TRIGGERnometry - Jeremy Shapiro on Trump, Trident, Israel & Iran

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

Former advisor to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Jeremy Shapiro, discusses President Trump, Britain, Trident, Israel and Iran with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Find us on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers and notorious comedians. SUBSCRIBE for more amazing content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Shapiro, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. And welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constance and Kissy. And this is the show for you. If you're bored of watching people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about, at Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts.

We ask the experts. Here at the world famous Angel Comedy Club, our amazing expert guest this week is Jeremy Shapiro, who is the Research Director for the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior official in the State Department under President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Jeremy Shapiro, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. Jeremy Shapiro, thank you for coming on.

Thanks for having me. It's great to have you here. So before we get started with our interview, which I'm sure will be lots about foreign affairs, which is something you're an expert in. Just tell us a little bit about how you got to be where you are today. What's been your journey? Yeah, it's a long and winding road. You know, I grew up in Boston and Massachusetts in the U.S.

a very sort of normal suburb. And I had a sort of staggeringly boring, you know, by the standards of such things, childhood. I've always wanted to have a sort of childhood trauma to overcome, but I never managed to find one. My parents were great. They were always encouraging me. We, you know, we were neither too wealthy nor too poor, which is, you know, frustrating to create a story, but probably very good for one's childhood. And the only real problem I had, I think as I was growing up was that I was very technical. I was a sort of computer nerd even before it was popular to be a computer nerd. And I spent most of my teenage years and college experience in the computer lab.

And after university, I got a job in Silicon Valley working for a big computer company, which was pretty good, I suppose. but I think over time I became really very, very bored with it. It had the problem that it was extremely detailed-oriented, more than about concepts, and you got very, very good at smaller and smaller parts of the computer project that you were working on, which was in the interest of the company

to make you a real expert at something very small. And as you got better and better at less and less, eventually you were the sort of world's expert. at nothing. And it was very isolating. You could only really talk to the five or six people that you worked with. Who were the last people that you wanted to talk with? Because you saw them all day, and they were frankly very boring.

So at that point, in my mid-20s, I sort of wrote to a professor that I had in university and said, you know, I think I want to do something else. And he recommended that I come to the school that he was at and get a master's degree in international relations. which was at Johns Hopkins, Sice, in Washington, D.C. And I did that, and that was really quite helpful for me to sort of understand the role of politics. It came a bit late to it, but to understand the role of politics in life and to understand what the big questions were.

And I spent several years in a master's in a Ph.D. program, which I never completed. Oh, so you're a dropout. That means you must be very good. All the dropouts always do well, right? Yeah, I think dropping out of a PhD program is a sort of badge of honor because it shows that you lack the patience to wrestle with an idea for five or seven years until you've beaten it to death. And, no, I mean, I think I should have graduated, but I was afflicted by the sort of twin enemies of knowledge,

which are love and money. and I moved to Washington both for a job and for a woman. I eventually lost the woman, but I unfortunately managed to keep the job. I'm not really sure, frankly, that that was the right choice. But there it was. And I ended up working at, I started at Rand, which is a big think tank, which works mostly for the U.S. Defense Department in Washington. I think I did something which is very helpful for anyone starting out,

which is I showed up as an intern and I just refused to leave. And so eventually they gave me a job. And, you know, that was great. I mean, because you were really sort of wrestling with policy ideas, trying to help the government to understand what the broader political implications of what they were doing was and really just frankly learning a lot. I mean, these are really great ways to learn. And I moved from there to Brookings, which is a big think tank in Washington.

And I spent several years there. And at Brookings, where I mostly worked on U.S. European relations, I was able also to get really involved in sort of democratic foreign policy circles and to work on campaigns first for John Kerry and then for Barack Obama as a sort of foreign policy advisor. There are dozens or even hundreds of these in a U.S. presidential campaign, but they really give you some insight into the way that foreign policy plays out in the campaign, and they just give you access to the people and to the process of a political campaign, and so that was quite helpful.

And after I had signed up to work for Barack Obama early in his 2008 campaign early in 2007, because U.S. presidential campaigns are essentially endless. And I did that because, not because I preferred him, really, to Hillary Clinton, but because I found him to be interesting and because the Hillary Clinton campaign was extremely crowded. As one of my friends put it, I'm tired of being in the same room, having the same arguments with everybody that I used to argue with in the Clinton administration. Sounds like my Facebook fee, to be honest with you. Yeah, I think the Clinton campaign is a little bit of,

about the Facebook feed is people who've been together for too long. Kind of a problem that she's had for a long time. And the Obama campaign was just much more exciting. It really wasn't philosophically different, I would say, but it had a real different kind of energy to it, I thought. And when they asked me to be an advisor, I said, sure, why not? I didn't expect him to win. I'm not even sure I wanted him to win in terms of my career.

because, you know, I was pretty happy with the think tank, and the idea of going into government was quite scary to me. And when, contrary to my plans, he won, which really was a huge shock. I still haven't quite gotten over it. I went in and worked at the State Department, first as an advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for, European Affairs who had been a colleague of mine at Brookings and had been the guy that brought me into the campaign. And then on the policy planning staff where I worked pretty closely with Hillary Clinton and with her big advisor, Jake Sullivan. And, you know, that was incredible. I mean, it was working in government, at least in the U.S. government,

is really interesting, amazing even. It's horrible, I would have to say. I always compare it to like a car wreck. You know, it's like horrible and tragic and unavoidable, but you cannot take your eyes off of it. You can't stop watching because it is really fascinating and you learn a tremendous amount. Some things that you really never wanted to know about how government works, about how policy works,

and even about how human nature works. And it has really informed my, my subsequent work. I think it's had a greater sort of, I don't think I actually accomplished almost anything. And even the things that I accomplished, I'm not sure they were a good idea. But I think I learned more from that experience than any other experience I've had. Arguably it's made me a bit too cynical, but I do think that everybody should do that for at least a few years just to sort of test their assumptions and to understand.

what I call the policymaking dilemma is the pressures that the policy makers are under. I feel as if people who've never been in government don't, and frankly quite a few have, don't really have an appreciation for the variety of pressures and the types of constraints that policymakers typically operate under. The sort of view outside is, oh, these people have a lot of power, they can do anything they want. The view from the inside is that you're barraged from a hundred different directions and you have incredibly little freedom of action. And that people are telling you things, making recommendations to you that you already know and have already rejected or are already trying to do. But you can't and you can't do anything about it.

And that's incredibly frustrating. And I think as what I've tried to do particularly since I left is to try to understand. the pressures that those people are under and to talk to them in a way that they can you know that they certainly that challenges them you need to challenge them but also that understands the constraints that they face do you think looking back at the trump campaign with phrases like drain the swamp do you think that actually public trust in politicians as and especially in Washington has actually decreased significantly no um i was i was I always find that to be a strange question because I can't remember a time when people had trust in politicians.

So it hasn't really decreased. It's always been terrible. But do you think it's got even worse where someone openly refers to Washington as a swamp? And everyone goes, yeah, okay. Well, not everyone, but there's certainly the people who voted for him. No, people have been doing that my entire adult life. you know, it is classic, certainly among American politicians, to run against Washington. People have been doing that at least since Ronald Reagan, probably before,

and to run as an outsider, to run as an anti-establishment figure. Think about this. George W. Bush, when he ran for president in 2000, ran against Washington, ran as an anti-establishment figure. He was the son of a former president. And yet he positioned himself that way, and people bought it. Hillary Clinton tried to run as an outsider. She was the wife of a president.

Al Gore ran as an outsider. He was the vice president. Everybody does this to, they don't succeed, sometimes they don't succeed. Very often they don't succeed. George W. Bush did succeed as positioning himself as an outsider. So almost anything is possible. You know, Donald Trump, I don't know what makes Donald Trump an outsider.

He's a billionaire. He's been hobnobbing with all of these establishment figures for 20 years. He's certainly an asshole, so I don't know if that makes him an outsider, but he took the same rhetoric. I think that the distinction to me made in the 2016 election is that there is a certain, let's say, oligarchy in both parties, which, you know, I mean, the United States, I think like any country is a sort of combination between democracy and oligarchy. And I think this is actually kind of necessary because you can't run a country without an elite.

You know, people are always running against the elite, but you don't actually ever run a country without an elite. You just replace the current one that you have. And the United States has had for a long time a system of competitive elites who run the country. country in alternation, which is a reasonably good way of keeping them honest, but certainly can be frustrating to people who aren't in either of those elites. Donald Trump did something in the 2016 campaign, which was very new. It wasn't running against Washington. That's the oldest trope in the book. It was avoiding having any sort of debt or homage to the oligarchy of his party. He ran against not just the Democratic Party, not just against Washington, not just against

Washington, he ran against the Republican Party. He ran against their control of the system. And that was never possible before, not because you couldn't make the political message, but because you couldn't get the money and get the backing and the endorsement of key institutions like the media and the expert community like I am part of. and he was able to evade that system in the first instance by being incredibly wealthy, but maybe more importantly, by in the second instance, being already a celebrity and not really needing

their endorsement. He had his own brand. He didn't need the Republican brand. Yeah, his own brand. I mean, typically if you start off as a new presidential candidate, you need to convince the public that you're not a lunatic. And in the way that, The way that you convince the public that you're not a lunatic is people that they already know not to be lunatics come out and say,

oh, this guy's got a pretty interesting campaign. Oh, he's good. Donald Trump didn't need to do that, not because he's not a lunatic, but because people already knew who he was. This is very, very rare in American politics that someone comes from nowhere. I think it's perhaps the future of American politics. That's what I was about to ask you. Do you think it's Donald Trump's all the way in from here? Like, is it going to be Oprah Winfrey,

Kanye West? Is that what's going to happen for now? I think that Donald Trump has demonstrated, if we really needed any demonstration, the incredible power of celebrity. And social media has only accentuated this. And that I think we should expect, people are always asking me,

who is the Democratic candidate for 2020? And, you know, you can come up with 30 or 40 different possibilities. I think that there's also a very good chance that the Democratic candidate is someone that we have never heard of, or at least never considered as a democratic candidate. We probably have heard of them, probably have heard of them. We've got their album, basically.

Yeah, yeah, they probably have headlined in this club. And, you know, I think that that kind of celebrity, that kind of non-politician, that kind of person who has a rapport with the public, that the public knows who they are, that they don't need to go through the party oligarchy or through the expert community, that they have no problem either raising money or just already having money, and that they don't need any of the sort of existing groups to say,

well, this guy's okay, this guy's not a lunatic, this guy's plans makes sense. I think that could be the future of American politics. It's fascinating to note that when you look at almost all of the last several presidents, sort of including George W. Bush, they've really basically come from nowhere. they've been people who not only haven't had much of a political record, but have succeeded because they haven't had a political record. When people were advising Barack Obama on whether he should run for president in 2006-7, when he'd only just been in politics as a senator for a couple of years,

they were saying, well, you know, maybe you should get, maybe you should get more experienced, get more into Washington, know people more. And he had the insight to understand that actually the only time he could run for president was in his first term as senator. And if you look at the 2016 Republican primary, what you see is that every new senator basically ran for president in the Republican side in 2016, because they realized that if they didn't, they would have too much of a record, too much experience to run for president.

counts against you these days. And I think that future presidential candidates are going to understand that, already are understanding that. So I don't know if Oprah wants to be president. I know that she couldn't be worse than Donald Trump. I don't think she knows really anything about being president, but I don't think that it's really important to have a lot of sort of the typical experience

that we generally associate with presidents to be a good president, I do think that you need to have a few qualities that Donald Trump really lacks, which is, you know, listening to people, the capacity to learn, a basis of good judgment and a moral center. Those things would be nice. You know, Oprah Winfrey may have those, maybe some other celebrities will, I'm not inalterably opposed. I mean, obviously as an expert and as someone who spent my life trying to educate myself about these stuff, it's very sad for me to say, well, you know, you don't

really need to be an expert to be president. But I think that's fine. What I'm hoping for is that we can find someone, even if they're a celebrity, who is willing to learn, who has judgment, who has a moral core, who has something that they want to achieve. What I don't know was how to assess those things. By someone's music album or the headline set, the Angel Company Club. And so, I mean, I asked, you know, does Oprah Winfrey have those things? She might. I don't know.

But the thing that terrifies me is, okay, you are particularly successful, whether you're a musician or an actor. How does that qualify you to go and negotiate with North Korea about the dissonment of their nuclear weapons? Yeah, look, I shouldn't tell you this as an expert as someone who does international. national relations. It doesn't qualify you to do that, but it's not important to be able to do that as president. The president has a lot of people that can do that for him, that can help him do that, that can instruct him on how to do that. The government, Washington is full of people like this. They're all over the place. Honestly, I could assemble six for you. In an hour, we could have a

pick-up basketball game about North Korea. Well, I'll make you sound like the Avengers. It's not anywhere near that interesting. Nobody has a hammer, which is unfortunate. But what a president needs is not an ability to negotiate, not information, knowledge about North Korea. We could teach him that in an afternoon. He needs enough self-confidence to reach out. Donald Trump's got that.

To the experts. No, Donald Trump doesn't have that. I mean, I think that this is a fundamental problem. One of the ways that you can tell that Donald Comp is deeply insecure and lacks the necessary self-confidence to be a good president is the way he keeps telling you how great he is. I'm sure that you guys probably went to high school and are familiar with this type.

Yeah. No, I mean, someone who's truly self-confident is someone who is able to listen and take advice and not feel like it diminishes them. Sure. You know, you were saying earlier that Hillary Clinton has become very toxic, and I think there's definitely some truth to that in American politics. But one of the things that gave me great comfort in working with her

and in voting for her later as president, even though I often disagreed with her on key issues, was that she was someone who was confident enough in her intellect and in her capacity to listen to people that she disagreed with, to take arguments seriously, to wrestle with ideas in a way that was open to change. You didn't usually change your mind because, generally speaking, she was smarter than you were, and she generally felt like she was right, but she listened, and she occasionally changed her mind. And she had a basic good judgment and a basic moral core.

and I think that that's what presidents need. And I don't rule out a celebrity having those kinds of things. If you think about Ronald Reagan, because I should add something else that a president needs, is really the ability to communicate with the public. And, you know, I can't do that, I think, as this interview is probably already proven. And, you know, I think that that's a real political skill. which a lot of very, very smart, very, very expert people simply don't have. It has frankly nothing to do with knowing what the right thing to do in North Korea is.

And, you know, I think people like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are very good at that. And I think maybe celebrities in general could be good at that. That's probably how they became celebrities. But what we're going to need to do, if we're going to have people like that, as president, people who can get whose communication skills allow them to get elected, we're going to need to be able to be able to forge an alliance, if you will, with an expert governing class that can help the communicators govern. Reagan did that pretty well.

Donald Trump isn't doing that at all. He's not even trying. He doesn't recognize that he needs to. And I think that's the real struggle that we'll have is if, if you're not. If we're going to have government by celebrity or government by a famous person, how are we going to create a system where they can access expertise and not feel diminished? Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers.

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Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and first. furniture sale. That's avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. So here you are in the UK talking about and advising people about foreign and researching foreign relations. I saw an interview that you did with Channel 4, I think it was news night. And one of the things you said, I think you mentioned you got a lot of pushback on was the Britain as a medium level power. What is your view of Britain's role in the world today? Yeah, look, I should say in starting off that I live in the United Kingdom and I do that for a reason. I really like it.

It's a great country. It's a wonderful place to live and it's got a great future. So I don't mean to be disparaging of it when I say, you know, get real. You know, I mean, Donald Tusk is famous for saying there are two kinds of countries in Europe. those countries that realize that they're small countries and those countries that don't. And the United Kingdom is clearly one that doesn't realize that it is a medium-sized power. It's odd. There is this very strange schizophrenia about this. If you look at government policy, if you look at the way that the United Kingdom has been reducing its military budget,

the way that the United Kingdom has been withdrawing a lot of its influence in the world, world, you see a very strong recognition that the United Kingdom needs to redefine its relationship with the world and think of itself as a medium power, which can certainly punch above its weight but needs to relate very well with its neighbors and with some of its key partners in order to function in the world. But yet if you look at the sort of politics in Britain, if you look at the way people speak about the United Kingdom, it sounds like it's 1890. I mean, there's this sort of idea of, you know, what did they call it, Empire 2.0?

Every third movie seems to be about Dunkirk or about 1940. You know, these were great times. I understand that. And some amazing things were accomplished. We did win the war. Yeah, yeah, that was great. And I'm really glad that you did. We won the war.

We won the war. I like it. We've got a Russian and American and an Englishman. And the Englishman is like, yeah, we won the war. I think we can all take some credit. Let's just say that. But, you know, it was good that the war was won. I think we can all agree on that.

But it was kind of a while ago. The world has moved on, even if the movies have not. And I think there is a new reality. And in this new reality, the United Kingdom still has enormous strengths, but it cannot be the United Kingdom of old. It needs to understand that it is a medium power in a difficult and cruel world. And that means it needs to seek very, think very carefully about its alliances, about its international positioning. That means there can be no spirit of Dunkirk for 2018 because the United Kingdom cannot function alone.

and that means it needs to think very hard about the role that its European partners play in its security and prosperity and the role of the United States plays in its security and prosperity. And I feel as if that debate here is very often submerged in an imperial nostalgia, which doesn't really help anybody. So in a roundabout way, you're basically saying Brexit was a mistake. I hope that that wasn't a roundabout way of saying that. Yeah, I mean, Brexit is a sort of. spectacular mistake in my view. It is very much Turkey's voting for Christmas. And I, you know, I think there is a good possibility that with a lot of clever statesmanship on the, on both the

European and the British side, that it can be only not much worse than it was before. That's a good possibility. But there are really only downsides, and it could be terrible. And it's all completely unnecessary and stupid because I think, you know, a proper debate in the pre-referendum period would have told some people some harsh realities about the world today. And I think actually even the Remain side was really unwilling to do that. They were unwilling, and you know I understand why in political communication it's not good to tell people you have to do this. And that's again, you know, why I'm not a good politician.

I think this interview really demonstrates that. But the fact of the matter is, and I'm a fact of the matter is guy, Britain needs its European partners. It needs them even because the United States isn't a reliable enough partner. And this idea of going back to the empire or going back to a special relationship, which has never really existed, or certainly not existed in the way that the British think of it, is a fantasy. Well, I wanted to ask you about Trident, Britain's nuclear weapons.

Before I do, I just want to say this table is, this microphones rather, very sensitive. So when you tap the table, it sounds to the listeners like Trident has been launched. So sorry about that. I'll try not to launch any nuclear weapons. But I'm curious, you talk about a cruel and harsh world. I mean, in the world where Russia is running around doing the things that it's doing, and with the backup of its nuclear weapons, I mean, Russia is very clear about that. The Russian regime says, we are powerful because we have nukes.

We have a lot of nukes, right? What do you make of the debate or the conversations around Trident? Jeremy Corbyn, the labor leader in this country, said that he wants to get rid of it. Other people are saying this would be ridiculous. What do you think would be the impact for Britain of losing its nuclear deterrent? Well, I think it would be a bad idea for Britain to lose its nuclear deterrent overall. I think a nuclear deterrent, particularly for a mature country like Britain,

is broadly speaking a good idea. And it does sort of prevent the worst possible catastrophes. I would say, however, that particularly when you look at Trident and when you look at the way that Britain is maintaining its nuclear deterrent, it is extraordinarily expensive. It is a massive drain on the British defense budget. On a certain level, the British defense budget and almost a lot of the British public purse is becoming just focused, frankly, if you, frankly, if you

look at, if you look at British public spending these days, it basically looks like the NHS and the nuclear deterrent. I mean, that's a slight exaggeration. Pensions as well. Pensions as well, of course, yes. And I think that what the British need to do is, I certainly wouldn't advise getting rid of the nuclear deterrent. I would be thinking very hard about whether Trident is the right way to do that. And I would be thinking very hard about how they can better cooperate with their partners, right? I mean, with a nuclear deterrent. I mean, the French have a nuclear deterrent, which is also weighing them down. The Germans aren't

participating in it at all, but of course are benefiting from it, and that's true of the rest of Europe. And, you know, the great insight about the European Union, particularly European Union foreign policy, is that basically you guys all want the same thing. You're not really competing with each other, which is a sort of historical miracle at this point. And so it makes sense to combine your efforts when you're medium-sized countries in a harsh and cruel world. But Europe isn't doing that. I mean, one of the points you made in an article that you wrote recently, you were talking about Iran, and we'll get to that in a second. But one of the points you made is actually Europe is divided quite often against itself, and countries will seek

the help of America against other European countries. Within Europe, so far. while we're not cooperating, is it not wise for Britain to hold on to its ability to deter others? Particularly because one of the other thing that would happen if Britain was to give away Trident, would essentially, to put it very crudely, you become America's bitch even more because you don't have your own ability to control. No, I wouldn't advocate. I would agree. I wouldn't advocate that Britain should get rid of its nuclear deterrent.

I'm not sure about the Trident aspect of it. a submarine launched deterrent like they have is extremely expensive. So I think my only point is that in maintaining a nuclear deterrent, which I think it should do in part not to be America's bitch, but really not to be anybody's bitch. Well, yeah, exactly. Because being a bitch sucks. I'm glad I brought that up.

You really run with it. Yeah, well, this is a sort of rule of international politics. I think that they do need. to look very carefully at ways of doing that more cheaply. One way might be thinking about other mechanisms besides Trident. Another way might be cooperating with European partners on the space. So like a land-based thing if it was? Land-based or air-based, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, the thing about a nuclear weapon, I think people get very involved in the sort of intricacies.

Well, you know, a sea-launched weapon is very hard to find and is very survivable, second strike, blah, blah, blah. You know, in a luxurious world, it would be good to think about all of these things. But actually, if you look at the history of nuclear weapons, it doesn't matter that much. The important thing is that you have them and that people think you might be able to use them. And people don't take a lot of risks when it comes to nuclear weapons. There was a sort of... It's kind of understandable, isn't it? So, you know, there's a lot of focus in the United States about stewardship, does the nuclear weapon work. you know, if I was an opponent of the United States

and I was something, well, you know, it's not clear that America's nuclear weapons really work 100% of the time. We can trade, they're only 60, 70% reliable. Let's invade and see how that works. People don't think that way. So, yeah, I think a deterrent is important. I think we underestimate how easy it is to create a deterrent with nuclear weapons.

That's both the great and the horrible thing about them. And so Trident is a very, very sophisticated system. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are a very sophisticated system. They do provide an extraordinarily survivable deterrent, and that's impressive. And during the Cold War, it was the sort of jewel in the crown of the American nuclear Trident, triad, excuse me. But I'm not really sure it's necessary for the kind of nuclear deterrent that the United Kingdom both needs and can afford.

Moving quickly on towards what's happening in Israel with Trump and the embassy, can you just give us a little bit of a background as to why that is so inflammatory? Sure. I mean, it's a big question. I accept that. Yeah, you want me to go back to Moses on Sinai? Oh, that far, okay. Tell us about Moses.

Yeah, I mean, everything in Israel starts with the Bible, but I won't go back that far. I think the issue is the central question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the city of Jerusalem. I mean, and it is biblical. It is for all of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a sort of central and holy city.

And to go there is to sort of wallow in the incredible history of those religions in that city and in their conflict over centuries. and millennia. It's quite incredible. And so it is, particularly for the Israelis and the Palestinians, a city which is sort of deep in their emotional heart, deep in their historical heart. They both have historical claims to that city which go back millennia. And when Israel was created in 1948, the city was divided, not between the Israelis and the Palestinians, interestingly, between the Israelis and the Jordanians. And Israel had West Jerusalem, and Jordan had East

Jerusalem. And East Jerusalem is where the Temple Mount is, which is the holiest site, both in Jerusalem, both for the Jews and for Muslims, because it's where the Alaksa Mosque is. And in the 1967 war, the six-day war, the Israelis seized all of Jerusalem and the Jordanians relinquished their claim to the Palestinians. And so since the Israeli occupation in 1967, there has been an effort by the Israelis to establish in the mind of the entire international community that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel. They have not annexed the West Bank. They did not annex Gaza, which they also took in the 67 war. But they have annexed East Jerusalem. They

have claimed that they will always rule over this. And the question of how Jerusalem will play in what's called the two-state solution, the idea that there will be a Palestinian state next to Israel at a certain point has been the central, one of the central questions in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations going back to at least Camp David in the 1970s. And so when Trump decides to move, I mean, I guess I should add that the U.S. Congress, which has always been even more pro-Israeli than U.S. presidents, passed a bill. in the 1990s in 1995 saying that the United States recognizes Jerusalem as the capital and we'll move the embassy there. And presidents have always, since that time, waived that requirement

in the bill saying that it wasn't in the interests of the United States and the interest of peace in the Middle East to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. So previous presidents, in other words, knew. how inflammatory this would be and have avoided doing it? Yeah, well, it's not just that it would be inflammatory. You know, I think obviously there's been a lot of violence in the last few days, but that's not the central question because there's always violence in the Middle East. And if you want to do something, anything, you have to, you will very often create

at least short-term violence. It's the nature of the region. I think it's very important that it'll be inflammatory, but the more central question is does it in the longer term push toward peace? And here I think U.S. presidents have felt that if you want to bring Israel and Palestine together, you need to be able to coerce both of them, right? You need to be able to have carrots and sticks for both of them. And a critical carrot and or stick against the Israelis in creating a negotiation is the status of Jerusalem.

So typically American officials would say, well, you know, we're going to hold the status of Jerusalem until the end to seal the deal because that's what the Israelis most want. and it's just a tenant of negotiations that you don't play your strongest card at the beginning. You play them at the end. You know, Donald Trump, I don't think he doesn't, it's not that he doesn't understand that exactly, it's that he doesn't seem to care.

He's interested in making a big splash. He's interested in having an impact immediately. Long term for him is next Tuesday. And so he doesn't really seem to care as far as I can tell. You can say he doesn't know, but at least 100 people have told him directly,

and he either doesn't take it in or doesn't care. And so I don't think that this has really furthered the cause of peace, and not just because of the immediate violence, which is bad enough, but also because it makes the structure of the negotiation a lot harder.

Having said that, and maybe that way on Donald Trump, it wasn't going well anyway. And it's not really clear that he spoiled anything because it's not clear that there was anything to spoil. But, you know, I think in a situation that appears hopeless, like the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, it probably doesn't make sense to just make it all the more hopeless because you want to have a good photo opportunity. And I think that that's what he's done. So you're saying that the decision to move the embassy was based entirely on ego? Yeah, on ego and on domestic politics. I think, frankly, you can trace every Donald Trump foreign

policy decision thus far to some combination of ego and domestic politics. Because he isn't really interested in foreign policy per se beyond immigration questions and maybe international trade questions. It doesn't really have anything he wants to accomplish in the long term. He's not trying to create a specific role for the United States and the world. He's not really trying to reshape the world according to any sort of ideology or image. Donald Trump has one very, very clear ideology, and it's the greater magnificence of Donald Trump. Picking up on that, then, what do you make of Donald Trump-led with withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.

Can you first of all just for anyone who doesn't know what it is, including me and Francis, to a large extent, what was the Iran nuclear deal, what still is the Iran nuclear deal, and why did Donald Trump decide to pull out of it? So the Iran nuclear deal, which is the technical term for it, is the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Sounds good. Yeah, yeah. Anything with an acronym like that must be good.

Yeah. was a deal between actually seven countries, what they called the P5 plus one, which is all of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, which is the U.S., Russia, China, France, and Britain plus Germany, and then those six had a deal with Iran, essentially. And the essential deal was a very simple one, really, the Iranians agreed to freeze their nuclear program, to dismantle their nuclear enrichment capacity, and to submit to a very, very intrusive regime of inspections to verify that,

and the international community, those seven countries, six countries, excuse me, agreed to relieve the economic sanctions that had been placed against Iran and to give them some economic benefits so that their economy could get back on track. This was a really, really controversial deal, particularly in the United States and Iran. And the substance of the complaint, at least on the U.S. side, was that this had not addressed Iran's other nefarious activities in the Iran is involved in a lot of civil wars in the region in places like Syria and Yemen and Iraq. And it hadn't addressed Iran's ballistic missile capability and that Iran was still a very bad actor. You know, the response to this from the officials that created the deal was, yeah, that's true.

You know, one thing at a time. What we did in this deal was address the nuclear program, and that's really important for all the reasons that we talked about in the ways that nuclear weapons affect the Donald Trump also say that there was cash involved that the West was actually giving around cash yeah that's not true which is a frequent theme in in responding to Donald Trump but what what was happening was that a lot of the cat a lot of Iran's money had been frozen in Western bank accounts as a result and part of the revolution and part of the

sanctions and some of the Iran's own money was released back to them. Makes sense. So I would I would assert that there's a big difference between giving Iran cash and giving them back their own money which had never belonged to anybody else. Okay. But yeah, I mean Iran, the intent of this deal going beyond cash was to give Iran economic benefits. So if we assume that there is a rational element to Donald Trump, what is the

ration, and I know it's an assumption, what is the rationale for withdrawing from this deal which prevents around from developing nuclear weapons? I can't come up with a rationale. I tried. I think that there is a real effort by a lot of people to construct a strategic narrative around what Donald Trump does. I guess because it just makes us feel better about the world, right? Okay, well, I think what he's trying to do is this, and he's got this plan, and I don't believe. All right, well, let's ignore the word rationale.

Why does he think it's bad? I think he thinks that the deal is bad because it allows Iran to engage in all of these other activities because Obama made it, and he wants to undo the legacy. I mean, frankly, if you look at what the president is apparently going to do, seems to be about to do in North Korea, he's probably not going to conclude a deal as favorable

as the Iranian nuclear deal with the North Koreans. But it will have the essential distinction that it will not be concluded by Barack Obama. So really, this is the level of which American foreign policy is now operating. Yeah, I mean, look, that's the level at which Donald Trump is operating. You can certainly, if you are, let's say, John Bolton, Donald Trump's National Security Advisor, you can have a more strategic rationale,

but the only way that you can understand that rationale is if you are moving in one way or another toward a policy of regime change in Iran. John Bolton has been very clear that he doesn't think that we can ever have an effective

deal or ever have a responsible actor in Iran as long as this regime is in charge of Iran. And that means pretty clearly that if you want to solve this problem, you have to move toward some policy that's going to get you to regime change. And in that way, obviously, you would not want the nuclear deal. What you would want is an international coalition that was worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons to create enemies against Iran.

You'd want to go back to the days of 2014, where everybody's worried about Iran. was allied against the Iranians. And so that makes a certain amount of sense. It's very clear that's not what Donald Trump is trying to do. He ran on getting the United States out of the Middle East, not on fighting another regime-change war with a yet stronger regime in the Middle East. So I don't think that's in his mind, but that is where his policy is pushing us. So, I mean, what would you see as, I mean, let's say that Trump has his way.

What are going to be the long-term implication, do you think? Well, Trump will probably have his way when it comes to the Iranian nuclear deal. I don't think that it really holds together without the United States. And I'm very nervous about the implications. I think, look, I always say, I talked earlier about the policymaker's dilemma. And so I was trying to get into the mind of the people. So let's just imagine for a moment that you're the Iranian National Security Advisor,

which is probably a tough job. You get something wrong. You're not just fired, right? Yeah, you're literally fired. Yeah. Yeah, it has many, many disadvantages. I think the media is even tougher. So you're the Iranian National Security Advisor, and one day you have this nuclear deal,

and one day the most powerful country on Earth, with a president who seems, you know, withdraws from it, tells the entire world that you're evil, and basically signals that they're coming to get you, which is what Donald Trump hasn't precisely done that, but many of his subordinates have done that in ways, which you don't have to be paranoid to be afraid of. What would you do? Well, you know, I mean, we just discussed it in the case of the United Kingdom. You would develop nuclear weapons immediately. That's exactly what I would do, because basically you've been told

that a country with the most powerful military in the world is out to get you. So my suspicion will be that over the next several months, that the Iranians will turn back toward creating a nuclear program, just because that's what I would do. I could be wrong about that. I don't really understand what's going on in the Iranian regime. I know it's very contested. But there were a lot of people in Iran at the time the nuclear deal was concluded.

And since, that have been saying exactly the opposite of what Donald Trump was saying, this is a bad deal for us. We need these nuclear weapons because if we don't have them eventually, the Americans will come. Yeah, the Americans will come for us. And so this will verify everything that they have been saying. So they'll move toward that, and that will mean that the United States and Israel and Saudi Arabia will try to resurrect the international coalition against them. I'm not sure if they'll succeed in bringing back the Europeans and the Russians and the Chinese who might feel pretty burnt by this.

But they might or at least succeed in bringing back the Europeans, and they'll try to create a lot of economic pressure on Iran. The first phase in the typical sort of American regime change script is you create pressure on the regime. You assert that there is a democratic opposition, which is just yearning to be breathed free. We've seen how that works. But it is oppressed by the regime. There's always a degree of truth to that, but usually exaggerated. And you try to stimulate regime change from within, sometimes by also having a program on the side to to support the people who want to do that within the country.

When that doesn't work, you start to up the level of enmity between both sides and to create a reason to have a greater conflict so that you can devote more American resources and more allied resources to the struggle. And, you know, in the Iraq case, that ended. That was a long period. That was 12 years, basically, from the first Gulf War to the second Gulf War where these dynamics were going on. And that ended with an American invasion. I think an American invasion of Iran is very, very unlikely.

But a sort of long-term conflict in which there's even force used between the two of them is definitely possible. Because I think there will be people in the United States who will believe that regime change is both necessary. and possible if we keep up the pressure for long enough. So it sounds to me like what you're saying with Donald Trump is that essentially the world's policeman is withdrawing from the world to some extent, and you think there's going to be more crime because of it? No, I wouldn't say that's exactly what I'm saying. Certainly not in the Iran case, actually.

And again, this gets to the confusion of Donald Trump. Donald Trump definitely ran on we don't want to be the policeman. Right. He definitely said, I'm not interested in Middle Eastern wars. But his policy and the policy of a lot of his, the avowed policy of a lot of his subordinates, including people like John Bolton, is specifically to be the policeman in places like the Middle East and specifically to police the Iranian regime. So there's a huge contradiction here.

If you were going, if you didn't want to be the world's policeman, the nuclear deal was a great. idea, right? Because it allows you to say, well, we've dealt with a nuclear problem and there are other problems with Iran, but those are easier to deal with, and the countries in the region can deal with them or the Russians can deal with them. Who cares? We only care about nuclear weapons. But once the nuclear weapons are back on the table, that is really something which engages the American public, which engages American security interests, because we're especially scared of nuclear weapons. And that really... brings you back in to the Middle East.

You know, does Donald Trump understand this contradiction? I have no idea. He doesn't really seem that interested in it. Donald Trump bless him. I wish I had this capacity. He doesn't seem to care about consistency. It's probably what's made him a great politician. And so he is, you know, they say that the mark of genius

is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time and not go crazy. Donald Trump can hold dozens, as far as I can tell. So in that sense, he is a very stable genius. He's the best genius in the world. He's the greatest genius.

There's something to that. I mean, I have to say that that would keep me awake at night, the idea that I was both trying to get the United States out of the Middle East and taking measures that would, that seemed to be getting the United States into greater conflict with Iran. His subordinates, and he has both types of subordinates, coordinates are struggling against these two issues.

And so the result basically is confusion. And you can read a lot of different policies into what the United States is doing. If you're focused on Iran, you're thinking he's trying to get in. If you're focused on Syria, you're thinking he's trying to get out. And these things don't really work well together. But that's Donald Trump. I think that's a fantastic place to leave him.

Yeah. Yep. We can do that. We can do that. We always ask the final question, Jeremy. So the final question is always in this podcast. What is the number one issue that you think is incredibly important that people simply aren't talking about at the moment?

Yeah, I was struggling with that issue with that question because from my perspective... Jeremy, you've just given away a secret that we ask the question in advance and you get a chance to prepare it. This show is ruined forever now. Thank you. Sorry to give away your secret. Yeah, no, I actually had all of the questions in advance.

Even we don't know all the questions in advance. It's definitely no truth. Yeah. No, I think it is helpful to be able to think about that. And it's hard from my perspective because I feel like I talk about everything all the time. And people are always saying to me, yeah, we're not paying enough attention to Chinese banks or something. and then I go out and find 1,100 different articles on Chinese banks. We have a massive media environment.

We have a massive expert community. We're paying attention to virtually everything. Some things don't have political salience, but that's really about how the public receives them. So it's not... Well, your friend, Gideon actually made this point on this very show that he wrote an article about something that he thought was really important and then no one read it.

So quite often, even if you are talking about something, that you think is essential. No one really cares. Yeah, what can you do about that? You can't really make people, and frankly, a lot of times it's rational. I mean, people shouldn't care about things that don't affect them immediately,

given that they have a lot of things that do affect them immediately in a limited bandwidth. I have to say that, so to my mind, I'm always focused on what makes people care about things. And I say my number one frustration

with the reasons that people care, with the reasons that people about things is the lack of statistical and probabilistic reasoning in the public. If there were, you know, if I were emperor of the world, that's a great way to start a statement. Yeah, yeah. No, I think this is a good idea. I think that's Trump's ultimate ambition, isn't it? Emperor of the world.

It's mine too. He's somewhat closer. But if I were emperor of the world, I would make everybody go to statistics and probability class. I would then be overthrown immediately. Yes. But really, one of the things that's fascinating about the inability of people like me to convince anyone, including I have the hasten to add my mother, about my policy beliefs, is that they don't reason according to large numbers.

I find this to be both fascinating and frustrating. I guess if you think about it, there's a lot of sort of evolutionary study on this, that people, that we evolved in communities of about 150 people. And so if you live in a community of 150 people and somebody gets eaten by a bear, it makes sense for you to be really, really scared of bears. And if the neighboring village is harboring bears, it makes sense even for you to have a problem with them. that neighboring village. But if you live in a community of 65 million, which is the UK, or 7 billion, which is the world, and somebody gets eaten by a bear, even if that person gets eaten by the bear on live television, it doesn't make any sense for you to be worried about bears. You should just go on with your life as if no one was ever eaten by a bear. But that is not what we

do. When someone gets eaten by a bear on live television, we create a war on bears. And we invade countries. And so, I'm obviously talking about terrorism or of anything else, but I think it exists

on a whole bunch of different issues. If you're trying to tell people what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of, they don't understand what you're saying because they don't understand what large numbers mean.

So they don't understand that it probably doesn't make sense to go out and fight a war in Iraq or Syria to prevent terrorism back here when you have much bigger problems and in fact terrorism isn't much of a threat because it looks so good on television.

And I think that this is this sort of lack of statistical and probabilistic reasoning is one of the main problems that we have in our public policy. I have no idea what to do about it because we're not going to improve it, but I do think that it is the issue which people are paying. It is the sort of the problem with our public discourse that people are paying very little attention to. That's a really great point on which to end the show.

Jim, before we let you go, you are on Twitter at Y. Shapiro. J.Y. Shapiro, perfect. I'm Constantine Kisson at Constantine Kishen. And I'm Francis Foster at Failing Human. If you enjoyed the show this week, please subscribe to us on YouTube. Follow us on Twitter at TriggerPod on Instagram as well. On iTunes, on SoundCloud. We're going to be on Pocketcast very soon.

So just follow us, subscribe to us, and we'll see you in about a week's time. Thanks for watching. Thank you. Thank you.