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Jan. 10, 2023 - Tulsi Gabbard Show
01:19:53
The Cost of War w/ Stephen Kinzer | The Tulsi Gabbard Show
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When that agent came back, he had a reception in the White House and everybody toasted him.
It sounded great.
We got rid of a guy we didn't like and we replaced him with someone, the Shah, who would do whatever we wanted.
So it's a perfect ending.
But only if history stops.
Unfortunately, history doesn't stop.
It keeps on happening.
When you violently intervene in the affairs of another country, you're doing something like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill.
You can let it go, but you have no control over how it bounces or where it ends.
Iran is a perfect example of this.
What is the cost of war?
Now, if you listen to politicians talking on camera, or if you hear some of the conversations that happen in Washington, D.C. amongst the permanent Washington class of elite politicians and those in the media and the military-industrial complex, very rarely do you ever hear them D.C. amongst the permanent Washington class of elite politicians and those in the media and the military-industrial complex, very rarely do you ever hear them actually
Somehow there is always a blank check coming from Congress, spending our American taxpayer dollars to go and wage new wars, a new cold war, a nuclear arms race, while they tell people back here at home, people who are struggling for clean water or for safe communities or securing our borders. people who are struggling for clean water or for safe just saying, sorry, there's not enough.
You never hear them actually talk about and tell the American people what is the cost of war in the form of cost in human lives, the form of cost to American taxpayers, the form of cost to our economy, and to our freedom.
Now my guest today is somebody who asks this question very often.
He's a prolific author, foreign policy correspondent, who's gone and traveled to over 50 countries in the world over five continents.
Stephen Kinzer is a fellow at Brown University, and he's somebody who is very well versed on not only foreign policy, but the cost of war and the cost and consequences of the decisions that are made by the President Hi,
Stephen.
Hey, good to hear your voice and good to see you.
Thank you.
Likewise, it has been, it's been a while.
Yeah.
Wasn't there something in New Hampshire?
Was there some kind of an election up there?
I forget.
Exactly.
A lot has happened since then.
I forget if that was like towards the end of 2019 or early 2020 that we had that forum up there.
But my gosh, in just the span of, what, two, almost three years now.
It's crazy.
Yeah, we're becoming too American for our own good.
I'm not sure how to take that.
I won't say cryptic things like that during our interview.
Yeah, okay.
Because, you know, people are listening and might wonder, what do you mean?
What do you mean?
What does it mean to be an American today, Dr. Kinzer?
That's a whole different path.
We'll get into that one.
I'll answer whatever you have.
Exactly, exactly.
Okay.
No, no.
It's good to see you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
Well, it's great to stay in touch.
It is.
And I kind of feel like even though we haven't talked a whole lot, I feel like we're in touch because I get your emails every week and I get to read your column and hear about the great work that you're continuing to do.
There at Brown University, but also just being that important voice of realism in the public sphere of foreign policy where there are too few voices.
Well, I'm trying to beat my spoon on the high chair here.
I think maybe not too many people are listening, but at least you are, and I'm listening to you, so we're forming maybe a little critical mass.
Yeah, that's where we start, right?
I remember as we were going through that presidential campaign, and I remember having, I don't know, brunch or lunch with you and...
There were a couple other people there in Boston as we were just starting the campaign and one of the things that we've talked about then and then since then is the frustration in presidential politics especially but really across the sphere with the mainstream media is how little...
Actual focus is placed on candidates running for president, given the most important responsibility that they and they alone would have as president to serve and lead as commander-in-chief.
I know this is something that I obviously experienced firsthand in running for president, was just the media and these other candidates were not actually interested in talking about foreign policy and talking about the cost and consequences of the decisions that are made and the policies that are made and You know, the United States history and foreign policy.
And I think as a result, when you look at these decisions, there's very little actual, unpractical understanding and knowledge for voters across the country of what the cost of war is, both from a security perspective as well as an economic perspective.
And so for me, as I was on that campaign, you know, one of the main reasons that I ran was because I saw the writing on the wall about the dangers of entering into a new Cold War, where that would lead in pushing us to the precipice of nuclear catastrophe, more so now than ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the cost to the American people and to people in the world, And our national security of regime change war.
These are all things that I heard from reporters at that time, like, why do you keep talking about this stuff?
Nobody else is talking about this.
Why do you care so much about it?
Well, we look to where we are today with this proxy war with Russia and people really across the spectrum saying, yeah, we are at a greater risk of nuclear catastrophe now than before.
And it feels like only now people are starting to wake up to that situation.
And so you've spent a lot, you continue to spend a lot of your time specifically with Brown University's Cost of War project.
And I think that's a good place to start because I think it creates the context and understanding for the work that you've done for decades in talking about I mean, the Cost of War project at Brown is something that is just such an incredibly insightful tool, but something that you and others have invested a lot of time and energy into.
First of all, I think you're right that when it comes to presidential candidates, we have such a weak bench.
There just doesn't seem to be a draw in our political system that brings the best people into politics.
And you could actually think that's a good way to measure the success of a political system.
If it attracts the best people to seek public office, that's a successful system.
By that standard, we're not doing so well.
The quality of leadership in many other areas in America is actually higher than it is in public life, and that's not the way it should be.
Secondly, your point about the role of foreign policy in presidential debates and in congressional debates is absolutely true.
Most members of Congress don't even want to answer questions on foreign policy.
They haven't thought about it, and they fear saying anything wrong.
So what they do is they just grab for the cliches that have been on the talking point cards that both parties distribute to their members.
Because they know if they stick to the talking points, they will blend in with the crowd of agreement and affirmation and not dare to stand out and be challenged for actually taking a position where they're even asking questions about the policy that's being promoted.
The debate on American foreign policy is conducted within a very narrow spectrum.
You could say it's like between the 40-yard lines to use a football analogy.
You have to stay within the consensus.
This has never been more clear than it is now with the Ukraine war.
Where the slightest peep of dissent from the official narrative is treated as something that needs to be stamped out as it could be the beginnings of a frightful epidemic.
It does not only affect the two political parties, but it affects the media.
It's absolutely true.
There's an intellectual no-fly zone around not just Ukraine, but China, Taiwan, many of our other foreign policy issues.
You have to repeat the same catechism.
And it's easier for politicians, I think, to do that.
There isn't so much political capital to be gained, it seems to me, in promoting the idea of a responsible, respectful, humble, restrained foreign policy.
Whereas there's always this desire to beat your chest and say, we're going to have even more guns and more weapons.
Now, what I do notice happening Is that this consensus, though it remains very strong in Washington, is not as strong in the rest of America as it used to be.
There's a real cleavage growing.
I think there is a growing sense in the United States that our constant reliance on aggressive interference in the affairs of other countries is not good for those countries, and it's not good for the security interests of the United States.
So I do see a separation now where there's more openness in the American public to a different American approach to the world, but that hasn't leaked into Washington yet.
Do you think that it will?
I've seen an interesting shift in there seem to be more Republicans now willing to take that position and say, hey, yeah, let's have a realistic view.
Let's exercise restraint.
Let's pursue diplomacy.
Let's not go and launch these wars that take many different forms but ultimately undermine both our national and economic interests in this country.
Whereas on the opposite side, voices that we would expect from the Democratic Party to be those voices for peace, to be those voices for diplomacy, as we've seen very recently, they're nonexistent.
And when this group of the so-called Progressive Caucus stood up and said, hey, President Biden, pursue diplomacy to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine because of the devastating cost to the people of Ukraine but also to the American people, it wasn't even 24 hours before they quickly retracted the letter it wasn't even 24 hours before they quickly retracted the letter and did a 180 where literally I think it was the chair of the committee saying, no, don't exercise
How is it that the Democrats have gotten so far out of touch with where the majority of Americans are?
The oddest thing to me about that whole brouhaha regarding that letter was that it advocated in a very gentle way that while we're making war, couldn't we also think about the possibility of maybe diplomacy sometime?
So that was immediately crushed by the Democratic leadership.
And then it was only a few days later that President Biden himself announced that that was his policy.
So, even the hint that you're getting a little bit ahead of the party boss is considered totally unacceptable.
Now, you're absolutely right in pointing out this phenomenon about the Republicans versus the Democrats, which I think is Relatively new.
And the Republicans have too.
But what I didn't expect was that in this vote, every single Democrat in the Senate and every single Democrat in the House all voted for the aid to Ukraine.
Not a single dissenting voice.
So that can't just have been everybody's individual calculation.
There has to have been word passed that we absolutely have to be united on this.
So there were only 57 members of the House.
And 11 members of the Senate who voted against that aid package.
And every single one was a Republican.
Now, later on, I read an article in the Washington Post saying that you don't have to panic.
Actually, the leaders of the Republican Party in the Congress are still very interested in war, and the anti-war caucus is just a minority.
Well, I thought, okay, it's too bad that it's only a minority, but at least there is such a caucus.
You wouldn't be able to write that about the Democrats because they are totally unanimous.
And actually, it takes me on to a larger speculation.
Sometimes I think that The idea of a restrained, modest foreign policy doesn't fit with the progressive ideal.
It's liberal utopianism that teaches us we're working towards a perfect world.
If we just keep knocking off the bad government, soon there'll be no more warlords.
Science will advance.
There'll be no more diseases.
We're heading towards a better and better world.
We just have to whack down the people that stand in our way.
Conservatives don't think like that.
Conservatives feel that all people in all countries are going to have their own interests forever, and these interests are going to clash, and that's what diplomacy is for.
So forget the fantasy that you're going to remake the world in your own image.
It's not good for the world, and it's not good for us.
That's essentially a conservative idea.
Now, many Republicans have drifted away from that also, but when you look back in history at people like Robert Taft, who used to be called Mr. Republican, Back in the late 40s and early 50s, he was opposing the creation of NATO because he said it's just going to set half the world against the other half.
So this is a strain that runs deep in America.
The idea of a modest, restrained foreign policy in which, as John Quincy Adams so memorably said, America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy America.
is very deep in our heritage.
It's not something that's just been made up.
Those of us who favored are only trying to reclaim a very important strain in American history.
You talk about kind of the liberal, the traditional liberal perspective of going like, if we just get rid of all the bad guys, then we can create this perfect utopia of a world.
And what I've seen, though, is that so often, even as they are using those words or that rhetoric of like, well, we've just got to go get rid of these bad guys because they're really, really bad people, and we need to help save the people that they are lording over, these dictators, authoritarian leaders.
These regime change wars are waged under this guise of good-heartedness and humanitarianism, but when you actually look at the results, look at the consequences, things so often end up far worse for the people in these countries than they were before.
What to speak of the fact, I mean, you use the word fantasy, that's really what it is.
And I first learned about you through your book, Overthrow.
And I don't remember how I came across if somebody gave it to me or I found it online or something like that.
But you talk about this and show the many different examples of both overt and covert coups or regime changes.
Examples of exactly what we're talking about that have happened throughout the world and throughout our country's history.
But how...
How damaging it is and how, I mean, they're lying to the American people when they're saying like, oh, we got to go save these people from this evil, evil person.
but very often they have other motives at play.
Americans are very compassionate people.
Yes.
We hate the idea that anybody is suffering anywhere.
Our leaders know this about us, and they manipulate this into a kind of savior complex where they think if they show us one picture of some poor girl who had acid in her face because she tried to go to school, That's so awful.
We have to bomb that country and save that poor girl.
So this Good Samaritan idea puts us in the role of a self-appointed police officer who goes around the world and picks out who's good and who's bad and then also decides what has to be done with the ones who are bad.
It's based on the idea that if you would just peel away the tiny little upper layer of bad people in any country, the natural anti-Americanism, I'm sorry, the natural pro-American view of all those people would then emerge.
It is not possible for us to believe that maybe people in those countries have some reasons to resent us.
And it's not just because of a few little people.
You know, countries always like to think of themselves as good.
And think that if anyone doesn't like them, those must be bad people.
I mean, individuals are the same way.
Take me, for example.
I'm a super nice guy.
And if you don't like me, there could only be two reasons.
One is, you don't know me.
You've been misinformed.
You think I'm bad.
And the other one is, you're a jerk yourself so you wouldn't like a really good person like me.
Naturally.
That I have actually done things that are really bad, and your dislike for me is not based on a fantasy or a misunderstanding, but it's real, based on knowledge of who I am and what I've done.
That would never occur to me.
That can't be.
And I think that's the role that the United States has played.
We still cannot grasp, after all these decades, the reality of nationalism in other countries.
We want leaders of other countries to put the interests of the United States ahead of their own countries.
This is not realistic.
And as we have now been told that the world has to be divided between the democracies and the autocracies and will decide who's on which list, more and more countries are coming forward to say, we don't want to have to decide.
We don't want to be on one list or another.
This was exactly what neutralist countries wanted.
We're telling the United States back in the 1950s when John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State.
We still haven't learned the nature of third world nationalism and the determination of people in other countries to control their own resources.
It's not different in their eyes to be dominated by the United States than to be dominated for anyone else.
You know, so much of what I see in the world reflects the difference in China's approach and our approach.
After all we did in Iraq, China has just arrived in Iraq and announced that they're gonna build a thousand schools.
China has built 100 seaports in Africa.
I used to live in Central America.
There's now one Olympic-level world-class stadium in Central America.
It's in Costa Rica.
Who built it?
The Chinese.
Think of the number of countries China has bombed in the last 25 years.
None!
I don't want to start to count the number of countries that we've bombed.
How can we then complain that other countries don't seem to want to embrace us immediately?
Yeah.
Right.
The other piece that we see, too, is, again, I point back to your book, Overthrow, as the United States leaders act as the world's police going and deciding, you know, which leaders or which countries are acceptable versus not, after toppling Certain leaders they deem unacceptable.
The United States also has a very active role in choosing who replaces them.
So it's not this true, you know, they talk about democracy and supporting the voices of the people.
Well, there's a pretty heavy hand of the U.S. government to pick or tilt the scales, putting it nicely on who those people are, because as you said, Actually...
Active democracies in other countries are not so good for us because that means that the natural impulse of ordinary people is going to come forward.
You talked about the kind of leaders that we like to impose or that we encourage to take over in other countries.
We're always looking for a leader who embodies two basic qualities.
One is it should be somebody who's popular, somebody who's a nationalist, somebody who's beloved by his people and supported by his people.
be somebody who will do what we tell him because we didn't overthrow that last government in order to have someone in there that we don't like.
Right.
But those things conflict.
You cannot have both.
If you have a leader who is going to do what America tells them, he's not going to be a nationalist and popular with everybody.
And we've never been able to recognize that.
We always assume that any leader in any country and all the voters in any country would want nothing more than to embrace the United States because there's no good reason not to.
That's because we see the world from our own perspective.
We don't put ourselves in the shoes of other people.
When we intervene in other countries, we immediately forget about it.
People don't know we fought a war in the Philippines or we overthrew the government of Iran or Guatemala or the Congo.
But let me tell you, the people in those countries do not forget.
The memory of those interventions festers and burns in their hearts and souls.
And then we get shocked when the reaction explodes.
Cuba is a perfect example.
We intervened in Cuba in 1898 and promised that we would let Cuba become fully independent.
We changed our mind because we saw that the new government wasn't going to be favorable to American corporate interests.
Flash forward 60 years later.
The first speech that Fidel Castro made when he came down from the mountains in the beginning of 1959 in Santiago, Cuba, did not contain any explicit program, but it did contain one promise.
He said, I promise you that this time it will not be like 1898 when the Americans came in and took over our country.
Now that speech was not reported in the United States, but if it had been, Well, first of all, Americans would say, what happened in 1898?
We have no historical memory.
But secondly, we would ask, what could something that happened 60 years ago possibly have to do with today?
We've got to learn that the legacy of our interventions doesn't fade away just because we forget about them.
Exactly.
And I think that what this comes down to is making sure that we have leaders who are acting in the best interests of our country.
As every leader, as you point out, of every country, the expectation that people should have of the leaders of their country is that they act in their best interests, economic interests, security interests, and so forth.
And so even as...
Whether it's people like President Biden or leaders of the past who claim like, well, we need to go wage this war in this other country for democracy or for freedom or no matter what they claim, when we look at this kind of interventionist foreign policy, it actually works against our country's interests.
It works against our national security interests.
And I think one of the prime current examples of this is Iran.
And you wrote a whole book about what happened in Iran, where you can't hear someone running for office, especially national office, talk about the greatest threats our country faces without talking about Iran.
But this wasn't something that just popped up Talk about your work in this area.
This is what we talked about in New Hampshire.
Because of the relevance of leaders acting in the best interest of our country and how this interventionist being a world's police policy that Hillary Clinton and so many others have advocated for has actually undermined our national security interests, whether it's in the short term or the long term.
I love the way you keep using the word interests, because to me that is the central reality of geopolitics.
The United States, like every country in the world, has interests.
We should be devoted to protecting and defending and promoting our interests.
We should not subcontract our foreign policy to other countries.
Each country has its own interests, and that's fine.
We should also respect the security interests of other countries.
But it's the pursuit of national interest that ultimately can lead to some kind of diplomatic architecture and security architecture that's acceptable to everyone.
We have to realize that we have interests, we need to defend them, but they should be our interests.
You can't be acting on behalf of someone else's interests.
And I think too often our foreign policy has been hijacked that way.
You mentioned Iran.
This is a real great example of an intervention gone horrifically wrong.
So, in the early 1950s, the democratic government of Iran nationalized the country's oil industry.
That set off in horror in the West.
The United States and Britain joined together.
A CIA officer was sent with a lot of money to Iran in the summer of 1953. And after just three weeks there, he had managed to overthrow Iran.
Not only the leader of the government, but the democratic system in Iran.
So that was just three weeks, and it was celebrated.
When that agent came back, he had a reception in the White House and everybody toasted him.
It sounded great.
We got rid of a guy we didn't like, and we replaced him with someone, the Shah, who would do whatever we wanted.
So it's a perfect ending, but only if history stops.
Unfortunately, history doesn't stop.
It keeps on happening.
When you violently intervene in the affairs of another country, you're doing something like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill.
You can let it go, but you have no control over how it bounces or where it ends.
Iran is a perfect example of this.
So what happened after our so-called successful coup in 1953?
The Shah ruled for 25 years with increasing repression.
His repression produced the explosion of the late 1970s, what we call the Islamic Revolution.
That revolution brought to power a clique of fanatically anti-American mullahs who have been intently and sometimes very violently undermining American interests all over the world.
That Islamic Revolution also gave Saddam Hussein the idea he could now attack the next door Iran because it was in turmoil.
That led to our embrace of Iraq because we didn't like Iran anymore.
That started our death spiral down in Iraq.
That revolution in Iran also terrified the Soviets.
They were afraid that radical Islam would penetrate into their southern republics.
It's one of the reasons they invaded Afghanistan.
That's what drew us into the entire Afghanistan quagmire.
So a lot of history came from three weeks in Tehran in 1953. It's truly an object lesson for the arrogance that tells you we're going to fix the thing in some foreign country.
Then we're going to look away and nothing bad will ever happen again.
That's only in James Bond books.
In real life, history doesn't work that way.
No kidding.
What a great example of reality versus fantasy.
What do you see just on the topic of Iran?
Because it is in the news these days.
How do you see the current situation with the Biden administration looking to try to get back into some form of agreement to prevent nuclear, to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed country?
And obviously there's a whole bunch of other countries in the Middle East that are seeking to impact this.
You know, in the previous agreement, obviously Russia and China had a big role to play in President Obama's agreement.
I would say things, relationships, diplomatic talks between the United States and Russia and the U.S. and China are in, it's basically non-existent at this point from my vantage point, which again kind of points to what are the consequences of waging these which again kind of points to what are the consequences of waging these kinds of wars and increasing tension and being in a new Cold War based on
What I'd like to see happen in the Middle East is for the United States to take its thumb off the scales and let the countries in the Middle East work out a security architecture in which everybody would have a place.
We don't like that because there are a few forces and countries in the Middle East that we think should not have a place.
But really, that's none of our business.
The Middle East would be much more secure if we actually would loosen our desire to control it.
Now, when we started with the Carter Doctrine written by Zbigniew Brzezinski that said that any outside interference in the Persian Gulf was going to be considered an attack on the United States, we had two great concerns.
Number one, we're getting all our oil from the Middle East, from the Persian Gulf.
And number two, we don't want the Soviet Union having influence there.
Well, we're not getting our oil from the Persian Gulf anymore.
There's no Soviet Union anymore.
So the reasons that gave birth to our obsession with the Persian Gulf have evaporated.
Nonetheless, we still follow this policy that I remember Theodore Roosevelt proclaiming more than a century ago.
Whenever the flag goes up somewhere, it never comes down.
I think this is really a dangerous policy.
It means every place where the U.S. ever set foot, we have to stay forever.
And even leading American military officials have told Congress that the number of bases we have around the world, which is something like 800, is quite excessive and largely just a legacy of where American troops wound up at the end of the Second World War.
So we don't really go back and revisit our security posture and ask if it's really devoted to confronting the actual threats that we have.
Or have we, through threat inflation, come up with the idea that we have many more threats than we actually have?
And this then becomes, of course, the number one excuse for us to spend most of our national resources on weaponry rather than the problems we have here at home.
How do you address the ongoing rhetoric we hear these days about competition?
Competition is kind of one of those buzzwords that people are using now, whether they call it great powers competition or the near peer adversary competition.
It's used most often in connection with the United States and China, but you've also heard it at different times with regards to Russia.
I've often asked this question of different people, what do you mean by competition?
And it seems like the prevailing foreign policy establishment in Washington sees competition as though, in order for the United States to quote unquote win in a competition, The only way to do that is by literally squashing out the other major competitors.
It's a zero-sum outcome.
There's one winner and one loser.
Rather than saying, hey, we're going to compete by offering a better idea, a better relationship, or a better partnership, the response is one that is almost militaristic in nature, either literally or figuratively.
You're reminding me of one of my favorite cartoons in which there's two dogs sitting at a bar having a beer and one says to the other, it's not enough that we win.
Cats must also lose.
And I think there is some of that mentality in Washington, that it's not enough for us to be good.
It's that all those countries that we've put on our adversary list have to suffer.
That's why we've got this obsession with sanctions, which I have watched all over the world that crush countries, but don't bring anybody closer to regime change because people that can't eat and don't have jobs are not going to go out on the street and protest.
Now, you talk about competition.
You're right, I think that word comes up most frequently in regard to China.
Our idea of how to deal with this competition is to block China, to stop China, to hold China back, to restrict China, to sanction China, to make sure China can't do the things that it wants to do economically or politically in the world.
That's not gonna work.
We're not gonna be able to hold China down.
We can improve our position in this future world, but we should do it by improving ourselves.
Unfortunately, that's more difficult than just shouting and saying, we want to have more aircraft carriers in the South China Sea.
It would mean government actions like improving our education system, and it would mean social actions like addressing social decomposition and family situations at home in our poorer neighborhoods.
So those are complex issues, and I think politicians like to shy away from that.
So there are The answer to competition is let's get the big sledgehammer and try to smash what you call the adversary.
There's no sense that there's a possible overlap of interests.
Once we decide that we disagree strongly with a country on one thing, we don't want to communicate with them anymore.
Whereas the whole art of diplomacy is the opposite.
You know, I used to know a guy who was the U.S. ambassador to Hungary when it was a communist country.
And he told me the first thing I did when I arrived there is I realized, okay, this is a communist country.
They're on the other side.
We all know that.
All right.
Within that reality, what can we accomplish?
So that's the approach of diplomacy, to try to put yourself in the other person's shoes.
But sometimes I think there's an instinct in the American soul that tells you diplomacy is kind of weak.
It's appeasement.
It only gets you part of what you want, because diplomacy, by definition, means that everybody walks away from the table getting something.
I think there's a will to win in the American soul that is resistant to this kind of thing.
And I think that can be very dangerous because demagogues can appeal to that.
Yeah.
You bring up so many important points.
That will to win, and yet so often these political leaders and politicians and even some military leaders, they cannot define what winning is.
And too often, as you put it, winning is, well, we're going to make these other people suffer.
And you see this so often through sanctions regimes, but also through military action.
And it's such a twisted perspective of these leaders who are making these decisions rather than coming at this from the approach of, okay, how is this action actually serving the best interests of the American people?
How is it helping improve the quality of life or safety or security or opportunity for the American people?
Too often it is just, well, we just have to make them suffer and think that that is somehow going to solve a problem when, in fact, as we're seeing now again with this proxy war with Russia, these massive sanctions regimes that are intended to try to make these leaders and oligarchs and people in Russia suffer, well, you're actually making the American people suffer and endure hardship in the process.
So what is this actually all for?
You mentioned Afghanistan.
I think the real reason that for 20 years we were never able to accomplish our goals there is that we never figured out what our goals were.
Was it supposed to be to catch Bin Laden, to overthrow the Taliban, to remake Afghanistan so it's like Switzerland, to crush the drug trade?
The borderlines, the goalposts kept changing.
We never knew what we were doing there.
We should have had a much narrower definition of why we were there.
I think part of our impulse is we want to stay there to make them like us.
Now, they've had a thousand years plus developing their culture.
We have only had a couple of centuries.
And it's a real arrogance for us to think, Afghans really don't know how to run a government.
We do.
So we're going to bring our government in a box and we're going to show them how civilized people run their countries.
Well, this is something that China is very careful not to do.
China never feels that its political system is the right political system for anybody else.
But we do.
We feel like somehow we've been blessed with the insider knowledge of what's the best way to run a country.
And it would be so churlish of us to hold it to ourselves, so we want to bludgeon other countries into adapting our view of the world.
So, you talking about the importance of inserting these questions into political debate, I sometimes ask myself this.
When you see a political debate on candidates, you often hear a question like, where's the biggest threat in the world?
What country's our biggest enemy?
Or, what are you going to do to prevent this country from doing this thing?
Nobody ever asks, I can't remember this ever happening, what are you going to do to reduce tensions in the world and bring us closer to peace?
This is a question that never appears on any television debate.
And I think it's a reflection of how the media is so much a part of the Washington echo chamber.
There's a sense in the press that America's like a team.
And everybody on a team has their own role.
And the role of the press.
Is to transmit the official narrative to the American people and make sure that counter narratives never come in to pollute what Americans are receiving.
I hate this idea.
I don't think the press should be on anybody's team.
I don't like the idea of giving journalists prizes for writing stories about how evil is Russia, how evil is China.
How about some stories that examine us?
You know, we are a bad country when it comes to looking in the mirror.
It's hard for individuals, too.
I don't like to look and see some of the things that I might have done that didn't come out so well, and neither do countries.
But there's a difference between the ignorance of foreign policy in the United States and the ignorance of foreign policy in other places.
People in Bolivia may not know much about the Middle East, and that's a shame because it's an interesting subject.
But it doesn't hurt anybody.
The difference in the United States is we act on our ignorance.
And that's why I'd like to see some of these issues brought up in politics in a way that gives politicians at least the opportunity to do something other than just bark back the talking points that everybody else has already repeated.
Exactly.
I think one of the challenges, too, and I think one of the things that probably makes a lot of politicians afraid to do this, and even people in the media, is that if people like you or I ask these tough questions about how we assess our country's foreign policy, how we assess, you know, what the negative consequences have been or are of the decisions that our leaders are making, we're very quickly labeled as being traitors or treasonous or anti-American.
Don't you love this country?
When in reality, yes, I love this country.
I still serve in the Army Reserves almost 20 years.
I am proud to wear this country's uniform.
I will go and put my life on the line with my brothers and sisters in uniform to defend our security and freedom from those who seek to do us harm.
And that's why I'm asking these questions.
That's why I'm challenging this foreign policy establishment because I recognize what's at stake, and I recognize that in order for us to be truly prosperous and free as a people and as a country, truly prosperous and free, we must be at peace.
And that's where the quote from James Madison, I know you're familiar with it, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he talks about how the greatest threat to liberty, or the threat that is most dreaded to liberty, is war.
But this is something they don't want us to think about.
And I liked Ben Franklin.
There never was a bad peace or a good war.
Right.
So just to pick up on a couple of the comments you made, you're absolutely right that raising any fundamental questions about the assumptions that underlie our foreign policy and our approach to the world stigmatizes you in Washington.
And it's actually literally true for the people that work in Washington.
Like if you're a reporter who's on some kind of crazy idea that contradicts the official narrative, people won't return your phone calls.
You'll be thought of as a kind of a nut.
You'll never have lunch in this town again.
So there's a tremendous pressure on people in Washington.
And I see this.
Young people coming into the foreign policy world in Washington are terrified, for example, about every tweet they write.
Because...
Twenty years from now, when they might be under consideration to be the co-vice deputy assistant something, they're going to pull this out.
So they're so afraid of making a single peep that's outside the narrative.
And the other point about this civilian foreign policy establishment in Washington is that...
When you spend a little time understanding how that system operates, you realize that somewhat counter-intuitively, the real warmongers in Washington do not wear uniforms.
There is no greater warmonger in Washington than a civilian foreign policy official.
These people have been completely formed by a certain culture where you go to certain schools, certain graduate programs, you get certain ideas, then you work for certain congressional staff, you work in think tanks.
Pretty soon you're totally vetted and then you can come up and just produce the same kind of foreign policy that we've had all along.
It's very difficult to break away from that and I guess you're an example of how difficult it is for you once you step outside that consensus.
You definitely get a hardened shell of armor around you given the kinds of attacks that people levy against those of us who are speaking the truth and challenging their narrative,
challenging the reality that this foreign policy establishment that's been in charge for so long has done a great disservice to this country, has done a great disservice to our security, has done a great disservice to our economy and the well-being of the American people.
What to speak of truly dishonoring those who raise their right hand, enlisting in our nation's military to support and defend the Constitution.
And to provide that security and freedom to the American people only to be so misused and abused by these civilian leaders and both politicians and those who have not been elected because they care more about beating their chest or they care more about the military industrial complex or their own selfish ambition.
Ultimately, not caring about the lives lost and the suffering and the destruction that they cause both here at home and in other countries.
I think the generals are more aware of that.
They're aware of two things.
First of all, people are going to die.
The kids they send into war are going to die.
And the other thing they know is wars never come out the way they're planned.
It's not like on a board.
So I think they understand this more than some civilians.
Our military has been configured by our foreign policy leaders over the years for global deployment.
It is not configured for defending our homeland.
And that's what we use it for.
It's for interfering and occupying and influencing coercively countries all over the world.
So I believe in an army that is not used for social work.
I'm all for foreign aid if you have it done well and countries want it.
But that shouldn't be done by soldiers.
You need an army that really has an edge, that's ready to fight.
And it shouldn't be dissipated in extended, limitless actions in faraway places.
That takes away the edge.
There might be a time when we really do need an army.
I don't think we're preparing for it well by sending people on extended deployments all over the world and giving them the sense that that's really what the army stands for.
It's dangerous, actually, in the future to configure an army this way.
Yeah, I think that this, you know, the nation-building mission that our military has been used for for so long has been proven to be a failure time and time again.
I will say, you know, I serve as a civil affairs officer in the Army Reserves, and civil affairs officers are known as being the warrior diplomats in the military.
And I've seen how Over time, both through first-hand experience as well as through others that I've worked with, how when the diplomats are failing at their jobs because of the thing that we talked about, well, we've got, you know, the head of the State Department saying, well, we're not going to talk to this country because they've done a thing wrong or we disagree with them on this or that.
We're seeing the consequences of that play out.
Oftentimes, The only lines of communication where diplomacy can actually happen are the relationships between military leaders from the United States and other countries.
And sometimes this is happening at some of the lowest levels.
You know, like a captain, a naval officer, an O3, who was, and I'm not good with Navy ranks, so sorry to all the Navy people who are watching.
I know a captain in the Navy is the same as a colonel in the Army, but basically someone who was an O3, you know, kind of a lower-level officer who was in charge of his ship in the Middle East, you know, they were directly, on a day-to-day basis,
de-conflicting I think?
The uniforms of these countries who because they know the cost of war really don't want to go to war and are trying to de-escalate the tensions that are increasing because of the so-called diplomats of these countries.
I think what's happening is that those civic affairs officers and others who are de-conflicting conflicts are essentially doing the job that should have been done by higher ranking diplomats.
This is true.
That's like the squad that's cleaning up after the elephants.
These guys should be doing that.
But we pay so little attention to diplomacy that soldiers find themselves as the only people on the ground doing these things.
Exactly.
Syria is a great example.
The United States controls effectively a big chunk of Syria.
And the people that are running it are all in military uniforms.
The State Department has no presence there at all.
So the people that are in the military have to take on diplomatic jobs.
It was famous that Robert Gates teased Hillary Clinton once by saying, I have more money for my military bands than you have for your entire diplomatic corps.
And I think it's really an imbalance that we need to work out.
Diplomacy is not a bad word, but I think in Washington, sometimes it is.
Because the so-called diplomats in charge of the State Department are too often the ones who are egging on and encouraging waging of war, whether it be economic war through sanctions or otherwise.
I want to talk a little bit to you about elections interference.
This is a term that, again, has become very popular over the last few years, and the people in Washington saying, oh, be careful, Russia's interfered in our elections, Russia's responsible for getting Donald Trump elected, very quickly throwing out different countries coming in and trying to manipulate voters and the information that they're getting and who they vote for.
I often talk about, again, having experienced this firsthand, how there is more done to manipulate voters and limit their access to fair information so they can draw their own conclusions by our corporate mainstream media and political parties than anybody else.
But even if you just look at Interference in foreign elections or foreign interference in elections.
You've talked about this and written about this extensively and this is another example where both journalists and politicians refuse to look in the mirror And say, oh, well, I wonder what the United States is doing and interfering in other people's elections.
And I remember this clip, and we'll find it later and play it here, but it was then-Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona, who was on CNN or something like that, and there was a question that was asked.
Well, what about...
Maybe it wasn't on CNN. But he was like, what about the United States record of interfering in other countries' elections?
And he said, we would never do that.
We don't interfere in anybody else's elections.
It's like, are you kidding me?
And you're a United States senator?
Americans like to live in a cloud of fantasy and delusion when it comes to what we do in the rest of the world.
We think of ourselves as the saints in a sinful world and we're called upon by some greater force to go out and redeem the world, which means make it more like us.
So you talk about election interference.
This is nothing new.
This is a situation that's gone on ever since there have been elections.
One of the very first CIA operations in 1948 was a massive effort to interfere in the first major election held in Europe.
That was in Italy.
Well, we were terrified that the Communist Party, which had gained a lot of prestige during the Second World War as partisans, might win the election.
That we'd have a legal Communist Party government or a government with communists in it in Italy.
The CIA launched a massive project.
We paid off politicians.
We bribed journalists.
We even had a massive campaign in the United States To get Italian Americans to write to their relatives and tell them all American aid is going to be cut off for Italy.
That massive debt we accumulated during the war, we're going to have to pay it.
If we elect the right guy, the Americans will forgive that debt.
And that succeeded.
And the CIA thought of this as a great success.
Now, it may or may not have been a success or the right thing to do, but it's not right to deny that it ever happened.
The United States was then the decisive factor in every Italian election for the next 25 years.
We did the exact same thing in Japan, where we effectively founded the Liberal Democratic Party, funded it, chose its leaders, and had them on the CIA payroll while they were serving in top positions in government.
And I give you one other great example of American interference.
It came when Bill Clinton was president.
In 1996, Boris Yeltsin had to run for re-election.
Everybody hated him in Russia.
His approval ratings were in the single digits.
And Bill Clinton told his team, I want this guy to win so bad it hurts.
So he mobilized all of his resources right before the election.
Yeltsin received hundreds of huge pile, billions of dollars from the International Monetary Fund to distribute among the oligarchs and all the others who controlled votes.
A team of Americans went to Moscow and introduced techniques like focus groups and advertising to create fears that they detected among people in these focus groups.
Techniques that had never been used in Russia before.
And amazingly, Boris Yeltsin got up off the floor.
He won that election.
He served for a couple of years until his alcoholism became so acute that he quit.
And what was his last act?
Naming his successor, who was Vladimir Putin.
So we would never have had Putin had we not promoted Yeltsin by interfering in that election.
And it was so obvious that even Time Magazine, a week later, had Yeltsin on the cover with a cartoon, he's holding an American flag.
So, you can argue that this was okay to do, but please don't argue with me that it never happened.
And it's that kind of dishonesty and hypocrisy that, I might be wrong, but I feel like more and more people are starting to catch on.
You know, I remember that line from Casablanca, I'm shocked, shocked to learn the gambling is going on in this establishment, says the guy as he's cashing in his chips.
And I think maybe there's a little bit of that.
Yeah.
And I think it's also part of why people, again, as we started this conversation talking about how disconnected the politicians and the foreign policy establishment in Washington is from the sentiment of the American people who largely are saying, no, we should not be the world's police.
Why don't you come and support the police in our own neighborhoods and keep our kids safe in our own communities, right?
One thing that's bothered me about social justice movements that have emerged in America in recent years is that they don't seem to make any connection between their desire for money for projects and the fact that we're spending $800 billion a year to maintain our military establishment.
They're always being asked, where are you going to get the money for this?
So there is a place to get the money.
Now, as you know, there are groups on both ends of the political spectrum that share the view that America should have a more restrained foreign policy.
These groups would probably argue with each other over what should be done with the money that we would save.
There could be very different ways of spending it, by tax cuts or by social programs.
That's an interesting debate to have.
But they would both agree there's a huge pot of money out there.
That nobody is touching.
It's most of the discretionary spending in our entire federal budget.
And until we tap into that and realize how much of it is not only wasteful but actually winds up undermining our national position, we're not going to have the resources to address the problems that we have here at home.
I think that's exactly right.
And we did not have that debate in this country really at all, to my knowledge, as we were waging war in Afghanistan for over 20 years.
I think most people had no concept of how much of our taxpayer dollars were going towards this war, of which there was no clear objective.
Even lower enlisted guys in the military who were deploying there Not once, not twice, but three, four, five, six, seven times.
Each time coming back saying, what is this for?
What are we trying to accomplish here?
Feeling like they're on a hamster wheel and never actually making progress towards any clear objective.
This is not even about going towards the wrong objective.
Having no clear objective, certainly no achievable objective, no definition of winning.
And that's where...
I think probably better than anyone else, the Cost of War project at Brown has done a great job in really looking at what that cost has been.
Well, you talk about how the soldiers in Afghanistan feel.
And I have a quite similar account from the ones I've spoken to.
And what I hear from them always is, it was very clear from the beginning, we're not fighting for freedom.
We're not fighting for the Afghan government.
We're not fighting for the U.S. Army.
What we're really fighting for is just to bring my buddies home.
I just want to get all these guys home a lot.
And in the military, they call that force protection.
Once you're in force protection, you're going to lose the war because all you're concerned about is avoiding casualties.
And when you put people in those kinds of deployments where they don't see any point to going into battle, you automatically fall back onto this.
So it's, again, the imperative of using your military sharply and harshly when it needs to be used and otherwise don't use it.
The Cost of War Project, of which I'm only peripherally a part at Brown, has been a wonderful thing.
They have really tried to quantify how many billions we have poured into this war, how many people have been killed.
The stories that we come up with about entire plane loads of Pallets of hundred dollar bills being taken from one plane coming from the United States to Kabul into another plane to go to Dubai to be put into the bank accounts of the corrupt warlords to whom we were sending all this money are really overwhelming.
It's not just that the money was not used to any effect.
So much of it was looted and stolen.
This was being known to our Special Inspector General.
He was publishing reports of I remember meeting him once and telling him, wow, you're way off the reservation.
How are you allowed to say these things?
And he said, it's only for one reason.
Nobody cares.
They read it, they throw it away, they don't react to it.
So only later does that become clear to us.
But I think you're right that Americans are kept very much in the dark about what our...
Soldiers and our diplomats are doing abroad.
What are the effects of American sanctions?
What are the effects of American military action?
We never see that.
Sanctions for members of Congress is just something to sign so that I can go back and say, the other guy wanted 20 sanctions on this country.
I wanted 30. Aren't I a real tough guy?
They don't see what's on the other end.
And the despair and sometimes hatred that it produces in other countries that actually undermines our national interest.
In this world, what people in other countries think of you really is the fundamental basis of soft power.
And that's where I fear China.
They've picked up on this.
We haven't.
We really feel that the way to win friends and influence people is to bomb them or to occupy them or to sanction them.
The Chinese don't do that, and that's the one thing I fear about how we're falling behind, and the one lesson I think we might learn from them.
When I was in Congress and I was serving on the Armed Services Committee, I introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act as well as a separate standalone bill that very simply required an assessment of sanctions regimes wherever we have them in place around the world and we have them in place in far more places than people realize because so often these sanctions are never lifted once they are put in place.
But my legislation just said we need to get periodic reports to Congress on what the consequences of these sanctions are and an assessment of whether or not they are meeting the intended objective, why they were put in place in the first place, and what effect they were having on the civilian population in these countries.
I was surprised that I was able to get this legislation passed in the defense bill through the House.
But as you can imagine, somehow it got stripped out in the dark of night with no explanation whatsoever before the final bill came forward to pass through both the House and the Senate.
But I think it goes directly to that point that you're making about how sanctions are used by politicians to make them feel or look tough, but they're not at all interested to see if even if they're working or to see who's being hurt by them.
Sanctions are only effective if they're part of a larger project, if there's a diplomatic reason why you're imposing them in order to get to a certain goal.
But we just use them for punishment, just because we want to do something.
So I've watched sanctions in at least three countries.
I watched our sanctions on Yugoslavia, on Iraq, and on Iran.
I can tell you that among many other effects, the first thing that they do is they enable a criminal class.
There's always a new business now, sanctions busting.
Let me tell you that in Iran, if you want an Apple Watch, no matter how strong the sanctions are, they can have it to you by tomorrow.
The speedboats are going across the Persian Gulf from Dubai 20 times a day.
Who is running those?
Not law-abiding citizens.
Actually, in Iran's case, it's the Revolutionary Guard.
The most brutally repressive organ in Iran is making a lot of its money thanks to our sanctions.
So you always have the enrichment of a criminal class.
I saw this in Serbia also.
It used to be smugglers and thugs.
Then they built up private armies and they were the ones that would go into villages that were the wrong religion and burn down the village.
That's how they became powerful, by sanctions busting.
And I'll tell you one little story that stuck in my mind.
I was in Iraq.
Not only did I watch children die there with doctors telling me that if I could just go across the border in Jordan for $1, I could buy something that would save this baby's life.
When were you there, Stephen?
That was in the period of the late 90s.
Okay.
So, that was the same period of sanctions when Saddam was in power.
It was a period when Madeleine Albright was asked on television about a UN report saying 500,000 Iraqi babies and children had died as a result of US sanctions.
And what did she think about this?
She didn't even challenge the number.
She said, yes, we believe it was worth it.
Worth it for what?
To achieve some kind of vague political success that ultimately didn't prove out to be anything until we started bombing?
But I'll tell you an even smaller story that comes out of that same trip to Iraq.
I went to meet the guy who ran the United Nations Development Office, and he held up a lead pencil.
He said, I want to import lead pencils for the Iraqi schoolchildren, but I'm not allowed to do it because of U.S. sanctions.
You know that sanctions are not only against military equipment, but they're against what's called dual-use equipment.
So civilian equipment like a truck that could be used for the military.
He said, so the Americans have decided that this pencil is dual-use because the lead that's inside the pencil could be somehow extracted.
It could be then ground down into a powder.
The powder could be put on the front of airplanes.
It would make it less easy for us to detect their airplanes by radar Therefore, the guy says, I cannot import pencils for the school children here.
How do you think that makes people feel about America over many years?
Yeah, that's such a powerful story because you're right.
Anytime anyone questions different sanctions that are being put in place and the negative effect, both directly and indirectly, on the civilians in these countries that are being sanctioned, the excuse that's always given is exactly that.
Well, we're only sanctioning military equipment.
Yeah.
up impacting, you know, your story is a powerful one.
I've heard others that have to do with medicine and medical equipment and other things that really are essential and end up causing great harm, if not death.
Yeah, sanctions should be used very sparingly, and they should have a limited lifespan.
As you point out, there's never any death of a sanction.
They don't wind down.
They're just there forever.
And God forbid that any member of Congress would ever get up and say, I have a bill to repeal about 20 sanctions out of the 10,000 that we have out there.
Exactly.
This would be a non-starter.
Exactly.
So we only use them as a means of punishment to make people's lives worse.
And what are we punishing them for?
For the sin of living under a government that we don't like.
And rather, I'm bringing this full circle back to where we started, rather than making these decisions based on what serves the best interests of the American people, we have these politicians completely focused on how do we cause great harm to others And yet we see how it has a direct negative effect on the American people themselves.
Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing right now, how this plays out for people who are listening and watching, bringing this home to some of the challenges that we're seeing today with the sanctions against Russia?
The Russia project is just a real example of touching some kind of psychological piece of our being that's been there for a hundred years, which is Russia is some kind of an evil force that's always out there.
Part of our dislike is based on Russia's behavior, but not all of it.
There's a great deal that's already in our mind.
First of all, We love enemies.
It's great to have enemies out there.
And that's what leads to what we call threat inflation.
It sort of makes us feel good that America is this little country and we have terrible enemies all over the world.
Of course, the rest of the world doesn't see it that way.
We are always looking for ways to pressure other countries to do what we want and become more like us.
It's very difficult for us to understand that many countries don't want this.
So the world is really not flat.
Everybody doesn't want the same things that we want.
People have different priorities.
The number one priority for people everywhere before political rights is security.
You want to be able to walk on the street and build a house and not have the police come and steal the windows the next day.
In countries that don't have that, it's foolish to begin telling people you have to think about whether you have a free press or not, whether you're able to criticize the government or not.
So I feel like instead of looking around the world and finding places where governments are being repressive and doing things that we don't like, we should be looking a little bit more at the problems inside the United States.
Don't consider ourselves to be God-appointed policemen of the world who decide who's good and who's bad and then decide what we're going to do on the basis of making those decisions.
There's a great essay by Montaigne in which he says, I'll soften it a little, your own excrement should always smell the worst to you.
But we're not like that.
Everybody else's smells so bad.
They're so evil out there.
Look at the things they do.
I can tell by watching it on every TV station and seeing it in every newspaper.
I know how evil they are.
Whereas we just smell like lavender.
We've never done anything wrong.
I think this is maybe one of the reasons that I wound up being the skunk in the foreign policy garden party.
I didn't come to the study of foreign policy the way most people in Washington do, through this system of congressional staffs and graduate programs and everybody that sits together at dinner all the time.
I learned about American foreign policy...
As a journalist, as a foreign correspondent, as a war correspondent, I learned about what America does in the world from the perspective of the countries where that stuff is done.
And that gives you a real different perspective.
It's not so sanitary, and it's not so clear-cut.
Anybody who's been out in the world will tell you that America's role is not as pure as we like to be told.
On the other hand, It never ceases to impress me how, despite all our sins, wherever you go in the world, people have a tremendous admiration for the United States, for what we've accomplished.
We're still a draw.
We're a dream for people all over the world.
I wish we would press that.
That is our greatest advantage, and it's still out there.
There is an enormous reservoir of goodwill for the United States.
If we would only play on that, Then our competition with other countries would flower in ways that benefit us instead of putting ourselves in the position where we seem like an aggressor.
Right now, if I tell a person in another country, the United States is getting really interested in your country, you're probably going to be worried.
You're afraid.
That shouldn't be true.
You should welcome American interest.
But what American interest now means is too scary.
And that's why I think we need to look more deeply at what really is in our interests and not act as if we know what is in everybody's interest and as if everybody's interest is the same.
And that's where there is opportunity.
I love the way that you put that, because it really shows where there is opportunity for the United States to choose how we are relating with other countries, keeping in mind, again, that we cannot achieve prosperity and uphold freedom without peace, and that we should be developing relationships with other countries to find those areas of mutual interest to increase mutual prosperity.
Because if we're coming at this with a win-win mindset rather than the zero-sum mentality that we're seeing too often in foreign policy, then we are far less likely to go to war with someone where we share those mutual interests that are advancing both of our economies, both of our countries, both then we are far less likely to go to war with someone where China is a great example of this to me.
We have so many common interests, including global stability.
But when you sit down with someone at a table, it's not a productive start to say, I detest everything you do.
Your moral values are awful and you're a huge threat to global peace and security.
Now, having said that, let's talk about what we can do together.
Which is what they do all the time.
Exactly.
That's our approach.
It's exactly what they do.
How would you feel if somebody called you and was like, yeah, I think you're horrible.
You're this, you're this, you're that.
But cool.
Let's work together.
Yeah, I think Americans need to be a little bit more realistic.
And actually, it's good for us.
This is not something that's a giveaway to others.
You put it very well.
It's not a zero-sum game.
It's not to take it back to that cartoon.
Just the dogs win, but cats also have to lose.
No, they don't.
There could be a world, which is the one in which we live, in which cats and dogs live together.
And they don't have to love each other.
And I think America ought to accept that.
We shouldn't insist that everybody's on our side, that everybody's in the column of countries that we like, or that everybody embraces our values or even says nice things about us.
Let's concentrate on all the real problems we have at home, which have only increased at the same time that our engagement with other countries has increased and taken away the resources that we need to apply at home.
This is a very hopeful note for us to end on.
I can't wait to have more conversations with you because we got a lot happening in the world.
But I do want to close on a hopeful note because so often in these conversations about foreign policy, It can seem like only doom and gloom exists, but I think there's great hope in us seeing the opportunity that we have as Americans, as a country that was built on the foundation of freedom, to strengthen those freedoms here at home.
And to further that cause of peace.
Given most Americans are sick and tired of these constant regime change wars, these constant interventions, the spending of trillions of our taxpayer dollars on wars that actually undermine our national security, what's your message to people about how we can change To me, it's a very deeply American message, as I said to you earlier.
In George Washington's farewell address, which is a beautiful summation of the kind of foreign policy I like, he used this wonderful line, Why quit our own to stand on foreign ground?
We are not abandoning the world by stopping to try to control it militarily.
On the contrary, we're encouraging the rest of the world.
Peace is not an un-American point of view.
The idea that America can coexist with other countries is sometimes difficult for Americans to accept because for the last hundred years, we've been the big kid on the block.
Now, The civilizations that have lasted for a really long time on Earth...
Like Iran or China, which are probably the two oldest on Earth, have survived over millennia by realizing that you have to ride the currents of history.
You can't expect to be on top all the time.
I've studied a lot of Iranian history.
There were times when Iran was the great empire.
Then there were times when Iran was really in terrible shape and about to fall apart.
Then there were times when it was in the middle.
If you don't accept that, if you insist on being on top all the time, You're going to have a recipe for self-destruction.
And to me, the big challenge that the United States faces, which makes it the big challenge the world faces, is this.
The United States and the world are in a big transition now.
As part of that transition, the United States is at least in a relative sense going to become less powerful.
Are we ready to accept that world?
Or are we so conditioned that we can't accept any world that we don't dominate and we're willing to strike out violently to prevent the emergence of a world that's multipolar?
I hope that won't happen.
I hope we can understand that we can live perfectly well and probably better by not trying to dominate the world.
And I do believe, as we said earlier, that there's a growing constituency for this out there.
I think when you see politicians and other political groups in Washington starting to give some lip service to that changing body of opinion, it shows you that they're noticing it out there.
They don't say that just because their own minds have been changed.
They're saying these things because they feel like they need to cater to a change in the American electorate.
And I do think that as more candidates emerge and more focus is put on world affairs, that some voters will consider their candidates' views on world affairs in casting their votes and realize...
that you cannot separate a person's views about the world from their views about the United States.
Exactly.
That foreign policy is domestic policy.
I hope that people keep this in mind.
And really, it comes down to if we want change, if we don't want to continue to see trillions of our taxpayer dollars sent overseas and instead looking at the quality of life, looking at how we can address the needs of people here in this country in a variety of ways and actually have that conversation, looking at how we can address the needs of people here in this country in a variety
And as candidates come and put themselves before you, ask those questions and don't fall for the usual response for someone who says, you know, we shouldn't be the policemen of the world.
They automatically say, well, you're an isolationist.
You just want to cut off the United States from the rest of the world and that's where that George Washington quote that you mentioned is really so powerful.
The comeback is, why do you believe that the only way we can relate with other countries in the world is to bomb them?
We have the opportunity as a country to exercise real leadership.
We want to be leaders in the world.
Exercise real leadership by demonstrating how we can find those areas of mutual interest and mutual prosperity and together work towards peace that only furthers opportunity, prosperity, and freedom everywhere.
Yeah.
People all around the world are going to be looking at the big powers and how their countries run.
How successful are their countries?
They're naturally going to be more sympathetic and more admiring toward countries that seem to be able to manage their own affairs very well.
That is a little bit daunting for us because we may not turn out so well on that scale.
If we want to win the world's sympathy, the best way to do it is to show them that we have a highly functioning society at home that's successful and united and vibrant.
And you can only do that by changing the focus of American policy from dominating the world to serving our own underserved people.
So good to talk to you, Stephen.
I feel like we could talk for hours and I want to have this conversation again with you.
There's just too much to cover.
I appreciate you continuing to bring your voice of reason and restraint and realism.
Please don't stop because the country needs you and look forward to being able to hang out with you sometime again soon.
Can't wait.
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