School of War - Ep 92: Cliff May on Defending Democracies

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Cliff May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, joins the show to talk about the neo-imperialism of America’s adversaries and what defending democracy requires. ▪️ Times      •    02:22 Introduction      •    02:39 Taking on Jon Stewart     •    06:50 Starting in the Soviet Union     •    12:26 Policy activism     •   20:11 Foundation for Defense of Democracies      •    26:31 Ending tyranny     •    34:53 The people have to want it     •    41:05 Are we misleading ourselves?     •   43:23 Cracks in the Axis of Tyrannies       •    47:26 Chinese imperialism     •    52:35 Understanding ourselves abroad Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack  

My guest today, Cliff May, is the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where I'm a senior fellow. It's significant that it's democracies, plural. The implication being that the defense of specific democracies, especially ours, is a different matter than the abstract defense of the concept. We get into that issue as we discuss Cliff's incredible career as a journalist and policy activist, talking about the ways in which the idea of democracy should and shouldn't matter in our strategy for the world. this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay-on. 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. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel for

free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today by Cliff May, who is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Also, my boss, so thanks, Cliff for coming on the show here. I hope I do okay. And I'm looking at your bio here, and I have to say, I'm just going to name some highlights here as I go through. Foreign correspondent and editor at the New York Times, amongst other publications served all over the world in that capacity. You were a commissioner on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, served on the Iraq Study Group,

served on the bipartisan advisory committee on democracy promotion, which is something we'll get to later. You were a communications director for the Republican National Committee back when the Republican Party used to win elections in 2000, which I think was a good year for the Republican Party. On top of all of this, you are also in a very elect group, possibly the only member. I've not done the research on this,

conservatives who have gone toe to toe with John Stewart at the Daily Show in his prime, not 2023 kind of preachy, annoying John Stewart, but, you know, 2005-ish, really funny, really dangerous John Stewart and not only live to tell the tale, but I actually think got the better of him. So Cliff May, thank you for joining the show. Thanks, Aaron. I love the program, and I'm glad to be with you. What was it like being? I realized that we are some 20 years after the fact here, But may as well start with something fun. What was it like defeating John Stewart in battle? I don't see it as defeating.

First of all, I would say it was very, very scary. I mean, I had done many interviews from people like Bill O'Reilly and all kinds, but I knew this would be different. And people I went for advice said, this will be different because he has a weapon you do not have in this combat. He has humor. And you do not. And don't think you do. You may think you're a funny guy, but don't try to be funny.

you'll get beaten. And it was actually, I got to just, full disclosure, was Bill Crystal who told me that. He said, he's going to do this, but be very careful. And of course, I broke the rule. And how did I break the rule? So the subject was enhanced interrogations, torture, that sort of thing. And John Stewart is introducing it. He's talking about waterboarding. He's talking about sleep deprivation. He's talking about lights and loud music. And he's going on about whether it's torture, where there's, and he pauses at one point, and I couldn't help myself, I just leaned it and I said, excuse me, but how are you going to make this funny? And the studio audience broke up and he broke up and actually it broke the ice and it really helped us for the remainder of the conversation.

And what I have to say in his favor is he wasn't just reading off questions or talking points, even though he disagreed with me on the subject. He showed genuine intellectual curiosity. But here's the other part of it. At one point, I got a little bit aggressive, and I said, John, if you think that spritsing water up the nostrils of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, if you think that's torture and you think we're war criminals for doing that, then I guess you think, I don't know, that President Truman is a war criminal after all because he dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And he said, yeah, I do. That's exactly right. I do. I said, okay, okay. And when the camera stopped and he leaned over to me and he said, I cannot believe you just got me to call Truman a war criminal. Two nights later, he came back on the show and he said, look, I had a very lively discussion with Cliff May from the Foundation for Depends of Democracy's a couple of days ago. You may have heard it, may have not. You can watch it on a website. But at one point, I said, I thought President Truman was a war criminal. I've given that.

some thought, and actually I don't think that's true. I wanted to just create, but he never said why. He never expressed the logic that says, colleague Sheikh Mohammed, who was alive and well today, he gained weight in Guantanamo, that somehow we are war criminals for what we did to him, but not, but Prudu Truman isn't. It's a hard question, enhanced interrogations, torture, all that stuff, and we won't go into it today, I hope. It wasn't our, it wasn't our subject that we were going to talk about. I just remember another throwback to the aughts, the Vanity Fair article where Christopher Hitchens allowed himself to be waterboarded. Another classic of the period and classic I know, it's my contention that if you can be waterboarded, go back home, pour yourself a

scotch, light a cigarette, and write a piece for Vanity Fair, you haven't been tortured. It's a bit off the wall here, but since you raised Harry Truman, have you seen Oppenheimer? I haven't yet seen. I haven't seen Oppenheimer. I haven't even seen Barbie. I haven't seen any of the idea. Gary Oldman does, in my opinion, he's been a little criticized for it in some quarters. I think he does a fantastic job as Truman. When they replay the famous Oppenheimer Truman interview, I think more or less line by line as it actually happened. He has a great, there's a great Gary Oldman moment where he switches from back-slapping politician to more or less unmasked contempt for Oppenheimer's, in his opinion, misplaced moral angst. Wonderful actor, Gary Oldman, one of my favorites.

So to business, to what we are here to discuss, we are here to discuss your career and how it led to FDD. And then this question, I mean, it is the foundation for defense of democracies, this question of the role that thinking about democracy or thinking about regime type ought to play and foreign policy. But let's take it back to the start. I mean, you've spent a lot of your career thinking about, well, non-democracies, tyrannies. You have another fun fact from your biography. You have a certificate in Russian language and literature. from Leningrad State University. So maybe let's start there.

How did you start as a Russianist? You know, to be quite honest, I was a teenager and about to go to college at age of 18. We're living in New York City. To be really honest, my parents said, you know, we know you. You're going to get in trouble if you stay in New York City this summer because you always do with your hippie and beatnik friends and whatnot. We'll send you somewhere. Where do you want to go?

what, you find some program, something educational to do. And the college that I was going to had a program actually just for the summer in the Soviet Union. And I mentioned that. And they said, yeah, do that. Go ahead and do that. Get out of here for the summer. And I went and I was, I hadn't spent much time in any foreign country. The Soviet Union was so very foreign. I found it fascinating. I kind of walked around the whole time with a bilingual dictionary and worked hard on my Russian, and I was just fascinated. When I got into college, the next thing you know, I was a Russian major. They skipped me from into second year language courses. I started taking history courses. Long story, a little shorter. I ended up after when I graduated, going to the Russian Institute

and the School of International Affairs at Columbia, partly because I had met Marshall Schulman, who was kind of a legendary professor there, that I'd met him at a party in Russia. And in those days, because it was very hard for people studying Russian or studying Russia to spend much time in the Soviet Union, all these guys could read Russian and hear it, they couldn't speak it very well, and I was kind of jabbering in it. So Marshall Schulman said, hey, come to Columbia and you'll get in. So I did that. And while I was there, I thought, what am I going to do? I didn't really have the attention span, I thought, for a doctorate. I didn't think I'd have the personality for foreign in service, I thought maybe journalism. And I started taking courses of the journalism school

and eventually ended up, I took a master's degree in international affairs and a master's degree in journalism. Journalism, I thought, would mean people would, well, it was two things. I think it interested me about journalism. And back in those days, I thought journalists were kind of a fraternity dedicated to truth seeking and truth-veilling. I have to say, I don't think it's much of that anymore. There's some, but not so much we can talk about what's gone wrong with journalism. And the other thing was simply I wanted somebody to pay to send me to interesting places and great foreign adventures and that sort of thing. And journalism seemed like the way. And people said, well, yeah, but you can't expect to be like

necessarily a foreign correspondent. You may find yourself, you know, reporting on the cops in New Orleans or Kansas City. And I said, well, I'll take the risk. And that's what I ended up doing. And again, eventually I did find my way to the New York Times as foreign correspondent. And had some wonderful years that kind of, I think of the kind of the end of the golden era of foreign correspondence, when once you were sent off to a place like Africa as I was, you weren't in touch very much. You were, you were a big shot over there. And it was an adventure. And there was sort of, first of it was well funded, right? You're all the implications. Yeah, you could write checks and you could be very creative. Let me say it this way, I can't get any trouble anymore. One could be,

and some journalists were very famous for the creativity of their expense accounts. I'm not saying I did anything wrong. I'm just saying I didn't quibble. Here's a question. So, I mean, I'm familiar with foreign correspondency mostly through the writings of Eulen Waugh. And of course, in the British conception of it,

then as I think to an extent now, there's a certain lack of self-seriousness and extraordinary cynicism. There's a wonderful moment in Scoop. One of my favorite, ever, ever, scoop. A wonderful book. It's very funny. Go ahead.

I think it's in scoop, right, where the garden correspondent of the times is accidentally sent as the war correspondent to some obscure civil war in Africa. And is it in scooper? Am I maybe? I think that's where there's a telegram. Some correspondent from another newspaper gets shot and there's a telegrams sent to the reporter, you know, reporter from, you know, reporter from, you know, Harold Tribune or whatever shot. Why you not shot? I may be conflating things here. But all of that speaks to the spirit of the British enterprise of foreign correspondency.

But I assume that the New York Times, there was a greater air of, we are here to tell the story of the world, a sort of justified seriousness. Perhaps. Maybe not. Maybe not. It's hard to say. Look, I think Scoop is, I mean, I recommend it to any of your listeners who haven't because it's such a classic boot from the beast. If you remember, the correspondent. Not Max Boot, by the way, we're talking about here, but someone else.

No, listen, we took as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, I took my, I took my job seriously, I took myself seriously. And it was, you know, it was interesting, it was interesting work. I would say in Africa, it was often very difficult work. It was hard to get around. It was hard to get interviews, even though people, they were very careful what they would say to you. It comes time it's hard to get your stories out. I mean, I learned how to use a telex machine and cut a tape and spring it through from, you know, bush stations while I'm swatting mosquitoes. but I enjoyed the adventure of it.

So let's fast forward a bit to the turn of the century and the period leading up to 9-11. I want to talk about FDD, which of course today, where I have the honor of being a fellow in which today is, you know, it's a significant player in Washington, D.C. It has a real voice and real impact. Taking it back to its founding, what made you, I mean, it's worked out, but what made you look at the landscape of Washington, D.C. and think, you know what we need, we need another think tank. That's what Washington, D.C. needs. It wasn't my idea. What happened was I had a visit, and it was, oddly enough, it was about a week before the attacks of 9-11. And that visit was from Jack Kemp and Jean Kirkpatrick. You know who those people are. I find our young interns often don't very quickly. Jean Kirkpatrick was ambassador,

first woman who was ambassador to the United Nations, a lifelong Democrat who went to work for Ronald Reagan. famously. And the other person was Jack Kemp, who I had covered when he was running for president, running for president in the primaries against Bush, flying around the country with him. He was a congress. He was a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. He was a congressman. He later became secretary of HUD. He ran with Bob Dole, and I'm the number two slot on the presidential ticket as vice. I knew the two of them from my journalistic career at the New York Times. They came to see me one day. I was actually working for some kind of fancy consulting firm. And basically what they said is, look, we think the United States is taking a holiday from history. We think

the United States is taking a peace dividend prematurely. People think that Berlin Wall fell. We have no enemies. Is that so? What happened to us in Lebanon in 1983? What happened to us in New York in 1993? What happened to us at Cobar Towers in 1996? How come two of our embassies got bombed in Africa in 1998. How come the USS Cole got attacked by a suicide bomber in 2000? I said, we can go on about this. Well, what we want to know, and we're asking you as a consultant and a researcher at this point, Cliff, is anybody seriously focusing and connecting the dots among these things and saying, oh, you know what? The United States has some serious enemies, some serious adversaries. There are ideologies, regimes, individuals, groups that are

justifying and promoting and sponsoring terrorism, and it could get pretty bad. You know, let's let's, don't we need to look at this? Look at what's going on with Israel. People, I'm worried not just about the terrorism, but how people justify it. Oh, they have grievances. They have legitimate grievances. Well, legitimate grievances or whatever grievances do not give you license or should not to murder other people's children.

So they said, go look and I said, wow, a fascinating research subject. I'll get back to you. tried to begin to do that. 9-11 happens. I meet with them again. I say, this is what you feared and anticipated, isn't it? And they said, precisely so. What have you found? And I said, actually, I think this subject is being avoided. Because it has religious dimensions, which no one wants to talk about.

I don't see think tanks looking at it. I don't think universities are for sure. I don't think the media wants to know about this particularly. I would say it's not being done. So they said, your second assignment, come up with a long memo to us, and what kind of organization would study these subjects, educate Congress, educate administrations and agencies, educate the public through the media,

whatever it is, give us an outline, give us a blueprint. And I came up with a concept and a name and a mission statement and a business plan. I said, take a look at this. They read it. They came back to me. They said, yeah, this is pretty much what we had in mind. We think this is a good idea. I said, well, I'm glad I could be helpful.

You let me know if you need me. again, I love you guys. He said, no, no, sit down. After what happened in 9-11 a few days ago, we're not going to spend six months doing a search. You got this blueprint. Why don't you build it? Why don't you quit your job and do it? And there were a couple of reasons why I did most simply, and I didn't decide to write away, but I did it pretty quickly. It was one, I knew I was going to be obsessed with this anyhow, so I might as well be obsessed during the day, not just nights and weekends. A second reason was I knew two people killed the 9-11, one in New York and one in Washington, close friends. And the third was, as a young correspondent in 1979, I had been assigned to cover

the revolution in Iran. And it had been running through my head ever since, and I think this is true, that that revolution, which is not an Iranian revolution, but an Islamic revolution, that was the beginning of the age of sacred terror. Yes, that revolution was Shia and Persian, but it galvanized the Sunni Arab world who essentially said, this is a humiliation. Here's the first modern nation state, the Islamic Republic of Iran, dedicated, committed to a jihad against the West. And it is Shia and it's Persian. Where is ours? Where's the Arab Sunni version? And their view was at that point, It's supposed to be the Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi royals are having too good a time shopping in Paris, skiing in Stade, and drinking whiskey with their infidel buddies in Washington.

And I would argue that from that seed, Al-Qaeda sprouted. And with this in mind, I thought, okay, I want to do this. I have a reason for asking this question, which is that I've been teaching for a while. I teach most summers these days, and I'm used to students who don't really remember 9-11, but I've just crossed the line in the last few years where I have students who were not alive on 9-11, which is a whole other, it's also like a memento mori for me personally,

which I know you understand. Do you feel comfortable talking about your two friends who died on 9-11? I just think it's worth talking about it. It's worth talking about the day because people don't, I mean, the young people don't know about it. Yeah, I mean, Barbara Olson,

who died on the plane in Washington was fairly well-known character as, I can't see, he's my best friend, but she was certainly a friend and acquaintances. I'd run into her in the green room in those days. Anybody was on TV, met a Zagicabat in the green room. I'd seen her just a few days before.

The person who died in New York was somebody who had been a girlfriend of mine for a long time. We actually lived together for a time in Africa. And she was just, her office happened to be in the World Trade Center. And she was somebody who would listen to the announcement saying, don't leave your offices, where we'll come get you. and she was a very good girl, and she didn't. And when it collapsed, that was it. That was it. And so on a personal basis, it hit me that those two people had died.

It wasn't a statistic at that point. Yeah. I don't know anybody who died on 9-11. My dad had recently, at that point, been laid to rest in Arlington. And I always took it personally. He's also in the part of the cemetery that's basically adjacent to the Pentagon and to the part of the Pentagon that got hit. And I've always taken it personally, the proximity of the explosion, which is not quite the same thing. He fought in which wars?

World War II in Vietnam. I was a late arrival in his life. I'm not that old for listeners who can't seem. He didn't fight in Korea, but he fought in Vietnam. No, no, he missed. He served in Korea at various points in his career, but he missed the war there. As somebody who just, I actually just spent quite a while in the past year looking into the Korean War in some level of detail. Actually, interesting in retrospect, what a limited portion of American power was actually in Korea,

because, of course, we were waiting for the big one, the balloon to go up in Europe. So Korea was always a limited enterprise for the U.S. military. Though his division from World War II, the Third Infantry Division, does end up in Korea at some point. All right. So it's FDD. Here's my next question. And this starts to get into the substance of what I wanted to talk with you about today. It's the foundation for defense of democracies.

Talk about that. It sounds like it's like an unusual turn of phrase at first when you hear it. Why is this the specific phrase? The conception I had is that the democratic societies of the world were, and indeed are, perhaps even more so today, under attack and under threat. So we're not trying to define democracy or talk about how much power the Supreme Court should have versus the legislature versus the – that's not about it. It's about democratic societies and the threats they face from jihadism. But I would say today from very much from the Communist Party of China, from the neo-imperialists of Russia, and all their allies, whether it's North Korea or Venezuela or Cuba, that's what we were talking about. What we used to call the free world, and we used to use that phrase without any embarrassment.

And now it sounds, I don't know, difficult or quaint. I still use it, but most people do not. But I think it's important that the free world endure. And that's what we're talking about. It's lovely, and this is, I think, part of what you want to discuss today, if the free world expands. But that's not the essential mission. The essential mission is the preservation of free and democratic societies, free societies in particular, if that is clear. So there's any number of ways into this. I guess where I'll start is, as you are well aware, there's all sorts of people who would take the point you just made and say that you are

racing headlong into danger in the way that you are thinking and speaking about foreign affairs, that fine, we have a way of life that we like. Surely other people have ways of life that they like, but when it comes down to it, all countries basically act the same. They all kind of want to secure their ways of life. They all want some level of power and prosperity. They don't want to be threatened. They want to feel like the boss to the extent that's possible given their economies and situations. And so if we get all tied up in our heads about preferring one kind of country to another kind of country amongst our partners, we're just going to get muddle headed. We're going to get muddle headed and we're going to make mistakes. This is a line of thought that you encounter on the right.

In some ways you can encounter on the left, though it's a little bit more complicated there, sometimes goes by the name realism in various versions. You set up FDD in a way in direct opposition to this way of thing, or at least so it seems. Yeah, I mean, two things on that. One is it's defensive. I mean, you can take that of you, and I'll still say that the free societies of the world want to endure and not be overcome by unfree empires. And that's our genuine threat. So just preserving our way of life in America, maybe in Europe, in other places, absolutely. The idea that it's pretty clear that the people of Ukraine do not want to be dominated from the Kremlin. I think that's hardly an arguable point. and we've been giving them some help as they try to defend their nation and their independence and the freedoms that they've enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's pretty clear. I think it's pretty clear that most people, not all, in Hong Kong, do not welcome the fact that Beijing has decided, yeah, we had a treaty obligation to have one country, two systems, and we're going to allow

the people of Hong Kong to continue to have the freedoms they got used to under British colonialism, and they've said, no, actually, you don't have. It's pretty clear that people of Hong Kong are not happy with that. I think it's also, I think, pretty clear that Lebanon is not in particularly good shape as Hezbollah has arisen as the dominant power there. The country is poor. People are less free. They're in danger if they speak against Hezbollah.

That's, you know, pretty obvious. I don't think Syria, which is where Bashar al-Assad has been propped up by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia together, more than 500,000 Arabs have been killed there by the Assad regime and his accomplices. Well, certainly those people, or the five or more million who have been displaced, I don't think they believe that, oh, we have a way of life here that is just as good as anybody else's. I doubt that doesn't get a whole lot of reporting, but this mess with an old reporter,

I know how dangerous it is to go into a place like Syria and attempt to report. So people don't. They'd rather have dinner in Tel Aviv and, you know, report on things that are going on in West Bank and maybe occasionally Gaza where they have a Hamas link fixer. So that's why I reject that so-called realist view that everybody is doing exactly what they want to do. It's not, and democracy is not an easy system to create or to maintain. But I think most people, not everybody would like a little bit of freedom to say what they want and not have a knock on the door at 3 o'clock in the morning, maybe to worship as they want and not be told not to, you know, not to be a slave or a servant of anybody else. I don't think that's, I don't think that's an odd or eccentric idea or idealistic either.

The way you lay it out seems very reasonable. And just to go back to the name of FDD, the Foundation for Defensive Democracies is a kind of moderate sort of expression. It's limited, right, in the ambition that it implies as opposed to the Foundation for Defensive Democracy, which would seem to imply a much bolder scheme. That all said, we both lived through the 2000 aughts that you served on this commission about democracy promotion. I will say for myself, I've gone through my own evolution on these things. I cracked this joke about Christopher Hitchens earlier in our conversation. Christopher Hitchens read the warrant at my commissioning in the Marine Court. He drove down to Quantico to read the warrant.

I remember mostly being just surprised that he drove. I just didn't picture him driving a car, but he did. And so I was all in. I was circa 2007. I was all in on the freedom agenda. And my views have changed. My views have evolved. Talk about your own thinking during those years and this notion that sort of swept Washington

from the president on down that we were going to promote democracy. And I mean, I'll say it because the president said it. We're going to end tyranny. We're going to end tyranny in our time. And tyranny always seemed to me to be overly ambitious, a goal. But like you, I have had an evolution and in the same direction that you have. And I particularly remember the most fraught moment when I was on this commission on democracy promotion reporting to Condi Rice. was when she was, the U.S. government was pushing for elections in Gaza and the West Bank.

And I kind of took a dissenting view. There may have been some others who did, but I don't recall, but I certainly did, saying, look, elections alone do not a democracy make. You need to establish certain freedoms first. If you cannot in Gaza, get up on a soapbox and say, vote for me, and I'll end the war with Israel and your children will live better, then you're not ready. And if the person on that soapbox knows he will not survive 24 hours, having said that, then you're not ready to hold elections. That elections comes after the establishment of some basic fundamental freedoms, not afterwards. And on this, Condi Rice disagreed with me.

She said, look, you've got to start somewhere, and this is where we're starting. I do think in retrospect, we kind of know the answer to that because this was, you know, one man, one vote, one time the election did put Hamas into power. I don't question that. But Hamas has never decided going back to the people and said, you still want us to rule. Mahmoud Abbas is, I think, in the 18th year of a four-year term over on the West Bank. He just has not gone back to the people on that. And so I think establishing, before you establish voting, you want to establishes, you want to establish. some basic freedoms. And I would still say, and this is where I'm not as, maybe wouldn't say,

Neo-Konish as I used to be, or you want to establish some basic freedoms and then move from there. I mean, I think it would be good in a country that is authoritarian. It was freedom of speech, freedom of religion, some freedom of the press, and then maybe elections for mayor in various places, local elections. And then you build up over time because I think it is difficult not to vote in a purely tribal way. And look, I think democracy is proving in some ways that are difficult to maintain in this country. Both parties are saying, and maybe with some reason, our democracy is threatened. Well, you know, it shouldn't be. We should be able to have a robust debate over a lot of issues, but we're having, you know, I'm not, I don't mean to be, I'm not pessimistic, but we're having some

difficulties right now, it seems to me. You know, you talk about Rice's support for Palestinian elections. It struck me, as you said that, that somewhat ironically, given all the criticism that Barack Obama leveled at George W. Bush in his administration, you get even richer examples in the Obama administration of what he wouldn't have called a democracy promotion, but of support for democracy as an aim of foreign policy that just goes horribly awry. The Arab Spring, of course, is what I'm thinking of. And you have Egypt. I don't know if you agree with this, actually. I agree. He seems like a shining example, support for Morsi in Egypt as a shining example of support for Morsi in Egypt as a shining example of. of this kind of thinking that just so swiftly,

and frankly, at that point, so predictably, goes off the rails. So one thing I would say is, yes, I was always skeptical of the Arab Spring. Others were maybe more so. I mean, I was hopeful, but I was skeptical. And yes, in terms of the election in Egypt that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, I did think it was, first of all, you were going to see at the very best, you were going to see serious majoritarianism. And there are quite a few people, some I know and admire

who are unconcerned about majoritarianism in these countries. And I would argue that if you don't have minority rights, rights for minorities, whether it's political minorities, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, this is not a democratic system. And the Muslim Brotherhood had no intention of saying, oh, yes, we have to have some checks and balances, separation of powers, populations and make sure we have a free and fair elections in the future. You know, the place that

that was most, where we were most encouraged about the possibility of that, if you remember, has been to the Tunisia. And now that's disappeared too, unfortunately. So yes, majoritarianism to me is not synonymous with democracy. And that's hard for some people to grasp. And when we talk about democracy, we don't mean democracy. In this country, we don't of democracy, we have a Republican form of government, which, and that's what, and the founders, as you know, very well, spent a lot of time thinking about how to avoid the tyranny of the majority, how to avoid pure democracy. That's not of all what they wanted. That's why members of the House are elected for two years and senators for six years and presidents for four years. And we have

an interesting way of putting Supreme Court justices into power where it involves the executive and legislative branch, right? And then they have lifetime tenure. And you see there are those who are opposed to that, too, because I don't like the configuration of the current Supreme Court. It's more complex. I wish people, I wish young people, I hope the young people you're talking to are spending more time learning about the structure of this government, how brilliant it was and why it needs to be preserved and not wiped out saying, oh, we don't need an electoral college, we just need a majority vote, and a lot of people in California can overcome those in Wisconsin, Montana, because who are they? And that's not, that's not the democracy as we mean

it. It seems to me that one of the recurring problems when we get optimistic about democracy flourishing and otherwise unpromising soil is that our foreign policy elites, I mean, our diplomats, our, our, you know, our foundation officials, you know, a certain kind of politician that the people who are influential in these kinds of conversations, think tank scholars, they tend to befriend elites in these other countries, Egyptian elites, you know, Afghan elites would have you. And these foreign elites are often, you know, as fluent in English as they are in their native languages. They're extremely well educated. They are much wealthier on average than the average citizen of their country. And unsurprisingly, they have, on average, much more affection for the mores and worldviews of the

Westerners whom they've encountered in, you know, graduate school or in business or wherever. And so there be, there sets in amongst American policy elites this belief that, well, you know, when, when the moment comes and, you know, the younger ones among their friends are in Tucker Square demonstrating against, you know, an admittedly authoritarian regime, well, you know, every Egyptian I know thinks that Mubarak's a bad guy and they want a better life. And, you know, they, why, why shouldn't, why shouldn't they have it? it seems like a reasonable and good thing. And then the election is held and it's the brotherhood that's elected, of course.

And this is, I mean, you covered the Iranian revolution. I mean, the pattern is alarmingly similar. But, you know, my own evolution on this question, you know, came because of Afghanistan because the deployment I spent in southern Afghanistan, far from Kabul, far from where you encounter these elites. There were no, I mean, the local elites where I was had a different worldview. And I was, you know, my conversion from Hitchensism, which I had been a follower of up to that point, you know, came at the hands of some very rough encounters and a rough education on the streets

of Helman province where, you know, I'd imagine that we would remove the Taliban boot from the neck of the oppressed Afghan farmer who would rise up and want the things that all, you know, all humans naturally want, the franchise, the vote, you know, free markets, et cetera. And I discovered that this was just not the situation. This was just not the case. The, the politics in that part of the world were savage and complicated. They all revolved around the drug trade. The Alabama, one factor among many. The representatives of the Kabul government were a bunch of mediocrities at best, gangsters occasionally, who certainly did not seem like the best option to the locals for how to run their community. And by the way, nobody can read, slightly overstated,

but not much. I mean, male literacy was in the low double digits, female literacy was zero, which when you think about it, it's hard to make a democracy work when the sovereign is illiterate. And let me add a couple of things here. One is, meanwhile, I mean, I remember going back to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union to meet with, at least journalists who were looking forward to an era of freedom and where they could. We had freedom of the press and all of that. And this is a very, Russia, whatever else, it is a very literate country. People are, a lot of smart, well-educated people there. And I have to say, I was hopeful, but certainly dubious. And I kind of insulted my Russian guest.

on a number of occasions because I pointed out, for example, I pointed out how difficult this was going to be to transition from communism to capitalism. I said, look, it's sort of like there are no recipes that you can find that tell you how to make eggs out of bomblets. I can tell you loads of books in your libraries and at Columbia where I went to graduate school explaining the transition from capitalism to communism, show me the books that show you to tell you how to go in the other direction. I said, this is going to be challenging for you, and they didn't like that. They thought they were absolutely up to the task. And, of course, they weren't. Of course, you just had a coup in Niger, which had been one of the few fairly democratic and successful places in Africa.

But let me broaden this just for one second. I know because I want your views on this. I think that, and this is important to reflect on it because I don't think we have. after World War II, the whole idea was we America, we're not going to be imperialists, we're going to be hegemones to an extent, but we're going to have, we're going to establish an international community, a United Nations. I was recently reading something, don't ask me why, by Eleanor Roosevelt about this, and the idea that we're going to have a universal, not even global, universal declaration

of human rights, we would all agree on certain basic principles and values. And when I was a commission on the U.S. Commission International Religious Freedom, the conceit was we were going to go to these countries and say, you know, we all agree on religious freedom, right? So let's talk about how we accomplish it here. And the fact of the matter is we're talking about enlightenment values, are we not, that we thought had become universal. But that was kind of wishful thinking. And if you look at what's going on right now, and there's a column that your friend and mine, the great professor and scholar Walter Newell wrote about what we call the actions of tyrannies. You've got three countries that are very, very closely aligned. I think Walter and I saw this

earlier than some. Not everybody admits this yet, and that's Russia, Communist China. I mean, here is Neo-Imperialist Russia, communist China, and Islamist Nuran. And they're closely aligned now, working together in all kinds of ways. We've had naval exercises by the Chinese and Russians off Alaska, we have Shahid missile drones going to Russia to kill Ukrainians. We can go on on this. The point is that none of these three countries believe in enlightenment values. None of them. And the point is that when we talk and our diplomats talk about, well, the international community believes, no, the international, first of all, there is no international community. The values in Burma, the values in Nigeria, the values in Russia, the values in China.

We share very few values necessarily. We want to. that we wanted that to happen. But I don't think it has, and if it hasn't, we need to rethink what we call the world order. And this is complicated too, because the last thing of fish is likely to be aware of is water. The last thing we're likely to be aware of is the global order in which we live. But the Chinese Communist Party, the Russian neo-imperialists and the Islamists of Iran, they are intent on changing it and controlling it. And they make a good case. They say, we need multipolarity.

That's what we need. Multipolarity. And that means an end to enlightenment values. And it also means this. We believe, as part of this, in the idea of self-determination, a people, a nation. They should be able to decide for themselves and be independent, not dominated by an empire. Chinese Communist Party does not believe that. Putin does not believe that.

Ali Khamini and Iran does not believe that. They all want to dominate other countries. They don't believe in the concept of self-determination. They don't believe in the idea of the nation state, which is a European idea, basically. Is it not? I mean, it's not a, it is. And so if these ideas are not just being questioned but being attacked, we have to think about what's going to replace it and what that means if this is replaced for our children and

grandchildren, what kind of world they will live in if the world order is transformed in in the ways I'm just beginning to have it. Well, let me, let me put a challenge to you for that line of argument. And I recommend this piece to listeners. It's a great piece that you wrote with Waller Newell in the Washington Times. Waller's been on the program before, by the way. We talked about Vladimir Putin. That's where I've heard of.

Brand of tyranny. Okay, fine. You have these three countries, a bunch of bad guys. Lots of bad guys in the world. But these guys are pretty bad. Fine. And what unites them? Well, they don't like us.

They don't like America and what America represents. And that does seem to be a factor. in their decision making, and it does to seem to be to some extent a kind of binding agent among them. But that very observation sort of suggests that we have some agency in this. There's something that we, America, are doing that is offensive to them. So that's, you know, challenge one is, is there something about American behavior that ought to be amended that could make the situation maybe a little bit less perilous for us all? And two, aren't you and Waller-Nuel kind of overstating the case a bit here. By your own admission, you have Russian imperialists,

which is a very grand way of describing Vladimir Putin's thuggishness. You have a bunch of, you know, Maoists of a kind, Maoists who have gone corporate in China and are trying to work out the tensions and that. And then you have, you know, Shia theocrats, you know, waiting for, waiting for their own millenarian dreams to come true. There have got to be some fissures and lines of tension here that are exploitable. And don't we sort of mislead ourselves by thinking of them all, as a unit. What are your responses to these? So, yeah, very good. First, I sort of reject the, we have,

there's a sort of narcissism. It's not what you call an agency in this regard, I consider it to be narcissism. Oh, this is all about us. We're doing things to offend them. We're, you know, we're in their hair. If we just get out of their neighborhood, they like us again.

It's, it's all our fault. Whatever it is, it's America's full. Blame America first. I don't think that's true. You know, if you go back over history, did Jenghis Khan come across the steps into Europe because he had grievances against the, you know, the peoples of Poland? I mean, I don't think so. It's actually the most natural thing in the world, most natural, to say, I want to conquer my neighbor.

Right? I mean, just in a Darwinian sense, if you're a small little nation state and you don't want to conquer your neighbors and you're surrounded by other nation states, and we'll call them nation states, even though that's not really polities. And they say, well, we do. Guess who's likely to survive at the end of the day? Those who conquer, those who march, those who loot. And before you had the Industrial Revolution, the way to amass wealth was looting and taking over others and taxing the farmers.

And maybe if some empire said, hey, we'll protect you. We just need 10% of your crop. Others would say we need 60% and, you know, suck it up. But that was a natural way. What's unnatural is for the U.S., for example, at the end of World War II, to say, you know, we're going to have something we're going to call international laws. We didn't invent that. It goes back, I know, to Grosius in the 17th century. But we're going to obey those laws and you're going to obey those laws and we're going to have a win-win approach to things and we're going to utilize diplomacy.

We don't need to have armed combat. We were trying really a great experiment within history. and we should recognize the ways in which it hasn't come to pass so we think about what to do about it. Now, the second part of your question, just remind me is what that, I think I forgot. That they have fundamentally different worldviews and goals, and it's hard to imagine. Okay, so, yes, right. And so, okay, and so right now, this axis of tyrannies, you're right, they are different, but they have something in common, which is this world of multipolarity and to take

over, those are their neighbors they want to take over. And so you can imagine a world in 24, 50 or 100 years where Asia is dominated entirely by the Communist Party of China. Russia dominates Eastern Europe again, and the Middle East is dominated by L.A. Committee. And yes, at a certain point, they may come into conflict with one another. I think they understand that. I think Xi Jinping thinks, is it good for me or bad if Kazakhstan is taken over by Putin, say, after he succeeds or doesn't succeed in Ukraine. Do I want that or do I want to let him have that for now? There's plenty of Asia that I might want to move populations into that has where you have vast resources and not much population. Why should Putin have a city called Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan?

By the way, Vladivostok ruler of the East. That's what that actually means. Right? And I think Xi Jinping, but I think it's not on Xi Jinping's immediate to-do list. He's smart and strategic enough to know that's a problem for later. Right now, Taiwan is my problem. And I want to succeed on that. Russia thinks my problem for my, if I'm going to have an empire or Putin, thinks I need Ukraine. Al-Aqamani and Iran thinks I've got now Syria. I've got Lebanon. I'd like to have Iraq. I almost do, but I can't. I want to have Yemen. I don't like the same. I don't like the Saudis, but the Chinese are asking me to go easy on them so I can turn more of my attention to Israel, and the main thing is that I get nuclear weapons, so I'm a big player along with Russia and

China. So, yes, they have different interests. But, you know, we had different interests than the Soviet Union did, and we allied to good effect in World War II. The Soviet Union had different interest from Adolf Hitler, but they allied under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pack as long as it was useful to Hitler. None of these guys are sentimental, and none of these guys believe that promises they make need to be kept out of some sense of honor. Yeah. There's another dimension to what we're talking about, you know, sort of regime type and ideology and how it matters or doesn't matter in foreign policy that I think is important. These, you know, these words that we use to describe things are misleading. Even when people are acting in good faith and trying to, you know, trying to

actually say what they mean in an honest way, you can easily get misled because we're talking about phenomena and groups of people that are so complicated and so multivarius that even when you're trying to be honest, it's hard. And a lot of the time, people aren't trying to be honest. And here's what I mean. I was in Saudi Arabia last fall with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies talking to their minister of state in a meeting we had with him. And we got into a bit of a debate about China, and I suggested that Chinese imperialism was fundamentally revisionist, and if Saudi Arabia sees itself as a quote-unquote realist power, his words, not mine, it ought to look askance at the revisionists and revolutionaries of the world.

And he immediately pushed back and said, there's no such thing as Chinese imperialism. There's French imperialism. There's British imperialism. There are long histories of those things. There's no Chinese imperialism, to which. I responded, well, I think the people of Tibet or the Muslims of northwest China and Jingjiang would, you know, themselves look askance at that observation and the sort of the debate moved on. But it was striking how what to me seems obvious, which is that China, that the Chinese state

dominated by Han Chinese and ruled today by the Chinese Communist Party in Xi Jinping is clearly an empire of sorts, by which I mean the rule of one group of people over others, as opposed to say something Republican based on equal citizenship. Yeah, you're 100% right. I don't know whether he didn't get that or didn't think it was useful for him to acknowledge that. You certainly have Tibet is a separate culture, and it's not just, I mean, first thing to say is at university campuses all over America, you have, you know, imperialist studies,

and it's all focused on the 19th century and ignoring the 21st century, ignoring the kind of arguments you're talking about in these classrooms. It's all British imperialism, French imperialism, maybe a little bit of a Dutch imperialist, imperialism, Belgian imperialism, but it's going on right now. And it's not a, I don't think it's even questionable. Look, Xinjiang means new frontiers. What new frontiers? What does that, what does that tell you? The people of that region, they call themselves East Turkestan. And they're, they are much closely related to the people of Kazakhstan and the people of Uzbekistan and all the, they're, they're Turkic peoples. But they've been That's absolutely the case. I've long argued, long, long, long, that Vladimir Putin believes, and he's not wrong in this, that Russia has never been an issue state. It's always been an empire, and it needs to be an empire, and it can't be a successful empire without Ukraine. I mean, the title is czar of all the Russians, all the Russians, Russia proper, Belarus, white

Russia, Ukraine, also like New Frontier, the frontier of Russia. And he could have more, look, he's already, Georgia is almost a vassal state, unfortunately, at this point with two provinces that he cut off in 2008. He took Crimea. He could have headed for Kazakhstan, and he would have been, it might have been a smarter move, but I think if you read him, the people of you, he wants Ukrainians under this empire. The other thing about the Russian empire that we don't always understand is most empires go abroad by ship.

The Russians did not. They went abroad on foot, crossing over into the countries around Mongolia. And there's so many small minorities that they took over in these places that couldn't really stand up. The places where they had some difficulty would be like, you know, the Caucasus, right? That's where you have the Chechen, the Chechens, for example. They're not Russians. They're under Russian domination.

But the Chechians are distinct. Dagestanis are distinct. Putin defeated the Chechens. and he thought he would easily defeat as well the Ukrainians. And most of our analysts thought he would as well. There are reasons why that hasn't happened. But again, I don't predict how this comes out. I'm concerned about how it comes out because we have seen, look,

we surrendered to the Taliban in, I would argue, in Afghanistan two years ago, almost exactly since the time of what we're making this recording. And I think that was a dreadful thing to do. And it was unnecessary. We didn't need to have a huge presence there in order to protect what we had achieved and filled on it more slowly. If we also lose without having a boot on the ground in Ukraine, it'll be bad. Remember what colleague Sheikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of 9-11 attacks, the murder of Daniel Pearl, remember what he told his CIA interrogator. We don't need to defeat you Americans militarily.

We just need to fight long enough, and then you'll quit. I think that's how our, I think a lot of our enemies think that. Those are wise words. Yeah. One last question for you, and it's on the same theme of, you know, the ways in which we go awry and understanding things in the ways in which words mislead us. I think the same issue of understanding adversary regimes and foreign regimes, I mean, it applies at home.

I think Americans be too. you know, have trouble understanding what it is that we have and what is the structure of American power and American leadership. And when you start talking about American leadership, you're already sort of euphemizing a bit, right? I tend to use phrases like that because I find the sort of radical left-wing critique of America and the world to be preposterous and overstated that we are sort of literal empire oppressing people through various means, some overt, some sort of, you know, through mysterious corporate structures. It seems, it seems ridiculous. On the other hand, There is a tradition of territorial expansion in the United States in the North American continent.

We expanded to go sea to sea that's part of our history. We went overseas to, you know, we fought the Spanish Empire in Cuba and the Philippines. I don't have to recite this history for you, obviously. And today we have inherited from the British Empire a role in the international system, while not imperial exactly, certainly is a role of, I think the academic term is primacy. We don't rule other NATO countries. It's ridiculous to suggest that we do. But it's also, it's not exactly a republic either, is it?

So how to understand American power and its advantages and disadvantages seems to me to also be part of the problem. We struggle to understand adversaries and we kind of struggle to understand ourselves. I don't know if you agree with that. I do agree with that. One thing it makes me realize is that, you know, we talked to the beginning of this conversation of my going abroad as a foreign country. correspondent to places like Africa and Russia. And I always felt that I was learning less about

the countries I was visiting than I was about the United States and about America and where I came from in each of these countries. I think what you're talking about is, yes, it's America, again, early on, it was one thing, but after World War II, I think Roosevelt had some disapproval, even of the British Empire. And I think the idea was an experiment. Could we be a sort of the nevelent hegemon? Could we be a little? a very liberal empire. We're not going to dictate to our allies. In Europe, we might, that might be occasions where we would seem to be bullying them and pulling our weight, or we make it seem to be imperialistic because McDonald's was getting popular in France,

and people resented that, and American movies were popular. So it's called cultural imperialism, but that's a metaphorical concept. It's not the same as, for example, going on right now where you have in Syria villages where the Sunnis have been pushed out and where the Iranians are bringing in Shia from Afghanistan and from Pakistan and from Uzbekistan who had volunteered or been recruited into militias and they're giving them the homes of Sunni Arabs. That's colonialism. And that's imperialism. We don't do that. I do think, was it Colin Powell said, hey, after World War II, we only asked for enough land to bury our fallen warriors that we don't want anything else. We could have insisted on something else. So we were not, the idea was we would

not be an empire. But the problem is if we are not, if the problem is if there is not American leadership in the world, what is there? And it's not going to be a some kind of global republic. It's simply that's not going to happen. There's no evidence of that. The United Nations is in many ways of failed enterprise, I think, that we support. There are other, if we give, when the British were exhausted after World War II and could no longer enjoy or demonstrate primacy, could no longer be a hegemon, they could pass the torch to us in the United States, and we would take it. If we're ready to pass the torch, we have two possibilities.

There are countries that are good enough, but not strong enough. Denmark, I'm sure they do a good job, but, you know, or there are countries that are are strong enough, but they're not good enough. And they very much include this access of tyrannies. China has the leading one with Russia as a junior partner, Iran as a more junior partner, and then you have, again, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, at all those. And by the way, this is subject for another day. This axis of tyrannies is making great progress for itself in Africa and Latin America right now. And America is not. They does not have policies to push back and maintain its influence in these parts of the world.

Cliff May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, columnist for the Washington Times. Sir, it's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Always fun to talk to you. Thanks, Sarah. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.