Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/9/22 Daniel Larison on the Battle to Define Conservative Foreign Policy

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Scott is joined by Daniel Larison to discuss a piece he wrote recently that aims to rebut an article published in Foreign Policy. Larison criticizes that article, written by Nadia Schadlow, for using right-wing language to argue that conservatives have always and should always rally around the war machine in Washington. Scott and Larison talk about the absurdity of that position and observe how the opposite is true.  Discussed on the show: “The battle for who owns ‘conservative statecraft’” (Responsible Statecraft)  “Conservative U.S. Statecraft for the 21st Century” (Foreign Policy) A Republic, Not an Empire by Pat Buchanan “George Packer’s attempt to carve up restraint is a real turkey” (Responsible Statecraft) Scott’s debate with Bill Kristol Taibbi’s Debate on the mainstream media 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: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. 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 anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's 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 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for 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 so you guys check it out on the line i've got the great daniel larrison formerly of the american conservative magazine now writing for responsible statecraft the quincy institute their responsible statecraft dot org And we got a bunch of stuff to talk about today, but the most important one I want to begin with is the battle for who owns, quote, conservative statecraft. Welcome back to the show.

Daniel, how are you, sir? I'm doing well. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, absolutely. Happy to talk to you. So ain't there a fight on between the America firsters sort of Jacksonian types and the neocon-lecunuch types and the Wall Street, business types and us libertarians too or well i'm not including you or you're more of a conservative but me and my guys and we're in there somewhere a little at least and um boy are we up against a bunch of hawks and so give us your measure of the situation here well sure well so the the piece that talked about that uh from a few weeks ago i was responding to something that was put out by Nadia Shadlau in foreign policy

and it was an interesting it was a bad piece and that's why I hook it on but it was notable because it was trying to co-opt the language of conservative principle or traditional conservatism

essentially window dressing for very standard hawketh and neo-conservative foreign policy ideology it was basically trying to put a traditional conservative gloss on the empire and on everything

that's been going on over the last several decades. And so it was I found it interesting that they were trying to do that that. That Shadlow was trying to do that and even dropping in references to Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke to sort of

lend it some sort of intellectual heft, I guess, or maybe that was that was what they were trying to do, all by way of trying to justify the status quo and saying that basically nothing should change, and the conservative state craft is essentially militarism and power projection wherever we want to go. And so my challenge to that is essentially a foreign policy of prudence and caution and restraint to be very different

from that. It's prudence and caution dictate that we shouldn't be meddling in most of the world, that we shouldn't be spending such huge sums on the military, and we shouldn't be sending the military to all parts of the world, especially those places where we have nothing at stake. So there is a big fight on. I think the telling thing is that I think Hawks and Neoconservatives know that their standard arguments, or the old argument. arguments that they would have used, say, 20 years ago, simply don't mean anything to most

people that identify as conservatives. And so they're trying to speak in a different language now, but it's clearly fake and forced because they don't believe in prudence, they don't believe in caution, they don't believe in any of the things that are actually at the heart of what could be conservative statecraft. In terms of the political battle inside the GOP right now among elected officials, unfortunately, I think the hawks still have the upper hand because they tend to be the ones that get selected to run in the elections, and they tend to be the ones that define the terms of the debate within the leadership of the party. And so I think it's going to be a contest between a lot of people at the grassroots level

and those people that are still in charge of the Republican Party trying to pull things in different directions. Yeah, well, we certainly have a fight on our hands for the hearts and minds of the mass of the conservatives and Republican voters out there. Now, I think it's funny that the way that, and I know that I'm being a little unfair because this is me paraphrasing, you paraphrasing her,

but the idea that conservatism, means whatever we're doing now we should just conserve that even if now what we're doing is completely crazy and radical and poorly thought out but we don't want to make a change that would be a leftist thing to do when we're in the middle of getting

into a nuclear war or something yeah and one of the things I've said in my response is that the only thing that Godlow's version of conservatism is going to conserve is the military industrial complex because that's clearly what she's most interested in that's what she wants to

protect from any possible criticism or opposition, and she wants to keep that money flowing. And so that's, I mean, to my mind, that has absolutely nothing to do with what I understand conservatism to be, and it really has nothing to do with the kind of country that I would like to CSB, because a country that is so heavily invested in militarism is one that cannot remain a truly free country. And for the people on the hawkish side, they will often use this language of liberty and promoting liberty and, oh, this is at the core of who we are, but you can't actually have a free country.

You can't enjoy liberty at home if your foreign policy is so heavily defined by militarism and constant warfare and this was I mean this was common sense to people in this country not that long ago it seems like a long time ago now but as recently as

even 80, 90 years ago Americans understood that there were trade-offs between being a free and Republican country and being a militaristic empire and that's and clearly we

over the last century the U.S. has moved into becoming the latter. And so you can't be free country the way that we should be if you're constantly involved in those sorts of operations around the world. And I think the war on terror and the last 20 years especially have driven that home, but endless war does eventually come home and it ends up corroding and destroying things that we value here at home as well.

Yeah. You know, once upon a time there was this documentary. I interviewed the guy. It was way back in 0708. I don't know if anybody could find any more. It might be out there. It was called World War 4. And he was a former Bush staffer. Yeah, that comes from Norman Podhoritz saying that the Cold War was World War III and the Terror War is World War IV. And Ladeen, I guess, had picked that up. And this guy had been on the Bush, the W. Bush campaign in 2000 and was a real. believer and then by the time he made this documentary he's very jaded and upset so he goes in search of what the hell is going on here and how we got into iraq and he goes and he interviews the neocons and he asks and i have this audio somewhere um he asked michael ladeen well you know what's so conservative about world revolution anyway and ladeen or i forgot exactly i phrased a question because that's how ladeen answers it laden says what's so conservative about world revolution i don't know in other words you know he's a he might be on the right but he's a radical right winger not a conservative at all he wants to you know destroy the terror masters starting in tehran and then everywhere else you can

find one right from nicaragua to to um russia to china to wherever and i should have gone with the capitals there but was it managua i guess anyway um so but see here's the thing and I really learned this well from when I first started hanging around with the guys from anti-war.com. I guess I picked this up a little bit from the new American magazine in the 90s, too, was that it really was the right, pretty much, that opposed the World Wars, at least, you know, until Pearl Harbor or the Zimmerman Telegram or whatever, and that were, you know, at first, the more skeptical ones on the establishment of NATO and the enshrining of a permanent Cold War, but then essentially because the enemy was the commies, that meant that the left were more soft on

them. I guess the liberals were hawks in the Truman fashion to prove what commies they weren't, so they were pretty, you know, Cold Warlike, like Truman and Kennedy and so forth. But the right became the party of the McCarthyites, you know, they became the absolute, you know, and I don't know how bad his foreign policy was, but overall the anti-communist sentiment on The right helped support the even Truman's war in Korea, and then essentially Johnson's war in Vietnam, and it became left-wing hippies in the street with long hair and daiglo and tie-dye saying that we shouldn't be doing this, right? Born on the 4th of July, he comes home from the war and moves left in order to oppose the war in Vietnam, right? And then so that meant then that

it's a very liberal left wing and therefore wimpy and effeminate thing to be against war. And all right wingers, all tough guys, anybody with any sense of macho or facial hair or whatever, has to be a war hawk. And because otherwise you're one of them. And so then, you know, we're stuck with the paradox where, as you're explaining, that all this war we've been waging is changing our society and changing especially our form of government in the worst way. and in drastic forms at the expense of our freedom.

But it just sounds, I don't know, too much like something a liberal would say to too many right-winger say, and I guess especially of the boomer generation and so forth. Right? Is that like, am I going somewhere with this? Well, I mean, yeah, that's how it was, as I was growing up, that was the sort of the stereotype, but that was now the debate receded.

I mean, I grew up in a basically Republican household. I was surrounded by lots of conservative media and so for probably the first half of my life I imbibed a lot of this basically reflexive hawkishness pro-military interventionist sentiment that anybody that was questioning any of that was considered

either unpatriotic or kind of unreliable and so I was well versed in all that or I was very familiar with all of growing up. And then it was really during the 90s, as you see under the Clinton administration, sort of the hyper interventionism that the U.S. engaged in even then, and then it went into overdrive after 9-11, that the U.S. foreign policy was not really tethered to the security of the United States, that it was going off on these crazy missions that had little or nothing

to do with protecting American citizens and American territory from foreign threats. It was almost entirely to do with projecting power and meddling in other people's affairs. And it was really the interventions in the 90s that it woke me up to what was really wrong with American foreign policy, then stuff that I was never really exposed to growing up.

And then you started to hear more and more from people like Patty, canon, challenging the status quo in foreign policy and reminding us that our foreign policy used to be radically different and honestly, much better, a bunch better for the United States anyway. And so that was what really left me out of those conventional stereotypes about who should be anti-war. Ideally, all sane people could be anti-war, but I think conservatives especially have a strong incentive to be anti-war because war strengthens the state. It strengthens concentrations of power,

and all of that comes at the expense of local communities, at the expense of families, at the expense of social order. And we forget that, especially in the case of modern war over the last 30 years, Americans don't necessarily see the corrosive effects of war happening because they happen more gradually because there's more of a disconnect between the people doing the fighting and the people at home. But there's really, there are coercive effects that seep in and take over and ultimately warp the way that we see the world and the way that we think about ourselves so that we end up becoming this very militaristic people just in our in our attitudes and our way of thinking about the world so that all avenues to other

sorts of resolution of conflicts get shut off even before the war start. And so we end up thinking of military intervention as the sort of the default or that we're practically the only option available other than sanctions. And so there's this constant pressure on the whole society to think in terms of using violence and using coercion to compel other people to do our bidding and it's it's been really i think very poisonous for the american people and for our society all right now so i admit like i'm kind of a reactionary old bircher still from like a long time ago and i kind of just want to get us out of the united nations and have nothing to do with international kind of anything and that kind of thing

And yet, I think, you know, right now we have our government, we're not just right now, in the, since the end of the Cold War, since H.W. Bush announced the new order, what we say goes, that essentially the American, well, and maybe even since 45, I don't know, but, but their interpretation is that America's the world army to enforce the world law. And the UN Security Council and its edicts don't mean anything if it's not. if we don't have the United States of America to hold it all together. It's the liberal rules-based international order of cooperation and friendship. And it's funny because they talk about great power competition, which says there's something in it for us right there in the description, in the name of it. But at the same time, no, no, no, all we're doing is enforcing the U.N. charter and just making sure that nobody ever fights anymore. And that, of course, you know, if we came home, as Bill Crystal would put it. If we brought our stuff out of wherever all we're dominant, then they're all

going to go back to Oregon. Europe doesn't want to be dominated by Germany. They'd rather be dominated by us than by Germany. And if we leave, then they're all going to start killing each other. And then maybe we'll have, you know, God knows what, India and China and Pakistan, everything is going to all fall apart if we're not there to hold it all together. And it's funny, though, because I would point out this one more thing, too, that I don't know if you saw this, but this is not conspiracy stuff. It was in a very mainstream news report in Japan, that they opened up a trilateral commission meeting to the press. And Rahm Emanuel gave the American speech about the liberal rules-based world order, and then the whole place went into a riot.

And the Japanese and the South Koreans and the Vietnamese essentially told him, no, F you, because they actually said, Daniel, that imagine this. Our allies said, China is upholding the U.N. Charter's world order much more than you are. You talk about liberal rules-based world order. That's your excuse for violating the agreement that we all had before. And now you're going to make us choose between you and China. We're going to choose China, not you, because look at where we live. And so, you know, anyway. But so that's another view of it, right? But so, um, What I'm trying to get to, the American's view, which is the world order at all is dependent on the American Empire to be the fair referee and make it all happen, whereas even our allies in Japan and Korea and so forth think that that's really not true, that even Beijing is a better upholder of that world order. And I guess, so never mind getting out of the UN, but do you think that we could have, you know, really withdrawn that far without it necessarily being such a disruption to the world the way the Americans believe that it would?

Well, I think there would always be some kind of period of adjustment in any major things like that. But do I think that the world would fall into chaos and anarchy if the U.S. stopped projecting power and stopped having forward deployed military forces all over the world? No, I don't. One reason for that is that all these other countries have their own interest in maintaining the peace, and they have their own resources for maintaining the peace. And the chief reason why so many of them are so dependent on the U.S. is that we have actively encouraged them to be dependent. And we have done everything we can to stop them from building up their own independent security arrangements

because people in our government, people in our political class, want the U.S. to remain deeply involved in those matters. It's not a case where if we were to pull out, they would be completely defenseless and without any means to do anything for themselves. They certainly could do more for themselves. They could do it right now, and they could certainly

adjust to doing that over the next 10, 20, 30 years. So it's really it's a it's just a scare tactic by people that want to keep things the way they are to say that everything will fall apart. The world will descend

into something akin to World War II or even something worse than that, if the U.S. doesn't continue doing what it's doing. And I think it doesn't give the other nations of the world much credit that they would automatically revert to their worst instincts and their most destructive instincts without the U.S. to guide them and lead them. Because clearly, we have not been very good at even guiding ourselves or in governing ourselves. As you say, we're the ones that are often trampling on international law. We're the ones that are often violating the rules that we profess uphold. And that's one of the reasons

why I think there is that perception that other major powers may not be any worse than we are and may even be better when it comes to respecting that system, because we often look for ways to make end runs around the UN system and to come up with excuses for why when we violate the UN charter and we attack other countries, ultimately it's okay because, hey, it's us and of course the people that we're attacking are bad people. And so we always find some useful loophole to those rules when we want to. So I think the trouble that we face is that there is a tremendous amount of fear that things might fall apart if we leave, but that's, it really is just fear that has been

stoked by people that want to keep us deeply involved in the world in a militarized way. I have no problem with significant engagement. the rest of the world. But the militarized form that has taken, especially in the last 30 years, is, as I said, deeply corrosive and corrupting to this country. So that's something we need to move away from. And I think that the rest of the world will adjust fairly successfully to that because they have strong incentives to maintain peace in their own regions. And we're not as important and we're not as indispensable as we like to think we are.

Now, when I first started reading anti-war.com, it was just a revelation to me that Pat Buchanan was a regular there. And first of all, I just, I was astounded that. They ran Ron Paul. That's how I knew I was in love with the thing. But, but then I was like, Pap Buchanan? Because I paid attention to politics and say the election in 92, but I was still just a kid. And what I knew of Pat Buchanan was he was anti-gay and anti-abortion. And it was the culture war versus the liberals and this kind of thing, which didn't really improve. me. I couldn't tell the difference between him and Pat Robertson at that time, you know? And then it turns out that like, no, this guy wrote all these books about why you better not do this way back then. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more. You mentioned him before. I wonder if he could tell us a little bit more about what it was that he told us so back then and what a revelation that was to you at the time, as you had mentioned before. Well, so, I mean, of course, he was one of the outspoken opponents of the original Gulf War,

the first war against Iraq back in 1990, 91. Which I'd missed that, but I was in ninth grade. So I'd... No, right. Right. We were, yeah, we were kids. We were keen to pick up on that, I think. But that, he showed that there was a very clear alternative conservative

approach to foreign policy even then. And because, of course, I mean, and you'll remember what it was like with Desert Storm. It was, at the time, it was a... extremely popular and it remained fairly popular because it was perceived as having been an easy win and a big win and everything went fairly well with that with

relatively few American casualties and so being a critic of that war was not at all an easy thing to do it was not a politically convenient thing to do and certainly it didn't

I'm sure it didn't help in the short term with Buchanan's political fortunes that he had opposed it. But it showed to me that there was a real difference as a matter of principle over what the U.S. role in the world should be after the end of the Cold War. And there was recognition that we didn't need to keep doing the things that we had been doing for the last 40 years at that time, and that we could choose a different path. We could go on to become, as Jean-Gert-Patrick put it,

a normal country. We can become a normal country again after the aberration that the Cold War had been. Because I think there was still a recognition among many conservatives that even if you want to say that the Cold War was fully justified or the least bad option given the circumstances, that it was an aberration from what we should be doing and that we need to move back away from it now that it was over. And so that was really the fight on the right, and it still is the flight on the right, ever since the end of the Soviet Union,

because there was a recognition that there was no longer a need for this globe-spanning imperial project that we had built up over those decades. But unfortunately, that project became entranced and more powerful than ever because there was now nothing to really stand in its way. And so I was really first alerted or became more familiar with Buchanan's arguments about this over the course of the late 90s, especially in connection with the intervention in Kosovo, and then when he wrote his book, In Polic Not an Empire.

And that's what really broke through for me that there was a way to have a responsible insane U.S. foreign policy that was also not married to this sort of imperialistic overreach. And unfortunately, the timing of Buchanan's message with that book was not great because, of course, that was at the very height. of the so-called unipolar moment. That's when skepticism about U.S. power was probably at its nadir, and then, of course, after 9-11, there was even more difficulty in getting that sort of argument heard. But it was because I had been exposed to that in the late 90s, that when they came out and established the American conservative in the early 2000s to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. That's when I knew I had found my political home and my, you know, the vision that I

wanted to align myself with because that, it was the one that made the most sense to me. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books. Real good ones. So far, we've got Will Griggs-Snow quarter. Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. And four of mine. Fool's Aaron. Enough already. The great Ron Paul and my brand new one, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one, The Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at Libertarian Institute.org

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moment it's the foreign affairs article it was it could only ever last for a little while because the other countries including russia is going to get rich again or richer china and india and brazil are going to become more influential and we'll have to acknowledge their opinions about things, some. So we have a chance to make things our way for a little while and before it all balances out. Now they act like if American power has to recede at all, that means that, oh, you want China to rule the world instead of America. And including America, Daniel, come on. Right. No, right. And I think with a lot of that, you have a lot of people that are wedded to this idea of U.S. egemony that project their own aspirations onto everybody else.

I assume that everybody else must want to dominate things in the same way that they do. And there's usually not a whole lot of proof to back that up. I'm always amazed at how people will uncritically talk about, you know, China wants to displace us or China wants to be the new hegemon. And they'll say, oh, and they want to build this network of bases around the world, and they don't even have more than one base outside of the own country. And, you know, arguably they might have a second one, pending on how things work out.

It's just laughable that the the aspirations of these other countries are in any way comparable to what we've been doing. And as you said, Krauthammer acknowledged that it was just a moment. It was going to be fleeting. And of course, he and the other de jeminists were instrumentally in making sure that that moment

was much poorer than it would have otherwise been because they ended up wasting huge, amounts of resources and burning through political capital like nobody's business with the invasion of Iraq and their crusading foreign policy in the 2000s. So what a lot of people want to do is try to get back to that moment at the start of the century and then try to somehow lock it in to create some sort of permanent military predominance. But it's simply, it's physically impossible and it's going to be, I think, financial

impossible longer term for the U.S. to keep that kind of an edge for everybody else. And we need to learn how to live or coexist with other powers without this enormous military advantage that we've become so accustomed to because you can't be, we're not going to be able to maintain that edge to the extent that we've had it. And we have to learn how to do foreign policy in ways that go beyond making threats and imposing sanctions. All right. So, well, you know, I guess on that question, what should the American position on China be, especially in the sense that, you know, they do have, and I would blame the Americans first, our government first, I don't care for provoking this, but they do have a more

expansive foreign policy compared to what it was, you know, building up these island shoals and these disputed rocks out there between them and the Philippines and them in Japan and all this kind of stuff. And so, you know, I don't know, without the hyperbole of next thing you know, they'll be in Tokyo or California. But, you know, on the other hand, Donald Trump's first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who had been the CEO of Exxon, he said that he told Bob Woodward that the problem is China is threatening our domination of the Pacific, right? So are we going to have to share it? How bad is it going to be?

If you were in charge, like, what is a reasonable take on how to deal with the Chi-coms, Daniel? Well, so I think that quote from Tillerson illustrates part of the problem that we assume that the Pacific is ours to dominate in perpetuity. We have to recognize that as the balance of power, our shifts, we won't be able to impose our will on the whole of the Pacific or on the whole

of the Indo-Pacific, as they now grandly choose to call it, in the way that it used to be. And so there will have to be some accommodation, some willingness to compromise with China in certain areas, because the alternative is ever higher tensions and increasing arms race between the two of us, and then possibly even direct conflict, whether over Taiwan or over some other dispute. And of course, and there are all of these territorial disputes between China and its neighbors that are raised problems, but they're manageable problems. These are not.

And then, of course, we have no particular stake in most of them. I think with the Sankakus, we've formally said that we would defend them if the Chinese ever tried to seize them out right, which I think is crazy because there's a lot of them. There are just some rocks in the ocean. They don't matter. And so it's certainly not worth going to war over, but we have actually made that commitment to the Japanese under the treaty. And so that's one potential flashpoint that's worrisome.

But I think if there were an understanding that there could be some sort of condominium, some sort of coexistence between two powers in the Pacific, that it doesn't have to just be our domination or their domination, or their domination, because neither one is really sustainable, we would need to find a way to create a modus vivendi with them. And I think one of the first steps to doing that is to drop this conceit that we're going to go to war over Taiwan, because it doesn't make sense for us to go to war over Taiwan. If we did go to war over Taiwan, we might very well lose.

Even if we didn't lose, we would suffer major losses, probably higher losses than anything we've suffered since, probably since World War II, but at least certainly since Vietnam. And it would be a very, it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best. So it doesn't make sense to me that we would risk so much, including possible major war with a nuclear weapon. state over something like that. And so that is one area where I would direct the U.S. in a different course away from the confrontation that we're seeing now over Taiwan.

And so back to the ideological part of this, right, is that regardless of the color of the Chinese flag there and that whole dynamic, a conservative policy might sound. conservative, like you. Well, we're going to have to figure something out and be reasonable adults about this. And then on the other side, I mean, really, where does the pivot to Asia come from? That was Hillary Clinton announced this policy in foreign policy when she was the incoming Secretary of State back in 2011. And no, no, sorry, it was in 2000. Well, maybe she was already Secretary of State.

I think it was in 2011. Anyway. And this is, you know, Trump continued. in his own way and added the trade war and all of that. But, um, you know, you could call this like the Trumanite liberal policy. And you have this other article here about George Packer, who is famous to me for being one of the most important liberals who helped to build the media consensus for their side in the buildup to a Rock War II 20 years ago. Uh, Pollock and O'Hanlon were kind of the dynamic duo from the Brookings Institute and wherever. Um, and this guy was sort of,

the third major guy saying, come on, all good liberals got to get with George W. Bush's invasion. It's going to be good for the people of Iraq. And Saddam Hussein is such a bad guy, et cetera, and all these things. And now here he is saying, essentially, okay, that whole Middle East thing didn't work out. But what we're going to do, we're just going to forget about that and all the guys who fought in it, too, and died in it and everything else. We're just going to memory hole all of that stuff because right now we got, Russia, they're the bad guys, and that means we're on the side of the little guy, the good guy, the Ukrainians, defending themselves. And so now's no time to turn our back on liberal world rules-based order hegemony type thing.

And so, one, I want to let you, you know, talk a lot about Packer and what you wrote about this here. But two, like, it seems like there's a way that we can, you know, if I'm not too clumsily doing it right now, that we can show that, yeah, this is. is the consensus that we're against is what these idiots from the New Yorker think, you know? Yeah, and so I wrote the piece against Shadlow to sort of guard against

the neo-concertive attack against anti-intervention and pro-restraint people. And then the Packer piece that came out a little bit after that was an attack coming from the left to his published in the Atlantic. And, yeah,

it was striking in a couple ways that he of all people thought that it was appropriate to denounce anyone for foreign policy errors when his own tradition, his own tradition of liberal interventionism was deeply discredited, not just by the Iraq War, but by the Libyan War as well. And in fact, I even found, I went looking, and I remember that he had supported the Libyan intervention, and I went back and found that he had even written about it and was curing it on when it began. And to my mind, that's, that was typical of these kinds of liberal hawks.

They, they never saw a military intervention they didn't like. They never doubted the efficacy of American power. They never doubted the goodness of American power. And so they, they just automatically, instinctively, always side with the U.S. interfering somewhere and using force somewhere. ostensibly for high-minded goals or whatever, but ultimately they just worship this use of power and always end up siding with it. And so of course they hate restraint. Of course they hate people that say that there are limits to that power and that there are reasons

to hold back. There are reasons not to get involved. And so the attack piece itself was kind of laughable because he didn't really engage with anything that actual restrainers said, whether about Ukraine or anything else. And so he's just sort of writing them off. But then I thought it was interesting because

when he got to Iran, he's discussed him, he basically acknowledged the restraint position was correct. And we're not going to pursue regime change. We're not going to invade. And that sanctions are actually hurting the people.

which everyone I think now recognizes is true. But somehow, in spite of recognizing that the restrains have been right about that, he just writes them off and mocks them as hopeless. And so it was a revealing piece in that it showed some of the shamelessness and the total lack of accountability that exists in our foreign policy debates

where someone like that, who more than almost anybody in the foreign policy debates should be discredited and never heard from again, chooses to act as some sort of commissar and say that this whole foreign policy tradition is now not welcome as part of the debate, that they should just be passed out into the margins. it's it's it's frustrating on one level but it's it's also a reminder that you know this this keeps happening because the arguments that these people have for their policies are often shockingly weak and so the the only things that they can really do are denounce and smear and margin wise because they can't they usually can't win on the merits and and so they're reduced to this

yeah you know what i know that that's true i debated bill crystal and all he did as i knew he was going to do was just get up there and you know mumble a bunch of slogans and bromides look we haven't had a war daniel since nineteen forty five we've kept the peace this whole time how can you complain that's his argument right right yeah okay Um, good one. And even though, like, he is the man most responsible other than like, okay, Richard Pearl Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush himself. Um, but he's really tied with all of them for man most responsible for getting us into a rock war two 20 years ago. And just like Packer here. And just like, you know, the editor of the Atlantic that ran Packers article

is Jeffrey Goldberg, the guy that said that Saddam was training. Al-Qaeda in the New Yorker magazine. Is the editor the damn article, one of the most important magazines in America? Still, all of them. No accountability whatsoever. And so

this keeps happening. And I like, you know, I read a thing about oh, I know what it was. Did you see Taiibi and a Brit from the spectator debated Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg for from the New York Times in Toronto on whether you should trust the mainstream media or not.

It's a great read. Yeah, you don't have to sit through the whole video. Yeah, they had the transcript at his substack, and it's really great. And now I hope I can remember what my point was going to be. We'll see. Flip a coin, Dana, over there, and see if I can remember it. You should watch it. This is really fun.

I'll tell you, the first. funny as part of it is Taibi says something about, you know, back in the days of Walter Kronkite, people said that they trusted the media. Now they just don't for all these reasons and stuff. Gladwell just grabs on to that and spends the rest of the time

calling Matt Taibi a white supremacist who wishes that we lived in the 1950s. He like four or five times goes, oh yeah, Taiibi just wants to go back to the 50s. What are you even talking about, man? And people said Kronkite was the most trusted man

America in 1972 or something. I don't even know. And he wasn't saying, I want to go back to that. He was just saying, look at how much trust the mainstream media has lost since then. That's all he ever said. And Gladwell spends the whole time saying that this proves that Taibi is the leader of the area of nations. So that was funny.

That was not my point, but it was funny. Well, I mean, talking about trust in media, one of the things that's been interesting to see or to reflect on. in the last few years is that there is a tremendous deference towards the government from the media, especially when it comes to national security issues. And, of course, that was true back in the run-up to the Iraq War as well. There's this tremendous deference to the government and taking government claims at face value no matter how outlandish they may seem.

And I think that's one of the reasons. in fact why there is so much distrust of major media outlets because they do tend to defer to power. They don't challenge those in power. They don't question official claims as much as they're supposed to be doing. And so they end up becoming mouthpieces for the government, and government mouthpieces are rightly viewed with suspicion and skepticism. And that's one of the problems that we keep running into. because whether it's for reasons of access or ideological reasons, or whatever it may be,

there is a strong bias in favor of deferring to those official claims. What we need from our media outlets is for them to challenge them and to question them and not assume that the government is the truth. I think you may have seen that story about the missile strike that happened in Poland and the initial AP alert went out saying Russian missiles hit Poland and their only source for that was one anonymous intelligence official

and in their internal deliberations one of the editors said oh they wouldn't they wouldn't get that wrong an intelligence official wouldn't make a mistake about something like that I can't imagine that he would right so what is this

what is an editor doing just swallowing this stuff whole without any skepticism, without any doubt at all, and that's how a lot of the news reporting on national security stuff knows evidently, where official claims are simply taken for whatever the government says, and there's no investigation, there's no double checking of it, and it just goes out. And luckily, they did end up rescinding that story, or they corrected that story and acknowledged that they made a mistake, but the initial report set off that firestorm of people calling for direct intervention in Ukraine.

And, you know, you had people talking about sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet and closing a no-fly zone, all because of an errant air defense missile from the Ukrainian side. Article 5! Yeah, right, right. And so it was disturbing to see how ready, so many people were to jump on that bandwagon and to believe the most thinly sourced claim because it pushed in the direction that they already wanted to go. And the more disturbing thing is to realize that if our government and the Polish government

had jumped on that same bandwagon and promoted a lie about it, a lot of the media outlets would have just echoed them. You would not have seen people pushing back on it. You would not have seen people saying, well, what if it was a Ukrainian missile? Because at that point, anybody raising that question would be accused of disloyalty

or wanting Russia to win or something. And so it's, this is the atmosphere that we're operating. And it's very, it's very bad for a healthy debate. Yeah. Hey, I remember my awesome point, too, which was about Michelle Gold, Goldberg saying, well, we got it right that Russia was going to invade Ukraine when, of course,

the New York Times completely neglected to explain to the American people in any reasonable terms whatsoever why it happened and America's role in the thing, even though they covered every provocation for the last 30 years and every warning about what was going to happen for the last 30 years too. And they still won't tell the truth to the American people about what's behind that war, but she's saying, yeah, but that time when we repeated CIA talking points, it wasn't a lie, and it turned out to be right. But she couldn't cite a single thing that they got right where they exposed the U.S. government for anything. All she's saying is, yes, we tow the line for the state all the time, but here's one example where it wasn't totally BS. Well, yeah,

and the lieutenant speaks for itself, but it's also worth remembering that a lot of the fithful claims coming out of the administration in the early in the days prior to the invasion didn't end up being borne out by events either. There was a lot of boom-and-gloom scenarios coming through the leaks in the press saying that Kiev would fall in three days or something. And maybe that was, that may have been what the Russians imagined would happen, but there was no reason to think that that would happen. So it was It was one of those cases where there was a lot of extra fearmongering on top of whatever the warnings were. And that fearmongering was amplified over and over by credulous people like the ones you're talking about.

All right. Well, I will let you go and have a great afternoon. I hope after this, Daniel. I really appreciate your time on the show. Yeah, thanks a lot, Scott. Thank you, guys. That is Daniel Larrison, once upon a time, and soon again someday, our guy at anti-war.com. And here he is that responsible statecraft writing about the battle for conservative statecraft and the horribleness of George Packer. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com. anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.