Harvard Prof. Stephen Walt Dissects US Foreign Policy: Israel/Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, China, BRICS, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #162
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Professor Stephen Wald is a professor of international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
He has long been one of the most independent-minded and interesting voices on foreign policy in American academia.
In 2007, he teamed with University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, who was recently on our show for one of our most watched episodes, to write the extremely controversial at the time book entitled The Israel Lobby, which documented
The array of powerful lobbying groups that dominate Washington, groups like Planned Parenthood, the NRA, corporate lobbies, and lobbies for the military-industrial complex, and the duo described how the Israel lobby, devoted to ensuring bipartisan support for Israel and its various struggles and wars, has become one of the most successful and effective lobbies in Washington.
Like Mearsheimer, Professor Walt is regarded as a leading voice of the so-called Realist School of Foreign Policy and International Relations.
Since 9-11, this school of thought has typically found expression in opposing the numerous American wars, regime change operations, and interventions, arguing that the U.S.
fights far too many wars and far too easily resorts to the military option in places like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and now in Ukraine, and that the U.S. should use military force only when its national security and homeland are directly threatened.
That is a view that happens to be quite similar to the foreign policy critiques expressed by Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign when he railed against the Bush-Cheney foreign policy doctrine, against neoconservatives, and against liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party.
The title of the last book that Walt wrote, published in 2018, provides a helpful summary of this worldview, quote, the hell of good intentions, America's foreign policy elite, and the decline of US primacy.
That book is a scathing critique of US bipartisan foreign policy that dominated the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.
And in it, he argues that the failures of that interventionist, happy foreign policy is what contributed to Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election.
We had originally planned to have Professor Walton to focus primarily on the U.S.
and NATO role in the war in Ukraine, but obviously the events of the last six days changed that focus quite a bit.
We spent a significant chunk of time at the start discussing with him the vast and serious implications of the Hamas attack on Israel, the very aggressive Israeli response, and the key role now played by the Biden administration in providing the Israelis with military and financial support for its military response in Gaza.
We also discussed the criticisms of his university, Harvard, for failing to condemn Hamas aggressively enough, as well as the attempt led by billionaire hedge fund managers to compile a list of Harvard students who recently signed pro-Palestinian statements and to block them from being hired as a result.
We also spoke with him about what the implications would be if the U.S.
did end up bombing or otherwise attacking Iran, as numerous politicians are urging.
We also spoke about the ongoing war in Ukraine and the motives and goals of the U.S.
in fueling it.
We talked about the expansion of the China-led BRICS alliance and the question of whether the world really is moving from a U.S.-dominated one into a world that is multipolar.
What the proper understanding Americans should have of China, whether they're an enemy, a competitor, a country with whom the U.S.
can and sometimes should attempt to partner, and finally, whether the anti-interventionism that helped Donald Trump to victory is now eroding in light of overwhelming bipartisan support for the U.S.
role in the war in Ukraine and now this new war in Israel and Gaza.
Back in 2007, Professors Waltz and Mearsheimer were aggressively vilified by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, even standing accused widely of being anti-Semitic for writing about the Israel lobby and examining the bipartisan support for Israel in Washington.
They did survive those quite vicious attacks on their character and are now much more identified with their very studied and informed opposition to the American obsession with wars, with interventions and with regime change operations.
I found this discussion with Professor Wald every bit as enlightening and provocative as I expected it to be, and I trust that you will see it similarly.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Professor Walde, it's great to have you as your debut appearance on it's great to have you as your debut appearance on System Update.
We've been hoping to speak with you for quite a while, and we're happy we were finally able to make it happen.
Welcome to the program.
Nice to be with you.
So there's obviously a lot going on.
We picked a week to talk to you where the news is pretty active, to put that mildly.
Obviously, the event that is dominating discussion is the latest outbreak of this war between Israel in Gaza.
And I have a lot of specific questions about this war for you and its implications, what's driving it.
But before we get into those specific ones, let me just give you an opportunity to tell me your impressions generally about the events of the last six days.
Well, they're deeply depressing on multiple levels.
And this is one of these issues, I think, all of us who are concerned about it have to try and handle with as much care and sensitivity, recognizing that there are people suffering and fearful on both sides.
It's also a reminder of this sort of tragic paradox that at moments when it is probably most important to be calm and try to think carefully about what the right course of action is, that's also tends to be when it's hardest to do and people will naturally react emotionally on.
My overall view of this is, you know, obviously it's tragic and the actions being taken are clearly reprehensible.
What Hamas did was wrong, a horrific violation of international law and the commission of obvious war crimes deserves widespread condemnation.
I believe Israel's response now is also violating international law, threatening a mass slaughter there.
And it seems to me both these responses have to be condemned by those of us who are hoping eventually that we can move towards a more peaceful situation.
I think there's a tendency in situations like this to, for people to opine a little bit more aggressively than the actual knowledge permits.
And I think it's something we probably all have to struggle against a little bit.
But I want to ask you about the issue of the motives of the people who perpetrated the attack inside Israel on Saturday, which is Hamas and its very allied groups.
Is it possible to know what Hamas's motives are beyond just a kind of opportunistic desire to bring violence to Israel for its own sake?
Is there something geostrategic or geopolitical or involving the domestic politics of Israel that you think might have caused them to spend a lot of time obviously planning and coordinating and then carrying out such an incredibly audacious and horrific attack inside Israel?
Yeah, I appreciate what you said at the beginning of it, that we all need to be somewhat humble about our ability to know exactly what the motivations were and exactly why they acted as they did, why the atrocities that occurred took place as well.
I think that one can discern a
Call it strategic logic, and that was that the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others, you could argue almost the entire international community, had been marginalizing the Palestinian issue, had been trying to treat this as something that maybe would get addressed at some point down the road, and possibly the prospect of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia was seen as something that had to be headed off to as a way of further
Marginalizing the Palestinian cause, and that by staging this audacious and horrific attack, the strategic motive would have been simply a reminder that this issue was not going to go away, that it was eventually going to require a political solution and it could not be forgotten.
Again, that is not a justification for what Hamas did, but if you're looking for a strategic logic to it, it seems to me that's probably the best one can do.
about the attack was that not only the attack itself in terms of being very coordinated and professionalized more so than I think prior attacks of Hamas have been, but also the propaganda campaign, the videos that we saw, some of the most disturbing ones, some of the ones that have provoked a lot of the most intense indignation some of the ones that have provoked a lot of the most intense indignation among any decent person who's looking at what Hamas did in Israel is going to
A lot of those videos were videos that were produced by Hamas that were very highly produced with a lot of music and graphics.
It seems as though they weren't trying to show themselves in their best light, but were almost intending on some level to terrorize the Israeli population to remind the Israelis that they're perhaps not as safe as they think they are.
And it didn't seem as though they cared very much about perceptions in the West.
What do you think was the motive in Hamas doing those sorts of things?
Yeah, that's, I think, much harder, I think, for most of us to understand.
In my view, this is completely counterproductive from the perspective of the broader Palestinian cause and for the reasons you laid out, that this, you know, horrifies the rest of us.
It diminishes, I think, some sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
It empowers The most extreme elements in Israeli society in various ways.
To me, it's completely counterproductive.
Now, one can then start trying to develop possible explanations for it that they thought this was maybe going to rally support elsewhere that this was going to.
be just vengeance for what they perceive as many years of oppression and the losses suffered on their side.
I have a colleague who obviously compared this as others have to some of the horrific videos that ISIS used to propose.
And my comment to them was yes, and look what happened to the supposed caliphate that the world by and large rallied to suppress that as well.
So from, I think, from Hamas's perspective, this was an enormous blunder, in addition to being horrific, just as on a basic human rights level.
Let me ask you a similar question about the Israeli perspective in terms of what now is motivating them and their response.
Could just be a byproduct of my own subjective trajectory as an American who decided really to focus on politics and journalism in the wake of 9-11 and what I kind of thought was a lot of the excesses of our reaction both militarily but also in terms of civil liberties.
Seems like, obviously, a country that suffers an attack like this is not going to tolerate, a population would never tolerate the government being inactive and not responding in a very aggressive way.
I remember in the days and weeks and even months after 9-11, there was very much this kind of thirst for vengeance, this righteous rage.
You know, we have to go and kill the people who did this and if people are near them who are innocent, well, so be it.
That's just how it has to be.
I think I thought at least that one of the lessons we learned from 9-11 was that when you respond it with that kind of Kind of primal desire just to destroy for its own sake you end up making a lot of mistakes being counterproductive So we are now kind of seeing this counter reaction certainly throughout the Arab world but even in other places that aren't part of the West in Latin America in Asia are kind of now counter discussed at the incredibly
aggressive and seemingly indiscriminate response of the Israelis when it comes to bombing Gaza, ordering half the population to move to the south within 24 hours.
Is Israel now functioning the way the U.S.
did in the wake of 9-11, just kind of with the primal rage, or is there some geostrategic objective that you think they are attempting to accomplish with this massive bombing campaign in Gaza?
Well, those two things are not completely incompatible in the sense that, yes, I think they're reacting very much the way the United States did after 9-11, and they may feel like they have a larger strategic objective that they can achieve through this operation.
But again, there's no question Israel was going to respond to this, but as we said at the very outset of the program, these are the moments when it is hardest for leaders and populations to think sort of calmly and rationally.
You know, protracted violence does tend to bring out the worst on both sides.
There are rare exceptions to that, but I think that's a pretty common dynamic.
And it is often self-defeating.
That is to say, if one overreacts, if one abandons international law, just lashes out, reacts disproportionately, ignores the laws of war, etc., this often rebounds ultimately to one's own detriment.
And I think there's a danger here that the Israeli reaction will be an overreaction will eventually cost them international sympathy and support.
I think we ought to recognize also that Israel is in a serious policy dilemma here.
I mean, I think the last 50 years, if not more, have demonstrated that the Palestinian question is not one that can be solved through violence.
It's not one that can be solved through military power.
Even if they are successful in eliminating Hamas, and one can certainly understand why they want to do that now, that's not going to end Palestinian resistance.
One still has to consider what the endgame ultimately is here.
And that's I think a very difficult challenge for Israel and indeed for the rest of us.
But yes, I'm deeply worried about the fact that the Israeli response is going to be excessive and of course many innocent people who had nothing to do with these attacks are going to die as a consequence.
You have an article in Foreign Policy in the journal Foreign Policy this week.
The headline of it is, Israel could win this Gaza battle and lose the war.
And the sub-headline is, an all-out effort is again underway to maintain an unsustainable regional status quo.
Now part of the argument you advanced there is the one that you just got done explaining that you can try and obliterate Gaza, obliterate Hamas.
And it's unlikely to solve the problem, but when you write about what you call an unsustainable regional status quo, what do you mean by that?
What is the status quo and in what way is it unsustainable?
Well, it's the one I referred to previously.
It's the belief that you could have a peaceful, tranquil, prosperous, productive Middle East and leave the Palestinian question off to one side.
The fate of, you know, roughly 7 million people or so, and that that could simply be ignored forever.
They would remain quiescent and quiet, either in the, you know, open air prison that has been Gaza or in essentially the apartheid conditions of the West Bank.
And this, of course, was what the Trump administration was trying to do with the Abraham Accords.
It's what the Biden administration was trying to do with the normalization process.
And for the most part, ignoring any possibility of a peace process involving the Palestinians Hey, mostly devoting a blind eye to what the Netanyahu government was now doing on the West Bank.
So a lot of different parties here, not just the United States, not just Israel.
We're trying to leave this one off to one side.
And that's the element of the status quo here.
It seems to me that's now been shown to be unsustainable.
If that problem is not addressed, tragic events like this are likely to keep recurring, and that's something that should concern all of us.
Yeah, it's always interesting, you know, the extent to which people in Israel can express critiques of the Israeli government that are often not heard in the West, including the fact that just last month the former head of the Mossad said that we are now in a situation where Israel has become essentially an apartheid government in the sense that it's ruling over a majority that don't have political rights when you count the people in the West Bank and Gaza.
Ehud Barak has been long warning that.
So let me ask you about The domestic politics of Israel and how this might be affected.
Prior to the Samas attack, Netanyahu was in huge trouble.
Corruption scandals.
There was, in particular, an extremely vitriolic conflict in Israel about this attempt to remove judicial independence that the Israeli right has long wanted.
You saw, you know, things you never saw before in Israel, like reservists saying they wouldn't fulfill their duties, and intelligence professionals going on strike.
Obviously, when you have an attack like this, you have the rally around the flag effect.
We had that after 9-11, when suddenly George Bush became very popular.
But at the same time, The reality is, whatever else is true, this was a huge intelligence failure on Netanyahu's watch.
The failure to detect that Hamas was planning an attack of this kind.
Right now, there is a lot of unity in Israel the way there was in 9-11.
You have this unity government even that formed.
I'm just wondering, though, what you think the effect of this war is likely to be on Netanyahu.
Will this enable him to postpone, maybe even permanently, the political danger that he was in?
Or at some point, is this going to turn back on him?
I think that first of all this is another one of these places where we ought to be humble about our ability to forecast because lots of things could go in different ways.
But my own view is this is very bad news in the long term for Netanyahu.
There are some polls coming out of Israel now suggesting that you know sort of 80 percent 60 to 80 percent of Israelis think he should step down.
So yes, there has been a rally around the flag effect, but it's not escaped the Israeli notice that he is the Prime Minister and a number of the policies that he's adopted probably made this attack more likely and made it more likely to succeed by undermining Israeli readiness near Gaza.
I mean, I think the appropriate comparison here, by the way, is back to the October War in 1973, where there was a similar intelligence failure.
with very serious consequences for Israel.
Golda Meir was prime minister at the time.
She remained in office for some months after that, but there was eventually a fact-finding investigative commission, obviously found the government had been derelict in a variety of ways.
It was the end of her political career and ultimately actually paved the way for the sort of ending the monopoly the Labour Party had on political power in Israel.
So the domestic political consequences then were quite significant and I believe they'll be quite significant in this case.
But it's not entirely clear what's going to happen.
There's going to be a lot of finger-pointing.
Moderates who have opposed Netanyahu will blame him, of course.
Some of his more right-wing supporters are going to blame the moderates for undermining unity.
They'll accuse the Reservists who were protesting Netanyahu of weakening Israel.
So I think you're going to see a very serious, you know, a highly partisan, highly charged bunch of finger pointing in Israel in the months once this immediate crisis is over.
Yeah, it's interesting to contrast it to American politics where there were similar claims about the Bush administration's failure to detect 9/11 or even the Clinton administration prior to it.
There was this kind of transition as the attack was being planned.
And in reality, no one really paid a price for that.
Bush got re-elected in 2004 and there wasn't really any major government leaders who ended up being fired for that intelligence failure.
It's just an interesting contrast.
Let me ask you this.
One of the things that always makes any war involving Israel different from an American perspective is that our government plays such a central role in Supporting Israel in arming it, in funding it, in helping it in all ways.
You have the Biden administration paying visits already at the highest levels to the Israeli government, expressing support, mobilizing aircraft carriers and the like in the region, showing that we're not just going to support Israel rhetorically but also, if necessary, militarily.
What do you think, though, is the actual posture of the Biden administration in private?
From what you can tell, and I realize, again, we may be talking about limited information here, but do you think the Biden administration is doing what they're saying in public, namely telling the Israelis, look, whatever you need to do, whatever you feel like you need to do, go do, we're behind you?
Or do you think they're putting or attempting to place some kind of limit from a humanitarian perspective on what the Israelis do in Gaza?
Well, I think that the first of all, nobody in the Biden administration has called me to tell me what they're thinking.
It's not a surprise.
This is purely speculative on my part.
But I think that, you know, the Biden administration both is instinctively deeply sympathetic to Israel.
Joe Biden has, throughout his political career, prided himself on the support he's given Israel.
And Anthony Blinken is, you know, very strongly pro-Israel in his overall orientation.
So this is not, you know, rallying to Israel is not something that they do with any difficulty.
Whatsoever.
I think they also recognize that domestic political incentives here are entirely for, you know, sort of unconditional support for Israel.
Now.
They have said in I think rather pro forma fashion that they would like Israel to You know, act differently to respect international law, but there's no indication that they're going to put any real pressure on Israel to do so, at least not at this stage.
So I'm sure they would like this to be as constrained a response as possible, but you're not going to see the United States leading the charge, it seems to me, to try and bring this to an end, which is unfortunate given the role that we have there.
The best, I think, for both sides now would be to try and bring the current violence to an end as rapidly as possible, but I don't see a mechanism for doing that in the cards right at the moment.
So on that topic, you wrote a book back in 2007, it's a little scary to remember the date, but I guess we have to, called The Israel Lobby, which you co-authored with Professor John Mearsheimer.
And it's a long book, and I've written about it, a lot of people have, so I don't want to try and summarize it, but one of the things you did discuss was The number of lobbying groups inside Washington that wield a large amount of power like the NRA or Planned Parenthood, obviously Wall Street lobbies, big tech lobbies, and one of them is the Israel lobby which ensures more or less rock-solid bipartisan support for Israel, something that has pretty much remained very constant
No matter how many elections we have, no matter how many times the White House changes hands, you probably, I think, have to go back to maybe Bush 41 to find any actual real pressure on Israel when they threatened to withhold loan guarantees if they didn't stop settlement expansion.
So pro-Israel sentiment is a bipartisan policy and long has been in Washington.
Given that it's now been 15 years since that book was published, I'd like to ask you whether you think anything has changed in terms of either the lobby getting weaker or stronger or in some way operating differently or things more or less the same as the way that you described them back then.
I think there have been changes, but not substantial changes in terms of policy.
The core argument, you summarized it reasonably well, we characterize the Israel lobby as an interest group like lots of other interest groups in America.
It's not a conspiracy, it's not a cabal, it's right out there in the open like the Farm Lobby and Big Pharma and other interest groups as well.
NRA would come to mind as well.
An argument was that this group worked very successfully to maintain unconditional American support for Israel.
And we further argued that this was stifling our ability to manage the peace process and that ultimately it was bad for the United States, but also bad for Israel as well.
And I take no pleasure in saying that I think the events of the past week support that argument, that the failure to achieve a just peace in the Middle East and including peace for the Palestinians has been very, very bad for Israel as well as not good for the that the failure to achieve a just peace in the Middle East Now, American policy hasn't really changed.
One might even argue it's gotten somewhat worse.
What I think has changed is two things.
One is the popular discussion of this.
The popular discourse about it is much more wide-ranging.
You do get opinions now.
You can actually talk about the influence of groups like AIPAC and others without being pilloried.
And I think that Our book and a number of other things helped open that up.
You've also, I think, seen a shift in attitudes more generally in the body politic, recognizing the unfairness, the injustice of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in ways that was not true.
15 or 20 years recognition that the two-state solution that we have long supported and that we called for in that book, the two-state solution is probably not an option any longer and largely because of the continued expansion of settlements and the rightward shift in Israeli politics.
So, on the one hand, you know, I am disappointed that U.S.
policy didn't move in a more constructive direction, but I do think we have had at least a more open discussion of this, and that may lead to more farsighted policies in the future.
So we can't really have a full discussion about Israel, the war in Israel, U.S.
support for it, without talking about Iran, in large part because barely 24 hours went by before we had very prominent, mostly Republican politicians, though not only, people like Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, in various ways calling for the U.S.
to go and bomb Iran.
At first it was if we can demonstrate that they directly planned this attack, but now that caveat has even kind of disappeared in some expressions of this view that we ought to go bomb Iranian refineries in response to what happened.
You had an article in the Wall Street Journal and now one in the New York Times trying to link Iran to this attack, although even the Israeli and American governments are saying they haven't seen definitive evidence that that was true.
What would be the implications if the United States and/or Israel did something like bomb the refineries or other infrastructure in Iran?
Well, then you're talking about a regional war in the Middle East and one that would be, you know, devastating for some countries in the region.
I mean, Iran is much weaker, but it is not incapable of defending itself in various ways.
It has a large missile forces.
Some of those missiles can reach our friends in the region, and there's no reason to believe that they wouldn't use them.
So you're talking immediately about countries, including Israel, who would suffer if an active war like that broke out.
At that point, Hezbollah, an Iranian ally in Lebanon, would probably get involved, and they have tens of thousands of rockets that they can fire into Israel as well.
So I think anyone who cares about Israel or cares about countries in the region does not want to see this war expand territorially.
And I think actually the Israeli government and the American government do not, in some respects, want to discover that there's evidence linking Iran to this in any kind of direct or active way.
I mean, I think the interest of almost everyone now is to try and bring this to an end as quickly as possible and not allow it to get bigger.
And if there are American politicians trying to make political hay out of this, I think that's, you know, irresponsible at a minimum and reprehensible at worst.
You are on the faculty of Harvard, which finds itself, yet again, at the center of a pretty serious controversy.
A lot of students and donors and faculty members have expressed anger at the institution for not issuing a statement strongly condemning Hamas for these attacks.
And then you also have, at the same time, a campaign that's led by a couple of very influential billionaire hedge fund managers compiling lists of the names of Harvard students who signed pro-Palestinian statements in order, they say, to create an environment that would prohibit them from being hiring a judge. to create an environment that would prohibit them from being I think one student at Harvard even lost her job, a job that had been extended by a law firm and that was celebrated as part of this effort.
Do you see that campaign I just described as a legitimate or healthy form of activism, or do these pose serious threats to free speech and academic freedom?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The student who lost the job, I believe, was someone at NYU.
Yeah, you're right.
Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so let me say a couple of things about this.
I mean, first of all, I thought the original student statement that got so much criticism was really quite stupid and insensitive.
I mean, it attempted to put all the blame for this on Israel and did not condemn what Hamas did.
And I thought that was just wrong in terms of understanding the situation.
failed to recognize the crimes that had been committed against innocent Israelis.
And was also the timing was horrific.
This is a moment when many people had suffered direct losses.
So if the students had ever asked me if they should print this, I would have said no, absolutely not.
And I don't support that at all.
The second, I think that attempts to then go and punish them, etc.
You know, I'm inclined to cut the average 19 year old a little bit more slack than that.
And I think it's also something that universities have to be extremely careful and think a little bit more about.
That in general universities as institutions should try to avoid being forced to take political positions on the controversial issues of the day.
Individual faculty members can take different positions and academic freedom should protect them in that way, but the university as an organization Shouldn't be laying out a particular political line because you inevitably get into trouble and people will not be happy with the line you took.
So yes, I understand why the university wants to condemn what Hamas did.
I condemn what Hamas did.
But as soon as you do that, then you will get voices saying, well, why aren't you condemning other crimes that might be of equal magnitude, equally heinous?
Well, I think that's the argument, right, that Harvard has in the past few years, particularly manifested institutionally about the George Floyd protest, about a couple of other very inflammatory and widely debated political issues.
And so I think the argument is when you don't refrain or abstain generally from commenting, so why aren't you doing it here?
Yeah, no, I think that it shows you the danger that when university as an organization attempts to become a political player on issues other than perhaps, you know, things like the tax status of universities or research funding for universities where they are directly things like the tax status of universities or research funding for universities where they are directly engaged, when they attempt to take political stances as an institution or organization, they inevitably invite the kind of controversy that Harvard
So universities need to be, you know, open, need to be learning environments, need to be places where people can say things that are wrong, right, and that we might disagree with, and maybe those people will learn from the criticism they get, and we can collectively all become and maybe those people will learn from the criticism they get,
But I do think it is just dangerous when universities start trying to take political positions on issues where, you know, people are going to disagree and where it will be impossible to satisfy all sides.
When we originally wanted to have you on the show, the idea was, oh, let's talk to him primarily about the war in Ukraine, as well as some other issues about international relations and the like, but that was the primary focus originally when we had you on.
It almost seems like a different universe, really, to make the war in Ukraine the primary topic, given what's happened.
But we do have some time, so I just wanted to ask you, before anything specific, we're now 18 months into this war.
The United States, along with its NATO allies, have become very active participants, not obviously in terms of standing combat troops there, but arming and funding in so many different ways, supporting the Ukrainian military in this war.
What do you make of the overall state of the war and the progress that the West was hoping to make in expelling Russia from Ukrainian territory?
Well, I think the hopes that many had, myself included, that Ukraine would win a sort of rapid and relatively cheap victory and expel Russia from the territory it seized, I think those hopes have been disappointed.
I think that was unrealistic to believe early on, and especially unrealistic once we saw the preparations that Russia had made to defend the areas it had taken.
And unfortunately we now are facing a grinding stalemate in which it is hard to see how Ukraine's prospects improve.
The Russian military has improved its performance.
Russia has three times the population, greater military potential.
And even with lots of continued Western support, given the nature of the combat, the nature of the situation along the lines of defense, it's hard for me to see how Ukraine can stage the kind of decisive breakthrough that it would take.
And that means you're going to end up having to negotiate a settlement That settlement is not going to be one that you or I might wish to be able to write.
It's going to involve very painful compromises.
And until we get to that moment, Ukraine is going to continue to suffer.
And therefore, the right course of action, one has to think very carefully about how much damage you want to help
But I think one of the things that is so striking about what has happened here is that there seems to have been almost no diplomatic efforts on the part of the United States and even some of its key Western European allies who tend to be more active diplomatically to try and resolve this dispute in some way.
And that gave rise to the concern that the actual motive of the United States or the driving motive of the United States is not to end the war but to prolong the war in order to weaken Russia.
If that means sacrificing Ukrainians or Ukraine in order to do it, well, it seems like And to some extent, at least, from the lack of diplomatic efforts, that that seems to be the goal.
One of the things we've run into several times in our discussion is that, I think especially when it comes to motives, that's where it's often hardest to answer definitively.
We can forever debate, why did the United States invade Iraq?
Was it because of oil?
Was it because of Israel?
Was it because of George Bush's desire to avenge his father's, you know, all those different theories that will never be resolved?
Do you, though, think there is validity to the concern that what the United States really is trying to do here is not end the war but prolong it?
Yeah, I suspect if you went around the entire U.S.
government, you could find some people who see it that way.
I don't think that's the central tendency of the U.S.
government.
I think the belief has been that the Ukrainians want to continue to try and liberate their country, that what Russia did is a violation of international law, and they've also fought the war in violation of international law.
And that therefore we are on the side of the angels.
And the ultimate purpose here is not to prolong the war and use Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken Russia.
Clearly, the Biden administration and the Secretary of Defense did say that one of the goals here is to weaken Russia enough so it can't do things like this again.
That was said, by the way, at the very beginning of the war.
But I think now, you know, when the Ukrainians were planning their counteroffensive, the purpose was to try and improve Ukraine's bargaining position so they could get a better deal and an ultimate peace settlement.
And I believe if the Biden administration thought they could get that kind of a deal now, they might be interested in pursuing it.
But, and this is I think maybe the broader point, I think when historians look back on this conflict, they're going to see this as a diplomatic failure on our part of pretty mammoth proportions.
Certainly it was a diplomatic failure not to realize that the progressive expansion of NATO over many years was eventually going to provoke a Russian reaction, as indeed it did.
And American diplomats and American leaders kept ignoring those Russian warnings, even in the months prior to the actual Russian attack.
I think the Biden administration's handling of those negotiations simply did not take seriously what was about to occur and never tried to come up with a solution that might have averted the attack.
Similarly, once the war took place, we've not been particularly supportive of diplomacy.
We weren't backing some of the mediation efforts that, you know, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was engaged in that may have led to a quick secession of the war on better terms.
So I don't defend the Biden administration's handling of this war from a diplomatic point of view or the ways in which all of their predecessors have handled relations with Russia really since the 1990s.
We have a little bit of time left, so I have a couple questions I want to ask you about sort of broader international trends.
There was a speech back in July by Fiona Hill, who is a longtime hawk on issues like countries like Russia and China.
She was an ally of John Bolton or a protege of his.
She was in the Trump administration and kind of known for her militaristic stance on a variety of issues concerning war intervention.
And she gave a speech to a group of Western security state agents and policymakers where she argued that what we used to call the rest of the world, which basically is the entire world outside of North America and Western Europe, is now uniting, which basically is the entire world outside of North America and Western Europe, is now uniting, in essence, against the West and the war in Ukraine is fueling that because it's
in essence, against the West, and the war in Ukraine is fueling that because it's reminding them of the resentments that they have that they think the West uses military force to dominate the world, as they did many times in the regions of these countries, and they see Ukraine through that lens.
And one of the things she pointed to was the expansion of BRICS, which is the alliance led by China and Russia, Brazil, India, and South Africa, that seems to be growing while the United States is fixated on Ukraine.
You have in Africa, for example, countries like Niger expelling the French and seeming to turn to Russia and China.
You have China's waltzing into the Middle East and negotiating some kind of approach, mom, between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
And you have growing numbers of BRICS members now joining.
And you have President Lula da Silva of Brazil saying he dreams every day of de-dollarization.
Do you agree with the basic thrust of that view that our fixation on Ukraine has enabled the Chinese and BRICS to get stronger?
And how seriously do you take the rise of BRICS as a viable alternative or some kind of a cause of multipolarity in the world?
Let me approach that sort of reverse order.
I don't see the BRICS coalition as a particularly cohesive one, or at this point, a particularly capable one.
If you add up all the capabilities of the various members, it's still, you know, sort of dwarfed by sort of the alternative, what you might call the Western coalition as well.
That said, I do think the trends you're describing, there are things that should concern the United States.
Uh, you know, some Americans have been greatly surprised by the response and let's again, to oversimplify, call it the global South to the war in Ukraine.
And it's not that these countries think what Russia did is appropriate, are defending Putin in any particular ways.
What they're doing is two things.
One is they're pursuing their own interests as they see them.
So India has not been outspoken in condemning Russia because it has military relations with Russia in certain respects, still gets defense equipment from them, and still gets oil and gas.
China, of course, has had a particular response.
Brazil has been critical of not defending Putin, but certainly calling for peace there as well.
Saudi Arabia, Of course, has not, you know, lined up with us on this.
Even Israel, as a matter of fact, did not line up with the United States on Ukraine.
These were all countries pursuing what they thought their interests were.
The second part you alluded to is that the reaction of many in the global South is to say, we understand your concern about Ukraine, but where were you when equally large tragedies were taking place in sub-Saharan Africa?
when tragedies were befalling other countries and you were actually making them worse.
So the double standards or the hypocrisy is something that I think also animates the reluctance to just jump on board the American campaign there.
I think there's this sense that many other countries from the rest of the world do not accept our narrative and see our actions in very different ways.
Look at the situation in Ukraine and immediately think about the American invasion of Iraq and its consequences for Iraqis, etc.
I think that's something that we should be mindful of particularly if you start thinking about a sort of long-term competition with China where the Chinese can come in and very easily say Look, you should be promoting a world order that we have a larger voice in because look how badly the one the United States has been running has operated in recent years.
I know it's hard to overgeneralize when we talk about the rest of the world.
Obviously, India is going to see things very differently than perhaps China or Russia or countries in South America.
But do you see the outbreak of these new hostilities in Israel and in Gaza and what the Israelis are doing in Gaza and the fact that the United States is going to be supporting that in To some extent, probably to a pretty significant extent, as potentially aggravating those trends, namely that what we're calling the rest of the world, the global south, BRICS, whatever you want to refer to it as, that there are going to be a lot of people who see this in the same way as they see the war in Ukraine, or at least allow China to exploit that.
Like, look at what these countries do.
They go everywhere, they bomb when they want, they use their military force to dominate the world.
Yeah, I think that's a real danger.
Part of the critique of American foreign policy is that we're very selective in applying moral and legal principles.
We like international law.
We like human rights when it's our adversaries that we can criticize for that, but then we ignore it when it's our friends.
that do it.
And this is clearly going to be exploited by those who want to criticize the United States as well.
I think it will also give ammunition to what has been a central theme of Chinese foreign policy now for quite some time, is that there is this U.S.-led world order, and it doesn't work very well.
And that's especially evident in the Middle East.
The United States has been the overwhelming external force in the Middle East, really since the end of the Cold War.
We took complete stewardship over the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
We fought a war in Iraq.
We fought a war in Afghanistan.
We helped intervene in Libya.
We have been backing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others as well.
We've been focused constantly on pressuring Iran.
It's been a US-led Middle East, and China can now turn to the world and say, and look what just happened.
Look at the results of letting the United States run it.
We should have a multipolar order where power is shared, where you trust us or listen to us on how these problems should be resolved.
Because look, we can get along with everyone.
We have relations with Israel.
We have relations with Saudi Arabia.
We have relations with Iran.
Right.
So in a sense, one of the ways this tragedy in Israel and in Gaza is undermining American interests is it strengthens the case that you really don't want to listen to America.
You want to listen to someone else when it comes to defining a world order.
Just a couple more quick questions before I let you go.
Let me ask you about China.
And I know this is a broad question, but it seems like You know, we're kind of juggling a lot of different potential military conflicts in the world.
We have this proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
We're obviously now going to be heavily involved in what Israel is doing in the Middle East.
As I said, there are calls to, even if we don't bomb Iran, to increase our tensions with Iran.
And then there are, of course, a lot of politicians in the United States that insist that we have to see China as an enemy.
And there's even open talk about the possibility of preparing for war with China.
Especially if they attack Taiwan, but even if they don't.
What do you think is the proper way for Americans to view China?
Are they indelibly or inevitably an enemy of the United States?
Are they a competitor?
Can they be kind of someone, a country with whom we sometimes have conflict and sometimes can partner?
What's the proper way to understand that relationship?
Well, a good realist like me would say that some degree of rivalry between the world's two most powerful states is inevitable.
It's unavoidable.
They're each going to cast a rather wary eye on the other and keep an eye on what the other is doing.
And that inevitably involves a certain amount of competition as well.
The big question is how intense or how dangerous does that competition become?
So for some Americans who are greatly worried about the prospect that China is going to dominate Asia, become the world's leading power, and then interfere in a variety of ways, this is really a serious challenge.
Others, and I would include myself in that camp, See China as a serious competitor, but not one that is imminently poised to dominate Asia as a hegemonic power or exert that kind of influence around the world.
It has as many problems at home as we do, and that's going to limit what it can do.
Finally, that, you know, much of this competition right now is taking place in economics, you know, with the United States, in fact, trying to impose restrictions on chips and other forms of advanced technology.
And I have real misgivings about that policy.
I think it's defensible on narrow national security grounds.
What Jake Sullivan would say, you know, the high fence on a small yard, you restrict a limited number of things.
Very tightly.
The problem is it's really hard to keep that yard small.
It'll inevitably grow more and more restrictions get placed and that's going to hurt us.
It's going to hurt our allies and it may not actually slow China down that much.
Last point I would just make here is that that the United States has to be very careful that it is not so confrontational towards China that we alarm our various friends in the region.
Those countries and South Korea Australia India Philippines are worried about China's rising power and some of its activities, but they also are worried about a conflict in which they would suffer as much as we would possibly more.
So we should be spending at least as much time trying to figure out how to manage the relationship with China and lower that temperature as we are spending preparing for some conflict that we'd prefer to avoid.
Oh, I have to add one other point here.
It is possible that, you know, future generations will look back and say these two great countries were completely missing the point.
It missed the plot entirely that in the early part of the 20th century, the fundamental issue was something like climate change, and they should have gotten together to address that problem.
With most of their force and energy and not squabbled between each other and you know future generations may look back on this and say that we had our eye actually fundamentally off the ball at a critical moment in the evolution of the human species.
Yeah, that's a pretty significant concern.
Let me just ask you as my last question, focus a little bit on American domestic politics.
It seemed to me, and I guess I am using the past tense, that the perspective that you have long advocated, this realist view of international relations and more informed policy, had actually made a fair amount of progress in advance
Largely as a result of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign where he explicitly ran on expelling neoconservatism from the Republican Party, condemning the Bush-Cheney, even Reagan, foreign policy orthodoxy of wars and unnecessary wars that aren't fought for American interests but fought for the interests of a lot of other countries.
I think he had a lot of that lurking.
It wasn't like Trump caused it.
You saw success that Ron Paul had in the Republican Party advocating that sort of thing.
But certainly it seemed like that, at least within the Republican Party, we were starting to see the rise of this kind of anti-interventionist sentiment, this view that we had made a lot of mistakes in the wake of 9-11, being too readily, too willing to use military force when it was not wise or productive to do so.
I guess the reason I'm using the past tense now, though, is because the neocons, who did kind of get alienated from the Republican Party, ended up finding a very comfortable home, I guess, returning back to the Democratic Party.
And now, in the wake of this conflict with Israel, you're seeing the kind of return of that old instinct of the Republican Party of, well, we need to be involved, and we're helping Israel.
Possibly with Iran.
There's a lot of Republican support for the war in Ukraine and continuing that and obviously a lot of hawkishness toward China.
What do you view as the nature of realism or anti-interventionism in terms of whether it has become stronger or whether it's becoming weaker in the domestic political context?
Yeah, it's a great question.
And again, it's one of these places where you don't, you can't know entirely.
But I think I'm more optimistic, I guess, here.
So, you know, first of all, what the anti, the realist or restraint position was arguing against was not just neoconservatism, it was the sort of alliance of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists or liberal internationalists.
So that's what unites both the old Republican Party and the traditional Democratic Party.
And what we saw with the election of Joe Biden was essentially the return of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, very similar to the Obama administration as well, which had that sort of liberal internationalist element to it.
Now, remember, Biden did take us out of Afghanistan, for which he was heavily criticized, but I still think that was the right decision.
The rest of it, though, I think was sticking with the sort of standard foreign policy orthodoxy.
And in the last week or so, as you said, that's come back big time.
It's also been evident in our response to Ukraine.
My only point is this isn't going to work any better now than it was working before, that we're getting a certain sort of rally around these old ideas right now.
But I think when people see what the ultimate results of some of this are likely to be, the emerging shift in the body politic that has made people more skeptical, not about America being engaged in the world, But America that thinks it can reshape local politics all over the world and America that tends to reach for the military solution as a first resort rather than as a last resort.
I think that's that view is going to continue to grow within the body politic and especially with people who are younger and Sort of don't remember or never experienced the periods where there was a sort of bipartisan Cold War consensus.
So I think over time, we're going to see still a growing support for a more sensible foreign policy, you know, independent of Trumpism and maybe even taking roots in the Democratic Party as well.
Yeah, it's funny.
I think one about getting older is one of the things you kind of go from believing people are going to learn from history to realizing that every year that goes by, there's more and more people who didn't live through the same history that you did, and therefore don't really have the benefit of having learned from that.
Well, I'm happy to end the discussion on a reasonably optimistic note, at least in terms of the way that you see things, and I really enjoyed the discussion.
Very much appreciate your taking the time to just talk with us tonight.
Nice talking with you too, Glenn.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for talking.
Bye-bye.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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