Pod Save the World - Inching closer to nuclear war

Episode Date: February 2, 2018

Tommy talks with New York Times editor and writer Max Fisher about disconcerting signs that the Trump administration is seriously considering a military attack on North Korea. Then they talk about how ambiguous demands about US credibility can lead us to make terrible foreign policy decisions, and the changing expectations in Afghanistan.

Today on Pate of the World, my guest is a New York Times journalist named Max Fisher. We talk about North Korea. Are we ticking closer to a military confrontation? We talk about something he's dubbed the credibility trap, which over decades in Washington has pushed us to see a military confrontation as the necessary outcome in all our foreign policy debates so as to preserve U.S. credibility around the world. And we talk about Afghanistan. It barely got mentioned in President Trump's State of Union speech, but experts on Afghanistan

policy are subtly starting to change the way they view the potential outcomes from victories to potential defeats. You will not want to miss it. Max is someone who is able to cut through the conventional wisdom in Washington. And if you like this show, you'll love his writing and what he has to say. My guest today is Max Fisher. He is an editor and writer for the interpreter, an excellent New York Times column and newsletter that explores the ideas and context behind major world events. He will help you understand topics from authoritarianism to arms control. It is excellent. It helps me prepare for this show every week. If you guys like this show, you should follow Max and Amanda Taub on Twitter. They are great and they're funny. Max, thanks for doing the show, man. Sure. Thanks for the great endorsement. Yeah, well, you know, you make me smarter. So the reason I reached out to you to do this interview was because of a story in the Washington Post that terrified both of us. They reported that Trump had pulled back his nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, a guy named Victor Chaa, who is a well-known policy. the expert, worked in the Bush administration, widely respected. Apparently, he was pulled back,

though, because Victor opposed what's called a bloody nose strike on North Korea. That strategy suggests the U.S. could conduct a limited strike on North Korea as a deterrent, because as we all know, the way to avoid a war is to start one. You tweeted what I was thinking, which is that all along, you'd assume that this talk of a bloody nose strike was a bluff because the risk was just too high. that post story makes us think otherwise. Can you explain what a bloody nose strike might look like and what you think the consequences of such an action could be? Right.

Well, kind of tellingly, I actually don't think that a bloody nose strike is a real thing. Yeah. I don't either. I think that's just something that they made up because it sounds kind of like cool and tough, which is one of the reasons that I think a lot of us thought like, okay, this is some combination of domestic political signaling or it's a bluff in the hopes that this will be a low-cost way to deter the North Koreans,

which comes with some really significant risks that we should talk about. But it's a reasonable strategy. Like you can kind of make an argument for it. But it really is starting to seem like with this cha thing, it's becoming harder for me to convince myself that it's all a bluff. And the reason for that is that like, you know, bluffing is pretty low cost. Right? Like you get people like you and me rolled up with like, well, you can't do that. And if you launch a strike, then, you know, won't accomplish anything and risk a nuclear war. But, you know, that doesn't really. My tweet storms are devastating. That's right. And single-handedly going to bring down. That's right. But like actually blocking the nomination of an ambassador to a post that we really need. Like the relations with the South Koreans right now are really strained. And like whether you're thinking. about a war or not, you want an, like, if your plan is to bluff, you need an ambassador there.

So blocking the nomination of a really well-respected ambassador who is like ready to come in and do the job, that's a very high-cost step to take. And it really suggests. And also like, the fact that Chaw came out basically within like half an hour, like the guy is real fast and wrote something that said, you know, they were pushing for a quote-unquote bloody nose strike. I was uncomfortable with it. Well, you also asked me what that is. So I, I, I, guess what that is is just like lobbing some missiles at North Korea as a way to say like, hey, please give up your nuclear weapons, which it's not really clear how the one gets to the other. You know what I mean?

And that like the ambiguity there is, again, that's a reason why we're like, okay, this is probably a bluff because they're just talking about missiles, not about, you know, where do we strike? What does it do? While they were saying, we're going to hit North Korea nuclear missiles on the launch pad, they don't have launch pads. They're mobile. They're buried in sites. Right.

They're mobile. So the fact that they even bother to say like, oh, we're going to hit mobile launchers is kind of like, okay, this is not a real thing. But it's starting to look like maybe it is. Yeah. I think you make an important point that having an ambassador or not having an ambassador is actually a big deal. Like, yes, someone is in charge. But for example, Barack Obama sent over a guy named Mark Lippert. Mark had been the NSC chief of staff.

He had military experience. He had worked in the Pentagon. on because there's a lot of equities in the region. You have North Korea, obviously, and you're a big part of that, those policy discussions. But the U.S. ambassador to South Korea is dealing with one of the most important economic relationships we have. We have 28,500 troops serving in Korea. So he's liaising or she's liaising with U.S. forces Korea. So there's a lot going on.

Like, that's a very big job. And I think many of us were excited to see someone with the experience of Victor Cha, even though I might disagree with him on a lot of policy matters, put forward for this job. job. And then, yeah, like you said, to see it yanked back, it is ominous to say the least. Well, and it's also, there's been a lot of focus on this disagreement over should we launch an attack on North Korea as a way to like punish its nuclear weapons program, convince them to give it up. Like, rightly, that is a big question that we should be talking about. But the other really big disagreement that I think in some ways is even more striking and important to pay

attention to is that Cha, who is a really serious political scientist on his own merits, has repeatedly argued that the Kim regime that runs North Korea is rational. And the Trump administration's position, which is one of the big data points suggesting that, you know, maybe they do mean this, is that the regime is not rational. And the pretty much expert consensus is that it is rational. I mean, you don't keep a state that weak and isolated and poor stable for as long as it has been stable unless you're like pretty canny and pretty thoughtful about keeping the regime alive. And all of their steps make sense. They're like, they're brutal and they're, you know, morally deplorable, but they're rational

to keep the regime alive. And this is something that Cha really hit on in his op-ed is that there's a disagreement over with this regime is rational or not. And, you know, HR McMaster is the National Security Advisor. When he has been making the case for strikes, they have been premised on the idea that Kim is not rational and can't be deterred, so therefore we can't tolerate North Korea having a nuclear weapons program and have to forcibly disarm them. Now, as Chopp pointed out, it doesn't really make sense if you're making the argument. Well, on the one hand,

Kim is irrational, so can't be trusted to have a nuclear weapons program without, you know, wildly using them one day. But in the other hand, we think he's rational enough that he will correctly perceive the signal of a limited American strike as a punishment, but not the start of a war. Right. Because that, I mean, to be clear, that's the danger hanging over all of this, is that a limited strike or even just talk of one could create this, you know, accident or misstep or slide into a larger war. Yeah. And again, you know, Evan Osnos, I've heard him talk about this. He's a great journalist.

He writes with New Yorker about China and Asia generally and also about politics. But, you know, he and you, very few people talk about the actual stakes of what a war in the Korean Peninsula could look like. I mean, they have chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons. nuclear weapons, artillery, blanketing soul. The discussions are like hundreds of thousands to millions of people dead in the first couple weeks

depending on how long it goes, right? Yeah, it's hard to, we actually talk about this a lot, is like how do we write about the, you know, to be here like low level, low probability risk, but that is so extremely dangerous. I mean, when the numbers are that high, and when you're talking about potential first,

use, I mean, even pretty likely nuclear use in the case of a war, first since 1945, it's hard to know how to accurately convey it without sounding like, you know, it's like crazy doomsday scenarios because that's what they are. I mean, the North Korea's war plan is very clear. And that, I mean, the thing to remember is that they are really weak compared to the United States and know it. So they are just in a knife's edge. And their war plan is very clear that, you know, first we shall sort of. as a way to kind of suppress it and as a way to shock the South Koreans into surrendering. And then they're very crystal clear about this. Use conventional or probably nuclear weapons on major South Korean ports, Target Okinawa, Target Guam. And the idea is just to disable all of our assets in the region, which is hundreds of thousands of American lives, not to mention probably millions of South Koreans, significant number of Japanese.

And then the next step is to hold a major American. American city at risk with a long-range nuclear weapon, which one thing that really puzzles me about everything the Trump administration says about North Korea is they keep talking about, and he mentioned this, the state of union, we can't let North Korea get nuclear-arm missile capability to reach the United States. They're there, man. It happened. That speaks to another sort of bit of illogic in this. So you alluded to the fact that Victor Chaa immediately wrote an op-ed, sort of warning about the risks of a bloody nose strike. Shortly after that, I think today, the Washington Post ran a column by a reporter, a journalist named Josh Rogan, that says the

bloody nose attack on North Korea is not happening anytime soon. They quote officials saying there's no change in policy. Yes, they're reviewing options from the Department of Defense that include things like a limited strike, but that we all should just chill out because it's not imminent. But what I don't get is the issue with North Korea is the ongoing development of nuclear and missile technology. So waiting doesn't help us there and time doesn't turn a bad idea into a good idea. So what do you make of that competing narrative spinning out after the Chah News? I mean, I kind of think that I know we're going to talk about Afghanistan later. And like, I think one parallel is just this situation is humiliating.

Yeah. It's just really, you know, they have achieved effective nuclear deterrence against the United States, which is crazy. I mean, this is one of the poorest countries in the world. It has, you know, I looked it up at one point. It's something like the GDP of Birmingham, Alabama. I mean, it is a tiny country, and it's now one of three, China, Russia, and North Korea, that has nuclearly deterred the United States. And that's very hard for us to process, and it's very hard for us to accept.

So we end up kind of winding in this like, well, the sanctions are really going to bite or, you know, we're going to threaten a strike or we're going to launch a strike. something is going to happen. And then the regime is going to decide to voluntarily surrender the nuclear weapons program that it believes, not without reason, is the only thing between it and its total destruction. There's no reason to think that they would give it up. And every reason to think that they would accept everything up to including a nuclear war in order to hold on to them. And how do you admit that to yourself?

I don't envy that. A multi-decade, multi-administration failure, but a major one nonetheless. I'm struck by how we never hear about new diplomatic initiatives on almost any issue, not on Syria, not with ISIS, not in Afghanistan, not in North Korea. How much do you think that's because of the general exodus of senior State Department officials that we've seen happening? Like just today we learn that Tom Shannon, who is the highest ranking career official at the State Department is stepping down.

He was known as the walking encyclopedia of information at state. What do you think the net effect is on policy of those people just kind of being taken away from the decision-making table? So pretty shortly after Trump was elected, I thought a good thing to do with the first year would be to kind of travel around all of the major treaty allies and kind of check in with folks in the government there and see, you know, how does this work? How are you running the relationships? How are you dealing with this? And the first place I went was Germany. And, you know, they kind of people would, officials on the record would say what they had to say, which is like, we believe in the transatlantic relationship and everything is going to be great. And we're managing all of this.

And I was interviewing one senior official with the SPD, which is the kind of big center left party in the Reichstag. And, you know, he was kind of giving me, it'll be fine. We have our disagreements. We'll work it through. And then the interview was kind of wrapping up and, you know, closing the notebooks. And he said, by the way, we can't get anyone at the State Department to answer our calls. Do you know who's working Europe policy there now? Cool. That's great.

And that's been the year. It's been a year of that. And people have kind of consigned themselves to like, okay, well, I guess there's no one on the other end of the phone line. But that creates drift. It creates uncertainty. It's actually been amazing to me how the degree to which allies are holding on to the relationship, despite, you know, feeling personally slightly. by the Trump administration, despite their public's really not being happy with the Trump administration and the alliance. I mean, it really speaks to kind of the endurance of American power. You know, and I met with South Korean officials. They said, hey, we think that maybe your country is going to drag our country into a nuclear war, and we're really unhappy about it. And people are floating

these scenarios of, you know, maybe if you guys go to war, our troops are going to stand down and we're not going to go with you, which, you know, no one will officially suggest, but it's kind of being discussed. But then they'll say, you know, we don't have any choice. We're with the American, so we're going to put on a happy face. Moon is going to meet with Trump. So I don't know. It's really interesting to see both how deep the effect has been and how little it has changed.

Yeah. They're riding the mechanical bowl at the bar and they can't get on something. The Akota to your Germany story is that Trump nominated like the most acerbic hostile Twitter troll out there to be his U.S. ambassador to Germany. So careful what you wish for, German friends. I believe he's actually blocked me on Twitter. Oh, good. Lucky you.

So all of this talk about threats of military action, North Korea, dovetails nicely with an issue. You've written about a lot, which is something called the credibility trap. The theory, if I can summarize it briefly goes, that the U.S. has to follow through on every threat and confront every adversary to maintain our, quote, credibility in the world. And if we don't, our enemies will rise up in our global, standing will plummet and the United States will no longer be the leader in the world that we once were. Did I describe that correctly? Why do you think that logic is so dangerous? It's dangerous because countries are not like people. We so badly want to see them that way because then the

world would make more sense and it would be more relatable. And we also really want to believe that American power is this kind of like self-fulilling, self-reinforcing phenomenon. And the more of it that there is out there in the world, kind of regardless of how it's applied, the better and the better that, you know, the more the world will be aligned to our interest and made it our image. But it's dangerous because it tells you that the answer to every problem is more application of American force. You know, it says that if, I mean, the classic example of this and the thing that got me to write a lot about it was Bashar al-Assad and Syria used chemical weapons. And I actually thought that there were good reasons to consider launching a strike as a way to

kind of enforce the global norm against the use of chemical weapons. But that wasn't the argument primarily out there. The argument primarily out there was that America is like a person and America has a reputation and there will be a stain on a reputation. Nobody will take us seriously and, you know, Russia will take over the world. And that was silly. I mean, even Julie Yaffe did a great story, I think for the Atlantic, where she actually talked to a lot of foreign policy. policy people in Russia and they said, you know, did you guys invade Ukraine because we stained our credibility in Syria, which was the big argument, right? Was that, look, we failed to follow through on our threats.

Now people don't take us seriously and Putin is walking all over Europe. And they literally did not even understand the argument. And she had to keep explaining it because it didn't, it just like did not logically follow even in their minds, much less being like a nefarious plot. And rightly so. I mean, I don't mean this is not an effort to absolve the Obama minister. in any way for the situation in Syria. But I do think it is very instructive to see how deeply the argument you're discussing

this credibility trap has infected this debate because the so-called redline discussion from Obama was not a promise to fully intervene in Syria and tip the outcome from Assad to the rebels. It was a threat that said, if you use chemical weapons, we will respond with military force. So I think that nuance gets lost. But yeah, you're referencing this notoriously stupid Bush administration official turned columnists who suggested that the redline decision was why Putin invaded Ukraine. And Julia Yafee asked Russian officials about the theory. They didn't even understand it. It also,

it conveniently omits the fact that Putin invaded Georgia long after we, President Bush, invaded Iraq. So like when you got these glaring logical fallacies within your own argument, within this decade, how does this become settled conventional wisdom? Right. How does it become conventional wisdom? I mean, when we look at other countries' foreign policies, Russia, China, we readily accept the idea that they have kind of ideologies and pathologies that guide how they see the world, how they interact with it, and what they want from it. In fact, that's central to how we understand Vladimir Putin's Russia, China. Even when we talk about what the United Kingdom and France do in the world, you know, we kind of start with, you know, France is trying to reclaim lost empire, you know, the United Kingdom. has this kind of World War II global leader thing going on. But when we look at ourselves,

we just, we cannot see our foreign policies anything but just the expression of pure values and pure reason. And that is itself, I think, part of the pathology. You know, after World War II, the Cold War, we kind of started drinking our own Kool-Aid. Yeah. And this idea that the world should be made on our image. And, you know, I think that especially when it's compared to the Soviet Union, There is a very compelling argument for that, that this, you know, the American model is significantly better. But what that became was the application of American force everywhere it is challenged will de facto improve the world just because it's us. And that is how we got, you know, three or four decades of propping up really terrible dictators all around the world. You know, we did some democracy promotion, but we did a lot of the opposite.

But the argument was always not we need to, you know, intervene in El Salvador because of national. interests, but we need to do it because it's a challenge to American power. And any challenge to American power is, you know, Hitler at Munich, it's, you know, the destruction of the world, it's a challenge to the values that hold the world together. I mean, this is why Iran makes people in D.C. nuts. So crazy. Yeah. It is just, and, you know, Iran does a lot of terrible things domestically in the region. There are very strong arguments just on, you know, American interest grounds to containing and opposing that. But what makes people so nuts is that the fact that this is a country that it's trying to exist and, you know, rationally is pursuing as part of

its core interest, the idea that it wants to carve out a space absent of American power. And the idea that we would have to tolerate that to even a small degree is very challenging for people in Washington. And the idea that there might be a country that, you know, it might be pursuing this strategy in terrible, morally appalling ways, but is rashly concluded that interests are better served by opposing United States, it's very hard for us to see because it means treating ourselves as just another country and not something that represents by sheer value of our virtue, the global interest and the global good. I can't overstate the number of times I heard someone say, we have to take a military action in ex-unrelated country because of the message

it will send to Iran. But you point out in your piece throughout history, there's no evidence that that that logic is true. It goes back to the Korean War where we thought, you know, we have to invade Korea because of the message it will send to the European allies. It goes to Vietnam where we continued fighting one of those deadly wars in our history because of concerns about how retreat would be perceived by the Soviets, even though history has shown us that they were just baffled why we kept troops in Vietnam for so long. Like, how do you get people? to see and fix this logical fallacy that seemed to have like calcified within the establishment, as Ben Rhodes will call it the blob.

Well, so like if you talk to Daryl Press, who's a Dartmouth University political scientist, and he's one of several who have tried to like rigorously, empirically, quantitatively, investigate this question of, you know, does reputation exist for countries? If you stand down in one place, will you be challenged in other places? Like, does credibility exist? And always found no. And you ask him, like, you know, but it feels so true, but, you know, doesn't it feel like if we stand down one place, we'll be challenged another? And he'll say, look, imagine it from the other point of view, and it starts to make a lot more sense.

And the thing that he will cite, which I think is a little bit of an outdated example, I think he needs a new one. But in, I think it was 61, Khrushchev just over and over said that the Soviets were going to take West Berlin, just repeat. repeatedly threatened it, and he never did it. And if credibility were a real thing, then shortly after that, when he went to install nuclear weapons in Cuba and said, I'm going to start a war to put these weapons there, we would not have taken him seriously, right? Because his credibility would have been so damaged. You know, we would have looked at Soviet influence elsewhere in the world and say, these guys are a paper tiger. They don't. Khrushchev does not mean it when he personally says things. So therefore, the state of the Soviet Union is not to be fair. But that wasn't what we did. We continued to look at each threat on its own merits. Was it rational? Was there force behind it? And if there was, then we took it seriously. And that's what other countries do with us, even if it's not how we like to see ourselves.

Yeah. And that's also, you know, we have to remember that the notion of deterrence that sort of underlies all of this is getting more and more complicated. Like deterrence used to be pretty easy, right? You nuke me. I'll nuke you. So nobody's going to take a first strike. those are sort of clear rules or certainty.

It gets very muddled when you're applying sort of a deterrence theory to cyberspace or election hacking as we just saw in 2016 or actual space, you know, like what we're doing in an outer space or dealing with non-nation states. I know that when I was still at the White House and I left in 2013, there weren't public, that's for sure. Or in my mind, particularly clear private rules of the road when it came to sort of offensive cyber capability, for example. Right. And I did an interview with Ash Carter, it was the defense secretary, I think pretty close before the election. And we talked about deterrence and how it was changing. And I give him a lot of credit because he was really gained for kind of acknowledging where we hadn't figured things out. But in the other hand, that was a little bit scary. And I was asking him about, you know, okay, when does a cyber attack cross that line? And more to the point, how do you clearly signal to your adversaries when it will cross that line? Because, you know, when people talk about deterrence and it's changing and it's being fuzzy, the thing that people are most worried about is, or that you often hear people worry about is, you know, oh, if we're not clear about what the lines are, then, you know, like Russia tried to intervene in the election and they'll kind of play in that area of ambiguity. The thing that has always worried more is that we set the line somewhere but are not clear with ourselves where it is, not clear with our adversaries where it is, and they cross it without meaning to. and then you have an escalation

a cyber attack that feels like it's a start of a war so we treat it as if it is one we counterattack I mean I think that's something

that is not a zero probability risk with North Korea which is unbelievably brazen with cyber attacks in a way that makes I think Russian election meddling look pretty tame by comparison

I mean some of the things they do in South Korea are just nuts and the more that we start to threaten them the more they're going to feel incentivized to try that here. One last question of this credibility trap issue, which is, in my mind, I think, oddly,

Trump has almost shown himself to be sort of immune to this credibility trap debate. He tweets crazy stuff all the time. He lies all the time. He follows through on none of it. And no one, I mean, maybe there are, like smart analysts like Danny Russell, who is one of Assistant Secretary for Asia, believes that the Chinese think Trump is a paper tiger in kind of a joke because he hasn't followed through it on any of his threats. But, you know, for example, he said that if North Korea keeps threatening us, they'll be met with fire and fury like the world

has never seen. And just today, they threatened us and said we'd meet our final doom. I mean, do you think he's in some way inoculated himself from these debates or is because he's a Republican and he doesn't deal with like the right wing attacking him on every front like Obama did with Syria? Well, so he early on, he actually kind of indulged a lot of. lot of the like DC foreign policy class, you know, demand number one for restoring American credibility, which was to launch an air strike in Syria as, you know, to do what Obama never would. Right. And he did it. And, you know, I don't know if you remember, but he like, they found some airfield

that was empty and they bombed the runway. But they were, the jets were using the runway like the next day. Yeah, it was meaningless. It was meaningless. But it was amazing was that it got like rapturous cheers at D.C. I mean, I remember that was, I don't know if anyone said that that was the day he became president, but definitely a lot of, like, think tankers who hated him were like, oh, he finally, you know, he came through. Yeah.

But I think that, you know, there's not as much pressure for it right now, right? I mean, his domestic constituency is just not the D.C. foreign policy class. So, and, you know, I think it's telling that even though Obama, ultimately resisted the pressure to launch an air strike in Syria. You know, he clearly felt that criticism. And he spent, you know, he would bring it up a lot. And he would respond to it a lot. And, you know, he seemed kind of pissed about it sometimes.

This is a constituency that he had to care about. But that is just not the case from Trump. So there's no pressure for it. That's right. Now what there is a lot of pressure for is massively shutting down legal immigration. Right. That's right. Yeah.

I mean, I think for Democrats generally, there is just far more risk that's perceived by Democrats. to criticisms from the right of them being weak. I mean, look at like the leading from behind nonsense. Republicans turned a background quote in a New Yorker story into somehow a defining character resistant of Obama's foreign policy when there was actually no real evidence if you sort of looked at the fact that he killed bin Laden

and sent tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan and did all these other things increased drone strikes on terrorists, that that was somehow passive. You know, I'm not saying those are great policies, but they certainly weren't, you know, peace-knit nonsense. they suggested. Right. I mean, I always thought the thing in that line of criticism that rang true to me is you would sometimes kind of hear people say like, you know, he just doesn't

believe in American power like we do. And I actually think that that's true. I mean, I don't think that he would ever say it. Like there are all these debates about, oh, is he an American exceptionalist? I mean, that phrase doesn't mean anything. Yeah. But, you know, I think that he probably take a little bit more of the realist view that the U.S. is a really big country and it has really good values that are worth spreading out in the world, but that it's just a country. Yeah, I think he wanted us to be thoughtful about U.S. interests and the value of our intervention, especially when it comes to military intervention. Because the argument you hear that make all the time on Syria is couldn't stop

sectarian violence in Iraq with 150,000 troops. There's no reason to suggest we could do so in Syria, an arguably more complicated place. But the one place we have not discussed yet is where we are at war. and it's almost undiscussed in the media as well as the ongoing war in Afghanistan. You discuss it all the time, man. I know, I care. Well, the other day, right, he quietly sent like another 1,000 troops there. So I think we're back up to 14,000.

The rhetoric, though, is the same as it has been for years. We're not winning, but we're not losing. But in all the Pentagon needs is more troops and more time and we can get there. And meanwhile, the security situation has rapidly deteriorated. You have a piece that's out just now that suggests after 16 years of war, Afghanistan experts have stopped talking about what victory looks like and instead are considering the range of potential defeat scenarios. That, I thought, was a fascinating change.

What does that mean? Well, I mean, there's kind of been, I'm sure, you know and have seen and heard yourself kind of a growing sense over the last few years that, like, you know, guys, we're not going to win this. And, you know, that was kind of implicit in the, you know, Obama administration drawdown that we're not going to achieve our goals and it's time to, like, really constrain what we expect to get out of this. But we're really at a point where, you know, I don't want to say the state has failed, but it's not at a point where it can, even with American help, reconstitute itself to take over the country. But it also can't really fully lose because the Taliban is also too weak to win. You know, you have warlords running big parts of the country. it's kind of in this like locked self-perpetuating stalemate quasi-permanent you know not quite collapse

and what you hear people talk about when you talk about you know the people who still give a shit about Afghanistan still go you know still kind of know all the players there it's just a range of like managed defeat of you know well I mean I thought the thing was really telling is that there was one person I told you know a friend of mine who's an Afghanistan specialist she said you know talk to this other woman who she's a little bit more optimistic on Afghanistan than I am, but she has some really good ideas. So I called her up. And I asked her, what's a good model? And she said Somalia. Yeah, that was striking to me. Not a place I'd look to for good news stories. But it, I mean, it is, you know, it is kind of interesting. I mean, what they did was they basically said like, okay, this is not having a Somalian state is not going to work.

Not in this decade, maybe not in this generation. But what we can do is just drastically curtail the state, leave big parts of the country to base. you know, local strong men, warlords, you know, informal citizen councils, liaison with them, but kind of just give them a chance to build the country back up from the grassroots, we hope, fingers crossed. And that is really not a great, particularly exciting, optimistic model. You know, probably won't work, but it might. But that's just kind of where we are with Afghanistan. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, you can't talk about Afghanistan without Pakistan. In early January, Trump announced that they're going to cut off security assistance to Pakistan, financial security assistance, because they hadn't done enough to curb terrorism. He is far from the first president to be furious at the Pakistanis.

Obama talked about the need to get them to do more to stop harboring terrorists. I'm sure President Bush did every president for a long time. But now I'm reading these reports that suggest recent upticks and violence in Kabul in Afghanistan are associated. with Trump's decision to cut off assistance to the Pakistanis. Now, I get the logic behind that, which is that the Taliban that the Pakistanis are aligned with are responding and kind on their behalf. But I haven't seen hard evidence of it. And it seems like a pretty big assertion to lay at Trump's feet without evidence. What's your take on this? I mean, I think the way someone put it to me is they said, like, it would logically follow that Pakistan would ramp back up. But A, like you said,

we don't really yet have any at least publicly visible proof of this. And B, you don't actually need that to explain the huge uptick in violence over the last couple weeks. I mean, the clearest causal factor you can draw is the huge increase in American airstrikes, which is, you know, is succeeding in really suppressing the Taliban's ability to keep control over open rural areas, which is where they like to operate. But they're responding, you know, one could argue, somewhat predictably by launching these spectacular shocking terrorist attacks in Kabul and in cities. So if they can't, you know, control vast parts of the countryside, they're going to undermine the state and show their power another way, which is by slaughtering civilians in the streets.

Now, that doesn't mean that it's Donald Trump's fault that the Taliban has chosen to pursue just unbelievably horrific terrorism. But, you know, you have to be honest with yourself about the cause and effect of certain policies. And ramping up air strikes was the kind of thing that, you know, not just Trump, but like candidates all the time suggest because it sounds good. It sounds like getting serious, getting tough. You know, I would argue that Obama did some of this too. And that doesn't actually connect to any verifiable policy outcomes. And then you end up kind of bearing the cost of this thing that you're doing in order to like look like you're doing something.

But the people who bear the cost of that aren't, not American politicians. they're, you know, very small number of Americans who are volunteers, so we kind of like turn a blind eye to that. But it's mostly Afghan, you know, kids and families. Yeah. God. I mean, I just imagine, you know, I've been in meetings after these sort of spectacular, horrific attacks in Afghanistan. And you go in and you're horrified by the photos you see and the death count and everyone is furious and wants to get these fuckers and you, you know, you ramp up U.S. efforts commensurate with what the Taliban just did. but there's still no endgame. And, you know, Trump was asked if we're going to try to have peace talks with the Taliban, and he said no. But Rex Tillerson doesn't believe that's the policy.

CENTCOM was briefing reporters just days before Trump made these statements to say that there was a renewed focus on reconciliation talks. I mean, I get the feeling that no one knows what the policy is. When you talk to his team, do you hear something that's clearly articulated? Do our troops know who are actually fighting? So I asked someone what would a peace deal with the Taliban look like? What do we think kind of the broad contours are? Because usually when you're like two, three, four years out from a deal, you have a sense for like, you know, what the basic issues are and the kind of range of outcomes. And he said, I have, he is someone who had worked on this, including into the current administration.

He said, I have no idea because we have invested so little diplomatic and political capital in talks. and, you know, neither of the Taliban, that we haven't even talked enough to get a clear sense of what we want, or what they want, or what we want. You know, this guy was in the administration, he said, I don't know what the American acceptable positions are. I don't know what our minimums are. I don't know what is most important to us because we have not even thought it through ourselves. And there's no reason to think that the Taliban has thought it through because none of us has been in a room long enough to figure that out. Yeah. And you can see why, because we would all have to admit that we are going to be so far away from the goals that we set out on, you know, in our case 16 years ago, in their case, what is it, 24 years ago, 1992. I think I did that math right. I'll trust you. On math, that's a mistake. But, like, it's, you know, no one can accept that humiliation politically.

But what we can accept is this kind of, like, what we all know is kind of an empty promise of, like, well, we'll get there. Have you actually, have you seen the post? The film? No. Yeah. I've not yet. It's okay.

It's like B minus. But. It was always weird because the Times broke the Pentagon papers. Oh, really? Is that right? No one at the Times has mentioned that. I haven't heard that come up with anyone. Well, if anyone listening has watched it, it was like, I just watched it and it blew my mind because it's, it's all about this like huge scandal that the United States knows that the Vietnam War is losing and doomed.

And yet we're fighting it anyway and sending Americans to fight. die because we can't admit defeat. And it's this like top secret thing that like the Nixon administration puts out the gag order because they don't want, you know, the Pentagon papers that reveal this to come out in a huge fight and a scandal. And I was watching it and thinking like, well, that's true now and we all know it. And now we're losing in plain sight. I mean, generals are saying it. Right. It's just, it's just like completely banal common knowledge. I mean, I was thinking like if we put the Pentagon papers equivalent of Afghanistan on the front page, everybody would be like, why? We'd be like, Why are you writing this?

Everybody knows this. The scandal is that we no longer care. That's the problem. Yes. I think that that is true. Well, that's a fun place to conclude this conversation. Max, thank you for cutting through the conventional wisdom on some of these things and offering fact-based, research-based, evidence-based opinions on super complicated stuff

and sharing that with my audience today. I really appreciate it. Thanks, man. I wish I'm saying that. And I will link to a whole bunch of the great stuff you've written. that we were referencing throughout the conversation. So if you want more, it exists. Well, thanks for chatting with me.

It was really fun. Yeah, me too. Thanks, man. Talk to you, too. That was another uplifting episode of Pod Save the World. Thank you, as always, for tuning in. Even though I might have left you with one star in your soul, after hearing all this, please give us five in the iTunes store

because it means a lot to the show and to me. And talk to you next week.