The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East by Steven Simon

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East by Steven Simon A longtime American foreign policy insider’s penetrating and definitive reckoning with this country��s involvement in the Middle East—and its bitter end The culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when American perception of the Middle East shifted from a cluster of faraway and frequently skirmishing nations to a shining, urgent opportunity for America to (in Reagan’s words) “serve the cause of world peace and the future of mankind.” Reagan fired the starting gun on decades of deepening American involvement, but as the global economy grew, bringing an increasing reliance on oil, U.S. diplomatic and military energies were ever more fatefully absorbed by the Middle East until the Obama administration and its successors finally sought to disentangle America from the region. Grand Delusion explores the motivations, strategies, and shortcomings of each presidential administration from Reagan to today, exposing a web of intertwined events—from Lebanese civil conflict to shifting Iranian domestic politics, Cold War rivalries, and Saudi Arabia’s quest for security to 9/11 and the war on terror—managed by a Washington policy process frequently ruled by wishful thinking and partisan politics. Simon’s sharp sense of irony and incisive writing bring a complex history to life. He questions the motives behind America's commitment to Israel; explodes the popular narrative of Desert Storm as a “good war”; and calls out the devastating consequences of our mistakes, particularly for people of the region trapped by the onslaught of American military action and pitiless economic sanctions. Grand Delusion reveals that this story, while episodically impressive, was too often tragic and at times dishonorable. As we enter a new era in foreign policy, this is an essential book, a cautionary history that illuminates American's propensity for self-deception and misadventure at a moment when the nation is redefining its engagement with a world in crisis.

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and we get to talk about all sorts of brilliant stuff. I'm being told we're going to be booking our third billionaire, or he was a billionaire until he recently sold his company. I think that was a valuation, but we're evidently booking him on the show. So the billionaire is just coming. I think we're just going to have a billionaire show from here on out. I don't know. We'll probably run out of episodes at that point.

But we have, of course, the most brilliant minds, authors, thinkers on the show, and none of them are me. So that's why we have guests. So we have smart people on. Today we have an amazing guest on the show. He is here to talk to us about his latest book that comes out April 11, 2023. I think it's about the Styx album in 1976 called Grand Illusion. No, it's not.

I'm making that up. His book is actually entitled appropriately grand delusion the rise and fall of american ambition in the middle east steven simon is on the show with us today he's going to talk about his amazing book and some of the insight because the one thing you always hear me say on the show the one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history so maybe we should stop doing that because we just go round and round stephen simon served on the national security council staff as a senior director for middle east and north african affairs from 2011 to 2012

he also worked on the nsc staff 1994 to 1999 on counterterrorism and middle east policy these assignments followed a 15-year career at the u.s department of state and between government assignments he was the uh hazib savid senior fellow for middle eastern studies at the council on foreign relations did i get that right i don't think I did. Close enough. Hasib Sabat. In fact, we've had a few people from the CFR on the show. He was an analyst for the RAND Corporation and a deputy director

in International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is currently a professor at Colby College and he is the co-author, among other books, of the Age of Sacred Terror, winner of the Arthur C. Ross Award for the Best Book in International Relations. Welcome to the show, Stephen. How are you? I'm great. I'm great, and thank you for bringing me on your show. I really appreciate it. And it's wonderful to have you. In fact, I think we had the head of the Council on Foreign Relations on the show, a

brilliant gentleman, and a few others, actually, that have been on the show from there so uh we love the insight that you guys bring to the show uh steven give us a dot com or wherever on the internet you want people to maybe get to know you a little bit better you know i wish i wish i could um but i'm i'm just i'm completely out of it. I'm divorced from social media. But I do have a Twitter account. Occasionally I do post. It's SNS underscore 1239. There you go. You know, the Internet's pretty toxic anyway, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It can be toxic, and sometimes it might be better like i have a bad habit of writing long posts on facebook and i'm like you know i really should put some of this crap into a book and people are like maybe you should just shut up so there's that so anyway what motivated you want to write this latest book um you know i didn't think that there was anything out there on the topic. There was a really great book by a British professor, Lawrence Friedman, called Choice of Enemies. And that was really the inspiration for it. He just covered a shorter period in U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

But he was really kind of a model and inspiration. And I thought, well, since I've been there, as well as studied it as an academic, it's the logical thing to do, would be to follow up on his book. And it would also be an opportunity for me to come to grips with my career. Because, you know, when you're really serving in government, you're not all that reflective. I mean, you don't think so much about what you're doing. You know what you've got to do and you do it. The president has a vision, whatever it is, for U.S. policy. You're there at the White House. Your job is to make sure that that policy, that that vision is turned into policy and ultimately into reality if the government

is functioning properly. So I wanted to look back on what I'd done over the course of, you know, decades and make sense out of it. There you go. It's interesting insight that you're giving. So give us a broad overview of the book, a 30,000 view, and then let's get into some of the details. Yeah, sure. The book really has a couple of themes.

One is that U.S. policy since really the end of the Carter administration, but mostly the beginning of the Reagan administration, which is to say 1981 when he was inaugurated, was regulated by big ideas. Every administration came in. It had its big idea. But the thing about these big ideas is that they were essentially disconnected from reality in the region. So, you know, you had these administrations come in and they'd believe this or they'd believe that. And then they sort of apply these ideas to a region that, you know, wouldn't recognize them, you know, if it bumped into these ideas in a closet. I mean, these ideas were just developed and carried through in the absence of any contact with reality. So that was the one thing. The second theme, which is related, is the degree to which each administration was impervious to voices from within the administration saying's the job, generally speaking, of the intelligence community.

That's their job. You know, they come in and they speak truth to power. And they say, well, you know, you may want to do X, but, you know, that only works in your imagination. It's not going to work when you try to apply it on the administration's desire to implement their big idea, whatever the big idea was. Thirdly, and this kind of blew my mind, you know, in retrospect, I mean, I came into government at the beginning of the Reagan administration, and I had a certain, you know, take on my experience of government back then. And, of course, I was their conviction that the key partner for the United States in the region was Iran. Iran was going to be the key player, and Iran was the country with which the United States had to forge a strong relationship.

That, you know, I mean, I was there, and I didn't really have that impression at the time, but the documents, you know, in retrospect, make it clear. So those were the main big themes, you know, large ideas that had nothing to do about Iran, and with Reagan sort of pointing in one direction, but one which was never followed up. And thirdly, that the intelligence community did, by and large, a pretty good job. They did a good job, but nobody listened. You know, I've always been enthralled

with the U.S. government, U.S. government policy and what they do. As a very young boy, I tripped across my mother's copy of 1,000 Days, I think by Schlesinger, about the John F. Kennedy administration. And he detailed in there, I might have his name wrong,

he detailed in there what the Kennedy administration went through, a bit of the deception, or what was apparent deception, by, I believe, the CIA in the Bay of Pigs, and how he dealt with that, and of course how he used that data to process and deal with the crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis. And ever since then, it's always been really interesting to me. You know, we had an author on yesterday who we talked about Nigeria and the Civil War that it went through and the impact on his family. But part of that was the imperialism of United Kingdom and American stance.

And, you know, looking through history of how American presidents and American administrations have tried to put their fingers on the scale from everything from CIA assassinations to, you know, us mucking up governments, Iran, of course, you know, how we, how, you know, the Shah of Iran and how we tried to gain our support there, Cuba as well. And it's interesting to me, the process of what goes through that. And so in your book, you cover 40 years of us mucking about, I'm going to use the word mucking about, with trying to make that work. And one thing that's always interesting to me is, as you mentioned, you know, we have this huge establishment of these U.S. ambassadors. You know, we've had on the show,

we've had people that have worked in the government that they have a very long, broad policy because they're there. And these presidents' administrations sometimes come in for four or eight years. And even the intelligence community knows that, you know, hey, these guys are just the show of the week, if you will. And, you know, they come in and one person does another and another does another. And how many presidents do you outline and go through the process in the book and kind of analyze our American ambition, as you say, in the Middle East? Well, I start with Jimmy Carter, the end of his administration, and then Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush,

Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and, of course, Joe Biden. So quite a big run of different administrations. Yeah. And what do you feel? I mean, this is kind of a big, giant question. It might be more complex than the simple answer but is is there is part of our problem in our american sort of ambition is is that asshole americanist sort of ideal that we are that we're the best thinkers of whatever you know like i mentioned the john f kennedy administration it brought it brought the college people in and the people were trying to manage a a war from some sort of college

thing that you could you know somehow there from some sort of college thing that you could, you know, somehow there was some sort of logical business decisions you can make in a war that would make some sort of edge or difference, and I think it backfired is the summation. Why do we have this grand illusion? Because you've entitled the book that. What does that refer to yeah so uh it it stems from a couple of things uh one is that in the aftermath of world war ii the united states um had uh what one scholar called a preponderance of power. The United States was just so powerful relative to all other countries. I just named them, clumped them together. It just, nobody separately or in combination was remotely as powerful, you know, as the United States.

And, you know, the generation that grew up in that era, let's say the boomers, you know, they absorbed, you know, this sense that the United States had a preponderance of power and could do whatever it wanted, and there wasn't anyone who could seriously challenge it. The second thing was Vietnam, because, you know, Vietnam appeared to challenge this view that the United States did have a preponderance of power. You know, the U.S. fought that war, you know, from the early 60s through the early 1970s. We suffered almost 60,000 KIA, you know, killed in action. We bombed, you know, North Vietnam to a fairly well. We probably killed a million North Vietnamese.

And yet we lost. We left Vietnam with our tail between our legs. So, you know, the generation that my book talks about tries to reconcile these two facts, the preponderance of power that they were led to believe the United States possessed on the one hand, and this defeat that they suffered in Vietnam on the other, which was a traumatizing event in American history. So they tried to reconcile these two ideas and the way they did it was by pursuing two goals. The one was to erase the memory and the shame of Vietnam and show that the United States could be a power overseas and truly reflect its ability to create reality despite the disappointing aberration of Vietnam, that they could do it. And this was a driving motivation for this generation, and it led to a number of wars in the Middle East. I mean, but really before Reagan, and especially during Vietnam, you know, the United States didn't want to do anything in the Middle East. The British were still a power in the Middle East, and they could sort

of deal with security problems. They didn't really have to worry about access to oil because, you know, the British were in the Persian Gulf, and they would block the Soviets from somehow materializing in the Middle East and stealing our oil. The United States was so averse to action in the Middle East during this period that even in the June 1967 war, when all these Arab countries ganged up on Israel and Israel preempted in a devastating attack that essentially reshaped that part of the Middle East. The Johnson administration, Lyndon Johnson administration, had a chance to intervene and stop the war from even starting. But they didn't want to do it because they were just they weren't in the habit of intervening in the Middle East.

And they had other more important things to do in their view, which, among other things, was fighting this war in Vietnam. So, you know, the United States just, they didn't think in terms of intervention. But all that changed with the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, and then the accession of the Reagan administration. And almost just as soon as they came into office, the Reagan administration launched an incursion, a U.S. incursion into Lebanon, which turned out, you know, disastrously. But as disastrously as that intervention played out, it didn't seem to contradict in the minds of this new generation of policymakers the conviction that the United States could do whatever it wanted in the Middle East. So anyway, I think that's where it really comes from.

There you go. And so you walk through Reagan and all the different presidents since that have tried to, you know, been the people that, you know, hey, we're going to bring peace to the Middle East. I mean, I've been hearing that for 40 years and it's kind of become almost slapstick or comedic because you're like, oh, yeah, you're going to solve the Middle East problem. You know, up until Donald Trump and other places,

you know, you saw Bill Clinton had that famous Israeli Palestinian moment on the lawn where he got everybody shake hands with the, with everybody. And it's, it's really interesting how we just keep going back to that is large part of your book cover, you know cover George W. Bush, the incursion into taking Iraq in a bit of war? Some people call us being imperialistic when we do that or empire building um i know there was i know in the uh it seems to me and i'm i'm i can't remember

the names but there were certain people that traced through a lot of these administrations especially the republican ones that had i know during the george bush administration the w bush administration i believe there was actually a document of empire building, I think it was called. And I believe some of the specters of those people behind the document, Rumsfeld and other people, and I'm thinking of another name, they have gone through many of these administrations. You look at, who's the gentleman with the mustache?

In fact, we famously joked with Dr. Richard Haass, who came on the show, about the mustache. And he was actually the proponent between, you know, he always wants to go to war with Iran. Was there truth to some of these documents and some of these proponents that went through administration that consulted with the presidents that constantly have this this attachment or um issue with trying to empire build in the middle east and you know bring

sort of an american imperialism to it yeah so um you, imperialism is a loaded word. So, you know, I just avoid it because it gets people's hackles up, you know, one way or another. I don't know. And that's those are deep waters. No reason for us to wade in there. But for sure. For sure. There were two U.S. interests in the Middle East that drove American involvement, certainly in the years from 1980 virtually to the present. Two interests were oil. Okay, everybody kind of knows that, but you really got to stop and think about it. I mean, you know, when the U.S. declared its interest in Persian Gulf oil, it really needed that oil, not for itself, not for the United States, but it needed it for the Europeans who were seeking to rebuild after World War II. And the idea was, well, you know, if the Europeans didn't have plenty of cheap oil and a reliable supply of it to rebuild, then Western Europe would fall victim

to communism. So, you know, the importance of Persian Gulf oil was that it underpinned the Western position in the Cold War. And so that was existential. People thought that that was just, you know, incredibly important. It didn't get more urgent than that, and then the other interest was Israel. Israel was established in 1948, you know, in the wake of World War II and these horrible, you know, the horrible Holocaust and the attempt by the Germans to erase the Jewish people in Europe. There were a lot of, you know, Jews who managed to escape Europe or who, you know, Hitler didn't get a chance to kill before Germany lost the war. They needed a place to go. And frankly, neither the United States nor Britain wanted

to let them into their respective countries. So it made sense to send them to Palestine, which is where the Jewish survivors seem to want to go. And then it became a responsibility for the United States to safeguard this new state and see that it survived against the odds in a very hostile region. So two big interests. These were strongly held interests. In the case of Israel, it was supported by a strong domestic constituency. So it was a domestic political issue as much as it was a foreign policy issue. On the oil side of things, it was a profound economic concern. So even after, you know, the Soviet, you know, venture in the Middle East dissolved, and there was no longer any conceivable threat to oil in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, oil was still really important because it meant that the price of oil meant the difference between a recession and a thriving economy. So it was hugely important. And because there was so much money involved, these relationships with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

and other oil producers threw off a lot of cash. So you got everybody from members of Congress to lobbyists to big donors to political candidates in the United States, they all thrived on the cash that the U.S.-Saudi relationship just sort of tossed off in great quantities. And that solidified, you know, this perception in Washington that Saudi Arabia was just really important to U.S. interests. So, those two things, you know, driving U.S. intervention. Now, was this imperialism? Was it not imperialism? Who knows? Empire building? But maybe there was a bit of that, actually. And the United States wound up acting as though it were an empire, intervening militarily in very significant ways, one in 1991 and the other in 2003.

And those interventions were both launched by somebody named Bush. So, you know, and they were both justified by grand ideas, okay, by this big idea that people, that the administration carried around in front of them wherever they went. And in the way the George W. Bush administration expressed it, it was the New World Order. And in the New World Order, people played by the rules. Bad countries didn't invade nice countries. Big countries didn't exploit small countries. In other words, all the things the United States actually did over the years. You know, in the New World Order, that would not happen. And the United States was going to be the guarantor of this new world order. make a gift of democracy to the Arabs in the region who were thirsting for it. And if the United States had to kill 100,000 Arabs, you know, to make this work, well, you know, surely if you asked all those Arabs, assuming you could communicate with them in the next world, you know, they would tell you, hey, I was glad to give my life, you know, so that there could be democracy in Iraq.

But the wars were justified by these grand themes. And they were grand themes that didn't really relate very much uh to to realities uh in in the region and the two wars are connected because you know the first war which was launched to get iraq out of kuwait iraq had invaded kuwait this small country just um south of it to steal kuwait's oil for a lot of reasons. Anyway, they felt they were entitled to it, so they just wanted to go and take it. The United States launched a war to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but they didn't finish the job.

And they left Saddam Hussein who ran Iraq with a huge army and that created problems because the United States wanted Iraq to comply with various rules and regulations you know after that war but there were the kinds of rules and regulations that you could only enforce if you occupied a country and had a big army there. But we weren't occupying it, and we didn't have a big army there. So the situation went unresolved until Bush's son became president and, deranged by 9-11, decided to take it out on Iraq. But Iraq would not have been in the crosshairs in the second Bush administration if it hadn't have been attacked by a previous Bush administration.

There you go. And you talk about that in the book, about how George W. Bush has stated repeatedly that he was not going to invade Iraq, but they'd already prepared for war. In fact, there's the famous, uh, the famous thing where Colin Powell goes before the UN committee and, and claims that they do have proof of WMDs and,

and they're just faking it. Um, I don't know if he was aware of that at the time or if he believed whatever sort of intelligence he was fed. Yeah, this kind of arrogance that we have as Americans, and I believe, did some of that doctrine that you're talking about kind of give us this sort of attitude that we were the police state to the world, that it was our job to police and and enforce you know world order as it were well yeah and we the united states had two powerful weapons

it believed um uh to control things uh the one was this enormous military establishment. I mean, truly colossal. And the other was a reserve currency, the dollar. You know, the global economy was structured around the dollar. You know, if you weren't working in dollars, well, you know, that was too bad because you couldn't do any serious transactions. And if you were working in dollars, all those transactions ran through the Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States. So between control of a global currency and a preponderance of military power. The United States had tremendous tools, but at the end of the day, they proved to be a delusion.

Because the wars that the United States especially in the oil trade, was never sufficient to force Iran to sign an agreement on nuclear weapons that it didn't want to sign. So, you know, you've got these fantastic capabilities which seem to be the biggest ever in the history of recorded time um but you still couldn't get your way yeah and and you know let me ask you this because this is important i don don't know if you talk about it in the book, but there's been a lot of discussion that part of the reason for the Iraq war was Saddam threatened to or was taking oil, his oil, off of the dollar. And you mentioned before, that's a big power for us. That's kind of a topic that's come up recently because right now, once again, and I believe China and Russia have been at this for years,

but China, Russia, Iran are trying to establish a new denomination that can replace the dollar as the thing that everything is bought and traded in the world, especially oil. Is there any truth to that with the Iraqi war and the George Bush administration that one of the big pushes for or maybe it was the original uh father uh but george bush's administration that the threat that sonoma is going to take his oil off of the dollar that was one of the reasons we invaded that you know that might be true i'm not familiar with it. But it was the era in which the U, there's a reason the dollar is a reserve currency. And the one is that, well, there's nobody who doubts the staying power of the United States,

you know, and its political institutions. So already that confers on the dollar, you know, a huge credibility. And the other is that, you know, the dollar is just that. It's a currency that enables commerce and transactions to proceed, and the United States understands that the desirability of the dollar is not just owing to the stability of the United States, but it owes to the understanding of the United States that you don't mess with currency.

And it's this latter consideration that's become really problematic, Russian, Chinese, Iranian cabal to try and establish their own currencies, whether it's the renminbi, the Chinese unit of currency, is looking pretty good in this respect now. Because when people want to do transactions, they don't have to worry that suddenly their dollar is going to become toxic. Yeah. Either because they're doing business with a country or an individual that's been sanctioned by the United States or you yourself have been sanctioned by the United States. So your currency essentially becomes worthless for serious transactions. And we've seen that tool used as a weapon now in modern warfare,

technically through banking, like with the war in the Ukraine with Russia, and how they've tried to isolate its ability to trade and do money. What do you hope people come away from in reading your book? Because it's quite the book, and you're covering a lot of ground. What do you hope people come away from in the book and maybe discover? Okay. I suppose that's the big question, Chris. Yeah, so several things. The first is that, you know, administration after administration is, you know, besotted with, you know, various delusions, they are deluded precisely because they don't have much connection to realities on the ground,

but they're just linked to how policymakers think about what the world should be like. Now, there's nothing wrong with that per se, but if you lose sight of what the world is like, then you've got a problem. And that's been a policymakers from within each administration whose job it is to deal in a serious and undiluted way with reality. It's their job to do that and present that to policymakers. Those people are more often ignored than not. The second is that we have this terrible relationship with Iran. And it's been a problem for the United States since the moment the book

begins. And you had in fact the Reagan administration, and this has been in the news just recently, by the fact, the Reagan administration, and this has been in the news just recently, you know, by the way, the Reagan administration started out even before the election by colluding with the Iranians to hold on to American hostages until Reagan was elected and inaugurated as a way to jam his opponent's campaign, Jimmy Carter's campaign. And then after that, Reagan continued to sell weapons to Iran. And then in the end of his first term, the beginning of his second term, he entered into a secret deal with the Iranians to supply the Iranians with weapons. And he didn't do that accidentally. And we know from documents that are available for scholars and others to see that members of the administration argued forcefully that if you look at Iran,

you know, the size of their population, the quality of its education, the fact that, among other things, it's not Arab and so forth. It was it was the logical ally for the United States. Wow. And ever since then, in each administration, the president either comes in wanting to slap the Iranians around and then leaves office wanting to hug them, or, you know, the president comes in wanting to hug Iran and leaves office, you know, just wanting to kick them in the shins. You know, so that's been a very vexing thing, and it's still very vexing now. So that's another theme.

The United States has never figured out how to deal with Iran. And third is this infatuation with military force that seems to be diminishing right now, at least with respect to the Middle East. But the infatuation with military force was really something, certainly in my time in government and the history of the period just shows it. And military doctrines like shock and awe could intoxicate policymakers and cause them to think that the United States could do like like amazing things and automatically succeed. Lastly, you know, I'd say going back to the two main drivers for U.S. policy in the period covered by the book, Israel and oil, you know, basically. The United States, I think what the book tries to show is that the

United States has accomplished its objectives with respect to Israel and Saudi Arabia. You know, Israel is a country whose existence no one in their right mind would challenge right now. Militarily, it's the strongest country in the Middle East, and it's nuclear armed. It's not the vulnerable country it was after World War II that the United States had to protect. And one can see how Israel, feeling secure and wealthy at this stage, feels free to diss the United States because Israel doesn't need the United States anymore, or at least in their perception. They don't need the United States anymore. So they're happier dealing with the United States closely when there's a Republican administration because the values coincide.

But otherwise, you know, the United States, they could take it or leave it. Saudi Arabia is a country with no natural predators. It's incredibly rich. And it's now carving out its own path, seeking stronger relationships with countries that are adversaries of the United States. Yeah. Ten years ago, that would have been completely unthinkable. to do that had the United States not succeeded in incubating Saudi Arabia and keeping it safe during the years when it was arguably vulnerable. And I think, you know, this is like the empty nest syndrome, Chris. You know, that the chicks have fledged and the United States needs to accept the fact, you know, that, you know, Israel and Saudi Arabia are not, you know, the little kids who are hanging around the wrong crowd in the schoolyard and need to be controlled or disciplined.

But they are they're just following their own their own star now. So, you know, that's that's what you get for succeeding and it it's interesting the arrogance of our american foreign policy and like i like like i said the first book i ever read was uh not not not the first book i ever read but the first real uh sort of administrative policy book that i read was 1000 Days. And it was interesting to me to see, you know, how a president deals with the intelligence community. At that time, the CIA doing all sorts of stuff that the CIA does. And it was interesting to me the play of how, as a country, we've tried to put our thumb on so many different scales and we've tried to put you know in this in this sort of incitement of well you know democracy the

shining beacon on the hill which is a favorite phrase among the reagan administration and the you know trying to put our thumbs on the scales and you see the sort of crises that we created in Cuba in South America there was the famous massacre of the administration funneling guns and stuff the Reagan administration funneling guns into was it Ecuador? There was all sorts of problems

in the South America that we did there genocide in Guatemala all sorts of different things that we did there, genocide in Guatemala, all sorts of different things that we were trying to muck about with our thing. Even when you look at Saddam Hussein, we built and funded that guy, and then we get bit in the butt.

Same thing with what you mentioned with Saudi Arabia now. Evidently, they're one of the people who maybe, it's speculated, may be involved in this new scheme to try and overthrow the dollar as the predominant use of purchasing power and oil in the world. to do this this sort of idealistic sort of pledge that uh you know oh the iraqis will greet us as liberators um you know and no one seemed to understand in the w bush administration that saddam hussein was the only thing keeping you know the factions of iraq from from going at each other and creating a whole civil war um and it's always been interesting to me how, you know, we seem to almost create these problems over these years by mucking about and trying to, you know, be the smart guy in the room.

And we actually end up causing problems or like 9-11 getting attacked and destroyed and then drawn into an even bigger conflict that, you know, I mean, when you look at how we pulled out of Afghanistan recently, um, and, and you, you know, we, we had, we had soldiers that wrote books on the war that were sitting there going, what the hell did we do all that for? Why did we, why did we lose our people? Why did I fight this war for, you know, this ugly ending that was almost like Saigon? You know, that helicopter out of Saigon.

So it's interesting. And I think it's important that books like yours highlight this so that we kind of have an understanding. And maybe we come out of the atmosphere with this, you know, this asshole American deal that somehow we're the brilliant people in the room with the answers to everything. Or maybe we are, I don't know. Well, we certainly have the grand delusions. There you go. There you go. And hence the title of the book. Anything more you want to tease on the book before we go? Because we could probably spend another 40 years talking about these concepts i think chris i think we hit the uh we hit the high points i would just add that it looks it looked as though in a in a obama's second term and onward the fever had broken.

I mean, Obama came into office also with a grand illusion. And it was not unlike the preceding grand illusions of previous administrations. This one was that the United States could also impose democracy on the Middle East because we had the Arab Spring, you recall, that was during Obama's first term and there was turbulence, especially in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, and so forth, all these smaller countries. And the United States intervened in Libya in a fairly big way. And that turned into what Obama ultimately called a shit show. It was, you know, and but, you know, Obama kind of looked at what happened in in libya and sort of said well we're not doing that again you know we're not we're not doing that again and then you look at the result of that you know, Obama at first was not inclined to get involved in Syria. And there's still this perception out there that the United States remained uninvolved. by David Petraeus in the short time that Petraeus was heading the CIA during Obama's first term to launch a major effort to arm and train

the so-called moderate opposition to the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. And that turned out to be one of the largest such operations that the United States had launched ever. As we can see by looking at the newspaper every day, it didn't work. You know, Assad is still there. And the United States is reduced to, you know, 900 men and women in uniform in eastern Syria, basically, you know, protecting the Kurds and the oil wells there. And that's sort of about it. But I doubt that Obama, if you asked him today, well, was that a good idea, you know, to launch that huge arm and train effort in Syria. And he'd probably say, nah, not really.

That what it did was drag out a bloody civil war in ways that certainly didn't further U.S. interest, but added, you know, to the vast toll of the war that has been paid by the Syrian people. But anyway, if you look at Obama's second term, he's got one signature policy program in the Middle East, and that's bringing Iran to the table to get control of its nuclear program. And he succeeded in doing that. And many people doubted that he could, but he did, and it was a good agreement. And the Iranians were abiding by it until you know donald trump um walked away from it yeah so but but that gets

us to donald trump who who was mostly in non-intervention mode um and and and now you know we look at joe biden and we see uh more or less the same reluctance to get involved in the Middle East. And this was before Ukraine. Okay. And now with the Ukraine thing going on and tensions with China, you could really see why the administration would be distracted from the Middle East. But even before those huge developments unfolded, Biden was pretty reluctant, you know, to put skin in any Middle Eastern game. So anyway, what I'm saying here really is that perhaps the fever has broken and this age of intervention, the age of grand delusion, is coming to an end.

Yeah. That would be a good thing. Yeah. The interest to me, too, is, and like I say, from the moment I read 1,000 Days, seeing the chessboard of how things play out. Like, for example,

one of the things that constrained Obama was a public perception that we're tired of wars we're tired of this iraq thing we're just over it stop it quit getting into new things and so he had that pressure on him but then you see you know we just had an author on earlier this week that that wrote about the migrant crisis in 2015 you see how that shaped geopolitical nations that dealt with all these immigrants that came out of Syria and moved the country, countries, especially in Europe and here in America, very dangerously close to fascism and authoritarianism

and very right-wingish sort of push because of this, you know, the racism of immigration and other things in dealing with that, you know, and we do this huge curve and arc as a country politically to where, you know, we have more right-wing figures getting elected, you know, and kind of the rise of a territorium between Brazil, Europe, and all these sort of things where now, you know, we're dealing with the affront of fascism.

And so it's interesting to me how all of the public policy or the foreign policy that we do in America has these whole sort of chessboard sort of come arounds. And so that's why I think it's important people read your book and understand how, you know, all these things affect. I read one time, or I think someone said one time, that one of the challenges with U.S. administrations is when they come in, there's kind of this, they feel that they have a mandate,

that they've been ordained by the voters to have this mandate, and that they are now the smartest kids in the room, and they're going to fix it all. And they very quickly come slamming against reality. I don't know if you find that's a true analogy, but I heard to fix it all. And they very quickly come slamming against reality. I don't know if you find that's a true analogy, but I heard someone say it once.

You know, it's very true. And I've been through a number of these transitions and both as a civil servant, you know, a career government person and also a political appointee. And, you know, of course, a new administration comes in and they do think they know better than the outgoing administration and that one of the things they need to do is clean up the mess that's been created by the guys and gals who are on their way out. I think that's a natural inclination, and it's true of Republicans and Democrats.

It just seems to be baked into the pie. Yeah, there you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, and I love these discussions, and they're insightful, and hopefully, you know, I mean, I say this continuously as a quote of mine, The one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history. And thereby we go around and around. So it's important that we learn from our history and that we kind of, I don't know, try and do better, whatever that means. So there you go.

Give us your dot coms or I think it was a Twitter handle that you use that maybe people can go check you out on the interwebs. You bet. Go ahead. Yep. SNS underscore 1239. There you go. On Twitter.

There you go. And order up the book, folks, wherever fine books are sold. Learn about your history because it's important, of course, as a voting block, as people who elect the administrations and have an influence of public perception and public desires for what goes on in the Middle East. This is stuff we need to know and understand because we're the ones who ultimately vote to put these people in office. Order up the book wherever fine books are sold.

The Grand Delusion. I'm sorry. Let me recut that. Grand Delusion. The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East by Stephen Simon. Available April 11, 2023. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss,

and all the other places you can find on the N-Webs. Thanks for tuning in. Be good tos.com fortress chris fuss youtube.com fortress chris fuss and all the other places you can find on the nwebs thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time