Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/12/21 Daniel Larison on Iran, Sanctions and Great Power Competition

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

Scott brings Daniel Larison back to the show to discuss a handful of articles he’s written recently for Antiwar.com. First they discuss his piece pointing out that there is no legal basis for any action the U.S. takes against Iran, a fact that ought to be brought up more in our public discourse. Scott and Larison also discuss how American foreign policy itself is a rather large incentive for Iran to become a nuclear power. We’ve killed leaders who gave up their nukes. And those who have them, we tend to just criticize from afar. Next they tackle sanctions. The pain caused by American sanctions is as real as the pain caused by American bombs, but it’s not as easy to visualize. Larison explains what we should picture. Lastly they discuss Great Power Competition and predict what will happen as America’s global military power shrinks.  Discussed on the show: “Attacking Iran Would Be a Crime” (Antiwar.com)  “Sanctions Are an Inherently Indiscriminate Weapon” (Antiwar.com) “Dispensing With Indispensability: The US Failed To Improve the World” (Antiwar.com) “The Bankruptcy of ‘Great Power Competition’” (Antiwar.com) The Stupidity of War by John Mueller Daniel Larison is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com, contributor at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLarison or on his blog, Eunomia. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antivore.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys you know um i'm so proud of what antiwar dot com is and has been doing these days and it sucks that justin is gone of course but dave de camp and jason did of course are just absolutely holding down the news section all day every day and Kyle Anzalone is doing a great job doing my job as editor of the viewpoints there and our list of columnists is just killing we got Cato's two best guys Bondo and Carpenter of course we have the

great leftists Ted Snyder and Danny Sherson who of course is also the war veteran we got a great libertarian hero Sheldon richmond of course and we've got uh, paleo. Oh, and Ray McGovern. He goes in with the progressives there, uh, former CIA officer. And, uh, and Daniel Larison, who used to be with the American conservative magazine and, uh, represents the paleo conservative faction in the columnist section at antiwar.com and just writes absolutely great stuff all the time. And I should mention also that he has his own site, Unomia, which is now a Substack at Daniel Larison.substack.com as well. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Daniel? Thanks for having me on. I'm doing pretty well. How are you?

I'm doing great. Happy to have you on the show. And like I say, that's part of anti-war.com. So, man, you have so much great stuff. But can we please start with attacking Iran would be a crime? Well, that doesn't make any sense. America can do whatever it wants all the time, right? Well, it certainly seems that way. I mean, that's often the way it works in practice. But if any of the laws or rules that the U.S. claims to subscribe to mean anything, I suppose that's an open question, but if they do mean anything, then the U.S. is bound not to threaten the use of force or use force against other states except in the rare exception of self-defense. And as we know, in many cases, it has broken that prohibition.

has violated that. And if the U.S. were to attack Iran or if Israel were to attack Iran, if anyone was to attack Iran, that would also be a violation of the U.N. charter and international law. And more basically, it would be just outright aggression. Even if the U.N. charter didn't exist, we would still recognize it as an act of aggression to attack a country simply because it has a nuclear program that is larger than we would like it to be. and so that's that's the crime that I'm talking about that's the the violation that would we would be committing that our government would be committing if they did that and so

it's just to challenge this sort of state assumption that is in the Iran policy debate that military action against their nuclear facilities is a legitimate option it's not yeah well but they need that threat so that they can what coerce the Ayatollin into adding new provisions to the nuclear deal of 2015 before America gets back in it? Is that it, Daniel? Well, that's the way it's often framed. It's framed as a way of trying to put more pressure on the Iranian government to make additional concessions. But I mean, we know how we would respond if we were being, if we had a gun put to our heads and being told we have to make additional concessions under duress. We would resist. And I think any self-respecting government in the same

position would resist. And so the threat of using force is not conducive to a successful compromise, especially when, as we know in the case of the nuclear deal, the U.S. is the one that has been in the wrong. The U.S. is the one that violated all the terms that it agreed to, and it's only because of that that Iran has since moved away from its compliance with the agreement, which it had been complying with fully for several years. So we're essentially breaking our word and then trying to punish them for responding to that breach.

It's simply ridiculous. Yeah. All right. Now, here's the thing, though. If I say to you, nuclear threat, then you probably are going to be in too big of a hurry to look into nuclear technology and the background

history of the non-proliferation treaty and the true nature of Iran's nuclear program. That sounds pretty bad. And it, also sounds like the kind of thing that only people who specialized in nuclear stuff in college know about and the rest of us don't and we got to defer to them, right? Well, and I mean, it's interesting you put it that way because a lot of the people that work most closely on this stuff, a lot of the people that work in arms control are keenly

aware of the difference between a nuclear program for civilian purposes and a nuclear weapons program. And we're banging our heads against the wall trying to say that these are two very different things, and you shouldn't conflate them. Of course, Iran Hawks take advantage of the fact, as you say, most people are not aware of this distinction where they don't recognize that distinction. And so they try to keep pushing them together all the time, so much so that I think we saw in a poll earlier this year that most Americans think that Iran already has nuclear weapons when they don't. And so the propaganda that has been churned out over the last 10, 15 years has unfortunately been quite effective in blurring that line and making

people misunderstand that having a nuclear program in and of itself does not mean that you're going to have nukes or that you do have nukes. And so it's useful for fearmongers and war mongers to create that confusion. They certainly try to exploit that confusion. But it's also worth noting in connection with this talk of attacking. them, that the surefire way of convincing their government to build nuclear weapons is to threaten them with attack or to actually attack them, because that is when a government will have the greatest incentive to try to get a deterrent to prevent that from ever happening

again. And I think we see with the North Korean example, a government that was afraid of being attacked and went through the process of getting its own nuclear weapons, and now it feels, I think, in its own terms, much more secure from foreign attacks. than it used to. And that, unfortunately, that example is a bad one if you want to discourage Iran from following that, going down that path. Right.

Yeah, especially look at, well, let's see, Saddam Hussein gave up his nuclear program, and Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program, and they're both dead now. Iran, they have a latent nuclear deterrent. Don't make me do it. and so far we've stayed out, but we threaten them all the time. And then further on this lighting scale, as you say, North Korea, who we don't threaten at all. Not really, anyway.

Not anymore, not anymore, right. Yeah, so, you know, any dictator or any government out there anywhere in the world falls crossways against the Americans, it's a pretty clear path to security right there. There's one and one thing only that will deter the Americans from regime change. Same thing in Moscow, right? Pretty obvious why we don't do a coup in Moscow because it could get really ugly. It would threaten even us if it went all sour, right?

Right, and we, yeah, you simply don't try that sort of thing with a nuclear weapon state. And so the surprising thing to me, or is somewhat surprising, having followed this now since the late 2000s, is that Iran hasn't already built these weapons because they did have, they probably had the technical means to do it by now. I think they could have figured it out if they had been determined to do it no matter what. And they chose a different path.

And so I would think, I mean, in the interest of nonproliferation, if nothing else, you want to encourage them to keep going down the path that they had chosen to not pursue nuclear weapons. But of course, as we know, Hawks need that issue to demigod, They need it to keep the pressure on, to keep Iran under sanctions and to keep them isolated, to keep them as the enemy du jour. And that's why they keep doing everything they can to wreck any kind of peaceful diplomatic solution. That's why they've been trying to bring down the nuclear deal these last several years. Do the Americas, I mean, well, first of all, the people who are now being so obstructionist in getting America back into,

to the deal that the vile, horrible Donald Trump got us out of for no good reason, and not just from my point of view on that action, but from their point of view on this horrible, horrible, despicable person who would dare to do such a thing to the deal that they struck in the Obama years. Now back in Obama's vice president's presidential administration, the very same people, especially Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, and Blinken, now the Secretary of State, This is their deal that they help to create. And now, is it, Daniel, that they have a promise to the Israelis that we won't get back in the deal unless we can convince the Ayatollah to add medium range missiles and aid to Hezbollah and whatever other conditions to it? And do they even mean to accomplish that?

Or they're simply just bowing down to Israel's poison pills just to make sure that they can't get back in the deal? the deal that they made in the damn first place just back six years ago. Right. I don't know what promises of any have been made. I have seen over the last nine months, almost 10 months now, incredible foot dragging and moving of goalposts by the Biden administration, where they try to increase the demands on Iran to try to open the door to these follow-on talks for the supposed longer and stronger deal that they always like to talk about.

And they had to have known that that was going to go nowhere. And in case they didn't know that, the Iranian government kept telling them as much, that no other issues are going to be on the table, especially not until the current agreement is revived and fully enforced. And so I think what one of the problems is that a lot of Democrats, on Iran feel the need to feign hawkishness or to strike hawkish poses to fend off attacks from more hardline people in Washington. And I think some of them actually really do believe in their own talking points about all

these other issues where they think that Iran is some sort of menace. And so they think that they can try to extract more by using the maximum pressure sanctions that Trump imposed for their own benefit. And I think it's incredibly cynical, and it does go against everything that they said against Trump when they were out of office. And it's backfiring on them because the Iranians aren't going to put up with it. They're not going to go along with it. And so it's been a huge waste of time in that sense where they go through the motions of

claiming to want to be back in the deal, but then doing absolutely nothing that would actually get them what they want. If they had offered significant sanctions relief earlier in the year, I think we would have seen much more significant progress in reviving the agreement than we've seen. As it is, the sanctions relief is the key sticking point, and it's going to continue to be the sticking point because all the sanctions that we slapped on them over the last three and a half years are illegitimate and in violation of our own obligations. So they're not going to go for it. Just to be perfectly clear about this, America doesn't have to do anything for them other than stop doing this thing to them, this virtual blockade. Right. Right now, we are waging a comprehensive economic war on their country, basically trying to cut them off from the rest of the global economy as much as possible to make it impossible for any financial institution to transfer payments, to make it impossible for them to raise it. any revenue off of their oil sales. They still managed to get some through back channels

and through deals with the Chinese through middlemen. But basically, we're trying to cut off their economy from the rest of the world. And the goal of that, under Trump anyway, was to try to force them to yield all across the board on a range of issues where, of course, they weren't going to yield. And all we have to do is simply stop strangling their economy and make good on the promises that we made in 2015, which was to let them rejoin the world economy and do business as usual. And so it costs us nothing. In fact, it probably saves us time and trouble because all of the effort that the Treasury

goes into designating these companies and institutions and enforcing the sanctions eats up resources and personnel that could actually be working for the American people instead. Yeah. Hey you all, it's the digital age and dating is no exception. Well, DROM is a new values-based dating app.

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The convertible design allows for four different mounting methods. Go to freerangefeeder.com slash Scott or use promo code Scott to get 10% off and get the free e-book. Subscribe to their newsletter to immediately receive your free copy of getting started with backyard chickens. That's freerangefeater.com slash Scott. Yeah, it's part of that same thing about, you know, the lesson of the history of dealing with the Americans is get yourself some nukes. The other lesson is you just can't believe anything the Americans say, even if it's a deal in writing. When it's, you know, W. Bush breaking Bill Clinton's deal with the North Koreans or Barack Obama breaking W. Bush's deal with the Libyans. or then Donald Trump

break an Obama's deal with the Iranians. Joe Biden, of course, you know, kicked the can down the road in Afghanistan, although eventually he got us out of there, certainly broke his promise to the American people that he'd end support for the Saudi war in Yemen. But that's not exactly the same thing.

But still, you see what I mean, though, that any other government out there, even some of these same ones, right? the next government in Libya or the current government in North Korea, for example. How can they believe anything the Americans say, no matter what kind of assurances they give when our government's track record is so contrary to that? Right. Well, it's become a real problem. We've seen that with dealings with the North Koreans. We see it in a lot of our diplomatic engagements where having either reneged on our promises

or pulled out of past treaties, we've given other governments every reason to assume that any commitment we make will expire within a few years. And, of course, with the partisan wrangling that you have between members of the two parties, that will often happen simply out of partisan spite, I think, where it doesn't even matter to some of these people why the agreement was made or what merits it might have for the country

simply because the other side made it, that's good enough reason to get rid of it. And you can't have functioning diplomacy under those circumstances, and sure enough, we don't have functioning diplomacy. We cannot, for the life of us, negotiate anything that lasts. And unfortunately, that's a real blow to the cause of peace, because if you can't resolve things through negotiations, then that gives the Hawks their pretext for slapping on sanctions or using force, because I'll say, well, there's no other option. Well, of course, there always isn't a choice.

There is always another option besides going down that road of coercion. But when diplomacy has been so badly weakened, it does make it much more difficult to make the case that we ought to stick with it. But I think even in the case of the negotiations with Iran, we have to stick with it because the other options are unacceptable. Yeah. I think, you know, sanctions is such a great euphemism, isn't it? for blockade, legal, you know, outlawing of trade between people.

And, you know, Ron Paul back in, you know, 2008 and 12 when he ran, they would always call him an isolationist. And he would say, well, look, I'm for free trade with everybody. You guys are the isolationist. You want to put sanctions on everybody who doesn't bend your will all the time. But, you know, I got to tell you, from the middle of Texas, I can't see sanctions from here. Right? Like at least, Daniel, when there's a war, they'll show me like a profile view of a marine shooting.

They'll never show you what he's shooting at, but at least there's something. But you tell me sanctions, I don't know what's a picture. But you've got this great thing about here, about sanctions are an inherently indiscriminate weapon that you wrote for anti-war.com. So can you show us what does it look like? Sure. Well, so, I mean, one of the visuals of the effects of the, we're talking comprehensive broad sanctions, sanctions that attack an entire economy. The images that should come to mind are pediatric cancer patients that can't get the medicine that they need and so die or can't get the treatment that they need and end up dying because the medicine that they need isn't available to them or it can't be obtained quickly enough or cheaply enough or in large enough quantities. And so the sick and the vulnerable end up going without and end up dying preventable deaths. from chronic and rare diseases, and also from more treatable conditions that end up turning

into worse things the longer that they go untreated. Another image you might see are people that can't afford to buy as much food as they used to because all of the prices have shot up and the value of their currency has plummeted because they can't do normal business and they can't import things the way that they used to. And so the victims of these sanctions are always going to be ordinary people because when you wage a war on an entire economy, you are striking at the lifeblood of that country. And as that lifeblood dries up, the people that suffer most are going to be those that have the narrowest margin of error in that economy. So it's going to be the poorest, it's going to be workers, it's going to be elderly and children and the ill. And so those are the ones who suffer.

And of course, often that happens out of sight, and so people don't realize that it's happening. But it is, that is by, the sanctions strike at all of these people by design. Broad sanctions are inevitably always striking at the entire population. The idea that, oh, it's just aimed at the government. We don't want to hurt the people is at best self-deception. And I think in most cases, they know that they're hurting the population, but they want to pretend otherwise for the sake of public consumption. And so it's, I call it an inherently indiscriminate weapon because it is a kind of collective

punishment. It's a punishment that's meted out regardless of a person's connection to the government, a person's responsibility for the actions of that government. In most cases, the people who suffer have no control over what their government does. have no say in it but they're the ones who are made to pay for it and in many cases in the cases of thousands and even tens of thousands of people that has meant paying with their lives yeah all right now I got to switch gears on you real quick in the last few minutes here okay it's a subject of something that

you wrote a couple articles here dispensing with indispensability and the bankruptcy of great power competition and You might have seen my debate with Bill Crystal, where I made the case that essentially America's wars and coups and the rest in the third world, support for dictators, et cetera, that that discredits the whole idea of, you know, Pax Americana. Where's the Pax? You know, all these people are dead. And Crystal insisted that, no, well, look, we've kept the peace in Europe and in East Asia. I mean, not counting Korea and Vietnam, but, hey, between China and Japan. hand so that's good and American hegemony gets the credit for that and if we were to stop and especially if we were to pull our Navy back and this is a case that a guy that I interviewed on the show

Peter Zion was making the case that this is already underway although I wish I don't know doesn't look like it to me but he's saying that you know once the Americans really do come home and bring our Navy home the whole rest of the world is going to break out into war again and it could be China in India or India in Pakistan or Sweden and Russia, China, Japan, whoever it is, they're all going to start fighting. The only thing that's stopping them from fighting now is American dominance. And maybe that sucks for whatever problems it causes back home. But it's, I don't think Crystal would even concede that much, but that it's worth it because

the alternative is total chaos. Or if it's not the USA as the world government, then it would be China. instead and then just think how screwed we be then Daniel what about that and I know that's a big long question but you know what I mean sure well and so so yeah the first thing is the assumption that the that hegemony the US hegemony is responsible for the the lack of great power conflict let's say I mean that obviously there's still been lots of wars during the so-called Pax Americana since World War II the what people really mean by that is that there hasn't been great power conflict between the major industrialized nations and why is that and the easy

answer the answer the hegemonists to give is well because we're we're suppressing security competition we're deterring everyone from acting out and that's going to to continue to be the case as long as we keep doing what we're doing but i i think that that's that's bad reasoning it's it's simply assuming that what they want to keep doing is responsible for this regardless of any other explanations. One obvious explanation that can account for the absence of great power conflict during this period

is the existence of nuclear weapons. Great power conflict has become so costly with the existence of nuclear weapons that it's no longer worth trying. And I think that that would remain the case, no matter what our military footprint in the world looks like. Another

argument that's been made, John Miller has made it in his book The Stupidity of War and I think is worth taking seriously is that the experience of the World Wars, especially World War II was so harrowing, it was so terrible, that there has actually been some learning

among the nations of the world that total war, war on that scale simply is not worth the cost. And that that would hold true even if the U.S. withdrew its forces from all over.

And of course, no one is in any danger of withdrawing all those forces anytime soon. But if it were to happen, I don't think you would see the total breakdown in a national order that you see or that these people predict. It's not, ultimately it's unknowable, but it doesn't really make sense. As if we have this tremendous power to rein in all of the appetites and passions of the entire planet, and that it's solely down to that. to us to keep the world at peace. It's extremely arrogant, and I think it's contrary to the experience of history that everyone is just itching to go after each other no matter what. States will go to

war with each other when they think there's actually an advantage in it. If most states no longer believe that war brings them an advantage, they're not going to resort to using force no matter what we do. And so we have, you know, we have to give other states some credit for having their own ability to make rational decisions in their own interest. And I don't think we do. There's this notion that some of the other states in the world are simply irrational aggressors that will attack at the first drop of a hat. And that's, I think that's just a caricature that Hawks used to justify our own impulse to metal. Yeah, a little bit of Freudian projection there it sounds like right um uh yeah well now so okay and i'm sorry because we're almost out of time

i'll give you a minute or two here on uh i was talking with daniel davis earlier and he's saying we should butt out but he also is i guess conceding uh from his point of view that yeah there really is a threat that china might invade Taiwan and sometime soon and they're certainly getting ready for it and so i guess he feels it's really important to argue that we should not interview if it does happen. Right. Yeah, he's made some excellent arguments explaining why it's not worth it to us to do it. Why, even if we win, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. It will be far costlier than it's worth. And we ought to stay away. I know he argues, he thinks it's going to happen fairly soon.

I don't know. I appreciate his arguments. I appreciate his judgment on the question. I think there is, I mean, certainly there is a threat, a potential threat coming from China towards Taiwan. Whether they judge it to be worth the risk, I don't know. But certainly I think on the policy question, whether you think it's going to happen soon or you think it's going to happen later or you think it might never happen, the correct U.S. policy position is this is not our fight. And we do not have anything at stake that is big enough to justify the potential costs of a war with China, even excluding a nuclear exchange. Assuming that just imagine for a moment that nukes are off the table and no one wants to use them, just in terms of a conventional war, it would be hugely costly for us and much more costly than anything we've seen probably since Vietnam, maybe since World War II. so it's it's really not worth it for us and in terms of our policy that that has to be the consideration right so what about the argument though that you know if we weren't if we did

really withdraw then all these other countries by necessity would all get their own nukes south korea and japan and saudi arabia and egypt and you know whatever brazil whatever middle-ranked powers don't have them now they'll all arm up with nukes even if not to you know attack them but they'll all feel like without america there to deter they'll need their own deterrent is that you think that's right i well it's certainly possible in certain cases that some countries may decide that they need to have their own deterrence um south korea is already floating that option in their presidential election they're already talking about it as a possibility even though u.s extended deterrence is still

theoretically there um and that's always been an issue in the Japanese debate as well. So it's certainly possible in some cases. I don't think you're going to have a mad dash of lots of states doing it. For one thing, it is an expensive proposition. It is demanding on the resources of a country to do that. And unless you have some acute security threat that you're really worried about, I'm not sure that you really you would see it as being worth your while to do that. Even if that were to happen, I don't know that that's necessarily the worst outcome. Because if we believe that the presence of nuclear weapons has actually been stabilizing rather than destabilizing,

if a few more states have them, that could actually contribute to greater international security rather than less. Yeah. So I, you know, that's, but again, that's, that's, that's, we're speculating about that. Right. Well, and it's such a paradox, right, that it does seem that way until, right up until it doesn't work anymore and then you lose entire cities in afternoons and things like that. Right. Well, so obviously the preference that we should all have is to have as few states as possible

having them. But I, you know, I think if, if that's the worst case scenario where, let's say, Japan and South Korea end up having them, that's probably not such a bad outcome, all things considered. Yeah, it could be worse. All of them would be very unlikely to use them, seems like. Right. But anyway, all right, I'm sorry, we're out time. Got to run. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me on.

All right, you guys. That is Daniel Larison. He is at Unomia, which is danielarison. substack.com and of course at anti-war.com right there in the right-hand margin as well. Attacking Iran would be a crime is his latest. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com,

ScottHorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.