The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 196. How America Talks Itself Into Endless Wars

Episode Date: July 5, 2026

What does the gap between American foreign policy rhetoric and reality reveal about the failures of its military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Iran? In an age of algorithm-driven political polarisation, can authentic political speech still break through, or has social media made Trump-style fragmentation impossible to overcome? Is Donald Trump an anomaly in American politics, or part of a recurring historical cycle - and what does this suggest about America's future? Alastair and Rory are joined by Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama's former speechwriter and Deputy National Security advisor, to answer all of these questions and more. __________ Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. Search IG.com to find out more and/or Look for IG in your app store. Barack Obama's 2009 ⁠speech⁠ on a 'New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan', as mentioned by Rory. __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Caroline Kaye Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's therestispoletics.com. America acts like a self-interested superpower that wants the straight-of-hormoze open or wants access to Oriole.

And then we put a narrative around it that is much more grandiose. People around the world have figured out don't believe the narrative because at the end of the day, they're going to act in a pretty narrow self-interest. We've seen in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, now in Iran, and it's led us to make mistake after mistake after mistake. No Democrat has taken billions of dollars for his family's crypto business for the Emirates. No Democrat has taken a billion dollar plane from the Qataris.

It's a scale of corruption that we've just never seen in American politics. We're being algorithmically polarized. Donald Trump has been the perfect person for that because he knows if he gets up at a rally and speaks for an hour. He doesn't have to give a coherent speech. the algorithm will do all the work for him. This episode is presented by IG. Now, as a listener of this podcast, you're no doubt acutely aware of the world's unstable political landscape

and how it can affect your money. Exactly. It can be incredibly frustrating to feel like yet another maddening decision made in Westminster or Brussels or, dare I say, Washington can directly affect your finances. But IG can be a real help, something at least which might help you avoid losing sleep when we lose yet another British Prime Minister.

With access to global stock shares in ETFs, IG gives investors, like you, the tools to build a portfolio that reaches beyond the realm of political instability, all with zero commission on investments and no annual fees. Backed by over 50 years of heritage, IG is built for investors who think beyond the current news cycle. Search IG.com to find out more. IG, trade, invest, progress. Capital at risk, other fees may apply. Welcome to the rest of this politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. We are with Ben Rhodes.

This is a great guest to have at this time as we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. And people struggle with the concept of American identity right now. Ben is somebody who was alongside Barack Obama for eight years as a speechwriter. Pretty good gig that, given what an orator, Barack Obama was and is, but also as a national security advisor. and somebody who's remained very, very active in the American political debate, not least with his podcast, Ponset of the World. But interestingly, I was up most of the night waiting for France to play Iraq, but then getting through your latest book, which is a collection of 15 speeches

that tell the story of America, which were fascinating. And you have this line in there where you say, transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump seemed dizzying at the time, but it's natural when viewed in the sweep of American history. So I can't wait to get into that. But thanks for being here. It's great to be with you guys. Thank you, Ben.

Tell us a little bit about you and what you studied and what alternative career paths you might have gone and what kind of person you were before you became this guy locked into politics. That's a great question because I did not intend to go into politics. I actually got a master's degree in fiction writing, which a lot of my political opponents in the Republican Party have had a lot of fun with over the years. But I was working in kind of local politics in New York.

I always had an interest in politics. But I thought I was going to live in Brooklyn and be a writer and go down that path. And on 9-11, I was working for a local city council campaign handing out flyers at a polling site. It was voting day in New York. And I witnessed the attacks. And all of a sudden, being a 23-year-old, you know, sitting in an outer borough New York apartment, writing short stories about, being a 23-year-old writer seemed incredibly trivial. And I wanted to be a part of whatever happened next. I actually went to an Army recruiter. And it's funny, they looked at me,

this is before they had kind of gotten the message, vacuum everybody up who walks in the door. Because the guy looked at me and said, well, we have nothing for you to do. You're a fiction writer. Like, I don't really know why you're here. So I ended up applying for journalism jobs in D.C. I thought I'd write about foreign policy. And a guy, an editor, Foreign Policy magazine looked at me and said, well, we don't have a job for you here, but have you ever considered being a speechwriter? And I had not, because who thinks about being that? And that kind of set in motion the rest of my life because he had been asked for a referral

for a speechwriter for a guy named Lee Hamilton who ran a thing tank in D.C., the Wilson Center, and ended up being the co-chair of our 9-11 commission. So very accidental entry into politics and foreign policy, I would have been living in New York trying to write novels and work in journalism. That's so interesting to hear that sort of, because it is one of those moments that changed a lot of people's lives. It changed our lives in the Labor government because we went from being domestic focused to the rest of Tony Blair's time, basically being post 9-11 and all the stuff that flowed from that. But what was the speech writing thing? I mean, I'm fascinated by this because you're a writer, you're a good writer.

But then what's the role of a speech? Yes. So this was really interesting because I'd always had these dual interests, writing and politics. And I should say my household growing up was very political. My brother who runs Sky News here, the two of us and our parents, and my father was a conservative Republican. My mother was a liberal Democrat. And my brother was kind of a libertarian in those days.

So we debate was a part of the household. So it was a very unhappy family to me. Actually, it was fun. We enjoyed it back in the days when you could argue without, you know, hating each other. And speeches actually were in the backdrop because the one thing my parents shared in common politically was this kind of reverence for the Kennedy brothers and the kind of 60s rhetoric, Martin Luther King, too. So I'd always kind of had a soundtrack, almost, of American speeches. When I actually got hired as a speechwriter, what was interesting is, you know, my whole life

up to that point, writing had been in my own voice. And I think the main job of a speech writer is to realize you're not writing for yourself. You have to learn the voice of the person you're writing for. My first boss had been in Congress for 34 years from Indiana. He couldn't have been more different than me. He was a conservative Democrat from Southern Indiana, crude cut, oversized I had to learn to speak like a guy like that. And think like him. And think like him and very plain spoken simple language. Actually, it ended up being a huge benefit.

I like to think that I owe my living to him because kind of made a living and distilling complicated foreign policy to people in simple language. But to me, you know, and obviously when I got hired by Obama, I had to learn to write in his voice. It's not about the best written speech. it's about helping somebody say what they want to say in the most authentic possible way that they can say it. So it sounds like they're the only person on earth who could be delivering this speech. And I think that's a common thread to any good speech. The person giving it has to be the only person who could deliver it.

It's not the quality of the writing. It's the authenticity of the voice. Obviously, we're all in awe of Obama's speeches, but I guess we naively assume that he writes every word of them himself. And that's clearly not true, right? How does the process actually work? I mean, how much of it is his words and how much of it is your words? Yeah, bro, it's funny you say that because I remember me and John Favro, who's still my podcast colleague, but we were the two speechwriters on the Yes, We Can speech in the 2008 campaign.

And sometimes people would find that out and be kind of disappointed that Obama didn't just stand up and recite that, you know, out of nowhere. But then I'd always tell people, close your eyes and imagine Hillary Clinton or John Kerry or Al Gore delivering that. speech, it'd be absurd, right? And this is the point that it actually was Barack Obama's voice. And the process, I'd say it's twofold. One is just how do you learn someone like his voice? You know, when I got hired by Obama, I read every word he'd ever written. And he'd written a couple of autobiographies. I read every transcript of every interview he gave. I'd literally be grabbing, you know, sentences out of his, you know, transcripts to use in speeches. Oh, he said that in an interesting way. So I really had to kind of learn how he talked. I also, I

also had to kind of find the origins of how he talked. So Obama shaped by the civil rights movement, if I wanted to, you know, capture his voice, I had to go back and read King's speeches. Obama also shaped by kind of aspirational Democratic Party politics. So I read on that campaign, we always read the Kennedy speeches before we wrote big speeches. But he also was very involved. And so on the front end of any big speech, we'd sit down with him, you know, whichever speechwriter was working on it for an hour. And he would essentially kind of dictate an outline. You know, here's what I want to say, this and then this and then this. He'd sprinkle in phrases that he'd want to use. He'd kind of, here's arguments I want to rebut. And so by the time I wrote a draft, I had a pretty

clear sense of what he wanted to say. Then in the process of revision, he was, you know, very involved. Like we'd go back and forth seven, eight, nine times on some of these speeches, him line editing. And one of my jobs, which didn't make me a lot of friends in the government, was also to keep other people out of it. I mean, Alistair, you know what this is like, but, you know, these speeches go around and every policy advisor is like, no, you have to say it this way. And my job is to say no to be about 95% of these edits unless they were absolutely essential. And everybody would think, like, oh, Rhodes, he's, you know, jealously guarding this text. But that was actually Obama. Like, he wanted it to sound like him. And a reason a lot of politicians don't sound like real people

is they, you end up taking too many edits from too many people. These 15 speeches that you've delighted upon, and I'd love to know what sort of process you went through to decide it, but the one you picked from Obama, is him really confronting some of the things that people are, it's always like a rebuttal of his character. Yeah. The attacks on his character, and he's taking that on, and he's doing it in a really kind of hopeful, positive sort of way. Why did you think that was the speech that told that chapter of American history rather than all the other speeches that you could have picked? It's interesting to ask that question because that was actually not the speech I originally was going to use. I was going to use this speech he gave in 2015 that was the 50th

anniversary of the Selma March. And it's a very triumphant speech. It's basically the triumph of American progressive politics. And then Trump won the election. And so then it seemed like, that's not the right note to end this book on. And so I went back to the 2008 speech he gave on race. If people remember, there was a huge controversy. We seemed like we're on our way to the Democratic nomination. And then all of a sudden, all these videos start to circulate online of Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who also baptized his children, married him and Michelle. So he couldn't kind of distance himself saying, you know, God damn America and America is a racist nation. And 9-11 was America's chickens coming up to roost. And, you know, these were in the days when, you know,

scandals could still shock. And our campaign is sinking like a stone. And so he decides, I have to give a speech on race that is essentially also kind of rebutting any effort to kind of other me, you know, as someone who is not able to occupy the office because I'm just too different and because of my race and a whole bunch of other things. And actually, this gets to your point to worry about process because, you know, we prepared a draft for him. But this is one of the only times in which, you know, send the draft off in the next morning. He had stayed up all night. And this one he typed, which is not usual. And John Favro, says, you've got to see this. He calls me over. And we see, you know, a few paragraphs in black.

And then about nine pages, if anybody uses red track changes, about nine pages of red track changes. And then a few paragraphs in black. He kept the beginning and the end and had written the whole speech himself. I don't know why he didn't just accept the track changes. I think he was trying to show us. Here's where I can do, you know, when I actually have time to write a speech. But what he did that was so interesting is it's both personal and political in the sense. at the kind of two core parts of that speech. One is a famous passage where he says, you know, he's essentially saying Revin Wright, it's a complex character. He's done wonderful things in this community that I can't come out of. He was a Marine. So he's not just those clips. And he says, you know, I could no more disown Revin Wright than I could disown my white grandmother, a woman I

love who raised me, who also said racist things made me cringe. It was interesting to read that passage today because he's kind of giving as a progressive Democrat an argument against cancel culture. Yeah. And saying, like, look around. Look, who do we love that is perfect, you know? And why do we choose to only see the worst in each other? If we chose to see one another as full human beings, actually politically, that's a basis

for finding common ground. Because then he talks about the experience of black structural inequality in America. But then he talks about the white working class. And he says, a line that really resonated today to me, you know, these are people who don't feel particularly privileged by their race. their jobs have been shipped overseas. They don't like their concerns about crime to be dismissed as racist. He's talking about Trump voters. And again, what he's saying is that if we can find a shared identity, like the things that we have in common, and if we can kind of stand in each other's shoes,

in the same way that he was asking people, hey, stand in Reverend Wright's shoes and look at history from his perspective, stand in my white grandmother's shoes and look at her perspective, why she might be afraid, you know, walking the streets in some neighborhoods. If we can empathize with one another. That's actually how we're going to get health care and education. And that's kind of Obama's theory of politics. I looked very, very closely at a 2009 speech that President Obama gave on Afghanistan. Yeah, I wrote that one. Yeah. And I'm, I was completely intrigued by it, and I've been looking at it again. And why I'm interested is it's the way in which speech writing becomes foreign policy or foreign policy becomes speech writing. Maybe in show notes,

we can share the key parts of the speech. But basically, you say, we have a very narrow goal, which is to defeat al-Qaeda. And in order to defeat al-Qaeda, we need to defeat the Taliban. And in order to defeat the Taliban, we need a counter-insurgency warfare strategy. And in order to have a successful counter-insurgency warfare strategy, we need to build governance in Afghanistan. And in order to build governance in Afghanistan, we need to stabilize Pakistan. And it reflects the statement that Obama had made earlier, much more pithy, where he says, in order to defeat some of bin Laden, we need to win in Afghanistan and stabilize Pakistan. Even at the time, it was insane.

It totally insane. You'd got so carried away by this chain of mad logic that you'd got yourselves into a world where, quite clearly, in order to catch Osama bin Laden, you just needed a catch Osama bin Laden. You didn't need a win in Afghanistan and stabilized Pakistan. So talk us through this and what it tells us about U.S. foreign policy thinking, speech writing, and the mania of this chain of logic. So actually, first of all, if you go look carefully at the speech itself, Obama is quite specific about defeating al-Qaeda. He never fully accepted that full logic train. He didn't want to say we're going to win in Afghanistan. And I actually had some, I remember having a sentence in there about like victory.

So he says the final goal in the region is to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda. A necessary condition is the defeat of Taliban. Because if the Afghan government falls to Taliban, that country will again be a host for terrorists. And such efforts are hampered by naturally Afghan government. So that includes the deployment of 17,000 troops, but also a more comprehensive approach, promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government. Yeah, I know the speech you're talking about. Finally, Afghanistan cannot be addressed without Pakistan. Defeat an enemy that heeds no borders or laws.

We must recognize the fundamental connection between the future of Afghanistan, Pakistan. And then the quote, a few weeks earlier, in order to catch a sum of enlightened, we have to win in Afghanistan, stabilized Pakistan. I was thinking about this surge speech in December. That's an earlier one. So, like, you are correct. I think it was insane to follow that logic. train. I actually think that the only goal that Obama was truly committed to is the one of defeating al-Qaeda. And so when I look back on that, and I kind of felt this a bit at the time, Rory,

but I thought the surge was a mistake because I thought that there are two problems with this that speak to bigger problems in American foreign policy. The first is that there's a machinery of American foreign policy that often has ambitions that extend beyond what the American people are willing to do. So the American military was very committed to this counterinsurgency. approach that they had developed in Iraq and they wanted to take it to Afghanistan. And Petraeus, General Petraeus was, after having been the general in Iraq, was the commander of Central Command, which oversaw the war in Afghanistan. And so they just wanted resources to do their counterinsurgency strategy.

And all Obama wanted to do is focus on Al-Qaeda. And so mistake number one we made was to kind of accept the resource creep that the machine, machinery of American foreign policy wanted in a manner that I think went beyond what Obama himself was committed to. And I'm not sure that he makes the set of decisions he made in 2009 later in his presidency. Like he's new. He comes in. The military is like, all right, let's go. Let's get these resources. I think the second thing that I think is also really important that I spent years kind of trying to reckon with as someone who contributed to the narrative American farm policy is the narrative of American foreign policy usually becomes far more ambitious.

than what is, A, achievable in the world, and B, is sustainable with American political support. So we talk about victory or we talk about defeating the Taliban who are indigenous to Afghanistan. Like, you know, and Roy, you're the expert on this too, but I would send these meetings where people would talk about like defeating the Kani network. And I would think to my, which is a part of the Taliban that was in a particular geography. And I think to myself, well, they live there. You know, we don't. And I think we've seen in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, now in Iran, that that we send these military resources or troops into these places with a kind of soaring rhetorical mission that is, A, completely unachievable in the kind of context of where we're operating. And B, it's just something that Americans are not going to stay committed to.

And it's led us to make mistake after mistake after mistake. So I completely accept the premise of your question. And I think that part of what we have and I try to do and everything I've said and written about since I left government is really reckon with this. We can't continue to give ourselves a grandiose mission in the world that not only can to not succeed, but frankly, we're the only ones who still believe it. Like the people in those countries don't think that's what we're doing. And they're not wrong, by the way. Afghans are not wrong. Iraqis are not wrong. Iranians are not wrong. Like, Libyans were not wrong. Like, America acts

like a self-interested superpower that wants the Strait of Hormuz open or once al-Qaeda killed or once access to Oriole. And then we put a narrative around it that is much more grandiose. But I think people around the world have figured out, like don't believe the narrative because at the end of the day, they're going to act in a pretty narrow self-interest. Let's tell you that to Iraq then. You were probably part of the writing of the Iraq study group. Yes. And it's fair to say, you were ignored by the then Bush administration.

You talk about the narrative. We became part of that narrative as well. And, you know, paid quite a heavy political price in some ways. But I just wanted, what is it in the American mindset that is going on? That somebody like you who studied this and been there can see that in all of these, and you could probably go further back to Vietnam. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

All of these big military interventions. the American mindset is we're America, we've got the most powerful military in the world, we're the most powerful country in the world, we will be able to deliver. And we're seeing that again now in recent months in relation to Iran. Is that going to change or are we stuck with this American sense of their own superiority? No, it has to change. And I think it is changing. And just to put a fine point on it, because I've been a skeptic.

Even when I was in government, I was a skeptic, I've done some real personal reckoning since aided by people I know from places. like Afghanistan, who could sit me down and tell me chapter and verse every single mistake we made. You didn't understand our country, right? I remember being a young person in Washington around the time of the Iraq Seder group, and people used to talk about Vietnam syndrome. And Vietnam syndrome in the American context was this idea that Americans learned this wrong lesson from Vietnam. They had a syndrome that they didn't want to intervene militarily in other countries. I remember thinking that was a strange thing, as if it was a disease. Maybe Americans were right. You know, maybe

Maybe they learned something. Because actually, it's not ordinary Americans that are like, let's get into some more wars. Like, let's invade Iraq. Like, it's a very top-down idea. But in 9-11, there's you. Yeah. There's a guy who wants to write novels thinking this is a massive moment of the country of the world. I want to do something.

But we also know there's Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Wolfowitz and these guys are thinking, we now want to take out Iraq and Saddam and take on the Taliban. What was so interesting to me about that moment is I honestly, if I'm honest about this, I got into as much for my city as for my patriotism. I saw my city attack that I loved. I grew up in New York. And I remember moving to D.C. and the Afghan war made sense to me. You know, like we're trying to go get these guys that did this. I remember people starting to talk about Iraq and thinking, well, I remember that war from 10 years ago, but why are we doing that? And I remember being 24 and being truly confused about why are we shifting from Afghanistan to Iraq and being skeptical.

My boss, Lee Hamilton, opposed it, but he'd opposed the Gulf War. He was a skeptic of American military power. But then I remember the Colin Powell presentation and frankly, Tony Blair, too. Like, these are people I trusted, you know. And being like, well, those guys say we have to do this. Like, maybe they know something I don't, you know. And actually, part of what I've learned is that they didn't, right? But I think that I went to Iraq that was such a form of experience for me in two,

It was at the height of, you know, the worst violence in Iraq. And we talked to every Iraqi politician and militia leader and it was with James Baker and we were there to do this kind of autopsy of what had happened and these recommendations about what to do. And I remember just thinking, like, why are we going to understand this place better than these people? You know, like, like, we can. And so we kind of recommended it like, well, here's how you get out.

And then I think the surge happened. Americans took all the wrong lessons because. they wanted to feel like they had done something militarily that had turned this tide, when in fact, if you looked underneath the hood of this urge, it was all the political dealings that had been made, including with the Shia militias, that had reduced violence. And so I think there's an every time the American national security establishment and political establishment of both parties can find some, oh, look, we figured it out. You know, the problem in Iraq wasn't the war.

It's just that we didn't have the right counterinsurgency strategy. So we can do it again and do it better. or we did this wrong in the Obama administration. Like, well, maybe the lesson to apply to Libya is we just don't put boots on the ground. We'll just do it by air. And yet the results continue to be the same everywhere. One of the problems, of course, is that when you write a speech like that and it comes out of the president's mouth, the military now say the commander in chief has set these as our objectives. And one of the things I noticed in Afghanistan is you guys would be blaming General McChrystal and saying he leaked the commander's assessment.

We didn't have any choice. we had to send that the military's bullied it, sent to it. And then when I sat down with General McChrystal, he's like, well, this is the commander-in-chief's intent, and this is what we're delivering. And he said we've got to win in Afghanistan, and we've got to create good governance, and we've got to defeat the Taliban, and we've got to stabilize Pakistan. So I'm going to deploy the force to casualty. So there's a terrible problem here, which is both sides echoing off each other, blaming each other. But the rhetorical inflation, which you talk to, is almost inevitable, isn't it? Because the truth of the matter is you would have had to say in Afghanistan or Iraq, listen, this is going to be really messy.

You know, if we spend 30, 40 years here, if we're lucky, Afghanistan might look a little bit more like Pakistan, a little bit less like the Congo. We might be able to create a little bit more prosperity in Kabul and maybe in Bahmian, but Kandah is still going to be a bit wild and woolly. Women's rights are not likely to transform across the country. We can contain some terrorist threats. I don't remember really if these are no talking points. And so part of the problem is you simply cannot be honest with the public about what's likely to happen. You have to keep saying, we're going to free Afghan women. We're going to create democracy.

This is going to be completely safe. So I think, Rory, if you look at the arc of how we talked about Afghanistan, because I originally thought, but the December 2009 speech about the surge, that's when Obama started to demonstrably lower the rhetorical ambition. and the only defeat was applied to al-Qaeda. We actually had it in the process that produced a surge. Because I like General McChrystal, but I think I'm not sure. We, in that process of that surge, decided that we were not going to set the objective of defeating the Taliban. And so if you look at the rhetoric of that speech, in December of 2009, we talked about defeating al-Qaeda, and we talk about pushing back the Taliban.

And then in each subsequent year, like Obama's rhetoric about Afghanistan did get more narrow. Oftentimes the military will grab the most maximalist rhetoric they can find to justify the most maximalist resources. And, you know, they have a tough job. I don't actually, I don't blame them because politicians always – And they're also asking themselves, what do you want? Yeah. What is the president doing here? What's he really doing here?

And you're not able to say to him. I mean, if that's really what you felt, you wouldn't have searched. Well, but it's what I felt, certainly at the time. I think Obama was an ambivalent person around that surge. But to put a finer point on it, because I'm agreeing with the premise of much of what you say, there's a policy issue and then there's the rhetorical issue. I mean, on the rhetorical issue, do you need to have objectives that go beyond just killing a set of terrorists? Like, I think you do. Like, I think there was a sincere interest in things like women's rights and access to education for girls in Afghanistan.

However, I do believe that if we're being honest with Afghans, who are actually the people we should be most honest with, you know, it starts to feel like over time that the women's rights is like the public relations for the other things that you're doing. And that leads to my substantive point, which is my bigger problem is all the meetings I was in. And I mean, Alistair, I don't know how you experience this with the rock. But like, and I remember feelings at the time, but I certainly feel more in retrospect. there were no Afghans in the room. You know, like we're sitting here, you know, a bunch of, you know, largely white guys in Washington making these decisions. And then the Afghans that we're talking to are people that are dependent on us, you know, they want the most resources. They want the billions of dollars.

They want the contractors. You know, they want to sustain American military engagement because they're profiting off of it. And in many cases, they're not demonstrators. better actors than the Taliban in some cases, not all cases. Whereas if we actually had a capacity to systematically engage Afghans on the front end, about both the rhetoric and the policy, I think you'd get different outcomes. So I totally, I agree with your premise. I do, I guess where I push back a little bit is I do think America needs a values proposition in these things. Because, I mean, to take the book, for instance, like, you know, FDR and the

eve of World War II recognized, hey, we need a values proposition. And that's when he came up with the four freedoms. We've gone all the way from the four freedoms to open the effing straight and get rid of the nuclear dust. And so I think there's got to be a medium between the kind of rhetorical approach to foreign policy that over promises and can justify all manner of resources and open the effing straight. I mean, at core, you do need to suggest that, hey, we are here. We want to try as best we can to make these places better. I would argue actually that American military involvement tends not to make places better at all. So we should think about, you know, being incredibly limited in our use of military force when it's only an absolute imperative.

But I do think you need to infuse your foreign policy with some values proposition or else, you know, we're really no different than China or Russia. It's obvious from hearing you speak and also reading the stuff that you've written that you've done quite a lot of soul search. Yes. about then and what you think about it now. And I've been through the same process and probably most notably at a two-hour episode where Rory Grilledby about Iraq and we don't need to kind of go over all that now. But it's interesting, as Barack Obama gone through the same process, and I wonder if he does, if I can ask you about Syria, because I often look back at that as a point at which Vladimir Putin really felt emboldened and empowered because the leader of the free world says,

If you, you know, if Syria Assad uses chemical weapons, that's a red line. We're not going to let you cross it. You cross it. Putin sends his weakness. I just wonder whether, and just more generally, whether Obama has gone through as bigger processes you seem to have done of actually thinking really deeply about what you said and did at the time and what the consequences were. Well, I'll talk about myself and then Obama.

I mean, because on Syria, like, I actually have a different view than I think most people, which is, I find it interesting that, you know, we can look. at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Iran, and see American military involvement did not make the place better. And yet there's this belief of it. Well, if only you'd intervened in Syria, it would have been better, you know. I look at Syria and think it's an absolute human tragedy, what happened there, but the idea that American missile strikes would have magically ended a civil war. So what did the red line mean? What was the red line? Well, the red line was that there's going to be consequence that there's a use of chemical weapons. But then what happened in that instance,

right, is Obama was going to use military force. But then he realized that if he did, this would be probably a long military engagement. And so unlike Trump and Iran, he said, well, if I'm going to get involved in a long military engagement in Syria, I want to get congressional authorization. And we went to Congress. And nobody in Congress wanted to vote for that because they knew it was probably going to be a mess. Marco Rubio, for instance, who've been chastising Obama for not bombing Syria, announced that he would vote against U.S. strikes in Syria. And so I actually think that if we think that things like the Constitution and the war powers matter and you can't get congressional approval, and the same thing happened here, right?

You guys couldn't get it. So then we shifted course and negotiated something with Putin to get a bunch of chemical weapons out. I'm not suggesting that it's perfect, but that's what happened. To be self-critical. So when I look back on Syria, I don't think that there was like some military option that somehow would have worked because frankly even if we'd killed Assad like there still would have been a civil war there still would have been refugees there still would have been all that calamity I look at the rhetorical you know call for Assad to go when we didn't have any assurance that he would or a strategy we knew could remove him right that that probably foreclosed certain diplomatic options I look at the decision which again I didn't really like at the time to start arming proxy groups in Syria Which decisions did you like?

You give me as a very... The things I worked on, the Iran nuclear agreement. I negotiated the normalizations of relations with Cuba, the Paris Climate Accord. I liked a lot of... Take take take, tip. I liked a lot of our foreign policy. But I'm ambivalent about our America's use of military force, including the ones that I was a part of. No, I feel I felt great about the Ebola response.

what America can do in the world when it's not kind of military forward, I think is quite extraordinary. Because again, no U.S., no Iran nuclear deal, no Cuban normalization, no Paris climate accord, no Ebola response, right? Those are the effective uses of American foreign policy. I feel proud about the bin Laden operation, right? There's a targeted use of military force to achieve a very specific objective to get this person that is both the leader of al-Qaeda and the guide to 9-11. So I feel good about a lot of things. What I don't feel good about is the way in which the United States has continually not learned lessons in how it goes to war. And so in Syria, I do, you know, I think Obama, I don't think he is haunted, I think he's haunted by the outcome

more than that he didn't bomb Syria after the red line. And so I think you go back and you think, like, was there a diplomatic approach that could have been more effective kind of on the front end of that conflict before it got out of control, you know? Then one problem with the things that you mentioned, which obviously Alistair and I and most listeners are strongly supportive of, is that they don't last. The JCPOA collapses, that climate accords collapse. And why do they collapse? Because there isn't a consensus in American political life to underscore these things. And part of the problem is that whereas from probably 1945 through to, I don't know, 2014, it was pretty easy to imagine a continuous American foreign policy. You do a deal with the United

States and it lasts because this foreign policy establishment that we're all a bit skeptical about, had a set of views that went from administration to administration, now feels a bit dubious. You know, you sign a deal as an Iranian with one lot, next lot comes and it's kicked out. You make all these big decisions on your carbon emissions. Next lot comes in. It's all out the window. You sign up to get American, you know, AI frontier models embedded in your entire economy. Suddenly you wake up and those frontier models are not being released. Well, this, I agree with it and also don't take responsibility for because, you know, I can't account for Donald Trump, you know, because frankly, I think even a Republican that didn't like our foreign policy would probably not have pulled out of the JCPOA.

Although Bush or someone like him might have pulled out of climate, of course. Yeah, but the thing about on that one, I'd say the Paris Agreement, the U.S. comes in and out, but it does last. I mean, Paris is still the framework under which the world is dealing with climate change. Something that the U.S. negotiated continues to exist. I would actually argue that the funny thing about the JCPOA is they're trying to negotiate another one. I mean, so in a way it did last. Hey, it's the alternative approach. So I actually continue to have a lot of pride in the proof of concept that we have that, hey, now we tried it both ways in Iran, right? We tried the JCPA way and that worked. Iran complied. We've tried the use of military force and it was a complete and utter disaster. And so now we're trying to get back into something like the JCPOA. I think the problem is American politics is kind of indistinguishable from American foreign policy. And I think there's been like Oftentimes people who work in foreign policy are like, we're just sitting here in a lab designing these approaches. No, like, you know, it's ultimately an extension of politics. And until America

gets its politics in order, that's always going to haunt American foreign policy because it's not just the Iranians, it's the Europeans. It's the Asian allies who are like, is any agreement that we sign with the Americans durable here? That is not a foreign policy problem, though. That is a politics problem. Okay, Ben, really quick breaking them back for more. Before the next track starts, have you ever wondered, who are the people in my old family photos? Or what brought them to Canada? With Ancestry, you can start finding answers. Start with a name and we'll guide you from there.

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Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair. Every style, every home. The quote from the book that I mentioned in the introduction, where you said the transition from Obama to Trump seemed dizzying at the time. It sure did. But it's natural when viewed in the sweep of American history. Why? Why wasn't the sort of the sense of Obama as a the progressive, taking the country in a progressive direction. Why couldn't that be kept going? Well, first of all, I mean, part of what I'm wrestling with in the book is that they're, at core, in my view, like two stories about American identity that have always been in conflict. There's a kind of

exclusionary identity. You know, we are essentially a white Christian nation, the inheritors of Western civilization and supremacy, really. And other people can be here, but they have to kind of subordinate themselves to that identity. And frankly, J.D. Vance will make versions of that case in his own words Trump does in his actions. Whereas then there's a progressive story of American identity, which is we are a nation committed to the creed that all men are creed equal and women. And American history has been an effort to close the gap between reality and that ambition. And that's the tradition of abolitionism and the suffrage movement and civil rights movement, all manner of movements for change. And I think if you look at the suit of American history,

when we take leaps forward, there's always a backlash after. We could start the clock at the of war. You have reconstruction and all these victories, you know, emancipation and black suffrage, and then we get segregation, you know, there's a civil rights movement followed by Nixon, right? There's an Obama followed by Trump. So where I think it's not an aberration is that when America kind of pushes forward in the direction of a more progressive identity that is multiracial democracy, there's usually a pullback, almost like an undertow. I will say. say that to use the, you could extend the analogy, each time the wave goes further before the undertow. So you get slavery abolished. Then you get segregation about, you know, then you get

a black president. And, you know, so America continues to become more diverse despite efforts, you know, to undo or block immigration. So I actually think that the, the sweep of American history is one that moves in progressive direction. And yet it doesn't mean there's not like an effort to kind of claw back that core more exclusionary identity. And I was very interesting. You obviously felt you've got to put Donald Trump in there because whether we're like it or not is a very consequential political figure. And you chose his second inaugural speech, which I think is the right choice

because I think it was a very, very consequential speech. But are you saying then that you think actually there will now be a backlash to that and it will take us? Oh, yes. I truly do. It's interesting. One of the reason I wanted to write this book is I wanted to understand what's happening now by going back through history, right? I want to understand what are the forces that could create someone like a Trump. And where is he different? And first of all, I found that, you know, Trump, there's a lot that feeds in him from American history. Like there's always been a strain of America first isolationism. I read about that. There's been a populism of the white working class that has been about not just smashing establishments, but about making sure that political rights are still kind of privileged for us. There's always been zing.

xenophobia and kind of spasms of anti-immigrant politics. Where Trump differentiates is, you know, he has a line in that on second inaugural. He's referring to Butler where he, you know, was almost, you was shot at. I was saved by God to make America great again. I, I, I, I. Where he differentiates is he removes himself from political competition within the rules. He enriches himself on a massive scale in a way that we've not seen before. The corruption and the illegality are different. You know, If someone had those ideas that I don't like, but they did them within the agreed upon lines, I wouldn't like them. But Trump is trying to obliterate the lines. Now, what I also found is the period in American history that felt most familiar to me vis-vis today is the Gilded Age, is the late 19th century, where actually a lot of commonalities, right? After Reconstruction, it's like, no, no, we're done with black political rights and there's been too much immigration. We're going to ban Chinese from coming in here. then there's a rampant, unbridled capitalism where the inequality was kind of like it is today. You had robber barren railroad magnates and Wall Street running out of control.

Corruption and politics was endemic at not just a national level of the local level. That period was followed by the progressive era where not only did we have the beginnings of a social safety net, but we had the direct election of American senators. We had women's suffrage. We had the creation of the Federal Reserve so that the government could manage the economy, not just, you know, J.P. Morgan, right? I think we're in for a similar period where the backlash is we have to change the functioning of our government as well as the kind of outcomes that we're seeking in policy. And I do think that the extremity of this second Trump term, if we survive it, and I think we're in for a pretty weird two and a half years.

But I do think that I'm actually pessimistic in the short term and pretty optimistic in the long term that there's going to be a pretty significant backlash to this that could, allow for serious reforms, not just in, you know, I want better health care policy, but in the functioning of how government operates. One thing that is an impediment to any type of reform is your constitution. I mean, it is sort of staggering from any other country to imagine that you have a constitution that allows the president to pardon his own family members. And what possible world could that be a legitimate use of executive power? And what possible, what possible use could it be that he can direct the Department of Justice and the way that. that he can to persecute his enemies and protect his friends. But you worship this constitution.

And you have a Supreme Court that worships this constitution. He uses this constitution to reinforce the two major drivers of corruption, which is the DOJ and the pardon system. So when are you going to change it? So the first speech in my book is Ben Franklin, who gives a speech defending the Constitution. It's the last argument before people are to sign the Constitution. And what he says is this is not a perfect document. None of us think that this is the perfect document. This is the first draft. And we have to compromise to get this done. And then we'll fight it out and continue to build on it. And actually, Franklin modeled that behavior because the first thing he did, and it was actually his final public act before he died, is when the new government was set up, he petitioned it to

abolish slavery. And I say that, Rory, because I'm, you know, as you can see today, I'm more than willing to admit, I don't know everything. I've been wrong about things. I'm not wrong about this. This originalism, this idea that the Supreme Court has, that we have to just get in the heads of these collection of white guys in the 18th century and whatever they thought about abortion we should do now. That's not what the founders intended. They were like, this is the beginning and we we're not have to fix things as we go, you know. Now, this is the point about Trump. You know, somehow in all American history, we managed to not have people, but when people come along and show the weakness in the system, you've got to change the system. And so I think going forward,

the next Democrat or, you know, I'd be great if it was a Republican. I just don't think that's likely, is going to have to get in and change how the government is structured. Sorry, you're not saying you want a Republican to win. No, I want a Democrat to win. But I want whoever it is to, you know, we need to get money out of politics. And how are you going to do that? You know, if enough people want to do it, we can do it.

Like, I think that there's a fatalism that has crept in. And this is part of my argument about speeches and words. You have to paint a picture for people. Like, right now there's a tremendous amount of people who, you know, with a lot of power and a lot of money who want to make Americans believe you'll never get money out of politics. You'll never be able to get rid of this crazy system of redrawing congressional districts that polarizes people. You never be able to regulate artificial intelligence or social media, right? These are probably 80, 20 issues in the public, you know, you need to make the case that this is not separate from

the fact that things cost too much. I mean, John Ossoff from Georgia's beginning to do this and it's resonating because Democrats have had this pain thing, you know, to your point of like, do we talk about things like democracy and the corruption of DOJ and pardon and all this? Or do we talk about kitchen table issues and, you know, prices are trying health care. And actually, the whole point is that they're not separate because if you're not fixing the money in politics and the corruption of how government functions, you're not going to get better outcomes on things like health care.

So the next person should be trying to amend the pardon power, should be trying to kind of take a look at the law. It's not the norms that govern how the Department of Justice functions. Try to nationalize rational, rational, congressional districts. Try to do whatever you can possibly do to get money out of politics. I told you before we were recording, I did an event with Mick Mulvaney, Trump's former chief of staff. And I was putting all this stuff about we cannot believe the corruption. We cannot believe this stuff.

And he was like, he was almost saying, yeah, but the Democrats do it after they leave office? They, you know, do you think Obama flies economy? Do you think that Clinton's ever used a plane that wasn't private? they get all the money in for their libraries. And you've just had the, you were at the launch of the old book. So, and then, you know, we interviewed Nancy Pelosi a while back, you know, and there's the, I mean, it's almost like a joke that Nancy Pelosi and the stock trades and all that stuff. Yeah. So how do you, Trump in a way is just. And Biden pardoned his family.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trump's just being so much more open. I'll load the guy. I load everything he does and everything he stands for. But I think that's what's what's making it harder. Those two things are what's making it hard of the Democrats to, to make a. case for this. Look, there's elements that I disagree with and elements that I agree with. Because on the one hand, you know, Migmulvani sounds, bear with me, there's a bit of a

Putinism in there because I remember I talked to Alexi and Navalny a bunch from my last book. And Navalny said something really interesting to me, which is, and I'll never forget, you know, we're like FaceTiming during the pandemic. And he's like, look, you know, Putin doesn't need to convince people that he's not corrupt or that he's telling the truth. He just needs to convince people that everybody's corrupt. and everybody lies in politics.

And so you might as well have the strong man that hates the same people that you do. And so where I disagree with like a Mick Mulvaney is this is spare me. No Democrat has taken billions of dollars for his family's crypto business for the Emirates and then waive the export controls on data centers there. No Democrat has taken a billion dollar plane from the Qataris. Like to have some Democrats become lobbyists when they love government is that unappealing? and do I disagree with that, sure. But don't hide behind that. That's a way for Republicans to evade responsibility for a scale of corruption that we've

just never seen in American politics. However, I should say the Democratic Party has to change its approach to some of these issues. I've been supportive of this new crop of almost all younger Democrats. By the way, who span the ideological spectrum because you can have like a Zoran Mamdani in New York, a grand platinum in Maine, a James Tolarico, in Texas, John Ossoff in Georgia. What they have in common is, it looks like they have views on Israel that are unaffected by APEC, or it looks like they have views on how to reform Wall Street that are unaffected by contributions from big banks so that we're not, you know, taxing wealth or the

carried interest loophole for hedge funds, right? Like, people can see this. Like, I think sometimes politicians think people are dumber than they are. Like, and they look at Democrats and they're like, they're slightly better version than these Republicans, but actually the Republicans seem to like kind of hate some of the same people I do. And it's the Putin thing. So then I'll give them my vote. And I think Democrats have to hold themselves expect more from their politicians. And if you model, I mean, Platon has been, I don't know if you guys covered this, but like, and I spend hours talking to the guy. Like, and look, he's got plenty of flaws. But what he has is authenticity. Nobody thinks that that guy's bought and paid for, you know. And like I would take that over, you know, some candidate who looked like they're designed in a laboratory by the Chuck Schumer and the DSCC, you know, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I mean, if you look in in Michigan right now, Haley Stevens is the Chuck Schumer back candidate there. And nobody knows what she stands for, you know. And Abdul Al-Sayed is outperforming her and people like, how, how's that guy winning?

Well, because people, it's less even ideology today. And it's just like, who do I actually, who can actually trust? Like, will, I mean, I always say to people when people get, you know, I'd have fights about Mamdani. I'd be like, what you guys miss about his positions on Israel is it's not just about Israel. It's a they see him taking those positions. They see him getting killed for taking those positions, getting beat up by all these powerful people. They believe them. And then they believe that he'll fight to lower their prices.

Because he's willing to kind of take all this heat over here from very powerful people, they're like, well, maybe when he tells me that he's going to like get free child care, I actually believe he'll fight to do that. And so that's what I mean about like you have to, I think there's a high. higher bar for Democrats to kind of demonstrate, like, we get it. You know, we get that you're sick of this feeling that, like, nobody's, you know, they're all the same. Social media and populism. And you were right at the very beginning of this, weren't you? When you come in and Obama 1, this is all about mastering it and some of those elections. Hashtag yes we can. Yeah. Hashtag yes we can. So,

tell us a little bit about that. I mean, what have you learned about the relationship between social media and populism and how does that feed in to how we think about politics today? I'll say one thing about my experience in government, one thing about this book. My experience in government, Rory, and you were there, so you remember this, is I actually think that the turning point was the Arab Spring because you have the sense of social media as an organizing tool and a communications tool and a democratic tool and clearly played a role in the Arab Spring. And that scared the shit out of every autocrat. And it's almost like that if they had a meeting, like the Bond movie where like Putin and Arab autocrats and whoever gets together in room in 2011 is like, oh, wait a second, actually. this could be, this could work for us. These are the perfect tools of both surveillance and disinformation, you know, and I could feel it turning at that time where all of a sudden,

like, the Egyptian Revolution that was born on social media, was killed by social media. There was massive amounts of disinformation flowing. Now, to take it to the populism, and one the things I looked at in the book that was so interesting to me is, in Ben Franklin's Day, I start with him, right? A speech is only heard by the people in the room, and then it's reprinted in newspapers. So it's these kind of careful arguments. Then in the 19th century, there's like a circuit. You know, people are out speaking day after day and town after town. Performance starts to matter. Oratory. Then the radio comes along and it's plain spoken explanation. Then FDR masters that. Then television, we get King and Kennedy in this charisma. What social media does is

no longer do people consume whole speeches or listen to whole stories from politicians. They are fed by an algorithm like clips that are designed in a lab to trigger them, like make you really, really hate the people that you disagree with, are really, really sure that you're correct, you know? And Donald Trump has been the perfect person for that because he knows if he gets up at a rally and speaks for an hour, nobody's, he doesn't have to give a coherent speech that the next day, the algorithm will do all the work for him. It will, it will deliver, you know, as if perfectly designed for his politics and polarization, those clips in a way. that really reinforces supporters and anger his opponents. And by the way, anger is not good for progressives.

We don't do anger well. For the last decade, we've been kind of grim and pissed off. You need joy and optimism, I think, to win in progressive politics. And so actually, I think, you know, we need both, I mean, I would argue we need, you know, we still need regulatory approaches to algorithms because, you know, it's not, this is not happening by accident. It's happening by design. We are being algorithmically polarized. and until we try to systematically disrupt that, we will be. But I also think we need to counterprogram Trump. It's not like, I think sometimes Democrats like, we need to be more like that. We need to be on podcasts and we need to curse and we need to have clever social media.

And they forget what's the story? I mean, Alistair, you were a master of this. Like, if you know your story, if you, and actually I would argue speech is where you figure out what the story is, all your other communications are better. because like even if not everybody's listening to the whole speech, if you work that out, in American politics, we call a stump speech, if you know your core message, the story you're telling, but not just what you want to do, but why you want to do it and where and how and make people believe that you can get there. You make people believe the things that, you know, it's like, can we get money out of politics, all these things? Well, then your social media is

better. Then your podcast appearances are better. Then, you know, your interviews are better because you actually know what you're doing. He's given a better, of the answer to the question you asked me recently about defining strategy. Yeah. Keir had this problem here. You know, like, I watched this from afar and it was like, what's the story the labor is telling? You know, I knew what they weren't. I knew like the kind of, they were like the Democrats.

Like, here's the talking points we think are the safest to land on. But what's the story, you know? But that being said, and you're right about the way the landscapes change. But if you think about, if you're going to write a follow up to this book, where you're allowed maybe a few non-Americans. Mark Carney's speech in Davos, big event, moved a dial. King Charles' speech in Congress, I think it was one of the best subtle analysis

of what's happening to American politics. So I think speech is still really, really matter. They do. Well, Carney's a great example of why they matter, right? Because people can realize about speeches. But when someone comes along, part of what was effective about Carney, because there are different kinds of speeches that are effective.

one is a speech that just tells everybody something that they kind of already know to be true. But nobody stood up. So what was so interesting about that Carney speech is, you know, we all know that the liberal order is broken and not coming back. But, you know, having the Prime Minister of Canada in a very smart, clear way, like, just name all that and tell hard truths and not be afraid. Knowing that the guy who was destroying the liberal order was on the day's there, right? that's what made that powerful. I think people actually, people are really confused. It's why they listen to our podcast.

Like, they're really confused about what the hell's going on. And it should not be a radical notion that we need politicians to stand up and not just tell us like their health care plan or, but to tell us like what the hell is going on, you know? And, and tell hard truths. Like people are ready to hear hard truths. And I actually would say, I think speeches are where certainly in America, we've adjudicated American identity and also. So had people at critical moments come along and tell us, here's where we are and here's how we're going to get out of here. I think one of the things that strikes me with both of you is that there's also the question

of the element of risk and the context. So I'm thinking when Obama's standing up to speak in a black church, there is an element of context and risk when King Charles is standing up to speak in Congress and you're aware that J.D. Vance is behind him. There's a sense of there's a potential opposition. And actually, I think one of the things. One of the things I take from all these speeches, maybe that's your point about Kani and Trump, right? That a speech is really effective when you sense that there's somebody in that audience who might be really offended, that you're having to persuade.

Yeah. Yeah, we, you know, there's something Obama did in the O8 campaign that we would deliberately go and try to, you know, when he gave his speech on the need for fuel efficiency standards. I know that sounds kind of wonky, but he did it in Detroit in front of the automaker. And then we said, like, see, he'll go tell the people that need to hear this, you know. And I think that that is, there's something really powerful about the setting that you choose to give a speech. Like, I remember King Charles's speech was so interesting about that. And I say this with respect because I do think it was a really good speech. What he was saying should have been anodyne, right?

Like, these should not be radical ideas. But because he's doing it in Congress and because J.D. Vance is standing there, it's like, oh, man, he's really like stirring the pot here, right? And so I think politicians need to have that sense, recapture that sense of setting and theater. Because what people are most angry about, I think on the right, as well as the left, is that it feels like they don't take back control. Like this was the Brexit slogan that worked, right? There are these forces that that we have no agency over that control our lives, these oligarchs or these tech companies or these politicians or if you're on the right, it's, you know, these globalist elites or whatever, and going to those settings and telling our truths and calling

things out, man, I think people will react positively to that. Well, I think looking back over the thousands of speeches that Tony Blair made, I think the most significant political speech you made was the first Labour Party conference back in 1994. Well, because he was killing sacred cows, right? Yeah. And also, it was interesting when you said that you had eight large drafts, I think we had, I think we were draft 32 by 5 a.m.

And this is your cause for speech. Yeah. Yeah. So for younger audiences, this is a moment where Tony Blair basically turns up the Labor Party conference and gets rid of a fundamental part of the Constitution. Well, or starts a debate saying, I think this is something we should think about doing. Doesn't even use those words. One of my favorite lines in your whole book, maybe it's a great place to end.

I love this. The ability to silence an audience is far more powerful than the capacity to excite them. I love that. And that was, you know, in reference to link. Lincoln, because also listening, listening is the most powerful thing you can get an audience to do, more than anybody can get into the applaud, right? But Lincoln stands up at the end of the Civil War. And he says the most radical thing any American presence ever said. He says, is every drop of blood drawn by the lash must be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword. Then the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous. In other words, if all of us have to die to pay for the sin of slavery, that would be justified. that is a hard effing truth, right? And yet people at the time understood, oh, actually, he's giving us a chance at redemption. He's giving us a bigger meaning than saving a union.

There's a moral purpose to this nation. And we just atone for our sin. And now we have this opportunity to start this nation fresh over again. And again, I think that nothing silences a crowd more than telling them a hard truth that they know deep down. is true. Well, the best praise I can give any book is, I wish I'd written that. It's called Always Say the Battle of American Identity and thanks for talking to us. Thanks, guys. Thank you, Ben. Alice, one of the things I thought, listened to that is how we're lacking in Britain the ability to write that kind of book with that kind of impact. I need to encourage you to write

it because one of the interesting things about America, with all its trace, troubles and all our grumbles about Trump, they can still construct a story about American identity, which is, I'm going to make you read a speech by Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King, JFK, Obama. Now imagine in Britain, right, I try to make you read a speech by Pitt the Younger, then a speech by Disraeli, right? Then a speech by Ramsey MacDonald. Now, we might do Churchill, but that's about it, isn't it, really? And so this might challenge you with the book. What is it about American confidence, sense of nationhood, sense of identity that they can so comfortably. I'm not sure about this. I'm not sure about this. I think you could, let's just go through. Who would you do?

See, what's interesting about his book? He hasn't got that, I mean, he's got several presidents. But he's got a couple of people I've never heard of. One of my favorite chapters was about a woman called Anna Dickinson, who was a kind of firebrand feminist. Really, really interesting. He's got several from people who are. He's got one from an indigenous American who just, you know, he's taking on people who are, you know, this is our country kind of thing. So he's telling the whole history.

But I think you'd go through. I mean, look, I'll tell you one, just when you said that, I think I put Neil Kinnock in there because I think he made some really consequential and extraordinarily oratorical speeches. You'd probably put whether you like the content or not Tony Blair's speech to Parliament on going to war in Iraq. I might say I'd prefer I have his 1994 Labor Party Conference speech. Thatcher you'd have to put in. So I think interesting, though, you're still talking about very recent history. I mean, the interesting about the Americans is they stretch so comfortably back to 1776, 1860s. And you notice that even when he talks about American identity, when he says, you know, I've realized Trump's not new. You know, this is like what happened in the late 1800s with the Gilded Age. And then you'll have other Americans saying, of course, we've had populism before we had with Andrew. Jackson and the 1830s, right? Very oddly, for a very new country, they're much

more comfortable seeing themselves as having a sort of continuity with the late 1700s, 1800s. The examples you gave were all 80s and 90s. That's because I'm trying to think of speech. You've said to me, do this book, and I'm trying to think of current people that we know. I think the other thing is really interesting

about this book. And I'm not sure I agree with him when he said that, you know, I agree the speech has got to be authentic. That point he made that this can be something that only that person could say. I think sometimes you can write great thoughts for other people. But what I think is really interesting about, for example, his analysis there of Abraham Lincoln. I'm fascinated by this idea of none of us know what Abraham Lincoln sounded like. We've had fed down through the years, this is what he said, and this is the reaction. I'm always mesmerized when you

read some of these speeches of pre-sounding. systems, how many people actually heard this? He talks about them being put in newspapers. How accurate was the reporting of these great speeches that he now does these kind of amazing textual analysis on. But I think, I'm not sure I'm going to do it, but something like Ian Dale, who writes these sorts of books all the time, I think 15 speeches that tell the story of Britain, you can easily find those. Maybe because we do more plays and... Yeah, it wouldn't have the same impact that it has in America. So, for example, in America, you can make a very, very good living writing biographies of 19th century presidents.

I mean, every time the great blockbuster biography of often quite an obscure person comes out, every kind of well-read American feels this is something they've got to put on their bookshelf. And I think Ian would be the first to admit that it's not, it doesn't achieve that sense of kind of national pride and identity that America achieves effortlessly with this kind of stuff. He's got a very interesting passage in the book where he talks about, I think this is in the context of this woman, Dickinson, that it was like a thing in America that people flocked to hear people speak, whereas today it might be to watch an athlete or to watch a musician. People really, really took an interest in listening to articulate people speaking. So maybe they do have a deeper culture in that, but you've got me thinking now, Rui. I certainly think that, let's find out,

but first of all, whether a book like this has been written in the UK. I don't know. None that spring to mind. There's lots of compilations of speeches. Hansar do do that fair. regularly. And there's the whole sort of compendium of great speeches, speeches that change the world. But what he does really well is he takes the speech, but then builds around it, the story of the speaker, and why it fits a particular period in American history. It's also the American story of optimism and confidence is so striking. I mean, after all, we didn't have to do the same things on slavery because we didn't have that form of slavery. We didn't have to do the same things on civil rights because we didn't have that kind of

segregation. I think Congress has only just managed to pass a federal law on lynching, very, very reasoning. Gun laws haven't been changed. Abortion remains in a situation where, you know, as Europeans, we think Americans are living in a completely different century. And yet the narrative is, this is the most progressive go-getting out of the wave of history is going forward, and they put it back a bit, but the wave of history goes forward. And actually, we look at the United States, we think, has the wave of history really got that far ahead? No. I mean, I think Ben, even from the progressive left in the United States, has such a sense of national pride. I mean, such a sense – I mean, you feel that what unites Obama, Trump, Ben, and the rest of them,

is that at some level, American exceptionalism, America is the greatest democracy on earth, America is the country. And that's what it all follows from. The reason why you venerate a speech that Benjamin Franklin made, and you don't venerate a speech that Pitt the younger made, a reason that you worry about what Andrew Jackson was doing in the 1830 says, your story is, this is the greatest country on earth. And every one of these speeches and biographies leads up to the extraordinary thing. And maybe we had that with Gladstone was probably the last time we really felt bad.

God, that's a very gloomy thought about the state of our speaking. Anyway, I thought it was a really good conversation. I hope our listeners and viewers enjoyed that. I think he's a very bright guy. Oh, and sorry, final thing. I know what you're going to say, Roy? What am I going to say? You're going to say, do you think he's been more reflective about his time there than you've been in yours?

Well, that's an interesting question. That's a hell of a hell of a question. That's a really good question. That's a really good question. Go on, what is the answer? That's a really good question, yeah. I got the feeling he was, I mean, that's why I said to him as anything good he did, because he was like everything we raised.

He was like, well, that was a mistake and this was a mistake. I think he probably has reflected more. But I also think he's, look, he's still very close to Obama. He and all the team, Favro and Tommy Vita, they were all there at the opening of the presidential library last week. So, for example, I don't think I would ever. come out. You know when you said the speech on Afghanistan? He said, I wrote that. Yeah. I think I'd ever do that. No. I think he's just been able to separate himself. No, I think he probably has gone through more, or put it this way, I think his soul searching has led to a settled position

in himself, whereas I still, I still soul search. A lot to develop there. But my final one that I really want to get you on is this question of the balance between rhetoric and reality and the way in which sometimes really grand speeches. You know, I was trying to dig into it on Afghanistan, but, you know, you can make big statements about poverty or equality in Britain and it would be the same. Work very well in the moment because they sound very grand, but in the long run, they cause two problems. One of them is they set up unrealistic policy expectations. The second thing is, in the end, they disappoint the public because you're setting up something that sounds very grand, a gender sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized states in Afghanistan based on democracy,

human rights, through law. What is that? That is both something that is a ridiculous guide on policy and something that's going to make the public cynical. So I'm just interested in this in political communication. How do you get the balance right between, and you know, if you're labor, you know, you will say, Starmer's closing speech, we've made a much more equal society, we've made a much more just society, we've made a much fair society. And I guess a lot of the public listening saying, really? I mean, maybe a little bit, but we don't actually feel, I mean, this is the language of the Russian Revolution. And what have you actually done? Well, it doesn't feel very different from what we were two years ago. I think that balance is tough.

And I think it's, there's such a cynicism around politics that it's made it harder. I think you, but I think you do always have to have a sense of idealism. I think you, otherwise, you know, what's the point to any of it? It's like when we were talking to Dan Juergensen, the European climate guy. And he's got the facts sort of pouring out. And he's got all the facts to tell you, this is really scary and this is really dangerous. But then he's also determined to say to you,

we can do this. We can do this if. I think too often the promise that people make in a great piece of political oratory, the promise is not laden with the caveats and the what ifs. And I think sometimes you need a bit of that. And the way to have that is actually to say, this is going to be tough. This is going to be difficult.

This is going to require all of us to get engaged, to get involved. And I think that's what Obama did really. I think Obama, I mean, I didn't say this to Ben, but the truth is being a speechwriter for a guy with that voice and that lyricism and that ability to write himself as well, because he is a very good writer, Obama. but what he I felt was able to do in his speaking style was to give you a sense of the big vision, the big hope, this can happen, but at the same time, it was always underpinned by a sense of step by step we get there.

And I guess the other thing you'd have to say about Obama is because this, you know, we talk about legacy and of course these guys have got, as you say, there'll be books about these people till the end of time. Obama's legacy in part is judged by the fact of what. followed. Now, Ben's theory on that is that that's because we go forward and then we get pushed back and then you keep going forward. I hope is right. And I hope the next guy is so much better than what we've got now. But I think that balance is one that people are driven, I think, by the way the media operates, by the lack of ease of being heard even now making

a political case, is that people sometimes go over the top on the hope without too much focus, enough focus on the expectation. Great. Well, a lot to develop there. Thank you very much. but I thought that was beautiful. Good on rhetoric, good on America, good on speeches. Thank you. See you soon. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do?

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