arab conflicts like your border disagreement in Kuwait. A week later, Saddam rolls into Iraq and the surprise that George Bush didn't take it well.

It's a great cautionary tale about miscommunication, even with, as you note, a very competent administration. And then you have the Trump administration. What potential miscommunication worries you the most? It's endless. You know, we could miscommunicate with the Chinese over North Korea. We may be miscommunicating in quite a big way right now. The president, as I read his remarks to the UN, really is threatening a war of annihilation against North Korea if they don't stop both the nuclear program and issuing threats with it. Well, that means either we're going to have a really big war on the Korean Peninsula or we're effectively going to back down and make the Obama red line, which is.

sorry, I was very critical of, look like nothing. I mean, this will be infinitely worse than the Obama red line that wasn't a red line. And so that's a big communications issue right there. The ability to communicate, what are the things that you simply will not tolerate is absolutely essentially important. Also, you know, what are the things that you will do? What are the things you'll do for allies and friends? The list really is endless. So we're out of government.

We get to point at problems and say that's a hard problem. fix that. North Korea, as you just mentioned, is maybe the hardest Clinton, Bush, Obama. We all failed to fix it. What do you think he should be doing? Do you think tweeting complaints of China is enough? So, let me tell me, let me give you for the future my favorite Dodge, which you can use in other settings. And that is, I don't answer those questions, really, or I don't answer them directly, because of what I said previously, that so much a policy is about implementation and execution. and it's not as if there's a platonic ideal of a policy that is out there, which if you would just give it to the administration and those dummies would use it, everything would be fine. There are policies that can be executed by particular administrations at particular times.

And there are other times when even the same administration can't do at the end what it could do at the beginning and vice versa. and I think it's a real mistake to recommend policies which you don't believe the current incumbents can effectively execute. Okay. Now, that may be a bit of an evasion. Of course, the other response is always the consultant's response, which is, you know, if I were in your position, I wouldn't be in your position. You know, the first thing I would have said to Trump is don't tweet. Yeah. Well, there is that.

For, let me stop you there. We laugh at Trump's tweets. but they're not laughable for a number of reasons. First, as I also say in the piece, you know, these are a gold mine for foreign intelligence analysts trying to figure out the psyche of this president. So he is one of the most transparent of individuals. We know what his hot buttons are. You know what he reacts to. You know what all of his emotions and impulses are. What a gift to the psychological profilers. The second thing is tweets are statements of policy by the president of the United States. And if we get to the point where we just think of them as kind of, you know,

the sort of lunatic expressions of a disordered mind, then when the time comes when you actually do have to communicate something, again, why should anybody believe him? And the third thing, which again, I think we have been desensitized to, is the diminution of the dignity of the office. you know, the kinds of things that he puts in those tweets are not comical. Some of them are just they're vulgar, they're repensible, and he's doing serious damage to that institution. I agree. I mean, I do think we are all boiled frogs when it comes to Trump's actions, and we need to sometimes step back and think he tweeted an anti-Semitic accounts meme about violence against Hillary Clinton. No planet is that appropriate, but, you know, it almost kind of gets brushed off today

because it's one in a series of ridiculous actions like that. And I do think on the foreign stage, you're right, that it's an even greater problem. So you are someone who is hawkish on Iran. I think that's fair. Do you think Trump should tear up the Iran deal or decertify it? No, I don't. I did think it was a terrible deal and even spoke and wrote to that effect. But my view is also, once the United States government signs a deal, you have to stick with

that respected whether you think your predecessor was doing the right thing or not. And there is an obligation, I think, for any administration to make sure that foreign countries understand that there's a fundamental continuity in American foreign policy, even if one administration is quite different from another. I think it's quite fair and appropriate for them to really hold Iran's feet to the fire on all kinds of other things, you know, the various things that they've done throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf in particular. And there is pretty clearly a Iran-North Korea story. So I think it's appropriate to come down hard on the Iranians over a whole bunch of things. I think it makes sense to absolutely hold them to the letter of the agreement.

Would I simply rip up the agreement when there's no replacement for it and when the other countries that are party to it would be deeply opposed to it? I don't think so. That was a very rational, fair answer. I want people to hear criticisms of the Iran deal because obviously I'm an Obama person. I've spoken to a lot of people who I've worked with, who are my friends. What are your primary concerns with the deal as constructed? Well, I do think it was a mistake. You get so focused on the nuclear dimension that one ignores the rest of Iran's malign behavior.

I also think that fundamentally what the deal did, and this may have been the best that could have been accomplished. And, you know, I've heard that argument from people like Jake Sullivan, and I understand it, even if I don't fully go along with it, I think fundamentally this just kicks the can down the road. And so we're basically right now with Iran, where we were with North Korea 10 years ago. That is to say, where they're on a trajectory to developing nuclear weapons, this agreement slows it down, but that's, it slows it down somewhat. But in terms of the basic technology, in terms of the missile technology, in terms of the ability to enrich fuel and all that, they've actually advanced considerably over where they were, and they will be in a position to go further yet. And then the last thing, I think, is inevitably, once you begin taking off sanctions, all kinds of countries are going to rush in to begin doing business with Iran. And so you take away your most valuable tool in dealing with them, which was, of course, the sanctions. regime.

Chifton gears a little bit to Iraq. Do you think, I mean, you were a supporter of the war at the time. You wrote a piece in 2005 that was before you went into the Bush administration that I think is still very much worth reading. Do you think we've learned the right lessons from the Iraq War? Because I worry about this version of events. I feel like I hear today that suggests it was the right thing to do even if the intelligence was wrong and the problem was simply mismanagement or lack of planning.

And that if we had left troops in 2011, you know, in hindsight it might have been the right call. Does that version of events doom us to repeat our mistakes? Or what's your take on the lesson? Well, I have a long discussion of this in my book, The Big Stick. There's a chapter called 15 years of war, and I, particularly because I was in favor of the war, and I was a government official in 2007, 2008, I thought it was really important to come to terms with it. And it's, you know, it's never a satisfying answer to say, well, it's complicated, but it is complicated. Obviously, one of the most important premises of the war turned out to be false, and that is the intelligence about the nuclear program. And I don't think there was malice in that, but that was clearly a problem.

And the second thing was our institutions were clearly not prepared for the tasks that they should have expected to face once the regime was overthrown. I don't think those lessons have particularly been learned, in part because those are. understand. I always hold the civilian authorities completely responsible no matter what because they're the ones who are elected. But I do think that there was definitely an issue not only with the management of the occupation to include by the president and his immediate advisors, but also by the military, which really wanted to have nothing to do with a military governance mission. I also think, and this would be a little bit more controversial for my friends in the Obama administration, I think after all that, and after a lot of blood and treasure, we pretty much recovered. So that by the end, and I was, the largest part of my portfolio was Iraq and Afghanistan. I did not have a good feeling about Afghanistan, but I had a pretty good feeling about Iraq. And the phrase that I used, which I think still held, was a fragile trajectory to success. And I think career diplomats like Ryan Crocker and Jim Jeffrey, who were not in favor of the war,

but really know that part of the world well, would have agreed with that. So I do think that there were errors that were made thereafter by the Obama administration that were not necessary. I guess I'd say two more things. One is, you know, we never know what the alternative would have been. And that's an important thing to remember when everyone looks at a historical episode, you know, because I think what you would have had happened was, and it was clear by 2003 that the inspections regime had already broken down. So the nuclear program was no longer under inspections. And the sanctions regime was breaking down. And this was also a source of a lot of anti-American animus throughout the Arab world.

So I think the whole thing would have broken down. And Saddam would have been out of his cage. And, you know, what that world would have been like, I don't know. Believe it or not, there's actually a book by a Canadian political scientist who makes an interesting counter, which I cite in the book, which makes an interesting counterfactual argument that even if Al Gore had been elected president, there would have been another Iraq. war more or less along those lines. Who knows? But it's an interesting argument. I think beyond that, though, there is a real danger that we're going to let Iraq be turned into what they called the 19th century the bloody shirt. Whenever the Republicans wanted to shut down discussion in the late 19th century, when they were dealing with the Democrats, they would wave the bloody shirts. I remember

what side you guys were on in the Civil War? And that's just a way of shutting people up. and stopping a discussion. There is a real danger that Iraq becomes the bloody shirt. And lots of discussions about, you know, what should we do in Syria, what should we do in North Korea, what should we do anywhere, is seen through the prism of Iraq. And in the same way that it was a mistake to use Vietnam as the prism to view the rest of the Cold War. And it was a mistake to view Munich in the early 1960s, as we did, as the prism through which to view Vietnam, we don't want to make that mistake again. Well, I think it would be a similar mistake here. We face different kinds of challenges coming up, much more in the way of great power competition, a very different sort of conflict with

jihadist elements out there. And although I think we do have to think very hard about Iraq, it would be a mistake to obsess about it. Yeah, I mean, look, I agree. I don't want to in any way shut down the conversation and I again appreciate you coming on the show to have it I do think like when I think back to the run up to the Iraq war the risks entail the worst case scenarios I feel like didn't get enough

coverage as relative to the rosy you know predictions from Cheney and others I think in Libya as well you know the effort to prevent a massacre in Benghazi was effective but you know there wasn't enough conversation about what had to come

next and it's a disaster now I agree with that. There's not that much difference between us. There's some, but, you know, it applies on the other side. So in the kind of standard talk I give about this, I know whether or not you'll agree with this, it's a little bit harsh on both administrations. I always say when you put up the tombstone of George W. Bush's foreign policy, whatever else is written on that tombstone at the top in capital letters will be the word Iraq. And I think when the time comes to put up the tombstone for the Obama administration's foreign policy. There'll be a lot of other stuff that'll be written on that tombstone. And at the top of that tombstone, though, in capital letters,

will be the word Syria. That may be true. Look, I mean, anyone who worked in the Obama administration on foreign policy is going to lay in bed at night thinking about what could, should have been done in Syria for a very long time. And if they tell you otherwise, they're a liar. I think hopefully next to Syria will be bin Laden's face because that is something we all should be proud of. Some former Obama officials who you probably know, John Feiner, Rob Malley, Jeff Prescott, they wrote a great piece in the New Yorker this month about how many of the harshest critics of President Trump's foreign policy were conservative hawks who supported the war. That includes people like David From, Max Boot, Bill Crystal.

You, I would put on that list. Today, you guys are the darlings of the left. We tweet out your stories. We point to your writing as confirmation that we're right about Trump. Does that feel strange? Does that tell us all a perverse lesson about what why? Washington values? There is a little bit of it.

When the situation changes, people like Peter Bunnard will be going back to trying to rip me up. So at one level I appreciate it, another level I don't entirely, I don't expect it to last. But I do think there's, look, there is something deeper here, for better or for worse. Whenever you're in an administration and, you know, there's the Washington pushing and pulling and the bitter op-eds. and all that, the differences are accentuated. I think what we're seeing here is actually a divide within the country, and it's not just because of Trump, between a group of people who basically have sort of a consensus. So a former colleague of mine in the Bush administration, Kristen Silverberg, and I debated Derek Chalet and Vikram Singh, both of whom, of course, you know, well,

at one of these Intelligence Squared debates in New York. And the resolution was Obama foreign policy was a disaster. I'm very pleased to report that even in the depths of middown Manhattan, the affirmative one, which surprised both Kristen and myself. It's probably because Kristen's great debater. But the truth is, you know, Derek and Vikram are friends of ours. This was a couple of weeks after the election. And, you know, of course, we're sitting around and having a drink afterwards.

And the thing that I think struck all four of us is, you know, fundamentally we agree. about the main outlines of American foreign policy. Some serious differences over Iraq, Syria, Iran deal, and what have you, notwithstanding. That, it is a mistake to think that that consensus view, which is fundamentally the view that got crystallized at the end of World War II into the Cold War is unchallengeable. And that it just kind of will naturally triumph. It won't. And I think it is challenged on the left. That's a little bit more muted because everybody's focused on Trump. But it is very much out there on the left. And it's out there on the right. And one of the things that I'm hoping that might be productive from all this is that those of us who have been on different sides of policy issues in recent years can come together. I do push back really against, you know, waving the bloody shirt on Iraq. It is just a way of shutting things down. It also, it really oversimplifies the history. of that war.

You know, a large part of me as being a military historian, and I cringe at it because, you know, any historian who goes deep into the origins of war knows, well, they're complicated things. And I think using it

as a battering ram, it's not intellectually serious. It's not particularly fair. I'm not going to whine about it, but I don't think it's going to advance any useful discussion going forward, that's for sure. Yeah, look, I hear you.

I guess let's talk about the process that led us into Iraq because, you know, I interviewed Will Hurd the other day, a Republican Congressman from Texas, who was a CIA operative who used to brief delegations and he ran for Congress because he would sit down with members of the intelligence community who couldn't tell him the difference between the Sunni and a Shiite. And I think that's a depressing encapsulation of the level of debate that went into one of the biggest disasters in our foreign policy history, right? So, I mean, how do we fix that part of this process? Well, I mean, obviously, we all want a great intelligence community. We all want orderly debate. I do think the decision-making of the Bush administration going in does deserve a lot of critical thinking to include making sure that different views get represented in front of a president and argue down. But at the end of the day, there's no way that you can orchestrate good judgment. there's also, I think, another point which is really important for everybody to understand.

And that is, and here's the historian speaking. And bear in mind, I wasn't in government at the time. I was an interested spectator with a son who was in the army. Two tours, I believe, right? Two tours in Iraq, yes. Which is why also I really get impatient about being lectured about Iraq by people who either didn't serve or don't have family members who served. to understand the decision for Iraq, and actually the person who got this best, I think, was Tony Blair, you have to understand the change in the emotional atmosphere that affected all decision makers in the wake of 9-11. I think that's the part that people really don't get.

Condi Rice once said to me that, you know, if you were in the White House on September 11th, as she was, every day thereafter has been September 12th, and you're afraid that it's September 10th. You might say that's not entirely rational, you know, nobody should act that way and so on and so forth. I completely get that. But there's a major act of empathy that is needed to remember that is the psychological and emotional environment of decision making. The other thing that I would say is, and I think this is the important lesson, is it a lesson for any president as they put together a cabinet? that is, do we really have a team of forceful people who will debate things out in front of me? You know, one of the people who got through all that, Scott Free, was Colin Powell, you know, who never really sort of stood up and articulated a powerful argument against the war.

Now, there are a number of reasons for that, I think, to include actually Powell's military background. It's one of the reasons why I'm somewhat uneasy about having so many generals. around Trump. At the end of the day, generals look at a president and they see the commander in chief, and they may not like the commander in chief, or they may not think the commander in chief is making the right decisions, but he's still the commander in chief. And so I think that, you know, part of the job of the staff is to make sure that that stuff gets argued out in front of a president as much as possible. But at the end of the day, you know, you can't legislate good judgment and you can't legislate good fortune. And, you can't legislate good fortune. And,

And a lot is going to hinge on what the cocktail of personalities is. And then a lot is also going to depend on the institutions. I do not believe Iraq had to turn out the way it turned out in the first few years. I really don't. In the same way, I don't think Iraq had to be what it is now. And we could go into the Obama administration on Iraq policy as well. And by the way, as you will remember, the Iraq, certainly with the vice president who had the Iraq portfolio, or at least large part of it, was saying, You know, he thought Iraq was in great shape in 2009.

Yeah, I mean, look, none of us predicted Syria collapsing or the Europe spring generally. But look, point taken. And I've sat in meetings in a situation room where we've had intelligence streams that made me feel like it was September 10th. So I have enormous empathy. And I was a press guy. You know, I have enormous empathy for Condi and everyone else who were dealing with this. I think what people still have a hard time dealing with was the way the war was sold. It felt dishonest.

You know, you don't roll out a new product in August. from the quotes from Andy Card were unfortunate. I think there was a overlay of fear and a political process that just felt like it led to a bad decision. But, you know, point taken on the empathy for sure. Yeah, I mean, I don't believe it was the worst decision ever. And I'm not willing to concede the idea that this is just this utter and total calamity that was doomed to be that way. That's, again, being essentially an historian changes how you a bit how you view things. you realize how much of how much of history, particularly the history of warfare, is contingent.

It's particular people making particular decisions at particular times. And it's a, it's mistake to say, boy, that one decision unleashed a terrible course of events. That's very rarely the case. And we need to remind ourselves with that. Yeah. Last question for you. Thank you for being so gracious with your time. You sort of spoke to this earlier, but I feel like the rise of the Tea Party, the 2016 election, it felt like a major shift in the party platforms on foreign policy. I don't mean the platforms themselves, but sort of where they stand. Trump was calling the Iraq war disaster. He pretended he never supported it.

He did. He seemed to call for the U.S. to retreat from the world. Well, Hillary Clinton was out there talking about projecting American power abroad. We used to talk about hocks and doves. Do you think there's a Republican and a Democratic approach to foreign policy anymore? Can you define it or have things been scrambled? I think things have been scrambled. I mean, I never thought Hawks and Doves.

There are a number of labels which get stuck on me, which I really push back on. Hawk is one. Neocon is another. I've never understood what that exactly, you know, what the apostolic creed of the neocons is supposed to be that I've sworn allegiance to. And I don't think Hawk and Dove makes a whole lot of sense. You know, sometimes it makes sense to use force and sometimes it doesn't make sense to use force. And it's very situational. Yeah, I mean, it's useless shorthand.

It's why Obama rejected the term doctrine all over the place. It's just, you're right. You can't summarize these things. I do think there is a difference, though. There is, on the one hand, out there a kind of, I mean, you can call it an establishment view, but it was certainly the consensus view about the American role in the world, which was based on bipartisan consensus. And, you know, that establishment, even during the strain of both Bush and Obama, which, for a variety of reasons where there's plenty of blame to go around, some of that bipartisanship got strained pretty hard. it was still basically there.

The fact that you and I can have a perfectly pleasant conversation and I can have a very perfectly pleasant conversation with Derek Chalet or lots of other people who are in the Obama administration says something. But there is, I think, a tension between that view and a kind of populist nationalist view, which has always been out there. For me, the lesson of the election, not just on foreign policy, but on a whole bunch of things, is that demons that I thought were dead and buried aren't. Yeah. And that's a, it's a disturbing thought. But as I've also, you know, I've said to all my students, you know, immediately after the election, I was doing nonstop political grief counseling.

Me too. You know, my parents, when I think about it, lived through the Depression in World War II and the early Cold War and Korea and Joe McCarthy and Vietnam and the city's going up in flames. And my grandparents lived through pogroms, World War I, the influenza epidemic, the Depression, World War II, Korea, Joe McCarthy, Vietnam, and the city's going up in flame. So who says we get off easily? And I think the mistake is that too many in our generation have not realized that. that Ben Franklin was right when he said to the crowd that asked him after the constitutional

convention, what kind of government have you given us a republic if you can keep it? And so it's on all of us to stand up and do something about it. Well, I agree with that. And thank you so much for being willing to talk about it. You've been very gracious with your time. Your piece in the Atlantic is Trump ending the American era. It's beautifully written. It reminded me of a whole bunch of things Trump had done on foreign policy that I've forgotten about because I am a boiled frog like everybody else. So everyone should read it. And thank you so much for joining the show. Tommy, thanks so much. Nice to make your acquaintance even virtually. Take care. You do. Have a great day. You too. Bye-bye.