School of War - Ep 47: Senator Tom Cotton on American Foreign Policy

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Tom Cotton, senator from Arkansas and author of Only the Strong: Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power, joins the show to talk about U.S. foreign policy. ▪️ Times  • 01:03 Introduction • 03:43 Formative Interests • 06:47 Bill Rood And The Distant Ramparts • 11:13 Joining The Infantry  • 13:30 Iraq & Afghanistan • 18:39 Congress  • 21:19 Foreign Entanglements • 25:54 Progressivism • 32:06 Vietnam • 38:52 Iran  • 44:26 Withdrawal • 47:15 American Interests And The Rimland

Tom Cotton, the junior senator from Arkansas, made waves not long after his arrival in the Senate by penning a letter to Iran's supreme leader and circulating it to his colleagues for their signatures, which most of the Republicans provided, pointing out that if the so-called Iran deal didn't take the form of a treaty, the next president could just throw it out. Suffice it to say that the Obama administration and Cotton's Democratic colleagues were not especially amused by this action. A letter to the Ayatollah was among the earliest high-profile stands that Cotton has taken on issues of national security. In this episode, Senator Cotton and I cover a wide range of issues, from his background in military service and influences, to the views that the American founders took on foreign affairs, to which party is principally responsible for America's war in Vietnam, and to why Americans should care about such distant and imperiled places like Ukraine and Taiwan. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Join the day by Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, an author of Only the Strong,

reversing the Left's plot to sabotage American power. Senator, thanks for joining the show. Thanks for having me on, Aaron. I appreciate it. So I thought we'd start off by getting into your background. You grew up in Arkansas. You had some exposure to the military when you were a young man. Talk about growing up, you know, towards the end of the Cold War in Yale County, what your views were of America then.

and what the formative influences were. Well, I didn't grow up in a political household in the sense that we didn't discuss politics or public policy or philosophy around the dinner table. We were too busy with baseball and basketball and working on the farm. And, you know, back in those days, Arkansas was a one-party state. So most politics was decided in the Democratic primaries, which meant it was usually contest to personalities. So I remember explicitly my father saying, you know,

we don't put up yard signs or bumper stickers because we know the other people from the race for a county judge. sheriff and we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. But I did grow up in a very conservative household in a sense of traditional patriotism for America that, you know, we stood for the anthem, said the Pledge of Allegiance. My father himself was a Vietnam veteran. He did talk about it a lot. On occasion, it would come up. He was very busy, obviously, in the 80s and 90s, working in his full-time job, plus the farm, plus being a dad. Since he's retired, he's gotten a lot or involved in veterans causes.

But I just grew up believing that America obviously was a great country. And we were on the right side. We had the Reagan view of the Cold War that we should win and they should lose. And then you went off to college as an undergraduate at Harvard, and, of course, you encountered universal agreement with those views. Not quite universal agreement. I will say that I think college campuses back in those days 25 years ago were much less hostile to that kind of.

traditional and simple patriotism of most Americans than they are today based on my experiences with my young aides or my interns and talking to them about college campuses. Obviously, as a conservative, I was in a minority at college. I never felt like I was a beleaguered or oppressed minority, however. You know, we had vigorous, robust debates in dorm rooms and seminar rooms at the newspaper's editorial board. And I always thought that we had, opportunity to express our views and be heard and lose the votes on them. But still, it was a place where a free speech was more respected back then than it is today. But Harvard in the 1990s was still liberal and insular, just like it was back in the 70s when I think one of the professors

couldn't believe that George McGovern had lost because everyone she knew voted for McGovern. So, you're obviously a prominent national security leader in the party, and that's not a requirement, not every national politician has an interest in those issues. Sticking with your background for a minute, you know, what were the formative intellectual inputs in your education that, you know, advanced or clarified your worldview? Probably 9-11 was really a turning point for me. I was interested in politics and history before 9-11, but I wouldn't say I studied as carefully as I started to that.

I was in my last year of law school, and fortunately it was. a relatively easy year on the academic front. So I started then what I've continued since, which is careful study of history and the world, trying to make sense of it, trying to learn from the past, trying to understand different nations, their cultures, and how that influences the way that behave today in their relationship with the United States. Again, I was aware of these things before 9-11, but I was much more likely to pick up if I was going to be reading something about politics or government history, a political biography before 9-11. After 9-11, I was much more likely to pick up something by Don Kagan or other historians of international relations and military

history, that kind of thing. Where were you in 9-11? I was in my morning evidence class, you know, back in those days, when dinosaurs were on the earth, we didn't have Wi-Fi or smartphones or I think even internet connections in our rooms, in our classroom. So I was oblivious for the first hour or so of what had happened until we got dismissed from class and walked out and saw all the stricken, shocked faces. Yeah. And, you know, what's the timeline from there to you joining the military? Well, as I described only the strong, I wanted to rush out right away and join that week.

I had a few friends who were either in the Army or had been in the Army, and they suggested that would be an imprudent decision because unfortunately the bad guys weren't going to go anywhere for a while. And the Army certainly wasn't ever going to go anywhere. And if I dropped out of school after three years of loans with no degree, my student loans probably wouldn't go very far, go away either, unless I just waited until Joe Biden forgave them all 20 years later. But I realized a few years later when I was in basic training making a few hundred bucks a paycheck, but they had been right about that. So I stuck out the course I was on. I finished law school and worked for Jerry Smith, the great federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit down in Texas,

and then I worked for a little over a year in private practice to pay off my loans. But by the summer of 2004, once my loans were repaid, I set the process in motion to enlisting the Army. And that right before Christmas in 2004, when I contracted, and then right after the new year in 2005, is when I shipped out to basic training. Now, I want to get into your military experience here in a second, but I also don't want to leave behind your education completely because I want to ask you about a guy, I suspect, most people listening to the show, this name will be new to them. But you had an opportunity to learn from a guy named Bill Rood, an influential figure within a relatively, you know, a small but

influential segment of American conservatives. And you encountered him at Claremont, right? No, I never personally encountered him. Okay. But I do have a lot of friends at Claremont in the Claremont world. In fact, I had taken a year off between college and law school to go to the Claremont graduate school study at the time, primarily with Charles Kessler, Mark Blitz, and the late great Michael Yulman, but also had a lot of friends at the Claremont Institute. That's when Larry Arne, a native Arkansas who's now the president of Hillsdale College, was the president of the Claremont Institute. And a lot of them had studied with Bill Rood when he was a professor at Claremont. So unfortunately, I never had a chance to meet him personally, but I'd heard about him

indirectly the way so many people who were at Claremont had heard or had learned indirectly via the students of Leo Strauss. And I did have a chance at Claremont when I was a summer fellow at one of their programs to spend a little bit of time around Harry Jaffa. He was up there in years, but he was still coming out to visit with students from time to time. And for those of your listeners who don't know much about Bill Rood, a lot of the folks at Claremont, like Larry Arn, like Charles Kessler, would say that Bill Rood was to international relations in military history, what Harry Jaffa was to political philosophy.

He was just an incredibly innovative, original thinker who saw the world with, very clear eyes, very much in contrast to a lot of our so-called foreign policy elite in Washington and New York. And he didn't write a great, he certainly didn't write many books, right? There's one book about the Cold War. Yeah, unfortunately, he didn't write a lot. So a lot of what we know, our generation knows about Bill Rood comes through his students. He wrote one book, great book called Kingdoms of the Blind, something of a history of the Cold War

and the strategy of it. That came out in the late 70s or early 80s at a very, very dangerous point. the Cold War, where to him it looked, I think, reasonably, Soviet Russia could be on the verge of overrunning European NATO. That all turned around when Ronald Reagan became president, of course. He also wrote a famous essay in the 1960 called The Distant Ramparts, and I referenced this in only the strong, about Vietnam, and why the Vietnam War was a necessary war, as Reagan would later call it noble cause, how John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had very badly damaged our execution of the Vietnam War, but why it was so vital,

and also why it was so vital to man what he called the distant ramparts, to have a forward presence in the old world in places like South Korea and Japan, the Middle East, Italy, Spain, Great Britain. And he also has this amazing takedown of George Kennan, I think from the early 80s. Just an absolutely savage essay. And he sort of, you know, he distinguished himself from the canonite vision of realism. and there was this sort of mix, right, in his thinking about foreign relations of

unsentimental, unromantic calculations of hard power, but still something that wasn't entirely without idealism or morality, in his vision of America and his vision of the reality of America's enemies. Yeah, well, as I write a little bit about this and only the strong, that the nature of a regime does make a difference for its conduct in international affairs. It's not determinative, but it makes a big difference. Some of the older school realists don't see it that way. Whether you're a democracy, a dictatorship, a monarchy, what have you. They view it. I think the analogy they used to use is like billiard balls on a billiards table. It doesn't really matter what's inside the ball, which is an analogy to a nation state because they all behave the same in the world. And Bill Rood explained that's just not the case. Now, every nation, whatever its form of governments, has some imperatives that will probably lead it to behave in similar ways. But it does make a difference whether you have, you know, a Democratic people dictating your politics like we do in America or much of Western Europe does, or whether you have a mercurial dictator, as so much of the world still has a day and always has had.

There's some weaknesses in that, too. He writes a lot about what he calls the Democratic strategy deficit and how democratic people is because they're so unused to using force in their own day-to-day life when the lives. when the life of just your normal American in the marketplace at work in their neighborhoods is about persuasion and mutually beneficial exchange. It's very different from the way a tyrant sees the world. And therefore, Democratic peoples tend to underestimate the threats that are gathering. And as I write, not only the strong, you can see that throughout the history of modern democracies going back a couple hundred years. You join the Army.

It's sort of the peak of the fighting in Iraq, 2005. most lawyers who join the Army become Army lawyers. Why did you join the infantry? It was unusual. It wasn't unique. Officer Candaceville in the first day, I had to crowd into this little classroom and sit in those, you know, third grade desks. So they had the desks attached to the chairs. And I was crammed in next to a guy named Jade Al Covey, a cotton Covey, alphabetical order. And you had to take all of your patches and badges and insignia off your uniform on the first day or for OCS.

I didn't have any, obviously, just coming from basic training. He did. I could see that he had the sunwashed shadow of an 80-second airborne combat patch on, and I asked him how long he'd been in. He said a couple years and been deployed the previous year. I said, what'd you do? He said, what'd you do? Before you join?

Because he was obviously older. He said, oh, I was a lawyer. So the only two lawyers turned infantrymen in the Army were sitting next to each other in OCS that day. And I joined the infantry because it's the main effort in the Army. You know, the Army has a lot of important jobs, but at the end of the day, the infantry's mission is the Army mission, close with and destroy the enemy by means of fire and maneuver or repel his attack by counterattack. And I wanted to be at the heart of the mission. And in the infantry, I always wanted to be and was fortunate to be light infantry, which means at the 101st, primarily,

not in tracked vehicles or mounted on Humvees or that we all, by the time we got down the range, used Humvees regularly. because, again, in light infantry, it's the heart of the infantry. You know, if you're in mechanized infantry and you've got four Bradley fighting vehicles, kind of the queen bee of your fighting formation are those vehicles. And the first thing you check on and ask every morning you wake up as a leader are our tracks up and running, whereas in the light infantry, all of your equipment is what soldiers can carry in their hands, drawn their back.

So it's the purest form of leadership because it's just distilled down to, you know, ensuring that, you know, 40 men can achieve together as a, coherent fighting force, what they probably couldn't do separately. Was your dad in the infantry in Vietnam? He was. He was live infantry, first of the 14th, in Vietnam. He left here in the summer of 69 and spent about five months or so out in the jungle before he was drawn back to a job in the rear. And so tell listeners about your time in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.

You also served in the old guard here in D.C. at Arlington Cemetery and wrote a book about that called Sacred Duty. But what did you do in Iraq? So I got to Iraq in the spring of 2006. If you recall, the surge happened or was announced in January of 2007. It was clear to me from some of my first patrols. Before I was even in charge of my platoon, I was just doing ride-alongs with my outgoing platoon leader counterpart that we were woefully undermanned, that we did not have the troops to achieve the mission that we had,

that things had spiraled out of control by the summer of 2006. So we were fighting not just an insurgency, but a pretty big. bitter sectarian war as well. Probably the most bloodshed we saw was not against American forces, but between Iraqi civilians in our area of operations. There's plenty of firefights

and roadside bombs aimed at our troops, but the really brutal bloodshed was between the civilians. It hadn't always been like that from the beginning, but because we had too few troops from the beginning, it was, it's kind of spiraled out of control. And as I write and only the strong, as I've always said,

that's one of my key lessons I took away from my time in Iraq is that security has to come first, whether you're talking about trying to secure a country or win a war, or whether you're talking about trying to protect our citizens on our streets. You know, there's a lot of other goals you can have, whether the domestic goals or international goals, but if you don't have security and safety for people, you can't achieve anything else. I was pleased, you know, when I got back to the States, we fortunately were able to bring everyone back for my platoon alive and well, Thanksgiving week. 2006. And things did not look good. You know, the Democrats had just won the House and the Senate,

the Iraq study group, and recommended essentially a rapid withdrawal. Political winds were shifting against George Bush, but I thought it was his finest hour that he did not cut and run, but rather announced a surge a few weeks later, added more troops, got new leadership in the country, and despite all of the missteps from the first few years of the Iraq war, essentially handed over a stable and quiet country to Barack Obama in 2009. Yeah. And then, so you got to see Afghanistan as well. Talk a little bit about what you did there and, you know, what contrasts you saw between

the American effort there versus in Iraq and the challenge there versus the challenge in Iraq. Well, again, I was in Afghanistan right before the surge was announced from the fall of 2008 to the summer of 2009. Oh, but it was just a coincidence, not causation that I was in both countries right before we had to add significant numbers of new troops. You know, what I... So first, the very different countries, Afghanistan is much bigger. Its resources are much smaller than Iraqs. The people are very different as well. I think there's a difference between Afghanistan in the sense that they had lived

essentially in anarchy for 30 years by that point, whereas the Iraqi people had lived under tyranny, you know, fueled by oil money. So I found the Afghan people to be very resourceful, very individualistic, very prideful in a way that the Iraqi people were kind of used to having subsidy checks given to them all the time. They wanted the Americans to do everything for them. The Afghans didn't always, did never really act like that. Mission was very different. I was the operations officer on a reconstruction team.

In those days, they were being run by Air Force and Navy commanders. So the Department of Defense had wanted infantry captains to be kind of the ground combat leader, and that's what I did on that team. Again, not enough troops there. in the early days of the Obama presidency, kind of the second half of my time in Afghanistan, as I write in only as strong, a lot of misgivings about the president's actions, or I should say lack of actions, since it famously took him so long to settle on a strategy in Afghanistan, despite his unusually bellicose and belligerent rhetoric about the Afghanistan war throughout the campaign,

2007, 2008, and just some of the appalling rhetoric about America that we witness on Armed Forces Network, as he traveled around on his apology tour, saying that America had lots of problems and apologizing for them, that we were no more exceptional really than Greece or Great Britain and then most famously in Cairo, towards the end of our tour there. Certainly the troops were taking note of that. And the Afghans were taking note of the indecision and the delays,

the famous Afghan proverb, that you have the watches, but we have the time. Unfortunately, that proved to be true. When President Obama in the fall of 2009 announced a kind of surge, arbitrarily reduced what the military said it needed without any real strategic reason, announced a deadline for those troops. You know, Bob Gates writes in his memoirs about this that really probably was the last, that squandered the last opportunity we had to achieve some kind of durable victory there like we had in Iraq in the final two years of the Bush presidency.

Yeah, Afghans would bring it up with me directly. They just raise it. Why should we work with you when you're leaving here in a couple of years? Your president said so. So you come back to the United States. You're out of the Army. You've got a law degree. The world is professionally speaking, at least your oyster.

You can do whatever you want and go make a lot of money in business. Why Congress? I don't know, bad judgment. So I got in the Army in 2009 and worked in business until 2011. And so often is the case in politics, and a lot of it is just a matter of fortuitous timing and circumstances. I was preparing the second half of 2011 to strike out on a new path in business. So I was kind of mentally, professionally, personally prepared. to leave my work and go start something else.

Maybe either start a business of my own or, you know, take a management job in another existing business where I could once again lead people as opposed to, you know, advise and do analysis on spreadsheets and that kind of thing. And as circumstances had it, one, Arkansas, although always a conservative, traditional state, had always been democratic, as we discussed earlier. But in 2010, like the rest of the country, we'd had a big election in the Tea Party wave. There's one Democratic congressman left, and the Democrats in charge of legislature probably to their chagrin in retrospect moved my home from a newly Republican-controlled district to the last Democratic-controlled district in the House. And I had some friends who were in politics who encouraged me to look at that race.

And again, it was at its time when Arkansas was shifting, so there weren't a lot of local elected Republicans who were champing at the bit to run for Congress. You know, if it had been five years earlier, I probably couldn't have won a general election. Maybe I could have, but it would have been a lot different. If it were five years later, maybe I would have won the primary, but I might not have had, you know, 12 people running in the primary against me because there were so many new Republicans elected. And I decided to take the plans, partly because it was, you know, at a time. And again, I was ready to make a shift anyway. But mostly it's a chance to serve the country again, you know, in a very different kind of way. But worst case scenario was I'd spend about 10 or 12 months campaigning across.

South and West Arkansas, probably meet a lot of new people who knew what kind of opportunities that would create if I lost. Best case scenario was I won and had a new office and a new chance to serve the country again. So we'll come back to your time in Congress and in the Senate here in a couple minutes, but I want to turn to the book, Only the Strong, and talk about what you write there. I mean, you start at the start. You start at the American founding and what you describe as a progressive assault on the founding and its vision of America in the world. You know, there are those who, there's a sort of quick look at George Washington and the foreign policy views of the founders that, you know, you could summarize by saying these guys were safe behind a couple

big oceans, didn't want foreign entanglements, didn't want permanent alliances, and, you know, wasn't that great and shouldn't we return to something like that? I mean, you encounter a lot of people whose understanding of the founding, in terms of foreign policy runs something like that. You take a somewhat more nuanced view. What's your view of the founder's vision of foreign policy? Well, I think the founders were giants in every way to include in their conduct of America's foreign policy. Probably the two most distinctive were George Washington and John Quincy Adams. The second not only as president, but even maybe more so as Secretary of State to James Monroe, since John Quincy Adams helped craft the Monroe Doctrine, a foundational doctrine in American foreign policy.

But even as I write down on this strong, you know, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were also a very shrewd statesman when it came to America's interest to bring. What you learn from someone like Bill Rood is that foreign policy is foremost the domain of prudence and practical judgment. It's really not the realm of abstract ideologies that's much more common in domestic politics. It's common in foreign policy as well, but it usually ends up poorly. There's always 101 different circumstances you have to take into account when you're making judgments about foreign policy. And if you take all those circumstances into account and you look at where America was in the 1790s and the early 1800s versus where we were, say, in the 1980s, I think you'll see that Ronald Reagan conducted a foreign policy very similar to what George Washington or John Quincy Adam would have done. Again, under the circumstances, which you always have to account for.

Now, Reagan's foreign policy looks very different from what George Washington wrote about in the Farewell Address or some of John Quincy Adams' most famous. writings and pronouncements. You know, famously, John Quincy Adams said, we don't go abroad looking for monsters to slay, and Reagan slayed a lot of monsters all around the world. But if you take into account all the different circumstances and military technology, communications technology, the threat that we faced from Soviet Russia,

which was both a traditional old world power, with a globalist, godless ideology grafted on top of it, I think you would have found that George Washington and John Quincy Adams, and the rest of the founders would have done exactly what Ronald Reagan was doing in the 1980s. And you can see that in their own conduct of foreign policy. I tell the story in some detail and only strong about the Barbary Pirates. And as a former Marine, you know, the story well, but most people think that it's just, oh, you know, the Barbary Pirates were kidnapping American sailors and impressing them. We sent our Navy and our Marine over there to put an end to that.

It's much more complicated than that. You know, it was, it started around the Revolutionary War when we lost the protection of the British fleet, obviously, because we had rebelled against Great Britain. Thomas Jefferson, when he was ministered to France, wanted immediately go to war, John Adams. More cool-headed than Thomas Jefferson, as was often the case, said that he understood and agreed, but we were in no condition to be fighting a naval war

in the Mediterranean against the Barbary pirates, and the best we could do for now is to pay the ransom to get our sailors back. And that's what they did in the Articles of Confederation period. That's what they did in George Washington and John Adams' period. Jefferson became president. Not only did he still have that view, he had a dozen years of naval buildup, and he concluded that it was time to stand up to them. But by the end of his tenure, and through James Madison's early tenure, when we were more focused on the war of 1812,

with Great Britain, they went back to the policy of paying ransom. Things are very bad, bad policy always, because it encourages more kidnapping, more hostage-taking, as you see today with countries like Iran, but under the circumstances, you see why they reasoned the way they did. And in the end, they did finally smash the Barbary Pirates and end the threat of it after the War of 1812 ended. But even with the founding fathers, you can see how much circumstances and conditions at the time have to guide foreign policy reasoning. So you might reach what looks like diametrically opposed results, as they did just in a span of years, either going to war with the Barbary Pirates versus paying them ransom, but under the circumstances, they're still aiming at the same guiding principles. And as I say, and only the strong since we're a constitutional.

Republic is based on the natural equality of all mankind, just look at what our founding documents say. The principles that guide us domestically are what should guide us in foreign policy as well. The Constitution says as to secure the blessings of liberty. And I would say in foreign policy, the simplest way to think about those blessings of liberty are safety, freedom, and prosperity. So in between the founders and Ronald Reagan, a lot of things happen. in particular, you document in the book, there's the rise of something called progressivism, and progressivism has a view of American foreign policy.

So what is progressivism? What's its view of foreign policy? Who are we actually talking about here? So today, progressive politicians like Barack Obama, who are at best ambivalent about America and openly hostile to American power, are usually shrewd and expressing those opinions. Sometimes the mask slips, as it did with Barack Obama when he said that he believed in American exceptionalism, the same way that Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. We should say it's just a kind of obsolete and childish chauvinism for one's own.

But normally they're much more guarded about that. That was not the case with progressives and the patron saint of progressivism, Woodrow Wilson, who was a college professor, of course, before he was a politician. They were openly critical of the founders and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in a way that only the most extreme and unimprudent politicians today would be. Politicians that comes from Democrats that voted for Joe Biden 9 to 10, let's say. So the progressives repudiated the founders' basis of our country, which is the natural equality of all mankind and the inherent dignity and rights of all people.

They said that was kind of childish, outmoded thinking. The founders were, you know, kind of bounded by the. their historical circumstance, they didn't see as far as we see now in the late 19th, early 20th century. So they replaced nature as a guide for our politics with history. You might say history of the capital age, a kind of historical determinism. This is heavily influenced by German romantic philosophy, most notably Hegel. One of his famous sanctions, the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, which means you can only achieve true wisdom at the end of human history.

These ideas are still very influential today. You know, you hear someone like Francis Fukuyama write about the end of history. It's like as if history has a process that naturally reaches its end, as opposed to what, you know, historians had previously thought, you know, going back to Thucydides, that history was the record of events happening here and there driven by the decisions of individual men. You sit today with politicians when they say things like the arc of history or being on the right side of history. Again, Ducydides, or for that matter, Justice Scalia would say, you know, history doesn't have an art. It doesn't move in a certain direction. It moves based on human choice. Well, the progressives didn't see it like that, and therefore they believed that we were evolving in a direction and that the ideas of the founding, although maybe appropriate at the time, we're now outmoded and obsolete,

that you didn't need things like separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, to protect the people and their liberties because we had reached a point where we could count on neutral, scientific, disinterested experts to guide public affairs, and that we could have this vast administrative state that now seems not so normal to most Americans, because we've had it for so long, but back then was a major innovation, the idea that you could have unelected bureaucrats in Washington setting rules for our country, enforcing those rules, and then adjudicating those rules. It's all a creation of Woodrow Wilson and the progressives. So they didn't focus a lot on foreign policy because they were so intent on kind of remaking American politics at home.

But you can see how that view of human nature being changeable and therefore improvable, therefore perfectable, can influence foreign policy. They have these kind of grand utopian schemes best captured in Woodrow Wilson's 14 points speech to Congress when he declared war. If you read that speech, it's remarkable, like it's full of abstractions and fighting for other people's interests as opposed to America's interests. We had plenty of reasons. And I think George Washington or John Quincy Adams would have cited plenty of reasons to go to war with Germany. They were conducting unrestricted submarine warfare against our shipping, which was immediately causing supply chain shortages and inflation in America. They had killed over 100 Americans in the Lusitania. They had schemed with the government of Mexico to try to reclaim the territory that we had won from Mexico and the Mexican-Americans.

war. All of these are more than, more than sufficient reason to go to war, but Woodrow Wilson didn't cite any of them. He cited all these abstractions that, again, are based on this utopian idea that we've moved beyond this fixed, permanent, timeless human nature that has fallen and that is sinful and therefore needs things like separation of powers and federalism and checks and balances domestically, and in the world needs a strong military, needs clear-eyed, hard-nosed thinking about the threats the country faces. And that comes through today. You still see that strain of thought and a kind of abstract liberal internationalism that it's okay to use American military power as long as you're not using it to protect America's vital national interests. So you think about, you know,

Madden and Albright wanting to deploy American troops into the Balkans in the early Clinton administration to keep the peace in a civil war there. You know, Barack Obama getting harangued by a lot of his aides into the disastrous military intervention in Libya in 20, 2011 for something called the R2P, the responsibility to protect, as if the American people had a responsibility to go to war anywhere in the world whenever someone's being oppressed. We'd like to see that stop. We'd like to do everything we can't help it. But the idea that we're going to go to war every time people is oppressed somewhere,

it's just a fanciful flight of utopian dreaming that, again, goes back to that thinking of Woodrow Wilson and the progressives. So you spend a fair amount of time in the book talking about Vietnam, and I think folks will be interested in that discussion. You know, there's, again, if your knowledge of Vietnam comes from, you know, sort of encounters with pop culture, you could be forgiven for thinking that the 60s and 70s ran something like there was John Kennedy. He was a great guy, great American leader, tragic end. Somehow we got into Vietnam. It's not entirely clear.

And then Nixon, Nixon did Vietnam. He was a bad guy. He was corrupt. And the whole thing was a disaster. Largely as a consequence. I don't, I mean, that's obviously kind of ridiculous, but I don't think it's totally unfair as a characterization of what you would, what you would. take away from pop culture. What's your analysis of Vietnam and how does it fit into your broader argument? So I do spend a lot of time on Vietnam because it's such a turning point

for our country, but especially a turning point for the American left. So starting with Wilson and the progressives, you have this kind of abstract utopian idealism that America can go to war and perhaps redeem our own failed history by fighting for the political, social, economic, well-being of other peoples. As long as we don't defend our own interests, it's fine to fight abroad. But once you've abandoned the moral basis of America, once you've repudiated the American founding, it's a very short slide into repudiating America itself. And that's what you saw with the so-called New Left in the 60s and 70s. They were no longer hostile to American power to defend America's interest. They were hostile to America itself. You know, that's why you had terrorist bombings on college

campuses and military bases and the United States Capitol while you had pampered college students, you know, burning their draft cards and chanting Ho Chi men slogans when they're going to get their draft physicals evading the draft on scales never seen before in American history. And that still continues today, as I explained only this strong, a second strain of liberal foreign policy thinking is isolationism, that there's no set of conditions that are too humiliating not to just surrender. It exists alongside that kind of Wilsonian abstract internationalism. But the story that you outlined in Vietnam,

which is the typical media historian story is very wrong. And there's been a lot of great history written about this in recent years on which I draw in Vietnam. First off on the home front, for many years and well into the Vietnam War, Vietnam was viewed as most other wars in American history had been. People supported it. Some people opposed it. Some people opposed the draft.

They didn't necessarily want to fight. they did their duty, though, and went off to fight. It was not a war fought by miserable conscripts, as the left often portrays, more than two-thirds of all veterans of Vietnam were volunteers, just like my dad was. But the left definitely abandoned Vietnam very early on. And it was a democratic defeat. So you had John F. Kennedy, who basically presided over one failure after another as president, especially in foreign policy, starting with the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961. and then the humiliating Vienna summit, then the Berlin Wall, and then ceding much of Laos, which became the Ho Chi Men Trail.

He felt compelled by 1962 to kind of demonstrate our credibility in Vietnam. He said that explicitly. At what had been a war between the communists in North Vietnam and a pro-American regime in South Vietnam, he turned into an American war not only by seating that key terrain in Laos, but also acquiescing to a coup and then assassination of no-dim-deem, the South Vietnamese leader, who was no one's idea of a liberal Democrat by any means. I mean, he was a strong man. But he had been an effective leader. He had defended the South from the North Vietnamese and Ho Chi Men.

And it was clear that there was no alternative made even more clear by his assassination, because then South Vietnam went through a series of ineffective leaders that cycled in and out. And that really turned the war into an American war. We had very few troops in Vietnam, and they were all there primarily as advisors through Kennedy's assassination. But then LBJ felt compelled to substantially increase our involvement in Vietnam because of the vacuum that knows assassination had caused. And he also, just for political reasons, I think, he was, on the one hand, you know, fixated with not losing South Vietnam the way he viewed troops. being criticized for losing China and almost losing Korea. But he also wanted to appease all of the left-wing peacemicks in his party. Yet he had this progressive mindset that he and his

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamere applied to war fighting, that it was best done by the so-called best and brightest, you know, a bunch of bureaucrats and corporate types in Washington, tinkering with bombing runs and targeting and generally forcing the military to fight with one hand tied behind its back. And that's why. by the time he left office in 1968, the Vietnam War was so far off track, and we had so many people killed by then. But even by 1969, if you look at public opinion polls, the opinion had turned against the war, like it had turned against the war in Iraq. More people said we shouldn't have been in war, or it was a mistake. If you ask them what we should do, though, it was a very traditional

American view, that we should escalate to win. People still thought that in majorities through the end of Nixon's first year. That's basically what we're going to do. Richard Nixon did, as he escalated to win. He took the shackles off our military, started bombing Hanoi, started mining Haifong Harbor, took the offensive to North Vietnam, and forced them to the bargaining table. And as you see so often, when Republicans inherit debacles, like Eisenhower inherited Korea, Nixon inherited Vietnam, Reagan inherited every debacle in the world, Donald Trump inherited a Middle East that was in flames. By the end of Nixon's first term, it was relatively stable. You know, the Paris Peace Accords came about shortly after Nixon's

re-election. And it was generally believed, both here and in Vietnam, that a stable solution had been reached, and we were back down to troop levels that paralleled what we had at the very beginning of the Kennedy administration. And Nixon, you know, helped achieve those peace accords by promising the South, but also threatening the North, that if the North tried to topple the South, that we would be back. happened then, though, was Watergate at home that badly weakened Nixon. Democratic Congresses began to cut off aid, especially after the 74 Watergate landslide. And by the time Nixon resigned and Jerry Ford was president, the Congress cut off all aid. Of course, Joe Biden voted for that as a young senator. And then you had the humiliation of our retreat from the Saigon embassy with helicopters

taking off and Vietnamese people trying to cling to them, which wouldn't be repeated until 50 years later when Joe Biden was president. And you saw a similar, similar humiliation in Kabul. So I want to come up to the present era and to your time in Congress and the Senate. You didn't waste much time becoming prominent on foreign policy issues. And I think the thing that brought you to a lot of people's attention for the first time was your involvement in the Iran issue and a letter you organized to be sent to Ayatollah Khomeini. Tell that story real quick, if you would. And of course, we're recording this here today towards the end of October. there's unrest in the streets across Iran.

There's been unrest in the streets in Iran before, but this one seems to be sticking. So I'm curious to know your views of the road ahead there. Well, I think Iran is a very good case, and I make this case and not only the strong for how Barack Obama, the most ideological president since Woodrow Wilson, viewed the world and how he viewed American-American power. It's common among people on the right to view Obama as inexperienced. He was young. He'd all have been a state senator and a community organizer and good speechmaker, but not up to the job. And they got taken advantage of by the crafty Ayatollahs.

As I explained it only the strong, that is far from the case. People used to ask me at the time, like when I published that letter, it's like, why is he not getting a better deal? When the terrible deal came out, it's like, why didn't he get a better deal? The answer is he didn't want a better deal. He got the exact deal he wanted. He got exactly what he wanted from Iran and the Middle East, which was for America to apologize, to atone for our supposed sins, and to pull in our horns. And it's much clearer to people in retrospect, and I hope that only strong makes it clear if you go back and think about what Barack Obama thinks about Iran. He's very clear, if you read carefully in his speeches and books, that he thinks America is

to blame for the tensions with Iran. He wrote in his second memoir. He wrote in his most recent memoir. He said it in 2007 and eight on the campaign. trail. He said it in his famous Cairo speech in 2009. He said it at the United Nations in 2013 when he revealed his nuclear diplomacy that America was to blame for a coup against a democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953, which is a complete falsehood. He's talking about Mohammed Mossadegh, who was not democratically elected and who himself was in effect attempting a coup against

Iranian customs and constitution when he refused to leave office after the Shah removed him. and it was the Iranian. In particular, it was the clerics in Iran who had risen up against Mossadegh in 1953. Barack Obama also, that colors his view of our relationship with Iran. What also colors his view is that he thinks for the next 25 years, America stood by a brutal strong man in the Shah. Well, yes, we supported the Shah in Iran because the Shah was pro-American. Again, he was no one's idea of a liberal Democrat, but any sensible person knew he was much better than what any viable alternative was. Back in those days, it may have been a Soviet communist stooge.

By 1979, it was radical anti-American Ayatollos. But this is the way Barack Obama views Iran, that we've wronged them, that we needed to make it up to them, that we needed to convince them, that we would be a normal nation, they could become a normal nation, and that would then further enable him to withdraw from the Middle East, to elevate Iran on the one hand and its allies, and in return to undermine the, their adversaries, which say our allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab nations. So, you know, he recently expressed his regret that he did not support the protest movement in 2009 during the so-called Green Revolution. I don't believe that for a moment. I think he's lying to burnish his legacy. Because, again, at the time, many Republicans said Barack Obama was inexperienced and he was caught flat-footed and indecisive. in the summer 2009, Barack Obama was ruthless, as he always was in pursuing his ideological goal, which was to have a grand rapprochement with Ayatollos.

It wasn't just about a nuclear deal to stop their nuclear program. It was about this grand bargain, and he was not going to do anything to upset the apple cart with the Ayatollahs. That's why he let those innocent protesters be slaughtered in the street without a peep. Same thing in 2011 to 2013 with Syria. You know, he withdrew support from Hosni and Babark in Egypt. Mubarak fell. He intervened and topple Muammar Gaddafi, an eccentric dictator, but someone who, by 2011, had become a de facto American ally.

He'd had the exact opposite approach with Assad, where we had much greater interest than we did in Libya. Why? Because Assad was an Iranian client, and again, he was going to do nothing to upset the apple cart with the Ayatollahs. Remember in the summer of 2012, when he got caught on a hot mic telling Dimitri Medvedev that if you'll just give me a Give me until after the election, I'll have a lot more flexibility.

At the same time he was doing that, he was sending Jake Sullivan, who was then an obscure aide and is now the National Security Advisor to Oman to meet secretly with Ayatollahs. What do you want to bet me that Jake Sullivan was telling the Ayatollahs, just give us until after the election. We'll have a little more flexibility. And that's exactly what happened. After the election, the Obama team kept citing the presidential election in Iran as the main reason they could now pursue nuclear diplomacy. but that was the wrong presidential election. They could now pursue this program because of Barack Obama's reelection.

And that's why he gave away the story. That's why the deal is so bad is he never was intent on restraining Iran's nuclear program. He was intent on atoning for America's crimes against Iran and facilitating America's withdrawal from the region. That's a deeply hostile view of America's role there and America's history. There's a longstanding desire. It's not just in the Democratic Party to extricate the United States from the Middle East, broadly speaking, so to include, say, Central Asia and Afghanistan as well, so that we might focus on more pressing strategic concerns, for example, from China and Russia. Something like this presumably was on President Biden's mind when he made the decision to finally pull the trigger on the withdrawal in Afghanistan.

in, what has been the actual consequence of that withdrawal with respect to our interests with Russia and China? Well, I don't want to give Joe Biden more credit than he deserves for being some kind of grand strategic thinker. No one thinks that Joe Biden is that. Joe Biden doesn't even think he's that. Yeah. The fiasco in Afghanistan last year resulted from a toxic combination of Joe Biden's rank incompetence and Joe Biden's deep insecurity. As I discuss, and only the strong, throughout that torturous period in 2009, Barack Obama was trying to decide what to do in Afghanistan because his political and his philosophical leanings clashed so strongly with his chesty, bellicose rhetoric from the 2008 campaign. Joe Biden was a malignant figure in the administration.

Bob Gates writes about this at length, said that Biden subjected Barack Obama to Chinese water torture throughout 2009. I'm not just saying that military leaders like Stan McChrystal or Dave Petraeus were wrong, but that they were rotten. They were lying to the president. They were trying to box him in. They were leaking to the media. They were working with members of Congress to undermine him. In the end, Joe Biden lost that debate. He was really the only person in 2009, he said, we should just cut and run.

And he was bitter about that for 12 years, carried a chip on his shoulder. To include a chip against, on his shoulder about Barack Obama. And once he took office, I think he was determined to show everyone. to include Barack Obama, that he had been right all along, and that he was the president who was going to get this done. And that's why he didn't heed the advice of basically everyone in his administration to include his fellow liberal civilians in the White House and the Department of State say nothing about military leaders in the Department of Defense. And then you get into the rank incompetence of Joe Biden and Tony Blinken in particular at the State Department. The consequences are severe and lasting. You know, Chinese propaganda outlets were already talking about a so-called Afghan effect.

as Kabul was falling. And I certainly don't think it's a coincidence that Vladimir Putin was marshalling troops on Ukraine's border just weeks after we left Afghanistan. When you combine debacle in Afghanistan with Biden's long train of concessions and appeasement towards Putin in 2021 with Putin's longstanding desire to reassemble the key constituent parts of the Russian Empire, most importantly, Ukraine, I think you see that Joe Biden, in effect, enticed or tempted Vladimir Putin to go for the jugular in Ukraine to do what he'd always wanted to do. So just like the Vietnam effect led to a lot of the turmoil and chaos around the world and the Carter presidency, I'm afraid that we're going to be living with the Afghan effect for a while, at least as long as Joe Biden

as president. Final question here, because I want to be respectful of your time. What are American interests when it comes to distant, not especially significant in themselves, that's a premise we could challenge places like Ukraine and Taiwan. And I appreciate, of course, there might be some nuance between the two situations. You know, why should, why should we care? So I lay out in some detail and only the strong how to think about our interests. As we're talking about earlier, you know, as a constitutional Republic, our goals and our ends abroad are the same as they are at home, our safety, our freedom, our prosperity. How does that translate into concrete interests? I lay on a few. First is our home.

I mean, it's been the overriding priority of American national security policies since the founding to prevent attacks on our home, especially in modern times, given the ravages of modern warfare. Our citizens, we have millions of Americans across the world, and they should be able to travel in total safety. As I say in the book, there was a phrase in Roman times, Civis Romanus that would hold a Roman citizen harmless wherever he was. Americans should be able to travel with the same kind of civis, Americana's confidence. Third is our commerce. We are a continental nation in the new world, far removed from the rest of the world, so we depend heavily on trade. That's why, you know, as Walter Russell Mead has said, one of the quickest ways to

get into war with America is to impede our movements across the seas or through the skies and our open trade. Today that means a little bit more as well, the movement of data and information across cables and satellites, that kind of thing. And then finally our friends. Again, as a continental nation in the new world, we rely on a network of friends and allies and partners around the world to ensure that there cannot be a nation or a coalition of nations that assemble the old world's population, key terrain, and resources to use against us. I mean, I think it's important note. I mean, just look at it.

I mean, seven-eighths of the world's population is in the old world. Most of the key terrain and much of the world's resources are there as well. And whether it was the British Empire in the 19th century, Germany, and its allies in World War I, Germany, Italy, Japan, World War II, Soviet Russia, throughout the Cold War, now communist China, those are all the same kind of threat. Countries or coalitions of nations that might assemble all the vast resources, terrain, people of the old world, to be able to call the shots, to run the show in the world against America's interests, as Bill Rood would put it. And that's why he said that we manned the distant ramparts. Given the nature of modern military and communications technology, we need to have a forward presence in large part to protect our

home. Whereas I heard sometimes in the Army, our main defense strategy is to play away games. You know, we want to be able to keep the ravages of war far away from our own shores while protecting our other interests, especially our economic interest around the world. That's why when you look at our troop presences around the world, they tend to be on what Belroo drawing on the work of Harold McKinder and Nicholas Spikman said was the Rimland, the littoral regions of Eurasia, so Great Britain, Spain. Italy, Bahrain, Qatar, Japan, South Korea. We don't have a large troop presence is in the middle of Central Asia or in Africa or South America because they have less geostrategic significance to us

and that it's better to have that network of friendly allies, partners, and small troop deployments around the world to keep the peace abroad so we don't have a war of visitors here on our shores. that's always been the core of American national security strategy. Again, circumstances have changed a lot, especially technological circumstances since the founding, but the principles remain the same. Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, author of Only the Strong, Reversing the Left's plot to Sabotage American Power. And full disclosure for our listeners, I served on Senator Cotton's staff in the Senate for a few years. It's a pleasure. Thanks for making the time, and it's great to speak with you. Yeah, thanks for having me.

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